Most Akin

by Herman Melville, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Of all the trades men have devised for standing between one thing and another, that of the inspector of customs is the least regarded, and I think the most metaphysical. The surgeon stands between a man and his death, and is thanked for it; the priest between a man and his God, and is paid in Sunday silver; but the inspector stands between a thing and its name, and nobody thanks him, and the Government pays him four dollars a day, or what four dollars has become.

I have stood there thirty-one years. For the first nineteen I stood on the river piers, among the coffee and the hides; for the last twelve I have stood on the Gansevoort Ring, where the long haulers come in from the outer dark, four thousand million miles out and back, with ice for the water-works. I know the hold of an ice-ship as once I knew the hold of a whaler. They smell the same, which is a thing no one believes until he has been down in one: tar, and cold iron, and the sweat of men who have been too long together.

My instrument is the Schedule. It is older than the Ring and older than the hauling trade, and nobody has ever thought it worth replacing; for it was made by men who meant it to hold everything, and it very nearly does. Ninety-seven chapters. Live animals at the head of it, as in Genesis; then meats, fishes, the fruits of the earth; then salts and earths and stones, and the ores, and the fuels; then the chemistry, which goes on for pages like the begats; then hides, woods, papers, cloths, shoes, stones again but worked, metals, machines, ships, instruments, arms; and at the very end, in the ninety-seventh chapter, works of art, collectors' pieces, and antiques, which is where the Schedule puts whatever men have loved too much to use. And between the seventy-sixth chapter, which is aluminium, and the seventy-eighth, which is lead, there is a seventy-seventh that holds nothing at all. It was left blank by the first makers, reserved, the margin says, for possible future use. I have never seen anything entered there. I used to read the empty page at the start of a night watch, the way some men read a psalm.

Under the chapters lie the headings, and under the headings the subheadings, and beneath all of it, like the keel beneath a ship, six General Rules for reading the rest. Most of what I do needs only the first. The fourth I had invoked perhaps three times in thirty-one years. It says that goods which cannot be classified under any of the others shall be classified under the heading appropriate to the goods to which they are most akin.

Most akin. I have turned those two words over more nights than I have turned over any line of Scripture.

---

The Bethiah Folger came in on the fourteenth, nine years and a month out of the Ring, and warped into the third ice-dock with her holds sealed and her crew alive; eleven went out, eleven came back, which in that trade is accounted a fortune before a gram of cargo is weighed. She carried, by her manifest, forty-one thousand tonnes of cometary ice, cut and stowed in blocks, consigned to the Water Board of the Ring under the standing contract. Heading 2201: waters, natural or artificial; ice and snow. I could have written it in my sleep. I have written it in my sleep.

But there was a second paper under the manifest, in the master's hand, and it declared one block separately. Item, one body found within the nucleus at a depth of four hundred metres, not ice, not the property of the consignee, claimed as salvage by the master and company, nature unknown.

The master was Asa Gorham. I knew him slightly from before his voyage, when he had been mate in the Hannah Pell: a tall, spare, courteous man with a way of standing still in a doorway that kept you on the other side of it. He met me at the hold lock in a clean jacket, which I took for a bad sign, since a man who has been nine years in the dark and dresses to meet the customs has something he wishes the customs to believe.

"You'll want to see it," he said.

"I will want to see all of it, Captain."

"You'll want to see it," he said, and he put the lamp in my hand himself.

I will set down what I saw before I set down what anyone said about it, for that is the order my trade requires, and I have found it a good order for most things.

The Bethiah Folger's cargo, like all cometary ice, was not white. People on the old Earth imagined comets as snowballs, and drew them so; but a comet's heart is dirty, black and grey as a coal-barge's slush, a frozen rubble of water and dust and old carbon that has been tumbling in the far cold since before the sun was lit. Her forward hold was stacked with such blocks, each the size of a cottage, each one stencilled with its number and its depth of cutting, and when I put my lamp to them they gave back nothing, or a brown glimmer at most, the way a pond does at night.

Block 61 lay alone in the after hold, chocked and lashed in a cradle of its own. It was white.

I do not mean pale. I mean that it took my lamp and gave it back entire, so that for a moment I saw the outline of my own hand thrown against the bulkhead behind me. It was clean water ice, as clear in its depths as a church window and white at its faces where the cutting saws had frosted it, without a speck of dust in the whole of it, and it had come, by the log, out of the middle of a dirty comet four hundred metres down.

