The Column

The cars get them as far as a cut four miles out and then stop, because the track ahead is under three feet of the Willamette and a man in a railroad coat is standing at the head of the train explaining this to a dozen people at once and to nobody. Kyra puts her head out and looks along the line. It's in the fields. It is in a great deal more than the fields, Val says from inside. You can't see it from there. I do not need to see it. That water came out of the Nehalem and everything else in the state at once, and it has been coming since the tenth of May, and if it is in the fields here it is in the streets there. She folds the newspaper she bought at the Grove, which is four days old and has been wrong about the crest twice. Not far now. We are nine miles short and standing still. Not far now, Val agrees. They come into the city in the afternoon on the back of a dray, with a man called Hesketh who takes forty cents for it and is pleased with the arrangement, along a road that has water standing in the wheel ruts and then water over the ruts and then, at the bottom of the grade, no road at all. What there is instead is a plank walk on trestles, put up in ten days by men who have done it before, running above the flood at the height of a first-floor window. Portland is under the river and open for business. There are boats on Front Street — not rescue boats, or not most of them: delivery boats, with a man at the oars and another standing amidships with a crate on his shoulder, pulling up to a second-story window where a woman leans out with her sleeves rolled and takes the crate off him and gives him a chit for it. A grocer has moved his entire stock up a floor and hung a sign out the window saying so. Somebody has painted a waterline on the brick of the Failing block with the date beside it, which Val looks at for a while. They're marking it, she says. They mark everything. They are marking it while it is still rising, which is a different order of confidence. Six weeks earlier they had been standing in a meadow eighty miles west with a surveyor's blaze on the top of it, and Kyra had said the thing neither of them had said in four years, which was that it was time, and Val had not argued. Thirty-six years at that lake — the longest either of them has been anywhere on this planet by a factor of three, and the last six of them a slow arithmetic problem: the Vernonia man's wife, who had been a girl when they came; the boy who was nineteen in seventy-one and gray at thirty-two and is now a man of forty-two who has begun, in the last two summers, to talk about the Miller sisters in front of them as though they were a feature of the weather. So: a town with a bank and a newspaper that comes the same day it is printed. Val wanted the bank and Kyra wanted the newspaper and neither of them needed to explain which. They take two rooms on Twelfth, on ground that is high and dry and smells of the river anyway, from a woman who is not interested in them and wants the month in advance. Miller, Val says. Kyra does not look at her. She has known it was coming since the Grove and decided somewhere on Hesketh's dray that she was not going to be the one to raise it. The woman writes it down without any interest whatsoever, which is the only way anybody has ever written down a name that commonplace, and gives them a key, and that is the whole transaction. Say it, Val says upstairs. I'm not going to say it. You have been not saying it for six weeks and it is going to come out eventually and I would rather it came out in a room we are paying for. She puts the bag down. Forty-six years. We have been Miller since Missouri and the rule is a decade. The rule was already gone. The rule went when the wagon party settled in the same valley we did and two hundred people knew our faces. That is a reason and it is not the reason. Kyra sits down on the end of the bed. All right. The deed. A hundred and sixty acres in the county of Washington, in the name of Martha Miller, on a receiver's receipt that is copied into a book in Oregon City and out of that book into another one, and there is no version of the next thirty years in which I stop being Martha Miller while I hold it. Then sell it. Selling it puts my name on a second instrument with a date on it and a buyer who can be asked questions. Selling it is worse. Then keep it and stop talking about it. I have kept it and I have stopped talking about it since eighteen fifty-eight, and I am talking about it now because we are in a city of sixty thousand people and every one of the reasons I gave you in fifty-eight was about a valley with nine families in it. Kyra lets that sit. You could have said this at the lake. I could not — because at the lake it would have sounded like an argument for staying, and it was not one, and Kyra had already said the true thing in the meadow and Val was not going to put anything in front of it. There is a rule about this, made on a wharf in Boston in 1725, and it has never been about reasoning; it has been about the object. Not a key. Not a room in anybody's house. Not a place at a table that is laid for us. Kyra put the first hole in it on the Missouri in forty-nine with nine words about a wagon, and has been unrepentant ever since. Val put the second one in it herself, in cash, at a land office, with her eyes entirely open. I knew what I was doing, she says, to the window. I know you did. I would do it again. I know that too, says Kyra. That's not the part that worries me and it never has been. What Kyra does for the next nine days is go down to the water. She does not announce it and Val does not ask, and after the second morning Val stops pretending she does not know where she goes. It is not dramatic, and the lack of drama is most of what there is to say about it: the river has taken the low part of a city that knew for a week it was coming, and there is almost nobody in danger and a very great deal to be carried — a piano out of a parlor on First, a sewing machine, a cat in a basket that does not want to be in a basket, a chandler's whole stock passed hand to hand along a plank walk by seven people who have not been introduced. Kyra puts her sleeves up on the first morning and does not put them down until the ninth. She is good at it in a way that has nothing to do with strength: she is good at it because she can see, in a line of people handing things along, the one who is about to drop something, and she is always standing next to that one. Nobody asks her name. It is that kind of week. On the seventh evening she comes up the stairs wet to the hip and stands in the doorway with her hair down her back, dark and heavy with the river in it, and only the one place above the ear where the lamp finds the copper the way it always finds it. Val looks at her for slightly longer than the situation requires. There was a man on Ash Street with a horse in the water. Is the horse all right? The horse is fine. The man is an idiot. She pulls the pins out of what is left of her hair and shakes it and gives up on it. Ask me the other thing. I was not going to ask you anything. You have been not asking me for a week and you are very bad at it. Val puts her pen down. Why the water, she says. Kyra thinks about it honestly, which takes a moment, because she does not usually have to. Because nobody on that street has asked me a single question in seven days. Not one. Not where I'm from, not what my sister does, not how long we're stopping. There is a woman I have stood beside for nine hours who does not know my name and we have got two floors of a warehouse up a staircase between us. That is the flood. That is the flood. In three weeks the water goes down and she asks me where I'm from and I give her four of the eleven answers and she goes away satisfied and that is that. She gets a boot off. I know what it is, Val. I'm not confused about it. I would just like it noted that for nine days I have been extremely useful to a large number of people who have no idea what I am, and I have not had to be careful for one single hour of it, and I am going to be sorry when the river goes down. Val does not say anything for a moment. Noted, she says. Don't. I am not doing anything. You are doing the thing where you file it, and then in about four years you hand it back to me having done something with it, and I never see it coming and I never once mind. The crest comes on the seventh of June and the river stands at thirty-three feet, which is higher than anything any living person in that city has seen, and the men who painted the waterline on the Failing block have to go up and do it again. Val goes down on the last day of it and stands on the plank walk above Front Street in the middle of the afternoon. She has not gone down before: she has spent nine days finding rooms and opening an account at a bank on Second and reading four newspapers a day and writing eleven letters that will establish, for anyone who ever looks, a Miss Miller of Washington County who came up to the city on business and stayed — and all of that was necessary and none of it was the reason she had not gone down. The reason is that she has been in two cities where the water came and in one of them she had been able to do something about it. She stands and watches a boat go up Front Street between the buildings, and a man on a second-story sill eating his dinner with his feet hanging over the river, and a shop sign reflected upside down in a street — and understands that nobody here is frightened at all. They are inconvenienced and they are interested. The water is going to go down and the city is going to go on being where it is, and in four years there will be an argument in a saloon about whether the mark on the Failing block is the ninety-four or the eighty-one. She thinks: they will all be dead in sixty years and this will still be the highest it ever came, and somebody will point at the paint and not know a single name of anybody who saw it. And then she thinks, because she cannot help it, that she is going to be there for that. Kyra finds her on the plank walk at about six. She does not ask what Val is doing there, and does not say anything at all for a while, and the two of them stand side by side above a drowned street in the long light with their sleeves down and their hair up and nothing about either of them worth a second look from anybody. Thirty-six years, Kyra says. Thirty-six years. It was a good lake. It was an excellent lake, Val says, and I am not going to be able to talk about it for a while, and I would like that understood rather than discussed. Understood. The light goes off the water the way it does when it has a whole city to come off. Somewhere below them a man is singing badly and being encouraged. How long do we give this one? Kyra says. And Val, who has had an answer to that question ready at all times and has produced it on demand for two hundred and eighty-seven years, stands there above the flood with the deed folded in a box in a rented room on Twelfth and finds that she does not have one. I'll tell you in the spring, she says.

The house they take in the spring is on the east side, up from the water and a long way from anything either of them has ever wanted, and what recommends it is that the woman who owns it lives in Astoria and does not care. Seven rooms. A stove that draws. Gas in four of them and a landlord's promise about the other three that Val prices at nothing and gets in writing anyway. Kyra walks every room of it twice and comes back to the kitchen and puts her hands on the table. It's a good table. It is the only good thing in the building. It's a very good table, Val, and you have been standing in front of it for four minutes. Val has in fact been standing in front of it for rather longer than that, and has already got as far as the Sunday, and is not going to be the one to say so. The trouble comes up over the lease, the way it always comes up, which is sideways and in front of a stranger. The agent has a printed form and a pen and a question that is not a question. And the two ladies are — cousins, says Val. Kyra does not react in any way that a man with a printed form would have noticed, which is a skill, and which she has been practicing since before the Thirty Years' War. He writes it down. Cousins is a thing a man writes down without looking up, because it is the least interesting arrangement in the world and it explains a house. Cousins, Kyra says on the stairs, when he has gone. By marriage. You didn't say by marriage. It is implied by the fact that we do not look alike. We look extremely alike, we have looked extremely alike since we were girls, there is a window in this house where I have twice mistaken you for me — by marriage, Val says. And Kyra laughs, up out of the middle of her, and goes on up the stairs, and they have both been doing exactly this since a stone house in Maribor. It is an old argument and it runs in a groove. Kyra wants sisters: sisters is the thing people hand you before you have had to claim anything at all — it arrives unasked, it accounts for everything, and all the work is done by somebody else's assumption while you stand there and say nothing. Val wants distance in it: a cousin, a companion engaged by the month, a boarder in the one year she got her way about a boarder — something with a joint in it, something that could be taken apart and carried off in two directions if it ever had to be. They have run it in Maribor and on a quay in Trieste and in two rooms in New York and outside a printing house in Philadelphia, half teasing and half meant, every time, for two hundred and fifty years. Neither of them has ever asked the other why. What makes it different in ninety-five is that this time it is not a preference. It is arithmetic, and Val did it in February and has been carrying it since. I have to be Miller, she says, at the good table, with the directory open in front of her. I know. And two Millers in one house on the east side of this city is a pair of sisters, and a pair of sisters is two people with the same dead parents, and the moment anybody has two of us on one piece of paper they have a family, and a family is a thing that can be traced backward. She turns a page. One Miller is a woman with a piece of ground in Washington County. Two Millers is a history. Kyra sits down opposite her. So I stop. Yes. Forty-seven years. Forty-seven years, Val says, and does not soften it, because softening it would have been worse and both of them know that. She does it properly, because there is no other way she knows how: she goes through the city directory and the county register and counts, the way they have counted a register for a name in every country since the Peace, and comes up the far side of an evening with three columns and a figure. Smith, Johnson, Anderson. In that order. Anderson runs a shade behind Johnson in the directory and a shade ahead of it in the county, which means it is commoner than it looks and nobody has noticed, which is the whole of what we want. Anderson. Anderson. There are ninety of them and eleven of those are on this side of the river and not one of them is related to any of the others. Kyra puts her finger on the page and turns it round to look at it. Ada, she says. Val waits for the reasoning and none arrives. Why Ada? It was on the page. That is not a method. It is my method, and I have used it on two planets and I have never once been caught, and you have a system and so do I and mine is that I look at a thing and I know. Your system is that you do not have one. My system is that I do not have one, Kyra agrees, and it has an unbroken record, and you may take that up with the universe. Val lets it go and then, an hour later, does not. Keep Sarah, she says. What? Sarah Anderson. It is a smaller change and it halves the risk. You have answered to it for forty-seven years and you answer to it in your sleep and at a door and when somebody says it behind you in a street, and that is not a small asset to throw away for the sake of a clean sheet. Her hands are flat on the table. I would rather you kept half of it than none. Kyra looks at her for a long moment. No, she says. It is the better arrangement. It is the better arrangement and I am not doing it, and I would like to tell you why, and I would like you not to argue with me about it, which I am aware is a great deal to ask of you. Val puts the pen down. There is one person alive who knows that name is false. Yes. Or there was in ninety, and there is no reason to think otherwise and no way on this earth to find out. Her hands are in her lap, which is the tell, and Val has known it was the tell since about 1650. She is the only one, Val. In four hundred years. Everybody else who ever heard either of those names heard a true thing as far as they knew it, and she heard a false one and said nothing about it for forty years. She did. So Sarah Miller is not a name I wore. It is a thing one woman on this planet gave me back and did not break. Her voice does not rise at all. And I am not going to carry half of it into a rented house on the east side of Portland and answer to it at the door for a grocer. I would rather put the whole of it down properly and be somebody else entirely. The gas makes the small noise gas makes. Ada Anderson, Val says. Ada Anderson. They put the house up on the Sunday, which is Val's doing, and has been Val's doing since a kitchen in Maribor in the 1640s when she worked out that two people who are never both sitting down will lose each other inside a year without ever having a quarrel about it. The form of it has changed a great many times; the rule has not, and the rule is that it happens, and that nothing is allowed to be more important than it, and that whoever is carrying something difficult brings it to the table rather than around it. Kyra does the cooking because Val's cooking is, in her own assessment, procedurally correct. It is edible. It is arithmetic with a fire under it. Afterward Kyra sits with her feet up on the second chair and her head back, and the last of the light comes in low off the west window and goes across the table, and it takes the dark of her hair and finds the copper in it above the ear the way it has been finding it since a mountain. Val, who read a panel for two centuries and has never once got out of the habit of reading in order, looks at that for slightly longer than she intended to and then looks at the wall. Two hundred and fifty years, Kyra says to the ceiling. Of what? Sisters. Cousins. Boarders, once, for a year, which you enjoyed far more than you let on. She rolls her head to look at her. We have had that argument in six countries and I have never once asked you why you want it that way. Val does not move. No, she says. And you have never asked me either. No. Two hundred and fifty years and neither of us has ever once opened it, and we have opened a great many worse things in the last ten. Kyra puts her hands behind her head. I noticed it on the stairs when the agent went, and I have been carrying it round all week, and I wanted it said out loud by somebody. There is a pause that runs on for a while, and in it Val Sorin has the entire thing available to her and in order, the way she has everything in order, and could say it in about four sentences. She does not. And Kyra, who can hear a silence in that woman the way other people hear weather coming, does not ask, and makes a point of not asking, and lets it go by choosing that moment to complain about the chair. This chair is an instrument of policy. It came with the house. It came with the house because nobody in Astoria could be paid to keep it. And that is the end of it, and both of them know exactly what has just been put down and left where it is, and neither of them touches it. Later, going up, Val stops on the landing with her hand on the rail. It is not because I want the distance, she says. Kyra stops two steps below her. All right. That is not me opening it. I know it isn't. I am aware that it sounds like the beginning of opening it and it is not, and I would rather say the one true sentence I have than let you go to bed with the wrong one. She is looking at the rail and not at her. It has never been about wanting you further off. I have wanted you nearer since a hut. That is all I have tonight. And she goes up. Kyra stands on the stairs of a rented house on the east side of a city that had been under water eleven months before, and does not follow her for a minute, and then does.

Josephine Selby keeps a stationer's on Union Avenue with a lending shelf at the back, and the mail for four streets is held there in a rack behind the counter, and that is the entire reason any of it happens. She is twenty-six and buried a husband at twenty-three and does not discuss it. What she discusses is paper: she can tell you what a ream of anything costs in Portland and what it cost the year before and what the freight has done to it, and she has opinions about steel pens that she is perfectly aware nobody wants. Val goes in for a ledger in February and comes out forty minutes later having been sold the correct ledger, a worse ledger at half the price which the woman recommended against, and a subscription to a scientific quarterly out of London that arrives four months late and costs more than the freight is worth. She puts all three on the table. What happened, says Kyra. I am not entirely sure. It is not a decision, and neither of them ever quite forgives herself for it afterward, in the way you do not forgive yourself for weather. The rule is no long friendships, and the rule has been kept for two hundred and ninety years by a method that has nothing to do with willpower: they moved. You cannot be somebody's friend for forty years if you are gone in nine, and the discipline of the decade has done all the work, and neither of them has ever had to refuse anybody anything. They are not moving in nine years. Val has known that since a land office in fifty-eight and said it out loud in a rented room on Twelfth, and Kyra has known it since the meadow. So what happens in ninety-seven is that nothing happens, repeatedly, for eleven months, and at the end of it there is a woman who comes to Sunday dinner. Val had gone in for the mail because it was raining and Kyra had gone to the lumber office, and Jo Selby had a parcel behind the counter and a query. Miss Miller. Do you keep books? I keep my own. That is not what I asked and you know it isn't. Val looks at her. I have three hundred and forty dollars in that till that ought to be in a column, says Jo Selby, and a book I have been carrying since the spring with four hands in it, two of them mine, and I would rather pay a woman than a man because a man will tell my brother-in-law. Why would he tell your brother-in-law? Because men do. And Val Sorin, who has three good reasons in order and has them ready before the sentence is finished, hears herself say that she could look at it on Thursday. You said yes, Kyra says that evening, delighted. I said Thursday. You said yes, you said it standing up in a shop in the rain, and you have not done that since a man asked you to look at a pump in about seventeen forty. It is a ledger with four hands in it. It is a ledger with four hands in it, Kyra agrees, and you have been dying for something with a column in it since we came down off that hill, and you may go on telling me it is about the money for as long as you find it useful. Val does not tell her it is about the money; it is one of the small mercies of three hundred and sixty-seven years that she has stopped bothering. The mail goes the other way after that. Kyra takes it over because she is on Union Avenue four days a week anyway and because she likes the shop, and from about March she comes in at noon with whatever is in the rack and puts it on the table, and Val goes through it in the order she always goes through it, which is by hand and not by postmark. There is a great deal of it: Val has spent three years building a Miss Miller who has a reason to be in the city, and a reason has to correspond with somebody — a seed house, an assessor, a man in Oregon City who answers questions about title for a fee and has never once asked why a woman in Portland is asking them. Assessor. Assessor. Your London one, four months late, with a corner off. They post them flat and the agents fold them. You say that every time. It is true every time. Kyra drops the last of it on the table. Nothing from New Bedford, she says. Val does not look up. Not today, she says. And Kyra grins at the back of her head and goes to take her boots off, and that is the whole of it, and neither of them thinks about it again for two months. Jo comes to dinner for the first time in June and does not stop. She is easy in a house in the way of a woman who has nowhere in particular to be: she eats a great deal, argues about the quarterly with Val on the grounds that she has read it first in the shop — which is an admission she makes without any embarrassment whatsoever — and is funny about her customers in a way that is never once cruel, which Kyra notices inside a month and mentions to nobody. She asks them four questions in nine months. Where they are from, and gets Pennsylvania. What their people did, and gets the second answer. Whether they mean to stay, and gets the fourth, which is one word long. And once, in October, looking at the two of them across a table, she asks how it is that cousins by marriage come to be keeping house together at the far end of the country — and Kyra gives her the eighth answer, which is the long one about a farm and a mortgage and a brother, and Jo Selby says God, yes, and tells them about her own brother-in-law for eleven minutes. Val watches her do it and understands something she does not enjoy understanding, which is that the answers work best on people who want them to. She'll be dead in fifty years, Val says in November, with the door shut. I know. Less. Sixty at the outside and she is twenty-six, so fifty, and I have watched the arithmetic on that woman twice this month without meaning to. Her back is to the room. I would like it noted that I know exactly what we are doing. Noted. We have never done it. Not once. Frederick was eleven months and Jakob was twenty-five years and he was a man I slept beside, which is a different thing and hurts in a way there is at least a shape for. She turns round. There is no shape for this. There is no word in either language for what that woman is going to be to us in forty years. Kyra is quiet for a moment. Then we'll find one, she says. We're getting better at that. The rain comes in the third week of November and does what it does and does not stop, and Jo stays late on a Sunday arguing about whether the quarterly's man on the spectrum of the sun is a fraud, and goes home at nine with a lantern and an umbrella she does not open. Val sits down at the table afterward with the ledger she is not going to open either. Kyra comes in with the last of the plates. The lamp is low and the fire has got down to the part where it does more good than light, and Kyra's hair has come loose over the course of the evening and hangs down over one shoulder — and in that light it is not black, whatever anybody in the shop would have told you: it has the copper in it at the ear and along the fall of it, and it does that in every room they have ever been in and has been doing it since a mountain. Val watches her stack plates for a while. Then she says, to the table, in the flat voice she uses for a reading she has checked twice: anything from New Bedford? Kyra puts the plates down. She does not say anything at all for a second, and what goes across her face is not surprise, because she has been living beside that woman for three hundred and sixty-seven years and has known since about the fourth month of it that Val Sorin never says a thing twice by accident. There might be, she says. Might there. It's a long way. It comes when it comes. It does, Val agrees, and gets up, and puts out the lamp. Upstairs there is a fire that was laid that afternoon by a woman who decided on Friday what was going to happen on Sunday, and who carried it through two days of a stationer's ledger and a dinner and an argument about the spectrum of the sun without one thing showing on her face. Kyra stands in the door and looks at the fire and then at her. Friday, she says. Thursday, in fact. Thursday. She shuts the door with her heel. You sat through the whole of that woman's theory about the sun. I did. And you were going to sit through another hour of it if she'd stayed. I was going to sit through a great deal, says Val. Afterward the rain goes on doing what it is doing on the roof and on the window and in the gutter that is already wrong, and the fire gets down past the point of being any use for seeing by, and neither of them moves to do anything about any of it. She asked me about my people again, Kyra says. Which answer did you give her? The second one. You gave her the second one in March. I know I did. Her face is in the side of Val's neck and she does not lift it. She remembered it. She remembered it exactly, and she said it back to me before I'd finished, and then she looked pleased with herself. Val does not say anything. That's the first time in four hundred years, says Kyra, that anybody has known one of those well enough to finish it. The fire ticks. We are going to have to be very careful with her, Val says. Yes. And we are not going to be. No, says Kyra, we are not — and neither of them says anything else about it that year.

