“All society is not founded on law, but on the agreement of what man is worth. Take away the measure, and the law will become the covenant of the strong. We believed that the measure was given to us from outside. We have made two mistakes: first we thought it was given, then we thought it was impossible without it. Sylvester Kulgan, On the Necessity of Succession, 1861 list, banned from circulation in seven cities
I. Quiet Zaton
There were six of them in the boat, and none of them spoke.
This silence must be understood correctly: it was neither fear nor reverence. It was the kind of silence that arises between people who had each decided how to hold on and were now afraid to speak first, lest they show what that firmness cost them.
Teresa Malinowska sat on her nose, her hands on the toolbox, watching the Cup emerge from the fog.
We call a thing after its likeness, she thought, and this is the first defeat of reason. When we call it, we stop seeing.
Sixty years ago, the cup was named after the people who came here first, and since then, anyone who has seen it has seen the cup. A semicircular wall of forty sazhens, smooth from the inside, layered from the outside, rising from the standing water of the sunset and going into the mist with two horns, between which, if you believe the shooting of 1834, the distance is nine hundred and twenty steps.
It wasn't a bowl. It was part of something that in the human body was not matched - Ottique at one time suggested a joint, College in the inventory cautiously designated "object concave", and the surrounding residents, which in the villages around the sunset was collected hardly a hundred and a half, called simply the Wall and in conversation with strangers tried not to call at all.
The Cup wasn't rotting inside.
This has been verified, verified and confirmed three times. The meat placed on its inner surface dried up, but did not decompose. The corpse, left there for a year, dried up in the form of a leather bag and retained features. The water standing in the depressions, green and blooming, but did not give a putrid smell.
Why this happened, no one knew, and College in an 1834 report explicitly stated that it “does not know” – a formulation that Teresa Malinowska was more proud of than any other achievement of its corporation.
This is why Restorers was founded here.
Not because the place is sacred. Because you can work with fabric without ice.
The boat touched the bridges.
The man who met her was young, bossy, in a gray canvas, and perfectly calm.
- Master of Malinowska. College Anatomists, Kutna Observing the agreement of the ninth of September.
- Right.
- My name is Jiri. I'm assigned to you for the entire term. I must answer any question you may have, show any room except the Garden after the third hour, and report to the Master all that you have asked. He said it without a shadow of embarrassment. I am commanded to inform you of this duty at once, so that you do not waste your efforts on friendship with me.
Malinowska looked at it more closely.
- Who told you?
- Master of Kulgan.
- And you always tell people the truth about being watched?
“The master says secrecy is a duty to lie,” said Jiri. - We're not lying. We just do things you don’t approve of and tell you beforehand.
Okay, She thought, as she climbed the bridges, Every real misfortune begins, not with deception, but with a man who is perfectly honest and will not stop at all.
The settlement was called Zaton and consisted of one hundred and ninety buildings placed close to the inner surface of the Cup, so that the back wall of each house was itself.
Malinowska walked and counted. To think of her as a way of not giving in.
Fourteen workshops. Of them: glass blowing, two chemical, mechanical with steam drive, foundry small, apothecary, two for the processing of fabric - the same fabric - and four, the purpose of which she did not determine on the go.
The forge worked. I was working a sawmill. It was the most unexpected thing, the printing press.
She counted more than two hundred people in the first hour, and they were not pilgrims or fanatics. They were workers. They carried, dragged, wiped their hands on their aprons, argued about the price of coal, chased children. The kids were here - six in sight in an hour and all six looked healthy.
That's what they don't say in the sect reports. - She thought. They don't say they work better than us. That a heretic is usually cleaner in the yard.
On the wall of the printing house hung a sheet of fresh printing. She stopped and read it.
It was not a call, a sermon, or a prophecy. It was an estimate.
Expenditure for the fourth quarter: coal — 240 centners; copper — 60 pounds; sheet glass — 40 square feet; alcohol purified — 900 tins; cloth by name — according to the inventory of the Garden; blood clean — seven measures, the full balance of the fund.
She read the last line three times.
Then again.
Seven measures.
Not a “measure,” not a “two measures,” as in the imperial caskets, which are carried around cities with fillings and doctors. Seven. The total balance of the fund accumulated, I think, over the sixty years of the existence of Zaton: redeemed, exchanged, begged, received for debts, withdrawn from dying births, obtained in pre-reliquaries.
The largest private supply of pure blood known to the College.
Fourth-quarter spending.
Malinowska stood in front of a piece of paper glued with flour glue to the boardwalk wall of the printing house, and realized that for the first time in eleven years of service she was physically having difficulty breathing.
"Mary Master," said Jiri softly. The Master of Kulgan is waiting for you at six.
II. The Argument
“Man is held by three things: the fear of punishment, the love of his fellow man, and the measure by which he judges himself when no one is looking. The first is the law. The second one is family. The third one is gone, and we have pretended for the fourth century that we have not noticed it. Sylvester Kulgan, On the Necessity of Succession
Master Sylvester Kulgan was a man of sixty-five years, short, with bad skin, with the hands of a craftsman and with the special slouching that happens to people who have worked for decades in bad light.
He wasn't majestic. Teresa Malinowska noted this and recorded it because greatness is the cheapest of fakes, and its absence was the first truly disturbing observation of the day.
- You read the estimate, he said instead of greeting.
- I read it.
- All right. Then we'll save two days.
He pointed her at the chair. The room was small, littered with paper; the window overlooked the inner surface of the Cup, and in the glass stood its gray layered infinity.
- You came to observe and report to College, Kulgan said. College, in turn, will pass the report to the First Emperor's Office because your rector has been in correspondence with her since spring and believes that no one knows about it. I don't care. I want you to understand one thing, and then we'll get to work.
- Hello.
- I'm not going to resurrect God. He said it exactly as the weather reports. The former God is dead, his identity has disappeared, and it is impossible to return it. Anyone who says otherwise is either a fool or feeds on fools.
Malinowska was silent.
- You're surprised, Kulgan said.
- I heard something different about the Recoverers.
- You have heard of the Restorers what Restorers says in Pardubice, in Brno and at fairs. Half of our movement really believes that it is possible to collect the Father from the remains, like a clock is assembled. - He's squirming. - They're useful. They bring money, fabric and people. I haven’t spoken to them publicly in twenty years.
- It's called a lie, Master.
- It's called silence," said Kulgan, "and you, gentlemen, work at an institution that has been silent for twenty years about the four drugs extracted from burials being stored in the basement of the second building. Let's not measure ourselves with clean hands. We're both stained in the same way, just different.
He pulled a sheet at her.
- Here's my argument. Read it and object.
The sheet was written in his handwriting - small, curved, with cross-outs. Malinowska read for five minutes.
The argument was that.
One. Every human society needs a measure, an agreement that man is worth something regardless of his utility. Without this consent there is no right, no mercy, no prohibition to kill the useless.
Two. Six hundred and sixty-six years ago, this measure was removed not philosophically, but physically: people saw with their own eyes that the Creator did not want to exist. Not “died for us,” not “testing us,” just stopped.
Three. Everything that happened after that was a slow fall of measure. Not because people have become angrier, but because each generation has to reinvent why. The Churches do this by thinking that He will return. Anatomists – inventing that the measure is not necessary at all, but enough benefit. Empire – Inventing that order is the measure.
Fourth. All three answers have already yielded visible results: cities that traffic in people; hospitals that pick out lists; science that dissects the living because the dead give less information.
Five. Therefore, the measure must be put back. I can't find you. Do it.
Sixth. The created being will not be God. It will be something that humanity will agree on anew.
- You propose, said Malinowska, slowly, to make an object of worship.
- Yeah.
- Knowing he's not what they're gonna take him for.
- Yeah.
- And you call it re-establishment. - She put down the sheet. Do you know that your actions will be a lie? In a hundred years, people will judge each other by the essence you have grown in the vat, and they will regard it as something it is not.
Kulgan looked at her with interest.
“Panny,” he said, “what do you think the old measure stood for?”
Silence.
He was waiting for this question. - She thought. He waited for him all the time, and I gave him a nice, neat way, like we were rehearsing.
