The Door

There is a thing on the television about people buying a house they cannot afford and arguing about a kitchen, and neither of them has the slightest interest in it, and neither of them turns it off. It has been a long week of the kind that is long for no reason. Rain since Tuesday. Four cartons from a records office in Sacramento standing in the hall where the delivery man left them, which Val has opened and gone through and repacked and has not carried anywhere, because there is nowhere in particular for them to go and because what is in them is what was in the last four. A list on the table in Val's hand with nine things on it and four crossed out, which has been nine things with four crossed out since Sunday. They are on the couch the way they have been on couches since there were couches — Val at the end with her feet up, Kyra beside her and half turned in, close enough that there is no gap anywhere along them. The one lamp is behind Val's shoulder and does to the pale of her hair what every lamp on two worlds has ever done to it, which is to take the gold out at the crown and leave it at the ends. And at some point Kyra becomes aware, in the entirely idle way of a woman who is not watching a television program either, that Val's skirt has got itself arranged in such a way that there is nothing whatever in her road. She does not announce it. She takes about a minute and a half getting there, which is not caution and is not stealth, it is simply the pace at which she does anything with that woman when there is no hurry on — her hand down off Val's knee and up under, unhurried, taking every second it takes. Val notices somewhere around the knee and does nothing at all about it. She does not look over. She does not say anything. She shifts perhaps half an inch, which is a permission and is understood as one, and goes on holding her list and not reading it. It takes a while to get through. It always does, and Kyra has never once minded, and she works her fingers into the thick of it slowly and without any impatience whatsoever, parting it the way you part long grass to see the ground, because there is a very great deal and it does not give way for anybody. And then she finds her, exactly where she has been for four hundred and some years, drawn back and quiet and entirely unaware that anybody is coming. Kyra uses her smallest finger. She always does for this. One stroke, barely any weight in it at all. Val's hands come to rest on the list. That is all. She does not look round and she does not stop looking at the television, and under the skirt her whole body has gone still in the particular way it goes still, and about four seconds later she comes up around Kyra's finger and curls, and holds. Not a word. There are never any words in it and after four hundred years there does not need to be — a pressure and a curl and a particular unhurried slowness, which has meant what it means since Maribor and has never once been said aloud by either of them. Kyra answers it. They go on like that for some minutes with a man on the television complaining about a countertop. It is not a conversation. That is the thing about it: they have the long kind, on this couch, a few times a month, with trousers over the back of a chair and both of them facing and something real to be said. This is not that. This is the other use, the small one, the one with no subject in it at all — four centuries of a language that has never once managed a noun, being used for the thing it is best at, which is saying nothing in particular to somebody who is already there. And then Kyra does something she has never done. She takes her finger away — which gets a small protest, a tightening and a let-go, that she ignores entirely — and turns her hand over, and lays the flat of her palm down across the whole of it. Not into. Not through. Flat, and open, and covering everything, the way you put a hand on a sleeping animal or on the lid of something. And leaves it there. Val sits up. What are you doing? Nothing. You are doing something, you have stopped — Val, I am doing nothing at all, says Kyra, and I would like you to leave it there for a minute. And Val, who was going to say something else, does not say it. She puts the list down on the floor. And then, because a thing she has not seen is a thing she does not have, and because there is nobody in that house or on that road who is going to walk in, she takes hold of the hem of her own skirt and pulls it up out of the way so that she can look at what is happening. There is a hand on her. That is all. One hand, laid flat, fingers together, not doing one single thing — and under it and around the edges of it, nothing of her showing anywhere at all. Kyra's hand covers the whole of it. Every part. The entire thick dark unmanaged four-hundred-year-old business of her, the thing she has never once taken off and never would, the thing that takes two minutes and cost her a night in Maribor and about an hour of weeping in a bedroom in Portland — and it fits, completely, with room at the edges, under one woman's hand. Oh, says Val. I noticed about a year ago, Kyra says. Val turns her head on the arm of the couch. You noticed. I was lying there one night with my hand where it is now and I thought, that's all of it. That's the whole famous thing. And then I thought about saying it to you and I couldn't work out how without it sounding like I was making a joke, so I put it away. She has not moved her hand a particle. And then tonight you were cross about a list and I thought I'd just do it instead. Val does not say anything. You can have it either way. You can have it as me being soppy on a couch, which it partly is. Or you can have the other thing. Say the other thing. I have had a razor to you every August for a hundred and sixteen years, love, and I have never once taken a hair more than the mark needs, and it is back inside three weeks and I have never been sorry to see it come back. I am aware of most of that. And I can cover the lot with one hand. The man on the television has moved on to the garden. That's all, Kyra says, and takes her free hand off the back of the couch and puts it flat on Val's shin. That's everything I've got. It isn't big, Val. It has never once been big. It's about the size of my hand and I've been carrying that around for a year not knowing how to say it to you. Val looks at it for a long moment. She is, as it happens, doing arithmetic, and she would admit to it under no circumstances whatever. Not the width of a hand — she has that already, she has had it since about 1690 and it is four and a quarter inches across the knuckles and seven from the wrist. What she is doing is putting it next to things. Next to four hundred years of a heading with a figure under it. Next to two minutes, and a hundred and some nights where she lay in the dark and checked, and a razor in a stranger's bathroom in Portland, and a woman holding her by the jaw in a bedroom in November saying no twice. All of it. The whole weight of the thing. And here it is in front of her at last with a measure against it, and the measure is a hand, and the hand goes round the outside with room to spare. I have wanted a scale for four hundred years, Val says. I know you have. I have had figures for everything and a scale for almost none of it. That is my entire complaint about this planet and I have made it to you in about nine kitchens. Her voice is not entirely steady. And you have just put one on the only thing I have ever actually needed one for, and it is not a number, and it is your hand. Kyra looks at the back of her own hand for a moment. It's not a very big hand. It is exactly the right size, says Val, which is the point, and you knew it was the point, and you have been sitting on it for a year because you could not work out how to say it without me taking it the wrong way. That's about the shape of it. You were correct to wait. I know I was, says Kyra. I'm very good at this. Val puts her own hand down on top of Kyra's, through the skirt, and holds it there. Do not move it. I wasn't going to. I would like it where it is for some while. I am not able to tell you why and I would rather you did not ask. I'm not going to ask you, says Kyra. I've known why since about a year ago. That's rather the whole business. They stay like that until the program finishes and another one starts and the people in it begin arguing about a different kitchen. At some point Val's light comes up, which it does now in a lit room with the television going, because the curtains are shut and the nearest house is a quarter of a mile down the road and the two of them let the old rule go somewhere in the spring without discussing it. Kyra watches the dark of her own hair fall forward into the edge of it and go the color it goes, chestnut with the copper coming up along the one side, which she has been seeing in mirrors since she was a girl and has never once got used to. And at some point after that she turns her hand over again and takes up where she left off, slowly, with no announcement at all — and Val makes a small sound she does not authorize and puts her head back against the arm of the couch. The list stays on the floor. It has nine things on it and four crossed out, and it will still have nine things on it and four crossed out in the morning.

The thing nobody tells you about looking for a family across four hundred years of other people's paperwork is how much of it is spelling. Val has four cartons from Sacramento, two from a diocesan office in Santa Fe that cost her more than they were worth, and a county index on loan that she is not strictly entitled to have. What she is looking for is a line of descent with no name attached to it, in a country that has been three countries, among people who changed how they wrote themselves down every time somebody at a desk asked them to. She has been at it since June. She has four possibles and one of them is probably two people. It is the Thursday of the second week of November and the rain has been going since breakfast, and she has the long table to herself because Kyra is in Vernonia doing something about a culvert. She keeps the book beside her out of habit rather than need. It has four hundred and nine names in it and a great deal else — a bearing taken off a hull in 1789, a speed from a man in a field, two reckonings of the year, the eleven lines of the ship's own record copied out four times in a hand that got smaller as the centuries went. She has not opened it for the lines in a while; she opens it that afternoon for a date, which is the sort of thing she opens it for now. And the page falls where it has always fallen, because a book opens where it has been opened. She reads them. She does not mean to and there is no reason to and she knows them well enough to have written them on a wall in the dark, and she reads all eleven anyway with her finger under the fourth, which is what she has been doing since 1700. They say when the fold was entered and from where. They say the geometry. They say what the ship did and what the ship was asked to do and the one place where those two differ. They say the transit took fifteen seconds. And that is the end of them, and she made her peace with the end of them a long time ago. What she has never made her peace with is the fourth line. Three hundred and twenty-six years of it: the asked and the did, side by side, in the ship's own hand, with the difference between them stated to a precision no instrument on this planet could reproduce — and she has looked at that difference every time she has opened the book and has treated it, every single time, as the record of a wound. That is what it was. It was the thing that happened to them. It is the reason there is a hull on a mountain in the Carpathians instead of in a yard six miles inland of Aventhal, and the reason there are seventeen names she has carried every day since, and she has never once in three centuries looked at it as anything else. She gets up and puts the kettle on and does not make anything with it. Here is the shape of what she has been doing instead, for four hundred years, which anybody who had watched her do it would have called thorough. She has a speed with no distance against it. She has a bearing with no distance against it. She has a distance to a star that turned out to be the wrong star, which took nine years to get and nineteen to let go of. She has a method that reads what a thing is made of off the light coming away from it, which is a fine method and tells you nothing about how far off the thing is. Every chain she has ever built stops one term short. She has built a great many of them. In about nine kitchens on two continents she has got to the end of one out loud, and stopped, because the next word would have been therefore and there was nothing to hang on it. Four hundred years of trying to work out where Sethal is from here. The paper is not in the book. The paper is in a flat gray box on the second shelf with about sixty others, and she read it in 1991 and filed it and has not thought about it since, because it was not about anything she wanted. It is eleven pages long and it is not a good paper. A man at a state university spent most of a career on a narrow problem in instrument work, which was what to do when a device has been wrong in a way you can characterize. His argument was that a known fault is not noise: if you can state exactly how a thing failed, you do not need to know where it was pointed, because the fault and the correction are the same object read in opposite directions. He demonstrated it on telescope mountings. He was mildly right, and about forty people cared, and the field went somewhere else within a decade. Val read it because she reads everything. She found it sensible and slight and put it away. She stands in a kitchen in Oregon with a cold kettle and does not move for a while. Then she goes back to the table and sits down and puts the paper beside the book, open at the fourth line, and looks at the two of them next to each other for about ten minutes without touching either. A fold is not a journey. There is no distance in it to be slow across. Her own daughter said that in a cold room to a woman who had come up the stairs with bad news, and it has been quoted back to Val twice by people who thought they were comforting her, and she agreed with it both times and went on doing exactly what she had been doing. She has spent four centuries looking for a distance in a thing that does not have one. The ship did not get lost. The ship did something very slightly other than what it was asked, and wrote down both, and has been sitting on a mountain for four hundred years with the fault and the correction in the same eleven lines, and she has read them as an obituary. She does the work. That takes her the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening and she does not eat, and at a quarter to nine she has it on four sheets with the fourth line at the top of the first and the man from the state university's one useful move at the top of the second, and at the bottom of the fourth there is a line that ends in a way no line of hers has ended since 1608. She looks at it. Then she checks it, from the beginning, in order, which takes forty minutes. Then she checks it again from the other end, which takes longer. Then she writes out the two places it could still be wrong, and goes and gets what she needs to close the first one, and closes it, and sits with the second for about an hour and cannot make it fail. Kyra comes in at half past ten with her hair wet through and the shoulders of her coat dark with it. That culvert is a crime, Kyra says, from the hall. That culvert has been a crime since before the mill shut and I have told four separate men so and every one of them agreed with me and none of them has a shovel. She comes through pulling her arms out of the sleeves. There is mud in my hair. There is mud in my — She stops in the doorway. Val is sitting exactly where she was sitting at half past two, with the one lamp on and the pale of her head bent over four sheets of paper and the rest of the room dark behind her. Val. Val puts the pencil down flat. You are wet through. I am aware that I am wet through. What's happened. Nothing has happened, says Val. Go and get dry. Kyra does not go and get dry. She comes three steps in and stops at the corner of the table with the coat over her arm and her hair gone almost black with the rain through it, and looks at the woman and then at the four sheets and then at the woman again. Is it the line? says Kyra. Have you got one of them? No. Then what. And Val Sorin, who has been sitting in that chair for nine hours arriving at the only thing she has ever wanted, opens her mouth and tells her about a paper on telescope mountings. She does it properly. She does it in order, with the man's name and the year and the journal and what was wrong with the field he was working in, and the shape of his argument in four sentences, and why it was ignored, and the particular narrowness of it that made it useless to everybody including him. It takes about three minutes and it is, as a piece of exposition, entirely excellent. Kyra puts the coat on the back of a chair and sits down on the arm of it and lets her get all the way to the end. That's not what I asked you, says Kyra. It is the relevant — Val. Val squares the four sheets against the edge of the table. It is the relevant background and you will not be able to follow the rest of it without — I don't want to follow the rest of it. Kyra has not raised her voice at all. I want the last line. You've got four sheets there and you've been sitting in the dark with them and you have just given me three minutes about a man in a university who has been dead for twenty years. Say the last line. Val looks at the table. The light has come up at the wrists some time before and she has not noticed it and does nothing about it now. I cannot, says Val. Can't say it, or it isn't there? It is there. Then — I have been building that sentence since sixteen hundred and eight, and it has stopped in the same place every time, and I have stopped it in front of you in about nine kitchens, and you have never asked me to finish it, because you knew I could not. She has a hand down flat on the paper on each side of her. And it finishes. I have had it since a quarter to nine and I have checked it twice and found the two places it could break and closed one of them and failed to break the other, and I have been sitting here since, and I am not able to make it come. Kyra comes off the arm of the chair and crouches down beside her, in the mud and the wet, and sets her palm on the table rather than on Val. Then write it, Kyra says. Val turns the fourth sheet over and writes six words on the back of it and turns it round. Kyra reads them. She is quiet for longer than she has been quiet in some years, and the gold comes up at the rim of her eyes without the warning, which it does under strain and has done four times in four hundred years, and she does not know and will not be told until much later. Say it anyway, Kyra says. Kyra — I'm not being cruel. You've written it, so it's out, so the only thing left is the hard half and you will not sleep until it's done. She has got hold of the leg of the table. Say it to me. And Val says it, badly, flatly, in a voice that gets away from her twice in six words, to a woman crouching in a wet coat on a kitchen floor in Oregon at twenty-five to twelve at night.

