ACACIUS, LIBRARIAN, INVENTOR OF NOTHINGNESS (The tenth sign)

Daniel Frini

Silence dominates the hot afternoon in Deir Mar Takla's Eutychian monastery, on Euphrates's banks, on a day in the year that centuries later will be known as seven hundred and forty after the birth of Jesus the Christ.

Acacius is an intelligent man and an avid reader of the ancient Greek and Arabic texts that enrich the library in his charge, which gave him a well-deserved prestige as a wise and holy man.

He's spent the last few months abstracted in an exciting idea, suggested by the books, that startles and excites him. For weeks, he's slept little or nothing, neglected his prayers, barely eats, and seems distracted and absent. Only this morning he shared his reasoning with the other ten monks, while they ate some unleavened bread crumbs, and shook the calm and centenary atmosphere of the cloisters won to the rock. The reaction, as he expected, has been one of doubt at best, and outrage at most. Only the abbot remained silent and pondered the librarian's words.

Now, in the quiet time that follows at noon, Acacius decides that a good way to put his thoughts in order is to write them down.

He's in his kalbbia and, through the little window open in the stone, looks unseeing at the arid horizon beyond the river. In a mechanical gesture, with his hand, he cleans the palimpsest on which he's going to work. He plunges the kalamos into the vessel with ink —made by the spice brother with hawthorn wood, gill nut, black stone, honey, wine, and blue vitriol—, he drains the surplus, and directs the kalamos to the surface, stops his hand in the air for a second, hesitating, and finally writes:

 

‘Why, my Lord and God, it's given to me to ask this question? Is it the Great Enemy who wants to make me sin by doubting Your Wisdom? Did I let myself be won by pride? If You've willed that some knowledge should remain forbidden to men, why do I find that my reflection isn't wrong?

I've known the very subtle wit possessed by the sages of India, by which they surpass all other peoples in arithmetic and geometry; the same which the infidel Muslims inherited: a valuable method of calculation, which surpasses all imagination, so that it seems the work of magicians or demons; and that they manifest through of nine signs, by which they can indicate any degree of magnitude, from Thy Oneness to the total number of days of Eternity.’

 

A throat clearing stops him. Acacius turns his head and finds the abbot's tiny, stooped figure silhouetted against the low door of the kalbbia.

“Blessings, brother librarian.”

“Blessings, brother abbot.”

Acacius lowers his head in submission and, although he knows why his superior is there, he asks politely:

“To what do I owe the honor of your visit?”

“I'll be frank and direct, brother. The Lord has given me the unmerited grace of intelligence that allows me to appreciate the work of learned men, as is the case with Panjab or Bendosabora's men, or your own, dear brother. I'm gratified and amazed at the God's greatness who has denied His Person to the infidels, and yet has enlightened them so that with nine conveniently placed strokes they resolve what has been an extraordinary effort for Latins and our Greek fathers. And it's well that it should be so: nine moons needs the mother to bring a child to life, Parmenides says that nine is the number of absolute things, Porphyry says, in his Enneads: ‘I've had the joy of finding the product of the perfect number, by nine’; nine are the orders of angels, there are nine kinds of demons and nine precious stones; nine gates allowed access to Temple of Jerusalem's kodesh ha-kodashim; three worlds there are, heaven, earth and hell, and in each of them there's a triad; hence nine is the number that closes the third cycle from unity, and with it, the creation. But I don't understand, dear brother, your stubbornness in saying that the wise men who preceded us have missed something—”

