The cars got them as far as a cut four miles out and then stopped, because the track ahead was under three feet of the Willamette and a man in a railroad coat was standing at the head of the train explaining this to a dozen people at once and to nobody.

Kyra put her head out and looked along the line.

“It’s in the fields.”

“It is in a great deal more than the fields,” Val said, from inside.

“You can’t see it from there.”

“I do not need to see it. That water came out of the Nehalem and everything else in the state at once, and it has been coming since the tenth of May, and if it is in the fields here it is in the streets there.” Val folded the newspaper she had bought at the Grove, which was four days old and had been wrong about the crest twice. “Not far now.”

Kyra pulled her head back in and looked at her.

“We are nine miles short and standing still.”

“Not far now,” Val agreed.

They came into the city in the afternoon on the back of a dray, with a man called Hesketh who took forty cents for it and was pleased with the arrangement, along a road that had water standing in the wheel ruts and then water over the ruts and then, at the bottom of the grade, no road at all.

What there was instead was a plank walk on trestles, put up in ten days by men who had done it before, running above the flood at the height of a first-floor window.

Portland was under the river and open for business.

There were boats on Front Street. Not rescue boats, or not most of them; delivery boats, with a man at the oars and another one standing amidships with a crate of something on his shoulder, pulling up to a second-story window where a woman leaned out with her sleeves rolled and took the crate off him and gave him a chit for it. A grocer had moved his entire stock up a floor and hung a sign out the window saying so. Somebody had painted a waterline on the brick of the Failing block with the date beside it, which Val looked at for a while.

“They’re marking it,” she said.

“They mark everything.”

“They are marking it while it is still rising, which is a different order of confidence.”

Six weeks earlier they had been standing in a meadow eighty miles west with a surveyor’s blaze on the top of it, and Kyra had said the thing neither of them had said in four years, which was that it was time, and Val had not argued.

Thirty-six years at that lake. The longest either of them had been anywhere on this planet by a factor of three, and the last six of them a slow arithmetic problem: the Vernonia man’s wife, who had been a girl when they came; the boy who had been nineteen in seventy-one and gray at thirty-two and was now a man of forty-two who had begun, in the last two summers, to talk about the Miller sisters in front of them as though they were a feature of the weather.

So: a town with a bank and a newspaper that came the same day it was printed. Val had wanted the bank and Kyra had wanted the newspaper and neither of them had needed to explain which.

They took two rooms on Twelfth, on ground that was high and dry and smelled of the river anyway, from a woman who was not interested in them and wanted the month in advance.

“Miller,” Val said.

Kyra did not look at her. She had known it was coming since the Grove and had decided somewhere on Hesketh’s dray that she was not going to be the one to raise it.

The woman wrote it down without any interest whatsoever, which is the only way anybody has ever written down a name that commonplace, and gave them a key, and that was the whole transaction.

“Say it,” Val said, upstairs.

“I’m not going to say it.”

“You have been not saying it for six weeks and it is going to come out eventually and I would rather it came out in a room we are paying for.” Val put the bag down. “Forty-six years. We have been Miller since Missouri and the rule is a decade.”

“The rule was already gone. The rule went when the wagon party settled in the same valley we did and two hundred people knew our faces.”

“That is a reason and it is not the reason.”

Kyra sat down on the end of the bed.

“All right,” she said. “The deed.”

“A hundred and sixty acres in the county of Washington,” said Val, “in the name of Martha Miller, on a receiver’s receipt that is copied into a book in Oregon City and out of that book into another one, and there is no version of the next thirty years in which I stop being Martha Miller while I hold it.”

“Then sell it.”

“Selling it puts my name on a second instrument with a date on it and a buyer who can be asked questions. Selling it is worse.”

“Then keep it and stop talking about it.”

“I have kept it and I have stopped talking about it since eighteen fifty-eight,” Val said, “and I am talking about it now because we are in a city of sixty thousand people and every one of the reasons I gave you in fifty-eight was about a valley with nine families in it.”

Kyra let that sit.

“You could have said this at the lake.”

“I could not,” said Val, “because at the lake it would have sounded like an argument for staying, and it was not one, and you had already said the true thing in the meadow and I was not going to put anything in front of it.”

There was a rule about this, made on a wharf in Boston in seventeen twenty-five, and it had never been about reasoning. It had been about the object. Not a key. Not a room in anybody’s house. Not a place at a table that is laid for us.

Kyra had put the first hole in it on the Missouri in forty-nine with nine words about a wagon, and had been unrepentant ever since.

Val had put the second one in it herself, in cash, at a land office, with her eyes entirely open.

“I knew what I was doing,” she said, to the window.

“I know you did.”

“I would do it again.”

“I know that too,” said Kyra. “That’s not the part that worries me and it never has been.”

What Kyra did for the next nine days was go down to the water.

She did not announce it and Val did not ask, and after the second morning Val stopped pretending she did not know where she went.

It was not dramatic, and the lack of drama was most of what there was to say about it. The river had taken the low part of a city that had known for a week it was coming, and there was almost nobody in danger and a very great deal to be carried: a piano out of a parlor on First, a sewing machine, a cat in a basket that did not want to be in a basket, a chandler’s whole stock passed hand to hand along a plank walk by seven people who had not been introduced. Kyra put her sleeves up on the first morning and did not put them down until the ninth.

She was good at it in a way that had nothing to do with strength. She was good at it because she could see, in a line of people handing things along, the one who was about to drop something, and she was always standing next to that one.

Nobody asked her name. It was that kind of week.

On the seventh evening she came up the stairs wet to the hip and stood in the doorway with her hair down her back, dark and heavy with the river in it, and only the one place above the ear where the lamp found the copper the way it always found it.

Val looked at her for slightly longer than the situation required.

“There was a man on Ash Street,” Kyra said, “with a horse in the water.”

“Is the horse all right?”

“The horse is fine. The man is an idiot.” She pulled the pins out of what was left of her hair and shook it and gave up on it. “Ask me the other thing.”

“I was not going to ask you anything.”

“You have been not asking me for a week and you are very bad at it.”

Val put her pen down.

“Why the water,” she said.

Kyra thought about it honestly, which took a moment, because she did not usually have to.

“Because nobody on that street has asked me a single question in seven days,” she said. “Not one. Not where I’m from, not what my sister does, not how long we’re stopping. There is a woman I have stood beside for nine hours who does not know my name and we have got two floors of a warehouse up a staircase between us.”

“That is the flood.”

“That is the flood. In three weeks the water goes down and she asks me where I’m from and I give her four of the eleven answers and she goes away satisfied and that is that.” Kyra sat down and got a boot off. “I know what it is, Val. I’m not confused about it. I would just like it noted that for nine days I have been extremely useful to a large number of people who have no idea what I am, and I have not had to be careful for one single hour of it, and I am going to be sorry when the river goes down.”

Val did not say anything for a moment.

“Noted,” she said.

“Don’t.”

“I am not doing anything.”

“You are doing the thing where you file it,” said Kyra, “and then in about four years you hand it back to me having done something with it, and I never see it coming and I never once mind.”

The crest came on the seventh of June and the river stood at thirty-three feet, which was higher than anything any living person in that city had seen, and the men who had painted the waterline on the Failing block had to go up and do it again.

Val went down on the last day of it and stood on the plank walk above Front Street in the middle of the afternoon.

She had not gone down before. She had spent nine days finding rooms and opening an account at a bank on Second and reading four newspapers a day and writing eleven letters that would establish, for anyone who ever looked, a Miss Miller of Washington County who had come up to the city on business and stayed, and all of that was necessary and none of it was the reason she had not gone down.

The reason was that she had been in two cities where the water came and in one of them she had been able to do something about it.

She stood and watched a boat go up Front Street between the buildings, and a man on a second-story sill eating his dinner with his feet hanging over the river, and a shop sign reflected upside down in a street, and she understood that nobody here was frightened at all. They were inconvenienced and they were interested. The water was going to go down and the city was going to go on being where it was, and in four years there would be an argument in a saloon about whether the mark on the Failing block was the ninety-four or the eighty-one.

She thought: they will all be dead in sixty years and this will still be the highest it ever came, and somebody will point at the paint and not know a single name of anybody who saw it.

And then she thought, because she could not help it, that she was going to be there for that.

Kyra found her on the plank walk at about six.

She did not ask what Val was doing there, and she did not say anything at all for a while, and the two of them stood side by side above a drowned street in the long light with their sleeves down and their hair up and nothing about either of them worth a second look from anybody.

“Thirty-six years,” Kyra said.

“Thirty-six years.”

“It was a good lake.”

“It was an excellent lake,” Val said, “and I am not going to be able to talk about it for a while, and I would like that understood rather than discussed.”

“Understood.”

The light went off the water the way it does when it has a whole city to come off. Somewhere below them a man was singing badly and being encouraged.

“How long do we give this one?” Kyra said.

And Val, who had an answer to that question ready at all times and had produced it on demand for two hundred and eighty-seven years, stood there above the flood with the deed folded in a box in a rented room on Twelfth and found that she did not have one.

“I’ll tell you in the spring,” she said.

— end of chapter one —

The house they took in the spring was on the east side, up from the water and a long way from anything either of them had ever wanted, and what recommended it was that the woman who owned it lived in Astoria and did not care.

Seven rooms. A stove that drew. Gas in four of them and a landlord’s promise about the other three that Val priced at nothing and got in writing anyway.

Kyra walked every room of it twice and came back to the kitchen and put her hands on the table.

“It’s a good table.”

“It is the only good thing in the building.”

“It’s a very good table, Val, and you have been standing in front of it for four minutes.”

Val had in fact been standing in front of it for rather longer than that, and had already got as far as the Sunday, and was not going to be the one to say so.

The trouble came up over the lease, the way it always came up, which was sideways and in front of a stranger.

The agent had a printed form and a pen and a question that was not a question.

“And the two ladies are—”

“Cousins,” said Val.

Kyra did not react in any way that a man with a printed form would have noticed, which is a skill, and which she had been practicing since before the Thirty Years’ War.

He wrote it down. Cousins is a thing a man writes down without looking up, because it is the least interesting arrangement in the world and it explains a house.

“Cousins,” Kyra said, on the stairs, when he had gone.

“By marriage.”

“You didn’t say by marriage.”

“It is implied by the fact that we do not look alike.”

“We look extremely alike, we have looked extremely alike since we were girls, there is a window in this house where I have twice mistaken you for me—”

“By marriage,” Val said.

And Kyra laughed, up out of the middle of her, and went on up the stairs, and they had both been doing exactly this since a stone house in Maribor.

It was an old argument and it ran in a groove.

Kyra wanted sisters. Sisters is the thing people hand you before you have had to claim anything at all; it arrives unasked, it accounts for everything, and all the work is done by somebody else’s assumption while you stand there and say nothing.

Val wanted distance in it. A cousin. A companion engaged by the month. A boarder, in the one year she got her way about a boarder. Something with a joint in it, something that could be taken apart and carried off in two directions if it ever had to be.

They had run it in Maribor and on a quay in Trieste and in two rooms in New York and outside a printing house in Philadelphia, half teasing and half meant, every time, for two hundred and fifty years.

Neither of them had ever asked the other why.

What made it different in ninety-five was that this time it was not a preference. It was arithmetic, and Val had done it in February and had been carrying it since.

“I have to be Miller,” she said, at the good table, with the directory open in front of her.

“I know.”

“And two Millers in one house on the east side of this city is a pair of sisters, and a pair of sisters is two people with the same dead parents, and the moment anybody has two of us on one piece of paper they have a family, and a family is a thing that can be traced backward.” Val turned a page. “One Miller is a woman with a piece of ground in Washington County. Two Millers is a history.”

Kyra sat down opposite her.

“So I stop.”

“Yes.”

“Forty-seven years.”

“Forty-seven years,” Val said, and did not soften it, because softening it would have been worse and both of them knew that.

She did it properly, because there was no other way she knew how. She went through the city directory and the county register and she counted, the way they had counted a register for a name in every country since the Peace, and she came up the far side of an evening with three columns and a figure.

“Smith, Johnson, Anderson,” she said. “In that order. Anderson runs a shade behind Johnson in the directory and a shade ahead of it in the county, which means it is commoner than it looks and nobody has noticed, which is the whole of what we want.”

“Anderson.”

“Anderson. There are ninety of them and eleven of those are on this side of the river and not one of them is related to any of the others.”

Kyra put her finger on the page and turned it round to look at it.

“Ada,” she said.

Val waited for the reasoning and none arrived.

“Why Ada?”

“It was on the page.”

“That is not a method.”

“It is my method,” said Kyra, “and I have used it on two planets and I have never once been caught, and you have a system and so do I and mine is that I look at a thing and I know.”

“Your system is that you do not have one.”

“My system is that I do not have one,” Kyra agreed, “and it has an unbroken record, and you may take that up with the universe.”

Val let it go and then, an hour later, did not.

“Keep Sarah,” she said.

“What?”

“Sarah Anderson. It is a smaller change and it halves the risk. You have answered to it for forty-seven years and you answer to it in your sleep and at a door and when somebody says it behind you in a street, and that is not a small asset to throw away for the sake of a clean sheet.” Val had her hands flat on the table. “I would rather you kept half of it than none.”

Kyra looked at her for a long moment.

“No,” she said.

“It is the better arrangement.”

“It is the better arrangement and I am not doing it, and I would like to tell you why, and I would like you not to argue with me about it, which I am aware is a great deal to ask of you.”

Val put the pen down.

“There is one person alive who knows that name is false,” Kyra said.

“Yes.”

“Or there was in ninety, and there is no reason to think otherwise and no way on this earth to find out.” She had her hands in her lap, which was the tell, and Val had known it was the tell since about sixteen fifty. “She is the only one, Val. In four hundred years. Everybody else who ever heard either of those names heard a true thing as far as they knew it, and she heard a false one and said nothing about it for forty years.”

“She did.”

“So Sarah Miller is not a name I wore. It is a thing one woman on this planet gave me back and did not break.” Kyra’s voice did not rise at all. “And I am not going to carry half of it into a rented house on the east side of Portland and answer to it at the door for a grocer. I would rather put the whole of it down properly and be somebody else entirely.”

The gas made the small noise gas makes.

“Ada Anderson,” Val said.

“Ada Anderson.”

They put the house up on the Sunday, which was Val’s doing, and which had been Val’s doing since a kitchen in Maribor in the sixteen forties when she had worked out that two people who are never both sitting down will lose each other inside a year without ever having a quarrel about it.

The form of it had changed a great many times. The rule had not, and the rule was that it happened, and that nothing was allowed to be more important than it, and that whoever was carrying something difficult brought it to the table rather than around it.

Kyra did the cooking because Val’s cooking was, in her own assessment, procedurally correct.

“It is edible.”

“It is arithmetic with a fire under it.”

Afterward Kyra sat with her feet up on the second chair and her head back, and the last of the light came in low off the west window and went across the table, and it took the dark of her hair and found the copper in it above the ear the way it had been finding it since a mountain.

Val, who had read a panel for two centuries and had never once got out of the habit of reading in order, looked at that for slightly longer than she had intended to and then looked at the wall.

“Two hundred and fifty years,” Kyra said, to the ceiling.

“Of what?”

“Sisters. Cousins. Boarders, once, for a year, which you enjoyed far more than you let on.” She rolled her head to look at her. “We have had that argument in six countries and I have never once asked you why you want it that way.”

Val did not move.

“No,” she said.

“And you have never asked me either.”

“No.”

“Two hundred and fifty years and neither of us has ever once opened it, and we have opened a great many worse things in the last ten.” Kyra put her hands behind her head. “I noticed it on the stairs when the agent went, and I have been carrying it round all week, and I wanted it said out loud by somebody.”

There was a pause that ran on for a while, and in it Val Sorin had the entire thing available to her and in order, the way she had everything in order, and could have said it in about four sentences.

She did not.

And Kyra, who could hear a silence in that woman the way other people hear weather coming, did not ask, and made a point of not asking, and let it go by choosing that moment to complain about the chair.

“This chair is an instrument of policy.”

“It came with the house.”

“It came with the house because nobody in Astoria could be paid to keep it.”

And that was the end of it, and both of them knew exactly what had just been put down and left where it was, and neither of them touched it.

Later, going up, Val stopped on the landing with her hand on the rail.

“It is not because I want the distance,” she said.

Kyra stopped two steps below her.

“All right.”

“That is not me opening it.”

“I know it isn’t.”

“I am aware that it sounds like the beginning of opening it and it is not, and I would rather say the one true sentence I have than let you go to bed with the wrong one.” Val was looking at the rail and not at her. “It has never been about wanting you further off. I have wanted you nearer since a hut. That is all I have tonight.”

And she went up.

Kyra stood on the stairs of a rented house on the east side of a city that had been under water eleven months before, and did not follow her for a minute, and then did.

— end of chapter two —

Josephine Selby kept a stationer’s on Union Avenue with a lending shelf at the back, and the mail for four streets was held there in a rack behind the counter, and that is the entire reason any of it happened.

She was twenty-six and she had buried a husband at twenty-three and she did not discuss it. What she discussed was paper. She could tell you what a ream of anything cost in Portland and what it had cost the year before and what the freight had done to it, and she had opinions about steel pens that she was perfectly aware nobody wanted.

Val went in for a ledger in February and came out forty minutes later having been sold the correct ledger, a worse ledger at half the price which the woman had recommended against, and a subscription to a scientific quarterly out of London that arrived four months late and cost more than the freight was worth.

She put all three on the table.

“What happened,” said Kyra.

“I am not entirely sure.”

It was not a decision. Neither of them ever quite forgave herself for it afterward, in the way you do not forgive yourself for weather.

The rule was no long friendships, and the rule had been kept for two hundred and ninety years by a method that had nothing to do with willpower: they moved. You cannot be somebody’s friend for forty years if you are gone in nine, and the discipline of the decade had done all the work, and neither of them had ever had to refuse anybody anything.

They were not moving in nine years. Val had known that since a land office in fifty-eight and had said it out loud in a rented room on Twelfth, and Kyra had known it since the meadow.

So what happened in ninety-seven was that nothing happened, repeatedly, for eleven months, and at the end of it there was a woman who came to Sunday dinner.

Val had gone in for the mail because it was raining and Kyra had gone to the lumber office, and Jo Selby had a parcel behind the counter and a query.

“Miss Miller. Do you keep books?”

“I keep my own.”

“That is not what I asked and you know it isn’t.”

Val looked at her.

“I have three hundred and forty dollars in that till that ought to be in a column,” said Jo Selby, “and a book I have been carrying since the spring with four hands in it, two of them mine, and I would rather pay a woman than a man because a man will tell my brother-in-law.”

“Why would he tell your brother-in-law?”

“Because men do.”

And Val Sorin, who had three good reasons in order and had them ready before the sentence was finished, heard herself say that she could look at it on Thursday.

“You said yes,” Kyra said that evening, delighted.

“I said Thursday.”

“You said yes, you said it standing up in a shop in the rain, and you have not done that since a man asked you to look at a pump in about seventeen forty.”

“It is a ledger with four hands in it.”

“It is a ledger with four hands in it,” Kyra agreed, “and you have been dying for something with a column in it since we came down off that hill, and you may go on telling me it is about the money for as long as you find it useful.”

Val did not tell her it was about the money. It was one of the small mercies of three hundred and sixty-seven years that she had stopped bothering.

The mail went the other way after that.

Kyra took it over because she was on Union Avenue four days a week anyway and because she liked the shop, and from about March she came in at noon with whatever was in the rack and put it on the table and Val went through it in the order she always went through it, which was by hand and not by postmark.

There was a great deal of it. Val had spent three years building a Miss Miller who had a reason to be in the city, and a reason has to correspond with somebody: a seed house, an assessor, a man in Oregon City who answered questions about title for a fee and had never once asked why a woman in Portland was asking them.

“Assessor. Assessor. Your London one, four months late, with a corner off.”

“They post them flat and the agents fold them.”

“You say that every time.”

“It is true every time.”

Kyra dropped the last of it on the table.

“Nothing from New Bedford,” she said.

Val did not look up.

“Not today,” she said.

And Kyra grinned at the back of her head and went to take her boots off, and that was the whole of it, and neither of them thought about it again for two months.

Jo came to dinner for the first time in June and did not stop.

She was easy in a house in the way of a woman who has nowhere in particular to be. She ate a great deal, argued about the quarterly with Val on the grounds that she had read it first in the shop, which was an admission she made without any embarrassment whatsoever, and was funny about her customers in a way that was never once cruel, which Kyra noticed inside a month and mentioned to nobody.

She asked them four questions in nine months.

Where they were from, and got Pennsylvania. What their people did, and got the second answer. Whether they meant to stay, and got the fourth, which is one word long. And once, in October, looking at the two of them across a table, she asked how it was that cousins by marriage came to be keeping house together at the far end of the country, and Kyra gave her the eighth answer, which is the long one about a farm and a mortgage and a brother, and Jo Selby said, “God, yes,” and told them about her own brother-in-law for eleven minutes.

Val watched her do it and understood something she did not enjoy understanding, which was that the answers worked best on people who wanted them to.

“She’ll be dead in fifty years,” Val said, in November, with the door shut.

“I know.”

“Less. Sixty at the outside and she is twenty-six, so fifty, and I have watched the arithmetic on that woman twice this month without meaning to.” Val had her back to the room. “I would like it noted that I know exactly what we are doing.”

“Noted.”

“We have never done it. Not once. Frederick was eleven months and Jakob was twenty-five years and he was a man I slept beside, which is a different thing and hurts in a way there is at least a shape for.” She turned round. “There is no shape for this. There is no word in either language for what that woman is going to be to us in forty years.”

Kyra was quiet for a moment.

“Then we’ll find one,” she said. “We’re getting better at that.”

The rain came in the third week of November and did what it does and did not stop, and Jo stayed late on a Sunday arguing about whether the quarterly’s man on the spectrum of the sun was a fraud, and went home at nine with a lantern and an umbrella she did not open.

Val sat down at the table afterward with the ledger she was not going to open either.

Kyra came in with the last of the plates.

The lamp was low and the fire had got down to the part where it does more good than light, and Kyra’s hair had come loose over the course of the evening and hung down over one shoulder, and in that light it was not black, whatever anybody in the shop would have told you; it had the copper in it at the ear and along the fall of it, and it did that in every room they had ever been in and had been doing it since a mountain.

Val watched her stack plates for a while.

Then she said, to the table, in the flat voice she used for a reading she had checked twice:

“Anything from New Bedford?”

Kyra put the plates down.

She did not say anything at all for a second, and what went across her face was not surprise, because she had been living beside that woman for three hundred and sixty-seven years and had known since about the fourth month of it that Val Sorin never said a thing twice by accident.

“There might be,” she said.

“Might there.”

“It’s a long way. It comes when it comes.”

“It does,” Val agreed, and got up, and put out the lamp.

Upstairs there was a fire that had been laid that afternoon by a woman who had decided on Friday what was going to happen on Sunday, and had carried it through two days of a stationer’s ledger and a dinner and an argument about the spectrum of the sun without one thing showing on her face.

Kyra stood in the door and looked at the fire and then at her.

“Friday,” she said.

“Thursday, in fact.”

“Thursday.” Kyra shut the door with her heel. “You sat through the whole of that woman’s theory about the sun.”

“I did.”

“And you were going to sit through another hour of it if she’d stayed.”

“I was going to sit through a great deal,” said Val.

Afterward the rain went on doing what it was doing on the roof and on the window and in the gutter that was already wrong, and the fire got down past the point of being any use for seeing by, and neither of them moved to do anything about any of it.

“She asked me about my people again,” Kyra said.

“Which answer did you give her?”

“The second one.”

“You gave her the second one in March.”

“I know I did.” Kyra had her face in the side of Val’s neck and did not lift it. “She remembered it. She remembered it exactly, and she said it back to me before I’d finished, and then she looked pleased with herself.”

Val did not say anything.

“That’s the first time in four hundred years,” said Kyra, “that anybody has known one of those well enough to finish it.”

The fire ticked.

“We are going to have to be very careful with her,” Val said.

“Yes.”

“And we are not going to be.”

“No,” said Kyra, “we are not,” and neither of them said anything else about it that year.

— end of chapter three —

The gutter on the north side had been wrong since they took the house, and neither of them had done anything about it, because doing something about it meant one of them going up a ladder in the rain.

It had been raining since the middle of the morning. Not hard. Portland did not do hard; Portland did continuous, gray, and personally directed, and Val had said in their second autumn that the weather here had no events in it, only a policy.

She was at the window with her hands in her sleeves.

“Six,” she said.

Kyra was on the sofa with her feet up and a cup balanced on her sternum, which was a thing she did and which Val had given up commenting on about a century ago.

