The Second Column

"I am not abandoning rationality. I am expanding the definition of what rationality is permitted to accommodate." — Francis Killerton

The card was still on the corner of the table where Jameson had placed it.

Francis had looked at it twice since Jameson's departure — once immediately after the door had closed, when he had crossed to the table with the intention of picking it up, and once approximately an hour later, when the passage he had been writing had reached a natural resting point and he had straightened and rolled his shoulders and found his eyes settling on the small rectangle of card as though it had been quietly insisting on his attention in the interval. Both times he had looked at it and not picked it up and returned to the work, and the card had remained where it was, and the work had continued, and the afternoon had moved through its western declension toward evening without his having done anything about it.

It was not that the card did not interest him. It interested him considerably, which was precisely why he had not picked it up. There was a quality to the interest that he did not want to admit into the room until the passage he was working on was finished — or not finished exactly, because nothing he was working on was finished in the sense of being complete and bounded and susceptible to that word without qualification, but finished in the sense of having reached the point at which the day's particular contribution to it had been made and the thinking had achieved its furthest coherent extension for the present session.

He was not there yet.

He was sitting at the work table, the notebook open before him, the pen in his hand, the six objects arranged in their configuration around the current page in a way that had happened again without his having decided it should happen — the Scroll of Awareness to his left, the Infinite Scroll of Knowledge above it, the Amulet of Connection directly opposite him across the table, the Chalice to his right, the Shielded Tree plaque and the Tree of Gratification at the near edge, equidistant from his hands. He had not arranged them in this manner intentionally. He had been writing, and at some point during the writing had become aware that the objects had migrated from their previous positions to their current ones, and had understood, looking at the configuration, that his hands had done it while his mind was elsewhere, which was either a very rational response to an extended period of working in close proximity to objects he handled frequently, or was something that he was putting in the second column of the ledger — the column that was growing, by increments he was tracking carefully, in directions that his MIT training had not equipped him to evaluate.

He had written this in the notebook. He had written: The objects move. Not independently — I am not recording that, whatever else I am prepared to record. My hands move them. The question I am not yet prepared to answer is whether my hands are acting on instructions from my mind or on instructions from something else, and I am putting this question in the second column not because I disbelieve it but because I do not yet have the language to write about it accurately, and I will not write about it inaccurately.

He read this back now. He did not cross it out.

He turned to a fresh page and wrote the heading he had been building toward for the past two hours: On the nature of what is being preserved, and why preservation requires concealment.

This was the passage he had not yet been able to write directly. He had approached it from three angles over the course of the afternoon and had each time found himself writing around it rather than through it — producing good material, useful material, material that would eventually find its place in the fuller document, but not the material he was after. The material he was after required him to sit with something that was, he acknowledged privately, more uncomfortable than the rest of it.

He looked at the Scroll of Awareness.

The Scroll of Awareness had been hidden in the walls of the temple of Eanna for the better part of two thousand years. It had been placed there by a man named Nabû-kudurri-usur who had spent his adult life transcribing oral teachings that had themselves survived for fifteen centuries before he committed them to this particular scroll, and who had then hidden the scroll rather than display it or distribute it or present it to any of the scholarly institutions that existed in Uruk in 200 before the common era and that would presumably have received it with interest. He had hidden it in a wall. He had sealed the wall over it. He had, so far as the evidence indicated, told nobody where it was, and had died without anyone knowing that the object Francis had extracted from the rubble of the east colonnade was there to be extracted.

Francis had spent considerable time thinking about why.

The obvious answer was the one the document itself suggested — that the knowledge the scroll contained was dangerous in the wrong hands, that concealment was a form of protection, that the principle of Awareness, whatever it ultimately meant in the full context of the Guardian Order's philosophy, was something that required a qualified recipient rather than an indiscriminate audience. This was a satisfying answer and probably partly correct.