And in the middle of the white block was a hollow, a perfect sphere, a little over four metres through.

I have seen bubbles in ice; every ice-man has. They are lenses, or lozenges, or strings of beads, flattened and drawn out by the freezing. This was a sphere as true as a bearing-ball, and its inner wall was smooth beyond anything I have a word for. Polished is not the word, for polish leaves the ghost of the polishing. Glass is not the word, for glass ripples. When I held the lamp to the outside of the block and looked through, I could see the far wall of the hollow, and the near wall, and they showed no mark at all, so that the hollow seemed less a thing that was there than a place where the ice had declined to be.

"Somebody made that," said Gorham, at my shoulder.

I said nothing. I had my work to do, and I did it.

---

For two days I measured Block 61 as I would measure any article claimed as other than it was declared. I set down here what I set down then, because the catalogue is the whole of my method, and I have never known a better one.

Mass, two hundred and six tonnes, less than an equal block of solid ice by the weight of the water the hollow would have held. Temperature at the faces, forty degrees above the absolute zero, at the core by probe the same, which is what the far dark leaves in anything it keeps long enough. Composition by the spectrometer: water, and water, and water. The proportion of the heavy hydrogen in it, the ratio by which the chemists tell one water from another, matched to the third figure the ratio of the dirty ice around it in the forward hold; so the white ice and the black had been born, by every test I could put, of the same water in the same cold. The hollow held a vacuum harder than the hold, which is to say it held nothing, and the gauge registered nothing, and I recorded nothing in the column. Of radiation, none above the common background. Of magnetism, none. Of sound, when Tamsin Hulse, the second mate, struck the block with a mallet at my request, a dull note, like a cask half full.

That was Hulse's part, for those two days: she struck what I asked her to strike, held what I asked her to hold, and read the gauges back to me in a flat Cape Ann voice, number by number, and never once told me what any of it meant. She had stood the after-hold watch through the whole of the return, four years and some months, alone with the block for six hours in every twenty-four. The others had a superstition about it, she told me, and would not take the watch. I asked her what she did down there all those hours.

"Logged the temperatures," she said. "Checked the lashings. Looked at it."

"And what did you make of it, looking?"

She considered this with the gravity of a woman asked to state her cargo.

"It's ice," she said. "All the way through it's ice. And then in the middle it isn't anything." She tapped the gauge that read zero. "I logged that too."

That was all I could get from her, then or after; and I confess I thought it the most honest report I received from any quarter in that business.

---

Gorham's report was otherwise, and he made it to me in his cabin on the third evening, with a bottle of the Ring's dreadful rum between us that he did not drink.

He had found the white block himself, he said, the saw-crew having stopped at the colour and called him. He had gone down into the cut, and put his lamp to it, as I had, and seen the sphere. He knew at once, he said, that it was a made thing. No comet ever freezes clean in its heart. No bubble ever rounds itself true. No ice ever polishes its own inside. It was a vessel, a casket, an egg, a message laid down in the cold by a hand that knew the cold would keep it; and he had brought it home across the whole breadth of the dark so that it could be opened by men fit to read it.

"And what does it say, Captain?" I asked.

He looked at me for a while.

"It says that we are not the first," he said. "That somebody passed this way before there was anyone here to see them pass. That they left a mark so it would be found by whoever came far enough. I have come far enough." He laid his hand flat on the table, as if the table were the block. "It isn't ice, Inspector. Ice is what it's in."

Now I will be plain about the stakes, since Gorham was plain with me. Under the standing contract every tonne of ice the Bethiah Folger cut belonged to the Water Board, and the crew were paid by the tonne at a rate that, after nine years, would buy each of them perhaps a small house on one of the inner spokes. But anything found in the ice that was not ice belonged by the old law of salvage to the finder; and a made thing from before the sun, if it were such, would be worth more than the Ring itself. If I entered Block 61 under 2201, it went to the water-works and was melted for the tanks with the rest. If I entered it under the ninety-seventh chapter, as an object of archaeological interest, it was his and his crew's, and they were rich, and the question of who had made it went on to the learned men.

"You've read the Rules," he said. "You know the fourth one. Most akin. It's not akin to ice. Look at it. It's akin to a thing made."

