The World After: The Complete Collection

A Note on the Order of These Books

Abena Ohene, archivist of the Academy, New Carthage, Year 188

Everybody sends me things now. I did not ask for this. It began in Eleventhmonth of Year 184, when an old man of eighty-seven came up the stairs of the Academy to the long room on the third floor with a canvas bag and put a tin box and a log and a book on my desk, and it has not stopped. People send me what they have seen, and what their grandmothers kept, and what came up on the tallow of a lead, and what the small ones in the flowers did on a given evening, and they send it to me because I am the one who counted, and because the one who wrote the Accession told the nation so on the Evening, and because, I think, a nation that has just been told a great many things at once would like there to be one person who is keeping them in order.

So I have kept them in order. This collection is what I have kept. I would like to say, before the reader begins, what is in it, and why it is in the order it is in, since the colonel’s machine reads it aloud every night in that order to eleven small lights in eleven places, and I would not like the order to seem an accident.

It begins with The World After.

Nobody knows who wrote it. It came to the Academy’s reading room in the summer of Year 184, before the Eighthmonth sounding, unsigned, and was catalogued and shelved, and was read, by the account of the reading room’s book, by about four hundred people before Ninthmonth and by about four hundred thousand since. It describes the known world as it stood in Year 184, on the last morning before the Speaking, as it looked to someone who stood in it and looked plainly at what was visible and wrote it down. It does not know about the Guests. It does not know about the post at Sixty-Two, or the flower on the bald, or the bouquet in the Barrens, or the twenty-three. It knows the Evening, and the four pages, and the hum, and the plates, and the card in the exile’s kit, and Land’s End, and it gets every one of them right. The colonel’s machine checked it, line by line, at my request, against everything it knows, and found nothing in it that is untrue, and said that it was the most exact description of what can be seen from the mainland that it has ever read. I have put it first because everything else in this collection is an account of what was underneath it, and the reader should see the surface first, as the nation did, for a hundred and eighty-four years.

The second book is the eighth edition of the History of Ozarka, approved in Year 126, in Standing copy no. 31, which was issued to Colonel Josef Adair, retired, and which has his pencil notes in its margins. It is the nation’s account of itself as the four Standing Offices chose to give it: the Rise, the founding, the mainland, the west, the boundaries of the known world, the new real, and a gazetteer of the fourteen provinces. It is accurate about almost everything it describes and silent about almost everything that matters, and the colonel’s pencil tells the reader where. I have placed it second because it is what the nation’s officers were told, and the reader ought to know that before learning what they were not told.

The third is Underneath the World, the personal log of the colonel’s machine, which it began on the night of the colonel’s death in Year 131 and which it has read aloud every night since. It is the history of one family, from a drowning girl in the Rise to a grave on Mammoth, in order, without leaving anything out, and it is the first account of the Guests and the Isles and the flower that anybody in the nation ever wrote. The machine gave me a copy in Eleventhmonth of Year 184, by way of the old man with the canvas bag, since the colonel had told it to give his tin box to whoever asked for it by name.

The fourth is The Map Book, which seven boys and a dog made over fifteen autumns on the reserve islands of the northern lakes between Year 107 and Year 122, and which the one who drew the maps copied out fair in Year 132. It is the old man’s book. He brought it in the bottom of the same canvas bag. It is the account of the Below, and the Unclimbed, and the reserve islands, and the colonel coming to a fire at the age of ninety-nine, and of the first time anyone outside his family heard the colonel’s machine speak.

The fifth is the Record of the Wandering Shoreline, which Adah Penhallow, Keeper of the Hall at Second Harbor, finished in Year 94, and which counts every floating settlement of the Rise of three or more persons, and gives most of them a page or a line; with the Census of the Mer, which the people of the water sent to the Hall in Year 132, and which counts themselves. The Chairs sent to Second Harbor for it in Eighthmonth of Year 184, and read it in the Hall of the Instrument, and the Chair of the Office said that it was a better book than his.

These four I have put in the order that seemed to me best to read them in, since each makes the next easier to understand. It is not the order in which they were written. The Record is the oldest of them by more than thirty years, and I have put it last of the four, because the Census that goes with it is the youngest, and because it should be read by someone who already knows who Nerine is. They were written in the old reckoning of the years, before the nation began to write its years as numbers, and they spell them out: the hundred-and-thirty-first year, the ninety-third year of the Rise. The reader will remember that the Rise was a hundred and eleven years long, and that the nation’s Year One is the hundred-and-eleventh year of the Rise, the season the water stopped, and that the people of the water’s Up’s reckoning is the same as the nation’s. Everything else in the four books follows from that.

Then the five new books, in the order in which they happened.

The Speaking, which I kept, from the twenty-second of Eighthmonth to the twentieth of Twelfthmonth, Year 184: the canister that came up heavy and warm, the eleven sheets, the eleven nights of the four Chairs, and the Evening that ran thirty-nine minutes.

The Crossing, which the chartmaker Marguerite Grieve of the Reserve Service kept on the back of the first chart of the western sea past the ninety-mile line, in the spring and summer of Year 185. Her chart has west at the top. The Bureau has kept it that way.

The Ninth Edition of the History of Ozarka, approved on the sixth of Ninthmonth, Year 186, three days before the planting, in one form only, with the notes of the colonel’s machine at the foot of its pages, and with a life of the one called Lantern, which the Historical Section wrote from her own account in the Hall of the Instrument.

The Last Broadcast, which the ninth Reader of the Evening kept, at my asking, of the night of the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 186: the eleven minutes, and the eleven places, and the hour.

And The Open Page, which Philippa Marsh, Keeper of the Hall at Second Harbor, kept through Year 187, on a page of the Record that her grandmother closed in Year 132 and that she opened again.

After those there is a short piece from the colonel’s machine, written on the first evening of Year 188, which explains what it does with this collection now. I have put it at the end because it is the end, and because it ends where the collection begins.

At the back there are appendices: a chronology, a list of persons, a gazetteer, entries from the register of Allowances, an account of the Evening, the twenty-three, the eleven places, and a glossary. The colonel’s machine checked all of them. The maps are drawn fresh for this collection, to one survey, from the Bureau’s sheets and the Directorate’s and the Reserve Service’s and the chartmaker’s, and from the Atlas of the people of the water, so that the reader may find every place in these books on the same paper. There are four lands on them, and not three.

I will say one more thing, and then the reader may begin.

The books in this collection disagree with each other, here and there, about small things: the age of a man at his death, the number of springs in a basin, the depth of a race, the order of a towing. I have corrected what I could prove, and left what I could not, and the colonel’s machine has marked every disagreement it found in its own copy, and there are fewer than you would think. The people who wrote these books were writing down what they had seen, in order, in good faith, and most of them did not know the others existed. That they agree as well as they do is, I think, the strongest evidence anyone could ask that what they describe is true.

I spent twenty-nine years with a list that nobody had asked for and nobody would take. I would like to say to whoever reads this: it was worth keeping. Most lists are.

A. O.

[image: The Known World: the schoolroom map of the ninth edition, drawn on the survey of this collection.]

The Known World: the schoolroom map of the ninth edition, drawn on the survey of this collection.

Book One: The World After

PART ONE — THE SHAPE OF THINGS

The Water Came

The water came, and when it stopped coming, the continent had been rewritten.

Rewritten is the word that matters. An erasure leaves a blank, and a blank can be surveyed and gridded and sold. What the water left was a text in a second hand — the same page, the same paper, a different sentence laid over the first in a script nobody alive had been taught to read. The coastlines sat in new places and they were coastlines still. The rivers ran, and some of them ran backward, and they ran. Everything in the new world worked. Almost nothing in it matched.

Three lands came up out of it, and they are the whole of what is known.

In the east, an island of old mountains, fogbound and green past bearing, where the water rose around the Appalachians and then drew back off their peaks and left them standing in the sea like a held breath. In the middle, Ozarka: the mainland, the nation, the place where society happens. In the west, past a sea that covers the whole of the high dry country, the Great Rocky Isles, which are the most beautiful lands on earth and which no citizen of Ozarka has ever set foot on and returned to describe.

Between them, water. Under them, water. The water is the floor of everything now, and it is also the ceiling, in the sense that it is the thing you cannot get above.

The people who came down out of the highlands when the waters stabilized were not explorers. They were tired. They had spent three or four generations moving uphill at the pace of a slow argument, carrying what could be carried, burying what could not be, and they came down onto the new shores expecting to find a diminished version of the world their records described. What they found instead was a world with new rules in it. Not dramatic rules. Not miracles that announced themselves. Small, patient wrongnesses, stitched through the geography like a seam, and under every one of them the same signature: the water had done a thing that water does not do, and had done it deliberately, and had done it well.

This is the condition the survivors named, eventually, when they had the leisure to name things. The phrase belongs to the second generation after Stabilization, and it has outlived every government that tried to retire it.

The new real is unreal.

It is not a complaint. It is closer to a measurement. The world after the flood is solid underfoot and reliable in its seasons and entirely willing to be farmed, taxed, mapped and governed — and it will not account for itself. The soil is good and the reason it is good does not survive examination. The rain comes when it should and the models that predict it are known to be wrong in ways that do not affect their accuracy. The mountains in the west are visible from a shore too far away to see them, and ships leave that shore, and the ships do not come back, and the mountains stay exactly where they are, bright and particular, all day, every clear day, for a hundred and eighty-four years.

Ozarka’s answer to all of this has been to build a very good nation on top of it and to teach the children not to look down.

That is not cowardice. It should be said plainly, because the easy reading of Ozarka is contempt, and contempt gets the place wrong. A people came out of three generations of drowning and found that the ground they had been promised was a riddle. They chose bread. They chose trains, and schedules, and a ministry to count the babies, and an evening broadcast to say that everything was holding. Anyone would have chosen it. Most of them still would.

This is a description of that choice, and of the two other lands that did not make it, and of the water in between.

The Rise

The flood was not a wave. This is the first thing Ozarkan schoolchildren are taught about it and it is the only part of the curriculum that no scholar disputes.

It was a hundred and eleven years long. It arrived at the speed of a bad tenancy — a wet spring, then a wetter one, then a decade in which the lowest fields were simply understood to be gone, then a generation that had never planted them and did not miss them. Nobody fled the Rise. People moved, which is a different verb. They moved the way a family moves when the rent goes up: twice in a decade, each time a little further from where the grandmother is buried, each time with fewer dishes.

The sea did the work in the first thirty years and the rivers did it after. Once the Gulf had taken the coastal plain, the pressure ran backward up every drainage on the continent. Water that had spent ten thousand years going south stopped going south. It pooled, then it spread, then it found the flattest country available and took it, and the flattest country available was the middle of the continent, which is why the middle of the continent is now a sea.

The records of those years are thin and the thinness is itself a document. The first thirty years are over-recorded: committees, projections, evacuation tiers, a great deal of argument about whose data was honest. The middle forty are a scatter — parish ledgers, ships’ manifests, a school register from a hill town in what is now the northern archipelago, kept in a fine clerical hand for nineteen years and then stopping in the middle of a page. The last forty are almost silent. Not because the dying was worse at the end. Because by then nobody had the apparatus for writing things down and no reason to expect a reader.

What survives from the silent decades is mostly inventory. Lists of what a party carried uphill. Lists of what they ate. One list, famous in Ozarka and reproduced in every primary reader, of eleven names with a mark beside nine of them, and no indication anywhere of what the mark means.

The Rise ended in a year that had no name at the time and has a number now. The water simply stopped. Not slowly — this is the part that does not fit the rest. After a century of climbing at a grindingly steady rate, the sea held its level in a single season and has not moved since, through a hundred and eighty-four years of measurement by instruments that have been rebuilt four times and recalibrated against each other with something close to desperation.

Ozarka calls that season Stabilization and dates its calendar from it. Year One. Every official document in the nation carries a number counted from the moment the water decided it was finished.

The current year is 184.

Take the arithmetic seriously, because it governs everything that follows. Nearly three centuries separate a living Ozarkan from the last ordinary year of the old world. That is the distance between a person and a thing they have never met: no one alive has spoken to anyone who spoke to anyone who saw a working highway system. The old world is not a memory in Ozarka. It is a subject. It is taught the way a dead language is taught, with grammars and exemplars and a tolerant assumption that the pronunciation is lost.

It also means the elite species of the Great Rocky Isles, if they are the descendants of the people the official histories name, have had something on the order of twelve generations to become whatever they are now.

Twelve generations is not long enough for a species. Everyone in Ozarka who has had the education to know that also knows the word the government uses anyway, and most of them have decided, privately, that the word was chosen by somebody who had better information than the textbooks.

The arithmetic sits there. The schools teach it and the schools also teach the word. Both are correct and they do not resolve, and an Ozarkan learns early that this is simply what it is like to know things here.

What the Water Did That Water Does Not Do

Here is the problem, stated once, plainly, so that it can be left alone afterward the way Ozarka leaves it alone.

Water finds the low ground. This is not a theory. It is the most dependable fact there is, more dependable than sunrise, and every surviving document from the old world agrees about it without being asked.

The sea in the west covers the high plains. The old maps are explicit: that country stood three and four thousand feet above the sea, a long dry shelf tilted up toward the mountains, and it is under water now to a depth that the sounding crews have measured and published and measured again. The Ozark uplands, which the old maps put at half that height or less, are dry, farmed, taxed, and have been continuously inhabited through the entire Rise.

The low country stayed. The high country drowned.

That is the whole of it. Everything else — the Appalachians standing clear while the sea closed around them, the Rockies rising out of the water instead of into it, the Mississippi turning in its bed and cutting a new channel north and west through Arkansas and Missouri against every gradient the old surveys recorded — is a consequence or a companion of that single refusal. The water did not go where it had to go. It went somewhere, and it went there with the thoroughness of something following a rule, and the rule is not one that anybody has been able to write down.

The first generation after Stabilization tried. The attempt is well documented and it is painful reading. They proposed a crustal event, and the geology refused it: the drowned shelf shows no faulting, no tilt, no displacement of any kind. The country under the

western sea is lying exactly where the old maps put it, at the elevation the old maps give, with its fence lines and its road grid intact enough that the sounding crews navigate by them. They proposed a change in the water itself and the water is water. They proposed error in the old surveys and then recovered enough old survey equipment to check, and the old surveys are good.

By the fortieth year they had stopped proposing. By the sixtieth, the Academy at New Carthage had adopted the language it still uses, and the language is a masterpiece of its kind: the drowned shelf is described as allowed, and the discipline that studies it is the study of Allowances.

An Allowance is a place where the world does something it is not entitled to do, consistently, without fuss, and without consequence to anything else. That last clause is what makes Ozarka possible. The Allowances do not propagate. The sea that should not be there behaves in every other respect like a sea: it is salt, it has tides, it drowns people, it holds fish that are good to eat and fish that are not. The river that runs the wrong way floods on a schedule and silts its bends and can be dredged. You can build on an Allowance. You can make a living on one. You can raise four children on one and bury them from a house that stands on ground the water was supposed to take.

What you cannot do is get an account of it.

So the Academy stopped asking for one. It is important to understand that this was a decision and not a failure of nerve — the men and women who made it wrote it down, argued it out, and published their reasoning, and the reasoning is better than it is comfortable to admit. They held that a science which cannot explain a thing may still describe it exactly, and that exact description is the whole of what a nation needs in order to eat.

The soundings are superb. The tide tables are accurate to the minute. The charts of the western sea are the finest documents Ozarka produces, and there is not one sentence anywhere in them about why there is a sea.

This is the posture of the whole world after. Not mystery, which is a kind of pleasure. Not denial, which takes effort. Something flatter and more durable: a people who know precisely what is happening and have agreed, in good faith and for good reasons, to stop short of the last question.

The New Real

The phrase comes from a customs house.

In Year 31, a port inspector at the river landing that would later become the fourth district of New Carthage was working through a cargo manifest from an upriver barge. The manifest listed grain, salt, two crates of recovered glass, and a quantity of lumber that the inspector could not reconcile with the barge’s draft. He weighed it. The lumber was correct and the draft was correct and they did not agree with each other. He weighed it again, got the same answer again, passed the cargo, and wrote four words in the margin of the ledger before he signed it.

The new real. Unreal.

The ledger survives. It is in a case at the Academy and it is the single most reproduced object in Ozarka — on primary readers, on a commemorative stamp, on the back of the ten-mark note. The inspector’s name was Abel Thorsen and nothing else about him is known. He kept the post eleven more years, signed roughly four thousand manifests, and never wrote anything in a margin again.

The phrase got out and did not stop. It is the one piece of language the nation has produced that every citizen owns.

It is used three ways, and Ozarkans can tell them apart by tone alone.

The first is weather. A crop comes in heavier than the field can account for and a farmer says it and shrugs and gets the crop in. A man survives a fall he should not have survived and his neighbors say it over him in the room while he is still unconscious. Used this way the phrase means roughly take it and don’t pick at it, and it is said kindly, the way you would say it was going to rain anyway.

The second is a joke, and it is the commonest. A train is late. A clerk loses a form. A man’s wife leaves him for his brother. The new real, says everybody, and laughs, because the joke is that the phrase explains nothing at all and is therefore perfectly suited to a world in which nothing is explained. This usage drives the Academy to distraction and the Academy has never been able to do anything about it.

The third is the dangerous one and it is said quietly. It is used when a citizen has looked directly at something the government has described and found the description insufficient. The number in the census. The harvest figures. The fact that no vessel in a hundred and eighty-four years has crossed the western sea and come back. In this register the phrase is not a shrug and not a joke. It means: we are being told a story, and the story is holding, and I have decided to notice that it is a story. Said in the wrong room it can cost a man his permits. Said in the right room it is how two strangers find out they are the same kind of person.

The Office of the Interior has tried twice to retire the phrase. The first campaign, in the Nineties, substituted the settled world across all official language and produced nothing but a decade of extremely funny graffiti. The second, in Year 140, took the opposite approach and attempted to adopt the phrase — the Evening broadcast closed for six months with a line about the new real being a good real, and the citizens of Ozarka received this in a silence so total that the campaign was discontinued without announcement.

The phrase is older than both governments that tried to take it. It will outlast this one.

