Chapter 355 The Signer

Konrad came to the map room on a Tuesday.

Market day. Everyone was down at the stalls in the square or out on the north farms, and the map room was nearly empty. Just Okafor at the great table with her slate, and Garnet in the corner with the morning's sheet, and me, because I'd come to tell Okafor the Lanthe's valley was finished and stayed because she'd made coffee.

He knocked.

Nobody knocked on the map room door. Not in four years. People came in, or they stood in the doorway like the Overseer, or they sent Dot. Konrad knocked. Twice. Very precisely. The way you knock on the door of a Senate chamber.

Okafor looked up.

"Come in," she said.

He came in.

In his dark coat. With his cane that he didn't need. Narrow and grey and perfectly composed. He stopped just inside the door and stood there with both hands on the cane and looked at the great table, at Garnet's sheets, at the four hundred and nineteen circles and the black ones with their white dots and green dots and the back of the sheet covered in grey.

"Marshal Okafor," he said.

"Senator."

"Not any more," said Konrad. "I resigned. In writing. To the long table. Three weeks ago." A pause. "Nobody read it out. I asked them not to."

Okafor put down her pencil.

"What can I do for you, Mr. Friese?"

Konrad didn't answer at once.

He looked at Garnet. In the corner. With her drawing board on her knees and the old brown dog on her feet and her pencil stopped halfway across the page. She was looking at him the way she looked at things she was going to draw later. Very steadily. Taking all of it.

He looked at me.

Then at Okafor.

"I'd like to contribute," he said. "To the war."

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Okafor looked at him. At the cane. At the dark coat. At the face that had stayed perfectly composed in front of the Senate and the Council and the long table, and once, on the bottom step of my porch, hadn't.

"You don't have powers," she said.

"No."

"You're sixty-four."

"Sixty-six," said Konrad. "Halloway's numbers say my bones are fifty. She says that's Avalon. She says she doesn't know where it stops." He didn't smile. "I'm told I've stopped wearing out. I'd like to be some use while I'm not."

"You sat in the Senate for thirty years," said Okafor, "and voted for every directive against the modified."

"Yes."

"You signed your wife into a room."

"Yes," said Konrad. "I did."

"You signed the recovery orders on Day 300. Every route sheet with a person line on it. Thirty years. First." Okafor's voice didn't change. "Your daughter read the list out to you on a porch. With your granddaughter on her lap."

Konrad didn't look away.

"Yes," he said. "That's why I'm here."

Okafor picked up her pencil again. She didn't write anything with it.

"Go on," she said.

"I signed first," said Konrad. "Everything. For thirty years. Every order. Every transfer. Every shipment that went from Avalon to somewhere that wasn't Earth." He looked at the great table. "I read every one before I signed it. I always read them. Crane used to laugh. He said nobody read them. He said the point of signing first was that the others didn't have to read them because you had."

He put one hand flat on the edge of the great table.

"I remember them," he said.

Nobody moved.

"Not all of them," said Konrad. "Thirty years. Thousands of sheets. But the codes. The receiving codes. The ones on the containers. On the person lines." He looked at me. "Your cadet. The one at the relay basin. Dane. He saw three or four sheets with a person line and a receiving code on them and it took him a year to understand what they meant."

"Yes."

"I saw thousands," said Konrad. "And I understood every one. The day I signed it." His hand was very still on the table. "I signed them anyway. Because I'd been told the tithe kept the domes safe. Because I'd signed the first one, and then the next was easier. Because if I'd stopped signing first, someone would have looked at why the Storm's wife was never seen." A pause. "I'm not telling you that so you'll understand. I'm telling you so you'll know I'm not going to pretend I didn't know."

"And the codes?" said Okafor.

Konrad took his hand off the table.

"Every one went somewhere," he said. "Not one place. A great many. Out from the station. Along routes. With waypoints. Every waypoint had a code. Every container passed through three or four before it reached the receiving code at the end." He looked at the back of Garnet's sheet. At the dots. "I never knew where they were. Nobody did. They were codes. Numbers. On a sheet." A pause. "But I'd know them again. If I saw them. And if somebody had a map."