“Six what?”

“The downspout. It doesn’t run, it holds and lets go. Six. Sometimes seven.”

“You’re counting the rain.”

“I am counting the gutter.” Val did not turn round. “The rain is continuous. The gutter is not, which is the entire function of a gutter and the reason that one is wrong.”

Kyra put the cup on the floor and laughed at the ceiling.

“What.”

“You have counted something every single day I have known you.”

“That is almost certainly true.”

“Since we were girls on a plateau,” Kyra said, and put both hands over her face and made a noise into them.

The light went early in that month and neither of them got up to do anything about it. The stove drew badly. Kyra’s coat had been over the back of the chair nobody sat in since Fourthday, and the gutter went on letting go in sixes.

Val came away from the window, and Kyra moved her knees without being asked so that Val could sit down at the end of the sofa, and then put her feet back where they had been, which was in Val’s lap.

Val put her hand flat on an ankle, warming it, which was how that had started about eighty years ago and what it had gone on being.

“I never counted anything,” Kyra said.

“At the Vayr.”

“At the Vayr. I never counted anything, I never measured anything, I never wrote a single thing down that wasn’t work. And I have thought, on and off, for about three hundred years, that I should have.”

“Counted what?”

“You know what.”

“I want to hear you say it,” Val said, “and I am aware that I am doing to you exactly what you have done to me four times this century.”

“Five.”

“Five,” Val agreed. “Say it.”

“Emrin,” said Kyra.

Val’s thumb went once across the bone of the ankle and stopped.

“Go on.”

“They teach you at school,” Kyra said. “You get a room and a woman with a diagram and forty minutes. She says everything correctly, in no order a living person could use, and she says it in the voice they keep for it, and then you get the other half out in the yard from three girls who are lying.”

“That sounds correct.”

“It’s correct everywhere. I have now watched it be correct on two worlds.” Kyra turned her wrist over and looked at it. “Here is what the woman with the diagram told me. That he would go under. That he would come out past the sheath. That there would be a change of color and a pattern in the skin of it, and that the pattern is what you work, and that you have about a minute.”

“All true.”

“All true and all useless, and I want you to understand why.” She sat up against the arm so that they were facing along the sofa, and kept one foot in Val’s lap, and Val kept her hand on it. “She said a change of color. She did not say which blue. Val, there are blues. There is a blue like a vein under the skin of your wrist and there is a blue like the last of the evening off the Headland and there is a blue that is almost gray and looks like something has gone wrong, and I had a man under my hands at eighteen years old going a color I could not name and I did not know whether it was the right one.”

“Nobody told you the range.”

“Nobody told me there was a range.”

“That is not instruction,” Val said. “That is a diagram with the axes left off.”

“And the pattern.” Kyra put her hands up and made a shape in the air between them and then took it apart again, annoyed. “They call it a fold, and it is a fold, and it is also not a fold. It’s a turn. It is like the thread on a bolt, if the bolt were warm, and moving, and had an opinion.”

Val laughed, and Kyra pointed at her.

“Don’t. That is the best I have ever done and I have had three centuries.”

“It is very good.”

“It is not good, it is a bolt, I have described a man’s body as a piece of hardware.” Kyra put her hands down. “But the turn goes one way round. That’s the thing. It has a direction, and you have to go with it, and nobody tells you how to know which way it is, because everybody assumes you can see it — and you can see it, when you know. At eighteen, in the dark, with your own hands shaking, you cannot. You are going by feel and you are guessing.”

“Did you ever go the wrong way?”

“Constantly.” She said it flat. “And you can feel it stop working. That is the part they leave out. It does not hurt him and he is not there to mind and it simply goes slack under your hand. Loses the turn. And then you have perhaps twenty seconds to find the other direction, and by then you are frightened, and frightened hands are no use to anybody.”

Val’s hand had closed round the ankle.

“And then it went back,” Kyra said.

“How long did you have?”

“The minute. All of it, the first time. I did nothing whatsoever for a full minute and then it went back.”

The rain went on doing what it was doing.

“They call that a return,” said Kyra. “That’s the word. They give you that word at school before they give you anything useful, and the girls in the yard use it about each other, and it is the flattest word in that entire language. It doesn’t sound like anything at all. That’s what makes it good.”

“Yes,” Val said.

“And he came back up.”

Val had gone still in the particular way she went still, and Kyra watched her do it and kept going, because the one thing you did not do with that woman was stop and check.

“He was warm and he was glad and he was in an extremely good humor, because he had been somewhere extraordinary and he had no idea. He cannot know. He cannot see any of it — not the color, not the turn, not the length of it. That is the whole architecture of the thing. The only window into the biggest event of a man’s body is a woman standing over him. And I was eighteen, and he looked down at himself, and there was nothing there.”

“Kyra.”

“And he said, it’s all right. First time.” She was quiet for a second. “He got there before I did.”

Val moved. She came up the sofa without making any production of it and sat with her hip against Kyra’s knees and took her hand, which she did rarely enough that Kyra stopped talking.

“I want to say something in the middle of this,” Val said, “and I would rather say it in the middle than save it for the end, because I have spent about two hundred years saving things for the end and it has never once improved them.”

“All right.”

“You were eighteen, and you were in the dark, working by feel, on a thing you had been told about and not shown, with a range you did not know existed and a direction nobody had thought to mention.” Val’s voice did not move at all. “That is not a person failing. That is a person being sent up a mountain with a drawing of a mountain.”

Kyra’s eyes went, all the way out to the rim, and Val told her, because she always did.

“They’ve gone.”

“I know.”

“I like it when they go.”

“I know that too,” said Kyra, and did not look away, which she had not managed for the first two centuries of knowing her.

“Four years,” Kyra said. “Eleven times it went the whole way. I know that number, it is the only number I have ever kept, and I have never said it out loud to any living person.”

“Out of.”

“Out of a great many. And the two days after each one, because you cannot try again inside the day, so there was always two days of us being extremely pleasant to each other across a table.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That it was extraordinary.” Kyra said it without any weight. “Every time. I gave that man beautiful accounts. I invented them. By the third year I could do four minutes of it and he would lie there with his eyes shut and his hands behind his head, and the only thing I was any good at in four years was that, and it was lying.”

“It isn’t lying.”

“It isn’t the truth.”

“No,” said Val. “It is the third thing. There is a word for it on this planet and I have not found it yet, and I have been looking since about the time we were in Boston, and when I find it you will be the first to know.”

“Here’s the part I’ve never said,” Kyra said.

Val turned her hand over and laced their fingers and waited.

“I have never known whether I froze because I was eighteen and had no idea what I was doing.” She stopped. She got it out on the second run. “Or because it was him.”

The gutter let go.

“I liked him. I have never said a word against that man and I never will. He wrote to me steadily and well about his brother’s boat and the licensing office and a dog that had adopted the yard and never once asked when I was coming back, and I did not have the equipment to appreciate that at the time.” Kyra’s thumb was moving on the back of Val’s hand. “But I stood up in front of a house full of people and said yes to somebody I liked, and then for four years my body would not do the thing it was supposed to do, and there is no experiment in the world that tells you which of those two is the cause of the other.”

“No. There isn’t.”

“Three hundred years and I can’t get at it.”

“You cannot get at it because it is not gettable, and that is a fault in the question and not in you.” Val leaned over and put her forehead against Kyra’s for a second, which was a thing from a wagon and had been a thing ever since.

“I want to say a thing about your eleven,” Val said.

“Go on.”

“You have carried that number since before there was a road up that hill, as a record of the times you managed.” Her voice was low and completely level. “It is not that. It is a record of eleven times a girl of eighteen, with no instruction worth the name, in the dark, on a thing she could not see, going by feel, found the right direction and held it for a minute. That is not a small number. That is a very large number and it has been filed under the wrong heading for three hundred years.”

The stove ticked.

“You worked that out just now,” Kyra said.

“I worked it out about nine minutes ago and I have been deciding how to say it since.”

“You’d have sat on it.”

“For fifty years,” Val said. “I’m aware.”

“Your turn,” Kyra said.

And Val did not answer.

It went on long enough to become a thing in the room. Kyra did not fill it, because she had learned in the first winter that filling it was how you lost it, and she lay there with her foot in Val’s lap and let the silence run, and watched.

And at the wrists, where the sleeves had fallen back, and under the jaw below the ear, the light came up in Val Sorin.

Not much. Not the way it went in a dark bedroom. Enough that in a room with no lamp lit you could see where her hands were.

“I am not going to answer that tonight,” Val said.

“All right.”

“That is not — ” She stopped. She started again, and her voice did not move, and Kyra knew exactly what that cost and had known for three centuries. “I know what you have just handed me. I will not price it and hand you back something smaller and call it even. I am going to answer it. It is going to take me some days.”

Kyra breathed out.

“Two hundred years ago,” she said, “you’d have said thank you for telling me.”

“I know.”

“You did say it.”

“I know exactly when I said it,” said Val, “and I know what room I was standing in, and I have thought about it more often than you would find comfortable.”

“Val.”

“Some days. That is what I have.”

And Kyra Davan, who had been waiting since she was nineteen years old to be told that an answer was coming rather than simply not arriving, found that it was enough, and was faintly annoyed at how much it was enough.

The rain kept on. Neither of them lit the lamp.

What light there was came off the window, gray and going, and it found the pale of Val’s hair where it had fallen forward over the afternoon and did what it had done on a mountain and in a lane in Trieste and in a wagon on the Sweetwater, which was to make her look about nineteen, which she was not and had not been for a very long time.

Kyra looked at her for a while.

“You didn’t plan this,” she said.

“No.”

“You always plan it.”

“I am aware of that too,” said Val, and took the cup up off the floor and set it out of the way on the sill, and Kyra started laughing and did not get very far with it.

— end of chapter four —

The thing about a house with a bad stove is that the cold comes up from underneath, so afterward they stayed where they were, which they would have done anyway.

It was the small hours and it had stopped raining, which in that month was the only weather worth noticing. There was a street lamp two houses along and a wet maple in front of it, and the pattern that came through onto the ceiling moved when the wind did.

Kyra was somewhere in the region of Val’s shoulder with one leg through both of hers and a quantity of her own hair trapped under Val’s arm, which she would object to in about four minutes and was not going to do anything about now.

The light was still up.

It was at the wrists, and under the jaw below the ear, and along the inside of one forearm where Kyra’s hand was, and it had been up for some while and showed no sign of going anywhere.

Kyra watched it for a bit.

“Give me the account,” she said.

There was a pause of a length she enjoyed very much.

“No,” said Val.

“Give me the account.”

“That is for a man who cannot see. You were here.”

“I’m aware of where I was.”

“Then you know what it looked like, because you were looking at it, which is the entire distinction on which the custom rests.” Val had not moved. Her voice had the flatness it got when she was being cornered by something she found funny and was not going to admit to finding funny. “There is no version of this in which you require an account.”

“I never said I required it.”

Kyra propped herself up on one elbow so that she could see her properly, and the light came up another degree when she did, which Val could not do anything about and which both of them noted.

“Kyra.”

“Give me the account, Sorin.”

Val lay there and looked at the moving pattern on the ceiling for long enough that a person who did not know her would have assumed she had declined.

“It was — ” she said.

And stopped.

Kyra waited. She had learned that in a building on a plateau and had been practicing ever since and was still not good at it.

“It was about forty minutes,” Val said.

“Val.”

“That is a fact and it is accurate.”

“It is not an account, it is a timetable.”

“I am aware of what it is.” Val put the back of her hand over her eyes, which did nothing whatsoever about the light, since the light was in the hand. “Give me a moment.”

“Take all of them.”

“There was rain until the third hour,” Val said, “and then there was not, and I noticed that it had stopped, and I would like it on the record that noticing that was not a failure of attention but the opposite, because I was aware of every single thing in that room at once, including the rain, including the maple, including the fact that the stove had gone out at some point and that neither of us was going to do anything about it—”

“You’re inventorying.”

“I am establishing conditions.”

“You are inventorying a room,” said Kyra, “because you would rather do that than tell me one true thing about yourself, and I have watched you do it on two worlds, and I am not letting you have this one.”

Val took her hand off her eyes.

“I don’t have any numbers,” Val said.

“I know.”

“You do not understand what I am telling you. I am telling you that I reached for them, just now, on purpose, in order, the way I have reached for them my entire life, and there are none. There is nothing in it that can be counted.” Her voice had gone very quiet and had not lost a particle of its precision. “I have given accounts of every man I have ever been with, on two worlds, and every one of them had a number in it somewhere, and I have never once had to describe something that did not.”

“Then describe it without one.”

“I do not know how.”

“Try it badly,” said Kyra. “I did it badly for four years and a man was extremely pleased with me.”

And Val laughed — properly, a real one, the kind that happened perhaps twice a decade and only ever in a dark room with one other person in it — and Kyra felt the whole length of her go loose with it and thought, not for the first time, that she would have traded a considerable portion of this planet for the sound.

“All right,” Val said.

“All right.”

“I wasn’t counting.”

Kyra went still.

“That is the account. That is all of it and you are not getting a better one out of me tonight.” Val was looking at the ceiling again. “Not at the start and not in the middle and not at the end, and there was a stretch of it where I was not in the room at all, and I did not know that could happen to me while I was awake.” She stopped. She went on. “And I was not frightened of it. That is the part I would like you to have. At nineteen I would have been. At a hundred I would have been. I was not frightened of it tonight and I am not frightened of it now, and I do not know when that stopped, and I have been lying here trying to work out the year.”

“Don’t.”

“I was going to try anyway.”

“I know you were,” said Kyra, and put her hand flat on Val’s sternum, where the light was not, and left it there.

The maple moved on the ceiling.

“Why did you ask?” Val said.

“Because I wanted to watch you try.”

“That is a horrible reason and I believe it.”

“It’s the true one.” Kyra’s thumb went once across a rib and back. “It was the true one when I said it.”

Val turned her head.

“And now?”

And Kyra Davan, who had been loud about everything in her life since she was nine years old and had never once been at a loss for the next sentence, found that she had arrived somewhere without having set out for it.

“Nobody has ever given me one,” she said.

The room did not do anything. The lamp two houses along went on doing what it did.

“Four years with Emrin, and then a man from four systems out, and then the other one, and then four centuries of this planet.” She said it into Val’s shoulder, not looking up. “I have given accounts. I have given the most beautiful accounts anybody on either world has ever given, and every one of them was a gift, and about half of them were invented. And it is a thing a woman does for a man. It has never once gone the other way, and it was never going to, because there was never anything for them to tell me. They weren’t there.”

“Kyra.”

“That is not a complaint about any of them. It is the arrangement.” She was quiet for a second. “And I did not know I had wanted it until I opened my mouth and asked you for one as a joke.”

Val moved.

She got her arm out from under the hair, which they both ignored, and turned over onto her side so that they were facing, and took Kyra’s hand and laced their fingers, and held it against her own chest where Kyra could feel what her heart was doing, which was a thing she had started on a river and had never explained.

“Then I will give you one,” she said.

“Val, you don’t have to—”

“I have been waiting since about the fourth minute of this conversation for you to get out of the way so that I could.” Her voice did not move. “Be quiet. This is the one I can do.”

And Kyra shut her mouth, because there was a thing that happened to Val Sorin when she was about to describe something outside herself — a settling, a change of register, the woman who had read a panel for two hundred years coming up into her own voice — and it had been happening to her since they were nineteen and it had never once got less.

“Your eyes went at the start,” Val said. “Not in the middle, which is where they usually go. At the start, before anything, when you turned round and knew what I had decided. They were gold before I had touched you. I want you to know that, because you have never seen it and you never will.”

“Oh,” said Kyra.

“They stayed. The whole way. I have seen them come and go a great many times and I have never seen them stay like that, and I could not tell you what it means, only that it happened and that I watched it and that I stopped doing anything else for a while in order to watch it.”

“That’s not—”

“I have not finished.” Val’s thumb moved once. “The dark of your hair against the pillow in that light is not black. Everybody who has ever looked at you has thought it was black, on two worlds, and they are all wrong. It has the copper in it at the third hour with one street lamp two houses away. I have checked. I have been checking since a hut on a mountain and the answer has never changed.”

Kyra made a sound she did not authorize.

“And there was a point,” said Val, “somewhere past the middle, where you laughed. Not at anything. You laughed and you did not stop what you were doing and you did not explain it, and I have no number for that either, and it is the thing I will still have in a hundred years when everything else in this account has gone.”

Somewhere down the street a horse went by on the wet.

“That’s a good account,” Kyra said.

“It is accurate.”

“I know it’s accurate. That’s what’s wrong with it.” Her face was wet and she was not doing anything about it and was not remotely ashamed of it, which was the difference between her and the woman holding her hand and always had been. “I have given about two hundred of those and not one of them was accurate.”

Val did not say anything for a moment.

“Then I will give you another one on Thursday,” she said.

And Kyra laughed, wetly, into her collarbone, and got her leg back through both of Val’s, and said, “You’ll have to earn it,” and Val said, “I am aware of the terms,” and the light did not go down for another hour.

In the morning, dressing, with her back to the room, Val said: “I had not planned that.”

She said it to a chest of drawers, as a fact, the way she reported a reading.

Kyra, who had known it since about the moment Val took the cup off the floor, and who had spent the whole of the night deciding not to say so, did up a button and said nothing at all, and let the woman have it.

It was five days before Val came back to the other thing, and she came back to it the way she came back to everything, which was at a time of her own choosing with the ground prepared.

Sunday. The table cleared. Jo gone at eight because the shop opened early in December.

“Sit down,” Val said.

“I am sitting down.”

“Sit down properly. I am going to do this once and I am not going to be able to do it twice.”

Kyra put her hands in her lap.

“Aro,” said Val.

“I got it right the first time.”

“Val—”

“Let me do all of it, because if you stop me I will arrange it, and I would rather not arrange it.” She had her eyes on the stove. “I got it right the first time and the second time and every time after that, and I have never told a living soul, and I want you to hear the rest before you decide what it means.”

“All right.”

“I had read about it. I had read everything there was, which is not much and most of it is a diagram with the axes off, as we have established. And then I did the thing I do, which is that I worked out the timing in advance.” She said it evenly. “I know how long a minute is. I have known how long a minute is since I was nine. I went up that hill in the warm season with the whole sequence in order in my head like a panel, and when it happened I was not brave and I was not gifted. I was rehearsed.”

“That isn’t nothing.”

“It is not nothing and it is not what you had.” Val turned her head. “You were in the dark with your hands shaking and no map. I had a map and no shaking hands, and the reason my hands were steady is not that I was steadier than you. It is that I put everything into the part I could prepare so that I would not have to be in the part I could not.”

Kyra did not say anything.

“I counted,” Val said.

“Counted what?”

“All of it, Kyra. Every time he came up, for as long as it went on, and again with Sven a lifetime later, and I have never lost one of those figures and I have never written one of them down, and until this minute I had never said so out loud.”

“Why?”

“Why did I count?”

“Yes.”

Val was quiet for a moment. The stove did what it did.

“Because if I was counting I was still in the room,” she said.

Kyra sat with that.

“Say that again.”

“No.”

“Val.”

“I heard myself the first time and it was quite enough.” But she did not take her hand back and she did not go anywhere, and after a second she said it anyway, because she had decided in a rented room on Twelfth that she was going to stop making Kyra Davan ask twice for things. “If I was counting, I was still in the room. If I stopped counting I was going to be entirely in it, and at nineteen I did not know what would be left of me afterward, and I had never in my life not known that.”

“And was there? Anything left.”

“Yes,” said Val. “That was the part that frightened me.”

Kyra put her hand up and got hold of the back of her neck, which was from a street in Trieste in the fourth year and had never once needed a reason since.

Neither of them moved for a while. The stove drew badly. Out in the dark the gutter on the north side held and let go, six, sometimes seven, and neither of them was ever going to do anything about it.

“Five days,” Kyra said.

“Five days.”

“You said some.”

“I said some and I meant a fortnight,” Val said, “and I would rather not examine why it was five,” and Kyra said that was fine, and did not examine it either, and the two of them sat at that table with the lamp unlit until it was properly late.

— end of chapter five —

Word of the enumeration reached the east side in the last week of May, and Val had a copy of the schedule itself by the Thursday, because Jo Selby sold stationery to a man whose brother was an enumerator and because Val had asked for it in a tone that did not sound like asking.

She put it on the table and read it twice and then sat back.

“Twenty-eight,” she said.

“Twenty-eight what?”

“Columns. In sixty it was a man on a horse with a sheet and about eleven questions, and I answered all of them standing in a doorway, and he wrote it down wrong twice and I let him.” Val turned the thing round so Kyra could see it. “This asks what month I was born in.”

Kyra came and looked over her shoulder.

“Ah,” she said.

They had been giving ages to governments for fifty years and Val had a rule about it, made in a doorway in the Nehalem country in the summer of sixty and kept ever since: you age on paper exactly as fast as you age, because a woman who is thirty-one in one schedule and fifty-one in the next twenty years later is a woman nobody ever looks at twice, and a woman who is thirty-one both times is a woman a clerk remembers.

The rule had worked for forty years. It had worked because it was true.

Martha Miller had been thirty-one in sixty and fifty-one in eighty, and in the summer of nineteen hundred she was seventy-one.

“Say it,” Kyra said.

“I am not going to be able to give him seventy-one.”

“No.”

“A man is going to stand in that doorway and look at my face and write down seventy-one and go on to the next house, and either he thinks nothing of it, in which case he is the only man in Oregon who would, or he thinks something of it and tells somebody in a saloon.” Val had her hands flat on the schedule. “I have known this was coming since we came down off that hill. I have had six years and I have not solved it, and I want to say out loud that I have not solved it, because I have been walking round this house for a month letting you believe that I had.”

Kyra sat down.

“I didn’t believe you had,” she said.

What they did instead was what they had done with every problem of that shape since a wharf in Boston, which was to lay out the ways it could go wrong and count them.

“Give him thirty-four,” said Kyra. “Everybody lies.”

“Everybody lies by four years in the direction of being younger and unmarried. Nobody lies by thirty-seven.”

“Nobody is going to lay the sheets side by side.”

“That is exactly what I said in sixty,” Val said, “and I was wrong, and the reason I was wrong is that I said it about one schedule and there are now going to be four of them.”

“Four.”

“Sixty, eighty, this one, and the one that comes in ten years, and the one after that, and they do not burn them, Kyra. That is the part nobody on this planet has understood yet. They do not burn them. They put them in a building.”

She worked it for two days and came back with the answer she had known she was going to come back with, and did not enjoy it.

“Thirty-four,” she said.

“You just told me nobody lies by thirty-seven.”

“They do not, and I am going to, and here is why.” Val put one finger on the table. “Those sheets are not sorted by name. They are sorted by where a man walked. To lay my two side by side you would have to already know that a Martha Miller in this city and a Martha Miller in Washington County were the same woman, and to know that you would need a reason to be looking, and nobody has a reason to be looking.”

“And if somebody ever does.”

“If somebody ever does, then the seventy-one would not have saved me either, because the face would have done it in the doorway forty years earlier.” She sat back. “So I am trading a certainty for a possibility, which is the whole of what any of this has ever been, and I would like it understood that I am doing it with my eyes open and that I know exactly which rule I am breaking, because it was mine and I made it in a doorway and I have been proud of it for forty years.”

Kyra reached over and put two fingers on the back of her wrist and left them there.

Which left the month.

It was the one question in twenty-eight that Val had never had to answer, on this planet or the other one, because nobody had ever asked. The Assembly had wanted a year. The parish books in Maribor had wanted a saint. Every clerk from Trieste to the Nehalem had wanted a number and a county, and not one of them in three centuries had wanted to know the month.

She sat with the schedule for a long while.

“February,” she said.

“Why February?”

“Because nothing has ever happened to me in February.”

Kyra looked up.

“Not on this world and not on the other one,” Val said. “I have been through the notebook. Not a birth, not a death, not a departure, not one thing I would have to keep my face still for. It is the only month I have got that is empty, and if a man is going to ask me that question in a doorway every ten years for the rest of my life I would like the answer to cost me nothing whatsoever.”

“Mine, then,” Kyra said.

“Yours.”

“Aug—”

“No.”

It came out faster than Val had meant it to, and flatter, and the room went very quiet around it.

Kyra shut her mouth.

“I know,” she said, after a second.

“I am not—”

“Val. I know. I had it halfway out of my mouth before I heard it.” She had her hands in her lap. “It goes in the book and the book goes in the building.”

“It goes in the building.”

“And then there is a month in a federal schedule that I chose for a reason, and a reason is a thing that can be found.” Kyra let out a breath. “September. There is nothing in September either.”

“There is not.”