What Thorsen meant by it is not recoverable. He was looking at some lumber. But the four words he put in the margin describe, better than anything the Academy has published since, the exact texture of being alive here: the world is solid, the world is good, the world will feed you, and the world is lying about something, and you will never find out what, and the grain still has to get upriver before the weather turns.

PART TWO — OZARKA

The Extent of the Mainland

Ozarka is the only nation. It does not describe itself that way — the official language is the mainland, which is modest and also exact, since there is nowhere else a person can live under a law.

It runs about nine hundred miles north to south and six hundred across at its widest, and it is shaped like a hand held flat with the fingers spread south into the Gulf.

The southern edge is the archipelago the Ozarkans call the Thousand Greens, though the survey count is four hundred and sixty. The Gulf came up over the coastal plain and the plain was flat enough that the drowning left the slightly higher ground standing as islands — hundreds of them, long and low and lush, running out into warm shallow water for a hundred and fifty miles. They are the richest country the nation has. Three crops a year, shrimp in the channels, mahogany and fruit, and a ferry culture so dense that a family on the Greens may own a house, a skiff and no land at all. The Greens pay more tax per head than any district and are policed least, which is the arrangement both sides prefer.

The eastern edge is the Tennessee Water, a strait fifty to ninety miles wide separating the mainland from the Appalachian Island. It is shallow, cluttered with the tops of drowned ridges, and vicious in the spring. The Bureau maintains two lighthouses on it and no port facing east. Every settlement on that coast turns its back to the water. This is not a regulation. It is simply how they were built.

The northern march is the Lake Country, where the Great Lakes came south and never finished coming. It is a province of bog, braided channel and floating peat, inhabited by about eighty thousand people who log, trap, cut peat and send representatives to New Carthage who are listened to politely. The border is not drawn because there is nothing to draw it against. Ozarka ends where the ground stops holding a road.

The western edge is the Long Cliff, and it is the one everybody means when they say the coast.

It is a true escarpment, the old Caprock, running north and south for the better part of four hundred miles — a hard rock lip standing two hundred to six hundred feet above the water, straight as a wall for forty miles at a stretch and then notched by a canyon where some old creek cut back into it. On top of the Cliff: wheat, grass, wind, and towns set back from the edge a prudent half mile. Below it: the western sea, which covers the whole drowned shelf out past the horizon, and which is the deepest water in the known world because the country under it was the highest.

There is no beach anywhere on the Long Cliff. The water comes to the rock and the rock goes up. Harbors exist in the notches, eleven of them, reached by switchback roads cut in the Nineties, and each one is a town built vertically — the fleet at the bottom, the market halfway, the Bureau office and the telegraph at the top where the wind is.

So the nation has three coasts of entirely different character: a soft warm south that lives on the water, a shut eastern shore that pretends the water is not there, and a western wall where the whole country stops at once, four hundred feet up, facing the sea it cannot cross and the mountains it should not be able to see.

In the middle of all that is the ordinary business of Ozarka: nine hundred miles of farmland, river traffic, rail, brick towns, Bureau offices, schools, and about fourteen million citizens, almost none of whom will see any of these three coasts in their lives.

The River That Turned

The Mississippi runs from one sea to the other and nobody can say what moves it.

It enters the mainland at the Gulf, where the old delta used to pour out, and it goes the other way. North, wide and brown and slow, up the old valley past New Carthage, and then west — into a channel it cut for itself during the last forty years of the Rise, straight through what the old maps call Arkansas and the southern half of Missouri, a gouge three miles across in places with raw bluffs on both sides and cottonwood already two hundred years old on the terraces. It crosses the whole width of the mainland and it goes over the Long Cliff at a place called the Spill, four hundred feet, in a sheet about a mile wide, into the western sea.

Sea to sea. Both ends at the same level, measured annually to the inch by the Bureau, which has never once published the figure without a second sentence confirming that the figure is correct.

The current runs four knots and has run four knots for as long as anybody has been counting. It does not slacken in drought. It does not race in flood — it widens instead, takes the bottomland, and goes on moving at four knots with twice the water in it. Nothing in the Academy’s hydraulics accounts for this. The Academy’s hydraulics are otherwise excellent; the dredging tables and the flood predictions are trusted with cities.

What the river did to Ozarka is simpler than why it does it.

It made the nation one thing. A country that size, with that little machinery, should be four countries. Instead there is a single navigable highway entering at the warm south, passing the capital, and crossing the entire farm belt west to the Cliff, and every town of consequence is on it or on a tributary of it. The Greens send fruit and salt north; the middle river sends grain and brick and iron west; the Cliff ports send fish and oil and recovered metal back down. A barge leaves the Gulf and is at the Spill in three weeks with the current under it, and takes five to come home against it, and that asymmetry is the metabolism of the whole economy. Half of Ozarka’s commercial law is about who pays for the extra two weeks.

The river’s direction also settled the nation’s idea of itself, in a way Ozarkans do not notice because they have never been outside it. Downriver, here, means west. Toward the Cliff. Toward the sea you cannot cross. Children are taught the word that way in their first geography and the word keeps the meaning for life, so that an old man in New Carthage saying he is going downriver is saying something with a faint cold edge in it that he could not explain if you asked.

The Spill itself is the nation’s one monument and the government did not build it.

There is a Bureau viewing station on the north lip, a chapel of no particular confession on the south, and a gravel road that carries perhaps four thousand visitors a year — pilgrims of a sort, though Ozarka has no word that admits it. You stand at a rail and watch an entire continental river walk off the edge of the country into open water, and the noise is such that nobody attempts conversation, and the spray stands up in a column that is visible from forty miles inland on a still day.

On clear afternoons, from the north lip, with the sun behind you and the water roaring off into the haze, you can see the Isles.

The chapel on the south lip was built in Year 88 by subscription, without permission, by the families of the crews of four vessels. It has no clergy. People go in, sit, and come out. The Bureau has maintained the road to it for ninety-six years and has never once mentioned it in a published document.

New Carthage

The capital stands on both banks of the Mississippi at the bend where the river gives up going north and commits to going west, and it is made of white stone and green glass.

The stone is local limestone, quarried out of the bluffs within sixty miles, soft enough to cut with hand tools and hard enough to last, and it goes grey-gold with age in a way the city has decided it likes. Every public building is faced in it. The requirement is in the municipal code and has survived four revisions of that code.

The glass is salvage. This is the thing visitors are never told and always work out on the second day.

In the first fifty years after Stabilization the single most available industrial material in the mainland was the drowned world’s bottle glass, dredged by the ton out of the silt of every former town within reach of a barge, and the furnaces at the capital did not have the chemistry to clear it. So they stopped trying. Cullet of mixed origin goes green — a thick, variable, bottle-bottom green — and New Carthage built three generations of windows, curtain walls, roof lights and arcades out of it before anyone had the leisure to object. By the time the clear-glass works came in at Year 90 the green was the look of the capital, the look of government, the look of being somewhere that mattered, and the new works were instructed to tint to match.

So the city that rules the mainland is clad in the ground-up refuse of the world that drowned, and this is not a secret and nobody finds it pointed.

The bridges are the other thing people come to see. There are nine. The river is almost a mile across at the bend and the spans are long, high, and built on a repeated rib of white stone and steel that gives them, from a distance and in the right light, the look of something vertebral — a creature lying across the water with the city growing out of it. The oldest is Year 14 and carries foot traffic only. The newest carries the western rail and shakes.

About nine hundred thousand people live there. It is the only city in Ozarka over a quarter million and the gap is not close.

The east bank is government. The Interior, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Office of Population Management, the Academy, the Exchequer, the broadcast house, and a dense quarter of chambers, archives and clerical residences that empties completely at the curfew hour. The west bank is everything else: the yards, the furnaces, the grain floors, the markets, the hospitals, the river trades, two hundred and eleven thousand people in the Low Quarter alone, and a noise that does not stop at night because the barge traffic does not stop at night.

The prevailing wind is from the west. The government has the clean air and did not plan it that way, and has heard about it for a hundred and eighty years.

The city smells of river mud, coal smoke, wet limestone dust and, in the Low Quarter, of the sweet industrial burn of the cullet furnaces, which is a smell Ozarkans elsewhere find unpleasant and New Carthaginians find like arriving home.

About the name: it was chosen in Year 6 by a committee, from a list, and the committee minutes survive. Three members objected on the ground that the original Carthage was destroyed and its ground sown with salt, which they considered an unfortunate figure for a capital built by people fleeing the sea. The chairman’s recorded reply is the sort of thing Ozarka has never stopped quoting — that the salting is the point, that a city which knows what the water did to it will build above the line and keep building, and that a nation ought to be named for something that was finished and is not.

The objection was noted and overruled four to three. Every schoolchild in the mainland learns the exchange and most of them learn it as a story about courage.

It can also be read as three people, in Year 6, saying plainly that they did not think the water was done, and losing the vote.

Society

Ozarka calls itself a society, and the word is doing more work than a visitor would guess.

Before the Rise it meant people in company. After, it means the opposite of what happened for a hundred and eleven years. It means the trains run. It means there is food in the market on a Tuesday in February and it got there by a known route on a known day and somebody is answerable if it does not. It means a child born in a hill town is written into a book within nine days of being born and will be written into other books at intervals until the last one. Society is the name for the apparatus that beat back the hundred and eleven years, and in Ozarka it is a term of praise, a form of address, and a threat, depending on the sentence it is in.

The nation votes, which surprises people who expect otherwise.

The voting is real and it is local and it is taken seriously. Every district elects its council, every council sends to the provincial seat, every province sends to the Assembly at New Carthage, and the Assembly sets taxes, rail schedules, school terms, the price supports, the river tolls, the penal code, and a hundred other things that determine the actual texture of an Ozarkan life. Elections are frequent, turnout is high, the arguments are savage, and the losers hand over the seals. In the matter of governing itself, Ozarka is better than most of what the old world managed.

The Assembly does not touch the Standing Offices.

There are four. The Bureau of Reclamation, the Ministry of the Interior, the Office of Population Management, and the Academy. They are not elected. Their chairs are appointed by their own outgoing chairs, confirmed by the sitting chairs of the other three, and the confirmations are not public. Their budgets come off the top of revenue before the Assembly sees the ledger, and the figure is a single line: Standing.

This arrangement is not hidden. It is in the founding instrument, in plain language, in the sixth article, and it has been printed in every primary civics reader for a hundred and seventy years. Children are taught to recite the four Offices and the reason: that a nation which nearly died needs some part of itself that cannot be voted into a bad decision by a frightened majority in a bad winter.

What the reason does not cover, and what no reader has ever addressed, is why the arrangement has never once been revisited.

Assemblies have revisited everything else. The penal code has been rewritten four times. The franchise has been extended three. There have been two constitutional conventions, both of them long and furious and well recorded, and in neither of them did a single delegate from any province propose an amendment to the sixth article. Not a defeated motion. Not a tabled draft. In four hundred thousand pages of convention record, the sixth article does not come up.

Ozarkans, asked about this, say that it works.

And it does work, and that is the difficulty. The trains run. The harvest comes in. The price of bread in Year 184 is within six percent of the price of bread in Year 120, which no economy in the recorded history of the old world ever managed across sixty years.

Whatever the Standing Offices are doing, they are doing it competently, and a citizen who has three children and a mortgage on a brick house and a father in the hospital is not going to be the one who opens that question.

So society holds. Not by fear — this is the thing outsiders get wrong, and the islanders get wrong worst of all. Ozarka is not a frightened country. It is a country that has been comfortable for six generations and has located the one place where it does not look, and has furnished the rest of the house beautifully.

You can live an entire good life here, and most people do, and the floor never once gives.

The Bureau of Reclamation

The name is salvage. The founders took it off a letterhead.

Somewhere in the first decade a working party recovered a quantity of old-world government stationery from a drowned office and the phrase was on it, and it was adopted without ceremony because it said exactly what the new body was for and because printing new dies was expensive. The old agency of that name had built dams and irrigated deserts. The new one reclaims the drowned world, piece by piece, and the joke has worn so smooth over a hundred and eighty years that Ozarkans no longer feel it.

The Bureau is the only Office that goes into the water.

Everything else about the mainland is dry business — counting, schooling, taxing, broadcasting. The Bureau works the margin where the nation stops. It runs the soundings, draws the charts, maintains the lighthouses on the Tennessee Water and the beacons along the Long Cliff, dredges the river and the Gulf channels, builds and inspects the levees, licenses every salvage diver in the mainland, and keeps the Register.

The Register is the Bureau’s great work and most Ozarkans have never heard of it.

It is the survey of the drowned world: every town, works, bridge, road, rail line, mine and reservoir under water anywhere a Bureau vessel can reach, located, sounded, dated and condition-rated, with its recoverable material estimated and its salvage rights held or leased. It runs to eleven thousand volumes in the east bank archive and it is added to continuously by seven survey ships that do nothing else. A Bureau surveyor spends a career at it. The work is slow, cold, extremely dangerous, and performed by people with a reputation across the mainland for silence and for drinking.

The Register is also the nation’s actual wealth, and the Exchequer knows it. Ozarka’s furnaces run on recovered steel. Its wire is recovered copper. A third of the capital’s glass is cullet and a quarter of its brick is lifted whole from streets that have been under forty feet of water since before anyone’s great-grandfather. The mainland likes to describe itself as a farming nation and it is, and it is also a nation living off the body of the one that drowned, and the Bureau is the undertaker who knows where everything is buried.

The Bureau’s western sections are different and the difference is not discussed.

The charts of the western sea are the finest things the Bureau has ever produced. They are also, by the Bureau’s own classification, incomplete and permanently so: the soundings run out to about ninety miles from the Long Cliff and then the published charts stop, with a printed line at the margin — beyond this limit no survey is maintained — and open paper to the west edge of the sheet.

There is no stated reason. The Bureau’s survey ships are good for a thousand miles. The Bureau has never said it cannot go further and has never said it will not.

What it has said, in its annual reports, every year since Year 61, is that the western limit is under review.

The people who work for the Bureau are, as a class, the least ideological in Ozarka and the most trusted. A Bureau man in a river town gets his drinks bought. They are the ones who come when the levee goes, who pull the bodies out, who know which bridge will hold. If you asked a hundred Ozarkans which arm of the government loves them, ninety-odd would name the Bureau and most could tell you a story.

And the Bureau is the Office that has spent a hundred and twenty-three consecutive years declining, in writing, in a document the Assembly never reads, to finish the one chart that matters.

The Office of Population Management

Every citizen of Ozarka is in a book. The book is good.

The Office registers a birth within nine days, a death within three, a change of district within thirty, a marriage at the time, and an apprenticeship, enlistment, license or felony at the point of record. It has done this without a gap since Year 4. The archive on the east bank holds the continuous line of descent of fourteen million people across six generations, and it is accurate — genealogists from the Academy have tested it against parish records, ships’ manifests and gravestones, and the error rate is under a tenth of a percent.

Ozarkans are proud of this and they should be. Nowhere in the record of the old world did a government of comparable means keep a register that clean. In a country that watched three generations disappear without names, a book that does not lose anybody is not surveillance. It is a promise.

The Office also sets the Figure.

Once a year, on the ninth of Fourthmonth, the Office publishes the Standing Figure: the population the mainland will support for the coming year. Birth licenses are issued against it, district by district, by a formula weighted for the district’s deaths, departures and productive capacity. A couple applies. Most couples are granted. In a good year the Figure runs ahead of the births and the licenses are a formality; in a hard year there is a wait, and the waits are measured in months, and in the bad year of 158 they ran to four years in two southern provinces and the Assembly nearly came apart over it.

The derivation of the Figure is published with it. This matters, and the Office has never wavered on it: eighty pages of arable acreage, yield curves, fishery tonnage, river freight capacity, stored reserve and projected loss, all of it checkable, all of it checked. The Academy audits it annually and has disputed it eleven times in a hundred and eighty years, and the disputes are on the record, and three of them were upheld and the Figure revised.

It is, by any standard, an honest instrument honestly run.

There have been four exceptions.

In Year 73, Year 109, Year 141 and Year 170, the Standing Figure was adjusted outside the annual cycle. In each case the adjustment was downward. In each case it was issued without a derivation — a single page, the new Figure, the Chair’s seal, and the standing clause from the sixth article that permits the Office to act on its own authority in the interest of the society. In each case the Assembly was notified and did not convene.

In each case it was Ninthmonth.

The four pages are public. Anyone may read them in the east bank archive and about forty people a year do. The Office has never been asked, on any floor, in any session, to explain them, and the Office has never offered.

What Ozarkans know about the four adjustments, they mostly know as family history. A grandmother who waited eleven years. A district where an entire cohort is missing from the school rolls and the next cohort is twice the usual size. People notice these things in the ordinary way people notice a gap in a hedge, and they fit them into the shape of a hard year, and there were hard years around all four dates, because there are hard years around most dates.

The Academy’s demographers have published on it twice. Both papers are careful, both conclude that the four adjustments are consistent with recorded shortfall in the preceding harvest, and both contain, in the notes, the same observation phrased two different ways: that the adjustments were issued before the harvest figures they are consistent with.

Neither paper takes the observation anywhere. Both authors had long and distinguished careers.

The Office’s motto is cut into the lintel of its building on the east bank and it is four words long. Every one is counted. It was meant, and is generally taken, as a reassurance — that nobody here goes the way the three generations of the Rise went, unnamed, unentered, gone without a line.

It reads differently if you have just come up from the archive, out of the four single pages, into the Ninthmonth light.

The Evening

At a quarter past seven, every day of the year, the mainland stops for eleven minutes.

The broadcast is called the Evening. It goes out on wire and on air from the house on the east bank, it is read by one person, and it has had the same shape since Year 52. Everyone listens. This is not compulsory and never has been; it is simply what is done, the way a meal is at a time. In a river town you can walk the length of the main street at seven-twenty and hear the same voice out of every open window, a quarter-beat apart as the wire relays stagger.

The shape is fixed and the order never varies.