For three days after that neither of them does anything about it, which is not avoidance and is agreed without being discussed. There is a thing that has to happen to a person when a sentence like that finishes, and both of them know what it is and know it cannot be hurried. Val goes to the mill as usual. Kyra goes back to Vernonia and shouts at a man about a culvert and gets a shovel out of him. They eat. They watch some television. On the second evening Val stands at the sink for a long time with a plate in her hand and the water running and has to be told about it. On the fourth morning Kyra comes down and does not sit. Val looks up from the paper and reads her in about a second and a half, which after four hundred years is not a skill, it is a condition. Sit down. No. Then I will stand up. Don't do that either. Kyra has her hands in the pockets of the cardigan she wears when she is not going anywhere. I need to say a thing and I have been trying to say it since about ten past five this morning and I am going to make a mess of it. Then make a mess of it. She does not make a mess of it. She does not say it at all. She stands in the middle of a kitchen in a cardigan with the rain going on the window behind her and her hair shoved back out of the way, dark and heavy with the morning in it, and she opens her mouth twice and nothing comes out of it either time, and the second time she makes a small sound at herself and turns round and looks at the stove. Val does not help her. That is deliberate and it is the hardest thing she does that week. In June, Kyra says, to the stove, on the Tuesday, at the end of Fenner Road, Marcus asked me something and I did not answer him and I did not tell you. Out in the hall the clock goes on with its business. Go on. That's it. That's the whole — She stops. No. That is not the whole of it and I am not going to be allowed that one. She turns round. He asked me to be the one who holds me. Not for the peak. For the rest of it. For as long as I'm on this planet and as long as he is. Val puts the paper down and folds it once and puts her hand flat on top of it. Say exactly what he said. I can't. That's the other thing I've been carrying about. Kyra comes as far as the back of the chair and holds on to it. I have an exact memory of about nine thousand conversations and I cannot give you the words of that one. He was being careful. He had thought about every part of it and he had got the order wrong and he knew he had. It was an offer, and it was a question, and underneath both of them a man asking whether he was allowed to find out if it could be an offer at all, and it was the three of them at the same time, and his hands were not steady, and he was twenty-two years old. And you said nothing. I said nothing, and he told me that was all right, and he meant it. Her knuckles have gone. That's the part. He meant it, Val. He let me off. Val lets that sit where it has landed. What she is doing in those few seconds is something she will not describe to anybody for another two years, and when she does describe it she will get it slightly wrong, because the thing she is looking at is her own shape and nobody sees that straight. Five months, says Val. Five months. In the snow, in sixteen hundred and seven, you said nothing kept, not from here on, not one thing, ever again, and you said it out loud and at volume with your voice gone to a rasp, and I said yes, which I had never said to anybody about anything. I know what I said. I am not reciting it at you. I am establishing that we both have the same text. She turns her hand over on the folded paper. Now sit down. The next part is long and I am not delivering it to the back of a chair. Kyra sits. Ask me what I did about yours, says Val. That is not the same — Val does not move at all. Ask me. What did you do about mine. Three hundred and some years of it. Not one large thing. There was never a large thing, which is what made it workable. There was a small one about every eleven days and each of them had a reason, and the reasons were good, and I could give you about forty of them now from memory and every single one would stand up in front of a committee. Her eyes are on the table. And I did it to a woman who had already told me what it cost her, in an orchard, with the children in the trees, in a level voice, before any of it happened. You stopped. I stopped in 1976 and I was three hundred and sixty-nine years late, and the only reason I am able to sit here is that you let me stop rather than making me earn it. She looks up. So I am not going to be gracious about this, because gracious would be me handing you the easy version and I had the hard one and it is the only thing that ever worked on me. Then don't be gracious, says Kyra. Be the other thing. The other thing is a question. Ask it. Why. Kyra sits with that for about a quarter of a minute, which in her is the equivalent of leaving the room. Because if I'd told you, you'd have had an opinion. I would have had four. You'd have had four, and every one of them would have been correct, and you would have laid them out in order and then said and it is entirely your decision and meant it. She drags a hand down over her own face and leaves it at her jaw. And I'd have decided. That's what I'm telling you. I would have decided in about nine minutes, because that's what happens when you put something in front of me and I am sitting in a room with you. And you did not want to decide. I did not want to decide. She has got hold of the table edge without knowing it. Val, there is a boy in this county who offered me the rest of his life, and the only honest answers available to me in June were no and I don't know, and I could not get either of them out of my mouth, and I have spent four hundred years being the one who says things. Val gets up, which she does not usually do in the middle of anything, and goes as far as the window and stands with her back to all of it for a moment, and then comes back and sits down again. That is the first true thing anybody has told me about you in some time, says Val. Kyra puts both hands up into the dark of her hair and holds them there. It isn't flattering. It is not supposed to be flattering, it is supposed to be accurate, and you have just handed me something I have been looking at from the outside since about the fever hospital and have never had a word for. She has a hand flat on the table either side of the folded paper. You cannot say a hard thing. You can say nine difficult ones before breakfast and you do, and I have watched you do it for four centuries and taken it for the same faculty. It is not the same faculty. When it is going to cost you, it does not come. That's a horrible thing to find out at four hundred and nineteen. It is an extremely horrible thing to find out and I found mine out at three hundred and sixty-nine, says Val, and I would not go back and be spared it. The rain comes on harder for a while and then goes off it again. There's the other half, Kyra says. There is. You did it on Thursday night. I did it on Thursday night. You wrote six words on the back of a sheet of paper, says Kyra, and now there's an answer to him, and it isn't I don't know, and it hasn't been I don't know since about a quarter to nine that evening. She is not crying and her voice has gone down to almost nothing, which with her is worse. We're going home. So the answer's no. And I didn't choose it, Val, that's the — I know. I kept it for five months so I wouldn't have to decide, and while I was keeping it you went and made the decision not exist. Val reads her the way she reads a panel, across and then down, and takes her time over it, and then says the thing she worked out on the Thursday somewhere between the first check and the second and has been holding since. I took it off you, Val says. You didn't — I did. I want it said in this room once and then I am not going to say it again, because it is true and it is not a confession and it is not my fault, and all three of those are the case at the same time. The light has come up under her jaw and she leaves it. I told that boy in April that I would give him everything I knew and everything I did not and then let him decide, and I would find it very hard and I would do it anyway. And then in November I sat down at this table and removed the question. He will never know that happened. You will, and I will, and that is the whole of the audience. That isn't — It is not an injury and nobody is owed anything for it. She squares the folded paper with one finger. It is simply a fact about what I did, and I would rather carry it than have it turn up in forty years with interest on it. Kyra puts her forehead down on her own forearms on the table. I have to tell him, Kyra says, into them. Yes. To his face. Val folds the paper again, along a crease that is already there. Yes. I don't know how to do that, Val, and I have four hundred years of being good at people. Being good at people is the thing that is going to be in your way, says Val, and I will be no use to you at all, and I have thought about it for four days and that is where it comes out. Kyra lifts her head. The gold has been and gone, and neither of them mentions it, and neither of them ever has. Four days, Kyra says. You've known for four days that I was keeping something? I have known since about June that you were keeping something. I did not know what it was. And you never said. No. Val, that's — That is the reason I have not been gracious this morning, says Val, and I would be obliged if you would notice that I have not been, because it is the one part of this I am actually proud of. She turns her hand over. I waited. I have never waited in my life. I have arranged nine hundred conversations in four hundred years so that the other person arrived where I wanted them, and in June I understood that you were carrying something, and I sat on it for five months and let you bring it down those stairs yourself. Why? Because you came up a flight of stairs once to offer me a thing I had not asked for, says Val, and I sent it back, and you have never once held that against me, and I have been looking for four hundred years for a way to say that I understood what it cost you. Waiting was the only one I could find. Kyra comes round and gets behind the chair and puts a hand flat on the back of her head, which is the old one. They stay like that for a while with the rain going. I'm going to do it badly, Kyra says. You are going to do it badly. That is not the same as doing it wrong and I have had four centuries to learn the difference and I am telling you now so that you have it in advance. Kyra gets hold of a handful of the pale hair and lets it go again. Is that a kindness? It is a measurement, says Val. You may use it as a kindness if you want. I have never been able to stop people doing that and I stopped minding about it in Portland. And Kyra makes a sound somewhere above her that is most of a laugh and not all of one, with her hand still flat on the pale of Val's head, and does not take it away for some time.

Val has decided about it on the Tuesday, which Kyra knows, because the woman has been visibly deciding about something since about four in the afternoon and has been no good to anybody since half past five. What Kyra does not know — what she has no way of knowing, and what Val has taken three weeks and a certain amount of quiet thought to arrive at — is that she has decided about something else entirely. They go up early. It is the first week of December and the rain has gone off for once and somebody three houses down is running a generator in the dark for reasons nobody on that road has ever established, and the two of them get into that bed the way they have been getting into beds for four hundred years, which is without any ceremony and with a good deal of complaint about the quilt. The two minutes happen. They always do. Kyra is ready first, as she has been since the second winter, and lies there and runs her hand up the length of Val's back and talks entirely beside the point about the generator, and Val gets there in her own time the way she does. And then they lace — side by side, facing, hip to hip, with Val's knee drawn up between — and Kyra takes hold of her, lightly, and waits for the evening to start. It does not start. Val answers her — properly, with everything in it, not absently — and then holds exactly there and does not move on. The pressure is at the very bottom of the range. Almost nothing. The amount you use across a couch with a television going, and no more than that, and it does not vary by a particle. Kyra gives it a minute, which she considers generous. Then she does the obvious thing and takes her own up a little, which in four hundred years has never once failed to be understood. Val does not follow. Val. Mm. What are you doing? Nothing, says Val. Kyra gets her head up off the pillow about four inches. You are extremely obviously doing something. I am doing nothing at all, says Val, and I would like you to leave it there for a while. And Kyra, who recognizes the sentence immediately and from considerably closer range than Val could have known, puts her head back down on the pillow and shuts up. She lasts about six minutes. That is not a criticism of Kyra Davan and she would not accept it as one. She was built a particular way and has been that way for four hundred and some years and has never had cause to develop any patience with her own body, because her own body has never asked for any. Everything in her goes fast. It has always gone fast. There is a run-up of perhaps half a minute and then there is the thing itself, and the half minute has been the entirety of her experience of anticipation since she was eighteen years old. So after six minutes of almost nothing Kyra says, reasonably, Are we going to — No. Val. Not yet, says Val. Possibly not for some time. I want to be honest with you about that in advance. How long is some time? I am not going to tell you. Oh, that's — If I tell you, you will have a number, says Val, and you will go and sit next to it and wait for it, and I have spent four hundred years doing precisely that and I am not handing it to you in December. Kyra lies there in the dark and considers several responses. That's the most annoying thing anybody has ever said to me in this bed. It is not even the most annoying thing I have said in it this year. At eleven minutes she tries to move it along. Not crudely — she is not a crude woman and has never needed to be; she simply does the thing that works, which is to answer somebody with slightly more than they gave you and let them find their way up it, and she has been doing that since Maribor and it has worked every single time. Val comes back down to exactly where she was and stays there. That is a refusal, says Kyra. It is an invitation. You are reading it as a refusal because you have not once in your life been invited to do nothing. I do nothing all the time, I am extremely good at nothing — You are extremely good at being idle, says Val, which is a different thing entirely and which I have admired for four centuries. Nobody has ever held you still. And there is a silence then, of about fifteen seconds, which is a very long one for that woman. That's unkind. It is not unkind and you know it is not, and if you want me to stop, say the word and I will stop inside half a second and we will have a perfectly good evening the ordinary way. She has not changed the pressure once. I am asking for an hour. I will take less. I would like the hour. Kyra is quiet for a bit. You've thought about this. For three weeks. Of course you have. She lets out a breath. All right, Val. Have your hour. The first twenty minutes are awful. She will say so afterward and will say it cheerfully. They are awful — she is restless and hot and faintly cross and keeps arriving at the edge of saying something and then not saying it, and twice she catches herself about to reach for more out of what she can only describe as habit, the way a person reaches for a glass that is not there. And underneath it all, unvarying, at the absolute floor of the range, Val goes on holding her. Not nothing. That is the thing she cannot get round. It would be easy if it were nothing. It is a hand on her, continuously, in the only place on either world where that hand means anything, and it is not going anywhere and it is not stopping either. Somewhere around the half hour it goes over. She could not afterward say when or what happened, and Val — who could have told her, who has been counting since they lay down and has it at thirty-four minutes — does not tell her, then or ever. What happens is that she stops waiting for the next part. That is all. She stops lying there on the way to something and simply lies there, in a dark room, with a woman's leg over hers and the generator gone quiet at last and the cold coming off the window — and the thing that has been running underneath her since she was eighteen years old, the low constant hurry of a body that has never once had a reason to wait, goes off. She had not known it was on. Oh, says Kyra. Val does not say anything whatsoever. She does not alter the pressure and she does not ask and she does not look pleased with herself, all three of which take some doing. Val, I didn't know it was — I know. It's been there my whole life. I know, says Val. Since I was eighteen. Since before that. The whole — and Kyra stops, because her voice has gone, and lies in the dark being held by about a quarter of an ounce of pressure and finds that she is crying and has no particular feeling about it one way or the other. It goes on a long time after that and nothing happens in any of it. They talk a bit — not about this: about the generator, and about a man at the hardware counter in Vernonia, and about whether the Hendricks are going to sell, and at one point Kyra laughs at something and the laugh comes out into the room entirely differently from how her laughs usually come out, slower, from further down. And then they do not talk for about twenty minutes and that is perfectly all right too. It is the longest Kyra Davan has ever been in a bed with somebody and not been going anywhere, and it is, she will eventually get round to telling her, somewhere in the region of the best hour of four hundred years, and she will be extremely annoyed about having to say so. When it does eventually go somewhere, it goes the way it always goes. Half a minute. No run-up to speak of. Up and over and down at the speed her body has been doing it since the Vayr, with nothing changed and nothing improved and nothing fixed about any part of her. And that is fine. That is entirely fine. Both of them know it is fine. Neither of them mentions it. Say what it was, says Kyra, a good while later. You know what it was. I want it from you. I gave you mine on a couch with my hand flat and I had to say it out loud and it cost me, and you can do the same. Val lies there for a moment. Her light is up at the wrists and down the insides of her arms and Kyra has been watching it the whole time and has said nothing, which costs her something and is noted. You have never had any time, Val says. That is all of it and I am going to say the rest badly. You have thirty seconds. You have had thirty seconds since you were eighteen years old and you have never once complained about it and I have watched you not complain about it for four hundred years. Her eyes are on the ceiling. And I have two minutes, every time, and I spent three hundred and fifty years believing that two minutes was a fault, and you told me in a kitchen in Vernonia that it was the best part of the evening, and I did not believe you. Val — I believe you now. That is what the three weeks were about. Nothing moves in her voice at all. I have had two minutes of that every single time since the second winter. Thousands of them. And you have had none, not one, in four hundred years, because your body does not give you any and nobody can give you any — except that I can, if I simply refuse to move, and it turns out the only thing I have ever had that you have not is time. Kyra is some time coming back from that. You gave me your two minutes, Kyra says. I gave you an hour. I am not a small-minded woman. And Kyra laughs, and gets hold of her, and buries her face somewhere around her collarbone in the pale of her hair, and says something into it that Val does not catch and lets go by. I covered you with one hand, Kyra says, later, nearly asleep. You did. And you gave me an hour. I did. That's the two of us, isn't it. That's the whole thing. I've got a hand and you've got a clock and we've been handing them back and forth for four hundred years without either of us noticing what we were doing. Val lies in the dark and turns that over, and finds it exact, and says so, which takes her about a minute. By then Kyra is asleep — and down at the bottom of everything, barely anything at all, the grip is still going, the way it does, the way it has since Maribor, requiring nothing from either of them.

By the middle of January the table has stopped being a table. There are four sheets from the Thursday in November, which have become nine, which have become a stack she keeps square with the edge. There is the book. There is the man from the state university, photocopied now because she has stopped trusting the original to being handled. There is a mug of tea at Val's left elbow that was made at a quarter past seven and is going to be drunk at some point in the way a thing is going to happen eventually. Kyra comes through at nine with her boots in her hand and does not ask, because she asked on the Monday and got nine minutes about a geometry and has learned her lesson. What Val is doing is the fourth read. The first read is for whether it works. The second is for whether you have fooled yourself. The third is the one where you go and get the things that could break it and try them on it one at a time, and she did that in December and nothing broke. The fourth read is for what it costs — what the thing actually requires, in the world, of a person, stated in order, with nothing left out because it was obvious. She is on the sixth sheet. She has been on the sixth sheet for about forty minutes. The line says what it said on the first three reads. It says that the correction is applied by the thing being corrected. It says that a body in that condition has no reference outside itself, and that eleven seconds is what one body can hold alone, and that the transit is fifteen. It says, in her own hand, in the flat way she writes everything, that the arrangement therefore requires two bodies in resonant coupling, each of which serves as the other's outside reference, and that the duration is irrelevant because a circuit does not need to know where it is, it only needs both ends. She wrote that in December without looking up from the page. She reads it on the fourth pass and stops at it, and could not immediately say why, and sits there with her hand flat on the sheet for the better part of a minute. It is not that she does not know where it comes from. She has known exactly where it comes from since before either of them had a child. She sat in a dark lander cabin four hours out from Thennet with a notebook on her knee and did not write the next line down, because she could hear how it would sound in a room. She stood on a wall some time after that and said out loud, to nobody in particular, that it was not a metaphor and had never been a metaphor, that it was an instruction, four thousand years old, and that it was the fifth step. She was right, and was able to prove it with animals in a cold room, and it went into a training annex above the protocol for paired runs with a faculty record number under it in smaller type, and that was the end of the matter and has been for four centuries. What stops her on the sixth sheet is not recognition. It is that she proved it about other people. She puts the pencil down and turns the sheet over and sits looking at the back of it. Kyra has got one boot on and stops with the other in her hand. Val. Say the Vey thing. Say the — The line. Say it. Not the version in the annex, which I wrote the cover note for and could recite in my sleep. She has not turned round. Say it the way you had it. Kyra puts the boot down on the floor. She does not have to go and get it from anywhere: she has been unable to read it in a manual without seeing a valley with eleven fields in it and a road, and she sat in a bad chair in a house above that valley with an old woman's hands on the arms of a chair opposite her, and she was twenty years younger than the woman who has just asked her and came away from that room with a thing she has never been able to put down. Two enter, says Kyra. Neither completes without the other. One carries what the other cannot. And the rest of it. It is not a secret. It is an agreement. Val sits with that for a moment. Then Val says, in the flattest voice available to her, There is nothing in it. I'm sorry? There is nothing in it, Kyra. That is what I have just understood and I want to say it badly before I say it well. She turns round in the chair at last. I have carried that line about for four hundred years as a thing somebody knew. A people on a plateau who noticed a true thing about bodies and kept it for four thousand years in a ceremony, and four surveys filed it under pastoral sentiment, and I was the one who worked out what it was, and I have been quietly pleased about that since before either of us had a child. You were right about it. I was right about it and it is not an insight, says Val. It is a description. They did not encode anything. They did not hide a message in a ceremony for four thousand years in the hope that somebody would come along. They stood eleven days in an unclosed interval and watched who came out of it whole and then went on doing the thing that worked, by doing it, without knowing one word about why, and the reason it is in my sixth sheet is not that they put it there. It is that it is simply true, and anything that is true will turn up in the work of anybody who gets far enough, and I have been treating a correct observation as a message addressed to me. Kyra comes over and sits on the corner of the table, in one boot, which Val lets pass without comment. That's the most deflated I have ever seen you about being right, Kyra says. I am not deflated. I am being accurate about a thing I have been slightly wrong about for a long time, which is a different sensation and I have never learned to enjoy it. Val. What. Narra Vey told me that in a cold room, says Kyra, and she was unimpressed with both of us, and what she told me was that it is not a secret, it is an agreement. She did not say an observation. She said an agreement. She has her hands round her own knee. Nobody agrees to a fact. You agree to a thing you are going to go on doing with somebody. Val looks at her. That is not what she meant. I was in the room and you weren't, says Kyra, and it is exactly what she meant, and you have the other half of it on your sixth sheet and you have been looking at it for forty minutes. The tea goes on being at Val's elbow. Say the practical form, Kyra says, after a while. You've been sitting on it since the Monday and I have let you. It requires two. I know it requires two. You do not know what I mean by it, because I did not know what I meant by it until about ten past nine. She has both hands on the edge of the table now. It is not two people traveling together. It is not two seats. It is one arrangement with two ends, and neither end is the thing, and the thing does not exist unless both of them hold for fifteen seconds, and any two Sethalans alive could do it because it is a fact about the bodies and not about the people. Any two. Any two, says Val. Two strangers off a step. Two men who dislike each other. It is plumbing, Kyra, it is not a sacrament, and I want that said out loud in this kitchen once so that neither of us ever gets to be sentimental about it afterward. Kyra is quiet for a bit. All right, Kyra says. Now say the other half of that. There isn't — There is, and you've had it since ten past nine, and you've gone the color you go. The dark of her hair has fallen forward and she pushes it back without noticing. Any two could do it. Fine. That's the machine. Now tell me what it takes to hold a thing like that for fifteen seconds while everything you've got to steer by is gone. Val does not answer for a moment. Practice, says Val. How much. More than any two strangers off a step have got. And then Val says it, because it is true and because she stopped being able to leave the true ones in her mouth somewhere around 1976: We have been doing it on a couch in front of a television since Maribor. Kyra has nothing to put against that. I am not being romantic. I would like that understood and I will fight about it. Val has her eyes on the sheet. The thing that is required is two bodies that can stay in agreement through something that gives them nothing to steer by, for a duration, without either of them letting go when it gets uncomfortable, and we have four hundred years of that, and we did not build it for this and it is not for this, and it is nevertheless the only qualification either of us has got. That's the most Val Sorin sentence I have ever heard. It is an accurate sentence. It's both, says Kyra. That's what I'm telling you. It's been both the whole time and you have never once let it be. She goes and finds the other boot after that and puts it on, and says something about the gutter at the back, and goes out, and Val hears the truck go down the road. And then she sits in an empty kitchen with the sixth sheet in front of her and does the thing she has been avoiding since ten past nine, which is to work the requirement backward. Eleven seconds alone. Fifteen seconds of transit. Nine sections and nine pairs and a table in a building that had done everything right. It takes her under a minute. It does not arrive as a discovery and it does not arrive with any drama in it; it falls out of the arithmetic sideways, the way the worst things do, while she is checking something else. Eight people answered the report. Eight people were in a room with the other half of themselves when the sections stopped agreeing. Eleven people were not. That is all there is to it. There is no cruelty in it and there was never a fault in the vessel, the solution, the crew or the procedure, and a woman in a kitchen in Oregon has just become the only person on two worlds who can state why seventeen households were never told anything. She gets up and pours the tea down the sink. There is nothing to be done with it. There is no one to tell and no one who would understand the claim, and the only document it could ever go into is one that does not exist and is not going to, and she is four hundred and nineteen years and eight thousand miles from anybody with standing to hear it. And there is one other thing in it, which is that Ramel Aden had moved, because verification does not pair. She stands at the sink for a while with the cup in her hand. Then she washes it and puts it on the rack and goes back to the table and starts the fourth read again from the first sheet, because the fourth read is not finished and there are nine sheets in it, and a thing half checked is a thing not checked.

