The Weight of Ancient Light

"I have read it eleven times. I shall read it again. Not because it yields new information — but because I am not yet the man it requires." — Francis Killerton

The candle on the corner of the mantelpiece had burned itself out sometime in the small hours, and Francis had not replaced it. He had not noticed it go. He was aware of the gaslight on the table — its steady, yellowish presence at the edge of his vision — and of the objects arranged before him on the table's surface, and of very little else.

He was standing.

He could not have said with any confidence when he had last sat down, or whether the distinction between standing and sitting had presented itself to him as a choice or whether he had simply found himself on his feet at some point during the night and remained there because the quality of thinking available to him in that position was marginally better than the alternative. His back registered a mild protest that he acknowledged and set aside. Outside the east windows, the gardens were dark, though not as dark as they had been an hour ago. He did not look at the windows. He was looking at the Scroll of Awareness, which lay unrolled before him on the table, held flat at its upper and lower edges by the combined weight of a copy of Ruskin's The Stones of Venice and a surveying manual from his second year at MIT, both of which he had pressed into service without any particular sense of irony.

The scroll was two feet in length when fully unrolled, and he had fully unrolled it, and he was standing before it in the way that a man might stand before a document he had been asked to sign without being given adequate time to read — with a concentration that was not entirely comfortable and a reluctance to look away that he could not entirely account for.

He had read it eleven times. Possibly twelve. He had lost count somewhere around the fifth day, when the distinction between reading it again and simply continuing to read it had ceased to present itself as meaningful.

It was not that the text was obscure, precisely. Portions of it remained beyond him — the script shifted registers in ways that suggested multiple hands across multiple generations, and there were passages in an older variant of the cuneiform that Dr Armitage would have managed with more confidence than Francis could claim. But the central substance of the document, the teachings and meditations that Nabû-kudurri-usur had transcribed from the oral tradition of Ereshkigal's descendants two centuries before the common era, had made itself available to him with a clarity that he found more unsettling than obscurity would have been. Obscurity he could have managed. Obscurity was a technical problem, the kind of problem that yielded to sufficient application of intelligence and scholarship. This was something different. This was a document that seemed, on each successive reading, to be less about what it said and more about what it produced in the person reading it — a quality of attention to one's own thought processes that Francis had not previously experienced and could not, even now, fully describe in language that would have satisfied his MIT examining panel.

He was aware that this was not a conventional response to an archaeological artefact.

He had written as much in the notebook, at some point during the third night. He had written: I am aware that this is not a conventional response. And then, below it, after a gap during which he had apparently stood at the window for an indeterminate period: I am not certain that conventional responses were what was intended.

He had not crossed it out.

The notebook lay open to his left, its current page dense with writing that had begun in his usual hand — the precise, architectural script that his draughting training had given him, small and regular and ruled by habit even on unlined paper — and had gradually, over the course of the night, become something that retained the individual letterforms of his handwriting but had lost the careful containment that normally governed them. The letters were larger. They pressed harder into the page. In two places he had gone through the paper entirely.

He was not, he told himself, behaving irrationally.

He was behaving like a man in possession of information that had not yet found its proper form. This was a recognisable condition. He had experienced versions of it at MIT, during the weeks preceding the completion of his final year thesis, when the solution to the load distribution problem had been available to him in some inarticulate pre-verbal register for a fortnight before he had been able to render it in mathematics. The current experience was of the same family. It was simply — larger. The gap between what he understood and what he could express was wider, and the material on the other side of that gap was of a different order of magnitude than anything his thesis had required him to grapple with.

He looked at the six objects on the table.

They had been arranged in their current configuration for three days, and he had not moved them, partly because the configuration felt correct in some way he could not articulate and partly because he had developed, over the past weeks, a mild but persistent reluctance to handle certain of them without specific purpose. The Scroll of Awareness at the centre. The Infinite Scroll of Knowledge to its left, rolled and tied with ancient linen. The Amulet of Connection placed with its interwoven circles facing upward, which at certain angles and in certain qualities of light produced an impression of movement that Francis had recorded in the notebook without commentary. The Chalice of Freedom near the window, the silver gone soft in the lamplight, the soaring bird on its surface caught mid-flight and held there for nineteen centuries and counting. The Shielded Tree of Survival plaque propped with its back against the Ruskin. The Tree of Gratification at the near edge of the table, closest to where he stood.

He reached out and picked up the Tree of Gratification.

It was warm. It was always warm — a fact he had established on the third night by the simple experiment of leaving it on the far windowsill for two hours in a room where the temperature had dropped sufficiently that his breath was briefly visible, then retrieving it and holding it in both hands. It had been warm then as now, with a warmth that came from within the object rather than from any external source, a warmth that was entirely inconsistent with the physical conditions of the room and that Francis had recorded in the notebook with the same careful, unembellished factuality that he would have brought to recording a measurement or a material specification, because the alternative was to record it with the kind of language that he was not yet prepared to use about things he was holding in his hands in a library in Boston.

Ninlil had carved the original. In 2318 before the common era. Forty-two centuries ago, give or take, a person named Ninlil had held something very like this object and had understood something that Francis was only beginning, at the age of twenty-two, to approach the edge of understanding. The arithmetic of that produced in him a sensation he had written down as vertiginous recognition and then stared at for some time before concluding that the phrase was as accurate as he was likely to manage.

He set the Tree of Gratification down with the care he always gave it.

He moved to the wall.