Garnet put down her pencil.

"I've got a map," she said.

Everyone looked at her.

She didn't get up. She sat in the corner with her drawing board and the dog on her feet and looked at Konrad very steadily.

"I've got the threads," she said. "Every one we know about. All nine lines. Every world on them. Every freed queen and every black world and every circle." She held up the back of the sheet. The dots. "And the middle. And the thick thread past it, where the voice showed Lucas. And the hollow world at the end of it." She put the board down. "I don't know where any of your codes are. I don't know what they mean."

"Neither did I," said Konrad.

"But if you told me the codes," said Garnet. "In order. The way the containers went. One waypoint, then the next, then the next." She picked up her pencil. "I could see if they matched. The threads. The way they go."

Konrad looked at her for a long time.

"Who are you?" he said.

"Garnet Dask," said Garnet. "Maps." She pointed with the pencil at the slate on the great table. "It says so. On the bottom. Very small. Okafor wrote it."

Okafor didn't say anything for a long time.

Then she turned the slate over. To the back. Past everything. And looked at Konrad.

"Not out there," she said. "You don't go on a ship. You don't go on a team. You don't go anywhere near a thread." She put her finger on the slate. "You sit in this room. With her." She looked at Garnet. "And you tell her every code you remember. In order. However long it takes."

"Yes," said Konrad.

"And every one you tell her," said Okafor, "you say out loud what was in the container. If you know. If there was a person line. Who it was. If there was a name."

Konrad was very still.

"There weren't names," he said. "Only numbers."

"Then say the numbers," said Okafor. "Out loud. Every one." She wrote something on the slate. "Somebody should."

He started that afternoon.

I didn't stay. I had a people coming in from the south with a world of salt marsh that was half black and a queen who wouldn't leave it, and I had to make them somewhere before the ships came in at dusk. But I came back at midnight, because I couldn't sleep, and the lamp was still on in the map room.

Konrad was at the great table. Sitting. With his cane leaning against his chair and his hands flat on the wood.

Garnet was beside him. With a new sheet. Not the threads. A blank one. Covered in small marks. Codes, in her neat hand. Lines between them. Waypoints. Hundreds.

Konrad was talking.

Very quietly. Very steadily. In the voice he'd used in the Senate, I think, to read things into the record.

"Seven-three-K. Receiving. Via four-one-one, four-one-nine, nine-nine-two." A pause. "Cargo: silver, refined, nine hundred units." He didn't stop. "Seven-three-K. Receiving. Via four-one-one, four-one-nine, nine-nine-two. Person line. Number one-four."

Garnet's pencil moved.

"Pod fourteen," said Konrad. Quieter. "Day three hundred. Avalon. Pim Arden." A pause. "Route interrupted. Recovered." Another pause. "He's on Avalon. He walks with a stick some days. Edda says it's getting better."

He stopped.

He sat very still with his hands flat on the table for a long time.

Then he went on.

Garnet didn't look up at me when I came in. She was drawing. Lines. From code to code.

Konrad didn't look up either.

I stood in the doorway. Like the Overseer. And didn't go in. And after a while I went home.

He went on for eleven days.

Every day. From dawn until long after dark. Garnet went home to sleep and came back at dawn, and he was there. Okafor said she didn't think he slept at all the first three nights. Then Ingrid came down on the fourth night and sat in the chair across from him and said nothing at all for an hour, and when she got up to go he went home with her as far as the guest house and slept until noon, and came back.

She came every night after that.

Not to talk. She didn't talk to him. Mother said she didn't think they'd exchanged twenty words in the whole eleven days. She sat across the table from him with a cup of tea, in the green scarf, while he read the codes into the record and Garnet drew. And when he stopped, at the end of the night, she stood up, and he stood up, and they walked up the hill together as far as the guest house, and she went on alone.

"Why?" I asked her. On the porch. On the seventh night.

Ingrid looked at her hands. At the forks of lightning under the skin.