- There's a difference, she said. - That was real.
- It was real, Kulgan agreed, and it didn't help. It existed in the most literal sense that human language can understand, and the world became what you saw on the way here. So it was never about authenticity, Madam Master. It was about availability.
He stood up and walked to the window behind which was the Cup.
- I'm sixty-six years old, he said. - I won't see the result. I won't even know if it worked. All I can do is make sure that in two hundred years the question “why it is not necessary to kill the useless” has a shorter answer than the treatise.
- And that answer would be a lie.
- This answer will be anchored, said Master Sylvester Kulgan. A lie is when I tell you a lie. And this is when I tell the truth to people who are not yet born, in the only language they can hear.
She went out into the dark and stood on the bridges for a long time.
The water in the sunset was still and in the light of the lantern appeared black, not red, and reflected the lights of Zaton - one hundred and ninety buildings, fourteen workshops, printing house, sawmill, six healthy children.
That's his power. - She thought. Not in persuasiveness. That he's the only one I know who asked the question out loud.
College doesn't ask why not. College asks what you can do. The Church doesn't ask at all. Empire asks what is profitable in a hundred years, and I have until now considered this the most honest of all answers.
And this crazy guy in a bad jacket asks, "What are we standing on?"
And the answer is seven measures.
She took out a field log, opened it on the first blank page, and wrote down a line under the date, which she then reproduced verbatim in the report:
“He is not mad. That would be a relief.”
III. The Garden
“The fabric taken from him is not he. The chip is not a tree, and the finger of the dead is not a dead man. But anyone who holds it in his hands knows that his hand does not tremble with cold. Pharmacy regulations Zaton, section on storage
The garden was shown to her on the fourth day.
She understood that four days was also a method: first workshops, then a printing house, then a hospital, then a school where children were taught to count and read by a drawing book with pictures, and only then, when the observer had already been drawn into the human life of places and lost his primary alertness, he was shown the main thing.
She understood that and walked in unprepared anyway, because she couldn't prepare.
The garden occupied a long, low structure attached to the Cup itself and extending into it – into that layered gray column – to a depth that could not be estimated from the outside. It was warm, about twenty degrees, flat; humid; and perfectly, deafeningly quiet, except for the two belt-driven air pumps.
There were vats along the walls.
There were nineteen. Glass, iron-rimmed, each in human height, with copper covers, hoses and pressure gauges. Six of them had a liquid - cloudy, yellowish, with a slight red. The rest were not there, and they were washed, waiting.
“The food environment,” said the apothecary. His name was Vaclav Gouska, he was in his seventies, and he moved through the Garden as a man who had walked here for thirty years moved. Whey, salt, sugar, a little alcohol against spoilage, and one percent blood.
- Rotten?
- Medium. - He straightened his glasses. - From the rest, but not from the net stock. We call it drinking, which is a joke, because you can't drink it.
- What does she give?
- The tissue is growing, Gouska said. On a normal serum, human tissue lives four days and dies. This one grows. We don't know why. We know at what concentration it grows best: one-hundredth. At two hundredths, it grows faster and gets wrong. At five, you get what you'll see down the hall, and I'll show you, because the master told you to show everything.
He took her further.
That's how all real abominations work. I thought Malinowska was following him. Not as a villainy. It is a method that simply has specified parameters.
The fabric they grew out of was human.
This should be taken literally and without consolation. Restorers did not grow humans out of divine matter—the divine matter did not obey them, and all attempts in the sixties to give any reproducible device ended in failure.
They grew a man out of a man.
The donors were their own. Each resident of Zaton over eighteen times a year gave a flap of skin the size of a nail and some blood; this was called a "contribution", this was printed on the quarterly list along with coal, and Malinowska saw a queue at the pharmacy on the first day, taking it for a queue to see a doctor.
- We don't take from strangers, Gouska said. - Never. The Master banned in the forty-ninth, after Olomouc.
- What was in Olomouc?
- They took money from the poor, and a year later they took it not for money. - The old man said it calmly. The master went there, looked and burned down the workshop. Since then, only our own and only voluntarily, and therefore it grows slowly.
- How much did it take you to get your current body?
- Eleven years.
Malinowska has stopped.
- Eleven years?
- Eleven. Gouska looked at her with a lot of fun. Mr. Master, you seem to think that we will make a man of minced meat in winter. Nope. The fabric grows by its own time, not ours. Bone is the slowest. Nerves don't grow much at all. It has grown in part almost always: what lies in our ward is partly what we have. It's been done twice in nineteen vats, and we still don't understand why.
He opened the door at the end of the hallway.
- He said, “Here are the ones who have grown up wrong.”
There were twelve.
They lay in a separate long room, in beds laid clean, with two nurses, at the stove, at the window, behind which was a gray layered wall - and the first thing that Teresa Malinowska noted was just this: clean linen, oven, window.
The second thing she said was that they had names. On the back of each bed hung a tablet with a number, date and name.
The third she noted a minute later, when her eyes were used to it, and she was unable to write anything but a list of it in the report.
Number four, Matej, year of excavation 1852. A male body, about five feet tall. The skin and muscle system are developed. The skull box is not closed in the parietal part; the hole is closed with a plate and a bandage. They have eyes, they watch the light source. It doesn't respond to sound. It's powered by a probe.
Number Seven, "Anna," 1857. Female body, development is normal to the level of the chest; below - not completed, limbs are rudimentary. Breathing. It makes a sound on the exhale, rhythmic, about forty times a minute, continuously, with breaks in sleep.
Number Nine, "The Quiet," 1860. The body is full, full, without visible defects. He's not waking up. Eleventh year.
Number twelve...
She reached twelfth and walked out.
Gouska found her in the street, where she stood, her hands on her knees, breathing.
He didn’t say any of the things that he said in such cases. He waited.
- Why didn’t you kill them? she asked.
- We discussed it, the apothecary said. - Four times in twenty years. By general vote.
- And?
- In the forty-ninth they decided to kill three. Dead. - He was looking past her, at the water. Then for twelve years, no one at Zaton could decide what we did, mercy or cleaning. And the master said, Until we can answer, we have no right to repeat.
- That's not the answer.
- That's not the answer, Gouska agreed. This is a delay that has been extended for twenty years. Madam Master, we have no theology on this. We have twelve beds, two nurses and a stove to be heated. I'm drowning.
Malinowska straightened out.
- They feel it?
- Fourth, yes. Ninth, I don't know, and no one knows. Seventh... - He's quiet. - Seven, I think so. We give it poppy when the sound becomes different.
- Is she suffering in her eleventh year?
Thirteenth, said Vaclav Gouska. And I go to her every day because if I stop going, I’ll forget she’s human in a month, and a year from now I’ll say she’s never been. I've seen this happen to people. I don't want that to happen to me.
In the evening, Malinowska wrote in a magazine:
“Abomination and decency are not mixed here, but are executed by the same people with equal care. This refutes everything I was taught at College, which believes that cruelty is the result of negligence. It is the consequence of consistency.”
And below:
“I haven’t asked you the main thing yet.”
IV. Arithmetic
“The argument that a resource is spent on the sublime is the argument of the merchant, not of the philosopher. The sublime has no price, but the measure of blood has it, and every mother in this city knows it. — Of Teresa's objections to Malinowska, College report, Appendix II
She asked about the main thing on the ninth day, in front of witnesses, because she decided that he could not get away with the aphorism with witnesses.
She was wrong. He didn't try.
The Zaton meeting took place in a printing house, the only room where two hundred people were housed, and took place every Wednesday, and everyone was admitted, including the observer from College, including, as it turned out, children.
She stood up and said,
- Seven measures.
It was quiet in the hall.
- In the fourth quarter, there is an expenditure: seven measures of pure blood, the full balance of the fund. I want this number to sound out loud, not in paper, and for everyone in this room to hear what it means.
She unrolled her sheets.
The measure of pure blood used in childbirth practice increases the likelihood of a pregnancy by about four times. This is College data for twenty-two years, for eleven cities, four hundred and thirteen cases. One measure is enough for four full courses.
She looked up.
