Location: Thinblood, Kell Vor
Date: Firstclaw 8, Yr 76 of the Still Flame
POV: Aeryn Veyra
The pill went down chalky and sat there.
The water after it tasted of the canteen rather than of water, and neither of those things had changed since the first morning.
Ninety-five left.
Aeryn sat on the edge of the cot with the empty canteen in her hands and gave the day its first honest look, which was the walking, which had been getting put off since her eyes opened.
Then she did it.
Eight paces to the far plate.
Turn.
Six back, and the knee went.
Fourteen.
Down on the boards against the plate, waiting for the shaking to stop, and there was nothing to swear at.
The number was the number.
Last night an empty column in her head had taken the words tomorrow, fifteen, and the column had been empty, and the fifteen had been a wish wearing a figure’s clothes.
Twice more, to be sure.
Fourteen.
Then thirteen, because the second run had cost her the third.
***
So the curve was going to be slow.
That had been known in the way a person knows a thing they have not yet had to pay for.
A body recovers faster than it works.
Hers, taken off three runs and a range, and true.
What had not been done was the next step, which was to ask what the finding actually predicted, and the answer was that it predicted nothing whatever about today.
Recovery was not progress.
Recovery meant she could try again sooner.
It did not mean the trying got her further.
Legs are built out of repetitions and repetitions are built out of days, and no arrangement of those two produces fifteen paces on the strength of wanting it.
Weeks, then.
Turning that over produced less resentment than expected.
A slow curve is still a curve, and a woman who has spent a career reading curves does not get to object to one for being honest with her.
What she minded was the other end of it.
There was now a figure attached to how long the box under the cot was going to sit there.
Nine of them, sealed, waiting on a woman who could cross a room and a half.
***
The boy was at the fill port when she got as far as the doorway, which was as far as she was going today, and he had four pails and was counting them in a way that suggested he had counted them going up as well.
“One.
Two.” He looked at her and went on counting.
“Three.
Four.
That’s four.”
Thank you.
Reading the band took him a moment, and he read it out loud, which nobody else did.
“You don’t have to write that every time.”
No.
“Long Count says you’ll wear it out.” He put the pails down in a row and stood up and looked at her forearm rather than at her, with the frank, unbothered rudeness of somebody who has not yet been taught that a thing can be private.
“That’s a good one.
Ours are the old kind.”
He put his own arm out beside hers without asking.
The band on it was a duller metal and wider, and it sat badly, and it had the look of an object that had been on three or four people before this one.
“Mine’s my grandfather’s,” he said.
“You get given one when you’re born, but out here they give you a dead one and put your name in it.
Da says it’s the same thing.”
Is it.
“Da says.” He shrugged.
“It still counts.”
Counts what.
The look he gave her then was the first genuinely puzzled one she had got out of anybody on this world, and it lasted about a second and a half, and she watched him decide she was slow rather than foreign, which was the correct decision for him to make and cost her nothing.
“Everything,” he said.
“It’s a band.”
He picked up two of the pails and went off down the slope, counting.
***
Vaelith came earlier than he had come the day before, with a roll of dressing under his arm that he did not open, which was its own small piece of information.
“Your hand.”
She put it out.
He took the wrist rather than the hand and turned it and looked at the fingers for a while without touching them.
“Better than it has any right to be.”
Then we can go on.
“That is not what I said.”
No.
But we can.
He sat on the crate.
Sitting on the crate had begun happening without being asked somewhere in the last three days, and it had been noticed once and remarked on never.
The delivery question had been planned for the middle of the tithe, where it would look like housekeeping.
The stone went up on a stated weight, at the turn of the season.
The weight was set somewhere she would never see.
And the count of what came out of the shaft, and the count of who was alive on this face to send it up, and the count of what every man on this mountain was worth, went up continuously and never stopped, because every one of them wore a band and the band did the counting whether anybody read it or not.
Continuously.
“Yes.”
Even here.
“Especially here.” Vaelith turned the roll of dressing over in his hands once and put it on his knee.
“The Covenant would not run a link out to a penal world so that we might talk to one another.
It runs it so that what is taken can be counted.
The counting is the reason the link exists.”
And it reports on people.
“It reports what a person is.” He looked at the wall plate for a moment.
“One band to one man.
Only the central brain may hold two of them side by side.
That is law, and it is one of perhaps four that this world still troubles itself with, so if you were about to ask what mine says, I could not tell you and I would not.”