"Because he's saying it out loud," she said. "Every number. Every one he signed. Out loud. For the first time." A pause. "Somebody should be there to hear it. Who knows what it costs him." She looked out at the town. "I don't forgive him. I won't. But I know what it costs. And I'm the only one who does."

Sigmund told Risa on the second day.

On the plain. At dawn. With the candles. Two for Risa now, and one for small Sigmund, who'd turned up every morning since the finishing and sat cross-legged beside his mother with his tongue between his teeth, glaring at his flame.

Sigmund didn't usually come to the candles. He came that morning. And sat down on the grass beside his sister. And watched her get both flames still. It took her twenty minutes.

When she'd done it, he said, "Jessa's due in the spring."

Both candles went out.

Not on purpose. Risa didn't put them out. They just went out. All at once. Along with small Sigmund's. And every hair on Risa's head stood up, and a very small cloud came into being over her, black, and a single bolt of lightning came out of it and hit the grass ten feet away and left a smoking ring.

Ingrid didn't move.

"Again," she said. "From the start. Two candles." She looked at her son. "Congratulations, love. Now go away. You've set her back a week."

Risa didn't light the candles again.

She threw her arms round her brother instead. On the grass. Knocking him over. And held on, with her hair on end and the small black cloud over both of them raining very slightly, while he lay on his back on the plain and laughed.

Small Sigmund, beside them, looked at his grandmother.

"Am I set back a week too?" he said.

"No sweetheart," said Ingrid. "You are doing amazing, My little spark."

Task Force Nine went out for the first time on the fifth day.

As lightning.

It wasn't a big thing. Okafor said afterward that was the point. A small thing first. A town in the far north, past Carver, where the Thren stood on their crystal plain growing toward the light. Something came down a thread at the hour before dawn. Not correctors. Three handlers. Old. Grey. Lost. Off a thread that hadn't carried anything in years, from a world that had been freed and forgotten, still walking toward a tower that wasn't there any more.

They came down on the edge of the Thren plain.

Ruan heard them at six minutes. Ilka put it on every band.

And at the bottom of the hill, on the porch, the three chairs emptied.

I didn't see it. Nobody saw it. It was too fast. A line of white from the porch to the north, so bright every window in the town lit, and then nothing.

Then Ilka, on the band, very quietly:

"Task Force Nine on the Thren plain. Forty seconds." A pause. "Calder's being sick."

Mother held the ground under the Thren so the handlers couldn't reach them. Maura, when she'd finished being sick, kept them warm. And Ingrid walked out in front of three grey handlers on a plain of crystal under a hard white sun and put out one thin hand.

And everything went quiet.

She didn't light them. She didn't have to. She called the spark out of them, and held it, and the handlers stopped. Mid-step. In the light.

And stood there.

Not walking. Not pushing. Not doing anything at all. For the first time since they'd been made.

The Thren, behind Mother's held ground, very slowly, turned toward them. In light. And said something. It took them four hours.

Dot translated it after.

They said: you may stand here, said Dot. They said: we stand. For years. Toward the light. It is not a bad way to be. A pause. They said: you are welcome to stand with us until you know what else you would like to be.

The handlers are still there.

On the edge of the Thren plain. Past Carver. Standing. In the light. Very still.

Ingrid goes up once a week. As lightning. To see if they've decided anything yet. She says one of them turned its head last time. Toward the sun.

She says that's a start.

Maura was sick again on the way home. On Ingrid's scarf.

"I told you," she said. Sitting on the porch steps with her head between her knees. "I told you I'd lose my hairpins."

"You didn't lose your hairpins," said Mother.

"I lost my breakfast," said Maura. "Which is worse. Somebody make me some tea."

Ingrid made her some tea. She didn't mention the scarf.

Pim came on the sixth day.

I wasn't there. Garnet told me. That night, at the kitchen table, with the dog under her chair and a cup of milk going cold in front of her.

He came to the map room door at noon. With his stick. He walked with it some days still, Edda said, though it was getting better. He was taller than I remembered. Older. His silver mended and finished and his face very still, the way faces go when they've been somewhere nobody should have been and come back.