The drawing had begun nine days ago, the night the foolscap had stopped being sufficient — when the vision had expanded past the capacity of individual sheets of paper to contain individual elements of it and had demanded, with an urgency that Francis had found difficult to resist and had eventually stopped trying to, a surface large enough to hold the whole thing simultaneously. The wallpaper above the fireplace was a cream ground with a small repeating pattern of stylised leaves, and it had accepted the charcoal without complaint. Charles was going to have a great deal to say about it. Francis was aware of this and had set the awareness aside in the same mental location as the protest from his back, to be retrieved and attended to at a later point when the present work permitted.

What had grown across the wallpaper in nine days was not, Francis thought, looking at it now in the lamplight with the fresh eyes that extreme tiredness occasionally and paradoxically provided, a single drawing. It was more accurately described as several drawings occupying the same surface simultaneously, layered and annotated and cross-referenced in a manner that made complete sense from the inside and would likely appear, to any uninitiated observer, as the work of someone whose relationship with conventional draughting practice had become strained.

There were floor plans — three distinct structures, rendered at different scales, with the principal rooms and circulation spaces indicated in the manner he had been trained to indicate them, clear and legible and professionally competent. There were elevations of the principal façades, drawn with the confident line of someone who had been reading architectural drawings since childhood. There were structural sections, annotated with material specifications and load-bearing notes in the small professional script that had not abandoned him even when the rest of his handwriting had.

And there was the other layer. The layer beneath and between and around the professional drawings, which could not be described in the language of architectural convention because it did not belong to architectural convention. Rooms that appeared within rooms, accessed by means that the floor plans indicated but did not explain. Spaces below the lowest indicated floor level, drawn in a lighter hand as though he had been uncertain, when he drew them, whether they belonged on the same surface as the rest. A network of connecting passages that ran between structures and beneath streets in a configuration that was, he acknowledged privately, more influenced by what he had seen in Uruk than by anything in his MIT curriculum. And in the lower right corner of the whole composition, in the smallest and most careful writing on the entire wall, a sentence that he had written on the third night and had not looked at directly since:

What is built above is the lesser half of what is built.

He stood before the wall with the charcoal in his hand, not yet drawing, simply looking. This was part of the process — the looking before the drawing, the period of registration in which the whole presented itself as a whole before he added to any part of it. He had learned this from his father, though Charles had taught it in the context of reviewing a client's brief, not in the context of standing before a wall covered in charcoal at five o'clock in the morning after four consecutive nights without adequate sleep.

He thought about his father briefly. Charles's door closed at the end of the landing. Charles's patience, which was the patience of an architect and therefore professional and structural and built to last, but which had limits that Francis was not, even in his current state, entirely insensible to. He thought about the conversation that was coming — the one in which Charles would require an accounting of what Francis intended to do with himself, and when, and to what practical end the past weeks of self-imposed isolation had been directed.

He had an answer to that question. He had, in fact, an answer of considerable substance and ambition, rendered across forty square feet of his father's wallpaper and filling three notebooks and the better part of his waking and sleeping consciousness for the past several weeks. The question was how much of it he could present to a fifty-three year old Boston architect in terms that would land as vision rather than as evidence of something requiring medical attention.

He put the charcoal to the wall.

He was adding to the lower level — the section beneath the lowest indicated floor, the part he had drawn tentatively and was now returning to with more conviction — when the quality of the light in the room changed. Not the gaslight, which was steady and unchanged. The windows. The east-garden windows, which had been uniformly dark since he had last looked at them and which were now, at the upper edge of each pane, beginning to show the first indeterminate lightening that preceded dawn.

Francis stopped drawing.

He looked at the windows for a moment, the charcoal held loosely in his hand, leaving a small dark mark on his palm where it rested. The garden was coming back — the fountain first, then the path, then the nearest of the box hedges taking shape against the lightening sky with the deliberate, incremental patience of things that have been there all along and require only sufficient light to become visible.

He turned back to the notebook. He found the current page and read what he had written during the night, which took some time, as the night had been productive. What he read did not displease him. It was incomplete — everything was incomplete, the wall was incomplete, the notebooks were incomplete, the vision itself was incomplete in the sense that a thing being built is incomplete, present and real and accumulating toward a form that was becoming clearer with each hour of work — but it was not wrong. He was not wrong about this. He was as certain of that as he had been certain of anything in his life, which was not a form of certainty he was accustomed to and which he therefore regarded with a residual caution that seemed, under the present circumstances, somewhat academic.

He dipped the pen.

At the top of a fresh page he wrote the date — 10 July 1873 — and then, below it, the heading he had been working toward for several days and had not until this moment felt ready to commit to paper:

Killerton Enterprises: Principal Objectives and Founding Philosophy.

He looked at it. He read it twice. Something in him that had been wound to an almost intolerable tension over the past weeks released, fractionally, at the sight of it — at the evidence that the thing he had been moving toward had acquired a name and a shape and the beginning of a form that existed outside his own head.

He began to write.

He wrote for a long time, and the gardens outside the east windows grew steadily lighter around him, and the lamp on the table burned on, and the six objects remained in their configuration on the cleared surface of the table, and the drawing on the wall held everything it had accumulated over nine nights of work, and Francis did not look up from the page until Mrs Holt's kitchen, somewhere in the distant operational world of the house, produced the sound of something metallic being set down on a stone floor, and he realised, with the mild surprise of a man returning from a considerable distance, that it was morning.