The gutter on the north side has been wrong since they took the house and neither of them has done anything about it, because doing something about it means one of them going up a ladder in the rain. It has been raining since the middle of the morning — not hard; Portland does not do hard, Portland does continuous, gray and personally directed, and Val said in their second autumn that the weather here has no events in it, only a policy. She is at the window with her hands in her sleeves. Six, she says. Kyra is on the sofa with her feet up and a cup balanced on her sternum, which is a thing she does and which Val gave up commenting on about a century ago. Six what? The downspout. It doesn't run, it holds and lets go. Six. Sometimes seven. You're counting the rain. I am counting the gutter. She does not turn round. The rain is continuous. The gutter is not, which is the entire function of a gutter and the reason that one is wrong. Kyra puts the cup on the floor and laughs at the ceiling. What. You have counted something every single day I have known you. That is almost certainly true. Since we were girls on a plateau, Kyra says, and puts both hands over her face and makes a noise into them. The light goes early in that month and neither of them gets up to do anything about it. The stove draws badly. Kyra's coat has been over the back of the chair nobody sits in since Fourthday, and the gutter goes on letting go in sixes. Val comes away from the window, and Kyra moves her knees without being asked so that Val can sit down at the end of the sofa, and then puts her feet back where they had been, which is in Val's lap. Val puts her hand flat on an ankle, warming it, which is how that started about eighty years ago and what it has gone on being. I never counted anything, Kyra says. At the Vayr. At the Vayr. I never counted anything, I never measured anything, I never wrote a single thing down that wasn't work. And I have thought, on and off, for about three hundred years, that I should have. Counted what? You know what. I want to hear you say it, and I am aware that I am doing to you exactly what you have done to me four times this century. Five. Five, Val agrees. Say it. Emrin, says Kyra. Val's thumb goes once across the bone of the ankle and stops. Go on. And what follows is the most sustained piece of Sethal biology anywhere in the series, delivered as a grievance about teaching. They teach you at school. You get a room and a woman with a diagram and forty minutes. She says everything correctly, in no order a living person could use, and she says it in the voice they keep for it, and then you get the other half out in the yard from three girls who are lying. That sounds correct. It's correct everywhere. I have now watched it be correct on two worlds. Here is what the woman with the diagram told her: that he would go under; that he would come out past the sheath; that there would be a change of color and a pattern in the skin of it, and that the pattern is what you work, and that you have about a minute. All true. All true and all useless, and I want you to understand why. She sits up against the arm so that they are facing along the sofa, and keeps one foot in Val's lap, and Val keeps her hand on it. She said a change of color. She did not say which blue. Val, there are blues. There is a blue like a vein under the skin of your wrist and there is a blue like the last of the evening off the Headland and there is a blue that is almost gray and looks like something has gone wrong, and I had a man under my hands at eighteen years old going a color I could not name and I did not know whether it was the right one. Nobody told you the range. Nobody told me there was a range. That is not instruction, Val says. That is a diagram with the axes left off. And then the pattern. Kyra puts her hands up and makes a shape in the air between them and then takes it apart again, annoyed. They call it a fold, and it is a fold, and it is also not a fold. It's a turn. It is like the thread on a bolt, if the bolt were warm, and moving, and had an opinion. Val laughs, and Kyra points at her. Don't. That is the best I have ever done and I have had three centuries. It is very good. It is not good, it is a bolt, I have described a man's body as a piece of hardware. She puts her hands down. But the turn goes one way round. That's the thing. It has a direction, and you have to go with it, and nobody tells you how to know which way it is, because everybody assumes you can see it — and you can see it, when you know. At eighteen, in the dark, with your own hands shaking, you cannot. You are going by feel and you are guessing. Did you ever go the wrong way? Constantly. She says it flat. And you can feel it stop working. That is the part they leave out. It does not hurt him and he is not there to mind and it simply goes slack under your hand. Loses the turn. And then you have perhaps twenty seconds to find the other direction, and by then you are frightened, and frightened hands are no use to anybody. Val's hand has closed round the ankle. And then it went back. How long did you have? The minute. All of it, the first time. I did nothing whatsoever for a full minute and then it went back. The rain goes on doing what it is doing. They call that a return. That's the word. They give you that word at school before they give you anything useful, and the girls in the yard use it about each other, and it is the flattest word in that entire language. It doesn't sound like anything at all. That's what makes it good. Yes, Val says. And he came back up. Val has gone still in the particular way she goes still, and Kyra watches her do it and keeps going, because the one thing you do not do with that woman is stop and check. He was warm and he was glad and he was in an extremely good humor, because he had been somewhere extraordinary and he had no idea. He cannot know. He cannot see any of it — not the color, not the turn, not the length of it. That is the whole architecture of the thing. The only window into the biggest event of a man's body is a woman standing over him. And I was eighteen, and he looked down at himself, and there was nothing there. Kyra. And he said, it's all right. First time. She is quiet for a second. He got there before I did. Val moves. She comes up the sofa without making any production of it and sits with her hip against Kyra's knees and takes her hand, which she does rarely enough that Kyra stops talking. I want to say something in the middle of this, and I would rather say it in the middle than save it for the end, because I have spent about two hundred years saving things for the end and it has never once improved them. All right. You were eighteen, and you were in the dark, working by feel, on a thing you had been told about and not shown, with a range you did not know existed and a direction nobody had thought to mention. Her voice does not move at all. That is not a person failing. That is a person being sent up a mountain with a drawing of a mountain. Kyra's eyes go, all the way out to the rim, and Val tells her, because she always does. They've gone. I know. I like it when they go. I know that too, says Kyra, and does not look away, which she had not managed for the first two centuries of knowing her. Four years, Kyra says. Eleven times it went the whole way. I know that number, it is the only number I have ever kept, and I have never said it out loud to any living person. Out of. Out of a great many. And the two days after each one, because you cannot try again inside the day, so there was always two days of us being extremely pleasant to each other across a table. What did you tell him? That it was extraordinary. She says it without any weight. Every time. I gave that man beautiful accounts. I invented them. By the third year I could do four minutes of it and he would lie there with his eyes shut and his hands behind his head, and the only thing I was any good at in four years was that, and it was lying. It isn't lying. It isn't the truth. No, says Val. It is the third thing. There is a word for it on this planet and I have not found it yet, and I have been looking since about the time we were in Boston, and when I find it you will be the first to know. Here's the part I've never said. Val turns her hand over and laces their fingers and waits. I have never known whether I froze because I was eighteen and had no idea what I was doing. She stops. She gets it out on the second run. Or because it was him. The gutter lets go. I liked him. I have never said a word against that man and I never will. He wrote to me steadily and well about his brother's boat and the licensing office and a dog that had adopted the yard and never once asked when I was coming back, and I did not have the equipment to appreciate that at the time. Her thumb is moving on the back of Val's hand. But I stood up in front of a house full of people and said yes to somebody I liked, and then for four years my body would not do the thing it was supposed to do, and there is no experiment in the world that tells you which of those two is the cause of the other. No. There isn't. Three hundred years and I can't get at it. You cannot get at it because it is not gettable, and that is a fault in the question and not in you. Val leans over and puts her forehead against Kyra's for a second, which is a thing from a wagon and has been a thing ever since. And then the reframing, which is the point of the chapter: I want to say a thing about your eleven. Go on. You have carried that number since before there was a road up that hill, as a record of the times you managed. Her voice is low and completely level. It is not that. It is a record of eleven times a girl of eighteen, with no instruction worth the name, in the dark, on a thing she could not see, going by feel, found the right direction and held it for a minute. That is not a small number. That is a very large number and it has been filed under the wrong heading for three hundred years. The stove ticks. You worked that out just now, Kyra says. I worked it out about nine minutes ago and I have been deciding how to say it since. You'd have sat on it. For fifty years, Val says. I'm aware. Your turn, Kyra says. And Val does not answer. It goes on long enough to become a thing in the room. Kyra does not fill it, because she learned in the first winter that filling it is how you lose it, and she lies there with her foot in Val's lap and lets the silence run, and watches. And at the wrists, where the sleeves have fallen back, and under the jaw below the ear, the light comes up in Val Sorin. Not much. Not the way it goes in a dark bedroom. Enough that in a room with no lamp lit you can see where her hands are. I am not going to answer that tonight, Val says. All right. That is not — she stops, and starts again, and her voice does not move, and Kyra knows exactly what that costs and has known for three centuries. I know what you have just handed me. I will not price it and hand you back something smaller and call it even. I am going to answer it. It is going to take me some days. Kyra breathes out. Two hundred years ago you'd have said thank you for telling me. I know. You did say it. I know exactly when I said it, says Val, and I know what room I was standing in, and I have thought about it more often than you would find comfortable. Val. Some days. That is what I have. And Kyra Davan, who has been waiting since she was nineteen years old to be told that an answer is coming rather than simply not arriving, finds that it is enough, and is faintly annoyed at how much it is enough. The rain keeps on. Neither of them lights the lamp. What light there is comes off the window, gray and going, and it finds the pale of Val's hair where it has fallen forward over the afternoon and does what it did on a mountain and in a lane in Trieste and in a wagon on the Sweetwater, which is to make her look about nineteen, which she is not and has not been for a very long time. Kyra looks at her for a while. You didn't plan this, she says. No. You always plan it. I am aware of that too, says Val, and takes the cup up off the floor and sets it out of the way on the sill — and Kyra starts laughing and does not get very far with it.

The thing about a house with a bad stove is that the cold comes up from underneath, so afterward they stay where they are, which they would have done anyway. It is the small hours and it has stopped raining, which in that month is the only weather worth noticing; there is a street lamp two houses along and a wet maple in front of it, and the pattern that comes through onto the ceiling moves when the wind does. Kyra is somewhere in the region of Val's shoulder with one leg through both of hers and a quantity of her own hair trapped under Val's arm, which she will object to in about four minutes and is not going to do anything about now. The light is still up — at the wrists, and under the jaw below the ear, and along the inside of one forearm where Kyra's hand is — and it has been up for some while and shows no sign of going anywhere. Kyra watches it for a bit. Give me the account, she says. There is a pause of a length she enjoys very much. No, says Val. Give me the account. That is for a man who cannot see. You were here. I'm aware of where I was. Then you know what it looked like, because you were looking at it, which is the entire distinction on which the custom rests. Val has not moved; her voice has the flatness it gets when she is being cornered by something she finds funny and is not going to admit to finding funny. There is no version of this in which you require an account. I never said I required it. Kyra props herself up on one elbow so that she can see her properly, and the light comes up another degree when she does, which Val cannot do anything about and which both of them note. Kyra. Give me the account, Sorin. Val lies there and looks at the moving pattern on the ceiling for long enough that a person who did not know her would have assumed she had declined. It was — she says. And stops. Kyra waits; she learned that in a building on a plateau and has been practicing ever since and is still not good at it. It was about forty minutes, Val says. Val. That is a fact and it is accurate. It is not an account, it is a timetable. I am aware of what it is. Val puts the back of her hand over her eyes, which does nothing whatsoever about the light, since the light is in the hand. Give me a moment. Take all of them. There was rain until the third hour, Val says, and then there was not, and I noticed that it had stopped, and I would like it on the record that noticing that was not a failure of attention but the opposite, because I was aware of every single thing in that room at once, including the rain, including the maple, including the fact that the stove had gone out at some point and that neither of us was going to do anything about it — you're inventorying. I am establishing conditions. You are inventorying a room, says Kyra, because you would rather do that than tell me one true thing about yourself, and I have watched you do it on two worlds, and I am not letting you have this one. Val takes her hand off her eyes. I don't have any numbers, Val says. I know. You do not understand what I am telling you. I am telling you that I reached for them, just now, on purpose, in order, the way I have reached for them my entire life, and there are none. There is nothing in it that can be counted. Her voice has gone very quiet and has not lost a particle of its precision. I have given accounts of every man I have ever been with, on two worlds, and every one of them had a number in it somewhere, and I have never once had to describe something that did not. Then describe it without one. I do not know how. Try it badly, says Kyra. I did it badly for four years and a man was extremely pleased with me. And Val laughs — properly, a real one, the kind that happens perhaps twice a decade and only ever in a dark room with one other person in it — and Kyra feels the whole length of her go loose with it and thinks, not for the first time, that she would have traded a considerable portion of this planet for the sound. All right, Val says. All right. I wasn't counting. Kyra goes still. That is the account. That is all of it and you are not getting a better one out of me tonight. Val is looking at the ceiling again. Not at the start and not in the middle and not at the end, and there was a stretch of it where I was not in the room at all, and I did not know that could happen to me while I was awake. She stops. She goes on. And I was not frightened of it. That is the part I would like you to have. At nineteen I would have been. At a hundred I would have been. I was not frightened of it tonight and I am not frightened of it now, and I do not know when that stopped, and I have been lying here trying to work out the year. Don't. I was going to try anyway. I know you were, says Kyra, and puts her hand flat on Val's sternum, where the light is not, and leaves it there. The maple moves on the ceiling. Why did you ask? Val says. Because I wanted to watch you try. That is a horrible reason and I believe it. It's the true one. Kyra's thumb goes once across a rib and back. It was the true one when I said it. Val turns her head. And now? And Kyra Davan, who has been loud about everything in her life since she was nine years old and has never once been at a loss for the next sentence, finds that she has arrived somewhere without having set out for it. Nobody has ever given me one, she says. The room does not do anything. The lamp two houses along goes on doing what it does. Four years with Emrin, and then a man from four systems out, and then the other one, and then four centuries of this planet. She says it into Val's shoulder, not looking up. I have given accounts. I have given the most beautiful accounts anybody on either world has ever given, and every one of them was a gift, and about half of them were invented. And it is a thing a woman does for a man. It has never once gone the other way, and it was never going to, because there was never anything for them to tell me. They weren't there. Kyra. That is not a complaint about any of them. It is the arrangement. She is quiet for a second. And I did not know I had wanted it until I opened my mouth and asked you for one as a joke. Val moves. She gets her arm out from under the hair, which they both ignore, and turns over onto her side so that they are facing, and takes Kyra's hand and laces their fingers, and holds it against her own chest where Kyra can feel what her heart is doing — which is a thing she started on a river and has never explained. Then I will give you one, she says. Val, you don't have to — I have been waiting since about the fourth minute of this conversation for you to get out of the way so that I could. Her voice does not move. Be quiet. This is the one I can do. And Kyra shuts her mouth, because there is a thing that happens to Val Sorin when she is about to describe something outside herself — a settling, a change of register, the woman who read a panel for two hundred years coming up into her own voice — and it has been happening to her since they were nineteen and it has never once got less. Your eyes went at the start, Val says. Not in the middle, which is where they usually go. At the start, before anything, when you turned round and knew what I had decided. They were gold before I had touched you. I want you to know that, because you have never seen it and you never will. Oh, says Kyra. They stayed. The whole way. I have seen them come and go a great many times and I have never seen them stay like that, and I could not tell you what it means, only that it happened and that I watched it and that I stopped doing anything else for a while in order to watch it. That's not — I have not finished. Val's thumb moves once. The dark of your hair against the pillow in that light is not black. Everybody who has ever looked at you has thought it was black, on two worlds, and they are all wrong. It has the copper in it at the third hour with one street lamp two houses away. I have checked. I have been checking since a hut on a mountain and the answer has never changed. Kyra makes a sound she does not authorize. And there was a point, says Val, somewhere past the middle, where you laughed. Not at anything. You laughed and you did not stop what you were doing and you did not explain it, and I have no number for that either, and it is the thing I will still have in a hundred years when everything else in this account has gone. Somewhere down the street a horse goes by on the wet. That's a good account, Kyra says. It is accurate. I know it's accurate. That's what's wrong with it. Her face is wet and she is not doing anything about it and is not remotely ashamed of it, which is the difference between her and the woman holding her hand and always has been. I have given about two hundred of those and not one of them was accurate. Val does not say anything for a moment. Then I will give you another one on Thursday, she says. And Kyra laughs, wetly, into her collarbone, and gets her leg back through both of Val's, and says you'll have to earn it, and Val says I am aware of the terms, and the light does not go down for another hour. In the morning, dressing, with her back to the room, Val says: I had not planned that. She says it to a chest of drawers, as a fact, the way she reports a reading. Kyra, who has known it since about the moment Val took the cup off the floor, and who has spent the whole of the night deciding not to say so, does up a button and says nothing at all, and lets the woman have it. It is five days before Val comes back to the other thing, and she comes back to it the way she comes back to everything, which is at a time of her own choosing with the ground prepared: Sunday, the table cleared, Jo gone at eight because the shop opens early in December. Sit down, Val says. I am sitting down. Sit down properly. I am going to do this once and I am not going to be able to do it twice. Kyra puts her hands in her lap. Aro, says Val. I got it right the first time. Val — let me do all of it, because if you stop me I will arrange it, and I would rather not arrange it. Her eyes are on the stove. I got it right the first time and the second time and every time after that, and I have never told a living soul, and I want you to hear the rest before you decide what it means. All right. I had read about it. I had read everything there was, which is not much and most of it is a diagram with the axes off, as we have established. And then I did the thing I do, which is that I worked out the timing in advance. She says it evenly. I know how long a minute is. I have known how long a minute is since I was nine. I went up that hill in the warm season with the whole sequence in order in my head like a panel, and when it happened I was not brave and I was not gifted. I was rehearsed. That isn't nothing. It is not nothing and it is not what you had. Val turns her head. You were in the dark with your hands shaking and no map. I had a map and no shaking hands, and the reason my hands were steady is not that I was steadier than you. It is that I put everything into the part I could prepare so that I would not have to be in the part I could not. Kyra does not say anything. I counted, Val says. Counted what? All of it, Kyra. Every time he came up, for as long as it went on, and again with Sven a lifetime later, and I have never lost one of those figures and I have never written one of them down, and until this minute I had never said so out loud. Why? Why did I count? Yes. Val is quiet for a moment. The stove does what it does. Because if I was counting I was still in the room, she says. Kyra sits with that. Say that again. No. Val. I heard myself the first time and it was quite enough. But she does not take her hand back and does not go anywhere, and after a second she says it anyway, because she decided in a rented room on Twelfth that she was going to stop making Kyra Davan ask twice for things. If I was counting, I was still in the room. If I stopped counting I was going to be entirely in it, and at nineteen I did not know what would be left of me afterward, and I had never in my life not known that. And was there? Anything left. Yes, says Val. That was the part that frightened me. Kyra puts her hand up and gets hold of the back of her neck, which is from a street in Trieste in the fourth year and has never once needed a reason since. Neither of them moves for a while. The stove draws badly. Out in the dark the gutter on the north side holds and lets go, six, sometimes seven, and neither of them is ever going to do anything about it. Five days, Kyra says. Five days. You said some. I said some and I meant a fortnight, Val says, and I would rather not examine why it was five — and Kyra says that is fine, and does not examine it either, and the two of them sit at that table with the lamp unlit until it is properly late.

Word of the enumeration reaches the east side in the last week of May, and Val has a copy of the schedule itself by the Thursday, because Jo Selby sells stationery to a man whose brother is an enumerator and because Val asked for it in a tone that did not sound like asking. She puts it on the table and reads it twice and then sits back. Twenty-eight, she says. Twenty-eight what? Columns. In sixty it was a man on a horse with a sheet and about eleven questions, and I answered all of them standing in a doorway, and he wrote it down wrong twice and I let him. She turns it round so Kyra can see. This asks what month I was born in. Kyra comes and looks over her shoulder. Ah, she says. They have been giving ages to governments for fifty years and Val has a rule about it, made in a doorway in the Nehalem country in the summer of sixty and kept ever since: you age on paper exactly as fast as you age, because a woman who is thirty-one in one schedule and fifty-one in the next twenty years later is a woman nobody ever looks at twice, and a woman who is thirty-one both times is a woman a clerk remembers. The rule has worked for forty years, and it has worked because it was true. Martha Miller was thirty-one in sixty and fifty-one in eighty, and in the summer of nineteen hundred she is seventy-one. Say it, Kyra says. I am not going to be able to give him seventy-one. No. A man is going to stand in that doorway and look at my face and write down seventy-one and go on to the next house, and either he thinks nothing of it, in which case he is the only man in Oregon who would, or he thinks something of it and tells somebody in a saloon. Her hands are flat on the schedule. I have known this was coming since we came down off that hill. I have had six years and I have not solved it, and I want to say out loud that I have not solved it, because I have been walking round this house for a month letting you believe that I had. Kyra sits down. I didn't believe you had, she says. What they do instead is what they have done with every problem of that shape since a wharf in Boston, which is to lay out the ways it can go wrong and count them. Give him thirty-four, says Kyra. Everybody lies. Everybody lies by four years in the direction of being younger and unmarried. Nobody lies by thirty-seven. Nobody is going to lay the sheets side by side. That is exactly what I said in sixty, and I was wrong, and the reason I was wrong is that I said it about one schedule and there are now going to be four of them. Four. Sixty, eighty, this one, and the one that comes in ten years, and the one after that — and they do not burn them, Kyra. That is the part nobody on this planet has understood yet. They do not burn them. They put them in a building. She works it for two days and comes back with the answer she knew she was going to come back with, and does not enjoy it. Thirty-four, she says. You just told me nobody lies by thirty-seven. They do not, and I am going to, and here is why. She puts one finger on the table. Those sheets are not sorted by name. They are sorted by where a man walked. To lay my two side by side you would have to already know that a Martha Miller in this city and a Martha Miller in Washington County were the same woman, and to know that you would need a reason to be looking, and nobody has a reason to be looking. And if somebody ever does. If somebody ever does, then the seventy-one would not have saved me either, because the face would have done it in the doorway forty years earlier. She sits back. So I am trading a certainty for a possibility, which is the whole of what any of this has ever been, and I would like it understood that I am doing it with my eyes open and that I know exactly which rule I am breaking, because it was mine and I made it in a doorway and I have been proud of it for forty years. Kyra reaches over and puts two fingers on the back of her wrist and leaves them there. Which leaves the month. It is the one question in twenty-eight that Val has never had to answer, on this planet or the other one, because nobody has ever asked: the Assembly wanted a year; the parish books in Maribor wanted a saint; every clerk from Trieste to the Nehalem wanted a number and a county, and not one of them in three centuries wanted to know the month. She sits with the schedule for a long while. February, she says. Why February? Because nothing has ever happened to me in February. Kyra looks up. Not on this world and not on the other one. I have been through the notebook. Not a birth, not a death, not a departure, not one thing I would have to keep my face still for. It is the only month I have got that is empty, and if a man is going to ask me that question in a doorway every ten years for the rest of my life I would like the answer to cost me nothing whatsoever. Mine, then, Kyra says. Yours. Aug — no. It comes out faster than Val meant it to, and flatter, and the room goes very quiet around it. Kyra shuts her mouth. I know, she says after a second. I am not — Val. I know. I had it halfway out of my mouth before I heard it. Her hands are in her lap. It goes in the book and the book goes in the building. It goes in the building. And then there is a month in a federal schedule that I chose for a reason, and a reason is a thing that can be found. She lets out a breath. September. There is nothing in September either. There is not. Then September, and we will neither of us think about it again. The man comes on the eighth of June at about four in the afternoon and his name is Dolph Varney and he has been walking since half past seven and has a blister he mentions twice. Val stands in her own doorway and gives him twenty-eight columns in a voice with nothing in it at all. Miller, Martha. Head. Female, white. Born February, eighteen sixty-six. Aged thirty-four. Single. Born Pennsylvania, father Pennsylvania, mother Pennsylvania. Reads, writes, speaks English. Occupation, accounts. Renting the house. Anderson, Ada. Cousin. September, eighteen sixty-eight. Thirty-one. Single. Pennsylvania throughout — which Val decided in February on the grounds that two women from the same state explain each other and two women from different states invite a question. Varney writes it all down in a good round hand and does not look up once. Then he comes to a column near the middle and pauses over it and looks at the two of them and makes a small decision, the way men do about forty times a day without ever knowing they have done it. Mother of how many children, he says. And number living. We are single, says Val. I know it. I ask anyway, on account of I got told off in ninety for not asking. He has the pen ready and is entirely without malice, which makes it worse. Most times it's a dash. There is a pause of about one second. A dash, Val says. He puts a dash, and a second dash in the box beside it, and then he looks at Kyra and asks her the same two questions, because the column has a line for every woman in the house and Dolph Varney was told off in ninety and does not intend to be told off again. A dash, Kyra says. He says something about the weather and about a house on the corner where nobody will come to the door, and he thanks them and goes down the steps and is gone by ten past four. Val shuts the door and stands with her hand on it. Kyra does not say anything at all. She goes and puts the kettle over and stands with her back to the room for as long as it takes — which is a kindness she learned to perform in about 1650 and has performed perhaps two hundred times since and has never once been thanked for. After a while Val comes and sits down at the table. One, she says. I know. One, and one living, and I have no idea whether the second half of that is still true and I will not have any idea for the whole of the rest of my life. Her voice does not move at all. And a man with a blister asked me the only question in twenty-eight columns that I could have answered honestly, and I gave him a dash. He asked me too, says Kyra from the stove. I know he did. One. One living. Same dash. She does not turn round. And they were born a fortnight apart, Val, and there is a man in a government office who now has it written down that neither of them was ever born at all. Kyra. I am not going to do anything about it. I am telling you because I have decided that I tell you things now. She turns her cup round a quarter turn and leaves it. That is the whole of it. You may go on with the kettle. And Kyra goes on with the kettle, because that is what has been asked for, and puts a hand flat between Val's shoulders on the way past, and does not stop walking. Later, in the long light, Kyra sits on the back step with her hair down her back to dry after the wash, and the sun comes round the corner of the house and gets into it and finds the copper the way it finds it every time, and Val sits on the step above her with the schedule folded in her lap and does not read it again. Sixteen documents, Val says. Is that all. It is a great many. It is sixteen pieces of paper in three hundred years, Val, and there are men on this street who generate four in a morning. Kyra tips her head back against Val's knee. What was the February for again? Because nothing has ever happened to me in it. Mm, says Kyra. Something has now. Val does not answer that for a while. Yes, she says. I noticed that at about the third column.