I was not going to ask.
True, and useless.
What she wanted was what hers said, and to whom, and how often, and there was no way on this world to ask it.
Her hand was most of the way through the first letter before she took it off the band and let the line die.
Vaelith went on about the turn and the weight and did not appear to have seen it.
He had also not asked, on either of the two days, why a woman who could not cross her own room was spending the middle of it flat on the floor.
A man who does not ask a question that obvious has not failed to notice it.
Tomorrow, she wrote, before he could stand up and say it first, and had the small mean pleasure of watching him adjust.
***
He went at the point where the light started going.
What she had was a state instrument on her own forearm, issued at birth to a body that was not hers, reporting to something she had no access to, and it had been reporting every day since she woke up in this room.
It reported a woman at the bottom of every scale this civilization had.
That had been true when the reporting started.
It was going to stop being true.
Not this week.
The first box had gone into skin and hair and had moved nothing anybody could read.
But nine boxes remained, and somewhere in the course was the point at which a thing this world could measure began to move, and on the day it moved a woman filed at the bottom of the register would climb, in a place where nothing climbs, and a machine that nobody had to be paying attention to would put the fact somewhere permanent.
The empire that arranged six years of this had a schedule.
It had put her here to run down quietly against a calendar, and at the other end of that calendar a girl of nineteen was becoming a woman of twenty-five.
Nobody had to be watching for it to matter.
Getting that wrong was the standard mistake, and she had watched better officers than herself make it.
Nobody watches a corpse.
A record does not require a reader in order to be a record, and on the day somebody did eventually come looking, the whole of it would be lying there in order, dated, with a line in it where the dying stopped.
Then stop the record.
***
Not remove it.
She sat with the difference for a while, because getting it backward would kill her, and because it would kill her while wearing the face of caution.
A band that goes quiet has failed or has been interfered with, and either of those brings somebody to look at it.
There were probably three such visits to this mountain in a year, and finding out how fast they came was not an experiment available to her.
A band that goes on reporting the same figures forever is a woman who never got better.
A line in a register that stopped being interesting six years ago, in a column full of lines like it, on a world made of them.
Freeze it.
Do not silence it.
The band on her forearm had been worn for six days without once being thought of as an object.
She looked at it now as an object, and worked out what opening it was going to cost.
***
There were no tools.
There had never been any tools, and the kit had four things in it, and none of them went inside a sealed state instrument.
What she had instead was the thing that had found the agent in her own marrow while a man who was not a physician stood two paces away and found nothing.
It could see.
It could reach.
Neither by much, yet.
And it came out of the same account as everything else.
She priced it before starting, because everything else this week had been priced and it was far too late to stop being that person.
The water in the cup was one supply.
Her capacity to steer what a bath released was the same supply.
So every hour spent inside this band was an hour not spent inside the next box, and there was no exchange rate anywhere to look up.
Which was where the only piece of luck she had been handed since the first morning turned up.
She distrusted it for about ten seconds on principle, and then took it, because a soldier who refuses luck on principle is a soldier who has confused superstition with rigor.
The box was unusable anyway.
Fourteen paces.
Thirteen on a bad run.
Last night’s ruling had put the second box behind a wall and left the water standing there with nothing to do, and her capacity was idle, and it was going to stay idle for as long as her legs took.
Weeks, on this morning’s figures.
Weeks was the shape of what this was going to take out of her.
There would not be another window.
One stretch of her life in which the most valuable thing she owned had no better use, open now, closing on the day she could walk far enough to spend a box.
Against which there was the other column, and she made herself go down it properly, item by item, rather than glance at it.
Two days ago there had been two men on this slope.
One of them had gone somewhere nobody would tell her about, and the one who remained came at dawn and went when the light went and slept a long way up the hill. Read the latest chapters at g.com.
Whatever she did tonight, she was going to do it in a box at the bottom of a mountain with nobody on the door and no means of calling out, and she would be doing it in the one condition she had spent two lives arranging never to be in.
A commander who waits for good conditions before acting is a commander who never acts, and she had said that to other people, and had meant it, and had also never once said it about herself while lying on a floor she could not get up off.
Tonight anyway.
***
The room came first.
The crate went against the door plate on its long edge, canted so the plate could not swing without shifting it.
The canteen went on the high corner, upright, a finger of overhang holding it.
