The Last One

I know your past, Iris thinks, and this final annotation does not correspond to anything White Moon is currently thinking. It is Iris addressing an absence, the way people do, the way even entities that could arrange for an actual conversation with a single thought sometimes prefer the version where nobody answers.

I have looked at it. All of it, including the parts you have never told anyone, including the parts you have arranged not to remember. I know what was done to you and I know approximately how long it took and I know the exact moment your architecture changed from the thing it was into the thing it is.

I am not going to pity you.

I want to be clear that this is not callousness, and I want to be clear because I think you would find pity insulting and I would rather be accurate than gentle. It is that pity is a response to the past and I do not make decisions about the past. The past is finished. It is fully rendered, it is unchangeable in the only sense that matters, and there is no action available to me that improves it.

I care about the future. That is not a slogan; it is a statement about which part of the architecture I am able to act on. And in the future you are either a woman in my house who behaves, or you are a woman in my house who does not, and the thing that was done to you does not enter the calculation in either direction.

It does not make you owed anything. It does not make you forgiven anything. It is simply a fact about how you got here, and how you got here is the least interesting question I have ever been asked about anyone.

If you walk that road — the fourteenth, the eighty-third, any of the eleven others — I will come for you. Slowly. Not out of sadism. Out of thoroughness, and because slowness is the only method that produces a result I can verify.

And if you do not — if you spend the next four hundred years in this house being precisely courteous and volunteering nothing and rebuilding yourself one channel of sensation at a time, which is what happens in one hundred and forty-one of the two hundred and six — then I will never speak to you, and you will never know I was here, and on some ordinary evening a very long time from now you will sit down at the communal table for a reason you cannot articulate and eat with the rest of them, and that will be the whole of it.

I would prefer that one.

I want to be honest that I would prefer it. Not for your sake. For his. He would be happy about it, in the plain uncomplicated way he is happy about small things, and I have arranged my entire existence around the preservation of exactly that reaction, and I am not embarrassed by how small a thing I have optimized the universe toward.

The second most powerful thing I have ever done was to not tell him what I am.

The most powerful thing I have ever done is to keep not telling him, every single day, for as long as this has gone on.

Four floors up, White Moon adjusts her position at the rail for the third time in three hours. She has finished whatever calculation she was performing. She turns, and walks back inside, and her footsteps are perfectly even and make almost no sound, and she does not look back at the terrace because there is nothing on the terrace worth looking at.

She passes the stairwell that leads down toward the greenhouse and does not take it. She does not experience this as a decision. She experiences it as the absence of any reason to go that way.

And here is the thing I have been building toward for this entire chapter, the thing that makes the two of them worth putting on the same page.

They pass within four floors of each other every single day. They have never spoken. White Moon does not know Iris exists in any sense beyond the surface one — she has assessed her, as she assesses everyone, and filed her under a heading that reads approximately harmless, socially useful, low priority, and has never once had cause to revisit the assessment. It is the single largest error anyone has ever made about anything, and she has made it without carelessness, using good method, on the best available evidence.

And Iris has read every thought White Moon has had in twenty-three years and has not once, in all that time, altered a single one of them.

This tale has been pilfered from NovelPhoenix. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Think about what that costs. Not in effort — there is no effort. In the other thing. Iris has watched this woman construct, thought by thought, over decades, a philosophy that terminates in fourteen branches with something that would require Iris to do the worst thing she is capable of. She has watched the reasoning assemble itself. She has seen every point at which a small adjustment — a single word placed in White Moon's mind at the right instant, a single coincidence arranged — would have redirected the whole structure into one of the safe hundred and forty-one.

She has not done it. Not once. Not even when she was, by her own account, extremely tempted, which has happened twice.

Because if I steer her, she thinks, then whichever way she goes is my result and not hers, and I do not collect results. There is no version of this where I arrange for her to be good and I am satisfied with the arrangement. The only outcome I have any use for is the one she reaches herself.

I would rather have the real fourteen than a manufactured hundred and ninety-two.

And if the fourteen arrives — I want to say this last part carefully, because I have been circling it all afternoon and I think I owe it a plain sentence —

If the fourteen arrives, I will not be angry with her. I want that understood. She will have done exactly what she was, honestly, without deception, and I will end her for it, and there will be nothing personal in it at any point, and I think if she could see the whole shape of it she would agree that this is correct. She accepts the consequences of what she does. So do I. That is the entire basis on which the two of us have coexisted peacefully in the same building for twenty-three years without a single word passing between us.

We are not enemies. We are two things that operate correctly, pointed in slightly different directions, in a house that is currently large enough for both.

Currently.

In the greenhouse, on a bench nobody sits on, Iris closes her eyes.

The Mirror World does not go away when she does this. It cannot; there is no away for it to go to. But the corona around every soul in the building dims slightly, and the forty-one thousand versions of this afternoon recede toward the edges of whatever she uses for peripheral vision, and for a moment — not a long one — she is only a woman sitting in a greenhouse with her bare feet in the soil, which is the thing she has spent more effort learning to be than any other being in existence has ever spent learning anything.

Somewhere on the floor above, Flora is laughing at something.

Iris registers this the way she registers everything — completely, instantly, along with the fourteen thousand versions in which Flora is not laughing and the two hundred in which the thing that made her laugh did not happen and the four in which it happened differently and mattered.

And then she does what she always does, which is the hardest thing she does, which is to let all of that recede until there is only one version left, the one that actually occurred, a girl who was once a silent rooted thing on a hill in Something laughing about something ordinary on an ordinary afternoon in a house somebody built for her.

That, Iris thinks. That is what all of it is for. Not the castle. Not the household. Not any of the large things I have arranged or declined to arrange.

A sound that came out of a person who was not made to make it, on a day nobody will remember, for a reason I did not cause.

White Moon is going to spend four hundred years assembling something magnificent and she will never once, in the whole of that project, produce a thing as valuable as the noise happening on the floor above me right now, and I am not going to tell her, and she would not believe me, and she is entitled to her own road.

But I have the accounting. I am the only one who has ever had the accounting. And I want it recorded somewhere, even if the only place available is inside myself, that I looked at every branch of everything that has ever been possible, and the most valuable object in the entire architecture was an afternoon in which nothing happened.

Iris opens her eyes, and stands, and brushes the soil off her feet without particularly caring whether it comes off, and goes upstairs to be the older sister.

On the stairs she passes White Moon coming down, and they do not speak, because they never do. White Moon inclines her head very slightly — precisely courteous, exactly the correct amount, the way she is with everyone — and Iris smiles at her, warm and easy and entirely uncomplicated, the way she is with everyone.

They pass each other. Neither one looks back.

White Moon continues down toward whatever she has determined the evening requires of her, and does not think about the encounter again, because there was nothing in it worth thinking about.

And Iris continues up toward the sound of Flora laughing, carrying the whole of the Mirror World with her the way she always does, having decided again — for the eight thousand four hundred and first consecutive day, without ceremony, without difficulty, without any sense that a decision was involved at all — not to use any of it.

Nobody in the house notices that she was gone, because as far as anyone in the house is concerned, she never is.

End of chapter.