“Then September, and we will neither of us think about it again.”

The man came on the eighth of June at about four in the afternoon and his name was Dolph Varney and he had been walking since half past seven and had a blister he mentioned twice.

Val stood in her own doorway and gave him twenty-eight columns in a voice with nothing in it at all.

Miller, Martha. Head. Female, white. Born February, eighteen sixty-six. Aged thirty-four. Single. Born Pennsylvania, father Pennsylvania, mother Pennsylvania. Reads, writes, speaks English. Occupation, accounts. Renting the house.

Anderson, Ada. Cousin. September, eighteen sixty-eight. Thirty-one. Single. Pennsylvania throughout, which Val had decided in February on the grounds that two women from the same state explain each other and two women from different states invite a question.

Varney wrote it all down in a good round hand and did not look up once.

Then he came to a column near the middle and paused over it and looked at the two of them and made a small decision, the way men do about forty times a day without ever knowing they have done it.

“Mother of how many children,” he said. “And number living.”

“We are single,” said Val.

“I know it. I ask anyway, on account of I got told off in ninety for not asking.” He had the pen ready and was entirely without malice, which made it worse. “Most times it’s a dash.”

There was a pause of about one second.

“A dash,” Val said.

He put a dash, and a second dash in the box beside it, and then he looked at Kyra and asked her the same two questions, because the column had a line for every woman in the house and Dolph Varney had been told off in ninety and did not intend to be told off again.

“A dash,” Kyra said.

He said something about the weather and about a house on the corner where nobody would come to the door, and he thanked them and went down the steps and was gone by ten past four.

Val shut the door and stood with her hand on it.

Kyra did not say anything at all. She went and put the kettle over and stood with her back to the room for as long as it took, which was a kindness she had learned to perform in about sixteen fifty and had performed perhaps two hundred times since and had never once been thanked for.

After a while Val came and sat down at the table.

“One,” she said.

“I know.”

“One, and one living, and I have no idea whether the second half of that is still true and I will not have any idea for the whole of the rest of my life.” Her voice did not move at all. “And a man with a blister asked me the only question in twenty-eight columns that I could have answered honestly, and I gave him a dash.”

“He asked me too,” said Kyra, from the stove.

“I know he did.”

“One. One living. Same dash.” She did not turn round. “And they were born a fortnight apart, Val, and there is a man in a government office who now has it written down that neither of them was ever born at all.”

“Kyra.”

“I am not going to do anything about it. I am telling you because I have decided that I tell you things now.” She turned her cup round a quarter turn and left it. “That is the whole of it. You may go on with the kettle.”

And Kyra went on with the kettle, because that was what had been asked for, and put a hand flat between Val’s shoulders on the way past, and did not stop walking.

Later, in the long light, Kyra sat on the back step with her hair down her back to dry after the wash, and the sun came round the corner of the house and got into it and found the copper the way it found it every time, and Val sat on the step above her with the schedule folded in her lap and did not read it again.

“Sixteen documents,” Val said.

“Is that all.”

“It is a great many.”

“It is sixteen pieces of paper in three hundred years, Val, and there are men on this street who generate four in a morning.” Kyra tipped her head back against Val’s knee. “What was the February for again?”

“Because nothing has ever happened to me in it.”

“Mm,” said Kyra. “Something has now.”

Val did not answer that for a while.

“Yes,” she said. “I noticed that at about the third column.”

— end of chapter six —

Nobody in Portland put up plums in the second week of August except people who had bought too many plums, which is exactly what had happened, and which Val had predicted at the market in front of a witness.

It was too hot for it. They did it anyway, with the window up and the back door open and the smell going out into a yard where somebody two fences over was burning something they should not have been.

Kyra had the jars. Val had the accounts, which she was doing at the end of the same table on the grounds that somebody had to and that it was not going to be the woman with syrup to the wrist.

“Pass me that.”

Val passed it without looking up. It was a tin of milk, unopened, which had been sitting by the salt since Fourthday for no reason either of them could account for.

“Two and five-eighths,” she said.

Kyra stopped.

“What?”

“Across. That is what it is across, and there are four of them in the press, and if you are going to build a wall out of them I would like to know in advance.”

“You know the width of a tin.”

“I know the width of most things,” Val said, and turned a page.

Kyra put the tin down on the table between them and looked at it for a while.

“Val.”

“Mm.”

“How wide was Aro?”

Val’s pencil stopped.

The thing about that house in that year was that the two of them had got somewhere over the winter and neither of them had said so. Val put the pencil down flat, which she did when she was choosing to be in a conversation rather than found by one.

“Are you asking me seriously?”

“I am asking you entirely seriously and I would like you to know that I have wanted to ask for about two hundred years.”

“Two and a half,” said Val. “Three at the extension.”

Kyra picked the tin back up.

“That’s—”

“That is wider than the tin, yes.”

“That is wider than the tin, Val.”

“By a little.” Val had her chin on her hand now. “I could not get my hand round it. I want to be clear that I am not saying that for effect. I tried, in the way one does, and I could not, and I remember being extremely annoyed about it for reasons I could not have defended to anybody.”

And Kyra Davan sat down on the chair with the bad leg and laughed until she had to put the tin down again.

“A shade under a foot with the glans out,” Val said, a while later, “which I did not know at the time was anything at all.”

“You didn’t know.”

“I was twenty-two. I had nothing to put it beside.” She turned her hand over on the table. “I had a number and no scale. It is the only time in my life I have had one without the other, and I did not find out what it meant for about forty years.”

“How did you find out?”

“By measuring somebody else,” Val said, “and being surprised.”

Kyra wiped her hands on the cloth and came and sat down properly, opposite, with her forearms on the table.

“Tell me the rest of it.”

“The rest of what?”

“All of it. Everything you’ve got.” She said it plainly and without any heat in it at all. “I have been walking around for three hundred years knowing approximately nothing about my own life, and you have been walking around beside me with the whole of yours written down in your head, and I want it. Not to keep score. Because it is yours and I have never had any of it.”

Val looked at her for a moment.

Then she reached across and turned the accounts face down, which was as clear a statement as she was capable of making.

She did it properly, because there was no other way she knew how.

“Aro. A shade under a foot, and three across at the extension, which is a length increase outside anything I have measured since and a width increase that is exactly ordinary. That took me a century to notice and it still interests me.”

“Why does it interest you?”

“Because it means he was not a large man in proportion. He was an ordinary man with one rare characteristic.” Val said it with the flatness she used for a soil sample. “Which is, when you think about it, a description of almost everybody.”

“Go on.”

“The Venetian, who lasted four months, and Matthias at the mill, who lasted two years and some, and the one in the seventh year whose name I have never said aloud since. And Sven, about whom I have everything, because there were ten years of him.” She paused. “He is the smallest man in this conversation so far and he lasted longer than any of them, and I would like to say something about that.”

“Say it.”

“By then I was not there for that,” Val said. “I was sixty-seven years old and I liked the sound of him coming up the stair and I liked that he wrote out the watering for four plants. If I had met him at twenty-two I do not think I would have noticed him at all, and I am not proud of that, and it is true.”

Kyra put her hand out on the table, palm up, and Val put hers in it without either of them making a thing of it, and their fingers went together the way they always did.

“Now you,” Val said.

“I don’t have any of this.”

“You have all of it, you simply have it in another currency, and I would remind you that I cannot spend mine.” Val’s thumb moved once. “Deyn.”

Kyra thought about it.

“Bigger than Emrin,” she said. “Noticeably. Not—” She looked around the kitchen, and her eye went across the shelf and the crock and the flour scoop and landed on nothing, and she made an impatient noise. “Not the tin. Under the tin. About a jar lid.”

“Which jar.”

“The small ones. Not the quart ones.”

“An inch and three-quarters,” said Val.

“Is it?”

“The small ones are an inch and three-quarters at the lid, and I would put Deyn at about that, from what you have said and from how you said it.” Val had not let go of her hand. “And seven and a half long, or very near, and nine at the extension. Am I close?”

Kyra stared at her.

“I have no idea,” she said. “That is the whole problem. It sounds right and I have absolutely no way to know, and you have just done in four seconds what I could not do in two hundred and fifty years of thinking about it on and off.”

“I have done nothing. I have taken a jar lid and a tone of voice.”

“That is not nothing, Val.”

“It is arithmetic performed on somebody else’s memory,” Val said, “and it is the most I have ever been able to do for you on this subject, and I have wanted to do it for a long time.”

Somebody’s dog went down the lane. The plums went on doing what plums do.

“Ask me the one you want to ask,” Kyra said.

“I do not want to ask it.”

“You’ve wanted to ask it since November.”

“That is true and I still do not want to.” Val looked at their hands. “You said less than three, most times. On the spurts. That is the figure I cannot put down.”

“Why?”

“Because the band is four to six,” Val said. “Everywhere. Every man I have measured and every man I have heard measured. Four to six.”

Kyra did not say anything for a moment.

“So he was under it.”

“He was under it.”

“And the rest of him?”

And there it was, and Val had known it was coming since the second week of a bad November, and had decided in the intervening nine months exactly how she was going to do it, which was straight.

“Six inches,” she said. “Seven and a half with the glans out. An inch and a half across. From everything you have ever told me and the way your hands went when you told me, he was at the bottom of the range on every measure there is, and he is the smallest man in this conversation by a clear margin, and I have known it since a road in about eighteen ten.”

“Since eighteen ten.”

“You mentioned something on that road and I did the arithmetic without meaning to, and then I had it, and there was nowhere on this planet to put it.”

Kyra sat back in the chair with the bad leg and looked at the ceiling for a while, and Val let her, and did not fill it, and did not check.

“Ninety-three years,” Kyra said.

“Yes.”

“You have been carrying that for ninety-three years.”

“I have been carrying rather a lot for rather a long time and that one was not even the heaviest, which I appreciate is not a defense.”

“I’m not asking for one.” She brought her head back down. Her eyes had gone a little, out toward the rim, and Val told her, because she always did, and Kyra waved it off with two fingers without looking. “I want to say something and I want to get it right.”

“Take your time.”

“It didn’t matter.” Kyra said it slowly, the way she said things she had only just found. “That is the thing I have got, standing in a kitchen with my hands full of plums. It did not matter. Not one part of what went wrong in that house had anything to do with six inches, and I have spent three hundred years wondering whether I was the fault in it, and it turns out there are these numbers, and they are interesting, and they explain nothing whatsoever.”

“No,” Val said. “They don’t.”

“You’d know.”

“I would know. I have more of them than anybody alive and I have never once got a single true thing out of them about why anything happened.” Her voice did not move. “I can tell you what every man I have been with measured. I cannot tell you why I walked out to a pump house in the rain for four months and could not say his name in my own kitchen. The numbers are not for that. I have known it a long time and it has not stopped me taking them.”

“Why do you take them, then?”

Val was quiet for a second.

“Because the account goes to him,” she said. “Every time. You stand over a man and you do the work and then you hand him the whole of what it was like, because he was not there for it, and he takes it away with him and it is his.” She turned her cup round and left it. “The figures were the part nobody ever asked me for. So I kept those.”

The sun had got round to the back window and was coming in low and orange across the table and the jars and the upturned accounts, and it found the pale of Val’s hair where it had come loose over the afternoon and turned all of it the color of the fruit.

Kyra got up and came round the table.

“Nine,” Val said, to the tablecloth.

“What?”

“Aro. Once. There was one night I counted nine, and I have never seen it again, from him or from anybody.” She was going slightly pink and appeared to be entirely unaware of it. “About five tablespoons. Evenly distributed. It took the better part of a minute and I lay there and counted every one of them like a woman timing a train.”

Kyra made a sound.

“Don’t.”

“I’m not going to say anything.”

“You are going to say a great deal, you are simply arranging it first.”

“I am arranging it beautifully,” Kyra agreed, and got her hands into the loose of Val’s hair at the back and tipped her head up. “Nine.”

“Nine.”

“A pump man from four days east.”

“A pump man from four days east,” said Val, “and I want it noted that I did not know at the time that it was remarkable, and that I have therefore never once had the pleasure of being impressed by it in the moment, and that I have been mildly annoyed about it since before either of us had ever heard of this planet.”

They did not get to the other one.

It came up — it was always going to come up, it had been in the room from about the second jar — and Kyra got as far as the first syllable of the name and then stopped herself with her mouth still open, which Val had not seen her do in four hundred years.

“Not tonight,” Kyra said.

“No.”

“It’s not—”

“I know what you are doing,” Val said. “You are keeping it whole. It does not go in with the plums.”

“That’s it. That is exactly it.”

“Then we will do it properly, on a day we have set aside for it, and I will bring what I have.” Val stood up, and the light came with her, and had been up at her wrists for some while, and neither of them said a word about that either. “There is quite a lot of it.”

“I know there is.”

“You do not know how much.”

“No,” Kyra said. “I don’t.”

And they left the last four jars until morning, which in that house was a decision with a meaning attached, which both of them understood perfectly and neither of them said.

— end of chapter seven —

They set a day aside for it, which neither of them had done for anything in four hundred years, and which was therefore awkward from the moment they woke up.

It was a Sunday in the third week of November. Kyra had told Jo they were not available and had enjoyed saying it. Val had cleared the table and then, over the course of the morning, put three unrelated things back on it, and was now moving them around.

“Stop it.”

“I am not doing anything.”

“You have moved the salt four times,” Kyra said, and took it off the table and put it on the shelf behind her, and sat down. “There. Now you have to start.”

Val sat.

“I made notes,” she said.

“Of course you did.”

“I made them on Thursday and I read them last night and I put them in the stove this morning, and I want that on the record, because it was extremely difficult and nobody saw me do it.”

Kyra put her elbows on the table.

“Why’d you burn them?”

“Because I was going to read them to you,” Val said, “and that is not a conversation, that is a delivery, and you would have sat there and let me do it because you are kind, and afterward neither of us would have said anything true.”

“Start with the easy one,” Kyra said. “Do you keep going?”

“Always.”

“Always, as in—”

“Always. Every man, every time, since Aro.” Val had her hands flat on the table. “It did not occur to me for about sixty years that stopping was available. I thought the thing ran to its end and you stayed with it, the way you stay with a reading until the needle settles, and by the time I understood it was a choice I had already made it four hundred times without noticing.”

“That’s why the nine.”

“That is why the nine.” She said it without any performance at all. “He was exceptional and I did not stop, and I have spent a long time being quietly proud of a figure that I helped make. I would like you to know I am aware of that.”

“You caused a bit of your own result.”

“I caused a bit of my own result,” Val agreed, “at twenty-two, while counting it, and I had never once put an asterisk on it in my own head until about four months ago.”

Kyra got up and came back with two cups of what the grocer on Morrison was calling coffee, and did not sit down straight away.

“I didn’t know you could,” she said. “Keep going. At eighteen.”

“Nobody tells you.”

“Nobody tells you. The woman with the diagram covered the minute and covered the folds and did not spend one word on what happens after it starts, because after it starts the interesting part is over as far as a curriculum is concerned.” Kyra sat. “So for the first two years I stopped the moment he went. Every time. I thought that was the shape of it — you do the difficult part and then you take your hands off and let the man have his.”

“And then?”

“Deyn.” She turned the cup round. “Deyn told me. In about nine words, in the middle of it, in a language I was still bad at. He was the only one who ever told me anything about any of this and he was not even the same species.”

Val was very still.

“Say the nine words.”

“You can go on if you want to. Nobody says so.” Kyra shrugged one shoulder. “That was it. That was the whole of my instruction. Everything else I ever learned about a man’s body I worked out in the dark.”

“I have a question,” Val said, “and it is not a kind one, and I am asking it because I want you to ask me the same thing afterward.”

“Go on.”

“Did you ever stop because you were annoyed with him?”

Kyra laughed, once, and then did not answer for long enough that the answer arrived on its own.

“Once,” she said. “Emrin. Third year. We had had a thing about his mother in the afternoon, and that evening it went the whole way for once, and I took my hands off early and sat back and let it finish and told him afterward that it had been beautiful.” Her jaw moved. “And it probably was. I wasn’t watching.”

“Kyra.”

“I am not asking to be talked out of it. I did it and I knew I was doing it and I have never said it to anybody.” She looked up. “Your turn. Same question.”

“Sven,” Val said. “Repeatedly. Not from temper — from tiredness. I was in my sixties and he came three nights a week for years and there were a great many evenings when I did the whole of it properly and then stopped because I wanted to go to sleep.” She turned her cup a quarter turn. “And I have never decided whether that is a failure of love or simply what a long thing looks like, and I have had three hundred years and no view.”

“It’s what a long thing looks like.”

“You would say that.”

“I’d say it because it’s true,” Kyra said, and reached across and got two of Val’s fingers and kept them.

The rain had come on outside. Somebody went past with a handcart and swore at the corner.

“Right,” Kyra said.

“You don’t have to go first.”

“I do, actually, because if you go first I’ll spend the whole of mine arranging it against yours.” She let go of the fingers and put her hands in her lap, which Val had learned a long time ago was the tell. “Xander.”

Val did not say anything.

“One,” said Kyra. “At the most. Usually one. Twice it was none at all, because it did not take — it went all the way out, blue and folded and everything the way it is supposed to, and I did the work and it simply did not come, and he went back down and I sat there.”

“And when it did come?”

“One. Small. It did not go anywhere.” Kyra looked around for something and found nothing and gave up on it, which she almost never did. “There is no object. There isn’t one. It was less than a thing you would measure.”

“And you stopped.”

“I stopped.”

“Every time?”

“Every time,” Kyra said. “And I want to tell you why, because I have known why since about the second month and I have never once said it out loud.”

“Because if I kept going,” she said, “it would have gone on being small for longer.”

Val’s hands came off the table.

“He could not see it. He never could — that is the whole arrangement, he is not there, he comes back up and looks down at himself and whatever is on him is the only thing he is ever going to know. And there was almost nothing on him.” Kyra’s voice had gone very flat and very steady, which in her was the equivalent of somebody else shouting. “So I took my hands off early and I let it finish and then I sat on the edge of that bed and told him it had been extraordinary, and I was good at it, Val. I had had four years of practice at exactly that, and he believed every word.”

“You were protecting him.”

“I was managing him. Let’s use the right one.”

“Those are the same act performed by different people.”

“They are not, and you know they are not, and I have had four hundred years to work out which one I was doing.” She stopped. She got the rest of it out. “And the awful part is that it is the same thing I did with Emrin. Exactly the same. Take your hands off, make it end sooner, and then give him an account that is better than the thing was. I did that with two different men on two different worlds and I never once noticed it was a habit.”

Val was quiet for a long time.

“Six,” she said. “Seven, one night. And I kept going every single time.”

Kyra’s head came up.

“Every time.”

“Every time, because I keep going with everybody and always have, and I want to be very clear that it was not generosity and it was not love and it was not anything about him. It was method. He got the whole of my attention because everybody gets the whole of my attention and I have never known how to give less.”

“Six to seven.”

“Six to seven.”

And Kyra Davan put both hands flat on the table and let out a breath she appeared to have been holding since August.

“Oh, thank God,” she said.

“That’s it. That is it, isn’t it. You kept going and I did not.” She was talking fast now, which she did when something had let go. “It was never him and it was never me, it was two women doing two different things with their hands, and I have spent a century thinking that man came apart in your bed and lay there like a dead fish in mine, and it was technique.”

“Kyra.”

“It was technique. Val, I could have had—” She stopped. “All right. That is enough of that. But it was technique.”

Val was looking at the table.

She had known this was coming for about ninety seconds and had spent all ninety of them trying to find a road round it, and there was not one, because there never is with arithmetic. That was the entire trouble with arithmetic and always had been. It did not care what you had spent the morning hoping.

“No,” she said.

“No what?”

“It is not technique.”

“Don’t do this.”

“I have to do this and you know I have to, and you would not forgive me in a year if I didn’t.” Val put one finger on the table. “The band is four to six. Every man. Every time. Four to six, on two worlds, across four hundred years of looking.”

“Val—”

“Keeping going is worth one.”

The rain did what it was doing.

“One,” Val said again. “That is the entire value of it. It takes a man from six to seven. It took Aro from eight to nine on one night in the warm season and it has never taken anybody anywhere else. If you had kept your hands on that man from the first of it to the last of it every night for seven months, you would have got two.”

Kyra did not move.

“You got one,” Val said. “The bottom of the ordinary range is four. There are three missing and stopping does not account for a single one of them.”

Nobody said anything for a while. The handcart came back the other way.

“You could have let me have it,” Kyra said, eventually.

“Yes.”

“For a week, even. You could have let me have it for a week and told me in the spring.”

“Yes,” Val said. “I thought about it while you were talking. I got about as far as the spring and then I understood that you would find it yourself in about four months, because you are not stupid and the figure is not complicated, and you would find it on your own in a kitchen with nobody in it.” Her voice did not move and her hand was shaking slightly, which Kyra could see and did not mention. “And then you would have had it alone. And you would have known that I did the sum first and said nothing, and that is the one thing I have promised you I would never do again.”

Kyra put her face in her hands for a moment.

“That’s a good reason.”

“It is the only one I had.”

“It’s a good reason.” She took her hands down. Her eyes had gone right out to the rim and neither of them said a word about it. “All right. So what is the answer? Because you have got one. You have had it since August and you did not burn it with the notes.”

Val turned her cup round once and left it.

“He never asked me a single question about myself,” she said.

“What?”

“In seven months. Not what I worked on, not who I trained under, not whether I was any relation to Vaedom Sorin of the Assembly, which is the question I had been answering since I was nine years old and which every person I have ever met has asked me inside an hour.” She looked up. “He came over to a table because a woman had read the same page three times. And for seven months every question that man asked me was about the four feet in front of him.”

“And with me—”

“With you he ran the whole of it.” Val said it as gently as she was able, which was not very. “You told me yourself, on a ruled sheet, about a hundred years ago. The hand that went near your arm and did not arrive. The question about your Sixthdays. The offer to walk you back, made at precisely the moment you could decline it without anybody being embarrassed. You watched him do the entire apparatus and you admired the work, and you were right to, because it was good work.”

“He was performing.”

“He was working,” said Val. “The whole time. And a man who is working cannot go anywhere, Kyra. That is the one thing that arrangement will not let him do. He has to stop being in the room, and he could not stop being in the room with you, because with you he was never once off duty.”

Kyra sat back and looked at the ceiling of a rented house in Portland for a long time.

“So I got the show,” she said.

“You got the show.”

“A hundred years and a ruled sheet, and I worked out that he had a calendar, and what I actually had was a man being excellent at me for seven months.” Her throat moved. “And you got him.”

“I got him,” Val said, “and I did not notice, and I have spent four centuries filing him as a man who ran a routine on a woman in a chair at a materials table. I was wrong. That is my half of it, and I am not going to pretend mine is the light one. Yours is worse and mine is not nothing.”

Neither of them said the other thing.

It sat in the room for a while, the way it had sat in rooms for three hundred years, and it was not avoidance and both of them knew that too. Two women had gone to that man in the same year and each had come away with a daughter, a fortnight apart, and there was no country on either world with a word for what that made them to each other.

“Not today,” Kyra said.

“No.”

“I am not putting them in with this. They are not a consequence of a measurement.”

“They are not,” Val said, “and if you had suggested otherwise I would have said something I could not take back,” and that was the end of it for that year.

The rain eased off about four and neither of them had moved.

At some point Kyra had come round the table and got into the chair with her, which was not a thing that chair was built for and which they had established some years ago it would nonetheless take, and they sat there wedged and uncomfortable with Kyra’s legs over the arm and her hair in Val’s mouth.

“I’m not sorry I stopped,” Kyra said, into her collarbone.

“No.”

“I want that said. I stopped because I was being kind to him and I would do it again, and it turns out it made almost no difference, and both of those are true.”

“Both of those are true.”

“You’d have kept going.”

“I would have kept going,” Val said, “because I would not have thought of it, and you thought of it, and that is a thing you can do that I have never been able to do once in four hundred years.”

Kyra was quiet.

“That is the nicest thing you have ever said to me.”

“It is not remotely the nicest thing I have ever said to you and I intend to prove it later,” said Val, “when we are both out of this chair, which is going to be a considerable undertaking and which I have not yet worked out.”

They got out of the chair eventually. It took some doing and involved Kyra putting a hand on the wall.

The light had gone that flat pewter color it goes in Portland in the hour before dark, and the room smelled of coffee that neither of them had drunk.

Kyra sat on the end of the table with her heels against the leg.

“Can I ask you something about us now,” she said, “instead of about four dead men and a live one?”

“Xander is not dead.”

“Xander is four hundred years and a galaxy away and I am counting him as scenery. Val. Can I ask you?”

“Ask me.”

“Did you ever count me?”

