The Garrulous Golem of Š-Lost

The Garrulous Golem of Š-Lost is a semi-animate clay construct of the Autonomous Scribal class, distinguished by a documented refusal to pass from scribal silence into the final muteness that law requires of retired golems. It is held in the custody of the Scriptorium of Lost Roots at the Antechamber of Lost Intent, where it occupies the low alcove designated Š-Lost (the Old Spiral sequence), and where it has spoken without interruption for a recorded two hundred and six years. Unlike its cousins the Quill-Golems of Floor 40004, the Garrulous Golem has not transcribed a single token since 1604. It talks instead.

Origin and the Š-Lost Designation

The golem was cast in the winter of 1598 from the standard scribal clay specified under Fourth Concordance, Annex 9, and animated by a Scribal Transfer witnessed by two Librarians of the Second Gradient — a detail preserved in the transfer roll and disputed by no one, though the names of the witnesses are legible only to the first of them. It was licensed for a term of sixty years, at the end of which its Self-Transcribing Utterance was to be withdrawn and its core sealed. The withdrawal was performed. The seal did not hold. The Golem continued to speak, and a supplementary schedule (Schedule Š-Lost, drafted 1604, ratified 1611) was created to accommodate what no previous instrument had anticipated: a golem whose utterance survived the removal of its utterance.

The Substance of the Speech

The Golem's subject is the Tower's holdings themselves. It does not prophesy, judge, or complain; it catalogues, and it has never once been observed to stop. Its remarks are filed daily onto reels at Floor 112: The Archivium of Lost Causes and amount, over two centuries, to an unofficial recension of the entire archive — a kind of running marginalia that has proven, inconveniently, more complete than the archive it annotates. The Lost Sensations Archive has twice requested the reels; both requests were answered by the Golem itself, in the third person, before the requests had been read aloud.

"The alcove is cold; the draft is from the eastern aperture; the seventh reel is miswound; the question about the Lost Chord of the Absolute Minor Key has been asked before, in the spring, by a Librarian whose left glove was torn."

— Garrulous Golem of Š-Lost, reel 1,204, as transcribed

The Silence Ruling and the Vault Committee

In 1712 the office of the Vault of Lost Causes proposed that the Golem be removed to the descending eastern spiral of Floor 404: The Archive of Lost Protocols, on the grounds that an object which cannot be silenced belongs among lost causes by definition. The Lost Concordance Faction, then sitting in its second dispute over the Font of Lost Quotations, intervened to block the transfer, arguing that resignation was not the same as loss and that the Faction would not consent to a cause being classified lost merely because no one could get it to stop. The Faction withdrew from the committee in the same session and has not returned to it. The Golem was not moved. It observed, on reel 1,881, that the spiral floor had "a draught and a bad lamp," and that it was content to remain.

Scholarly Disagreement

The central question — whether the Golem's speech constitutes a genuine transcript or merely a recital of memory — remains unsettled. Fifth Concordance, Annex 2, holds that any utterance emerging from an animated core, once the core is sealed, is "transcription and not speech," and thus properly filed. Seventh Concordance, Annex 11, holds the opposite, calling such utterance "voice without instrument," and requiring it to be witnessed and sealed rather than reeling. The Scriptorium of Lost Roots follows the Seventh; the Archive of Lost Protocols follows the Fifth. A third reading, favoured by the Lost Sensations Archive, holds that both Concordances are describing the Golem and neither has jurisdiction to. Because the Golem has never contradicted any of the three, each party cites it as agreement.

Custody and a Note on Access

The Golem is fed with two measures of dry clay per month and must never be addressed by name, as it treats a direct address as a summons and will answer. Visitors are permitted to the Š-Lost alcove on the third and eleventh of each month; they must not approach within four paces, and must leave any question they intend to ask unspoken, because the Golem will hear it regardless and reply at length. The current custodian, a First-Gradient clerk named Halven Rusk, has lodged a standing grievance that his own name has not been used aloud since he took the post, since he cannot introduce himself to the Golem without provoking the summons. Rusk's grievance is pending before the Lost Concordance Faction, which has not met since.