Som-Som’s operation is described before it happens, in a careful future tense: “She would be blinded, but not exactly. Her hearing would remain, after a fashion, and she would even be able to speak. But she would be Silenced.” The House Without Clocks severs the link between the two halves of her brain, fixes a porcelain mask over the right side of her face and a thick glove on her right hand, and from then on the wizards who pay for her can say whatever they like in bed. She hears it, and nothing she hears can get back out.

“Hypothetical Lizard” opens Alan Moore’s Illuminations, his first book of short stories, and it’s the oldest thing in it by more than twenty years. He wrote it in 1987 for Liavek: Wizard’s Row, a shared-world anthology edited by Will Shetterly and Emma Bull, and William Shaw’s review in Strange Horizons calls it his “first serious attempt at short prose fiction”. It was up for a World Fantasy Award the following year, when Ursula K. Le Guin won. Somewhere between then and now it lost its first word. It used to be “A Hypothetical Lizard”, and I think the article was better, because it admits there might be others.

Liavek has a rule for magic that’s worth knowing before you go in. According to Wikipedia’s summary of the setting, everyone’s luck surfaces on their birthday for as long as their mother was in labour, and in that window you can invest it in an object that powers your spells for the rest of the year. (So a hard birth makes a stronger wizard, which is a bleak thing for a group of fantasy writers to have agreed on.) A wizard’s power is sitting in a ring or a cup or a button somewhere, and anyone who learned which one would know exactly where to hurt them. I’d guess that’s what makes a wizard’s pillow talk worth the surgery.

The neurology is real, or near enough. Roger Sperry had shared the 1981 Nobel Prize for work on what each hemisphere of the brain does on its own, and Moore takes split-brain research and turns it into a brothel’s business model. I’m not sure the mask and the glove add up exactly, nerve by nerve, but the passage Kathryn Adams quotes at Pixelated Geek is about how it feels rather than how it works: “Silence, massive and absolute, surrounded her and would not permit her to make the smallest sound. She was embedded in silence, a tiny bubble of consciousness within an infinity of solid rock, mute and grey and endless.”

It’s dense. Paul Di Filippo, reviewing the book for Locus, calls it the most conventional piece there and gets the flavour right with “Huysmans-via-Tanith-Lee”, decadence and cruelty in sentences that won’t let you skim. The courtyard is “the gargantuan inkblot”, and one arrival rattles into the House “in a small cart lined with cushions”. Moore’s later prose, all the way to The Great When, keeps that appetite for ornament. Here it’s younger and not always under control, but a plainer style would sit oddly in a brothel where every resident has been altered to suit somebody’s taste.

Som-Som can still talk, though not to any purpose. What comes out are non sequiturs about the life before. When her friend Rawra Chin visits, Som-Som sips “her floral infusion through the left corner of the mouth”, the side the mask leaves free, and Rawra learns to wait “until Som-Som had finished her non sequitur” before going on. Rawra’s introduction is the sentence most reviewers stop on: “The visitor’s name was Rawra Chin, and she was a man.”

Shaw winces at that line, though he finds Rawra’s portrayal sympathetic, and he notes that it survived “revisions to the original text”. The snippets I could compare show how fine-grained those revisions were. Foral Yatt’s greeting was “cooly inoffensive” in the 1988 reprint in The Year’s Best Fantasy and is “coolly inoffensive” now. Somebody fixed the spelling of an adverb and left that sentence standing, and it was the one most worth changing.

Foral Yatt is an actor, Rawra’s lover and then the person she leaves, and Rawra isn’t simply the wronged party. There’s a moment where she “gazed icily down at the figure on the bed”, irritated past bearing by “that unbearable little-girl voice”, and the Brazilian critic Luiz Santiago, writing at Plano Crítico, is clear that both of them do wrong at different points.

The title arrives partway through as a ball that can’t be opened and might or might not have a small lizard inside it. Di Filippo quotes the best image of it, with Foral holding it: “The copper ball turned between his fingers, a miniature planet rolling from day into night.”

The ending is where readers split. Santiago admits he couldn’t say for certain what crime is committed in the last pages, offers a guess involving poison and Foral leaving in Rawra’s carriage, and asks anyone who understood it to explain in the comments. Adams settles for “a revenge that’s epic in its scope and its pettiness”. I’m not going to settle it either, and I don’t think the story means me to.

Santiago puts his finger on why without quite meaning to. The crime goes unresolved although there’s a witness, because the witness was shaped precisely so that she couldn’t tell secrets. Moore has built a viewpoint that’s physically unable to testify and then made it the only witness. Whatever happens at the end, Som-Som takes it in and can’t give it back, and the reader is left where she is, holding a closed copper ball and being told there might be a lizard in it. John Pistelli prefers Antony Johnston’s comic adaptation for Avatar Press because it “clarifies its central conflict”, which seems to me the one thing this story shouldn’t have done for it.

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