There is a pocket universe, smaller than the worlds the catalogue more usually holds, reachable by a single veil of the old and indeterminate kind, and within it stands a thing the survey has never been able to decide whether to file among its wonders or its warnings, and has filed, in the end, among both. The destination is written P071-E, The Tender Spires, and the crossing to it is gentle, and sanctioned, and well travelled, because what waits on the other side is, on first sight and for a long while after, simply beautiful.
The Spires are towers of living matter, pale and immense, rising from the floor of the pocket universe in numbers no single vantage takes in at once. They grow. This is established beyond dispute. They are not built, in the sense of having been raised by labor, and they are not stone, and they are not dead. They are biomass, grown the way a coral is grown or a forest is grown, slowly, by accumulation, into forms that the eye insists on reading as architecture. There are balconies on the Tender Spires. There are rooftops. There are the long pale galleries and the high terraces that a visitor names without thinking, because there is no other word for the shape, and because, at the distance from which the Spires are properly seen, they appear to be inhabited.
They appear to be inhabited because they are. Across the middle distance, in the soft constant light of that small universe, a visitor to the Spires will see figures. They move along the galleries and in and out of the high openings. They gather, in the early and late hours, on the balconies and the rooftops, in the loose unhurried groupings of a people at the end of a day. No account has ever resolved them more closely than this, and the reason no account has is the whole of why the finding carries a rating at all.
They notice the approach. This is the matter the survey states most carefully, because it is the matter least like a wonder. A visitor who begins to cross the open ground toward a Spire is seen to be doing so, from a great way off, by the figures on it. They look up. They turn, on the balconies and the high terraces, toward the one who comes, and they watch the approach the way a settled people watch a stranger crossing their valley, without alarm and without welcome, simply marking that it is happening. And as the visitor draws nearer, while still the better part of a mile away, the figures go inside, without haste, into the openings of the Spire, and they do not come out again while the visitor is near, and when the base of the Spire is at last reached there is no one there, and there has never been anyone there, and there is no trace, in the pale living matter of the tower, that anyone was ever there at all.
The survey has reached the base of many Spires. It has reached the base of every Spire it has chosen to. It has found, each time, the same thing, which is nothing, and has come away each time with the same two facts and no third to set between them. The figures are there, until they are approached. The figures are not there, when the approach arrives. The half-mile holds, in every recorded case, with the consistency of a law, and the Servatory has stopped expecting the case that breaks it.
There remains the matter of the mass, and the survey raises it last because it is the matter it can do least with. The pocket universe is small, and what lives in it natively is small, and there is nothing in its native order remotely sufficient to grow towers of that scale and that number. The matter the Spires are made of came from somewhere. It did not come from the pocket universe, which has no ecology to spare it. It came, by the only road into that place, across the single old veil that serves it, over a span of time the survey cannot bound, accumulating into the pale immense towers a visitor crosses sanctioned ground to admire. Where, on the far side of that veil, so much living matter was gathered from, and by what, and over how long, is not established, and is held, what little of it is held at all, in an account this one does not open.
The Servatory rates the Tender Spires at Noted, and sends a reader toward them without reservation, and asks only the one thing the figures themselves appear to ask. Come and see them. Stand at the distance from which they are beautiful, and they are very beautiful, and watch the unhurried life move along the high galleries in the soft light of that small place. But do not cross the open ground toward a Spire to see the people on it more closely. They will have seen you first. They always have. And whatever it is they withdraw from, or withdraw into, the survey would not have a reader learn by being the approach that empties a balcony.
There the matter rests.
~ The Lectors