He stood in the doorway. Like the Overseer.

Konrad was reading codes. He stopped.

"Seven-three-K," said Pim. "That's where I was going."

Konrad didn't move.

"Edda told me," said Pim. "What you're doing. She said you remembered the codes. She said you were saying the numbers out loud." He looked at the great table. At Garnet's sheet. "She said you'd get to mine. Eventually." A pause. "I wanted to be here when you did."

"It was the fourth day," said Konrad. Very quietly. "I said it on the fourth day."

Pim looked at him for a long time.

"Then say it again," he said.

Konrad said it again.

Seven-three-K. Receiving. Via four-one-one, the relay basin, a Hand. Person line. Number one-four. Pod fourteen. Day three hundred. Avalon.

And then, after a long pause, because Okafor had said if there was a name:

Pim Arden.

Pim stood in the doorway with his stick.

"You signed that," he said.

"Yes."

"First."

"Yes."

"Did you read it?"

"Yes," said Konrad. "I read every one."

Pim didn't say anything for a long time. Garnet said she held her pencil so tight it broke.

Then Pim came into the map room. All the way. Leaning on the stick. And sat down at the great table. Across from Konrad. In Ingrid's chair.

"Then read me the rest," he said. "The ones that didn't get found." He put the stick against the table. "I'll sit here. I was in a housing for a year with something pulling my silver out through my skull. I can sit in a chair."

Konrad looked at him.

"Why?" he said.

"Because I got found," said Pim. "And they didn't." He folded his hands on the table. "Somebody who got found should hear them."

He stayed until dusk. Then Ingrid came, and he gave her back her chair, and went home.

He came back the next day. And the next. Every day until the eleventh.

He never said anything else to Konrad. Not once. He sat and listened.

Garnet said that was worse than anything he could have said. And better.

Konrad finished on the eleventh night.

I was there. Okafor sent Dot for me at midnight. The Marshal would like the operator to come.

I went.

The map room was lit. Every lamp. Konrad was at the great table. Sitting very straight. With his hands flat on the wood. Ingrid across from him, in her chair, with her tea. Okafor standing by the window.

And Garnet.

She was standing at the end of the table. With two sheets in front of her. One on top of the other. The threads, on the bottom. Every line, every world, the middle, the thick thread past it. And on top, on thin paper she'd made herself by soaking the seed-vault inventories and pressing them flat, so you could see through it, Konrad's codes. Every waypoint. Every route. Thirty years of containers.

She'd laid one on top of the other.

They matched.

Not all of them. Most of the waypoints were on the nine lines. On the threads we knew. Towers. Worlds. Places the containers had stopped on their way. Garnet had marked every one that matched in green, and there were hundreds.

But the receiving codes. The ones at the end. Where every route went in the end, after three or four waypoints.

There were eleven.

Eleven receiving codes. In thirty years of containers. Garnet had marked them in red.

Ten of them were on the threads we knew. At the ends of lines. Worlds we'd freed. Places that had been depots once, Konrad said, where the silver and the tokens and the people were sorted before they went on.

The eleventh wasn't on any thread we knew.

It was past the middle.

On the thick thread.

Garnet put her finger on it.

"Seven-three-K," she said.

Konrad didn't move.

"Every person line," said Garnet. "Every one. In thirty years." Her voice was very steady and her hands weren't. "Every container with a number on it instead of a name." She looked at the red mark. "They all went through ten different depots. Every route different. Three waypoints, four." She swallowed. "And then all of them, every one, went here."

Seven-three-K.

On the thick thread past the middle.

Halfway between the middle and the hollow world.

Nobody said anything for a very long time.

Then Konrad said, very quietly, without lifting his hands from the table:

"I never knew where it was. Seven-three-K. I signed it four thousand, one hundred and twelve times." A pause. "I used to wonder. At night. What a receiving code that only took people looked like." He looked at the red mark. "I never once asked."

Okafor came away from the window.

She stood at the great table and looked at the two sheets for a long time. At the green waypoints. At the ten red depots on the nine lines. At the eleventh. On the thick thread. Past the middle.

