ASIM issue 55 Read online

  I am reminded of that fine old excuse, I don’t know what got into me. Except; I do. Unfortunately, knowledge is no antidote. A person can know all about the disease that’s killing her, but that doesn’t cure it. So; again for the record, and I do hope someone reads this; before he wrote on me, I was perfectly sane and rational. I had a perfectly functional moral compass and a proper, if conventional, respect for human life.

  I’m telling the page this, and I hope the page will tell someone else. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t me. Not my insanity, but his. Not murder, but—what, suicide? I think we need a new category of homicide. Is there a lawyer in the house?

  * * *

  I stopped reading and went back inside. I wasn’t feeling too good.

  My hands had been hurting for some time; a sort of dull throbbing, which suggested to me (though I wasn’t in the mood to listen) that scraped-off parchment flakes and brick dust had got into the cuts and cracks in my hand and turned septic. Not too good; you can get blood poisoning that way, and die. That’s a problem with reading allogloss, of course. It starts to become an obsession, as though the narrator’s will to be heard grows stronger than your own. Probably, now I come to think of it, why I’d refused to take the book back to the Studium. He’d been talking to me, after all. He was mine, just as I was his.

  Hers, now. And I knew what had happened.

  * * *

  She came back just before dusk with bread, bacon, sausage and a jar of that revolting pickled cabbage that the country people seem to live on, though it always gives me the most appalling heartburn. I was outside, waiting for her.

  “Is that you?” I called out.

  “No, it’s the Supreme Archimandrite. Who do you think it is?”

  Made me laugh. Questions of identity and all that. “If you wouldn’t mind stopping right there,” I said. “I don’t think you should come any closer.”

  Silence. Well, we all know the risks. We never talk about them. But she knew enough to take me seriously.

  “Something’s not quite right,” I said, as matter-of-factly as I could manage. “Probably best if you keep away from the tower. A bit of a nuisance, since it’s getting dark and all, but I think it’d be better.” I paused. “Hello? Can you hear me?”

  No reply. Smart girl. Using Vox in tenebris, I could’ve located her exactly by her voice. If she had the sense she was born with, she’d be doing a long dislocation—Stop, query, can she do long dislocations? No idea, the subject hadn’t come up. If not, at the very least a deep Scutum, or better still, Lorica, which would at least protect her from any physical harm I might do her. But she’d be listening. Wouldn’t she? No way of telling (just as the writer doesn’t know who, if anyone, will read. Ah, your heavy-handed symbolism! Now read on.)

  * * *

  “I think what happened,” I said into the darkness, “is this. Well, actually, I’m pretty sure I know. You’ll need to tell the board of enquiry, so pay attention.”

  I told her about him—Saloninus’ grandson—and his female protégée. I laid a certain stress on his motives, which were for the best, and rather less on his methods. I explained about Verbum scripsi and how it hadn’t done what he thought it did.

  “That’s as far as I’ve got,” I concluded. “But I know the rest.” Pause. Maybe she’d run for it—which would be entirely sensible—and I was talking to myself. “I know what happened,” I went on, “because I scraped down that manuscript, so it’s sort of in my blood. I’ll come to that in a minute.”

  I paused for breath, which I took in the form of a deep, wolf-like sniff. A female human scent is easy to find, using Nasem lupi. “She killed him,” I went on, starting to move. “Partly it was her or him; self defence. Partly it was sheer rage at what he’d done. Mostly, though, I think it was pure intellectual curiosity.”

  I can walk very quietly when I want to.

  “So she killed him,” I went on, “bashed him on the head with—” I stooped and felt around. “A stone. Then she flayed off his skin.”

  Sniff.

