Fielding’s surgery was on Capper Street, which Fang Yuan had not walked before.
He went on a Tuesday, eight days after waking in the body, because eight days was long enough to have established a pattern of avoiding it without appearing to avoid it, and because the creditor had sent a third letter and he needed Fielding’s social standing more than he needed his caution.
The surgery occupied the ground floor of a narrow terraced house, its window dressed with plain white curtains and a small brass plate that said R.
Fielding, M.D.
The waiting room held three wooden chairs and a smell of carbolic and old wool and something underneath both that he could not name through chemistry.
He sat in the leftmost chair and waited.
The other two chairs were occupied.
A woman with a child who coughed at intervals.
A man in his forties who had the particular stillness of someone managing pain rather than resting.
He observed them.
He thought about the smell.
It was not carbolic.
It was something that carbolic was trying to cover, the way a newspaper held close to a lamp covered the smell of gas but did not remove it.
He catalogued it and held it separate from the other data in the room and did not reach for a conclusion.
He had been reaching for conclusions without enough data.
The Moorfield canal body was still unidentified.
He had checked the next two papers.
Fielding appeared at the inner door, looked at him with the same measuring quality he had deployed at the dinner table, and said: “Edwin.
Good.”
The examination was thorough.
Fang Yuan had prepared for this in the way he prepared for anything with a physical component: he had spent two evenings reading what he could obtain about pulmonary examination, about the sounds a stethoscope surfaced and what each meant, about what a physician listening to his chest would expect to hear from a patient who had been unwell in August and had recovered since.
He knew what the examination should produce.
He held himself to match it.
Fielding worked in silence.
He listened in four places on the back, three on the front, two on the sides.
He pressed the lymph nodes below the jaw, checked the eyes with a small lamp, asked him to breathe in and hold it and release.
“Better,” Fielding said.
The word carried the same valence it had at the dinner table: accurate and insufficient.
“I told you,” Fang Yuan said.
“You did.” Fielding set down the stethoscope and sat in the chair across from the examination table.
He had the posture of someone who had delivered news from that chair many times and had learned how to angle his weight for conversations that took longer than expected.
“Your chest is clear.
That’s not in question.” He looked at his hands, then back.
“What I’m wondering about is the other thing.”
“The other thing,” Fang Yuan said.
“The way you hold your head when someone speaks to you.
The way you paused last Thursday before answering Ashwick’s question about the Anfield Road development.
Edwin Colford has been to that dinner table many times and has a position on Anfield Road that he has expressed before.” Fielding said it without accusation.
He said it the way a physician described a symptom, which was: with precision and without judgment, because the judgment would come from elsewhere.
“You answered correctly.
But you took a half-second to locate the answer.”
The room was quiet.
In the waiting room, the child coughed once.
He had not known Fielding was watching the Anfield Road question.
He had assessed Fielding as watching him in the broad manner of someone conducting general surveillance, not in the specific manner of someone who had prepared a test and was waiting to grade it.
That was an error.
He filed it.
He also noted that the error was of the same type as the Margaret Carver error on day two: he had built a model of the person and the model had not been granular enough.
“I’ve been having difficulty with recall,” he said.
“Since August.
It comes and goes.”
Fielding looked at him for a moment.
“That’s one explanation,” he said.
He waited.
“There’s a woman named Aldham,” Fielding said.
“Catherine Aldham.
She works at your firm.
You know her.”
“I know her,” Fang Yuan said.
“She came to see me three weeks ago.
Just before you returned to work.” Fielding turned the stethoscope over in his hands, a small habitual motion, the way some men handled pipes.
“She was concerned about you.
About what happened in August and whether you had fully recovered.”
Three weeks ago was before he had arrived in the body.
Whatever Edwin had been, Miss Aldham had known enough of it to visit a physician on his behalf.
He said: “She didn’t mention it.”
“She wouldn’t.
That’s her nature.” Fielding set the stethoscope down on the desk beside him.
“I’m going to ask you something, and I want a direct answer.”
“Ask.”
“In August, were you doing something you shouldn’t have been?”
He held the silence for exactly the length it needed to be, which was not long.
“I was looking into something,” he said.
“I stopped.”
Fielding absorbed this.
“Good,” he said, in a tone that meant he had not believed it but had decided to accept it as a working premise.
“Because what I saw in August was not a pulmonary presentation.
What I saw in August was a man whose cognitive functioning had been altered in a specific way that I have seen before and do not wish to see again in anyone I know.”
He let that sit.
“I appreciate you telling me,” Fang Yuan said.
“I’m telling you because Catherine was worried, and because I have a professional obligation, and because.” Fielding stopped.
He looked at the desk.
“Because Edwin Colford is not the sort of person to do something irreversible out of curiosity, and I would like to continue believing that.”
He left.
The carbolic smell followed him out onto Capper Street and then the autumn air took it, and he walked two blocks before he stopped under the overhang of a chemist’s shop and stood with the new information and let it run.
Miss Aldham had gone to Fielding.
That meant she knew about August, which meant she knew what Edwin had been doing in August, which meant the drainage annotations were not Edwin working through something alone but Edwin keeping records of an ongoing involvement with something that had gotten into him in a way a physician could see and describe.
Fielding had seen it before.
He did not wish to see it again.
Both of those clauses were carrying weight that the rest of the sentence was not big enough to support.
The metaphysical substrate was not distant.
It was not confined to newspaper stories about northern districts.
It had been in this body’s life, in the specific person whose room he now occupied, in the weeks before he arrived.
He had known this was possible.
He had assessed it as low-probability and had not revised the assessment when the drainage annotations appeared, and had not revised it again when the canal body appeared, and had not revised it a third time when Fielding’s first measurement at the dinner table was too precise to be casual.
Three failures to revise.
He stood with that.
The street around him continued.
A boy with a barrow.
Two women in conversation outside a greengrocer’s, their breath visible in the cold air.
A cab moving at the particular pace of a cab without a hurrying passenger.
He had been underweighting data that did not fit his initial model of the situation.
He had classified Edwin’s death as an ordinary variable and had been building around it rather than through it.
That was not a pattern he could afford.
He started walking again.
He had two things he needed now: the drainage annotations decoded, and a direct conversation with Miss Aldham before she decided he had recovered in the wrong direction.
The newspaper that evening carried a brief item, six lines, tucked into the shipping notices on page four.
He almost missed it.
He had been reading with one part of his attention while the other ran the Fielding conversation again, checking for what he had missed.
The word Tingen caught him because he had not seen it before in print and did not know why it registered.
He read the six lines.
A disturbance in a town called Tingen, in the Loen kingdom across the Sonia Sea.
The correspondent reported unusual events at a schoolhouse, described only as “occurrences of an unsettling character.” No deaths reported.
The school had been closed pending investigation by unnamed authorities.
He folded the paper.
Tingen was not Backlund.
The events described were not his concern.
The metaphysical substrate was not confined to this city, which was information he had already possessed in theory and was now filing in fact.
He put the Tingen story in a separate part of his mental architecture from the Backlund threads and did not connect them.
He did not connect them because there was no data connecting them.
He went to sleep with the drainage book on the desk and the problem of Miss Aldham still open, and the specific phrase Fielding had used, cognitive functioning altered in a specific way, running underneath everything else like a current he couldn’t quite locate the source of.