Val, who was standing at the window with her back to the room, put her forehead against the cold of the glass for a second.

“Yes.”

“Val.”

“Once. Early. I would put it at the second winter, in that appalling room with the shutter that would not close, and I want to state before you say anything that it was not a success.”

Kyra was grinning at her back and Val could hear it.

“What happened?”

“There was nothing to count,” Val said. “That is what happened. I went in with a method and the method had no purchase on any part of it. There is no emergence and no window and nothing arrives at intervals, and at some point I understood that I had brought a ruler to a river, and I put it down.”

“A ruler to a river.”

“Do not enjoy that as much as you are enjoying it.”

“I am going to enjoy it for a hundred years,” said Kyra.

“It was the first time I understood it was a different thing,” Val said, turning round. “Not a version of the other thing done with a woman. A different thing, with no clock in it.”

“That’s the part.”

“Which part?”

“The clock.” Kyra pushed off the table and came and stood in front of her. “Do you know that every single time I was ever with a man I was on a timer? A minute. From the moment it came out. A minute to find the turn and get the pressure right and not be frightened, and if I did not, that was that for a day.”

“I know exactly how long a minute is.”

“I know you do. I am telling you what it was like for somebody who doesn’t.” She put two fingers flat on Val’s sternum. “And then a day comes and you are in a bad room with a broken shutter and there is no minute. There is no minute, there is no posture, nobody has to be on their back, nothing has to happen in an order, and if it goes wrong you just — carry on. Or don’t. Or start again in ten minutes, which you cannot do with a man, you have to wait a whole day, which I have always thought was the single stupidest thing about the entire arrangement.”

“It is not stupid, it is a refractory constraint.”

“It is stupid, Val.”

“It is a stupid refractory constraint,” Val conceded, “and I have thought so since about sixteen fifty.”

“Here is the one nobody says,” Kyra said, after a moment. “With a man, one of you isn’t there.”

Val did not answer.

“That is it, isn’t it. The best thing that can happen to him is that he leaves, and you stand over it and do the work, and then afterward you tell him what it looked like, because he was not there to see. It is the most intimate thing in the world and there is only ever one person in the room.”

“Yes,” said Val.

“And with you there’s two.”

“There are two.”

“Every time. Both of us, the whole way, watching the entire thing.” Kyra’s voice had dropped. “I did not know that was available. For seventy-seven years on that planet I did not know it was a thing that could be had, and then it turned out it was just — sitting there. Being ordinary. In a room with a bad shutter.”

“I envied them,” Val said.

Kyra’s head came up.

“The men. All of them.” Val had gone still and precise, which was how the difficult ones came out. “They got to go. That is what the arrangement gives him — he gets to stop holding himself together for a while, entirely, in front of somebody, and come back afterward and be told what he was like. I watched four men do that and I stood over every one of them with my hands steady and I envied them, and it took me most of my life to put a word on it.”

“Val.”

“It is not an admirable thing to envy.”

“It is the least surprising thing you have ever said to me.” Kyra got hold of the front of her collar with two fingers and did not pull. “You have never been able to put yourself down. Not once, in four hundred years, in front of anybody.”

“That is not true anymore.”

“No,” said Kyra. “It isn’t. That is why I am not saying it as an accusation.”

“We were bad at it,” Val said.

“We were dreadful at it.”

“For the better part of a century we were dreadful at it, and it was entirely because we each brought the wrong habit into the room and neither of us noticed.” Val’s mouth had gone crooked. “I kept going. Always. Past the end of things, past the point where you had finished, because in my head the shape of it was that you stayed until the needle settled, and it did not occur to me that a person might simply be done and want to lie there.”

“You were very thorough.”

“I was relentless and you were too polite to say so for ninety years.”

“I wasn’t polite. I was doing my own version.” Kyra let go of the collar. “I stopped early. All the time. Every time I thought you had had enough or I had taken too long or you might be tired, I took my hands off and made it end tidily, which is exactly what I did to Emrin and exactly what I did to Xander, and I did it to you for about a century without once asking whether you wanted it.”

“You were being kind.”

“I was managing you,” Kyra said. “We agreed on the word this afternoon and I am not going to soften it now that it is mine.”

“Who said it first?” Val asked.

“You don’t remember?”

“I remember perfectly. I want to hear you say it.”

“That is a filthy trick and you have been doing it all afternoon.” Kyra was laughing. “I did. Of course I did. We were in the room over the saddler’s and I said would you stop doing that, and you went the color of a sheet, and I had to spend twenty minutes explaining that I did not mean stop, I meant stop doing the one specific thing, and you sat on the end of that bed with your hands in your lap like a woman waiting for a verdict.”

“I thought you were ending it.”

“I know you did.”

“I sat there and constructed the whole of the rest of my life in about four seconds,” Val said, “and it was not good, and then you said the second half of the sentence.”

“And what did you feel?”

Val considered it honestly, which took a moment.

“Relief,” she said. “Enormous relief. Because it meant there was a right answer and you had it and I could stop guessing. I had been guessing for ninety years and I had never once thought to ask, because asking would have meant admitting I did not already know.”

“So now we ask,” Kyra said.

“Now we ask.”

“Out loud. In words. Like enormous idiots.” She was working her way closer without appearing to move, which was a thing she had been doing since the first winter and which Val had never once failed to notice and had never once mentioned.

“Nobody is ahead,” she said.

“No.”

“That is the thing I would want written down, if we wrote anything down. There is no ledger. I do not owe you one and you do not owe me two, and if either of us ever starts keeping it we should burn the house.”

“You are describing my notes.”

“I am describing your notes,” Kyra agreed, “and you burned them this morning, and I have not stopped thinking about it since ten o’clock.”

“I burned them for the conversation.”

“You burned them for me.”

“I burned them for you,” Val said.

And Kyra kissed her, slowly and without any hurry in it at all, the way she had been kissing her since a hut on a mountain, and Val’s hands went up into the loose of her hair and stayed there, and the pewter light came in off the window and found the pale of her and did what it always did.

“Upstairs,” Val said, some while later, against her mouth.

“You planned this.”

“I did not plan any part of today and I have not planned a single thing since August, and I have been meaning to raise it with you, because it has been going on for some months and I do not entirely know what to do about it.”

“I know it’s been going on for some months.”

“Of course you do.”

“I’ve known since the morning you said it to the drawers.” Kyra had her forehead against Val’s and was not moving. “I was not going to say anything. You would have started planning it again out of embarrassment.”

“That is almost certainly true.”

“Upstairs,” Kyra agreed.

And there was no minute, and no posture, and nothing that had to happen in any order at all, and nobody counted anything.

— end of chapter eight —

The Trail ran eight hundred feet and cost a quarter at every door along it, and by the middle of August there was not a person on the east side who had not been down it at least twice and formed a view.

Jo Selby had been four times. She had views about all of it: that the Streets of Cairo were a swindle, that the diving elk was worse than a swindle, and that anybody who paid to see a man be shot out of anything deserved what they got.

“And the babies,” she said, over the plates, “which I will not go into again.”

Val put her fork down.

“The what?”

There was a building on the Trail with a high roof and ten incubators in it behind plate glass, and inside the incubators there were infants who had been born too early, and the papers in May had called the machines artificial mothers and had said so admiringly.

A quarter got you in. The quarter paid for the doctors and the nurses and the milk, and the parents were charged nothing at all, which was the part Val could not put down once she had picked it up.

They went on a Tuesday because Tuesday was quieter.

It was very hot in there and it smelled of carbolic and warm metal, and the nurses moved about behind the glass at the pace of people who are being watched and have decided not to mind.

The infants were extremely small. Nobody warned you about that, and the notices outside had gone out of their way not to say it: two and a half pounds is not a small baby, it is a different order of object, and the whole room was quiet in the way a church is quiet, and a man in a straw hat kept saying would you look at that to nobody.

Val read every card on the wall, in order, twice.

Kyra did not read anything.

There was a woman next to them at the glass with a baby of her own on her shoulder, a big one, four months at least and furious about the heat, and she jogged it and looked in at the machines and said, comfortably, to nobody in particular:

“Imagine leaving them.”

She did not mean anything by it. She meant the parents who had handed their children to a showman on an amusement street, and she was wrong about that too, and there was no version of the afternoon in which anybody was going to explain it to her.

Kyra turned and walked out.

Val stayed for a moment, because leaving immediately would have been a thing somebody noticed, and then paid for two pamphlets she did not want and went after her.

They got the whole way home without saying anything, which took the better part of an hour and two streetcars.

It was Kyra who went first, standing in her own kitchen with her hat still on.

“He told me he couldn’t.”

Val did not move.

“Alexander. He told me, in about the third month, lying on his back in that room with the bad window, that he could not father a child. Not that he did not want one. That he could not.” She took the hat off and did not put it anywhere. “And I believed him, and I went on believing him, and I have believed him for four hundred years, and I have never once asked you whether he said it to you too.”

“He said it to me in the second month,” Val said.

“In what words?”

“In exactly those words. I cannot father a child. Flat, once, not looking at me, and then he changed the subject, and I let him.”

Kyra sat down on the chair with the bad leg.

“A Sethal man does not say that,” Val said. “That is the first thing. It is not a sentence anybody volunteers. It is not in the class of things that get said, and it was not said in a difficult moment, and it was not said to get anything, and that is why it worked on both of us. It was the strangest thing I had ever been told by a man in a bed and I filed it as true because nobody lies in that direction.”

“Nobody lies in that direction,” Kyra agreed.

“He was not lying. I want that established before we go any further, because I have had four centuries with it and I am as certain of that as I am of anything.” Val put her hands on the back of a chair. “Somebody told him. Somebody got to that man at some point and told him what he was, and he believed it, and he handed it on to us exactly as he had received it.”

“Who tells a man a thing like that?”

“Somebody with a reason,” said Val, “and no record of it anywhere, which I noticed at the time and did nothing about, and which I have thought about approximately once a year since.”

She went and got the box and did not open it, and put it on the table and sat down in front of it, which was how she started anything she had been carrying.

“Three assays,” she said. “Everybody on that planet is assayed at fourteen. Everybody. It is the most ordinary piece of paper a person has, and there are three of them, and every one of his had been waived.”

“Waived.”

“Separately. Each one waived on the grounds that another institution held the other two.” Val’s voice had gone entirely level. “Which is the tidiest thing I have ever seen on a form, and a thing no clerk would ever catch, because each waiver is correct on its own and only the three together are impossible.”

“You found that at the time.”

“I found it a hundred and sixty years later, in a chair, with nothing else to do.” She turned the box a quarter turn and left it. “And the part I have never said out loud is this. Under what we have got — under the way it actually works — you cannot test a man on his own. There is no assay of a man by himself. It does not exist, because the thing you would be testing does not exist until a woman has finished a minute’s work on him.”

Kyra looked up.

“So nobody ever tested him.”

“Nobody ever tested him. Somebody told him. And the one document that could have told him whether the sentence in his mouth was true is the document that is not there.”

The kettle did what kettles do. Neither of them got up.

“A fortnight,” Val said.

“What?”

“Between them. Between the two of them, at the start. I have known the figure since they were born and I have never once known what to do with it.” She had her fingers spread on the table. “And I know now, because of the sheet, and because of what the lockout means, and because I have spent nine months with all of it laid out in front of me. A fortnight is not a coincidence, Kyra. A fortnight is the shortest it could possibly have been.”

Kyra went very still.

“Say that in a way I can hold.”

“He could not have done it any closer together than he did.” Val said it plainly. “Not if he had wanted to and not if he had planned it. The body will not allow it. We read that sheet in the room above the seed merchant and we saw a man managing two women with a calendar, and we were right about the calendar, and we were wrong about who was keeping it.”

“He wasn’t keeping it.”

“He was not keeping it. It was keeping him.”

Kyra put her head back and looked at the ceiling for a long time.

“A hundred years I have had that sheet in my mouth,” she said. “Two columns and seven months of Fifthdays and not one night where he would have had to choose. I have used it on myself perhaps four hundred times.”

“I know.”

“And the whole of it was a man’s body doing the only thing it could do.”

“A great deal of it,” said Val. “Not all of it. He still chose the Fifthdays and he still did not tell either of us about the other, and I will not hand you a version where that costs him nothing. But the shape you have been reading as cunning is not cunning. It is a constraint, and I have checked it against everything I have, and it holds.”

Later, with the lamp lit and the heat gone out of the day, Kyra said the other thing.

“What did you tell him?”

“Afterward?”

“Afterward. When he asked. He did ask.”

“He asked every time.” Val was at the window with her back to the room. “And I told him. In order, from the start, to the shade, without leaving anything out and without improving any of it, because that is what I do with a physical fact and because it had not occurred to me that there was another way of doing it.”

“And?”

“And I liked it,” Val said.

She said it to the glass.

“I have never told anybody that either. He asked me a question that only I could answer and he sat there and took the whole of the answer, and I have spent my life being asked for readings by people who wanted the short version, and he wanted all of it, and I gave him all of it, and I liked it more than I liked most of the rest of it.”

“Val.”

“I am aware of what that is. You need not point at it.”

She turned round to say the rest of it and did not say the rest of it, because Kyra had her head back against the chair and the lamp was behind her, and it was doing the thing it did — taking the dark of her hair down to almost nothing and then finding the copper in it at the one place above the ear, the way every light on two worlds had found it and always would.

“I told him it was fine,” Kyra said.

Val turned round.

“Every time. I put my face on and I told him it was fine and I made it sound like something, because he could not see and I was not going to hand a man his own body back to him in that condition.” Her hands were open on her knees. “So he had two of us, in the same seven months, telling him two different things about the same body, and neither of them was a lie, and he had no way on that world to put them side by side.”

“No.”

“And he went to his grave — ” She stopped. “He did not go to his grave. He is alive. That is worse and I will not think about it tonight.”

“There is a thing I have not said,” Val said, “and I have been deciding for about an hour whether to say it tonight or in a week, and I have decided tonight, because a week is how I used to do it.”

“Then say it.”

“You have had two answers your whole life. You froze because you were eighteen and did not know what you were doing, or you froze because it was him. Those are the two you have been turning over since before there was a road up that hill.”

“They are the only two there are.”

“There is a third,” said Val, “and I do not think anybody ever told you it existed.”

Kyra did not say anything.

“Completing it is not the same as it taking. It is a likelihood and it has never been anything else. A woman can do every part of it correctly, inside the minute, with the turn held the whole way, and it simply does not take, and nothing about that is a failure of hers.” Val’s voice did not move at all. “Some proportion of those returns were nobody’s fault. Not yours, not his, not anybody’s. I do not know what proportion and I never will and neither will you, and it is not nothing, and you have never once had it in the room while you were doing the arithmetic on yourself.”

Kyra sat with that for a long while.

“The woman with the diagram never said that.”

“No.”

“Forty minutes and a diagram and she never said the word sometimes once.” Kyra’s eyes had gone out to the rim and she let them. “How long have you had that?”

“Since I was about twenty.”

“And you didn’t—”

“I did not know you needed it,” Val said. “That is the whole of my defense and it is a poor one. You never said the first two out loud until last autumn, and I have had a piece of ordinary mechanism in my pocket for the better part of four centuries that would have taken a third of the weight off you, and I did not know, and I am telling you now, in a kitchen, four hundred years late.”

The lamp did what lamps do. Out on the street somebody’s dog had opinions about somebody’s cart.

“They were very small,” Kyra said.

“They were.”

“I keep seeing the one on the end. She had her whole hand round the edge of the blanket and there was nobody in that room who belonged to her.” Kyra rubbed her face. “And there was a woman standing next to me with a great fat healthy thing on her shoulder saying imagine leaving them, and I wanted to take her by the arm and tell her the truth about herself and everybody she has ever met, and instead I walked out and got on a streetcar.”

“I know.”

“Do you think about it?”

Val was quiet for a moment.

“Every day,” she said. “Not for long. That is the arrangement I came to, and it took me about eighty years to come to it, and I am not going to describe it to you tonight because I am not sure it would survive being described.”

“All right.”

“Ask me again in the winter.”

“I will,” said Kyra, and did not, for three years.

— end of chapter nine —

She told Kyra in March, which was the change, because in any of the three centuries before it she would have carried the thing round in her own chest until it was over and then mentioned it in November as a completed fact.

“My father is four hundred and six this year,” she said, at the table, with the accounts open in front of her and her thumb keeping a column.

Kyra put the iron down.

“Val.”

“I am not asking for anything. I am telling you in advance because I have worked out that telling you afterward is a thing I do to keep the shape of it in my own hands, and I would rather not do that anymore.” She did not look up from the column. “That is all. You may go back to the shirt.”

Kyra did not go back to the shirt.

She did not ask anything else for nine days, which was its own kind of restraint and cost her a good deal, and when she did ask she asked the smallest possible question.

“Why that number?”

“Teor Casse,” said Val.

“The Casse who did the water at Ebren?”

“The same. He lived to be four hundred and six, and everybody said so, and it was said the way people say a thing that is remarkable and not impossible.” Val had the notebook out now and was not writing in it. “It is the only figure I have. In seventy-seven years on that planet nobody ever told me what a life was, because nobody tells you that, because it is not a question anybody asks out loud.”

“So you took the one you had.”

“I took the one I had.”

“It is not a lifespan,” she said, a moment later, because she could not leave it.

“No.”

“It is one man. It is a single observation with nothing either side of it, and I could not publish it, and if a student brought it to me in a corridor I would send her away and tell her to come back with forty.” Val put her hand flat on the notebook. “I have known that for three hundred years. I have known it the entire time I have been counting toward it. And I am going to mark it anyway, and I want you to understand that I am doing something I would fail anybody else for doing, with my eyes open, on purpose.”

“Because you need a day.”

“Because I need a day,” Val said, “and there is not going to be one, and this is the nearest thing to one that exists.”

What she did in the end was nothing that anybody watching would have been able to name.

She worked in the morning. She went to the shop and settled a quarter’s books with Jo and argued with her about a stamped invoice. She came back and ate what was in front of her.

And in the evening she took the notebook out to the back step and sat there with it shut on her knee until it was too dark to have written in it anyway, and then came in and put it away.

Kyra, from the kitchen window, watched the whole of it and did not go out.

“I did not know what to put,” Val said afterward.

“There isn’t anything to put.”

“There is a great deal to put. That is not the difficulty. The difficulty is that every sentence I constructed was in the wrong tense and I could not get any of them out of it.” She sat down. “My father died this year. He did not. My father is dead. I do not know that. My father would be four hundred and six — would be, as though something had interrupted it, and nothing has interrupted it. He is a man going about his business at a distance nobody on this planet has a figure for, and the only thing that has happened is that I have run out of the number I was using.”

Kyra came and sat on the edge of the table.

“So you grieved him for nothing.”

“I grieved him correctly,” Val said, “and for nothing. Both. That is the whole of the trouble and I have not found a way round it in nine months.”

“He embraced you in front of the Assembly,” Kyra said.

“Seven of them.”

“Seven members of the Assembly, and you told me about it twice in the first year I knew you and never again, and I have thought about it more than you would find reasonable.”

“Why?”

“Because I could not work out whether you were pleased or appalled, and it took me about forty years to understand that it was both, and that the two of you had no other arrangement available.” Kyra shrugged one shoulder. “My father shouted. Yours arranged things and did not tell you, and both of them thought they were doing it for us, and one of them was easier to be angry with.”

“Mine was not easier.”

“No,” said Kyra. “Mine was.”

It was a long time before either of them said anything else.

The light had gone and the lamp was not lit, and what came in off the street found the pale of Val’s hair where it had come down over the day, and Kyra looked at that for a while and then said the thing she had been carrying since a kitchen three years earlier.

“It is the winter.”

Val did not pretend not to understand.

“It is August.”

“It is three winters past the winter, and I have not asked once, and I want the arrangement.” Kyra’s voice was perfectly level. “You said you were not sure it would survive being described. I have decided that I do not care whether it survives.”

Val sat with it for a while.

“I do not imagine her,” she said.

“What?”

“Genie. I do not imagine her. Not older, not in a room, not doing anything. I have not once in four hundred years allowed myself to construct a picture of my daughter as she would be now, and it is not because it hurts.”

“Then why?”

“Because I would be manufacturing evidence,” Val said.

The room did not do anything.

“I have one true image of her and it is a stowage floor and she is thirty-nine years old and she has her hand up because somebody has just said something to her. That is data. It happened and I was there and it is accurate.” Her voice had not moved a particle. “And if I sit here and build her a face at three hundred and forty, I will have made something up, and the made-up thing will be in the same place in my head as the true one, and within about a century I will not be able to tell you which is which. So I do not do it. I have not done it since the second year and I am not going to start.”

Kyra did not say anything for a long moment.

“Oh, Val,” she said.

“I am not asking to be talked out of it.”

“I am not going to talk you out of it. It is the most you thing I have ever heard and I have heard a great many.” She got down off the table and crouched in front of the chair, which she did perhaps twice a century. “I do the other one.”

“The other one.”

“I make her up constantly.” Kyra said it without a scrap of apology. “Every year. I have given Kal a house and a bad neighbor and a thing she does with her hands that she got from her grandmother, and I have had her take up the water work and give it up again and take it up a second time, and I have married her off twice and unmarried her once, and I have no idea whether any of it is within a thousand miles of true.”

“And that does not trouble you.”

“It troubles me enormously. I do it anyway.” She put her hands on Val’s knees. “Because the alternative is that I have a girl of thirty-nine standing on a floor, and she stands there forever, and nobody ever comes and gets her.”

“Four hundred years,” Val said.

“Four hundred years.”

“Four hundred years, in the same house, doing the exact opposite thing about the same subject, and neither of us has ever once said so.”

“No.”

“Which of us is right?”

“Neither of us is right,” said Kyra. “That is what I have got, after all of it. There is no correct way to do this because it is not a thing that is supposed to be done, and we are each protecting something, and mine is her and yours is the record, and I would not swap and neither would you.”

Val put her hand over one of the hands on her knee and left it there.

“Tell me one,” she said.

“One what?”

“One of the made-up ones. About Kal.”

Kyra looked up at her.

“You will hate it.”

“I will hate it. Tell me one anyway.”

“And you will not do the thing where you point out that I have no basis for any of it.”

“Kyra,” said Val, “I have just sat on a step for two hours holding a shut notebook. I am in no position to be rigorous about anybody.”

So Kyra told her one, there in the dark, with her hands still on the woman’s knees.

It was a small one and it was not about anything: Kal at about two hundred, in a corridor, arguing with somebody about a schedule and winning, and then going out afterward and being unaccountably pleased with herself and telling nobody. It took about a minute to tell. Kyra did not improve it, which for her was an act of considerable discipline.

When she had finished, Val did not say anything for a while.

“That is not evidence,” she said.

“No.”

“It is not evidence and I am going to have it in my head for the rest of my life, and I would like it noted that you have just put something in there that I cannot get out.”

“Noted,” said Kyra.

“I am not sure whether I am grateful.”

“You will be in about nine years,” she said, and Val laughed once, in the dark, which was not a sound the month had produced before.

— end of chapter ten —

The woman in Astoria who had owned the house and had not cared about it died in February, and her son cared about it a great deal, and by the end of March there was a board in the yard.

Fourteen years. It was the second longest either of them had been in one building on this planet and Val had the first one in a box with a deed in it.

Kyra went round the rooms twice on the last morning, which she had also done on the first, and came back to the kitchen and stood with her hands on the table.

“Don’t,” she said.

“I have not said anything.”

“You are about to say something about a table.”

“I was going to say that the cart comes at two,” said Val, which was true and was not all of it.

The house on Clinton was smaller and better built and had a stair that turned, and Val took the lease on the whole house in her own name and then let a room at the back to a Miss Anderson for two dollars and seventy-five cents a week.

Kyra put the paper down after reading it twice.

“You are charging me rent.”

“I am charging Miss Anderson rent.”

“Val.”

“A woman who lets a room and does not take money for it is a woman with something else going on, and every neighbor on a street can smell that inside a season.” Val had her hands folded. “There will be a rent book. It will be in this house and nowhere else and no government will ever see it, and it will be the most ordinary object in the building, and if anybody ever asks either of us what we are to each other there will be a book with figures in it that answers before we have to.”

“And it goes back in your pocket on the Sunday.”

“It goes back in the house on the Sunday,” said Val. “There is only one pocket.”

Kyra took it up on the stairs that evening, which was where she took up everything.

“Cousins for fourteen years.”

“Cousins by marriage.”

“Cousins by marriage for fourteen years and now I am a lodger.” She was two steps below and had her arms folded and was enjoying herself and was also not entirely enjoying herself, which was the form that argument had always taken. “It is further off. You have moved us one further off, and you did it while I was carrying a crate.”

