Chapter 1 - Parchment Mining
Time began…
The Notice of Not Existing nestled at a formal angle atop the sleek metal cubicle desk. Above it, a shadow slid. A dry right hand with square fingernails took the notice in its clutch. The hand slid those boxy keratin talons beneath the enveloping girdle of sealing stamps. All the while, the right hand’s left-built twin drummed the round keys of a clickety-clackety word-machine, pausing only once to take command of the full range of letters. Each hand operated with complete independence from the other. Each performed its task with mechanical efficiency. The mind governing the hands ran both the typing job and the opening job with computational familiarity.
The Notice slipped from the envelope for the first time in epochs. Its text cowered under the harsh light of office-lanterns. A pair of eyes, embedded in a face, attached to the hands - by way of arms, torso, and neck - settled on the words. Eyes, face, neck, torso, arms, hands, and all biology attached to them, belonged to one Mr. Grey.
Mr. Grey’s features suited his name. His little mustache was grey. His eyes were grey. His skin had a greyness in its pallor. Each of these features exhibited perfect neutrality during the reading of the Notice. The grey eyes punctured each word, and kept jerky, tockwork rhythm with the typing stabs of the left hand.
That left hand, however, gradually lost its independence. As the shuttle of the grey eyes flicked from word to word, moving down line by line, the shuttle of the word-machine decelerated click by click. The left hand full-stopped at the exact moment the eyes pierced the last word of the Notice.
Mr. Grey pushed away from the metal desk. He stood straight, walked from his corkboard cubicle, and easily escaped from his department’s Cubicle Hedge. The two chief characteristics in his stride were: a rigid posture, and the mechanical step of a wind-up tin soldier. Indeed, his grey eminence extended past his face and hands and skin. It suffused his movement. And his dress. His robe was flat grey, down to the stitches. His shoes matched his robe. His undershirt was more of a conventional starchy than true grey, but that article too, had more ‘cloud’ than ‘sun’ in the degree of its bleaching. Even the office-lanterns, with their heavy, humming glare, surrendered before the obstinately matte complexion. Neither shadow nor light altered the shading of Mr. Grey. The grey bled into his very expression, which showed nothing of excitement or joy. Neither were cruelty or sorrow painted on his features. Mr. Grey’s expression was simply, stone. The Medusa and all her scaly locks, attacking a man utterly divorced from his soul, couldn’t cut a stiffer sculpture.
With the Notice still held in the dry right hand’s grasp, Mr. Grey stepped down a long corridor, past the cowering office-lanterns. His feet echoed ahead of him with perfect rhythm. Two sharp corners, two more long halls, and a latched iron door, brought him to the building’s exterior. A rogue gust left by The Gaunt, Brooding, Hungry Wind tried stealing the Notice, and pulled on Mr. Grey’s robes and hair. The dry left hand drew a pair of earmuffs - grey, of course - from a pocket of the robe. With ears secured, Mr. Grey marched over a metal catwalk, closer to the gloomy clouds above than the grimy streets below. From the catwalk, he stepped onto the cheese-grater floor of a scaffolded, skeletal, latticed-metal tower: the array of office balloon-elevators.
The balloon-elevators operated, not on one giant balloon, but on many tiny ones. The inflated bags floated above the elevator cage, each with a bright flush, like inverted droplets of blood. They floated at odds with Mr. Grey’s grey mien. He didn’t seem to mind.
Mr. Grey stepped into the cage of one elevator, the only one ready at his floor. He closed and barred the door. He turned to the adjacent cage-wall, to the collection of pistons, valves, and levers which operated the lift.
Mr. Grey reached for the first knob. The action was mechanical, a signal for other mechanical motions among the elevator’s thorny machinery. A specific number of blood-drop balloons would pop, and the elevator would drop to the Parchmentwork Mines.
Mr. Grey stopped his hand short at the sound of hasty feet clanging on the catwalk. Mr. Grey glanced back the way he’d come, ticking his head sideways a dozen degrees. The grey eyes skewered a familiar person - Ms. Maysey - rushing at Mr. Grey’s elevator cage. Ms. Maysey reached the cage, exhaled a soundless hello, and wrenched open the iron door. She crammed herself in beside Mr. Grey and took instant control of the knobs and levers.