“Brother Abbot, in my meditations I've found a certain anomaly that's the root of my uneasiness. The Latin Fathers teach that the Son of God returned from the dead on the third day, and so we accept it. It's our faith that He surrendered His Soul to the Mercy of the Maker on Friday, which we count as the first day; Saturday went by, which is the second day, and He rose again for Father's Glory and our eternal salvation, on Sunday, which we count as the third. However, this way of counting the days, was never clear to me, and I’ve come up with another, which I don't find wrong: Jesus the Christ died on Friday's ninth hour. And the hours that elapsed until the quarta vigilia on Sunday, when Mary of Magdala discovered the empty sepulcher, they make barely a day and a fraction, and not three days as our Fathers have taught us, and professes the Nicene and Constantinopolitan Symbol of Faith, when it says ‘He suffered and was buried, and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures.’ Now, let's do the same reasoning, but counting backwards: starting from the quarta vigilia on Sunday to the quarta vigilia on Saturday, we count one day, but the number of hours from the quarta vigilia on Saturday to the ninth hour on Friday doesn't make a day. This means that there was a time when there were no days, and this is the key to my agony. India's nine signs don't contemplate this dilemma. Do we need a new sign?”

“Neither the Hindus nor the Muslims mention anything about this riddle.”

“It's true. And only in Ptolemy, in the sixth volume of his Hè Megalè Syntaxis, I’ve found a symbol at the end of a quantity to indicate a hundred; I can't know if he came to the same conclusion that I did, 'cause he clarifies nothing on the subject, and if so, his notation hasn't been used again.”

“But, Acacius, brother; if such a sign existed, it'd have to be a sign devised by the evil one, and contrary to the Will of the Lord.”

“That worries me, brother abbot. Such a sign represents the absence of quantity. When I wish to add to any cipher the absence of quantity, the result is the same cipher. On the other hand, when I try to use the table of Pythagoras to make the product, adding to it the sign of absence, I transform any quantity into nothing. Even when I repeated this procedure innumerable times, I find no mistake in my reasoning—”

“Do you realize, brother, what you're proposing? If such a sign existed, Acacius, it'd be the archetype of absence and the paradigm of nothingness. We'd have at hand the Power of the Lord to destroy worlds by a simple sign.”

“I've seen it, and I'm frightened by this discovery. I pray for the Wisdom of God to guide me and show me the way. What should I do? Should I make my discovery known to the wise so that they too may know His Power, and we may draw closer to Him? Should I conceal what I’ve been allowed to glimpse?”

The Abbot respects Acacius's erudition and admires him, and he's amazed at the logic of the saint's reasoning. He's traveled all over the East defending Eutyches's doctrine in Christological disputes, from Nicaea to Antioch. He's an able man and knows how to recognize the immense power that Acacius has discovered in the tenth sign, and it frightens him, more than the daimons, diabolos, and impure spirits he's defeated, more than Asmodai, Choronzon, or Jaldabaoth.

Acacius, who hasn't yet released the kalamos, lowers his head and closes his eyes.

The Abbot, a veteran of a thousand battles against the Unworthy, moves quickly. He takes the reed instrument from the monk's hand and thrusts it, with all his might, into the librarian's throat, who doesn't even manage to be surprised. Minutes later, Acacius dies.

The Abbot knows that the danger is still latent: he's seen the Tree of Knowledge's fruit that was forbidden to Father Adam, and he wants to forget, with all the strength of his old heart, but he understands that he won't be able to do it. He knows, too, that in the future, he could be tricked by the Dark One and persuaded to reveal the mystery. So, he takes the ink's vessel and drinks the contents in one gulp. He lies down on the small room's warm floor. He prays, in an inaudible voice, asking for forgiveness. The afternoon's heat, which stretches into the night, lulls him to sleep. He remembers an old song's melody that his mother sang to him, and though he tries hard, he cannot remember the words. Then, the ink's poisons extinguish everything for him, too.

Daniel Frini (Argentina, 1963) is an engineer, writer, and visual artist. He participated in anthologies in different languages and his latest book (in Spanish) is The chick spiders’ sex life. He won several awards, the last one, the First Prize in the «Martín Fierro» Short Story Contest (Argentina, 2024). In English, he published in several magazines: Minifiction, Alchemy. Global Science Fiction. University of California, Boundless 2021. The Rio Grande International Poetry Festival Anthology. e-mail dfrini@gmail.com IG: @danielfrini.