Chapter 561 - 560: Forty Cycles

Chapter 561: Chapter 560: Forty Cycles

Location:Seven Peaks — The Forge Yard; The Hall; The Night Stair; Medicine Hall

Date/Time:TC1857.05.03 – TC1857.05.09

Forty-one glass tubes laid end to end on a trestle make a line about the length of a man, and if you stand at one end of it and look down the length, the first thing you see is that somebody has done this before.

Raven stood at the end of the trestle for a long time before she let anybody talk.

Each tube was a plug: undisturbed material, taken at one meter of depth, sealed at the bottom of the hole and not opened until it reached this table. Silas had numbered them in his own hand. They ran in order from the shallow end to the deep end, and Lin Yue had laid them flat on a white cloth and had not written a word on the sheet beside them, which was how Raven knew what was coming.

Fine at the bottom. Coarse at the top.

Then, above it, the same again from the beginning.

Then again.

Then again.

***

"Forty," Lin Yue answered. "Forty-one if you count the one at the surface that’s been rained on for a year, and I won’t count it because it’s ruined."

"Forty separate times."

"Forty separate sequences. I’m not saying times, and I’m not going to let anybody in this room say times either." She had her hands inside her sleeves, and she had not moved from the end of the trestle since Raven came in. "A sequence means the material got laid down fine first and coarse last, and then something stopped, and then it started again from the bottom. That is what is in the tubes. Whether each one took a season or a century, I cannot tell you. Whether they were done by the same process, I cannot tell you. What I can tell you is that the boundaries are sharp."

"How sharp."

"There is no blending at any of them. None." She indicated the line of tubes with two fingers and did not touch them. "If you pour material and stop and come back a hundred years later, the top of the old layer has weathered, and the bottom of the new one has worked into it. These are cut. Every one of them. Forty times something finished and as many times something started again, and nothing in between ever got a chance to become anything."

Raven had been counting down the line and stopped.

"Every tube has one."

"Every tube has one." Lin Yue kept her eyes on the tubes. "That is the part I have been sitting on since the cart came in, and I would like it said slowly, because it is worse than the boundaries are. Silas took a plug at every meter. A plug is the width of two fingers. There is no reason in the world that a two-finger sample taken at one meter, and again at two, and again at three, should land on a boundary every single time — unless the boundaries are a meter apart. All of them."

"Meaning?"

"It means I cannot tell you what it means." She put her hands back inside her sleeves. "Ground does not do a thing forty times and stop it in the same place every time. Nothing I have ever opened does. That is the whole of what I have, and I am not going one step past it."

Silas had come in with the cart and had not sat down since. He looked as though he had not sat down for a month.

"Say the last part," Silas put in.

"It goes all the way." Lin Yue looked at Raven. "We were arguing about whether the smooth layer under the continent was a thing that happened or a thing somebody made. It isn’t either. It’s a thing somebody has been doing. Forty times, to a depth we have now stopped at because the drill string ran out, and there is no reason in the material to think that is the number and every reason to think it is only how far we got."

***

Raven walked the length of the trestle once, slowly, with both hands pushed into her coat so she would not touch anything.

Up close, the boundaries were not lines. They were edges. In every tube, at the place where one sequence stopped and the next began, there was a plane so flat and so clean that it looked cut rather than settled, and above it the fine material started again as though it had been poured onto glass. She had seen a mason lay a course on a wall that badly and get shouted at. She had never seen ground do it once, and she was looking at a line of it done over and over and over down the length of a table.

Silas had labeled the tubes at both ends. Depth on the left, sequence number on the right. Somewhere around the twentieth tube his handwriting had stopped being neat.

Raven did not answer, and what she was not saying had a shape, and she held on to the edge of the trestle until it went away.

Three months ago Tianlei had sat at the west door of the Hall with a handful of path gravel and had graded it, fine at the bottom and coarse on top, in a neat round pile about the size of a bowl, and had then gone in to his supper. Aldis Stell had written it down because Aldis Stell wrote everything down. She had read the note, and filed it where Naida would see it on the first of the month, and had said nothing about it to anybody, because there was nothing to say and because the alternative was to start saying things she could not demonstrate.