Nobody in Portland puts up plums in the second week of August except people who have bought too many plums, which is exactly what has happened, and which Val predicted at the market in front of a witness. It is too hot for it. They do it anyway, with the window up and the back door open and the smell going out into a yard where somebody two fences over is burning something they should not be. Kyra has the jars; Val has the accounts, which she is doing at the end of the same table on the grounds that somebody has to and that it is not going to be the woman with syrup to the wrist. Pass me that. Val passes it without looking up. It is a tin of milk, unopened, which has been sitting by the salt since Fourthday for no reason either of them can account for. Two and five-eighths, she says. Kyra stops. What? Across. That is what it is across, and there are four of them in the press, and if you are going to build a wall out of them I would like to know in advance. You know the width of a tin. I know the width of most things, Val says, and turns a page. Kyra puts the tin down on the table between them and looks at it for a while. Val. Mm. How wide was Aro? Val's pencil stops. The thing about that house in that year is that the two of them have got somewhere over the winter and neither of them has said so. Val puts the pencil down flat, which she does when she is choosing to be in a conversation rather than found by one. Are you asking me seriously? I am asking you entirely seriously and I would like you to know that I have wanted to ask for about two hundred years. Two and a half, says Val. Three at the extension. Kyra picks the tin back up. That's — that is wider than the tin, yes. That is wider than the tin, Val. By a little. Her chin is on her hand now. I could not get my hand round it. I want to be clear that I am not saying that for effect. I tried, in the way one does, and I could not, and I remember being extremely annoyed about it for reasons I could not have defended to anybody. And Kyra Davan sits down on the chair with the bad leg and laughs until she has to put the tin down again. A shade under a foot with the glans out, Val says a while later, which I did not know at the time was anything at all. You didn't know. I was twenty-two. I had nothing to put it beside. She turns her hand over on the table. I had a number and no scale. It is the only time in my life I have had one without the other, and I did not find out what it meant for about forty years. How did you find out? By measuring somebody else, Val says, and being surprised. Kyra wipes her hands on the cloth and comes and sits down properly, opposite, with her forearms on the table. Tell me the rest of it. The rest of what? All of it. Everything you've got. She says it plainly and without any heat in it at all. I have been walking around for three hundred years knowing approximately nothing about my own life, and you have been walking around beside me with the whole of yours written down in your head, and I want it. Not to keep score. Because it is yours and I have never had any of it. Val looks at her for a moment. Then she reaches across and turns the accounts face down, which is as clear a statement as she is capable of making. She does it properly, because there is no other way she knows how. Aro. A shade under a foot, and three across at the extension, which is a length increase outside anything I have measured since and a width increase that is exactly ordinary. That took me a century to notice and it still interests me. Why does it interest you? Because it means he was not a large man in proportion. He was an ordinary man with one rare characteristic. She says it with the flatness she uses for a soil sample. Which is, when you think about it, a description of almost everybody. Go on. The Venetian, who lasted four months, and Matthias at the mill, who lasted two years and some, and the one in the seventh year whose name I have never said aloud since. And Sven, about whom I have everything, because there were ten years of him. She pauses. He is the smallest man in this conversation so far and he lasted longer than any of them, and I would like to say something about that. Say it. By then I was not there for that, Val says. I was sixty-seven years old and I liked the sound of him coming up the stair and I liked that he wrote out the watering for four plants. If I had met him at twenty-two I do not think I would have noticed him at all, and I am not proud of that, and it is true. Kyra puts her hand out on the table, palm up, and Val puts hers in it without either of them making a thing of it, and their fingers go together the way they always do. Now you, Val says. I don't have any of this. You have all of it, you simply have it in another currency, and I would remind you that I cannot spend mine. Her thumb moves once. Deyn. Kyra thinks about it. Bigger than Emrin. Noticeably. Not — she looks around the kitchen, and her eye goes across the shelf and the crock and the flour scoop and lands on nothing, and she makes an impatient noise. Not the tin. Under the tin. About a jar lid. Which jar. The small ones. Not the quart ones. An inch and three-quarters, says Val. Is it? The small ones are an inch and three-quarters at the lid, and I would put Deyn at about that, from what you have said and from how you said it. She has not let go of her hand. And seven and a half long, or very near, and nine at the extension. Am I close? Kyra stares at her. I have no idea. That is the whole problem. It sounds right and I have absolutely no way to know, and you have just done in four seconds what I could not do in two hundred and fifty years of thinking about it on and off. I have done nothing. I have taken a jar lid and a tone of voice. That is not nothing, Val. It is arithmetic performed on somebody else's memory, Val says, and it is the most I have ever been able to do for you on this subject, and I have wanted to do it for a long time. Somebody's dog goes down the lane. The plums go on doing what plums do. Ask me the one you want to ask, Kyra says. I do not want to ask it. You've wanted to ask it since November. That is true and I still do not want to. Val looks at their hands. You said less than three, most times. On the spurts. That is the figure I cannot put down. Why? Because the band is four to six, Val says. Everywhere. Every man I have measured and every man I have heard measured. Four to six. Kyra does not say anything for a moment. So he was under it. He was under it. And the rest of him? And there it is, and Val has known it was coming since the second week of a bad November and has decided in the intervening nine months exactly how she is going to do it, which is straight. Six inches. Seven and a half with the glans out. An inch and a half across. From everything you have ever told me and the way your hands went when you told me, he was at the bottom of the range on every measure there is, and he is the smallest man in this conversation by a clear margin, and I have known it since a road in about eighteen ten. Since eighteen ten. You mentioned something on that road and I did the arithmetic without meaning to, and then I had it, and there was nowhere on this planet to put it. Kyra sits back in the chair with the bad leg and looks at the ceiling for a while, and Val lets her, and does not fill it, and does not check. Ninety-three years, Kyra says. Yes. You have been carrying that for ninety-three years. I have been carrying rather a lot for rather a long time and that one was not even the heaviest, which I appreciate is not a defense. I'm not asking for one. She brings her head back down; her eyes have gone a little, out toward the rim, and Val tells her, because she always does, and Kyra waves it off with two fingers without looking. I want to say something and I want to get it right. Take your time. It didn't matter. She says it slowly, the way she says things she has only just found. That is the thing I have got, standing in a kitchen with my hands full of plums. It did not matter. Not one part of what went wrong in that house had anything to do with six inches, and I have spent three hundred years wondering whether I was the fault in it, and it turns out there are these numbers, and they are interesting, and they explain nothing whatsoever. No, Val says. They don't. You'd know. I would know. I have more of them than anybody alive and I have never once got a single true thing out of them about why anything happened. Her voice does not move. I can tell you what every man I have been with measured. I cannot tell you why I walked out to a pump house in the rain for four months and could not say his name in my own kitchen. The numbers are not for that. I have known it a long time and it has not stopped me taking them. Why do you take them, then? Val is quiet for a second. Because the account goes to him, she says. Every time. You stand over a man and you do the work and then you hand him the whole of what it was like, because he was not there for it, and he takes it away with him and it is his. She turns her cup round and leaves it. The figures were the part nobody ever asked me for. So I kept those. The sun has got round to the back window and is coming in low and orange across the table and the jars and the upturned accounts, and it finds the pale of Val's hair where it has come loose over the afternoon and turns all of it the color of the fruit. Kyra gets up and comes round the table. Nine, Val says, to the tablecloth. What? Aro. Once. There was one night I counted nine, and I have never seen it again, from him or from anybody. She is going slightly pink and appears to be entirely unaware of it. About five tablespoons. Evenly distributed. It took the better part of a minute and I lay there and counted every one of them like a woman timing a train. Kyra makes a sound. Don't. I'm not going to say anything. You are going to say a great deal, you are simply arranging it first. I am arranging it beautifully, Kyra agrees, and gets her hands into the loose of Val's hair at the back and tips her head up. Nine. Nine. A pump man from four days east. A pump man from four days east, says Val, and I want it noted that I did not know at the time that it was remarkable, and that I have therefore never once had the pleasure of being impressed by it in the moment, and that I have been mildly annoyed about it since before either of us had ever heard of this planet. They do not get to the other one. It comes up — it was always going to come up, it has been in the room from about the second jar — and Kyra gets as far as the first syllable of the name and then stops herself with her mouth still open, which Val has not seen her do in four hundred years. Not tonight, Kyra says. No. It's not — I know what you are doing, Val says. You are keeping it whole. It does not go in with the plums. That's it. That is exactly it. Then we will do it properly, on a day we have set aside for it, and I will bring what I have. Val stands up, and the light comes with her, and has been up at her wrists for some while, and neither of them says a word about that either. There is quite a lot of it. I know there is. You do not know how much. No, Kyra says. I don't. And they leave the last four jars until morning, which in that house is a decision with a meaning attached, which both of them understand perfectly and neither of them says.

They set a day aside for it, which neither of them has done for anything in four hundred years, and which is therefore awkward from the moment they wake up. It is a Sunday in the third week of November. Kyra has told Jo they are not available and has enjoyed saying it. Val has cleared the table and then, over the course of the morning, put three unrelated things back on it, and is now moving them around. Stop it. I am not doing anything. You have moved the salt four times, Kyra says, and takes it off the table and puts it on the shelf behind her, and sits down. There. Now you have to start. Val sits. I made notes, she says. Of course you did. I made them on Thursday and I read them last night and I put them in the stove this morning, and I want that on the record, because it was extremely difficult and nobody saw me do it. Kyra puts her elbows on the table. Why'd you burn them? Because I was going to read them to you, and that is not a conversation, that is a delivery, and you would have sat there and let me do it because you are kind, and afterward neither of us would have said anything true. Start with the easy one, Kyra says. Do you keep going? Always. Always, as in — always. Every man, every time, since Aro. Her hands are flat on the table. It did not occur to me for about sixty years that stopping was available. I thought the thing ran to its end and you stayed with it, the way you stay with a reading until the needle settles, and by the time I understood it was a choice I had already made it four hundred times without noticing. That's why the nine. That is why the nine. She says it without any performance at all. He was exceptional and I did not stop, and I have spent a long time being quietly proud of a figure that I helped make. I would like you to know I am aware of that. You caused a bit of your own result. I caused a bit of my own result, Val agrees, at twenty-two, while counting it, and I had never once put an asterisk on it in my own head until about four months ago. Kyra gets up and comes back with two cups of what the grocer on Morrison is calling coffee, and does not sit down straight away. I didn't know you could. Keep going. At eighteen. Nobody tells you. Nobody tells you. The woman with the diagram covered the minute and covered the folds and did not spend one word on what happens after it starts, because after it starts the interesting part is over as far as a curriculum is concerned. She sits. So for the first two years I stopped the moment he went. Every time. I thought that was the shape of it — you do the difficult part and then you take your hands off and let the man have his. And then? Deyn. She turns the cup round. Deyn told me. In about nine words, in the middle of it, in a language I was still bad at. He was the only one who ever told me anything about any of this and he was not even the same species. Val is very still. Say the nine words. You can go on if you want to. Nobody says so. She shrugs one shoulder. That was it. That was the whole of my instruction. Everything else I ever learned about a man's body I worked out in the dark. I have a question, Val says, and it is not a kind one, and I am asking it because I want you to ask me the same thing afterward. Go on. Did you ever stop because you were annoyed with him? Kyra laughs, once, and then does not answer for long enough that the answer arrives on its own. Once. Emrin. Third year. We had had a thing about his mother in the afternoon, and that evening it went the whole way for once, and I took my hands off early and sat back and let it finish and told him afterward that it had been beautiful. Her jaw moves. And it probably was. I wasn't watching. Kyra. I am not asking to be talked out of it. I did it and I knew I was doing it and I have never said it to anybody. She looks up. Your turn. Same question. Sven, Val says. Repeatedly. Not from temper — from tiredness. I was in my sixties and he came three nights a week for years and there were a great many evenings when I did the whole of it properly and then stopped because I wanted to go to sleep. She turns her cup a quarter turn. And I have never decided whether that is a failure of love or simply what a long thing looks like, and I have had three hundred years and no view. It's what a long thing looks like. You would say that. I'd say it because it's true, Kyra says, and reaches across and gets two of Val's fingers and keeps them. The rain has come on outside. Somebody goes past with a handcart and swears at the corner. Right, Kyra says. You don't have to go first. I do, actually, because if you go first I'll spend the whole of mine arranging it against yours. She lets go of the fingers and puts her hands in her lap, which Val learned a long time ago is the tell. Xander. Val does not say anything. One, says Kyra. At the most. Usually one. Twice it was none at all, because it did not take — it went all the way out, blue and folded and everything the way it is supposed to, and I did the work and it simply did not come, and he went back down and I sat there. And when it did come? One. Small. It did not go anywhere. She looks around for something and finds nothing and gives up on it, which she almost never does. There is no object. There isn't one. It was less than a thing you would measure. And you stopped. I stopped. Every time? Every time. And I want to tell you why, because I have known why since about the second month and I have never once said it out loud. And then: because if I kept going, it would have gone on being small for longer. Val's hands come off the table. He could not see it. He never could — that is the whole arrangement, he is not there, he comes back up and looks down at himself and whatever is on him is the only thing he is ever going to know. And there was almost nothing on him. Her voice has gone very flat and very steady, which in her is the equivalent of somebody else shouting. So I took my hands off early and I let it finish and then I sat on the edge of that bed and told him it had been extraordinary, and I was good at it, Val. I had had four years of practice at exactly that, and he believed every word. You were protecting him. I was managing him. Let's use the right one. Those are the same act performed by different people. They are not, and you know they are not, and I have had four hundred years to work out which one I was doing. She stops. She gets the rest of it out. And the awful part is that it is the same thing I did with Emrin. Exactly the same. Take your hands off, make it end sooner, and then give him an account that is better than the thing was. I did that with two different men on two different worlds and I never once noticed it was a habit. Val is quiet for a long time. Six, she says. Seven, one night. And I kept going every single time. Kyra's head comes up. Every time. Every time, because I keep going with everybody and always have, and I want to be very clear that it was not generosity and it was not love and it was not anything about him. It was method. He got the whole of my attention because everybody gets the whole of my attention and I have never known how to give less. Six to seven. Six to seven. And Kyra Davan puts both hands flat on the table and lets out a breath she appears to have been holding since August. Oh, thank God, she says. That's it. That is it, isn't it. You kept going and I did not. She is talking fast now, which she does when something has let go. It was never him and it was never me, it was two women doing two different things with their hands, and I have spent a century thinking that man came apart in your bed and lay there like a dead fish in mine, and it was technique. Kyra. It was technique. Val, I could have had — she stops. All right. That is enough of that. But it was technique. Val is looking at the table. She has known this was coming for about ninety seconds and has spent all ninety of them trying to find a road round it, and there is not one, because there never is with arithmetic. That is the entire trouble with arithmetic and always has been: it does not care what you have spent the morning hoping. No, she says. No what? It is not technique. Don't do this. I have to do this and you know I have to, and you would not forgive me in a year if I didn't. She puts one finger on the table. The band is four to six. Every man. Every time. Four to six, on two worlds, across four hundred years of looking. Val — keeping going is worth one. The rain does what it is doing. One. That is the entire value of it. It takes a man from six to seven. It took Aro from eight to nine on one night in the warm season and it has never taken anybody anywhere else. If you had kept your hands on that man from the first of it to the last of it every night for seven months, you would have got two. Kyra does not move. You got one. The bottom of the ordinary range is four. There are three missing and stopping does not account for a single one of them. Nobody says anything for a while. The handcart comes back the other way. You could have let me have it, Kyra says eventually. Yes. For a week, even. You could have let me have it for a week and told me in the spring. Yes, Val says. I thought about it while you were talking. I got about as far as the spring and then I understood that you would find it yourself in about four months, because you are not stupid and the figure is not complicated, and you would find it on your own in a kitchen with nobody in it. Her voice does not move and her hand is shaking slightly, which Kyra can see and does not mention. And then you would have had it alone. And you would have known that I did the sum first and said nothing, and that is the one thing I have promised you I would never do again. Kyra puts her face in her hands for a moment. That's a good reason. It is the only one I had. It's a good reason. She takes her hands down; her eyes have gone right out to the rim and neither of them says a word about it. All right. So what is the answer? Because you have got one. You have had it since August and you did not burn it with the notes. Val turns her cup round once and leaves it. He never asked me a single question about myself, she says. What? In seven months. Not what I worked on, not who I trained under, not whether I was any relation to Vaedom Sorin of the Assembly, which is the question I had been answering since I was nine years old and which every person I have ever met has asked me inside an hour. She looks up. He came over to a table because a woman had read the same page three times. And for seven months every question that man asked me was about the four feet in front of him. And with me — with you he ran the whole of it. Val says it as gently as she is able, which is not very. You told me yourself, on a ruled sheet, about a hundred years ago. The hand that went near your arm and did not arrive. The question about your Sixthdays. The offer to walk you back, made at precisely the moment you could decline it without anybody being embarrassed. You watched him do the entire apparatus and you admired the work, and you were right to, because it was good work. He was performing. He was working, says Val. The whole time. And a man who is working cannot go anywhere, Kyra. That is the one thing that arrangement will not let him do. He has to stop being in the room, and he could not stop being in the room with you, because with you he was never once off duty. Kyra sits back and looks at the ceiling of a rented house in Portland for a long time. So I got the show, she says. You got the show. A hundred years and a ruled sheet, and I worked out that he had a calendar, and what I actually had was a man being excellent at me for seven months. Her throat moves. And you got him. I got him, Val says, and I did not notice, and I have spent four centuries filing him as a man who ran a routine on a woman in a chair at a materials table. I was wrong. That is my half of it, and I am not going to pretend mine is the light one. Yours is worse and mine is not nothing. Neither of them says the other thing. It sits in the room for a while, the way it has sat in rooms for three hundred years, and it is not avoidance and both of them know that too: two women went to that man in the same year and each came away with a daughter, a fortnight apart, and there is no country on either world with a word for what that makes them to each other. Not today, Kyra says. No. I am not putting them in with this. They are not a consequence of a measurement. They are not, Val says, and if you had suggested otherwise I would have said something I could not take back — and that is the end of it for that year. The rain eases off about four and neither of them has moved. At some point Kyra has come round the table and got into the chair with her, which is not a thing that chair was built for and which they established some years ago it will nonetheless take, and they sit there wedged and uncomfortable with Kyra's legs over the arm and her hair in Val's mouth. I'm not sorry I stopped, Kyra says into her collarbone. No. I want that said. I stopped because I was being kind to him and I would do it again, and it turns out it made almost no difference, and both of those are true. Both of those are true. You'd have kept going. I would have kept going, because I would not have thought of it, and you thought of it, and that is a thing you can do that I have never been able to do once in four hundred years. Kyra is quiet. That is the nicest thing you have ever said to me. It is not remotely the nicest thing I have ever said to you and I intend to prove it later, says Val, when we are both out of this chair, which is going to be a considerable undertaking and which I have not yet worked out. They get out of the chair eventually; it takes some doing and involves Kyra putting a hand on the wall. The light has gone that flat pewter color it goes in Portland in the hour before dark, and the room smells of coffee that neither of them has drunk. Kyra sits on the end of the table with her heels against the leg. Can I ask you something about us now, instead of about four dead men and a live one? Xander is not dead. Xander is four hundred years and a galaxy away and I am counting him as scenery. Val. Can I ask you? Ask me. Did you ever count me? Val, standing at the window with her back to the room, puts her forehead against the cold of the glass for a second. Yes. Val. Once. Early. I would put it at the second winter, in that appalling room with the shutter that would not close, and I want to state before you say anything that it was not a success. Kyra is grinning at her back and Val can hear it. What happened? There was nothing to count. That is what happened. I went in with a method and the method had no purchase on any part of it. There is no emergence and no window and nothing arrives at intervals, and at some point I understood that I had brought a ruler to a river, and I put it down. A ruler to a river. Do not enjoy that as much as you are enjoying it. I am going to enjoy it for a hundred years, says Kyra. It was the first time I understood it was a different thing, Val says, turning round. Not a version of the other thing done with a woman. A different thing, with no clock in it. That's the part. Which part? The clock. Kyra pushes off the table and comes and stands in front of her. Do you know that every single time I was ever with a man I was on a timer? A minute. From the moment it came out. A minute to find the turn and get the pressure right and not be frightened, and if I did not, that was that for a day. I know exactly how long a minute is. I know you do. I am telling you what it was like for somebody who doesn't. She puts two fingers flat on Val's sternum. And then a day comes and you are in a bad room with a broken shutter and there is no minute. There is no minute, there is no posture, nobody has to be on their back, nothing has to happen in an order, and if it goes wrong you just — carry on. Or don't. Or start again in ten minutes, which you cannot do with a man, you have to wait a whole day, which I have always thought was the single stupidest thing about the entire arrangement. It is not stupid, it is a refractory constraint. It is stupid, Val. It is a stupid refractory constraint, Val concedes, and I have thought so since about sixteen fifty. And then the one nobody says, which Kyra says: with a man, one of you isn't there. Val does not answer. That is it, isn't it. The best thing that can happen to him is that he leaves, and you stand over it and do the work, and then afterward you tell him what it looked like, because he was not there to see. It is the most intimate thing in the world and there is only ever one person in the room. Yes, says Val. And with you there's two. There are two. Every time. Both of us, the whole way, watching the entire thing. Her voice has dropped. I did not know that was available. For seventy-seven years on that planet I did not know it was a thing that could be had, and then it turned out it was just — sitting there. Being ordinary. In a room with a bad shutter. I envied them, Val says. Kyra's head comes up. The men. All of them. Val has gone still and precise, which is how the difficult ones come out. They got to go. That is what the arrangement gives him — he gets to stop holding himself together for a while, entirely, in front of somebody, and come back afterward and be told what he was like. I watched four men do that and I stood over every one of them with my hands steady and I envied them, and it took me most of my life to put a word on it. Val. It is not an admirable thing to envy. It is the least surprising thing you have ever said to me. Kyra gets hold of the front of her collar with two fingers and does not pull. You have never been able to put yourself down. Not once, in four hundred years, in front of anybody. That is not true anymore. No, says Kyra. It isn't. That is why I am not saying it as an accusation. We were bad at it, Val says. We were dreadful at it. For the better part of a century we were dreadful at it, and it was entirely because we each brought the wrong habit into the room and neither of us noticed. Her mouth has gone crooked. I kept going. Always. Past the end of things, past the point where you had finished, because in my head the shape of it was that you stayed until the needle settled, and it did not occur to me that a person might simply be done and want to lie there. You were very thorough. I was relentless and you were too polite to say so for ninety years. I wasn't polite. I was doing my own version. Kyra lets go of the collar. I stopped early. All the time. Every time I thought you had had enough or I had taken too long or you might be tired, I took my hands off and made it end tidily, which is exactly what I did to Emrin and exactly what I did to Xander, and I did it to you for about a century without once asking whether you wanted it. You were being kind. I was managing you, Kyra says. We agreed on the word this afternoon and I am not going to soften it now that it is mine. Who said it first? Val asks. You don't remember? I remember perfectly. I want to hear you say it. That is a filthy trick and you have been doing it all afternoon. Kyra is laughing. I did. Of course I did. We were in the room over the saddler's and I said would you stop doing that, and you went the color of a sheet, and I had to spend twenty minutes explaining that I did not mean stop, I meant stop doing the one specific thing, and you sat on the end of that bed with your hands in your lap like a woman waiting for a verdict. I thought you were ending it. I know you did. I sat there and constructed the whole of the rest of my life in about four seconds, and it was not good, and then you said the second half of the sentence. And what did you feel? Val considers it honestly, which takes a moment. Relief. Enormous relief. Because it meant there was a right answer and you had it and I could stop guessing. I had been guessing for ninety years and I had never once thought to ask, because asking would have meant admitting I did not already know. So now we ask, Kyra says. Now we ask. Out loud. In words. Like enormous idiots. She is working her way closer without appearing to move, which is a thing she has been doing since the first winter and which Val has never once failed to notice and never once mentioned. Nobody is ahead, she says. No. That is the thing I would want written down, if we wrote anything down. There is no ledger. I do not owe you one and you do not owe me two, and if either of us ever starts keeping it we should burn the house. You are describing my notes. I am describing your notes, Kyra agrees, and you burned them this morning, and I have not stopped thinking about it since ten o'clock. I burned them for the conversation. You burned them for me. I burned them for you, Val says. And Kyra kisses her, slowly and without any hurry in it at all, the way she has been kissing her since a hut on a mountain, and Val's hands go up into the loose of her hair and stay there, and the pewter light comes in off the window and finds the pale of her and does what it always does. Upstairs, Val says some while later, against her mouth. You planned this. I did not plan any part of today and I have not planned a single thing since August, and I have been meaning to raise it with you, because it has been going on for some months and I do not entirely know what to do about it. I know it's been going on for some months. Of course you do. I've known since the morning you said it to the drawers. Kyra has her forehead against Val's and is not moving. I was not going to say anything. You would have started planning it again out of embarrassment. That is almost certainly true. Upstairs, Kyra agrees. And there is no minute, and no posture, and nothing that has to happen in any order at all, and nobody counts anything.