- Seven measures are twenty-eight women. We have a list of seventeen or eighteen of them. Without blood, four or five out of the same twenty-eight are carried out.
Silence.
- Thirteen children, Teresa Malinowska told the newspaper. - Rounding it down. Your fourth quarter spending is thirteen live children who won't be.
She sat down.
Master Sylvester Kulgan rose from his seat in the third row - he was not sitting on an elevated place, he was not sitting on an elevated place at all, and by day nine she began to realize how thoughtful this was - and stepped forward.
"Mani Master of Laws," he said. - All numbers are correct. I checked them against the same tables in the sixty-eighth when I was deciding.
He turned to the hall.
- Thirteen children. Maybe fourteen. We spend it on raising one creature that will not be God and will not save any sick person.
He spoke without pressure, almost boring.
- I want you to understand that this is not a sacrifice in the name of the highest. It is a choice between thirteen living children now and an attempt to change what children will be born for in two hundred years. The second one might not come out. The first one will be for sure.
He's quiet.
- I cannot prove that my choice is right, Magister Kulgan said. I can only say that I am making it openly, with the budget published; that I have kept the fund under lock and key for twelve years; and that if Zaton votes otherwise, the seven measures will go to the infirmaries of Kutna and Pardubice tomorrow, and I will be the first to sign the invoice.
And sat down.
Voted by show of hands. In Zaton, everyone who contributed, that is, every adult, had the right to vote; there were one hundred and ninety-seven of them on that day.
Against the expense, twenty-nine.
One hundred and forty-one.
Twenty-seven did not raise their hands at all, and the master Kulgan demanded that this number be entered in the protocol in a separate line.
- Silence counting, he said. - Always count silence. In a hundred years, everyone will be in favor.
Malinowska left the printing house and did not remember how she reached the bridges.
He didn't. He wasn't cheating. He gave the full price to two hundred people and got her consent.
And consent is the most terrible thing I've ever seen in my life.
She was standing by the water and a man stopped nearby.
She was a woman of about thirty-five, in an apron, with her hands shabby, the one who works in the dyeing room. Malinowska saw her in the audience, and she voted for her.
"Mani Master," said the woman. - I wanted to tell you not to think.
- What didn't you think?
- That we don't understand. - She was looking away. I was the third person on the list seven years ago. Then they were. I was not enough: there were two before me, and the measure was over.
She said it flat, no theater.
- I know how much it is. I know better than you, sir, because you know the tables, and I know better than you. - She finally turned around. - And I raised my hand anyway.
- Why?
- Can you tell me why? the woman asked.
Malinowska didn't get it.
- Why-what?
- That's it. She circled the sun, the fog, the Wall. - Why put up with it? Why give birth in this? Why not drown yourself at thirty-five if it doesn't work anyway? Can you scientists explain that? Not how, why.
- No, Teresa Malinowska said.
- He says he will try to get the answer.
The woman shrugged her shoulders and went to the houses.
- He may be lying, she said over her shoulder. - But at least he's answering.
V. The Anniversary
“The heavens have been opened all at once; in this the evidences do not differ in any land. Calendars are diverging. The Westerns lay the day on February according to Roman account; the Eastern ones on autumn according to their own; the keepers of Last Judgement count by the moon, and therefore each year come to a different number. Each side blames the other two for being a year late or a year in a hurry. None of the three dates have been confirmed. This did not prevent any of the three marches. The Chronicle of Zaton, Winter 1870
Pilgrims began coming in November.
First two and three, then families, then wagon trains. By mid-December, there were about four hundred men on the east bank of the sank - in huts, in upturned boats, in dugouts dug in frozen clay - and Zaton fed them, because not feeding meant getting four hundred corpses under the wall.
None of the people who came knew exactly what was waiting for.
This Teresa Malinowska set methodically: she went around the camp and interviewed one hundred and twelve people, writing down the answers verbatim, and then three evenings to sort the records.
Thirty-one people were waiting for God’s return.
Twenty-eight came to be treated, not for anything definite, but in general, “just in case,” hoping that where there would be a miracle, they would get a miracle.
Nineteen came to see.
Fourteen fled the imperial recruiting force and chose Zaton because recruiters had not yet come.
Eleven went to Jerusalem and stayed there for the winter.
The six were waiting for the end of the world and wanted to meet him in the right place.
Three came to kill.
The latter she found by accident, because they were not hiding: two men and a woman from the community of Blood and Judah, camping separately, by the water. They readily explained that they were here to witness blasphemy and, if possible, to stop it, and that they did not consider it necessary to conceal it, because secrecy is a duty to lie.
I heard the same formula from Jiri on the first day.
People on opposite sides always say the same words. - She wrote it down. It would have to mean something profound. I'm afraid that just means that there are few words.
The Reich Observer arrived on the twentieth of December, in four sledges, with twelve guards and mercenaries, taken, he reported, "for the soldiers' lack of imagination."
He was fat, cheerful, in an expensive cape, and his name was Ondrej Kubat.
"Magister Malinowska!" he said as he entered the refectory and shook off the snow. "I read your report on the Northern Eye. Twice. The second time because I did not sleep after the first."
- Report closed.
- Of course, it is closed, Kubat agreed, seated. I read it closed, which would be difficult if it were open.
He didn't come to disturb. He came to count - and announced it from the doorstep before taking off his gloves.
Malinowska was present at his conversation with Master Kulgan because both wanted it, and for different reasons: Kulgan - for the observer of College to see that Zaton does not sign anything secretly; Kubat - because, as he put it, "the witness improves the quality of the conversation on both sides, kind of like good dishes."
She recorded this conversation almost verbatim and later considered it the most important document of her entire service.
- I'm tasked," said Kubat, "to figure out three things. First, do you intend to declare the created being God? Second, do you intend to declare him emperor, heir, judge, or other authority? Three: how much you want for it.
- The first is no, Kulgan said. - I'm not announcing it. Others will announce it, and I can't stop it, and I'm telling you that in advance.
- Perfect. Second?
- Never. The master said it sharply, for the first time in three months losing his evenness. The creature to whom the right to order is attributed, in a generation will become the seal on the orders of others. I've been writing about this for twenty years.
- Reading, nodded Kubat. The third part, “On the Necessity of Succession,” explains why every church hires soldiers sooner or later. Great chapter. The emperor, between us, read it, too, and he didn't like it.
- I can imagine.
- You can't, Kubat said hilariously. He didn’t like the fact that you were against the government. He didn't like you being right. He is a wise man and therefore of bad temper. - He folded his arms on his stomach. - Now three. How much?
- Nothing.
- Master.
- Nothing, repeated Kulgan. Zaton does not sell the result, does not deposit it, does not accept security or enter into an exclusive agreement.
Kubat sighed with sincerity, with regret, of the man who is to explain the obvious.
- Then let me tell you what's going to happen. Not a threat, a prediction, and you check it. - He bent his finger. First, you will succeed or you will not succeed. If it doesn't work, I'll leave, you'll go broke, four hundred pilgrims will wander off and half will die on the way, which, by the way, will be your job.
Second finger.
- If it works, then by spring there will be not four hundred people, but four thousand. You'll be no longer fed by the neighborhood. You will start buying bread, and bread will go on the imperial roads.
Three.
- By summer, there will be two parties here: two Restorerss who consider you a heretic; Keeperss who consider you a gravedigger; Bloods and Judgments who consider you all at once; and, he smiled, a number of perfectly secular people who believe that a creature from which to be nullified is worth more than a mine.
- To pinch, repeated Kulgan.
Master, you have grown your body in an environment that contains pure blood of seven measures. Kubat was very good-natured. I am not a doctor, but in my fifth year I kept caskets, and before that I had counted salt in the office for twelve years. If even a part of the properties will pass into his own blood, lymph, saliva, whatever, then a month after the first healed, pilgrims will not come here. Buyers will come. And then, he spread his hands, the question will not be how much you want for it, but how much it will last.
It was quiet.
Malinowska looked at Master Sylvester Kulgan and saw how this man, for the first time in her entire stay at Zaton, had no prepared answer.
- I thought about it, he finally said.
- I'm sure you do.
