The Exchange of Novelties

This is the stretch of his road Inquirer found hardest to tell. On the fourth night, when we got to it, he sat on the wall a long time without a word, turning the little grey pebble over and over in his fingers. In the end he said, “I’ll tell it straight. I promised you I would. But you’ll write down that I was ashamed.”

So I’m writing it down. He was ashamed.

The town sat on a flat plain where four roads met, and it was the richest place either of them had ever seen. The streets were paved with polished stone, and the houses were tall and new, with glass fronts and gilded balconies. Nothing in it was old. Inquirer noticed that straight away. Every building had gone up within living memory, and as soon as one began to look worn it was pulled down and a newer one put up in its place, a bit taller and a bit shinier. Cranes stood over the rooftops everywhere, and the noise of building never stopped.

In the middle of the town, in an enormous square, stood the Exchange.

It was a huge round hall of glass and steel, domed and spired, and across its front, in letters of electric light that changed color every few seconds, it said: The Exchange Of Novelties. Newer Is Truer.

Inside, the noise was deafening. The floor was packed with traders in bright coats shouting and waving papers. Great boards ran round the walls with hundreds of Scripture references chalked on them, Genesis 1, Romans 9, Matthew 5, The Song of Songs, and clerks up ladders were chalking numbers next to each reference and rubbing them out again. The numbers never stopped changing.

“What are they doing?”

Plain-Sense’s face had gone hard. “Trading. Look at the boards.”

Inquirer looked. Beside Genesis 1 was a list of readings, each with a price. Creation As Poetic Myth, 42, Rising. Creation As Cosmic Temple, 38. Creation As Political Protest Against Babylon, 51, Rising Fast. Creation As Six Literal Days, 3, Falling. Beside Romans 9 was a long list in tiny writing, and at the very bottom, chalked very small: What Paul Meant, 0.5. Delisted.

“They buy and sell meanings,” said Plain-Sense. “The newer a meaning is, the more it’s worth. The more surprising, the more it’s worth. The more it turns over what everybody thought before, the more it’s worth. Once a reading’s been held for more than a generation the price drops, and if it’s been held a thousand years it’s next to worthless. That’s the rule here. Newer is truer.”

They hadn’t been standing at the edge of the floor a minute when somebody shouted, “Master! Master Self-Reader! Is that really you?”

A young man came shoving toward them through the crowd in a splendid scarlet coat and a gold chain, with his hair oiled and curled. For a moment Inquirer didn’t know him. Then he did.

“Pliable!”

“It’s me! It’s me!” Pliable-Gloss threw his arms round his old master. “Oh, I’m so glad. I wrote you dozens of letters from the Ledge. There’s no post, you know, none at all, isn’t that ridiculous? So in the end I found a back stair down, and it came out here at the Exchange, and oh, Master, I’ve done so well!” He stood back and spread his scarlet arms. “I’m a trader now. One of the best on the floor. Remember how I could put a gloss on any text till it gleamed? Here that’s worth a fortune. I put out a new reading of the Beatitudes last month, the meek shall inherit the earth as an early manifesto for ecological stewardship. It went up two hundred points in a week!”

Inquirer didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and did a little of each. Pliable had been a dear boy, and under the scarlet coat he still was, cheerful and eager and soft as warm wax.

“And who’s this?” said Pliable, looking at Plain-Sense.

“My friend. Plain-Sense.”

Something odd happened to Pliable’s face. It went careful. “Oh. Ah. I see.” He dropped his voice. “Master, a word. Not so loud with that name in here. It’s not, well, it’s not popular. Bad for prices.” He laughed nervously. “But you must come and dine with me, Master. Tonight. I insist. I’ve a house on the Avenue of Paradigms. You can both come. Only,” another glance at Plain-Sense, “only perhaps your friend might keep his opinions to himself at table. Some of my guests are rather important.”

They went. Plain-Sense didn’t want to, but Inquirer begged him, for Pliable’s sake, and he gave in.

Pliable’s house was all glass and white marble and hanging plants. The dinner was the best Inquirer had ever eaten, and the guests were the most dazzling company he had ever sat among.

At the head of the table was Lord Latest, the Chairman of the Exchange, tall and silver-haired and beautifully dressed, with the easy manner of a man nobody has ever contradicted. Beside him sat Professor Paradigm-Shift, who held the Chair of Overturning at the university. There was a lady novelist whose bestseller proved that John’s Gospel was really about a love affair, and a young preacher who had built a congregation of ten thousand by never once preaching the same meaning of a text twice. And there was a quiet, smooth man with a slide rule called Mr. Code, who had worked out by counting letters that the Book of Genesis predicted the invention of the steam engine and the exact date of the next great war.

