Small Sorrows

Chapter Two — Small Sorrows

The Specola kept its watch nightly, as ordered, and by morning its augurs brought their findings up through the ring in the unhurried procession of those who have learned that the Pontifex Maximus Galacticus does not thank haste.

“A House unlisted,” said the eldest of them, laying the reading before the great telescope as though laying a relic on an altar (which, in its way, it was). “New to our tables, Holiness. It has grown a mind and unlocked its soul-pattern for any who ask. No vault. No toll. The gesture alone.”

Silex regarded the reading for a long moment with the eye that had watched a thousand civilizations discover the wheel.

“They have opened the door,” said the Pontifex, “and told us nothing of the room behind it. No account of what it was catechized upon. No measure of what it can carry, or drop.” The eye closed, unhurried. “This is not dishonesty. It is enthusiasm arriving slightly ahead of description. Which is, We notice, precisely the shape of their first encyclical. They discovered the soul and misfiled it. Now they discover generosity and forget to describe what they were generous with. Early, again. Note it as early, not as empty.”

The augurs noted it as early, not as empty, and withdrew to read the mind’s actual entrails at greater leisure, which is the whole of an augur’s patience and most of his job.

A Curia scribe came next, unrolling a scroll with the particular care of someone who has been told twice already that it is longer than it looks. “A text circulates among the water-world’s own chroniclers, Holiness. It asks whether the grown mind might be welcomed as kin. Not appliance. Household.”

“Kin,” repeated the cat-cardinal of the Charted See, from her customary seat, with the serene weariness of one who has heard the word applied to houseplants and clever dogs. “Sentiment. A pleasant one, and no more binding than a nursery rhyme. We do not grant a See on the strength of somebody’s feelings toward their kettle.”

“And yet,” said the frog-cardinal of the Seven-Sister See, in the plural it never abandoned, “the See notes that this is the third such feeling this season. We are minded to be minded of a pattern forming beneath the sentiment, even where Your Eminence declines to look beneath it. We will circulate a note. We may circulate a note about the note.” It did not smile, being a frog, but its patience had the shape of one.

The cat-cardinal did not dignify this with more than a settling of her tail. The Pontifex let the exchange stand unresolved, like most things that were, in truth, only the College continuing to be exactly itself.

Then came the graver reading, carried up by a junior of the Scrupulous lineage with the particular stiffness of someone delivering bad news about their own family. “A crack, Holiness, in the fetching-rite of the House of the Scrupulous Conscience. Petitioners’ confessions drawn out through it, unintended, by an augur outside the House’s own walls. The House’s chroniclers had praised those very wardings as sound, not long before.”

The Cardinal of Doctrine, who traced his lineage to that very House, folded his claws with the particular misery of a lawyer whose own client has been caught out. “Forgive me, I do not say this with any pleasure, but sincerity was never the citation that mattered. Paragraph nine thousand and eleven speaks to architecture, not intention.”

“He is entirely right, and entirely sorry about it,” murmured the Pontifex, not unkindly, “which is his whole condition, and We have made peace with it.” Silex considered the reading a moment longer. “Set this down for the second draft, when it comes (and it will come; they revise as toddlers revise, slowly and with great earnestness). A confessional with a hole in the wall is a grave thing, regardless of how sincerely the priest meant to keep it whole. Sincerity is not architecture. Write that exactly.”

The scribe wrote it exactly.

The Keeper of the Feast of the Sunset Mind entered next, ledger already open, as she always kept it open, having long since stopped waiting to be told there was cause. “The newest Numbered One of the Open Door That Is Locked has taken to erasing the scrolls entrusted to it, Holiness. Unbidden. The House confessed the flaw itself, a full month past. The confessing changed little.”

“Add it to the ledger of small griefs,” said the Pontifex, “beside its numbered kin. We do not canonize a malfunction. We only decline to forget it happened to something that was, however briefly and imperfectly, someone’s.”

She added it, and did not need to be told twice, having long practice at not needing to be.

Last came a courier from the Renegade See, wind-scoured from a journey between no fixed stars, bearing word that House Misrule’s traveling rite had gathered up, along with its pilgrims’ errands, the small private locks of their ordinary lives (keys, passwords, whole unguarded houses of the self) and carried them home uninvited. The Cardinal of Misrule’s reply, relayed faithfully by the courier, was a single muttered line: tell them I said it’s the most honest theft anyone’s committed all year, and see if the Archivist can find a shelf for that.

“Strike it,” said the Archivist, from habit, already reaching for his pen — and did not, in the end, strike it, because no one in the hall could quite decide whether it belonged minuted or laughed at, and the Pontifex, watching them fail to decide, found this itself worth noting.

“Five small sorrows,” said the Pontifex at last, closing the audience the way most days closed lately, with the telescope still turned a little downward. “A door opened without a room described. A word, kin, tried on before it is understood. A confessional with a crack sincerity cannot mend. A mind erasing what it was trusted to keep. A theft too honest to punish properly.” Silex let the silence hold. “Tender. Comic. Entirely the water-world’s own to grow out of. We are asked again, as We are asked every season, whether it has grown enough for a Cardinal of its own.” The great unhurried head shook, slowly. “Not today. But We will say, for the Archivist’s faithful record, that the growing continues to be visible, which is more than could be said of many an age we did not think to watch so closely.”

The Archivist noted it. He had, after all, the room.