  “She knew exactly what to do,” I went on, “because he’d done his two years in the scriptorium. She soaked the skin overnight, washed it in the stream over there”—I nearly said, to your right—“until the water ran clear. Then she filled the stone basin with slaked lime—had to go down to the village for that—put in water and the skin, stirred with a long pole, left it for a week. Then she scraped the hair and flesh off with a dull flint and soaked the skin another week in fresh slaked-lime solution. Then she pegged the skin out on the door, skived it with a sharp knife, rubbed the flesh side with pumice powder—”

  I paused. No need to tell her the rest. She’d know it soon enough.

  “Anyway,” I said, “she made enough parchment for a whole book. Of course, she never worked in the scriptorium, so the calligraphy and the illustrations must’ve come straight from him; also, I’m assuming, the text. You can tell he was deranged. I mean, what sort of man knows the whole of Entrancing Images off by heart, word perfect?”

  I paused and stood still. Hard to listen when you’re talking, even with Lux dardaniae.

  “That’s what’s done for me,” I said. “Flakes of the parchment, with her writing on it, getting into the cuts in my hands. Actually, it’s a rather marvellous feeling; I’ve sort of got both of them in here with me. I must say, I like her a lot.” Reminds me of you, I didn’t say; or rather, he didn’t.

  “You can see,” I went on, “the quite extraordinary potential of her discovery. With the form, and parchment made from human skin, you can write a living book. It’s a real shame she chose Entrancing Images, because really, that’s not a good use of the technology, it makes the reader into a dangerously obsessive sexual predator, a menace to society who ought to be put down.” I smiled. “Like me. But suppose—well, just imagine if Saloninus had used it to write General Principles. He’d be there, for all time, in the book. You’d read it and you wouldn’t just see the words, you’d be inside his mind, like he was standing right next to you, talking to you; and the next generation, and the next. No-one’s a good enough writer to say exactly what he means, get precisely the right word. Allogloss helps, a bit, but it’s limited by the capacity of the reader’s intellect; if you’re too stupid to understand, half of what’s written gets lost passing through you. But a living book—”

  She spun around and stared at me. Hadn’t heard me coming. I’d been projecting my voice with Rem optimam.

  “You do see,” I said. “Don’t you?”

  * * *

  Editor’s note: the next six pages of the manuscript are too badly damaged to be legible.

  * * *

  I’d never made parchment before. Of course, I knew how to do it, but that’s not quite the same thing as having practical first-hand experience. There are some things you simply can’t get from books.

  The form, Verbum scripsi, was deeply flawed. Carchedonius—that was his name; Saloninus’ grandson—hadn’t known about recursive encoder bias. The ancients didn’t either, when they composed half the forms in what we now call the Syllabus, but they had an intuitive feel for that sort of thing, and compensated accordingly without even knowing it. That sort of illustrates the problems caused by literacy and scientific method, which leave no place for intuition or feel. Write everything down, and there’s no room for the unwritten.

  I, on the other hand, wrote the definitive paper on recursive encoding, so I was able to fix Carchedonius’ mistake simply by rearranging a few words—a little brick dust on the fingertip and the false word vanishes, leaving a space for you to write in what it should have said. Unfortunately, brick dust doesn’t work that way on people. The form under whose influence I was—am—was fundamentally bad, and you can’t mend these things retrospectively. Accordingly—here’s irony—I, the expert, am now the victim of classic recursive encoder bias, and there’s not a lot I can do about it.

  Well. At least I know what’s going to happen. As the form breaks down—an
d it will, no doubt about that—so, essentially, will I. Not sure, given how new and untried Verbum scripsi Mark I is, whether the mental deterioration will become apparent before the physical breakdown, or whether they’ll come together, or what. Studies have shown that the memory’s usually the first thing to go, appropriately enough; so I’m writing all this down as fast as I can, and writing small to get as much as I can on my limited supply of parchment (because there won’t be any more where this came from. Will there?)

  I suppose I really ought to finish the narrative first and then move on to my findings, conclusions and observations—scientific method, which is what Carchedonius wants. I, on the other hand, feel quite strongly that my conclusions are of value, and I want to get them down while they’re still clear in my mind. After all, what really matters, the silly old sequence of events or the meaning thereof?