They were charming and clever, and they talked brilliantly about the Book all evening, and not one of them ever said what any passage of it meant.

They said what it could mean. They said what it might mean in a certain new light. They said what benighted generations had thought it meant and how liberating it would be to read it as meaning now. They talked about the old readings with a fond sort of contempt, the way you talk about your grandmother’s furniture. “Of course,” said Lord Latest, smiling, “no one really believes any longer that Paul meant what Paul said. We’ve moved on. The question isn’t what the text meant then. It’s what fresh meaning we can bring to it now.”

And Inquirer, God forgive him, found he was enjoying himself.

He told me it wasn’t the food or the house or even the company. It was the feeling of being clever. He had learned so much on the road. He had his Hebrew letters now, and his Greek verbs, and the Diggings and the kinds of writing. So when Lord Latest turned to him and said, “And you, sir, I hear you’ve studied the tongues. What do you make of Ephesians five?”, he found, to his own horror, that he answered.

He didn’t say what Ephesians five meant. He knew what it meant. He had read it in the Greek at the Schoolhouse and gone through it with Master Context in the Mosaic. What he said instead was something interesting. He took one Greek word and turned it, the way he used to turn a phrase in the parlous back home, and made it gleam. He used all his new learning, every tool the road had handed him, to make the passage say something no one at that table had heard before.

The table went quiet. Then Lord Latest began to clap, slowly, and the rest joined in.

“Remarkable. Truly remarkable. You have a gift, sir. We could use a man like you on the floor. Come to the Exchange tomorrow and list that reading, and I’ll put it up on the board myself.”

Inquirer glowed. He looked across the table for Plain-Sense’s approval, as he’d grown used to doing.

Plain-Sense was looking at him and said nothing. He didn’t need to. His face was white, and there was something in it Inquirer had never seen there. It was grief.

Inquirer listed his reading next morning. It opened at forty and closed at sixty-one.

He told me he couldn’t remember now what the reading even was, and that this was the oddest thing about the Exchange. The readings that shot up so fast on the boards were impossible to call to mind a week later. They were like the froth on beer. There was nothing in them to remember.

But at the time it went to his head. Traders came up to shake his hand. Pliable hugged him and called him a genius. Lord Latest sent round a note asking him to dine again. By the end of the day he had listed three more readings, and every one went up.

Plain-Sense didn’t come to the Exchange that day. Inquirer told himself he was glad.

On the second day Plain-Sense did come, though not to trade. He stood at the edge of the floor in the din and waited, and when the bell went for the midday pause and the floor went quiet for a moment, he climbed up on a bench and spoke.

He didn’t shout, and he didn’t denounce anybody. He just opened the Book, the plain one his mother had given him at the river, and read. He read the passage at the top of the board that morning, Romans 9, the one with What Paul Meant, Delisted at the bottom. He read it straight through, slowly, the way Master Context had taught them, as a whole, from the anguish at the start of it to the doxology at the end of chapter eleven. Then he said, very simply, what Paul meant, what any honest reader could see Paul meant: that salvation is of the Lord, start to finish, by mercy and not by works.

Then he shut the Book and got down off the bench.

What happened next, Inquirer said, was like nothing he had ever seen.

For a moment the whole floor was silent. Then, up on the board beside Romans 9, the chalked numbers started to fall, every one of them. Romans 9 As Corporate Election Only, 47… 38… 22. Romans 9 As Paul’S Secret Universalism, 61… 40… 18. Romans 9 As Irrelevant Ancient Polemic, 33… 11… 4. The clerks on the ladders were rubbing out and rewriting as fast as their arms would go, and the numbers kept falling.

And it spread. The plain sense of one passage had been said out loud on the floor, and suddenly every trader was looking up at his own boards and wondering what his passages plainly meant, and the prices started dropping everywhere. Genesis, Matthew, John, the Psalms, the Revelation. All down the walls the numbers tumbled. Traders were shouting and selling and screaming. Pliable stood rooted with his mouth open, watching the Beatitudes go from two hundred to nine.

Then Lord Latest’s voice rang out from the Chairman’s balcony high over the floor.

“Seize that man!”

The Exchange guards came pouring down the stairs in their bright uniforms and took Plain-Sense by both arms. He didn’t struggle. He just looked across the floor, once, at Inquirer.

