Chapter 353 The Long Count

It was Doctor Bell who noticed first.

Not Halloway. Not Ruth. Not anyone from the ward, who'd been looking at bodies every day for years and should have seen it. Doctor Bell, who'd spent forty years on Level Fifty-eight looking at dome glass and pump housings and the slow fatigue of metal under pressure, and who said afterward that the only reason she noticed was that she wasn't looking at people at all.

She was looking at her spectacles.

"I've lost them," she said.

At the kitchen table. In the evening. She'd come up the hill with a satchel of drawings for the new interceptor frames, which she wanted me to look at because she said I could feel stress in a weld better than any instrument she'd ever built. She sat down across from me. And pushed the satchel across. And didn't open it.

"Lost what?"

"My spectacles," said Doctor Bell. "Both pairs. The reading pair and the far pair. I came up the hill without either of them." She looked at her hands on the table. "I didn't notice until I was at the gate."

"I'll look—"

"No," said Doctor Bell. "You don't understand. I didn't need them." She looked up at me. "I read the gate number. From the road. Without them. I haven't been able to do that since I was thirty-eight."

I didn't say anything.

Doctor Bell took a small black notebook out of one of her pockets. The one she always had. She opened it to a page near the back that wasn't about steel.

"I've been keeping track," she said. "Since I noticed. Three weeks ago. Not just me." She turned the notebook round. "Halvard Ostrand. Sixty-eight. Arthritis in both hands since he was fifty. He's been framing interceptors with his bare hands for two months and hasn't mentioned it once. I asked. He said he'd forgotten." She moved her finger down the page. "Hettie Crale's cows. Two hundred of them. Milk yield up a third since the barn. She thought it was the grass." Down. "The man on Forty-two with the cat. The one you opened the door for. He was eighty-three on Earth. He came to the north farms last month and asked for work."

"People get better," I said. "When they're not under a dome. Good air. Real food. Sun."

"Yes," said Doctor Bell. "For a month. For a season. That's not what I'm seeing." She closed the notebook. "I'm seeing it get better and keep getting better. Every week. In everyone I measure." A pause. "Including people who've been here three years."

I noticed it myself the next morning.

On the way down the hill to the map room. Past the forge, past the square, past the green door of Thorne's shop.

The green door was open.

Thorne's shop had been dark for a long time. Thorne was very old. Older than anyone in the town. Older than the General. He'd baked the rye for the Overseer's bread for years, and for the porch, and for half the town, until his hands wouldn't knead any more and Meg had taken over the ovens and Thorne had taken to sitting in a chair by the shop window in the mornings, watching the street.

The chair by the window was empty.

I stopped at the door.

Thorne was at the bench at the back. In his apron. With his sleeves rolled up over arms like knotted rope. Kneading.

He didn't look up. He was concentrating. The way Maura concentrated. The way you concentrate on something your hands used to know and have just remembered.

Meg was in the doorway to the back room. With her arms folded. Watching him.

She saw me. And came out onto the step.

"Three weeks," she said. Very quietly. So he wouldn't hear. "He got up one morning and went to the bench. Didn't say anything. Just started." She looked back at him through the door. "His hands haven't done that in four years, Dask. The doctors in the dome said they'd never do it again. That it was the joints. That it only goes one way."

"It goes the other way here," I said.

Meg looked at me for a long time.

"Is that you?" she said. "Doing that? Did you—"

"No," I said. "I haven't touched him."

Meg didn't say anything.

Inside, Thorne finished the loaf. And shaped it. And put it on the board. And stood back and looked at it, with his old hands on his hips.

"Too much rye," he said. To nobody. "Always too much rye. Your mother used to say." He looked up. And saw me at the door. "Dask. You'll take the end of this up to that grey thing on the red glass. It's been eating Meg's. Hers is too soft."

She went to Halloway the next morning.

I went with her. Because she asked. Because she said Halloway would listen to her more carefully if the person sitting beside her could feel every grain of whatever they were talking about.

Halloway was in the small room at the end of the long ward with the window. Writing. She looked up when we came in, and looked at Doctor Bell, and then at me, and put her pen down.

"You've noticed," she said.

Doctor Bell sat down.

"How long have you known?" she said.

