The Door

There was a thing on the television about people buying a house they could not afford and arguing about a kitchen, and neither of them had the slightest interest in it, and neither of them turned it off.

It had been a long week of the kind that is long for no reason. Rain since Tuesday. Four cartons from a records office in Sacramento standing in the hall where the delivery man had left them, which Val had opened and gone through and repacked and had not carried anywhere, because there was nowhere in particular for them to go and because what was in them was what had been in the last four. A list on the table in Val's hand with nine things on it and four crossed out, which had been nine things with four crossed out since Sunday.

They were on the couch the way they had been on couches since there were couches — Val at the end with her feet up, Kyra beside her and half turned in, close enough that there was no gap anywhere along them. The one lamp was behind Val's shoulder and did to the pale of her hair what every lamp on two worlds had ever done to it, which was to take the gold out at the crown and leave it at the ends.

And at some point Kyra became aware, in the entirely idle way of a woman who is not watching a television program either, that Val's skirt had got itself arranged in such a way that there was nothing whatever in her road.

She did not announce it.

She took about a minute and a half getting there, which was not caution and was not stealth, it was simply the pace at which she did anything with that woman when there was no hurry on — her hand down off Val's knee and up under, unhurried, taking every second it took.

Val noticed somewhere around the knee and did nothing at all about it.

She did not look over. She did not say anything. She shifted perhaps half an inch, which was a permission and was understood as one, and went on holding her list and not reading it.

It took a while to get through.

It always did, and Kyra had never once minded, and she worked her fingers into the thick of it slowly and without any impatience whatsoever, parting it the way you part long grass to see the ground, because there was a very great deal and it did not give way for anybody.

And then she found her, exactly where she had been for four hundred and some years, drawn back and quiet and entirely unaware that anybody was coming.

Kyra used her smallest finger. She always did for this.

One stroke, barely any weight in it at all.

Val's hands came to rest on the list.

That was all. She did not look round and she did not stop looking at the television, and under the skirt her whole body had gone still in the particular way it went still, and about four seconds later she came up around Kyra's finger and curled, and held.

Not a word. There were never any words in it and after four hundred years there did not need to be — a pressure and a curl and a particular unhurried slowness, which had meant what it meant since Maribor and had never once been said aloud by either of them.

Kyra answered it.

They went on like that for some minutes with a man on the television complaining about a countertop.

It was not a conversation. That was the thing about it — they had the long kind, on this couch, a few times a month, with trousers over the back of a chair and both of them facing and something real to be said. This was not that. This was the other use, the small one, the one with no subject in it at all.

Four centuries of a language that had never once managed a noun, being used for the thing it was best at, which was saying nothing in particular to somebody who was already there.

And then Kyra did something she had never done.

She took her finger away — which got a small protest, a tightening and a let-go, that she ignored entirely — and turned her hand over, and laid the flat of her palm down across the whole of it.

Not into. Not through. Flat, and open, and covering everything, the way you put a hand on a sleeping animal or on the lid of something.

And left it there.

Val sat up.

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing."

"You are doing something, you have stopped—"

"Val, I am doing nothing at all," said Kyra, "and I would like you to leave it there for a minute."

And Val, who had been going to say something else, did not say it. She put the list down on the floor. And then, because a thing she had not seen was a thing she did not have, and because there was nobody in that house or on that road who was going to walk in, she took hold of the hem of her own skirt and pulled it up out of the way so that she could look at what was happening.

There was a hand on her.

That was all. One hand, laid flat, fingers together, not doing one single thing — and under it and around the edges of it, nothing of her showing anywhere at all.

Kyra's hand covered the whole of it.

Every part. The entire thick dark unmanaged four-hundred-year-old business of her, the thing she had never once taken off and never would, the thing that took two minutes and had cost her a night in Maribor and about an hour of weeping in a bedroom in Portland — and it fit, completely, with room at the edges, under one woman's hand.

"Oh," said Val.

"I noticed about a year ago," Kyra said.

Val turned her head on the arm of the couch.

"You noticed."

"I was lying there one night with my hand where it is now and I thought, that's all of it. That's the whole famous thing. And then I thought about saying it to you and I couldn't work out how without it sounding like I was making a joke, so I put it away." She had not moved her hand a particle. "And then tonight you were cross about a list and I thought I'd just do it instead."

Val did not say anything.

"You can have it either way," said Kyra. "You can have it as me being soppy on a couch, which it partly is. Or you can have the other thing."

"Say the other thing."

"I have had a razor to you every August for a hundred and sixteen years, love," said Kyra, "and I have never once taken a hair more than the mark needs, and it is back inside three weeks and I have never been sorry to see it come back."

"I am aware of most of that."

"And I can cover the lot with one hand."

The man on the television had moved on to the garden.

"That's all," Kyra said, and took her free hand off the back of the couch and put it flat on Val's shin. "That's everything I've got. It isn't big, Val. It has never once been big. It's about the size of my hand and I've been carrying that around for a year not knowing how to say it to you."

Val looked at it for a long moment.

She was, as it happens, doing arithmetic, and she would have admitted to it under no circumstances whatever. Not the width of a hand — she had that already, she had had it since about 1690 and it was four and a quarter inches across the knuckles and seven from the wrist. What she was doing was putting it next to things.

Next to four hundred years of a heading with a figure under it.

Next to two minutes, and a hundred and some nights where she had lain in the dark and checked, and a razor in a stranger's bathroom in Portland, and a woman holding her by the jaw in a bedroom in November saying no twice.

All of it. The whole weight of the thing. And here it was in front of her at last with a measure against it, and the measure was a hand, and the hand went round the outside with room to spare.

"I have wanted a scale for four hundred years," Val said.

"I know you have."

"I have had figures for everything and a scale for almost none of it. That is my entire complaint about this planet and I have made it to you in about nine kitchens." Her voice was not entirely steady. "And you have just put one on the only thing I have ever actually needed one for, and it is not a number, and it is your hand."

Kyra looked at the back of her own hand for a moment.

"It's not a very big hand."

"It is exactly the right size," said Val, "which is the point, and you knew it was the point, and you have been sitting on it for a year because you could not work out how to say it without me taking it the wrong way."

"That's about the shape of it."

"You were correct to wait."

"I know I was," said Kyra. "I'm very good at this."

Val put her own hand down on top of Kyra's, through the skirt, and held it there.

"Do not move it."

"I wasn't going to."

"I would like it where it is for some while. I am not able to tell you why and I would rather you did not ask."

"I'm not going to ask you," said Kyra. "I've known why since about a year ago. That's rather the whole business."

They stayed like that until the program finished and another one started and the people in it began arguing about a different kitchen.

At some point Val's light came up, which it did now in a lit room with the television going, because the curtains were shut and the nearest house was a quarter of a mile down the road and the two of them had let the old rule go somewhere in the spring without discussing it.

Kyra watched the dark of her own hair fall forward into the edge of it and go the color it went, chestnut with the copper coming up along the one side, which she had been seeing in mirrors since she was a girl and had never once got used to.

And at some point after that she turned her hand over again and took up where she had left off, slowly, with no announcement at all — and Val made a small sound she did not authorize and put her head back against the arm of the couch.

The list stayed on the floor. It had nine things on it and four crossed out, and it would still have nine things on it and four crossed out in the morning.

— end of chapter one —

The thing nobody tells you about looking for a family across four hundred years of other people's paperwork is how much of it is spelling.

Val had four cartons from Sacramento, two from a diocesan office in Santa Fe that had cost her more than they were worth, and a county index on loan that she was not strictly entitled to have. What she was looking for was a line of descent with no name attached to it, in a country that had been three countries, among people who had changed how they wrote themselves down every time somebody at a desk asked them to. She had been at it since June. She had four possibles and one of them was probably two people.

It was the Thursday of the second week of November and the rain had been going since breakfast, and she had the long table to herself because Kyra was in Vernonia doing something about a culvert.

She kept the book beside her out of habit rather than need.

It had four hundred and nine names in it and a great deal else — a bearing she had taken off a hull in 1789, a speed from a man in a field, two reckonings of the year, the eleven lines of the ship's own record copied out four times in a hand that got smaller as the centuries went. She had not opened it for the lines in a while. She opened it that afternoon for a date, which was the sort of thing she opened it for now.

And the page fell where it had always fallen, because a book opens where it has been opened.

She read them. She did not mean to and there was no reason to and she knew them well enough to have written them on a wall in the dark, and she read all eleven anyway with her finger under the fourth, which is what she had been doing since 1700.

They say when the fold was entered and from where. They say the geometry. They say what the ship did and what the ship was asked to do and the one place where those two differ. They say the transit took fifteen seconds.

And that is the end of them, and she had made her peace with the end of them a long time ago.

What she had never made her peace with was the fourth line.

Three hundred and twenty-six years of it. The asked and the did, side by side, in the ship's own hand, with the difference between them stated to a precision no instrument on this planet could reproduce — and she had looked at that difference every time she had opened the book and had treated it, every single time, as the record of a wound.

That is what it was. It was the thing that had happened to them. It was the reason there was a hull on a mountain in the Carpathians instead of in a yard six miles inland of Aventhal, and the reason there were seventeen names she had carried every day since, and she had never once in three centuries looked at it as anything else.

She got up and put the kettle on and did not make anything with it.

Here is the shape of what she had been doing instead, for four hundred years, which anybody who had watched her do it would have called thorough.

She had a speed with no distance against it. She had a bearing with no distance against it. She had a distance to a star that turned out to be the wrong star, which had taken nine years to get and nineteen to let go of. She had a method that reads what a thing is made of off the light coming away from it, which is a fine method and tells you nothing about how far off the thing is.

Every chain she had ever built stopped one term short. She had built a great many of them. In about nine kitchens on two continents she had got to the end of one out loud, and stopped, because the next word would have been therefore and there was nothing to hang on it.

Four hundred years of trying to work out where Sethal is from here.

The paper was not in the book. The paper was in a flat gray box on the second shelf with about sixty others, and she had read it in 1991 and filed it and not thought about it since, because it had not been about anything she wanted.

It was eleven pages long and it was not a good paper.

A man at a state university had spent most of a career on a narrow problem in instrument work, which was what to do when a device has been wrong in a way you can characterize. His argument was that a known fault is not noise. If you can state exactly how a thing failed, you do not need to know where it was pointed, because the fault and the correction are the same object read in opposite directions. He had demonstrated it on telescope mountings. He had been mildly right, and about forty people had cared, and the field had gone somewhere else within a decade.

Val had read it because she read everything. She had found it sensible and slight and had put it away.

She stood in a kitchen in Oregon with a cold kettle and did not move for a while.

Then she went back to the table and sat down and put the paper beside the book, open at the fourth line, and looked at the two of them next to each other for about ten minutes without touching either.

A fold is not a journey. There is no distance in it to be slow across. Her own daughter had said that in a cold room to a woman who had come up the stairs with bad news, and it had been quoted back to Val twice by people who thought they were comforting her, and she had agreed with it both times and gone on doing exactly what she had been doing.

She had spent four centuries looking for a distance in a thing that does not have one.

The ship had not got lost. The ship had done something very slightly other than what it was asked, and had written down both, and had been sitting on a mountain for four hundred years with the fault and the correction in the same eleven lines, and she had read them as an obituary.

She did the work.

That took her the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening and she did not eat, and at a quarter to nine she had it on four sheets with the fourth line at the top of the first and the man from the state university's one useful move at the top of the second, and at the bottom of the fourth there was a line that ended in a way no line of hers had ended since 1608.

She looked at it.

Then she checked it, from the beginning, in order, which took forty minutes. Then she checked it again from the other end, which took longer. Then she wrote out the two places it could still be wrong, and went and got what she needed to close the first one, and closed it, and sat with the second for about an hour and could not make it fail.

Kyra came in at half past ten with her hair wet through and the shoulders of her coat dark with it.

"That culvert is a crime," Kyra said, from the hall. "That culvert has been a crime since before the mill shut and I have told four separate men so and every one of them agreed with me and none of them has a shovel." She came through pulling her arms out of the sleeves. "There is mud in my hair. There is mud in my—"

She stopped in the doorway.

Val was sitting exactly where she had been sitting at half past two, with the one lamp on and the pale of her head bent over four sheets of paper and the rest of the room dark behind her.

"Val."

Val put the pencil down flat.

"You are wet through."

"I am aware that I am wet through. What's happened."

"Nothing has happened," said Val. "Go and get dry."

Kyra did not go and get dry. She came three steps in and stopped at the corner of the table with the coat over her arm and her hair gone almost black with the rain through it, and looked at the woman and then at the four sheets and then at the woman again.

"Is it the line?" said Kyra. "Have you got one of them?"

"No."

"Then what."

And Val Sorin, who had been sitting in that chair for nine hours arriving at the only thing she had ever wanted, opened her mouth and told her about a paper on telescope mountings.

She did it properly. She did it in order, with the man's name and the year and the journal and what was wrong with the field he had been working in, and the shape of his argument in four sentences, and why it had been ignored, and the particular narrowness of it that had made it useless to everybody including him.

It took about three minutes and it was, as a piece of exposition, entirely excellent.

Kyra put the coat on the back of a chair and sat down on the arm of it and let her get all the way to the end.

"That's not what I asked you," said Kyra.

"It is the relevant—"

"Val."

Val squared the four sheets against the edge of the table.

"It is the relevant background and you will not be able to follow the rest of it without—"

"I don't want to follow the rest of it." Kyra had not raised her voice at all. "I want the last line. You've got four sheets there and you've been sitting in the dark with them and you have just given me three minutes about a man in a university who has been dead for twenty years. Say the last line."

Val looked at the table.

The light had come up at the wrists some time before and she had not noticed it and did nothing about it now.

"I cannot," said Val.

"Can't say it, or it isn't there?"

"It is there."

"Then—"

"I have been building that sentence since sixteen hundred and eight," said Val, "and it has stopped in the same place every time, and I have stopped it in front of you in about nine kitchens, and you have never asked me to finish it, because you knew I could not." She had a hand down on the paper on each side of her, flat. "And it finishes. I have had it since a quarter to nine and I have checked it twice and found the two places it could break and closed one of them and failed to break the other, and I have been sitting here since, and I am not able to make it come."

Kyra came off the arm of the chair and crouched down beside her, in the mud and the wet, and set her palm on the table rather than on Val.

"Then write it," Kyra said.

Val turned the fourth sheet over and wrote six words on the back of it and turned it round.

Kyra read them.

She was quiet for longer than she had been quiet in some years, and the gold came up at the rim of her eyes without the warning, which it does under strain and had done four times in four hundred years, and she did not know and would not be told until much later.

"Say it anyway," Kyra said.

"Kyra—"

"I'm not being cruel. You've written it, so it's out, so the only thing left is the hard half and you will not sleep until it's done." She had got hold of the leg of the table. "Say it to me."

And Val said it, badly, flatly, in a voice that got away from her twice in six words, to a woman crouching in a wet coat on a kitchen floor in Oregon at twenty-five to twelve at night.

— end of chapter two —

For three days after that neither of them did anything about it, which was not avoidance and was agreed without being discussed.

There was a thing that had to happen to a person when a sentence like that finished, and both of them knew what it was and knew it could not be hurried. Val went to the mill as usual. Kyra went back to Vernonia and shouted at a man about a culvert and got a shovel out of him. They ate. They watched some television. On the second evening Val stood at the sink for a long time with a plate in her hand and the water running and had to be told about it.

On the fourth morning Kyra came down and did not sit.

Val looked up from the paper and read her in about a second and a half, which after four hundred years is not a skill, it is a condition.

"Sit down."

"No."

"Then I will stand up."

"Don't do that either." Kyra had her hands in the pockets of the cardigan she wore when she was not going anywhere. "I need to say a thing and I have been trying to say it since about ten past five this morning and I am going to make a mess of it."

"Then make a mess of it."

She did not make a mess of it. She did not say it at all.

She stood in the middle of a kitchen in a cardigan with the rain going on the window behind her and her hair shoved back out of the way, dark and heavy with the morning in it, and she opened her mouth twice and nothing came out of it either time, and the second time she made a small sound at herself and turned round and looked at the stove.

Val did not help her. That was deliberate and it was the hardest thing she did that week.

"In June," Kyra said, to the stove, "on the Tuesday, at the end of Fenner Road, Marcus asked me something and I did not answer him and I did not tell you."

Out in the hall the clock went on with its business.

"Go on."

"That's it. That's the whole—" She stopped. "No. That is not the whole of it and I am not going to be allowed that one." She turned round. "He asked me to be the one who holds me. Not for the peak. For the rest of it. For as long as I'm on this planet and as long as he is."

Val put the paper down and folded it once and put her hand flat on top of it.

"Say exactly what he said."

"I can't. That's the other thing I've been carrying about." Kyra came as far as the back of the chair and held on to it. "I have an exact memory of about nine thousand conversations and I cannot give you the words of that one. He was being careful. He had thought about every part of it and he had got the order wrong and he knew he had. It was an offer, and it was a question, and underneath both of them a man asking whether he was allowed to find out if it could be an offer at all, and it was the three of them at the same time, and his hands were not steady, and he was twenty-two years old."

"And you said nothing."

"I said nothing, and he told me that was all right, and he meant it." Her knuckles had gone. "That's the part. He meant it, Val. He let me off."

Val let that sit where it had landed.

What she was doing in those few seconds was something she would not describe to anybody for another two years, and when she did describe it she would get it slightly wrong, because the thing she was looking at was her own shape and nobody sees that straight.

"Five months," said Val.

"Five months."

"In the snow, in sixteen hundred and seven, you said nothing kept, not from here on, not one thing, ever again, and you said it out loud and at volume with your voice gone to a rasp, and I said yes, which I had never said to anybody about anything."

"I know what I said."

"I am not reciting it at you. I am establishing that we both have the same text." Val turned her hand over on the folded paper. "Now sit down. The next part is long and I am not delivering it to the back of a chair."

Kyra sat.

"Ask me what I did about yours," said Val.

"That is not the same—"

Val did not move at all.

"Ask me."

"What did you do about mine."