They do it on a Saturday at the end of February, in Ray Hale's yard, because it is the one place in the county where all three of them have a reason to be standing. Ray has a trailer with a bad axle and has been saying so since Christmas. Marcus has the jack out and most of a toolset on a feed sack and has got further with it than Ray has in two months. Ray himself went in at half past two to watch something and has not come back, which is Ray. Kyra has been quiet in the truck the whole way out. She has tried four openings on the road between the house and the turn and discarded all of them, and Val has let her do it and has said nothing whatever, which you can only do for somebody if you have four centuries of credit with them. Marcus straightens up when they come through the gate and wipes his hands down the front of his jeans. Both of you, he says. Both of us. Val has stopped about six feet short of him, which is deliberate. He looks at Kyra for a beat longer than a glance, and then back at Val, and something goes out of his face and something else comes into it, and he puts the wrench down on the feed sack and does not pick anything else up. All right, says Marcus. Val gives it to him standing, with her hands at her sides. We have found a way to go home. It is not a ship and it is not anything you could be shown. It will work or it will not and we will know inside fifteen seconds either way, and if it does not work there is no second attempt and nothing of us comes back. She lets that sit for exactly as long as it needs. We are going in the autumn. I am telling you first, before anybody, because that is the arrangement I have had with one other man in my life and he is dead. Marcus stands in a yard with mud on his boots and takes it. Okay, he says. Then he turns round and looks at the treeline for a while, and neither woman says anything to the back of him. When he turns back his eyes are wet and his voice is entirely steady, which Val files and does not comment on. The autumn. September or October. It depends on a thing I cannot explain to you in a yard. Will you tell me when it's the day? No, says Val. He nods as if he had expected that, and kicks at the edge of the feed sack, and says, Yeah. There is a second thing, Val says, and you should have it from me rather than work it out in nine years in a kitchen. Kyra's head comes round. In April I sat in a library with you and told you I would give you everything I knew and everything I did not, and then let you decide, and that I would find it very hard and would do it anyway. Val has not moved from where she stopped. In November I sat down at a table and did a piece of arithmetic, and when I stood up again the thing you were deciding about no longer existed. I did not do it for that reason. It is nonetheless what I did, and you are not going to hear it from anybody else, so you are hearing it from me. Marcus thinks about that properly. He is slow in the way that is not slow. That's not the same as deciding for me. It is adjacent to it, says Val, and adjacent is close enough to be worth saying out loud. And then there is nothing left in the yard except the thing Val cannot say for her. She does not look at Kyra and she does not shift her weight and she does not clear her throat, and the holding still of her is the single hardest piece of work she does that year. Kyra comes forward two steps on her own. Marcus. I know. You don't, and I'm going to — She stops. The sun is coming off the metal of the trailer and the dark of her hair has the copper up in it along one side and she has not combed it since the truck. In June you asked me something on your granddad's porch. You don't have to do this. That's the second time you've said that to me, says Kyra, and I'm not taking it twice. She gets about four words further and then it goes. Not tears. Her face does nothing at all, which anybody who knew her would find more alarming than weeping. She has the sentence — she had it in the truck, she had it that morning at six, she has rehearsed something perfectly decent and perfectly true and it is all there and in order — and she opens her mouth in a yard in February and the whole of it stays where it is. Four hundred years of a woman who says things. Val does not help her. What comes out in the end is not the sentence. I kept it from her for five months, Kyra says. Marcus blinks. What you asked me. I didn't tell her until November. Her hands have gone into her coat pockets and stayed there. And the reason wasn't you. It was that if I'd told her I'd have had to answer you, and I couldn't, and I let five months go by so I wouldn't have to be the one who said it. She looks at him straight. That's the whole of what I've got for you and it's about me and not about you, and I know exactly how poor it is. Kyra — It's poor, Marcus. Don't be nice about it. I've had four hundred years of people being nice about things and I have never once needed it less than I need it now. He stands there in the mud and works it through, and does not look away from her while he does it, which costs him something. So that's a no, he says. Marcus. It's all right. I'm not asking you to say it. I'm saying it, so that you don't have to, and then it's said and we can both stop standing here. He puts a hand on the side of the trailer. I worked it out at the gate. You both came. You'd not both have come for anything else. And Kyra Davan, who has never in four centuries been let off anything she had not arranged to be let off, stands in Ray Hale's yard and is let off a second time by a man of twenty-three, and finds that it is the worst thing that has happened to her in a long while. Val speaks once more, and only once, and she chooses the ground. You will want to know what happens to you, says Val. I know what happens to me. You know the first half. The second half is that there will be nobody to ask. She takes a step forward, which she has not done all afternoon. Whatever moved in you that night has not moved back, and will not, and in forty years you will notice something about yourself in a room full of people and there will be no one on this planet who can tell you whether it is a thing or nothing. That is not a warning. It is simply the shape of it, and I would rather you had it now than at sixty. Marcus looks at his own hands for a moment. That's what it's like for you two. That is exactly what it has been like for us two, says Val, since the spring of sixteen hundred and seven, and we are about to stop, and you are about to start, and I have not found a way to make that acceptable and have stopped looking. Nobody asks him for anything. That is not an oversight. There is a version of the afternoon in which one of them says something about never telling anybody, and Val rehearsed it in December and discarded it in January, because the only honest form of it was nobody would believe you and he knows that and they know it and saying it would have been an insult to a man who held on in the dark for six hours without being asked twice. So nothing is said about it, then or ever, and it holds for the rest of his life. In the end he goes back to the axle, because there is an axle and because it is something to do with his hands. Will you come out again, he says, from under it. Before. Not for this. Just out. Yes, says Kyra. All right then. They stand about for a bit while he works. Ray comes out at twenty past four with three cups of coffee and a quantity of opinion about the axle and finds two women and a young man standing round a trailer not saying very much, and puts it down to the cold, and is wrong, and pours the coffee anyway. In the truck, at the end of Fenner Road, Kyra puts her hands in her lap and looks out of the side window for about two miles. You didn't help me, Kyra says. No. Thank you. Val puts her hand on the gear lever and leaves it there and does not say anything else at all, and the rain comes on again somewhere past the quarry, and the pale of her hair in the last of that light is the only bright thing in the cab.

