THE RESTORATION OF SILENCE

“The worst thing that can happen to a good story is a person who took part in it.”

I
  The phrase “irony of fate” is usually illustrated with the image of a sailor dying of thirst in the desert. A neat, canonical example. But as a mental exercise, one might try to find others, less obvious, less obedient. For instance, the fact that history has no grave for Herodotus. The very same Herodotus whom Cicero, with all the confidence of a Roman who knew how to assign paternity, called the father of history.

  There is no tomb. No urn. No reliably identified city where he saw his last sunrise or survived (or failed to survive) his final day. No one knows now. No one knew three hundred years ago. And judging by the silence, no one was particularly eager to know then either.

  What remains are versions. Hypotheses. And the thick, practiced silence of old Hellas.

  The city of Thurii gave Herodotus his second name, his last one, acquired while still alive. Yet Thurii itself never returned the favor. No monument. No plaque. No inscribed column leaning modestly into oblivion. Athens, on the other hand, built him something closer to a complex: classical, pedagogical, recommended for students who expected from the Lyceum not only rhetorical muscle but moral posture. Almost a museum. Almost a cult.

  This asymmetry conveniently feeds the supporters of the so-called Periclean Scraper theory. According to them, Herodotus died during his final journey, not in some conveniently barbarian elsewhere, but in radiant Athens itself. Symbolic. Elegant. As the theory goes, Herodotus was unceremoniously eliminated among other initiates into Pericles’ grand ideas, initiates who, for reasons never specified, had begun to feel less like assets and more like liabilities. Or worse: witnesses.

  We are not inclined to dignify such conjectures by reinforcing their place in history. Still less to supplement them with later interpolations produced by interested hands. These tend to surface periodically in archives across the northern Aegean: lists, tables, marginal scratches left by dozens of anonymous contributors hoping to crawl into history at least by a single line.

  Yet one fact remains stubbornly intact. Herodotus was involved in the founding of Thurii.

  A “common” colony, as it was officially called, raised almost on the site of ancient Sybaris. Almost. Instead of theatrically restoring the legendary city of pleasures and refined excess (the Sybaris that gave its name to an entire philosophy of living), Thurii was assembled in haste. Practically shoulder to shoulder with the ruins: from the roofs of the first houses, a seven-year-old could have hit yesterday with a stone.

  And that was how they lived. Athenian volunteers. New settlers. Descendants of Sybarites, by blood or by coincidence. Every day they walked through the ruins of yesterday. And every evening they returned to today: to dour, makeshift Thurii, assembled without taste or patience. Like a punishment for former luxury.

  The only unresolved detail was the addressee of that punishment.

II
  Herodotus’ role in the final phase of Athenian democracy remains opaque, so opaque that one is tempted to suspect this opacity was the point. Too many moments in his biography coincide neatly with zones where documents stop leaving footprints.

  One anecdote from the period preserves a line attributed to a clerk of the Council of Five Hundred:
  “History is what happens when the witness is already dead, and the protocol is signed in his name.”

  From fragments, partial transcripts, unsigned notes, and a couple of discreetly scraped tablets, the following version of events has been reconstructed. Its coherence is provisional. Responsibility for interpretation rests entirely with the reader.

  Pericles acted with the confidence of a mature servant of democracy. His concept of an External Threat (Persia) was remarkably versatile. It justified emergencies, softened expansion, and wrapped ambition in the language of collective security. The threat itself worked better than any actual invasion. While others clung to Marathon, Pericles spoke of the future: a unified alliance of poleis, decisions made swiftly, centrally, and preferably in his office.

  In practice, matters were simpler. The democratic faction wanted more: territory, tribute, votes in foreign councils. Everything else was rhetorical upholstery. The difficulty was that their opponents could also read subtext. So Pericles began by clearing the flanks at home. The Areopagus was “reformed,” a soft modernization, officially. Thucydides and his circle were removed next, with minimal explanation and maximum finality.

  In the end, Pericles remained one of the ten Strategoi, exactly as the constitution prescribed. But he alone decided. The others attended meetings, signed documents when prompted, nodded more often than not. Formally, democracy. In reality, a political singularity, noticed by everyone, addressed by no one, because addressing it would have required rewriting the rules.

  Only then could the Idea of a greater Hellas be carried beyond the Sacred City.