The Trail runs eight hundred feet and costs a quarter at every door along it, and by the middle of August there is not a person on the east side who has not been down it at least twice and formed a view. Jo Selby has been four times and has views about all of it: that the Streets of Cairo are a swindle, that the diving elk is worse than a swindle, and that anybody who pays to see a man be shot out of anything deserves what they get. And the babies, she says over the plates, which I will not go into again. Val puts her fork down. The what? There is a building on the Trail with a high roof and ten incubators in it behind plate glass, and inside the incubators there are infants who have been born too early — and the papers in May called the machines artificial mothers and said so admiringly. A quarter gets you in. The quarter pays for the doctors and the nurses and the milk, and the parents are charged nothing at all, which is the part Val cannot put down once she has picked it up. They go on a Tuesday because Tuesday is quieter. It is very hot in there and it smells of carbolic and warm metal, and the nurses move about behind the glass at the pace of people who are being watched and have decided not to mind. The infants are extremely small — nobody warns you about that, and the notices outside have gone out of their way not to say it: two and a half pounds is not a small baby, it is a different order of object, and the whole room is quiet in the way a church is quiet, and a man in a straw hat keeps saying would you look at that to nobody. Val reads every card on the wall, in order, twice. Kyra does not read anything. There is a woman next to them at the glass with a baby of her own on her shoulder, a big one, four months at least and furious about the heat, and she jogs it and looks in at the machines and says, comfortably, to nobody in particular: imagine leaving them. She does not mean anything by it — she means the parents who have handed their children to a showman on an amusement street, and she is wrong about that too, and there is no version of the afternoon in which anybody is going to explain it to her. Kyra turns and walks out. Val stays for a moment, because leaving immediately would be a thing somebody notices, and then pays for two pamphlets she does not want and goes after her. They get the whole way home without saying anything, which takes the better part of an hour and two streetcars. It is Kyra who goes first, standing in her own kitchen with her hat still on. He told me he couldn't. Val does not move. Alexander. He told me, in about the third month, lying on his back in that room with the bad window, that he could not father a child. Not that he did not want one. That he could not. She takes the hat off and does not put it anywhere. And I believed him, and I went on believing him, and I have believed him for four hundred years, and I have never once asked you whether he said it to you too. He said it to me in the second month, Val says. In what words? In exactly those words. I cannot father a child. Flat, once, not looking at me, and then he changed the subject, and I let him. Kyra sits down on the chair with the bad leg. A Sethal man does not say that, Val says. That is the first thing. It is not a sentence anybody volunteers. It is not in the class of things that get said, and it was not said in a difficult moment, and it was not said to get anything, and that is why it worked on both of us. It was the strangest thing I had ever been told by a man in a bed and I filed it as true because nobody lies in that direction. Nobody lies in that direction, Kyra agrees. He was not lying. I want that established before we go any further, because I have had four centuries with it and I am as certain of that as I am of anything. Val puts her hands on the back of a chair. Somebody told him. Somebody got to that man at some point and told him what he was, and he believed it, and he handed it on to us exactly as he had received it. Who tells a man a thing like that? Somebody with a reason, says Val, and no record of it anywhere, which I noticed at the time and did nothing about, and which I have thought about approximately once a year since. She goes and gets the box and does not open it, and puts it on the table and sits down in front of it, which is how she starts anything she has been carrying. Three assays, she says. Everybody on that planet is assayed at fourteen. Everybody. It is the most ordinary piece of paper a person has, and there are three of them, and every one of his had been waived. Waived. Separately. Each one waived on the grounds that another institution held the other two. Her voice has gone entirely level. Which is the tidiest thing I have ever seen on a form, and a thing no clerk would ever catch, because each waiver is correct on its own and only the three together are impossible. You found that at the time. I found it a hundred and sixty years later, in a chair, with nothing else to do. She turns the box a quarter turn and leaves it. And the part I have never said out loud is this. Under what we have got — under the way it actually works — you cannot test a man on his own. There is no assay of a man by himself. It does not exist, because the thing you would be testing does not exist until a woman has finished a minute's work on him. Kyra looks up. So nobody ever tested him. Nobody ever tested him. Somebody told him. And the one document that could have told him whether the sentence in his mouth was true is the document that is not there. The kettle does what kettles do. Neither of them gets up. A fortnight, Val says. What? Between them. Between the two of them, at the start. I have known the figure since they were born and I have never once known what to do with it. Her fingers are spread on the table. And I know now, because of the sheet, and because of what the lockout means, and because I have spent nine months with all of it laid out in front of me. A fortnight is not a coincidence, Kyra. A fortnight is the shortest it could possibly have been. Kyra goes very still. Say that in a way I can hold. He could not have done it any closer together than he did. Val says it plainly. Not if he had wanted to and not if he had planned it. The body will not allow it. We read that sheet in the room above the seed merchant and we saw a man managing two women with a calendar, and we were right about the calendar, and we were wrong about who was keeping it. He wasn't keeping it. He was not keeping it. It was keeping him. Kyra puts her head back and looks at the ceiling for a long time. A hundred years I have had that sheet in my mouth, she says. Two columns and seven months of Fifthdays and not one night where he would have had to choose. I have used it on myself perhaps four hundred times. I know. And the whole of it was a man's body doing the only thing it could do. A great deal of it, says Val. Not all of it. He still chose the Fifthdays and he still did not tell either of us about the other, and I will not hand you a version where that costs him nothing. But the shape you have been reading as cunning is not cunning. It is a constraint, and I have checked it against everything I have, and it holds. Later, with the lamp lit and the heat gone out of the day, Kyra says the other thing. What did you tell him? Afterward? Afterward. When he asked. He did ask. He asked every time. Val is at the window with her back to the room. And I told him. In order, from the start, to the shade, without leaving anything out and without improving any of it, because that is what I do with a physical fact and because it had not occurred to me that there was another way of doing it. And? And I liked it, Val says. She says it to the glass. I have never told anybody that either. He asked me a question that only I could answer and he sat there and took the whole of the answer, and I have spent my life being asked for readings by people who wanted the short version, and he wanted all of it, and I gave him all of it, and I liked it more than I liked most of the rest of it. Val. I am aware of what that is. You need not point at it. She turns round to say the rest of it and does not say the rest of it, because Kyra has her head back against the chair and the lamp is behind her, and it is doing the thing it does — taking the dark of her hair down to almost nothing and then finding the copper in it at the one place above the ear, the way every light on two worlds has found it and always will. I told him it was fine, Kyra says. Val turns round. Every time. I put my face on and I told him it was fine and I made it sound like something, because he could not see and I was not going to hand a man his own body back to him in that condition. Her hands are open on her knees. So he had two of us, in the same seven months, telling him two different things about the same body, and neither of them was a lie, and he had no way on that world to put them side by side. No. And he went to his grave — she stops. He did not go to his grave. He is alive. That is worse and I will not think about it tonight. There is a thing I have not said, Val says, and I have been deciding for about an hour whether to say it tonight or in a week, and I have decided tonight, because a week is how I used to do it. Then say it. You have had two answers your whole life. You froze because you were eighteen and did not know what you were doing, or you froze because it was him. Those are the two you have been turning over since before there was a road up that hill. They are the only two there are. There is a third, says Val, and I do not think anybody ever told you it existed. Kyra does not say anything. Completing it is not the same as it taking. It is a likelihood and it has never been anything else. A woman can do every part of it correctly, inside the minute, with the turn held the whole way, and it simply does not take, and nothing about that is a failure of hers. Her voice does not move at all. Some proportion of those returns were nobody's fault. Not yours, not his, not anybody's. I do not know what proportion and I never will and neither will you, and it is not nothing, and you have never once had it in the room while you were doing the arithmetic on yourself. Kyra sits with that for a long while. The woman with the diagram never said that. No. Forty minutes and a diagram and she never said the word sometimes once. Her eyes have gone out to the rim and she lets them. How long have you had that? Since I was about twenty. And you didn't — I did not know you needed it, Val says. That is the whole of my defense and it is a poor one. You never said the first two out loud until last autumn, and I have had a piece of ordinary mechanism in my pocket for the better part of four centuries that would have taken a third of the weight off you, and I did not know, and I am telling you now, in a kitchen, four hundred years late. The lamp does what lamps do. Out on the street somebody's dog has opinions about somebody's cart. They were very small, Kyra says. They were. I keep seeing the one on the end. She had her whole hand round the edge of the blanket and there was nobody in that room who belonged to her. She rubs her face. And there was a woman standing next to me with a great fat healthy thing on her shoulder saying imagine leaving them, and I wanted to take her by the arm and tell her the truth about herself and everybody she has ever met, and instead I walked out and got on a streetcar. I know. Do you think about it? Val is quiet for a moment. Every day, she says. Not for long. That is the arrangement I came to, and it took me about eighty years to come to it, and I am not going to describe it to you tonight because I am not sure it would survive being described. All right. Ask me again in the winter. I will, says Kyra, and does not, for three years.

She tells Kyra in March, which is the change, because in any of the three centuries before it she would have carried the thing round in her own chest until it was over and then mentioned it in November as a completed fact. My father is four hundred and six this year, she says, at the table, with the accounts open in front of her and her thumb keeping a column. Kyra puts the iron down. Val. I am not asking for anything. I am telling you in advance because I have worked out that telling you afterward is a thing I do to keep the shape of it in my own hands, and I would rather not do that anymore. She does not look up from the column. That is all. You may go back to the shirt. Kyra does not go back to the shirt. She does not ask anything else for nine days, which is its own kind of restraint and costs her a good deal, and when she does ask she asks the smallest possible question. Why that number? Teor Casse, says Val. The Casse who did the water at Ebren? The same. He lived to be four hundred and six, and everybody said so, and it was said the way people say a thing that is remarkable and not impossible. She has the notebook out now and is not writing in it. It is the only figure I have. In seventy-seven years on that planet nobody ever told me what a life was, because nobody tells you that, because it is not a question anybody asks out loud. So you took the one you had. I took the one I had. And then, because she cannot leave it: it is not a lifespan. No. It is one man. It is a single observation with nothing either side of it, and I could not publish it, and if a student brought it to me in a corridor I would send her away and tell her to come back with forty. She puts her hand flat on the notebook. I have known that for three hundred years. I have known it the entire time I have been counting toward it. And I am going to mark it anyway, and I want you to understand that I am doing something I would fail anybody else for doing, with my eyes open, on purpose. Because you need a day. Because I need a day, Val says, and there is not going to be one, and this is the nearest thing to one that exists. What she does in the end is nothing that anybody watching would have been able to name. She works in the morning. She goes to the shop and settles a quarter's books with Jo and argues with her about a stamped invoice. She comes back and eats what is in front of her. And in the evening she takes the notebook out to the back step and sits there with it shut on her knee until it is too dark to have written in it anyway, and then comes in and puts it away. Kyra, from the kitchen window, watches the whole of it and does not go out. I did not know what to put, Val says afterward. There isn't anything to put. There is a great deal to put. That is not the difficulty. The difficulty is that every sentence I constructed was in the wrong tense and I could not get any of them out of it. She sits down. My father died this year. He did not. My father is dead. I do not know that. My father would be four hundred and six — would be, as though something had interrupted it, and nothing has interrupted it. He is a man going about his business at a distance nobody on this planet has a figure for, and the only thing that has happened is that I have run out of the number I was using. Kyra comes and sits on the edge of the table. So you grieved him for nothing. I grieved him correctly, Val says, and for nothing. Both. That is the whole of the trouble and I have not found a way round it in nine months. He embraced you in front of the Assembly, Kyra says. Seven of them. Seven members of the Assembly, and you told me about it twice in the first year I knew you and never again, and I have thought about it more than you would find reasonable. Why? Because I could not work out whether you were pleased or appalled, and it took me about forty years to understand that it was both, and that the two of you had no other arrangement available. She shrugs one shoulder. My father shouted. Yours arranged things and did not tell you, and both of them thought they were doing it for us, and one of them was easier to be angry with. Mine was not easier. No, says Kyra. Mine was. It is a long time before either of them says anything else. The light has gone and the lamp is not lit, and what comes in off the street finds the pale of Val's hair where it has come down over the day, and Kyra looks at that for a while and then says the thing she has been carrying since a kitchen three years earlier. It is the winter. Val does not pretend not to understand. It is August. It is three winters past the winter, and I have not asked once, and I want the arrangement. Kyra's voice is perfectly level. You said you were not sure it would survive being described. I have decided that I do not care whether it survives. Val sits with it for a while. I do not imagine her, she says. What? Genie. I do not imagine her. Not older, not in a room, not doing anything. I have not once in four hundred years allowed myself to construct a picture of my daughter as she would be now, and it is not because it hurts. Then why? Because I would be manufacturing evidence, Val says. The room does not do anything. I have one true image of her and it is a stowage floor and she is thirty-nine years old and she has her hand up because somebody has just said something to her. That is data. It happened and I was there and it is accurate. Her voice has not moved a particle. And if I sit here and build her a face at three hundred and forty, I will have made something up, and the made-up thing will be in the same place in my head as the true one, and within about a century I will not be able to tell you which is which. So I do not do it. I have not done it since the second year and I am not going to start. Kyra does not say anything for a long moment. Oh, Val, she says. I am not asking to be talked out of it. I am not going to talk you out of it. It is the most you thing I have ever heard and I have heard a great many. She gets down off the table and crouches in front of the chair, which she does perhaps twice a century. I do the other one. The other one. I make her up constantly. Kyra says it without a scrap of apology. Every year. I have given Kal a house and a bad neighbor and a thing she does with her hands that she got from her grandmother, and I have had her take up the water work and give it up again and take it up a second time, and I have married her off twice and unmarried her once, and I have no idea whether any of it is within a thousand miles of true. And that does not trouble you. It troubles me enormously. I do it anyway. She puts her hands on Val's knees. Because the alternative is that I have a girl of thirty-nine standing on a floor, and she stands there forever, and nobody ever comes and gets her. Four hundred years, Val says. Four hundred years. Four hundred years, in the same house, doing the exact opposite thing about the same subject, and neither of us has ever once said so. No. Which of us is right? Neither of us is right, says Kyra. That is what I have got, after all of it. There is no correct way to do this because it is not a thing that is supposed to be done, and we are each protecting something, and mine is her and yours is the record, and I would not swap and neither would you. Val puts her hand over one of the hands on her knee and leaves it there. Tell me one, she says. One what? One of the made-up ones. About Kal. Kyra looks up at her. You will hate it. I will hate it. Tell me one anyway. And you will not do the thing where you point out that I have no basis for any of it. Kyra, says Val, I have just sat on a step for two hours holding a shut notebook. I am in no position to be rigorous about anybody. So Kyra tells her one, there in the dark, with her hands still on the woman's knees. It is a small one and it is not about anything: Kal at about two hundred, in a corridor, arguing with somebody about a schedule and winning, and then going out afterward and being unaccountably pleased with herself and telling nobody. It takes about a minute to tell. Kyra does not improve it, which for her is an act of considerable discipline. When she has finished, Val does not say anything for a while. That is not evidence, she says. No. It is not evidence and I am going to have it in my head for the rest of my life, and I would like it noted that you have just put something in there that I cannot get out. Noted, says Kyra. I am not sure whether I am grateful. You will be in about nine years, she says — and Val laughs once, in the dark, which is not a sound the month has produced before.