"Three hundred and some years of it," Val said. "Not one large thing. There was never a large thing, which is what made it workable. There was a small one about every eleven days and each of them had a reason, and the reasons were good, and I could give you about forty of them now from memory and every single one would stand up in front of a committee." She had her eyes on the table. "And I did it to a woman who had already told me what it cost her, in an orchard, with the children in the trees, in a level voice, before any of it happened."

"You stopped."

"I stopped in 1976 and I was three hundred and sixty-nine years late, and the only reason I am able to sit here is that you let me stop rather than making me earn it." Val looked up. "So I am not going to be gracious about this, because gracious would be me handing you the easy version and I had the hard one and it is the only thing that ever worked on me."

"Then don't be gracious," said Kyra. "Be the other thing."

"The other thing is a question."

"Ask it."

"Why."

Kyra sat with that for about a quarter of a minute, which in her is the equivalent of leaving the room.

"Because if I'd told you, you'd have had an opinion," Kyra said.

"I would have had four."

"You'd have had four, and every one of them would have been correct, and you would have laid them out in order and then said and it is entirely your decision and meant it." She dragged a hand down over her own face and left it at her jaw. "And I'd have decided. That's what I'm telling you. I would have decided in about nine minutes, because that's what happens when you put something in front of me and I am sitting in a room with you."

"And you did not want to decide."

"I did not want to decide." Kyra had got hold of the table edge without knowing it. "Val, there is a boy in this county who offered me the rest of his life, and the only honest answers available to me in June were no and I don't know, and I could not get either of them out of my mouth, and I have spent four hundred years being the one who says things."

Val got up, which she did not usually do in the middle of anything, and went as far as the window and stood with her back to all of it for a moment, and then came back and sat down again.

"That is the first true thing anybody has told me about you in some time," said Val.

Kyra put both hands up into the dark of her hair and held them there.

"It isn't flattering."

"It is not supposed to be flattering, it is supposed to be accurate, and you have just handed me something I have been looking at from the outside since about the fever hospital and have never had a word for." She had a hand flat on the table either side of the folded paper. "You cannot say a hard thing. You can say nine difficult ones before breakfast and you do, and I have watched you do it for four centuries and taken it for the same faculty. It is not the same faculty. When it is going to cost you, it does not come."

"That's a horrible thing to find out at four hundred and nineteen."

"It is an extremely horrible thing to find out and I found mine out at three hundred and sixty-nine," said Val, "and I would not go back and be spared it."

The rain came on harder for a while and then went off it again.

"There's the other half," Kyra said.

"There is."

"You did it on Thursday night."

"I did it on Thursday night."

"You wrote six words on the back of a sheet of paper," said Kyra, "and now there's an answer to him, and it isn't I don't know, and it hasn't been I don't know since about a quarter to nine that evening." She was not crying and her voice had gone down to almost nothing, which with her is worse. "We're going home. So the answer's no. And I didn't choose it, Val, that's the—"

"I know."

"I kept it for five months so I wouldn't have to decide, and while I was keeping it you went and made the decision not exist."

Val read her the way she read a panel, across and then down, and took her time over it, and then said the thing she had worked out on the Thursday somewhere between the first check and the second and had been holding since.

"I took it off you," Val said.

"You didn't—"

"I did. I want it said in this room once and then I am not going to say it again, because it is true and it is not a confession and it is not my fault, and all three of those are the case at the same time." The light had come up under her jaw and she left it. "I told that boy in April that I would give him everything I knew and everything I did not and then let him decide, and I would find it very hard and I would do it anyway. And then in November I sat down at this table and removed the question. He will never know that happened. You will, and I will, and that is the whole of the audience."

"That isn't—"

"It is not an injury and nobody is owed anything for it." Val squared the folded paper with one finger. "It is simply a fact about what I did, and I would rather carry it than have it turn up in forty years with interest on it."

Kyra put her forehead down on her own forearms on the table.

"I have to tell him," Kyra said, into them.

"Yes."

"To his face."

Val folded the paper again, along a crease that was already there.

"Yes."

"I don't know how to do that, Val, and I have four hundred years of being good at people."

"Being good at people is the thing that is going to be in your way," said Val, "and I will be no use to you at all, and I have thought about it for four days and that is where it comes out."

Kyra lifted her head. The gold had been and gone, and neither of them mentioned it, and neither of them ever had.

"Four days," Kyra said. "You've known for four days that I was keeping something?"

"I have known since about June that you were keeping something. I did not know what it was."

"And you never said."

"No."

"Val, that's—"

"That is the reason I have not been gracious this morning," said Val, "and I would be obliged if you would notice that I have not been, because it is the one part of this I am actually proud of." She turned her hand over. "I waited. I have never waited in my life. I have arranged nine hundred conversations in four hundred years so that the other person arrived where I wanted them, and in June I understood that you were carrying something, and I sat on it for five months and let you bring it down those stairs yourself."

"Why?"

"Because you came up a flight of stairs once to offer me a thing I had not asked for," said Val, "and I sent it back, and you have never once held that against me, and I have been looking for four hundred years for a way to say that I understood what it cost you. Waiting was the only one I could find."

Kyra came round and got behind the chair and put a hand flat on the back of her head, which was the old one.

They stayed like that for a while with the rain going.

"I'm going to do it badly," Kyra said.

"You are going to do it badly. That is not the same as doing it wrong and I have had four centuries to learn the difference and I am telling you now so that you have it in advance."

Kyra got hold of a handful of the pale hair and let it go again.

"Is that a kindness?"

"It is a measurement," said Val. "You may use it as a kindness if you want. I have never been able to stop people doing that and I stopped minding about it in Portland."

And Kyra made a sound somewhere above her that was most of a laugh and not all of one, with her hand still flat on the pale of Val's head, and did not take it away for some time.

— end of chapter three —

Val had decided about it on the Tuesday, which Kyra knew, because the woman had been visibly deciding about something since about four in the afternoon and had been no good to anybody since half past five.

What Kyra did not know — what she had no way of knowing, and what Val had taken three weeks and a certain amount of quiet thought to arrive at — was that she had decided about something else entirely.

They went up early.

It was the first week of December and the rain had gone off for once and somebody three houses down was running a generator in the dark for reasons nobody on that road had ever established, and the two of them got into that bed the way they had been getting into beds for four hundred years, which was without any ceremony and with a good deal of complaint about the quilt.

The two minutes happened. They always did. Kyra was ready first, as she had been since the second winter, and lay there and ran her hand up the length of Val's back and talked entirely beside the point about the generator, and Val got there in her own time the way she did.

And then they laced — side by side, facing, hip to hip, with Val's knee drawn up between — and Kyra took hold of her, lightly, and waited for the evening to start.

It did not start.

Val answered her — properly, with everything in it, not absently — and then held exactly there and did not move on.

The pressure was at the very bottom of the range. Almost nothing. The amount you use across a couch with a television going, and no more than that, and it did not vary by a particle.

Kyra gave it a minute, which she considered generous.

Then she did the obvious thing and took her own up a little, which in four hundred years had never once failed to be understood.

Val did not follow.

"Val."

"Mm."

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing," said Val.

Kyra got her head up off the pillow about four inches.

"You are extremely obviously doing something."

"I am doing nothing at all," said Val, "and I would like you to leave it there for a while."

And Kyra, who recognized the sentence immediately and from considerably closer range than Val could have known, put her head back down on the pillow and shut up.

She lasted about six minutes.

That is not a criticism of Kyra Davan and she would not have accepted it as one. She had been built a particular way and had been that way for four hundred and some years and had never had cause to develop any patience with her own body, because her own body had never asked for any.

Everything in her went fast. It had always gone fast. There was a run-up of perhaps half a minute and then there was the thing itself, and the half minute had been the entirety of her experience of anticipation since she was eighteen years old.

So after six minutes of almost nothing Kyra said, reasonably, "Are we going to—"

"No."

"Val."

"Not yet," said Val. "Possibly not for some time. I want to be honest with you about that in advance."

"How long is some time?"

"I am not going to tell you."

"Oh, that's—"

"If I tell you, you will have a number," said Val, "and you will go and sit next to it and wait for it, and I have spent four hundred years doing precisely that and I am not handing it to you in December."

Kyra lay there in the dark and considered several responses.

"That's the most annoying thing anybody has ever said to me in this bed."

"It is not even the most annoying thing I have said in it this year."

At eleven minutes she tried to move it along.

Not crudely. She was not a crude woman and had never needed to be — she simply did the thing that works, which is to answer somebody with slightly more than they gave you and let them find their way up it, and she had been doing that since Maribor and it had worked every single time.

Val came back down to exactly where she had been and stayed there.

"That is a refusal," said Kyra.

"It is an invitation. You are reading it as a refusal because you have not once in your life been invited to do nothing."

"I do nothing all the time, I am extremely good at nothing—"

"You are extremely good at being idle," said Val, "which is a different thing entirely and which I have admired for four centuries. Nobody has ever held you still."

And there was a silence then, of about fifteen seconds, which is a very long one for that woman.

"That's unkind."

"It is not unkind and you know it is not, and if you want me to stop, say the word and I will stop inside half a second and we will have a perfectly good evening the ordinary way." Val had not changed the pressure once. "I am asking for an hour. I will take less. I would like the hour."

Kyra was quiet for a bit.

"You've thought about this."

"For three weeks."

"Of course you have." She let out a breath. "All right, Val. Have your hour."

The first twenty minutes were awful.

She would say so afterward and would say it cheerfully. They were awful — she was restless and hot and faintly cross and kept arriving at the edge of saying something and then not saying it, and twice she caught herself about to reach for more out of what she could only describe as habit, the way a person reaches for a glass that is not there.

And underneath it all, unvarying, at the absolute floor of the range, Val went on holding her.

Not nothing. That was the thing she could not get round. It would have been easy if it were nothing. It was a hand on her, continuously, in the only place on either world where that hand meant anything, and it was not going anywhere and it was not stopping either.

Somewhere around the half hour it went over.

She could not afterward say when or what happened, and Val — who could have told her, who had been counting since they lay down and had it at thirty-four minutes — did not tell her, then or ever.

What happened was that she stopped waiting for the next part.

That was all. She stopped lying there on the way to something and simply lay there, in a dark room, with a woman's leg over hers and the generator gone quiet at last and the cold coming off the window — and the thing that had been running underneath her since she was eighteen years old, the low constant hurry of a body that has never once had a reason to wait, went off.

She had not known it was on.

"Oh," said Kyra.

Val did not say anything whatsoever. She did not alter the pressure and she did not ask and she did not look pleased with herself, all three of which took some doing.

"Val, I didn't know it was—"

"I know."

"It's been there my whole life."

"I know," said Val.

"Since I was eighteen. Since before that. The whole—" and Kyra stopped, because her voice had gone, and lay in the dark being held by about a quarter of an ounce of pressure and found that she was crying and had no particular feeling about it one way or the other.

It went on a long time after that and nothing happened in any of it.

They talked a bit. Not about this — about the generator, and about a man at the hardware counter in Vernonia, and about whether the Hendricks were going to sell, and at one point Kyra laughed at something and the laugh came out into the room entirely differently from how her laughs usually came out, slower, from further down.

And then they did not talk for about twenty minutes and that was perfectly all right too.

It was the longest Kyra Davan had ever been in a bed with somebody and not been going anywhere, and it was, she would eventually get round to telling her, somewhere in the region of the best hour of four hundred years, and she would be extremely annoyed about having to say so.

When it did eventually go somewhere, it went the way it always went.

Half a minute. No run-up to speak of. Up and over and down at the speed her body had been doing it since the Vayr, with nothing changed and nothing improved and nothing fixed about any part of her.

And that was fine.

That was entirely fine. Both of them knew it was fine. Neither of them mentioned it.

"Say what it was," said Kyra, a good while later.

"You know what it was."

"I want it from you. I gave you mine on a couch with my hand flat and I had to say it out loud and it cost me, and you can do the same."

Val lay there for a moment. Her light was up at the wrists and down the insides of her arms and Kyra had been watching it the whole time and had said nothing, which cost her something and was noted.

"You have never had any time," Val said.

"That is all of it and I am going to say the rest badly. You have thirty seconds. You have had thirty seconds since you were eighteen years old and you have never once complained about it and I have watched you not complain about it for four hundred years." She had her eyes on the ceiling. "And I have two minutes, every time, and I spent three hundred and fifty years believing that two minutes was a fault, and you told me in a kitchen in Vernonia that it was the best part of the evening, and I did not believe you."

"Val—"

"I believe you now. That is what the three weeks were about." Nothing moved in her voice at all. "I have had two minutes of that every single time since the second winter. Thousands of them. And you have had none, not one, in four hundred years, because your body does not give you any and nobody can give you any — except that I can, if I simply refuse to move, and it turns out the only thing I have ever had that you have not is time."

Kyra was some time coming back from that.

"You gave me your two minutes," Kyra said.

"I gave you an hour. I am not a small-minded woman."

And Kyra laughed, and got hold of her, and buried her face somewhere around her collarbone in the pale of her hair, and said something into it that Val did not catch and let go by.

"I covered you with one hand," Kyra said, later, nearly asleep.

"You did."

"And you gave me an hour."

"I did."

"That's the two of us, isn't it. That's the whole thing. I've got a hand and you've got a clock and we've been handing them back and forth for four hundred years without either of us noticing what we were doing."

Val lay in the dark and turned that over, and found it exact, and said so, which took her about a minute.

By then Kyra was asleep — and down at the bottom of everything, barely anything at all, the grip was still going, the way it did, the way it had since Maribor, requiring nothing from either of them.

— end of chapter four —

By the middle of January the table had stopped being a table.

There were four sheets from the Thursday in November, which had become nine, which had become a stack she kept square with the edge. There was the book. There was the man from the state university, photocopied now because she had stopped trusting the original to being handled. There was a mug of tea at Val's left elbow that had been made at a quarter past seven and was going to be drunk at some point in the way a thing is going to happen eventually.

Kyra came through at nine with her boots in her hand and did not ask, because she had asked on the Monday and had got nine minutes about a geometry and had learned her lesson.

What Val was doing was the fourth read.

The first read is for whether it works. The second is for whether you have fooled yourself. The third is the one where you go and get the things that could break it and try them on it one at a time, and she had done that in December and nothing had broken.

The fourth read is for what it costs. What the thing actually requires, in the world, of a person, stated in order, with nothing left out because it was obvious.

She was on the sixth sheet. She had been on the sixth sheet for about forty minutes.

The line said what it had said on the first three reads.

It said that the correction is applied by the thing being corrected. It said that a body in that condition has no reference outside itself, and that eleven seconds is what one body can hold alone, and that the transit is fifteen. It said, in her own hand, in the flat way she wrote everything, that the arrangement therefore requires two bodies in resonant coupling, each of which serves as the other's outside reference, and that the duration is irrelevant because a circuit does not need to know where it is, it only needs both ends.

She had written that in December without looking up from the page.

She read it on the fourth pass and stopped at it, and could not immediately have said why, and sat there with her hand flat on the sheet for the better part of a minute.

It was not that she did not know where it came from. She had known exactly where it came from since before either of them had a child.

She had sat in a dark lander cabin four hours out from Thennet with a notebook on her knee and not written the next line down, because she could hear how it would sound in a room. She had stood on a wall some time after that and said out loud, to nobody in particular, that it was not a metaphor and had never been a metaphor, that it was an instruction, four thousand years old, and that it was the fifth step. She had been right, and had been able to prove it with animals in a cold room, and it had gone into a training annex above the protocol for paired runs with a faculty record number under it in smaller type, and that was the end of the matter and had been for four centuries.

What stopped her on the sixth sheet was not recognition.

It was that she had proved it about other people.

She put the pencil down and turned the sheet over and sat looking at the back of it.

Kyra had got one boot on and stopped with the other in her hand.

"Val."

"Say the Vey thing."

"Say the—"

"The line. Say it. Not the version in the annex, which I wrote the cover note for and could recite in my sleep." Val had not turned round. "Say it the way you had it."

Kyra put the boot down on the floor.

She did not have to go and get it from anywhere. She had been unable to read it in a manual without seeing a valley with eleven fields in it and a road, and she had sat in a bad chair in a house above that valley with an old woman's hands on the arms of a chair opposite her, and she had been twenty years younger than the woman who had just asked her and had come away from that room with a thing she had never been able to put down.

"Two enter," said Kyra. "Neither completes without the other. One carries what the other cannot."

"And the rest of it."

"It is not a secret. It is an agreement."

Val sat with that for a moment.

Then Val said, in the flattest voice available to her, "There is nothing in it."

"I'm sorry?"

"There is nothing in it, Kyra. That is what I have just understood and I want to say it badly before I say it well." She turned round in the chair at last. "I have carried that line about for four hundred years as a thing somebody knew. A people on a plateau who noticed a true thing about bodies and kept it for four thousand years in a ceremony, and four surveys filed it under pastoral sentiment, and I was the one who worked out what it was, and I have been quietly pleased about that since before either of us had a child."

"You were right about it."

"I was right about it and it is not an insight," said Val. "It is a description. They did not encode anything. They did not hide a message in a ceremony for four thousand years in the hope that somebody would come along. They stood eleven days in an unclosed interval and watched who came out of it whole and then went on doing the thing that worked, by doing it, without knowing one word about why, and the reason it is in my sixth sheet is not that they put it there. It is that it is simply true, and anything that is true will turn up in the work of anybody who gets far enough, and I have been treating a correct observation as a message addressed to me."

Kyra came over and sat on the corner of the table, in one boot, which Val let pass without comment.

"That's the most deflated I have ever seen you about being right," Kyra said.

"I am not deflated. I am being accurate about a thing I have been slightly wrong about for a long time, which is a different sensation and I have never learned to enjoy it."

"Val."

"What."

"Narra Vey told me that in a cold room," said Kyra, "and she was unimpressed with both of us, and what she told me was that it is not a secret, it is an agreement. She did not say an observation. She said an agreement." She had her hands round her own knee. "Nobody agrees to a fact. You agree to a thing you are going to go on doing with somebody."

Val looked at her.