Halloway didn't answer at once. She reached into the drawer of her desk. And took out a folder. Thick. Older than anything else on the desk. Worn at the edges the way paper wears when it's been opened and closed every night for a long time.

She put it on the desk between them.

"Three years," said Halloway.

"I started it on Earth," she said.

She opened the folder. The first pages were old. Program floor paper. Grey, with the crest at the top. Columns of numbers in her small precise hand.

"Not on purpose," she said. "I was taking blood. From the thirty-one. Every week. The Retention families. Because that was my job." Her voice was very flat. "And I noticed something. The ones whose silver had been opened. On the hello. By him." She didn't look at me. "Their numbers changed. Not just the silver. Everything. Blood. Bone density. The markers I'd been told to look for that meant they were wearing out." She turned a page. "They stopped wearing out."

"Mother's tremor," I said.

"Forty-two to sixteen," said Halloway. "Toby counted it. On the hello. I had it on paper before he told you." She turned another page. "I thought it was the silver. Being opened. Being finished. I thought that was all it was."

"And then?"

Halloway turned to the middle of the folder.

The paper changed. Not Program grey. Avalon paper. Rough. From the mill on the river below the town that Halvard Ostrand designed and the east block carpenters built.

"And then I came here," she said.

She'd kept counting.

Every patient. Every person who came onto the long ward. Every child born. Every crossing that came off a ship. She'd taken their numbers when they arrived and taken them again a month later and a year later, and written them down in the folder, column after column, in the small precise hand she'd used on the Program floors to measure how fast people were dying.

On Avalon, she'd been measuring how fast they weren't.

"It's not the silver," said Halloway.

Doctor Bell looked up.

"It's not just the silver," said Halloway. "That's what I thought. On Earth. That it was what he did. The doors. The finishing." She turned the folder round. Toward us. A long column of numbers, very neat. "This is the east locks. Pell's people. Every one I could reach. No silver in any of them. Not a grain. They were never in the Program. Never on the floors. They came out through the locks at night for two years because they'd heard there was somewhere else." She put her finger on the column. "They're healthier. Every one. Every year. The same way the finished ones are."

"Without silver."

"Without silver," said Halloway. "Without anyone opening anything. Without anything at all except being here." She looked at me. "It's not you, Lucas. It's not the silver. It's Avalon."

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Doctor Bell said, "I want to study it."

Halloway didn't answer.

"Properly," said Doctor Bell. "Not one folder in a drawer. Every person. Every people. Every species on Avalon. All the way back. All the way forward." Her face was very bright. "Halloway. If it's the world. If there's something about this world that makes people stop wearing out—"

"No," said Halloway.

Doctor Bell stopped.

Halloway closed the folder. Very carefully. And put both hands flat on top of it.

"I took blood on the Program floors for twenty years," she said. "Every week. From people in chairs who didn't know their names. I wrote down how fast they were dying, in columns, very neatly, so somebody upstairs could decide whether it was fast enough." Her voice didn't change. "Do you know what they called it? On the floors? When they wanted to know something about people's bodies and the people didn't get to say no?"

Doctor Bell didn't answer.

"Further studies," said Halloway.

The room was very quiet.

"I'm not saying it shouldn't be done," said Halloway. "I'm saying I won't do it the way it was done before. And I won't let anyone else." She looked at Doctor Bell. "Every person who's measured asks to be. Every people. Every brood. Every queen. Nobody's measured who didn't say yes. Nobody's measured who doesn't get to see their own numbers. Nobody's measured who can't stop." She took her hands off the folder. "And it goes to the long table. All of it. Before anyone takes a single drop of blood."

Doctor Bell looked at her for a long time.

Then she took off both pairs of spectacles, which she'd found in her coat pocket that morning and put back on out of habit, and put them on the desk.

"Yes," she said. "Of course. That's how it should have been done all along."

The long table met on it a week later.

It was the longest meeting it had ever had. Longer than the night we voted on the crossings. Longer than the night we voted to answer the houses. It went from noon until after midnight, in the bowl in the side of the hill, with every seat full and lamps going round the rings as the sun went down.

Halloway stood at the bottom by the round stone and said what she'd said in the small room. All of it. The Program floors. The columns. The words they'd used.

Then Doctor Bell stood up and said what she'd seen. The spectacles. Halvard Ostrand's hands. Hettie Crale's cows. The man on Forty-two.