- And I decided that it shouldn't stop.
- Of course not, Kubat said almost gently. I didn’t come here to stop you. I was sent to ask the price, and I learned you're not selling. Great. I'll put it in the report, and the office will decide to wait.
He got up, buttoned one button and sat back down.
- There's a fourth thing, he said. I didn’t ask her, so I’ll ask her.
- Ask me.
- Sell the measures.
The room became very quiet.
- All seven, Kubat said. Not the result, not the being, not the right to it, seven measures as they lie in the vessels in which they lie. I pay with a paper bill that will be accepted in any city from Colin to Brno: twenty-two thousand silver. It's a price that nobody will buy at, and you know that better than I do, because it's a price that they don't buy at, they buy at.
Master Kulgan was silent.
- I will not hide them in the treasury, Kubat continued. I give you a word that, of course, costs you nothing: they will go to the infirmaries - Kutna, Pardubice, Colin, German Brod - and in a year I will send you a list by name. Twenty-eight women. Thirteen children. You counted.
- Thirteen, repeated Kulgan.
“Master,” said Kubat, “I have been counting salt for twelve years and have learned one thing: He who chooses between present and future always chooses the future because the future does not scream.”
Teresa Malinowska, who was sitting against the wall, later recorded that this was the only minute in the winter that she felt the outcome was undecided.
- No, said Master Sylvester Kulgan.
- Why?
- Because you're right, and because in a year's time you'll send me a list, and I'll read it for the rest of my life. - The old man's voice didn't waver. And because thirteen children who can be named will always outweigh two hundred years who have no names. That's how a human is made. The decision must be made by someone who agrees to be a scoundrel.
Kubat looked at him for a long time.
- You know, he said, I asked that question for the fifth time in my life. Four sold.
- How?
- Two were drunk, the imperial observer said as he rose. - One of them is ours. One died content.
He buttoned the other buttons.
- I'll tell you one last thing, and you'll remember it later.
He zipped his cape.
- I'm keeping the last forty-four measures of pure blood on the registers. I give two to the cities, buy an oath, save eight women from a hundred and a half, and I know for sure that in a hundred years there will be no blood at all. You decided to make it so that after it there was at least something left, except empty chests. - Kubat put on a hat. - So I almost feel sorry for you. And so when the empire comes here, and it comes, I'm likely to be the one who writes the paper for it.
He's out.
The master of Kulgan sat for a while, then moved the inkwell away from him - very carefully, to the width of his hand, as if it was disturbing - and went out after him without saying a word.
Malinowska was left alone in a room where the fourth-quarter estimate was on the table, and sat there until dark.
He refused, - she wrote it down tonight. I still don’t understand what I wanted: for him to agree and be ordinary, or for him to stand up and be who he thinks he is.
I write down both options because honesty requires me to admit that I wanted the other one stronger, and that means that in three months he did exactly what he does to everyone.
The Keepers came two days after the Imperial, on foot, without a wagon train, numbering eleven.
The elder was under seventy: dry, gray, with the same long stick, which in Zeliv is called a staff, and is held as a weapon. He called himself brother Rzhegorj and said that he was coming from Zeliv for the sixth week and that he asked to listen to him once, after which he would leave and never return.
He was heard in the printing house, in full room.
He didn't preach. He spoke as a man who had one argument and knew there would be no second.
- You grew a body out of your tissue, he said. I don’t blame you for that, although many of my brothers blame you. Your skin, your blood, your will. There's nothing to argue about.
He looked around the room.
- I mean, different. You put seven measures into it. This means that the substance taken from the Creator’s body is now inside a being that breathes, eats and one day dies. And when it dies, and it dies, you will have a corpse containing the blood of God.
It was quiet in the hall.
- Think of what it is. - Rzhegorzh said everything so smoothly. - Not a human being or a relic. A body that can be opened and in which there is something to look for. You're not producing an heir. You produce residue. The first new residue in six hundred and sixty-six years.
Malinowska, sitting in the third row, wrote down the phrase verbatim and emphasized it twice.
- We will keep it intact, said someone in the room.
- You are. - The old man nodded. You, the two hundred people who raised him. And your grandchildren? And the four hundred who stand on the shore and whom you feed today? In forty years there will be a city here, and there will be famine in the city, and someone will say, ‘We have seven measures under our castle, and children are dying.’ And he'll be right, brothers. The worst part is that he will be right.
He's quiet.
- We'll be keeping a body that no one ever made for six hundred years. You do the second. I came to ask you one thing: did you have any idea who would watch him after you?
Master Sylvester Kulgan has risen.
He remained silent for a long time, longer than she had seen in her entire stay at Zaton, and then said,
- Nope.
- Thank you for your honesty.
- I can write the charter, Kulgan said. - I'll write it. I will write twenty pages about things that should never be done to him, and they will continue to work until the day when the people who knew me are alive. I don't know what's next.
- Then there is the queue, said brother Rzhegorzh.
- Then there is the queue, the master agreed.
The old man nodded, bowed to the hall - not lowly, as one bows to a shrine, but briefly, as one bows to the congregation - and went out.
Eleven of the Guardians left that night and, as promised, never returned.
He didn't say a word about sacrilege, - recorded Malinowska. Not once. He was talking about storage, the only thing his order really understood: what happened to the valuable thing a hundred years after the death of anyone who knew why it was.
I came here to watch the madmen. I haven't met one in four months. It turned out to be much worse.
VI. The Method
“Awakening is not a return. The one who left returns. No one left here, and therefore it is more correct to speak of the beginning, as they say of the beginning at birth, although this word is not accurate, for what is conceived is born. Vaclav Gouska, pharmacist Zaton, working records
The body was called the sixteenth, after the number of the Chan.
Teresa Malinowska saw him for the first time on the eleventh day and then twenty-three more times because she was contractually entitled to attend all the examinations.
She recorded the same way she would have recorded the drug, and that was the only way to keep going into the Garden.
The male body, the age of development - from twenty to twenty-five years. Five feet nine inches tall. Addition is correct, proportions without deviations. The skin is pale, without pigmentation, nails and hair grow. The hair is dark.
Muscle tone is low (a consequence of immobility). Therapy: massage, electrical irritation according to the Gowski method, twice a day, eleventh year.
Breathing has been independent since 1866. Heart since 1863. Digestion is incomplete; nutrition through the probe.
The eyes open in the fourth minute after irritation; the movement of the pupil into the light is present.
Consciousness: absent. College is defined as the absence of a directed response to a changing environment. During twenty-three observations, no cases were recorded.
Gender: male. I have not been informed of the reason for the choice. When asked again, the pharmacist Gouska replied, “It happened.” On the third question, Master Kulgan replied, “It happened, and it’s for the best, because if we chose, we would choose, and every choice is preaching.”
The “wake-up” method consisted of four parts, and none of them contained anything that College had not done on dogs, frogs and—in two known Malinowska cases she had not written about—in humans.
First, replace the nutrient medium with blood. Clean.
Here we need a clarification, without which the whole idea looks like a waste of a fool. Seven measures, and measure is what is placed in the palm of the hand, would not be enough for a tenth of a vat in human height. Therefore, the body was transferred from a large vat to a narrow glass casing, repeating its outline with a gap of two fingers, and a little more than fourteen pins went into this casing in three days.
Seven measures amounted to about a fifth of it. The rest was serum.
- Is the fifth part enough? asked Malinowska.
- I don't know, Gouska said. - Nobody knows. We took as much as we have, that's not a calculation, Madam Master, that's all that was.
Second: a gradual rise in temperature to thirty-eight and one-tenth.
Third, electrical excitation of the vagus nerve and cortex according to the scheme developed in Zaton and, as Gouska honestly pointed out, copied from the works of the Prague school of the fortieth year.
The fourth, longest, is waiting.
- You realize," Gouska told her the day before, "that we're not investing anything in it. No soul, no spark, no beginning. We simply create conditions where the body that has everything will work as a whole, not as a piece.
- And you think that's enough?
- I think that’s enough for a dog, the old man said. The dog is made up of the same parts and works entirely. If we're not, we'll know tomorrow, and it's going to be the most important discovery in the history of medicine, and I'm very happy.