"That is not what she meant."

"I was in the room and you weren't," said Kyra, "and it is exactly what she meant, and you have the other half of it on your sixth sheet and you have been looking at it for forty minutes."

The tea went on being at Val's elbow.

"Say the practical form," Kyra said, after a while. "You've been sitting on it since the Monday and I have let you."

"It requires two."

"I know it requires two."

"You do not know what I mean by it, because I did not know what I meant by it until about ten past nine." Val had both hands on the edge of the table now. "It is not two people traveling together. It is not two seats. It is one arrangement with two ends, and neither end is the thing, and the thing does not exist unless both of them hold for fifteen seconds, and any two Sethalans alive could do it because it is a fact about the bodies and not about the people."

"Any two."

"Any two," said Val. "Two strangers off a step. Two men who dislike each other. It is plumbing, Kyra, it is not a sacrament, and I want that said out loud in this kitchen once so that neither of us ever gets to be sentimental about it afterward."

Kyra was quiet for a bit.

"All right," Kyra said. "Now say the other half of that."

"There isn't—"

"There is, and you've had it since ten past nine, and you've gone the color you go." The dark of her hair had fallen forward and she pushed it back without noticing. "Any two could do it. Fine. That's the machine. Now tell me what it takes to hold a thing like that for fifteen seconds while everything you've got to steer by is gone."

Val did not answer for a moment.

"Practice," said Val.

"How much."

"More than any two strangers off a step have got."

And then Val said it, because it was true and because she had stopped being able to leave the true ones in her mouth somewhere around 1976:

"We have been doing it on a couch in front of a television since Maribor."

Kyra had nothing to put against that.

"I am not being romantic. I would like that understood and I will fight about it." Val had her eyes on the sheet. "The thing that is required is two bodies that can stay in agreement through something that gives them nothing to steer by, for a duration, without either of them letting go when it gets uncomfortable, and we have four hundred years of that, and we did not build it for this and it is not for this, and it is nevertheless the only qualification either of us has got."

"That's the most Val Sorin sentence I have ever heard."

"It is an accurate sentence."

"It's both," said Kyra. "That's what I'm telling you. It's been both the whole time and you have never once let it be."

She went and found the other boot after that and put it on, and said something about the gutter at the back, and went out, and Val heard the truck go down the road.

And then she sat in an empty kitchen with the sixth sheet in front of her and did the thing she had been avoiding since ten past nine, which was to work the requirement backward.

Eleven seconds alone. Fifteen seconds of transit. Nine sections and nine pairs and a table in a building that had done everything right.

It took her under a minute. It did not arrive as a discovery and it did not arrive with any drama in it; it fell out of the arithmetic sideways, the way the worst things do, while she was checking something else.

Eight people answered the report. Eight people were in a room with the other half of themselves when the sections stopped agreeing. Eleven people were not.

That is all there is to it. There is no cruelty in it and there was never a fault in the vessel, the solution, the crew or the procedure, and a woman in a kitchen in Oregon had just become the only person on two worlds who could state why seventeen households had never been told anything.

She got up and poured the tea down the sink.

There was nothing to be done with it. There was no one to tell and no one who would understand the claim, and the only document it could ever go into was one that did not exist and was not going to, and she was four hundred and nineteen years and eight thousand miles from anybody with standing to hear it.

And there was one other thing in it, which was that Ramel Aden had moved, because verification does not pair.

She stood at the sink for a while with the cup in her hand.

Then she washed it and put it on the rack and went back to the table and started the fourth read again from the first sheet, because the fourth read was not finished and there were nine sheets in it, and a thing half checked is a thing not checked.

— end of chapter five —

They did it on a Saturday at the end of February, in Ray Hale's yard, because it was the one place in the county where all three of them had a reason to be standing.

Ray had a trailer with a bad axle and had been saying so since Christmas. Marcus had the jack out and most of a toolset on a feed sack and had got further with it than Ray had in two months. Ray himself had gone in at half past two to watch something and had not come back, which was Ray.

Kyra had been quiet in the truck the whole way out. She had tried four openings on the road between the house and the turn and had discarded all of them, and Val had let her do it and had said nothing whatever, which you can only do for somebody if you have four centuries of credit with them.

Marcus straightened up when they came through the gate and wiped his hands down the front of his jeans.

"Both of you," he said.

"Both of us." Val had stopped about six feet short of him, which was deliberate.

He looked at Kyra for a beat longer than a glance, and then back at Val, and something went out of his face and something else came into it, and he put the wrench down on the feed sack and did not pick anything else up.

"All right," said Marcus.

Val gave it to him standing, with her hands at her sides.

"We have found a way to go home. It is not a ship and it is not anything you could be shown. It will work or it will not and we will know inside fifteen seconds either way, and if it does not work there is no second attempt and nothing of us comes back." She let that sit for exactly as long as it needed. "We are going in the autumn. I am telling you first, before anybody, because that is the arrangement I have had with one other man in my life and he is dead."

Marcus stood in a yard with mud on his boots and took it.

"Okay," he said.

Then he turned round and looked at the treeline for a while, and neither woman said anything to the back of him.

When he turned back his eyes were wet and his voice was entirely steady, which Val filed and did not comment on.

"The autumn."

"September or October. It depends on a thing I cannot explain to you in a yard."

"Will you tell me when it's the day?"

"No," said Val.

He nodded as if he had expected that, and kicked at the edge of the feed sack, and said, "Yeah."

"There is a second thing," Val said, "and you should have it from me rather than work it out in nine years in a kitchen."

Kyra's head came round.

"In April I sat in a library with you and told you I would give you everything I knew and everything I did not, and then let you decide, and that I would find it very hard and would do it anyway." Val had not moved from where she had stopped. "In November I sat down at a table and did a piece of arithmetic, and when I stood up again the thing you were deciding about no longer existed. I did not do it for that reason. It is nonetheless what I did, and you are not going to hear it from anybody else, so you are hearing it from me."

Marcus thought about that properly. He was slow in the way that is not slow.

"That's not the same as deciding for me."

"It is adjacent to it," said Val, "and adjacent is close enough to be worth saying out loud."

And then there was nothing left in the yard except the thing Val could not say for her.

She did not look at Kyra and she did not shift her weight and she did not clear her throat, and the holding still of her was the single hardest piece of work she did that year.

Kyra came forward two steps on her own.

"Marcus."

"I know."

"You don't, and I'm going to—" She stopped. The sun was coming off the metal of the trailer and the dark of her hair had the copper up in it along one side and she had not combed it since the truck. "In June you asked me something on your granddad's porch."

"You don't have to do this."

"That's the second time you've said that to me," said Kyra, "and I'm not taking it twice."

She got about four words further and then it went.

Not tears. Her face did nothing at all, which anybody who knew her would have found more alarming than weeping. She had the sentence — she had had it in the truck, she had had it that morning at six, she had rehearsed something perfectly decent and perfectly true and it was all there and in order — and she opened her mouth in a yard in February and the whole of it stayed where it was.

Four hundred years of a woman who says things.

Val did not help her.

What came out in the end was not the sentence.

"I kept it from her for five months," Kyra said.

Marcus blinked.

"What you asked me. I didn't tell her until November." Her hands had gone into her coat pockets and stayed there. "And the reason wasn't you. It was that if I'd told her I'd have had to answer you, and I couldn't, and I let five months go by so I wouldn't have to be the one who said it." She looked at him straight. "That's the whole of what I've got for you and it's about me and not about you, and I know exactly how poor it is."

"Kyra—"

"It's poor, Marcus. Don't be nice about it. I've had four hundred years of people being nice about things and I have never once needed it less than I need it now."

He stood there in the mud and worked it through, and did not look away from her while he did it, which cost him something.

"So that's a no," he said.

"Marcus."

"It's all right. I'm not asking you to say it. I'm saying it, so that you don't have to, and then it's said and we can both stop standing here." He put a hand on the side of the trailer. "I worked it out at the gate. You both came. You'd not both have come for anything else."

And Kyra Davan, who had never in four centuries been let off anything she had not arranged to be let off, stood in Ray Hale's yard and was let off a second time by a man of twenty-three, and found that it was the worst thing that had happened to her in a long while.

Val spoke once more, and only once, and she chose the ground.

"You will want to know what happens to you," said Val.

"I know what happens to me."

"You know the first half. The second half is that there will be nobody to ask." Val took a step forward, which she had not done all afternoon. "Whatever moved in you that night has not moved back, and will not, and in forty years you will notice something about yourself in a room full of people and there will be no one on this planet who can tell you whether it is a thing or nothing. That is not a warning. It is simply the shape of it, and I would rather you had it now than at sixty."

Marcus looked at his own hands for a moment.

"That's what it's like for you two."

"That is exactly what it has been like for us two," said Val, "since the spring of sixteen hundred and seven, and we are about to stop, and you are about to start, and I have not found a way to make that acceptable and have stopped looking."

Nobody asked him for anything. That was not an oversight.

There was a version of the afternoon in which one of them said something about never telling anybody, and Val had rehearsed it in December and discarded it in January, because the only honest form of it was nobody would believe you and he knew that and they knew it and saying it would have been an insult to a man who had held on in the dark for six hours without being asked twice.

So nothing was said about it, then or ever, and it held for the rest of his life.

In the end he went back to the axle, because there was an axle and because it was something to do with his hands.

"Will you come out again," he said, from under it. "Before. Not for this. Just out."

"Yes," said Kyra.

"All right then."

They stood about for a bit while he worked. Ray came out at twenty past four with three cups of coffee and a quantity of opinion about the axle and found two women and a young man standing round a trailer not saying very much, and put it down to the cold, and was wrong, and poured the coffee anyway.

In the truck, at the end of Fenner Road, Kyra put her hands in her lap and looked out of the side window for about two miles.

"You didn't help me," Kyra said.

"No."

"Thank you."

Val put her hand on the gear lever and left it there and did not say anything else at all, and the rain came on again somewhere past the quarry, and the pale of her hair in the last of that light was the only bright thing in the cab.

— end of chapter six —

The snow had been down eleven days and the road above the village had not been a road for nine of them, and there was nothing to do in the rooms above the shuttered shop but wait for the weather to make up its mind and be looked at by people who had decided, inside a week, that the two women upstairs were sisters and that the quiet one had the money.

They gave the dull answers on the second morning, in order, to a woman with a basket who had come up to be neighborly and to look at the furniture. Nobody ever asked for a twelfth.

Val had the inventory out on the table. It had been four pages for six days and had been finished for five of them, and she went through it in the evenings anyway, because going up that mountain with the wrong thing in the pack was not a mistake she intended to make twice in four hundred years.

Kyra had the window, with her sleeves pulled down over her hands, doing the thing she did in a town with no work in it, which was to look at it.

"Ask me what I'm thinking."

"You will tell me whether I ask or not."

"That's true and it's not the point."

Val put the pencil down flat.

"There are going to be men there," Kyra said.

"There are men downstairs."

"Val."

"I know what you mean. I have known what you mean since about the ninth month and I have been waiting to see which way you would come at it."

Kyra turned round and put her back against the cold of the glass, which she would regret in a minute and was not thinking about.

"I've got a question," Kyra said. "It's four hundred years old and I've never had a reason to need the answer, and now there's a reason and it isn't a good one, and I'm going to ask it anyway."

"Then it has kept well."

"How did you manage Aro?"

Val did not move for a moment. The stove was doing what that stove did, which was not much.

"In what sense."

"In the only sense there is. You were twenty." Kyra came off the window. "Three across at the extension. I've had that figure since a kitchen with plums in it, and I have carried it about for a hundred and twenty-six years and been very pleased with myself for having it, and I have never once asked you the next thing. How does a woman of twenty do that."

"Carefully," said Val.

"That's not an answer and you know it isn't."

"No." Val turned the inventory face down, which she had done once before in a kitchen and had not done since. "I prepared."

"Prepared."

"I made a set."

It came out the way everything came out of her, which was in order and with the numbers in it.

"Nine pieces. Turned out of a stoppering resin in the cold room at the station, in the evenings, after the others had gone up. Each one a quarter inch over the one before it. I made the last one a quarter inch over what I had put him at."

"You'd put him at something."

"I had put him at something in the first week, in a doorway, with my coat still on." Val had her chin on her hand. "I was out by an eighth. I have been out by more since on things that mattered less."

"And then what."

"Then four months. Three evenings a week, in a room with a bolt on it, with the dates in the back of a field book and the time against each one and a note where it had not gone well." She put it the way she put a soil sample. "And in the whole of those four months I did not let that man near me, and he thought it was shyness, and I let him think it, and I have not corrected it to a living soul until this minute."

Kyra came over and sat down at the foot of the bed. She did it slowly, which in her is the equivalent of somebody shouting.

"Say the rest."

"There is no rest. It worked."

"Val."

"It worked, which is the part nobody would put in a book. I went to him in the fifth month and it was not difficult and it did not hurt and I was not brave about anything, because I had spent four months making sure that there would be nothing to be brave about. That is the whole of the method and it is the whole of my character and you have known both for four hundred years."

"Were you frightened of him?"

"No. I was frightened of arriving and not being able to do it properly. Which is not the same thing, and is worse, and I would like that said out loud once in my life by somebody who is not me."

Kyra looked at her for a while.

"You built yourself a set of instruments at twenty years old," Kyra said, "so that you would not turn up to a man unready."

"Yes."

"And then you went and stood in his doorway for an hour without saying anything."

"That was afterward."

"That was not afterward, that was the same woman," said Kyra, and laughed, and then stopped laughing, which took her about four seconds and which Val watched the whole of.

"What happened to them?"

"I kept the figures, and I put the set in the melt."

The light had gone out of the valley while they were doing that. It went early there and it went all at once, the way it had gone the first winter, and neither of them did anything about the lamp.

"Ramel," Kyra said.

Val did not answer.

"He was near enough the same man. You told me that once, years ago, in about four words, and you have never said anything else about it since."

"Near enough the same man," said Val.

"So you did it again."

"I did it again," said Val.

"On a ship."

"On a ship. In a stores bay with the door held with a strap, out of pipe lagging and a resin meant for seals, and badly, and in five weeks instead of four months, because five weeks was what there was."

Kyra went very still.

"Five weeks."

"Yes."

"You began it in the sixth."

"I began it in the sixth," said Val.

Kyra got up off the bed and went four paces to the wall and stood there with her hand flat on it, which was a thing she had done perhaps nine times in four centuries and every one of them had been about this.

"I have had that number since a fire on a mountain. You sat on the other side of it and you said the sixth week and you said where and you said how often, and I took the sixth week and I have had it in me ever since, and every single time I have turned it over it has been a number about him." She turned round. The gold had come up at the rim of her eyes and she made no move to hide it and did not appear to know it was there. "It was a number about you. You spent five weeks of your last season on that world in a stores bay getting ready, alone, with a strap on the door, and then you came to me at a fire and gave me the week you started and not one word about the five in front of it, and I have been angry at a number for four hundred years and it was the wrong number."

"I did not leave it out."

"Don't."

"I am not defending myself, I am telling you a fact and it is worse than the defense." Val had not moved from the table. "I did not leave it out. It never once occurred to me that it was part of what anybody was owed. It was preparation. It was the same as checking a seal. I have sat with that sentence since you said the whole season on a mountain and I have never until this evening understood that there was a thing in it you were entitled to."

Kyra came back and sat down on the end of the bed again.

"There's a thing I've never said about him," Kyra said, "and I'm going to say it now, because we are two days from a mountain and I will not get another evening like this one."

"Say it."

"You left him off the list."

Val did not move.

"Which list," said Val.

"You know which list. In the kitchen, in the summer, when we did the color." Kyra had her chin on her knees. "Emrin. Deyn. Aro. Sven. Xander. Five men, one color. You had your hand over your eyes and you went through them in order and you did not say his name."

The stove went on doing the very little that stove did.

"I am aware," said Val.

"Four hundred years of a woman who has never miscounted anything in her life."

"I did not miscount. I would like that distinction preserved." Val turned the pencil over and set it down. "I left him out. I did not decide to. I noticed about nine seconds after I stopped speaking and I said nothing, and then I went on not saying anything about it for the rest of that year, and I have had it in the back of my head ever since in the way that one has a tooth."

"Why?"

"Because he is the one I do not put in lists," said Val.

Kyra sat with that for a moment and then began, helplessly, to laugh.

"That's it? That's the whole—"

"That is the whole of it and I am not going to improve on it."

"Val, you put me in lists."

"You are in every list I have ever made," said Val, "which I had intended to say to you at some point in a more considered way and have now said in a rented room above a shop, and I would be grateful if you did not quote it back to me."

"I am absolutely going to quote it back to you."

"I am aware of that as well."

And that was the end of it. Neither of them went back to it, then or on the mountain or in the three years after, and there is a sheet of paper somewhere on another world with five names on it and a sixth that is not there, and the only two people alive who could have corrected it never did.

The lamp got lit eventually, by Kyra, because Val would have gone on sitting in the dark and doing arithmetic in it until morning.

"There's a thing I want on the record," Val said, when it was lit, "and I am going to do it badly."

"Do it badly."

"We are going back to a world where that minute is ordinary." She had her eyes on the table. "Where there is a word for it in a curriculum and somebody with a chart and most of an afternoon, and every person in every room will have the whole of it as a thing that is simply true about being alive. And I did it at twenty, under a clock, with a duty on me, and I did it well, and I have not done it in four hundred and nineteen years."

"And?"

"And I am not going to do it again, and I do not want to, and I would like it understood that I am not leaving it behind by accident." Val looked up. "I am leaving it. That is a different verb and it is the one I mean."

Kyra got up off the floor where she had ended up and came and stood by the table.

"Say the next bit."

"There isn't a next bit."

"There is, and you've had it since the ninth month, and I've watched you not say it in four countries."

Val sat with that for a moment. The light came up under her ear and along the jaw, in a cold room with one lamp in it, and she did not put her sleeves down.

