Eight Turns

by Sergius of Reshaina, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Notes to the first rendering of the Formulary into gallery speech, left for the midwife Dunya Fell at the Third Gallery, Conamara, on the night before the lift.

Dunya,

You will find these notes in the drawer under the slate, where you keep the cord clamps. I put them there because you open that drawer more often than any other, and because no one from the council opens it at all.

The Formulary is finished as far as I can finish it. The two hundred and six sections that came through the Ganymede relay are rendered. The forty-one that did not come through are marked with a bar in the margin, and I have not guessed at them. When the second packet comes, someone will put them in. It may be you. It should not be me, guessing tonight, because the lift goes at the turn. I have paid Arno at the stores the two rations I owed him for the slates, so nobody will come asking you for them.

I said at the beginning that we would do three books and that the order mattered: the Little Logic first, so that a reader learns what a definition is before she meets one; then the Formulary, which is the body; then the hymns, which are what the body is for. The council thought the hymns were my business and the Formulary yours and the Logic nobody's. We have done the Logic and the Formulary. The hymns I take with me to Valhalla, and I will work at them on the crossing, without you, which means they will be bad.

What follows are the words that cost us something. I have kept them in the order we came to them, not in the order of the alphabet, because the order we came to them is the order in which we learned how to do this, and whoever revises the Formulary should be able to see where we were still learning. The early sections are worse. You know which ones. Leave them where they can be found.

Day. The only easy word in the book. The Archive's day is the turning of the Earth under its sun; ours is the bell day the galleries keep, twenty-four hours, which the founders brought down with them and which no one here has ever found a reason to give up. I rendered it day. You wrote it without looking up. I mention it because it was the last time either of us did that.

Month. I came to this word in the second section, the one on the courses, and I rendered it eight turns, because eight turns of this world round its planet come to twenty-eight days and nine hours and a half, and the Archive says a woman's courses come round in about twenty-eight. I was pleased with it. I had worked it out on the ship from the Lagrange schools, eleven years ago, before I knew anyone here.

You put the stylus down and said that no woman in the galleries says eight turns. You said a woman here says she is on her tide, and that the girls learn it before they learn what it means. I asked whether the tide and the courses kept together, and you said no, and that nobody thought they did, and that it was a word, not a claim.

I did not understand the difference then. I think I understand it now. The Archive's month was a claim once, about the moon, and stopped being one, and the women of Earth went on using it. Your tide was never a claim at all; it was what they had to hand. So in section two we wrote tide. In the tables of pregnancy, where the Archive counts forty weeks from the first day of the last courses, we kept the days and did not convert them, because a midwife counting ten tides of eight turns comes out four days late, and four days is not nothing to a woman who is already late.

You wanted the turns in the margin anyway, because the women count in turns whatever the Formulary says. They are in the margin. I would not have put them there.

Weight. The Archive's newborn is three and a half kilograms, and it says weight when it means this. You said that here a baby has heft, and that weight is what the ice-cutters complain about at the shaft head, where the spring scales were made for Earth and read everything at a seventh of what the hand expects. I asked whether a mother would understand weight in the Archive's sense. You said she would understand it, and think the Formulary was written by someone off the lift. Which it was.

We wrote heft, and mass in the tables, and I put a note in section nine that the infirmary scale is a balance and reads true, and that the arm does not.

Midwife. The Archive has the word, and also obstetrician, nurse, physician and attendant, and uses them as if they were different people. In the Third Gallery they are you. I wanted to keep the distinctions, because the Archive keeps them, and because a gallery may one day have more than one of you. You said that a gallery with more than one of you would be able to make its own words, and that a Formulary which sent the reader looking for an obstetrician would teach her only that she had not got one.

We wrote midwife wherever the Archive names a person at a birth, and physician only where it names one who prescribes. That made me the physician in every section. I noticed it and said nothing, and so did you. In section forty, where the Archive tells the attendant to send for the physician if the bleeding does not stop, you wrote send for Petros, and then wiped it, and wrote it again properly.

Down. The Archive tells the woman, at the second stage, to bear down. I read it out and you laughed, so that the stylus scored the slate. Then you said that it was not wrong, only that it was the advice of somebody who had been dragged on by a whole world; that here the child does not fall out of anyone; that the women are taught to push along, toward the midwife, with their feet braced on the bar. I had seen the bar fitted to the birthing cradles for eleven years and taken it for a rail to stop the cradle tipping.

We wrote push along. I would like it recorded that I did not know what the bar was for. Whoever revises this will think I was a strange sort of physician. I was the sort they had.

