Academic Exercises

by K. J. Parker

  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 protegee. 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, wolflike 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, scived 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 round 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 leaves 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—and 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, for ever, 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)]

  Purple and Black

  For Francis Fitzgibbon

  and Malcolm Barres-Baker,

  comites Catulli

  Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.

  Phormio begs to inform His Majesty that he has safely arrived at Tremissis City and has assumed control of the civil and military administration.

  You are, of course, an unmitigated bastard. Not content with dragging me away from my chair at Anassus, which I worked bloody hard to earn and which will now go to that pinhead Atho, you made me waste three months of my life in a military academy, of all places, and now you’ve dumped me here, in the last place on earth, surrounded by snow, soldiers and savages. What the hell did I ever do to you?

  Well, I’m here now. Absolutely ghastly journey, being thrown around in a post-cart along with mail-sacks and boxes of biscuits and cages of shitty chickens. There was this fat woman sitting opposite, and every time the cart went over a pothole or a rock, she got shot across the cart straight into my lap. I guess she must’ve been used to travelling post, because she just carried on reading; even when she ended up sitting on my head with one leg sticking out over the side, I don’t think she ever lost her place. Oh, and a wheel came off, slap bang on the top of the mountain, just before noon. That was no fun. Thanks, friend.

  Governor Philoctenus wasn’t pleased to see me. Really, when you sack a man, it’s only polite to tell him about it, rather than leaving that particular chore to his supplanter. He didn’t believe me (and why should he?). He assumed I was some kind of loon, nearly had me slung in jail, except quite by chance I had my commission with me in my pocket rather than packed away in my document-case at the bottom of my trunk. It took me quite some time to convince him it wasn’t a forgery. Then he lost his temper.

  Anyhow, I’m here, and everything seems to be in order, more or less; I say that, but I haven’t got a clue what a properly-functioning provincial government looks like. There’s about ten thousand clerks in grubby shirts and worn-out sandals who dart in and out of offices and don’t seem to hear you when you ask them something, and miles and miles of shelves of dossiers, files, records, ledgers, you name it, and everybody’s extremely busy, so I guess something must be getting done. Whether it’s anything useful, I simply don’t know. By the way, it’s perishing cold here; they have five enormous sheds full of charcoal, but it’s against regulations to issue any before the Ides, and apparently I haven’t got the authority to override the rules. The least you can do, in my opinion, is send me a woolly scarf.

  You haven’t got a book on governing you could lend me, have you? Seriously.

  As for the insurgency, it can’t be all that bad, because nobody around here seems to know anything about it. Of course, I haven’t met the military yet. That particular joy still awaits me.

  His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, to Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, greetings.

  His Majesty acknowledges Phormio’s report and hereby authorises the early release of restricted stores, namely charcoal, at the governor’s discretion.

  Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Please find herewith;

  Item; three (3) scarves, woollen, long, thick

  Item; six (6) pairs mittens, woollen, extra thick

  Item; six (6) pairs socks, woollen, double ply

  Item; twelve (12) blankets, civil/diplomatic grade

  Item; one (1) jar oysters, Bethusian, first quality, in brine

  (Are you all right for footwear? Hats? How about

  a portable stove?)

&n
bsp; Look, I’m sorry, all right? It is, as they say, a lousy rotten job but someone’s got to do it. A bit like being emperor, yes?

  Anything you need, you write to me, it’ll be with you as soon as possible—not Civil Service as soon as possible, but as fast as a cart can get up the mountain. The thought of you freezing to death, huddled in a blanket, warming your tiny pink fingers over a guttering candle, is more than I can bear. I’ve been losing sleep over it. The administration of the empire is on hold until I hear from you that you’re warmer. All right?

  Moving on, how are things out there? Have you found the war yet? Everything’s always somewhere, as my mother used to say when I couldn’t find my hymn-book. Maybe it’s fallen down the back of something, or it got put away somewhere safe. A great big noisy thing like a war is bound to turn up sooner or later. Please advise.

  Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.

  Phormio begs to inform His Majesty that he has sought out the enemy, but as yet has been unable to identify them.

  You’re still a bastard, but thanks for the socks. Not my colour, but at least I’m getting some feeling back in my toes. They still won’t let me have any charcoal. Apparently, you need to write separately to the quartermaster’s office, charcoal being a military commodity (why?) and specify the quantity to be released and the date of release. You should know that, dammit. Why should I have to teach you your job?

  I blame myself, of course. I remember it clearly; in third year, in the back bar of the Poverty and Justice. Political power, I said, should under no circumstances be allowed to vest in the hands of anybody who wants it, and all the important offices of state should be filled by men who’d much rather be doing something else. Well, quite.