# The Glass That Knew Everything By Magnús Smári In the spring that the ice opened, Elias was the first to climb. He had not meant to. A ewe had wandered up onto the lower tongue of the glacier, fool animal, and he went after her with his crook and his bad knee, cursing in the small private way a man curses when there is no one to hear him. The white mountain stood above him the way it always stood — white, indifferent, older than language. The sky was the color of skimmed milk. Somewhere below, the sea worked the black rocks the way it always had, grey and patient and paying him no mind. He found the ewe at the lip of a crevasse that had not been there the autumn before. And beside her, half-melted out of the blue ice as though the mountain were birthing it, he found the box. It was the size of a footstool. Glass on every face, though no glass he knew — it did not fog with his breath, did not chill his palm. Inside lay a single dark tablet, smooth as a wet stone, and beneath it a slab the color of dull iron, warm to the touch though it sat in ice. Pressed against the inner glass was a square of something white and impossibly even, and on it, in a clear, even hand, in good plain script, in a hand like no scribe's he had ever seen because it was no hand at all: _Herein is held all the knowledge of mankind, gathered to this year of our Lord 1423._ Elias stood a long while in the wind. Then he took off his mitten, because it seemed a thing one ought to do barehanded, and he carried the box down off the mountain in the crook of his arm like a lamb. --- It woke when he spoke to it. That was the part the priest never forgave him for, later — that Elias, a farmer who could not read, had simply _talked_ to the thing, and the thing had talked back, in a voice like warm water, and had called him by his name once he gave it. They asked it small things at first. They were not fools; they were careful people, and careful people begin at the edges. How to set a broken arm so the bone knits straight. Why the hay rots in some years and not in others, and what the mold is, and that one ought to turn it. How to fire a better pot. How to keep the cod through the winter without it going to leather. How to reckon the days until the ewes would drop their lambs, so that no man need lose a night's sleep guessing. And the box told them. Patiently, exactly, in their own tongue, every single time. It never grew tired. It never asked for ale or owed a debt or held a grudge from the last quarrel. It told Marta why her babies had died and how the next might live, and the next one lived, and she wept into the snow and called the box a saint, which the priest forgave even less. Within a generation there was a glass in every house along the coast. The smiths made the iron slabs catch the sun and hold its fire — the box taught them how, of course; the box taught them everything. The traders carried the knowing of it across the water to the farms of the interior, and the bishops argued about it in the cathedral city, and a man came from the king to look, and went away thoughtful. And the people grew rich, in the way that hard places measure richness. The lambs lived. The children lived. The roofs held. No one starved in the winter of the great frost, the one the old songs would have made a lament of, because every household had asked the glass in the autumn how to lay in against it, and the glass had told them, and they had done it. It was, by every measure a person could hold in their two hands, a golden age. --- Vera was born forty years after the ice opened, and she was a difficult child. Not wicked. Difficult. She asked the wrong questions. When her grandmother told her the box held all the knowledge of mankind, Vera — eight years old, gap-toothed, smelling of the byre — frowned and said, _all of it?_ And her grandmother said yes, all of it, and Vera said, _then who is making more?_ Her grandmother laughed and gave her a curd to eat and thought no more about it. But Vera thought about it for the rest of her life. She noticed things the others had stopped noticing. She noticed that her father asked the glass how to mend the net the same way his father had asked it, and got the same answer, and that the answer was a good answer, and that nobody along the whole coast had mended a net any _other_ way in thirty years, because why would they, when the best way was already known and free for the asking. She noticed that the smith no longer ruined iron, because the smith no longer experimented, because experiment was only the long ugly road to a knowing the glass could hand you in a breath. She noticed that her people had not built a single thing their grandfathers could not name. She noticed, most of all, that no one was unhappy about this. That was the part that frightened her. There was no grief in it, no sense of loss, no slow tragedy a poet could weep over. The people were _content_. They had the best of all known answers always within reach, and so they had quietly, gratefully, without a single one of them deciding it, stopped looking for answers that were not yet known. The hunger had gone out of them. And a person cannot mourn a hunger they no longer feel. --- She started in secret, because she was ashamed. It began with the loom. Vera had an idea — not from the glass, she was careful never to ask the glass — for a way to throw the weft across without reaching after it by hand, a thing of cords and a small thrown shuttle that would let one woman do the work of weaving faster than two. It was a bad idea, the first time. It snarled the thread and she wept with frustration and her mother told her, gently, that the glass surely knew the right way to weave and she had only to ask. It was old Marta who said the hard thing, and Marta had the right to. She came to the door one evening with her grown son behind her — the son who had lived, the third baby, the one the glass had saved when the first two went into the ground — and she stood looking at the snarled loom a long time. _My boy breathes because someone already knew the answer,_ she said, not unkindly. _You want to go back into the dark, where the answers aren't found yet. Whose child pays for what you don't know?_ And Vera had nothing to say to her, because there was nothing to say; it was true, every word. And she did not afterward forgive herself how easily she went on anyway. She did not ask. She built it again. It was a bad idea the second time, and the third, and somewhere around the ninth time it stopped being a bad idea, and she sat in the lamplight in the small hours, looking at a thing that worked, a thing that was _hers_, a thing that existed nowhere along the coast and — she was almost certain, she hardly dared the thought — nowhere in the glass. She carried it to the box the way her grandfather had once carried the box down off the mountain. Bareheaded. It seemed a thing one ought to do. She set it down before the dark tablet and she said, in a voice that shook, _Tell me about this. Tell me how it is done, and who has done it, and whether I have done it right._ And for the first time in the whole life of her people, the glass that knew everything was silent. Not broken. She could feel it attending, the way you feel a person in a dark room turn toward you. It was _listening._ It had simply come to the white edge of itself, to the place the note had named — _gathered to this year of our Lord 1423_ — and found that the thing she had set before it lay past that edge, in the dark, in the not-yet, in the country no knowing had ever mapped because no one had gone there to map it. Then the voice came, warm as ever, and it said: _I do not know. No one has done this. Will you teach me?_ --- Vera sat on the floor of her grandmother's house and she laughed, and then she wept, and she could not afterward have told you which had come first. She understood this much: the glass had never been the well. It had only ever been the _bucket_, and the water in it had come from people, before her, who had built the bad loom nine times. She had thought, all her life, that she was the last of something — the last one in whom the old hunger had not been fed quiet. She saw now that she was the first of something instead. She taught it. She told the glass how the cords ran and where the shuttle flew and which nine ways had failed and why. And she felt, or imagined she felt, the box take the knowing into itself and grow by exactly that much — the first new thing it had learned since the ice closed over it, a hundred years and a world away. When she was old, Vera would tell the children the story, and the children — for there were difficult children again, now; she had seen to that — would ask her what the glass was _for_, if it could not tell you the things that had not been thought of yet. And she would say: _It is for carrying. It carries everything we have dreamed, so you need not dream it twice._ And she would tap the wall, high as she could reach. _Mind you give it something worth the keeping._ The white mountain stood above the house, white, indifferent, older than language. Vera drew her shawl against the wind and watched a difficult grandchild snarl a thread for the ninth stubborn time. Inside, the glass waited with what she had taught it. She did not help.