"Nothing I did with any of them was ever not a task," said Val. "Not one minute of it, on either world, in four hundred and nineteen years. There was always a thing to get right and a person waiting for me to get it right, and I got it right, and I was proud of it, and I am not ashamed of a single evening of it." She stopped. "And there is one room I have ever been in where there is nothing to get right. It has no clock in it and no method and nothing anybody is owed, and I did not know a room like that existed until I was two hundred years old and I have been standing in it ever since."

Kyra did not say anything for a bit. Then she got down on the floor with her back to the bed, which is where she did her best work, and said it to the stove rather than to her.

"When we get there, there'll be somewhere to go."

Val put the pencil down flat for the second time that evening.

"Say the rest of it."

"You know the rest of it."

"I would like you to say it anyway, because I have had it for about three weeks and I have been hoping you would not get there."

"Four hundred years," Kyra said, "and there has never been anywhere for either of us to go. Not once. You could have walked out of any house we ever had and gone four thousand miles and you'd still have been the only other one of us on the planet and so would I. It was never a choice, Val. We have never once chosen each other. We've been the only thing available."

Val did not answer that straight away.

"That is not true," said Val. "I am going to argue with it, and I want to do the other thing first."

"What other thing?"

"The honest one." She turned the pencil over once. "You are right that it becomes a question when we land. There is a world down there with eleven hundred million people on it and about nine of them are family, and for the first time since sixteen hundred and seven a woman could get up and go somewhere and have a life in it. I have known that since about the second week. I have not mentioned it. I would like it on the record that not mentioning it was a decision and not an oversight."

"I know it was."

"Then ask me the thing you actually want to ask," said Val.

"Could you?" said Kyra. "Not would. Could."

"Yes."

Kyra's head came up off the quilt.

"I want to be accurate, because you asked an accurate question and you deserve one back. Yes. I could get up and go. I would survive it. I would be functional inside a year, because I am extremely good at being functional, and I would have work and a room and a routine and I would be perfectly all right to look at."

"Val—"

"And I would be a woman who had once been able to put everything down, and had chosen not to be." Val had both hands flat on the table. "That is the cost and it is not negotiable and it does not get better with time. There is one room in four hundred and some years where there is nothing to get right. If I walk away from it there is not another one. Not because the universe is cruel. Because it took four centuries to build and I would be starting at the beginning at four hundred and ninety-seven with somebody who does not know what the light is."

"Now mine," said Kyra.

"Yours is worse."

"Don't do that."

"I am not being gallant, I am reporting. You could do it more easily than I could and we both know it. You are open with everybody. You were open with the woman at the market in Calderveil inside four minutes." Val looked at her. "You could be in a kitchen in Aventhal in two years with somebody who adored you and you would be entirely yourself in it, and you would not have to build one single thing."

"That's the bit that's wrong."

"Then correct it."

Kyra took a while over it, which for her is the tell.

"I was open with Jakob for twenty-five years. Entirely. Not one thing held back that I could have given him. And I stood in a lane in Trieste with the whole of it coming up my throat and the sentence was you have known me for twenty-five years and you have never once met me."

"I remember."

"So being open isn't the thing. I can do that with anybody and it costs me nothing and it has never once got me what I wanted." She had her arms round her knees. "You're the only person who ever met me, Val. Four hundred and seventy-nine years since a wash room, two planets, nine men and about a thousand people I liked, and one woman who actually looked."

Val did not say anything.

"So I could go, and I'd be fine, and I'd be lovely company, and nobody would ever see me again as long as I lived."

They sat with it. Somebody came up the lane below with a shovel and gave up on it halfway and went in again.

"Turn it over," Kyra said at last.

"Turn what over?"

"We've spent an hour on why you'd go and what it would cost. Do the other side. There's a world down there with family in it and work and people we haven't met and about nine hundred things neither of us has done." She had her chin on her knees. "Why would you stay? Not would you. Why."

Val did not answer.

"That's a harder one," said Kyra.

"It is a considerably harder one and I have no idea why."

She sat with it for the better part of two minutes, which Kyra let her have.

"Because you have never had any use for me," Val said.

"That is a horrible sentence."

"It is the best I have got and I will stand behind it. Everywhere else I have ever been, on either world, I have been useful. That is the arrangement and I made it myself and I have never once complained about it. People want the figure, or the paperwork, or the hand that does not shake, and I give them the figure and they are grateful and there is nothing else between us." She put both hands flat on the table. "You have never once needed me to be good at anything. Not in four hundred years. You have been pleased when I was — you have been insufferable about it on occasion — and you have never required it, and there is one piece of evidence that settles the matter and we both know what it is."

"Maribor."

"Maribor. The one occasion in four hundred years when I produced nothing whatsoever. Nothing. The thing I was best at and could not do it, and I said two words and lay there waiting to find out what I was worth with the output removed." She stopped. "And you said all right, and you went to sleep, and you never mentioned it again, and I have been living off that for four hundred years."

Kyra dragged a hand down over her own face and left it at her jaw.

"Right. Mine."

"Yours."

"You're the only person who ever told me no."

Val looked up.

"Everybody says yes to me. Everybody. They always have. I come into a room and I am warm at people and they like it and they give me whatever it is, and I have never in four hundred years had to work for one single thing I wanted off anybody." Kyra had her arms round her knees again. "And it is pleasant and it is useless and I did not understand it was useless until about a year ago."

"Go on."

"You would not be acquitted on the wording when I handed you a way out of a promise you'd broken. You would not take the comfortable version of anything I ever offered you. You would not let me be quieter when I came up those stairs to offer it." Her jaw had gone. "I have offered you about nine things in four hundred years and you have sent four of them back, and every single one you sent back was a thing I would have been worse for."

"That is not a flattering portrait of me."

"It is the most flattering thing I will ever say about anybody. Val, I can get warmth anywhere. I could get it on that mountain road from a man with a cart. The thing I cannot get anywhere else in the universe is somebody who will look at what I've handed them and say no, that one's wrong, take it back."

She stopped.

"That's not love either, strictly. I know it isn't. It's just that I've had four hundred years of being agreed with and about nine occasions of being corrected, and every one of the nine was you, and I'd give the rest of it up before I gave those up."

Something shifted on the roof and slid off and landed in the yard.

"There is a third," said Val.

"Go on."

"It is the one I have been avoiding for an hour." She turned the pencil over and set it down. "Everybody we are about to see knew us before."

Kyra went still.

"Vaedom knew a woman of seventy-seven who had never been off that planet. The girls knew a mother who had a post at the institute and a house and a great deal to say about other people's methods, and they knew her until they were thirty-nine, and then she got on a ship." Val's hands were flat. "Not one of them has ever met the person either of us has spent four hundred years becoming. They will be glad to see us and they will be looking at somebody they remember."

"And you're the only one who—"

"I am the only one who was there for any of it. And you are the only one who was there for mine." Val looked at her. "Maribor and the trail and the court in Trieste and the fever hospital and every single ordinary Tuesday in between. Four hundred years that happened to nobody else alive. If we part when we land, then the whole of it goes into two separate heads and stays there, and a thing in one head is a memory. In two it is a fact."

Kyra put her face down on her knees for a bit.

"Those are good reasons," Kyra said, muffled.

"They are reasons. I want to be exact about the difference." Val did not soften it. "They are good tonight, in a rented room, in the snow, six days from a mountain. I cannot guarantee any of them and I am not going to pretend otherwise, because a reason you can guarantee is not a reason, it is a vow, and I have never given you one of those and I am not starting now."

"I know you're not."

"If any of them stops being true I will tell you at the time," said Val, "which I could not have said to you in eighteen thirty-eight, and which is the only promise I am able to make and the only one I have ever made you."

Kyra lifted her head.

"That'll do."

"That is not very much."

"Val, it's everything. You spent four hundred years not telling me things and about a year learning to tell me at the time, and you've just offered me the one thing you had to build from nothing." She had hold of the table edge and did not appear to know it. "Everybody else would have promised me forever in about four seconds and meant it for a fortnight."

"That is an extremely cynical view of a species."

"It's an extremely cynical view of nine men and about a thousand people I liked, and I'd put money on it."

Later the lamp was down and the stove was doing nothing at all and the valley had gone entirely quiet in the way a valley goes when there is snow on everything including the sound.

"How long till the road?" Kyra said, from somewhere under the pale of Val's hair.

"A week. Possibly four days."

"That's not an answer."

"Not far now," said Val.

Kyra laughed into her shoulder, which was the right response and had been for four centuries, and then turned over, and after a while they laced, and the light was up, and there was nothing in that room that had to be done inside any particular minute, and neither of them counted anything at all.

— end of chapter seven —

The dream was not complicated and it did not need to be.

They arrived. That was all. The valley, the long way down off the mountain, a road, a town, a house with a door in it — and Val went up the step and opened the door and the house was empty and had been empty for a very long time, and she stood in the hall knowing with the total unarguable certainty of two o'clock in the morning that she was four hundred and some years late and had always been going to be.

She came up out of it the way she came up out of everything, which was all at once and without a sound.

The room was cold and the shutter was rattling and there was nothing at all wrong with the world.

It took her the usual eleven or twelve seconds to put that together — the ordinary stocktaking of a woman waking somewhere she has woken a thousand times, the shape of the room, the noise of the weather, the weight of the quilt — and in those seconds she lay with her heart going and her mouth dry and did not move one muscle, because she never did.

They had gone to sleep laced. They often did now. Not for anything — they had not been doing anything, they had simply been lying there arguing about the pack and had carried on lying there until neither of them was arguing, which had been happening more and more as the winter went on.

And it was still going. Down at the very bottom of everything, barely anything at all, the way it did.

And then Kyra answered her.

It was not much. It was a very small thing — a change in the pressure, up a fraction and held there, and then a slow easing back down, and then nothing more.

It took perhaps three seconds and it arrived about four seconds after Val's heart had started going.

Kyra did not wake up. She did not stir, she did not change her breathing, she did not do any of the things a person does on the way up out of sleep. She was somewhere entirely else and had been for two hours and would be for another five.

And her body had reached over and done that, and gone back to doing nothing.

Val lay in the dark for about an hour after that.

Not frightened. The dream had gone off her within a minute of the answer, which she noticed at the time and which was, she thought, rather the point.

What she did instead was what she did. She went back through it. She found three other occasions she could produce without any trouble at all — a bad night in Lowell, something in the second winter in Trieste, the week after the fever hospital in 1918 — and then she stopped looking for more, because she already knew what the answer was and the answer was a great many.

Four hundred years of a woman answering her in her sleep.

And not once, in four hundred years, had it occurred to Val Sorin to mention it.

There was one window in that room and it put a cold gray on everything, and the fair head coming down the stair into it went the color it went under anything northern, which Kyra noticed and did not examine, the way she had not examined it since she was eighteen.

She told her over the bread and the bad coffee, which was fast for her and was the whole of her arc in one decision, and which she would be quietly satisfied about for some weeks.

"I had a bad night."

Kyra put the pot down.

"You didn't say."

"I am saying now, which is approximately nine hours, and I would like it noted that in eighteen thirty-eight it would have been nine years." Val had a cup in both hands that she had no intention of drinking. "It was the arrival one. The house being empty."

"Oh, love."

"It is an extremely ordinary dream and I have had it perhaps twenty times since we decided, and it does not mean anything beyond the obvious." She turned the cup a quarter turn. "That is not the part."

"Then what's the part?"

"You answered me."

Kyra sat down opposite her.

"I don't remember waking up."

"You did not wake up," said Val. "That is the part."

And then Val said it properly, in order, with the figures in it, because that was the only way anything had ever come out of her and because this was the one time in four hundred years the figures were doing some good.

"We had gone to sleep laced. We do, now. I came up out of it at some point after two and my heart was going and I did not move, and about four seconds later you came up — not much, a fraction, held for about three seconds and then eased off again — and then nothing. You did not stir. Your breathing did not change. You were two hours down and you stayed two hours down."

"That's not—"

"I am not finished." Val looked up. "And it worked, Kyra. That is the part I have been sitting with since two in the morning. The dream came off me inside a minute. Not because I reasoned with it — I did not get a chance to reason with it, I had not got as far as reasoning. It went because somebody told me they were there."

Kyra was not quick to answer, which in her is the whole alarm bell.

"How often?"

"I stopped counting at four and the four took me about a minute." Nothing moved in Val's voice at all. "Lowell, the bad winter. Trieste, in the second year, more than once. The week after the hospital in 1918, which was nearly every night and I had entirely forgotten until two o'clock this morning." She stopped. "It is a great many, and I cannot give you a number, and I have had a number for everything else that has ever happened to me."

"Four hundred years."

"Four hundred years, and I have never once mentioned it, and I did not even know I had not mentioned it, which is worse."

Kyra got up and went to the shutter and put her back to the room, which she did about four times a century.

"Say it again. The bit about not waking."

"You did not wake up. You have never woken up. Not on any of the occasions I can produce and I would put money on all the ones I cannot." Val had not moved. "Whatever did that was not you deciding anything. There is no version of this in which you chose it. You were asleep and something in you reached over and said a true thing and went back to sleep."

"Val—"

"It is the only communication I have ever received in four hundred years, from anybody, on either world, that could not possibly have been arranged."

And Kyra stood at that shutter for a long moment with her arms folded, and then said the thing Val had not expected and should have.

"So even that's free."

"I beg your—"

"Even that." She turned round. "Val, I have spent about a year now finding out that I cannot say a hard thing. Twice I've had a sentence in my mouth and it would not come — in a kitchen in November and in a yard in February, and you watched both of them." Her jaw had gone. "You get yours out. Badly, flat, nine hours later, and it costs you the whole evening. I say nine things before breakfast and not one of them has ever cost me anything at all."

"That is not—"

"And now you're telling me the best thing I've ever done for you, the actual best one, I did asleep. Unconscious. For nothing. Four hundred times, and I wasn't even in the room. It's all free. The whole of me is free. You have been paying for every single word since Maribor and I have never once put anything on the counter."

Val sat very still at that table.

"Sit down."

"I don't want to sit down."

"Kyra. Sit down, because I am going to say something that will take me a minute and I will not deliver it to the back of your head."

So Kyra came and sat down, because that voice gets used perhaps four times a century.

"You have it exactly backwards," said Val, "and I am going to be slow about it, so let me be slow."

"Go on."

"You think it costs you nothing because it is shallow. That is what you have been telling yourself since about last spring and it has been getting worse since the summer, and I have watched it get worse and have not known how to put a hand on it." Val had a palm flat on the wood either side of the cup. "It does not cost you anything because it is underneath the part that costs."

Kyra did not say anything.

"Everything of mine happens at the top. All of it. Every word I have ever said to you came out through four hundred years of apparatus — the face, the voice, the five hours, the counting, the thing I do where I decide at four o'clock. That is where I live and that is why it costs. I have to carry it all the way up and over." She turned the cup a quarter turn and let it go. "What answered me at two o'clock this morning was not at the top. It was not anywhere near the top. It was so far underneath the top that the woman it belonged to was asleep."

"That's a distinction without a—"

"It is the entire distinction and you are not going to argue me out of it, because I am the one who has been standing underneath it for four centuries catching what came down." Val's voice had not risen at all. "Free is not the word. Free would mean it was nothing. It is foundational. It is the thing the rest of you is built on top of, and it does not cost you anything for the same reason your heart does not cost you anything, which is not that your heart is cheap."

"Val."

"And it is not shallow, Kyra. It is the deepest thing either of us has got." She stopped. She went on. "I can arrange anything. You know that about me better than anybody alive and you have been generous about it for four hundred years. There is not one thing I have ever given you that I could not, in principle, have constructed. Not one. Including the true ones."

"That's not true."

"It is entirely true and it is the great private horror of my life, and I have never said it to anybody, and I am saying it over bad coffee in a rented room because you are standing at a shutter telling me you have never put anything on the counter."

Kyra put her hand over her mouth.

"Everything I have ever handed you, I built. And I meant every word of all of it — I want that understood, I am not confessing to a fraud — but it went through me first, and I checked it, and I decided." Val's eyes were on the table. "And you reach over in your sleep and tell me you are there, and there is no apparatus anywhere in it, and it is the only thing in four hundred years that arrived without passing through anybody's hands."

"I didn't know I did it."

"I know you didn't."

"Four hundred years and I didn't know."

"You could not have known. That is what it is." Val finally looked up. "And I want to say the rest of it, because it is the part I came downstairs to say and I have been circling it for ten minutes like a woman afraid of a dog."

"Say it."

"There is a part of you that is not under your management, and it is good, and it has been getting it right for four hundred years without supervision."

Out in the lane somebody was breaking ice off a step.

"And that is the same condition I have been in since sixteen hundred and seven," said Val, "and I have never once had company in it."

"The light."

"The light. Which I cannot stop, cannot time, cannot falsify, and which has given me away in nine countries, and which I spent two hundred years regarding as a defect and about another two hundred not regarding as anything at all." She turned her hands over on the table. "And it turns out you have one too. Mine shows. Yours reaches over in the dark and does the kindest thing either of us has ever done for the other, and neither of us is in charge of our own."

"That's—"

"That is the first thing in four hundred years that has been the same for both of us, and I did not know it until two o'clock this morning, and I have been waiting since then for you to come down."

Kyra came round the table and got down on the floor beside the chair, which was not a thing a woman of her age had any business doing and which she did about once a decade, and put her forehead against Val's knee.

They stayed like that for a while.

"Tell me the next time," Kyra said, into the cloth.

"The next time I have the dream?"

"The next time I do it." Kyra's hand had got hold of her ankle. "I want to know. Not every time — I'll go peculiar about it if it's every time, I'll start trying to catch myself and then I'll be you." She looked up. "But sometimes. When it's a bad one. I want to be told what I did."

And Val, who had spent four hundred years giving accurate accounts of other people's bodies to people who could not see them, said, "Yes," and found that her voice was not entirely under control, and did not do anything about that either.

The road came open on the eleventh of March, which was four days after the man at the bottom of the stairs had said and two days before Val had.

They had one evening left in those rooms and they spent it on the floor with the pack between them and the inventory face up at last, and Kyra made her read it out.

She read it out. Four pages, in order, in a flat voice, with the weights.

"Now the other one," said Kyra.

"There is no other one."