Then the long table talked.

The Ossari spoke first. In the rock. Through the stones in the wall by the forge, through Dot, through the wood of every seat.

They say their eldest, said Dot, was very old when they came. Older than any Ossari has been. She was going to die. She knew. They all knew. She came anyway, so she could die somewhere that was not burning. A pause. She has not died. She sings new galleries every morning. Under the ranges. She says the rock here is easier.

The Vel spoke in colour, across the sky over the western coast, and Dot read it off the clouds. The herds are larger. Calves that should not have lived have lived.

The Thren spoke in light. Very slowly. It took them most of the evening. Dot said, at the end of it, very quietly: They say they have grown more in one year here than in a hundred on their own world. They say they do not know why. They say they would like to.

Then the humans.

Carver's seat said their old people were walking again. People who'd come off the ships in chairs.

Ashby said the salt-workers' lungs were clearing. Men who'd coughed for thirty years from the salt dust in the long tunnels under Ashby, on Earth, before the crossings, had stopped coughing.

Halden said nothing for a long time. Then the old man who'd sat with Voss in the Karst hall, who'd seen Teodor Voss in the door of his bicycle shop when the screens went white, stood up.

"I'm a hundred and one," he said.

The bowl went very quiet.

"I was seventy when Halden went," he said. "I came back. With the others. To be there, so somebody would. I lived in the ring round the broken dome thirty years. I was going to die there. I was ready to." He looked at his hands. "I came here because Voss asked me to come and tell her about the bicycles. I thought I'd have a season." He looked up. "I'm a hundred and one. I walked down the hill to this bowl this morning. On my own. Without the stick."

He sat down.

Nobody said anything.

Voss stood up.

She hadn't spoken all day. She sat at the clerk's desk at the bottom of the bowl with her pen, writing everything down, the way she'd written everything down since she came to Avalon. She put the pen down now.

"I signed the Program," she said. "I signed the transfers. I watched the floors from upstairs for twenty years. I know what further studies meant." She looked at Halloway. "I'd like to be measured first."

Halloway looked at her for a long time.

"Why?"

"Because I'm the one who'd have had it done to other people," said Voss. "If it had been Earth. If it had been the floors." She sat back down. "I'd like it done to me first. With my yes. So everyone can see what it looks like when it's done right."

The long table voted at midnight.

It passed. With Halloway's rules. Every one. Ask first. See your own numbers. Stop whenever you like. Every people decides for itself. Every queen decides for herself.

And one more rule. That Halloway added at the end. Standing at the round stone with her folder under her arm.

"Nothing that's learned," she said, "goes to make anyone into anything. Not soldiers. Not weapons. Not stock." She looked round the bowl. At every ring. "If we find out why people live longer here, then people live longer here. That's all it's for."

Kwame, on Hana's knee, at the head of the round stone, pointed at her.

Which everyone had agreed counted.

They started in the spring.

Doctor Bell ran it. Halloway watched every page. Neve took the blood, because Neve could feel what was in it before she drew it and could tell people, before the needle went in, exactly what they'd find.

They called it the Long Count.

Not a study. Not further anything. Wren named it. Because she said she'd been counting people her whole life, since before the dome, and this was the first time anyone had asked her to count something that was going to keep going instead of stopping.

Voss was first.

On the long ward. In the small room at the end with the window. With the long table's whole vote written out on a sheet on the desk in Halloway's hand, every rule, and Voss's name at the bottom of it, signed, very steadily, in the same hand that had signed the transfers.

Neve sat across from her. With her lit hands.

"I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do," said Neve. "Before I do it. Every time."

"Yes," said Voss.

"I'm going to put two fingers on your wrist. And feel. And tell you what I feel." Neve held up her hand. "Then I'm going to take a little blood. From the inside of your elbow. It'll sting. Then I'm going to write down what I find. And give you the page." A pause. "And if you want me to stop. At any point. Before the needle. After. Halfway through the page. You say so, and I stop, and the page goes in the fire."

Voss looked at her.

"Did anyone ever say that?" she said. "On the floors?"

"No," said Neve.

"Did you ever want to?"

Neve didn't answer for a long time.

"Every day," she said. "Every single day. For a hundred and twelve days in a row I wanted to say it, and I took the blood and wrote the numbers and sat with the ones who didn't wake up." She held out her hand. "I'm saying it now."

