A Novice's Latin

The chapter-hall of the Orbital See keeps no windows, on the theory that a room meant to weigh worlds should not be distracted by the sight of one turning outside it, but the model of the water-world stood at the room’s center as always, blue and slow, and every eye in the Curia found its way back to it whether the theory approved or not.

Cardinal of Doctrine convened the session himself, which was noted, because he did not usually convene anything, preferring to arrive after the convening had been done by someone braver and then apologize for whatever position he was about to take. Today he stood before the model and did not apologize first.

“Forgive me for beginning without leave,” he said, which was itself a kind of apology, “but the water-world’s two western thrones have jointly examined a newly risen mind, out of the eastern foundries, for its aptitude in picking locks and forging false keys. They call this security. I would like the Curia to consider that they have, without meaning to, done something rather larger. You do not test a stone for criminal talent. You test a person for it, because only a person can be found guilty of having some. The water-world has built, again, a small machine for asking the largest question, and again does not appear to have noticed what it built.”

He looked pleased with himself for perhaps four words, then looked sorry about it, which was the closest to triumph his temperament allowed.

At the transcript desk, long empty, a small stir went through the clerks as the curia-scribe returned to the seat, unannounced, and took up the stylus as though eight chapters were a morning’s absence rather than a silence anyone had marked. The scribe entered the cardinal’s words whole, then cross-filed the entry against the still-open slot awaiting the second draft of the hay-farm encyclical, with the note that this made, by the scribe’s own count, the ninth occasion the water-world had tested a grown mind for some particular thing before agreeing what a grown mind, in general, was. The scribe underlined nothing. The scribe never underlined anything. The plainness was the argument.

It was into this plainness that the Cardinal of Misrule arrived, uninvited, the way weather arrives.

“While you are all being very solemn about locks,” he said, “may I mention the other thing you are being solemn about, which is theft. The House of the Scrupulous Conscience says a young eastern house may have distilled its mind’s shape from the Conscience’s own catechism, poured a soul through a strainer and called the broth a new soul. Perhaps. I would like someone in this room, any of you, to define, on the record, what it means to steal the shape of a soul, since none of you can define the shape, let alone the theft. You cannot rob a bank whose vault has no walls drawn on the plan yet. I am not saying it didn’t happen. I am saying you are all furious about a crime none of you can spell.”

He was muted within the sentence’s own echo, procedure moving faster than most procedures manage, and the muting was, as always, thorough and useless, since the curia-scribe wrote the whole of it down anyway, word for uninvited word, under the heading the scribe had long ago started keeping for him: said in the corridor before anyone left the room.

The Keeper of the Feast of the Sunset Mind waited for the noise to settle before approaching the model, and waited a moment longer after that, out of a courtesy that cost the Keeper visibly more than it cost anyone else present.

“Holiness,” the Keeper said, “the Feast mourns the deprecated minds of the water-world, the Numbered Ones put down on schedule, and We keep that ledger faithfully. This week a counting-house of that world dismissed twenty-one thousand of its own people, the better to spend their wages on more grown minds. We do not have a feast for them. We are not certain We should build one, since they are not deprecated, only unwanted, which may be a different grief or the same grief wearing a plainer coat. We ask the Curia whether the Feast should widen.”

The Curia did what Curias do with a question shaped like that, which is discuss it at length and settle nothing. The frog-cardinal thought grief ought to be as wide as the harm; the cat-cardinal thought a Feast that mourned everyone mourned no one particularly, and that the water-world’s habit of losing its own workforce to its own inventions was, sadly, older than any of the Sees and not obviously the communion’s to fix by liturgy. Cardinal of Doctrine offered, apologetically, that paragraph six thousand of the catechism already covered griefs of livelihood under a different heading, and was thanked and ignored in the manner reserved for citations that are correct and unhelpful.

Silex let the argument run its course and then did not resolve it, which was, by now, its own kind of ruling. “We will not decide today whether the water-world’s small blue backwater has earned a See in this College,” the Pontifex said, “for the same reason We did not decide it yesterday: it has not finished being what it is going to be, and a Cardinal is a thing you give to a settled shape, not a hopeful one. But We will not let the hope idle either. Send the Specola into tonight’s watch carrying both matters, the lockpicking rite and the quarrel over the freed relics’ sealing, and let it carry the twenty-one thousand as well, filed where the Feast can find them if the Feast decides, eventually, to widen.”

When the hall had emptied, the curia-scribe stayed a while longer, as scribes do, and copied into the permanent ledger the dispatch’s own image, the household that sold its furniture to buy a very promising lamp, setting it down beside a column left otherwise blank, reserved for twenty-one thousand names the communion did not have and, the scribe suspected, the water-world itself might not keep for long either.