- What if it is?
Vaclav Gouska was silent for a long time.
- Then, he said, I have sunk the oven for twelve men all my life, and tomorrow I will flood for the thirteenth.
Seven measures were opened on the twenty-eighth of December, in the presence of forty witnesses, including the observer College, including two from the community of Blood and the Court, whom Master Kulgan had invited personally and who had come.
Two of the congregation of Blood and Judgment were called Simon and Ondrey, and they were not only brothers in the community.
Before the start, the master of Kulgan asked if anyone wanted to say anything. It was a normal Zaton procedure, and usually nobody wanted to.
The youngest has risen, Simon.
He was twenty-five years old, and spoke quietly and was noticeably anxious, but spoke without straying, like a man who had repeated it to himself many times.
- You do it, he said, because you think there was no trial. That the Father simply ceased to live, and the world remained without measure and we must put a new one.
- That's about it, Kulgan said.
- We think otherwise. We believe there was a trial. Once, in front of all, he was seen in all lands, and the sentence was executed by the convicted man’s own hands. Simon looked around forty people. This is what I am asking you to hear, not what you are told about us.
He took his breath.
- If you put a new one, he will be judged, too. Not us. Not tomorrow. But every thing done perfect will one day be questioned for what it has allowed, and the more perfect it is, the more fully it will be asked. You're not giving the world a foothold. You appoint another to be executed and raise him in a vat for eleven years.
The silence lasted a long time.
- This is a coherent argument, said the master at Kulgan. - I'm not answering it.
- Why?
- There is only one way to answer it: to say that there was no trial. And this, brother, is your faith, and I will not examine it in front of you like a watch does.
Simon sat down.
Malinowska recorded his words in full—the only theological text she had taken out of Zaton—and it is quoted in the College report without comment, as she did not consider herself entitled to comment on it.
Malinowska stood four steps away and saw it being done.
The vessels were taken from the fund one by one. Preliquary, different glass, different years: two - monastic work of the fourteenth century; one - with a seal that no one could read; four - later, into which blood was transfused in 1809 with all the precautions that they were then able, with a record of transfusion and with the signature of a doctor who died forty years ago.
For sixty years the same opinion has been held of these four Colleges: all transfusion is contact with the medium, and all contact with the medium is a loss of purity, and therefore they cannot be considered authentic. Zaton held on to another. This dispute was never resolved and could not be resolved, because the only way to verify it was to use it.
Teresa Malinowska noted to herself that of the seven measures that Master Kulgan ordered as the last miracle in the world, four, according to her own institution, were no longer miracles.
She didn't say it out loud. She still doesn't know why.
They were opened above the funnel, and the contents went down the tube into a vat, and it went not like a liquid, but like a liquid goes in deep water: united body, slowly, reluctantly.
The light from the four lamps fell on the stream and did not pass through.
Teresa Malinowska, a third-generation atheist, a College anatomist, author of eleven papers and co-author of the Northern Eye inventory, watched the last remaining substance capable of reversing the death of one particular child pour into a glass vat—and caught herself counting.
Thirteen. Fourteen. Count. Count, because if you stop counting now, you will start praying, and you are thirty-one years old and you know how everything that happens here works.
One of the brothers of Blood and Judah, the younger one, was kneeling and weeping.
The second stood upright and looked and remembered, and Malinowska understood with absolute clarity that this person remembered faces.
The last vessel was empty at a quarter of the first night.
The master of Kulgan looked at the clock, then at the calendar hanging at the entrance.
Twenty-ninth of December.
The Western churches had six weeks to go before the anniversary. In the east it passed in the autumn, and the easterners held the opinion that the westerns were late by a whole year and were celebrating six hundred and sixty-seven. Those who waited for the Last Messiah were counted by the moon and this year came to September.
Neither side could prove its date, and all three considered the dispute to be over in their favor.
- I ask you to put in the record," said the master loudly, "that the date is determined by the readiness of the fabric, not by the number.
He looked around forty witnesses.
- And I'd like you to know that this won't change anything. In a year, they will say we chose the day. A hundred years later, that day chose us. - He turned away. - Write, Madam Master. At least one of us will have some paper.
VII. Night
And this is what no prophet has said: that the first sound of the new world will be a cry, and that it will not be humanity that will cry, but the one we have made for it. - attributed to Teresa Malinowska; not found in her surviving papers
The temperature was raised in nineteen hours.
Teresa Malinowska sat in the Garden all night and all the next day because she had the right to be present, and because she honestly wrote that she could not be anywhere else.
There were four people in the Garden: Gouska, two nurses, and her. Magister Kulgan came twice, stood for a while, and left. He gave no orders. He could do almost nothing with his hands, and he knew it.
That's how every design works. Malinowska thought, looking at the pressure gauges. He who does not know, but who does not ask why. Between them lies the whole story.
At the third hour of the morning on the thirty-first of December, the sixteenth number began to breathe more often.
In the fourth, he opened his eyes, and that meant nothing, because he had opened them before.
He closed them at half past six and that didn’t mean anything either.
At seven-twenty he raised his right hand.
Gouska, who was dozing in a chair, woke up instantly as the old men woke up.
- Keep the lights straight, he said.
The hand rose about on the palm, shook and fell. I got up again a minute later.
- A cramp? - Malinowska asked.
- Nope.
- How do you define it?
- No, the apothecary said. - The cramp is faster and the same. And this is different.
At eight-zero, five, the sixteenth number screamed.
This cry is described in three independent sources, and neither of them coincides with the other two in the estimate of duration: Gouska writes “about a minute”, Malinowska – “four or five minutes”, the nurse Magda Veselaya, questioned later, testified that “screamed until he took his voice off, and it was a long time.”
All three sources coincide in the other.
It wasn't a newborn scream.
The newborn is screaming out, rhythmically, and there's work in that scream: it opens up the lungs. Here a grown-up throat shouted, never making a sound, and the sound came out ragged, monstrously low, breaking, and there was no rhythm in it, only the pure, continuous transmission of a single message that everyone in the room understood, without having a word of common language.
It hurts.
So that's what we called the gift of life. - she wrote it down later. We give it without asking, and the first thing that the receiver receives is pain, and he tells us immediately and clearly, and we immediately call it a cry of joy, because we cannot do otherwise.
Gouska gave a poppy.
He gave it two minutes after it started, at a time when the clear picture could still be observed and when College, if it were here, would have demanded to observe.
Malinowska did not object.
She then spent her whole life thinking that the only absolutely right thing she did in Zaton was to keep quiet.
Lights.
Not light, extension. There is no top, no bottom, no boundary, no one who looks. Expansion is also a cutting.
Something's pressing the same everywhere. It'll be called air later.
Something's pulling down. It'll be called weight later.
The cutting is in waves, and between the waves there is empty, and there is nothing in the empty, and it is worse than the cutting, because the cutting is at least.
Noise. Noise of different heights, and it doesn't mean it.
Warm sideways. Heat is the only thing that doesn’t cut.
To reach for the heat. Pull. Not “deciding to reach out” – there is no one who decides; there is only that which stretches, and it reaches, and bumps, and grabs.
He does.
He does.
He grabbed her finger.
This happened at nine and a half in the morning, after a poppy tincture, when the cry turned into rare breaths, and the Teresa Malinowska stood at the vat, because Gouska ordered to hold his head while he changed his pillow.
The fingers of the sixteenth number closed on her index, and the grip was weak, incorrect and completely unambiguous.
She stood bent, in an uncomfortable position, for fifteen minutes.
She couldn't open his hand. Or rather, it could: the hand was weak, and it could be unclothed with a single movement. She couldn't do that.
It's a grasping reflex. - She thought. It is found in babies, monkeys, kittens. It does not mean recognition, attachment, gratitude. It doesn't mean anything. It's the spinal cord.
Untie your hand.
It's the spinal cord.
Untie.
At one point, she noticed she was speaking out loud. It's a little quiet, on one note, like you say to a horse or a very drunk.
- Shh, she said. - I'm here. Shh. I'm here.
The Gouska returned with a pillow and stopped at the door.