But Francis had arrived, over the past weeks, at the view that it was not the whole answer. Because the scroll had not simply been hidden. It had been hidden in a place — a temple, a building, a constructed space — in such a way that the building itself became the instrument of preservation. The wall of the temple of Eanna was not merely a hiding place. It was a vault. It was architecture deployed in the service of protection, and the person who had made that decision had understood something that Francis was only now beginning to articulate: that a building could be made to mean more than it appeared to mean, and that the excess of meaning, the meaning that did not appear on the surface, was often the meaning that mattered most.

He began to write.

He wrote quickly now, the pen moving at the pace it moved when the material was ready and the only remaining task was capture — the slightly frantic velocity of a man writing against the fear that the thought will outpace the hand. He wrote about concealment as a form of architecture. He wrote about the buildings Killerton Enterprises would construct and the relationship between their public faces and their private interiors, the structures the city would see and inhabit and understand and the structures within those structures that would serve a different purpose and answer to a different understanding. He wrote about the hidden chambers, the below-grade spaces, the connecting passages, the rooms whose existence would not appear on any official plan — not because he was deceiving anyone, or not only because of that, but because the things those rooms would contain required the kind of protection that only deliberate, considered concealment could provide.

He stopped.

He put the pen down.

He sat back in the chair and looked at what he had written, and for the first time in — he could not calculate how long, the days had been losing their edges — he felt something that was not the propulsive forward momentum of the work but something quieter and more ambivalent. Not doubt, precisely. Something adjacent to doubt. The recognition that what he was planning was not simply an innovative construction company with a philosophical framework. It was something considerably more complex than that, and the complexity had dimensions that he had been holding at a slight distance while he worked, dimensions that were now, in the stillness of the late afternoon with the pen set down and the notebook open and the objects arranged in their configuration around the page, insisting on being looked at directly.

He was twenty-two years old. He was sitting in his father's library in his father's house in the suburbs of Boston, surrounded by objects that were two thousand years old and that he had removed from an archaeological site in Mesopotamia without the authorisation of any body academic, governmental, or institutional — a fact that he had managed, during the intensive weeks of work, to keep in the peripheral rather than the central field of his attention, and that was now presenting itself with rather more clarity than was comfortable. He was planning a company that would operate simultaneously as a legitimate construction enterprise and as a covert preservation operation serving an organisation whose full nature and reach he did not yet entirely understand. He was doing this on the basis of a meeting that had lasted four hours in this same room in late June, with people he had known for four hours, whose authority he had accepted on the strength of something that was not evidence in any sense his education recognised.

He was doing all of this with a certainty that had not diminished by one degree since the moment it had arrived, and the certainty was itself, he acknowledged, the most alarming aspect of the entire situation.

He picked up the pen again.

He wrote, in the margin beside the passage he had just produced, in the smaller writing he used for the notations that were for himself rather than for any eventual reader: The certainty is not rational. I am aware that it is not rational. I am also aware that the things in this room are not explicable by any framework I was given, and that the people who visited were not explicable by any framework I was given, and that Uruk was not explicable by any framework I was given, and that at some point the accumulation of inexplicable things constitutes its own category of evidence.

He read it back.

Then he wrote below it: I am not abandoning rationality. I am expanding the definition of what rationality is permitted to accommodate.

He sat with this for a long moment. Outside, the day was declining. The quality of the light coming through the gaps in the west curtains had shifted from the amber of mid-afternoon to the deeper, more saturated gold of early evening, and the room around him had acquired the particular intimate quality of a space that has been inhabited intensively for a long time and has begun, in some indefinable way, to reflect that inhabitation — to hold the warmth and the concentration and the accumulated hours of work in the way that rooms sometimes do, as though the air itself has been altered by sustained human purpose.

He looked at the Amulet of Connection.

The interwoven circles on its surface were doing the thing with the light. He had noted this phenomenon on seven separate occasions and had written a careful, clinical description of it each time, and the clinical descriptions were accurate and he stood by them, and they did not adequately describe the experience of sitting alone in a room at this hour and watching an object that was twenty-two centuries old produce, in the quality of the gaslight falling across its surface, the impression of — he reached for the word and found, as he always found, that the available words were not quite right — of being looked at. Not of looking at something. Of being, oneself, the object of an attention.