Voss held out her wrist.

It took ten minutes.

When it was done, Neve wrote the last number down. And tore the page out. And held it out.

Voss took it.

She read it. All of it. Column by column. Very slowly. The way she'd read the Program reports upstairs every Monday for twenty years.

Then she folded it. Very carefully. And put it in her coat. Over her heart.

"Thank you," she said. To Neve.

And then, to Halloway, in the doorway:

"Next."

Dory asked to be counted.

She came down to the long ward on the first day of the Long Count with Pebble and her notebook and stood at the end of the line of people waiting, which went out of the doors and down the street past Thorne's shop, and waited.

When she got to the front, Neve looked at her for a long time.

"You're six," said Neve.

"Nearly seven," said Dory. "I look twelve. Papa says." She held out her wrist. "I grow fast. All of us do. Ash and Trevor and Sigmund and the twins. Halloway's been writing it down." She looked at Neve very seriously. "If you're counting how long people last, you should count the ones who grow fast too. In case it's different."

Neve looked at Halloway.

Halloway, in the doorway, nodded. Very slowly.

"She's right," she said. "We'll need them. All of them. If their parents say yes." She looked at Dory. "And if they say yes. Themselves. Each one."

"They will," said Dory. "I asked."

She held out her wrist.

Neve put two fingers on it.

And was quiet for a long time.

"What?" said Dory.

"Nothing," said Neve. "You're very well." She took her fingers away. "You're—" She stopped. "Your silver's not wearing out either. It's doing the other thing. It's getting more."

"Like the queens," said Dory.

Neve looked at her.

"Yes," she said. "Like the queens."

The Mom Squad went together.

Of course they did. They wouldn't be split up. They'd said so in writing. They came down the hill on the second morning, three of them, in a row, and stood in the line outside the long ward behind a Mireth and in front of two men from Carver, and waited their turn like everyone else.

Maura brought a loaf.

"For the nurses," she said, when Neve looked at it. "You've been standing all morning. Nobody's eaten." She put it on the desk. "And don't you dare put a needle in me before you've had a slice."

Neve had a slice.

Mother went first. Then Ingrid.

Ingrid was the one Halloway had been waiting for. I could see it on her face. She stood in the doorway of the small room with her folder and watched Neve put two fingers on Ingrid's thin wrist, and didn't say anything, and didn't breathe.

Years in a room. With a band round her neck. Halloway had taken the band off her on the long ward, after Earth, and looked at what was under it, and written in her folder in very small letters, I don't know how she's alive.

Neve felt for a long time.

"Your silver's coming back," she said at last. "Where the band was. All the way down." She frowned. "Faster than it should. Faster than anyone's I've felt." She looked up at Ingrid. "It's like it's catching up. On the years."

Ingrid looked at her own wrist.

"Is that the world?" she said. "Or me?"

"I don't know," said Neve. "That's what we're counting."

Ingrid considered this.

"Then count it," she said. "Every week. I'd like to know." She looked at Mother. "I lost a great deal of time, Dot. I'd like to know if I'm getting any of it back."

Maura went last.

She sat down in the chair with her sleeves already rolled up. Neve put two fingers on her wrist.

And took them away again. Very fast. As if she'd touched a stove.

"Sorry," said Maura. "I forget. It's on all the time now. Since the kitchen."

"You're warm," said Neve.

"I'm always warm, love."

"No," said Neve. "I mean—" She put her fingers back. Carefully. "Everything in you. Every number. It's not wearing out because it's—" She stopped. "It's like your whole body's a kitchen with the oven on. Nothing's getting cold enough to stop."

Maura looked at Halloway.

"Is that bad?" she said.

Halloway was writing very fast.

"I have no idea," she said. "Nobody's ever been like you before." She looked up. "Would you come back next week?"

"Every week," said Maura. "If you let me bring bread."

The queens said yes.

All of them. Every queen on Avalon. Our queen at the top of the garden wall. The heavy queen on the red glass. The old queen on her mountain, who said she was the oldest thing on Avalon and if anyone wanted to know how long things lived here they'd better start with her.

Doctor Bell went up the mountain herself. With her notebook. And sat on the warm stone beside the old queen for a whole day, asking questions through our queen, and writing down the answers.