One cycle.

She let go of the trestle.

"Put it in the record exactly as you’ve said it," she said. "Forty sequences, sharp boundaries, no blending, depth unfinished. Nothing else. And Ostrek gets the answer column, and nobody writes in it."

"It will be a long empty column," Lin Yue observed.

"I know."

***

Aren was in the forge yard splitting kindling, which nobody had asked him to do and which he had been doing for three days.

Raven sat down on the block opposite and did not say anything for a bit, and he went on splitting, and after the fourth one he put the hatchet down and waited, because he was nine and Northern and had no patience whatever for a southerner circling a thing.

"Your father gave me your question."

"I know. I asked him to."

"Then I’ll answer it badly, and you can tell me it’s bad." She put her elbows on her knees. "There isn’t a thing you’re supposed to do with it. That’s the first part, and it’s the important one. Getting out isn’t a debt. Nobody put it on you, and you can’t pay it off, and if you spend the next thirty years trying to, you’ll be no use to anybody, and you’ll be unhappy the whole time, and I’d know."

Aren looked at her with those ice-blue eyes and did not say the obvious thing, which Raven appreciated.

"That’s the part you’d say to anybody."

"Yes. Here’s the other part." She sat up. "You were on the list, and you came off it because two adults picked you up and walked out of a country over it. That happened to you. But there’s a thing that’s yours and not theirs, and it’s this: you’re the only person on this mountain who knows what that list feels like from inside, and there are people here making decisions about two hundred and six children who have never been on any list in their lives. Including me."

"So I’m useful."

"You’re not useful. That’s the word people use when they want something from a child and would rather not say so." Raven did not look away. "What you are is the only correction available. That’s different, and it’s worse, because it means when you think a room is wrong you have to say it, in the room, to people twice your size, and most of them will manage not to be pleased about it. You did it once. It cost you something. You’ll have to do it again."

Aren took his time with that.

"How often?"

"I don’t know. Not often. But you won’t get to choose when, and you’ll want to be somewhere else every single time."

He picked the hatchet back up.

"All right."

Then, after another log: "My father thinks I asked because I want to go north."

"Do you?"

"No." He split it clean. "I remember it."

***

Sera Vahn brought her the Corps list for the north on the fourth evening, which Raven had not asked for and had been going to have to ask for.

"Nineteen," she said. "That’s how many of mine can do the form and be relied on to do the third position, which is the one people hate, because standing behind somebody watching a head is not a thing soldiers are trained to enjoy. Nineteen out of three hundred and seventy-five. I’d rather give you a worse number than a better one and have you find out in a fold."

"Nineteen’s more than I expected."

"It’s twenty-six fewer than you need." Sera Vahn put the page down. "You’ll get the rest out of the drill yard and the Millford road people and the ones who’ve been standing at the frame every morning since Mei came back with those children, which is about eighty people, and I’d estimate a third of them are there because they want to be useful and two-thirds because they’ve worked out that everybody’s going to need it eventually."

"That’s a fair estimate."

"It is. And the one at the top of my list is Kira Desh, who is a week short of twelve and who has now asked me four separate times and once in writing." Sera Vahn’s expression did not change. "I’ve said no four times. I’m telling you now so that when I say yes next week nobody in a room acts surprised."

***

Kael’s answer came on the fifth day and was three lines longer than Raven had expected, and none of the three lines were agreement.

I will draft it. Understand what you are asking. If I write a clause permitting a signatory to place personnel inside another signatory’s territory without invitation, I am writing a clause the Empire will one day use, and so will the Federation, and they will use it against somebody who is not you and who has done nothing.

I am going to write it anyway, because you were going to do the thing regardless, and a rule that exists is worse than no rule exactly once and better than no rule every time after that.

The clause will be narrower than you want. It will require the entering party to publish the number of people, their locations and their purpose before they cross, to the other three signatories, in the same form, and to keep publishing it monthly until they leave. It will not permit weapons above a stated class. It will expire in twelve months and require renewal in front of all four. You will find it insulting. That is the correct reaction, and it is the reason it will survive the room.