Small, stretchy blood bags filled with rising gas as Ms. Maysey twisted knobs and flung switches. The lines attaching the balloons to the heavy metal cage stretched, until taut and ready for ascent. Only a security bar stuck in the tower-wall prevented a rapid, upward flight. Before yanking loose the bar, Ms. Maysey checked herself. She turned to Mr. Grey, and asked, was he going up as well?
Everything descriptive of Mr. Grey thus far would suggest he answered with an impersonal, to-the-point, and truthful, “No.” The Notice, shivering in the Wind’s gusty clutch, directed Mr. Grey to the Parchmentwork Mines. Down he must go to reach those lower realms. One would expect a short, sharp, unfeeling response in the negative to Ms. Maysey’s question, perhaps with an immediate correction of direction.
On receiving the question, however, Mr. Grey’s face transformed entirely. These were not the half-lidded grey eyes of intense apathy. This was not the flat line of mouth, buttoned up tight, and unlatching only to give necessary, truthful statements. Where had the robotic posture gone? What had become of the hands, which were no longer so dry? Who were these foreign characters which had supplanted Mr. Grey’s family of features? This posture, far from being stiff, leaned! Mr. Grey’s arms lifted the grey hands involuntarily, as if from want of purpose. The hands themselves were, in point of fact, damp. Still grey… but damp and grey! The thin line of the mouth beneath the little mustache opened and dared to steal a slight breath; a rhythmic operation normally belonging to the nostrils. The eyes changed the most; neither lidded nor apathetic, but wide and bright.
A startlement of the highest order - a paroxysm of surprise - infested every outward feature of Mr. Grey. The tense strength of his aspect fell, crushed beneath the pollution. Mr. Grey hadn’t anticipated this scenario; an interaction. With another person! Mr. Grey; that intimate familiar with the regular operations of pencil-pushery; that man who wore his grey persona so masterfully in the face of the inanimate sundries of his daily existence; faltered, before another person. Even one as mild and earthy as Ms. Maysey.
Mr. Grey did not say, “No,” in response to Ms. Maysey’s asking if he was ‘going up’. He fumbled his words, tossing them in his breath for a moment, and finally said, “Oh, sure…”
He almost followed it up with a smile. A smile! On the face of Mr. Grey! Did he mean to counterfeit? No… Mr. Grey almost made a genuinely friendly expression. A smile would have been awkward indeed, in that grey face. Awkward for Mr. Grey, stuck in the thick jelly of unfamiliar conversation. Not so awkward for Ms. Maysey, she being entirely occupied with a pocket of her robe during the alteration in Mr. Grey’s appearance. Most awkward for the smile itself, which would have realized instantly it had no business taking up residence on the face of Mr. Grey. The smile would have recognized the impropriety of its new accommodations and, consequently, left without notice.
Fortunately, Mr. Grey did not smile.
Ms. Maysey and Mr. Grey braced themselves. They unlocked their knees as cats in the first stage of a pounce, and wrapped their fingers around the nearest cold grate of metal. With her free hand, Ms. Maysey yanked the fastening pin from its lock. The balloon lift surged violently upward, exulting in liberation. The connecting ties between the blushing balloons and the metal cage went slack for a moment. Mr. Grey and Ms. Maysey received a vigorous up-and-down shaking. The Notice, still trapped in Mr. Grey’s freshly-dried hand, yelled parchment curses as it whipped in the surge. Ms. Maysey’s hair squeaked as it bounced, being, as it was, a curly nest of wood-mice.
Gradually the elevator settled down, as did its contents. Mr. Grey recomposed himself, returning to his pre-question aspect. Ms. Maysey’s hair-mice scurried back into a voluminous bob; some observed the cold air with water in their inky eyes, while others warmed themselves at the scalpy hearth.
Ms. Maysey’s hands darted through the plentiful folds of her puffy, corduroy robe. She drew forth quills, slips of parchment, and several treasure purses, returning each item with a shake of the mousehair. She finally smiled when - from an off-the-beaten-path pocket - she pulled a flint, a striker, and a wooden pipe. With too few limbs to engage all three objects at once, she passed the pipe to Mr. Grey, bidding him take charge. He pinched the pipe with two fingers, using the same delicate handling one might adopt with a venomous spider. Ms. Maysey, meanwhile, struck over and over. She sent curtains of sparks singing over Mr. Grey’s dry hand. Every so often a spark struck the pipe’s bowl, but never with a flare of ignition.