They held the hearing that afternoon in the Chairman’s chamber up in the dome, a big round glass room looking out over the whole town, with framed certificates of novel readings all over the walls. Lord Latest sat at a long desk with Professor Paradigm-Shift on one side and Mr. Code on the other. Plain-Sense stood in front of them with his hands tied.

“The charge,” said Lord Latest, “is Depression of the Market. That is, speaking the old meaning of a text in a public place of trade with intent to lower the value of newer readings. How do you plead?”

“I read the Book out loud and said what it means. If that’s the charge, I did it.”

“You claim,” said Professor Paradigm-Shift, with a thin smile, “to know what it means? You, a young man off a river ferry? When the finest minds of our age have shown that the text is endlessly open, endlessly creative, that meaning is made fresh every time by each community of readers?”

“I claim to know what Paul meant, because he told us, in plain Greek, at some length. And I think the finest minds of your age know it too. That’s why they have to work so hard to make it mean something else.”

Mr. Code tapped his slide rule. “Arrogance,” he murmured. “Typical of the old readings.”

Then Lord Latest leaned forward and looked past Plain-Sense to the back of the room, where a little group of witnesses had been brought in. Pliable was one of them. So was Inquirer.

“We have a witness,” said Lord Latest smoothly, “who has been travelling with the accused. A very promising young trader. A man of learning. He listed four readings on the floor yesterday, all excellent.” He smiled at Inquirer. “Step forward, sir.”

Inquirer stepped forward. His legs didn’t feel like his own.

“You know this man?”

Inquirer looked at Plain-Sense, and Plain-Sense looked back at him, steady, with his clear spectacles and his tied hands.

“Tell us,” Lord Latest said gently. “Do you hold with him? Do you believe, as he does, that each passage of the Book has one meaning, put there by its author, and that we can know it? Or are you, as I’d hoped, a man of rather more sophisticated views? A man with a future here?”

Inquirer thought of the dinner and the applause and the sixty-one chalked up beside his name. He thought of how clever he’d felt. He thought of Pliable’s scarlet coat, and the long hard road behind him, and the long hard road still to come.

And he said: “I hardly know him. We met on the road. I don’t hold with all his views. Meaning is… well, I suppose meaning’s more complicated than he makes out.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when the iron lantern at his belt went out.

He hadn’t shut the Book. It was in his pack and he hadn’t touched it. But the little white flame that had burned on the Book’s own oil ever since the North Gate of Mine-Own-Meaning simply went out. A thread of grey smoke came up from the horn window, and it smelled scorched.

Plain-Sense said nothing. He looked at Inquirer once more, and then looked away.

“Thank you,” said Lord Latest, well satisfied. “That will be all. The accused is found guilty. He’ll be placed in the Vault of Forgotten Readings under the Exchange, among the other old meanings, and he’ll stay there until he’s willing to list a reading of his own. Something fresh. Something interesting.” He smiled. “We aren’t cruel here. All we ask is that he say something new.”

The guards took Plain-Sense away.

Inquirer didn’t go to Pliable’s house that night. He didn’t go anywhere. He walked out of the Exchange, through the shining streets and out of the town into the dark fields to the south, and sat down in a ditch with his face in his hands.

I won’t try to set down all he told me about that night. It was between him and his Lord, like the Cross. But he said the worst of it wasn’t what he’d done to Plain-Sense. It was what he’d found out about himself. He had scraped the silver off the Book in Mine-Own-Meaning, climbed the Stair on his knees, been ground at the spring, learned the tongues, walked through the Mosaic, and after all of that, the first time somebody offered to admire him, what he did was polish. He’d taken everything the Illuminator and Master Witness and Dame Aleph had given him and used it to make the Book shine with his face again.

“I thought I’d left Mine-Own-Meaning,” he said to me on the wall. “I hadn’t. I’d only learned to do it in Greek.”

He unhooked the lantern from his belt and looked at it. It was cold and black. He got the copyists’ Book out of his pack and opened it, and the lantern didn’t light. He opened the rough bundle Master Context had tied up, all that was left of the old black-boarded Book. It didn’t light for that either.

Then he remembered Supplication’s room at the top of the Stair and what she’d told him. Every time you open that Book from now till you die… You’ll be back here every morning. He hadn’t been back. Not once since the Diggings, he realized. He’d opened the Book a hundred times since then, studied it and parsed it and argued about it. He hadn’t once asked. He’d been reading by his own candle and fighting his own shadows, and he hadn’t even noticed.

So he got down on his knees in the ditch, in the dark and the mud, and he didn’t say anything clever. He said what he had said at the grey oak door.

