By Guillermo Stitch.
This is an extract from The Coast of Everything by Guillermo Stitch (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2026).
The question can be answered very adequately within the strictures of standing directives: the archive is the biodigitised totality of Magistracy sweep. The accumulated hazmat of millennia. The most powerful toxins are contained therein. Sealed, of course.
That was never the purpose of the Warburg anyway, when we had observatory status and the possibility of realtime detection. Our mission rather was to identify and analyse previously unexamined toxins, classifying them according to type and potency. We alone on the Warburg are exposed to this risk — that contaminants of the utmost toxicity might be isolated by the array and, in the pre-analysis, archival stage, accessible to our scrutiny. There are other arrays but the Warburg is the only archival site in existence, for obvious reasons. That over time Committee members would succumb to a degree of exactly that kind of degradation that the Magistracy exists to protect against was no doubt foreseen. Factored in. Hence our isolation — the comms blackout, the nanoplants, the buoys.
Of course, detections of that calibre are incredibly rare. In my time, I have yet to discover any lurking undiscovered in the archive. It turns out that most of the materials, however heretical they might be, are banal. Most entertainments, for example, are merely silly. Doctrinal artefacts are as a matter of course no less so. The potential for actual harm is not always therefore apparent. And yet the evidence has been plain, here on the Warburg and notably among its Committee members that, through attrition if nothing else, exposure will cause disease.
Papa would answer differently. Of course he would — his is both the greatest mind on the Warburg and the most damaged. For his insight, his intellectual sensitivity, he has paid a price. It was he who first sought to interest me in the archive. In his many years as archivist he had come to love it, to see a beauty in the thing he had thought so beneath him — not to mention its utility. Once he had emerged from his despair at the loss of Aetiology, the archive had become as rich a source of data for him in the pursuit of his theoretical work as live detection had ever been. And indeed, he has answered the question, when I was the asker.
He bid me walk with him, one night, to the beach — this at the time he sought to coax me into taking over as archivist. It was certainly the case that I needed something to do with myself, but up till then I had resisted. I was full of youthful vanity, I suppose, and didn’t much care for the thought. It seemed like the job of a clerk, to me, though I would never have said as much. “I don’t think I could manage, Papa,” I would plead instead. “I’m not like you. I’m not entirely sure I know what the archive is, apart from endless old, forgotten files.” This last was said on the way down to the water and was the closest I’d come to disparaging the man’s work and therefore, of course, the man. “What is the archive, Papa?” I asked quickly, to brush the unintended slight away, but he did not respond and I was afraid that I’d offended him. If only he knew how much the very thought offended my heart!
We only get a few nights like that on the Warburg each year. Clear and still and warm. The sea was as quiet as I’d heard it in my young life. There was just the soft slap of water lapping at the jetty and, further out, the constant sigh of a slumbering ocean.
We lay side by side in the sand as we had so often done. Even the gulls were quiet, in awe perhaps of the overhead display — the sky was ablaze with other worlds and the milky nebulae that enveloped them. After a little time had passed, Papa spoke.
“What do you see, Lil?”
I blinked. His little tests, though I’d been subjected to them since I could remember, made me nervous.
“I see stars.”
He propped himself up on one elbow and turned to me.
“Really? I see none.”
We fell silent awhile. His eyes remained on me, I knew, while mine scanned the firmament in search of an answer fit for him.
“Now,” he said when he had given me a minute or two, “what do you see, Lil?”
“I see,” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, “light. Evidence of stars. Traces.”
“Much better. Clever Lil,” He smiled in the illumined night, then lay back and looked up at the sky again. “That, my girl,” he said, reaching out across the sand to pat my hand, “is the archive.”
I knew then that we were at the point in the conversation where my Papa’s increasing abstraction would begin to confound me. I recognised the pattern. Recognising patterns is what I’m good at, after all.
“Light,” he said. A single gooney drew a black curve against the stars. We watched it fly out over the water, out of our sight. “Light, yes. Aetiology in its purest form. A pathway to the past. And beyond that, perhaps, to a time before. Maybe that’s what truth is, Lil — a time before the past. For many years, I didn’t see it. I set myself the task of naming, numbering and tagging — a taxonomy of disconnected dots. The archived artefacts. Except these dots, when scrutinised closely, come apart. They are not dots at all, but themselves constellations, made of their own dots, and they in turn . . . the fractal geometry of the search for truth, Lil. It might drive a man to madness. But step back, or lie back rather, and, holding the gaze steady, focus not on this or that, but on the entirety. Better yet, slacken the optic muscles — let the whole thing blur, just a little bit.”
I wanted to do as he bid me, but was unsure of his meaning. I tried to refocus on a point low above my head, so that the stars would blur as he wanted, but all I could make out was the blur. It told me nothing. Several times I tried this, to no avail. I knew that he was smiling at me.
“You are trying, Lil,” he said, a minute or two having been allowed to elapse. “Stop it. Stop trying.”