III
  Herodotus arrived in Athens the way one arrives when one’s biography has already begun to resemble the synopsis of a tragedy, still negotiable, but increasingly reluctant to change genre.

  There had been an attempted coup in Halicarnassus. Unsuccessful, though conceptually ambitious. Exile followed, dreary, but hardly disqualifying in a city where the aesthetics of failure were judged alongside the elegance of the leap itself. He sailed with the Athenian fleet, more excursion than service, but the checkbox mattered. What he brought back was not heroism so much as stories: trimmed, calibrated, arranged with care. Athens was perpetually hungry for narratives, especially those that began as personal experiences and ended as matters of state.

  Pericles learned of Herodotus well before shaking his hand. This was not unusual. By the time of their first meeting, Herodotus had already passed through the status of promising contact: tested in conversation, vetted at banquets, discreetly evaluated through third parties of both sexes and varying loyalties. When Pericles finally invited him, first informally, then into his office, Herodotus was already half-installed.

  They spoke like men who had been reading the same books for years but had drawn incompatible conclusions. Herodotus spoke with a careful directness that still enjoyed a certain market value. Pericles listened. Then he made the small, economical gesture that Athenians had learned to read fluently: this man would be allowed closer.

  From that moment on, Herodotus ceased to be merely a gifted interlocutor and became infrastructure.

  His notes were quietly reclassified as “auxiliary material for decision-making.” He himself began to appear at discussions of things that officially did not exist. Meetings without agendas. Questions without minutes. Ideas that preferred not to be seen walking alone in daylight.

  It was an elegant arrangement. Herodotus believed he was being heard. Pericles ensured he was being used. Athens, as always, congratulated itself on the illusion of mutual benefit.

IV
  In conversations with Pericles and those nearest to him, Herodotus did not immediately, but eventually, let slip something that would later strike even himself as strange. Among other impressions, tucked somewhere between notes on temples, roads, and the indecencies of foreign peoples, he mentioned two places that had unsettled him by their scale, their precision, and their absolute dissimilarity to anything he had previously encountered among human constructions.

  The first was a perfectly even octagonal platform, a night’s march east of Tyre. It was paved with marble cracked by age, yet laid with such care and on such a foundation that no one, however motivated, had managed either to pry out large blocks or grind the surface down into reusable rubble. Attempts to convert the vacant expanse, roughly the size of four Athenian quarters, into a source of cheap building material had all failed quietly and definitively.

  The second was a pyramid sunk deep into the sands (shaytep, as the locals called it), later imitated with scholarly enthusiasm by the Egyptians who inherited the territory above it. Judging by the accessible interior chambers, its scale could be compared to a palace of ten full stories, were such a structure ever to make sense or offer the illusion of safe habitation.

  Both constructions were immense and curiously pointless, like poorly translated allegories. The same heavy geometry. The same sensation that they had not been built for people.

  The locals knew nothing about them. Nothing at all. The ignorance ran so deep that those who called them tombs did not argue with those who believed them to be stations of the gods. Herodotus noted this, not as a sign of provincial backwardness, but almost the opposite. One detail, in particular, struck him. Egyptians, Persians, and the border tribes who brushed against these ruins through geography or trade all shared the same conviction, touching in its simplicity: structures like these existed elsewhere.

  No one had seen them. No one had mapped them. But everyone seemed to know they must be there. Some cited drunken sailors’ tales from the inhospitable north. Others recalled evening stories passed down by ancestors about marvels on distant shores of the Pontus. All of it without names. Without coordinates. Only a background noise of words, the shadow of something once called knowledge.

V
  Lampon knew how to speak with the gods. Or at least how to simulate the effect convincingly.

  A seer. A priest. An interpreter of higher meanings. A specialist in correcting the worldly by metaphysical means.

  In Athens he was respected, not as a person, but as a function. He held the lifelong right to dine in the Prytaneion. Not a meal, but a signal. The loudest institutional voice of the polis, the Council of Five Hundred, formalized the will of the people there. Lampon had access. No election required. Authority delegated directly from the sky.

  His task was to ensure that no decision passed which might anger Olympus. A dizzying appointment for a supervisor overseeing assemblies theoretically designed to lack any single supervisor.