The snow has been down eleven days and the road above the village has not been a road for nine of them, and there is nothing to do in the rooms above the shuttered shop but wait for the weather to make up its mind and be looked at by people who have decided, inside a week, that the two women upstairs are sisters and that the quiet one has the money. They give the dull answers on the second morning, in order, to a woman with a basket who has come up to be neighborly and to look at the furniture. Nobody ever asks for a twelfth. Val has the inventory out on the table. It has been four pages for six days and has been finished for five of them, and she goes through it in the evenings anyway, because going up that mountain with the wrong thing in the pack is not a mistake she intends to make twice in four hundred years. Kyra has the window, with her sleeves pulled down over her hands, doing the thing she does in a town with no work in it, which is to look at it. Ask me what I'm thinking. You will tell me whether I ask or not. That's true and it's not the point. Val puts the pencil down flat. There are going to be men there, Kyra says. There are men downstairs. Val. I know what you mean. I have known what you mean since about the ninth month and I have been waiting to see which way you would come at it. Kyra turns round and puts her back against the cold of the glass, which she will regret in a minute and is not thinking about. I've got a question. It's four hundred years old and I've never had a reason to need the answer, and now there's a reason and it isn't a good one, and I'm going to ask it anyway. Then it has kept well. How did you manage Aro? Val does not move for a moment. The stove is doing what that stove does, which is not much. In what sense. In the only sense there is. You were twenty. Kyra comes off the window. Three across at the extension. I've had that figure since a kitchen with plums in it, and I have carried it about for a hundred and twenty-six years and been very pleased with myself for having it, and I have never once asked you the next thing. How does a woman of twenty do that. Carefully, says Val. That's not an answer and you know it isn't. No. Val turns the inventory face down, which she did once before in a kitchen and has not done since. I prepared. Prepared. I made a set. It comes out the way everything comes out of her, which is in order and with the numbers in it. Nine pieces. Turned out of a stoppering resin in the cold room at the station, in the evenings, after the others had gone up. Each one a quarter inch over the one before it. I made the last one a quarter inch over what I had put him at. You'd put him at something. I had put him at something in the first week, in a doorway, with my coat still on. Her chin is on her hand. I was out by an eighth. I have been out by more since on things that mattered less. And then what. Then four months. Three evenings a week, in a room with a bolt on it, with the dates in the back of a field book and the time against each one and a note where it had not gone well. She puts it the way she puts a soil sample. And in the whole of those four months I did not let that man near me, and he thought it was shyness, and I let him think it, and I have not corrected it to a living soul until this minute. Kyra comes over and sits down at the foot of the bed. She does it slowly, which in her is the equivalent of somebody shouting. Say the rest. There is no rest. It worked. Val. It worked, which is the part nobody would put in a book. I went to him in the fifth month and it was not difficult and it did not hurt and I was not brave about anything, because I had spent four months making sure that there would be nothing to be brave about. That is the whole of the method and it is the whole of my character and you have known both for four hundred years. Were you frightened of him? No. I was frightened of arriving and not being able to do it properly. Which is not the same thing, and is worse, and I would like that said out loud once in my life by somebody who is not me. Kyra looks at her for a while. You built yourself a set of instruments at twenty years old so that you would not turn up to a man unready. Yes. And then you went and stood in his doorway for an hour without saying anything. That was afterward. That was not afterward, that was the same woman, says Kyra, and laughs, and then stops laughing, which takes her about four seconds and which Val watches the whole of. What happened to them? I kept the figures, and I put the set in the melt. The light has gone out of the valley while they were doing that. It goes early there and it goes all at once, the way it went the first winter, and neither of them does anything about the lamp. Ramel, Kyra says. Val does not answer. He was near enough the same man. You told me that once, years ago, in about four words, and you have never said anything else about it since. Near enough the same man, says Val. So you did it again. I did it again, says Val. On a ship. On a ship. In a stores bay with the door held with a strap, out of pipe lagging and a resin meant for seals, and badly, and in five weeks instead of four months, because five weeks was what there was. Kyra goes very still. Five weeks. Yes. You began it in the sixth. I began it in the sixth, says Val. Kyra gets up off the bed and goes four paces to the wall and stands there with her hand flat on it, which is a thing she has done perhaps nine times in four centuries and every one of them has been about this. I have had that number since a fire on a mountain. You sat on the other side of it and you said the sixth week and you said where and you said how often, and I took the sixth week and I have had it in me ever since, and every single time I have turned it over it has been a number about him. She turns round. The gold has come up at the rim of her eyes and she makes no move to hide it and does not appear to know it is there. It was a number about you. You spent five weeks of your last season on that world in a stores bay getting ready, alone, with a strap on the door, and then you came to me at a fire and gave me the week you started and not one word about the five in front of it, and I have been angry at a number for four hundred years and it was the wrong number. I did not leave it out. Don't. I am not defending myself, I am telling you a fact and it is worse than the defense. Val has not moved from the table. I did not leave it out. It never once occurred to me that it was part of what anybody was owed. It was preparation. It was the same as checking a seal. I have sat with that sentence since you said the whole season on a mountain and I have never until this evening understood that there was a thing in it you were entitled to. Kyra comes back and sits down on the end of the bed again. There's a thing I've never said about him, Kyra says, and I'm going to say it now, because we are two days from a mountain and I will not get another evening like this one. Say it. You left him off the list. Val does not move. Which list, says Val. You know which list. In the kitchen, in the summer, when we did the color. Kyra has her chin on her knees. Emrin. Deyn. Aro. Sven. Xander. Five men, one color. You had your hand over your eyes and you went through them in order and you did not say his name. The stove goes on doing the very little that stove does. I am aware, says Val. Four hundred years of a woman who has never miscounted anything in her life. I did not miscount. I would like that distinction preserved. Val turns the pencil over and sets it down. I left him out. I did not decide to. I noticed about nine seconds after I stopped speaking and I said nothing, and then I went on not saying anything about it for the rest of that year, and I have had it in the back of my head ever since in the way that one has a tooth. Why? Because he is the one I do not put in lists, says Val. Kyra sits with that for a moment and then begins, helplessly, to laugh. That's it? That's the whole — That is the whole of it and I am not going to improve on it. Val, you put me in lists. You are in every list I have ever made, says Val, which I had intended to say to you at some point in a more considered way and have now said in a rented room above a shop, and I would be grateful if you did not quote it back to me. I am absolutely going to quote it back to you. I am aware of that as well. And that is the end of it. Neither of them goes back to it, then or on the mountain or in the three years after, and there is a sheet of paper somewhere on another world with five names on it and a sixth that is not there, and the only two people alive who could have corrected it never do. The lamp gets lit eventually, by Kyra, because Val would have gone on sitting in the dark and doing arithmetic in it until morning. There's a thing I want on the record, Val says, when it is lit, and I am going to do it badly. Do it badly. We are going back to a world where that minute is ordinary. Her eyes are on the table. Where there is a word for it in a curriculum and somebody with a chart and most of an afternoon, and every person in every room will have the whole of it as a thing that is simply true about being alive. And I did it at twenty, under a clock, with a duty on me, and I did it well, and I have not done it in four hundred and nineteen years. And? And I am not going to do it again, and I do not want to, and I would like it understood that I am not leaving it behind by accident. She looks up. I am leaving it. That is a different verb and it is the one I mean. Kyra gets up off the floor where she has ended up and comes and stands by the table. Say the next bit. There isn't a next bit. There is, and you've had it since the ninth month, and I've watched you not say it in four countries. Val sits with that for a moment. The light comes up under her ear and along the jaw, in a cold room with one lamp in it, and she does not put her sleeves down. Nothing I did with any of them was ever not a task. Not one minute of it, on either world, in four hundred and nineteen years. There was always a thing to get right and a person waiting for me to get it right, and I got it right, and I was proud of it, and I am not ashamed of a single evening of it. She stops. And there is one room I have ever been in where there is nothing to get right. It has no clock in it and no method and nothing anybody is owed, and I did not know a room like that existed until I was two hundred years old and I have been standing in it ever since. Kyra does not say anything for a bit. Then she gets down on the floor with her back to the bed, which is where she does her best work, and says it to the stove rather than to her. When we get there, there'll be somewhere to go. Val puts the pencil down flat for the second time that evening. Say the rest of it. You know the rest of it. I would like you to say it anyway, because I have had it for about three weeks and I have been hoping you would not get there. Four hundred years, Kyra says, and there has never been anywhere for either of us to go. Not once. You could have walked out of any house we ever had and gone four thousand miles and you'd still have been the only other one of us on the planet and so would I. It was never a choice, Val. We have never once chosen each other. We've been the only thing available. Val does not answer that straight away. That is not true, says Val. I am going to argue with it, and I want to do the other thing first. What other thing? The honest one. She turns the pencil over once. You are right that it becomes a question when we land. There is a world down there with eleven hundred million people on it and about nine of them are family, and for the first time since sixteen hundred and seven a woman could get up and go somewhere and have a life in it. I have known that since about the second week. I have not mentioned it. I would like it on the record that not mentioning it was a decision and not an oversight. I know it was. Then ask me the thing you actually want to ask, says Val. Could you? says Kyra. Not would. Could. Yes. Kyra's head comes up off the quilt. I want to be accurate, because you asked an accurate question and you deserve one back. Yes. I could get up and go. I would survive it. I would be functional inside a year, because I am extremely good at being functional, and I would have work and a room and a routine and I would be perfectly all right to look at. Val — And I would be a woman who had once been able to put everything down, and had chosen not to be. Both hands are flat on the table. That is the cost and it is not negotiable and it does not get better with time. There is one room in four hundred and some years where there is nothing to get right. If I walk away from it there is not another one. Not because the universe is cruel. Because it took four centuries to build and I would be starting at the beginning at four hundred and ninety-seven with somebody who does not know what the light is. Now mine, says Kyra. Yours is worse. Don't do that. I am not being gallant, I am reporting. You could do it more easily than I could and we both know it. You are open with everybody. You were open with the woman at the market in Calderveil inside four minutes. Val looks at her. You could be in a kitchen in Aventhal in two years with somebody who adored you and you would be entirely yourself in it, and you would not have to build one single thing. That's the bit that's wrong. Then correct it. Kyra takes a while over it, which for her is the tell. I was open with Jakob for twenty-five years. Entirely. Not one thing held back that I could have given him. And I stood in a lane in Trieste with the whole of it coming up my throat and the sentence was you have known me for twenty-five years and you have never once met me. I remember. So being open isn't the thing. I can do that with anybody and it costs me nothing and it has never once got me what I wanted. Her arms are round her knees. You're the only person who ever met me, Val. Four hundred and seventy-nine years since a wash room, two planets, nine men and about a thousand people I liked, and one woman who actually looked. Val does not say anything. So I could go, and I'd be fine, and I'd be lovely company, and nobody would ever see me again as long as I lived. They sit with it. Somebody comes up the lane below with a shovel and gives up on it halfway and goes in again. Turn it over, Kyra says at last. Turn what over? We've spent an hour on why you'd go and what it would cost. Do the other side. There's a world down there with family in it and work and people we haven't met and about nine hundred things neither of us has done. Her chin is on her knees. Why would you stay? Not would you. Why. Val does not answer. That's a harder one, says Kyra. It is a considerably harder one and I have no idea why. She sits with it for the better part of two minutes, which Kyra lets her have. Because you have never had any use for me, Val says. That is a horrible sentence. It is the best I have got and I will stand behind it. Everywhere else I have ever been, on either world, I have been useful. That is the arrangement and I made it myself and I have never once complained about it. People want the figure, or the paperwork, or the hand that does not shake, and I give them the figure and they are grateful and there is nothing else between us. Both hands flat on the table. You have never once needed me to be good at anything. Not in four hundred years. You have been pleased when I was — you have been insufferable about it on occasion — and you have never required it, and there is one piece of evidence that settles the matter and we both know what it is. Maribor. Maribor. The one occasion in four hundred years when I produced nothing whatsoever. Nothing. The thing I was best at and could not do it, and I said two words and lay there waiting to find out what I was worth with the output removed. She stops. And you said all right, and you went to sleep, and you never mentioned it again, and I have been living off that for four hundred years. Kyra drags a hand down over her own face and leaves it at her jaw. Right. Mine. Yours. You're the only person who ever told me no. Val looks up. Everybody says yes to me. Everybody. They always have. I come into a room and I am warm at people and they like it and they give me whatever it is, and I have never in four hundred years had to work for one single thing I wanted off anybody. Her arms are round her knees again. And it is pleasant and it is useless and I did not understand it was useless until about a year ago. Go on. You would not be acquitted on the wording when I handed you a way out of a promise you'd broken. You would not take the comfortable version of anything I ever offered you. You would not let me be quieter when I came up those stairs to offer it. Her jaw has gone. I have offered you about nine things in four hundred years and you have sent four of them back, and every single one you sent back was a thing I would have been worse for. That is not a flattering portrait of me. It is the most flattering thing I will ever say about anybody. Val, I can get warmth anywhere. I could get it on that mountain road from a man with a cart. The thing I cannot get anywhere else in the universe is somebody who will look at what I've handed them and say no, that one's wrong, take it back. She stops. That's not love either, strictly. I know it isn't. It's just that I've had four hundred years of being agreed with and about nine occasions of being corrected, and every one of the nine was you, and I'd give the rest of it up before I gave those up. Something shifts on the roof and slides off and lands in the yard. There is a third, says Val. Go on. It is the one I have been avoiding for an hour. She turns the pencil over and sets it down. Everybody we are about to see knew us before. Kyra goes still. Vaedom knew a woman of seventy-seven who had never been off that planet. The girls knew a mother who had a post at the institute and a house and a great deal to say about other people's methods, and they knew her until they were thirty-nine, and then she got on a ship. Val's hands are flat. Not one of them has ever met the person either of us has spent four hundred years becoming. They will be glad to see us and they will be looking at somebody they remember. And you're the only one who — I am the only one who was there for any of it. And you are the only one who was there for mine. Val looks at her. Maribor and the trail and the court in Trieste and the fever hospital and every single ordinary Tuesday in between. Four hundred years that happened to nobody else alive. If we part when we land, then the whole of it goes into two separate heads and stays there, and a thing in one head is a memory. In two it is a fact. Kyra puts her face down on her knees for a bit. Those are good reasons, Kyra says, muffled. They are reasons. I want to be exact about the difference. Val does not soften it. They are good tonight, in a rented room, in the snow, six days from a mountain. I cannot guarantee any of them and I am not going to pretend otherwise, because a reason you can guarantee is not a reason, it is a vow, and I have never given you one of those and I am not starting now. I know you're not. If any of them stops being true I will tell you at the time, says Val, which I could not have said to you in eighteen thirty-eight, and which is the only promise I am able to make and the only one I have ever made you. Kyra lifts her head. That'll do. That is not very much. Val, it's everything. You spent four hundred years not telling me things and about a year learning to tell me at the time, and you've just offered me the one thing you had to build from nothing. She has hold of the table edge and does not appear to know it. Everybody else would have promised me forever in about four seconds and meant it for a fortnight. That is an extremely cynical view of a species. It's an extremely cynical view of nine men and about a thousand people I liked, and I'd put money on it. Later the lamp is down and the stove is doing nothing at all and the valley has gone entirely quiet in the way a valley goes when there is snow on everything including the sound. How long till the road? Kyra says, from somewhere under the pale of Val's hair. A week. Possibly four days. That's not an answer. Not far now, says Val. Kyra laughs into her shoulder, which is the right response and has been for four centuries, and then turns over, and after a while they lace, and the light is up, and there is nothing in that room that has to be done inside any particular minute, and neither of them counts anything at all.

The dream is not complicated and does not need to be. They arrive. That is all: the valley, the long way down off the mountain, a road, a town, a house with a door in it — and Val goes up the step and opens the door and the house is empty and has been empty for a very long time, and she stands in the hall knowing with the total unarguable certainty of two o'clock in the morning that she is four hundred and some years late and was always going to be. She comes up out of it the way she comes up out of everything, which is all at once and without a sound. The room is cold and the shutter is rattling and there is nothing at all wrong with the world. It takes her the usual eleven or twelve seconds to put that together — the ordinary stocktaking of a woman waking somewhere she has woken a thousand times, the shape of the room, the noise of the weather, the weight of the quilt — and in those seconds she lies with her heart going and her mouth dry and does not move one muscle, because she never does. They had gone to sleep laced. They often do now. Not for anything — they had not been doing anything, they had simply been lying there arguing about the pack and had carried on lying there until neither of them was arguing, which has been happening more and more as the winter has gone on. And it is still going. Down at the very bottom of everything, barely anything at all, the way it does. And then Kyra answers her. It is not much. It is a very small thing — a change in the pressure, up a fraction and held there, and then a slow easing back down, and then nothing more. It takes perhaps three seconds and it arrives about four seconds after Val's heart has started going. Kyra does not wake up. She does not stir, she does not change her breathing, she does not do any of the things a person does on the way up out of sleep. She is somewhere entirely else and has been for two hours and will be for another five. And her body has reached over and done that, and gone back to doing nothing. Val lies in the dark for about an hour after that. Not frightened — the dream went off her within a minute of the answer, which she notices at the time and which is, she thinks, rather the point. What she does instead is what she does: she goes back through it. She finds three other occasions she can produce without any trouble at all — a bad night in Lowell, something in the second winter in Trieste, the week after the fever hospital in 1918 — and then she stops looking for more, because she already knows what the answer is and the answer is a great many. Four hundred years of a woman answering her in her sleep. And not once, in four hundred years, has it occurred to Val Sorin to mention it. There is one window in that room and it puts a cold gray on everything, and the fair head coming down the stair into it goes the color it goes under anything northern, which Kyra notices and does not examine, the way she has not examined it since she was eighteen. She tells her over the bread and the bad coffee, which is fast for her and is the whole of her arc in one decision, and which she will be quietly satisfied about for some weeks. I had a bad night. Kyra puts the pot down. You didn't say. I am saying now, which is approximately nine hours, and I would like it noted that in eighteen thirty-eight it would have been nine years. She has a cup in both hands that she has no intention of drinking. It was the arrival one. The house being empty. Oh, love. It is an extremely ordinary dream and I have had it perhaps twenty times since we decided, and it does not mean anything beyond the obvious. She turns the cup a quarter turn. That is not the part. Then what's the part? You answered me. Kyra sits down opposite her. I don't remember waking up. You did not wake up, says Val. That is the part. And then Val says it properly, in order, with the figures in it, because that is the only way anything has ever come out of her and because this is the one time in four hundred years the figures are doing some good. We had gone to sleep laced. We do, now. I came up out of it at some point after two and my heart was going and I did not move, and about four seconds later you came up — not much, a fraction, held for about three seconds and then eased off again — and then nothing. You did not stir. Your breathing did not change. You were two hours down and you stayed two hours down. That's not — I am not finished. She looks up. And it worked, Kyra. That is the part I have been sitting with since two in the morning. The dream came off me inside a minute. Not because I reasoned with it — I did not get a chance to reason with it, I had not got as far as reasoning. It went because somebody told me they were there. Kyra is not quick to answer, which in her is the whole alarm bell. How often? I stopped counting at four and the four took me about a minute. Nothing moves in Val's voice at all. Lowell, the bad winter. Trieste, in the second year, more than once. The week after the hospital in 1918, which was nearly every night and I had entirely forgotten until two o'clock this morning. She stops. It is a great many, and I cannot give you a number, and I have had a number for everything else that has ever happened to me. Four hundred years. Four hundred years, and I have never once mentioned it, and I did not even know I had not mentioned it, which is worse. Kyra gets up and goes to the shutter and puts her back to the room, which she does about four times a century. Say it again. The bit about not waking. You did not wake up. You have never woken up. Not on any of the occasions I can produce and I would put money on all the ones I cannot. Val has not moved. Whatever did that was not you deciding anything. There is no version of this in which you chose it. You were asleep and something in you reached over and said a true thing and went back to sleep. Val — It is the only communication I have ever received in four hundred years, from anybody, on either world, that could not possibly have been arranged. And Kyra stands at that shutter for a long moment with her arms folded, and then says the thing Val has not expected and should have. So even that's free. I beg your — Even that. She turns round. Val, I have spent about a year now finding out that I cannot say a hard thing. Twice I've had a sentence in my mouth and it would not come — in a kitchen in November and in a yard in February, and you watched both of them. Her jaw has gone. You get yours out. Badly, flat, nine hours later, and it costs you the whole evening. I say nine things before breakfast and not one of them has ever cost me anything at all. That is not — And now you're telling me the best thing I've ever done for you, the actual best one, I did asleep. Unconscious. For nothing. Four hundred times, and I wasn't even in the room. It's all free. The whole of me is free. You have been paying for every single word since Maribor and I have never once put anything on the counter. Val sits very still at that table. Sit down. I don't want to sit down. Kyra. Sit down, because I am going to say something that will take me a minute and I will not deliver it to the back of your head. So Kyra comes and sits down, because that voice gets used perhaps four times a century. You have it exactly backwards, says Val, and I am going to be slow about it, so let me be slow. Go on. You think it costs you nothing because it is shallow. That is what you have been telling yourself since about last spring and it has been getting worse since the summer, and I have watched it get worse and have not known how to put a hand on it. She has a palm flat on the wood either side of the cup. It does not cost you anything because it is underneath the part that costs. Kyra does not say anything. Everything of mine happens at the top. All of it. Every word I have ever said to you came out through four hundred years of apparatus — the face, the voice, the five hours, the counting, the thing I do where I decide at four o'clock. That is where I live and that is why it costs. I have to carry it all the way up and over. She turns the cup a quarter turn and lets it go. What answered me at two o'clock this morning was not at the top. It was not anywhere near the top. It was so far underneath the top that the woman it belonged to was asleep. That's a distinction without a — It is the entire distinction and you are not going to argue me out of it, because I am the one who has been standing underneath it for four centuries catching what came down. Her voice has not risen at all. Free is not the word. Free would mean it was nothing. It is foundational. It is the thing the rest of you is built on top of, and it does not cost you anything for the same reason your heart does not cost you anything, which is not that your heart is cheap. Val. And it is not shallow, Kyra. It is the deepest thing either of us has got. She stops. She goes on. I can arrange anything. You know that about me better than anybody alive and you have been generous about it for four hundred years. There is not one thing I have ever given you that I could not, in principle, have constructed. Not one. Including the true ones. That's not true. It is entirely true and it is the great private horror of my life, and I have never said it to anybody, and I am saying it over bad coffee in a rented room because you are standing at a shutter telling me you have never put anything on the counter. Kyra puts her hand over her mouth. Everything I have ever handed you, I built. And I meant every word of all of it — I want that understood, I am not confessing to a fraud — but it went through me first, and I checked it, and I decided. Her eyes are on the table. And you reach over in your sleep and tell me you are there, and there is no apparatus anywhere in it, and it is the only thing in four hundred years that arrived without passing through anybody's hands. I didn't know I did it. I know you didn't. Four hundred years and I didn't know. You could not have known. That is what it is. She finally looks up. And I want to say the rest of it, because it is the part I came downstairs to say and I have been circling it for ten minutes like a woman afraid of a dog. Say it. There is a part of you that is not under your management, and it is good, and it has been getting it right for four hundred years without supervision. Out in the lane somebody is breaking ice off a step. And that is the same condition I have been in since sixteen hundred and seven, says Val, and I have never once had company in it. The light. The light. Which I cannot stop, cannot time, cannot falsify, and which has given me away in nine countries, and which I spent two hundred years regarding as a defect and about another two hundred not regarding as anything at all. She turns her hands over on the table. And it turns out you have one too. Mine shows. Yours reaches over in the dark and does the kindest thing either of us has ever done for the other, and neither of us is in charge of our own. That's — That is the first thing in four hundred years that has been the same for both of us, and I did not know it until two o'clock this morning, and I have been waiting since then for you to come down. Kyra comes round the table and gets down on the floor beside the chair, which is not a thing a woman of her age has any business doing and which she does about once a decade, and puts her forehead against Val's knee. They stay like that for a while. Tell me the next time, Kyra says, into the cloth. The next time I have the dream? The next time I do it. Her hand has got hold of her ankle. I want to know. Not every time — I'll go peculiar about it if it's every time, I'll start trying to catch myself and then I'll be you. She looks up. But sometimes. When it's a bad one. I want to be told what I did. And Val, who has spent four hundred years giving accurate accounts of other people's bodies to people who could not see them, says, Yes, and finds that her voice is not entirely under control, and does not do anything about that either. The road comes open on the eleventh of March, which is four days after the man at the bottom of the stairs said and two days before Val did. They have one evening left in those rooms and they spend it on the floor with the pack between them and the inventory face up at last, and Kyra makes her read it out. She reads it out. Four pages, in order, in a flat voice, with the weights. Now the other one, says Kyra. There is no other one. There's the other one and it isn't going in the pack and you have been doing it in your head since Oregon. So they do the other one, which takes considerably longer, and which turns out not to overlap anywhere at all. Val's is thirty-one addresses. A bearing taken off a hull in a bad October. A notebook. A house on Clinton with a bad window. The particular way the light comes into a valley in the Coast Range at four in the afternoon in November, which she has been looking at for twelve years and has never once said anything about. Kyra's is people. A woman on Alberta with a face like a shut door who did a thing with rye. A man with a cart on a mountain road who wanted nothing at all. Ellen Ordway. Dee, who called them girls. Neither of them says she will miss any of it. That is not an oversight either. There is one other thing on the floor of that room and it gets about four sentences. Two women exist on paper in the state of Oregon. They were manufactured over fourteen years with a care that cost Val more thought than the fold did, and they have a house between them and a county record and a line in a federal file that cannot be handed back, and from the eleventh of March they are simply going to stop. Nobody will come looking, says Kyra. Nobody will come looking. There is nothing to look for and no one to report it, and in about nine years a clerk will move them to another drawer and in forty the drawer will be a database and they will sit in it being correct and quiet until the system is replaced. She puts the inventory down. Four hundred years of making people, and the last two will outlive us on that planet by about a century, and neither of them will ever do one single thing. That's the most pleased I've ever heard you about a filing cabinet. It is the only clean exit I have ever managed, says Val, and I did not have to kill anybody for it, and you will note that I am not going to be able to say that about the next part. It takes them two days to get up, because the snow is rotten on the south side and Val will not be hurried. The hull is where it has been since the spring of sixteen hundred and seven, which is to say under a great deal of rock on the wrong side of a snowfield, in the driest, safest, coldest place on that world, where nobody has ever found it and nobody is going to. They are four days inside it. What they do in there is a matter of geometry and is not interesting, and Val does it twice and then a third time, and on the fourth evening she calls it right and does not hedge, which she has not done about anything in four hundred years. And then, before they go forward, Kyra says the thing nobody has said out loud yet. It stays. It stays. Say it properly. You've got the figure. It gives us the first half and it cannot come with us, and there is no arrangement under which it ever leaves this mountain. She has the lamp down by her leg. It will be here when the glacier above it is not. It will be here when there is nothing on this planet that remembers what a Dutch village was. In eleven thousand years somebody may put a shaft down for a reason that has nothing to do with us and find a shape in the rock that they cannot explain, and they will not explain it, and that is the whole of what happens next. That's not a comfort. It was not offered as one, says Val. You asked me for the figure. They do not touch anything on the way out, and neither of them looks back down the run, and the lamp goes off at the hatch the way it has every time for four hundred years. Outside it is dark and clear and very cold, and the band is up over the ridge, enormous and perfectly ordinary, and the smudge is where it always is. Kyra finds it first, the way she always has. She does not point at it and she does not say anything about it, and neither does Val, and the two of them stand on a snowfield on the wrong planet for a while and then go down.

