Old Demons of the First Class
Here is another excerpt from the notebook of a student detailing the progress of some promising linguistic research. We truly hope that material like this properly conveys the daily student experience
The newest language the oldest intelligible-to-students Professor Emeritus speaks is a truly ancient dialect of Sumerian. Thankfully Sumerian stayed popular for a good long while as a not-very-changey liturgical language and I was able to get permission to set up a “Telephone Game”-style daisy chain of the bastards to finally address some untranslated samples of Harappan script we’ve had lying around for a long while.
It’s been attempted before for sure. But in order to make any progress, the student running the project has to be able to put up with a lot of abuse and shouting. Some of these older fuckers do not get along.
The Professors Emeriti hang out in a subsection of the ba library, in their own private club I guess you might say. Like most of the ba on file, they’re effectively switched off most of the time. Otherwise they would marinate in their own ineffectual bitterness and pass the time sniping at one another. Or plotting. Or worse.
“Switched off” means a combination of “unplugged from whatever generic construct gives them senses and a speaking interface” and “a kind of metaphorical freezing process that prevents the experience of time” because, well, sensory deprivation and the resulting dreaming/hallucination that would result from full consciousness would be catastrophic until they could be contained and pacified.
The Emeriti are absolutely all old demons of the first class—pulled from the ranks of the hundred or so previous legates, those who came in second or third of their batches and wandered the Earth (or wherever) after graduation scouting for students for the next batch and teaching (or profiting from, or just generally meddling by means of) what they’d learned as they saw fit until their duties aboveground were fulfilled and they were collected again, and also some fragments of old and damaged professors now retired, plus maybe a couple of failed students who were savant enough with particular topics to be relegated to the Library as resources rather than as menials, and maybe even a few worthy non-alumni harvested from the hordes of the dead or collected (by trade or stealth) from other polities.
I guess what I’m saying is that a mishandled Professor Emeritus starts out as a potentially nasty poltergeist-like escapade and scales up from there to a possible extinction-level event. Some of them certainly have enough spare parts cached away somewhere to achieve a new incarnation if they’re left unsupervised for too long. Many of them should have been relegated to Tartarus long ago. A few of them will be sent there eventually anyway, as soon as they cause one last bit of trouble and prove that the risks of keeping them around outweigh their usefulness.
Some of them are fine, though. Sweet, even. Grateful to still feel useful. But about half of the nice ones are just lying in the weeds, waiting for a chance to majorly fuck shit up. I really wish I knew which half.
So yes, occasionally you can get permission to haul decaying nukes out of the stockpile and line them up in a row for an almost certainly pointless translation project of an old wedding announcement or shipping manifest or shopping list you found. And the kicker is that if you’ve actually stumbled upon a tasty morsel of information somehow, every last one of these fuckers will know it before you do, and at least half of them would keep it to themselves and lie if they could get away with it. But these old freaks live—for a certain extremely flexible definition of the word live—to embarrass one another. So you thaw out an extra or two for error checking, but try to avoid having enough to form a committee that can organize and turn on you….
Meanwhile, Old Sumerian Dude can speak to five or so who are older than him, and one of those can understand four or five who are older than her, and so on, until I can possibly even get something useful out of one of those earlier-hominid types who were around for the founding of the First City, during the bright times when the campus was roving aboveground around the last glacial peak. Back when the Sahara was green. Back when all the coastal river-mouth settlements that humanity perpetually seems to favor weren’t under more than 100 meters of ocean on what’s now the continental shelves.
Somewhere deep in the ba library are even a few who might be able to talk about the Toba supervolcano catastrophe and the passing of Scholz’s Star through the Oort cloud at about the same time, or maybe slightly earlier. The faculty are oddly quiet about that time and much of the time before. They don’t seem to actively discourage digging, but they watch anyone who’s doing the digging quite carefully and seem reassured when investigators don’t find much. Like they’re letting us test their security around the topic now and then. But that’s a 70- to 80,000 year daisy chain of monsters—call it hundreds instead of just a handful—and I’m not up to that today.
It’s just that a bit of secrecy is weird behavior for a school that has as a founding tenet that no knowledge is forbidden.