  Lampon stayed close to Pericles. Intimately close. This could be read in two ways. Either Pericles believed in signs. Or he understood the value of myth, and knew how to deploy it. The two are not mutually exclusive. On the square, the people saw a priest. They heard a voice. Who stood behind that voice remained a matter for speculation.

  It was almost certainly Lampon who conceived the idea, layered like honeyed pastry, that if one were to compile all known reports of megalithic structures mentioned by Herodotus, convene a council of moderately learned men to interpret them, and simultaneously dispatch colorfully dressed priests with small but somber security escorts to the empire’s outer edges, one could make a very loud announcement.

  Athens, the statement would go, had recovered the forgotten knowledge of a pre-literate civilization, the knowledge of how to transform piles of stone into elements of defensive infrastructure. Or, if one preferred fewer syllables, a wonder-weapon, against which Persian arrows, anonymous triremes, and even barbarian magic (should anyone still consider it relevant) would amount to little more than wind in a vineyard.

  For domestic consumption, the entire spectacle functioned as pure signal geometry: parallelograms of fact intersecting triangles of legend, with the Athenian party standing at the center beneath the slogan We read stone better than anyone. Anyone who asked unnecessary questions simply wouldn’t be invited to the next symposium.

  Externally, Lampon’s idea was never about hoisting a catapult atop a pyramid and launching a menhir toward Mesopotamia. It was about saturating every diplomatic front with a myth: Athenian hegemony was not merely foreign policy. It was access to ancient knowledge, to a power beyond imagination (the phrasing likely originates in Lampon’s own preparatory drafts).

  The real goal lay buried beneath layers of demagogic ornamentation, as fraud hides beneath every tempting offer made by a marketplace charlatan: to ensure that recalcitrant poleis, especially those still laboring under the illusion of choice, would arrive voluntarily, bread and butter in hand, at a confederation where Athens controlled the bread, the butter, and the ledger.

VI
  When Lampon presented his hypothesis of megaliths as proto-components of sacred persuasion on a mass scale, Pericles did not merely approve it, he sealed it with an official nod and an unofficial proceed until it smokes. The idea was debatable, yes, but marketable. If more than three neighboring poleis believed in it, it would cease to be a local myth and begin to function, especially under the right lighting.

  There was no competition for executors. Herodotus received two sets of instructions.

  The written one concerned the collection and systematization of material on the Greco-Persian Wars: causes, routes, resources, diplomatic spasms. Paperwork for the Academy and the gullible. The oral one was simpler: locate, across the edges of the oikoumene, traces of the “ancients” protruding from the ground, and try not to damage them too badly while taking measurements.

  What would be done with the collected material was not explained. Not out of mistrust, but out of pragmatism: knowledge without leverage becomes ballast. And Herodotus already carried enough weight, nobility, faith in democracy, and a mild dependence on his own authorial voice.

  He was told exactly as much as was required to prevent unnecessary questions and avoid interference with those whose job it was to wrestle meaning from reality.

VII
  Throughout the entire expedition, whose geography we know in exhausting detail, Herodotus sent Lampon encrypted reports with exemplary regularity. They described structures of titanic scale and improbable form, discovered in precisely those regions where, as sailors fluent in waves and exaggeration liked to say, everything began not with myth, but directly with stone.

  A gallery of half-plethron columns lining a road straight as the noon shadow of a gnomon.

  A sphere, four triremes in diameter, resting on the floor of an abandoned harbor.

  A mountain cave of perfect cylindrical shape, extending for two stadia.

  Ten such constructions in total, not counting the two Herodotus had encountered by chance in earlier travels.

  The earliest reports were meticulous. Verbose. Almost embarrassingly enthusiastic, as though Herodotus himself were seeking revelation in these massive forms, something bordering on the religious. Careful excerpts. Schematics of doubt. Hypotheses beginning with what if we combine this with a stellar map and pour wine over a goat’s head… He analyzed the positioning of slabs, the behavior of light, the hypothetical routes of priestly processions, even the dietary preferences of the imagined builders.

  But by the eighth object the style thinned. By the tenth, it collapsed into two lines, as if the text itself had grown embarrassed.

  No, the geodesy and geometry remained precise, volumetric. Herodotus’ team continued to perform its duties in full compliance with instructions and payroll. But metaphors vanished. Comparisons evaporated. The rhetoric crumbled. The stones remained. The words did not.

