A Fair Copy

The stylus is no good to me.

I have worked out that I can hold a shard off the lectern crystal in the web of the right hand if I close the thumb over it and do not ask the fingers for anything, and that the fluid coming off the left forearm is enough to write with on the pale stone, and that it dries brown and stays legible. I am recording the method because the method took me some time and because somebody may need it.

Format follows.

I have the book. It came through the fire in the lining and it is scorched along the fore-edge and the ink held.

I am going to read it back. I have a reason and the reason is that I have been sitting on this floor for some time with nothing left to want, and a man with nothing left to want should check his arithmetic.

That is mine. I know the hand and I know the day and I remember the wall and the cold of it. I am putting a mark beside it. Mine.

Mine.

I stop here.

I wrote that word and I noticed that I had written it and I could not account for it and I left it in the file, and my reason, which is on the page in my own hand, was that the file is not for me.

I would like to know, now, who I thought it was for.

The room is doing something to the light. I am not going to describe it. It is not the subject and I have very little of the left arm left to write with.

I have turned to it four times. Each time my eye is somewhere else by the second line, on the facing page or two entries down, and I have to go back, and the going back is very like the moment in a corridor when you cannot remember why you came, and I have never in my life had that difficulty with a page.

Fifth attempt. Same.

I am going to copy it out instead.

I have thought about why this should work and I do not have time for the thought, so I will put down only the operational fact. Copying does not require me to understand a line. It requires me to find a letter and make the same letter. A hand can do that with nobody home.

P r e p a r e d   i n   a d v a n c e

C o n f i r m e d :

And then nothing. The field is empty. It was left empty on the night and it is empty now.

Turn the page.

I did not write that.

I want to be careful, because it is my hand and I have checked the hand, I checked it at the time, I wrote down that I had checked it. The letters are mine. The spacing is mine. The word closed is a word I use. And I did not write it. I have no memory of writing it and I have no memory of confirming anything and the field on the previous page is still empty, and a man does not close an entry and leave the field blank, because the whole of the format is that you fill the field.

Somebody tidied my file.

I did check. That is the part I want down. I checked, and I was satisfied, and I recorded my satisfaction, and I went on for ninety more days.

Above me the Hierophant says two words. I hear them the way you hear a door in another part of a house. I do not get the meaning and I do not need it. There is a change in the floor immediately afterward, a settling, the sort of shift a building makes when a very large weight has been taken up somewhere below it, and I understand from that alone that something has been agreed to by people who did not consult me and that it is going to be enormous.

I have perhaps a little time. I am going to spend it on the arithmetic.

I cannot simply stop. I have tried, in the way you try to stop a sound, and there is nothing to push against. It came in by being invited and it is in the way the water in a cloth is in the cloth.

But it came in for things. It gave, and I took, and every one of the things it gave me is an item, and items can be returned.

I am going to make the list. This is the last piece of work I am fit for and it happens to be the work I was trained to.

That is the inventory. That is everything I was paid.

I hand it back.

It does not fight. I want that in the record because I had expected a fight and there is not one.

It offers.

It offers so much and so fast that the offering is itself the answer to a question I have been carrying since the trench floor, which is how large a thing is. A large thing does not go through its pockets. It comes up around me the way it came up around me on the rock, and it is warm, and it is generous, and it puts everything it has on the floor between us at once, and there is not very much of it.

It offers me the corridor again. I put it down.

It offers me my mother. I put it down.

It offers, last, to tell me what happened to Kael.

I sit on the floor of a room where two gods are killing each other and I look at that offer for what is probably a second and I want it so badly that my hands come up, both of them, which they should not be able to do.

If it had said I will tell you where he is, I might not have managed this. It said I will tell you what happened to him, which is a thing you say about the dead, and it said it in the voice of a thing that has just looked in a file.

I put it down.

The severance is not a thing I did. It is a thing I stopped doing.

The whole of it, from the rock onward, was one continuous act of holding a door with my shoulder because the cold was on the other side. I stopped holding the door. That is all. The door shut on its own weight and it shut on both of us, on everything it had put in me and everything it had taken out, and the closing tore in the way that a bandage tears when it has been left on long enough to become part of the skin.

I will not describe the noise it made. It was not a noise. There is no field for it.

The floor is warm.

I have written that sentence three times in this book without meaning it and I mean it now. Not from below. From below is the other one, and I have felt that and it is a different warmth, patient and level and no business of mine.

This is the walls. This is the old warmth, the one out of the corridor, the one out of every day of my life until I was eleven years old, thin now and going, but hers, unmistakably hers, arriving through the stone into a man lying on it who spent four years learning to feel it and eleven learning to use it and three hundred and fifty-one days destroying the last of it.

She is dying and the building is still heated.

I put my hand on it. The left, because that is the one, and it is finished and it cannot feel anything at all, and I put it there anyway, flat, with the shoulder turned in, the way I have done it since before I could speak.

Nothing presses back.

I want to record without comment that there is now nothing in the world that knows I do that.

(the entry is unfinished. The crystal shard was recovered nine paces east of the dais. The book was not recovered.)