“The questioner thinks he is above what he has been asked. Thus the worker who dismantles the wall thinks himself above the wall until the moment the wall covers him. Jan Otlick, On the Limits of Inquiry, College of Anatomists, 1841
They walked for eight days, and he stood at the horizon for eight days.
This should be taken literally. It was not “seen”—it stood as the mountain stood, as time stood: it did not approach, it did not move away, it abolished all attempts to measure distance. The triangulation field formulas that Jaroslav Dvorak had taught for eleven years and rewrote three times were rejected on the second day. The corners converged on the impossible. The double-measured base gave a difference of four hundred sazhens, not because the instrument was wrong, but because the human eye, when it looked at such an object, ceased to be an instrument and became a believer.
We do not see the world. We see what has time to fit inside us.
He wrote it down in a field log on the second day and was angry at himself all night for his syllable. College did not encourage aphorisms. Aphorism is a place where thought is tired.
On the eighth day they went into the shadows.
The remain catalogued by the College as the Northern Eye lies in a bend of a dried riverbed and rises two hundred and twenty sazhens above the plain—a figure established not by measurement, but by a College agreement adopted in 1806 to end the disputes.
He's an eye.
It takes rigor. It does not look like an eye or “like” an eye. There is a sclera, there is a corneal dome, there is an iris wide into the city square, dark amber, with a fibrous stroma, visible unarmed; there is a pupil, now opaque, clogged with six centuries of dust, bone chips and bird droppings. There is, and this is described in Otlick with the precision for which he was called a madman during his lifetime, a remnant of a muscle, a slant lower, going into the ground and not found until now by any excavation.
What is missing is a head that he could be in.
And here's where the man stumbles. Dvorak thought, looking up. Not before the size. Before the discrepancy. The mind is not borne by the fact that an object is enormous, but by the fact that it is neat. We would forgive negligence. Chaos we would explain. But every vein is as diligently fulfilled here as in the rabbit eye, and therefore the mind demands a master—and the master demanded by the mind is God, and we return to where we came from.
- Professor.
Teresa Malinowska stood at the foot of the crack they had been walking for eight days. Young. Thirty-one. Of those whom College produces already ready - without a trace of faith, without a doubt, with only one method.
- The rash is fresh, she said. - Less than a year. The sclera is split into a thickness. The move goes down and in.
- Vitreous?
- It seems to have survived.
He didn't answer. He watched two porters unpack the lamps, and thought that no man in six hundred and sixty-six years had seen the inside of the divine eye, and that in an hour he would see it, and that it would probably be the worst hour of his life.
The desire to know is the very punishment for it.
There were nine.
Dvorak, Malinowska, four porters from freelance, two College shooters and brother of Vaclav - Keeper of the Dead God, attached to the expedition under the 1863 treaty under which College pledged not to perform autopsies without a witness from the Guardians, and Keepers pledged not to interfere. The College called this contract a “headpiece” and the Guardians called it a “concession”; both sides felt humiliated and both were right.
Brother Vaclav was the last to walk and was silent all the way.
It took six hours to descend.
The sclera is white and layered like wood and cut with a knife. Dvorak took eight samples and found on the fourth that the layers were not parallel: they fan out, as if they had grown not from the outside inward, but from a point that could not be in the object of such a shape.
The move was going down. On the forty-second yard, the walls became wet, and the lamps began to give the wrong flame, stretching out and crouching without any draft.
In the sixties, they came out.
I have to talk about light here.
There was no source in the cavity. There was no slit, no hole, no phosphorescent plaque — Malinowska checked the walls for forty steps and found nothing. And yet there was light in the cavity: a flat, faint, shadowless light that could read, but you couldn't tell where the line was coming from.
The wearers stood up and didn't go any further.
One of them, an older man named Havel, said very calmly, as the people who made the decision say:
- We'll wait for you upstairs, Mr. Professor.
- You're hired till the end of the turn.
- Yes, Havel said. - Hired. - And I went upstairs.
Three left. The fourth, a boy of seventeen, stayed and then cried for two hours in a row, silently, while still doing everything he was told.
That is why man cannot be counted. Dvorak thought as he looked at it. We think fear pushes away. But fear is only pressure; direction gives something else, and that is not what a man asks for advice. The boy didn't stay because he was brave. He stayed because he couldn’t do otherwise, and he’ll call it a choice when he’s old.
The cavity was vitreous.
It wasn't liquid. Over the course of six centuries it had become a cross between amber and cartilage, and in the thickness of it, Dvorak, he held up the lamp and in a minute lowered it because the hand had failed, and there were objects hanging in the thickness of it.
There were thousands.
Small, palm-sized, dark, regular, not chaotic, but layered, as generations are arranged in sediments. Near the wall are simple: smooth ovoids. And then it's more complicated: with projections, with symmetry. Further down, in the depths where the light was going and going, the forms that Dvorak later described in the report with one word: "completed," and College twice demanded clarification, and he twice refused to explain.