The woman in Astoria who had owned the house and had not cared about it dies in February, and her son cares about it a great deal, and by the end of March there is a board in the yard. Fourteen years in one building: the second longest either of them has managed on this planet, and Val has the first one in a box with a deed in it. Kyra goes round the rooms twice on the last morning, which is also what she did on the first, and comes back to the kitchen and stands with her hands on the table. Don't. I have not said anything. You are about to say something about a table. I was going to say that the cart comes at two, says Val, which is true and is not all of it. The house on Clinton is smaller and better built and has a stair that turns, and Val takes the lease on the whole of it in her own name and then lets the back room to a Miss Anderson for two dollars and seventy-five cents a week. Kyra puts the paper down after reading it twice. You are charging me rent. I am charging Miss Anderson rent. Val. A woman who lets a room and does not take money for it is a woman with something else going on, and every neighbor on a street can smell that inside a season. Her hands are folded. There will be a rent book. It will be in this house and nowhere else and no government will ever see it, and it will be the most ordinary object in the building, and if anybody ever asks either of us what we are to each other there will be a book with figures in it that answers before we have to. And it goes back in your pocket on the Sunday. It goes back in the house on the Sunday. There is only one pocket. Kyra takes it up on the stairs that evening, which is where she takes up everything, two steps below with her arms folded, enjoying herself and also not entirely enjoying herself, which is the form that argument has always taken. Cousins for fourteen years. Cousins by marriage. Cousins by marriage for fourteen years and now I am a lodger. It is further off. You have moved us one further off, and you did it while I was carrying a crate. It is the most distant relation two women can have and still share a roof, Val agrees. That is the entire recommendation. It is the only recommendation. It is a sufficient one. And then, with her voice not rising, which is how Val knows it has stopped being the old argument: A cousin stays. Val stops with her hand on the rail. A cousin is somebody's. She turns up and she is in the family and there is no particular day on which she stops being in it. A boarder can be given notice. That is what a boarder is. It is a person who can be told on a Friday that the room is wanted, and everybody on this street will understand it perfectly and nobody will think a thing about it. Nobody is giving anybody notice. I know that. I have known it since a mountain and I am not frightened of it and I am not asking you to reassure me. She comes up one step. I am telling you what the shape of it is, because you chose the shape and you chose it for good reasons and I do not think you looked at that part of it, and I have never once in four hundred years known you to want a thing looked at less than you want this looked at. Val does not say anything for a moment. No. I did not look at that part of it. Well. Now you have. The cart comes the next Tuesday with the last of the household and a thing on it that Kyra did not put there. She stands in the yard and looks at it for a while with the carter waiting. That is the table. It is. That table belonged to a dead woman in Astoria and then to her son, who wanted nine dollars for the whole kitchen and would not break it up. He would not break it up, Val agrees, so I bought the kitchen. Kyra puts her hand flat on the top of it, out there in the yard, in front of a man holding a horse. Where is the rest of the kitchen? I sold it in the afternoon to a man on Belmont for seven, and I want it understood that I came out of the arrangement two dollars down and that I have entered every part of it in the accounts under a heading I am not going to read to you. It goes in under the window where the light comes round in the afternoon, and by the third week the house smells of the new place instead of the old one, and neither of them ever says anything else about it at all. That is the year the rule dies properly, and both of them know the date. Not a key. Not a room in anybody's house. Not a place at a table that is laid for us — made in Boston in seventeen twenty-five by a woman who had watched what happens when you keep something, repaired in nine words on the Missouri a hundred and twenty-four years later, broken again at a land office, and now finished off in a yard over nine dollars and a carter's time. You could have left it, Kyra says, much later, in the dark. I could have left it. Say why you didn't. Because you put your hands on it on the first morning in ninety-five and said it was a good table, Val says, and I have been looking at that table for fourteen years and thinking about the morning, and I was not going to hand it to a man on Belmont for seven dollars. The rent is due on Mondays. It is paid on a Monday for one week, and after that on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and once memorably on the following Monday, and every single time it is handed over with an expression of such transparent innocence that Val takes to writing the date in the book without looking up. You are doing it on purpose. I am doing it in character. You are doing it because you have worked out that I will not say anything. I am doing it, says Kyra, because there is a woman in this house who owns a rent book, and she has been waiting fourteen years for a document she is allowed to be annoyed about, and I am not going to deprive her of it. Val writes the date down and does not look up and does not manage her face in time, and Kyra sees every bit of it from the doorway and says nothing whatsoever, which is worse. In November the notice about the enumeration goes round again, nine years after the last one, and Val reads it standing in the hall with her coat still on. April, she says. Already. Already. And a man is going to come to this door and write down a landlady and a boarder, in a house neither of us was in nine years ago, on a street that is not the street, with an age I am about to have to pick again. She hangs the coat up. And then we are going to change it. Change what? This. She gestures at the hall, the stair, the rent book on the shelf where it lives. Before he comes, not after. Whatever is on that schedule is the thing that lasts, and I am not putting a rent book on it. That gives you four months. It gives me four months, and a house to find, and I have priced the whole undertaking and I do not care for the figure. They walk up to the river on a Sunday in December because Kyra wants to see whether the new bridge is going to be as ugly as the last one, and it is raining in the way it does there in December, and about halfway along Kyra stops and looks at the distance still to go and says nothing at all in a very particular way. Not far now, says Val. It is a mile. Not far now. And Kyra puts her hands in her pockets and goes on, in the rain, on the east bank, beside a woman she is currently paying two dollars and seventy-five cents a week to live with. Later, out of the wet, with the fire going and her hair down her back drying in front of it and the copper coming up in it the way it does when there is anything at all to find it with, Kyra says: Sisters. Val looks up. Next year. When you change it. She does not turn round. Sisters. I have not said what I am changing it to. No, says Kyra. I have. And Val sits with the accounts open in front of her and does not argue, which in that house in that year is very close to a yes, and Kyra picks the hem back up and lets her have it.

Kyra finds the house, which has not happened in four hundred years, and she finds it by walking past it eleven days running on her way to nowhere in particular and then standing across the street from it on the twelfth. That one. You have not been inside it. I have not been inside it. It may have a stove that does not draw and a landlord in Astoria and a gutter on the north side. It may, Kyra agrees. That one. And Val, who has a method for this and has used it in nine cities and could produce four objections before the end of the street, looks at the side of her face and does not produce any of them. The trouble is the name, and they both know it before the lease is signed. Sisters have one surname. They do. And you cannot be Miller, for the reason I gave you in ninety-five, which has not improved with age. She has the directory open and is not reading it. One Miller is a woman with a piece of ground in another county. Two Millers is a family, and a family has parents, and parents have a place they came from. Kyra waits, because she has learned what it looks like when that woman has already done the work and is walking herself up to the answer out loud for the courtesy of it. So I stop, Val says. Kyra puts her cup down. You cannot stop. The deed is Martha Miller. The deed is Martha Miller of the county of Washington, says Val, and it will go on being Martha Miller of the county of Washington for as long as that piece of ground exists, and she will pay what she owes on it every year through a man in Hillsboro who has never seen her face and never will. And in Portland? In Portland she stops. She closes the directory. There is one Martha Miller on one federal schedule in this city, at an address that has been sold, in a house that now has a family of six in it. If I stop being her, that entry has nothing on either side of it. It does not lead anywhere and nothing leads to it. It becomes a woman who was in a house for one afternoon in nineteen hundred and then was not in the world at all. An orphan. An orphan, Val agrees, and orphans cannot be followed, and I have wanted one of those for a hundred and sixty years and have never been able to afford it. What it costs is that she can never again be Martha Miller anywhere a person can see her, and she says that out loud too, at the table, once, with her hands flat. It is the name I was given in a marriage register in Missouri and it is the name a woman in Dakota knew was false and did not say so about, and it has been mine longer than any other name I have ever had, on either world, including the one I was born with. Her voice is entirely level. And I am going to keep it in a drawer in Hillsboro and answer to Anderson on my own doorstep, and I would like one minute of not being sensible about it before we go on. Kyra gives her four. They move in the last week of February, which in Portland is the worst possible week to move anything, and the table goes in under the front window because that is where the light comes round. Anna and Ada Anderson — Kyra having chosen the first name out of the same page she chose Ada from, fifteen years earlier, and offering no better account of it than she did the first time. It was on the page. It was on the page, Val repeats. It is a good page. The Hawthorne line runs past the end of the street, and Val has been riding it for a year already, out of Clinton, because it is the line that goes where she needs to go. There is a conductor on it with a watch chain across his waistcoat that cost more than the coat and is worn where everybody can see it, and a way of putting two fingers to his cap that he does for every woman on the car and means nothing by. He has taken Val's fare all through the boarder year and he takes it all through the year after, and somewhere in the middle of that he begins to say afternoon, Miss, which is what a man says when he has decided you are a regular and has no intention of finding out anything further — which makes him, Val works out on a wet Thursday in March with her hand on the rail, the only person in the state of Oregon who has seen both of them at two addresses under two arrangements and two surnames and has not noticed a single thing about any of it. She does not tell Kyra for about a week. When she does, Kyra laughs for some time and then says she hopes the man lives to be a hundred, and Val says that on the available evidence he will live to be about sixty-one, and Kyra tells her to get out of the kitchen. The business in Hillsboro takes two days and a clerk, about thirty, with a mustache he has clearly thought about, waxed at the ends in a style that was current when the fair was on and has not been current for some years; he is entirely helpful and asks no questions that are not on the form, and Val gives him nothing that is not on the form either. Martha Miller of that county will pay her assessment through Mr. Crandall of Hillsboro, who will remit it, and who requires a letter and a signature and does not require a face. It takes eleven minutes. Val stands outside afterward in the rain for rather longer than that. The enumerator comes on a Wednesday in the middle of April and his name is Pettibone and he has a schedule with fewer columns on it than the last one, which Val notices and does not remark on. No month of birth this time: she has prepared February for nine years and is not asked for it. Anderson, Anna. Head. Anderson, Ada. Sister. Both single, both born in Pennsylvania of Pennsylvania parents, both able to read and write and speak English, one keeping books and one doing the other things a household requires that a printed schedule has four words for. He asks how long the house has been theirs and Val says since February, and he writes down that they rent, and he is gone in nine minutes. Seventeen documents, Val says, when the door is shut. And one of them is an orphan. And one of them is an orphan, and there are now two women in this state who do not exist and two who do, and the two who do not are the ones with the land. She sits down on the stairs, which she does not do. That is the most complicated thing I have ever arranged and it took fifteen years and I could not explain it to anybody, ever, including us in about forty years. Write it down. I am certainly not writing it down. Then tell me twice a year, says Kyra, and I will hold it, and when you have forgotten which county has which woman in it I will be extremely smug and then I will tell you. In the evening the light comes round to the front window and gets in across the table, and Kyra is doing something to a hem with her feet up on the second chair, and the sun finds the copper in her hair at the ear the way it has found it in every room on two worlds. Sisters, she says, without looking up. Sisters. You didn't fight it. No. You fought it in Maribor and you fought it in Trieste and you fought it outside a printing house in Philadelphia, and last spring you put me in a back room with a rent book, and this year you did not fight it at all. She bites off the thread. Why? And Val, who has the answer and has had it for two hundred and fifty years and is never going to say it, says the other true thing instead, which is the one she has never said either. Because it costs me something to give it to you, she says, and I have worked out that that is not a reason to refuse. Kyra puts the hem down in her lap. That is not an answer to what I asked. It is not. It is a better one. It is a different one, says Val, and it is the whole of what I have this year, and you may ask me again in fifty and I make no undertaking about what you will get. I will ask you again in fifty. I know you will. And Kyra picks the hem back up, and neither of them opens it, and the two of them sit in a rented house on Hawthorne in the first spring of a new arrangement being, on paper and in the mouths of every neighbor on that street, exactly what one of them has wanted since sixteen hundred and eight.

There is a man coming into the shop on Union Avenue about the steel pens, and he has been coming in about the steel pens since March, and by the end of June even the delivery boy has worked out that the man does not care about steel pens. Jo Selby reports all of it at the table with enormous relish and no intention whatsoever of doing anything about any of it. He is a perfectly nice man, and he is forty-four, and he buys a box of nibs a fortnight that he cannot possibly be using, and one of these days I am going to have to be kind to him and it is going to be dreadful. You could marry him, says Kyra. I could marry him. I had one. I know what they cost. Jo puts her fork down. Sixteen years I have had that shop and it is mine and the sign has my name on it, and a man who buys nibs he does not want is a man who has not thought about what happens to the sign. Afterward, with Jo gone and the plates stacked and the light still going at nine the way it does there in June, Kyra says, to the window: When was the last one? The last what? Mine. When was the last one. Val does not answer straight away, and Kyra turns round because the silence has a quality to it. You know. I know. Of course you know. Say it. Sixty-three, says Val. Asa Pruitt, who wrote you four letters in two years and came down twice, and met a widow at Walla Walla, and told you so in the second letter like a man settling an account. Kyra stands there for a moment. Forty-seven years. Forty-seven years. And you? Sixty-two. She says it without having to find it. Elias Mott. Seven months and a week, spring to the end of the year, and you met him exactly once at the mill site and asked me four questions about him afterward and only put three of them. Forty-eight years. Forty-eight years. Kyra comes and sits down opposite her and puts both hands on the table. Say the rest of them. And Val says the rest of them, because she has them, because she has always had everything: Jakob on a mole in Trieste, twenty-five years, long enough that there had been a chair in that house that was his and a way he had of coming in that both of them can still hear; the Venetian off the boat, four months; Matthias the papermaker at Germantown, two years and some, who asked Val to come and live at the mill and was told no immediately and kindly; the man in the seventh year at Philadelphia, four months, who went to Hartford in the spring. Then Oregon: Asa Pruitt, nearly two. Elias Mott, seven months and a week. Then nothing. It takes about six minutes, and when she has finished neither of them says anything for a while, because the shape of it is sitting on the table between them. They get shorter, Kyra says. They get shorter. Twenty-five years, and then two, and then four months, and then a man who lasted a season, and then forty-seven years of nothing and forty-eight years of nothing. She has gone quite pale under the warm cast of her. Val, I have never laid them out. Not once. Three hundred years and I have never put them in a row. I have. Kyra looks up. I laid them out in eighteen sixty-two, Val says, at a table in the Nehalem country, with a letter in front of me, and I told you then that it would be shorter next time and that I had known it since the second one, and I said I would want to talk about it eventually and not that night. You did say that. I said it forty-eight years ago and you said all right, and neither of us has mentioned it since, and I have been carrying an unfinished sentence about the two of us for the better part of half a century. She puts her hands flat. Which I would like on the record, because I have no explanation for it that does me any credit. Nobody decided, Kyra says. No. That is the part. There was no evening. There is no evening where either of us sat down and said we were finished with it. We did not make a rule and we did not have an argument and nothing happened at all, and it has been thirty-one years for you and it stopped without anybody being told. It stopped without either of us noticing, Val says, which is a stronger statement and is the one I would make. Then Kyra does the thing she does, which is to put the false version in the room on purpose so that it can be killed in front of a witness. I want to say the thing that is not true, so that we can both hear how untrue it is and then put it down. That they were all a way of passing the time until this. Val's hand comes flat on the table. No. I know. No, and I want to be entirely clear about it, because it is the sort of thing a person says at forty and goes on believing for four centuries, and it is a lie about all of them and it is a lie about us. Her voice does not move. Jakob Peršin was twenty-five years of your life. He was not a delay. You were not waiting for anything and neither was I, and if either of us ever starts telling it that way we will have taken four centuries of real things and turned them into a corridor. I said it so that you would say that, Val. I am aware of why you said it. Then what is the curve? Val is quiet for a while. There is a thing a man supplied, which neither of us could get from the other, for a very long time. Not the obvious one. The other one — being wanted by somebody who had not already decided about you. Somebody who came across the room. There was no version of that available between the two of us in sixteen hundred and eight, because we had already arrived and neither of us was coming across any rooms. And now? Now you come across rooms, Val says. You have done it about four times this year and you do not know you are doing it, and I have watched you do it since a wagon, and it took me until this evening to work out what it was. Kyra does not say anything at all. That is my account and it is not complete and it is the best I have on nine minutes' notice. The light has finally gone and neither of them has got up to do anything about it, and out on Hawthorne the last car of the evening goes past with its bell. Mine is shorter, Kyra says. Go on. We stopped needing to be somewhere else. She says it to the table and not to Val, which is the only way she could have said it. Every one of them was a place to go, and I do not mean that as a complaint about the men and I do not mean it about you either. I mean there was an hour in the week that was not this house, and I used to need that hour, and I have not needed it since before we came off that lake, and I did not notice the day I stopped. Neither did I, says Val. And on the stairs, later: The pact still stands. The pact stands. If there is ever another one, either way, it gets said the same evening, the way it always has. The same evening. Good. Kyra is two steps up and does not turn round. I do not think there is going to be another one. No. Neither do I. And I would like it understood that neither of us has just promised anything, because a promise about that would be a fence round a field nothing is trying to leave. That is the most romantic sentence you have ever constructed. It is a precise one. It is a fence round a field nothing is trying to leave, Val, I am going to have that on a sampler. She goes up. Val does not, for a while. She sits at the table in the dark with the shape of it still lying there in front of her — twenty-five years and two and four months and nothing and nothing — and does the thing she does with any curve, which is to look at where it goes if you carry it on, and finds that it does not go anywhere, because it has already arrived. Which leaves, as the only remaining question, what a person does about a thing that has already arrived and has never once been marked. She thinks about that for some time. Then she goes up, and says nothing about it to anybody for six weeks.