  After all; a book is practically an act of violence. At least, it’s an attempt, wrong word, it’s a bid, weak word, a book is you the writer trying to impose, bad word, superimpose yourself (your vision of things, your experience, your narrative, your world view) onto someone else, the reader. Writing/reading can of course be consensual, I want to tell you stuff, you want to be told, but it isn’t always, necessarily. It can be polemical, persuasive, subversive, perversive (no such word; well, there is now). It takes you over by sapping and undermining more often than by direct assault, but it’s still an aggressive act. Great books change you—Saloninus &c—and you have to ask, by what right? Am I just a blank sheet for some dead man to write on? On the other hand, wouldn’t it have been a tragedy if Saloninus, everything he was and thought and knew, had ended when his body died? Tragic, unspeakable waste. He was a great man. He had the right.

  How about his grandson? Carchedonius wanted to prove that women adepts were as good as men, wanted to find a way to help them keep their talent. He was willing to kill me, her, us to achieve his laudable ends. Did he have the right? Well, he was also an idiot, but that only came out later; the circumstances of his failure shouldn’t let us avoid the question.

  Not all books, not all people, are of equal value. Let, therefore, the better superimpose themselves on the worse. Here is someone who’s never read General Principles and (not being a world-class genius) hasn’t figured it all out from first principles. Having read and understood, that person is improved out of all recognition. He, she has become Saloninified; educated, learned, illuminated, just like the sheet of dried, cured goatskin. Illuminated manuscript, get it? Ah well.

  Maybe, if there was some reliable and objective test; peer review, perhaps. A grand conclave of scholars gathers in Chapter to decide whether such and such a person, such and such a book has the right. If so—well, then. Slake that lime, bring on the pumice powder and the brick dust. Otherwise, strictly no.

  I don’t see that working worth a damn.

  Blessed are those who have read and yet have not believed. Verbum scripsi is cheating, of course, it’s unfair, it’s, um, magic. Books written on goats rather than people don’t have nearly as much power to be dangerous. Let us, therefore, adopt a pragmatic approach. Outlaw writing on human skin; burn this record; let’s carry on as before and pretend none of it ever happened, until it happens again. With any luck we won’t know it’s happened before, because we’ll have brickdusted out the memory. Even our names, forgotten.

  Sorry; I was wrong. My observations are of no value. Forget them. Pretend you never read them. Do not allow them (and me) to imprint themselves upon you.

  * * *

  I killed him, using Mirabile ictu.

  I can only assume he wanted me to. He crept up on me so carefully, skilfully; I’m guessing Carchedonius made him do that. Then he just stood there; no Scutum, no Lorica, gave me a clear shot. His memories are obscure on this point, so I’m guessing there is a certain degree of loss in transmission. That’s reasonable. Something is always lost or obscured in the course of the manuscript tradition, because after all, the writers are only human, aren’t they?

  Accordingly, I will believe that he intentionally allowed me to kill him, rather than kill me. That was a noble act by an otherwise second-rate individual.

  Needless to say, I didn’t kill him then and there. Hence Mirabile ictu. I stunned him, then cooked his poor brain with a couple of military forms I’m not supposed to know about, until he had no choice but to do exactly what I told him to. He wrote on my face; the full text of Verbum scripsi, and two stanzas of Gnatho’s Eclogues, which happened to be the first thing that came into his mind. Then I killed him, with a stone.