They come back up in the second week of September, because the geometry was finished in March and the moment was not, and the moment is not a thing either of them can hurry. The summer in between is six months of being two women with nothing to do in a country where they have no business, and it is, Kyra says afterward, the strangest half-year of four centuries: a thing entirely decided and nothing whatever to do about it, in rented rooms, in three towns, with Val reading everything in the public libraries of two countries and finding nothing further to check and checking anyway. The path up is easier in September. That is the only thing about it that is easier. They are four days in the hull again and most of it is waiting. What there was to do was done in the spring. What is left is a window, and the window is a matter of hours rather than days, and Val has it to the minute and has had it to the minute since a kitchen in Oregon in November and has said the figure out loud exactly twice. On the last evening she goes through it with Kyra from the beginning, in order, because Kyra has asked her to and because it is the only way she knows of being kind. It takes about forty minutes. There are nine things that have to be true and seven of them are already true and two of them will be true at eleven minutes past four in the morning, and at the end of it Kyra says, Right, and nothing else at all. Here is what it is not. It is not a machine. There is no device, nothing to be thrown, no moment at which anybody says now. The ship gave her the shape of a fault four hundred years ago and a dead man in a state university gave her the move that turns a fault into a correction, and what the two of them are going to do with that is stand in a particular place at a particular time in a particular relation to each other, and that is all, and it is the whole of it, and Val has spent most of August being quietly appalled at how little there is to see. The second section lies on its side where it has lain since the spring of sixteen hundred and seven. It is not going anywhere. It has given what it had to give and it will be giving nothing further, and both of them made their peace with that in March. At ten past three they go forward and sit down against the bulkhead and wait. Val has the lamp down to almost nothing. Kyra has her coat on over everything and her boots on and her hands between her knees, and the one pale head in that section is the only thing catching any light at all. Say the thing about the seventeen, Kyra says, at about half past. That is not a thing I am going to say in here. I know. I wanted to see whether you'd say so. Val turns her head. You are frightened. I am extremely frightened and I have been since Oregon and I am not going to pretend about it, says Kyra. That isn't a problem. I've been frightened on a mountain before. I get on with things. At four o'clock they stand up. And Val Sorin, who wrote the paper the whole program stood on, and rewrote the continuity protocol for nineteen and then rewrote it again, and read nineteen panels in a single day with her own hand because she did not trust a good physician who had never read one — Val Sorin gets as far as the place she has to stand in and stops, about a pace short of it, and does not take the pace. She does not say anything. Her face does nothing whatever. She stands in a dead section with her arms at her sides and does not move, and the lamp goes on doing the almost nothing it is doing. Kyra waits. It goes on for some time. Afterward neither of them can put a figure on it, which in Val's case has never once happened before about anything. Val. I know what the window is. I know you do. I have eleven minutes. Her voice is entirely level and has nothing in it at all. I am aware of the arithmetic. I did the arithmetic. There is no part of this that I have not personally checked and I have never in the whole of my life been more certain of anything, and I cannot make my foot go forward, and I want that understood: I am not arguing with myself about it. I have tried. There is nothing there to argue with. Kyra does not tell her it will be all right. She does not say that she is frightened too, which is true and would be a kindness and would be the wrong one. She does not reason. She does not point out that four days ago the woman called it right and did not hedge. What she does is walk over and put a hand flat on the back of Val's head, which is the old one. Eleven people were alone, Kyra says. You've known that since January and you've said it to me once and never again. Yes. And Ramel was never not going to be. Yes. And you are not, and I am not, and that is the entire difference, and it is not a comfort and I am not offering it as one. She has not moved her hand. It's just what's true. That's all I've got, Val. I've never had anything else. Val stands there for a while longer. I can state the whole of it, says Val. I can state it better than anybody who has ever lived. And I cannot go in. I know. That is the fifth step. That is what it means. I have had that line for four hundred years and I thought it was about reference frames. It is about reference frames, says Kyra. It's also the other thing. I've been telling you that since January. And then she takes her hand off Val's head and gets hold of her by the wrist instead, which is not a gesture either of them has, and has no history and no reason and is not soft. Come on, says Kyra. And Val Sorin goes where she is taken, which she has not done since she was eighteen years old. They stand in the place. They get into the relation they have to be in, which is not ceremonious and takes about four seconds and which they have been rehearsing without knowing it on couches and in beds and in rented rooms since a road out of Maribor in 1620. Kyra says, I've got you. Val does not answer. She does not need to and there is nothing available to say with, and in any case Kyra already has it. There is no account of the next fifteen seconds and there never will be. The two people who came through them were inside them, and inside is the one place from which nothing can be described, and both of them had read that sentence in the other's handwriting at some point in four hundred years and neither had ever expected to be in it twice.

What they come out into is a field. It is six miles inland of Aventhal and it is the middle of the afternoon and it is the back of the growing season, and there are four hundred yards of something with a blue cast to it going away downhill in rows, and a wall, and beyond the wall a road with a surface on it that neither of them recognizes. Val goes down on her hands in the dirt and stays there for a while. That is not distress: the whole of her is telling her at once that the ground is right, and there is no preparing for that, and she had not known it was a thing that could be told. Kyra stands over her with her coat on in the warm and looks at a sky she has not seen since she was seventy-seven years old and says nothing at all for about two minutes, which is the longest she has managed in four centuries. There had been a yard here. That is the first wrong thing and it takes Val about nine seconds. There had been a fit-out yard six miles inland of Aventhal with nine bays in it and a hall and a long low building where forty people argued about provisioning, and she walked out of it for the last time on a Thirdday with Kyra four feet to her left and a crew of nineteen behind her, and what is here now is a field with a crop in it and a wall that was built by somebody who was not in a hurry. It's gone, says Kyra. It has been gone for some time. Look at the wall. Val gets up off her hands. That wall is not new. That wall is forty years old at least and it was built out of something that was here before it. Four hundred years, Val. Yes, says Val, and does not look at her, because something has already begun to be wrong and she does not yet have it. They walk down to the road because there is nothing else to do. They have been the fair one and the dark one in nine countries and they are going to be the fair one and the dark one here, and neither of them has thought about that until a man with a load looks at the two of them and visibly sorts them in the ordinary way. What Val is doing on that half mile is the thing she has done on every half mile of her life, which is to count. The wall. The crop, which she does not know and which is a cultivar, which means somebody made it. The road surface. The absence of a yard that employed four hundred people. And none of it comes out. Four hundred and nineteen years is a long time. It is long enough that a road moves, that a coast changes, that the word for a thing goes out of use. What is in front of her is eighty years of ordinary change on a planet that has gone on being itself, and she knows the difference the way a woman who has read strata knows the difference, and she walks down to that road getting steadily colder in the warm. There is a man on the road with a load of something and an animal to pull it, which is a thing Val has not expected and which tells her nothing, because there were men with loads on that road when she was a girl and there will be in nine hundred years. Kyra does the talking, because Kyra does the talking. She does it beautifully. She has not spoken the Sethal to a stranger in four hundred and twenty years and she gets the whole of it right, every sound in its place, the lift and the drop, and the man tells her about the road and about a bridge that is out and about his brother, and she stands in the dust and lets him and laughs in the right places. And then she asks him the date. He gives it to her the way anybody gives you the date, which is to say badly, with the day first and then the month and then a pause and then the year, because nobody says the year. Kyra says thank you and says something about his brother and lets him go. Then she turns round and says the year out loud to Val, in the middle of a road, in the afternoon. And Val Sorin does the sum, which takes her no time at all, and gets an answer that is wrong by three hundred and thirty-eight years. Say it again. Kyra says it again. That is not possible. Val — I am not being difficult. I am telling you that the number that man gave you is not a number that can be correct, and I want you to go back and ask him again, and I am aware of how that sounds. Val has both hands at her sides and nothing in her face whatsoever. Ask him what year he was born. Ask him how old his brother is. Ask him anything with a year in it. So Kyra goes back up the road and asks him, and comes down again, and the second answer agrees with the first. Val sits down on the bank at the side of that road. She does the sum four times. Not because she doubts it — she had it the first time, the way she has always had everything the first time — but because the four of them are four different roads to the same place and she wants all four to arrive there, and they do. Eighty-one years. Eighty-one years on this world. Four hundred and nineteen on the other one. She went into a fold on a Thirdday with a crew of nineteen and came out of it on a mountain in a country that did not have a name yet, and then lived four hundred and twenty years, one day at a time, in order, writing it down — and this planet has been going round its star for eighty-one of them. Say it, says Kyra. She has sat down on the bank too. The two year lengths differ by a few days. I worked that out in sixteen hundred and eight and I have carried it in a notebook ever since and I have been right about it for four centuries. Val has her hands on her knees. That is not what this is. That is a difference in how long a year is. This is a difference in how fast one goes. Did you know that could happen? Of course I knew it could happen. It is in the fold. It is the entire mechanism of the fold. She says it flatly, with no particular emphasis anywhere in it. I did not know it had happened to us, because there is no instrument on that planet that could have told me, and there was no line in the ship's record where the number would have been, and I looked for it once in 1976 and found the place where it was not and could do nothing with it. You looked for it. I looked for it, found an absence, and put it down, says Val. That is all I did about it in four hundred years. Kyra is quiet for a while. There is a bird doing something in the hedge behind them that neither of them has heard since they were young. Val. I have got there. I know you have. I want it said. Vaedom reached four hundred and six in nineteen hundred and eight, says Val. I marked the year. I did it in a house on Clinton with the blind down and I did it correctly, in order, with the date, and I grieved my father properly for the first and only time in my life, and I was sixty years older than I needed to be and he was not dead. He may not be — He is a hundred and eighty-six, says Val. That is not an opinion. That is seventy-seven plus eighty-one plus twenty-eight and there is no part of it I have to guess at. She sits on that bank for some time and does not cry and does not move. What she is doing, and what she will be doing on and off for the next two years, is going back through four hundred years of arithmetic and finding that all of it is wrong. Not wrong in the method. The method was perfect. Every sum she ever did was done correctly on the information available and she would stand behind every one of them in any room on either world. They are all wrong anyway, because the premise under them has been wrong since sixteen hundred and seven, and there was no way on that planet to find out, and she built four centuries of grief on top of it with the care of a woman laying a wall. Nineteen seventy-four. A kitchen, and a column of years, and the figure she carried toward her for six years, and said out loud to one person at a quarter past eleven at night, and was frightened of. Her daughters were about a hundred and ten. She cannot make it closer than that and she never will. I have been mourning people who were alive, she says. Yes. For centuries. On dates I calculated. With the blind down. She turns her hands over on her knees and looks at them. I have done one thing with my life, Kyra. I have put a figure on every unbearable thing that has ever happened to me and that is how I have carried any of it, and the figures were the thing I had, and they were the only thing I had, and I have just found out that I have been doing arithmetic on a dead man who is sitting somewhere on this planet in a chair. That's the good half. I am aware that it is the good half. Say the good half out loud, Val, or you'll be four years getting to it. Val sits with that. My father is alive, she says. Genie and Kal are a hundred and twenty and have most of their lives in front of them. There are seventeen households on this planet with people in them who were waiting, and the people who were waiting are the people who were waiting, and not their grandchildren. She stops, and starts again, and it does not come out any better the second time. I have been getting ready for four hundred and twenty years to arrive somewhere that had forgotten us, and I was rehearsing a thing that was not going to happen, and I was extremely thorough about it. And the loss. And the loss is real and nobody gets it back. The level has not gone out of her voice once. Eighty-one years. They were thirty-nine when I walked out of that yard and they are a hundred and twenty, and the whole of that is gone and it was the whole of their grown lives, and the fact that it is not four hundred years does not return one day of it. The man with the load has got about half a mile down the road by then and is still going. Right, says Kyra, and stands up, and puts a hand down. I have not finished. You have not started. You'll be at this for ten years and I know it and I'm not going to be the one who tells you to stop. She does not take the hand back. But you're sitting on a bank doing sums about your father and your father is an hour's walk from a town with a bridge out, and I have been four hundred and twenty years getting here and I would like to go. Val looks up at her. Then she takes the hand, which she has done twice in her life on another planet, and gets up off that bank, and the two of them go down the road in the afternoon with the dust going up behind them and nothing whatever to carry.