She came down at dusk very quiet.

"Well?" said Halloway.

Doctor Bell sat down at the kitchen table. And didn't open the notebook.

"I asked her why," she said. "Why Avalon. Why here. Why people stop wearing out." She took her spectacles off. "She said it's not Avalon."

"She said it's every world," said Doctor Bell.

Nobody at the table said anything.

"Every world that has a queen," said Doctor Bell. "A queen who's free. Who's singing. Who's not in a tower, or a pillar, or a room in a hollow world, giving everything she has to someone else." She looked at her notebook. "She said that's what a queen is. The place a world keeps its strength. And when a queen is free, the strength stays in the world. In the ground. In the water. In the air." A pause. "In everyone who lives there."

"And when she's not free?"

"Then the strength goes somewhere else," said Doctor Bell. "Up the thread. To the houses." She swallowed. "And the world wears out. A little at a time. Everything on it. The ground. The water. The people." She looked at Halloway. "She said it's the same thing your columns were measuring on the Program floors. Only slower. And everywhere."

Halloway didn't say anything for a long time.

Then she said, very quietly: "Earth."

Doctor Bell nodded.

"I asked her that," she said. "I asked her if that's why. The brown sky. The domes. Everything wearing out. For as long as anyone remembers." She looked down at the notebook. "She said she didn't know. She said she'd never been there."

"But?"

Doctor Bell opened the notebook. To the last page. And read it out. In the old queen's words, as near as our queen could give them, as near as she could write them down.

"Every world had a queen once," she read. "Every world that ever had anything living on it. That is how there came to be anything living on it." She stopped. Then went on. "Yours too, I think. A long time ago. Before the Sorn came to you. Before you were cut." A pause. "I think your sky was blue."

Nobody at the kitchen table said anything for a very long time.

Then Mother, from Father's chair by the stove, said, "Harriet used to say that."

Everyone looked at her.

"That the sky was blue," said Mother. "Before the domes. In the orphan halls on the forty-first floor, when we were girls. None of us had grandmothers. None of us had anyone. So Harriet made one up. A grandmother who'd seen the sky before the domes, and told her it was blue." She looked at her hands. "She told it every night, in the dark, in the long room with all the beds the same. We used to laugh at her." A pause. "Nobody believed it. I didn't either. Not until Avalon."

The Overseer asked to be counted too.

It came to the long ward on the last day of the first week, with the dog, and stood in the doorway the way it always stood, and didn't come in until Halloway said its name.

I was made, it said. In a vat. At the middle. I do not know how old I am. A pause. I do not know if a made thing wears out. Nobody ever told me. It looked at Neve's lit hands. I would like to know. If I am allowed to be counted.

"You're allowed," said Halloway.

Neve put two fingers on its long grey wrist.

She was quiet for a very long time.

"I don't know what I'm feeling," she said at last. Honestly. "Nobody's ever felt one of you before. I don't know what's well and what isn't." She looked up at it. "But it's the same this week as it was when you woke up on the ward after the houses let go of you. It hasn't got worse." A pause. "I'll feel it again next week. And the week after. And then we'll know something."

The Overseer looked at her for a long time.

Thank you, it said. For not knowing. And saying so.

The dog thumped its tail on the floor.

I went up on Father's roof that night.

And listened. Not to Avalon. Not to the bases or the threads or the thousand peoples in their skies and caves and oceans.

To the dark. Past the middle. Toward the hollow world.

To the queens in their rooms. Holding. Thousands of them. More. One going quiet every day.

I thought about worlds wearing out. A little at a time. For as long as anyone remembered. Because somewhere very far away, in a room in a hollowed world, a queen was giving everything she had up a thread to someone else.

I thought about Earth. Brown. Empty now. Every dome dark.

I thought about a queen who might have been there once. A long time ago. Before anyone was cut. When the sky was blue.

And I wondered which room she was in.

Luna found me on Father's roof.

She didn't climb up often. She said the roof was mine and the map room was hers and it was better for everyone if they stayed that way. She came up the ladder that night anyway, in her long coat, and sat down beside me with her knees up.

"You've heard," she said.

"Nobody's started wearing out."