He looked away.

He looked back.

The amulet was a bronze disc, approximately three inches in diameter, worn smooth at its edges by centuries of handling, its surface incised with interlocking circles in a continuous pattern that had no beginning and no end and that, if followed with the eye, produced a mild vertigo after a sustained period that Francis had also recorded clinically and that he was experiencing now, mildly, at the peripheral edge of his visual field.

Lugalbanda had made the original of this in 2318 before the common era. The version he was looking at had been made by a man named Enlil-uzur in 150 before the common era and consecrated in a ceremony in the temple of Inanna and kept as a sacred object thereafter, which meant that its history was not merely the history of its manufacture but the accumulated history of its use — the hands that had handled it, the purposes it had served, the ceremonies it had been part of, the two centuries of consecrated attention that had been directed at it before the fall of whatever finally ended its official custodianship and sent it into the obscurity from which Francis had retrieved it.

He was thinking about connection.

Not in the abstract — he had been thinking about connection in the abstract for weeks, in the context of the company and its dual mission and the relationship between its public and private dimensions. He was thinking about it in the immediate, physical sense. The amulet in its configuration on the table. The six objects and their arrangement. The feeling — he wrote it now, rapidly, before the clinical part of his mind could intervene — the feeling that the objects were not separate from one another. That they constituted, in their arrangement, something that was greater than the sum of their individual significances. That the principle each one embodied — Awareness, Knowledge, Freedom, Connection, Survival, Gratification — was not a standalone principle but part of a system, and that the system was not merely philosophical but operational, and that the operation it was designed to perform was one that he was, by degrees, beginning to understand.

He stopped writing. He read back what he had written.

He did not cross it out.

He sat in the chair with the pen held loosely and the notebook open and the six objects in their configuration on the table and felt, in the silence of the library in the declining day, the particular quality of a man who has arrived at the edge of something. Not the edge of his understanding — he was past that, had been past it for weeks. The edge of his ability to work alone. The edge of the solitary phase of this, the phase that had been necessary and was now — he acknowledged it directly, for the first time, without qualification — ending.

He needed Theodore Cartwright.

Not eventually, not when the document was complete and the vision fully articulated and the plan polished to the point where it could be presented without risk of being misunderstood. Now. In the incomplete, still-forming, living state that it was currently in — because the living state was, he understood suddenly, part of what he needed to show Cartwright. Not a finished proposal but a working vision. Not an argument to be evaluated but a process to be invited into.

He looked at the card on the corner of the table.

He reached out and picked it up.

He read the name on it. He read the address. He held the card between his fingers and felt the quality of the stock — the weight and texture of it — with the attention he brought to materials, the trained assessment of a man for whom the physical properties of things were information rather than merely sensation.

He set the card down in the open notebook, in the centre of the current page, where it lay against the dense handwriting of the afternoon's work like a small, formal interruption.

He looked at it for a moment.

Then he looked at the correspondence pile on the corner of the desk — the weeks of accumulated mail, stacked by Jameson with the patience of a man who had been waiting, without comment, for its recipient to be ready for it. He could see, from where he sat, that the pile was substantial. He could see also that on top of it sat an envelope distinguished from the others by something he could register even at this distance — the quality of the paper, the character of the handwriting, some indefinable property of its presence on the pile that made it the one his eye went to and stayed on.

He did not cross the room to it.

Not yet. The evening was not yet finished. The card in the notebook required thought, and the passage he had been working on required its concluding section, and outside the west curtains the last of the July light was still available to him, and he was not ready.

But he was closer to ready than he had been this morning.

He turned to a fresh page, wrote the date at the top — 10 July 1873, evening — and returned to the work, and the room held him as it had been holding him for weeks, and the objects remained in their configuration, and the light outside continued its slow, indifferent declension toward dark.