Waters. The Archive says the waters break, and means the bag the child lies in. I gave it as it stood. You stopped and asked me to read it again, and then asked whether I had ever heard anyone in the galleries say the water about anything but the one thing. I had not, now that you asked. The water is under us, and the pumps that keep the lowest gallery dry are the first thing the council pays for every year and the last thing anyone mentions at table. A woman told that her waters have broken, you said, will think first of the pumps.

We wrote the bag has gone, which is what the midwives say among themselves, and which is ugly, and which no one will misread.

Sunlight. The Archive prescribes it for the children, for the bones. There is a line in section fourteen: a quarter of an hour in the sun each day, with arms and face uncovered. I rendered it the lamps, because the violet lamps in the nursery gallery give what the sun gives, or the part of it the bones need, and I could not see what else to do.

You said the children call it going under the yellow, though the lamps are not yellow and have not been since your grandmother's time, when the old tubes were changed. I asked whether we should write what the lamps are, or what the children call them. You said a mother reading the Formulary at night, with a child who has started to bow at the knees, does not want to be told what the lamps are.

We wrote under the yellow, and I put the wavelength in the margin, for whoever comes after me and has to order new tubes.

Fever. You will remember this one. I rendered it heat for thirty sections, because heat is what the galleries say and because I did not think the difference mattered. In section thirty-one the Archive distinguishes the fever of the body from the heat of a room, and tells the midwife to take the child out of a warm place before she reads the thermometer. In the galleries no room is warm; the warmth is in the pipes and the floor plates and the bodies. I could not render that section with heat without writing nonsense. So from thirty-one on it is fever, and from one to thirty it is still heat.

You asked whether we should go back. I said no: two hundred and six sections, one translator, and a lift at the turn. I would say the same tonight, but I know it was the wrong answer for the Formulary and the right one for the lift. Whoever comes after: in sections one to thirty, heat means fever. Change it. I would have.

Moon. Here I come to the decision the council will hold against me, so I will set it down plainly, in case they ask you what I said.

There is no moon here. We are one. The Formulary barely needs the word: it appears once, in a passage the Archive quotes from an old physician of Earth about the fears of mothers, and I rendered it with a paraphrase and you did not object. The hymns need it more. The feast falls on the Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox of a world none of us has stood on, and you know what Valhalla is meeting to decide: whether the galleries keep the feast by the reckoning of Earth's moon, computed from tables nobody here can check, or by the turns, which everybody here can feel in the floor.

You and I are on different sides of that, and have been since before I came. Your congregation keeps the turn; mine keeps the tables. I have sat at your table on the turn feast and eaten your bread, and you have heard me preach the computation, and neither of us has moved.

But I am taking the hymns to Valhalla to render them on the way, and every hymn for the feast says moon. If I write the turn, I have preached your side in my own translation. If I keep the Archive's word, I have written a word for a thing no one who sings it has seen, which is what translating is meant to prevent.

I have not decided. I will decide on the crossing. I tell you so that when the hymns come back down, whichever word is in them, you will know that it was decided, and was not a slip.

Morning. The Archive speaks of a sickness of the early months and calls it by the time of day. I have nothing for it. The bell day has a morning only because the founders kept the word; the lamps come up at six, and nobody is sick because of it. You said the women call it the green, but that half of them have it at night and the other half all day, and that the word you would choose depends on whom you asked.

I have left the line blank. I would rather a reader found a gap than a word I chose because the line looked empty.

That is all of them that cost anything. The rest are in the margins. I have tried to be honest about where I was guessing, and I know I was guessing more often than I have marked. Someone with the full Archive, and more time, and three or four midwives instead of one, will find a great deal to put right. Let them. I would only ask that they do not take tide out of section two because it is not in the Archive. It is in the women.

The floor started at the half-turn while I was writing about the moon. It is louder now. They will be loading the lift.

Petros Kasab

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Note from the front of the second rendering, in another hand, sixty-three years later:

The first rendering of the Formulary is Father Kasab's, made with the midwife Dunya Fell of the Third Gallery from the incomplete first packet. I have made sections one to thirty new, since they are early and uncertain work, and corrected the rest throughout, in places heavily. His tables of pregnancy are sound. His doses in the children's sections were rounded down for safety, past the point where they did any good, and I have restored them from the full Archive.

He died at Valhalla in the second year of the synod. The hymns he took with him were never sent down, and I do not know which word he chose.

In section two I have kept tide. In the copy at the Third Gallery the line for the sickness of the early months is still blank. Someone has written beside it, in pencil, in a hand that is not his: ask the mother.

Agnes Hesketh

THE END

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Sergius of Reshaina, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Sergiō Rēsainēnsī per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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