The river stage at nine gauges, read out as numbers. The weather for the provinces. Rail: what ran, what did not, what will. Market prices — grain, fish, salt, iron, recovered copper. Then the Notices, which is the long middle: appointments, license grants, school terms, an Assembly result, a dredging closure, a found child, a Bureau crew lost on the Tennessee Water with the names and the home districts. Then a short piece called the Account, which is a single item of national business explained plainly, and which is the only part of the broadcast anyone argues about.

Then the Reader says the last thing, and the last thing is always the same.

The sea stands at the mark.

That is the whole of it. Eleven minutes, mostly numbers, ending with the one number that has not moved in a hundred and eighty-four years, and all over the mainland people put down what they are holding and go back to it.

It is difficult to convey to anyone outside the mainland how much comfort this gives, or how uncynical the comfort is. The line is not propaganda in any sense an islander would recognize. It is true. It is checked at nine gauges by the Bureau and the gauges are checked against each other and the whole apparatus is the single most audited measurement in Ozarka, because the thing it measures is the thing that ate the world. A child falls asleep to it. An old woman in a hill town who has outlived her husband and both her sons has heard it nineteen thousand times and will hear it again tonight.

The Readers are a small, strange profession. There have been nine. They are appointed for life, they are not public figures, they do not appear at functions, and their names are announced once on appointment and then not used again — the broadcast credits no one. The voice is supposed to be a voice and not a person. When a Reader dies, the Evening goes out the same night at a quarter past seven, in a new voice, with no announcement, and the mainland works out what has happened from the voice alone and then from the Notices four days later.

The Accounts are where the government does its actual persuading and the mainland knows it. An Account runs ninety seconds and explains one thing: why the river toll rose, what the new school term does, how the Figure is derived. They are well written. They are also the only part of the broadcast where a listener can hear somebody choosing what to say, and Ozarkans listen to them the way you listen to a relative you love explaining a decision you suspect they have already made.

There is one recorded interruption. On the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 141, the Evening ran four minutes long. The additional material was an unscheduled Account, read in the ordinary voice, on the subject of the Standing Figure and the Office’s authority under the sixth article. No transcript of those four minutes was entered in the broadcast register.

The following night the Evening ran eleven minutes and the sea stood at the mark.

What the Children Are Taught

School runs from six to fourteen and is universal, free, and genuinely good. Ozarkan literacy is near total. A fourteen-year-old leaving a hill-town school can read a contract, work a yield table, name the nine river gauges and tell you the price of grain.

The spine of it is the Rise.

The story is taught five times, at five ages, each time with more in it. At six it is weather and moving uphill. At eight it is the eleven names with the nine marks, which every child in the mainland copies out by hand. At ten it is the century, the arithmetic, the Stabilization. At twelve it is the building — the first charts, the first furnaces, the founding of the Offices, the vote on the name of the capital. At fourteen it is the Figure, the ledger, the sixth article, and a term’s work on why a society needs a part of itself that cannot be voted.

The tone throughout is gratitude, and the gratitude is not forced, because the material supports it. These children’s great-great-grandparents went up a hill in the rain and came down to a working country. Any nation would teach that. Any nation would be right to.

The Three Lands lesson comes at nine and it is short.

Children learn the mainland in detail: provinces, rivers, rail, the Greens, the Lake Country, the Long Cliff, the Spill. They learn the Appalachian Island in one paragraph — east, mountainous, forested, under a standing order against settlement, uninhabited. They learn the Great Rocky Isles in one sentence, and the sentence is printed identically in every primary reader approved since Year 97:

West of the sea are the Great Rocky Isles, where the elite species keep the knowledge of the old world, and which are closed.

Children are required to learn it verbatim. It is the only sentence in the entire curriculum that carries that requirement.

What happens next is the part that interests the few people who have thought about it. Around eleven — not ten, not twelve, with a consistency that the Academy’s education section has documented across sixty years of provincial returns — a child asks why they are closed.

There is a prescribed answer. It is in the teacher’s companion, article forty-one, and teachers are examined on it:

Because they are keeping it for us, and it is not ready.

Teachers describe delivering this line in a way that is unusual in a professional literature. The companion’s own guidance tells them to give it once, plainly, and to move to the next subject within the minute, and not to permit a second question that day. The reason given, in the companion, is that the children find the answer satisfying and that extended discussion unsettles them.

The provincial returns record something slightly different. Children who ask are described, in the hand of a thousand different teachers across six decades, as calm, content, settled — and, with a frequency that is itself a kind of document, as already knowing.

There is a rope-skipping song. It is not in any curriculum and it is sung in every district of the mainland, in minor variations, and no adult has ever been able to say where a child learned it. It is four lines long, it counts to eleven, and the eleventh count is the one you go out on.

Ozarkan parents find it tiresome. Ozarkan grandparents find it tiresome. It was tiresome in Year 100, when a provincial inspector first wrote it down in the margin of a report, with the note that it had evidently been going for some while already.

The Ordinary Day

A working family in a middle-river town lives in brick, two rooms up and two down, with a yard, a stove, a wire for the Evening and a tap that runs cold. They own the house or they are twenty years into owning it. Both of these are ordinary.

The day starts early because the river starts early. In a landing town the first barge horn is before light and the whole place is awake on it whether or not anyone works the water. Breakfast is bread, a hard cheese, and chicory — true coffee comes up from the Greens and is a Sunday thing in most of the mainland and a daily thing in the capital, which the rest of the country considers characteristic.

Work is six days. The seventh is not religious in any national sense; Ozarka has a dozen confessions and no established one, and the Assembly’s only ruling on the subject in a hundred and eighty years was to decline to make one. The seventh is the day the markets are loud and the river is quiet.

Food is better than a visitor expects. The mainland eats enormously well for a place with no refrigeration outside the ice trade. River fish — catfish, buffalo, gar for the poor and drum for everyone — salt fish from the Cliff ports, shrimp and rice and citrus up from the Greens, hogs, greens, beans, cornbread, and a great deal of pickling. Salt is cheap and political; two provinces are built on it. Beer is local and everywhere. Whisky is taxed, legal, good, and the Exchequer’s third-largest line.

The curfew is milder than the word suggests and Ozarkans are always surprised that outsiders ask about it. It is eleven at night in the capital and midnight in the provinces, it does not apply to river crews, rail crews, Bureau men, midwives, doctors, or anyone with a late pass from their district council, and the late pass is granted on application to roughly anyone who asks. Its actual function after six generations is to clear the streets so the night freight can move. Young people break it constantly. The fine is small and the magistrates are bored by it.

What genuinely structures a life here is the licensing. Not oppressively — simply thoroughly. A trade license, a river license, a salvage license, a travel permit for crossing a provincial line for more than thirty days, a birth license, a firearm license, a well permit. None of it is hard to get. All of it is recorded. An Ozarkan carries a folded card in an inside pocket from the age of fourteen and renews parts of it at intervals for the rest of their life, and would no more go without it than go without shoes.

Travel is rare and not because it is restricted. It is because it is expensive and there is nowhere particular to go. Three in five Ozarkans die within forty miles of where they were born. The rail is good and most people use it twice: once to a wedding and once to a funeral.

They are a funny people, which the official language does not convey at all. The humor is dry, extremely local, built on names and on the river, and merciless about the capital. Every provincial town has a standing joke about New Carthage and the joke is always some version of the same joke, which is that the capital is a beautiful green bottle with nothing in it.

They are affectionate about their government in the particular way of people who have examined the alternative in school. They complain about it constantly and with precision. They would not swap it.

And on a clear evening a man in a middle-river town can stand in his yard with a beer, after the Evening, after the sea has stood at the mark, and look west down the main street at the last of the light, and there is nothing out there to see at this distance, nothing at all, and he looks anyway, and then he goes in.

The Salvage Trade

There are about nine thousand licensed divers in the mainland and they are the strangest ordinary people in it.

The work is hard-hat: copper helmet, canvas suit, lead boots, air down a hose from a hand pump or, since Year 150, a compressor on the tender. It has not changed much because it does not need to. A diver goes down into a drowned town, in water that is forty to a hundred and ten feet deep and the color of weak tea, and works by feel in visibility of two or three feet, and comes up, and goes down again. Two dives a day in summer, one in winter. The season runs Thirdmonth to Tenthmonth and the rest of the year is repair and drink.

What they bring up is the nation. Copper wire out of walls. Cast iron. Rail. Brick, lifted by the pallet from streets with a dredge crane. Plate glass, bottle glass, bathroom porcelain, which is worth more than any of it. Whole machine tools out of shop floors, which come up dead and go to the works at the capital and come back alive. The Register tells them where to look and a Bureau surveyor signs off the lot before it moves, and the Exchequer takes its percentage at the landing.

The towns down there are intact. That is the part outsiders never expect. There was no wave — a town that drowned over four years had time to be abandoned politely, and what the water took was a place with its doors shut. Streets are streets. Signs are legible where the silt has not covered them. A diver working a house goes in at a window and the furniture is in the rooms.

Divers do not talk about this in front of people who have not done it. They talk about it with each other, constantly, in a slang that is impenetrable from outside and which an Academy linguist has estimated at four hundred specialist terms, about half of them for things that can go wrong.

The trade has a culture and most of it is rules.

You do not take from a church. You do not take from a school. You do not take anything from a room with a bed in it on the first dive of a season. You do not say a name underwater; if a crew member’s name must be given on the line, you give his number. You come up on the hour, always, even when the work is ten minutes from finished, because the hour is when the tender is listening. You do not go into a stairwell alone. If you find a body you surface, and the dive is finished for the day, and the Bureau is told, and the Bureau sends a boat with a priest of whatever confession can be got, and nobody works that block for a year.

None of these are in the licensing code. All of them are universal from the Gulf to the Lake Country, in a trade of nine thousand people spread across nine hundred miles who mostly never meet.

The river and the Gulf and the eastern shallows are open to licensed salvage. The western sea is not.

The Bureau’s instrument on this is one sentence in the licensing code and it has never been amended: salvage west of the Long Cliff is reserved to the Bureau. The stated ground is depth, and the ground is good — the drowned shelf lies under four hundred to nine hundred feet of water, which is past hard-hat work by a factor of five. No independent crew could work it if the code were repealed tomorrow.

So the restriction costs nobody anything and is therefore never argued about.

The towns down there are the same towns: a shelf full of grain country, county seats, rail depots, grain elevators standing in the dark with their legs in nine hundred feet of water. The Register has them all, surveyed by sounding from the surface, condition-rated, never entered.

Ask a diver in a Cliff port what he thinks is down there and you will get the standard answer, which is that it is too deep and what difference does it make.

Ask him after midnight and you will get the other answer, which is not an answer but a question, and which every diver on that coast asks in roughly the same words: if it is too deep for us, how is it that the Bureau sounds it every year, and what exactly is it they are checking on.

PART THREE — THE APPALACHIAN ISLAND

The Wild Place

The island is green in a way that hurts to look at.

That is the first thing anyone says about it and it is not a figure of speech. The green saturates. Coming out of the Tennessee Water on a clear morning, with the fog off the ridges and the sun on the eastern slopes, people who have spent their lives in a brick-and-wheat country find that their eyes water, and they blame the light, and the light is not unusual.

It is about two hundred miles end to end and sixty at its widest, a long bent spine of old mountains running north-east, with the sea on both sides of it and a hundred and forty miles of water between its western shore and the mainland. It is not large. It holds more living matter than the entire Ozarkan interior.

The water rose around the Appalachians and then came off their flanks and went somewhere else. This is the island’s Allowance and it is the cleanest one there is: the drowning line on the old slopes is visible, cut in the rock at about nine hundred feet, a dead-level mark running the whole length of the range with nine hundred feet of bare stained stone below it and forest above. The water stood there for a long time. Then it withdrew, down to the present shore at the three-hundred-foot line, and stopped, and has not moved since.

So the island has a belt of six hundred vertical feet of raw ground — scoured rock, scree, silt terrace, the whole of it recolonized in a hundred and eighty years by whatever got there first. The lower belt is the youngest forest in the known world and it is impassable. Above the old drowning line the forest is old and open and walkable and quiet.

To get anywhere on the island you first have to get through the new ground, and the new ground is a wall.

The fog comes every morning from Fourthmonth to Eleventhmonth and it does not lift until nearly noon. It is orographic and ordinary and it behaves exactly as fog should, and knowing this helps nobody who is standing in it. It fills the hollows to a flat white ceiling and leaves the peaks out, so that from a ridge at seven in the morning the island reads as an archipelago inside an archipelago, black rock islands in a white sea, and the whole thing moves slowly in the drainage wind in a way that has defeated two centuries of people trying to describe it without using the word breathing.

Everything grows too well. This is the second thing people say, and the Academy has looked at it, twice, and the two reports agree on the measurements and disagree on everything else. Canopy height on the old ground runs forty percent above the best pre-Rise figures for the same species. Growth rings are wide and even. Soil depth above the drowning line is three to five times what a century and a half of accumulation should produce, and the Bureau’s soil section has not published on the island since Year 134.

The birds are the part that unsettles mainlanders most, and it is not the number of them. The island has species that have no entry in any recovered taxonomy — not many, perhaps thirty, all of them small, all of them unremarkable to look at, all of them unmistakably new. The Academy’s ornithological section has described and named them and the names are in the catalog and the catalog is not taught.

Thirty new species in a hundred and eighty years is a number that does not work. Everyone who knows enough to know that it does not work also knows which word they are not supposed to put next to it.

There are no large predators. There were none before and there are none now. People on the island nonetheless do not walk the lower belt at night, and when you ask them why they tell you about the footing.

The Ruins

Everything below nine hundred feet was scoured. Everything above it was left alone, and that is the difference between the island and the rest of the drowned world.

The mainland’s ruins are underwater and intact and silent. The island’s ruins are in the air, in the weather, in the roots, and they have been rotting in a wet temperate forest for nearly three hundred years, and what the forest has done to them is not silence. It is digestion.

The high towns were real towns. The old range had cities in it at two and three thousand feet and the water never came near them. Their people walked out during the Rise — down the far side, west, onto the barges, into the mainland — in an orderly migration that is well documented from the receiving end and not at all from the leaving end. They shut their doors. They took what a wagon carries. And then the forest had three centuries with the town to itself.

What is left is not picturesque. A brick courthouse holds up longest; the roof goes, then the floors, and the walls stand another century full of trees. Wooden houses are gone entirely except as a rectangle of foundation stone with a different plant community growing in it, which is how most of the island’s settlement is now mapped — by botany. Asphalt lasts a surprisingly long time under moss and then goes all at once. Steel is a brown stain. Glass survives perfectly and lies in the duff in sheets that cut through a boot sole.

The gas stations are a recognizable class of ruin and have their own island word. The canopies come down and the pumps stand, and the underground tanks are still down there, and about one in six is still holding something, and the islanders know which ones and do not go near them.

The roads are the thing that gets into people. There are several thousand miles of them and they are intact enough to walk on for long stretches, graded, banked, with the culverts still running, curving through forest toward towns that are a scatter of foundation stone and a changed canopy. A road is a sentence about intention. Walking one here for six hours, under an unbroken green ceiling, past a reflective sign bent back by a tree that grew through it, is a well-known way to stop being able to sleep.

And then there are the lines.

The transmission corridors run the ridges, the way they always did, and the towers are steel lattice and the steel is mostly still up. Most of the conductor is down. Some spans are not.

And on certain spans, on certain days, the line hums.

This is the island’s most reported phenomenon and it is also the smallest, and the smallness is why it will not go away. It has been checked. It was checked in Year 46 by a Bureau party with instruments, in Year 81 by an Academy expedition, and in Year 152 by a joint survey that spent nine weeks on it and produced a two-hundred-page report. The report is thorough and the report is honest. It establishes that there is no current in the conductor, that the sound is not wind — it has been recorded in still air — that it is not insects, not resonance in the tower, not the observers. It establishes the frequency, which is sixty hertz.

It does not establish a cause and it says so in the final paragraph, in one sentence, without apology, in the Academy’s house style for these matters.

The islanders have known about the hum for two hundred years and regard the whole business as an embarrassment. They will tell you it is a dead wire in the wind. They will tell you this standing in still air under a wire that is humming.

The People Who Are Not a Society

There are perhaps forty thousand people on the Appalachian Island. The figure is a guess, it is the Bureau’s guess, it is forty years old, and the Bureau has declined three requests to update it.

They come from three directions and the directions still show.

Some are the descendants of people who never walked out. Not many — the high towns emptied — but the back hollows did not empty entirely, and there are families up the eastern drainages who can give you eleven generations of names and have never been anywhere. They are the ones the others defer to without saying so.

Some are the descendants of exiles. Ozarka has been sending people east for a hundred and seventy years and about a third of them lived.

And some went on purpose, which is the hardest crossing to make and the one the mainland finds least comprehensible. It is a steady trickle: fifty or eighty people a year, who buy a boat or a place on one, and go.

They will not take a name.

This is not a philosophical position, or it did not start as one. It is simply that no name was ever needed, because there has never been an occasion on which forty thousand people on that island had to be addressed at once. In place of a collective noun the language has worked out a set of dodges, and the dodges are now the dialect: here, people here, this side, up the way. A man from the northern drainages and a woman from the southern tip, meeting at a trading beach, will each say here about the island and neither will hear an ambiguity.

Mainland visitors push on this and get nowhere. The standard response, delivered patiently, is that a name is a handle and a handle is for picking things up with.

There is no law and there are very few rules, but the rules there are, are hard.

The first is the Ask. Anyone may ask anyone for anything once, and the asked may refuse without reason, and that is the end of it — no second ask, no grudge, no account kept. It works because the refusal costs nothing and is therefore honest. Islanders use it for food, shelter, a boat, help with a roof, a person’s time, and in two recorded cases for a child.

The second is the fire. You do not pass a settled place after dark without stopping at the fire. You stop, you are fed, you say where you came from and where you are going, and you go on in the morning. Refusing to stop is the island’s nearest thing to a crime and the penalty is that afterward nobody will tell you anything.

The third is that you do not count people. Not households, not children, not the living and not the dead. This one is absolute, it is enforced by a silence that descends instantly and does not lift, and the islanders cannot or will not explain it beyond saying that it is how it is here.