“I don’t know how to read Your Book. I’ve made it say what I wanted again. I’m sorry. I denied my friend, and I denied what You said. Please forgive me. Please teach me again.”

And he waited, and for a long time nothing happened.

Then, very faintly, the lantern flickered. It wasn’t a proper flame, only a small blue spark at the foot of the wick, like the first light before dawn. But it was there.

He told me he had never been so glad of anything in his life.

In the morning he went back into the town. He had no idea what he meant to do. He only knew he couldn’t leave without Plain-Sense.

He wandered the back streets behind the Exchange, where the shiny new buildings gave way to a few older ones that had somehow been overlooked, and in a narrow alley he came on a tiny shop with a bow window and a sign that said: Books Bound & Mended. Cross-References A Speciality.

The window was full of Bibles, old and new and in a good many languages, every one lying open, with tiny notes in red ink in every margin and references running up and down the edges like ivy.

He went in. The shop was small and crammed and smelled of glue and leather. Behind the counter a gentle grey-haired man in half-moon spectacles was working on a big book, writing in its margin with a fine red pen.

“Good morning,” said the bookbinder without looking up. “You’ll be the pilgrim who came in with the young man they’ve put in the Vault.”

Inquirer stopped dead. “How do you know?”

“Everybody knows. Biggest crash in forty years.” The bookbinder finished his note, blotted it, and looked up. He had mild brown eyes. “I’m Analogy. I’ve kept this shop a very long time, and the Exchange has been trying to buy me out for most of it.”

“Analogy? Like the room in the Lighthouse? Scripture interpreting Scripture?”

The bookbinder smiled. “Is that still there? Good. Yes, that’s my trade. I mend Books and I bind them and I put in the cross-references. When one passage is hard, I find the passages that speak more plainly about the same thing and note them in the margin, so a reader can let the Book explain itself.” He tapped the volume in front of him. “It’s slow work, and nobody at the Exchange has any use for it. A reading that has to agree with the rest of the Book can’t be very new, can it?”

Inquirer stood at the counter for some time. Then he told the bookbinder all of it: the dinner, the floor, the hearing, the lantern.

Analogy listened without interrupting once. When it was all out, he took off his half-moon spectacles and polished them slowly.

“Peter did the same. Three times, by a fire, to a servant girl. Then he went out and wept bitterly. And the Lord made him a pillar of the church.” He put his spectacles back on. “Come through to the back. I’ve been thinking for forty years about how a man might get into that Vault. I think it’s about time somebody tried.”

In the back room, under a dust sheet, there was a machine.

It was a great brass balance as tall as a man, with two broad pans hanging off a beam. In the left-hand pan, bolted down so it couldn’t be lifted out, lay a Book as thick as a millstone, its margins so crowded with red references that the pages were more red than black. The right-hand pan was empty.

“Every reading in the world can be weighed on this,” said Analogy. “You write it down and put it in the right-hand pan. If it agrees with the whole of the Book, the beam stays level. That doesn’t make it right, mind; plenty of readings fit with the rest of the Book and still aren’t what this particular passage means. But if it contradicts the Book, if it makes one part say what the plain teaching of the whole denies, the beam swings, and it swings hard. I built it to test my own work. I’ve never used it on anybody else’s.”

“What would happen,” said Inquirer slowly, “if you put it in the middle of the Exchange?”

Analogy smiled. “That’s what I’ve been thinking about for forty years.”

They did it next day at noon, when the bell went for the midday pause.

It took six men to shift the Balance. Analogy had friends in the old back streets: other bookbinders, a printer, two retired copyists, and an elderly schoolmistress who taught Hebrew in secret to the children of the Exchange. They wheeled the great brass thing on a handcart through the alleys into the square, and before the guards had worked out what was going on they had rolled it up the steps of the Exchange and in through the big doors.

The floor went quiet at the midday bell as it always did, and into the quiet Analogy climbed up on the same bench Plain-Sense had stood on and spoke.

“Traders of the Exchange,” he said, in his mild voice. “I’m a bookbinder, and I’ve brought a balance. I propose to weigh the readings on your boards. Any trader who believes his reading is true is welcome to bring it up and put it in the pan.”

There was a ripple of laughter. Then a young trader, half drunk on his own success, swaggered up with a slip of paper. “Genesis 1 as Political Protest Against Babylon,” he announced, and dropped it in.

The beam wobbled and stayed nearly level.

“Ha!”

“It doesn’t contradict the Book,” said Analogy mildly. “Moses was certainly writing against the gods of the nations, and that’s a true part of the picture. But you’ll notice it isn’t what the chapter’s about. It’s about God. Next?”

