Recto was a university town until the night of 30 September 1958, when the Congress of Academies, meeting there to mark a hundred years of the one-sided surface, resolved that it should henceforth be reviewed by its peers alone. The town turned over. It has lain ever since on a band with half a twist in it: fourteen kilometres long, a kilometre wide, one side, one edge, and beyond the edge a white without depth. Every instrument that points outward comes back to the Academy, so the only thing left to study is each other. Every scholar is a subject, every paper is a portrait, and every paper goes for review to the one person it describes, who usually contests it. Contested papers are fought section by section in the Anatomical Theatre; whatever the author defends standing is printed, and the rest appears in the Proceedings as white. Citations are the money, the Index counts them on punched cards, and everyone in Recto dresses, trains and stands as if they were being watched, because they are. This year, for the first time since 1958, someone has come in from outside.
Report I. To the Bureau, Survey Desk. Filed from Recto, the day after arrival. I walked out of the white at a quarter past four in the afternoon, onto stubble. I had been walking for some time; how long, my watch declines to say. There was no edge to cross. The white simply began to have ground und...
Report II. Filed from the Long Walk. The young woman with the binoculars is called Luzia Prado, and she is a naturalist of the Lyceum, which studies the scholars of Recto as a species. She took me for a walk to explain the town. The walk was fourteen kilometres long, and we did not finish it. The ...
Report III. The Charter, transcribed. The Registrar gave me a copy, typed on card stock, and I transcribe it whole, because nothing in Recto makes sense without it. It was adopted in the Congress Hall on 1 March 1959, in the presence of the surviving presidium, and has been amended once. Article 1...
Report IV. Filed from the Refectory, at supper. In nine days forty-one papers have been written about me. I list the academies so that the Bureau can see the method. The Grove has examined what I say: thirteen papers on my claims, of which the most cited argues that my statement I come from outside...
Report V. Filed from the Index Hall. The Index is the Congress building of 1958, a long limestone hall with a skylight of white glass, and in it stand forty punched-card sorters and tabulators, the machines that were shipped in to count the votes and the coffee of the Congress, and have counted eve...
Report VI. Filed from the high desk of the Exchange. Every review in Recto has a price before it is fought, and the price is made in a cast-iron market hall in the Arcades by a man with a moustache. Rashid Haddad keeps the Book. At noon the odds for the afternoon's reviews go up on the slate boards...
Report VII. Filed from the largest dome. The Observatory stands at the top of the Colleges, a limestone tower with three green domes, and its great refractor has not seen a star since 1959. It looks at people instead. From the largest dome you can see into half the windows of the Colleges, down thr...
Report VIII. Filed from the top tier of the Anatomical Theatre. The Theatre was built in 1911 for the medical faculty, after the one at Padua: six elliptical tiers of dark walnut around a floor so small that the top rail hangs almost over it, and a round oculus in the roof through which the white f...
Report IX. Filed from the Palaestra. Each academy fights as it thinks. I have now trained, badly, with three of them, and can report. The Grove wrestles. Its house is the Palaestra, a court of yellow sand inside a colonnade, and over its door is carved the Grove's answer to the inscription said to...
Report X. Filed from the Theatre, after a review I was not supposed to understand. Article 8 says that a paper whose subject cannot review it is printed without review. The founders wrote it for the dead, and for fifty years the historians lived on it: a paper about a dead delegate went through the...
Report XI. Filed from the ninth terrace of the Cut. In 1971 two academies tried to leave the other two. The Lyceum and the Theatre, tired of being outvoted at the Index, resolved to cut the Band down the middle along its whole length and live on their own half. They borrowed the excavators that had...
Report XII. Filed from the Congress Hall, in felt slippers. Archon Vale writes only about the dead, which in Recto is the one way to grow rich without ever standing in the Theatre: a paper about someone who cannot review it is printed without review. The Academy calls it necrography and calls the h...