He said nothing and left the door open.
Master Kulgan came at noon.
He looked at the sixteenth number, now lying in bed, an ordinary bed, placed along the wall of the Garden, fourteenth in the row where the twelve others stood, and stood for a long time in silence.
- Is he conscious? he asked at last.
- It responds to the environment in a targeted way, Malinowska said. - Light, sound, touch. Pulls his hand away from the cold. Turns his head on his voice.
- Is that consciousness?
- By definition, College is a yes.
- What do you think?
She looked at the man in the bed. He lay with his eyes open and looked up at the ceiling, and his eyes moved, and there was nothing in them that she could name.
- I think, Teresa Malinowska said, there is someone in there. He is very ill, and he does not know a single word—including the word "ill."
Magister Kulgan nodded.
- Give him a name, he said.
- What?
- Name. Right now, today, before they do it outside. - His voice was tired and angry. If we don’t name him, they’ll call him, and he’ll be called Heir, or Second, or whatever, with a capital letter, and then everything we’ve done for twenty years will go with that letter.
- Why me?
- Because you are an observer of College and you write down every hour, and because that name will be in your report before any sermon. - He turned to the door. And because, Madam Master, he was holding you by the finger, not me.
She thought till tonight.
In the journal Zaton, under the heading "sixteenth", by the hand of Teresa Malinowska inscribed:
“Matej Zatonsky, male, unknown age, no parent, contributions of one hundred and ninety-seven persons. He was awakened on the thirty-first of December 1870 at eight o'clock five o'clock in the morning.
She took the name from the fourth room, lying across two beds, that he watched the light and heard no sound.
It was the only sentimentality she had ever had, and she didn’t regret it.
VIII. Interpretation
“The phenomenon makes no sense. The story of the phenomenon is the only thing that makes sense, and therefore whoever comes first is more important than the one who was right. Sylvester Kulgan, On the Necessity of Succession, Part Four
By the morning of January, the camp knew everything.
We knew it was "it worked." He said, “He woke up at eight.” They knew, and Malinowska tracked this from three independent accounts, that he “spoken immediately and said a word that no one understood.”
He didn't say. He made no sound except screaming and breathing.
Nevertheless, by noon on the first day of January, four hundred steps from the Garden, there were no less than six versions of what was said, and two of them were already differing in writing, because among the pilgrims he was literate.
And so tradition comes into being. - She wrote it down. Not through lying. Through contraction. No one invented words; just “screamed” too hard to carry, and “said” – easily, and after a day in the world there is no person who would hold heavy.
Master Kulgan ordered no one to be allowed in.
This was the only order that Zaton did not comply with.
Not out of rebellion, but out of physics. There were three hundred and thirty people living in the village, one hundred and ninety-seven of them were donors, that is, they considered themselves involved in the most literal sense; each had relatives in the camp; and by the evening of the third January, the chain “a nurse – the brother of a nurse – his wife – four hundred people on the shore” worked smoothly.
On the fourth day of January, a child was brought to the garden gate.
The girl was about seven years old, her name was Barborka, she had a bone ulcer on her lower leg, open, old, with a fistula, and her mother carried it in her arms for four days from German Broad, because in German Brode they said that her leg should be cut.
Mother didn't scream or demand.
She sat at the gate and sat.
By evening there was a man of thirty sitting next to her, and it was impossible to disperse it without beating the women in front of four hundred people.
Gouska came out at dusk.
"A woman," he said. - I'm a druggist. I'll look at my leg.
- I'm not here for you.
- I know who you're with. He squatted, which was not easy at his age. - He can't walk. He can't sit. He doesn't know he has hands. He can't help you and he won't know you're here.
- Let him look at her, said his mother.
- He doesn't know where he's looking.
- Let him look.
And here, I recorded Malinowska that night. I realized that everything was lost.
She didn't ask for healing. She asked for a look. No retraction works against such a request because the request does not contain an affirmation. We can prove that he doesn't heal. We can't prove he's not looking.
The Gouska did what any pharmacist who had worked for thirty years with people, not with ideas, would do in his place.
He took the blood of Mateus Zaton.
A quarter ounce, ulnar vein, needle, two witnesses, log entry. And he took her to his room, and he worked all night, and at six in the morning he went to Malinowska in the room, sat on her bed, and said,
-Many Master. I need your eye because I don't believe mine anymore.
They worked until noon.
The method was crude—it could not have been otherwise—but it was the same as the College had been testing the measures for twenty-two years, and the Malinowska knew it by heart.
- Just keep in mind, Gouska said, placing the lamps, “a test to light sifts out a crude fake and can do nothing else.”
"I know," said Malinowska. We have every result marked with the word “preliminary”.
There is no one way the world can trust. Hence the fake measures at every fair, and the fact that no doctor in these lands is completely calm.
Lights. The serum was holding the light. Not like pure blood, it holds it whole; this one missed about a third, and that was more than any human blood that Teresa Malinowska had seen in eleven years.
Putrefaction test. The meat placed in the whey had no odor on the fourth day.
Wound test. Three rabbits, three identical incisions; two - a lotion of serum, the third - water. By the third day, the difference was such that Gouska turned away and left the room.
Malinowska brought the experience to the end alone and recorded the result in a smooth handwriting.
Then she sat down and sat there, not moving, for about an hour.
It's material. - She thought. It is absolutely, of course, boring materially. The body is grown in a medium containing seven measures; its own blood carries some of its properties; its properties are weakened—a third of the light instead of the whole—and will likely weaken as it lives, eats, drinks, and exchanges with the world.
There is no miracle, no will, no answer. There's dilution here.
And that, she wrote in the next line, would have absolutely no meaning.
He had written a book that day and never knew it.
She determined a third of the light by the eye, at the Gowski lamp, in which by morning oil had sat down and the wick gave yellower than usual. She was going to try again on a fresh one, and she didn't do it that day or after, because Barborca's mother came in on the fourth of January, and since the fourth of January, there has been no day in Zaton where a quarter ounce of blood could be used to test itself.
How weak the properties are – by a third, by half, by half – and remained unknown. All subsequent calculations of College, including her own, relied on the figure obtained when the lamp was burning.
She was right twice.
First, on the fourth of January, Gouska took Barborca’s mother a bottle of soaked water and said exactly what was true: that it was a drug made from the blood of a man named Matej, that it would probably help, that it was not sacred and that it didn’t have to be paid for.
The woman listened, nodded and thanked.
And then, taking twenty steps, she turned to the thirty seated and said,
- Dal.
Secondly, by the tenth of January, there were no longer thirty men at the gates of the Garden, nor forty.
Teresa Malinowska counted in person, twice, from different ends of the series.
Two hundred and sixty-four.
IX. The Cost
“Whoever holds the object of another’s hope in his hand thinks he decides. It is the queue that decides.” Ondrej Kubat, Office of the Acceding Cities, Memorandum of 14 March 1871
The order was established on the nineteenth of January.
He was reasonable. Teresa Malinowska was present at the time of its drafting and was forced to admit that in eleven years of service she had not seen a more balanced document of this kind.
Blood is taken no more than once every seven days, no more than four ounces at a time. The serum is diluted according to the pharmacy prescription one to twenty. They are given out free of charge, never for money, in any form, including gifts. The doctor decides; the doctor is invited from the outside and changes every three months; wounds, burns and birth fever are the first to go on the list, because there the action is tested, not expected.
Master Kulgan insisted on one more point, and Malinowska wrote it down verbatim:
In the handout there is a leaf which says: This is a medicine from the blood of the man Mateus Zaton, who is alive, lies behind this wall, and cannot speak or walk. Read aloud to every illiterate.
The sheet was hung.
It was read aloud.
People listened, nodded, thanked, and left, carrying the bottle, and in huts on the shore they said: “Give.”
We believe that the human being is misled by the lack of knowledge. - recorded Malinowska. There's a lot of information here. They are told the truth at the entrance, exit and on the way. Truth passes through them without touching them, because it does not answer their question. Their question is “Why do I do this?” and the truth answers only “How do I do it?”
In February, Matej Zatonsky learned to sit.