The Ostranders two doors down have been married twenty-five years on the ninth of August, and there is a photographer on their porch about it, and by noon there is nobody on that block who does not know. Kyra watches the whole operation from the front room window with a cup she has stopped drinking from. He's moved the chair three times. Four. You're at the back of the house. I am at the back of the house, Val agrees, and I can hear a chair. Mrs. Ostrander has put on a collar for it and Mr. Ostrander has put on the expression men put on for a lens, which has not improved in the seventy years Kyra has been watching them do it. Twenty-five years, Kyra says, and they need a man with a box to tell them it happened. Val does not answer that, and Kyra does not notice, because there is nothing in it yet to notice. What happens over the four days that follow is that Val Sorin becomes slightly, unremarkably unavailable. She tells the Hartwells on the Wednesday that the Sunday will not do. She moves a delivery. On the Friday she comes back from the Hawthorne line an hour later than the line accounts for and offers no account of it, and on the Saturday, when Kyra asks in passing whether they are expected anywhere at the end of the week, Val says no rather faster than the question required. Kyra puts the iron down at that one and looks at the back of her for a while. She has been reading that stillness since a mountain: it is not evasion and never has been, it is a woman carrying a decision around under an ordinary face for as long as it takes her to find the words for the first sentence, and the only thing you can do with it is wait, and the only thing you must not do is name it. So Kyra picks the iron back up. Val gets to it on the Saturday evening, in the kitchen, with her back half turned and a cloth in her hands that does not need to be in them. The fourteenth is a Sunday. It is. I have kept it clear. Kyra sits down at the table, which she does not usually do at that hour. Say the rest of it. That is a considerable amount to ask for. It is four days of you moving furniture round the week, and I have watched every one of them and said nothing, which I would like noted, because it nearly killed me. Say the rest of it. Val turns round. Sixty years, she says. The kitchen goes very quiet, and it is not a warm quiet, and both of them know inside two seconds which way this is going to go. No, Kyra says. I am aware of the objection. Then you already know I'm right, so I'll say it once and we can both stop being polite about it. Both hands flat on the table. We do not keep dates. Not one, not ever, not since a wharf. A date is a thing that can be found, Val. It goes in a hand, and then the hand gets copied, and then somebody in an office fifty years from now has two women and a day and enough to start counting with. Yes. Don't yes me, I'm not finished. Her voice has not risen, which is how Val knows it is serious. And I am the one saying it. Me. I put a room on wheels in forty-nine because I could not stand the rule any longer, and I know exactly what that cost us and I have never once asked for it back. So when I tell you that a day in a calendar is different in kind from a wagon, I would like you to believe that I have thought about it. I do believe it. Then why are we standing here. Val comes and sits down opposite her, which takes a moment, because she had not planned to be sitting. In April a man came to that door with a printed schedule and a pen, and I stood in my own hall and told him two ages, and both of them were false, and he wrote them into a federal book that is copied into another book and kept. I know. I was in the pantry being a sister. You were very good at it. Her hands come together on the table. There is a house on this street that is on paper, and two women in it who are on paper, and a year of birth for each of them that is on paper, and every one of those things is a lie that somebody can copy. That is seventeen documents now, and I can tell you where every one of them is. Kyra waits. The fourteenth of August is written nowhere. Not in a book, not in a hand, not in a letter, not in the notebook. Nobody wrote it down at the time because there was nobody there to write it, and I have never written it since, and I have thought about writing it perhaps four hundred times. Val. It is the only thing we own that cannot be found. It cannot be found because it was never put anywhere. And that means it is the one date on this planet that costs us nothing at all, and I would like — and there she stops, having run out of the sentence she built and arrived at the part she could not build in four days. I would like to have it, she says. Kyra looks at her for a long moment. Then she gets up and goes to the window and stands with her arms folded, looking out at a street where the Ostranders' porch is empty and the light has gone that long gold it goes in August. What time, she says. And that is the whole of the concession, and Val takes it exactly as offered and does not say one word about having won anything, because she has not won anything: Kyra has been right for sixty years and is still right, and what Val found in four days of looking was the single thing the rule does not cover, and she went looking for it on purpose, and she is never going to say so. On the Sunday it is hot in a way Portland manages about nine days a year and is never ready for. They have the blind down in the back bedroom by four and the window up behind it, and the light that gets in comes around the edges of the blind and goes across the floor in two long bars the color of the inside of an apricot. There is a basin. There is the good scissors and the bad scissors, and a razor Val stropped that morning in the manner of a woman who had decided several days earlier that it would need stropping. Any word from New Bedford, Kyra says, to the ceiling. Not a thing. Shame. Val goes first, and she had not expected that to be the difficult part and it is the difficult part, because she asked for the whole of this and the asking was expensive and it turns out the receiving is worse. She lies down with her arm over her eyes for the first minute and a half and says nothing whatsoever, and Kyra, kneeling with the bad scissors, lets her have it. You're holding your breath. I am regulating it. You are holding your breath, Val, I can see your ribs doing nothing. She sits back on her heels. Would it help if I talked? It would help if you were quick. It would not help if I were quick, it would help if I were good, and those are different, and one of us has held a scalpel and the other one has not, and I want that said before I start. You have never held a scalpel in your life. I have held a great many things. Not a scalpel. Val. Take your arm off your face. And Val takes her arm off her face. It goes slowly and it is not solemn, which is the single best decision either of them makes that afternoon: Kyra swears at the bad scissors and is made to use the good ones, Val gives one instruction about the angle and is told where she can put it, and somewhere past the middle a fly gets in around the blind and there is an interval of about ninety seconds in which neither of them is capable of anything at all. And then it is quiet, and Kyra has the razor, and the light is coming round the edge of the blind in two bars, and she is working with her head down and her hair pushed back off one shoulder and the copper of it showing where the light finds it, the way it did on a mountain and in a lane and in a wagon bed and has never once stopped doing. I don't get to see you like this often, she says, while she is still working, without looking up. Val does not answer for slightly too long. No, she says. Kyra sets the razor down in the basin, sits back on her heels, and looks at her, the whole length of her, and makes no production of the looking. Do you know what I'm looking at? I have a working idea. Then I'm going to say it anyway, because otherwise you'll assume, and you assume badly. She puts a hand flat on the inside of her knee and leaves it there. When it's grown you're covered. That's the whole of it. There is a woman under there and I know she is under there and I have known for three hundred years, and it is perfectly all right, and I never say a word about it, because there is nothing to say about a thing you cannot see. Kyra. And then there's an afternoon like this one and the cover comes off and you are simply there. All of you. In the light with nothing in front of it. And you are beautiful, Val. Not the face — everybody on two worlds gets the face, and I have had the face since I was eighteen. This. You are beautiful here, and I have thought so since a mountain, and I have wanted to say it out loud in daylight for sixty years and never once had the afternoon to say it in. And Val, who has spent the whole of her life being looked at in ways she arranged in advance, lies there and is looked at in a way she did not. You are making a speech. I am making an observation. You are making a speech and there is a razor in the room. The razor is in the basin, and you are deflecting, and I have watched you deflect on two worlds since I was eighteen years old, and I am not letting you have this one. And Val stops deflecting. Then I will answer it properly, and I am going to have to use my own words, because I do not have yours and I have never once in my life been able to do the thing you have just done. Use them. Your vulva is the most exactly made thing I have ever looked at. Kyra goes very still. I have thought so since the first winter and I have never revised it, Val says, to the ceiling, in the voice she keeps for a reading she trusts. And the difference between us is that I have never had to wait for an afternoon. You have kept yourself short since before there was any reason for it — before the mark, before Missouri, before either of us had a single word for what we were doing — and I do not know when you started and I have never asked. Val — I have not finished. Her voice does not move at all. Which means that for three hundred years you have been there whenever I have looked, and I have looked every single time. Not once. Every time. And I never said one word about it, because saying it would have meant admitting that I had been looking, and I would rather have been shot. Three hundred years. Give or take. You have looked at me three hundred years running and said nothing, and I have been lying here for sixty of them thinking I was the only one in this arrangement doing any looking. I am aware it is absurd. It is not absurd, it is the most you thing I have ever heard in my life, says Kyra, and her eyes have gone out to the rim and she does not do anything about it, and neither of them says a word about that either. For the record, you could have mentioned it. I am mentioning it. You are mentioning it in nineteen ten. I am a deliberate woman, Val says, and Kyra puts her face down on her thigh and laughs until she has to stop. They do Kyra's after that and it takes no time at all and is entirely undramatic, because there is nothing to take back; she keeps it short and always has, and what the good scissors do is tidy a thing that has never been allowed to get untidy — which is the whole difference, and both of them understand it while it is happening. Kyra's band has never really gone away: low, plain, closed, nothing legible, sitting where it has sat since a river, visible to anyone who was ever going to be looking, which is one person. Val's has been gone for sixty years except when it is taken back. Turn toward the window, Kyra says. It is behind the blind. Turn toward the window, Val. And Val turns, and the light comes around the edge of the blind and goes across her, and Kyra Davan looks at a plain closed band sixty years old with the light of the woman wearing it coming up underneath it, in the skin, moving in it the way it moves, and puts two fingers on it and leaves them there and does not say anything for a while. It's doing it. Yes. It always does it. Every time. I forget between times how much it does it and then I look and it's — she stops, and starts again, and gets it out. Nobody else will ever see that. Not one person, ever, on any world, for as long as either of us lasts. No. And I get it about nine times in sixty years. I get ordinary ink, Val says. Kyra's head comes up. I want that said, because you are about to feel something about it and I would rather you felt the correct thing. She is looking at the ceiling, which is where she looks for anything that is going to cost her. Yours does not light. It is a band on a woman and it is exactly as remarkable as a band on a woman, and I have looked at it in daylight and in the dark and in a train in Nebraska, and it does nothing at all. That's — I have not finished. I do not mind. Her voice does not move. I have had four hundred years of being the one who gets the readable version of things and I have never once wanted it more than I wanted this. You got the thing nobody else can see. I got you holding still while somebody put it there. I would not trade, and I have considered it, in order to be sure. Kyra makes a sound she did not authorize. Don't. I'm not going to. You are going to, you are simply arranging it, and I have one more and then you may do whatever you like. The one more is the riverbank. I said I would not put a word on you that anybody else could ever read. You did. I was right. I have gone back over it and I am still right, and if you put me on that riverbank tomorrow I would rule the same way and I would be correct again. She turns her head and looks at her. And I have wished I had done it anyway. The room does not do anything. Not once. Not in a bad year. Regularly, in ordinary hours, for sixty years, I have wished there were a word on you in my hand, and I have known every single time that wishing it was a stupidity, and I have gone on wishing it, and I have never told you, and I am telling you now because I have run out of reasons not to that I can say out loud. Kyra puts her forehead down on Val's hip and stays there. In eighty-six, on that roof, I said a thing about a ring. I remember what you said. And I've not said it since, because it was stupid then and it's stupider now, and a ring is a thing a man buys in a shop with his name in the ledger, and we cannot have one, and I know all of that, and I am not — You still want it. Kyra stops. Twenty-four years, Val says. You said it once and then you put it down where I could see it and you have not picked it up since, and you have wanted it every day of those twenty-four years, and you have decided several thousand times not to mention it again in order to spare me having to say no. How long have you — Since about the second year. She gets her hand into the dark of her hair. I am not going to pretend I can give it to you. I can tell you that I know what you want and that I have known for a long time and that I have never once thought it was stupid, and that is the whole of what I have, and it is not enough, and I am saying it anyway. And Kyra Davan, who has been loud about everything since she was nine years old, does not say anything at all for a while, and does not need to, because Val can feel perfectly well what her face is doing. Three weeks, Kyra says, eventually. What is? You. Back to where nobody can find it. She lifts her head. Three weeks, maybe a day or two over. I've watched it happen before. You have counted it. Of course I've counted it. You count everything in the universe except the one thing and I have to take up the slack. That is the first time in three hundred and eighty years that anybody has accused me of insufficient counting, Val says, and Kyra laughs, up out of the middle of her, the kind the Ostranders could have identified through two walls. And then Val reaches up and gets her by the back of the neck, which is from a street in Trieste and has not needed a reason since, and brings her down, and that is the end of the talking for some while. There is no hurry in any of it — there never has been and there is less than usual now, because the day is theirs and was cleared four days in advance by a woman who clears nothing, and both of them know it, and neither of them says so. Kyra kisses her slowly and without any part of it being automatic, which has been true since a hut, and takes her time about the mouth and the jaw and the throat, and then goes down the whole length of her and takes a great deal longer than that, because she has three weeks of not being able to and she intends to spend the afternoon like a woman who knows what the calendar is going to do. Val, who decided on Wednesday what was going to happen on Sunday and carried it under an ordinary face through four days of moving the week around, stops being the woman who planned it somewhere in the first few minutes, and is gone after that. The light comes round the edge of the blind and goes across the bed in two bars, and moves as the afternoon moves, and it is in her hands and at her wrists and under the jaw below the ear and, for a long stretch of that afternoon, everywhere at once, all the way through, and Kyra watches it the entire time and does not say a word about it, because saying it is not what it is for. Afterward the light outside has gone and the room is the blue it goes in August at that hour, and somebody is calling a dog three houses down, and the fly has got out or given up. They'll have that photograph on the wall by Thursday. They will. Twenty-five years. Twenty-five years, Val agrees, and a man with a box, and Kyra starts laughing again and has to stop, because she has been laughing on and off for about an hour and there is a limit. The pale of Val's hair has come entirely loose over the course of the afternoon and is across both of them and under one of Kyra's arms, and will be objected to at some point, and is not going to be objected to now. June, Kyra says. What about it? That is when you started. Not the Ostranders and not the fourteenth. The evening you finished a sentence you began in sixty-two and then sat down there in the dark and did not come up for an hour. Her eyes are shut. Six weeks, Val. Six weeks, Val agrees, and I did not have a sentence for any of it until about the Wednesday. Same day next year, Kyra says. Not a question. Val does not answer straight away, and when she does it is the flat, procedural voice she uses for the things she has already decided and has been waiting all day to be asked. I have kept it clear, she says. And they lie there in a rented house on Hawthorne with the blind still down and a street outside that knows them as two sisters and will go on knowing them as two sisters for as long as it is useful, and neither of them moves, and neither of them sleeps for a good while, and at some point without either of them deciding to they lace.

The men come in October and are in the house eleven days, and when they have gone there is a wire run along the picture rail in every room downstairs and a fixture in the middle of each ceiling and a brass switch by every door. Val pays them, and checks the work, and asks two questions the foreman cannot answer and one he can, and sees them off the step. Then she goes back inside and does not come out for a while. Kyra comes up from the shop at about five with the rain on her and finds the front room lit — and the hall, and the kitchen, and the little room nobody uses, and the landing, and the stair. Every fixture in the house is on. It is not yet dark outside. She stands in the doorway with her hat in her hand and looks down the length of it, at a house with the light of about nine lamps in it and not one lamp anywhere, and at a woman standing in the middle of the front room with her hands at her sides doing absolutely nothing at all. What Val has done, over the course of about forty minutes and entirely alone, is go from room to room putting her thumb on every brass switch in the building and then standing in the doorway of each room for a moment afterward. She has put them off again. Then she has put them on again. She has done the front room four times. There is nobody in the house and nobody has seen any of it and she has not been able to make herself stop, and by the fourth time she understood perfectly well what she was doing, and went on doing it. Here is the thing she does not say. For three hundred and three years on this planet she has put out a light before she was seen by it, and lit one when she wanted to be, and made that calculation every single evening of every single year in every room she has ever slept in, and it has cost her something so small and so continuous that she stopped being able to feel it somewhere around the reign of a king she never met. A flame is a decision: it has to be fetched, and struck, and shielded, and put out, and every one of those is a moment in which a woman must have already known what she wanted. A brass switch is not a decision. It is a thumb. So she stands in the front room of a rented house on Hawthorne and puts the dark on and off with her thumb, four times, like a child, because for three centuries the dark has been a thing that happened to her and now it is a thing she has. Kyra hangs her hat up. She goes through to the kitchen past all of it, and puts the kettle over, and says something about the price of the rain, and does not ask. She has worked out about a third of it standing in that doorway, and she will work out rather more of it over the next few years and never gets the whole way, and at no point in the four centuries that follow does she ever put the question to that woman, because she decided in a doorway in the rain in October that it was not hers to ask for. That evening she puts two of them off on her way through, because nine is absurd, and leaves the rest. Val notices, and says nothing, and sleeps extremely well. Jo comes for dinner in November and stands in the hall and says that it is very bright. It is bright, Val agrees. They have done the church. They have done the church badly. There is a fixture over the third pew that is going to come down inside five years. You have been counting fixtures in a church. I have been counting fixtures everywhere, says Val, which is true, and which Kyra hears from the kitchen and files. The circular comes in the autumn of the year after that, in a bundle from the shop, four months late and with a corner off: four pages out of Cambridge in Massachusetts about twenty-five variable stars in a small cloud in the southern sky, saying that the ones that take longer to go round are brighter, and that the relation between the two is regular enough to write down. Val reads it at the table with her thumb keeping the page and does not move for some time. What, says Kyra. They are all in the same cloud. Is that good? It is the entire thing. They are all in the same cloud, which means they are all at about the same distance, which means that when one of them looks brighter than another it is brighter and not nearer. She turns the page over. Which means that if you know how long one of them takes, you know how bright it truly is. And if you know how bright a thing truly is, and you can see how bright it looks — and she stops. Go on, Kyra says. No. Kyra lets that sit for about a minute, which is her limit. Why not? Because there is no zero in it. She puts the circular flat on the table and turns it round so that Kyra can see the column of figures, which means nothing to Kyra and which Val knows means nothing to her and turns round anyway. She has the relation. She does not have the scale. Nobody knows how far away that cloud is, so nobody knows how bright any of them actually is, so every figure in here is one of these against another one of these and none of them is against anything real. Her voice is entirely level. It is a ruler with the marks on and no numbers. A number and no scale, says Kyra. Val looks up. Yes. You said that to me in a kitchen with plums in it. I did, and I have been in that position exactly once, and I did not enjoy it, and it took forty years to come out of it. How long does this one take? To come out of it? To get its numbers. Somebody has to get the distance to one of them by some entirely different method. One. That is all it needs. One of them close enough to be got at another way, and then the whole column has numbers on it and so does every cloud anybody ever points the thing at. And then? And then it is a ruler, Val says, and folds the circular, and puts it in the box, and does not say the next sentence, which she has had in her mouth for about four minutes and which she has no intention of letting out into a kitchen on Hawthorne on a wet evening in nineteen twelve. There is one other thing in it and she goes back to it twice. The four pages are signed by the director of the observatory, as all of them are, and in the second paragraph there is a sentence saying that the work was prepared by Miss Leavitt. Prepared by. Val sits with that for a while, in a house she holds the lease of under a name that is not hers, in a country where she has spent sixteen years arranging for no document anywhere to be able to find her. What, says Kyra, from the stove. A woman has done a piece of work, and it is going to be the most useful four pages printed on this planet this year, and her name is in it once, in the middle, in a sentence that says she prepared it. Will anybody know? Some of them will know. She puts the box away. And in four hundred years they will all know, and it will not be the smallest use to her, and I am the only person in this hemisphere who is certain of both halves of that sentence. Afterward Kyra comes and sits on the arm of the chair with her hair down, still damp, and the light off the ceiling fixture comes down on the whole of it at once and finds the copper everywhere at the same time instead of at the one place above the ear — a thing no lamp on two worlds has ever managed, and which Val has been noticing since October and has not mentioned. You have gone quiet. I am looking at something. At what? And Val, who has spent three hundred years measuring how brightly she was prepared to be seen, and who has just read four pages explaining that the only way to find out how far away anything is, is to know how brightly it truly shines, says: Nothing. Leave the light on.

Kyra knows on a Tuesday in the second week of September and does not say anything about it until the Friday, which is three days longer than she has ever managed before. It's started. Val puts the pen down. When. Tuesday. I was on the car and I knew on the car, and I have been checking since Tuesday to see whether I would stop knowing, and I have not. Val goes and gets the notebook and turns to the back of it, where there is a column that has been running for three hundred and eight years and has nothing in it but figures. She looks at it for a second. The twenty-ninth, she says. It is not dramatic, and that is worth saying plainly, because it never has been and it is not going to start. What it is, is about three weeks in which Kyra Davan is slightly not herself in a way nobody in the world can see: she sleeps badly and then sleeps enormously, she is hot in a cold room, she wants salt and then does not want anything, there is a fortnight somewhere in the middle when everything anybody says is very slightly too loud, and a morning near the end when she stands in the kitchen and cannot work out what she came in for and stands there long enough to be found. And once, usually, for something under a second, the gold comes up in her eyes when there is nothing whatsoever in the room to bring it. That is all there is to it. Twenty-nine times. I have never checked, Val says, on about the ninth day. Checked what? You. She is at the window with her hands in her sleeves. There is no instrument. There has never been an instrument. There was no instrument on that mountain and there is none on this street, and there is not going to be one in either of our lifetimes, and I want you to understand what that means about what I have been doing since sixteen hundred and eighteen. Kyra, who is lying on the sofa being slightly not herself, opens one eye. Say it. I have twenty-nine entries in a column, Kyra, and every one of them came out of your mouth. Kyra sits up. That is the whole record. There is no other source. I did not measure it, I did not observe it, I have never once been able to detect a single thing about any of them from the outside, and the flicker is a second long and I have missed about half of them. I have a column of twenty-nine figures in my own hand and the entire basis of it is that a woman told me. And you wrote them down anyway, says Kyra. I wrote them down the way I would write down a reading, says Val, which is what I have been meaning to tell you for about a week and have not been able to get into a sentence. I did not write them down as things you said. I wrote them down as data. I have been treating you as an instrument since the second peak and it did not occur to me until this month that that is a thing I have never done for any other person on either world. Kyra does not say anything for a while, which in her is the equivalent of somebody else standing up. Nobody has ever done that. I am aware. No, you are not aware, because you have been on the other side of it your whole life and you do not know what it is like over here. Her hands are flat on her knees. I have told people things about my own body since I was fourteen years old. Every one of them received it as a report from a person who might be mistaken. Not unkindly. Just — as a thing to be weighed, and mostly not weighed very heavily, and I have watched a great many faces do the arithmetic while I was still talking. Yes. And you put it in a column. I put it in a column, Val says. Why? Because you have never once been wrong, and I stopped testing the interval a very long time ago, and I would like that on the record as the single most unscientific thing I have ever done and the only one I have never regretted. Kyra puts her head back and laughs, badly, because she is in the fortnight where everything is too loud including herself. Don't make me laugh this week. I am not making you do anything. You are being extremely charming at a woman who cannot currently be in the same room as a door that closes too hard, and I would like it noted that it is working and that I resent it. The flicker comes on about the seventeenth day, in the kitchen, in the afternoon. Val is at the table and happens to be looking up, which she has been for about half of one peak in every three since the seventeen hundreds, and it goes across Kyra's eyes and is gone, the way a thing goes across water. Neither of them says anything for a second. There, says Kyra. I saw it. You never see it. I see about one in six and I have said so every time, Val says, and writes it in the column, and puts the date beside it, and underlines nothing, because there is nothing to underline. Then they have the same conversation they have every eleven years, which is short and has not changed in three centuries and is entirely wrong, and neither of them will find that out for a very long time. It is less than it was. It is not less than it was, Val says, it is exactly what it was, it is simply that we are used to it. It is less than it was on Sethal. That it certainly is. Whatever this planet did to us, it did that one kind thing, and I have been grateful for it for three hundred years and I have never once said so out loud, and I am saying it now because I am in the week where I say things. It is a mercy, Val agrees. It is the only one we got. And they leave it there, the way they have left it twenty-eight times before. It goes off in the first week of October, the way it always does, which is to say that on a Thursday Kyra wakes up and is simply herself again and could not have told anybody the hour it stopped. She comes down and stands in the kitchen doorway in the early light with her hair unpinned down her back, dark and heavy and with the one place above the ear where the sun finds the copper, and looks at the woman who has been feeding her salt for three weeks without ever once being asked to. Put the twenty-ninth down as finished, she says. What day? I don't know what day. Then I shall put down Thursday, says Val, and it will be wrong by a day or two in one direction, and it will go in the column beside the other twenty-eight, and in about four hundred years somebody is going to look at that page and think it was kept by a very careful person. It was kept by a very careful person. It was kept, Val says, by a woman writing down what her — and she stops. Kyra waits in the doorway with the sun coming round. — what she was told, Val says, and writes Thursday, and does not look up, and Kyra lets her have it and goes and puts the kettle over.

They put a hundred beds into the new auditorium in the middle of October and fill them in two days, and somebody from the parks bureau brings cut flowers in on the second morning, which everybody afterward agrees was either the best or the worst decision anybody made that autumn. The building is a year and a bit old. It was built for singers. There is a booking book in the office with the autumn written out in it in a good hand, and by the third week somebody has drawn a line through every date on it and written one word across the page. Kyra reads that page once, standing in the office doorway with her sleeves rolled, and does not mention it to anybody for nine years. They have the argument in the kitchen on the twelfth, the day after the city shuts. I am going, Kyra says. I know you are going. Then say the rest of it, because you have been standing at that window for an hour and you are not looking at anything. Val turns round. Boston, she says. They have been here before and they both know the shape of it: a city with something in it, and two women who go into the houses, and forty of them in a summer, and at the end of it forty families who have all noticed the same thing and have not yet said it to each other. It is not Boston. Boston was nine houses a day for eleven months and everybody knew our faces. It is worse than Boston. Boston did not have a newspaper that came out the same day and a building with four hundred people in it. So what do we do? Sit here? No, says Val. What they do is work out a rule, at the table, in about forty minutes, with Val doing most of the talking and Kyra putting the holes in it. Nights. Both of them, on the same nights, in the same ward, where the staff changes every week and nobody has time to form a view about anybody. No houses. No going out to the same family twice. Nothing that makes either of them the person who is sent for. And the part Val says last and says flatly, because there is no way to say it that is not what it is: If either of us is any good at it in front of a doctor who is going to remember, we stop being good at it. Val. I know. I have known since a cholera summer and I have never found a way round it, and I am not going to find one this month. So they carry water and turn people and do what can be done in a room where mostly nothing can be, and they do it competently and without distinction, and once in that whole autumn Val puts her hand on a boy's chest and says a sentence to a young doctor that saves him, and the doctor is twenty-six and exhausted and does not remember it afterward, which Val checks twice. Neither of them sickens. Four hundred and thirty people come through that building and nobody at all notices the two women on nights, because that is what a city in an epidemic is for: it is the only condition under which nobody is looking at anybody. It is a little after four in the morning on the last day of October. The ward is as quiet as it gets, which is not quiet — a man two rows over has been going for six hours and is not going to stop, somebody at the far end is talking to a person who is not in the building, and the flowers were changed that afternoon and are the only thing in four hundred feet of that room that smells of anything but carbolic. They are sitting against the wall with their backs to the boards and their legs out, in the ten minutes. Kyra has her head tipped back and her eyes shut, her hair out of its pins somewhere in the small hours and over one shoulder, and under the working lights it is not black, whatever anybody in that hall would have said; it has the copper in it at the ear the way it has in every room on two worlds, and Val looks at it for rather longer than she meant to and then looks down the ward. Tell me about the second room, Kyra says. Val does not stiffen. She has not stiffened at that sentence in a very long time. Trieste, she says. Trieste. And she gives her the paragraph. I was taken out of the room where you were a little after four on the afternoon of the second day, and I was brought back to it on the fourth. In the interval I was held below, in a room on the court side with one window. There were four men in it. Two of them I had seen upstairs and two of them I had not. Nothing was done to me that left a mark, and I was not asked one question about you at any point. I was asked the same eleven questions in a different order for two days and I gave the same answers to all of them and none of the answers were true. At the end of it they brought me up and put me in the room, and you were asleep, and I sat down against the door. That is the whole of it. It is accurate and it is complete and there is nothing in it that you do not now have. The same words — not approximately the same; the same, in the same order, with the same small pause after and two of them I had not, the way it was the first time she ever gave it and every time since. Kyra does not open her eyes. Thank you. You are welcome. The man two rows over goes on. A nurse comes down the aisle with a basin and goes back up it again. I have worked something out, Val says. Now? I worked it out about four seconds ago and if I do not say it now I will arrange it for a fortnight and then say a worse version. Kyra opens one eye. Go on. You did not ask me because you wanted to know. No. You have never asked because you wanted to know. I have been assuming for a very long time that you were still looking for a thing that was not in it, and going away without it, and coming back. She is looking down the ward and not at her. And I have been wrong about that, and I have been wrong about it for centuries, and the reason I know I have been wrong is that you asked me in this room, tonight, of all the rooms and all the nights there have ever been. Kyra sits up a little. Say the rest. There are a hundred beds in this hall and every single thing in it has changed since the flowers came. Everything here is different at four in the morning from how it was at ten. That is what the whole building is. And there is exactly one thing on this planet that comes out the same every time it is asked for, in the same order, with the pause in it, and you have known where it was since before there was a road up that hill. Kyra does not say anything for a while. That is it. That is exactly it and I could not have told you that. I know you could not. I have been doing it for four hundred years and I have never once known why I was doing it. I am aware, Val says, and I want it understood that I did not work it out either, until tonight, in a hall full of dying people, which is not a credit to me. And then, after a moment, the offer. I will give it to you. Give me what? The paragraph. Without being asked. On a bad week, when I can see that you need it — I could simply say it, and you would not have to put the sentence together and get it out of your mouth, which I have watched you do a great many times and which has never once been easy for you. Kyra turns her head and looks at her properly for the first time in about two hours. No, she says. It would cost you less. It would cost me every part of it. Her hand is flat on the boards between them. If you give it to me it is a thing you have decided I need. If I ask for it, it is a thing I went and got. There is a difference and it is the entire difference, Val, and I have had four hundred years of people deciding what I needed and handing it to me, and not one of those was worth a tenth of this. I had not thought of that. No. You would not have. It was a good offer, says Val. It was the best offer anybody has ever made me, Kyra says, and I am never going to take it, and I would like it made again in about a hundred years so that I can refuse it a second time. The ten minutes are up. They get off the wall. Going back down the aisle Val says, to the middle distance, in the voice she uses for readings: The man in the fourth bed will be alive on Friday. The woman beside him will not. Don't tell me that. You asked me not to in the second week and I have not, and I am telling you now because I have been carrying about ninety of them and I would like to put four of them down. Then put them down. She puts four of them down, walking, quietly, in about nine seconds, and Kyra takes them the way she takes everything and does not flinch at any of it, and they go back to work. The city opens again in the middle of November and shuts again in December, and neither of them ever goes back to that building for any purpose whatsoever until the spring of forty-eight, when the water comes through the railroad fill and they turn it into a place for people to sleep. On the last night, walking home in the dark with the mask still round her neck and the first proper cold of the year coming off the river, Kyra says: Four hundred and thirty through that hall. Through the hall. I do not have the city. Don't get the city. I already have the city, Val says. I have had it since the fourth of November and I have not said it and I am not going to — and Kyra puts her arm through hers, out in the open, on a public street, which they do not do, and does it anyway, and the two of them walk home like that in the dark.