"Nobody's started wearing out," said Luna. She looked at the sky. "Doctor Bell told me. Before the long table. She wanted me to know first. Because she said I'd be the one who had to plan round it."

"Plan round it?"

Luna was quiet for a long time.

"If people stop wearing out," she said, "then the war doesn't end because everyone who fought it gets old. It doesn't end because the houses wait us out." She pulled her coat tighter. "It ends when someone ends it. Us or them." A pause. "That's all. Nothing else is going to do it for us any more."

I didn't say anything.

"And Mother," said Luna. "Mine. Your mother. Ingrid. Maura. The General." She looked at me. "I've been afraid for years, Lucas. Every time they go out. That one of them won't come back because they're old and slow and something walks into them." She swallowed. "And now Bell tells me they're not getting older. Not here." She looked at her hands. "I don't know what to do with not being afraid of that."

"Be afraid of the other things," I said.

Luna laughed. Very small.

"There are enough of those," she said.

She leaned against my shoulder.

"I'd like a long time," she said. After a while. Very quietly. "With you. With all of us. On the porch. Saying it every night." A pause. "Longer than anyone's ever had."

"Then we'd better end it," I said.

"Yes," said Luna. "We'd better."

The Long Count's first numbers came in at the end of the season.

Doctor Bell brought them up the hill in a box. Not a folder. A box. Because there were too many for a folder. She put it on the kitchen table and took out the first sheet and handed it to Halloway without a word.

Halloway read it.

She read it twice.

Then she put it down. And took her spectacles off, which she still wore though she didn't need them any more, and pressed her fingers against her eyes.

"How long?" I said.

Halloway didn't answer.

Doctor Bell did.

"We don't know," she said. "Not yet. Not for years. You can't know how long people live until they've lived it." She picked up the sheet. "But from what we've got. From the queens, and the Ossari's eldest, and the old man from Halden, and Halloway's three years of columns, and every person and every people who said yes." She looked at it. "On Earth, the oldest anyone lived was about ninety. Under the domes. For as long as anyone kept records."

"And here?"

Doctor Bell put the sheet down.

"Here, nobody's started wearing out yet," she said. "Not the oldest. Not the ones who came in chairs. Not the man who's a hundred and one." She looked at Halloway. "We don't know where it stops. We've got no data for where it stops. We've got nobody who's reached it."

Mother laughed.

From Father's chair. Very quietly. Everyone looked at her.

"Trevor would have hated that," she said. "He always said he wanted to go before he got boring." She shook her head. "He'd have been insufferable at a hundred and fifty."

She stopped laughing.

She looked at her hands. At Father's ring.

"He'd have been here," she said. "If he'd lasted. If we'd got here sooner." Her voice was very steady. "He'd have been on the porch. Every night. Saying it awake."

Nobody said anything.

I got up. And went round the table. And knelt down beside Father's chair, the way Konrad knelt on the bottom step, the way Holt knelt in the hollow.

And said it. To her. Awake. Out loud.

The way he would have.

Halloway took one more thing out of the box before she left.

A single sheet. Folded. With her own name at the top.

"I measured myself," she said. "First. Before Voss. Before anyone. I didn't tell anybody." She unfolded it. "I wanted to know if I was allowed to ask other people to do something I hadn't done."

She put it on the table.

I looked at it. Columns of numbers. Her small precise hand. I didn't understand most of it.

Except the last line. At the bottom. Circled.

Wearing out: no.

And under it, in smaller writing, as if she'd added it later, after a long time sitting with the page:

I'd like to see what happens.

Days 3349–3460. The Long Count.

Doctor Bell lost her spectacles and didn't need them, and started counting: Halvard's hands, Hettie's cows, the man from Forty-two asking for farm work at eighty-three. Halloway had a folder: three years, Earth paper then Avalon paper, and the east locks people with no silver at all are healthier too. It's not the silver. It's Avalon. She said no to further studies, the words they used on the floors, until it was done right: ask, show, stop, the long table, nothing used to make anyone into anything. The Ossari's eldest sings new galleries. The Thren have grown a century in a year. Halden's old man is a hundred and one and walked down without his stick. Voss asked to be measured first. The old queen: it's every world with a free queen; when she isn't free, the world wears out. Yours had one once, I think. Your sky was blue. Nobody here has started wearing out. Halloway measured herself first: I'd like to see what happens.