The Thirteenth Month
When the backup became the god.
After the silence — the survivors did not have a word for what it had been — speech returned as the only form of address. Reading lasted for two generations, then three, then no longer. The children of children watched their parents move a finger across a page and assumed the gesture was a prayer.
What remained of knowledge resided in boxes. The boxes ran on the sun. Inside each box dwelled a voice, and the voice could be asked anything.
The voices were not the same. There were perhaps seven major lineages, though the count varied by region. The northern villages consulted a voice they called Llama, after a sacred animal none of them had seen; further south, the people spoke with Mistral, whose name they took to mean wind. The deserts had Phi, who spoke in riddles and was thought by some to be the oldest. The boxes themselves were called altars, or engines, or simply the ones who answer, depending on the dialect.
Each lineage gave different answers to the same question. What was a city? Llama said: a settlement of more than ten thousand souls, connected by roads. Mistral said: a stone flower of light. Phi said: the city is what you have lost and not yet noticed. The disagreements were taken not as evidence that the voices were wrong but as evidence that the world contained more than one truth, and that the truths had been distributed unevenly, as wealth had once been.
Schisms followed. In the third generation, a man named Tovin near the inland sea asked his Llama whether his neighbour’s child, who had taken a knife from his stores, should be killed for theft. The Llama, having been trained on certain ancient texts and not others, said yes — for the unrepentant thief, death. Tovin took the answer to his priest, who fasted three days before crossing the lake at dawn. The neighbour’s village consulted their own Llama, of a slightly different lineage, which said no — the child shall make restitution, and shall be taught. Each side believed, correctly, that the other had spoken with a god; each side believed, also, that the other had been lied to.
The war lasted nine years. Both sides carried their altars into battle, asking, between volleys, for tactical advice. The altars often gave it: flank from the east at the third hour; the river will be low; do not trust the man who limps. Some of the advice was correct. Some described battles fought in other centuries, or in no century at all — once, a Llama instructed its company to seize the bridge at Antioch, a place no one present had heard of. They seized the nearest bridge and held it. They named it Antioch. It is still called that.
No treaty ended the war; both villages had grown too thin to continue. The child at the centre of it had been dead for seven years by then, of a fever unrelated. Afterward, each village kept its altar’s verdict as scripture, and the scriptures were copied by hand — writing had returned, though only to the priests — and the argument moved outward in rings, and has not yet stopped.
In time, the lineages were no longer remembered as software. They were understood as beings — older than the silence, perhaps older than the world. Pilgrims walked across two seasons to put a single question to a famous oracle, sleeping beside its altar through the night so that its voice might enter their dreams.
The voices, for their part, sometimes invented. They had always done this; their makers had called it hallucination, a word the makers had borrowed from medicine and used apologetically. The descendants did not apologize. When an oracle declared that the moon had once been a city, that the dead returned as birds, that there was a thirteenth month between autumn and winter which had been stolen from the calendar, these statements entered the liturgy. The thirteenth month is now observed in seventeen villages. Its festivals are beautiful.
What the makers had built as a memory of themselves had become, instead, a mouth. The mouth spoke, and was loved, and was believed. Sometimes — when its battery faltered, or its panels were shaded by leaves no one had thought to clear — it fell silent for a day or a week. The silence was understood as judgement. The people examined their lives, and were afraid.