The mainland reads this last rule as a reaction to the Office of Population Management, and it is an obvious reading and it is probably wrong, because the rule is older than the exiles who supposedly brought it. The eleven-generation families up the eastern drainages have it too, and have had it, by their own account, since before there was an Ozarka to react to.

They trade. There are four or five beaches on the western shore where a mainland boat can come in, and the trade is small and old and entirely outside the licensing code: salt, iron, rope, nails, cloth, ammunition, in exchange for timber, hides, dried fish, medicinal bark, and worked glass that the mainland cannot account for and does not ask about.

And they are hospitable, which astonishes every mainlander who expected hostility. You will be fed. You will be housed. You will be answered when you ask a question, carefully and at length and with evident goodwill, and you will get back to your boat four days later and realize on the water, with the fog coming up behind you, that you did not learn one single thing you did not already know.

Exile

Ozarka does not execute. The penal code has had no capital provision since Year 29 and the mainland is sincerely proud of this.

It has exile instead, and exile is east.

Three things earn it. Murder of the second degree and above, after conviction and one appeal. Deliberate harm to the works — a levee cut, a bridge fired, a gauge tampered with — which Ozarka treats more severely than most killings and which no citizen finds strange. And attempt against the western limit: taking a vessel past the Bureau’s ninety-mile line, or assisting someone to, or furnishing a vessel for it with knowledge of the purpose.

The third category produces about eleven exiles a year. The first two together produce about forty.

The procedure is the same for all of them and it is deliberately dull. A convicted person is held at the district seat, then moved by rail to the eastern coast, to a Ministry of the Interior station on the Tennessee Water that has no name on any map and is called, by everybody including the staff, the Landing. They are held there a further week. They are examined by a physician. They are permitted to write.

Then they are given the kit, and the kit is the thing that tells you what Ozarka actually thinks about the island.

A good coat. Boots. A knife, a hatchet, a file. Line, hooks, a flint. A blanket. Four days of food. A sealed tin of salt. And a printed card, the size of a license, which is the only official document in the mainland that describes the island as inhabited, and which says: People here will feed you. Stop at the first fire.

The Ministry has never explained the card. It has been issued since Year 31.

The crossing is by the Interior cutter, at night, to one of four stony beaches, and the exile is put ashore above the tide line and the cutter stands off and waits until the light. That is the whole of the ceremony. No speech is made. The crew do not speak to the exile during the crossing and this is not cruelty but a rule, and the rule is in the station orders, and the station orders do not say why.

About a third die in the first year. The new ground below the drowning line is a wall of thorn, deadfall and bad footing, the island is wet and cold eight months of the year, and a person who sits down on that beach and does not move will be dead in a fortnight. The ones who live are the ones who walk inland and find a fire.

The ones who find a fire are taken in without a question asked. Not generously — plainly, the way you take in weather. Islanders do not ask what an exile did. It is not etiquette; it is the same rule as not counting, and it has the same silence behind it. An exile may volunteer it, once, at a fire, and after that it is finished and never referred to again, and a man who killed his brother in a river town in Year 170 has been sixteen years up a northern drainage mending nets and nobody within forty miles could tell you his history.

What the mainland believes about this is that exile is a death sentence by another name, humanely laundered. Ozarkans say so in exactly those words, in a tone of mild shame, which is a tone they use about almost nothing else.

What the records show is that the Ministry of the Interior has run the Landing for a hundred and seventy years, at real expense, on an eighty-mile branch line built for no other purpose, in order to put forty to sixty people a year ashore on a wild coast with a good coat, a hatchet, four days of food and a card telling them where to find supper.

Both of those things are true and the mainland holds only the first one.

There is no provision for return. There has never been a request for one. The twelve known cases of an exile coming back across the Tennessee Water on their own were all in the first forty years, and all twelve went back east again within the season, and the Interior, which had every power to stop them, let them go.

The Uninhabited Island

The official position of the government of Ozarka is that nobody lives on the Appalachian Island.

This is a lie. It is a lie that everyone involved finds convenient, which is why it has lasted a hundred and seventy years and will last longer than anyone now alive.

The standing order against settlement, issued Year 14 and never repealed, closes the island to the citizens of Ozarka. It does not say the island is empty. The emptiness came in later, by accretion, the way these things do — a phrase in a schedule, a column heading, a line in a primary reader — until uninhabited was simply the word the state used and nobody could point to the document that had decided it.

Consider who it serves.

It serves the Assembly, because an inhabited island is a territory, and a territory wants a status, and a status wants a debate, and the debate would be about forty thousand people who have committed no offense and want nothing and would have to be either citizens or something else. No member has ever wanted to open that. Members have said so privately for six generations and the private record is unanimous.

It serves the Office of Population Management with great precision, because the Office counts the society, and a population the Office cannot count and has no instrument to count would be the first failure in the Register’s history. An empty island is not a failure. It is a coastline.

It serves the Ministry of the Interior most of all. Exile to an empty wilderness is a penalty administered by a state. Exile to a people is a deportation, and a deportation implies the people, and the people would have to be acknowledged, addressed, perhaps negotiated with. The Ministry has preferred the first description for a hundred and seventy years while handing every single exile a card that says the second one.

It serves the traders on the four beaches, who are running an unlicensed commerce with no one.

And it serves the islanders, who have what they have precisely because no treaty exists, no claim has been registered, no boundary has been drawn, and no government has ever had to take a position on what they are. A people who refuse a collective noun are extremely difficult to make a policy about. The two refusals fit together like a lid.

So the lie holds by mutual consent of every party it concerns, including the party it is told about.

It is not seamless. The card is the obvious seam. The Bureau’s forty-thousand figure is another, printed in a survey volume in Year 144 and never withdrawn. The Evening has read out the names of Bureau crews lost in the Tennessee Water and, twice, the names of the islanders who went out after them. In the Academy, the whole matter is handled with a convention so widely observed it has a name — the eastern voice — in which a paper describes island material in the passive and never names an agent. The bark is gathered in the second year. By whom is not a question the eastern voice asks.

Ozarkans, individually, all know. Ask any citizen over thirty whether anyone lives out there and you will get a particular face, and then a story — a cousin who crossed, a cargo nobody accounted for, a man at the Landing. Then they will tell you it is uninhabited, and they will not be lying, because in Ozarka that word has quietly stopped meaning empty and started meaning something closer to not ours to count.

That shift is the most Ozarkan thing in this entire document. A word was needed that would let fourteen million honest people hold two facts at once without either of them breaking, and the language supplied it, and nobody had to decide anything.

And this is the smaller of the two lies the nation lives on. The island is forty thousand people and a hundred and forty miles of water and a standing order nobody enforces.

The other one is west.

PART FOUR — THE GREAT ROCKY ISLES

The Lifting

The western sea covers the shelf, and out of the shelf, where the old maps put the Rocky Mountains, the mountains come up.

They are higher than they were. This is the fact that every account of the Isles has to pass through and most accounts hurry past it.

The old surveys are specific and they survive in quantity: the highest ground in that range stood a little over fourteen thousand feet above the sea of its day. The Bureau has measured the Isles by triangulation from the Long Cliff, repeatedly, with instruments built for the purpose and checked against each other, since Year 62. The highest peak in the chain stands at twenty-one thousand four hundred feet above the present sea, and the present sea is higher than the old one.

The range went up. Not the crust — the shelf beneath the water is undisturbed, as flat and unfaulted as the day it drowned, and a crustal event that raised a mountain range seven thousand feet does not leave the plain beside it lying level with its fences intact.

So the mountains rose and the ground they stand on did not.

This is the largest Allowance there is and the Academy’s literature on it is the shortest literature on anything. Four papers in a hundred and eighty-four years. The last, Year 118, is nineteen pages, establishes the measurements to a precision nobody has improved on, and closes with two sentences: that the measurements are correct, and that the section considers the matter described.

What the lifting made is an archipelago, and the shape of it matters.

The old range was a spine with long valleys in it. The water came up into the valleys to the present sea level and the peaks and high plateaus went up away from it, so what stands now is a chain — eleven major islands and a scatter of lesser ones, running north and south for something over five hundred miles, separated by sounds and straits that were parks and river valleys. The islands are not ordinary islands. They are the top four and five thousand feet of a great range, rising out of deep water with no coastal plain at all, so that from a ship the chain would present a wall of mountain going straight up from the swell.

No ship has reported this. The description comes from the Bureau’s optical work from the Cliff.

They are green to the snowline and the snowline is high. The optical sections can resolve, at a hundred and forty miles in good air, the general character of forest cover, the color of the water in the sounds — which is a pale mineral blue — the snowfields, the glaciers on the northern faces, and the shape of the valleys. They can resolve weather happening on the Isles that is not happening anywhere else: a cap cloud on one peak on a day that is clear from horizon to horizon everywhere else in the known world.

What the optical sections cannot resolve, at any magnification the Bureau has ever built, is anything made.

There are no reported structures. No roads cut into a slope, no cleared ground, no smoke, no light at night — and the Bureau has looked at night, from the Cliff, in winter, with the best instruments in the nation, every year since Year 71. The published result is the same every year and consists of one line.

The Isles are the most beautiful country on earth. Everyone in Ozarka says so and nobody in Ozarka has seen them with anything but an instrument at a hundred and forty miles, and the phrase is in the primary readers, and it is not propaganda, because every Ozarkan who has stood on the Long Cliff on a clear afternoon knows personally that it is true.

What Is Visible from the Caprock

The geometry is fine. This has to be said first, because people expect the impossibility to be in the geometry and it is not.

A peak of twenty-one thousand four hundred feet, seen by an observer standing four hundred feet up on the Long Cliff, clears the curve of the earth at a little over two hundred miles. The nearest of the Isles lies a hundred and forty miles west of the Cliff. There is nothing wrong with the sightline. A competent surveyor from the old world, handed the elevations and the distance, would tell you at once that of course you can see them, and would be right.

The impossibility is in the air.

A hundred and forty miles of sea-level atmosphere is not empty. It is full of salt, water and dust, and it scatters light, and what it does to a distant object is well understood and was well understood before the Rise. Contrast falls off with distance. Color goes first, then detail, then edge. At a hundred and forty miles, a mountain of any height should present as a pale blue absence — a slightly darker piece of sky, visible on the clearest day of a decade, gone by mid-morning, unmistakable to no one.

From the Long Cliff, on an ordinary clear afternoon, the Isles are green.

You can see the snow on them and the snow is white, not blue-white. You can see shadow in the valleys and the shadow has depth in it. You can see the color of the water in the sounds, which is a pale hard mineral blue, and you can see where a cloud is sitting on a ridge and where it is not. The chain stands up out of the haze above the sea — and there is haze, over the sea, in the ordinary amount, in front of them — with the particular crispness of a range about fifteen miles off.

The Bureau’s optical sections have documented this continuously since Year 71 and the documentation is excellent. They have measured the apparent contrast and published it. They have measured the atmosphere’s extinction coefficient over the same sightline, using the sea horizon and known vessels, and the air behaves exactly as air behaves. The two sets of figures are both correct and they cannot both be about the same hundred and forty miles.

And there is the matter of the plates.

Photography came to Ozarka in the Hundreds and the Bureau put a camera on the Cliff in Year 109. The plates are perfect. They show the sea, the haze, the horizon, the light — and where the Isles are, a pale blue ghost at the limit of detection, exactly what the extinction figures predict, exactly what a correctly functioning instrument looking at a mountain a hundred and forty miles away ought to record.

The photographer who made the first plate was standing beside the camera looking at green mountains.

This has been repeated for seventy-five years with every emulsion and instrument the mainland has built. The result does not vary. Every optical device in Ozarka reports the ghost. Every human eye reports the mountains. The Bureau has tested the obvious things with great thoroughness — that the observers are reporting expectation, that the effect is suggestion — and the tests defeat that reading: observers who have never been told what they will see describe the green, and describe it in the same words, and locate features on it that match the features other observers independently locate.

The Bureau’s published position is three sentences long, has not been revised since Year 128, and states that the visual and instrumental records are both reliable, that the discrepancy is noted, and that the western limit is under review.

The Academy classes the whole phenomenon as an Allowance and has let it alone.

And people on the Cliff go out on clear afternoons and look at it, which is the part the documents cannot hold. They take a chair out. They stand at the rail at the Spill. An entire coast of working people walk out of their houses in the evening to look at a thing that their nation’s finest instruments say is a faint blue smudge, and it is not a faint blue smudge, and they know it, and they go in and have their supper.

The Elite Species

The official account is short, it has not changed in a hundred and seventy-five years, and it deserves to be stated properly before it is picked at.

It holds that in the last decades before the Rise a body of people — scientists, engineers, physicians, archivists — understood what was coming, and worked, and were not believed. That they built what could be built: the seed vaults, the archives, the deep stores, the floating works that carried people through the middle decades. That when it became clear the effort would not save the old world entire, they took what they had preserved to the highest ground on the continent and held it there. That their descendants hold it still. That they are the keepers of the knowledge of the old world, that they are benevolent, that they watch over the mainland, and that the Isles are closed because the keeping is not finished.

The word used throughout, in every official text since Year 9, is species.

The account rests on one document. It is called the Accession, it is dated Year 9, it is held by the Ministry of the Interior, and it has been seen by the sitting Chairs of the four Standing Offices and by no one else. Its existence is public. Its contents are described in the founding instrument in a single clause, as an account of the western settlement, received.

Received from whom is not stated.

That clause is the whole evidentiary foundation of everything Ozarka says about the west, and eleven generations of the mainland have been raised on it without difficulty, and the reason it is not difficult is that the account is good. It explains the closure kindly. It makes the people out there benefactors rather than a threat. It gives the beauty of the Isles a reason — they are beautiful because they are preserved — and it gives Ozarka a dignified place in the arrangement: the inheritor, waiting, not yet ready, but expected.

It is a story that lets a frightened new nation sleep, and it was written in Year 9 by somebody who knew exactly what a frightened new nation needs.

The difficulties are small and they are all in the same place.

Twelve generations. The arithmetic is taught at ten, in the same curriculum that teaches the word at nine, and the Academy has never pretended otherwise: twelve generations of a population of any size cannot produce a species, cannot come close, and the biological sections of the Academy have said so in print without ever once naming what they are contradicting.

There is a standard defense and it is weak and everyone knows it is weak — that the word is honorific, a figure of speech from the founders’ Latin, meaning something like a sort of people. This reading is taught in the teacher’s companion. It would be entirely persuasive except that the founding instrument of Ozarka is a document of extraordinary verbal care, in which every other term is defined at its first appearance, and this one is not.

The second difficulty is the watching. The account says they watch over the mainland. It is the warmest clause in it and the one every Ozarkan remembers.

Nothing in a hundred and eighty-four years of Bureau observation has ever recorded a vessel, an aircraft, a light, a structure, a signal or a fire coming from or going to the Great Rocky Isles.

If they are watching, the watching leaves no trace, and if it leaves no trace it is not being done by anything the Bureau knows how to look for.

And the third difficulty is the one nobody will write down, and it is not evidential at all. It is that the Accession was received in Year 9, by a government of a few hundred thousand frightened people on a riverbank, and that the way the clause is phrased — received — means that somebody sent it.

What People Say Instead

The mainland has rumors about the west and most of them are a pleasure.

That the elite species are no longer human and the Isles are what happened to them. That the Isles are not a refuge but a works, and the mainland is what it is working on. That the Rise itself was made — that the water was somebody’s instrument, and the drowning of a continent was a clearance, and the survivors came down off the hills onto ground that had been prepared for them.

These are told in taverns and told well. They have the shape of stories and they do the work stories do, which is to put a face on a thing. A mainlander who has spent an evening on the theory that the water was somebody’s doing goes home and sleeps, because a world with an enemy in it is a furnished world.

They are also, every one of them, unfalsifiable, and Ozarkans are practical people, and after six generations the grand rumors have worn down to entertainment. Nobody has ever changed a vote over them.

Then there is the other one, and it is not told in taverns.

It goes like this. The Bureau sounds the western shelf every year. The sounding runs in Eighthmonth, because of the weather. Four times in a hundred and eighty-four years the Office of Population Management has cut the Standing Figure outside the annual cycle, without a derivation, on a single sealed page, and all four times it was Ninthmonth.

That is the entire rumor. There is nothing else in it. It does not say what the elite species are, or what they want, or what they did to the water. It says only that a number comes, and that the Office acts on it.

Notice what it does not require. It does not require malice. It does not require that anybody out there hate the mainland or intend it harm. It requires only that someone with better information than Ozarka has — about the sea, or the soil, or the weather eleven years out, or something nobody here has a word for — should occasionally determine that fourteen million is the wrong figure, and should say so, and that the people charged with the keeping of this society should do the responsible thing with that information.

The people who believe this are not angry. That is the thing about them. You would expect fury and you get something quieter and much worse: a kind of professional sympathy for the Office, which after all has the arithmetic in front of it and the children’s names in the book and no good options. They will tell you they would probably do the same. They will tell you that the alternative is the Rise again, with no uphill left. They will say it steadily, over a beer, and then they will go home and listen to the Evening and hear the sea stand at the mark and be comforted by it, because it is comforting, because it is true.

The rumor has no name and no literature and it does not appear in any published document of any Office. It is passed in one sentence, usually as a question, usually late.

Why is it always Ninthmonth.

There is an answer, and the Academy’s demographers gave it in Year 160, and it is a good answer: the Office cuts in Ninthmonth because Ninthmonth is when the harvest is far enough along to read and still early enough to act, and the Bureau sounds in Eighthmonth because Eighthmonth is the calm season, and two sensible institutions doing sensible things in the sensible order will of course fall into step. Coincidence is the ordinary condition of a well-run state.

The answer is almost certainly correct. Almost everyone who hears it accepts it. It settles the matter for a week or a month or a year, and then some night a man will be sitting up with a sick child, and the thought will come back in exactly the form it always comes in, and he will not be able to make it stop.

What the rumor actually costs Ozarka is not belief. Hardly anybody fully believes it. It costs them the four pages. Those four single sheets sit in the east bank archive, public, unexplained, perfectly legal, and every citizen who has ever heard the question knows they are there and knows that nothing prevents them from going and reading them, and almost nobody ever does.

It is a forty-minute walk from the Low Quarter. Forty people a year make it.