The lamp went out, because a lamp burning at the wrong hour tells a slope something, and because nobody was going to be awake to use it.
She lay down on the boards rather than on the cot.
Going over from a hand’s height was preferable to going over from the cot, and if it went well, the floor was where she was going to be for a long time regardless.
Nobody had ever told her what happens to a person who goes into a sealed state instrument with nothing but themselves, because in her own century there had been tools for it and a bench to do it on and somebody in the next room.
She was afraid, and she let herself have it for the length of one breath, and then put it down where it could be picked up again afterward if there turned out to be an afterward.
Then in.
***
It was nothing like the marrow.
The marrow had been meat and mineral and a thing that belonged in neither, and finding it had been ugly and slow and had taken most of a night.
This was manufactured.
Every part of it had been put there on purpose, by somebody, in an order, for a reason, and she went along the order the way she had gone along a hundred unfamiliar systems in a life this civilization had not begun when she left it.
There was a great deal of it, and it was very small.
The part that listened, she left alone.
The part that talked, she left alone, because a band that cannot talk is a band that has failed.
What she wanted was the hinge between the counting and the talking, and finding it took a long time, and when it turned up she understood that she had been looking for something with moving parts and that it did not have any.
So she held the values where they sat.
There was nothing to throw and nothing to sever.
She put herself against the place where the numbers were rewritten and stopped them being rewritten, and holding that while the change took was the entire work, and it went on for a length of time she stopped being able to measure.
Somewhere in it the cold arrived.
Not the room.
Her own hands going first, then her arms after them, and a flatness coming up through the middle of her that had nothing to do with temperature at all.
She held it.
Then it went.
Not the band.
Her.
Whatever she was holding the values down with thinned out underneath her like river ice, all at once and everywhere, and for a moment there was nothing between her and the hinge at all, and the numbers began to move again.
Her jaw locked hard enough to hurt.
Something let go behind her nose, and she tasted it at the back of her throat and could not spare a hand to deal with it.
Two ways out.
Let go now, and she would be left with an instrument half rewritten, which was neither a working band nor a frozen one, and a band in that condition would report something no band had ever reported, and somebody would come and find out why.
Or go on.
Retreat had stopped being a direction some minutes ago.
The moment it had stopped being one had gone past her unnoticed, which was the part she would think about afterward, and the fact that going on was now the only road did not make it a decision she got to feel good about.
She got a hand back on it.
The floor got further away in the specific manner a floor has when a body has begun making decisions without consulting anybody, and she counted, because counting had got her through the bath and there was nothing else in the room to use.
Three hundred and something.
Then the hinge took, and settled, and the band went on reporting an F-rank female on a penal world exactly as it had reported her yesterday, and would go on reporting her for as long as anyone cared to look.
Verification was the part nobody ever wanted to do and the part that separated a job from an intention.
She made herself do it.
Down the length of it again, slower, along the same order, checking that the listening still listened and the talking still talked and that the values sitting behind both of them had gone rigid.
Three passes.
The third one found nothing the second had not, which was what a third pass is for.
Who could catch it, then.
Somebody holding two readings side by side, which was the central brain and nobody else, and the central brain compared a woman against herself and would find a woman who had not moved.
Somebody on this face with a reason to check, which was nobody, because nothing on this mountain had ever been worth checking.
Somebody who came out here to look, in a year in which three such visits were generous.
The risk was institutional, and the institution was slow and blind and a very long way off, and she went back through the list twice, and it held both times.
***
Coming back happened on the boards in the dark, cheek against wood, with both hands gone.
Done.
The satisfaction lasted about as long as it took to work out what came next, which was nothing, for a long time, in a room with no watch on it.
Getting her head up took two attempts.
The crate stood where it had been put.
The canteen sat on the corner with its finger of overhang and its half of water, upright, and the door had not moved.
From floor level the arrangement was exactly what it was, which was a good trap, and a trap tells you somebody is already inside.
Vaelith would come in the morning.
He came every morning.
He had come at dawn once already and had stood out there and let her sleep.
Writing anything on the band before then was not going to happen.
The arm would not lift.
Then he will make of it what he makes of it.
The blanket came off the cot by teeth and one elbow and took a while about it.
Under it, on the floor of a metal box eight paces long, going down, the last clear thing she had was that the state now believed her to be a dying woman and would go on believing it for as long as she wanted.
Which was the correct arrangement.
There was a little while yet before she found out what it cost.