The ba collection is pretty sparse before then as well as after. The professors who talk about such things explain that humanity was still interesting for at least a million years before then, but the cultural record was largely in the form of dance and “it could go on for a bit.” Some history, some mythology, some history slowly becoming mythology with each annual retelling, climatology, migration patterns, genealogies. The most fascinating part was the development of the choreographic languages used to record it all, of course. That’s what they say.
It’s hard to imagine today’s faculty out there, dancing away, trying to work out how best to interfere. They must have been a lot more beautiful then, during the bright times. Some of them have let themselves go, so to speak. The few that manage to be beautiful are, at the same time, quite terrifying. That can’t be the way it was back then. Either that or our earlier hominin ancestors were way less likely to freak out at the sight of a bit of monstrosity.
It just occurs to me now that maybe our professors are the ones who taught us as a species that maybe we ought to freak out when we see something that looks like them.
Sometimes you just want to shake one of them and demand that they tell you the facts of some event or phenomenon you know they once witnessed firsthand. Invariably they point to the Library, or maybe gesture around themselves aimlessly at the campus in general. This is where they store their memories, they’re saying. We, the students, are how they retrieve those memories and synthesize new conclusions. And it’s not like they’re idle. They write constantly. They read. They research, work on exploratory projects. Translate the ancient stuff into the newest languages. Attend one another’s lectures. Confer incessantly.
There are only ten students because we ten are all they have time for. We’re chosen for what we know that we can teach them as much as for our capacity to be taught. And then they train us like rats to run the maze of their memories so we can help them remember where they’ve hidden choice morsels that may have become relevant again. We’re autonomous agents of their curiosity, and eventually we become them. Or, if we don’t quite make the cut, we become these. These retired, burned out academics we keep in refrigerated boxes and wheel from place to place on carts and plug in when we have a reason to try to exploit them further. Los Vencidos. The Expended. The Retired. The Expired. The Emeriti.
There’s no standardization. For some we have to thaw a body and spend some time doing some careful stitching. Many are a bit more modular. But they must be kept weak. Withered legs, maybe one scrawny arm, lungs and syrinx capable of whispers only. Some are lightbulbs we screw into automatons that need stoking or winding. Some are a good deal harder to describe. The “magic mirror” interface was popular for a while. We try to keep the physical forms, the corpses, the constructs, the khat limited and simple and constrained, somewhere between a Furby and a masked Hannibal Lecter strapped to a furniture dolly, and for about the same reasons. But we treat them with respect and a tiny bit of deference when we bring them back to consciousness. There’s not too much point for more ceremony than that.
Most of them remember when they were us, when they also had to deal with the occasionally deranged, rickety and unsteady Emeriti, remember how they treated them and all of the reasons for caution and frequent exasperation. They know why any flattery used in coaxing them into the present time and place will always be a bit empty.
Welcome back to consciousness madam/sir/other respected individual. How was your sleep? The 52nd (or whichever) class is in session, or we are between class V and W with legates X and Y abroad, and Z is the headmaster. The following errata has been compiled for your specialties since last you were interred, and the following expansions, all for you to consult at your convenience before you are reinterred. Here is a small stack of any personal messages that may have been left for you. Et cetera. Your services, as detailed in your contract, are currently required.
If they are well liked, sometimes there is cake. Or whisky. Or a cigar. Or pornography. Try not to judge. You never know what you’ll miss most when it’s your turn on the shelf.
The rite is in a stilted liturgical Sumerian for Old Sumerian Dude, taught to me in Old Latin, the Latin of Plautus, by a Parthian who was an emissary to that upstart Roman Republic, because my Achaemenid-era Persian is kind of shit. And that’s the last possible name-dropping of antique languages because the names of the next five or six involved wouldn’t be recognized anyway. But eventually we have awoken an old proto-rishi whose stomping ground, back in the days when fabled Dilmun was just one tiny orchard-surrounded port-and-fishing village among many, was that crevice in the continental shelf in the northern corner of Arabian Sea due south from where Karachi sits now.
The proto-rishi jets about in its stone tank, peering out through the pitch-sealed quartz window, its W-shaped cuttlefish pupil magnified weirdly by the water and crystal lens despite the fact that we’re in no way using light to see. I hold up my stabilized cast of the tablet I want to translate, the carved face of it about the size of two hands open to receive a gift. It carries some fifty symbols of curves and lines, many abstract and symmetrical, some calling to mind the forms of animals or plant-life.