“It is the most distant relation two women can have and still share a roof,” Val agreed. “That is the entire recommendation.”

“It is the only recommendation.”

“It is a sufficient one.”

“A cousin stays,” Kyra said.

Val stopped with her hand on the rail.

“A cousin is somebody’s. She turns up and she is in the family and there is no particular day on which she stops being in it.” Kyra’s voice had not risen and that was how Val knew it had stopped being the old argument. “A boarder can be given notice. That is what a boarder is. It is a person who can be told on a Friday that the room is wanted, and everybody on this street will understand it perfectly and nobody will think a thing about it.”

“Nobody is giving anybody notice.”

“I know that. I have known it since a mountain and I am not frightened of it and I am not asking you to reassure me.” She came up one step. “I am telling you what the shape of it is, because you chose the shape and you chose it for good reasons and I do not think you looked at that part of it, and I have never once in four hundred years known you to want a thing looked at less than you want this looked at.”

Val did not say anything for a moment.

“No,” she said. “I did not look at that part of it.”

“Well. Now you have.”

The cart came the next Tuesday with the last of it and a thing on it that Kyra had not put there.

She stood in the yard on Hawthorne and looked at it for a while with the carter waiting.

“That is the table.”

“It is.”

“That table belonged to a dead woman in Astoria and then to her son, who wanted nine dollars for the whole kitchen and would not break it up.”

“He would not break it up,” Val agreed, “so I bought the kitchen.”

Kyra put her hand flat on the top of it, out there in the yard, in front of a man holding a horse.

“Where is the rest of the kitchen?”

“I sold it in the afternoon to a man on Belmont for seven, and I want it understood that I came out of the arrangement two dollars down and that I have entered every part of it in the accounts under a heading I am not going to read to you.”

It went in under the window where the light came round in the afternoon, and by the third week the house smelled of the new place instead of the old one, and neither of them ever said anything else about it at all.

That was the year the rule died properly, and both of them knew the date.

Not a key. Not a room in anybody’s house. Not a place at a table that is laid for us. Made in Boston in seventeen twenty-five by a woman who had watched what happens when you keep something, repaired in nine words on the Missouri a hundred and twenty-four years later, broken again at a land office, and now finished off in a yard on Clinton over nine dollars and a carter’s time.

“You could have left it,” Kyra said, much later, in the dark.

“I could have left it.”

“Say why you didn’t.”

“Because you put your hands on it on the first morning in ninety-five and said it was a good table,” Val said, “and I have been looking at that table for fourteen years and thinking about the morning, and I was not going to hand it to a man on Belmont for seven dollars.”

The rent was due on Mondays.

It was paid on Mondays for one week, and after that it was paid on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and once memorably on the following Monday, and every single time it was handed over with an expression of such transparent innocence that Val took to writing the date in the book without looking up.

“You are doing it on purpose.”

“I am doing it in character.”

“You are doing it because you have worked out that I will not say anything.”

“I am doing it,” said Kyra, “because there is a woman in this house who owns a rent book, and she has been waiting fourteen years for a document she is allowed to be annoyed about, and I am not going to deprive her of it.”

Val wrote the date down and did not look up and did not manage her face in time, and Kyra saw every bit of it from the doorway and said nothing whatsoever, which was worse.

In November the notice about the enumeration went round again, nine years after the last one, and Val read it standing in the hall with her coat still on.

“April,” she said.

“Already.”

“Already. And a man is going to come to this door and write down a landlady and a boarder, in a house neither of us was in nine years ago, on a street that is not the street, with an age I am about to have to pick again.” She hung the coat up. “And then we are going to change it.”

Kyra came out of the kitchen with a cloth in her hand.

“Change what?”

“This.” Val gestured at the hall, the stair, the rent book on the shelf where it lived. “Before he comes, not after. Whatever is on that schedule is the thing that lasts, and I am not putting a rent book on it.”

“That gives you four months.”

“It gives me four months,” Val agreed, “and a house to find, and I have priced the whole undertaking and I do not care for the figure.”

They walked up to the river on a Sunday in December because Kyra wanted to see whether the new bridge was going to be as ugly as the last one, and it was raining in the way it does there in December, and about halfway along Kyra stopped and looked at the distance still to go and said nothing at all in a very particular way.

“Not far now,” said Val.

“It is a mile.”

“Not far now.”

And Kyra put her hands in her pockets and went on, in the rain, on the east bank, beside a woman she was currently paying two dollars and seventy-five cents a week to live with.

Later, out of the wet, with the fire going and her hair down her back drying in front of it and the copper coming up in it the way it did when there was anything at all to find it with, Kyra said: “Sisters.”

Val looked up.

“Next year. When you change it.” Kyra did not turn round. “Sisters.”

“I have not said what I am changing it to.”

“No,” said Kyra. “I have.”

And Val sat with the accounts open in front of her and did not argue, which in that house in that year was very close to a yes, and Kyra picked the hem back up and let her have it.

— end of chapter eleven —

Kyra found the house, which had not happened in four hundred years, and she found it by walking past it eleven days running on her way to nowhere in particular and then standing across the street from it on the twelfth.

“That one.”

“You have not been inside it.”

“I have not been inside it.”

“It may have a stove that does not draw and a landlord in Astoria and a gutter on the north side.”

“It may,” Kyra agreed. “That one.”

And Val, who had a method for this and had used it in nine cities and could have produced four objections before the end of the street, looked at the side of her face and did not produce any of them.

The trouble was the name and they both knew it before the lease was signed.

“Sisters have one surname,” Val said.

“They do.”

“And you cannot be Miller, for the reason I gave you in ninety-five, which has not improved with age.” She had the directory open and was not reading it. “One Miller is a woman with a piece of ground in another county. Two Millers is a family, and a family has parents, and parents have a place they came from.”

Kyra waited, because she had learned what it looked like when that woman had already done the work and was walking herself up to the answer out loud for the courtesy of it.

“So I stop,” Val said.

Kyra put her cup down.

“You cannot stop. The deed is Martha Miller.”

“The deed is Martha Miller of the county of Washington,” said Val, “and it will go on being Martha Miller of the county of Washington for as long as that piece of ground exists, and she will pay what she owes on it every year through a man in Hillsboro who has never seen her face and never will.”

“And in Portland?”

“In Portland she stops.”

Val closed the directory.

“There is one Martha Miller on one federal schedule in this city, at an address that has been sold, in a house that now has a family of six in it. If I stop being her, that entry has nothing on either side of it. It does not lead anywhere and nothing leads to it. It becomes a woman who was in a house for one afternoon in nineteen hundred and then was not in the world at all.”

“An orphan.”

“An orphan,” Val agreed, “and orphans cannot be followed, and I have wanted one of those for a hundred and sixty years and have never been able to afford it.”

What it cost was that she could never again be Martha Miller anywhere a person could see her.

She said that out loud too, at the table, once, with her hands flat.

“It is the name I was given in a marriage register in Missouri and it is the name a woman in Dakota knew was false and did not say so about, and it has been mine longer than any other name I have ever had, on either world, including the one I was born with.” Her voice was entirely level. “And I am going to keep it in a drawer in Hillsboro and answer to Anderson on my own doorstep, and I would like one minute of not being sensible about it before we go on.”

Kyra gave her four.

They moved in the last week of February, which in Portland is the worst possible week to move anything, and the table went in under the front window because that was where the light came round.

Anna and Ada Anderson. Kyra had chosen the first name out of the same page she had chosen Ada from, fifteen years earlier, and offered no better account of it than she had the first time.

“It was on the page.”

“It was on the page,” Val repeated.

“It is a good page.”

The Hawthorne line ran past the end of the street and Val had been riding it for a year already, out of Clinton, because it was the line that went where she needed to go.

There was a conductor on it with a watch chain across his waistcoat that had cost more than the coat and was worn where everybody could see it, and he had a way of putting two fingers to his cap that he did for every woman on the car and meant nothing by.

He had taken Val’s fare all through the boarder year and he took it all through the year after, and somewhere in the middle of that he began to say afternoon, Miss, which is what a man says when he has decided you are a regular and has no intention of finding out anything further.

Which made him, Val worked out on a wet Thursday in March with her hand on the rail, the only person in the state of Oregon who had seen both of them at two addresses under two arrangements and two surnames and had not noticed a single thing about any of it.

She did not tell Kyra that for about a week. When she did, Kyra laughed for some time and then said that she hoped the man lived to be a hundred, and Val said that on the available evidence he would live to be about sixty-one, and Kyra told her to get out of the kitchen.

The business in Hillsboro took two days and a clerk.

He was about thirty and had a mustache he had clearly thought about, waxed at the ends in a style that had been current when the fair was on and had not been current for some years, and he was entirely helpful and asked no questions that were not on the form, and Val gave him nothing that was not on the form either.

Martha Miller of that county would pay her assessment through Mr. Crandall of Hillsboro, who would remit it, and who required a letter and a signature and did not require a face.

It took eleven minutes. Val stood outside afterward in the rain for rather longer than that.

The enumerator came on a Wednesday in the middle of April and his name was Pettibone and he had a schedule with fewer columns on it than the last one, which Val noticed and did not remark on.

No month of birth this time. She had prepared February for nine years and was not asked for it.

Anderson, Anna. Head. Anderson, Ada. Sister. Both single, both born in Pennsylvania of Pennsylvania parents, both able to read and write and speak English, one keeping books and one doing the other things a household requires that a printed schedule has four words for.

He asked how long the house had been theirs and Val said since February, and he wrote down that they rented, and he was gone in nine minutes.

“Seventeen documents,” Val said, when the door was shut.

“And one of them is an orphan.”

“And one of them is an orphan, and there are now two women in this state who do not exist and two who do, and the two who do not are the ones with the land.” She sat down on the stairs, which she did not do. “That is the most complicated thing I have ever arranged and it took fifteen years and I could not explain it to anybody, ever, including us in about forty years.”

“Write it down.”

“I am certainly not writing it down.”

“Then tell me twice a year,” said Kyra, “and I will hold it, and when you have forgotten which county has which woman in it I will be extremely smug and then I will tell you.”

In the evening the light came round to the front window and got in across the table, and Kyra was doing something to a hem with her feet up on the second chair, and the sun found the copper in her hair at the ear the way it had found it in every room on two worlds.

“Sisters,” she said, without looking up.

“Sisters.”

“You didn’t fight it.”

“No.”

“You fought it in Maribor and you fought it in Trieste and you fought it outside a printing house in Philadelphia, and last spring you put me in a back room with a rent book, and this year you did not fight it at all.” Kyra bit off the thread. “Why?”

And Val, who had the answer and had had it for two hundred and fifty years and was never going to say it, said the other true thing instead, which was the one she had never said either.

“Because it costs me something to give it to you,” she said, “and I have worked out that that is not a reason to refuse.”

Kyra put the hem down in her lap.

“That is not an answer to what I asked.”

“It is not.”

“It is a better one.”

“It is a different one,” said Val, “and it is the whole of what I have this year, and you may ask me again in fifty and I make no undertaking about what you will get.”

“I will ask you again in fifty.”

“I know you will.”

And Kyra picked the hem back up, and neither of them opened it, and the two of them sat in a rented house on Hawthorne in the first spring of a new arrangement being, on paper and in the mouths of every neighbor on that street, exactly what one of them had wanted since sixteen hundred and eight.

— end of chapter twelve —

There was a man coming into the shop on Union Avenue about the steel pens, and he had been coming in about the steel pens since March, and by the end of June even the delivery boy had worked out that the man did not care about steel pens.

Jo Selby reported all of it at the table with enormous relish and no intention whatsoever of doing anything about any of it.

“He is a perfectly nice man,” she said, “and he is forty-four, and he buys a box of nibs a fortnight that he cannot possibly be using, and one of these days I am going to have to be kind to him and it is going to be dreadful.”

“You could marry him,” said Kyra.

“I could marry him. I had one. I know what they cost.” Jo put her fork down. “Sixteen years I have had that shop and it is mine and the sign has my name on it, and a man who buys nibs he does not want is a man who has not thought about what happens to the sign.”

Afterward, with Jo gone and the plates stacked and the light still going at nine the way it does there in June, Kyra said, to the window:

“When was the last one?”

“The last what?”

“Mine. When was the last one.”

Val, at the table, did not answer straight away, and Kyra turned round because the silence had a quality to it.

“You know,” Kyra said.

“I know.”

“Of course you know. Say it.”

“Sixty-three,” said Val. “Asa Pruitt, who wrote you four letters in two years and came down twice, and met a widow at Walla Walla, and told you so in the second letter like a man settling an account.”

Kyra stood there for a moment.

“Forty-seven years.”

“Forty-seven years.”

“And you?”

“Sixty-two.” Val said it without having to find it. “Elias Mott. Seven months and a week, spring to the end of the year, and you met him exactly once at the mill site and asked me four questions about him afterward and only put three of them.”

“Forty-eight years.”

“Forty-eight years.”

Kyra came and sat down opposite her and put both hands on the table.

“Say the rest of them.”

Val said the rest of them, because she had them, because she has always had everything.

Jakob on a mole in Trieste, twenty-five years, which was long enough that there had been a chair in that house that was his and a way he had of coming in that both of them could still hear.

The Venetian off the boat, four months. Matthias the papermaker at Germantown, two years and some, who asked Val to come and live at the mill and was told no immediately and kindly. The man in the seventh year at Philadelphia, four months, who went to Hartford in the spring.

Then Oregon. Asa Pruitt, nearly two. Elias Mott, seven months and a week.

Then nothing.

It took about six minutes. When she had finished, neither of them said anything for a while, because the shape of it was sitting on the table between them.

“They get shorter,” Kyra said.

“They get shorter.”

“Twenty-five years, and then two, and then four months, and then a man who lasted a season, and then forty-seven years of nothing and forty-eight years of nothing.” She had gone quite pale under the warm cast of her. “Val, I have never laid them out. Not once. Three hundred years and I have never put them in a row.”

“I have.”

Kyra looked up.

“I laid them out in eighteen sixty-two,” Val said, “at a table in the Nehalem country, with a letter in front of me, and I told you then that it would be shorter next time and that I had known it since the second one, and I said I would want to talk about it eventually and not that night.”

“You did say that.”

“I said it forty-eight years ago and you said all right, and neither of us has mentioned it since, and I have been carrying an unfinished sentence about the two of us for the better part of half a century.” Val put her hands flat. “Which I would like on the record, because I have no explanation for it that does me any credit.”

“Nobody decided,” Kyra said.

“No.”

“That is the part. There was no evening. There is no evening where either of us sat down and said we were finished with it. We did not make a rule and we did not have an argument and nothing happened at all, and it has been thirty-one years for you and it stopped without anybody being told.”

“It stopped without either of us noticing,” Val said, “which is a stronger statement and is the one I would make.”

“I want to say the thing that is not true,” Kyra said, “so that we can both hear how untrue it is and then put it down.”

“Say it.”

“That they were all a way of passing the time until this.”

Val’s hand came flat on the table.

“No.”

“I know.”

“No, and I want to be entirely clear about it, because it is the sort of thing a person says at forty and goes on believing for four centuries, and it is a lie about all of them and it is a lie about us.” Her voice did not move. “Jakob Peršin was twenty-five years of your life. He was not a delay. You were not waiting for anything and neither was I, and if either of us ever starts telling it that way we will have taken four centuries of real things and turned them into a corridor.”

“I said it so that you would say that, Val.”

“I am aware of why you said it.”

“Then what is the curve?” Kyra said.

Val was quiet for a while.

“There is a thing a man supplied,” she said, “which neither of us could get from the other, for a very long time. Not the obvious one. The other one — being wanted by somebody who had not already decided about you. Somebody who came across the room. There was no version of that available between the two of us in sixteen hundred and eight, because we had already arrived and neither of us was coming across any rooms.”

“And now?”

“Now you come across rooms,” Val said. “You have done it about four times this year and you do not know you are doing it, and I have watched you do it since a wagon, and it took me until this evening to work out what it was.”

Kyra did not say anything at all.

“That is my account and it is not complete and it is the best I have on nine minutes’ notice.”

The light had finally gone and neither of them had got up to do anything about it, and out on Hawthorne the last car of the evening went past with its bell.

“Mine is shorter,” Kyra said.

“Go on.”

“We stopped needing to be somewhere else.”

She said it to the table and not to Val, which was the only way she could have said it.

“Every one of them was a place to go, and I do not mean that as a complaint about the men and I do not mean it about you either. I mean there was an hour in the week that was not this house, and I used to need that hour, and I have not needed it since before we came off that lake, and I did not notice the day I stopped.”

“Neither did I,” said Val.

“The pact still stands,” Kyra said, later, on the stairs.

“The pact stands.”

“If there is ever another one, either way, it gets said the same evening, the way it always has.”

“The same evening.”

“Good.” Kyra was two steps up and did not turn round. “I do not think there is going to be another one.”

“No,” Val said. “Neither do I. And I would like it understood that neither of us has just promised anything, because a promise about that would be a fence round a field nothing is trying to leave.”

“That is the most romantic sentence you have ever constructed.”

“It is a precise one.”

“It is a fence round a field nothing is trying to leave, Val, I am going to have that on a sampler.”

She went up. Val did not, for a while.

She sat at the table in the dark with the shape of it still lying there in front of her — twenty-five years and two and four months and nothing and nothing — and she did the thing she did with any curve, which was to look at where it went if you carried it on, and found that it did not go anywhere, because it had already arrived.

Which left, as the only remaining question, what a person does about a thing that has already arrived and has never once been marked.

She thought about that for some time.

Then she went up, and said nothing about it to anybody for six weeks.

— end of chapter thirteen —

The Ostranders two doors down had been married twenty-five years on the ninth of August, and there was a photographer on their porch about it, and by noon there was nobody on that block who did not know.

Kyra watched the whole operation from the front room window with a cup she had stopped drinking from.

“He’s moved the chair three times,” she said.

“Four.”

“You’re at the back of the house.”

“I am at the back of the house,” Val agreed, “and I can hear a chair.”

Mrs. Ostrander had put on a collar for it and Mr. Ostrander had put on the expression men put on for a lens, which had not improved in the seventy years Kyra had been watching them do it. The photographer went under his cloth. The street held still for him in the way a street does.

“Twenty-five years,” Kyra said, “and they need a man with a box to tell them it happened.”

Val did not answer that, and Kyra did not notice, because there was nothing in it yet to notice.

What happened over the four days that followed was that Val Sorin became slightly, unremarkably unavailable.

She told the Hartwells on the Wednesday that the Sunday would not do. She moved a delivery. On the Friday she came back from the Hawthorne line an hour later than the line accounts for and offered no account of it, and on the Saturday, when Kyra asked in passing whether they were expected anywhere at the end of the week, Val said no rather faster than the question had required.

Kyra put the iron down at that one and looked at the back of her for a while.

She had been reading that stillness since a mountain. It was not evasion and never had been; it was a woman carrying a decision around under an ordinary face for as long as it took her to find the words for the first sentence, and the only thing you could do with it was wait, and the only thing you must not do was name it.

So Kyra picked the iron back up.

Val got to it on the Saturday evening, in the kitchen, with her back half turned and a cloth in her hands that did not need to be in them.

“The fourteenth is a Sunday,” she said.

“It is.”

“I have kept it clear.”

Kyra sat down at the table, which she did not usually do at that hour.

“Say the rest of it.”

“That is a considerable amount to ask for.”

“It is four days of you moving furniture round the week,” said Kyra, “and I have watched every one of them and said nothing, which I would like noted, because it nearly killed me. Say the rest of it.”

Val turned round.

“Sixty years,” she said.

The kitchen went very quiet, and it was not a warm quiet, and both of them knew inside two seconds which way this was going to go.

“No,” Kyra said.

“I am aware of the objection.”

“Then you already know I’m right, so I’ll say it once and we can both stop being polite about it.” Kyra had both hands flat on the table. “We do not keep dates. Not one, not ever, not since a wharf. A date is a thing that can be found, Val. It goes in a hand, and then the hand gets copied, and then somebody in an office fifty years from now has two women and a day and enough to start counting with.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t yes me, I’m not finished.” Her voice had not risen and that was how Val knew it was serious. “And I am the one saying it. Me. I put a room on wheels in forty-nine because I could not stand the rule any longer, and I know exactly what that cost us and I have never once asked for it back. So when I tell you that a day in a calendar is different in kind from a wagon, I would like you to believe that I have thought about it.”

“I do believe it.”

“Then why are we standing here.”

Val came and sat down opposite her, which took a moment, because she had not planned to be sitting.

“In April,” she said, “a man came to that door with a printed schedule and a pen, and I stood in my own hall and told him two ages, and both of them were false, and he wrote them into a federal book that is copied into another book and kept.”

“I know. I was in the pantry being a sister.”

“You were very good at it.” Val put her hands together on the table. “There is a house on this street that is on paper, and two women in it who are on paper, and a year of birth for each of them that is on paper, and every one of those things is a lie that somebody can copy. That is seventeen documents now, and I can tell you where every one of them is.”

Kyra waited.

“The fourteenth of August is written nowhere,” said Val. “Not in a book, not in a hand, not in a letter, not in the notebook. Nobody wrote it down at the time because there was nobody there to write it, and I have never written it since, and I have thought about writing it perhaps four hundred times.”

“Val.”

“It is the only thing we own that cannot be found. It cannot be found because it was never put anywhere. And that means it is the one date on this planet that costs us nothing at all, and I would like—”

She stopped. She had run out of the sentence she had built and had come to the part she had not been able to build in four days.

“I would like to have it,” she said.

Kyra looked at her for a long moment.

Then she got up and went to the window and stood there with her arms folded, looking out at a street where the Ostranders’ porch was empty and the light had gone that long gold it goes in August.

“What time,” she said.

And that was the whole of the concession, and Val took it exactly as offered and did not say one word about having won anything, because she had not won anything. Kyra had been right for sixty years and was still right. What Val had found, in four days of looking, was the single thing the rule did not cover, and she had gone looking for it on purpose, and she was never going to say so.

On the Sunday it was hot in a way Portland manages about nine days a year and is never ready for.

They had the blind down in the back bedroom by four in the afternoon and the window up behind it, and the light that got in came around the edges of the blind and went across the floor in two long bars the color of the inside of an apricot.

There was a basin. There was the good scissors and the bad scissors, and a razor Val had stropped that morning in the manner of a woman who had decided several days earlier that it would need stropping.

“Any word from New Bedford,” Kyra said, to the ceiling.

“Not a thing.”

“Shame.”

Val went first.

She had not expected that to be the difficult part and it was the difficult part, because she had asked for the whole of this and the asking had been expensive and it turned out the receiving was worse. She lay down on the bed with her arm over her eyes for the first minute and a half and said nothing whatsoever, and Kyra, kneeling with the bad scissors, let her have it.

“You’re holding your breath.”

“I am regulating it.”

“You are holding your breath, Val, I can see your ribs doing nothing.” Kyra sat back on her heels. “Would it help if I talked?”

“It would help if you were quick.”

“It would not help if I were quick,” said Kyra, “it would help if I were good, and those are different, and one of us has held a scalpel and the other one has not, and I want that said before I start.”

“You have never held a scalpel in your life.”

“I have held a great many things.”

“Not a scalpel.”

“Val,” said Kyra, “take your arm off your face.”

And Val took her arm off her face.

It went slowly and it was not solemn, which was the single best decision either of them made that afternoon. Kyra swore at the bad scissors and was made to use the good ones. Val gave one instruction about the angle and was told where she could put it. Somewhere past the middle a fly got in around the blind and there was an interval of about ninety seconds in which neither of them was capable of anything at all.

And then it was quiet, and Kyra had the razor, and the light was coming round the edge of the blind and falling across the bed in two bars, and she was working with her head down and her hair pushed back off one shoulder and the copper of it showing where the light found it, the way it had on a mountain and in a lane and in a wagon bed, and had never once stopped doing.

“I don’t get to see you like this often,” she said.

She said it while she was still working. She did not look up.

Val did not answer for slightly too long.

“No,” she said.

Kyra set the razor down in the basin. She sat back on her heels and looked at her, the whole length of her, and did not make any production of the looking.

“Do you know what I’m looking at?”

“I have a working idea.”

“Then I’m going to say it anyway, because otherwise you’ll assume, and you assume badly.” Kyra put a hand flat on the inside of her knee and left it there. “When it’s grown you’re covered. That’s the whole of it. There is a woman under there and I know she is under there and I have known for three hundred years, and it is perfectly all right, and I never say a word about it, because there is nothing to say about a thing you cannot see.”

“Kyra.”