"There's the other one and it isn't going in the pack and you have been doing it in your head since Oregon."

So they did the other one, which took considerably longer, and which turned out not to overlap anywhere at all.

Val's was thirty-one addresses. A bearing taken off a hull in a bad October. A notebook. A house on Clinton with a bad window. The particular way the light comes into a valley in the Coast Range at four in the afternoon in November, which she had been looking at for twelve years and had never once said anything about.

Kyra's was people. A woman on Alberta with a face like a shut door who did a thing with rye. A man with a cart on a mountain road who had wanted nothing at all. Ellen Ordway. Dee, who called them girls.

Neither of them said she would miss any of it. That was not an oversight either.

There was one other thing on the floor of that room and it got about four sentences.

Two women existed on paper in the state of Oregon. They had been manufactured over fourteen years with a care that had cost Val more thought than the fold had, and they had a house between them and a county record and a line in a federal file that could not be handed back, and from the eleventh of March they were simply going to stop.

"Nobody will come looking," said Kyra.

"Nobody will come looking. There is nothing to look for and no one to report it, and in about nine years a clerk will move them to another drawer and in forty the drawer will be a database and they will sit in it being correct and quiet until the system is replaced." Val put the inventory down. "Four hundred years of making people, and the last two will outlive us on that planet by about a century, and neither of them will ever do one single thing."

"That's the most pleased I've ever heard you about a filing cabinet."

"It is the only clean exit I have ever managed," said Val, "and I did not have to kill anybody for it, and you will note that I am not going to be able to say that about the next part."

It took them two days to get up, because the snow was rotten on the south side and Val would not be hurried.

The hull was where it had been since the spring of sixteen hundred and seven, which is to say under a great deal of rock on the wrong side of a snowfield, in the driest, safest, coldest place on that world, where nobody had ever found it and nobody was going to.

They were four days inside it. What they did in there is a matter of geometry and is not interesting, and Val did it twice and then a third time, and on the fourth evening she called it right and did not hedge, which she had not done about anything in four hundred years.

And then, before they went forward, Kyra said the thing nobody had said out loud yet.

"It stays."

"It stays."

"Say it properly. You've got the figure."

"It gives us the first half and it cannot come with us, and there is no arrangement under which it ever leaves this mountain." Val had the lamp down by her leg. "It will be here when the glacier above it is not. It will be here when there is nothing on this planet that remembers what a Dutch village was. In eleven thousand years somebody may put a shaft down for a reason that has nothing to do with us and find a shape in the rock that they cannot explain, and they will not explain it, and that is the whole of what happens next."

"That's not a comfort."

"It was not offered as one," said Val. "You asked me for the figure."

They did not touch anything on the way out, and neither of them looked back down the run, and the lamp went off at the hatch the way it had every time for four hundred years.

Outside it was dark and clear and very cold, and the band was up over the ridge, enormous and perfectly ordinary, and the smudge was where it always was.

Kyra found it first, the way she always had.

She did not point at it and she did not say anything about it, and neither did Val, and the two of them stood on a snowfield on the wrong planet for a while and then went down.

— end of chapter eight —

They came back up in the second week of September, because the geometry had been finished in March and the moment had not, and the moment was not a thing either of them could hurry.

The summer in between was six months of being two women with nothing to do in a country where they had no business, and it was, Kyra said afterward, the strangest half-year of four centuries: a thing entirely decided and nothing whatever to do about it, in rented rooms, in three towns, with Val reading everything in the public libraries of two countries and finding nothing further to check and checking anyway.

The path up was easier in September. That was the only thing about it that was easier.

They were four days in the hull again and most of it was waiting.

What there was to do had been done in the spring. What was left was a window, and the window was a matter of hours rather than days, and Val had it to the minute and had had it to the minute since a kitchen in Oregon in November and had said the figure out loud exactly twice.

On the last evening she went through it with Kyra from the beginning, in order, because Kyra had asked her to and because it was the only way she knew of being kind.

It took about forty minutes. There were nine things that had to be true and seven of them were already true and two of them would be true at eleven minutes past four in the morning, and at the end of it Kyra said, "Right," and nothing else at all.

Here is what it was not.

It was not a machine. There was no device, nothing to be thrown, no moment at which anybody said now. The ship had given her the shape of a fault four hundred years ago and a dead man in a state university had given her the move that turns a fault into a correction, and what the two of them were going to do with that was stand in a particular place at a particular time in a particular relation to each other, and that was all, and it was the whole of it, and Val had spent most of August being quietly appalled at how little there was to see.

The second section lay on its side where it had lain since the spring of sixteen hundred and seven. It was not going anywhere. It had given what it had to give and it would be giving nothing further, and both of them had made their peace with that in March.

At ten past three they went forward and sat down against the bulkhead and waited.

Val had the lamp down to almost nothing. Kyra had her coat on over everything and her boots on and her hands between her knees, and the one pale head in that section was the only thing catching any light at all.

"Say the thing about the seventeen," Kyra said, at about half past.

"That is not a thing I am going to say in here."

"I know. I wanted to see whether you'd say so."

Val turned her head.

"You are frightened."

"I am extremely frightened and I have been since Oregon and I am not going to pretend about it," said Kyra. "That isn't a problem. I've been frightened on a mountain before. I get on with things."

At four o'clock they stood up.

And Val Sorin, who had written the paper the whole program stood on, and had rewritten the continuity protocol for nineteen and then rewritten it again, and had read nineteen panels in a single day with her own hand because she did not trust a good physician who had never read one — Val Sorin got as far as the place she had to stand in and stopped, about a pace short of it, and did not take the pace.

She did not say anything. Her face did nothing whatever. She stood in a dead section with her arms at her sides and did not move, and the lamp went on doing the almost nothing it was doing.

Kyra waited.

It went on for some time. Afterward neither of them could put a figure on it, which in Val's case had never once happened before about anything.

"Val."

"I know what the window is."

"I know you do."

"I have eleven minutes." Her voice was entirely level and had nothing in it at all. "I am aware of the arithmetic. I did the arithmetic. There is no part of this that I have not personally checked and I have never in the whole of my life been more certain of anything, and I cannot make my foot go forward, and I want that understood: I am not arguing with myself about it. I have tried. There is nothing there to argue with."

Kyra did not tell her it would be all right.

She did not say that she was frightened too, which was true and would have been a kindness and would have been the wrong one. She did not reason. She did not point out that four days ago the woman had called it right and had not hedged.

What she did was walk over and put a hand flat on the back of Val's head, which was the old one.

"Eleven people were alone," Kyra said. "You've known that since January and you've said it to me once and never again."

"Yes."

"And Ramel was never not going to be."

"Yes."

"And you are not, and I am not, and that is the entire difference, and it is not a comfort and I am not offering it as one." Kyra had not moved her hand. "It's just what's true. That's all I've got, Val. I've never had anything else."

Val stood there for a while longer.

"I can state the whole of it," said Val. "I can state it better than anybody who has ever lived. And I cannot go in."

"I know."

"That is the fifth step. That is what it means. I have had that line for four hundred years and I thought it was about reference frames."

"It is about reference frames," said Kyra. "It's also the other thing. I've been telling you that since January."

And then she took her hand off Val's head and got hold of her by the wrist instead, which was not a gesture either of them had, and had no history and no reason and was not soft.

"Come on," said Kyra.

And Val Sorin went where she was taken, which she had not done since she was eighteen years old.

They stood in the place. They got into the relation they had to be in, which was not ceremonious and took about four seconds and which they had been rehearsing without knowing it on couches and in beds and in rented rooms since a road out of Maribor in 1620.

Kyra said, "I've got you."

Val did not answer. She did not need to and there was nothing available to say with, and in any case Kyra already had it.

There is no account of the next fifteen seconds and there never will be.

The two people who came through them were inside them, and inside is the one place from which nothing can be described, and both of them had read that sentence in the other's handwriting at some point in four hundred years and neither had ever expected to be in it twice.

— end of chapter nine —

What they came out into was a field.

It was six miles inland of Aventhal and it was the middle of the afternoon and it was the back of the growing season, and there were four hundred yards of something with a blue cast to it going away downhill in rows, and a wall, and beyond the wall a road with a surface on it that neither of them recognized.

Val went down on her hands in the dirt and stayed there for a while. That was not distress. The whole of her was telling her at once that the ground was right, and there is no preparing for that, and she had not known it was a thing that could be told.

Kyra stood over her with her coat on in the warm and looked at a sky she had not seen since she was seventy-seven years old and said nothing at all for about two minutes, which is the longest she had managed in four centuries.

There had been a yard here. That was the first wrong thing and it took Val about nine seconds.

There had been a fit-out yard six miles inland of Aventhal with nine bays in it and a hall and a long low building where forty people had argued about provisioning, and she had walked out of it for the last time on a Thirdday with Kyra four feet to her left and a crew of nineteen behind her, and what was here now was a field with a crop in it and a wall that had been built by somebody who was not in a hurry.

"It's gone," said Kyra.

"It has been gone for some time. Look at the wall." Val got up off her hands. "That wall is not new. That wall is forty years old at least and it was built out of something that was here before it."

"Four hundred years, Val."

"Yes," said Val, and did not look at her, because something had already begun to be wrong and she did not yet have it.

They walked down to the road because there was nothing else to do.

They had been the fair one and the dark one in nine countries and they were going to be the fair one and the dark one here, and neither of them had thought about that until a man with a load looked at the two of them and visibly sorted them in the ordinary way.

What Val was doing on that half mile was the thing she had done on every half mile of her life, which was to count. The wall. The crop, which she did not know and which was a cultivar, which meant somebody had made it. The road surface. The absence of a yard that had employed four hundred people.

And none of it came out.

Four hundred and nineteen years is a long time. It is long enough that a road moves, that a coast changes, that the word for a thing goes out of use. What was in front of her was eighty years of ordinary change on a planet that had gone on being itself, and she knew the difference the way a woman who has read strata knows the difference, and she walked down to that road getting steadily colder in the warm.

There was a man on the road with a load of something and an animal to pull it, which was a thing Val had not expected and which told her nothing, because there had been men with loads on that road when she was a girl and there would be in nine hundred years.

Kyra did the talking, because Kyra does the talking.

She did it beautifully. She had not spoken the Sethal to a stranger in four hundred and twenty years and she got the whole of it right, every sound in its place, the lift and the drop, and the man told her about the road and about a bridge that was out and about his brother, and she stood in the dust and let him and laughed in the right places.

And then she asked him the date.

He gave it to her the way anybody gives you the date, which is to say badly, with the day first and then the month and then a pause and then the year, because nobody says the year.

Kyra said thank you and said something about his brother and let him go.

Then she turned round and said the year out loud to Val, in the middle of a road, in the afternoon.

And Val Sorin did the sum, which took her no time at all, and got an answer that was wrong by three hundred and thirty-eight years.

"Say it again."

Kyra said it again.

"That is not possible."

"Val—"

"I am not being difficult. I am telling you that the number that man gave you is not a number that can be correct, and I want you to go back and ask him again, and I am aware of how that sounds." Val had both hands at her sides and nothing in her face whatsoever. "Ask him what year he was born. Ask him how old his brother is. Ask him anything with a year in it."

So Kyra went back up the road and asked him, and came down again, and the second answer agreed with the first.

Val sat down on the bank at the side of that road.

She did the sum four times. Not because she doubted it — she had it the first time, the way she had always had everything the first time — but because the four of them were four different roads to the same place and she wanted all four to arrive there, and they did.

Eighty-one years.

Eighty-one years on this world. Four hundred and nineteen on the other one. She had gone into a fold on a Thirdday with a crew of nineteen and had come out of it on a mountain in a country that did not have a name yet, and had then lived four hundred and twenty years, one day at a time, in order, writing it down — and this planet had been going round its star for eighty-one of them.

"Say it," said Kyra. She had sat down on the bank too.

"The two year lengths differ by a few days. I worked that out in sixteen hundred and eight and I have carried it in a notebook ever since and I have been right about it for four centuries." Val had her hands on her knees. "That is not what this is. That is a difference in how long a year is. This is a difference in how fast one goes."

"Did you know that could happen?"

"Of course I knew it could happen. It is in the fold. It is the entire mechanism of the fold." She said it flatly, with no particular emphasis anywhere in it. "I did not know it had happened to us, because there is no instrument on that planet that could have told me, and there was no line in the ship's record where the number would have been, and I looked for it once in 1976 and found the place where it was not and could do nothing with it."

"You looked for it."

"I looked for it, found an absence, and put it down," said Val. "That is all I did about it in four hundred years."

Kyra was quiet for a while. There was a bird doing something in the hedge behind them that neither of them had heard since they were young.

"Val."

"I have got there."

"I know you have. I want it said."

"Vaedom reached four hundred and six in nineteen hundred and eight," said Val. "I marked the year. I did it in a house on Clinton with the blind down and I did it correctly, in order, with the date, and I grieved my father properly for the first and only time in my life, and I was sixty years older than I needed to be and he was not dead."

"He may not be—"

"He is a hundred and eighty-six," said Val. "That is not an opinion. That is seventy-seven plus eighty-one plus twenty-eight and there is no part of it I have to guess at."

She sat on that bank for some time and did not cry and did not move.

What she was doing, and what she would be doing on and off for the next two years, was going back through four hundred years of arithmetic and finding that all of it was wrong.

Not wrong in the method. The method had been perfect. Every sum she had ever done had been done correctly on the information available and she would stand behind every one of them in any room on either world. They were all wrong anyway, because the premise under them had been wrong since sixteen hundred and seven, and there had been no way on that planet to find out, and she had built four centuries of grief on top of it with the care of a woman laying a wall.

Nineteen seventy-four. A kitchen, and a column of years, and the figure she had carried toward her for six years, and said out loud to one person at a quarter past eleven at night, and had been frightened of.

Her daughters had been about a hundred and ten. She could not make it closer than that and she never would.

"I have been mourning people who were alive," she said.

"Yes."

"For centuries. On dates I calculated. With the blind down." She turned her hands over on her knees and looked at them. "I have done one thing with my life, Kyra. I have put a figure on every unbearable thing that has ever happened to me and that is how I have carried any of it, and the figures were the thing I had, and they were the only thing I had, and I have just found out that I have been doing arithmetic on a dead man who is sitting somewhere on this planet in a chair."

"That's the good half."

"I am aware that it is the good half."

"Say the good half out loud, Val, or you'll be four years getting to it."

Val sat with that.

"My father is alive," she said. "Genie and Kal are a hundred and twenty and have most of their lives in front of them. There are seventeen households on this planet with people in them who were waiting, and the people who were waiting are the people who were waiting, and not their grandchildren." She stopped, and started again, and it did not come out any better the second time. "I have been getting ready for four hundred and twenty years to arrive somewhere that had forgotten us, and I was rehearsing a thing that was not going to happen, and I was extremely thorough about it."

"And the loss."

"And the loss is real and nobody gets it back." The level had not gone out of her voice once. "Eighty-one years. They were thirty-nine when I walked out of that yard and they are a hundred and twenty, and the whole of that is gone and it was the whole of their grown lives, and the fact that it is not four hundred years does not return one day of it."

The man with the load had got about half a mile down the road by then and was still going.

"Right," said Kyra, and stood up, and put a hand down.

"I have not finished."

"You have not started. You'll be at this for ten years and I know it and I'm not going to be the one who tells you to stop." She did not take the hand back. "But you're sitting on a bank doing sums about your father and your father is an hour's walk from a town with a bridge out, and I have been four hundred and twenty years getting here and I would like to go."

Val looked up at her.

Then she took the hand, which she had done twice in her life on another planet, and got up off that bank, and the two of them went down the road in the afternoon with the dust going up behind them and nothing whatever to carry.

— end of chapter ten —

He was still in the house above the water, which Val had not allowed herself to expect and had expected anyway, and which told her inside about four seconds that he had never moved and had therefore never finished.

They came up the track in the late morning. There was a man sitting out at the end of the terrace with a board on his knees and something on it, and he looked up the way anybody looks up at a footstep.

And Val Sorin, who had rehearsed this in nine kitchens on two continents across four centuries and had a form of words for it that she had revised eleven times and had been rather proud of, stood on her father's track and said nothing whatsoever.

He got up slowly, which was the only thing about him that was slow.

He had not changed. That was the first of the wrong things and she had not braced for it, because eighty-one years does nothing at all to a man of a hundred and five on a planet where people live four hundred years, and the face looking at her across thirty feet of terrace was the face that had looked at her across a table in a kitchen on the eleventh day before she left.

The second wrong thing was that she had not changed either, and he could see that too.

"Vaelith," said Vaedom Sorin.

"Yes," said Val.

He did not come down the terrace. He put the board on the chair and stood where he was with his hands at his sides, and Val understood with complete clarity that he was doing exactly what she would have done, which was to establish that the thing in front of him was real before permitting anything else to happen.

It took him about half a minute. Kyra, three paces back, did not say a word through any of it, which cost her something and which Val noticed and would mention nine days later.

Then he said, "Kyra Davan," and Kyra said, "Hello, Vaedom," and after that it was somehow possible to walk up the rest of the terrace.

What happened for the next hour was not a reunion.

Val had seen reunions. She had stood at the back of four of them on a dock at Aventhal when she was twenty-two and had found them embarrassing. A reunion is two people doing the same thing at the same time, and what was happening on that terrace was two people doing entirely different things in the same place.

He had lost a daughter eighty-one years ago. He had done the whole of it — the nine weeks, the hall, the committee, the year when he stopped going to the institute and the year after that when he started again. He had put it down somewhere around the fortieth year and had got on with a life, and what was standing in front of him now was the undoing of something he had finished, and a man does not get to feel one thing about that.

And Val had lost a father in nineteen hundred and eight and had buried him correctly, with the blind down, on a date she had calculated herself.

They sat out there because it was warm and because neither of them suggested going in.

She told him what there was. The fold, the twenty-two seconds, the eight who answered and the six who did not come down. The mountain. The hull. She did it in order and she did it flatly and it took about forty minutes, and he did not interrupt once, which she had forgotten he did.