He is still in the house above the water, which Val has not allowed herself to expect and has expected anyway, and which tells her inside about four seconds that he never moved and has therefore never finished. They come up the track in the late morning. There is a man sitting out at the end of the terrace with a board on his knees and something on it, and he looks up the way anybody looks up at a footstep. And Val Sorin, who has rehearsed this in nine kitchens on two continents across four centuries and has a form of words for it that she has revised eleven times and has been rather proud of, stands on her father's track and says nothing whatsoever. He gets up slowly, which is the only thing about him that is slow. He has not changed. That is the first of the wrong things and she has not braced for it, because eighty-one years does nothing at all to a man of a hundred and five on a planet where people live four hundred years, and the face looking at her across thirty feet of terrace is the face that looked at her across a table in a kitchen on the eleventh day before she left. The second wrong thing is that she has not changed either, and he can see that too. Vaelith, says Vaedom Sorin. Yes, says Val. He does not come down the terrace. He puts the board on the chair and stands where he is with his hands at his sides, and Val understands with complete clarity that he is doing exactly what she would have done, which is to establish that the thing in front of him is real before permitting anything else to happen. It takes him about half a minute. Kyra, three paces back, does not say a word through any of it, which costs her something and which Val notices and will mention nine days later. Then he says, Kyra Davan, and Kyra says, Hello, Vaedom, and after that it is somehow possible to walk up the rest of the terrace. What happens for the next hour is not a reunion. Val has seen reunions. She stood at the back of four of them on a dock at Aventhal when she was twenty-two and found them embarrassing. A reunion is two people doing the same thing at the same time, and what is happening on that terrace is two people doing entirely different things in the same place. He lost a daughter eighty-one years ago. He did the whole of it — the nine weeks, the hall, the committee, the year when he stopped going to the institute and the year after that when he started again. He put it down somewhere around the fortieth year and got on with a life, and what is standing in front of him now is the undoing of something he had finished, and a man does not get to feel one thing about that. And Val lost a father in nineteen hundred and eight and buried him correctly, with the blind down, on a date she calculated herself. They sit out there because it is warm and because neither of them suggests going in. She tells him what there is: the fold, the twenty-two seconds, the eight who answered and the six who did not come down. The mountain. The hull. She does it in order and she does it flatly and it takes about forty minutes, and he does not interrupt once, which she had forgotten he does. And at the end of it he says the thing he has been waiting the whole forty minutes to say. Where have you been living. That is going to take some time, says Val. I have got a great deal of it. Yes, says Val. That is rather the difficulty. He looks at her then the way he looked at her when she was nine and had broken something and come to say so. Say it in one sentence and we will do the rest afterward. Four hundred and twenty years, says Val. The water goes on doing what the water does below that house. No, he says. Yes, says Val. Vaelith, it has been eighty-one years. I can give you the day. It has been eighty-one years here, says Val. That is correct and I am not disputing it and I have checked it four times on a road. It has been four hundred and twenty years where I was, and I have had every single one of them, in order, one at a time, and I have written most of them down. He sits with that for a long moment. She watches him do the thing she does, which is to take a statement and look for the place where it comes apart, and she watches him fail to find one, and she watches him understand that he is not going to. That is in the fold, he says at last. It is the entire mechanism of the fold, says Val. Did you know? No. There was nothing on that world that could have told me, and there was no line in the ship's own record where the number would have been, and I went and looked for it once in a cold section with a lamp on my knee and found the place where it was not. When. Val does not have to go and look for it. By their reckoning, the year nineteen hundred and seventy-six. And you did nothing with it, says Vaedom. There was nothing to be done with it, says Val, and finds that she has said it in exactly the voice she used to the lamp. Vaedom Sorin gets up and goes to the end of the terrace and stands looking down at the water with his back to both of them. Kyra, who has not said anything for an hour and a quarter, catches Val's eye across the table and does not do anything with it except hold it, and the dark of her hair has the copper up in it along one side in that light, the way it has in every light on two worlds. Then he comes back and sits down and asks the one question. He has a reputation for it at the institute: he will sit in the chair they keep for him through an entire afternoon of a thing and ask nothing at all, and then at the end he will ask one question, and everybody will be four days answering it properly. How old are you? Val puts her hands on the table. Four hundred and ninety-seven. And she watches her father receive a number that nobody on that planet has ever had cause to say out loud, because Teor Casse lived to four hundred and six and it is in every schoolroom on the coast as the longest life anybody has had. That is not possible either, he says. No, says Val. You are ninety-one years past — Ninety-one past Casse. Yes. I did that sum in a house in a place called Portland in nineteen hundred and thirty-six, alone, at a table, and I did not say it to anybody including the woman sitting on your terrace, and I have thought about why not for ninety years and I have an answer and it is not a good one. He does not ask what it is. He asks the next thing, which is worse. Is it going to stop? Val puts her hands flat on the board between them. I have no idea, says Val. There is nobody to ask. There has not been anybody to ask since sixteen hundred and seven and there is not anybody now, because what happened to the two of us happened on a world with a field that is wrong for us, for four hundred and twenty years, and there is no second case. There are two of you. There are two of us and we are the same case, says Val. That is one, not two. I have been making that correction in my own head for four centuries and I have never once been able to make it come out differently. And then he says the thing that takes the ground out, and he does not know he is doing it, which is the worst of it. Then I will have to go first, says Vaedom Sorin, which is the correct order, and I have spent eighty-one years thinking I had got it wrong. Val does not say anything. That is the thing nobody tells you about a child going before you. It is not only the losing. It is that the arrangement has been broken and you go on living in the broken version of it. He has his hands flat on the board, which he has picked up again without noticing. And I have been in that for eighty-one years and I am out of it in an afternoon, and I am going to need a while, Vaelith, and I would rather say so than pretend. So Val tells him. She has not planned to. It is not in any of the nine versions. In nineteen hundred and eight, by their reckoning, I did the arithmetic on you. You were a hundred and five when I left and four hundred and six is the figure, and I had no reason to think any year of it was wrong. So I marked it. I did it in a house on a street called Clinton with the blind down, on the day, properly, and it is the only time in my life I have grieved anybody on purpose rather than being overtaken by it. You held a day for me. I held a day for you and you were a hundred and sixty-one years old and perfectly well and probably out on this terrace, says Val, and I would like to be able to tell you that I find that funny. Vaedom Sorin looks at his daughter for a while. I would not have had you not do it, he says. It was wrong, says Val. It was not wrong. It was incorrect, which is a different word and you have known the difference since you were eleven years old. He puts the board down again. You did the right thing on the best figure you had. That is the whole of what anybody can do and it is what I taught you and I am not going to stand here and watch you decide it was a fault. I have four hundred years of it. Then you have four hundred years of having done the right thing on the best figure you had, says Vaedom, and you will want to take that apart, and I am telling you now, before you start, that there is nothing in it to take apart and that you will do it anyway. It comes up on her somewhere after that, in daylight, on her father's terrace, the way it does when she is not managing it — at the wrists first and then under the jaw. She does not put her sleeves down. She stopped doing that in the spring and she is not going to start again on this planet. Vaedom Sorin looks at his daughter's arms for a long moment. What is that? It is new, says Val. It arrived in the first year, on the other world, along with a quantity of other things, and it does that when I feel something and there has never been one single thing I could do about it. It was not there before. It was not there before. Nothing like it has ever been on anybody at this institute or anywhere else on this planet, and I have the only two cases, and one of them is in your kitchen. He looks at it a while longer. It is extremely beautiful, says Vaedom Sorin, and I should like it noted that I said so before I said anything sensible about it, and goes in to see about the food. Val sits out on her father's terrace by herself with her sleeves up until the light goes off the water.

Val makes the list on the fourth day, which surprises nobody who has ever met her, and it takes her about nine minutes, which surprises Kyra and should not. She has been carrying it since the mountain: seventeen names in the order they were on the crew board, with the section against each one, and she does not have to look anything up and does not pretend she does. You're not doing all seventeen, Kyra says. I am doing all seventeen. Val — There are seventeen households on this planet that have never been told what happened, and there is exactly one person alive who can tell them, and she is standing in a kitchen arguing about it. She folds the list once. I am not doing it out of penance and I would like that understood now rather than in four years. I am doing it because it is owed and because I can. They start in the second week and it takes the better part of two years, because the seventeen are spread over a continent and because they go slowly on purpose. The shape of it settles fast. They will write first, which Kyra does, because a letter from Kyra Davan reads like a person and a letter from Val Sorin reads like a finding. Then they will go, and sit in somebody's front room, and Val will say what there is. What there is divides in two, and the division is the whole difficulty. For six of them there is a place: a mountain in a country that had not had a name at the time, a spread of four or five miles, in the spring, at night — and Val can describe the ground, and the weather that week, and what grows there now, and she has stood on it, and she will say so. Six families get that. It is not nothing. More than once it is the only thing in the room that anybody can hold on to. For eleven of them there is a timestamp. She has nothing for the eleven and she does not pretend otherwise. No body, no ground, no last hour, no words. Twenty-two seconds by the meter and nothing afterward, and the sections were not there, and the word not there is the whole of it and there is no second paragraph. And the eleven are the worse deaths and the harder doors, and Val Sorin, who has never in four hundred and twenty years delivered a finding of any kind without a figure somewhere in it, sits in one front room after another over the course of a year with nothing in her hands. She does not get better at it. That is worth saying. She gets more accurate and she does not get better. The third one they do is Oret's. His brother is a hundred and seven and keeps bees on a smallholding four miles out of a town whose name has changed twice since the ship went, and he has read Kyra's letter four times before they come, and says so in the doorway, which is how they know what kind of afternoon it is going to be. His name is Tovan Oret. He has his brother's build and about a quarter of his noise. Val gives it to him in order, because that is the only way she has. Your brother was in the seventh section. There were four of them in that section and they were two pairs and they were together, in one room, for the whole of it. Her hands are on her knees. That is not a small thing and I want to put it first. Eleven people died in those twenty-two seconds and every one of them was alone, and your brother was not alone, and the four of them came through it and answered when the commander called for a report. Tovan Oret sits forward. He came through it. He came through it. There were eight of us. Eight. Eight, says Val, and four of them were in the seventh, and I read all four panels myself on the second day and there was nothing wrong with any of them. And then Val says the other half, because she has learned by the third door that the gap between the halves is where the damage happens and that the only mercy available is to make it short. Five days later the commander brought the sections down in pieces, in the order she had worked out, which was correct and which I would defend in any room on this planet. The sixth went first, and the seventh went with it, and it had not been meant to be attached to anything by then and it was. The bees are doing what bees do, out beyond the window. Six people, says Val. Your brother was one of them. It was not long and I do not know whether he knew, and I am not going to tell you that he did not, because I do not know. Tovan Oret takes that the way most of them take it, which is to say he says thank you. Then he sits for a while with his hands between his knees, and then he asks the thing he has been going to ask since he opened the letter. What was the last thing he said? I do not know. You were on the ship. I was in the second section and he was in the seventh and there were nine sections, says Val. I saw him at a meal on the last evening at the target and he was being loud about a game. I do not know what he said after that and nobody does and nobody ever will. That is true and it is accurate and it is the correct answer to the question he has asked. It is not what he wants and Val knows it is not what he wants inside half a second, and she sits in that room and cannot find anything else to give him, because there is not anything else and she does not manufacture. There was a stream, Tovan says. Four lines home. Eleven days out. There was, says Val. He sent me something rude. His voice has gone somewhere else. About a coat I'd bought. It was four lines and three of them were about the coat. Yes. And I didn't send anything back. Kyra does not move at all. There it is. Four of us didn't, says Tovan Oret, and Val watches Kyra's hands go still in her lap. Four of the families. We all knew each other, you understand, it was that sort of thing, and four of us sent nothing and we made a joke of it at the hall afterward, and I have had eighty-one years of that joke. He is not crying. He looks at the floor. He was twenty-six. Val says, You could not have known. And it is true, and it is the right thing, and it goes into that room and does absolutely nothing at all. She is aware of it landing wrong. She has four centuries of being aware of things landing wrong. What she does not have, and has never had, and is not going to acquire at four hundred and ninety-seven years of age in a stranger's front room, is the next move. Kyra puts her cup down. He had a laugh you could hear through a section and a half, Kyra says. Tovan Oret looks up. That's the thing I want to tell you and I've been waiting the whole way here to see whether there was a hole to put it in. She has come forward on the chair. He brought a game with him. Eleven counters, in a bag, and it was a stupid game and nobody could remember who had taught it to him, and by the fifth week there were four people on that ship who were serious about it. Serious. Tolven played it once, for two hours, and lost, and did not say one word about losing. He always had that bag. He had it in the bay. He was frightened of her — she puts her thumb at Val without looking round — and he got funnier the more frightened he was, which is a thing I have only ever seen in about four people and it is a gift and nobody ever calls it one. People complained about the laugh. They complained about it the way you complain about weather you have decided to keep. Tovan Oret puts both hands over his face. He was not having a bad time, says Kyra. That's it. That's the whole of what I came to give you and it isn't a fact and you can't do anything with it. He was twenty-six and he was on a ship and he was the youngest and loudest person on it and four people wanted to beat him at his own game, and the last nine weeks of his life were the best nine weeks he ever had, and I was there and I watched it and I am telling you. She lets that sit. And the coat was funny. I'd like to say that too. He read it out in the bay before he sent it. They are there another hour after that and it is an entirely different hour. He gets the bees out, which is to say he takes them out to look at the bees, and he talks, and Kyra talks, and at one point he laughs at something and then stops and apologizes for it and Kyra tells him not to be an idiot. And Val stands four paces off at the end of a row of hives with her hands behind her and does not say anything for about twenty minutes. What she does instead is look at the two of them: the old man bent over a frame, and the woman beside him with her sleeves pushed up and the sun finding the copper in the one place above the ear it has always found it, on two worlds, in every light there has ever been. She times it afterward out of habit. Nineteen minutes. Kyra goes up to the house with him at the end to see about something, which leaves Val at the gate with Tovan Oret's nephew, who is sixty and has driven over to be there and has not said four words all afternoon. Can I ask you something, says the nephew. You may ask me anything. I will answer about half of it. Was it worth it? Her coming. Only he's been like that about the stream for as long as I've been alive and I didn't think anything would — He stops, because he has got himself into a sentence he cannot finish politely. Val looks up the field at the two of them by the hives. I gave your uncle the account, says Val. It was complete and it was correct and I had checked every part of it and there is nobody else alive who could have given it to him. Yes. It was not what he needed and I could see that it was not and I had nothing further. She does not look away from the hives. What she did was better than anything I would have done. She did it better than I would have done it, and she did it without being asked, and if I had been in that room on my own he would have shut the door behind me this afternoon and been exactly where he was yesterday. The nephew does not say anything, because he has no idea what he has just been handed. That is the answer to your question, says Val. You may tell him the first part. Do not tell him the second. They walk back down to the road at about six. What were you and the lad talking about? says Kyra. Bees. You don't know anything about bees. I know a great deal about bees, says Val. I have simply never had any reason to mention it. Kyra laughs at that and lets it go, which she would not have done at two hundred, and the two of them go down the lane in the evening with fourteen doors still to do.

They have been in that house three days, and in three days neither of her daughters has asked. It is Kal's house, on the valley side, with a long room and a door at the end of it that stands open onto the yard because the weather is good and because that door has stood open in every house either of those women has ever lived in. There are four of them in it. It is the middle of the morning. Val has been watching the not-asking for three days and has done nothing about it, because she has spent four hundred and twenty years being the one who does not ask, and she recognizes the shape of it coming at her from the other direction and finds that she has no defense prepared. What she has instead is the Sethal. Nobody warned her about that and there would have been no way to. Four centuries of apparatus — the flat voice, the remark about drainage, the sentence arranged at four in the afternoon and delivered at nine — all of it was built on another world out of another language, by a woman working in a tongue she learned at seventy-eight from a man with a cart. She has the Sethal the way she had it at eighteen. Every instrument she owns is in the other one. And her light is up. It has been up most of the morning, faintly, at the wrists, in daylight, where all three of them can see it and where it says what it always says, which is that she is feeling something, and never once in four hundred and twenty years what. Kyra is at the end of the room with a cup she is not drinking, in the full light of a door standing open, with four hundred and twenty years of knowing exactly what the pale of that head does in daylight and no use for any of it this morning. Gennive Sorin has got up to do something about the fire that does not need doing. Kalenne Davan is at the table with her hands folded, which is what Kal does and has done since she was four years old. Val puts down what she is holding. You have both been very polite for three days, says Val, and neither of you has asked. So I am going to do it badly and then we are going to have lunch. Genie stops with her hand on the fire iron and does not put it down. I have a figure for everything. Your grandfather says it is the only thing he has ever been unable to get out of me, and he has been saying it since I was nine, and he said it again on his terrace on the second day and I had to leave the room. Val has her hands flat on the table in front of her. Four hundred and twenty years. Thirty-one addresses. Nine countries. Eleven died in the fold and six in the fall, and I have known all seventeen names every day since, in order, and I could give them to you now and get the sections right. Nobody says anything. I have not got one for her. And there it is, which is the thing nobody in that room could have described afterward and all four of them will remember for the rest of their lives. She has started a measurement. She has started it the way she starts every measurement, with the units and the span and the count, in order, out loud — and then she has got to the fourth item and there is nothing there, and instead of going round it or building a method for it or saying that the instrument is inadequate, which is what she has done about this precise thing in nine kitchens on another planet across four centuries, she puts it down. In front of her children. In daylight. In a room with the door open. I have been looking since Maribor and there is nothing in her that counts, Val says. That is not a compliment. It is a fault in the method, and I have had four hundred years to find a better method and there is not one, and I am done looking. Kal has not moved her hands. There is a second thing and it is worse and it is the reason I am saying any of this in front of the two of you rather than to her in a dark room, which is where I have said everything that was ever difficult. Val's voice does not go anywhere. She has believed since about the fourth winter that if I could undo the fold I would. She has never asked me. I have never told her. The answer is no, and it has been no for a very long time, and I could not say it on that planet because eleven people are dead and I was not going to stand on them and call it a good outcome. The door stands open onto the yard and a bird goes across it. You are both in this room. So I can say it. I would not undo it. She stops there for a moment, and it is not for effect: she has come to the end of the part she can do properly. And I love her, says Val Sorin, which is a sentence anybody can say and which tells you almost nothing, and I have nothing better. And then she does not take it back. She does not call it imprecise. She does not offer to improve on it. She said that same sentence once, in a dark room on the other world, and got as far as the word imprecise before a woman put a hand on her face and stopped her — and this time she lets it stand in the middle of a lit room with four people in it and the door open, and that is the single largest thing that has ever happened to her. I am not going to apologize for it this time, says Val. Kalenne Davan looks at her mother's partner across a table for about four seconds. I asked you about it once, says Kal. You did not. I was nine. Her hands are still folded. You were at the table at ours and she was mending the strap on something, and I asked why the two of you had never been bonded. Val does not say anything. You told me to go and find my sister. And here is what goes through Val Sorin in the three seconds after that, and it is the worst thing in this book. She has the afternoon. She has it entire. She could tell that room what the weather had been doing, and that the strap was off a bag and not a boot, and that Kyra had been working at it with the wrong awl because the right one had gone missing in the spring and was found in the autumn behind a crock. She could say what Kal was wearing. She could say where the light was coming from and at what angle, because she had been looking at it when she was not looking at the child. She does not have the question. It is not that she has forgotten it. There is nothing there to have forgotten. Her nine-year-old asked her the central question of her life across a kitchen table and she sent her out of the room, and it did not register at the time as an event, and the woman who has not lost one single thing in four hundred and twenty years has lost that. I do not remember it, says Val. No, says Kal. I didn't think you would. I've had the whole of my grown life to decide whether to tell you and I only decided this morning. Why this morning? Because you were going to say all this and then be embarrassed about it for a decade, and I wanted it on the table before you got started. She unfolds her hands at last and puts them flat. I'm not telling you it's all right. I'm telling you it was visible to a child who hadn't finished growing. That's all. It's a fact, not a verdict. Nobody has looked at Kyra. That is not quite true: Val has not looked at Kyra, deliberately, since she began, because she has known from the first sentence that if she looks she will stop. And Gennive Sorin, who has been loud in every argument she has ever been in since she was a girl, who has a reputation on two faculties for saying out loud the thing everybody else has decided to leave, puts the fire iron down on the hearth and crosses the room without one word in her mouth and stands next to Kyra Davan. She does not touch her. She does not say anything at all. She stands beside her, close, the way you stand beside somebody at a gate. Kyra goes. Not loudly. She puts the cup down on the sill without any particular care about where and stands there with her face doing the whole of it, the way she has cried since Maribor, without noise and without apology and without putting a hand up to any of it. Because here is what has just happened to her, and it is not being loved, which she has known since a room over a saddler's in 1795. It is that she has believed since the fourth winter that Val would undo it, and has never once asked, and has built four hundred years on top of not asking — and the woman has said otherwise in front of witnesses, under more duress than anybody in that room can measure, and then a daughter who is not hers and has no stake in it at all and has spent a hundred and twenty years watching from outside the pair has got up and crossed a floor. She cannot discount that one as kindness. There is no way of reading it in which it means anything else. Genie stands there and cannot do one thing about it, which is correct and is the point. She can confirm what has been true. She is not the person it has been true with, and nothing she has — and she has a great deal — is any use whatever to a woman standing at a window with four hundred years coming up through her at once. So nothing resolves. Kyra cries at a sill in her daughter's house and a young woman of a hundred and twenty stands next to her and the room holds. And then Val notices. Four hundred years earlier she would not have. In 1838 she would have noticed and filed it and raised it afterward, at the correct time, having arranged what to say. She gets up and goes across the room. Genie steps back when she comes, without being asked and without making anything of it, and goes and stands by her sister. Val puts both hands on Kyra's face. She has not done that in front of another living soul in four hundred and twenty years. It is Kyra's own move, from a bedroom in November, and the hands are not steady, and both of them know whose gesture it is and neither of them says so. You have been wrong about that, says Val, since the fourth winter, and I have had the evidence the whole time, and the first piece of it is that in sixteen hundred and — And she stops. Everyone in that room hears what is coming. Two of them were raised by it. All four of them know exactly what is about to arrive, in order, with the dates in it, flat and specific and unarguable and aimed at the wound. And it does not arrive. She stands in the middle of a lit room with her hands on a woman's face and puts the instrument down for the second time in ten minutes, and this time there is nothing at all to replace it with, and she does not go and find anything. Kyra, says Val. That is the whole of it. Her name, and nothing after it, from a woman who has not produced one sentence in four hundred and twenty years that was not carrying something. Kyra does not say anything. She has a hand up on Val's wrist and her face is wet and she has about nine things in her and not one of them will come, and she lets it be and stands there and does not fill it. That is the third time. Over by the table two women of a hundred and twenty stand and watch their mothers, and neither of them says a word about any of it, then or at lunch or at any point in the fifty years that follow. Out in the yard the weather goes on being good. The door stands open the whole time.