Malinowska approached the wall and put her hand in the back.
- Professor.
- I see it.
- No, you can't see. Her voice didn’t waver, and that was the worst part. - It's warm. And it's warm unevenly. It's warmer here. It's colder here. As if...
She didn't say that because the scientist doesn't say that. The preachers are saying.
- It’s like there’s a process going on inside, Dvorak finished exactly. -Yes. Decomposition gives you heat. Fermentation gives you heat. Slow oxidation gives you heat. None of these explanations require anything but chemistry.
- Six hundred years from now?
- Six hundred years from now, even more so. We don't know the speed. We only know our own.
He heard how good it sounded. He knew he wasn't speaking for her.
So the person standing at the cliff, begins to talk loudly about geology.
Brother Vaclav was standing afar. Now he's here.
- You will take a sample, he said. It wasn't a question.
- I'll take three.
- I'm contractually obliged to ask why.
- Dvorak said, “So that in a hundred years a woman in Pardubice would give birth without dying.” So that we understand what is in the blood doing what it does, and learn to repeat it. Because there's a finite amount of blood, brother, and you know that better than I do. You'll watch her. You don't make it.
- I know.
- And yet you're against it.
- I don't mind. Keeper was not looking at him, but up, where the completed forms hung in layers. Not for the reason you give me, Professor. You think I'm afraid of sacrilege. I stopped fearing sacrilege the year we opened our own reliquary to give drink to the dying in Hlumets, and I decided which one would lie down first.
He's quiet. Then he said,
- I don't mind because someone was here already.
She found it twenty minutes later.
Fourteen steps from the entrance, in the wall of the vitreous body, at a depth of about an elbow, lay a human hand frozen into the thickness.
Brush. Male. Safekeeping is complete - nails, hair on the phalanges, a callus at the base of the index, which happens from writing. The cut at the wrist is smooth, like a drug.
There were no clothes around. The body wasn't there. No trace of the move, no trace of the instrument, no slight disturbance in the layers surrounding it, and these layers, by every understanding, have grown over the centuries.
The brush lay deeper than the smooth ovoids against the wall.
I mean, before.
Dvorak stood and counted.
He counted long because the score was the only one he had left. Layers. Thickness. The rate of increase, assuming that it is constant. Assuming that the layers are growing at all, and not, say, settling. Assuming the person whose hand it is got in here outside. Assuming.
Each assumption was opened in two directions, and both sides were a cliff.
- Maybe," said Malinowska, and her voice was subtle, childish, "maybe the layers are not formed in time. Maybe in depth. Pressure. Then it might just be... deep.
- Maybe, Dvorak said.
- Then the explanation is material.
- It is material in any case, he said. It is material, even if it has been here for a thousand years. Even if she's been here longer than we can count. Matter doesn't have to be understood. It has to be matter.
He said it firmly and realized that he had spoken the formula of faith.
It is not the conviction that collapses, but the posture of the conviction. The idea remains true. The person carrying it ceases to stand upright.
He ordered samples taken. Three vitreous samples, two sclera samples and, after a four-minute silence that later cost him the pulpit, a brush.
Brother Vaclav didn't interfere. Under the treaty, he had no right to interfere. He wrote down a single line on his sheet, and Dvorak looked over his shoulder and read: "Taken." I testify.”
It took nine hours to get up.
It was night and it was raining, ordinary, reddish, and the three porters who had left were waiting by the fire, and no one told them anything, and they asked nothing.
Dvorak sat on a rock, his back to the remains, facing the plain, and realized he could not turn.
Not out of terror. From politeness. They do not turn to a person who has just been borrowed.
We call it incomprehensible and think it's saying something. But the "incomprehensible" is a word about us, not about him. It means, our tool is short. It doesn't mean that there lives the will.
And yet, the hand.
And yet, it lay deeper.
He got the magazine. Opened. He sat on a blank page until dawn and finally wrote down a sentence for which College subsequently removed him from fieldwork, and the Second Victim Church, on the contrary, reprinted it three times in its leaflets, providing it with an interpretation he did not have in mind and against which he wrote refutations until his death - ever longer, ever less convincing, ever less readable.
The phrase was:
“The object is not observing. But it is arranged as the observer is, and the difference between the two statements is less than it takes for a person to sleep well.
The brush was taken to College.
The eighteenth protocol of 1870 states that the opening of the drug found ordinary human tissue, not susceptible to decomposition, without signs of embalming, preservation or infection. The corn at the base of the index finger corresponds to the callus of the writing person.
The age of the drug could not be established.
The meeting lasted four hours. It resolved to continue the study, classify the report, and send no further expeditions to the Northern Eye without a special ruling.
There was no particular decision.
By the fall of 1870, there were four camps near the crack—Restorers, two sets of free diggers, and an armed procession of Guardians—and the question of what lay there deeper than it should have been was no longer a scientific question long before anyone had answered it.
This is how the question always ends: not with an answer, but with a crowd.