The Archivist's Gallery
from Nova Range
I’m e rathke, the author of a number of books. Learn more about what you signed up for here. Go here to manage your email notifications.
“You startled me.”
“Don’t make me ask again, boy.”
“I’ve never been this deep in the chateau.”
“Ha! Suppose your baubles pass for finery there, now. You have a message for me?”
“My message is for the Witch, sinjoro.”
“Hmph. You’re lost, then. You’ve gone too deep. What did your masters up above tell you?”
“They told me to give my message to the Witch and none other.”
“Tell you how to get there?”
“Think they assumed I knew, sinjoro.”
“Too cowardly to admit ignorance?”
“Sinjoro, was excitement that set my feet moving before I thought to ask. Knew she was near the ground floor. Thought I’d ask someone for guidance as I got closer, but these floors seem abandoned.”
“For the most part. You were staring at the painting. Tell me, what arrested you so about this one?”
“Sinjoro?”
“Go on, boy. What do you see?”
“Warrior of some kind. From long ago, I supposed. It was that sphere over her shoulder that caught my attention so much so that I didn’t hear your approach. Looks almost like the moon, but more desolate. A barren moon. It—well, it shocked me, sinjoro. This painting must be quite old. Possibly as old as the chateau itself.”
“The chateau, huh? That what your masters call this place.”
“What everyone calls it, sinjoro. I’ve heard no other name for, well, this.”
“Hmph. Painting’s not as old as all that. Old, yes, but this is a recreation of a much older painting. One sadly lost, or so my master told me when I was your age. We keep the old paintings down here. They’ve lost favor, such are the twists of taste of the clamoring climbers way up the bastion. Tell me, what floor are you from?”
“The Acolyte’s Hall is just above us and the Triumvirate’s Tomb is just below us. I’ve always just known it as home, but I’ve heard some call it the Servisto.”
“All the courtiers dress like you?”
“No, sinjoro. I’m but a courier.”
“Huh. They gave up these masterpieces for the gaudiness of modernity. Such is life, I suppose. Decadence reigns in the Triumvirate’s absence. The art of the ancients is yet to be rivaled, but why should we expect differently? The sun was once young and we rose to meet new suns. The stars our destination as we abandoned this dying earth. That’s what you see, there. You’re right to think of the moon, but you’re seeing backwards. The desolate sphere over the warrior’s shoulder is not the moon before it bloomed, but this earth long after it died, long before our ancestors returned home to attempt a resurrection. What made you assume the warrior was a woman?”
“Sinjoro?”
“You called the warrior her. Why?”
“I don’t know, sinjoro.”
“My master said the same thing of the painting. He told me the warrior was a woman. At the time, I didn’t think to argue, but I’ve thought of it often since then. How could he know? How could anyone but the original painter and her contemporaries know? We are so distant and foreign to that world that even the name of this piece is lost. My master had never even heard it, but he called it The Dark Soul. He believed it told a moment of history that signaled the collapse of our extraterrestrial empire. Some grand war full of tragedy and hope. This is the enduring image from that long ago war.
“Look here. The way the dead earth is framed over her shoulder against the blackness of space. This is the moment humanity turned her gaze back to her mother. We are a species orphaned. Like any orphan, we sought new parents on distant worlds. On the moon so close at hand. We recreated what we knew on earth in dozens or hundreds of places. You may have heard of the Ganymede Blues or perhaps even heard the song performed. So much gets lost. So much has been lost to time uncounted and languages extinct. The only constant is art. We no longer know what the Ganymede Blues refer to, but the notes soaked in tragedy allow us to feel what was once felt and known centuries or millennia ago. Musical notation has remained inexplicably constant. It’s in music alone that we travel through time to worlds now unknowable. Even earth before her death is a world we can never understand but through the sheet music preserved through expansion, conquest, collapse, and rebirth.
“Come, walk with me.”
“But my message—”
“Can wait. Come, I want to show you something.
“My master kept clocks. Hundreds of clocks. They line the walls of honeycombed hallways you see here. It was a generational habit for a long, long time. My own master didn’t know how to build a clock because his master and master’s master had lost the art. The ticking machines forever revolving and holding time captive. My master, he spent much of his childhood with these clocks, with the paintings and artistry of past ages.
“He told me as a child how he began to internalize the clocks. Back then, they all kept time the same. The hands of the clocks moved with precision, predictable and replicable. When first he internalized their rhythm, he would close his eyes and attempt to open them the moment a single revolution of the circle completed. It took him days to accomplish this, to perfectly internalize the beat of the hands as they turned. He told me it became the rhythm of his own heart. He kept at it, able to close his eyes as the revolution began and open it the moment that single revolution ended before it rolled over into the next.
“As he kept about his work, he continued to test himself with the clocks. His own master thought little of the clocks. He threatened, once, to toss them all into storage because of the way my master, his apprentice, became so distracted by their function. My master’s master told him there was no need to keep time because time kept itself. And so my master went about his days cleaning and restoring the art of the past, preserving the books that detail our many histories, though the words are in languages no one remembers. Even so, he preserved them. Such is the life of the archivist. All the while, he would test himself, my master. He would go about his tasks during the day and then make sure to look at a specific clock at a specific time every day. Always at that time. After years of testing his own internal keeping of time, he was singularly aware of every moment as it ticked by, and so could cast his gaze at any clock of his choosing at the exact time he wanted. In this way, his master no longer realized the depths of his tiny rebellion.