And at the end of it he said the thing he had been waiting the whole forty minutes to say.

"Where have you been living."

"That is going to take some time," said Val.

"I have got a great deal of it."

"Yes," said Val. "That is rather the difficulty."

He looked at her then the way he had looked at her when she was nine and had broken something and come to say so.

"Say it in one sentence and we will do the rest afterward."

"Four hundred and twenty years," said Val.

The water went on doing what the water does below that house.

"No," he said.

"Yes," said Val.

"Vaelith, it has been eighty-one years. I can give you the day."

"It has been eighty-one years here," said Val. "That is correct and I am not disputing it and I have checked it four times on a road. It has been four hundred and twenty years where I was, and I have had every single one of them, in order, one at a time, and I have written most of them down."

He sat with that for a long moment. She watched him do the thing she did, which is to take a statement and look for the place where it comes apart, and she watched him fail to find one, and she watched him understand that he was not going to.

"That is in the fold," he said at last.

"It is the entire mechanism of the fold," said Val.

"Did you know?"

"No. There was nothing on that world that could have told me, and there was no line in the ship's own record where the number would have been, and I went and looked for it once in a cold section with a lamp on my knee and found the place where it was not."

"When."

Val did not have to go and look for it.

"By their reckoning, the year nineteen hundred and seventy-six."

"And you did nothing with it," said Vaedom.

"There was nothing to be done with it," said Val, and found that she had said it in exactly the voice she had used to the lamp.

Vaedom Sorin got up and went to the end of the terrace and stood looking down at the water with his back to both of them.

Kyra, who had not said anything for an hour and a quarter, caught Val's eye across the table and did not do anything with it except hold it, and the dark of her hair had the copper up in it along one side in that light, the way it had in every light on two worlds.

Then he came back and sat down and asked the one question.

He had a reputation for it at the institute. He would sit in the chair they kept for him through an entire afternoon of a thing and ask nothing at all, and then at the end he would ask one question, and everybody would be four days answering it properly.

"How old are you?"

Val put her hands on the table.

"Four hundred and ninety-seven."

And she watched her father receive a number that nobody on that planet had ever had cause to say out loud, because Teor Casse lived to four hundred and six and it is in every schoolroom on the coast as the longest life anybody has had.

"That is not possible either," he said.

"No," said Val.

"You are ninety-one years past—"

"Ninety-one past Casse. Yes. I did that sum in a house in a place called Portland in nineteen hundred and thirty-six, alone, at a table, and I did not say it to anybody including the woman sitting on your terrace, and I have thought about why not for ninety years and I have an answer and it is not a good one."

He did not ask what it was. He asked the next thing, which was worse.

"Is it going to stop?"

Val put her hands flat on the board between them.

"I have no idea," said Val. "There is nobody to ask. There has not been anybody to ask since sixteen hundred and seven and there is not anybody now, because what happened to the two of us happened on a world with a field that is wrong for us, for four hundred and twenty years, and there is no second case."

"There are two of you."

"There are two of us and we are the same case," said Val. "That is one, not two. I have been making that correction in my own head for four centuries and I have never once been able to make it come out differently."

And then he said the thing that took the ground out, and he did not know he was doing it, which was the worst of it.

"Then I will have to go first," said Vaedom Sorin, "which is the correct order, and I have spent eighty-one years thinking I had got it wrong."

Val did not say anything.

"That is the thing nobody tells you about a child going before you. It is not only the losing. It is that the arrangement has been broken and you go on living in the broken version of it." He had his hands flat on the board, which he had picked up again without noticing. "And I have been in that for eighty-one years and I am out of it in an afternoon, and I am going to need a while, Vaelith, and I would rather say so than pretend."

So Val told him.

She had not planned to. It was not in any of the nine versions.

"In nineteen hundred and eight," said Val, "by their reckoning, I did the arithmetic on you. You were a hundred and five when I left and four hundred and six is the figure, and I had no reason to think any year of it was wrong. So I marked it. I did it in a house on a street called Clinton with the blind down, on the day, properly, and it is the only time in my life I have grieved anybody on purpose rather than being overtaken by it."

"You held a day for me."

"I held a day for you and you were a hundred and sixty-one years old and perfectly well and probably out on this terrace," said Val, "and I would like to be able to tell you that I find that funny."

Vaedom Sorin looked at his daughter for a while.

"I would not have had you not do it," he said.

"It was wrong," said Val.

"It was not wrong. It was incorrect, which is a different word and you have known the difference since you were eleven years old." He put the board down again. "You did the right thing on the best figure you had. That is the whole of what anybody can do and it is what I taught you and I am not going to stand here and watch you decide it was a fault."

"I have four hundred years of it."

"Then you have four hundred years of having done the right thing on the best figure you had," said Vaedom, "and you will want to take that apart, and I am telling you now, before you start, that there is nothing in it to take apart and that you will do it anyway."

It came up on her somewhere after that, in daylight, on her father's terrace, the way it does when she is not managing it — at the wrists first and then under the jaw.

She did not put her sleeves down. She had stopped doing that in the spring and she was not going to start again on this planet.

Vaedom Sorin looked at his daughter's arms for a long moment.

"What is that?"

"It is new," said Val. "It arrived in the first year, on the other world, along with a quantity of other things, and it does that when I feel something and there has never been one single thing I could do about it."

"It was not there before."

"It was not there before. Nothing like it has ever been on anybody at this institute or anywhere else on this planet, and I have the only two cases, and one of them is in your kitchen."

He looked at it a while longer.

"It is extremely beautiful," said Vaedom Sorin, "and I should like it noted that I said so before I said anything sensible about it," and went in to see about the food.

Val sat out on her father's terrace by herself with her sleeves up until the light went off the water.

— end of chapter eleven —

Val made the list on the fourth day, which surprised nobody who had ever met her, and it took her about nine minutes, which surprised Kyra and should not have.

She had been carrying it since the mountain. Seventeen names in the order they had been on the crew board, with the section against each one, and she did not have to look anything up and did not pretend she did.

"You're not doing all seventeen," Kyra said.

"I am doing all seventeen."

"Val—"

"There are seventeen households on this planet that have never been told what happened, and there is exactly one person alive who can tell them, and she is standing in a kitchen arguing about it." Val folded the list once. "I am not doing it out of penance and I would like that understood now rather than in four years. I am doing it because it is owed and because I can."

They started in the second week and it took the better part of two years, because the seventeen were spread over a continent and because they went slowly on purpose.

The shape of it settled fast. They would write first, which Kyra did, because a letter from Kyra Davan reads like a person and a letter from Val Sorin reads like a finding. Then they would go, and sit in somebody's front room, and Val would say what there was.

What there was divided in two, and the division was the whole difficulty.

For six of them there was a place. A mountain in a country that had not had a name at the time, a spread of four or five miles, in the spring, at night — and Val could describe the ground, and the weather that week, and what grew there now, and she had stood on it, and she would say so. Six families got that. It was not nothing. More than once it was the only thing in the room that anybody could hold on to.

For eleven of them there was a timestamp.

She had nothing for the eleven and she did not pretend otherwise.

No body, no ground, no last hour, no words. Twenty-two seconds by the meter and nothing afterward, and the sections were not there, and the word not there is the whole of it and there is no second paragraph.

And the eleven were the worse deaths and the harder doors, and Val Sorin, who had never in four hundred and twenty years delivered a finding of any kind without a figure somewhere in it, sat in one front room after another over the course of a year with nothing in her hands.

She did not get better at it. That is worth saying. She got more accurate and she did not get better.

The third one they did was Oret's.

His brother was a hundred and seven and kept bees on a smallholding four miles out of a town whose name had changed twice since the ship went, and he had read Kyra's letter four times before they came, and said so in the doorway, which was how they knew what kind of afternoon it was going to be.

His name was Tovan. He had his brother's build and about a quarter of his noise.

Val gave it to him in order, because that is the only way she has.

"Your brother was in the seventh section. There were four of them in that section and they were two pairs and they were together, in one room, for the whole of it." She had her hands on her knees. "That is not a small thing and I want to put it first. Eleven people died in those twenty-two seconds and every one of them was alone, and your brother was not alone, and the four of them came through it and answered when the commander called for a report."

Tovan Oret sat forward.

"He came through it."

"He came through it. There were eight of us."

"Eight."

"Eight," said Val, "and four of them were in the seventh, and I read all four panels myself on the second day and there was nothing wrong with any of them."

And then Val said the other half, because she had learned by the third door that the gap between the halves is where the damage happens and that the only mercy available is to make it short.

"Five days later the commander brought the sections down in pieces, in the order she had worked out, which was correct and which I would defend in any room on this planet. The sixth went first, and the seventh went with it, and it had not been meant to be attached to anything by then and it was."

The bees were doing what bees do, out beyond the window.

"Six people," said Val. "Your brother was one of them. It was not long and I do not know whether he knew, and I am not going to tell you that he did not, because I do not know."

Tovan Oret took that the way most of them took it, which is to say he said thank you.

Then he sat for a while with his hands between his knees, and then he asked the thing he had been going to ask since he opened the letter.

"What was the last thing he said?"

"I do not know."

"You were on the ship."

"I was in the second section and he was in the seventh and there were nine sections," said Val. "I saw him at a meal on the last evening at the target and he was being loud about a game. I do not know what he said after that and nobody does and nobody ever will."

That was true and it was accurate and it was the correct answer to the question he had asked.

It was not what he wanted and Val knew it was not what he wanted inside half a second, and she sat in that room and could not find anything else to give him, because there was not anything else and she does not manufacture.

"There was a stream," Tovan said. "Four lines home. Eleven days out."

"There was," said Val.

"He sent me something rude." His voice had gone somewhere else. "About a coat I'd bought. It was four lines and three of them were about the coat."

"Yes."

"And I didn't send anything back."

Kyra did not move at all.

There it was.

"Four of us didn't," said Tovan Oret, and Val watched Kyra's hands go still in her lap. "Four of the families. We all knew each other, you understand, it was that sort of thing, and four of us sent nothing and we made a joke of it at the hall afterward, and I have had eighty-one years of that joke." He was not crying. He looked at the floor. "He was twenty-six."

Val said, "You could not have known."

And it was true, and it was the right thing, and it went into that room and did absolutely nothing at all.

She was aware of it landing wrong. She had four centuries of being aware of things landing wrong. What she did not have, and had never had, and was not going to acquire at four hundred and ninety-seven years of age in a stranger's front room, was the next move.

Kyra put her cup down.

"He had a laugh you could hear through a section and a half," Kyra said.

Tovan Oret looked up.

"That's the thing I want to tell you and I've been waiting the whole way here to see whether there was a hole to put it in." Kyra had come forward on the chair. "He brought a game with him. Eleven counters, in a bag, and it was a stupid game and nobody could remember who had taught it to him, and by the fifth week there were four people on that ship who were serious about it. Serious. Tolven played it once, for two hours, and lost, and did not say one word about losing."

"He always had that bag."

"He had it in the bay. He was frightened of her—" she put her thumb at Val without looking round "—and he got funnier the more frightened he was, which is a thing I have only ever seen in about four people and it is a gift and nobody ever calls it one. People complained about the laugh. They complained about it the way you complain about weather you have decided to keep."

Tovan Oret put both hands over his face.

"He was not having a bad time," said Kyra. "That's it. That's the whole of what I came to give you and it isn't a fact and you can't do anything with it. He was twenty-six and he was on a ship and he was the youngest and loudest person on it and four people wanted to beat him at his own game, and the last nine weeks of his life were the best nine weeks he ever had, and I was there and I watched it and I am telling you."

She let that sit.

"And the coat was funny. I'd like to say that too. He read it out in the bay before he sent it."

They were there another hour after that and it was an entirely different hour.

He got the bees out, which is to say he took them out to look at the bees, and he talked, and Kyra talked, and at one point he laughed at something and then stopped and apologized for it and Kyra told him not to be an idiot.

And Val stood four paces off at the end of a row of hives with her hands behind her and did not say anything for about twenty minutes.

What she did instead was look at the two of them: the old man bent over a frame, and the woman beside him with her sleeves pushed up and the sun finding the copper in the one place above the ear it has always found it, on two worlds, in every light there has ever been. She timed it afterward out of habit. Nineteen minutes.

Kyra went up to the house with him at the end to see about something, which left Val at the gate with Tovan Oret's nephew, who was sixty and had driven over to be there and had not said four words all afternoon.

"Can I ask you something," said the nephew.

"You may ask me anything. I will answer about half of it."

"Was it worth it? Her coming. Only he's been like that about the stream for as long as I've been alive and I didn't think anything would—"

He stopped, because he had got himself into a sentence he could not finish politely.

Val looked up the field at the two of them by the hives.

"I gave your uncle the account," said Val. "It was complete and it was correct and I had checked every part of it and there is nobody else alive who could have given it to him."

"Yes."

"It was not what he needed and I could see that it was not and I had nothing further." She did not look away from the hives. "What she did was better than anything I would have done. She did it better than I would have done it, and she did it without being asked, and if I had been in that room on my own he would have shut the door behind me this afternoon and been exactly where he was yesterday."

The nephew did not say anything, because he had no idea what he had just been handed.

"That is the answer to your question," said Val. "You may tell him the first part. Do not tell him the second."

They walked back down to the road at about six.

"What were you and the lad talking about?" said Kyra.

"Bees."

"You don't know anything about bees."

"I know a great deal about bees," said Val. "I have simply never had any reason to mention it."

Kyra laughed at that and let it go, which she would not have done at two hundred, and the two of them went down the lane in the evening with fourteen doors still to do.

— end of chapter twelve —

They had been in that house three days, and in three days neither of her daughters had asked.

It was Kal's house, on the valley side, with a long room and a door at the end of it that stood open onto the yard because the weather was good and because that door had stood open in every house either of those women had ever lived in. There were four of them in it. It was the middle of the morning.

Val had been watching the not-asking for three days and had done nothing about it, because she had spent four hundred and twenty years being the one who does not ask, and she recognized the shape of it coming at her from the other direction and found that she had no defense prepared.

What she had instead was the Sethal.

Nobody had warned her about that and there would have been no way to. Four centuries of apparatus — the flat voice, the remark about drainage, the sentence arranged at four in the afternoon and delivered at nine — all of it had been built on another world out of another language, by a woman working in a tongue she had learned at seventy-eight from a man with a cart. She had the Sethal the way she had it at eighteen. Every instrument she owned was in the other one.

And her light was up. It had been up most of the morning, faintly, at the wrists, in daylight, where all three of them could see it and where it said what it always said, which is that she was feeling something, and never once in four hundred and twenty years what.

Kyra was at the end of the room with a cup she was not drinking, in the full light of a door standing open, with four hundred and twenty years of knowing exactly what the pale of that head does in daylight and no use for any of it this morning.

Genie had got up to do something about the fire that did not need doing. Kal was at the table with her hands folded, which is what Kal does and has done since she was four years old.

Val put down what she was holding.

"You have both been very polite for three days," said Val, "and neither of you has asked. So I am going to do it badly and then we are going to have lunch."

Genie stopped with her hand on the fire iron and did not put it down.

"I have a figure for everything. Your grandfather says it is the only thing he has ever been unable to get out of me, and he has been saying it since I was nine, and he said it again on his terrace on the second day and I had to leave the room." Val had her hands flat on the table in front of her. "Four hundred and twenty years. Thirty-one addresses. Nine countries. Eleven died in the fold and six in the fall, and I have known all seventeen names every day since, in order, and I could give them to you now and get the sections right."

Nobody said anything.

"I have not got one for her."

And there it was, which is the thing nobody in that room could have described afterward and all four of them would remember for the rest of their lives.

She had started a measurement. She had started it the way she started every measurement, with the units and the span and the count, in order, out loud — and then she had got to the fourth item and there was nothing there, and instead of going round it or building a method for it or saying that the instrument was inadequate, which is what she had done about this precise thing in nine kitchens on another planet across four centuries, she put it down.

In front of her children. In daylight. In a room with the door open.

"I have been looking since Maribor and there is nothing in her that counts," Val said. "That is not a compliment. It is a fault in the method, and I have had four hundred years to find a better method and there is not one, and I am done looking."

Kal had not moved her hands.

"There is a second thing and it is worse and it is the reason I am saying any of this in front of the two of you rather than to her in a dark room, which is where I have said everything that was ever difficult." Val's voice did not go anywhere. "She has believed since about the fourth winter that if I could undo the fold I would. She has never asked me. I have never told her. The answer is no, and it has been no for a very long time, and I could not say it on that planet because eleven people are dead and I was not going to stand on them and call it a good outcome."

The door stood open onto the yard and a bird went across it.

"You are both in this room. So I can say it. I would not undo it."

She stopped there for a moment, and it was not for effect. She had come to the end of the part she could do properly.

"And I love her," said Val Sorin, "which is a sentence anybody can say and which tells you almost nothing, and I have nothing better."

And then she did not take it back.

She did not call it imprecise. She did not offer to improve on it. She had said that same sentence once, in a dark room on the other world, and had got as far as the word imprecise before a woman put a hand on her face and stopped her — and this time she let it stand in the middle of a lit room with four people in it and the door open, and that was the single largest thing that had ever happened to her.

"I am not going to apologize for it this time," said Val.

Kalenne Davan looked at her mother's partner across a table for about four seconds.

"I asked you about it once," said Kal.

"You did not."

"I was nine." Kal's hands were still folded. "You were at the table at ours and she was mending the strap on something, and I asked why the two of you had never been bonded."

Val did not say anything.

"You told me to go and find my sister."

And here is what went through Val Sorin in the three seconds after that, and it is the worst thing in this book.

She had the afternoon. She had it entire. She could have told that room what the weather had been doing, and that the strap was off a bag and not a boot, and that Kyra had been working at it with the wrong awl because the right one had gone missing in the spring and was found in the autumn behind a crock. She could have said what Kal was wearing. She could have said where the light was coming from and at what angle, because she had been looking at it when she was not looking at the child.

She did not have the question.

