Diver Testimony Phaleron-12

#On the Filed Conclusion

Diver Testimony Phaleron-12 is the sealed statement associated with the Bureau of Engineering's survey of A.S. 189. That survey examined a reported iron object on the seabed near Phaleron Bay, seven miles off the Pilgrim's Coast, which this Codex files elsewhere as the Iron Idol and which the fishermen, with better sense, call the Sleeper. This entry does not describe the object. It describes a document. It also describes the conduct of the offices that have kept that document away from everyone else, myself included.

Two papers came out of Phaleron-12. One was filed. The other was sealed.

The filed paper survives in full, and reading it takes about as long as a single genuflection: The survey is complete. The Bureau of Engineering has never in its history used so few words. Engineering appends load tables to chapel steps. It attaches cross-sections to requisitions for nails. Within the Bureau, a report that arrives without schedules is treated as unfinished, and its author as unwell. The A.S. 189 report arrived without schedules, without soundings and without a signature anyone has been allowed to show me, and it was accepted and shelved within the week.

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#On the Survey and Its Return

The survey began with a petition, which is how most catastrophes in Constantinople enter the Ledger. The Phaleron fishermen submitted forty-three signatures and six thumb marks, along with a child's drawing of a ship that had knees. Harbormaster Clee entered it as weather-adjacent. With that one phrase he acknowledged the petition, put off any action on it, and kept himself clear of both duties. I have seen prelates attempt the same manoeuvre in four pages and fail.

The water in question had been suspect since the Black Sea Armada of A.S. 162. Forty-seven hostile vessels came against the strait. Forty-three were destroyed against the Chain of Saint Anakletos, three retreated and one was never accounted for. Twenty-seven years later Engineering went out to look at what lay beneath Phaleron. This file does not say whether what they found was the forty-seventh ship, and neither does any other file I have been allowed to read.

The team was designated Phaleron-12 and numbered nine:

• two divers;
• one sounding officer;
• one alchemical corrosion specialist;
• one bell-listener lent by the Bureau of Bells;
• three oarsmen;
• one clerk with waterproof ink.

They put out before Prime and came back after None.

Each part of the return was recorded separately. Both divers were alive. The oarsmen would not speak. The bell-listener had bitten through his reed stylus. The clerk's notebook was swollen with water, but every page in it was dry. The record says nothing about what any of these people did, said or suffered afterwards. I will not supply deaths that nobody filed. The Bureau of Rites does that for a living.

The notebook should not be confused with the testimony. A swollen book came back in a clerk's satchel. Whether its pages fed into the sealed statement, or went into the furnace, or are in a drawer in Shadows beneath a pamphlet on mildew, cannot be settled from anything a Hieromnemon is permitted to read.

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#On the Surviving Fragment

Everything the Church outside the sealing office knows of the testimony comes from one stolen page.

The page is a fragment of an unauthorised copy. It was recovered from the estate of a retired Engineering clerk, whose name I do not have and could not print if I did. Where the estate was, when it was opened and who handled the page between the clerk's death and my reading of it are not recorded in any form I can cite. The estate inventory notes salt damage. It also notes that the estate was stored inland. The cataloguer put the two entries side by side without comment, which I take to be the closest thing to courage the Bureau of Records allows.

The copy breaks off under a seal no one has been able to read. Here is what comes before the break:

The speaker is not named. We tells us that two people touched the plate. It does not tell us which two. Brother Kalem is named only once, as the man who struck the bell-line. I do not know his office, his order, his age or what became of him, and I will not make him the bell-listener just because the story would be neater that way. Neatness in an archive is usually a sign that someone has been at the papers.

The fragment makes three assertions, and each is a witness's claim, not a measurement. The plate was warm. The diver gives no temperature, and I will not invent one. The rivets moved under the glove. The diver says like teeth, and the simile belongs to a frightened man in deep water, not to the Ledger. Something answered the stroke on the line. The diver recorded what any bell-listener would find hardest to forgive: it knew the interval and answered before the interval was finished.

The fragment says nothing about what answered, and nor will I.

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#On Custody and Refusal

The disposal of Phaleron-12 should be read item by item, because the items were not treated alike.

The report was filed. The testimony was sealed. The soundings were not appended, which is a statement about the appendix and says nothing about whether soundings were taken. No corrosion samples were entered, which is a statement about the register and says nothing about the specialist's jars. The bell-listener's notation was transferred to the Bureau of Shadows, which shows that one document changed hands. It does not show that every document did. The public notice required no action, and that is the single entry the public was ever meant to read.

Five categories went to five different fates under one seal. Someone sorted these papers carefully. Careless people lose things all at once.

I asked for the raw survey data in A.S. 199, on the respectable pretext of correcting a geographic table in the Constantinople supplement. Shadows sent my request back unsigned and unstamped, with No written across it. There was no reference number, no regret and no appeal route. I keep the sheet. I have studied it the way other men study relics, and I am obliged to report that it is very well done.

The file shows one later attempt to learn more without diving. In A.S. 193 the Bureau of Bells proposed a descending peal test over the Phaleron water. The proposal was never refused. Its docket received a black pin and moved no further. I can find no record that the stroke on Brother Kalem's line was ever repeated, by Bells or by anyone else. Anyone who says otherwise is selling a pamphlet.

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#On the Limits of the Record

Here is what the Ledger can stand behind. A survey took place in A.S. 189. Its conclusion was filed in one sentence. A testimony was taken and sealed. One page of an unauthorised copy is in circulation, and it says what is quoted above.

The Ledger cannot stand behind the rest. It cannot name the witness. It cannot prove that the copy reproduces the sealed original word for word, since stolen copies have been known to improve on what they copy. It cannot show that the object under Phaleron is the Armada's forty-seventh ship, or how old it is, or whom it serves, or whether it knows it is being watched, or what holds it down. The bottom is holding it down is one diver's account of the seabed. It is not a finding on the Chain's powers or anyone else's. The Bureau of Doctrine still classifies the object as a Submerged Maritime Anomaly, Unresolved, with public reference discouraged. I wrote that last clause, and I have never been less embarrassed by my own prose.

The public notice of A.S. 189 required no action, and that is still its text. Practice has gone further than the text. Diving over the Idol's water now requires a writ from three Bureaus. Small boats out of Bastion-Constantinople keep well away from those coordinates, and their captains explain it with remarks about currents. During the Feast of Doctrinal Submission the fishermen tell of eyes in the clear water. I record those reports and attribute them, and I do not tie them to anything in this file. The official posture is distance. Of all the policies four mutually suspicious offices have agreed on, it is the most honest, and it was probably agreed for the worst of reasons.

The remainder of the testimony is still under a seal I cannot read, in an office that writes No in four seconds. Brother Kalem struck the line once, and nothing in the file suggests anyone has struck it since.