They move the enumeration to January that year, which nobody expected and which Val takes as a personal inconvenience, because it means a man on the step in the second week of a wet winter instead of a man on the step in April. He is called Roy Stickney and he is cold and he does not want to be there. Anderson, Anna, forty-six. Anderson, Ada, forty-three. Sisters, single, renting, Pennsylvania throughout, English in the house, one keeping books and one not keeping anything a schedule has a word for. He writes it all down without lifting his head once, and asks what the mother tongue is and writes English, and goes next door. Forty-six, Kyra says, when the door is shut. Forty-six. He did not look at you. He did not look at either of us, says Val, and I have been thinking about that for ten years and I have come to a conclusion I do not like. She sits down on the stairs with the cold still coming off her. In nineteen hundred I spent two days working out what a clerk could do with two sheets of paper. I was frightened of the paper. I have been frightened of the paper since Boston and I was wrong about which way round it goes. Say it properly. Nobody reads a schedule. Nobody. It goes in a building and it sits there and in a hundred years a person with a reason will get at it, and I have spent twenty years building against that person and she is not the danger. The danger is Mrs. Ostrander. Ellen Ostrander does not know how old you are. Ellen Ostrander knows exactly how long we have been on this street, because she watched the cart come, and she has watched her own hands for ten years while she was doing it. She puts her elbows on her knees. A clerk in a basement has a document. A woman two doors along has ten years of Sundays, and she does not need a figure, and she is not going to write anything down, and one day she is going to say something to her sister that neither of us will ever hear. Kyra sits down on the step above her. So we go. Not this year. Not next. Val is quiet for a second. But we go, and it will be sooner than I have been telling myself, and I wanted it said in a year when neither of us has to do anything about it. The other business that winter is Einstein, who has been in every newspaper in the English-speaking world since the middle of November and shows no sign of getting out of them. Kyra brings it up because the man in the shop brought it up and because it has got as far as the funny papers, which is where she judges all such things to have properly arrived. Light bends. Light bends. And it was a fellow with a photographic plate on an island off Africa who settled it in about four minutes. It was two expeditions, a great deal of cloud, and an argument that is not over, says Val, and yes. She explains it at the table over about half an hour, badly at first and then well, because she has read it twice through in the quarterly and has been turning it over since the autumn: that a heavy thing bends the path of light near it, and that the sun has now been caught doing so; and that the rest of it, the earlier part, says that a clock carried very fast does not agree with a clock left standing, and that neither of them is wrong. Kyra puts her chin on her hand. Say that again. Two clocks. You take one of them a great distance at a great speed and bring it back, and it does not read the same as the one that stayed on the shelf, and the difference is real and is not an error in the clock. Then which one is the right time? Both of them, Val says. That is the entire scandal and it is why the man is in the funny papers. Kyra is quiet for a moment, turning her cup. Us, she says. No. You have not thought about it. I thought about it in November, for about an evening, which is longer than it deserved. She is entirely level, in the flat voice she uses for a reading she has checked twice and does not intend to check again. It is about carrying a clock. It is about a thing that goes, at a speed, through a distance, and every one of those words has to be in it or the arithmetic does not start. And we went. We did not go. That is what a fold is. She puts her hand flat. There was no crossing. There is no distance in the record because no distance was covered; the ship's own account of it is eleven lines and the interval it gives is nothing at all, and I have had those eleven lines since seventeen hundred and I can still only read a third of them and that third is not in dispute. And after? After we were here. And time here — Time here is time. We are standing still on a world going about its business at the speed a world goes, and so are they, and there is nothing in any of this that touches two people sitting in chairs a long way from each other. The only displacement we ever took is the one that happened in the fold, and I measured that in sixteen hundred and eight with a stick and a shadow and two years of somebody else's almanac, and it has been in the notebook ever since, and it has not moved. You are certain. I am as certain of that as I am of anything I have got, Val says — and she is, and she is wrong, and there is nothing whatever on that planet or in that century that could have told her so. The other thing comes in the autumn, four months late, in a bundle from the shop: there has been a meeting in Washington in April at which two men stood up in front of the National Academy and disagreed, in public, at length, about how big everything is. One of them said it was all one enormous system and that the spiral things were clouds inside it. The other said the spiral things were not inside anything — that they were systems of their own, at distances nobody has the equipment to state, and that the one in Andromeda is the nearest of them. Val reads that sitting up in a chair with her thumb on the page and does not move for about four minutes. Which one is right? Kyra says, from the doorway. Nobody knows. That is what the meeting was. Two men in a room with the same photographs coming to opposite conclusions and going home, and the account of it in here is four pages long and does not come down on either side. What would settle it? A distance. One distance, to one of them, got properly. If it is inside, it is near. If it is outside, the figure will be a thing nobody on this planet has ever written down. She turns the page back and reads the paragraph again. And there is a woman in Cambridge who published a way of getting distances eight years ago and could not finish it because she had no zero, and there is no line in this article about her, and I would like to state for the room that those two things belong together and that not one man at that meeting said so. Kyra comes and stands behind the chair. You have a direction, she says. I have a direction. Since the hull. Since the hull, and I have had it for a hundred and thirty-one years, and it points at a smudge, and I have never in all that time known whether the smudge is a cloud in the next field or a thing so far off that saying the number out loud would be indecent. She puts the journal down on her knee. And two men have now stood up in a hall in Washington and had that exact argument in front of an audience, and neither of them has the faintest idea that there is a woman in Oregon with a bearing. Does it help? No. Val. It does not help. It is not a step and it is not the beginning of anything and I am not going to sit in this chair and pretend otherwise. She closes the journal. It is an argument about what kind of question I have been asking for a hundred and thirty-one years. That is all it is. And they will settle it, and it will take them some years, and when they do I will know which kind it was. She puts the journal in the box with the rest of it and does not take it out again that year. Later, with the lamp on and the rain doing what it does there in October, Kyra sits on the arm of the chair with her hair loose from the day and the light coming down on all of it at once and finding the copper everywhere, and Val looks at her for a while and does not say the thing she is thinking, which is not about Washington. Ask me in five years, Val says. About the smudge? About the smudge. I will forget. You will not forget, says Val, and neither will I, and we will both pretend the other one has, which is a thing this household has been doing for three hundred years and is extremely good at.

It comes in a newspaper, which after thirty years of journals four months late out of London and Cambridge is the part Val cannot get over. There has been a meeting in Washington over the turn of the year: a man out at a telescope in California has found the right kind of star in the spiral in Andromeda — the kind that goes round on a schedule, the kind out of the four pages in the box — and has watched it long enough to time it, and has therefore been able to say how bright it truly is, and has compared that with how bright it looks. The paper has it in seven column inches on an inside page, under a headline about the size of the universe, next to an advertisement for a hat. Val reads it standing in the hall with her coat on. Then she reads it again, sitting down, without having taken the coat off. Kyra comes out of the kitchen and stops in the doorway, because there is a way that woman goes still and it is not the same as being interested. Say it. Nine hundred thousand, Val says. Nine hundred thousand what? Years. Of light. That is what is between us and it. She gets the coat off eventually and puts the paper flat on the table and does not sit at it so much as stand over it. It is outside. That is the first thing and it is settled now, or it will be inside two years, because this is not an argument, this is a measurement, and the man has the plates. It is not a cloud in our own system. It is a system, and it is not ours. And the number is how far. The number is how far. She puts one finger on the column of type. It is not a distance in the way a road is a distance. It is the time it takes light to get here. Nine hundred thousand years of it, at the only speed there is. Kyra sits down. Is it right? It is approximately right and it is almost certainly too small, says Val, which I am saying in this kitchen and would not say in print, and I will not know why I think that for a long time. She is quiet for a while after that, standing over the table with her hands on it. There is a thing that follows, and I am going to say it once and then I would like to not say it again. Say it. Nothing can ever be sent. Kyra does not move. Not by us and not by them and not by anybody. Not a signal, not a light, not a word. If Genie stood on the sea wall tonight with the whole of the Assembly behind her and every instrument on that world pointed at us and shouted, it would arrive here in nine hundred thousand years, and there will be nothing here to arrive at. Her voice does not move at all. That is not a difficulty about equipment. There is no equipment. It is the shape of the thing. We knew we could not get back, Kyra says. We knew we could not get back. We did not know we could not be spoken to. Val takes her hands off the table. I have been carrying a thing since about the fourth year here and I have never said it out loud because it was too stupid to say, and I am going to say it now because it has just been taken off me. I have thought, on and off, for three centuries, that if they ever did work out where we had gone, there might one day be something in the sky that was meant for us. Oh, Val. I know what it is. I have known what it was every single time I have thought it. She sits down at last. It is not available. It was never available. It has not been available since before there was anybody on either world to want it, and I have been carrying it since sixteen hundred and eleven, and a man in California has just taken it out of my hands with a photographic plate. Kyra lets that sit for a long moment, and then says the other thing, because she got there while Val was still talking and has been waiting to be sure. Then what have I been looking at? Val looks up. From the porches. From every porch on this continent. What is it I have been looking at? Light that left before there was anybody. Say it properly. It is not home. It has never once been home. It is a picture of that place from nine hundred thousand years ago, and everything in it is gone, and the thing we have both been standing on steps looking at since sixteen hundred and seven is a photograph taken before either of our species had a language. The kettle has boiled at some point and neither of them has gone near it. It does not change it, Kyra says. It changes all of it. It changes it for you. She is not being unkind and it does not come out unkind. Val, I have never had a number. I have had a smudge over the roof of whatever building I was standing next to, and I have looked at it in nine countries, and I have never once thought I was seeing my daughter. I was looking at the direction. That is all it ever was and the direction has not moved. Val does not say anything for a moment. That is a better position than mine. It is not better. It is simply what I had. She reaches across and takes two of her fingers. You had the other one and you have had it since the fourth year, and it has just been taken, and I would like you to have the afternoon about it rather than the eleven minutes you were planning on. Val has the afternoon. What she does with the evening is arithmetic, because that is what she does with an evening. Eighty-five, she says, at about nine. What about it? The star. In the spiral, in eighteen eighty-five, that came up out of nothing and went away again, and we stood in a field at the lake and looked at it and I wrote four lines about it and put the notebook away. She has the notebook open now. It was faint. It was a thing you needed a glass for and half the people who looked did not see it. And? And if that spiral is nine hundred thousand years away, then whatever that was, it was not a small event that looked small. It was an event that put out as much light in a few weeks as the entire system around it. She sits back. There is no such thing. There is nothing in anybody's catalogue that does that. I have just proved that a thing I watched from a field with my own eyes cannot have happened. So one of them is wrong. One of them is wrong or there is a kind of event nobody has a name for, says Val, and I am not going to find out which in this house. She goes down to the library on the Thursday about something else and comes back with it anyway. Kyra knows before the door is properly shut. What. Miss Leavitt is dead, Val says. She takes her hat off and puts it on the table instead of the hook. Three years ago. December of twenty-one. She was fifty-three and it was in four lines in the back of a bulletin and I have been in that reading room perhaps forty times since and have never once looked her up, because there was no reason to look her up, because she had done her piece and I had it in a box. Val — The man in California could not have done any of it without her. Not one part. He needed the relation and somebody had to get the zero and then it was a ruler, exactly the way I said in this kitchen in nineteen twelve. She sits down without taking her coat off for the second time that month. Three years. She missed it by three years. She was fifty-three, and I am three hundred and ninety-five. Kyra comes and stands behind her and puts both hands flat on her shoulders and leaves them there. The lamp is on the sideboard and the light comes across at the level of the table, and it gets into the pale of Val's hair where it has come loose, and Kyra looks down at the top of that head for a while and does not say any of the four things she has ready. Do not tell me it is what happens, Val says, to the table. I was not going to. Everybody tells me it is what happens. It has been what happens for three hundred years and I have got extremely good at hearing it. I know, says Kyra. I was going to say that she got the hard half and somebody else got the easy half and the hard half was hers, and that you are the only person in this hemisphere who knows it, and that you have been the only person who knows a thing about four hundred times now and it has never once got easier. Val puts her hand up and holds one of the hands on her shoulder. Late, with the paper still on the table and the seven column inches and the hat advertisement beside them, Kyra says: What have you got now? A speed, from a man in seventeen twenty-eight. A bearing, from the hull. A distance to a star that is not the right star. A way of reading what a thing is made of out of its light. She folds the paper along the crease it came with. And a distance to the smudge, which is nine hundred thousand years of light and is the largest figure I have ever had occasion to write down. And what does that give you? Val is quiet for a moment. It gives me the size of the problem. That is all it gives me. I have spent a hundred and thirty-six years not knowing whether I was looking at a difficulty or an impossibility, and now I know which, and knowing which is not the same as being any nearer. She puts the paper in the box with the four pages from Cambridge and shuts the lid on both of them.

By the spring of that year it is over, in the way those things are over, which is that the men who did it are still in the street and are now saying they never much cared for it. The law went the summer before: nine judges in Washington read the thing and were unanimous about it, and that was the end of a measure voted in by a hundred and fifteen thousand people in this state four years earlier, and which had been, on its face, about where a child went to school. Val has followed the whole of it in the papers, which is to say she has cut out nine articles and put them in the box and has not been able to say why. What it was like, for the people it was about, they mostly learn from Jo — baptized into it and lapsed out of it and gone back to it after her husband died, in the manner of a great many people, and none of that was ever a subject at that table until the autumn of twenty-two, when it became one. She is fifty-one by then and has run a shop on Union Avenue for a quarter of a century and has put three delivery boys through their schooling. A man I have sold paper to since nineteen hundred and three crossed to the other side of the street, she says, in November of that year, at the table, with her hands round a cup. Not a bad man. I want that understood. He crossed the street and he did not look back and I watched him do it and I did not say anything to him about it then and I am not going to now. And nothing whatsoever happens to Anna and Ada Anderson. That is the shape of it, and Val says so out loud, once, in the kitchen, in the January after the law passed. It does not touch us. No. It is about children, and it is about a church, and there is not one word in it about two women in a house, and there was never going to be. Her hands are flat. Nobody has thought of us. That is all the protection we have ever had. Not the papers and not the names. Nobody has ever thought of us. Then why have you cut out nine articles? Val does not answer that for about a week. When she does answer it she answers it properly, standing at the window with her hands in her sleeves, in the way she has been answering things since a mountain. Because a hundred and fifteen thousand people put a household on a ballot. They did not put us on it. They put somebody on it. And what I have watched for four years is not a danger to us, it is a machine being built and tested and found to work, and the fact that it was pointed somewhere else this time is not a fact about the machine. Val. I have not slept properly since the autumn of twenty-two and I have had no right to a single hour of it, because nothing has happened to me, and I would like that said in this kitchen and then I would like to stop saying it. Say it as often as you like, says Kyra. Once is sufficient. The thirtieth comes in September, five days later in the month than the twenty-ninth, and Val writes it in the column and does not remark on the five days because she stopped testing the interval a very long time ago. It is an ordinary one until the second week. Then it is the fortnight, which is the part where everything anybody says is very slightly too loud, and this time the fortnight lands in a city where people have spent four years listening to each other. It happens in the shop on a Tuesday afternoon with four people in it. A man at the counter is telling Jo Selby, pleasantly, at length, and with no idea that he is doing anything at all, that the trouble with the school business had been that it went too far, and that the underlying feeling had been sound enough, and that he had always said so. Jo is wrapping a parcel and saying nothing, which is the only thing available to her and which she is doing very well. And Kyra Davan, at the shelf, in the second week of the thirtieth peak, with everything in the room about a third too loud and her own pulse in her ears, opens her mouth. What comes out is, Anna. Val is already crossing the floor — she has been watching that counter for about ninety seconds and started moving on the word underlying — and she gets to the shelf and puts a hand flat between Kyra's shoulder blades and says, in a voice pitched for the whole shop and containing nothing at all: The four-thirty. We will not get it. And Kyra says, No, we will not, and picks up the box she came for, and the two of them go out past the man at the counter, who does not stop talking. They get to the corner before either of them says anything. What was it going to be? Val says. I don't know. Kyra. I do not know, and that is what I have been standing here being frightened about for the last minute. Her hands are shaking and she is not doing anything about it. I had my mouth open and there was nothing in it. I have had my mouth open in a great many rooms in four hundred years and there has always been something in it, and I have always known exactly how far I was going to go, and this afternoon there was nothing there at all. It is the second week. I know it is the second week. It has been the second week thirty times, says Val, and it has never once cost us anything, and the reason it has never cost us anything is that we have spent every one of them in a house or a field or a wagon. They walk the long way round because Kyra wants to walk. It is the hour in September when the light comes along a street sideways, and it gets into her where the pins have come loose and finds the copper at the ear the way it found it on a mountain and in a lane and in a wagon bed, and Val walks beside her and looks at it twice and does not say anything about that either. It would not have been about us. Whatever it was. I was not going to stand in a stationer's and announce anything. No. You were going to say a true thing to a man about the underlying feeling. And? And he would have remembered you, Val says. That is all. Not a report, not a letter, not a name written anywhere. A man crossing a street four years from now because of a woman who said something to him in a shop, and then saying to somebody that there is a pair of them on Hawthorne who keep themselves to themselves. Kyra stops walking. That is exactly what he would say. It is what they always say, says Val. It was what they said in Maribor. They go in the spring of the year after that, which is sixteen years on Hawthorne and six years longer than Val ever intended. The house they take is eleven blocks south and not on any line either of them has ridden, and the table goes in under the window where the light comes round, and Ellen Ostrander is told they are moving nearer the shop, which is true, and is sorry, which is also true. Nobody on that street ever thinks about them again, which is the entire object and which Val has been arranging since the autumn of twenty-two and does not mention. Jo comes to the new house in April and stands in the front room and says it is darker than the last one. It is darker. You have put the table in the light and left yourselves the corner. We have put the table in the light, Val agrees, because one of us reads at it and the other one does everything else in this house at it, and the corner will do for me. Jo, who has been coming to their table for thirty years and has never once been told a single true thing about either of them that mattered, says that is sensible, and asks whether there has been any post. Nothing from New Bedford, says Kyra, from the kitchen. Not today, Val says. And Jo Selby, who is fifty-six years old and has sold paper on Union Avenue since before either of these women came down off a lake, says that she has never understood why anybody writes to Massachusetts, and goes to find the cups.