While trying to light the pipe, Ms. Maysey’s main set of eyes found the Notice in Mr. Grey’s other hand. She nodded her whiskery hair at the Notice, and said, “Got a complex, spiderweb-ish letter to rewrite up at Central Migration? Is that it, Mr. Grey?”
Mr. Grey wished to keep the Notice of Not Existing from Ms. Maysey. Or at least its contents. The text would reveal his true direction; they’d both be embarrassed. Mr. Grey said, “A formal delivery, Ms. Maysey.”
She smiled, and continued battling the blowing air for dominance of the flame. She went on, “But reallytruly, it must signify. That they gave it to you, someone of experience? If it’s regular pencil pushery, I’d file it for you. But only if that were okay! Only if you wanted, of course.”
“I won’t impose,” Mr. Grey kept the notice folded, but brandished it with a mechanical flick of the wrist, as though in emphasis. “This one’s for the top floor sirs and madams. You wouldn’t want to waste your whole day walking floors, would you?” Mr. Grey tucked the notice into a pocket of his own robe.
Ms. Maysey hit the striker hard, accidentally showering Mr. Grey’s robe in sparks. She blew hastily on the scorched fabric, though it was unnecessary in the rising lift’s breezy air. She apologized, then said, “It just gets me so cross. I don’t speak ill of any single person - indeed, how wretched I’d be! Finding I’d spoken ill of anybody - but the days where I’m cast as messenger girl, and end up riding balloons up and down and up and down all day, and run along corridors on every floor, well those days I work long past my shift. Sometimes it’s so far into night that the plows have stopped, and I end up wading jelly all the way home. Does that sound right? Just so some sir or madam, or some other department, doesn’t have to retrieve their own parchments? Not, I mean to say, not that the top floors don’t have important jobs! I find their effort admirable. Only it just doesn’t seem… entirely… fair. You understand?”
Mr. Grey said something noncommittal. Ms. Maysey’s pipe finally caught, and a tiny vapor trail wafted from the bowl. The breeze yanked the smoke into the adjacent emptiness of sky. Ms. Maysey thanked Mr. Grey, and at last took her pipe.
She’d just touched it to her lips, when The Gaunt, Brooding, Hungry Wind entered the air. Following her gusts, The Wind had tracked the smell of tobacco to their rising cage. In a show of childish spitefulness, The Wind snuffed the pipe.
Ms. Maysey shoved the pipe back into Mr. Grey’s hand. She renewed her striking showers of embers and turned a distressed face in the Wind’s direction. She said, “Are you trying to poison me?”
The Wind said, “Uh, check your own habits, tree-mouse-lady. You’re the one sucking fumes from a knotty old tube,” The Wind was in one of her poesy moods; she tossed her voice like clothesline laundry; billowing, low tones.
Ms. Maysey realized she’d spoken sharply in her haste to relight the pipe. She was one who gave ground at the first sign of an argument. Mr. Grey felt no great surprise when Ms. Maysey returned with, “Oh dear no, I never meant to accuse you,” she struck another shower of sparks on Mr. Grey’s hand, adding to the pattern of tiny scorch marks. Ms. Maysey didn’t notice, and Mr. Grey thought it awkward to bring it to her attention. He said nothing. Ms. Maysey went on, “You don’t mean to say I’ll catch poison from plain pipe smoke?”
The Wind shook the elevator scaffold dramatically. “Everybody knows dark clouds carry fever. Plus, it’s probably hurting my own air, second-handedly.”
“My physician prescribed it thougggghhh! He said pipe smoke helps avert vent poisoning.”
“Sounds like all our existences. Ended by garbage fumes or thistle fumes,” The Gaunt, Brooding, Hungry Wind sighed in mournful cello notes.
This information distressed Ms. Maysey. She gave up putting fire to Mr. Grey’s hand and took back her unlit pipe. She ran a shaky hand through her mousehair. Several rodents squeaked indignantly.