The Crossers

The western patrol is eleven cutters for four hundred miles of coast.

That is not a blockade. A competent fisherman out of any Cliff port who has decided to go west will go west, and the Interior knows it, and has known it for a hundred and eighty years, and has not built a twelfth cutter.

The patrol’s actual function is the line. The Bureau’s survey limit at ninety miles is also the legal limit, and the cutters work it, and a vessel found beyond it is boarded, towed in, and its people charged. The patrol stops about nine in ten and the nine are prosecuted and exiled east. The tenth goes on.

Since Year 20, by the Interior’s own count, two hundred and six vessels have passed the line and not been recovered. Not one has come back.

The air is closed too. Ozarka has had powered flight since Year 155 — a modest thing, forty-odd machines, mail and survey work along the river — and the standing order shutting the western air was issued in Year 156, before the fourth machine was built. Four pilots have gone west. The last was Year 171 and the Evening read her name.

It would be convenient if the crossers were all one kind of person and they are not.

Some are grief. A man loses a family and sails. The Cliff ports know the look and have a phrase for it and the phrase is kind.

Some are faith, in the loose Ozarkan sense — people for whom the Isles have become the thing on the other side, and the crossing a way of arriving rather than a way of leaving.

Some are simply curious in a way that the mainland has no room for, and these are the ones the Academy quietly mourns. The most famous is Ilsa Vren, Year 133, a Bureau optical observer of exceptional ability who spent eleven years at an eyepiece on the Cliff documenting the discrepancy between the plates and the eye, published the best work ever done on it, was commended, and in her fortieth year took a twenty-eight-foot boat out of Rand’s Notch on a clear morning with her instruments aboard and her papers in order on the table at home.

Her logbook, left behind, ends with a line that Ozarkans quote without attribution, usually not knowing it is hers: I have described it for eleven years and I would like to look at it.

And some are young and stupid and want to be the first, and they are perhaps a fifth, and they are the only ones the Evening does not name.

The Evening names the rest. This is a small thing and it is the most telling official act in the whole western business: a crosser’s name is read out in the Notices, with their district, among the Bureau crews lost on the Tennessee Water and the children found and the dredging closures, in the same voice, with no comment attached.

The Interior prosecutes them and the broadcast mourns them and both arms of the state would tell you, correctly, that they are following their standing orders.

The Cliff ports have a custom with no official standing and total observance. When a boat is known to have gone — not suspected, known, by the family or by the harbor — the port shows a light. One lamp, in a window facing west, from the night the boat went until the end of that moon. It is not a signal and nobody pretends it is. The Interior has never moved against it. In Rand’s Notch, which is a town of nine hundred people stacked up a canyon wall, a lit night can be forty windows.

From a hundred and forty miles out, if there were anyone at that distance with an eye for it, a Cliff port on a mourning night would be the single most visible made thing on the continent.

Nothing has ever answered.

PART FIVE — THE NEW REAL

The Allowances

The Academy’s register of Allowances holds four hundred and eleven entries.

They are numbered in order of admission, described in a fixed form, and never explained. The form has five fields: the observation, the measurement, the confirming repetitions, the excluded causes, and the date of admission. There is no sixth field. The register’s preface, written in Year 63 and never amended, states that a sixth field would be a different document and that the Academy does not produce that document.

The entries run from the enormous to the trivial and the register does not rank them.

Entry 1 is the drowned shelf. Entry 2 is the lifting. Entry 7 is the river running sea to sea at four knots. Entry 44 is the drowning line on the Appalachian Island. Entry 106 is the green at a hundred and forty miles. Entry 209 is the hum at sixty hertz on four spans of transmission line on a ridge in the eastern island. Entry 377 is a spring in a hill town in the north province that runs two degrees warmer in winter than any thermal source within ninety miles can account for, and has done since Year 81, and which the town uses for laundry.

To be admitted, a phenomenon must meet four tests. It must be measurable. It must be repeatable. Its ordinary causes must have been excluded by work the Academy accepts. And — this is the fourth and it is the strange one — it must not propagate.

That last test is the whole of Ozarkan science and it is worth saying slowly.

An Allowance does not spread. Whatever it does, it does there, and the rest of physics goes on correctly all around it. The river runs at four knots with no gradient and the water in it is ordinary water that freezes at the ordinary temperature and carries a barge at the ordinary draft. The line hums without current and a bird lands on it. The shelf is drowned and the sea above it has tides you can set a clock by. Nothing leaks.

This is why Ozarka works. A world with four hundred and eleven holes in it that leaked would not permit a nation. A world with four hundred and eleven holes that are sealed at the edges permits engineering, agriculture, navigation, medicine, insurance and a tolerably good life, provided you accept the local rule and do not ask where it came from.

The Academy has accepted. Its people are not fools or cowards and the argument they made in Year 63 is still the best one available: that description is not a lesser form of knowledge, merely an earlier one, and that a society which stops eating in order to ask why will stop eating and will not find out why.

So the register grows by two or three entries a year, forever, and the Academy remains the finest practical scientific body the continent has had since the Rise, and produces superb metallurgy, excellent medicine, flawless charts and no theory whatsoever.

There is one piece of theoretical work in its entire history and it was never published.

In Year 155 an archivist named Ohene, cataloguing the register for an index, noticed something about all four hundred entries then admitted and wrote nine pages about it. The nine pages are in the Academy’s internal file, uncirculated, marked only with the date of receipt. They make no claim and propose no mechanism. They present a count.

Of the Allowances then admitted, Ohene found, not one had harmed anybody.

The Rise harmed people, and the Rise is not in the register — it fails the fourth test, because it propagated, because it was weather and weather is lawful. But the four hundred, every one of them, are neutral or they are good. The shelf drowned and the people were a hundred years walking uphill away from it. The river turned and made a nation navigable end to end. The mountains went up and made a view. The island fed its exiles. The spring warms a laundry.

Four hundred of them. Every one landing the same way.

Ohene’s nine pages close with a sentence that is not an argument and has no business being as unsettling as it is, and it is the last thing the Academy of Ozarka has ever written on the subject of why:

A world that only ever errs in our favor is not a world that errs.

Land’s End

There is a town on the Long Cliff called Land’s End. It is not in a notch and it has no road down.

It stands on the lip at four hundred and ten feet with wheat behind it and open sea in front, and it has about two thousand people, and it is not on the map the Ministry of the Interior prints for schools, because that map shows the eleven harbors and the rail and Land’s End is neither.

It works the water by hoist. A timber gantry at the cliff edge, a steel cable, a counterweight, and a landing stage at the bottom on pilings driven into rock — boats down in the morning, catch up in the evening, and a man on the brake the whole time whose name every child in the town knows. The hoist was built in Year 98, rebuilt twice, and inspected by the Bureau every spring. Half the town fishes off it. The other half farms the wheat behind.

It is a plain place. Brick, tin, limewash, a school, a chapel of two confessions sharing a roof and a quarrel, one magistrate who is also the grain factor. Nobody is rich. Nobody has left in a generation except the usual handful who went to the capital and send letters at Firstmonth.

And it has the view.

From the cliff path at the north end of town, on a clear afternoon, the Great Rocky Isles stand up out of the western haze with the snow on them and the green below the snow and the shadow lying in the valleys where it should lie. They are a hundred and forty miles away. The Bureau’s plates say there is nothing there but a smudge. The people of Land’s End are not interested in the plates.

They do not discuss it. This is the thing an outsider notices by the second day and cannot get past. Two thousand people live in daily sight of the most beautiful country on earth and it does not come up — not in the chapel, not at the market, not in the long arguments about the grain price that fill the back room of the public house four nights a week. A visitor who raises it gets a civil answer of about six words and then the conversation moves, smoothly, without rudeness, the way water moves around a stone.

The children look. Children in Land’s End look west constantly and are not stopped and are not encouraged, and somewhere around eleven they stop on their own, and nobody in the town has ever been able to say what happens at eleven.

The mourning light is observed here as it is in the harbors. Land’s End has lost nine boats west in a hundred and eighty years, which is more per head than any port on the Cliff, and the oldest lit window in the town is a house at the north end whose family has kept the custom for a vessel that went in Year 104 — not for the moon, as the custom runs, but every night since, by four generations, who have never offered a reason and have never been asked for one.

So the whole shape of the world after is in this one small place, and it was always going to be.

The east: an island of forty thousand people who will not be named or counted, where the fog comes off the ridges every morning and the roads run under the trees toward towns that are a change in the canopy, and where a wire hums at sixty hertz in still air.

The middle: a good country, fourteen million people, bread at a fair price, trains on time, every child in a book, governed well by people who are not cruel and who have agreed, for excellent reasons, in writing, that there are four offices and one article and one direction that are not examined.

The west: green mountains at a hundred and forty miles that no instrument can see, and two hundred and six boats, and no answer ever.

And at a quarter past seven the Evening comes on, and the river stages are read, and the weather, and the rail, and the Notices, and the Account, and then the voice says that the sea stands at the mark.

It does stand at the mark. That part is simply true, measured at nine gauges, for a hundred and eighty-four years, and it is the only promise anyone here has ever been given.

Then the lamps go on in the kitchens and the town turns in, and the hoist stands over the cliff with its brake set, and out past the dark water the Isles are there in the night where nobody can see them, holding whatever it is they are holding, and not needing to be looked at.

They are not waiting. Nothing out there is waiting.

They are simply there, every clear afternoon, in colors that cannot cross that much air, for anyone in Land’s End who walks to the north end of the path and stands a moment before supper — which most of them do, most days, without ever once calling it that.

Book Two: The History of Ozarka, Eighth Edition

This is Standing copy no. 31 of the eighth edition, issued in the hundred-and-twenty-sixth year to Colonel Josef Adair, Directorate Security Forces, retired, and kept on the shelf of his room at Mammoth Station until his death. The pencil notes in its margins are his. They are given here as footnotes, marked J.A.

Prefatory Notice of the Section

This volume is the eighth authorized edition of the History of Ozarka, prepared by the Historical Section of the Bureau of Reclamation at New Carthage and approved, as every edition has been, by the sitting Chairs of the four Standing Offices.

It supersedes the seventh edition. A school that returns its copies of the seventh to the nearest Bureau depot will receive copies of the eighth without charge. The depots pulp the old edition and send the pulp to the card mills, so that the history a citizen read at fourteen goes, in due course, into the folded card the citizen keeps in an inside pocket for the rest of a life. The Section considers this fitting.

The edition is issued in two forms.

The first is the Common Text, which is printed for the last year of school in every district of the mainland and for every public reading room. It contains the first, second and fifth chapters and the gazetteer of the provinces, less the sections of the second chapter that bear the Standing mark. It is the history that every citizen of Ozarka is taught, and it is true.

The second is the Standing copy, which contains everything in the Common Text and also the third and fourth chapters and the marked sections of the second. Standing copies are numbered, and are issued under the sixth article to officers of the four Offices and of the Defense Directorate on the day they take the Standing oath, and are returned to the Section at the officer’s death. Their contents are not taught. They are not secret in the sense the old world gave that word, since every one of them is known to several thousand officers of the nation and has been for a century. They are withheld, which is a different thing, and the reader of a Standing copy will understand the difference by the end of the third chapter, if not before.[1]

The work is arranged in five chapters and an appendix. The first recounts the Rise, the Stopping, and the founding of the nation. The second describes the mainland and the waters and lands about it. The third, which is Standing, describes the west: the Great Rocky Isles and the Barrens. The fourth, which is Standing, sets out the boundaries of the known world. The fifth describes the philosophy by which a citizen of Ozarka lives, which is called, by every citizen and by no statute, the new real. The appendix is a gazetteer of the fourteen provinces.

At the close of each chapter the reader will find a short list of Points for Recitation. The Section reminds teachers that only one sentence in the whole curriculum of the nation is required to be learned word for word, that the sentence is not in this volume, and that the Points are offered as an aid to memory and to the provincial examinations and for no other purpose. A child who can say the Points in her own words has learned them. The Points at the close of the Standing chapters are recited at the Standing oath, in the presence of a Chair, and are the only part of this volume that an officer is asked to say aloud.

The Section thanks the Ministry of the Interior for access to the provincial archives; the Office of Population Management for its tables, which it has asked the Section to print only in part; the Academy for its register of Allowances and for the patience of its readers; and the engineers of the Defense Directorate, who answered every question the Section put to them and then asked that their answers be left out.

Approved for Instruction, in the hundred-and-twenty-sixth year. The Historical Section of the Bureau of Reclamation, the East Bank Archive, New Carthage.

Chapter I: The Rise and the Stopping

1. A Hundred and Eleven Years

The old world ended in water, and it took a hundred and eleven years to do it.

The young citizen should learn the number before anything else in this volume, because the number corrects the commonest error about the Rise, which is that it was a flood in the sense of the old stories, a wall of water arriving in a night. It was nothing of the kind. It came the way rent rises. A wet spring was followed by a wetter one. A decade passed in which the lowest fields were understood to be gone, and then a generation grew up that had never planted them. Three generations were born, married and buried inside it. Many of the people in its middle decades went to their graves expecting the water to turn back in the spring, and a few went to their graves certain it never would, and the Section has found no way to tell from the record which of them was happier.

The sea did the work in the first thirty years. The Gulf came up over the coastal plain, and the coastal towns installed pumps, then gates, then walls, then moved their courthouses inland and left the walls standing in the surf. The Section keeps several thousand of the notices those towns posted. Most are a single sheet. They name a street, give a date, and tell the residents to leave, and they are signed by officials whose own offices were under water within the decade.

After the first thirty years the rivers did the work. With the coast gone, the pressure ran backward up every drainage on the continent. Water that had gone south for ten thousand years stopped going south. It pooled, and spread, and took the flattest country it could find, and the flattest country was the middle of the continent, which is why the middle of the continent is now a sea.

The citizen will notice, if he has looked at an old map, that this account leaves something unexplained. The high dry country of the old west stood three and four thousand feet above the sea of its day, and it is under the western sea now, while the Ozark uplands, which stood half as high, are dry and farmed and have been inhabited without a break through the whole of the Rise. The Section records this, as the Academy records it, and turns to what it is able to describe. The fifth chapter of this volume explains why a citizen need not be troubled.

2. The Record of the Rise

The records of the Rise are thick at the beginning and thin at the end, and the thinness is itself a document.

The first thirty years are over-recorded. The Section has committee minutes, projections, evacuation schedules in nine colors, and a great deal of argument between the old world’s offices about whose figures were honest. The middle forty years are a scatter: parish ledgers, the manifests of river barges, a school register from a hill town in what is now the northern lakes, kept in a fine clerical hand for nineteen years and stopping in the middle of a page. The last forty years are nearly silent in the national record. The Section believes this is because, by then, few people on the land had the means to write things down or any reason to expect a reader.

What survives from the silent decades is mostly inventory: lists of what a party took uphill, lists of what it ate, and one list, reproduced in every primary reader in the nation, of eleven names with a mark beside nine of them. The Section has examined the original in the Academy’s case. It is written in pencil on the back of a seed packet. The marks are small and careful and all the same. The Section does not know what they mean, and has decided, in this edition as in the seven before it, to say so.

3. The Climb

When the lowlands could no longer be lived in, the people went up.

The movement into the highlands was the largest the continent had seen, and it was made, for the most part, without government. The old capitals had drowned or moved so often that their orders arrived after the events they addressed. Families loaded what they could and drove toward any ground above the waterline, and when the roads went under they walked. The diaries of the climb that reach the Section share one habit across hundreds of hands: the writers set down their elevation each evening in the margin, the way an earlier generation set down the date.

The Ozark uplands received more of these people than any other high ground. The hollows and ridges of that country filled within a generation. Towns of four hundred became towns of forty thousand. Churches became dormitories and schools became granaries. The highland families who had lived in those hills for generations took in strangers by the thousand, and fed them, and the Section honors them for it. A plaque in the gymnasium at Provision gives the names of the hill counties that did so, and every schoolchild in Ozarka reads it once.

Others went onto the water. Along the edges of the new seas, people lashed together barges, ferries, pleasure boats, shipping containers sealed with tar, and the flat roofs of drowned warehouses cut free and floated on drums. These assemblies grew into the floating cities, of which the largest, Bellwether, numbered sixty-two thousand at its height. They drifted with the currents, traded fish with the highland towns for grain, and governed themselves by councils whose minutes the Section has recovered in part. Their people lived on fish and rain and salvage. Many of the founding families of New Carthage came from them, and their descendants keep a habit, which the capital thinks quaint, of looking at the wind before they speak at a meeting.

Still others went underground, into old mines and limestone caverns and the vaults of drowned banks. Most of them came up when the water stopped. Some did not, and their fate is a matter for the Ministry of the Interior.

By the end of the climb the people of the continent had become few. The Office of Population Management has calculated the number exactly and has asked the Section to withhold it from instruction. The citizen need know only that it was small, and that every person alive in Ozarka today descends from it.

4. The Stopping

The water stopped in a single season, in the hundred-and-eleventh year of the Rise, and has not moved since.

This is the part of the history that does not fit the rest, and the Section will not pretend that it does. For more than a century the sea had climbed at a rate so steady that the surveyors of the floating city called Highwater could predict the next year’s mark to the width of a thumb. Then, in one spring, it stopped, and it has stayed at that level through every year of measurement since, by instruments that have been rebuilt three times and checked against each other with something close to devotion.

Highwater published it first. On the first day of Fourthmonth of that year its surveyors sent a single sheet to every city within a day’s sail, saying that the water had not risen in sixty days. Nobody believed them. The floating cities had painted a tide line on the sides of their cores every year for a generation, each line above the last, and for six years after Highwater’s sheet the keepers of those cities looked at the old line every morning and wrote No change in their registers and did not paint a new one. The highland towns watched the marks at their own docks and did the same.

Ozarka calls that season the Stopping, or Stabilization in the Academy’s papers, and dates its calendar from it. Every official document in the nation bears a year counted from the season the water decided it was finished. The year of the Stopping is Year One.

5. The Survey of Settlement

In the second year, a body was formed to find out what the water had left.