The man in nineteen thirty comes in April and writes down fifty-six and fifty-three and asks whether they own a radio, which is a new question and the only one either of them enjoys. We do not. Everybody has one. Everybody but this house, says Val, and he writes no in the box and goes on, and Kyra buys one in October out of her own money and does not consult anybody about it. The years after that are the ones everybody had. Jo keeps the shop, which not everybody on that street manages, and she keeps it going by selling less of everything and by carrying about nine accounts she has no reasonable expectation of collecting and by getting Val to tell her, twice a year, exactly how much longer she can go on doing that. Val tells her twice a year, exactly, to the month, and is wrong once, in the good direction, which Jo never lets her forget. You said March. I said March on the figures you gave me in September, Jo. It is July. It is July, Val agrees, because you did a thing in November that you did not put in the book, and I have not asked you what it was, and I am not going to. The Act goes through in the summer of thirty-five and Val reads every line of it, which almost nobody does, out of a bound copy in the reading room over two afternoons. She comes home and does not say anything about it for nine days. Then, at the table, with the radio off: There is going to be a number. A number for what? says Kyra. For a person. She has the notebook out, which means she has been at it for some days already and has simply not been ready. Everything we have ever done rests on one thing. A record sits in a book and there is nothing on either side of it. Martha Miller is in a federal schedule in nineteen hundred and nothing leads to her and nothing leads away, and that is not luck, that is thirty years of work and it is the best work I have done on this planet. And a number. A number is a thing designed to lead away. She puts her finger on the page. It goes on every wage you are ever paid. It goes in a ledger in Baltimore and it stays there and it is not reissued and it is not repeated and there is one of them for you and no other person on this continent has it, ever, alive or dead. Kyra sits down. So we do not get one. That is the first answer, and it is good for about nine years. She has worked that out too, in the nine days: not everybody is covered. A woman who keeps her own books for a shopkeeper and takes cash for it is not in the Act at all, and neither is a woman who does nothing anybody has a word for, and they can both stand outside the whole thing for the rest of the decade without anybody noticing. And then? And then it widens, because that is what these do, and in nineteen forty-five or fifty there will be a clerk somewhere who wants to know why a woman of seventy has never been in the system, and the answer will be interesting to him. She closes the notebook. A person who has no number in nineteen thirty-six is ordinary. A person who has no number in nineteen fifty is a question. They go to the post office on Union Avenue on a Thursday in the middle of November, and stand in a queue of about forty people, and it takes an hour and ten minutes. The form is one page: name, address, the name of the employer, the date and place of birth, the father's name and the mother's full name before she was married. Val looks at that last line for a moment. She has had a mother ready since a marriage register in Missouri in eighteen forty-eight — built her in a room above a store, given her a county and a maiden name and a plausible death, and carried her for eighty-eight years, and in all that time not one clerk, enumerator, agent, assessor or priest on this continent has ever once asked for her. She writes the name down. It takes four seconds and she has been holding it for the better part of a century. Outside, on the steps, Kyra says: You have gone a color. I am perfectly well. Val. I am going to say something and I would like to say it on the step rather than at home, because at home I will arrange it. She has the receipt in her hand and is not looking at it. That is the last name either of us is ever going to have. Kyra does not say anything. Not the last one we use. The last one that is ours. From this week there is a thing in a building in Baltimore with Anna Anderson on it, and there is no arrangement in the world by which a person hands one of those back and asks for another, and everything I have done for three hundred and twenty-nine years — the register in Missouri, the orphan in nineteen hundred, Hillsboro, every bit of it — was possible because you could always stop. And now you cannot. And now I cannot, and I have a piece of paper in my hand that says so, and it cost me five minutes and a queue. They walk down Union Avenue past the shop, which is shut, because it is a Thursday afternoon and Jo has not been well since September. Kyra puts her arm through Val's at the corner and does not take it out again the whole way home. Jo Selby dies in the third week of February with both of them in the room. It is not sudden and it is not long, and it is her heart, and she is sixty-five, and she has been saying since Christmas that she wants the shop to go to the second of her delivery boys, who is forty-one and has worked for her since he was fourteen, and she has put it in writing in January in her own hand because she does not trust anybody's hand but her own. The last thing she says that either of them can make anything of is about paper, which is correct, and which Kyra thinks about for a very long time afterward. Val does not go to pieces. She does the things there are to do, which are considerable, and she does them well, because a woman who has been dying beside people for three hundred and twenty-nine years knows exactly what there is to do in the four days afterward and does not have to be told. She writes to the sister in Astoria. She sits with the boy who is forty-one. She goes through the accounts twice and finds a thing in the second one that saves him about four hundred dollars, and does not mention that she found it. Kyra watches all of that from about nine feet away and lets her have every bit of it. It comes on the Sunday. Val is at the table with the last of it in front of her, and stops, and puts the pen down, and says, to the paper: Forty years. Forty years. She came into my life at twenty-six and went out of it at sixty-five and I was in the room for both, and that has never happened to me. Not once. Not on that world and not on this one. Her hands are flat on the table. Frederick was eleven months. Jakob was twenty-five years and I left. Everybody goes out of it sideways — we move, or they move, or the ship goes, and you carry a person off in your head at whatever age they were on the last day and they stay that age forever and you never find out. And you found out. I have watched one whole human life. Beginning to end, the useful part of it, in order, without a gap. It took forty years and it is the only complete thing I own. Kyra comes and sits down opposite her. The light is coming in low off the window the way it does there in February, thin and without any warmth in it, and it gets into the pale of Val's hair where it has come down and makes her look about nineteen, which she is not and has not been for a very long time. She never knew one true thing about us, Kyra says. Not one. Forty years at that table and she went out of the world believing she had two friends called Anderson from Pennsylvania. She had two friends, Val says. That part was not a lie and it is the only part that was ever going to matter to her, and I have been telling myself that since Tuesday and it has been working about half the time. It is working now. It is working now, she agrees, because you are sitting there. Afterward, much later, Kyra says the thing she has been carrying since the post office. She knew us by two names. She did. Miller, for about a year and a half, and then Anderson for the rest of it, and she never once asked about the change. She asked in ninety-eight, Val says. She asked once, in the shop, in April, and I gave her the sixth answer and she said God, families, and that was the end of it for thirty-nine years. You remember the month. I remember all of it, says Val. That is what I am for.

The new column is the fourth one along and it asks where you had been living on the first of April five years earlier, and Val sees it on the practice sheet a fortnight before the man comes and puts the sheet down on the table and looks at it for some time. What, says Kyra. It asks about the past. They have been asking about the past since Missouri. They ask where you were born. Where you were born is a place. This is a date and a place and another date and another place, in the same hand, on the same line. She puts her finger on it. For a hundred years I have been building documents that do not lead anywhere. This one is a document whose entire purpose is to lead somewhere. It costs them nothing, of course, because they have been in the same house since twenty-seven and the true answer and the safe answer are the same four words. Val says them, on the step, to a woman called Mrs. Rademacher who has four blocks to do before dark. Anderson, Anna, sixty-six. Anderson, Ada, sixty-three. Same house, same city, same county, five years ago and ten and thirteen. Grade of school completed? Eighth, says Val. Income last year? Nine hundred and forty dollars. Mrs. Rademacher writes all of it down and then comes to the bottom of the page and makes a small sound. You are on a line, she says. A line, Val says. Two lines on every sheet get the extra questions. It is a sample. It comes out of a table and I have no say in it whatever, and you are on one and your sister is not. She turns the page over. It is eight more and they are quick. And Val, who has spent forty years arranging a life around not being selected for anything, stands in her own doorway and is selected by a table. Father's birthplace. Mother's birthplace. Mother tongue in the home in childhood. Veteran, no. Social security number, which Val gives from memory without any hesitation at all, having decided in the queue in thirty-six that hesitating over it once would be worse than saying it a thousand times. And then the last two, which are for women only. Have you been married more than once? I have not been married at all. Number of children ever born. A dash, says Val. Mrs. Rademacher writes the dash and thanks her and goes to do her four blocks, and Val shuts the door and stands in the hall. Kyra comes out of the kitchen. What. I did not stop. Val. In nineteen hundred a man with a blister asked me that question and there was a second in it. A whole second, in a doorway, and I have thought about that second perhaps four hundred times. She is still holding the door handle. Just now it came out at the speed of the school grade. There was nothing in it at all. It was the eighth question of eight and I answered it like the price of a hat. Kyra takes her hand off the handle and does not say anything for a moment. Say what you are frightened of. That it is going. It is not going. It got easier. That is all I know. It got easier without my permission and I did not do anything to make it get easier, and if that one can go then I would like to know which of the others is going and in what order, and I have no way of finding out and nothing to measure it against. I will tell you. You cannot see the inside of it. I have been reading the outside of it since we were girls on a plateau, Kyra says, and I have got about eleven things wrong in four hundred years, and I will tell you, and you will believe me, because you have twenty-nine entries in a column that came out of my mouth and not one of them has ever been wrong either. Val lets go of the door. The city begins to change about eight months after that, and then it does not stop for four years. The first of it is a contract in the papers and then men in the paper about the contract, and then there is a yard at the north end where there was nothing, and then there are three yards, and then there are people arriving on every train from places neither of them has ever heard a Portland voice mention. By forty-two the streetcars are standing room at four in the morning because the shift changes at four in the morning, and there are women in the cars in trousers with their hair tied up, going to weld. Kyra watches them go past for about three weeks, standing at the corner in the dark with her collar up, and once Val comes out to find her and stands beside her and sees the headlamp of the four o'clock car come round and go across her — the dark of her hair and the copper in it at the ear, and the whole of her face lit for about a second and a half and then not. I want it, Kyra says. I know you do. Do not be reasonable at me yet. I want to say it properly first. Her hands are on the back of the chair. I have been in this country for ninety-five years and I have never once been paid for anything. Not on that world either. I have kept houses and I have doctored animals and I have carried people up staircases in an epidemic for nothing, and none of that is a complaint, and there is a woman on the four o'clock car with a burn on her wrist who is building a ship. Yes, says Val. I could do it. I could do it extremely well and you know I could. I know you could, Val says. Now be reasonable at me. And Val does it in three sentences, because there is no kind way to do it in more. You are sixty-five. The yard will not take you at sixty-five, and you cannot be anybody else at the gate, because the number goes on the payroll and the number belongs to a woman of sixty-five, and there is no arrangement on this planet by which you get a second one. Kyra does not say anything. And the badge has a photograph on it. That is the end of it and both of them know it inside about four seconds, and neither of them says anything for rather longer than four seconds. Six years, Kyra says, when she has it. Six years. You stood on the steps of a post office in thirty-six and told me what it was going to cost and I did not understand one word of it, and it has taken six years to arrive and it has arrived as a burn on a woman's wrist. I did not know it would be this, Val says. I want that said. I knew there would be a thing and I did not know what the thing was, and if I had known it was going to be this I do not know that I would have done anything differently, and I would have hated it more. What she does instead is everything there is that has no payroll attached to it, and there is a great deal: a city that doubles in three years is a city with nobody minding anything, and a woman of sixty-five who is plainly not sixty-five and who can carry a crate and talk to anybody is wanted in about nine places at once and asked for no paper in any of them. She runs a canteen two nights a week and then four. She learns the names of the shifts and then the names of the people on them, which nobody else bothers to do. And in the winter of forty-three she starts going out to the new place on the flats below the railroad, where they have put up a whole city in a hundred and ten days for the people the yards brought and the rest of Portland will not rent to. What is it like? Val asks, the first week. It is wooden and it is new and there is not one thing in it that is meant to last. Kyra has her boots off and her feet up. Eighteen thousand people and it is built on a floodplain behind a railroad fill, and I asked a man about the fill and he laughed at me. Val looks up. Say that again. He laughed at me, Val. Pleasantly. He said the dikes have held since before I was born, which I let stand. Val goes out there once, in February of forty-four, on a Sunday, and walks the length of it and back and looks at the fill for about eleven minutes and does not say anything at all on the way home. When they get in she takes the notebook out and writes four lines in it and shuts it. Are you going to tell me? Kyra says. No. Val. I have written down what I think and I have put a date on it, and I am not going to say it in this kitchen, because if I say it in this kitchen you will go out there on Tuesday and start telling people, and there are eighteen thousand of them and nowhere else in this city will have them. She puts the notebook in the box. And I would be telling them about rain. That is all I have got. A fill, and a river, and rain, and no year attached to any of it. Kyra sits with that for a while. All right, she says. It is not all right. No, says Kyra. It is not.

The notice goes round the flats that morning on a half-sheet of paper and Kyra reads one on a doorstep at about nine o'clock with a cup of somebody else's coffee in her hand. It says the dikes are safe at present. It says they will be warned if it becomes necessary. It says there will be time to leave. The last line says not to get excited. Kyra folds it and puts it in her coat pocket and keeps it for sixty-one years. She has been going out there two and three days a week since the winter of forty-three and by that spring she knows about four hundred people by name, which nobody else who does not live there does. The river has been up for a fortnight and everybody has been watching it and a good many of them have asked, and have been told what the half-sheet told them. Val has been asked as well, twice, by women at the canteen who know she is the sister who is good with figures, and both times she has said that she does not know, which is true, and has gone home and not slept, which she does not mention. It goes at about a quarter past four in the afternoon. Not the dike on the river: the railroad fill on the west side, where the embankment carries the line across the low ground, and which everybody has looked at for five years and thought of as a railway rather than as a wall. A piece of it about the length of a street simply is not there anymore, and what comes through it comes through at the height of a room. Kyra is at the north end when it starts and she hears it before she sees it, which she tells Val about once, four days later, and never again. What there is, is about an hour. In the first twenty minutes of it people get out on foot and by car and the roads work. In the second twenty they do not work. In the third twenty there are streets with four feet of the Columbia in them going somewhere in a hurry, and a great many people on porches and roofs and in upper rooms of buildings that were put up in a hundred and ten days and are not going to be there in the morning. There are boats by then — not many and not soon enough, and there are boats. What Kyra Davan does for the next five hours is stand in water up to the middle of her and pass people along a line. That is the whole of the technical account and she gives no better one afterward to anybody. There is a line of them, men mostly and four women, strung between a porch rail and a truck bed on the high ground, and things come along it: a woman handed over a rail, a man's dog, a suitcase somebody will not let go of, an old man with his arms round the neck of a boy of nineteen, and children, one after another, for five hours. She is good at it in the way she was good at it in a street full of the Willamette fifty-four years earlier, which is that she can see which person in a line is about to drop something, and she is always standing next to that one. Twice in those five hours the gold comes up in her eyes. The first time she has her back to everybody. The second time she does not, and there is a man eighteen inches from her face handing her a child, and she looks straight at him and there is no possible thing to be done about it and she does not do anything about it. He does not see it. He is fifty-one years old and has been in the water for two hours and his wife is on the truck and his mother is not, and he hands her the child and turns round for the next one. Nobody in that water looks at anybody's eyes all afternoon. Val gets the word in the city at about five and gets as far as the Denver Avenue end at about a quarter to seven and can get no further, because nobody can, because there is nowhere further to get to that is not the river. She stands on the fill with about two hundred other people for four hours. She does not shout and she does not ask anybody anything and she does not once put her hand on the arm of any of the men going past, because every one of those would have been a thing somebody remembered about a woman on the dike. What she does is count boats. She counts them out and she counts them back and she keeps the figure, because there is one thing on that embankment that she can do and it is the only one, and at some point after nine o'clock a boat comes in with eleven people in it and one of them is standing up in the bow being handed a rope, and Val Sorin finds that she has put both hands on the railing of somebody's truck and that she is holding it hard enough to hurt. There is a man on the fill with a camera for most of the afternoon and he is one of several. He is standing about where anybody would have stood, forty feet up, with the whole of it below him, and he takes what there is to take: the line in the water, the boats, the roofs with people on them, the rail, a woman being handed over it. Kyra knows he is there. She knows he is there within about ten minutes of his arriving, because knowing where the eyes in a place are is a thing she has done since she was nineteen years old and has never once had to think about. She has a child on her hip at the time, out of the water, waiting for the next pair of hands. She stays where she is. By dark there is no city. That is not a way of putting it: eighteen thousand people lived on that ground in the morning and by ten at night the ground is a lake with the tops of buildings in it, and the buildings are coming apart, and a great many of them go off their foundations and move and strike other buildings and stop. Fifteen people are known to have died. The number that has been argued about ever since is larger and nobody has ever been able to settle it, and Val, who has a figure for how many boats went out and how many came back, refuses for the rest of her life to give anybody an opinion about it. They find each other at about twenty past ten on the Denver Avenue side, among about four hundred people and a dozen trucks and a great deal of shouting, and do not touch each other at all. Ada. Anna. That is it. That is every word, in front of four hundred people, and both of them have four hundred years of practice at exactly that and neither of them has ever hated it more. They walk the two miles home without touching. In the kitchen with the door shut Kyra stands in the middle of the floor in a coat that weighs about thirty pounds and cannot get her fingers to work on the buttons, and Val does them, one at a time, from the bottom, without saying anything at all. Her hair has dried against her head and is beginning to come loose in pieces, and there is silt in it, and under the ceiling light it is the color of a river bottom and the copper does not show anywhere on her at all, which has not happened in three hundred and forty-one years and which Val notices and will remember for the rest of her life. There was a girl, Kyra says. All right. About four. Somebody put her in my arms at the rail and went back and I did not see them again and I do not know whose she was. Her voice is entirely level, which in her means what it always means. She was on the second truck and there was a woman from her building on it who knew her name. Then she is all right. I am going to find out. Not tonight. I am going to find out. I know you are. She finds out in eleven days, and the girl is fine, and that is the one thing out of the whole of that spring that Kyra Davan ever says out loud about it afterward, to anybody, in sixty-one years. Very late, with the coat still on the kitchen floor where it fell because neither of them had the strength to do anything about a coat, Val says the thing she has been carrying up two miles of road. There were men on that fill with cameras. Kyra does not open her eyes. There were four, she says. Four. Four that I saw. Two of them were from papers and I think one was a man from the housing people and I do not know about the fourth. She is very nearly asleep. I knew where all of them were the whole time, Val. I want that said tonight because tomorrow you are going to ask me whether I knew, and I knew, and I stayed in the line. Val does not say anything for a long moment. I am not going to ask you that tomorrow. You are. I am going to ask you something else, says Val, and you are going to say no, and I am going to do it anyway — and Kyra, who is asleep by then, does not hear any of it.

They put people to sleep in the auditorium, which neither of them has been inside since the autumn of nineteen eighteen and which has a hundred beds in it again by the Wednesday. Kyra is there every day for five weeks and does not once remark on the building, and Val does not either, and both of them know exactly what the other is not saying and let it stand. What is needed is lists: where a family has gone, which children are with which aunt, whether a man in a shelter on the east side has a wife in a church hall on the west, which about nine of them do. Kyra knew four hundred names before the flood and she knows about nine hundred by the end of June. Val raises it on the ninth of June at the table, with the papers of the week in front of her and four of them open. You are in three of these. I know. The rail one is the worst. You are in the second row, you are turned three-quarters on, and it is a good print. Her hands are flat on either side of it. And there will be more. There will be the ones they did not run, and the negatives, and whatever the housing man took, and the fourth one whose paper I have not identified. Say what you want. I want to get them. Kyra puts down what she is holding and does not sit down. No. I have not finished putting it, Kyra. You do not need to put it, I have known what it was since the kitchen on the night, and the answer is no. Her hands are on the back of the chair. And I am going to give you the reason and I would like you to take the reason seriously rather than taking it as a feeling. I always take your reasons seriously. Then take this one. Eighteen thousand people lost everything they owned in about an hour, and this city is already telling itself that it was not so bad and that the warning was adequate and that everybody got out, and there are men in offices in this town who would be extremely pleased if the afternoon turned out to have no pictures of it. I am not proposing to destroy the record of the flood. You are proposing to go through the record of the flood and take out the frames you do not care for. The frames with my — Val stops. Say it. The frames with you in them. It is my face, Kyra says. It is. It is my face, and it is my five hours, and it is the only afternoon in four hundred years that I have done a thing in public that I would want anybody to know I did, and you are asking me for it. She is not shouting and has never once in four centuries shouted about anything that mattered. And there are people in those pictures who were pulled out of a street, and their grandchildren are going to want to see that somebody came for them, and I am not having a woman in Oregon go round with a pair of scissors making that afternoon tidier. Val does not say anything at all. Say you understand it. I understand every word of it, says Val. Then that is the end of it. It takes her five weeks. She goes to the newspaper on Sixth as a woman compiling a record of the relief effort for a church committee, which is an entirely ordinary thing for an entirely ordinary woman of seventy-four to be doing in the summer of forty-eight, and she is patient and dull and is there nine times, and by the fourth visit the boy in the morgue has stopped watching her. She takes what she takes one at a time. She goes to the other paper twice. She finds the housing man through his own filing and buys forty prints off him for nine dollars on the grounds that the committee wants them, and he is glad of the nine dollars. The fourth photographer turns out to be a freelance who has sold two frames and kept the rest, and she buys the rest, and pays more than they are worth, and he thinks she is a fool and says so pleasantly. She burns them in the stove on a Thursday afternoon in the middle of July with the kitchen door shut. Negatives do not burn well: they curl and they stink and they take a long time, and she stands there and does it properly, because doing a thing properly is what she has instead of a defense. She counts them. Thirty-one prints and nineteen negatives, and she writes the figure in the notebook, and puts the date beside it, and does not write anything else. Kyra comes in at six and knows from the hall. She stands in the kitchen doorway for about four seconds and then goes and opens the window, and neither of them says a word for the length of time it takes to do that. How many? Fifty. You have the figure to the item. Thirty-one prints and nineteen negatives, Val says. Kyra stands at the open window with her back to the room. Are you going to say you are sorry? No. Why not? Because I am not, says Val, and you would know inside a syllable, and a false one would cost us more than the pictures did. You went round me. I went round you. I asked you and you gave me a good answer and I did it anyway, and it is the first time in three hundred and forty-one years that I have done a thing you had told me not to do, and I have no account of it that you are going to accept and I am not going to construct one. Then give me the one I will not accept. I could not have it, Val says. Your face in a drawer in a building in this city for as long as the building stands. That is all I have got. It is not a reason, it is a sentence about me, and I have had it in my mouth since a man on a fill put a camera up. And me? says Kyra. You are going to be angry for a considerable time and you are entitled to the whole of it. I am not angry. You are furious. I am furious and that is not the same thing. She turns round at last; her eyes have gone right out to the rim and she does not do anything about it and neither of them says a word about that either. Val, I would have said yes. What? In about a month. If you had left it with me and let it sit and come back in September I would have said yes, and I would have hated it and I would have said yes, and you did not wait five weeks because you have never once in four hundred years believed that you would get the answer if you waited for it. Val sits down. Neither of them says anything else about it that summer. They are entirely civil, which is the worst of it: they eat at the same table and answer each other and go to bed in the same room and do not touch, and Kyra goes out to the lists every day and comes back and reports what she has done in the tone of a woman reporting to a committee, and Val takes it that way and asks one question each time and no more. Six weeks of that. Neither of them apologizes, because there is no apology available that is not a lie, and both of them know that, and knowing it does not help in the slightest. The thirty-second comes in September. Kyra says so on a Friday, in the hall, in the flat voice she has been using since July: it started on the Tuesday. Val writes it in the column. And then, on the Saturday, without either of them saying one word about it, there is salt in the house. There is salt in the house on the Saturday and every day for three weeks after it, and the door that closes too hard gets a strip of felt on it on the Monday, and on the Thursday of the second week Kyra comes down at four in the morning because she cannot sleep and there is a lamp left low in the front room and a rug over the arm of the chair, which had not been there when she went up. Neither of them mentions any of it. It has been going on every eleven years since a hut on a mountain, and it does not ask permission, and it does not stop for anything, and it has never once required either of them to be on speaking terms. It goes off in the first week of October. Kyra comes down on a Thursday and is simply herself again, and stands in the kitchen doorway in the early light, and looks at the woman at the table with the pale of her hair coming down and the accounts open in front of her and a cup gone cold at her elbow. Put the thirty-second down as finished, she says. What day? I don't know what day. Then I shall put down Thursday, says Val. And Kyra comes and stands behind the chair and puts both hands on that woman's shoulders and leaves them there, and Val puts her hand up and holds one of them, and that is the whole of the apology in both directions and it takes about nine seconds and no words at all. Later, upstairs, with the rain starting on the roof for the first time since June, neither of them plans anything. Afterward Kyra lies with her face in the side of Val's neck and says, into her, I am still furious. I know. I am going to be furious about it in a hundred years. I am aware, Val says, and I have priced that too, and I paid it in July, and I would like it understood that I knew the figure at the time. You always know the figure. I always know the figure, she agrees. And the rain goes on doing what it does there from October, and at some point without either of them deciding to, they lace. The count was wrong. It was wrong by one, and it was not Val's fault in any sense she would have accepted: the freelance had sold three frames and not two, and the third had gone east that spring to a wire service and come back in a bundle of prints that nobody at the paper on Sixth ever filed, and in the autumn of that year a copy boy put the bundle in a box, and in nineteen sixty-one the box went into a basement, and in nineteen seventy-nine it went into another one. A row of people in a street that had become a river. Men in soaked shirts. A rowboat, and a woman being handed over a porch rail. And in the second row, with her hair plastered to her head and her sleeves shoved up and a child on her hip, a woman of about twenty-two. Neither of them ever knew.