It was not that she had forgotten it. There was nothing there to have forgotten. Her nine-year-old had asked her the central question of her life across a kitchen table and she had sent her out of the room, and it had not registered at the time as an event, and the woman who had not lost one single thing in four hundred and twenty years had lost that.

"I do not remember it," said Val.

"No," said Kal. "I didn't think you would. I've had the whole of my grown life to decide whether to tell you and I only decided this morning."

"Why this morning?"

"Because you were going to say all this and then be embarrassed about it for a decade, and I wanted it on the table before you got started." Kal unfolded her hands at last and put them flat. "I'm not telling you it's all right. I'm telling you it was visible to a child who hadn't finished growing. That's all. It's a fact, not a verdict."

Nobody had looked at Kyra.

That is not quite true. Val had not looked at Kyra, deliberately, since she began, because she had known from the first sentence that if she looked she would stop.

And Gennive Sorin, who had been loud in every argument she had ever been in since she was a girl, who had a reputation on two faculties for saying out loud the thing everybody else had decided to leave, put the fire iron down on the hearth and crossed the room without one word in her mouth and stood next to Kyra Davan.

She did not touch her. She did not say anything at all. She stood beside her, close, the way you stand beside somebody at a gate.

Kyra went.

Not loudly. She put the cup down on the sill without any particular care about where and stood there with her face doing the whole of it, the way she had cried since Maribor, without noise and without apology and without putting a hand up to any of it.

Because here is what had just happened to her, and it was not being loved, which she had known since a room over a saddler's in 1795.

It was that she had believed since the fourth winter that Val would undo it, and had never once asked, and had built four hundred years on top of not asking — and the woman had said otherwise in front of witnesses, under more duress than anybody in that room could measure, and then a daughter who was not hers and had no stake in it at all and had spent a hundred and twenty years watching from outside the pair had got up and crossed a floor.

She could not discount that one as kindness. There was no way of reading it in which it meant anything else.

Genie stood there and could not do one thing about it, which was correct and was the point.

She could confirm what had been true. She was not the person it had been true with, and nothing she had — and she had a great deal — was any use whatever to a woman standing at a window with four hundred years coming up through her at once.

So nothing resolved. Kyra cried at a sill in her daughter's house and a young woman of a hundred and twenty stood next to her and the room held.

And then Val noticed.

Four hundred years earlier she would not have. In 1838 she would have noticed and filed it and raised it afterward, at the correct time, having arranged what to say.

She got up and went across the room.

Genie stepped back when she came, without being asked and without making anything of it, and went and stood by her sister.

Val put both hands on Kyra's face.

She had not done that in front of another living soul in four hundred and twenty years. It was Kyra's own move, from a bedroom in November, and the hands were not steady, and both of them knew whose gesture it was and neither of them said so.

"You have been wrong about that," said Val, "since the fourth winter, and I have had the evidence the whole time, and the first piece of it is that in sixteen hundred and—"

And she stopped.

Everyone in that room heard what was coming. Two of them had been raised by it. All four of them knew exactly what was about to arrive, in order, with the dates in it, flat and specific and unarguable and aimed at the wound.

And it did not arrive.

She stood in the middle of a lit room with her hands on a woman's face and put the instrument down for the second time in ten minutes, and this time there was nothing at all to replace it with, and she did not go and find anything.

"Kyra," said Val.

That was the whole of it. Her name, and nothing after it, from a woman who had not produced one sentence in four hundred and twenty years that was not carrying something.

Kyra did not say anything.

She had a hand up on Val's wrist and her face was wet and she had about nine things in her and not one of them would come, and she let it be and stood there and did not fill it.

That was the third time.

Over by the table two women of a hundred and twenty stood and watched their mothers, and neither of them said a word about any of it, then or at lunch or at any point in the fifty years that followed.

Out in the yard the weather went on being good.

The door stood open the whole time.

— end of chapter thirteen —

She left Aden's until the eleventh, which Kyra noticed on the second and said nothing about until the ninth.

"You've put him last."

"I have put him eleventh of seventeen, which is not last."

"Val."

"I have put him last," said Val, "and I have known I was doing it since the list, and I have no intention of discussing why in a kitchen before breakfast."

Hessa Aden was a hundred and ninety-four years old and lived where she had always lived, in a house on the ninth terrace with a window that looked across at the backs of other houses, and she opened her own door.

"I know who you are," she said to Val.

"Yes."

"Two girls came. A long time ago now. Before my husband died." She had her hand on the frame and had not moved it. "One of them did the talking and the other one stood at the back and watched me, and I have thought about that ever since, because the one at the back was the one who understood what she was looking at."

"That would be Kal."

"It would be the one who did not talk," said Hessa Aden, and looked past Val at Kyra, "and I had no idea either of them was anything to do with the pair of you until the letter came."

She let them in. That was not a kindness and was not meant as one; it was a woman declining to have the conversation on a terrace where the neighbors were.

There was one lamp going in the middle of the afternoon and it did nothing for anybody. It took the pale out of Val entirely and made her look like a woman cut from the same gray as the chair, and Kyra, who had seen every light on two worlds do something to that head, thought that this was the first one that had done nothing at all.

The room was clean and dim and had nothing in it about her son, which Val registered inside four seconds and understood entirely, because she had lived in nine houses with nothing in them about anybody.

They sat. They were not offered anything.

"Say it, then," said Hessa Aden.

Val said it.

She gave it the way she had given it ten times already that year, in order, with the sections and the twenty-two seconds and what the hull did and what it had been asked to do. She said that there had been no fault in the vessel or the solution or the crew or the procedure. She said that eleven people did not answer the report and that his was one of the eleven and that she did not know anything further and would not pretend to.

It took about nine minutes. The old woman heard the whole of it without moving.

And then she said, "Is that all?"

"That is all that is known."

"That is all that is known." Hessa Aden put her hands on the arms of the chair. "They came here with that. Eighty-one years ago. Two girls of thirty-nine who had been sent, and a great deal of no fault was found, and my husband asked them where the paper was, and there was no paper, and there has never been any paper."

"They were not sent," said Val. "They came on their own and told nobody they were going."

"You were not here."

"No. But I know what they are, and neither of them has ever in her life been sent anywhere."

That landed somewhere. It did not land where Val wanted it.

"Then they were worse," said the old woman. "An institution sends somebody and you know what you are being handed. Two young women come because they want to, and you are supposed to be grateful, and what they are actually doing is tidying." She looked at her hands. "A dead man was useful to that program for about nine years. He had signed off the solution and then the ship did not arrive, and there is only one shape that story can take and everybody at the institute knew it, and the two girls came and sat where you are sitting and told me it was not his fault, and that was the first time anybody had said the word fault in my house."

Kyra, by the window, did not say anything.

And Val Sorin sat in that chair with four things in her hands and could use none of them.

She could have said that the solution was computed twice from two independent starting sets by a careful man, and that it was correct, and that the drive faculty at home had filed the same one eleven weeks earlier. She had said that already and it had been heard as the program talking.

She could have said that she had read the thing the daughter had found, and that it did not say what this woman thought it said.

She could have said that the eleven died because they were alone, and that Ramel Aden was the only person on that ship who was never going to be anything else, because verification does not pair and cannot be tied to one place, and that the table in the building that had done everything right had put him in no section at all.

She had had that since a kitchen in Oregon in January, and she had told one person, once, and never again.

You do not say that to a mother. Not ever. Not at a hundred and ninety-four in a dim room on the ninth terrace, and not with nothing to put under it but arithmetic nobody in the room could check.

"He was not alone," said Hessa Aden.

Val's hands did not move.

"That is what I have had for eighty-one years and I would like you to tell me whether it is true. He had a crew. He had people around him, nineteen of them, and whatever it was, he was not by himself in a room somewhere on his own." Her voice was entirely steady. "That is the thing I have got. I have not got a place and I have not got a day and I have not got a word he said, and I have that."

"He had a crew," said Val.

"That is not an answer."

"It is the answer I have."

And there was the fifth thing, which was the one she had not listed to herself on the walk up.

Because she could have said: he was not alone in the fifth month or the sixth or the seventh. He had four hours in every ninth day and he had a woman of seventy-seven, and he found her twice a week and always with something real in his hand, and the last two hours of any consequence in his life were spent in a stores bay with paper on his knees and a lamp off, and I was there, and I know what his face did.

That is true. It is also four things that would detonate in that room — a woman thirty years older than her son, the whole of the last season, a thing he never mentioned at home and perhaps meant to — and the mother would have to hold them for the rest of a very long life with nobody left alive to ask about any of it.

Val did the arithmetic on that in under two seconds, which is what she is for.

"He had a crew," said Val again, "and they knew his habits the way a family does. That is everything I can give you, and it is not enough, and I am aware that it is not."

The light had come up somewhere in the middle of all that, at the wrists, in a dim room, and the old woman had been looking at it for some minutes and had not asked.

That was worse than being asked. Val had four centuries of practice at being asked.

"You have come a very long way," said Hessa Aden at last.

"Four hundred and twenty years."

"That means nothing to me."

"No," said Val. "It does not mean anything to anybody and I have stopped expecting it to."

They were there another twenty minutes and none of it got better.

The old woman asked three more questions and Val answered all three accurately and none of the three were the question. At one point Kyra came away from the window and sat down and said something about the house and about the terrace and about a bakery that had been there and was not, and the old woman answered her perfectly civilly and it went nowhere, because warmth was not what was wanted either and Kyra knew it within half a sentence and stopped.

Nobody rescued anything. There was nothing in that room to rescue it with.

At the door Hessa Aden said the thing she had been going to say since the letter came.

"I am glad you are not dead."

"Thank you."

"I want to be clear that I am saying it because it is true and not because it is a kind thing to say in a doorway." Her hand was on the frame again. "Eighteen of them did not come back and two did, and I have had eighty-one years of thinking there was nobody left who had seen him after the yard, and it turns out there was somebody and she was four hundred years away and could not get here." She stopped. "That is not a complaint. I do not know what it is."

"No," said Val. "Neither do I."

They went down the ninth terrace in the afternoon, past the backs of other houses, and did not say anything for about four streets.

"You held something," Kyra said.

"I held three things."

"I know which two."

"Then you know why I held them," said Val, "and I am not going to go through it, and I would like you to ask me again in about nine years, because I will want to have it taken apart by then and today I will not survive it."

Kyra put a hand on her back between the shoulder blades, briefly, in a public street on the ninth terrace, and took it off again.

At the bottom they came out onto the harbor road where the light comes off the water in the afternoon, and Val stopped walking.

"I did not fix it," said Val.

"No."

"I have fixed ten of them. Not fixed. I have left ten houses better than I found them and I had begun to believe that was a thing I was doing, and I have just spent an hour in a room making a woman of a hundred and ninety-four say the word fault in her own house for the second time in her life."

"That's not what happened."

"It is approximately what happened and I would be obliged if you did not improve it," said Val. "There are six left. I am going to do the six."

And they went on down the harbor road.

— end of chapter fourteen —

Rask's house was inland, four hours from anywhere, on a holding his wife's family had worked for nine generations and which he had married into and never got used to and had complained about with enormous satisfaction for forty years.

They knew about the wife before they went, because Kyra had written and the letter had come back in a different hand.

She had waited seventy-two years. Then she had got ill in a way that people do not usually get ill on that planet, and had been ill for about a year, and had died nine years before two women came up a track to tell her what had happened to her husband.

Val read that letter four times, in the way she reads things, and then put it down and did not say anything for most of an hour.

The man who opened the door was a hundred and forty and had his father's build and a quantity of his father's manner, and he did not know what to do with either of them.

"You'll be the ones from the ship."

"Yes," said Val.

"I was nineteen." He said it the way a man puts a thing on a table at the start so that it does not have to be got at later. "I want that said before we sit down. I was nineteen and I'd been inland two years and I did not come home for the hall or for any of the rest of it, and my mother did the whole of it on her own, and I have had eighty-one years to decide how I feel about that and I have not got there."

"Then we will sit down," said Val, "and I will not be asking you about it."

His name was Edren and he gave them something to drink and sat where his father used to sit, which he mentioned, and which Val suspected he mentioned at every opportunity to every visitor and had done for decades.

She did it in order.

"Your father was in the third section with Nissa Halve, which is where the pairs table put the two of them and which meant the third section smelled permanently of coffee and argument for nine weeks." She had her hands on her knees. "The third section is one of the five that did not come through. He is one of the eleven, and I want to be plain with you about what that means before I say anything else, because the thing I have for most of the seventeen is a place on a mountain and I do not have one for you."

"There's nothing."

"There is nothing. No ground, no day, no hour. The sections were there and then they were not there, and the whole of it is twenty-two seconds, and if I had anything else I would have brought it four hours up a track to give you."

Edren Rask took that about as well as anybody takes it, which is to say he looked at the window for a bit.

"My mother used to say he'd have known," he said. "She said it for about forty years and I never knew whether she believed it or whether it was the thing she'd decided to have. He grew that hull. Ten years. He used to come in and tell her what the ninth bay had done that day like it was an animal."

Val did not say anything for a moment.

"She was right."

He looked round.

"There is one thing I have and I have been carrying it four hours up a track and I did not know until a minute ago whether I was going to give it to you," said Val, "and your mother has just decided it, which is not a sentence I expected to say today."

"Give it to me."

"A grown hull makes a sound along its cell boundaries. It is not a crack and it is not a tear. It is a long complaint, and it comes before anything that a person in another section would be able to feel, and there was one man on that ship who had spent ten years listening to that material tell him what it wanted." Val's voice did not move at all. "He heard it start. Before anybody. Before me, and I had a continuity panel in front of me that I had helped design."

"And?"

"And the channel was still open, and he said one word on it, forward, to the whole ship."

"What was the word?"

"No," said Val.

The room did not do anything. Out the back somebody was moving an animal about.

"That's it."

"That is it," said Val. "One syllable, in his own voice, and then the dark, and I have had it for four hundred and twenty years and have never said it out loud to anybody who was not on that ship." She stopped. "I do not know whether it is a good thing to have. I have thought about it the whole way up here and I cannot decide, and I have decided that deciding was not mine to do."

Edren Rask sat in his father's chair and turned it over for about two minutes, and neither woman said anything into it.

"He was telling it off," he said at last.

"I beg your pardon?" said Val.

"That's what it is. That's not a man being frightened." He had gone somewhere else and his voice had gone with him. "He said no to a hull. He'd have been saying it to the hull. Forty years he talked to those things like they were being difficult on purpose and the last thing he ever did was tell one off for doing something he hadn't authorized."

And then Edren Rask put his head back and laughed, which startled everybody in that room including him, and went on laughing for some time, and finished it by putting the heel of his hand against his eye and keeping it there.

"She'd have liked that," he said, when he had it back.

"Yes," said Kyra. "I think she would."

"Seventy-two years she waited," said Edren Rask, "and you two got here nine late."

"We got here as fast as it could be done," said Val, "and that is not an excuse and I am not offering it as one. Nine years. I have the figure and I will have it for the rest of my life."

"I'm not blaming you."

"I am aware that you are not. I am telling you that I will carry it anyway, because I do that, and because your mother is owed somebody carrying it."

They stayed the night, because it was four hours back and because he asked.

In the evening he got out a box of things and went through them without any system whatsoever, which Val found almost unbearable and sat through without comment: a tool with a worn handle, a card from somebody, a drawing a child had done of nine bays in a row with the ninth one bigger than the others for no reason either of them could work out.

The lamp in that room was low and orange and old-fashioned and found the chestnut and the copper in her the way firelight had been finding them since a hut on a mountain, and Val sat on the other side of the table and watched a man hand her a comb and a card and a child's drawing.

Kyra was good that evening. She was good the way she is good, which is that at some point everybody in a room is telling her things and nobody notices it happening, and by about the tenth hour Edren Rask was describing a man he had been nineteen years old with and had spent a hundred and twenty years failing to get hold of.

Val went out and stood in the yard for a while and looked at the sky and let her get on with it.

There were twelve more.

They are not set down here and it is not because nothing happened in them. They took the rest of that year and the better part of the next. There was a house where nobody would speak and a house where four generations had assembled and wanted it done in front of all of them, and a man of a hundred and sixty who had married again and whose second wife sat through the whole of it holding his hand and then saw them out and thanked them in the lane with her back to the window. There was one where it went entirely well and Val came out of it and was not able to speak for about a mile. There was one where a woman asked whether her sister had suffered and Val said she did not know, and the woman said thank you, and meant it, because nobody had ever not known before.

Twelve households. Val did all twelve and Kyra did all twelve, and this is not the place for those, and that is deliberate, and the reason is that there were seventeen of them and there has never been a version of this where all seventeen fit.

She kept the list in the back of the book.

Not the original. The original had been on a page in a different hand on another planet and she had left it there deliberately. This was a new one, in the Sethal, in her own writing, with a mark against each name as it was done — and by the end of the second year there were sixteen marks on it.

Kyra found it on the table one evening and looked at it for a while and did not say anything about the seventeenth, then or later.

— end of chapter fifteen —

The Vennars were the sixteenth and they were the one that went well, and Val could not speak for about a mile afterward.

There were nine of them in the house when she got there, which she had been warned about and had still not been ready for. A sister of a hundred and nineteen. Two of the sister's children. A man who had been Corin Vennar's closest friend at the hall and was a hundred and forty and had driven since the morning. Nobody wept and nobody was difficult and somebody kept putting things in front of them.

And she had nothing for them. He was in one of the five sections and he was one of the eleven and there was no ground and no hour, exactly as there had been none for Rask, and Val put it down in the first four minutes because she had learned that leaving it in the room does more damage than putting it down.

They took it the way you take a thing you have had for eighty-one years and have made your peace with.

"We had assumed," said the sister. "There was never going to be anything. The two girls who came said as much, the way you say a thing when you are being careful, and we understood."

"They were being careful."

"They were about nineteen." She caught herself. "Were they? They looked about nineteen."

"They were thirty-nine," said Val, "and they looked twenty-two, and so do I, and I have stopped explaining it to people and I am not going to start in your front room."

The sister laughed at that, properly, and that was the moment the afternoon turned.

What they wanted was not the account. They had the account inside ten minutes and they put it down and did not pick it up again.