No one spoke for several tocks. The Wind summoned the music of the balloon elevator by rattling the cage, rubbing the balloons together, and generally acting like a pest. She rummaged in their robes, cutting coldly into their skin and bones. She tried to get at the Notice in Mr. Grey’s pocket. He hastily stuffed his scorched hand in to keep the parchment trapped.
The Wind said, “Keeping secrets Mr. Grey? I watched that Notice, you know. Kept it safe in the Sunshine Post.”
Ms. Maysey, remembering the notice, chimed in. “Oh yes Mr. Grey, do tell what’s written.”
Mr. Grey tried tucking the rest of himself into his robe. It might have worked with Ms. Maysey’s puffy apparel. Mr. Grey’s was strictly business, however, and didn’t go in for that type of recreation. He drew his personal pocket ticker to buy himself a moment; an out-of-place action, since the balloons couldn’t pull any faster or slower. Finally, he said, “It’s nothing too important. A formal Notice of a situation adjustment.”
Ms. Maysey laughed, but with a muted, nervous pitch. The wind’s comment on smoking medicine had upset Ms. Maysey. She said, “I believe it. I do try not to express myself in a disagreeable way, since that might make others disagreeable, which wouldn’t agree for anybody,” she paused, carefully checking the air for fumes, breathed, then went on, “but it does sometimes seem like they make me do an awful lot of busy work. Wouldn’t you say?”
Mr. Grey never put his opinions that strongly. He said, “I’ll bet a cozy fire’s a comfort for you, at the end of such days?”
“It’s more than a comfort; it’s a necessity!” Mr. Grey thought he’d diverted, but Ms. Maysey said, “Go on then Mr. Grey. Show us the Notice.”
Ms. Maysey and The Wind watched him expectantly. Mr. Grey saw no avenue of escape. He drew from his pocket the Notice of Not Existing. It would reveal his downward course, towards the Parchmentwork Mines, and make both Mr. Grey and Ms. Maysey uncomfortable.
Mr. Grey was just unfolding the parchment, when the balloon air equalized. The cage stopped before Ms. Maysey’s floor. She forgot the notice, knocked the locking pin in place, and flung open their cage. She said she’d hear about it later and rushed off, her face furrowed by health concerns. The Wind also departed. She rushed after a flock of clouds which had broken loose from a gathered storm.
Mr. Grey relaxed, which meant no visible change to his cut-from-stone countenance. He took measures to prevent a second interaction like the one just survived. Instead of using the control panel and deflating the necessary number of balloons by that mechanism, he disengaged the locking pin and took out his pointiest quill. Mr. Grey reached overhead and stabbed at the cellular mass of bright balloons.
There was precedent for this manual method of hastening a balloon elevator’s descent, provided it were done correctly, with a conservative stab. Mr. Grey - whether some remnant fluster varied his mechanical movement, or whether some remnant gust from The Wind forced his arm - did not do it correctly. Mr. Grey made a rather radical stab. He hit many small balloons, when he meant to hit few.
The clotted mass popped in a gunfire burst. For a tock, friction held the cage in place. Then a last rattle shook the scaffold, and the metal box enclosing Mr. Grey plummeted.
With a crunch, and a squeal, and a mushroom cloud of shiny powder, the balloon elevator box hit the basement of the Starharbor Regional Justice Center. The crunch and squeal weren’t the noises of warping and compressing cage-metal, and the powder wasn’t mortar and stone turned to chalky dust. All this came from the packing peanuts which caught the dropping lift. They squeaked, groaned, compressed, and exploded. They filled the air around the fallen lift with a choking Styrofoam fog. They did their job.
Mr. Grey exited both elevator and Styrofoam cloud with an undignified lurch; coughing out plastic powder and alternating between waving away dust and trying to brush the foamy rubble from his robe. He stepped into a cavernous space, where the ceiling yawned into sightlessness overhead. The mine walls textured themselves in the standard chiseled earth; dotted here and there with standard lanterns, and non-standard motivational office posters. Behind Mr. Grey, the settling powder gradually revealed the array of balloon elevators and the safety-beds of packing peanuts. Ahead of him, railroad tracks ran out of sight into a gloomy distance.