She leaves Aden's until the eleventh, which Kyra notices on the second and says nothing about until the ninth. You've put him last. I have put him eleventh of seventeen, which is not last. Val. I have put him last, says Val, and I have known I was doing it since the list, and I have no intention of discussing why in a kitchen before breakfast. Hessa Aden is a hundred and ninety-four years old and lives where she has always lived, in a house on the ninth terrace with a window that looks across at the backs of other houses, and she opens her own door. I know who you are, she says to Val. Yes. Two girls came. A long time ago now. Before my husband died. She has her hand on the frame and has not moved it. One of them did the talking and the other one stood at the back and watched me, and I have thought about that ever since, because the one at the back was the one who understood what she was looking at. That would be Kal. It would be the one who did not talk, says Hessa Aden, and looks past Val at Kyra, and I had no idea either of them was anything to do with the pair of you until the letter came. She lets them in. That is not a kindness and is not meant as one; it is a woman declining to have the conversation on a terrace where the neighbors are. There is one lamp going in the middle of the afternoon and it does nothing for anybody. It takes the pale out of Val entirely and makes her look like a woman cut from the same gray as the chair, and Kyra, who has seen every light on two worlds do something to that head, thinks that this is the first one that has done nothing at all. The room is clean and dim and has nothing in it about her son, which Val registers inside four seconds and understands entirely, because she has lived in nine houses with nothing in them about anybody. They sit. They are not offered anything. Say it, then, says Hessa Aden. Val says it. She gives it the way she has given it ten times already that year, in order, with the sections and the twenty-two seconds and what the hull did and what it had been asked to do. She says that there was no fault in the vessel or the solution or the crew or the procedure. She says that eleven people did not answer the report and that his was one of the eleven and that she does not know anything further and will not pretend to. It takes about nine minutes. The old woman hears the whole of it without moving. And then she says, Is that all? That is all that is known. That is all that is known. She puts her hands on the arms of the chair. They came here with that. Eighty-one years ago. Two girls of thirty-nine who had been sent, and a great deal of no fault was found, and my husband asked them where the paper was, and there was no paper, and there has never been any paper. They were not sent, says Val. They came on their own and told nobody they were going. You were not here. No. But I know what they are, and neither of them has ever in her life been sent anywhere. That lands somewhere. It does not land where Val wants it. Then they were worse, says the old woman. An institution sends somebody and you know what you are being handed. Two young women come because they want to, and you are supposed to be grateful, and what they are actually doing is tidying. She looks at her hands. A dead man was useful to that program for about nine years. He had signed off the solution and then the ship did not arrive, and there is only one shape that story can take and everybody at the institute knew it, and the two girls came and sat where you are sitting and told me it was not his fault, and that was the first time anybody had said the word fault in my house. Kyra, by the window, does not say anything. And Val Sorin sits in that chair with four things in her hands and can use none of them. She could say that the solution was computed twice from two independent starting sets by a careful man, and that it was correct, and that the drive faculty at home had filed the same one eleven weeks earlier. She has said that already and it was heard as the program talking. She could say that she has read the thing the daughter found, and that it does not say what this woman thinks it says. She could say that the eleven died because they were alone, and that Ramel Aden was the only person on that ship who was never going to be anything else, because verification does not pair and cannot be tied to one place, and that the table in the building that had done everything right had put him in no section at all. She has had that since a kitchen in Oregon in January, and she has told one person, once, and never again. You do not say that to a mother. Not ever. Not at a hundred and ninety-four in a dim room on the ninth terrace, and not with nothing to put under it but arithmetic nobody in the room can check. He was not alone, says Hessa Aden. Val's hands do not move. That is what I have had for eighty-one years and I would like you to tell me whether it is true. He had a crew. He had people around him, nineteen of them, and whatever it was, he was not by himself in a room somewhere on his own. Her voice is entirely steady. That is the thing I have got. I have not got a place and I have not got a day and I have not got a word he said, and I have that. He had a crew, says Val. That is not an answer. It is the answer I have. And there is the fifth thing, which is the one she has not listed to herself on the walk up. Because she could have said: he was not alone in the fifth month or the sixth or the seventh. He had four hours in every ninth day and he had a woman of seventy-seven, and he found her twice a week and always with something real in his hand, and the last two hours of any consequence in his life were spent in a stores bay with paper on his knees and a lamp off, and I was there, and I know what his face did. That is true. It is also four things that would detonate in that room — a woman thirty years older than her son, the whole of the last season, a thing he never mentioned at home and perhaps meant to — and the mother would have to hold them for the rest of a very long life with nobody left alive to ask about any of it. Val does the arithmetic on that in under two seconds, which is what she is for. He had a crew, says Val again, and they knew his habits the way a family does. That is everything I can give you, and it is not enough, and I am aware that it is not. The light has come up somewhere in the middle of all that, at the wrists, in a dim room, and the old woman has been looking at it for some minutes and has not asked. That is worse than being asked. Val has four centuries of practice at being asked. You have come a very long way, says Hessa Aden at last. Four hundred and twenty years. That means nothing to me. No, says Val. It does not mean anything to anybody and I have stopped expecting it to. They are there another twenty minutes and none of it gets better. The old woman asks three more questions and Val answers all three accurately and none of the three are the question. At one point Kyra comes away from the window and sits down and says something about the house and about the terrace and about a bakery that had been there and is not, and the old woman answers her perfectly civilly and it goes nowhere, because warmth is not what is wanted either and Kyra knows it within half a sentence and stops. Nobody rescues anything. There is nothing in that room to rescue it with. At the door Hessa Aden says the thing she has been going to say since the letter came. I am glad you are not dead. Thank you. I want to be clear that I am saying it because it is true and not because it is a kind thing to say in a doorway. Her hand is on the frame again. Eighteen of them did not come back and two did, and I have had eighty-one years of thinking there was nobody left who had seen him after the yard, and it turns out there was somebody and she was four hundred years away and could not get here. She stops. That is not a complaint. I do not know what it is. No, says Val. Neither do I. They go down the ninth terrace in the afternoon, past the backs of other houses, and do not say anything for about four streets. You held something, Kyra says. I held three things. I know which two. Then you know why I held them, says Val, and I am not going to go through it, and I would like you to ask me again in about nine years, because I will want to have it taken apart by then and today I will not survive it. Kyra puts a hand on her back between the shoulder blades, briefly, in a public street on the ninth terrace, and takes it off again. At the bottom they come out onto the harbor road where the light comes off the water in the afternoon, and Val stops walking. I did not fix it, says Val. No. I have fixed ten of them. Not fixed. I have left ten houses better than I found them and I had begun to believe that was a thing I was doing, and I have just spent an hour in a room making a woman of a hundred and ninety-four say the word fault in her own house for the second time in her life. That's not what happened. It is approximately what happened and I would be obliged if you did not improve it, says Val. There are six left. I am going to do the six. And they go on down the harbor road.

Rask's house is inland, four hours from anywhere, on a holding his wife's family has worked for nine generations and which he married into and never got used to and complained about with enormous satisfaction for forty years. They know about the wife before they go, because Kyra wrote and the letter came back in a different hand. She waited seventy-two years. Then she got ill in a way that people do not usually get ill on that planet, and was ill for about a year, and died nine years before two women came up a track to tell her what had happened to her husband. Val reads that letter four times, in the way she reads things, and then puts it down and does not say anything for most of an hour. The man who opens the door is a hundred and forty and has his father's build and a quantity of his father's manner, and he does not know what to do with either of them. You'll be the ones from the ship. Yes, says Val. I was nineteen. He says it the way a man puts a thing on a table at the start so that it does not have to be got at later. I want that said before we sit down. I was nineteen and I'd been inland two years and I did not come home for the hall or for any of the rest of it, and my mother did the whole of it on her own, and I have had eighty-one years to decide how I feel about that and I have not got there. Then we will sit down, says Val, and I will not be asking you about it. His name is Edren Rask and he gives them something to drink and sits where his father used to sit, which he mentions, and which Val suspects he mentions at every opportunity to every visitor and has done for decades. She does it in order. Your father was in the third section with Nissa Halve, which is where the pairs table put the two of them and which meant the third section smelled permanently of coffee and argument for nine weeks. Her hands are on her knees. The third section is one of the five that did not come through. He is one of the eleven, and I want to be plain with you about what that means before I say anything else, because the thing I have for most of the seventeen is a place on a mountain and I do not have one for you. There's nothing. There is nothing. No ground, no day, no hour. The sections were there and then they were not there, and the whole of it is twenty-two seconds, and if I had anything else I would have brought it four hours up a track to give you. Edren Rask takes that about as well as anybody takes it, which is to say he looks at the window for a bit. My mother used to say he'd have known, he says. She said it for about forty years and I never knew whether she believed it or whether it was the thing she'd decided to have. He grew that hull. Ten years. He used to come in and tell her what the ninth bay had done that day like it was an animal. Val does not say anything for a moment. She was right. He looks round. There is one thing I have and I have been carrying it four hours up a track and I did not know until a minute ago whether I was going to give it to you, says Val, and your mother has just decided it, which is not a sentence I expected to say today. Give it to me. A grown hull makes a sound along its cell boundaries. It is not a crack and it is not a tear. It is a long complaint, and it comes before anything that a person in another section would be able to feel, and there was one man on that ship who had spent ten years listening to that material tell him what it wanted. Val's voice does not move at all. He heard it start. Before anybody. Before me, and I had a continuity panel in front of me that I had helped design. And? And the channel was still open, and he said one word on it, forward, to the whole ship. What was the word? No, says Val. The room does not do anything. Out the back somebody is moving an animal about. That's it. That is it, says Val. One syllable, in his own voice, and then the dark, and I have had it for four hundred and twenty years and have never said it out loud to anybody who was not on that ship. She stops. I do not know whether it is a good thing to have. I have thought about it the whole way up here and I cannot decide, and I have decided that deciding was not mine to do. Edren Rask sits in his father's chair and turns it over for about two minutes, and neither woman says anything into it. He was telling it off, he says at last. I beg your pardon? says Val. That's what it is. That's not a man being frightened. He has gone somewhere else and his voice has gone with him. He said no to a hull. He'd have been saying it to the hull. Forty years he talked to those things like they were being difficult on purpose and the last thing he ever did was tell one off for doing something he hadn't authorized. And then Edren Rask puts his head back and laughs, which startles everybody in that room including him, and goes on laughing for some time, and finishes it by putting the heel of his hand against his eye and keeping it there. She'd have liked that, he says, when he has it back. Yes, says Kyra. I think she would. Seventy-two years she waited, says Edren Rask, and you two got here nine late. We got here as fast as it could be done, says Val, and that is not an excuse and I am not offering it as one. Nine years. I have the figure and I will have it for the rest of my life. I'm not blaming you. I am aware that you are not. I am telling you that I will carry it anyway, because I do that, and because your mother is owed somebody carrying it. They stay the night, because it is four hours back and because he asks. In the evening he gets out a box of things and goes through them without any system whatsoever, which Val finds almost unbearable and sits through without comment: a tool with a worn handle, a card from somebody, a drawing a child had done of nine bays in a row with the ninth one bigger than the others for no reason either of them can work out. The lamp in that room is low and orange and old-fashioned and finds the chestnut and the copper in her the way firelight has been finding them since a hut on a mountain, and Val sits on the other side of the table and watches a man hand her a comb and a card and a child's drawing. Kyra is good that evening. She is good the way she is good, which is that at some point everybody in a room is telling her things and nobody notices it happening, and by about the tenth hour Edren Rask is describing a man he had been nineteen years old with and had spent a hundred and twenty years failing to get hold of. Val goes out and stands in the yard for a while and looks at the sky and lets her get on with it. There are twelve more. They are not set down and it is not because nothing happened in them. They take the rest of that year and the better part of the next. There is a house where nobody will speak and a house where four generations have assembled and want it done in front of all of them, and a man of a hundred and sixty who has married again and whose second wife sits through the whole of it holding his hand and then sees them out and thanks them in the lane with her back to the window. There is one where it goes entirely well and Val comes out of it and is not able to speak for about a mile. There is one where a woman asks whether her sister suffered and Val says she does not know, and the woman says thank you, and means it, because nobody has ever not known before. Twelve households. Val does all twelve and Kyra does all twelve, and this is not the place for those, and that is deliberate, and the reason is that there were seventeen of them and there has never been a version of this where all seventeen fit. She keeps the list in the back of the book. Not the original — the original was on a page in a different hand on another planet and she left it there deliberately. This is a new one, in the Sethal, in her own writing, with a mark against each name as it is done — and by the end of the second year there are sixteen marks on it. Kyra finds it on the table one evening and looks at it for a while and does not say anything about the seventeenth, then or later.