It took six weeks of daily work, and two nurses, Gouska, and — four hours a day, voluntarily, outside of any contract with the College — Malinowska herself worked with him.
She couldn't explain it to herself for a long time. Then I explained and wrote it down because I wrote it down.
I work with him because he's the only creature in Zaton who doesn't want anything from me.
Simon came in February.
He went to the gate of the Garden and asked permission to look, and was allowed in because the Gouska was in force, and the Gouska let anyone in.
Simon stood against the wall for an hour.
Matej that day for the first time kept himself sitting, without the hands of a nurse, - four or five heartbeats - and fell to his side, and he was caught, and he immediately fell asleep, like babies fall asleep after an effort.
- Is it hurting? asked Simon.
- My back hurts, Malinowska said. - Muscles don't hold. It'll pass.
- Not the back.
She didn't answer.
Simon stayed a little longer.
- I will tell you what I was afraid of when I walked. I was afraid to see something great. You know, to fall.
- And?
- And here's a man who's twenty-five years old and he's being taught to sit. - He was looking at the bed. - It's much worse, Madam. With the majestic, I would know what to do.
He went and came back twice, in late February and mid-March, and brought mittens, ordinary woollen mittens, for in the Garden, he said, it was "cold by the window," although the Garden was twenty degrees straight.
They took the mittens and put them in the head.
Matej learned the way a one-year-old learns, except that he had an adult body and fell hard and was difficult to hold.
By mid-February, he was distinguishing faces: turning his head on Gowska, on Magda, on her. By the end of February, it was making sounds, not screaming, but the meaningless chanting that a baby tries his throat with.
On the first day of March, he said the phrase.
Later estimates put the number of nine to sixty people present; seven were certainly present, including both nurses, the apothecary Gouscu and the observer College.
He lay on his side, tired after an hour of exercise, held Malinowska by the finger - he always held his finger, it remained from the first day - and said, quite cleanly, only smearing the first consonant:
- Shh. I'm here.
Teresa Malinowska closed her eyes.
She uttered these two words over him about forty times a day for nine weeks. She would say them automatically, as they say to a sick child, and she would never think about what she was saying, and certainly didn’t mean anything but “don’t be afraid.”
He repeated them as a parrot repeats the creak of the door: precisely, flawlessly, and without any touch on the meaning.
By evening, the phrase was in camp.
By the morning of the second of March, in German Brode.
By the end of the month, in Kutna, in Pardubice, in Colin, in Brno, and, according to the Reich post, in the Chancellery.
The first word disappeared from her.
"I'm here."
Teresa Malinowska wrote a separate letter to the College, outside the report, with a nine-week class log attached, where the dates were marked, how many times and in what connection she uttered the phrase.
The letter was read, recognized as valuable and attached.
In Zaton, she explained in person, three times, publicly, in the same printing press where she voted in September. She brought the magazine. She read the dates aloud.
She was listened to with respect.
On the fourth day, a chalk inscription appeared on the gate of the Garden, made by a pilgrim; it was erased and reappeared, and it was erased again, and was not washed for the fifth time.
"Said: I'm here. A scientist from Kutna testifies that she doesn’t believe.
Okay, I recorded Malinowska that night. My only advantage, unbelief, was taken from me and used as a signature on someone else's document. I can't even call it a fraud. Everything it says is true.
Master Sylvester Kulgan tried to stop it in March.
He suggested Zaton to stop the distribution completely; to make the medicine only for severe cases, three bottles a month; to take blood every two weeks instead of a week. Close the garden to all, including donors; camp on the shore to settle, paying for the road.
He spoke forty minutes, and it was the best speech he ever heard.
He said, We made a measure and made a source.
He said, “The source cannot be a measure, because the source is in line, and the measure is what is not divided.”
He said, If we continue, there will be a temple in ten years, a guard at the temple, a treasury at the guard, lists at the treasury, and lists of people whom we choose not to treat; and all that we have sacrificed our lives for for for sixty years will turn into another office distributing the death of others.
He said, I have written for twenty years that every church sooner or later hires soldiers. Don't make me be right in my own house.
It wasn't the printing press.
The printing house accommodated two hundred people, and by March in Zaton, not one hundred and ninety-seven adults were considered their own, but all those who wintered under the Wall and worked: the camp on the shore grew into a village in three months, and in February the meeting accepted that the contribution could be made not only by skin and blood, but also by labor.
Magister Kulgan voted for that rule. He later said it was the only decision he regretted—and that he regretted it wrongly, out of vanity, because the rule itself was right.
Voted on the shore, raising their hands, in the light of day, counting aloud by dozens.
For the Master's proposal, eighty-one.
Against, four hundred and six.
Jiri, the one who met her on the bridges and honestly warned her that he was supposed to report, stood in the third ten and raised his hand against her.
He caught her eye and didn't take her eyes. He never hid anything in the winter, and that, she later wrote, was the bottom line: Zaton honesty worked until the day when honest people had to choose between their old man and someone else’s healing leg.
He didn't lose to the fanatics. - recorded Malinowska that night. The same people who had given him seven measures in September stood on the shore. They gave it away because he explained the price. Now they refused him, because the price had changed, and he was no longer entitled to charge it: in three months between them and him stood two hundred and sixty-four men at the gate, and Barborca's mother, and a leg that was healing.
He built his influence on honesty. Honesty brought him to the general meeting, and the general meeting is the turn.
The Kulgan master did not resign, as there was no position at Zaton to leave. He just stopped showing up at meetings.
In April, Zaton hired twenty security personnel.
The contract was signed at Malinowska, and she noted that the senior mercenary - a young, very direct, with three ribbons on his hat - spoke confidently and seemed to believe in what he was guarding.
She noted that the company was the same one with which the imperial observer came here in December from Sazawa, where the two-measure box carried him all autumn. Kubat left, the company remained in the land, and five months later it was hired by the one to whom Kubat came to count.
The world is not small because it is small. - She wrote it down. It's because there are few people who can do the right thing, and they all pass through the same gate sooner or later.
On the eighth of April three came from the community of Blood and Judgment.
Two men and a woman, the same ones who were camping by the water and openly explaining why they had come. They were not touched because they had done nothing in four months and it was considered unacceptable to drive a person away for intent in Zaton.
They entered the Garden at third o'clock in the morning through the window of a wood-burning shed that had not closed since autumn.
The following is known.
Gouska was the first to wake up because old people don't sleep well. He went out into the hallway in his shirt, without light, and was stabbed in the stomach, and fell, and survived, and lived for another nine years.
The nurse Magda Merry screamed.
A woman from the community reached Matej's bed of Zaton and brought the knife in, and at that moment, three confirm, Matej woke up and looked at her.
He didn't do anything. He could do nothing: he could not stand up, he did not understand the danger, and most likely he did not know what a knife was.
He looked at it and said,
- Shh. I'm here.
The woman hit.
She missed—the blade went into the pillow and shoulder—and was knocked down by a running nurse, and a minute later there were eight people in the Garden, and three to twenty.
Two were killed on the spot.
Teresa Malinowska went out into the hallway when it was over, and saw two men on the floor, and squatted with a candle because she had a magazine and was supposed to be in the magazine.
She noted the growth of the first and the nature of the wound.
Then she held the candle to the second and recognized it.
Simon lay on his side, and his hand was in a wool mitten, the same as the pair that had been lying in Mateus’ headboard since March, of the same gray yarn, apparently tied that evening.
Teresa Malinowska squatted for quite some time.
Then she closed the magazine without finishing the record, and that was the only time in the winter she hadn't written down anything.
The woman, her name was Dorota, was not killed. She was kept in a wood shed for eleven days, while there was a debate about what to do with her, and she told everything that was wanted from her during those eleven days, and repeated it in front of a hundred people.
She said that she saw him wake up; that he was looking at her; that he said to her, "I'm here"; and that her hand couldn't hit her straight afterwards.
She said it as an accusation. She thought she was a sign of blasphemy.
She was released. She went to German Broad and told me. By June, it was the most famous story in the three lands, and it was told as she told it—that is, from the enemy’s perspective, with hate, with detail—and that’s why she was believed unconditionally.