“And then there’s an afternoon like this one and the cover comes off and you are simply there.” Her thumb moved once and came back. “All of you. In the light with nothing in front of it. And you are beautiful, Val. Not the face — everybody on two worlds gets the face, and I have had the face since I was eighteen. This. You are beautiful here, and I have thought so since a mountain, and I have wanted to say it out loud in daylight for sixty years and never once had the afternoon to say it in.”

Val, who had spent the whole of her life being looked at in ways she had arranged in advance, lay there and was looked at in a way she had not.

“You are making a speech.”

“I am making an observation.”

“You are making a speech and there is a razor in the room.”

“The razor is in the basin,” said Kyra, “and you are deflecting, and I have watched you deflect on two worlds since I was eighteen years old, and I am not letting you have this one.”

And Val stopped deflecting.

“Then I will answer it properly,” she said, “and I am going to have to use my own words, because I do not have yours and I have never once in my life been able to do the thing you have just done.”

“Use them.”

“Your vulva is the most exactly made thing I have ever looked at.”

Kyra went very still.

“I have thought so since the first winter and I have never revised it,” Val said, to the ceiling, in the voice she kept for a reading she trusted. “And the difference between us is that I have never had to wait for an afternoon. You have kept yourself short since before there was any reason for it — before the mark, before Missouri, before either of us had a single word for what we were doing — and I do not know when you started and I have never asked.”

“Val—”

“I have not finished.” Her voice did not move at all. “Which means that for three hundred years you have been there whenever I have looked, and I have looked every single time. Not once. Every time. And I never said one word about it, because saying it would have meant admitting that I had been looking, and I would rather have been shot.”

“Three hundred years,” Kyra said.

“Give or take.”

“You have looked at me three hundred years running and said nothing, and I have been lying here for sixty of them thinking I was the only one in this arrangement doing any looking.”

“I am aware it is absurd.”

“It is not absurd, it is the most you thing I have ever heard in my life,” said Kyra, and her eyes had gone out to the rim and she did not do anything about it, and neither of them said a word about that either.

“For the record,” she said, after a while, “you could have mentioned it.”

“I am mentioning it.”

“You are mentioning it in nineteen ten.”

“I am a deliberate woman,” Val said, and Kyra put her face down on her thigh and laughed until she had to stop.

They did Kyra’s after that, and it took no time at all and was entirely undramatic, because there was nothing to take back; she kept it short and always had, and what the good scissors did was tidy a thing that had never been allowed to get untidy.

Which was the whole difference, and both of them understood it while it was happening.

Kyra’s band had never really gone away. Low, plain, closed, nothing legible, sitting where it had sat since a river, visible to anyone who was ever going to be looking, which was one person.

Val’s had been gone for sixty years except when it was taken back.

“Turn toward the window,” Kyra said.

“It is behind the blind.”

“Turn toward the window, Val.”

And Val turned, and the light came around the edge of the blind and went across her, and Kyra Davan looked at a plain closed band sixty years old with the light of the woman wearing it coming up underneath it, in the skin, moving in it the way it moves, and she put two fingers on it and left them there and did not say anything for a while.

“It’s doing it,” Kyra said.

“Yes.”

“It always does it. Every time. I forget between times how much it does it and then I look and it’s—” Kyra stopped, and started again, and got it out. “Nobody else will ever see that. Not one person, ever, on any world, for as long as either of us lasts.”

“No.”

“And I get it about nine times in sixty years.”

“I get ordinary ink,” Val said.

Kyra’s head came up.

“I want that said, because you are about to feel something about it and I would rather you felt the correct thing.” Val was looking at the ceiling, which was where she looked for anything that was going to cost her. “Yours does not light. It is a band on a woman and it is exactly as remarkable as a band on a woman, and I have looked at it in daylight and in the dark and in a train in Nebraska, and it does nothing at all.”

“That’s—”

“I have not finished. I do not mind.” Her voice did not move. “I have had four hundred years of being the one who gets the readable version of things and I have never once wanted it more than I wanted this. You got the thing nobody else can see. I got you holding still while somebody put it there. I would not trade, and I have considered it, in order to be sure.”

Kyra made a sound she did not authorize.

“Don’t.”

“I’m not going to.”

“You are going to, you are simply arranging it,” Val said, “and I have one more and then you may do whatever you like.”

“I said I would not put a word on you that anybody else could ever read.”

“You did.”

“I was right. I have gone back over it and I am still right, and if you put me on that riverbank tomorrow I would rule the same way and I would be correct again.” Val turned her head and looked at her. “And I have wished I had done it anyway.”

The room did not do anything.

“Not once,” said Val. “Not in a bad year. Regularly, in ordinary hours, for sixty years, I have wished there were a word on you in my hand, and I have known every single time that wishing it was a stupidity, and I have gone on wishing it, and I have never told you, and I am telling you now because I have run out of reasons not to that I can say out loud.”

Kyra put her forehead down on Val’s hip and stayed there.

“In eighty-six,” Kyra said, into her, “on that roof, I said a thing about a ring.”

“I remember what you said.”

“And I’ve not said it since, because it was stupid then and it’s stupider now, and a ring is a thing a man buys in a shop with his name in the ledger, and we cannot have one, and I know all of that, and I am not—”

“You still want it.”

Kyra stopped.

“Twenty-four years,” Val said. “You said it once and then you put it down where I could see it and you have not picked it up since, and you have wanted it every day of those twenty-four years, and you have decided several thousand times not to mention it again in order to spare me having to say no.”

“How long have you—”

“Since about the second year.” Val got her hand into the dark of her hair. “I am not going to pretend I can give it to you. I can tell you that I know what you want and that I have known for a long time and that I have never once thought it was stupid, and that is the whole of what I have, and it is not enough, and I am saying it anyway.”

And Kyra Davan, who had been loud about everything since she was nine years old, did not say anything at all for a while, and did not need to, because Val could feel perfectly well what her face was doing.

“Three weeks,” Kyra said, eventually.

“What is?”

“You. Back to where nobody can find it.” She lifted her head. “Three weeks, maybe a day or two over. I’ve watched it happen before.”

“You have counted it.”

“Of course I’ve counted it. You count everything in the universe except the one thing and I have to take up the slack.”

“That is the first time in three hundred and eighty years,” Val said, “that anybody has accused me of insufficient counting,” and Kyra laughed, up out of the middle of her, the kind the Ostranders could have identified through two walls.

And then Val reached up and got her by the back of the neck, which was from a street in Trieste and had not needed a reason since, and brought her down, and that was the end of the talking for some while.

There was no hurry in any of it. There never had been and there was less than usual now, because the day was theirs and had been cleared four days in advance by a woman who cleared nothing, and both of them knew it, and neither of them said so.

Kyra kissed her slowly and without any part of it being automatic, which was a thing that had been true since a hut, and she took her time about the mouth and the jaw and the throat, and then she went down the whole length of her and took a great deal longer than that, because she had three weeks of not being able to and she intended to spend the afternoon like a woman who knows what the calendar is going to do.

Val, who had decided on Wednesday what was going to happen on Sunday and had carried it under an ordinary face through four days of moving the week around, stopped being the woman who had planned it somewhere in the first few minutes, and was gone after that.

The light came round the edge of the blind and went across the bed in two bars, and moved as the afternoon moved, and it was in her hands and at her wrists and under the jaw below the ear and, for a long stretch of that afternoon, everywhere at once, all the way through, and Kyra watched it the entire time and did not say a word about it, because saying it was not what it was for.

Afterward the light outside had gone and the room was the blue it goes in August at that hour, and somebody was calling a dog in three houses down, and the fly had got out or given up.

“They’ll have that photograph on the wall by Thursday,” Kyra said.

“They will.”

“Twenty-five years.”

“Twenty-five years,” Val agreed, “and a man with a box,” and Kyra started laughing again and had to stop, because she had been laughing on and off for about an hour and there is a limit.

The pale of Val’s hair had come entirely loose over the course of the afternoon and was across both of them and under one of Kyra’s arms, and would be objected to at some point, and was not going to be objected to now.

“June,” Kyra said.

“What about it?”

“That is when you started. Not the Ostranders and not the fourteenth. The evening you finished a sentence you began in sixty-two and then sat down there in the dark and did not come up for an hour.” She had her eyes shut. “Six weeks, Val.”

“Six weeks,” Val agreed, “and I did not have a sentence for any of it until about the Wednesday.”

“Same day next year,” Kyra said. Not a question.

Val did not answer straight away, and when she did it was the flat, procedural voice she used for the things she had already decided and had been waiting all day to be asked.

“I have kept it clear,” she said.

And they lay there in a rented house on Hawthorne with the blind still down and a street outside that knew them as two sisters and would go on knowing them as two sisters for as long as it was useful, and neither of them moved, and neither of them slept for a good while, and at some point without either of them deciding to they laced.

— end of chapter fourteen —

The men came in October and were in the house eleven days, and when they had gone there was a wire run along the picture rail in every room downstairs and a fixture in the middle of each ceiling and a brass switch by every door.

Val paid them, and checked the work, and asked two questions the foreman could not answer and one he could, and saw them off the step.

Then she went back inside and did not come out for a while.

Kyra came up from the shop at about five with the rain on her and found the front room lit.

And the hall. And the kitchen, and the little room nobody used, and the landing, and the stair.

Every fixture in the house was on. It was not yet dark outside.

She stood in the doorway with her hat in her hand and looked down the length of it, at a house with the light of about nine lamps in it and not one lamp anywhere, and at a woman standing in the middle of the front room with her hands at her sides doing absolutely nothing at all.

What Val had done, over the course of about forty minutes and entirely alone, was go from room to room putting her thumb on every brass switch in the building and then standing in the doorway of each room for a moment afterward.

She had put them off again. Then she had put them on again.

She had done the front room four times.

There was nobody in the house and nobody had seen any of it and she had not been able to make herself stop, and by the fourth time she had understood perfectly well what she was doing, and had gone on doing it.

Here is the thing she did not say.

For three hundred and three years on this planet she had put out a light before she was seen by it, and lit one when she wanted to be, and made that calculation every single evening of every single year in every room she had ever slept in, and it had cost her something so small and so continuous that she had stopped being able to feel it somewhere around the reign of a king she had never met.

A flame is a decision. It has to be fetched, and struck, and shielded, and put out, and every one of those is a moment in which a woman must have already known what she wanted.

A brass switch is not a decision. It is a thumb.

She stood in the front room of a rented house on Hawthorne and put the dark on and off with her thumb, four times, like a child, because for three centuries the dark had been a thing that happened to her and now it was a thing she had.

Kyra hung her hat up.

She went through to the kitchen past all of it, and put the kettle over, and said something about the price of the rain, and did not ask.

She had worked out about a third of it standing in the doorway and she would work out rather more of it over the next few years and she never got the whole way, and at no point in the four centuries that followed did she ever put the question to that woman, because she had decided in a doorway in the rain in October that it was not hers to ask for.

That evening she put two of them off on her way through, because nine was absurd, and left the rest.

Val noticed, and said nothing, and slept extremely well.

Jo came for dinner in November and stood in the hall and said that it was very bright.

“It is bright,” Val agreed.

“They have done the church.”

“They have done the church badly. There is a fixture over the third pew that is going to come down inside five years.”

“You have been counting fixtures in a church.”

“I have been counting fixtures everywhere,” said Val, which was true, and which Kyra heard from the kitchen and filed.

The circular came in the autumn of the year after that, in a bundle from the shop, four months late and with a corner off.

It was four pages out of Cambridge in Massachusetts about twenty-five variable stars in a small cloud in the southern sky, and what it said was that the ones that took longer to go round were brighter, and that the relation between the two was regular enough to write down.

Val read it at the table with her thumb keeping the page and did not move for some time.

“What,” said Kyra.

“They are all in the same cloud.”

“Is that good?”

“It is the entire thing. They are all in the same cloud, which means they are all at about the same distance, which means that when one of them looks brighter than another it is brighter and not nearer.” She turned the page over. “Which means that if you know how long one of them takes, you know how bright it truly is. And if you know how bright a thing truly is, and you can see how bright it looks — ”

She stopped.

“Go on,” Kyra said.

“No.”

Kyra let that sit for about a minute, which was her limit.

“Why not?”

“Because there is no zero in it,” Val said.

She put the circular flat on the table and turned it round so that Kyra could see the column of figures, which meant nothing to Kyra and which Val knew meant nothing to her and turned round anyway.

“She has the relation. She does not have the scale. Nobody knows how far away that cloud is, so nobody knows how bright any of them actually is, so every figure in here is one of these against another one of these and none of them is against anything real.” Her voice was entirely level. “It is a ruler with the marks on and no numbers.”

“A number and no scale,” said Kyra.

Val looked up.

“Yes.”

“You said that to me in a kitchen with plums in it.”

“I did,” Val said, “and I have been in that position exactly once, and I did not enjoy it, and it took forty years to come out of it.”

“How long does this one take?”

“To come out of it?”

“To get its numbers.”

“Somebody has to get the distance to one of them by some entirely different method,” said Val. “One. That is all it needs. One of them close enough to be got at another way, and then the whole column has numbers on it and so does every cloud anybody ever points the thing at.”

“And then?”

“And then it is a ruler,” Val said, and folded the circular, and put it in the box, and did not say the next sentence, which she had had in her mouth for about four minutes and which she had no intention of letting out into a kitchen on Hawthorne on a wet evening in nineteen twelve.

There was one other thing in it and she went back to it twice.

The four pages were signed by the director of the observatory, as all of them were, and in the second paragraph there was a sentence saying that the work had been prepared by Miss Leavitt.

Prepared by.

Val sat with that for a while, in a house she held the lease of under a name that was not hers, in a country where she had spent sixteen years arranging for no document anywhere to be able to find her.

“What,” said Kyra, from the stove.

“A woman has done a piece of work,” Val said, “and it is going to be the most useful four pages printed on this planet this year, and her name is in it once, in the middle, in a sentence that says she prepared it.”

“Will anybody know?”

“Some of them will know.” Val put the box away. “And in four hundred years they will all know, and it will not be the smallest use to her, and I am the only person in this hemisphere who is certain of both halves of that sentence.”

Afterward Kyra came and sat on the arm of the chair with her hair down, still damp, and the light off the ceiling fixture came down on the whole of it at once and found the copper everywhere at the same time instead of at the one place above the ear, which was a thing no lamp on two worlds had ever managed and which Val had been noticing since October and had not mentioned.

“You have gone quiet,” Kyra said.

“I am looking at something.”

“At what?”

And Val, who had spent three hundred years measuring how brightly she was prepared to be seen, and who had just read four pages explaining that the only way to find out how far away anything is, is to know how brightly it truly shines, said: “Nothing. Leave the light on.”

— end of chapter fifteen —

Kyra knew on a Tuesday in the second week of September and did not say anything about it until the Friday, which was three days longer than she had ever managed before.

“It’s started.”

Val put the pen down.

“When.”

“Tuesday. I was on the car and I knew on the car, and I have been checking since Tuesday to see whether I would stop knowing, and I have not.”

Val went and got the notebook and turned to the back of it, where there was a column that had been running for three hundred and eight years and had nothing in it but figures.

She looked at it for a second.

“The twenty-ninth,” she said.

It is not dramatic. That is worth saying plainly, because it never has been and it is not going to start.

What it is, is about three weeks in which Kyra Davan is slightly not herself in a way nobody in the world can see. She sleeps badly and then sleeps enormously. She is hot in a cold room. She wants salt and then does not want anything. There is a fortnight somewhere in the middle of it when everything anybody says is very slightly too loud, and a morning near the end when she stands in the kitchen and cannot work out what she came in for and stands there long enough to be found.

And once, usually, for something under a second, the gold comes up in her eyes when there is nothing whatsoever in the room to bring it.

That is all there is to it. Twenty-nine times.

“I have never checked,” Val said, on about the ninth day.

“Checked what?”

“You.” She was at the window with her hands in her sleeves. “There is no instrument. There has never been an instrument. There was no instrument on that mountain and there is none on this street, and there is not going to be one in either of our lifetimes, and I want you to understand what that means about what I have been doing since sixteen hundred and eighteen.”

Kyra, who was lying on the sofa being slightly not herself, opened one eye.

“Say it.”

“I have twenty-nine entries in a column, Kyra, and every one of them came out of your mouth.”

Kyra sat up.

“That is the whole record,” Val said. “There is no other source. I did not measure it, I did not observe it, I have never once been able to detect a single thing about any of them from the outside, and the flicker is a second long and I have missed about half of them. I have a column of twenty-nine figures in my own hand and the entire basis of it is that a woman told me.”

“And you wrote them down anyway,” said Kyra.

“I wrote them down the way I would write down a reading,” said Val, “which is what I have been meaning to tell you for about a week and have not been able to get into a sentence. I did not write them down as things you said. I wrote them down as data. I have been treating you as an instrument since the second peak and it did not occur to me until this month that that is a thing I have never done for any other person on either world.”

Kyra did not say anything for a while, which in her was the equivalent of somebody else standing up.

“Nobody has ever done that,” Kyra said.

“I am aware.”

“No, you are not aware, because you have been on the other side of it your whole life and you do not know what it is like over here.” She had her hands flat on her knees. “I have told people things about my own body since I was fourteen years old. Every one of them received it as a report from a person who might be mistaken. Not unkindly. Just — as a thing to be weighed, and mostly not weighed very heavily, and I have watched a great many faces do the arithmetic while I was still talking.”

“Yes.”

“And you put it in a column.”

“I put it in a column,” Val said.

“Why?”

“Because you have never once been wrong,” said Val, “and I stopped testing the interval a very long time ago, and I would like that on the record as the single most unscientific thing I have ever done and the only one I have never regretted.”

Kyra put her head back and laughed, badly, because she was in the fortnight where everything was too loud including herself.

“Don’t make me laugh this week.”

“I am not making you do anything.”

“You are being extremely charming at a woman who cannot currently be in the same room as a door that closes too hard, and I would like it noted that it is working and that I resent it.”

The flicker came on about the seventeenth day, in the kitchen, in the afternoon.

Val was at the table and happened to be looking up, which she had been for about half of one peak in every three since the seventeen hundreds, and it went across Kyra’s eyes and was gone, the way a thing goes across water.

Neither of them said anything for a second.

“There,” said Kyra.

“I saw it.”

“You never see it.”

“I see about one in six and I have said so every time,” Val said, and wrote it in the column, and put the date beside it, and underlined nothing, because there was nothing to underline.

They had the same conversation they had every eleven years, which was short and had not changed in three centuries and was entirely wrong, and neither of them would find that out for a very long time.

“It is less than it was.”

“It is not less than it was,” Val said, “it is exactly what it was, it is simply that we are used to it.”

“It is less than it was on Sethal.”

“That it certainly is.”

“Whatever this planet did to us,” said Kyra, “it did that one kind thing, and I have been grateful for it for three hundred years and I have never once said so out loud, and I am saying it now because I am in the week where I say things.”

“It is a mercy,” Val agreed.

“It is the only one we got.”

And they left it there, the way they had left it twenty-eight times before.

It went off in the first week of October, the way it always did, which is to say that on a Thursday Kyra woke up and was simply herself again and could not have told anybody the hour it had stopped.

She came down and stood in the kitchen doorway in the early light with her hair unpinned down her back, dark and heavy and with the one place above the ear where the sun found the copper, and looked at the woman who had been feeding her salt for three weeks without ever once being asked to.

“Put the twenty-ninth down as finished,” she said.

“What day?”

“I don’t know what day.”

“Then I shall put down Thursday,” said Val, “and it will be wrong by a day or two in one direction, and it will go in the column beside the other twenty-eight, and in about four hundred years somebody is going to look at that page and think it was kept by a very careful person.”

“It was kept by a very careful person.”

“It was kept,” Val said, “by a woman writing down what her—”

She stopped.

Kyra waited in the doorway with the sun coming round.

“—what she was told,” Val said, and wrote Thursday, and did not look up, and Kyra let her have it and went and put the kettle over.

— end of chapter sixteen —

They put a hundred beds into the new auditorium in the middle of October and filled them in two days, and somebody from the parks bureau brought cut flowers in on the second morning, which everybody afterward agreed had been either the best or the worst decision anybody made that autumn.

The building was a year and a bit old. It had been built for singers. There was a booking book in the office with the autumn written out in it in a good hand, and by the third week somebody had drawn a line through every date on it and written one word across the page.

Kyra read that page once, standing in the office doorway with her sleeves rolled, and did not mention it to anybody for nine years.

They had the argument in the kitchen on the twelfth, the day after the city shut.

“I am going,” Kyra said.

“I know you are going.”

“Then say the rest of it, because you have been standing at that window for an hour and you are not looking at anything.”

Val turned round.

“Boston,” she said.

They had been here before and they both knew the shape of it: a city with something in it, and two women who go into the houses, and forty of them in a summer, and at the end of it forty families who have all noticed the same thing and have not yet said it to each other.

“It is not Boston,” Kyra said. “Boston was nine houses a day for eleven months and everybody knew our faces.”

“It is worse than Boston. Boston did not have a newspaper that came out the same day and a building with four hundred people in it.”

“So what do we do? Sit here?”

“No,” said Val.

What they did was work out a rule, at the table, in about forty minutes, with Val doing most of the talking and Kyra putting the holes in it.

Nights. Both of them, on the same nights, in the same ward, where the staff changed every week and nobody had time to form a view about anybody. No houses. No going out to the same family twice. Nothing that made either of them the person who was sent for.

And the part Val said last and said flatly, because there was no way to say it that was not what it was:

“If either of us is any good at it in front of a doctor who is going to remember, we stop being good at it.”

“Val.”

“I know. I have known since a cholera summer and I have never found a way round it, and I am not going to find one this month.”

So they carried water and turned people and did what could be done in a room where mostly nothing could be, and they did it competently and without distinction, and once in that whole autumn Val put her hand on a boy’s chest and said a sentence to a young doctor that saved him, and the doctor was twenty-six and exhausted and did not remember it afterward, which Val checked twice.

Neither of them sickened.

Four hundred and thirty people came through that building and nobody at all noticed the two women on nights, because that is what a city in an epidemic is for: it is the only condition under which nobody is looking at anybody.

It was a little after four in the morning on the last day of October.

The ward was as quiet as it got, which was not quiet. There was a man two rows over who had been going for six hours and was not going to stop, and somebody at the far end was talking to a person who was not in the building, and the flowers had been changed that afternoon and were the only thing in four hundred feet of that room that smelled of anything but carbolic.

They were sitting against the wall with their backs to the boards and their legs out, in the ten minutes.

Kyra had her head tipped back against the boards and her eyes shut. Her hair had come out of its pins somewhere in the small hours and hung over one shoulder, and under the working lights it was not black, whatever anybody in that hall would have said; it had the copper in it at the ear the way it had in every room on two worlds, and Val looked at it for rather longer than she had meant to and then looked down the ward.

“Tell me about the second room,” Kyra said.

Val did not stiffen. She had not stiffened at that sentence in a very long time.

“Trieste,” she said.

“Trieste.”

And she gave her the paragraph.

I was taken out of the room where you were a little after four on the afternoon of the second day, and I was brought back to it on the fourth. In the interval I was held below, in a room on the court side with one window. There were four men in it. Two of them I had seen upstairs and two of them I had not. Nothing was done to me that left a mark, and I was not asked one question about you at any point. I was asked the same eleven questions in a different order for two days and I gave the same answers to all of them and none of the answers were true. At the end of it they brought me up and put me in the room, and you were asleep, and I sat down against the door. That is the whole of it. It is accurate and it is complete and there is nothing in it that you do not now have.

The same words. Not approximately the same; the same, in the same order, with the same small pause after and two of them I had not, the way it had been the first time she ever gave it and every time since.

Kyra did not open her eyes.

“Thank you.”

“You are welcome.”

The man two rows over went on. A nurse came down the aisle with a basin and went back up it again.

“I have worked something out,” Val said.

“Now?”

“I worked it out about four seconds ago and if I do not say it now I will arrange it for a fortnight and then say a worse version.”

Kyra opened one eye.

“Go on.”

“You did not ask me because you wanted to know.”

“No.”

“You have never asked because you wanted to know. I have been assuming for a very long time that you were still looking for a thing that was not in it, and going away without it, and coming back.” Val was looking down the ward and not at her. “And I have been wrong about that, and I have been wrong about it for centuries, and the reason I know I have been wrong is that you asked me in this room, tonight, of all the rooms and all the nights there have ever been.”

Kyra sat up a little.

“Say the rest.”

“There are a hundred beds in this hall and every single thing in it has changed since the flowers came,” said Val. “Everything here is different at four in the morning from how it was at ten. That is what the whole building is. And there is exactly one thing on this planet that comes out the same every time it is asked for, in the same order, with the pause in it, and you have known where it was since before there was a road up that hill.”