"It's a station," she said. "Not a world. A waypoint. Between the middle and the hollow world." She looked at me. "Did the voice show you anything there? When it showed you the thick thread?"

I thought about it. About going up the thread, scattered, in the cold. About the voice opening, and showing me the direction. Past the middle. A thread that wasn't a thread. Very thick. Very old.

And partway along it. Something. I'd thought it was a knot. A thickening. Where the thread went through something before it went on.

"Yes," I said. "Something. I didn't know what it was."

"Now you do," said Okafor.

She looked at Konrad.

He was still sitting very straight at the great table with his hands flat on the wood. He hadn't moved since Garnet put her finger on the red mark.

"Mr. Friese," said Okafor.

He looked up.

"Four thousand, one hundred and twelve," said Okafor. "You said that number out loud. Every one. For eleven days." She put her hand flat on the sheet beside his. "Now we know where they went. Every one. Because you remembered." A pause. "Nobody else on Avalon could have given us this."

Konrad didn't say anything.

"It doesn't make up for any of it," said Okafor. "It never will. You know that."

"Yes," said Konrad.

"But it's what you came here to do," said Okafor. "You asked to contribute. You have." She looked at him for a long time. "Thank you."

Konrad sat at the great table for a long time after that.

Then he stood up. With his cane. And looked at Ingrid.

She was still in her chair. With her tea. She hadn't said anything all night.

She stood up too.

And they walked out of the map room together. Down the long road. Up the hill. As far as the guest house.

I watched them from the map room window.

At the guest house gate, Konrad stopped. And turned round. And said something to her.

I didn't hear what. It wasn't mine.

But Ingrid stood at the gate of the guest house for a long time after he'd gone in. In the dark. In the green scarf.

Then she walked on up the hill alone.

Okafor called them in the next morning.

Everyone who'd plan it. Luna. Holt. The General. Risa, for the Wing. Ruan on the big screen. Wren in the corner. The Overseer in the doorway.

Garnet's two sheets on the great table. The red mark on the thick thread.

"We don't know what it is," said Okafor. "A station. A depot. A waypoint. Somewhere the person lines went, for thirty years, before they went on." She put her finger on it. "Halfway between the middle and the hollow world. On a thread nobody's ever travelled but the houses."

"And the voice," said Wren.

Okafor looked at her.

"The voice knows it," said Wren. With her eyes shut. "Everything on the thick thread goes through the voice first. Everything coming down and everything going up." She opened her eyes. "If Lucas asks. Through the door. Through Tally. It'll tell us what's there."

"Will it?"

"It hid him," said Wren. "In the grass. When the houses came down the line for him." A pause. "I think it'll tell us anything we ask. I think it's been waiting for someone to ask it something besides who it came out of."

The Overseer spoke from the doorway.

It is a sorting place, it said.

Everyone turned.

I did not know the code, said the Overseer. I never saw the sheets. But I know what is halfway on the thick thread. Everything made at the middle knows. Its long grey hands were very still. It is where the taken are sorted. Before the hollow world. Queens to the rooms. Young to the vats. Humans—

It stopped.

"Humans to what?" said Okafor.

The Overseer looked at the floor.

To be taught, it said. Like me. Like the keepers. Like the benches under the ring. A pause. That is where the children on the benches came from. Before the ring. That is where they were first taught their shape.

Nobody said anything.

Tally came from there, said the Overseer. Reed. Moon. Fifty-eight thousand on the benches. Its voice was very quiet. And Mr. Friese's four thousand. If they are not on the benches, they are still there.

Okafor stood at the great table for a long time.

Then she turned the slate over. To the back. Past everything. Under First one on time. Under Task Force Nine.

And wrote:

Seven-three-K. The sorting place.

And under it, very small:

Ask the voice.

Pim Arden wasn't one of the four thousand.

I want to write that down.

Pod fourteen. Day three hundred. A cadet who landed in a thorn gully two days south of the river on the first night on Avalon, a long time ago, and whose beacon didn't stop in the normal way. Whose name Wren wrote on her list beside the number. Whom Dane saw on a route sheet with a person-mark on it, the same number as his birthday, and didn't understand for a year.