What they wanted was him, and they wanted it from somebody who had been in a room with him, and they had been waiting eighty-one years for one.

So Kyra gave him to them for about three hours.

The careful man. The one who computed the return solution twice from two independent starting sets, as the standing instruction requires and as nobody ever actually does, and who plotted a composition every evening with the pleasure of a man watching numbers behave. The one who read the fourth section of the training annex out loud on a step in a yard in the voice of a man reading a proclamation, at twenty-four, with a navigator's certificate four months old, and told the others that it meant Sevrin was carrying the kit.

"He did that here," said the friend. "He did that at this table. He'd read anything out in that voice."

And at some point late on, somebody said the thing about the last stream.

"He sent a list," said the sister.

"He did," said Val.

"Four lines, and all four of them were food, and it was a joke, because the note takes eleven days and he was going to be here before it arrived." She had her hands in her lap. "And then it arrived and he was not."

"I know what was on it," said Val. "I read every stream that went off that ship, because I was the one who signed them out, and I have had his list for four hundred and twenty years and I did not know until this afternoon that it had ever got here."

The sister got up and went out of the room and came back with a card.

It was eighty-one years old and it had been handled a great deal.

"We do it on the day," said the sister. "All four. It is an absurd amount of food for the time of year and two of the four are not in season and we do them anyway, and the children think we are mad and come every year." She put the card down on the table between them. "My mother started it in the second year because she could not think of anything else to do, and we have done it eighty times, and I want it said that we have never once been sad at that table and we have never once pretended he was going to walk in."

Val looked at the card for some time.

"That is better than anything I brought you," said Val.

They were asked to stay for it, which was four months off, and they said yes, and they went.

Val got about a mile down the road before she had to stop and stand at a wall.

Kyra did not ask and did not touch her and stood about four feet off looking at the other side of the valley until it was over, which took some minutes, and then the two of them went on.

The rest of that second year was the ordinary business of living somewhere, which neither of them had expected to find difficult and both of them did.

Kyra's trouble came first and it came in a lit room.

They were at a thing — a gathering of some kind at Kal's, with about twenty people in it and the doors open — and somebody said something funny at the far end, and Kyra laughed the way she laughs, with her head back.

She felt it the half second before, the way she had been able to since a bench outside a hut — the warmth at the back of the eyes, like standing too near a stove — and a half second is not enough to do anything with in a room with four lamps in it.

The gold came up. All the way out from the pupil, clear and warm, in front of a woman of ninety who was standing eighteen inches away.

Val saw it from across the room and could do nothing whatever.

On the other world this had never been a problem, because on the other world nobody has anything to put it beside. A man there has had what he has had and all of them are the same as each other and there is nothing anywhere in his head that says a human eye does not do that.

Here, everybody has something to put it beside. Everybody in that room had been looking at Sethal eyes for a century and a half.

The woman of ninety said, "Oh — " and then stopped, and then said, "Forgive me, I thought for a moment you were unwell," and Kyra said something easy and turned her head, and the whole thing lasted perhaps four seconds and was entirely survived.

In the yard afterward, with the gray of her eyes back the way the gray of the sea comes back under cloud, Kyra stood with her back against the wall of her daughter's house and swore in English for about a minute and a half.

"I have no idea how to do this."

"No," said Val.

"You have four hundred years of it. The collars, the dusk, the nine kitchens. You built an entire apparatus." Her hands were going. "I have never had to hide one single thing in my life, Val. Not one. I've been warm at people since I was four years old and it has never once cost me anything and now I cannot go into a room."

"You can go into rooms."

"I cannot laugh in them."

"And I cannot help you," said Val.

"I know you can't."

"I want to say it out loud because you will otherwise spend four years waiting for me to." She had her hands behind her. "Everything I have is for a thing that sits on skin and can be covered by a sleeve, and it works because I decided at nineteen that I would be a person who was not looked at. You cannot do that. It is in your face and your whole method is being looked at, and if you stop being looked at there is nothing left of you in a room."

Kyra put her head back against the wall.

"That's the most useful thing anybody's said to me since we landed."

"It is also the only thing I have got," said Val, "and I have been three months arriving at it."

Val's own trouble was quieter and took longer to surface and was, she eventually admitted, worse.

They went to the institute in the spring because Kal had arranged it and because it would have been rude not to. It was four buildings now where it had been two. There were eleven hundred people in it.

Everybody was very glad to see her. That was the difficulty.

They had read her. All of them had read her — the paper was in a curriculum, the continuity protocol was in its fourth revision and two of her four unsubmitted corrections had been made by somebody else in the forties and made correctly. A woman of sixty took her round and showed her a room full of people doing a thing Val had proposed in a committee in a hall that no longer existed, and did it beautifully, and was so pleased.

And not one person in that building asked her a question she could answer.

They asked her about then. They asked her, with enormous care, about the fold and the hull and the twenty-two seconds, and she answered all of it. Nobody asked her anything about the work, because the work had gone eighty-one years past her while she was reading everything that four centuries of another species had to offer on an entirely different set of problems, and she had come back as the most distinguished and least useful person in the room.

She did not mind for the first hour. She noticed, somewhere in the second, that she had not been asked to look at anything, and that nobody was going to.

"Four hundred and twenty years," Val said to Kyra that night, "and the only thing on this planet I am qualified to do is be a figure in a corridor."

And underneath that was the other one, which she did not say for another nine months.

Everybody at that institute knew what she had done at eighteen.

They had known before Genie got there and they had known the whole time Genie was there, and Genie had spent her entire studentship in a building where nobody would say it to her face. It had been the one great advantage of the other world that nobody there had any idea what the quiet was, and that she could put her hand flat on a table in a kitchen in Portland and say the word to one person and have it mean only what the two of them had made it mean.

Here it was a thing in a file, and a thing people did not say, and a thing an old man on the third terrace had mentioned to her twice in the first fortnight because he thought he was being admiring.

The paper was the comedy and both of them needed it.

They had no registration, no lodging record, no standing of any kind, on a planet with clerks. They had spent four hundred and twenty years manufacturing exactly this sort of thing for a world that did not check, and this world checks, and the particular indignity was that Val Sorin — who had forged fourteen documents by 1890 and had got two women through a census in 1940 — was reduced to sitting in an office while a young man of forty explained to her, patiently, twice, that she could not be recorded as returning because there was no record of her having left.

"There is a record of my having left."

"There is a record of the vessel, madam."

"I was on it."

"Yes," said the young man, "but the vessel is lost."

Kyra laughed about that for nine days. She brought it up at Kal's. She brought it up at Vaedom's. She was still bringing it up two years later.

And at some point in the middle of that winter Val noticed that they had been speaking English in the house for most of a week without either of them deciding to, because there is no word in the Sethal for the thing a kitchen is at four in the afternoon in Oregon in November, and because the four hundred years that had actually happened to them had happened in a language that nobody on that planet spoke one syllable of.

She mentioned it once.

"I know," said Kyra. "I've known since the road."

"Does it trouble you?"

"It's the only thing that doesn't," said Kyra, and went back to what she was doing.

— end of chapter sixteen —

The house they ended up in was four miles from Kal's and had been empty two years and had a bad roof on the north side, which Val had known about before they took it and had taken it anyway, which Kyra considered the single most revealing thing the woman had done since they landed.

They had been in it ten months by the second autumn.

It had a door at the end of the long room that gave onto a yard with nothing in it, and that door stood open from the fourth month of the year to the ninth, and neither of them had ever once said anything about why.

The list was in the back of the book with sixteen marks on it.

Val did not raise it. That is worth stating plainly, because she raised everything, and she had the figure, and she had had the figure for most of a year, and she sat four feet from it most evenings and said nothing.

Kyra raised it in the end, in the way she raised things, which was from the other side of a room and with no preamble whatsoever.

"I'm not doing Halve."

"All right," said Val.

"That's it? All right?"

"I have had eleven months to decide what to say about it and that is what I arrived at."

"You did sixteen."

"I did sixteen because they were mine. The whole seventeen were mine. Nissa Halve is not mine." Val had not looked up from what she was doing. "She was yours. You had four days of her and you argued about the ninth channel and you were looking forward to the rest of it for a fortnight, and she said a thing about Genie at the hatch that you have repeated to me four times since, and there is no version of that door where I am the one who knocks on it."

"So you've been sitting on that the whole time."

"I have been sitting on it since the ninth terrace."

She did go, in the end, on her own, in the spring of the third year.

Halve's people were on the coast north of Aventhal. Kyra took the whole day and found the house and stood on the road outside it for about twenty minutes with the gate four feet away, and there was somebody in the garden the entire time who could have been asked anything.

And the sentence was there. She had it. She had had it since the letter she did not send.

She came home at the eleventh hour and Val was up and did not ask, and Kyra sat down at the table and said, "I couldn't."

"No."

"I stood there and I had the whole of it and it would not come, and I want you to know that I am not going to pretend I'll do it next year."

"I know you are not."

"That's three," Kyra said. "A kitchen, a yard, and a road on the coast."

"It is three."

"You'd have knocked."

"I would have knocked," said Val, "and I would have delivered the whole of it, complete and correct, to a family who did not want it from a stranger, and I did that on the ninth terrace in the first year and the woman is ninety-five years older than I am in every way that counts and I have thought about her every month since." She put down what she was holding at last. "There is no version of this where knocking is the brave thing and standing on a road is the failure. I knock because knocking costs me nothing. You stood on a road for twenty minutes, which cost you the day."

Kyra put her face in her hands for a bit.

"That's not true and you know it isn't."

"It is true and I will argue it for a century," said Val, "and I have the advantage of being right, which I intend to use."

The sixteen marks stayed sixteen. The list stayed in the back of the book. Neither of them ever moved it anywhere else.

Some while after that, on an evening with the door open and nothing happening, Kyra asked the other one.

"Are you ever going to tell anybody?"

"No."

"Val, you're the only person who—"

"I am the only person on two worlds who knows why eleven people died, and I have carried it to sixteen doors and not said it at any of them, and I am not going to say it at the seventeenth either and the seventeenth is not going to be knocked on." Her voice did not move. "There is no one to tell. There is no form it could take that is not a claim with nothing under it, and there is no household on this planet that is improved by being told that their son was in the wrong room."

"And the institute?"

"The institute would want it in writing," said Val, "and there is no paper, and there is never going to be any paper, and I have had a great deal of practice at that."

Kyra let that sit for a while.

"It eats you."

"It does not eat me. I want to be accurate." Val turned her cup a quarter turn. "I have had it since a kitchen in Oregon in January and I have found no use for it in three years and I am reasonably sure I never will, and the difference between that and the thing you are worried about is that I am not carrying it alone. I told you in a kitchen in January and you have had it ever since, and that is the whole of what I need and it has been the whole of what I need since about 1976."

"That's the second nicest thing you've ever said to me."

"I am aware of which one is first," said Val, "and so is a room full of our children, and I would prefer not to do it twice in one lifetime."

Vaedom came out every ninth day that summer and sat on the end of the terrace and complained about the roof.

That is the whole of it and it is the point. He complained about the roof on the north side, at length, with figures, and said that a man of a hundred and eighty-six should not have to explain a roof to a woman who had written the continuity protocol, and Val said that a roof was not a continuity protocol, and he said that it was, structurally, and would not let it go, and they did the whole thing again in the ninth month when it rained.

He sat where the afternoon came along the terrace and told his daughter twice that the pale was going out of her at the temple, which it was not and never would be, and which he had been saying to her since she was nine years old because it had been funny once.

He brought things. He brought bread that was not as good as the bread on Alberta and was told so by Kyra every single time, which became a thing between them, and he began bringing it on purpose to be told.

Nobody on that terrace ever referred to the year nineteen hundred and eight. Val had said it once on a terrace above the water in the first week and had not said it again, and he had not either, and the two of them were visibly the same sort of person about it and both of them knew it.

Kal had taken the small house on the other side of the valley and had mentioned it twice and would not ask.

Genie had mentioned it three times.

Val had invented a reason to be in that part of the valley in about forty seconds and had been sitting on it since the spring, which Kyra knew, and which Kyra had not said one word about, because the inventing was the whole of the gesture and saying so would have taken it off her.

Once, late in the third autumn, they talked about the mountain.

It was not a conversation. Kyra said something about the weather in the Carpathians at that time of year, out of nothing, in English, and Val said that it would be under about four feet by now, and that was the whole of it.

Neither of them said that the hull was still there. Neither of them said that the geometry was in a book in the back room and that there were two people alive who could read it.

There was nothing to say about any of that. It was simply the case, in the way that a door is the case, and it stood open at the end of the long room from the fourth month to the ninth, and neither of them had ever once said anything about why.

Nobody asked them whether they were staying.

Not Vaedom, who would have thought it rude. Not Genie, who thought about it a great deal and was for once in her life unable to get it out. Not Kal, who had worked out the whole shape of it inside a fortnight and had decided that it was not hers.

And not the two of them. That is the part worth putting down. Two women who had taken four hundred and twenty years to learn to say things at the time sat in a house with a bad roof for two years and did not once put that particular question into the air, and it was not avoidance and neither of them was afraid of it.

It was that there was nothing to decide yet, and both of them knew what it looks like when there is, and this did not look like that.

— end of chapter seventeen —

They went out on a Fourthday because Kyra wanted to and gave no reason, and Val, who had worked out the reason somewhere around the second turning and said nothing about it, carried the bag.

There was nobody on the road. It was the wrong month for it — the term had another nine weeks to run and the squads would be inland until the end of it — and the whole of that coast had the particular emptiness of a place that is busy nine days a year and abandoned for the rest.

The path up was worse than either of them remembered and they said so about four times each.

"It was not this steep."

"It was exactly this steep, Kyra. You were nineteen."

"I was eighteen," said Kyra, "and I ran up it, and I am now going to sit down on this rock for a minute and I would thank you not to make a note of it."

Val sat down on the rock as well, which was not a concession and was received as one.

They got to the top somewhere in the second hour and found it entirely unchanged, which neither of them had expected and both of them had.

The grass was the same. The way the land dropped off and then did not quite drop off and then did was the same. The four-mile mark was somewhere down to the left under a gorse that had not been there, and neither of them went to look for it.

The wind came across the top the way it always had and took the dark chestnut of her sideways off her face, and Val looked at it for rather longer than looking at it required, which was a thing she had been doing on that headland since she was eighteen years old and had never once admitted to.

They sat with their backs against the cairn the squads had always used and ate what was in the bag, which was mostly bread, and watched the light start to go.

Nine miles south the yards at Hessen Point sent something up eleven times a day and had done since before either of them was born.

"Kal's taken the small house," Kyra said.

"I know. She told me twice."

"She told me three times. She wants us to see it and she will not ask, so one of us is going to have to invent a reason to be in that part of the valley."

"I have already invented one," said Val.

"Of course you have."

They had never talked about the room with the door open. Not that week and not in the two years since, and both of them had been there, and there was nothing either of them could have added to it that would not have made it smaller.

What they talked about instead, for about a quarter of an hour, was bread.

"It's not the same."

"It is extremely good bread," said Val.

"It's very good bread and it isn't the same and I want it on the record that I am going to say this for the rest of my life." Kyra turned a piece of it over. "There was a woman on Alberta with a face like a shut door who did a thing with rye and I did not appreciate her at the time."

"You bought four a week for nine years."

"I did not appreciate her properly," said Kyra.

The sun went down behind them and the water began doing what it did.

It is not a thing that gets written about. It happens on that coast about two hundred evenings a year and nobody who lives there mentions it, in the way that nobody mentions any of it — the light coming off the shoulder of the headland and going across the water sideways, and the whole of the bay underneath turning the particular blue it turns, which is not the blue of anything else on that planet and has no name because it has never needed one.

Kyra did not say anything about it.

Val looked at the water for a long time and then at her, and did not say anything about it either, and that was the whole of the conversation.

A ship went up from Hessen Point while they were sitting there, without any sound at all, and rose for a few seconds, and then was not rising, and then was not there.

Neither of them looked at it.

Nobody ever did.

But they had both had to decide, which was new.

That was the thing about coming back that neither of them had been warned about and neither of them would ever say out loud, because there was nobody to say it to who would understand what was being described. At eighteen you did not look at a ship because looking at a ship did not occur to you. It was not restraint. There was nothing to restrain.

And they sat on that headland with the bread finished and the light nearly gone, and each of them separately did not turn her head, and each of them knew exactly what it had cost the other to manage it.

The light came up in Val somewhere after that.

At the wrists first and then under the jaw, the way it always had, in an empty place on her own planet with nobody for miles in any direction — and it was exactly as strange here as it had been in a hut in the Tatras in the first winter, because the field that made it is the field they left, and they had not come back as the women who went.

Kyra watched it come up and did not tell her, and then did.

"You're up."

"I am aware of what I am doing."

"I know you are," said Kyra. "I'm telling you anyway. Four hundred years and I've told you every single time and I am not stopping now that we're home."

The dark came up off the land behind them and the arc came out overhead the way it had every clear night of both their lives, enormous and perfectly ordinary, and neither of them looked at that either.

Kyra found the other one first.

"There."

It was low over the water and it was almost nothing — a smudge, long rather than round, fainter than anything near it, the kind of thing that goes out if you look straight at it.

Nobody on Sethal had ever named it. There had never been a reason to. It was a faint mark in the autumn sky that had been there for the whole of recorded history and had never once done anything, and a child who asked was told it was a smudge, and that was the end of it.

The two women on that headland knew what the people inside it called the place.

They did not say it. They never had, on this planet, and never would.

They looked at it for a long time.

Kyra put her hand out, palm up, on the grass between them.

Val looked at it for a moment, in the ordinary way she looked at anything, and then put her own into it.

The water went on doing what it did.

"Val."

"Mm."

"How much further?"

And Val did not laugh, and did not correct her, and did not point out that there was no road under them and nowhere beyond this and nothing whatever left to reach — and sat on a headland above the only water of its kind on two worlds, with the light up at her wrists and a woman's hand in hers, and gave the answer she had been giving since a road out of Maribor.

"Not far now."

— end of the series —