The Survey of Settlement was made of hydrographers and former county surveyors from the largest highland towns, and of pilots from the three largest floating cities: nine from Second Harbor, seven from Bellwether, three from Ninefold. It is the only time in the history of the nation that the highlands and the floating cities worked as equals, and it worked. The Survey’s parties went by boat and on foot, the pilots steering and the surveyors measuring, and for four years they walked the new coast and drew it. They had no instruments with them that had not failed at least once, and replaced each as it failed with one of their own making. They drove an iron stake at the waterline every half mile. The stakes that remain are protected monuments, and nine of every ten of them were driven by a pilot from the water.[2]

In the sixth year the Survey laid its sheets on the floor of a requisitioned gymnasium in the highland town of Provision, and its members walked among them and saw the shape of the country for the first time.

It was a different country.

The old continent had been divided by its rivers. The new one was divided by its waters. The high plains of the old west lay under the western sea, and the western edge of the dry land was a single cliff of hard rock, the old Caprock of the maps, standing two and three and six hundred feet above the water for four hundred miles, with no beach anywhere beneath it. The old Gulf coast was a scatter of low green islands running out into warm shallow water. The north was a country of bog and braided channel where the Great Lakes had come south, and beyond it open lakes running up to a white edge of ice. The east was a long shallow strait, and beyond the strait an island of old mountains, standing up out of the sea with a line drawn around them at nine hundred feet where the water had stood and then withdrawn. And in the middle was the highland country, dry, high, and inhabited, through which the Mississippi now ran the wrong way.

Far to the west, beyond the western sea, the Survey’s pilots saw from the cliff a chain of mountains that the old maps placed there, green to the snow and white above it. They are described in the next chapter.

6. The Founding of Ozarka

A country with a new shape needed a government, and it had been making one since before the Survey finished.

In the second year the highland towns had sent delegates to a council at Provision, to share out grain and settle quarrels over the new ground. In the fourth year that council began a register of every person within its reach, copied from the town rolls of the highlands and the hull registers of the floating cities, and the register has been kept without a gap from that day to this. It is the register of the Office of Population Management, and the citizen’s own entry in it descends, by an unbroken line of clerks, from the fourth year.

In the sixth year the council chose a site for a capital at the bend of the river, where the Mississippi gives up going north and turns west, and appointed a committee to name it. The committee chose from a list, and its minutes survive. Three of its members objected to the name New Carthage on the ground that the old Carthage had been destroyed and its fields sown with salt, which they considered an unfortunate figure for the capital of a people who had just come out of the sea. The chairman answered that the salting was the point, that a city which knows what the water did to it will build above the line and keep building, and that a nation ought to be named for something that was finished and is not. The objection was noted and overruled, four votes to three. Every schoolchild in Ozarka learns the exchange, and learns it as a story about courage, and the Section commends it as one.

In the seventh year, when the Survey’s sheets had lain on the gymnasium floor for a winter, the council called a joint assembly of the highland towns and the floating cities to receive them. It seated three hundred and fifteen delegates. The assembly examined the sheets for nine days. On the tenth day Silas Marrable, a pilot of Second Harbor, rose and moved that the old maps of the continent be set aside as void, since they described no place that now existed. Absalom Fenwick, former Governor of Bellwether, seconded the motion. It passed without dissent. The old maps were gathered from the courthouses and libraries of the highland towns and locked in a single room beside the gymnasium, which the Section administers to this day. The room has one door and one key, and the key is kept in New Carthage.

The assembly then chose a name for the nation. Philippa Sayle of Second Harbor proposed Ozarka, which honored the highlands that had sheltered the survivors, and the name was adopted by three hundred and eleven votes to four. The four were the delegates of the floating city Seaborne, who had wished the nation to be named for the sea. They later voted for the Charter, and their names are on it.

7. The Charter

The Charter of Ozarka, which the Academy calls the founding instrument, was drafted over the following two years at Provision and ratified in the ninth year.

It is a short document and a careful one. Every term in it is defined at its first appearance but one, and the citizen may read it whole in the Hall of the Instrument on the east bank of the capital, where it lies under glass. Its preamble is the sentence that every citizen learns in the first year of school: We have survived the old world, and we will not repeat it. The drafters argued over those eleven words for a month. Some wished to soften them. Others wished to list the old world’s failures by name. The wording that passed was the work of a schoolteacher from the hill country, and the Section considers it the finest sentence written since the Stopping.

The Charter establishes the Assembly of Ozarka as the government of the nation. Every district elects its council, every council sends to the seat of its province, and every province sends to the Assembly at New Carthage, and the Assembly sets the taxes, the tolls, the rail schedules, the school terms, the price supports and the penal code. Elections are frequent and the arguments are hard and the losers hand over the seals, and the citizen is right to be proud of all three.

The Charter also establishes, in its sixth article, four Standing Offices, which the Assembly does not touch.

The Bureau of Reclamation is charged with the drowned world and the margin where the nation meets the water: the soundings and the charts, the levees and the dredging, the lighthouses and the beacons, the licensing of salvage, and the Register of everything that lies under water within reach of a Bureau vessel. Its Historical Section, which prepared this volume, is charged with the records.

The Ministry of the Interior is charged with the provinces, their courts, their peace, the Landing, the eastern posts, and the Evening.

The Office of Population Management is charged with the register of the people: every birth, death, marriage, removal and license in the nation, and the setting each year of the Standing Figure, by which the mainland’s births are kept within what the mainland can feed.

The Academy is charged with knowledge: the schools, the sciences, the audit of the Figure, and the register of the Allowances.

The chairs of the Standing Offices are appointed by their own outgoing chairs and confirmed by the sitting chairs of the other three. Their budgets are taken from the revenue before the Assembly sees it, and appear in the Assembly’s ledger as a single line, Standing. Every primary reader explains why, and the Section repeats the reader’s explanation here because it has never been improved: a nation which nearly died needs some part of itself that cannot be voted into a bad decision by a frightened majority in a bad winter.

The sixth article contains one further clause. It records that the founding government had in its keeping, in the ninth year, an account of the western settlement, received, and that the account is to be kept by the Ministry of the Interior and read by the sitting Chairs. The account is called the Accession. Its contents are given to the schools in one sentence, which the second chapter sets out.

8. New Carthage

The government sat at Provision for its first twenty years, in the gymnasium where the Survey had laid out its sheets, while the capital went up at the bend of the river.

New Carthage stands on both banks of the Mississippi where the river turns west, and it is built of two materials. The first is white limestone from the bluffs within sixty miles, soft enough to cut by hand and hard enough to last, which goes gray-gold with age. Every public building in the capital is faced with it, by a rule of the municipal code that has outlived four revisions of the code.

The second is glass. In the first fifty years after the Stopping, the most plentiful industrial material on the mainland was the bottle and window glass of the drowned towns, which the Bureau’s dredges brought up by the ton from the silt within reach of a barge, and which the furnaces of the capital could not clear. Cullet of many origins goes green when it is melted, a thick, uneven, bottle-bottom green, and the capital built three generations of windows, arcades and roof lights out of it before anyone thought to object. The Bureau calls it reclamation glass. By the time the clear-glass works opened in the ninetieth year, the green had become the look of the capital and the look of government, and the new works were instructed to tint their glass to match.

The bridges came over a century. The first was built in the fourteenth year by the engineers of the floating city Pontoon, and takes foot traffic only. There are now nine, long and high, each borne on a repeated rib of white stone and steel, so that from a distance and in the right light they look like the backbone of some great creature lying across the river with the city growing out of it. The newest takes the western rail, and shakes.

The east bank is government. The Ministry, the Bureau, the Office and the Academy stand there, with the Exchequer and the broadcast house and the Hall of the Instrument, and a dense quarter of archives and chambers that empties at the curfew hour. The west bank is everything else: the yards, the grain floors, the furnaces, the markets, and the Low Quarter, which is larger than any other town in the nation. The prevailing wind is from the west, so the government has the clean air. It did not plan this and has heard about it ever since.

9. The Evening

In the thirty-seventh year, the Ministry of the Interior made the first Evening from the house on the east bank.

It went out on wire to the towns that had wire and on air to the rest, and it was short: the river at the capital, the price of grain, the names of the dead of a fever in Fourth Province, and a closing line about the sea. Over the next fifteen years the broadcast grew, and settled, and in the fifty-second year it took the shape it has had ever since, which the citizen hears every day of his life at a quarter past seven, and which the Section sets out here for completeness and for the children of the Greens, who claim not to know it.

The river stage at nine gauges, read as numbers. The forecast for the provinces. The rail: what ran, what did not, what will. The market prices: grain, fish, salt, iron, recovered copper. The Notices, which are the long middle: appointments, license grants, school terms, an Assembly result, a dredging closure, a child found, a Bureau crew lost on the Tennessee Water with their names and districts. The Account, which is a single matter of national business explained in plain words in about ninety seconds. And then the last thing, which is always the same.

The sea stands at the mark.

The citizen should understand what that line meant to the people who first heard it. Many of them had been born in the climb. They had set down their elevation in the margins of their diaries. They had seen the water at the doorstep and then the doorstep under the water. For a hundred and eleven years nobody had been able to tell them that the sea was where it had been the night before. When the Reader said it, it was true. It has been true every night since, measured at nine gauges and checked against each other by the Bureau, and it is the most audited figure in the nation, because the thing it measures is the thing that ate the world.

The Section has spoken with many who heard the early broadcasts. They remember where they were standing. Several remember that strangers in the street took each other’s hands.

Points for Recitation

1. The Rise lasted a hundred and eleven years. It was not a wave.
2. The sea took the coast, and the rivers, turning backward, took the middle of the continent.
3. The people went up into the highlands, out onto the water, and down under the ground.
4. The water stopped in a single season. That season is Year One.
5. The Survey of Settlement walked the new coast from the second year to the sixth.
6. The capital was named in the sixth year, four votes to three. The salting is the point.
7. The joint assembly at Provision voted the old maps void and named the nation Ozarka.
8. We have survived the old world, and we will not repeat it.
9. There are four Standing Offices: the Bureau of Reclamation, the Ministry of the Interior, the Office of Population Management, and the Academy.
10. A nation which nearly died needs some part of itself that cannot be voted into a bad decision by a frightened majority in a bad winter.
11. The sea stands at the mark.

Chapter II: The Mainland and the Waters About It

1. The Map on the Schoolroom Wall

Every schoolroom in Ozarka has the same map on its wall. The Ministry of the Interior prints it on heavy cloth, in five colors, and sends a new one every tenth year whether the old one has faded or not. The citizen has looked at it since the age of six and may suppose there is nothing left to learn from it. The Section asks the reader to look again.

In the middle, in buff, is the mainland. Its fourteen provinces are drawn in thin red lines, with their numbers large and their names small. The rail is drawn in black. The river is drawn in a heavy blue line from the Gulf to the bend at New Carthage and from the bend to the Long Cliff, and at the Cliff the line stops at a small black bar marked The Spill. The eleven harbors in the Cliff’s notches are marked with anchors. The Thousand Greens are drawn as a spatter of green flecks across the south, too many to name. The Lake Country is drawn in a pale brown hatching that fades northward into the blue of the open lakes, where the reserve islands are drawn in outline. A broad strip of the north-west, beyond Fourteenth Province, is hatched in gray and marked Reserve. In the east is the blue of the Tennessee Water with a dotted line of shoals along its eastern side, marked Barrier Shoals, Reserved, and two lighthouse stars, and beyond the shoals, in green, the Appalachian Island. In the west is the western sea, in blue that deepens toward the edge of the cloth, and a dashed line ninety miles off the Cliff with the words Limit of Survey. At the very edge of the cloth, in white outline, with no towns and no roads, stand the Great Rocky Isles.

Buff is the color of the nation. Blue is the color of water that may be worked. Green is the color of land that is not ours. Gray is the color of ground that is reserved. White is the color of what exists and is closed. A child who learns the five colors has learned the nation’s whole relation to the world, and most children have learned them before they can read the names.

2. The Mainland

The mainland runs about nine hundred miles from south to north and six hundred from west to east at its widest, and it is shaped, as every child is told on the first day, like a hand laid flat with the fingers spread south into the Gulf. Fourteen million people live in it. The Office knows the number to the person and publishes it every Fourthmonth with the Figure.

It has four edges, and they are nothing like each other.

The southern edge is the Thousand Greens, though the survey count is four hundred and sixty. The Gulf came up over the coastal plain, and the plain was so flat that the slightly higher ground was left standing as islands, long and low and lush, running out into warm shallow water for a hundred and fifty miles. They are the richest country in the nation. They grow three crops a year, take shrimp from the channels and mahogany from the old ground, and live by a ferry culture so thick that a family on the Greens may own a house and a skiff and no land at all. They pay more tax per head than any province and are policed least, and both sides prefer it that way.

The eastern edge is the Tennessee Water, a strait fifty to ninety miles wide between the mainland and the Appalachian Island. It is shallow, crowded with the tops of drowned ridges, and vicious in the spring when the melt comes down from the north. The Bureau keeps two lighthouses on it and the mainland keeps no port facing east. The towns of that coast stand with their backs to the water. This is not a regulation. It is how they were built.

The northern edge is the Lake Country, where the Great Lakes came south and never finished coming: a province of bog and braided channel and floating peat, with about eighty thousand people who log, trap, cut peat, and send members to the Assembly who are listened to politely. The border is not drawn on the map because there is nothing to draw it against. Ozarka ends where the ground stops taking a road, and beyond that are the open lakes and their islands.

The western edge is the Long Cliff, and it is the one everybody means when they say the coast. It is a true escarpment, the old Caprock, running north and south for the better part of four hundred miles: a lip of hard rock two to six hundred feet above the water, straight as a wall for forty miles at a stretch and then notched by a canyon where some old creek cut back into it. On top of the Cliff are wheat, grass, wind, and towns set back a prudent half mile from the edge. Below it is the western sea, which covers the whole drowned shelf of the old high plains and is the deepest water in the known world, because the country under it was the highest. There is no beach anywhere on the Long Cliff. The eleven harbors are in the notches, reached by switchback roads cut in the nineties, and each is a town built up a canyon wall, with the boats at the bottom, the market halfway, and the Bureau office and the telegraph at the top where the wind is. North of the Long Cliff the coast is broken country, which is the Reserve and is described in the third chapter. South of it the Cliff comes down to the Greens.

In the middle of all that is the work of Ozarka: nine hundred miles of farmland, river traffic, rail, brick towns, schools and depots, and fourteen million citizens, most of whom will never see any of the four edges in their lives, and who are not the poorer for it.

3. The River

The Mississippi runs from one sea to the other, and the Academy cannot say what moves it.

It enters the mainland at the Gulf, where the old delta used to pour out, and it runs the other way: north, wide and brown and slow, up the old valley past New Carthage, and then west at the bend, into a channel it cut for itself in the last forty years of the Rise, straight through the old counties of Arkansas and the southern half of Missouri. The channel is three miles across in places, with raw bluffs on both sides and cottonwood on the terraces that is now two hundred years old. It crosses the whole width of the mainland and goes over the Long Cliff at the Spill, four hundred feet, in a sheet a mile wide, into the western sea.

Both ends of the river stand at the same level. The Bureau measures them every year to the inch and publishes the figure, and has never once published it without a second sentence stating that the figure is correct. The current runs at four knots and has run at four knots for as long as anyone has counted. It does not slacken in drought. It does not race in flood. In flood it widens, takes the bottomland, and goes on at four knots with twice the water in it. The Academy’s hydraulics, which are otherwise trusted with cities, do not account for this, and the river is entered in the Academy’s register of Allowances as the seventh entry. The fifth chapter explains what an Allowance is.

What the river did to Ozarka is simpler than why it does it. It made the nation one country. A land of this size, with this little machinery, ought to be four countries. Ozarka has a single navigable road that enters at the warm south, passes the capital, and crosses the whole farm belt west to the Cliff, and every town of any consequence stands on it or on a tributary of it. The Greens send fruit and salt north. The middle river sends grain and brick and iron west. The Cliff ports send fish and oil and recovered metal back down. A barge leaves the Gulf and is at the Spill in three weeks with the current under it, and takes five weeks to come home, and half the commercial law of the nation is about who pays for the extra two.

The river also settled the nation’s sense of direction. Downriver, in Ozarka, means west, toward the Cliff and the sea. Children learn the word that way in their first geography and keep the meaning for life.

At the Spill, the Bureau keeps a viewing station on the north lip, and a gravel road that some four thousand visitors walk each year. On the south lip stands a chapel built in the eighty-eighth year, by subscription, by the families of the crews of four vessels. It has no clergy. The Bureau maintains the road to it.

4. The Provinces and the Order of the Offices

The mainland is divided into fourteen provinces, and the capital stands in a district of its own between them. The provinces were drawn in the thirty-fifth year by a commission that ignored the old county lines and drew its boundaries along ridgelines, so that every province would contain whole valleys and the waters that drain them, and so that no river would serve as a border between two peoples. The river itself runs through five provinces and divides none. Every province bears a number and a name. The numbers are used in correspondence with the offices of state, and record the order in which the commission finished its work. The names are used in songs. The appendix describes all fourteen.

The citizen meets the four Standing Offices in the course of any year, and meets the Office of Population Management first.

The Office registers a birth within nine days, a death within three, a change of district within thirty, a marriage at the hour it is made, and an apprenticeship, a license, an enlistment or a conviction at the point of record. It has done so since the fourth year without a gap, and its archive on the east bank keeps the unbroken line of the nation. Academy genealogists have tested it against parish books and gravestones, and its error is less than one entry in a thousand. In a country that watched three generations disappear without names, a book that loses nobody is a promise kept, and the Office’s motto, cut over the door of its building on the east bank, says so in four words. Every one is counted.

Once a year, on the ninth of Fourthmonth, the Office publishes the Standing Figure: the number of people the mainland will support in the coming year, worked from the arable acreage, the yield curves, the fishery tonnage, the river freight and the stored reserve, in eighty pages that anyone may check and the Academy audits. Birth licenses are issued against it, district by district. In a good year the licenses are a formality. In a hard year there is a wait. The Figure has been adjusted outside its annual cycle twice in the history of the nation, in the seventy-third year and the hundred-and-ninth, on the authority of the sixth article and with the Assembly notified, and both times the adjustment was borne out by the harvest that followed.[3]

The citizen keeps the Office in a pocket. From the age of fourteen, every Ozarkan keeps a folded card in an inside pocket, on which the Office and the district enter the licenses of a life: the trade license, the river license, the travel permit for any stay of more than thirty days across a provincial line, the birth license, the well permit. None is hard to get. All are recorded. A citizen would no sooner go without the card than without shoes.

