CHAPTER 24
Avery
◆
I squared the ninety-eight leaves against the edge of the oak and then squared them again.
My hands do that when the rest of me has run out of useful work.
The transcript lay squared beside the file with my pen across them both.
Eleven feet of table, ten men, and a motion on the floor to find that I could not read the paper under my own fingers.
The grate in the west wall held ash and no fire, and the cold ash had a smell that came across the room dry and gray and old.
The Gallery floor slopes. There is a brass drain at the center of it.
Every chair leg in the room finds the inch of fall on its way toward that drain, so nothing sits level and nobody has ever mentioned it out loud.
My chair had been set at the foot of the table.
I moved it up to the head, and the legs went over the tile with a noise that climbed into the dark tiers and came back down.
That noise was the loudest thing anybody made for a long while after.
Snow had been falling since before dawn with no wind under it.
The south windows had gone white in the corners and the light through them lay flat and hard on the oak.
Thorne waited until I was seated, which was courtesy, and he does courtesy the same as other men do bookkeeping.
He had the duplicate in front of him in its identical folder, the red wax broken clean along one side.
His hands rested on it without any weight in them.
“There is a mark on your face, Analyst,” he said. “Would it not be a kindness to ask whether you are well enough to sit at all?”
The mark was on my right cheekbone and it had its own pulse in the cold. I kept my hand down on the paper. Putting my hand up to my face was the entire purpose of the sentence, and he was welcome to want it.
“It would be a kindness to ask,” I said. “You are not asking. You are moving.”
“I am moving,” he said, and set one finger on the duplicate and left it there.
“The Custodian puts the Substitution. The Analyst’s seat is held by a person who cannot discharge it, and the instrument provides for that case in plain words.
I ask the roll to find her incapable, and I ask it with regret. ”
“Regret is cheap this morning.”
“It is the only thing I have ever been able to afford.”
Alistair moved his bandaged hand a half inch along the wood and did not lift it.
“The Ledger notes that the Custodian has produced a document he never entered in the archive,” he said. “I do not object to the motion. I object to the warrant under it, and I would like the objection written down before the count.”
The Chair sat two places down from Thorne with his hands folded and his back off the seat. Nine of the ten men in that room were made in this building, and he was one of the nine. He had waited his whole life to be asked for a number.
“The motion is before the table,” he said. “I will take the count.”
That was all he ever said. I have thought about him since.
I believe he had exactly one sentence in him and spent it early, so that nobody could make him spend a worse one later.
Behind him the tiers went up into the dark and I could not see faces up there, only the pale shapes of hands on the rails.
I put my palm flat on the buff cover. The oak had taken the heat of the room into it and the tile under my shoes had taken nothing. My whole body was awake between those two facts.
“Day eighty-nine of ninety,” I said. “You will want to hear this today.”
Somebody up in the second tier shifted and his chair spoke on the tile.
Under this table’s own instrument, incapacity is a question of fact, and a question of fact is settled by demonstration.
That is the only test the Cell has ever recognized, and it was the only thing I had carried down there that any of them were obliged to look at.
“Miss Pryn,” I said. “Come down and draw a leaf. Any leaf, and do not tell me the number until the paper is in front of me.”
Cecily Pryn came down the steps with her hands dry and her face giving away no more than the wall did. She put her thumb into the stack without looking at it, lifted, and set the open file in front of me. Then she went back up one step and stood with her hands crossed at the wrist.
“Leaf forty-four,” she said. “The table will note that the archivist chose and the Analyst did not.”
The leaf was ciphertext in Hollis Ware’s hand, eight blocks of five, running key underneath and no crib anywhere on the page.
My mother taught me to break a running key in a kitchen on the back of a phone bill when I was nine years old.
I did not ask for a pencil. The answer was never going to be the point.
The point was that ten men had to sit there and watch me get it out of the paper with nothing in my hands.
