What the Scholar Called Drivel

The university sits about ten buildings northeast of the centre of Qabarat. The records don't describe the walk there. They begin with gossip.

Before he had met anyone of consequence, Taeon wrote down what the building was talking about. One of its scholars, who went by Dr 21:2, had given a lecture people were calling xenophobic. He was a contemplative, and he was hit or miss with the rest of the staff. That is how the page opens. I have always thought it a sensible place to start. Before you walk into a forest, learn which way the wind has been blowing in it.

The receptionist was Akimbsy, and Akimbsy helped. The notes say no more than that, so neither will I.

Professor Muhaly's office was clean, roomy and orderly. It had a charming view of a park, a small table with four chairs around it, and an examination table laid with stones whose text ran in spirals. Taeon noted the room before the person, as he usually did. The professor looked up as they came in and nodded, and Whaloss, tall and thin in his one good suit of local silks, announced them.

Muhaly studied the ancient writing of the Castrovelian lashunta and wore purple hair, cut asymmetrically. What the professor wanted to talk about first was the scandal. Dr 21:2's lecture had examined a war and justified the genocide of the Formians, and he had been placed on academic leave. The university needed it smoothed over quickly. Firing him, the notes say plainly, would kind of suck. What Muhaly wanted was for someone to convince him to apologise. He could be found in his office on the sixth floor, or reached through Akimbsy.

The task the professor set them was the one they had come for: find out more about the writings, and about Halqueem Zan.

---

The Formians are an old people of this world: a hive people from the Colonies in the south, who fought the lashuntas of Asana for longer than anyone has kept records, until a peace was made. A lecture in Qabarat defending their destruction would not have been an abstraction to anyone in that building. The records don't say what Taeon thought of it. He wrote it down in a single line, between the professor's hair and the floor the man's office was on.

Note the hive, and do not count it as one.
Note the hive, and do not count it as many.
It is a kind of life you were not made to be.
Do not call it lesser for that.
Note who speaks of a kind as a weed.
Note who speaks of pulling it out at the root.
The forest has no weeds. It has only what grows.
The one who would empty the meadow of a kind
has decided the meadow is his.
It is not his.
Do not hurry to argue with him. First hear what he knows.
Then remember what he would do with it.

— the Observances, from the Readings on Kinds

Novitiates sometimes ask whether this Reading is about the Formians. It names nothing, and it is older than anything in his notes. But I was taught it in the same week I first read this page of his, and I don't think the one who taught me chose that week by chance. The last two lines are the ones the day bore out.

---

Whaloss took them to Dr 21:2's door. Inside was dust, debris and disorder: books, scrolls, statues, and computer hardware lying loose among them.

A contemplative is mostly mind. The body is small and withered beneath it, and what such a mind finds interesting does not always match what anyone else does. Dr 21:2 had given up his name. His reason, as Taeon took it down, was this: when the past is unknown we must make a tradition of challenging "so-called" tradition.

Halqueem Zan, he said, was a hack. His scribblings were not interesting.

Qwitch's judgement of him was short. All intellect, no personality. But Qwitch noticed something else as well. For all his uncouth manner, the doctor had gone through everything of Zan's there was, and only then dismissed it as drivel. Both things were true at once, and the second was the one the party needed.

A source who calls the material worthless has read it.
Ask what is in it.

— the Field Canon, on Informants, later additions

He named his price for helping before anyone could name theirs. He wanted to be reinstated. Cancel the suspension. Restore his access to the restricted material. Erase the whole incident from his tenure file, as though it had never happened. The notes list the three terms and don't record whether anyone agreed to them.

On Zan, he gave them a name. Only Dr Olmaya Solstarni had studied the material more recently than he had. Retrace her steps, he told them, and get a copy of her notes. Zan's original notes, "the reckless explorer's", had been accessed and were being converted and digitised. The record says eight hours, and doesn't say whose hands the work was in.

---

So they went to find Dr Solstarni, and through Professor Muhaly they learned she was not there. She had left on personal leave two days before. Muhaly was confused by it, having never approved the absence. She had been reviewing Zan's notes when she went.

The professor gave them a spare key card to her office.

The last lines of the page are about the language itself, and they don't say where Taeon learned them. It belonged to a group that was not elven, yet it was associated with a few known elven sites. She's seen it before, the note says. She had been working on matching the language to locations on a map.

A scholar sets aside the work she is in the middle of, without leave, two days before strangers arrive asking about it. The records don't draw a line between those two facts, and I won't either. I only note that when the page ends, he is carrying the key to her door.