For a moment, the silence deepened — no waves broke and there was a pause in the water’s lapping against the jetty. A breeze that almost wasn’t there, was like a cool pillow on my cheek. I let out a gasp. In my noticing those things, I had been distracted from the task and had relaxed my unblinking eyes, in preparation, I suppose, for my next attempt. In that second, they were focussed neither on the distances nor on anything close. They were not focussed at all. And there it was. The great distances were suddenly transformed. The universe felt like an indoor space, neither large nor small, neither friendly nor threatening, neither out of reach nor within it. I looked to Papa, to see if he saw — felt — what I did.
“That’s it Lil,” he said. “That’s what it’s like for me now.” He squeezed my hand. “It is a form of blindness that is also sight. I cannot distinguish between the sanitary and the sick any more. Between disease and cure, host and parasite, whichever binary you choose. This is a very serious disadvantage for the aetiologist. And yet . . . I feel advantaged. Blessed, you might even say.”
I withdrew my hand, startled by his language. He chuckled. It’s as well, if one is to hear such blasphemy, to be in the company of your most beloved. The only one you could possibly forgive for saying such things.
“I do not try to connect the dots, at least not in the sense of drawing a line from one to the other, and then another, and so on. Our maps and charts — the more complex they become, the more entrancing, but they are doomed to inadequacy. I wonder if . . . apart from other matters . . . that is what made your beautiful mother so fragile.
“No, it is the connecting tissue that interests me now. Do you know that it moves, Lil? I couldn’t see that, before. It . . . behaves, somehow. Pulses. I see ripples. Waves. Some animating force. There is no such thing as an interesting artefact, really. It’s all about the in-between. Do you see?”
I didn’t, of course. But the conversation had got under my skin. I didn’t see, but I wanted to. I didn’t know about the notebook then, that it was the key to this new understanding of my father’s. And I didn’t know then that, even armed with it, I still wouldn’t see. I would need you to see for me. Anyway, I found Papa’s state of mind rather worrying and I thought it was time his days were more restful. Soon afterwards, I accepted responsibility for the archive.
My answer, if you were to ask me?
I can only tell you what the archive is to me. What it has been. If at first I went looking for what my father had found there, it wasn’t long before the search overwhelmed me. There are places it seems I cannot follow. I need more than my Papa does. Or rather, I need less — I need those lines, those maps and charts he has come to dismiss. The tendons to his tissue. I need order. Mine is a forensic mind. I take after mother in that regard — if she had lived, I would have gone to Mapping, I’m sure. It is necessarily the case, then, that given this proclivity, I must disappoint my father. I have devoted much effort to the concealing of this truth.
I went looking for something else in the archive. My own search, my own story — my own little heresy, though I consoled myself with the thought that it was a true story I sought. The truest story I could think of, anyway: Time.
Or, in the context of the archive: chronology. This could form the basis for my organizational efforts. It was, at least, a new way to begin. Potency tags were of little use, but going by type, and referencing against the dismally limited education I’d had from the Stationmaster, I was able to piece together the rudiments of a history. Papa was only too happy to answer whatever blasphemous question I had the nerve to ask him from time to time, whenever the content of an artefact confounded me.
What I know of the world — except for you and Papa and we few who remain here, and for the trees and coves of the Warburg, the waves that wear at it, the wind that blows over it and the birds what wheel above it —i s second hand. All of it. You too, I know, and the boy. Nobody else living can know how it feels. Just we three.
The archive didn’t change that, but it did increase — exponentially — the quantity of data at my disposal, from which I could make suppositions, inferences, sketching out a skeletal notion of places, people and events previously unknown to me. It was mesmerising to become more deeply acquainted, if still imperfectly so, with the world beyond the limits of either my sense or my experience. By definition, an artefact was a known fiction — but in sufficient number, and arranged in sequence, suppositions about the realities that gave rise to them could be made. This was the pathway to the past that my father had spoken of. For the first time in my life, the river of information that flowed was under my direct control. It burst the confining banks of Fafl’s Magistracy-sanctioned instruction. Even Mama’s illicit and thrilling, but rather capricious, tutorials — which had stoked such fire in me — were superseded.
But nothing lasts does it? Nothing that pleases me, it seems. My newly expanded world was to close in on me again. The last live detections — of contemporaneous broadcasts — to be picked up by the Warburg array came in almost two years before I was born. I well remember the day I arrived at them, having threaded my way through the archive connecting that first series of dots, from the oldest artefacts I could find up to those final few. I remember the crushing realisation that no matter how many times I went back to find other pathways, I would always end up here — at the same artefact, picked up on the same day, in a world where I did not yet exist.
No matter how absorbing the journey then, time spent in the archive would never amount to more than a history lesson. It could have nothing to tell me about my world. It was a disconnection that my father would not have felt, having been brought to the Warburg and not born to it.
What I wanted was a pathway to the present.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Guillermo Stitch is the Executive Editor of Exacting Clam. He is the author of The Coast of Everything and Lake of Urine. He lives in Spain.