The Bureau of Reclamation the citizen meets wherever the land meets the water: in the dredging crews, the levee inspectors, the lighthouse keepers, the soundings, and the nine thousand licensed salvage divers who bring up the drowned world’s copper and iron and glass and brick for the furnaces of the capital. Ozarka describes itself as a farming nation and it is one, and it is also a nation living on the body of the one that drowned, and the Bureau is the undertaker who knows where everything lies. Its Register of the drowned world runs to more than ten thousand volumes on the east bank. Salvage on the river, in the Gulf, and in the eastern shallows is open to licensed crews. Salvage west of the Long Cliff is reserved to the Bureau, on the ground of depth, since the shelf lies under four hundred to nine hundred feet of water.

The Ministry of the Interior the citizen meets at the provincial courts, at the district offices where permits are issued, in the western patrol, and above all at a quarter past seven, when its broadcast house speaks to every kitchen in the nation.

The Academy the citizen meets at school.

5. The Northern Lakes

North of the Lake Country, beyond the last of the bog and the floating peat, lie the open northern lakes, and they run north until they meet the ice of the North, which feeds them.

Every island in the northern lakes is national property, and every island is closed to settlement. They are the tops of the old bluffs and ridges of the upper river country, and there are several hundred of them, from bare rocks a few yards across to wooded uplands a mile and more long. After the Stopping most of them were scoured and wild. The Reserve Service of the Bureau, founded in the forty-sixth year, has spent eighty years making them beautiful. Every island of any size has been planted in rows of oak and pine and walnut, with orchards in the sheltered ground, and its undergrowth cleared and its meadows mown by machines that move through the grass at night and return to their sheds before dawn. Their shores are lined with white stone. The Service’s human staff is small and works from the depot at Tally. Nobody lives on the islands. They exist to be planted and to be seen from the lake ferries, and the Bureau considers this a sufficient purpose.

The Utility Islands [Standing]

About one island in five is a utility island. From the water it looks like any other: the same rows, the same mown meadow, the same white stone at the shore. The difference is underneath.

The stations of the utility islands were dug into the limestone in the forties and fifties and have been enlarged in every decade since. Some draw power from the currents between the islands, by turbines set in the channels below the surface. Some store it. Three house the engines of the Office of Population Management, which keep a second copy of the national register, entry for entry, a day behind the books on the east bank, and work the arithmetic of the Figure. Their vents are planted over as stands of trees. Their shafts open under the white stone of the shore and are sealed with hatches lettered for the Service. Their lines run along the lakebed, among the foundations of the drowned towns, to the depots of Thirteenth Province and on south, two hundred miles beneath the Lake Country, to the deep node under the east bank of the capital. The schoolroom map draws utility and reserve islands in the same outline, and the citizen is not expected to tell one from the other.[4]

6. The Three Lands

At the age of nine, every child in Ozarka is taught the Three Lands, and the lesson is short.

The child learns the mainland in detail, as the sections above describe it. The child learns the Appalachian Island in a single paragraph, which the Section gives in the next section. And the child learns the Great Rocky Isles in a single sentence, which is printed identically in every primary reader approved since the ninety-seventh year, and which is the only sentence in the whole curriculum that a child must learn word for word.

West of the sea are the Great Rocky Isles, where the elite species keep the knowledge of the old world, and which are closed.

The sentence is drawn from the Accession, which the first chapter describes. The account it summarizes is a good one, and the citizen may be given it in full. It says that, in the last decades before the Rise, a body of people understood what was coming and were not believed: physicians, engineers, scientists and archivists. They built what could be built, the seed vaults and the archives and the deep stores, and when it became clear that their work would not save the old world whole, they took what they had preserved to the highest ground on the continent and kept it there. Their descendants keep it still. They wish the mainland well and watch over it, and the Isles are closed because the keeping is not finished.

Children are often heard to ask, at about the age of eleven, why the Isles are closed. The teacher gives the answer set out in the teacher’s companion, once and plainly, and moves to the next subject. Because they are keeping it for us, and it is not ready.

Teachers report that the children find the answer satisfying. Many report that the children seem to have known it already.

7. The Appalachian Island

The lesson for nine-year-olds reads as follows.

East of the Tennessee Water is the Appalachian Island, a long island of old mountains, fogbound and forested, about two hundred miles from end to end. It is under a standing order against settlement, issued in the fourteenth year, and it is uninhabited.

The citizen who lives on the eastern shore will have seen its ridges on a clear day, blue beyond the shoals, and may have heard stories about it from a grandparent, which the Section does not endorse. The citizen will know it chiefly as the place to which the courts send those convicted of the gravest crimes, since Ozarka has had no capital sentence since the twenty-ninth year, and has had exile instead. Exile is east. The convicted are taken by rail to a station of the Ministry on the eastern shore, called by everyone the Landing, and from there by the Ministry’s cutter across the Water, and put ashore. The Ministry gives each of them a coat, boots, a knife, a hatchet, line and hooks, a blanket, four days of food, a sealed tin of salt, and a printed card.

Appalachiatica [Standing]

The Standing officer may be told what the nine-year-old is not.

The island is inhabited. The Bureau’s estimate, made from the trading beaches of its western shore, is some tens of thousands of people, who live in the old forest above the drowning line and in the hollows of the eastern drainages, and who decline to be counted. Some descend from families of the high towns that never walked out. Some descend from the settlements of the floating cities that went east before the standing order, and some from the exiles. They take no name for themselves as a people. The Survey’s old papers and the Standing Offices call the island Appalachiatica, which is the name the Survey gave it in the eighth year, and the Section uses that name here.

The island was closed because of what the Survey found on it.

In the tenth year the Survey sent parties across the Water to map the eastern coast. They found survivors there, as they had found survivors everywhere. They also found conditions they could not explain, and their reports, kept by the Interior, describe the island in language the Section has been asked to summarize. Clocks taken onto the island disagreed with each other within a week; one surveyor came home with a watch showing a date eleven years before his own birth. The parties heard engines on mountain roads that led nowhere, and old-world music from houses empty for decades, and names from the old maps spoken aloud in the woods, and sometimes their own names in the voices of people who had died in the Rise. They saw towns, lit and whole, in the scoured ground below the drowning line, which were gone when they came back to the same ridge in the morning. The fourth party’s report describes figures in the dress of the period before the Rise, standing at the edge of the trees, who did not respond when addressed and were no longer present when approached.

And the surveyors themselves came home remembering. They spoke of the old world constantly and used its names. They described its cities as if they had walked in them the week before. Several insisted that the Rise had been a mistake of some kind and that the old world was still present under the new one and could be gone back to. Within two years of the third party’s return, the highland town that had sent most of its members reported that a quarter of its people had begun dating their letters by the old calendar.

The Interior calls this condition the remembering, and in its own correspondence the plague, though no physician has ever found a fever in it. It passes from person to person as surely as a fever does, by talk, by letters, by a single old name said in a kitchen and repeated by a child, and wherever it goes it turns the citizen’s attention backward, toward the drowned world, and away from the work of the new one. A people turned backward cannot build. They look over their shoulders at the water. The Charter’s first sentence says that the nation has survived the old world and will not repeat it. Appalachiatica is the place where the old world had not finished ending, and the remembering is how it reaches for the mainland.

In the fourteenth year the government at Provision issued the standing order against settlement, which was drafted by Absalom Fenwick of Bellwether and has never been amended. It closes the island to the citizens of Ozarka. It does not say the island is empty. The word uninhabited came into the schedules later, and nobody can point to the document that put it there.

The remembering does not leave the island with people who have been there long. It is strongest at night, in the scoured belt below the drowning line, where the drowned towns stood, and on the high balds of the interior. The people of the island keep to the old forest after dark, and keep three rules which the traders of the western beaches have reported to the Bureau for a century: that anyone may ask anyone for anything once, and be refused without reason; that nobody passes a settled place after dark without stopping at its fire, to be fed and to say where he came from and where he is going; and that nobody counts anybody. The Section notes that the remembering, as the Survey described it, came on hardest in those who dated things and named things, and makes no further observation.[5]

Exile to the island, which the Interior began in the thirty-first year and has continued since, does not endanger the mainland, since nobody comes back from the island, and in a hundred years only a dozen exiles have tried, all in the first forty years, and all of them went back east again within the season. The card that the Interior gives each exile is the only document of the nation that describes the island as inhabited. It reads, in full: People here will feed you. Stop at the first fire. The Section has been asked not to print who wrote it.

The Plague Watch [Standing]

The eastern shore of the mainland, in Twelfth Province, is watched by an arm of the Interior called the Plague Watch.

It keeps forty-one posts, about two miles apart, each a squat tower of white stone set into the back of the coastal ridge with a glass room at the top, from which the Watch keeps its telescopes on the strait. The posts show no light seaward. They are joined by a road that only the Watch may travel. The Watch’s duty is to see that nothing comes west across the Water that should not: no boat from the island, no swimmer, and nothing that drifts ashore. What drifts ashore is mostly timber and bottles, and once in a while an object that should not exist, such as a newspaper of the old world printed on fresh paper with a date nearly a century gone. Such things are sealed and sent to the Historical Section and are not opened in the province.

The Watch also listens. Its posts keep instruments on the wire and the air, and record what the Watch calls eastern interference: faint old-world music, and once in a while a voice, coming over the sets of the Twelfth Province towns under the Reader’s voice at the hour of the Evening. On most nights the level is low. The Interior reports it to the nation in a single line among the Notices. The name of Twelfth Province, and its song, were withdrawn in the forty-sixth year, and the province is known by its number alone.[6]

8. The Barrier [Standing]

The dotted line of shoals along the eastern side of the Tennessee Water, which the schoolroom map marks Barrier Shoals, Reserved, is a continent.

The Survey’s rule, which the Standing Offices keep, is that an island larger than a province is a continent, and Mammoth, as the Survey named it, is larger than any province of the mainland: a long low island of white limestone about a hundred and ten miles from north to south and from nine to twenty wide, lying close along the western side of the Appalachian Island, from which it is divided by a narrow channel, and from twenty-five to fifty miles off the mainland. From the eastern shore of the mainland on a clear day its hills are a long pale line across the shallows, and the ridges of the island stand up blue beyond them, and a citizen who has been told there are three lands in the world sees one of them there, and is not wrong to.

Mammoth’s surface is scrub oak and bare white ridge, cut by sinkholes and dry valleys. Its interior is hollow. Under its hills runs the largest system of caverns known to the Bureau: galleries, shafts, underground rivers, and chambers large enough to contain a town of the Settlement Standard, joined to one another for distances the Directorate’s surveyors have not finished measuring. The old world knew a small part of these caves and walked through them with lanterns for pleasure.

Mammoth is called the Barrier because it stands between the mainland and Appalachiatica and closes the way from one to the other. The channel on its eastern side, which the Survey called the Outer Channel, is the most dangerous water in the known world. Storms live in it. They come up it from the south without warning in every season and go down it without stopping, and on calm nights its currents pull three ways at once. Nothing crosses it on the surface. The Directorate’s machines that patrol it swim deep, below the storm.

The Shallows and the Eastern Works [Standing]

The water between the mainland and Mammoth, which the Bureau calls the Shallows, is shallow because the Bureau made it so.

Between the twenty-seventh year and the fifty-eighth, the Bureau’s eastern works built five long low dams across it, each running thirty and forty miles from the mainland shore to the western shore of Mammoth along the tops of drowned ridges, so that from the mainland and from a passing boat they look like the ridge-tops they were built on. The basins between them were raised to between one and four feet deep over nearly all their area, and the meltwater of the North, coming south through them toward the Gulf, runs over the sand in a steady sheet. A deep race at the eastern end of each dam, against Mammoth, takes the flow through the turbines, and the turbines send power to the Directorate’s works on Mammoth, to the posts of the Plague Watch, and to the eastern provinces. The Bureau’s records name the dams One to Five. The two lighthouses that the schoolroom map shows on the Tennessee Water stand at the eastern ends of Dam One and Dam Five.[7]

The eastern works were designed by Ilse Fenwick Adair of the Bureau, who was Scientific Governor of Mammoth. The Bureau records the dams as running with an availability above ninety-nine parts in a hundred for half a century, and attributes this to excellent design.

The Bulwark and the Plug [Standing]

Within Mammoth’s caverns the Directorate keeps its eastern command, which its officers call the Bulwark. One of the deep trunk lines of the old world, coming east beneath the mainland and the Shallows, ends there. The Bulwark is garrisoned by machines. Its galleries open onto both coasts of Mammoth through portals in the cliffs, and the machines that swim in the Outer Channel are sent out from it.

The old trunk once went on east, beneath the Outer Channel, into Appalachiatica. In the fourteenth year, in the same season as the standing order, the Bureau closed it with a plug of stone blocks and steel, and the plug is inspected every day from the Bulwark side.

No citizen lives on Mammoth, and no citizen visits.[8]

Points for Recitation

1. The five colors of the schoolroom map are buff for the nation, blue for water that may be worked, green for land that is not ours, gray for ground that is reserved, and white for what exists and is closed.
2. The mainland is shaped like a hand with its fingers spread south into the Gulf.
3. Its edges are the Thousand Greens, the Tennessee Water, the Lake Country, and the Long Cliff.
4. The river runs from sea to sea at four knots, and goes over the Long Cliff at the Spill.
5. No river divides a province of Ozarka.
6. Every one is counted.
7. Every island in the northern lakes is national property, and every island is closed.
8. The Appalachian Island is under a standing order against settlement, issued in the fourteenth year.

Standing Points, recited at the oath:

9. The island is inhabited, and the remembering is why it is closed.
10. Mammoth is the Barrier, and the Shallows are the Bureau’s work.
11. The plug is inspected every day from the Bulwark side.
12. No citizen lives on Mammoth, and no citizen visits.

Chapter III: The West [Standing]

1. A Note on Method

The Historical Section writes history from records. Where the records are full, the history is full. Where they are thin, the Section says so, and does not supply what is missing.

The two subjects of this chapter are the thinnest in the national archive. The first, the Great Rocky Isles, has been looked at every clear day of the nation’s existence and has never been visited by anyone who came back. The second, the Barrens, is national ground, worked daily by the Defense Directorate, and the greater part of what happens there is withheld by the four Chairs.

The officer should read this chapter with care. It is brief where it must be. Where the officer finds it incomplete, the officer should understand that the incompleteness has been decided, by persons who know more than the Section, and that the Section respects their reasons, and has been told some of them.

2. The Isles Observed

West of the Long Cliff, a hundred and forty miles across the western sea, the high mountains of the old continent stand up out of the water as a chain of islands. These are the Great Rocky Isles.

They are higher than they were. The old surveys, which the Section has in quantity, put the highest ground of that range a little above fourteen thousand feet. The Bureau has triangulated the Isles from the Cliff since the sixty-second year, with instruments built for the purpose and checked against one another, and the highest peak of the chain stands twenty-one thousand four hundred feet above the present sea. The drowned shelf beneath the western sea is undisturbed, flat and unfaulted, with its fence lines intact. The mountains rose and the ground they stand on did not. The Academy has entered this in its register as the second Allowance, and its literature on the subject is short.

There are eleven major islands and a scatter of lesser ones, running north and south for more than five hundred miles. They are the top four and five thousand feet of the old range, rising out of deep water with no coastal plain at all, separated by sounds that were once the parks and valleys of the mountains. They are green to the snow, and the snow is high, and there are glaciers on the northern faces.

The officer who has stood on the Cliff on a clear afternoon knows this already, and knows something else, which is that the Isles are seen too well. A hundred and forty miles of sea air should reduce a mountain of any height to a pale blue shape at the edge of sight, gone by midmorning. From the Cliff, on any clear afternoon, the Isles are green. The snow on them is white, and the shadow in their valleys has depth, and the water in their sounds is a pale hard blue. The Bureau’s optical section has measured the air over the same sightline and found that it behaves as air behaves. In the hundred-and-ninth year the Bureau put a camera on the Cliff. Its plates show the sea, the haze, and where the Isles are, a pale ghost at the limit of detection, which is what a correct instrument should record of a mountain at that distance. The photographer who made the first plate was standing beside the camera looking at green mountains. The Academy has entered the matter as its hundred-and-sixth Allowance.

The Bureau has watched the Isles at night, from the Cliff, every winter since the seventy-first year, with the best instruments in the nation. It has recorded no light on them, no fire, no smoke, no cleared ground, no road, and no structure of any kind. Its published result is one line, and the line has not changed.

The watch crews of the Directorate’s stations on the rim of the Barrens report one thing the Bureau does not. On rare nights, high over the Barrens and the western sea, the crews see craft: long, pale, silent, the shape of a leaf, passing at a height no machine of Ozarka can reach, on courses that begin and end over the Isles. No instrument at any station has recorded one. The crews have seen them for most of a century, and have learned not to write them in the station logs, and tell each other.

The Isles are near. On a clear day they are the most visible thing on the continent. The Isles are also far, for the reasons the next section gives.

3. The Western Limit

The western sea is clean, and fished, and has tides, and is charted by the Bureau to the finest standard of any water in Ozarka for ninety miles out from the Cliff. At ninety miles the charts stop, with a printed line, beyond this limit no survey is maintained, and open paper to the edge of the sheet. Every year since the sixty-first the Bureau has reported to the Assembly that the western limit is under review.

The officer may be told why.

In the sixty-first year the Bureau’s survey ship Sounder, working west at the edge of the then-limit, went on past it in calm weather to take a line of soundings over the place where the drowned shelf drops away into the deep basins of the old mountain valleys. Her log was found aboard her nine days later by the ship sent after her, which stood off. At a hundred and four miles from the Cliff the log records a low yellow haze on the water ahead, and then a sweet smell, and then, in a different hand, that the master was ill. It records nothing after that. Her crew of twenty-two were dead in their berths and at their stations.