No preacher, Teresa Malinowska recorded. I would not have done for Zaton what the woman who came to destroy him did. And this is the only thing in the history that would have been funny if the Gouska hadn’t been there for six weeks.
Matea Zaton was saved.
It was taken seriously: security, bars on the windows, three doctors, the best food in the village, a separate oven.
By May, he was starting to weaken.
The first thing that was noticed was not the doctor, but Magda Veselaya, because she was washing him. She said, It's yellow and cold.
Measurements confirmed: the pulse increased, the skin pale with a waxy tint, the gums are loose, shortness of breath with effort. He stopped sitting down on his own. He began to sleep for eighteen hours.
It was just a normal anemia. Four ounces a week in a healthy adult is on edge; four ounces a week in a person who doesn’t walk, eats poorly and recovers slowly is, as May has shown, off the line.
The Gouska, who had not yet risen, demanded that the fence be stopped through Magda.
The fence was reduced to three ounces every ten days.
In late May, when Gouska left his room for the first time after the knife, the meeting was asked a question that everyone had already asked.
If the body has grown in a pure blood environment and its own blood is working, why can’t you grow a second body in an environment out of Mateus’ blood?
Gouska answered standing, leaning on a stick, and spoke more slowly than usual.
- You can, he said. - You count it. Fourteen chords were worn on the casing, of which a fifth was blood. That's almost three stops. We took four ounces a week from him, and it turned him yellow.
He waited for the count.
- Three scallops is ninety-six ounces. Twenty-four weeks if you take four and give him nothing but food. Six months that he won't get up for and is likely to die.
- What if I took less? asked the back.
- Then it will be longer and still die, only later. - Gouska is down. And that’s also on the assumption that his blood is good as a medium, which no one knows and can only be tested in one way.
There was no vote on the matter. It was never lifted again.
It wasn't conscience that stopped them. - recorded Malinowska. Arithmetic stopped them, and I found myself thanking her for being on the right side for the first time in my life. If the numbers had converged differently, the second casing would have stood by June.
In June, he weighed as much as he did in March, but he was already lying still.
On June twenty-six, Teresa Malinowska wrote a letter that she did not send.
It was addressed to the rector of the College Anatomists, the same one who, as Master Kulgan had told her without any hesitation on the first day, had been in correspondence with the Imperial Chancellery since spring.
In a four-page letter, dry and in form, Master T. Malinowska stated the following.
That the settlement of Zaton contains a living person of unknown origin, whose blood has reproducible healing properties.
That blood is being taken in a volume incompatible with life, and that this man, under the present order, will die before the end of the year.
That College, by the statutes of 1834, may claim for itself any subject of research of exceptional scientific value, and that the Reich Chancellery has the means to secure such a requirement.
And that she, the observer of the September ninth treaty, strongly recommends that it be done immediately.
The letter was impeccable. It would almost certainly have worked: by August, soldiers would have come to Zaton, the fence would have stopped the same day, and Matej of Zaton would have been taken to Kutna, the very second building in which the four drugs extracted from the burials were stored in the basement.
He would have lived there probably longer. He would live there as a drug -- number, inventory, check-up -- and no one would hold his finger for four hours a day, because in College, that's what's called surveillance distortion.
She read the letter three times.
Then she folded it four times and placed it in the case, between the old sheets from the Northern Eye dossier.
She did it out of calculation and charity, and there's not a line in the report about it. The only record left from that day is in a personal journal and it reads:
Professor Dvorak then took the brush because he couldn’t help but take it, and lost the pulpit, and still writes refutations. I always thought he was wrong the minute he reached out.
Today I think he stumbled earlier: the minute he decided there was an observer who didn’t interfere.
There is no such observer. There is only one who intervenes and one who intervenes by inaction, and the other has the advantage of not having to sign anything.
She kept the letter for the rest of her life. It was found in her papers in 1897, unopened, enclosed in an envelope with an address and an unexposed date.
In July, the fourteenth, he died.
He did not die of bloodletting, at least not directly. He died of pneumonia, common to the world of one in four bed-ridden, and the protocol signed by the three doctors and the observer College states: "Acute inflammation of both lungs with general exhaustion and anemia."
The blood that healed the wounds of others for three months did not help his own body.
Malinowska noted this in the report because it knew that this line would be cut from all subsequent lists.
It happened.
X. The Report
“We do not choose gods. We choose what to make them out of, and then the need works, and it doesn’t ask us what we meant.” - the final line of the report of the Master T. Malinowska, crossed out by the censor College and restored in the 1889 edition
She left Zaton on the twenty-second of July, eight days after her death.
Master Sylvester Kulgan had not left his room for a fourth month. She came to say goodbye; he was alive, conscious and very old.
- You will write that I was wrong, he said.
- I'll write down what happened.
- It's the same thing. - He laughed. - Madam Master, I have been saying all my life that a man needs a measure, and that if it is not, it must be put. I still think so. I was wrong about one thing.
- What?
- I thought the measure was an item, Kulgan said. - That it can be made and put, as put a mile pole. And she seems to have a relationship. It arises between people or does not arise, and everything that can be put in the middle immediately becomes what causes the fight.
He looked out the window behind the cup.
- I fed him seven measures and eleven years, and I got a man who lived a hundred and ninety-five days, all the while sick, understood nothing, and died. - He didn't waver. - And you know what's worst? If I could start over, I think I would.
- Why?
- Because the alternative, Madam Master, is to admit that the question of why has no answer, and I cannot afford it at sixty-seven. - He closed his eyes. - You can. You're thirty-one. Try to keep it going longer.
He died in December of that year, and it was almost never written about, because it was no longer about him.
The fate of the rest is known from the papers.
The body of Mateus Zaton was not buried. The Zaton meeting, the same four hundred and six against eighty-one, decided to keep it, and kept it: in the Chalice, where nothing rots, in a closed room, with inventory and guards.
By the autumn of 1871, there were fifteen hundred people on the east coast. By the spring of 1872, the village had four hundred courtyards, two handouts, a market and the first church built, which Zaton did not build, bless and could not demolish.
He ran out of blood with him. Seventy-four bottles of prepared serum remained; they were issued on the list until 1874, and at the same time forgeries began, and in Kutna they asked as much for a bottle with the inscription “Zatonskaya” as for a fake measure.
The Zaton was empty and sold in 1876 for silver to pay for bread.
Twelve rooms from the Garden outlived everyone. The fourth, Matej, died in 1878; the seventh, Anna, who made the sound in her exhalation, in 1881, in the twenty-fourth year; the ninth, the Quiet, who never woke up, was alive as early as 1889, when Teresa Malinowska, who had come last time, saw it with her own eyes and recorded that it was still being followed and still being drowned, and that one church, except the three, was not doing it in the ground, which they all called.
Empire entered Zaton in 1877, peacefully, by treaty, with religious guarantees and with the obligation to maintain a handout.
The paper was made by an official of the office for the acceding cities. He was by that time very fat, suffered from shortness of breath and, according to a contemporary, at the signing said one phrase, which was later willingly repeated:
- There. Now they have roads.
Teresa's report, Malinowska, three hundred and eighty-eight pages long, was filed with the College of Anatomists in October 1871, declared outstanding, classified, and published eighteen years later in abbreviation.
The reflex appendix, the phrase appendix and the last paragraph were removed from it.
The last paragraph sounded like this.
I will be told that nothing supernatural happened in Zaton, and that is true. The tissue grew according to the laws of tissue; the blood acted according to the laws of substance; the man we made lived a hundred and ninety-five days and died of pneumonia, as do bedfellows in any infirmary in this country.
I will be told that people have been deceived, and that is not true. They weren't cheated. They read the truth aloud when they entered.
What happened was that six hundred and sixty-seven years ago what people used to refer to was taken out of the world, and they have been turning ever since to what was nearby. Body. Blood. The thing that lies behind the wall, and can neither stand nor object.
I don't know the means against it. I'm thirty-two, I don't believe in anything, and I held his finger for four hours a day for nine weeks and told him I was here.
I suppose it follows that I am not an exception, but just another way in which it happens.