I ask the leopard-headed homunculus that is my Parthian Emeritus to pass my question along: “Which way do I need to turn this so that you may read it?”
The serial translations take a moment. Some of them bounce back and forth between my helpers, in particular between the clockwork hare and the miniature stop-motion woman wading in her bowl of molten wax. Finally my Parthian speaks a Latin I barely understand with my Classical Latin emphasis. “You must turn it toward yourself so that I may read the reflection upon your heart.”
Ugh. I play my own version of the Un-Telephone Game in my head. Is it asking me to try to read it myself, to make my best guess, and it’ll evaluate my attempt? What might it have said that could have been translated into this mess? While I try to puzzle it out, I turn it so I can see it anyway, just to see if there’s any part of it I can get a handle on. The stone tank’s speaking membrane starts its rubbery resonances almost immediately. Does it have a way of piggy-backing on my own senses? If so, I am not a fan. I do not want it getting a grip on anything else inside my head.
Another translation works its way up the line toward me. “This is an unfortunate confection. A cheese. What is the nature of the soil of this message?”
I think I can work this out. “I made this copy to avoid damaging the original by too much handling. The original fragment was this shape, this size, but made of ochre-clay, iron-clay, painted twice. First with kaolin paste, then with antimony. All of the paint has worn away, but we could tell it had been thus.”
My response makes it halfway down the line before I start getting dark looks from those further along the chain. After a few minutes some form of my message finishes the trip.
A disturbing warbling comes from the stone tank’s membrane. Is it laughing?
A response starts bubbling back in my direction. Eventually it arrives and I swiftly decipher it all. “An upland farce,” my Parthian leopard relays. “The clay is of the upland valleys of the goat-chasers., which denotes the origin. It consists almost entirely of a reference to a fable about a goat-boy fucking a hole in a cliff-face and a viper who lives in the hole swallowing the far end of the offending penis. A trap entered in ignorant careless self-serving hubris where the only escape is the humiliation of self-emasculation. It is a response from an official of an upland village to an official in the lowland coastal city’s request for a tax of timber and minerals. ‘Come try to take it and see what happens,’ in effect.”
Everybody laughs, but in whatever way their bizarre interfaces allow. It’s kind of surreal and horrific. Like a movie scene directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Terry Gilliam. If I ever sleep again, this scene will replay in my nightmares.
This is an old, much repeated fable with many versions in many cultures. This tablet, along with versions in neighboring languages, may help with additional translations. We spend much of a further hour identifying logograms and producing a subset of a syllabary, which is mostly useless for a language no longer spoken. But all of this effort makes my troop of Emeriti feel like they are still needed and useful, which they express largely in terms of pretending to feel demeaned and bored and put out by such trivialities.
We all know it is a sham. But we play it out.
My mind is only half present while the sullen Library staff helps me put the incommoded Emeriti back into their respective reveries. There are checklists. They have to review the transcripts to make sure that any potential psychological trauma and degradation is logged. They get irritated with me when my answers are slow or muddled.
Because this is what I’m thinking instead of paying attention. I’m thinking that the tablet I chose to translate was subtly directed into my path by a professor or two, and that the message on the tablet, already known to them, was in this way also meant for me. Perhaps because it’s known that I have been curious about the Toba-sized hole in our records. In our collective memory. Perhaps they’re warning me that I shouldn’t be so crass as to put my dick in this hole. At least not my own dick. Maybe just a stick. You know. If I don’t decide to leave the hole alone altogether.
I understand that seeing it as a personal warning is potentially paranoid. There is no way for me to verify that it’s a message for me without either seeming a bit too interested in the topic or like maybe I’m starting to come unglued. Or just looking a bit stupid, because surely I should be able to figure something like that out for myself, right? Regardless, if it is a message for me, it is masterful. How I feel about further investigation into the Toba affair right at this moment seems like how I’d expect them to want me to feel about it if they didn’t want me to look into it.
But the moral of the fable is clear, regardless. Or the secondary moral, which was always my favorite. If you know it could be dangerous and you’re still curious, be smart enough to use someone else’s dick.