I said that I would consider it, which was true; and I went back to my quarters on the Ring and considered it until the middle watch.

---

I will not pretend I was not tempted. A man does not stand thirty-one years between things and their names without wishing, once, to give some great thing its true name and be done. And I believed, as nearly as I believe anything, that Gorham might be right; that a hand had made that sphere, and set it in the white, and laid it down in the dark to wait. I believed also that he might be wrong; that the far cold has ways of working we have not catalogued, as the sea had, in my youth, ways the books did not know. I could not choose between these. Every measurement I had taken leaned neither way. And that, I came to see somewhere about two in the morning, was the whole of the case.

For the Schedule does not ask what a thing means. It asks what a thing is. And what Block 61 was, by every test I or anyone could put to it, was water, frozen, white, in the shape of a block, with a hollow in it; and the hollow was nothing, and there is no heading in all the ninety-seven chapters for nothing. There is only the seventy-seventh, and it is reserved.

Gorham wanted the fourth Rule to carry his meaning into the books for him. But the fourth Rule does not discover kinship; it only asks for it, and the kinship has to be shown in description, character, purpose, nature. The block's description was ice. Its character was ice. Its nature was ice. Its purpose, if it had one, nobody alive could state, and I would not enter on a Government form a purpose that I had only been told. The thing most akin to Block 61 was Block 61, and it was ice.

In the morning I wrote the entry. Heading 2201. And beneath it, in the remarks, in my own hand, as near as I could make it to what I had seen: Contains one spherical void, approx. 4.1 m, wall of exceptional smoothness; origin undetermined; void empty by gauge. It was not much. It was everything I knew. I sent a copy to the Water Board with a note asking that the block be held unmelted until the College of the Ring could see it, which is a thing an inspector may request and a Board may ignore.

Then I went down to the Bethiah Folger to tell her master.

---

He was not in his cabin. Hulse met me at the after-hold lock in her suit, with her helmet under her arm, and her face told me before she did.

"He took the lance down an hour ago," she said. "I told him the entry wasn't in. He said it didn't matter what was in."

We went down together. The after hold was open to vacuum, as an ice-hold always is, and the only light was the blue of the thermal lance, which he had left burning and wedged against the cradle, and our own two lamps. Gorham was standing on the block. He had cut a shaft into its top face, very neatly, a man's width across, down through the clear white to the hollow, and the ice he had burned away had gone off as vapour into the hold and frozen again on every surface, so that the bulkheads and the lashings and the cradle glittered with a dirty frost.

He was looking down the shaft. I climbed up beside him and looked too.

There was nothing to see. The hollow was there, as before, and now it had a hole in its roof; and the vacuum within the sphere had met the vacuum of the hold, and the two had made no more of the meeting than two shadows do. Nothing had come out. Nothing had been waiting to come out. Where the lance had breached the wall the edge was ragged and fogged and ordinary, and the glass-smooth inside showed, by my lamp, a fine bloom of new frost settling over it from his own vapour, as dull as the inside of an icebox.

"It was sealed," Gorham said. He did not look up. "It was sealed, and I have opened it, and there is nothing in it." He said it twice more, in the same words, like a man reciting a manifest he has been told is incorrect.

Hulse unshipped the lance and shut it off. In the new dark the block took our two lamps and gave them back, white, entire.

The Water Board did not hold it for the College. A block that has been opened with a lance is, under any reading, broken ice, and broken ice goes to the tanks, and I had already entered it as such. The Bethiah Folger's crew were paid by the tonne, which came to the small houses; Gorham was fined for the lance, and paid it, and has not, I am told, shipped out again. I have not gone down into the after-hold of any ship since without looking first for something white.

But on the last morning, before the dock-crews came with the saws, Hulse went down into the hold one more time, and I went down with her. She climbed onto the block and reached down the shaft with a long gaff and broke away a piece of the inner wall, a curved shard the size of a saucer, still smooth on its concave side. She held it up to her lamp. It gave the light back, entire. Then, as we watched, the lamp's heat began to work on it, and its bright face fogged, and its edge smoked with a breath of vapour so faint I should not have seen it but for the lamp, and the breath went off into the dark of the hold, and was gone.

She logged it.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Hermannō Melvillō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Herman Melville, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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