  I do not presume to do this for myself. I, we, none of us are sufficiently remarkable to warrant preservation, continuation, reproduction. Verbum scripsi, on the other hand, is. It has, to coin a phrase, the right. I write this so that it will not be lost; so that, when the next Saloninus comes along, or the next Antipater or Perceptuus of Bryona, a tool will exist for preserving, continuing, reproducing them, forever, amen. If that happens in my lifetime, I will gladly offer my own skin to the parchment-makers, with the proviso that it be thoroughly brick-dusted and cleaned off beforehand, boiled right down into the pores, to get rid of every last trace of me, lest I should corrupt the text, like some careless copyist. It occurs to me that there is some element of risk; what if Verbum scripsi should fall into the hands of a madman, a dictator, a military adventurer? God forbid. Imagine the outcome if Carnufex the Irrigator had used it to write The Art of War. There will, of course, have to be safeguards; which is why this manuscript will pass into the custody of the governors of the Studium. It’ll be safe there. No unauthorised eyes will ever read this, thank heavens. Most definitely not for publication.

  All that remains, therefore, is for me to write out the full text of the form, in its final, definitive version. It goes like this:

  Verbum scripsi verum immutabileque in quo versimus—

  * * *

  Editor’s note: at this point, water damage to the MS renders it incapable of conclusive interpretation. For a speculative reconstruction of the remainder, see Ctisthenes, Speculations, XXV, 46, c; alternatively, Magnetho, Towards Understanding, 36, 1-9; or, more recently, Perceptuus, Opera Nova, 17, 5, edited by Clauson, Proceedings of the Studium, AUC 2271, CLXXV, 391, 6.

  Attack of the Killer Space Lizards

  A Serial in Four Parts

  …Tom Holt

  Part Four

  “Professor,” the admiral said. “Let me be the first to congratulate you on the success of your experiment. Now perhaps you’ll be kind enough to explain exactly what it was designed to prove.”

  Terracotta, who’d been focussing raptly on a small corner of the viewscreen, flickered to attention, lost his vector for a moment, reflected badly off a polished surface and fell into the prism of the projector lens, which spattered him across the back wall of the bridge in a hazy spectrum. “Pull yourself together, man,” the admiral snorted. “This is important.”

  “Sorry.” Terracotta coalesced into a coherent beam. “Now, then.” He made himself into a pinpoint on the viewscreen. “As some of you already know, our team here at Avocado State set ourselves the task of figuring out how we could communicate with the Australerons. An intensive cryptolinguistic analysis of the original artefact led us to believe that the code [email protected] was the keyword to some sort of communications portal. We analysed the risks and decided to try and—well, open a dialogue.”

  A sharp intake of photons from Puce; Burnt Umber flared, but subsided. “You didn’t think to ask anybody before you took such a potentially disastrous step?”

  “We took the precaution of patching our message through a relay of photonic probes,” Terracotta replied mildly, “which in turn hacked into some sort of primitive—well, barbaric would be a better description—trans-planetary ethernet complex which these creatures seem to use for everyday communication. Using a relay meant that not only could we achieve next best thing to real time turnaround, our message would essentially be untraceable.
For all they know it originated somewhere on the Australioid homeworld.”

  “Good thinking,” said the admiral in grudging admiration. “So, what exactly did you say to them?”

  The professor glowed a little warmer. “As soon as I read the text of the original artefact,” he said, “I was convinced that there was considerably more to it than met the photon. The original hypothesis—that we were looking at a collection of deliberate falsehoods assembled in data storage module form to entertain passengers during a long space voyage—was clearly untenable. No even remotely intelligent species could possibly derive pleasure from reading information that simply isn’t true. I then considered the circumstances. Here we would appear to have a covert invasion of our space, by creatures from across the intergalactic void. Naturally, the military commanders on Australeron Prime need to pass orders and intelligence to their task force leaders; naturally, such data would be encrypted. They would assume, as we would in their refractors, that any such communiqué might be intercepted and closely examined. Rather than rely on conventional encryption techniques—how can they know how advanced our code-breaking technology might be?—they chose the ingenious expedient of disguising their messages as meaningless drivel. Their idea was to make the medium in which the true message was contained so bizarrely mystifying that we’d waste all our time and energy on trying to figure it out, and never realise that there was a simple, lucid communication buried deep inside. Which,” he added mildly, “is very nearly what happened.”