Kyra did not say anything for a while.

“That is it,” she said. “That is exactly it and I could not have told you that.”

“I know you could not.”

“I have been doing it for four hundred years and I have never once known why I was doing it.”

“I am aware,” Val said, “and I want it understood that I did not work it out either, until tonight, in a hall full of dying people, which is not a credit to me.”

“Then I will give it to you,” Val said, after a moment.

“Give me what?”

“The paragraph. Without being asked. On a bad week, when I can see that you need it — I could simply say it, and you would not have to put the sentence together and get it out of your mouth, which I have watched you do a great many times and which has never once been easy for you.”

Kyra turned her head and looked at her properly for the first time in about two hours.

“No,” she said.

“It would cost you less.”

“It would cost me every part of it.” She had her hand flat on the boards between them. “If you give it to me it is a thing you have decided I need. If I ask for it, it is a thing I went and got. There is a difference and it is the entire difference, Val, and I have had four hundred years of people deciding what I needed and handing it to me, and not one of those was worth a tenth of this.”

“I had not thought of that.”

“No. You would not have.”

“It was a good offer,” said Val.

“It was the best offer anybody has ever made me,” Kyra said, “and I am never going to take it, and I would like it made again in about a hundred years so that I can refuse it a second time.”

The ten minutes were up. They got off the wall.

Going back down the aisle Val said, to the middle distance, in the voice she used for readings: “The man in the fourth bed will be alive on Friday. The woman beside him will not.”

“Don’t tell me that.”

“You asked me not to in the second week and I have not, and I am telling you now because I have been carrying about ninety of them and I would like to put four of them down.”

“Then put them down.”

She put four of them down, walking, quietly, in about nine seconds, and Kyra took them the way she took everything and did not flinch at any of it, and they went back to work.

The city opened again in the middle of November and shut again in December, and neither of them ever went back to that building for any purpose whatsoever until the spring of forty-eight, when the water came through the railroad fill and they turned it into a place for people to sleep.

On the last night, walking home in the dark with the mask still round her neck and the first proper cold of the year coming off the river, Kyra said: “Four hundred and thirty through that hall,” Kyra said.

“Through the hall. I do not have the city.”

“Don’t get the city.”

“I already have the city,” Val said. “I have had it since the fourth of November and I have not said it and I am not going to,” and Kyra put her arm through hers, out in the open, on a public street, which they did not do, and did it anyway, and the two of them walked home like that in the dark.

— end of chapter seventeen —

They moved the enumeration to January that year, which nobody had expected and which Val took as a personal inconvenience, because it meant a man on the step in the second week of a wet winter instead of a man on the step in April.

He was called Roy Stickney and he was cold and he did not want to be there.

Anderson, Anna, forty-six. Anderson, Ada, forty-three. Sisters, single, renting, Pennsylvania throughout, English in the house, one keeping books and one not keeping anything a schedule had a word for.

He wrote it all down without lifting his head once, and asked what the mother tongue was and wrote English, and went next door.

“Forty-six,” Kyra said, when the door was shut.

“Forty-six.”

“He did not look at you.”

“He did not look at either of us,” said Val, “and I have been thinking about that for ten years and I have come to a conclusion I do not like.”

She sat down on the stairs with the cold still coming off her.

“In nineteen hundred I spent two days working out what a clerk could do with two sheets of paper. I was frightened of the paper. I have been frightened of the paper since Boston and I was wrong about which way round it goes.”

“Say it properly.”

“Nobody reads a schedule,” Val said. “Nobody. It goes in a building and it sits there and in a hundred years a person with a reason will get at it, and I have spent twenty years building against that person and she is not the danger. The danger is Mrs. Ostrander.”

“Ellen Ostrander does not know how old you are.”

“Ellen Ostrander knows exactly how long we have been on this street, because she watched the cart come, and she has watched her own hands for ten years while she was doing it.” Val put her elbows on her knees. “A clerk in a basement has a document. A woman two doors along has ten years of Sundays, and she does not need a figure, and she is not going to write anything down, and one day she is going to say something to her sister that neither of us will ever hear.”

Kyra sat down on the step above her.

“So we go.”

“Not this year. Not next.” Val was quiet for a second. “But we go, and it will be sooner than I have been telling myself, and I wanted it said in a year when neither of us has to do anything about it.”

The other business that winter was Einstein, who had been in every newspaper in the English-speaking world since the middle of November and showed no sign of getting out of them.

Kyra brought it up because the man in the shop had brought it up and because it had got as far as the funny papers, which was where she judged all such things to have properly arrived.

“Light bends.”

“Light bends.”

“And it was a fellow with a photographic plate on an island off Africa who settled it in about four minutes.”

“It was two expeditions, a great deal of cloud, and an argument that is not over,” said Val, “and yes.”

She explained it at the table over about half an hour, badly at first and then well, because she had read it twice through in the quarterly and had been turning it over since the autumn.

That a heavy thing bends the path of light near it, and that the sun has now been caught doing so.

That the rest of it, the earlier part, says that a clock carried very fast does not agree with a clock left standing, and that neither of them is wrong.

Kyra put her chin on her hand.

“Say that again.”

“Two clocks. You take one of them a great distance at a great speed and bring it back, and it does not read the same as the one that stayed on the shelf, and the difference is real and is not an error in the clock.”

“Then which one is the right time?”

“Both of them,” Val said. “That is the entire scandal and it is why the man is in the funny papers.”

Kyra was quiet for a moment, turning her cup.

“Us,” Kyra said.

“No.”

“You have not thought about it.”

“I thought about it in November, for about an evening, which is longer than it deserved.” Val was entirely level, in the flat voice she used for a reading she had checked twice and did not intend to check again. “It is about carrying a clock. It is about a thing that goes, at a speed, through a distance, and every one of those words has to be in it or the arithmetic does not start.”

“And we went.”

“We did not go. That is what a fold is.” She put her hand flat. “There was no crossing. There is no distance in the record because no distance was covered; the ship’s own account of it is eleven lines and the interval it gives is nothing at all, and I have had those eleven lines since seventeen hundred and I can still only read a third of them and that third is not in dispute.”

“And after?” Kyra said.

“After we were here.”

“And time here—”

“Time here is time,” said Val. “We are standing still on a world going about its business at the speed a world goes, and so are they, and there is nothing in any of this that touches two people sitting in chairs a long way from each other. The only displacement we ever took is the one that happened in the fold, and I measured that in sixteen hundred and eight with a stick and a shadow and two years of somebody else’s almanac, and it has been in the notebook ever since, and it has not moved.”

“You are certain.”

“I am as certain of that as I am of anything I have got,” Val said, and she was, and she was wrong, and there was nothing whatever on that planet or in that century that could have told her so.

The other thing came in the autumn, four months late, in a bundle from the shop.

There had been a meeting in Washington in April at which two men had stood up in front of the National Academy and disagreed, in public, at length, about how big everything is.

One of them said it was all one enormous system and that the spiral things were clouds inside it.

The other said the spiral things were not inside anything. He said they were systems of their own, at distances nobody had the equipment to state, and that the one in Andromeda was the nearest of them.

Val read that sitting up in a chair with her thumb on the page and did not move for about four minutes.

“Which one is right?” Kyra said, from the doorway.

“Nobody knows. That is what the meeting was. Two men in a room with the same photographs coming to opposite conclusions and going home, and the account of it in here is four pages long and does not come down on either side.”

“What would settle it?”

“A distance,” Val said. “One distance, to one of them, got properly. If it is inside, it is near. If it is outside, the figure will be a thing nobody on this planet has ever written down.”

She turned the page back and read the paragraph again.

“And there is a woman in Cambridge who published a way of getting distances eight years ago and could not finish it because she had no zero, and there is no line in this article about her, and I would like to state for the room that those two things belong together and that not one man at that meeting said so.”

Kyra came and stood behind the chair.

“You have a direction,” she said.

“I have a direction.”

“Since the hull.”

“Since the hull, and I have had it for a hundred and thirty-one years, and it points at a smudge, and I have never in all that time known whether the smudge is a cloud in the next field or a thing so far off that saying the number out loud would be indecent.” Val put the journal down on her knee. “And two men have now stood up in a hall in Washington and had that exact argument in front of an audience, and neither of them has the faintest idea that there is a woman in Oregon with a bearing.”

“Does it help?”

“No.”

“Val.”

“It does not help. It is not a step and it is not the beginning of anything and I am not going to sit in this chair and pretend otherwise.” She closed the journal. “It is an argument about what kind of question I have been asking for a hundred and thirty-one years. That is all it is. And they will settle it, and it will take them some years, and when they do I will know which kind it was.”

She put the journal in the box with the rest of it and did not take it out again that year.

Later, with the lamp on and the rain doing what it does there in October, Kyra sat on the arm of the chair with her hair loose from the day and the light coming down on all of it at once and finding the copper everywhere, and Val looked at her for a while and did not say the thing she was thinking, which was not about Washington.

“Ask me in five years,” Val said.

“About the smudge?”

“About the smudge.”

“I will forget.”

“You will not forget,” said Val, “and neither will I, and we will both pretend the other one has, which is a thing this household has been doing for three hundred years and is extremely good at.”

— end of chapter eighteen —

It came in a newspaper, which after thirty years of journals four months late out of London and Cambridge was the part Val could not get over.

There had been a meeting in Washington over the turn of the year. A man out at a telescope in California had found the right kind of star in the spiral in Andromeda — the kind that goes round on a schedule, the kind out of the four pages in the box — and had watched it long enough to time it, and had therefore been able to say how bright it truly was, and had compared that with how bright it looked.

The paper had it in seven column inches on an inside page, under a headline about the size of the universe, next to an advertisement for a hat.

Val read it standing in the hall with her coat on.

Then she read it again, sitting down, without having taken the coat off.

Kyra came out of the kitchen and stopped in the doorway, because there is a way that woman goes still and it is not the same as being interested.

“Say it.”

“Nine hundred thousand,” Val said.

“Nine hundred thousand what?”

“Years. Of light. That is what is between us and it.”

She got the coat off eventually and put the paper flat on the table and did not sit at it so much as stand over it.

“It is outside,” she said. “That is the first thing and it is settled now, or it will be inside two years, because this is not an argument, this is a measurement, and the man has the plates. It is not a cloud in our own system. It is a system, and it is not ours.”

“And the number is how far.”

“The number is how far.” Val put one finger on the column of type. “It is not a distance in the way a road is a distance. It is the time it takes light to get here. Nine hundred thousand years of it, at the only speed there is.”

Kyra sat down.

“Is it right?”

“It is approximately right and it is almost certainly too small,” said Val, “which I am saying in this kitchen and would not say in print, and I will not know why I think that for a long time.”

She was quiet for a while after that, standing over the table with her hands on it.

“There is a thing that follows,” she said, “and I am going to say it once and then I would like to not say it again.”

“Say it.”

“Nothing can ever be sent.”

Kyra did not move.

“Not by us and not by them and not by anybody. Not a signal, not a light, not a word. If Genie stood on the sea wall tonight with the whole of the Assembly behind her and every instrument on that world pointed at us and shouted, it would arrive here in nine hundred thousand years, and there will be nothing here to arrive at.” Her voice did not move at all. “That is not a difficulty about equipment. There is no equipment. It is the shape of the thing.”

“We knew we could not get back,” Kyra said.

“We knew we could not get back. We did not know we could not be spoken to.” Val took her hands off the table. “I have been carrying a thing since about the fourth year here and I have never said it out loud because it was too stupid to say, and I am going to say it now because it has just been taken off me. I have thought, on and off, for three centuries, that if they ever did work out where we had gone, there might one day be something in the sky that was meant for us.”

“Oh, Val.”

“I know what it is. I have known what it was every single time I have thought it.” She sat down at last. “It is not available. It was never available. It has not been available since before there was anybody on either world to want it, and I have been carrying it since sixteen hundred and eleven, and a man in California has just taken it out of my hands with a photographic plate.”

Kyra let that sit for a long moment, and then said the other thing, because she had got there while Val was still talking and had been waiting to be sure.

“Then what have I been looking at?”

Val looked up.

“From the porches,” Kyra said. “From every porch on this continent. What is it I have been looking at?”

“Light that left before there was anybody.”

“Say it properly.”

“It is not home,” said Val. “It has never once been home. It is a picture of that place from nine hundred thousand years ago, and everything in it is gone, and the thing we have both been standing on steps looking at since sixteen hundred and seven is a photograph taken before either of our species had a language.”

The kettle had boiled at some point and neither of them had gone near it.

“It does not change it,” Kyra said.

“It changes all of it.”

“It changes it for you.” She was not being unkind and it did not come out unkind. “Val, I have never had a number. I have had a smudge over the roof of whatever building I was standing next to, and I have looked at it in nine countries, and I have never once thought I was seeing my daughter. I was looking at the direction. That is all it ever was and the direction has not moved.”

Val did not say anything for a moment.

“That is a better position than mine.”

“It is not better. It is simply what I had.” Kyra reached across and took two of her fingers. “You had the other one and you have had it since the fourth year, and it has just been taken, and I would like you to have the afternoon about it rather than the eleven minutes you were planning on.”

Val had the afternoon.

What she did with the evening was arithmetic, because that is what she does with an evening.

“Eighty-five,” she said, at about nine.

“What about it?”

“The star. In the spiral, in eighteen eighty-five, that came up out of nothing and went away again, and we stood in a field at the lake and looked at it and I wrote four lines about it and put the notebook away.” Val had the notebook open now. “It was faint. It was a thing you needed a glass for and half the people who looked did not see it.”

“And?”

“And if that spiral is nine hundred thousand years away, then whatever that was, it was not a small event that looked small. It was an event that put out as much light in a few weeks as the entire system around it.” She sat back. “There is no such thing. There is nothing in anybody’s catalogue that does that. I have just proved that a thing I watched from a field with my own eyes cannot have happened.”

“So one of them is wrong.”

“One of them is wrong or there is a kind of event nobody has a name for,” said Val, “and I am not going to find out which in this house.”

She went down to the library on the Thursday about something else and came back with it anyway.

Kyra knew before the door was properly shut.

“What.”

“Miss Leavitt is dead,” Val said.

She took her hat off and put it on the table instead of the hook.

“Three years ago. December of twenty-one. She was fifty-three and it was in four lines in the back of a bulletin and I have been in that reading room perhaps forty times since and have never once looked her up, because there was no reason to look her up, because she had done her piece and I had it in a box.”

“Val—”

“The man in California could not have done any of it without her. Not one part. He needed the relation and somebody had to get the zero and then it was a ruler, exactly the way I said in this kitchen in nineteen twelve.” She sat down without taking her coat off for the second time that month. “Three years. She missed it by three years. She was fifty-three, and I am three hundred and ninety-five.”

Kyra came and stood behind her and put both hands flat on her shoulders and left them there.

The lamp was on the sideboard and the light came across at the level of the table, and it got into the pale of Val’s hair where it had come loose, and Kyra looked down at the top of that head for a while and did not say any of the four things she had ready.

“Do not tell me it is what happens,” Val said, to the table.

“I was not going to.”

“Everybody tells me it is what happens. It has been what happens for three hundred years and I have got extremely good at hearing it.”

“I know,” said Kyra. “I was going to say that she got the hard half and somebody else got the easy half and the hard half was hers, and that you are the only person in this hemisphere who knows it, and that you have been the only person who knows a thing about four hundred times now and it has never once got easier.”

Val put her hand up and held one of the hands on her shoulder.

Late, with the paper still on the table and the seven column inches and the hat advertisement beside them, Kyra said: “What have you got now?”

“A speed, from a man in seventeen twenty-eight. A bearing, from the hull. A distance to a star that is not the right star. A way of reading what a thing is made of out of its light.” Val folded the paper along the crease it had come with. “And a distance to the smudge, which is nine hundred thousand years of light and is the largest figure I have ever had occasion to write down.”

“And what does that give you?”

Val was quiet for a moment.

“It gives me the size of the problem,” she said. “That is all it gives me. I have spent a hundred and thirty-six years not knowing whether I was looking at a difficulty or an impossibility, and now I know which, and knowing which is not the same as being any nearer.”

She put the paper in the box with the four pages from Cambridge and shut the lid on both of them.

— end of chapter nineteen —

By the spring of that year it was over, in the way those things are over, which is that the men who had done it were still in the street and were now saying they had never much cared for it.

The law had gone the summer before. Nine judges in Washington had read the thing and been unanimous about it and that was the end of a measure that had been voted in by a hundred and fifteen thousand people in this state four years earlier, and had been, on its face, about where a child went to school.

Val had followed the whole of it in the papers, which is to say she had cut out nine articles and put them in the box and had not been able to say why.

What it had been like, for the people it had been about, they mostly learned from Jo.

She had been baptized into it and had lapsed out of it and had gone back to it after her husband died, in the manner of a great many people, and none of that had ever been a subject at that table until the autumn of twenty-two, when it became one.

She was fifty-one by then and had run a shop on Union Avenue for a quarter of a century and had put three delivery boys through their schooling.

“A man I have sold paper to since nineteen hundred and three crossed to the other side of the street,” she said, in November of that year, at the table, with her hands round a cup. “Not a bad man. I want that understood. He crossed the street and he did not look back and I watched him do it and I did not say anything to him about it then and I am not going to now.”

And nothing whatsoever happened to Anna and Ada Anderson.

That was the shape of it and Val said so out loud, once, in the kitchen, in the January after the law passed.

“It does not touch us,” she said.

“No.”

“It is about children, and it is about a church, and there is not one word in it about two women in a house, and there was never going to be.” She had her hands flat. “Nobody has thought of us. That is all the protection we have ever had. Not the papers and not the names. Nobody has ever thought of us.”

“Then why have you cut out nine articles?”

Val did not answer that for about a week.

When she did answer it she answered it properly, standing at the window with her hands in her sleeves, in the way she had been answering things since a mountain.

“Because a hundred and fifteen thousand people put a household on a ballot,” she said. “They did not put us on it. They put somebody on it. And what I have watched for four years is not a danger to us, it is a machine being built and tested and found to work, and the fact that it was pointed somewhere else this time is not a fact about the machine.”

“Val.”

“I have not slept properly since the autumn of twenty-two and I have had no right to a single hour of it, because nothing has happened to me, and I would like that said in this kitchen and then I would like to stop saying it.”

“Say it as often as you like,” said Kyra.

“Once is sufficient.”

The thirtieth came in September, five days later in the month than the twenty-ninth, and Val wrote it in the column and did not remark on the five days because she had stopped testing the interval a very long time ago.

It was an ordinary one until the second week.

Then it was the fortnight, which is the part where everything anybody says is very slightly too loud, and this time the fortnight landed in a city where people had spent four years listening to each other.

It happened in the shop on a Tuesday afternoon with four people in it.

A man at the counter was telling Jo Selby, pleasantly, at length, and with no idea that he was doing anything at all, that the trouble with the school business had been that it had gone too far, and that the underlying feeling had been sound enough, and that he had always said so.

Jo was wrapping a parcel and saying nothing, which was the only thing available to her and which she was doing very well.

And Kyra Davan, at the shelf, in the second week of the thirtieth peak, with everything in the room about a third too loud and her own pulse in her ears, opened her mouth.

What came out was, “Anna.”

Val was already crossing the floor. She had been watching that counter for about ninety seconds and had started moving on the word underlying, and she got to the shelf and put a hand flat between Kyra’s shoulder blades and said, in a voice pitched for the whole shop and containing nothing at all:

“The four-thirty. We will not get it.”

And Kyra said, “No, we will not,” and picked up the box she had come for, and the two of them went out past the man at the counter, who did not stop talking.

They got to the corner before either of them said anything.

“What was it going to be?” Val said.

“I don’t know.”

“Kyra.”

“I do not know, and that is what I have been standing here being frightened about for the last minute.” Her hands were shaking and she was not doing anything about it. “I had my mouth open and there was nothing in it. I have had my mouth open in a great many rooms in four hundred years and there has always been something in it, and I have always known exactly how far I was going to go, and this afternoon there was nothing there at all.”

“It is the second week.”

“I know it is the second week.”

“It has been the second week thirty times,” said Val, “and it has never once cost us anything, and the reason it has never cost us anything is that we have spent every one of them in a house or a field or a wagon.”

They walked the long way round because Kyra wanted to walk.

It was the hour in September when the light comes along a street sideways, and it got into her where the pins had come loose and found the copper at the ear the way it had found it on a mountain and in a lane and in a wagon bed, and Val walked beside her and looked at it twice and did not say anything about that either.

“It would not have been about us,” she said, after a while. “Whatever it was. I was not going to stand in a stationer’s and announce anything.”

“No. You were going to say a true thing to a man about the underlying feeling.”

“And?”

“And he would have remembered you,” Val said. “That is all. Not a report, not a letter, not a name written anywhere. A man crossing a street four years from now because of a woman who said something to him in a shop, and then saying to somebody that there is a pair of them on Hawthorne who keep themselves to themselves.”

Kyra stopped walking.

“That is exactly what he would say.”

“It is what they always say,” said Val. “It was what they said in Maribor.”

They went in the spring of the year after that, which was sixteen years on Hawthorne and six years longer than Val had ever intended.

The house they took was eleven blocks south and not on any line either of them had ridden, and the table went in under the window where the light came round, and Ellen Ostrander was told they were moving nearer the shop, which was true, and was sorry, which was also true.

Nobody on that street ever thought about them again, which was the entire object and which Val had been arranging since the autumn of twenty-two and did not mention.

Jo came to the new house in April and stood in the front room and said it was darker than the last one.

“It is darker.”

“You have put the table in the light and left yourselves the corner.”

“We have put the table in the light,” Val agreed, “because one of us reads at it and the other one does everything else in this house at it, and the corner will do for me.”

Jo, who had been coming to their table for thirty years and had never once been told a single true thing about either of them that mattered, said that was sensible, and asked whether there had been any post.

“Nothing from New Bedford,” said Kyra, from the kitchen.

“Not today,” Val said.

And Jo Selby, who was fifty-six years old and had sold paper on Union Avenue since before either of these women had come down off a lake, said that she had never understood why anybody wrote to Massachusetts, and went to find the cups.

— end of chapter twenty —

The man in nineteen thirty came in April and wrote down fifty-six and fifty-three and asked whether they owned a radio, which was a new question and the only one either of them enjoyed.

“We do not.”

“Everybody has one.”

“Everybody but this house,” said Val, and he wrote no in the box and went on, and Kyra bought one in October out of her own money and did not consult anybody about it.

The years after that were the ones everybody had.

Jo kept the shop, which not everybody on that street managed. She kept it going by selling less of everything and by carrying about nine accounts she had no reasonable expectation of collecting and by getting Val to tell her, twice a year, exactly how much longer she could go on doing that.

Val told her twice a year, exactly, to the month, and was wrong once, in the good direction, which Jo never let her forget.

“You said March.”

“I said March on the figures you gave me in September, Jo.”

“It is July.”

“It is July,” Val agreed, “because you did a thing in November that you did not put in the book, and I have not asked you what it was, and I am not going to.”

The Act went through in the summer of thirty-five and Val read every line of it, which almost nobody did, out of a bound copy in the reading room over two afternoons.

She came home and did not say anything about it for nine days.

Then, at the table, with the radio off:

“There is going to be a number.”

“A number for what?” said Kyra.

“For a person.”

She had the notebook out, which meant she had been at it for some days already and had simply not been ready.

“Everything we have ever done rests on one thing,” she said. “A record sits in a book and there is nothing on either side of it. Martha Miller is in a federal schedule in nineteen hundred and nothing leads to her and nothing leads away, and that is not luck, that is thirty years of work and it is the best work I have done on this planet.”

“And a number.”

“A number is a thing designed to lead away.” Val put her finger on the page. “It goes on every wage you are ever paid. It goes in a ledger in Baltimore and it stays there and it is not reissued and it is not repeated and there is one of them for you and no other person on this continent has it, ever, alive or dead.”

Kyra sat down.

“So we do not get one.”

“That is the first answer,” said Val, “and it is good for about nine years.”

She had worked that out too, in the nine days.

Not everybody was covered. A woman who kept her own books for a shopkeeper and took cash for it was not in the Act at all, and neither was a woman who did nothing anybody had a word for, and they could both stand outside the whole thing for the rest of the decade without anybody noticing.

“And then?”

“And then it widens, because that is what these do, and in nineteen forty-five or fifty there will be a clerk somewhere who wants to know why a woman of seventy has never been in the system, and the answer will be interesting to him.” Val closed the notebook. “A person who has no number in nineteen thirty-six is ordinary. A person who has no number in nineteen fifty is a question.”

They went to the post office on Union Avenue on a Thursday in the middle of November, and stood in a queue of about forty people, and it took an hour and ten minutes.

