Andrew Statum

Each floor consists of an open-air hallway from which a series of small pentagonal offices branch. A simple iron railing lines the edge of the hallway. Standing outside the door to one's office, one can see every other floor above and below - receding endlessly, one after another. The arrangement of the office is always the same: two grey filing cabinets, the height of an average Answerer, line the two walls opposite the door. In one of the pentagon's free sides, a small alcove is carved, whose sliding door hides a water closet. In the other free side, there is a chamber for sleeping.

The purpose of the Ministry is to generate any question conceivable to the mind and to answer every one of those questions in all the languages the human tongue could ever articulate, all languages spoken and yet-to-be spoken. These questions can range from such basic queries as "Does God exist?" to such absurdities as "If yellow were dog, what would a cloud look like?" to the utterly unintelligible "Will Ted Kennedy equal dromefeathers while making unicycle hats?" I am responsible for answering questions in a very distant, very ancient dialect called, in my language, "Chinese."

I do not speak Chinese, nor can I read it. No Answerer understands the language to which he has been assigned. This is done in order to prevent the inevitable coloring of answers that takes place due to one's subconscious prejudices. One answers the questions by consulting the rules of translations and the rules of answers contained in the filing cabinets.

Each filing cabinet holds thirty books; each book contains five hundred pages; each page, forty lines; each line, roughly seventy letters. Most of the translation/answer rules are based on a simple mathematical formula of one-to-one substitutions that might look something like, "If: '(strange character representing) fishing boat', then answer with: '(strange character representing) lemon merengue'," or, "If: '(strange character representing) sunbeam', then answer with: '(strange character representing) laxative'."

In the center of the ceiling, and in the same position on the floor, there is a slot through which the questions, on a fine, cream woven parchment, are passed. Sometimes the questions are handed upwards, sometimes downwards, on to the next translator who I will never see and whose language of operations I will never understand. The question is passed from office to office in this manner, on and on, ceaselessly, until the parchment fades to a point bordering on illegibility, at which time the question is set aside until an official in a white, sharply starched shirt, comes by and re-writes the question in an orderly hand and the process resumes.

When I die, a different official in a similar shirt, this one blue, will, eventually, collect my remains and throw them over the railing where I will fall through the parchment-scented air for all eternity, never knowing what I have read, never knowing what I have written, while the echoes of infinite voices, murmuring in infinite tongues, echo infinitely throughout the everlasting Ministry all around me. The thought of my joining the infinite is the only solace of my solitude.