  From our perspective, progress. Athenians were famously capable of turning even a tax calculation into hexameter. When antiquity was involved, they tended to write as if they themselves had laid those stones, gripping a cosmic blueprint between their teeth.

  Lampon followed the change in tone with mounting concern. He even convened a series of consultations to compare early and late dispatches, sufficiently distorted to convince the assembled scholars that they were dealing with familiar theoretical abstractions. Some members of the Athenian school, particularly those inclined to read messages from Olympus into every cosmic sneeze, attributed the shift to fatigue. A long route. Barbarian cuisine. Women insufficiently trained in Hellenic desire.

  Lampon, however, was haunted by another possibility. The restorer of ruins was not tired. He had understood.

VIII
  Herodotus’ second arrival in Athens was calm, devoid of excessive praise. His personal report to Lampon was scheduled without urgency and without the ceremonial inflation of politeness. For the evening, the time of day when architecture becomes philosophy, and political maneuvering turns into liturgy.

  Lampon, as expected, received him with the air of a man accustomed to admiration echoing from behind. Yet this time there were no echoes. No stenographers. No mute servants. Not within two chambers in any direction.

  (It appears that later proponents of the Scraper theory reconstructed this dialogue from notes Lampon may have used while preparing a briefing for Pericles. The quality and volume of surviving material at this point are dubious, but irreplaceable.)

  “We’ll pour the wine ourselves tonight,” Lampon smiled as he sat down, continuing in the same careless tone. “So, did you bring us an oracle from the barbarians?”

  Herodotus took the seat opposite him.

  “I did,” he said. “The oracle, and the barbarians.”

  Lampon waited.

  Herodotus did not continue.

  “Well then. You saw, you wrote, we read. Now tell me.”

  “I’m afraid my spoken summary is no richer than what I managed to commit to papyrus.”

  “You’re avoiding the answer,” Lampon observed, still smiling. He wanted the speech, but not to force it. It was meant to ripen, ferment, spill out easily, like over-kept juice.

  “I’m not avoiding the answer,” Herodotus replied. “I’m avoiding language. When you try to describe what was created outside description, you don’t move closer to understanding. You only build a private labyrinth of words, and instead of an exit, you find a sign reading Museum Closed.”

  “And yet I’d happily wander your labyrinth,” Lampon encouraged him, taking a piece of cheese from the tray and gesturing toward a table his guest seemed not to notice.

  “At first there were words. Epithets. Analogies,” Herodotus resumed, slipping into his familiar register, like a man reading from a lecture prepared for a small but attentive audience. “Among the Celts, fragments of cyclopean observatories. Among the Scythians, operating tables for celestial surgery. Among the Egyptians, shafts for hygienic drainage of the soul straight to Sirius. But all of these similarities are projection phantoms. My culture reflected onto something without a reflective surface. It’s like explaining the taste of psilocybin through a manual on sandal repair.”

  “Mirrors have appeared in your labyrinth,” Lampon smiled wider. “So what changed after you looked into eight of them?”

  “I understand how this sounds here,” Herodotus said, briefly fixing his gaze on the priest before drifting back into the current of inner images. “Among load-bearing walls and useful ceilings. But imagine the walls I had to feel my way along. We approach a monument standing like an unsolved equation and immediately insert familiar context. A circle? Cult. Twelve? Zodiac. Stone? Ancestors lacked better materials. And we’re satisfied, because we’ve obtained an answer that stops thought. That’s not research. It’s mental self-fertilization.”

  “And you went looking for a different answer?”

  “No. I went looking for a different question.”

  “Explain.”

  “Imagine a dream in which you see a craftsman engaged in something unlike anything you know. He holds something, not a tool, not an artifact, not a fetish. Something. You wouldn’t begin by asking what is it? You’d try to understand what he’s doing. What he’s interacting with. Toward what end.”

  Lampon felt it was time to leave the labyrinth. The ease of the conversation had ceased to comfort him. The unease he had restrained for the past year knocked again at the wall of his patience.

  “But the craftsmen are gone,” he said. “Only their stones remain. Whom do you intend to question, and in what language?”

  Herodotus seemed not to register the shift.