The form was one page. Name, address, the name of the employer, the date and place of birth, the father’s name and the mother’s full name before she was married.

Val looked at that last line for a moment.

She had had a mother ready since a marriage register in Missouri in eighteen forty-eight. She had built her in a room above a store, given her a county and a maiden name and a plausible death, and had carried her for eighty-eight years, and in all that time not one clerk, enumerator, agent, assessor or priest on this continent had ever once asked for her.

She wrote the name down.

It took four seconds and she had been holding it for the better part of a century.

Outside, on the steps, Kyra said: “You have gone a color.”

“I am perfectly well.”

“Val.”

“I am going to say something and I would like to say it on the step rather than at home, because at home I will arrange it.” Val had the receipt in her hand and was not looking at it. “That is the last name either of us is ever going to have.”

Kyra did not say anything.

“Not the last one we use. The last one that is ours. From this week there is a thing in a building in Baltimore with Anna Anderson on it, and there is no arrangement in the world by which a person hands one of those back and asks for another, and everything I have done for three hundred and twenty-nine years — the register in Missouri, the orphan in nineteen hundred, Hillsboro, every bit of it — was possible because you could always stop.”

“And now you cannot.”

“And now I cannot,” said Val, “and I have a piece of paper in my hand that says so, and it cost me five minutes and a queue.”

They walked down Union Avenue past the shop, which was shut, because it was a Thursday afternoon and Jo had not been well since September.

Kyra put her arm through Val’s at the corner and did not take it out again the whole way home.

Jo Selby died in the third week of February with both of them in the room.

It was not sudden and it was not long, and it was her heart, and she was sixty-five, and she had been saying since Christmas that she wanted the shop to go to the second of her delivery boys, who was forty-one and had worked for her since he was fourteen, and she had put it in writing in January in her own hand because she did not trust anybody’s hand but her own.

The last thing she said that either of them could make anything of was about paper, which was correct, and which Kyra thought about for a very long time afterward.

Val did not go to pieces. She did the things there are to do, which are considerable, and she did them well, because a woman who has been dying beside people for three hundred and twenty-nine years knows exactly what there is to do in the four days afterward and does not have to be told.

She wrote to the sister in Astoria. She sat with the boy who was forty-one. She went through the accounts twice and found a thing in the second one that saved him about four hundred dollars, and did not mention that she had found it.

Kyra watched all of that from about nine feet away and let her have every bit of it.

It came on the Sunday.

Val was at the table with the last of it in front of her, and stopped, and put the pen down, and said, to the paper:

“Forty years.”

“Forty years.”

“She came into my life at twenty-six and went out of it at sixty-five and I was in the room for both, and that has never happened to me. Not once. Not on that world and not on this one.” Her hands were flat on the table. “Frederick was eleven months. Jakob was twenty-five years and I left. Everybody goes out of it sideways — we move, or they move, or the ship goes, and you carry a person off in your head at whatever age they were on the last day and they stay that age forever and you never find out.”

“And you found out.”

“I have watched one whole human life,” said Val. “Beginning to end, the useful part of it, in order, without a gap. It took forty years and it is the only complete thing I own.”

Kyra came and sat down opposite her.

The light was coming in low off the window the way it does there in February, thin and without any warmth in it, and it got into the pale of Val’s hair where it had come down and made her look about nineteen, which she was not and had not been for a very long time.

“She never knew one true thing about us,” Kyra said.

“Not one.”

“Forty years at that table and she went out of the world believing she had two friends called Anderson from Pennsylvania.”

“She had two friends,” Val said. “That part was not a lie and it is the only part that was ever going to matter to her, and I have been telling myself that since Tuesday and it has been working about half the time.”

“It is working now.”

“It is working now,” she agreed, “because you are sitting there.”

Afterward, much later, Kyra said the thing she had been carrying since the post office.

“She knew us by two names.”

“She did.”

“Miller, for about a year and a half, and then Anderson for the rest of it, and she never once asked about the change.”

“She asked in ninety-eight,” Val said. “She asked once, in the shop, in April, and I gave her the sixth answer and she said God, families, and that was the end of it for thirty-nine years.”

“You remember the month.”

“I remember all of it,” said Val. “That is what I am for.”

— end of chapter twenty-one —

The new column was the fourth one along and it asked where you had been living on the first of April five years earlier, and Val saw it on the practice sheet a fortnight before the man came and put the sheet down on the table and looked at it for some time.

“What,” said Kyra.

“It asks about the past.”

“They have been asking about the past since Missouri. They ask where you were born.”

“Where you were born is a place. This is a date and a place and another date and another place, in the same hand, on the same line.” Val put her finger on it. “For a hundred years I have been building documents that do not lead anywhere. This one is a document whose entire purpose is to lead somewhere.”

It cost them nothing, of course, because they had been in the same house since twenty-seven and the true answer and the safe answer were the same four words.

Val said them, on the step, to a woman called Mrs. Rademacher who had four blocks to do before dark. Anderson, Anna, sixty-six. Anderson, Ada, sixty-three. Same house, same city, same county, five years ago and ten and thirteen.

“Grade of school completed?”

“Eighth,” said Val.

“Income last year?”

“Nine hundred and forty dollars.”

Mrs. Rademacher wrote all of it down and then came to the bottom of the page and made a small sound.

“You are on a line,” she said.

“A line,” Val said.

“Two lines on every sheet get the extra questions. It is a sample. It comes out of a table and I have no say in it whatever, and you are on one and your sister is not.” She turned the page over. “It is eight more and they are quick.”

Val, who had spent forty years arranging a life around not being selected for anything, stood in her own doorway and was selected by a table.

Father’s birthplace. Mother’s birthplace. Mother tongue in the home in childhood. Veteran, no. Social security number, which Val gave from memory without any hesitation at all, having decided in the queue in thirty-six that hesitating over it once would be worse than saying it a thousand times.

And then the last two, which were for women only.

“Have you been married more than once?”

“I have not been married at all.”

“Number of children ever born.”

“A dash,” said Val.

Mrs. Rademacher wrote the dash and thanked her and went to do her four blocks, and Val shut the door and stood in the hall.

Kyra came out of the kitchen.

“What.”

“I did not stop.”

“Val.”

“In nineteen hundred a man with a blister asked me that question and there was a second in it. A whole second, in a doorway, and I have thought about that second perhaps four hundred times.” She was still holding the door handle. “Just now it came out at the speed of the school grade. There was nothing in it at all. It was the eighth question of eight and I answered it like the price of a hat.”

Kyra took her hand off the handle and did not say anything for a moment.

“Say what you are frightened of.”

“That it is going.”

“It is not going.”

“It got easier,” said Val. “That is all I know. It got easier without my permission and I did not do anything to make it get easier, and if that one can go then I would like to know which of the others is going and in what order, and I have no way of finding out and nothing to measure it against.”

“I will tell you.”

“You cannot see the inside of it.”

“I have been reading the outside of it since we were girls on a plateau,” Kyra said, “and I have got about eleven things wrong in four hundred years, and I will tell you, and you will believe me, because you have twenty-nine entries in a column that came out of my mouth and not one of them has ever been wrong either.”

Val let go of the door.

The city began to change about eight months after that, and then it did not stop for four years.

The first of it was a contract in the papers and then men in the paper about the contract, and then there was a yard at the north end where there had been nothing, and then there were three yards, and then there were people arriving on every train from places neither of them had ever heard a Portland voice mention.

By forty-two the streetcars were standing room at four in the morning because the shift changed at four in the morning, and there were women in the cars in trousers with their hair tied up, going to weld.

Kyra watched them go past for about three weeks, standing at the corner in the dark with her collar up, and once Val came out to find her and stood beside her and saw the headlamp of the four o’clock car come round and go across her — the dark of her hair and the copper in it at the ear, and the whole of her face lit for about a second and a half and then not.

“I want it,” Kyra said.

“I know you do.”

“Do not be reasonable at me yet. I want to say it properly first.” She had her hands on the back of the chair. “I have been in this country for ninety-five years and I have never once been paid for anything. Not on that world either. I have kept houses and I have doctored animals and I have carried people up staircases in an epidemic for nothing, and none of that is a complaint, and there is a woman on the four o’clock car with a burn on her wrist who is building a ship.”

“Yes,” said Val.

“I could do it. I could do it extremely well and you know I could.”

“I know you could,” Val said.

“Now be reasonable at me.”

Val did it in three sentences, because there was no kind way to do it in more.

“You are sixty-five,” she said. “The yard will not take you at sixty-five, and you cannot be anybody else at the gate, because the number goes on the payroll and the number belongs to a woman of sixty-five, and there is no arrangement on this planet by which you get a second one.”

Kyra did not say anything.

“And the badge has a photograph on it.”

That was the end of it and both of them knew it inside about four seconds, and neither of them said anything for rather longer than four seconds.

“Six years,” Kyra said, when she had it.

“Six years.”

“You stood on the steps of a post office in thirty-six and told me what it was going to cost and I did not understand one word of it, and it has taken six years to arrive and it has arrived as a burn on a woman’s wrist.”

“I did not know it would be this,” Val said. “I want that said. I knew there would be a thing and I did not know what the thing was, and if I had known it was going to be this I do not know that I would have done anything differently, and I would have hated it more.”

What she did instead was everything there was that had no payroll attached to it.

There was a great deal. A city that doubles in three years is a city with nobody minding anything, and a woman of sixty-five who is plainly not sixty-five and who can carry a crate and talk to anybody was wanted in about nine places at once and asked for no paper in any of them.

She ran a canteen two nights a week and then four. She learned the names of the shifts and then the names of the people on them, which nobody else bothered to do.

And in the winter of forty-three she started going out to the new place on the flats below the railroad, where they had put up a whole city in a hundred and ten days for the people the yards had brought and the rest of Portland would not rent to.

“What is it like?” Val asked, the first week.

“It is wooden and it is new and there is not one thing in it that is meant to last.” Kyra had her boots off and her feet up. “Eighteen thousand people and it is built on a floodplain behind a railroad fill, and I asked a man about the fill and he laughed at me.”

Val looked up.

“Say that again.”

“He laughed at me, Val. Pleasantly. He said the dikes have held since before I was born, which I let stand.”

Val went out there once, in February of forty-four, on a Sunday, and walked the length of it and back and looked at the fill for about eleven minutes and did not say anything at all on the way home.

When they got in she took the notebook out and wrote four lines in it and shut it.

“Are you going to tell me?” Kyra said.

“No.”

“Val.”

“I have written down what I think and I have put a date on it, and I am not going to say it in this kitchen, because if I say it in this kitchen you will go out there on Tuesday and start telling people, and there are eighteen thousand of them and nowhere else in this city will have them.” She put the notebook in the box. “And I would be telling them about rain. That is all I have got. A fill, and a river, and rain, and no year attached to any of it.”

Kyra sat with that for a while.

“All right,” she said.

“It is not all right.”

“No,” said Kyra. “It is not.”

— end of chapter twenty-two —

The notice went round the flats that morning on a half-sheet of paper and Kyra read one on a doorstep at about nine o’clock with a cup of somebody else’s coffee in her hand.

It said the dikes were safe at present. It said they would be warned if it became necessary. It said there would be time to leave.

The last line said not to get excited.

Kyra folded it and put it in her coat pocket and kept it for sixty-one years.

She had been going out there two and three days a week since the winter of forty-three and by that spring she knew about four hundred people by name, which nobody else who did not live there did.

The river had been up for a fortnight and everybody had been watching it and a good many of them had asked, and had been told what the half-sheet told them.

Val had been asked as well, twice, by women at the canteen who knew she was the sister who was good with figures, and both times she had said that she did not know, which was true, and had gone home and not slept, which she did not mention.

It went at about a quarter past four in the afternoon.

Not the dike on the river. The railroad fill on the west side, where the embankment carried the line across the low ground, and which everybody had looked at for five years and thought of as a railway rather than as a wall.

A piece of it about the length of a street simply was not there anymore, and what came through it came through at the height of a room.

Kyra was at the north end when it started and she heard it before she saw it, which she told Val about once, four days later, and never again.

What there was, was about an hour.

In the first twenty minutes of it people got out on foot and by car and the roads worked. In the second twenty they did not work. In the third twenty there were streets with four feet of the Columbia in them going somewhere in a hurry, and a great many people on porches and roofs and in upper rooms of buildings that had been put up in a hundred and ten days and were not going to be there in the morning.

There were boats by then. Not many and not soon enough and there were boats.

What Kyra Davan did for the next five hours was stand in water up to the middle of her and pass people along a line.

That is the whole of the technical account and she gave no better one afterward to anybody. There was a line of them, men mostly and four women, strung between a porch rail and a truck bed on the high ground, and things came along it: a woman handed over a rail, a man’s dog, a suitcase somebody would not let go of, an old man with his arms round the neck of a boy of nineteen, and children, one after another, for five hours.

She was good at it in the way she had been good at it in a street full of the Willamette fifty-four years earlier, which was that she could see which person in a line was about to drop something, and she was always standing next to that one.

Twice in those five hours the gold came up in her eyes.

The first time she had her back to everybody. The second time she did not, and there was a man eighteen inches from her face handing her a child, and she looked straight at him and there was no possible thing to be done about it and she did not do anything about it.

He did not see it. He was fifty-one years old and had been in the water for two hours and his wife was on the truck and his mother was not, and he handed her the child and turned round for the next one.

Nobody in that water looked at anybody’s eyes all afternoon.

Val got the word in the city at about five and got as far as the Denver Avenue end at about a quarter to seven and could not get any further, because nobody could, because there was nowhere further to get to that was not the river.

She stood on the fill with about two hundred other people for four hours.

She did not shout and she did not ask anybody anything and she did not once put her hand on the arm of any of the men going past, because every one of those would have been a thing somebody remembered about a woman on the dike.

What she did was count boats.

She counted them out and she counted them back and she kept the figure, because there was one thing on that embankment that she could do and it was the only one, and at some point after nine o’clock a boat came in with eleven people in it and one of them was standing up in the bow being handed a rope, and Val Sorin found that she had put both hands on the railing of somebody’s truck and that she was holding it hard enough to hurt.

There was a man on the fill with a camera for most of the afternoon and he was one of several.

He was standing about where anybody would have stood, forty feet up, with the whole of it below him, and he took what there was to take: the line in the water, the boats, the roofs with people on them, the rail, a woman being handed over it.

Kyra knew he was there. She knew he was there within about ten minutes of his arriving, because knowing where the eyes in a place are is a thing she has done since she was nineteen years old and has never once had to think about.

She had a child on her hip at the time, out of the water, waiting for the next pair of hands.

She stayed where she was.

By dark there was no city.

That is not a way of putting it. Eighteen thousand people had lived on that ground in the morning and by ten at night the ground was a lake with the tops of buildings in it, and the buildings were coming apart, and a great many of them went off their foundations and moved and struck other buildings and stopped.

Fifteen people are known to have died. The number that has been argued about ever since is larger and nobody has ever been able to settle it, and Val, who had a figure for how many boats went out and how many came back, refused for the rest of her life to give anybody an opinion about it.

They found each other at about twenty past ten on the Denver Avenue side, among about four hundred people and a dozen trucks and a great deal of shouting, and did not touch each other at all.

“Ada.”

“Anna.”

That was it. That was every word, in front of four hundred people, and both of them had four hundred years of practice at exactly that and neither of them had ever hated it more.

They walked the two miles home without touching.

In the kitchen with the door shut Kyra stood in the middle of the floor in a coat that weighed about thirty pounds and could not get her fingers to work on the buttons, and Val did them, one at a time, from the bottom, without saying anything at all.

Her hair had dried against her head and was beginning to come loose in pieces, and there was silt in it, and under the ceiling light it was the color of a river bottom and the copper did not show anywhere on her at all, which had not happened in three hundred and forty-one years and which Val noticed and would remember for the rest of her life.

“There was a girl,” Kyra said.

“All right.”

“About four. Somebody put her in my arms at the rail and went back and I did not see them again and I do not know whose she was.” Her voice was entirely level, which in her meant what it always meant. “She was on the second truck and there was a woman from her building on it who knew her name.”

“Then she is all right.”

“I am going to find out,” said Kyra. “Not tonight. I am going to find out.”

“I know you are.”

She found out in eleven days, and the girl was fine, and that was the one thing out of the whole of that spring that Kyra Davan ever said out loud about it afterward, to anybody, in sixty-one years.

Very late, with the coat still on the kitchen floor where it had fallen because neither of them had the strength to do anything about a coat, Val said the thing she had been carrying up two miles of road.

“There were men on that fill with cameras.”

Kyra did not open her eyes.

“There were four,” she said.

“Four.”

“Four that I saw. Two of them were from papers and I think one was a man from the housing people and I do not know about the fourth.” She was very nearly asleep. “I knew where all of them were the whole time, Val. I want that said tonight because tomorrow you are going to ask me whether I knew, and I knew, and I stayed in the line.”

Val did not say anything for a long moment.

“I am not going to ask you that tomorrow.”

“You are.”

“I am going to ask you something else,” said Val, “and you are going to say no, and I am going to do it anyway,” and Kyra, who was asleep by then, did not hear any of it.

— end of chapter twenty-three —

They put people to sleep in the auditorium, which neither of them had been inside since the autumn of nineteen eighteen and which had a hundred beds in it again by the Wednesday.

Kyra was there every day for five weeks and did not once remark on the building, and Val did not either, and both of them knew exactly what the other was not saying and let it stand.

What was needed was lists. Where a family had gone. Which children were with which aunt. Whether a man in a shelter on the east side had a wife in a church hall on the west, which about nine of them did.

Kyra knew four hundred names before the flood and she knew about nine hundred by the end of June.

Val raised it on the ninth of June at the table, with the papers of the week in front of her and four of them open.

“You are in three of these.”

“I know.”

“The rail one is the worst. You are in the second row, you are turned three-quarters on, and it is a good print.” Val had her hands flat on either side of it. “And there will be more. There will be the ones they did not run, and the negatives, and whatever the housing man took, and the fourth one whose paper I have not identified.”

“Say what you want.”

“I want to get them.”

Kyra put down what she was holding and did not sit down.

“No.”

“I have not finished putting it, Kyra.”

“You do not need to put it, I have known what it was since the kitchen on the night, and the answer is no.” She had her hands on the back of the chair. “And I am going to give you the reason and I would like you to take the reason seriously rather than taking it as a feeling.”

“I always take your reasons seriously.”

“Then take this one.”

“Eighteen thousand people lost everything they owned in about an hour,” Kyra said, “and this city is already telling itself that it was not so bad and that the warning was adequate and that everybody got out, and there are men in offices in this town who would be extremely pleased if the afternoon turned out to have no pictures of it.”

“I am not proposing to destroy the record of the flood.”

“You are proposing to go through the record of the flood and take out the frames you do not care for.”

“The frames with my—” Val stopped.

“Say it.”

“The frames with you in them.”

“It is my face,” Kyra said.

“It is.”

“It is my face, and it is my five hours, and it is the only afternoon in four hundred years that I have done a thing in public that I would want anybody to know I did, and you are asking me for it.” She was not shouting and had never once in four centuries shouted about anything that mattered. “And there are people in those pictures who were pulled out of a street, and their grandchildren are going to want to see that somebody came for them, and I am not having a woman in Oregon go round with a pair of scissors making that afternoon tidier.”

Val did not say anything at all.

“Say you understand it.”

“I understand every word of it,” said Val.

“Then that is the end of it.”

It took her five weeks.

She went to the newspaper on Sixth as a woman compiling a record of the relief effort for a church committee, which was an entirely ordinary thing for an entirely ordinary woman of seventy-four to be doing in the summer of forty-eight, and she was patient and dull and was there nine times, and by the fourth visit the boy in the morgue had stopped watching her.

She took what she took one at a time.

She went to the other paper twice. She found the housing man through his own filing and bought forty prints off him for nine dollars on the grounds that the committee wanted them, and he was glad of the nine dollars.

The fourth photographer turned out to be a freelance who had sold two frames and kept the rest, and she bought the rest, and paid more than they were worth, and he thought she was a fool and said so pleasantly.

She burned them in the stove on a Thursday afternoon in the middle of July with the kitchen door shut.

Negatives do not burn well. They curl and they stink and they take a long time, and she stood there and did it properly, because doing a thing properly was what she had instead of a defense.

She counted them.

Thirty-one prints and nineteen negatives, and she wrote the figure in the notebook, and put the date beside it, and did not write anything else.

Kyra came in at six and knew from the hall.

She stood in the kitchen doorway for about four seconds and then went and opened the window, and neither of them said a word for the length of time it took to do that.

“How many?”

“Fifty.”

“You have the figure to the item.”

“Thirty-one prints and nineteen negatives,” Val said.

Kyra stood at the open window with her back to the room.

“Are you going to say you are sorry?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I am not,” said Val, “and you would know inside a syllable, and a false one would cost us more than the pictures did.”

“You went round me.”

“I went round you. I asked you and you gave me a good answer and I did it anyway, and it is the first time in three hundred and forty-one years that I have done a thing you had told me not to do, and I have no account of it that you are going to accept and I am not going to construct one.”

“Then give me the one I will not accept.”

“I could not have it,” Val said. “Your face in a drawer in a building in this city for as long as the building stands. That is all I have got. It is not a reason, it is a sentence about me, and I have had it in my mouth since a man on a fill put a camera up.”

“And me?” said Kyra.

“You are going to be angry for a considerable time and you are entitled to the whole of it.”

“I am not angry.”

“You are furious.”

“I am furious and that is not the same thing.” She turned round at last. Her eyes had gone right out to the rim and she did not do anything about it and neither of them said a word about that either. “Val, I would have said yes.”

“What?”

“In about a month. If you had left it with me and let it sit and come back in September I would have said yes, and I would have hated it and I would have said yes, and you did not wait five weeks because you have never once in four hundred years believed that you would get the answer if you waited for it.”

Val sat down.

Neither of them said anything else about it that summer.

They were entirely civil, which was the worst of it. They ate at the same table and answered each other and went to bed in the same room and did not touch, and Kyra went out to the lists every day and came back and reported what she had done in the tone of a woman reporting to a committee, and Val took it that way and asked one question each time and no more.

Six weeks of that. Neither of them apologized, because there was no apology available that was not a lie, and both of them knew that, and knowing it did not help in the slightest.

The thirty-second came in September.

Kyra said so on a Friday, in the hall, in the flat voice she had been using since July: it had started on the Tuesday.

Val wrote it in the column.

And then, on the Saturday, without either of them saying one word about it, there was salt in the house. There was salt in the house on the Saturday and every day for three weeks after it, and the door that closed too hard got a strip of felt on it on the Monday, and on the Thursday of the second week Kyra came down at four in the morning because she could not sleep and there was a lamp left low in the front room and a rug over the arm of the chair, which had not been there when she went up.

Neither of them mentioned any of it.

It had been going on every eleven years since a hut on a mountain, and it did not ask permission, and it did not stop for anything, and it had never once required either of them to be on speaking terms.

It went off in the first week of October.

Kyra came down on a Thursday and was simply herself again, and stood in the kitchen doorway in the early light, and looked at the woman at the table with the pale of her hair coming down and the accounts open in front of her and a cup gone cold at her elbow.

“Put the thirty-second down as finished,” she said.

“What day?”

“I don’t know what day.”

“Then I shall put down Thursday,” said Val.

And Kyra came and stood behind the chair and put both hands on that woman’s shoulders and left them there, and Val put her hand up and held one of them, and that was the whole of the apology in both directions and it took about nine seconds and no words at all.

Later, upstairs, with the rain starting on the roof for the first time since June, neither of them planned anything.

Afterward Kyra lay with her face in the side of Val’s neck and said, into her, “I am still furious.”

“I know.”

“I am going to be furious about it in a hundred years.”

“I am aware,” Val said, “and I have priced that too, and I paid it in July, and I would like it understood that I knew the figure at the time.”

“You always know the figure.”

“I always know the figure,” she agreed.

And the rain went on doing what it does there from October, and at some point without either of them deciding to, they laced.

The count was wrong.

It was wrong by one, and it was not Val’s fault in any sense she would have accepted; the freelance had sold three frames and not two, and the third had gone east that spring to a wire service and come back in a bundle of prints that nobody at the paper on Sixth ever filed, and in the autumn of that year a copy boy put the bundle in a box, and in nineteen sixty-one the box went into a basement, and in nineteen seventy-nine it went into another one.

A row of people in a street that had become a river. Men in soaked shirts. A rowboat, and a woman being handed over a porch rail.

And in the second row, with her hair plastered to her head and her sleeves shoved up and a child on her hip, a woman of about twenty-two.

Neither of them ever knew.

— end of chapter twenty-four —