Konrad signed it. Seven-three-K, via the relay basin, via a Hand.

And the Hand never made the last waypoint. We got there first. Pim and Lise and Jessa, in housings in the hold of the first finger, with threads woven up the backs of their necks. Before seven-three-K.

Garnet marked that route in a different colour. Blue. It stops at the Hand and doesn't go on.

It's the only blue line on the sheet.

Four thousand, one hundred and three are red.

Ingrid told me what he'd said at the gate.

Not that night. A week after. On the plain, at dawn, between candles. Risa had gone to fetch more, because small Sigmund had melted his down to a puddle trying to make it stand still by glaring at it. Ingrid and I were alone on the grass.

"He said he'd like to come to supper," she said. "Not once a week. Not on Sigmund's night." She looked at the candle in front of her. Very still. "He said he'd like to come on an ordinary night. When nobody's told him he can." A pause. "He said he'd never once in his life done anything nobody had told him he could. Not even marrying me. His father told him to."

"What did you say?"

Ingrid didn't answer at once.

"I said no," she said.

I didn't say anything.

"I said no," said Ingrid again. "Not yet. I said he could come on Sigmund's night and bring the bread and sit on the top step, the way he does. And when I want him on an ordinary night, I'll tell him." She looked at her hands. "And he said thank you. And went in." A pause. "He's never once said thank you to me for saying no. In forty years. He used to say I was being difficult."

Risa came back across the grass with an armful of candles.

Ingrid took one and set it down in the grass in front of small Sigmund, who was sulking.

"Again," she said. "And don't glare at it this time. It doesn't care how cross you are."

Konrad came to supper on Sigmund's night.

He brought the bread. It was still not very good. Maura said it was getting less bad. He sat on the top step with his back to the post, the way he always did.

Sigmund sat down beside him.

Jessa came up the path a little later. From the hospital. Slowly, the way she walked now. She stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked at the two of them, father and son, side by side on the top step, not talking.

Sigmund stood up.

"Father," he said. "Jessa and I are having a baby. In the spring."

Konrad didn't say anything for a long time.

Then he stood up too. Slowly. With the cane he didn't need. And looked at Jessa at the bottom of the steps.

"Congratulations," he said. Very carefully. Getting every word right. The way he'd said I'd like to see my granddaughter, a long time ago, at the bottom of the same steps.

Jessa looked at him.

"You can hold it," she said. "When it comes. If you'd like." A pause. "Sigmund says you held Dory as if she might break. Or you might."

Konrad didn't say anything. He sat back down on the top step. Very suddenly. As if his legs had stopped.

Sigmund sat down beside him again.

And put his hand, very briefly, on his father's shoulder.

I said it that night. On the porch. Late.

The three chairs first. Mother. Ingrid. Maura, who said she'd stop being sick if it killed her and had been practising by spinning round on the plain until Halloway told her to stop.

Then everyone.

And then, at the end, I went down the steps. And down the long road. To the guest house gate.

The lamp was still on in the window.

I said it there too. Out loud. To nobody. To a lit window.

The lamp went out a moment later.

I don't know if he heard.

Days 3467–3480. The Signer.

Konrad knocked on the map room door and asked to contribute. No powers; sixty-six with fifty-year-old bones. He signed first for thirty years and read every sheet; he remembers the codes. Okafor: you sit with Garnet, say every code in order, and say the numbers out loud. Eleven days. Ingrid sat across from him every night and didn't speak, because somebody who knows what it costs should hear it. Sigmund told Risa about the baby on the plain and blew out all three candles. Task Force Nine's first lightning run: three lost handlers on the Thren plain; Ingrid hushed them; the Thren said they may stand there; Maura was sick on the scarf. Garnet laid the codes over the threads: ten depots on the nine lines, and every person line in thirty years, four thousand one hundred and twelve, ending at one: seven-three-K, on the thick thread, halfway to the hollow world. One blue line, Pim's, stops at the Hand, because we got there first. The rest are red.