  “If you want to understand a shadow, you don’t stare at the object, you examine the source of light. I looked at the invisible craftsmen. Or rather, at the light they emitted so we could amuse ourselves by drafting plans in the shade of their buildings. When that light stopped blinding me, I began to see. But I couldn’t translate what I saw into reports. How do you encode emptiness? The impulse faded, replaced by something close to respect, without reverence. I accepted the emptiness as it was. And I began to write accordingly. As a witness, not an apologist.”

  Lampon no longer bothered to hide his attention behind casual posture. He sat upright, staring intently at Herodotus, who was still not entirely present in the room or the moment. Finally the historian’s gaze sharpened, and he said, unexpectedly clearly, as though rehearsed to the point of premiere:

  “They caught the wind not for movement, but for taste.”

  “That’s all?” Lampon asked, barely containing himself.

  “I found not an explanation,” Herodotus replied, “but an understanding.”

  “Of what?”

  “That if among the ancestors there was one whose mischief outweighed his fear. He said: Let’s place the stones, like this. In a circle. By the stars. Or the other way around.”

  Lampon heard the old Herodotus again, the one he had once escorted from the military harbor to the archon’s palace, what felt like a lifetime ago. The words flowed, regained shape and force. And in rhythm with them, something heavy and indefinable began rising inside the priest.

  “And others followed,” Herodotus continued. “Not because they understood, but because it felt… exciting. Or amusing. Or simply new. And it spread. Like a fire no one meant to light, but everyone enjoyed feeding.”

  “You reduce the work of titans to a game?” Lampon pressed.

  “A game. Or play. Or fashion. Or, your own term, ritual without gods. I searched for depth where there was only the width of a moment. Sometimes a dolmen is just a dolmen. The imprint of laughter that has gone silent.”

  Lampon fell silent. Before him rose Herodotus’ geometric sketches. Verbal images from secret dispatches he had reread dozens of times. Clear in outline, immense, yet absurdly detailed. He moved from one divine toy to another and saw the same mute construction each time, equally opaque from every angle. As if ten oracles had issued ten identical silences.

  Silence.

  Mutism.

  Quiet.

  So complete it erased even the sounds of the real world. Neither the splash of the distant fountain nor the thoughtful tapping of Herodotus’ fingers on the rim of an empty cup reached Lampon’s inner ear.

  “Without cult? Without utility?” he finally said. “Not even a preliminary sketch for a future architectural school?”

  “No form. No function. Only the trace of someone’s inspiration.”

  “So you claim,” Lampon said slowly, “that they, all of them, were built for nothing?”

  “I claim that,” Herodotus shrugged. “Or refuse to claim the opposite. Which is effectively the same.”

  Lampon continued to look at him, not into his eyes, but inward, as if auditing the contents of his soul. He found no deceit. No evasion. Herodotus had tried earnestly to assign cult, ritual, design to chaos. To chase symmetry through coincidence. But each new structure replied: No. Nothing. Calm down.

  By the tenth, the traveler had calmed down.

  (It must be said: the Athenian had a head on his shoulders. Where a Spartan would have begun sacrificing and a Corinthian would have founded a school, Herodotus simply set down his stylus. And in that, we believe, lies the pinnacle of the era’s intellectual honesty.)

X
  In practice, however, Thurii happened.

  The initiative came from the democrats. Formally, from Pericles’ closest associates. Informally, possibly from Pericles himself.

  Here the fog thickens. Was this assignment, Herodotus’ last, merely another spasm of bureaucratic arrhythmia? Or was it the final phase of a much longer operation? Recall the central paradox of the new sponsor colony: its very existence did not eclipse the memory of exuberant Sybaris but multiplied despair by offering a daily view of its ruins.

  Strangely enough, it was precisely on this agora for bored lizards that the native of Halicarnassus and celebrated citizen of Athens acquired his enduring epithet: the Thurian. It was in Thurii, according to tradition, that Herodotus unified his Histories, a literary account of the touring exploits of spear- and sling-masters from Persepolis. At first glance. Or at least at the glance of those who read the work in its recommended form.

  That is to say, in the sequence of sections from which the inexperienced reader is gently guided to the conclusion that the author prioritized the events that glorified Hellas. Everything that preceded them appears merely as layers of clay, material to be gathered, kneaded, and applied in a smooth, anonymous coating to tablets destined to record the truly significant milestones.