“The clocks during his lifetime degraded and fell out of sync with each other, with themselves, with time itself. Now, there’s no way to know if all these clocks built by hundreds of different hands over hundreds of years measured the same time or were meant to record and track hundreds of different times in different places, in different worlds. But my master knew each of their times. He didn’t know whose time they kept but he kept all their times inside himself. As my master aged, the clocks degraded more and more, losing their own sense of time. For weeks, he believed it was him failing time itself. His habit of looking at a clock at the precise moment every day became a near existential problem. He believed he had lost time. But then he performed his own tests, going back to the days when a single revolution was all he cared about. In performing this experiment on hundreds of the clocks, he had choices to make. He could collapse under the weight of how he failed himself, failed time itself. Or he could find the confidence within himself to stand as the last bastion of time.
“He was an archivist, after all. He understood. He knew that he was correct. That the clocks were growing wrong. He couldn’t go to his own master, of course, for his master cared nothing for the clocks, for time. No one could solve this problem with the clocks. The art was lost to time, ironically. And so my master became the only clock keeping time accurately.
“Gradually, they began to stop. First so subtly was the transition from keeping time too slowly to keeping it not at all that he didn’t notice until a handful of clocks had stopped ticking. His master was long dead by then and I had only just become his apprentice. He told me on the day I met him when I was yet a child, far younger even than you, that I would never be able to learn all he had to teach by the time he died. He never told me why he never took an apprentice until he was already so old, but I imagine it has much to do with the emptiness of these halls that you observed. Time. That was his instruction. He taught me to keep time as he had learnt. I had no running clocks to teach me as he had, but only a scowling old man who stank of degradation and isolation.
“But he was my master. I knew no life before him, to tell you the truth. But a child. Orphaned by circumstance or indifference—I don’t know. I know I came here of my own accord. Perhaps lost. Perhaps lost just as you are now. These clocks you see are the legacy of my master. My master who was ignorant of their construction, their purpose, and even their function. You may wonder, Why did he not examine the mechanisms and learn how to build them or fix them himself? I cannot speak for him, but I imagine it’s much the reason we still seek answers in art so old it becomes new again.
“Imagine, for a moment, if you picked one of these paintings lining my walls and brought it back up to the Servisto with you. It may change the direction of modern art for a generation. So shocking are these old styles to your eyes grown in modernity that you lost yourself within the first one you saw. The work of a master recreating an older masterpiece, yes, but hardly the most arresting image found down here.
“Here. Look here. The inscription remains legible.”
“I cannot read it, sinjoro.”
“Perhaps none still living can.”
“What does it say?”
“My master didn’t know or failed to tell me. He was not wrong. There was no time to teach me all he knew. And so I know only a fraction of what I need. But I know time. I have seen it mark the face of my master. Watched its grime accumulate on these paintings I spend my life cleaning. Restoring to their ancient glory. And all for an audience of one. You see, I am without an apprentice.”
“I see.”
“What do you see here?”
“Another warrior.”
“Yes. Again, completely shrouded by armor. The helmet closed and black as the depths of space in The Dark Soul. What else?”
“The stars. It’s almost as if they’re in motion. Is it a trick of the light?”
“Huh. Does the light around you move?”
“No, sinjoro.”
“Then the trick is not the light’s.”
“Yes, sinjoro.”
“Do you see how her armor seethes? Look, here. These wispy tendrils of smoke rising from her shoulders—”
“They’re like wings.”
“Are. And here.”
“I’ve seen such things. Anjeles and diablos. They fill the Acolyte’s Dome.”
“Huh.”
“Have you ever been, majstro?”
“I belong to time, as do we all. And this place, the archives of humanity, is time’s tomb. One day, they’ll open again and we will know who once we were. We will know why we allowed the earth to die. Why we abandoned her. Why we returned and what we hoped to achieve in renewal.
“Look here, now. This weapon she wields. My master told me this painting is not a recreation in the traditional sense. He called the spear Micalo arcAnjelo. The painting is not a recreation but a recollection of a far older work. It is meant to remind our bones of who we once were, before the earth died screaming. Tell me, on your dome, are there anjeles like this?”
“None so black, majstro.”
“A diablo then?”
“Perhaps. It reminds me of their frightful faces.”
“Frightful or frightening?”
“Yes, majstro.”
“Huh. Come, let us return to The Dark Soul.”
“All these clocks…”
“Huh?”
“Have you never opened them? Attempted to fix them?”
“Look at my hands, boy. I am old. Too old to profane what has been made to me sacred. We need youth to heal the wounds of the past. These are archives of our own lost civilization. The civilization lost to us even as we live inside its carcass. I have done what I can to preserve what knowledge I can. But I am neither artist nor visionary. When my master died, I was only worried about preservation. About keeping time intact. He believed that we must keep time long enough for someone to heal it. Some new age to grow out of ours. Like mushrooms blooming from the dead. Someday, he believed, someone would find all these clocks and know what to do. They’d find the art, the books, all that we have preserved, and they’d make use of them.”
“Majstro? You’re weeping.”
“You see. I have kept faith. I have waited and persevered and preserved. I have waited for someone to find me, to rediscover the time I’ve kept. Look, now, here. The Dark Soul. She signaled a shift in humanity. The end of one age and the start of another. Do you not see what I see? You came here, lost, and found her. Knew her. Knew my clocks and the questions to ask. So I ask you now. Will you stay?”
“Sinjoro, my, uh…the Witch waits on my master’s word. Forgive me, but I must go.”
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