Revision ten is finished. It comes to you on the same rider as this. Do not thank me for that; it is not a courtesy, it is a precaution, because I have learned from the last six months that I would rather be corrected by you in private than in a hall.

Raven read it twice and then went and found Thorne.

"Send back four words," Raven told him. "Make it eight months."

***

The night stair was the coldest part of the Hall, and she took it slowly because the cold was the point; she had been going up it at the same hour for a fortnight to be somewhere that nobody would interrupt, and because Aldis Stell came down it at the same hour with his night book.

He handed her the week’s page without being asked. He always did. He had never once told her anything out loud that was in it.

Three entries on Tianlei.

Fourth day. Building with the blocks by the window. Stopped. Twelve seconds by count. Resumed at the same block. Did not appear aware of the interval.

Fifth day. Eating. Stopped. Eight seconds. Resumed the same mouthful.

Sixth day. Twice. Nine seconds and eleven seconds, about two hours apart. On the second one, there was blood from the left nostril, one drop, darker than blood is, which he wiped with the back of his hand without stopping what he was doing afterward. I did not ask him about it because I do not ask him about things. The drop was on the floorboard, and I have kept the board.

I have been timing these since the third day. I did not time the first one because I did not know it was a thing yet. There may have been others before that.

Raven stood on the stair with the page in her hand and the cold coming up the steps.

"You’ve kept the board."

"I cut it out." Aldis Stell had the night book still under his arm. "The floor’s got a square hole in it, and I’ve put a mat over it, and I’ll pay for the board out of my own coin if that’s a difficulty."

"It isn’t a difficulty."

"I didn’t know what else to do with it. I don’t know what it is. I’m not a healer, and I’m not a weaver, and I haven’t got an opinion." He said it without any anxiety at all, which was the whole of why he had the job. "I’ve written what happened. There’s a column on the other side for what it means, and I’ve left it alone, because the last time I wrote something in that column it was six years ago and I was wrong."

"Where’s the board now?"

"Under my bed, wrapped, with the date on it."

"Keep it there." Raven folded the page. "Keep timing. Don’t tell him you’re timing, don’t ask him what he sees, don’t put a lamp on him at night. And Aldis — if it gets to twenty seconds, or if there are two drops, you come and find me at whatever hour it is, and you don’t wait for the stair."

"Yes."

He went on down, and stopped three steps below her, and turned around, which he had never done.

"He said a thing on the sixth day," Aldis Stell reported. "After. Not during. I didn’t write it because he was talking to himself and I’ve a rule about that."

Raven did not move.

"He said she’s counting them too." Aldis Stell said it the way he would have said the weather. "I don’t know what he meant, and I’ve not asked, and I’d have taken it to my end if you hadn’t given me that instruction about the twenty seconds, and now I think I’d better have said it."

***

She sat in the empty Hall afterward, at the trestle, with forty-one glass tubes in a line beside her on a white cloth.

Somebody had left a lamp. She did not move it.

She had a rule about this, which she had made for herself after Windbreak and had kept to since: do not assemble. Do not take four things that frighten you and put them on the same page just because they frighten you, because a page like that is a story, and a story is the most expensive thing a person can carry into a room full of people who are about to act on it.

So she did not assemble.

She sat there and looked down the line of tubes at all those sharp boundaries with nothing weathered in between, and she thought about a small boy at a door with a handful of gravel, and about eleven seconds of nothing twice in one afternoon, and she did not put them on a page and she did not say them out loud to a single person, and she was going to have to go on not doing that for a long time.

What she did instead was get up and go down to the Medicine Hall and look in on Elian, who was asleep, and who had been standing for half an hour a day for three months now with no gain at all, and who had told her once that if a thing is different from what you thought then there is something in it you don’t know yet.

She stood in the doorway for a while.

Then she went and wrote to Windbreak and told Silas to send the drill string back north with a longer one on it.