Where tracks began, a tiny watchman’s box nestled like a flea against the cavern wall. In the box, the forewoman of the mines - Mr. Grey recognized the woman’s occupation by her hi-vis safety-robe and headlamp spectacles - sat composedly. She made a show of not noticing the elevator’s crash-landing, and kept her eyes roaming over the Regular Sunshine Post (which, I must tell you, was the name of the newsparchment, as well as the delivery service, and several other industries besides; but that’s not important).
Mr. Grey plucked pieces of Styrofoam from his robe and made sure the Notice still dwelt safely in his pocket. He walked with measured steps towards the watchman’s box and spoke with measured words to attract the forewoman’s attention. The footsteps and the words ran off after they’d done their job, away along the tracks, away down the tunnel, echoing madly.
The forewoman looked politely at Mr. Grey’s face while he spoke, and pointedly ignored his hands as they plucked Styrofoam bubbles from his robe, like flies from a honeypot. She listened, with her headlamp spectacles glaring into Mr. Grey’s eyes, as he related the contents of the Notice. Mr. Grey passed her the crumpled and world-weary parchment. The forewoman read it.
The Notice of Not Existing came from a lengthy, bureaucratic stock, very respectable language of the time and place. It contained delightful phrases such as, “Herein are set the certification which…” or “Section 203, as amended, sanctions the accumulation of emolumentary…” The smallness of the text and the length of the parchment precludes its inclusion as a whole within this story, as it would invariably crowd out at all that remains to be told. The persevering reader shall have to imagine the fascination of such a document. Those who feel jilted by its exclusion might find satisfaction in a fireside perusal of the latest issue of Terms and Conditions.
In brief, the contents of the Notice were thus. An old woman of inconsequential name had ceased existing by natural causes. She ceased existing in a place named ‘Glory Days’ (which has more to do with the story, but that will come later). The Notice entered its existence because this old woman, before abruptly giving up her own, had spent her early age in Starharbor. She had moved away by obtaining a travel visa - in a time even farther behind, when such documents were easily acquirable - and not returned. She had, however, left relations behind. The Notice required serving to any living relatives who remained in Starharbor. The Notice did not contain the original address information, which was why it first came to Mr. Grey. His task was to retrieve the change of address form, filed in ages past, which lay somewhere deep in the Parchmentwork Mines.
That was the summary of the Notice’s content. Also, Mr. Grey’s reason for having it. Also, his reason for being where he now was; brushing off packing peanut debris from his robe with a spark-singed hand, while the forewoman scanned the noble, bureaucratic Notice.
When the forewoman finished reading, she reshaped the Notice into something like a golf ball and flung it under the watchbox counter, into a waste basket. There the Notice’s part in this story ended. Mr. Grey would still need a Notice for the next of kin, but Time and Bother had worked that one too hard to be presentable. Mr. Grey would just clickety-clack the copy he needed from memory.
The forewoman once more put Mr. Grey under the twin spotlights of her lenses. She asked him what he wanted, which Mr. Grey had thought evident. He explained how he needed the old change-of-address form. This displeased the forewoman. She grumbled in several different directions; about it being ages old, and probably not in any current lode, and needing to commission an excavation team, and eons of digging, and being just about to go on her break besides. Mr. Grey expressed his sympathy, but explained again - without changing his tone or words - that he needed the old change-of-address form.
The forewoman muscled a crisp stack of parchment from a lower watchbox shelf and thudded it onto the counter. She slid it toward Mr. Grey slowly, like a live blasting brick. She said, if he wanted to commission an excavation, he’d need to fill the information on such-and-such pages, and get signatures from such-and-such sirs and madams, up in this-and-that department. Then the forewoman pulled her lunch from an even lower shelf in the tiny watchbox. she began arranging her meal courses on the counter by size and value.
Mr. Grey walked back to the balloon elevator array, filling forms as he went. The forewoman thought she’d disposed of the matter handily. She contemplated her meal. She considered starting with the least valuable course; the leftmost, a cupful of onyx beans. She changed her mind, breaking tradition, and pulled in the rightmost item instead; a tiny barrel of cart-beer.