  For such a reading to become possible, later editors, as we now know, divided the Histories into nine books. Another small irony in Herodotus’ posthumous fate. His life had been devoted to weaving disparate accounts into a single chain of knowledge. By the hands and styli of his successors, that chain was dismantled into links, which were then repeatedly displayed in sequences deemed momentarily convenient.

  For a time, Athens mentioned Thurii only occasionally, as one recalls a long dinner with dull relatives. What, then, occurred on this periphery of ambition to pull Herodotus back into the field of his party’s managerial imagination?

  The answer, as so often in life, appears disarmingly prosaic. The old man decided it was time. Not to die. No. To speak.

  Publicly. Before an audience. With scrolls, a lectern, and that expression professional speakers wear just before the phrase And do you know what else? Publication was also discussed. Local workshops, with their papyrus dealers and underpaid copyists, had already begun to calculate margins.

  Word of this reached Lampon, not as a fresh wind, but as a warm exhalation of antique panic. He required no details. Ready for readings was enough. He knew Herodotus. He knew how easily the man could forget the boundary between narration and confession, especially when listened to attentively.

  The danger was not that the massive corpus concealed direct accusations. Herodotus was no enemy. Far worse, he was a witness. In the vortex of his diegesis, fragments of history, scraps of geography, personal reflections, unapproved versions all could easily be swept together. Everything Pericles had ordered to be formulated, but not pronounced.

  The decision was swift. Herodotus was summoned to Athens. The pretext: patronage. A chair. An audience. A laurel wreath and a lifetime bust. The timing was perfect. If there were to be readings, let them occur at the center of the world.

  And on the way back… A stone. Rain. A random robber. A temperamental horse. Or simply the classic well, age after all.

  In modern terms, something we would call praeventio. The Greek lexicon offered a more refined word: hygiene. If nothing else, the Hellenes knew how to keep a narrative clean.

XI
  Thus, according to proponents of the Scraper theory, Pericles methodically erasing his associates from the commemorative board, the true story of Herodotus ends.

  His work survived, though not without significant excisions. The inevitable consequence was a noticeable thinning of the factual and testimonial foundation to which the original author had confidently appealed. Speculation about the proportions of conjecture and truth in his books continues to feed professional unmaskers to this day.

  Pericles never obtained his diplomatic wonder-weapon. No flash of terror crossed enemy faces. No column trembled under the vibration of an egregore. Instead, there emerged two blocs of poleis, welded together by paranoia and ambition, and the Peloponnesian War, an internal conflict of unprecedented scale, resembling a culinary dispute between the two heads of a single serpent.

  As if that were insufficient, plague disembarked in the Piraeus. With classical symptoms and a metaphysical aftertaste. A disease not treated, but interpreted. It is well known that Pericles himself, the helmsman steering through a windless storm, left this world via an emergency exit politely opened for him by the Queen of Epidemics.

  The Athenian school, that invisible gathering where three men publicly argue about the meaning of life so a fourth won’t reconsider supplying the olives, concluded that it was a system overload. A blot on papyrus pressed too long by a sharpened stylus.

  Lampon, however, appears to have drawn a different conclusion. For him, this was divine retribution, for attempting unauthorized access to the gods’ toy chest. He dissolved his name just in time into the noise of topical comedies and the archives of the expeditionary office attached to the Council of Five Hundred.

  Paradoxically, his final, carefully drafted and ambiguously signed assignment sent the priest to Thurii. For the purpose of establishing an alternative religious center in the event of further weakening of Delphic influence. Once again, one must admire the Athenians’ mastery of narrative sanitation beneath the thickest layer of logographic oil.

  With the last mentions of the meteorologist of divine intent vanished the paper debris capable of telling a curious mind far more than the serious documents wrapped inside it. Truth is what survives archival fire.

  Time, as is well known, is not the enemy of knowledge, but its only victor.

  The pyramids sink deeper each year, as if the earth were ashamed of their nakedness. Island statues once mistaken for fallen heroes of the Titanomachy increasingly resemble quirks of terrain. The blurrier the outline, the freer the hypothesis. The fewer the features, the louder the voices eager to explain.

  But perhaps this is how history truly repaid Herodotus.Monuments built in the style of Why not? They are not revered. Not cleaned. Not registered. They simply fade, just as the meaning of their existence once faded. Just as Herodotus of Thurii himself faded, leaving behind only a contradictory image.

  Sometimes that is a form of immortality. Sometimes, the only one.