“The subject was offered the window or the door,” I read. “He took the door. That is the second time he has taken the door. The note under it is in Ware’s own hand: the choice is the instrument, and the door is only furniture.”
I turned the folder a quarter turn so the light off the snow fell on the block and not on my knuckles.
“Open yours to the same leaf and follow me,” I said.
Thorne opened the duplicate. He is sixty-one years old and he took his time about it, and ten men watched him take it, and then he found the place with one finger and held it down.
“Read the rest of the block,” he said.
I read the rest of the block, and then the one under it, and his eyes went along his own page half a line behind my voice the entire time. When I stopped, the room had a weight in it that the snow outside did not account for.
“Is it word for word,” I said. “You are the only other living person in this building who can check me. The table cannot. Tell them.”
“It is word for word,” Thorne said, and closed the duplicate under his hand.
Giving me that cost him nothing, and that was how I knew the ground had moved under my feet and he had already moved with it.
“You have shown the table that you can read, Analyst. Reading is a skill. Capacity is judgment, and judgment is what the seat requires, and no leaf of that file will ever show me any.”
He was right. I had known he would be right since the summons came up under my door, and the second half of what I walked in with was not written on paper anywhere.
“Then I will give the table its judgment,” I said. “Leaf sixty-one. The fifth stage. I am not running this on any of you. I am reading it, and every man here who was made here will hear the year he stopped asking when he was going home.”
Julian’s right hand lay on the oak in front of him with the knuckles split open and not closing, and it did not move.
Alistair’s left hand was wrapped to the wrist and he held it in against his waistcoat.
Rook was down the table on my left with one shoulder set wrong under his coat.
Rook is never anything except about to do something, and he was doing nothing at all, and that told me he had counted the doors on his way in.
I found the block on the sixty-first leaf and put my finger under the first line. I read it out as Ware wrote it, three questions in a fixed order with the answer printed after the third.
“The fifth stage is put to the subject in the evening, at a table, with the Custodian standing,” I read. “It is three questions, and the subject has heard all three of them before. Whose hands are these. Whose house is this. When are you going home.”
Something went through the tiers that was not sound. I kept my finger on the line and my eyes on the paper, because looking up would have made it a performance, and this was not a performance. It was a text, and a text does not care who is in the room with it.
“You will close that file,” Thorne said. “The Custodian directs the Analyst to close it and to sit.”
“The Custodian directs,” I said. “The instrument says the Analyst reads. One of those is a quotation, and one of those is a man asking me for a favor in front of the roll.”
“The stage is complete on the night the subject does not ask the third question back,” I read. “He answers it instead. He answers it from one knee, and he is never told to kneel, and the answer is three words.”
Alistair went down first. He is the slowest man alive at finishing a gesture, and he finished this one before he had any say in it, right knee to the tile, the bandaged hand held in against his chest, and when he looked up the ice-blue of him had nothing in front of it.
Julian was already down beside him. Rook took the seat back in his right hand and put himself onto his knee with the left arm hanging dead from the shoulder, and on the way down he made a sound he had not planned on making.
“I am home,” Julian said, and Rook said it half a beat behind him, and Alistair said it with his eyes shut.
Up in the second tier a man I have never been introduced to said the same three words into his own hands.
He said nothing else for the rest of the morning.
Two more of them were on their feet without any knowledge of having stood.
Nine men in that room were made here, and every one of the nine heard his own year come up off the paper and go past him.
My hands were shaking on the file, so I laid them flat where the shaking would not show.
Three men on one knee on a tiled floor, in front of the men who put them there, and no one of the three had decided to do it.
The form reached in and took them down. All three would have chosen it, and they were never given the chance to choose it.
Both of those are true, and I was the only person in that room watching both.
Alistair’s voice came up off the floor with the courtesy still sitting in it, which was the worst sound in the building.
“I love you, I have nothing in my hands, and I am asking you to rule anyway.”
“Say it, sparrow,” Rook said. “We are down here until you do.”