The forewoman had just touched the barrel-rim to her lips when the noise of the elevators caught her attention. She turned and… it couldn’t be! There was Mr. Grey, the block of parchment tucked neatly in a right-angled elbow crook, looking clean and dry. He exited the lift, this time without the accompanying crash. He walked towards and stepped up to the counter. Mr. Grey placed the parchmentwork, fully filled out, next to the untouched lunch.
What could she do? The parchments were correct. The forewoman cast a final, mournful spotlight on her perfectly arranged lunch. Then she left her watchbox and her untasted meal to cower in the huge loneliness of the room. She ordered for a railcar. A moment later one rolled up to them from the gloom, heralded by the rhythmic squeak, squeak, squeak of a rusted wheel. The cart stopped at their waists. They boarded, and the forewoman began up-and-down pumping on the control lever with striated, marbly arms.
They shot off in the direction the cart had come from, into the hungry dark. The cold cave breath snatched at their hair and clothes. The forewoman’s glasses shone ahead as two scanty light-cones. Mr. Grey broke up the monotonous ride with earmuff adjustments, and examinations of his pocket-ticker. The latter action did nothing to tell the time; Mr. Grey sat fully caught in umbral darkness. But even that inky dark, like the harsh lanterns of the office hallways far above, couldn’t overcome the man’s greyness. Even in that dark stretch of railway, with the headlamp glasses carving cones of light in front, and everything behind caught in the bleakest night, there dwelt an obscure splotch of grey in the void.
Many moments rushed invisibly past in that dark stretch, before a new spark glimmered suddenly in the distance. The spark grew hastily to a glow as they rushed; into a solid orb of pure light as they rolled. Their cart entered a newer, bigger room, which cracked its knuckles and flexed its muscles. In this room, every wall carried uncountable numbers of what looked like giant, crawling glow-beetles. They were, in fact, beetles; thousands and millions of bugs with glowing shells. The bugs lit the walls of the cave. The walls didn’t vanish into nothingness above, thanks to the beetles, but they did vanish into the distance. Like a vertical horizon, the cave walls traveled up, and up, and up, until they met at a point where sight no longer distinguished individual sides. Inconceivably high went those walls, as though the rail had turned upside-down halfway through their trip, and gravity had reversed, and now the cave could climb as far down as it wanted, and never stop. And all that was, in fact, precisely the case.
In the center of this endlessly tall, endlessly sprawling room, a mountain loomed. Casually. Though impressively large, as mountains generally are, its presence wasn’t quite the spectacle it would have been beneath the sky. Compared to the endlessly high walls, the mountain looked almost dwarfish, and its slight droop at the top lent an informal, lazy attitude to the landmark.
This mountain’s unique feature was that not one earthly element made up its composition. This mountain formed from portfolio crags, and draft-bill gullies, and manilla summits. This mountain fanged its way out of the ground as a mass of ink and parchment.
As Mr. Grey and the forewoman’s cart stopped at the fresh-record foothills, their noses met the mixed scents of library stacks and workers’ sweat. Cords of coarse rope ran along pitons up the rugged ridges of the mountain. The lines disappeared into holes dug into the archival sides, dimly lit by captured glowbugs. Parchment miners pulled themselves along the ropes, with hands calloused through countless parchment cuts, and permanently stained by ink. Some miners dug in the new-fallen documents of the foothills, while others plumbed the depths of those glowing holes, following veins of increasingly golden parchment, searching for amendments of apocryphal legality.
The forewoman created a new team of workers. She explained the age and type of document they needed. The team began by consulting a separate, smaller mountain, which held documents detailing the main mountain’s layers and regions. Then the commission was ready. The workers hammered in new pitons and tied off new lengths of scratchy rope. They found a surface of lesser parchment density - topsoil, mostly made of meeting transcripts - and started digging.
Deep into the crust of the parchmentwork mountain delved the miners, glowbug lights in one hand, coffee mugs in the other. Mr. Grey sat on a hard pile of ‘business requirements’ and occupied himself sorting a nearby hill of ‘trademark licensing’.
Many more moments passed, scored by the music of the mines: complaints of bum knees, the lunchroom activities of ‘that guy’, the infrequent sounds of actual work being done. Eventually, a grim faced, office-scarred veteran miner interrupted Mr. Grey’s leisurely parchmentwork. The man stomped up to Mr. Grey, gruffly placed a document in his dry hands, then returned to the mines.