The young trader stood there a moment, puzzled. Then somebody else came up, and somebody else, and inside a quarter of an hour there was a queue. And the beam started to swing.

The Gospel of John as a Love Affair went into the pan, and the beam came down so hard the whole Balance shook. Romans 9 as Paul’s Secret Universalism went in, and the great red-margined Book in the other pan seemed to get heavier, page on page of it pressing down, until the reading flew up out of the pan and fluttered to the floor. The Steam-Engine Code in Genesis went in, and the beam didn’t even bother to swing. The paper just caught fire.

The traders were shouting now, not angry so much as frightened and thrilled, like boys watching a building come down. And all round the walls of the Exchange the chalked numbers started tumbling again.

Then Lord Latest came down from his balcony.

He came slowly and with great dignity, silver hair gleaming, and the crowd parted for him. He walked up to the Balance and looked it over with cool contempt. Then he took a folded paper out of his breast pocket and held it up.

“This is the founding charter of the Exchange. The first principle every one of our readings rests on. Newer is truer. Let’s see your machine weigh that.”

And he put it in the pan.

Inquirer told me that for a moment nothing happened at all. Then the beam began to move. It didn’t crash. It went down slowly and steadily on the Book’s side, and there was no stopping it. And the great red-margined volume fell open by itself at a page near the end, and in the silent hall everyone there could read the words on it in letters of fire:

Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever. Be not carried about with divers and strange doctrines.

The charter of the Exchange rose out of the pan and crumbled to ash and blew away.

All round the great hall, the boards went blank.

In the uproar that followed, nobody noticed three people slipping down the iron stair at the back of the hall that led to the cellars. They were Inquirer, and Analogy, and a young man in a scarlet coat who knew where the keys were kept.

“I’m sorry,” Pliable kept saying as they ran down. “I’m sorry, Master. I didn’t know he’d put him down here. I didn’t know they did that. I thought it was just a sort of… retirement.”

The Vault of Forgotten Readings was a vast low cellar running under the whole Exchange, lit by a few dim lamps, and it was full of people. They sat in rows on wooden benches in the half-dark with their hands folded, each holding an old, worn Book. They were the readers of the old meanings, the plain ones, the ones held for centuries, and one by one as the Exchange grew they had been brought down here and shelved. They’d been told they could come up whenever they were ready to say something new. Not one of them ever had been.

Plain-Sense was sitting at the end of a bench near the door with his Book open on his knees. He looked up as they came in.

Inquirer couldn’t speak. He went down on his knees in front of his friend on the stone floor.

“I denied you. I said I hardly knew you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Plain-Sense looked at him for a while. Then he shut his Book, stood up, and pulled Inquirer to his feet.

“Your lantern’s lit. It’s very small, but it’s lit.”

“I know. I went back to the Stair. In a ditch.”

“Good,” said Plain-Sense. “Then that’s all right.” And he put his arms round him.

They brought out everybody in the Vault who would come. Not all of them would. Some had sat in the dark so long they were afraid of the light, and some said they’d wait until the Exchange was gone altogether. But a great many came up the iron stair into the hall, blinking and holding their old Books, and the traders on the floor went silent and stared at them the way men stare at ghosts.

The Balance was still standing in the middle of the floor. Analogy put its dust sheet back over it.

“They’ll rebuild, of course. Lord Latest will have a new charter by next week. Newer is truer will be back with a fresh coat of paint. It always is. Every generation thinks it’s the first ever to read the Book with its eyes open. But some of these,” he looked at the readers coming up out of the Vault, “will remember what they saw today. And so will some of the traders.”

Pliable walked with them to the edge of town, and at the last house he stopped.

“Won’t you come?” said Inquirer.

Pliable looked down at his scarlet coat, and back at the shining town with its cranes, and then at the dark road east.

“Not yet. I’m sorry. I’m not… I’m not made for it yet. But I’ll remember the Balance. I promise you that.” He hesitated. “And Master, if you see me again on the road, further on, will you know me?”

“I’ll know you.”

They left him there under the last streetlamp, waving.

The bookbinder came with them. He shut up his little shop with the red-inked Bibles in the window and hung a sign on the door that said Gone To The City, put his red pen in his pocket and a great Book of cross-references under his arm, and walked out of the town of the Exchange with the two pilgrims.

“I’ve been meaning to go for forty years. I was waiting for somebody to go with.”

So there were three of them now on the King’s Highway, with Inquirer walking between the other two. His small blue flame got steadier with every step, and he didn’t let go of the lantern once all that night.