The Vennars are the sixteenth and they are the one that goes well, and Val cannot speak for about a mile afterward. There are nine of them in the house when she gets there, which she has been warned about and still is not ready for: a sister of a hundred and nineteen, two of the sister's children, a man who had been Corin Vennar's closest friend at the hall and is a hundred and forty and has driven since the morning. Nobody weeps and nobody is difficult and somebody keeps putting things in front of them. And she has nothing for them. He is in one of the five sections and he is one of the eleven and there is no ground and no hour, exactly as there was none for Rask, and Val puts it down in the first four minutes because she has learned that leaving it in the room does more damage than putting it down. They take it the way you take a thing you have had for eighty-one years and have made your peace with. We had assumed, says the sister. There was never going to be anything. The two girls who came said as much, the way you say a thing when you are being careful, and we understood. They were being careful. They were about nineteen. She catches herself. Were they? They looked about nineteen. They were thirty-nine, says Val, and they looked twenty-two, and so do I, and I have stopped explaining it to people and I am not going to start in your front room. The sister laughs at that, properly, and that is the moment the afternoon turns. What they want is not the account. They have the account inside ten minutes and they put it down and do not pick it up again. What they want is him, and they want it from somebody who was in a room with him, and they have been waiting eighty-one years for one. So Kyra gives him to them for about three hours. The careful man. The one who computed the return solution twice from two independent starting sets, as the standing instruction requires and as nobody ever actually does, and who plotted a composition every evening with the pleasure of a man watching numbers behave. The one who read the fourth section of the training annex out loud on a step in a yard in the voice of a man reading a proclamation, at twenty-four, with a navigator's certificate four months old, and told the others that it meant Sevrin was carrying the kit. He did that here, says the friend. He did that at this table. He'd read anything out in that voice. And at some point late on, somebody says the thing about the last stream. He sent a list, says the sister. He did, says Val. Four lines, and all four of them were food, and it was a joke, because the note takes eleven days and he was going to be here before it arrived. Her hands are in her lap. And then it arrived and he was not. I know what was on it, says Val. I read every stream that went off that ship, because I was the one who signed them out, and I have had his list for four hundred and twenty years and I did not know until this afternoon that it had ever got here. The sister gets up and goes out of the room and comes back with a card. It is eighty-one years old and it has been handled a great deal. We do it on the day, says the sister. All four. It is an absurd amount of food for the time of year and two of the four are not in season and we do them anyway, and the children think we are mad and come every year. She puts the card down on the table between them. My mother started it in the second year because she could not think of anything else to do, and we have done it eighty times, and I want it said that we have never once been sad at that table and we have never once pretended he was going to walk in. Val looks at the card for some time. That is better than anything I brought you, says Val. They are asked to stay for it, which is four months off, and they say yes, and they go. Val gets about a mile down the road before she has to stop and stand at a wall. Kyra does not ask and does not touch her and stands about four feet off looking at the other side of the valley until it is over, which takes some minutes, and then the two of them go on. The rest of that second year is the ordinary business of living somewhere, which neither of them expected to find difficult and both of them do. Kyra's trouble comes first and it comes in a lit room. They are at a thing — a gathering of some kind at Kal's, with about twenty people in it and the doors open — and somebody says something funny at the far end, and Kyra laughs the way she laughs, with her head back. She feels it the half second before, the way she has been able to since a bench outside a hut — the warmth at the back of the eyes, like standing too near a stove — and a half second is not enough to do anything with in a room with four lamps in it. The gold comes up. All the way out from the pupil, clear and warm, in front of a woman of ninety who is standing eighteen inches away. Val sees it from across the room and can do nothing whatever. On the other world this was never a problem, because on the other world nobody has anything to put it beside: a man there has had what he has had and all of them are the same as each other and there is nothing anywhere in his head that says a human eye does not do that. Here, everybody has something to put it beside. Everybody in that room has been looking at Sethal eyes for a century and a half. The woman of ninety says, Oh — and then stops, and then says, Forgive me, I thought for a moment you were unwell, and Kyra says something easy and turns her head, and the whole thing lasts perhaps four seconds and is entirely survived. In the yard afterward, with the gray of her eyes back the way the gray of the sea comes back under cloud, Kyra stands with her back against the wall of her daughter's house and swears in English for about a minute and a half. I have no idea how to do this. No, says Val. You have four hundred years of it. The collars, the dusk, the nine kitchens. You built an entire apparatus. Her hands are going. I have never had to hide one single thing in my life, Val. Not one. I've been warm at people since I was four years old and it has never once cost me anything and now I cannot go into a room. You can go into rooms. I cannot laugh in them. And I cannot help you, says Val. I know you can't. I want to say it out loud because you will otherwise spend four years waiting for me to. Her hands are behind her. Everything I have is for a thing that sits on skin and can be covered by a sleeve, and it works because I decided at nineteen that I would be a person who was not looked at. You cannot do that. It is in your face and your whole method is being looked at, and if you stop being looked at there is nothing left of you in a room. Kyra puts her head back against the wall. That's the most useful thing anybody's said to me since we landed. It is also the only thing I have got, says Val, and I have been three months arriving at it. Val's own trouble is quieter and takes longer to surface and is, she eventually admits, worse. They go to the institute in the spring because Kal has arranged it and because it would have been rude not to. It is four buildings now where it was two. There are eleven hundred people in it. Everybody is very glad to see her. That is the difficulty. They have read her. All of them have read her — the paper is in a curriculum, the continuity protocol is in its fourth revision and two of her four unsubmitted corrections were made by somebody else in the forties and made correctly. A woman of sixty takes her round and shows her a room full of people doing a thing Val proposed in a committee in a hall that no longer exists, and does it beautifully, and is so pleased. And not one person in that building asks her a question she can answer. They ask her about then. They ask her, with enormous care, about the fold and the hull and the twenty-two seconds, and she answers all of it. Nobody asks her anything about the work, because the work went eighty-one years past her while she was reading everything that four centuries of another species had to offer on an entirely different set of problems, and she has come back as the most distinguished and least useful person in the room. She does not mind for the first hour. She notices, somewhere in the second, that she has not been asked to look at anything, and that nobody is going to. Four hundred and twenty years, Val says to Kyra that night, and the only thing on this planet I am qualified to do is be a figure in a corridor. And underneath that is the other one, which she does not say for another nine months. Everybody at that institute knows what she did at eighteen. They knew before Genie got there and they knew the whole time Genie was there, and Genie spent her entire studentship in a building where nobody would say it to her face. It had been the one great advantage of the other world that nobody there had any idea what the quiet was, and that she could put her hand flat on a table in a kitchen in Portland and say the word to one person and have it mean only what the two of them had made it mean. Here it is a thing in a file, and a thing people do not say, and a thing an old man on the third terrace mentioned to her twice in the first fortnight because he thought he was being admiring. The paper is the comedy and both of them need it. They have no registration, no lodging record, no standing of any kind, on a planet with clerks. They have spent four hundred and twenty years manufacturing exactly this sort of thing for a world that does not check, and this world checks, and the particular indignity is that Val Sorin — who forged fourteen documents by 1890 and got two women through a census in 1940 — is reduced to sitting in an office while a young man of forty explains to her, patiently, twice, that she cannot be recorded as returning because there is no record of her having left. There is a record of my having left. There is a record of the vessel, madam. I was on it. Yes, says the young man, but the vessel is lost. Kyra laughs about that for nine days. She brings it up at Kal's. She brings it up at Vaedom's. She is still bringing it up two years later. And at some point in the middle of that winter Val notices that they have been speaking English in the house for most of a week without either of them deciding to, because there is no word in the Sethal for the thing a kitchen is at four in the afternoon in Oregon in November, and because the four hundred years that actually happened to them happened in a language that nobody on that planet speaks one syllable of. She mentions it once. I know, says Kyra. I've known since the road. Does it trouble you? It's the only thing that doesn't, says Kyra, and goes back to what she is doing.

The house they end up in is four miles from Kal's and has been empty two years and has a bad roof on the north side, which Val knew about before they took it and took it anyway, which Kyra considers the single most revealing thing the woman has done since they landed. They have been in it ten months by the second autumn. It has a door at the end of the long room that gives onto a yard with nothing in it, and that door stands open from the fourth month of the year to the ninth, and neither of them has ever once said anything about why. The list is in the back of the book with sixteen marks on it. Val does not raise it. That is worth stating plainly, because she raises everything, and she has the figure, and she has had the figure for most of a year, and she sits four feet from it most evenings and says nothing. Kyra raises it in the end, in the way she raises things, which is from the other side of a room and with no preamble whatsoever. I'm not doing Halve. All right, says Val. That's it? All right? I have had eleven months to decide what to say about it and that is what I arrived at. You did sixteen. I did sixteen because they were mine. The whole seventeen were mine. Nissa Halve is not mine. Val has not looked up from what she is doing. She was yours. You had four days of her and you argued about the ninth channel and you were looking forward to the rest of it for a fortnight, and she said a thing about Genie at the hatch that you have repeated to me four times since, and there is no version of that door where I am the one who knocks on it. So you've been sitting on that the whole time. I have been sitting on it since the ninth terrace. She does go, in the end, on her own, in the spring of the third year. Halve's people are on the coast north of Aventhal. Kyra takes the whole day and finds the house and stands on the road outside it for about twenty minutes with the gate four feet away, and there is somebody in the garden the entire time who could be asked anything. And the sentence is there. She has it. She has had it since the letter she did not send. She comes home at the eleventh hour and Val is up and does not ask, and Kyra sits down at the table and says, I couldn't. No. I stood there and I had the whole of it and it would not come, and I want you to know that I am not going to pretend I'll do it next year. I know you are not. That's three, Kyra says. A kitchen, a yard, and a road on the coast. It is three. You'd have knocked. I would have knocked, says Val, and I would have delivered the whole of it, complete and correct, to a family who did not want it from a stranger, and I did that on the ninth terrace in the first year and the woman is ninety-five years older than I am in every way that counts and I have thought about her every month since. She puts down what she is holding at last. There is no version of this where knocking is the brave thing and standing on a road is the failure. I knock because knocking costs me nothing. You stood on a road for twenty minutes, which cost you the day. Kyra puts her face in her hands for a bit. That's not true and you know it isn't. It is true and I will argue it for a century, says Val, and I have the advantage of being right, which I intend to use. The sixteen marks stay sixteen. The list stays in the back of the book. Neither of them ever moves it anywhere else. Some while after that, on an evening with the door open and nothing happening, Kyra asks the other one. Are you ever going to tell anybody? No. Val, you're the only person who — I am the only person on two worlds who knows why eleven people died, and I have carried it to sixteen doors and not said it at any of them, and I am not going to say it at the seventeenth either and the seventeenth is not going to be knocked on. Her voice does not move. There is no one to tell. There is no form it could take that is not a claim with nothing under it, and there is no household on this planet that is improved by being told that their son was in the wrong room. And the institute? The institute would want it in writing, says Val, and there is no paper, and there is never going to be any paper, and I have had a great deal of practice at that. Kyra lets that sit for a while. It eats you. It does not eat me. I want to be accurate. Val turns her cup a quarter turn. I have had it since a kitchen in Oregon in January and I have found no use for it in three years and I am reasonably sure I never will, and the difference between that and the thing you are worried about is that I am not carrying it alone. I told you in a kitchen in January and you have had it ever since, and that is the whole of what I need and it has been the whole of what I need since about 1976. That's the second nicest thing you've ever said to me. I am aware of which one is first, says Val, and so is a room full of our children, and I would prefer not to do it twice in one lifetime. Vaedom comes out every ninth day that summer and sits on the end of the terrace and complains about the roof. That is the whole of it and it is the point. He complains about the roof on the north side, at length, with figures, and says that a man of a hundred and eighty-six should not have to explain a roof to a woman who wrote the continuity protocol, and Val says that a roof is not a continuity protocol, and he says that it is, structurally, and will not let it go, and they do the whole thing again in the ninth month when it rains. He sits where the afternoon comes along the terrace and tells his daughter twice that the pale is going out of her at the temple, which it is not and never will be, and which he has been saying to her since she was nine years old because it was funny once. He brings things. He brings bread that is not as good as the bread on Alberta and is told so by Kyra every single time, which becomes a thing between them, and he begins bringing it on purpose to be told. Nobody on that terrace ever refers to the year nineteen hundred and eight. Val said it once on a terrace above the water in the first week and has not said it again, and he has not either, and the two of them are visibly the same sort of person about it and both of them know it. Kal has taken the small house on the other side of the valley and has mentioned it twice and will not ask. Genie has mentioned it three times. Val has invented a reason to be in that part of the valley in about forty seconds and has been sitting on it since the spring, which Kyra knows, and which Kyra has not said one word about, because the inventing is the whole of the gesture and saying so would take it off her. Once, late in the third autumn, they talk about the mountain. It is not a conversation. Kyra says something about the weather in the Carpathians at that time of year, out of nothing, in English, and Val says that it will be under about four feet by now, and that is the whole of it. Neither of them says that the hull is still there. Neither of them says that the geometry is in a book in the back room and that there are two people alive who can read it. There is nothing to say about any of that. It is simply the case, in the way that a door is the case, and it stands open at the end of the long room from the fourth month to the ninth, and neither of them has ever once said anything about why. Nobody asks them whether they are staying. Not Vaedom, who would think it rude. Not Genie, who thinks about it a great deal and is for once in her life unable to get it out. Not Kal, who has worked out the whole shape of it inside a fortnight and has decided that it is not hers. And not the two of them. That is the part worth putting down. Two women who took four hundred and twenty years to learn to say things at the time sit in a house with a bad roof for two years and do not once put that particular question into the air, and it is not avoidance and neither of them is afraid of it. It is that there is nothing to decide yet, and both of them know what it looks like when there is, and this does not look like that.

They go out on a Fourthday because Kyra wants to and gives no reason, and Val, who has worked out the reason somewhere around the second turning and says nothing about it, carries the bag. There is nobody on the road. It is the wrong month for it — the term has another nine weeks to run and the squads will be inland until the end of it — and the whole of that coast has the particular emptiness of a place that is busy nine days a year and abandoned for the rest. The path up is worse than either of them remembers and they say so about four times each. It was not this steep. It was exactly this steep, Kyra. You were nineteen. I was eighteen, says Kyra, and I ran up it, and I am now going to sit down on this rock for a minute and I would thank you not to make a note of it. Val sits down on the rock as well, which is not a concession and is received as one. They get to the top somewhere in the second hour and find it entirely unchanged, which neither of them expected and both of them did. The grass is the same. The way the land drops off and then does not quite drop off and then does is the same. The four-mile mark is somewhere down to the left under a gorse that was not there, and neither of them goes to look for it. The wind comes across the top the way it always has and takes the dark chestnut of her sideways off her face, and Val looks at it for rather longer than looking at it requires, which is a thing she has been doing on that headland since she was eighteen years old and has never once admitted to. They sit with their backs against the cairn the squads always used and eat what is in the bag, which is mostly bread, and watch the light start to go. Nine miles south the yards at Hessen Point send something up eleven times a day and have done since before either of them was born. Kal's taken the small house, Kyra says. I know. She told me twice. She told me three times. She wants us to see it and she will not ask, so one of us is going to have to invent a reason to be in that part of the valley. I have already invented one, says Val. Of course you have. They have never talked about the room with the door open. Not that week and not in the two years since, and both of them were there, and there is nothing either of them could add to it that would not make it smaller. What they talk about instead, for about a quarter of an hour, is bread. It's not the same. It is extremely good bread, says Val. It's very good bread and it isn't the same and I want it on the record that I am going to say this for the rest of my life. She turns a piece of it over. There was a woman on Alberta with a face like a shut door who did a thing with rye and I did not appreciate her at the time. You bought four a week for nine years. I did not appreciate her properly, says Kyra. The sun goes down behind them and the water begins doing what it does. It is not a thing that gets written about. It happens on that coast about two hundred evenings a year and nobody who lives there mentions it, in the way that nobody mentions any of it — the light coming off the shoulder of the headland and going across the water sideways, and the whole of the bay underneath turning the particular blue it turns, which is not the blue of anything else on that planet and has no name because it has never needed one. Kyra does not say anything about it. Val looks at the water for a long time and then at her, and does not say anything about it either, and that is the whole of the conversation. A ship goes up from Hessen Point while they are sitting there, without any sound at all, and rises for a few seconds, and then is not rising, and then is not there. Neither of them looks at it. Nobody ever does. But they have both had to decide, which is new. That is the thing about coming back that neither of them was warned about and neither of them will ever say out loud, because there is nobody to say it to who would understand what is being described: at eighteen you did not look at a ship because looking at a ship did not occur to you. It was not restraint. There was nothing to restrain. And they sit on that headland with the bread finished and the light nearly gone, and each of them separately does not turn her head, and each of them knows exactly what it has cost the other to manage it. The light comes up in Val somewhere after that. At the wrists first and then under the jaw, the way it always has, in an empty place on her own planet with nobody for miles in any direction — and it is exactly as strange here as it was in a hut in the Tatras in the first winter, because the field that made it is the field they left, and they have not come back as the women who went. Kyra watches it come up and does not tell her, and then does. You're up. I am aware of what I am doing. I know you are, says Kyra. I'm telling you anyway. Four hundred years and I've told you every single time and I am not stopping now that we're home. The dark comes up off the land behind them and the arc comes out overhead the way it has every clear night of both their lives, enormous and perfectly ordinary, and neither of them looks at that either. Kyra finds the other one first. There. It is low over the water and it is almost nothing — a smudge, long rather than round, fainter than anything near it, the kind of thing that goes out if you look straight at it. Nobody on Sethal has ever named it. There has never been a reason to. It is a faint mark in the autumn sky that has been there for the whole of recorded history and has never once done anything, and a child who asks is told it is a smudge, and that is the end of it. The two women on that headland know what the people inside it call the place. They do not say it. They never have, on this planet, and never will. They look at it for a long time. Kyra puts her hand out, palm up, on the grass between them. Val looks at it for a moment, in the ordinary way she looks at anything, and then puts her own into it. The water goes on doing what it does. Val. Mm. How much further? And Val does not laugh, and does not correct her, and does not point out that there is no road under them and nowhere beyond this and nothing whatever left to reach — and sits on a headland above the only water of its kind on two worlds, with the light up at her wrists and a woman's hand in hers, and gives the answer she has been giving since a road out of Maribor. Not far now.