Matej Sorn

#On His Station

Matej Sorn is a cooper's assistant of the Blue Zone of Constantinople. His trade is persuading wet staves to hold what they are given. He was thirty-six when the matter began and forty at the last medical review, in A.S. 201. This dossier is filed against that review because it is the most recent occasion on which anyone with a seal looked at him and wrote something down.

The files call him Subject Argent-1. The street calls him the sleepless man. His baptismal name appears once on the cover sheet and afterwards only where a clerk forgot himself. I restore it. A man who has outlasted fourteen months of Medicine has earned at least his own consonants.

He has a wife. He has a daughter, who was an infant when the trouble entered the house. The file names neither of them, and I will not supply names the Ledger has withheld. What has happened to them since is also unrecorded.

The administrative difficulty is easily stated. Sorn eats. Sorn works. Sorn answers questions with open contempt and correct grammar. Sorn does not sleep. Every Bureau that has examined him keeps a form for the dead, one for the possessed, one for the missing and one for the ordinarily insane. None keeps a form for a cooper's assistant who stays awake and goes on being a cooper's assistant.

#On the Change for Lamp-Wick

The object concerned is the Screaming Coin, a Class IV Unresolved Anomaly. Its first reliable record dates to A.S. 177, after the Three-Night Bombard, when a furnace-sweeper named Orek Marr pulled it from a slag gutter beneath Mill Seven in the Foundry Quarter. That is the date it was recovered. It has no date of manufacture, because no maker anyone will sign for. It returns after it is destroyed. On some occasions it screams when it changes hands. The rest belongs to its own file, and that file is long enough.

Twenty years after Marr, in A.S. 197, Sorn bought lamp-wick at a stall near the Pilgrim wharf and received the coin in his change. He heard nothing. By every account in the record, the coin does not object to being received.

He went home. He tried to hand it to his wife.

It screamed. Sorn heard it. His wife heard nothing at all. The file is firm on this, and I am firm with the file. Their infant daughter began to cry and did not stop for seven hours. No deposition yet devised can say what the child perceived. Infants make poor witnesses and worse signatories.

The record shows no completed handover, to his wife or to anyone else that night.

Sorn then did the one thing in this entire history that the Bureau of Purity actually tells citizens to do. He put the coin in a jar of vinegar, sealed the jar and carried it to the nearest Purity kiosk. It was past curfew. The clerk on duty refused to accept unstamped anomaly material outside posted hours and told him to come back in the morning.

The coin screamed. The clerk fell unconscious behind his own counter, the most honest posture a kiosk clerk has ever assumed.

Sorn did not sleep that night. According to the case file, he has not slept since.

The file does not say what became of the coin after the kiosk. Purity's object register lists it as contained. The same register lists its physical whereabouts as unknown. Both entries are stamped.

#On the Condition Recorded

The signs anyone can observe are few, plain and maddening. Sorn's eyes are clear. His appetite is regular. His hands stay steady until coins change hands somewhere near him. Then they shake. His pulse slows at Matins and quickens at Vespers. The case account says his body seems to keep the bells. I accept that as a comparison and nothing more. Nobody has shown that the bells are doing anything to him, and nobody has asked the bells.

Medicine looks for the drooping lid, the slack jaw and the grey hour before dawn when the head goes down on the bench. It does not find them. He shows no ordinary fatigue.

Everything else is his own testimony, and it goes in a separate drawer.

Sorn says he hears the coin all the time. He says it makes no difference whether the coin is sealed, lost or destroyed. He says the sound changes with distance. Near, it screams. Farther off, it counts. Very far away, it is the sea trying to remember a name. The file records these as his words. It records no location confirmed by them and no range measured. Nobody has ever followed his ear and found the coin waiting.

The coin's edge carries tally marks. The last verified count was thirty-four: twenty-three deaths and eleven disappearances. Sorn is in neither column. The revised Purity witness table of A.S. 199 lists forty-seven confirmed transfers, thirty-one audible manifestations and one unresolved survival. He is the survival. Sixteen transfers on that table produced no sound anyone reported. The coin keeps no rule that everyone must hear it, and the arithmetic forbids anyone to call his wife a liar.

#On the Examinations

Medicine took him first and kept him longest: fourteen months of confinement and observation. At the end of it Medicine had no sleep to record, no death to certify and no diagnosis to bind. What it did have was a growing pile of requests to extend its budget. It released him. A Bureau will forgive a patient for refusing to die. It will not forgive him for becoming an expense.

Purity interviewed him eleven times. Purity's business is containment. Eleven interviews is Purity's way of hoping the anomaly is inside the man, so that it could be kept inside a room. The file establishes no such thing.

The Bureau of Shadows interviewed him once and lost the transcript. I make no allegation. Shadows loses things the way a censer loses smoke: it is what the office is for.

The Bureau of Doctrine wants above all to know whether a thing is heresy, orthodoxy or mere noise. It asked him whether the sound conveyed doctrine.

Sorn answered: "It conveys wanting out."

Doctrine marked the reply theologically unhelpful and closed that line of inquiry. The answer does not say what wants out, or out of what. I will not say it for him.

The final review of A.S. 201 is the nearest thing to a verdict any office has produced. It records that no sleep was observed. That is narrower than the street's claim that he has never slept, and far narrower than anyone's claim about why. It records that fatigue markers are absent. It records cognitive deterioration that is slight, stable and, in the examiner's own word, contemptuous. It records spiritual contamination as unproven, which certifies him neither tainted nor clean. It recommends that observation continue, provided no institution brings him near coinage.

#On His Present Circumstances

Sorn lives in a room above a cooper's yard. The rent is paid from an anonymous relief account. White Cups denies running it. In Constantinople a written denial serves as both denial and receipt, and the file holds nothing better. Who controls the account is not recorded. I will thank the gossips of Records to keep their pencils sheathed until it is.

During market hours he plugs his ears with wax. He has not said whether it helps, and nobody has measured. He attends no service at which a collection plate goes round. The Church disapproves of such absences as a rule, and fines them where it can.

The file credits him with two talents. He can tell a counterfeit coin by touch. He can tell a cursed one by smell. Both abilities are recorded; their limits are not.

The Bureau of Tithes has never met a human faculty it did not want to requisition. It sent him a formal request for his services. He spat on the requisition. Of all the instruments ever served on Matej Sorn, it is the only one that got a reply in kind.

He goes on working staves. The coin goes on wherever it goes: through purses and poor-boxes, a pilgrim's alms at the Harbor of Chains, and the other corners of the city that the object file lists with more patience than I have. Nobody knows of any meeting between the two since the kiosk.

Disposition: unresolved survival. Observation to continue. No coin within reach of the subject. No clerk within reach of the subject's spit.