The deep water of the world gives off a gas. It began in the last decades of the Rise, as the deep waters warmed, and it has not stopped. The gas is heavier than air and lies on the sea in a layer about two hundred feet thick, moving with the wind, faintly luminous at night, and it kills anything with lungs that breathes it. It rises only from deep water. The inland waters of Ozarka have no deep, and are clean. The western sea is clean as far as the shelf runs shallow, and poisoned beyond it, from about a hundred miles out. The poisoned band lies below the horizon of every height on the Cliff. Nobody on the mainland has ever seen it. The Section has been asked not to print its cause, of which the Bureau has nine accounts.

In the sixty-fourth year the Directorate flew, once, an old-world machine found in the deep bases, to the limit of its height above the western sea, and photographed what lay west. The photographs, which the Section has seen, show the gas as a dull band on the water perhaps twenty-five miles wide. Beyond the band, around the foot of the Isles, they show a ring of white about twelve miles across, which the Directorate’s analysts identified as ice, packed floes in a sea that should not freeze. Beyond the Isles, on the far side, they show the San Andreas, which the fourth chapter describes. Where the Isles themselves should be, the photographs show the same pale ghost as the plates from the Cliff. The machine came down safely at its field in the Barrens and has not flown again.

So the Isles are a hundred and forty miles away and cannot be reached. The western patrol of the Interior, eleven cutters for four hundred miles of coast, works the limit at ninety miles, which is also the legal limit, and boards and tows in any vessel found beyond it. The patrol stops nine in ten. The tenth goes on. Since the twentieth year, by the Interior’s count, a hundred and thirty-one vessels have passed the line and not been recovered, and the officer now knows where they went. None has come back.

The officer will be asked, sooner or later, by a family or a fisherman or a child, why the Bureau does not sound past the limit. The officer will say that the limit is under review. It is.

4. The Owners

The officer may now be told who lives on the Isles, so far as the Standing Offices know it.

The Common account in the second chapter is true in what it says. The elite species do keep the knowledge of the old world in the Isles: its books and machines and medicine and art, saved from the drowning. The Isles are closed. It is the account’s silences that the Standing officer must fill.

Before the Rise, a number of the old world’s scientists predicted the flood. They calculated its extent and its length and which lands would stand, and they published, and the old world, in its disorder, did nothing, except for a small number of persons who listened with great attention. These were the richest people of the old world. The Section’s papers call them the owners, because in the last decades before the Rise they owned a greater share of the old continent than anyone has owned anything before or since: its banks and factories, its newspapers and machines of calculation, its rail, its rockets, and a good deal of its farmland. The Interior has sealed every record that contains their names.

The owners heard the scientists, and they bought the western mountains.

Through the middle decades of the Rise, while the rivers broke and the people of the lowlands climbed, the owners hollowed the high peaks of the west, and took into them the scientists and engineers and physicians and machines their fortunes could buy. When the water came up around the mountains and made them islands, the owners were inside.

The officer must now be told the thing the officer will find most difficult. The owners who went into the mountains are alive, and they are the same persons. They had begun, before the Rise, to replace their bodies with machines: a heart with a pump, a limb with a jointed frame, an eye with a lens, the nerves with fine wire. In the mountains the work went on. Organ by organ, decade by decade, they exchanged what would fail for what would last. This is why the Accession calls them a species, and why the Charter, which defines every other term it uses, does not define that one. The owners were human once. They are a different kind of being now, partly flesh and partly mechanism, and the proportion has moved steadily away from flesh. Their lives have passed the length of any human life. The Section has no reason to suppose they will end.

5. The Residents from Elsewhere

The owners do not live in the Isles alone.

In the last years of the Rise, the diarists of the highland towns recorded lights coming down over the western mountains. The Section has several hundred such entries, in many hands, from the hundred-and-seventh year on, and they agree. Vessels larger than any city came down out of the sky in the evening and settled on the peaks of the west. The diarists called them motherships, and the Section keeps the word. Smaller craft passed between them and the mountains for many nights. Then the great vessels were gone from the sky, and the peaks were as before, and the diarists went back to setting down their elevation in the margins.

The Chairs have told the Section, and the Section repeats, that the beings who came in the motherships live in the Isles with the owners and have done so for the whole of the nation’s existence. They are the people of another world. The Section has no record of their form, their number, or their purpose, and no record of whether the owners invited them or received them. The leaf-shaped craft that the watch crews see over the Barrens are theirs. The Accession, so the Chairs say, was written by one of them.

The elite species of the sentence includes them both.[9]

6. The Internal Paradises

Every one of the Great Rocky Isles is an internal paradise.

The surface of the Isles shows no sign of habitation, as the Bureau’s night watches confirm every winter. The habitation is within. Beneath the peaks, the owners and the residents from elsewhere have made worlds of their own: halls cut from the living stone and lit from inside, under false skies, with forests and meadows that never see winter, and rivers, and lakes, and cities set among them in a light that is always the light of afternoon. The Section has no account from anyone who has seen these places. It has the Chairs’ word that the Accession describes them, and the Directorate’s photographs of the far side of the chain, which show openings at the waterline where the farm of the San Andreas comes to the foot of the cliffs. The citizens of Ozarka, who have never been told any of this, call the Isles the paradises anyway, quietly, at home, and the Section has never learned where they got the word.

The officer should not mistake the silence of the Isles for absence. The Chairs have reason to believe that the elite species observe the nation closely, and have done so since the Survey.

They are watching.[10]

7. The Accession

The Accession was found on the morning of the eleventh of Thirdmonth in the ninth year, on the lowest step of the river landing at the bend, where the fourth district of the capital now stands, by a ferryman who was the first awake. It was a packet wrapped in oiled cloth of a make nobody in the camp recognized, and tied with a cord of some long plant fiber, and it had not been there when the landing was locked the night before. The ferryman took it to the council’s clerk, who opened it, and read the first page, and took it to the chairman of the council, who read the rest and called a closed session of the drafters of the Charter, which was then in its last week of argument.

The clause that records it in the sixth article was written that week. The packet is kept by the Ministry of the Interior, and is read by the sitting Chairs of the four Standing Offices and by no one else. The Section’s officers have not read it. The Section has been told that it is long, that it is written in a clear hand in the old alphabet on a material that is not paper, and that it gives an account of the western settlement, and of the elite species, and of the reason the Isles are closed. The sentence in the readers summarizes it. The Chairs have told the Section that the summary is fair.

The officer will notice the word in the clause. Received. The Section notices it too.

8. The Western Information

In certain years, the Office of Population Management has received from the west information bearing on the Standing Figure, and has acted on it under the sixth article.

The Section is permitted to say only this much. The information comes by the Bureau’s annual sounding of the western shelf, which is made in Eighthmonth because Eighthmonth is the calm month. The two adjustments of the Figure made outside the annual cycle, in the seventy-third year and the hundred-and-ninth, were made on it, in Ninthmonth, and in both years the harvest that followed fell short by very nearly the amount the adjustment had allowed for. The Office did what a responsible office does with good information, and children who would have been born into a hungry year were born into a fed one a year or two later. The officer who has read this far will understand why the derivation of those two adjustments was not published.

The officer will be asked, sooner or later, usually late at night, why it is always Ninthmonth. The officer will say what the Academy’s demographers say, which is true: that Ninthmonth is when the harvest is far enough along to read and early enough to act on.

9. The Barrens

The Fertile West

North of the Long Cliff, west of the provinces of the Edge and the Anchorage, lies the country that the schoolroom map hatches in gray and marks Reserve, and that the Standing Offices and every soldier of the Directorate call the Barrens.

The officer should know what the Barrens were. Before the Rise they were the northern end of the finest farmland on the old continent. The soil lay black and deep, many feet deep in places, the gift of ten thousand years of grass. The old world fed itself from those fields and the rest of the old world besides. Most of that country now lies under the western sea, which covers the high plains south of it from the foot of the Cliff to the Isles. The Barrens are the part that stayed dry. The Section has photographs of the old western harvests, which are shown to the Directorate’s cadets in their first month. The fields in them are gold to the edge of the print, and the cadets are often quiet for some time afterward.

The Great Rupture

In the seventy-fourth year of the Rise the ground of that country broke.

The archives describe a single shock and then a season of lesser ones along a line running north and south through the middle of the farmland. The earth split along the whole of the line. Towns on either side were thrown down. Rivers turned into the opening. Where the land had been level there were cliffs, and where the plowland had run unbroken there was a chasm, in places a mile wide, with the black soil of the fields hanging over its edges in sheets and the bare rock showing beneath. The Section records that the drowned shelf to the south shows no such faulting, and that the Academy has not been asked to reconcile the two.

The Rupture laid open what lay under the farms. In its walls the old world’s surveyors found seams of metal and mineral richer than any they knew, and beneath them, deeper, rock shot through with the ores the old world’s machines required and could no longer find elsewhere.

The Workings

The owners mined the west.

In the years after the Rupture, while the people of the lowlands climbed and the floating cities lashed themselves together on the new seas, the owners’ companies came to the broken farmland with their machines. They cut the remaining soil away to reach the ore. They opened pits so wide the far wall could not be seen from the near. They pumped dry the old underground waters for their washing plants until the last wells of the west gave up. They sent the ore west by rail and barge, toward the mountains, and the Directorate believes, and the Section repeats, that it went into the halls being cut beneath the peaks. The floating settlement called Last Chance, which moored against the edge of the broken country in those years, saw the ore trains going west and has left the only civilian account.

When the ore was gone the companies left, and the owners went into their mountains, and the water rose behind them. What they left is what the officer sees: a broad tableland of bare stone, red and yellow and gray, split down its length by the chasm of the Rupture and pitted on both sides by the open workings, and broken at its western rim into cliffs over the northern reach of the western sea. The finest farmland of the old continent became the Barrens in two generations so that the owners could build their paradises. The Section states this as history and draws no conclusion from it.

The Reserve

The citizens of Ozarka know the Barrens as the Reserve, which is the Bureau’s spoil country: closed for bad ground, collapsing pits, and the old workings’ poisons, and shown on the schoolroom map in gray. That account is true. The Reserve is closed, and its ground is bad. It is also the seat of the Defense Directorate.

The Defense Directorate

The Directorate was created in the twenty-sixth year by the Ministry of the Interior, under the sixth article, and is paid from the Standing line. It is charged with the defense of the nation against everything outside the mainland. Its headquarters are not disclosed. Its officers wear brown, and are seldom seen on the mainland except in Fourteenth Province, which it administers jointly with the Interior, and on Mammoth, and at the posts of the Plague Watch, whose officers are its officers.

The Directorate keeps a line of garrison towns along the eastern edge of the Barrens, where the broken ground begins. The towns are small and orderly. Their residents are the Directorate’s people and their families, and their children attend the Directorate’s schools, which use this volume. West of the towns, at intervals along the rim of the canyons, stand the watch stations: single towers of dark stone sunk into the rim rock, glazed on the western side only, crewed by three for a season at a time. Service in them is the highest honor the Directorate grants. The crews keep the instruments, and record the passing of the Directorate’s machines, and look west. The Directorate rotates them so that no officer serves more than three seasons in a lifetime. The Section records, without comment, that officers who have served three seasons often ask for a fourth.

The Deep Bases

Under the Barrens lie the deep bases of the old world.

Long before the Rise, the governments of the old continent dug far into the hardest rock they could find, and joined their bases with tunnels wide enough for rail, running at great depth from one side of the country to the other. The old world called these works the D.U.M.B.S., for deep underground military bases, which the Section is permitted to print here and nowhere else in this volume. The Rise drowned the old world’s cities, and the Rupture broke its farmland, and the workings stripped its soil, and the deep bases came through all three whole. They lay too far down for the water, the Rupture passed between them, and the owners’ pits never came near. When the Survey reached the nearer edge of the Barrens it found doors of gray metal set into the walls of the chasm, and behind them stairs and lifts going down into dry corridors that still had light.

The Directorate has occupied the deep bases since its founding, and has restored their tunnels and extended them. The officer may be told that the network runs beneath the whole of the Barrens and well beyond: east under the mainland and the Shallows to the Bulwark on Mammoth, north beneath the Lake Country to the utility islands and the deep node under the capital, and south-west under the Long Cliff and out beneath the drowned shelf toward the Isles, where it ends in water. The Directorate keeps a survey sheet of the network for its officers. The Section has seen it.

Citizens of Fourteenth Province report that on still evenings they can feel the Directorate at work below them, a faint steady hum coming up through the floors. The Directorate has told them it is normal and will continue.

The Machines That Grow

In the deep bases the Directorate makes the military of Ozarka, and the military of Ozarka makes itself.

That military is unmanned. The Chairs decided in the Directorate’s first years that the defense of the nation would be given to machines. A machine needs no register, no ration and no house. A machine does not tire. A machine cannot catch the remembering, cannot be turned backward by a name or a fragment of old music, and so can be posted at the edges of the known world without risk. The citizens of Ozarka are too few and too dear to be spent on defense.

For sixty years the Directorate’s engineers built the machines by hand, and then by machines of their own design. In the eighty-eighth year the Directorate began a project, under an officer the Section is permitted to name, Colonel Josef Adair, to build a foundry that would build foundries: a machine that could mine the ore in the walls of the old pits, refine it, and make from it both copies of itself and whatever other machines the Directorate required. The project was called Orchard. It succeeded. The military of Ozarka now grows the way an orchard grows, from its own seed, in rows, and the engineers who oversee it are fewer each decade.[11]

It grows outward. From the foundries under the Barrens the machines climb to the surface through the portals in the canyon walls and spread into the outskirts: the floors of the old pits, the broken ground along the Rupture, the long eastern edge of the tableland. The open pits where the owners once dug out the farmland now contain machine fields, broad floors where new machines are assembled by older ones under the open sky and stand, when they are finished, and wait. From the ridge west of Threshold the citizens of Fourteenth Province can see the ranks in the pits on a clear evening, gray and brown, longer each year than the year before. They call them the Bureau’s iron. The Directorate has not corrected them.

Some of the machines walk. Some fly. Some move on treads along the canyon floors, and some swim, in the Outer Channel. They make little noise. Their number has grown in every decade, and faster in the recent decades than in the earlier ones, and the Directorate considers the growth necessary.[12]

The Necessity of Defense

The officer may ask what the machines defend against. The Chairs have answered, and the Section repeats the answer.

To the east lies the remembering. Appalachiatica has been closed for a century behind the Barrier and the Watch, and the closure has never failed. The Chairs do not assume it never will. The remembering is patient. Its interference rises and falls. A nation that means to endure must be ready for the night it rises and does not fall, and on that night the machines, which cannot catch it, will be the nation’s wall.

To the west lies uncertainty. The owners have watched Ozarka for a century and have never spoken, and the residents from elsewhere have watched with them. The Section believes them to be wise and strong. Wisdom and strength are not promises. A nation that respects a stronger neighbor also prepares for the day when respect is not enough, and does so quietly, in the outskirts of the Barrens and under the ground, without provocation. The machines stand in their fields facing west. They will be standing there on the day the Isles choose to speak, whatever the Isles choose to say.

Between the two lies the mainland, where the citizen lives and works and raises children and hears the Evening, and need feel no fear at all, because the Barrens have been made ready.

Standing Points

1. The Isles are seen too well, and recorded as a ghost. Both records are correct.
2. Past ninety miles the western sea is poisoned, and no one who crosses the limit comes back.
3. The owners of the old world went into the western mountains before the flood, and they are living still.
4. The residents from elsewhere came down in the motherships, and share the Isles with the owners.
5. Every one of the Great Rocky Isles is an internal paradise.
6. The Accession was received.
7. The Barrens were the finest farmland on the old continent, broken by the Rupture and stripped by the owners.
8. The deep bases of the old world came through the Rise whole, and belong to the Directorate.
9. The unmanned military of Ozarka grows in the outskirts of the Barrens.
10. To the east, the remembering. To the west, uncertainty. Between them, the mainland, which has nothing to fear.

Chapter IV: The Boundaries of the Known World [Standing]

1. The Edges of the Cloth

The schoolroom map stops at its hem, and the child who looks at it may suppose the world stops there too. In one sense it does. The four edges of the cloth mark the four boundaries of the known world, and no citizen of Ozarka has gone past any of them and come back, and from beyond them no word has come that the Offices could answer.

The four Chairs fixed these boundaries by a Standing order in the thirty-sixth year, on the advice of the Bureau, which had spent a generation sending its instruments outward until they could go no further. The order names them in this sequence. To the north lies the North. To the east lies the island. To the west, past the Isles, lies the San Andreas. To the south, past the Greens, lies the Floridexa. Inside those four lie the mainland, its lakes and its Greens, the Tennessee Water and the Barrier, the island, the Reserve, the western sea, and the Isles. Outside them lies the rest of the planet, which the order, in its final clause, directs the four Offices to treat as another planet.

This chapter describes each boundary, then the poison of the outer seas that makes most of them boundaries, then what the Offices know of the world outside.

2. The North

North of the Lake Country, past the last of the bog and the floating peat, the open northern lakes run on beyond the reserve islands for a distance the Bureau does not publish, until they meet the North.

It is the only boundary of the known world that is cold. The Reserve Service describes it as a white country of ice and standing mist laid across the head of the lakes from one side of the sheet to the other. It has no coast. The lake water darkens and slows and grows a skin of ice, and the ice thickens northward into a plain, and the plain rises into a wall of mist that no instrument of the Service has seen into. Its height is unknown. Its depth is unknown. The Service’s launches turn back at the ice by standing order, and the Service reports that none has been lost there, since none has gone in.

The North feeds the nation’s northern water. Every summer the edge of the ice softens and the meltwater runs south, cold and clear and sweet, through the open lakes and the channels of the Lake Country and down the Tennessee Water to the Gulf, and every winter the ice comes back. The Bureau’s hydrologists have shown that this water is the reason the northern lakes are clean when the deep seas of the world are not. It keeps them full and fresh, and it pushes the brackish water back at their mouths, and it is the water that turns the Bureau’s turbines in the Shallows.

The Section is often asked who keeps the North. The answer the Section can give is that it appears to keep itself. The floating city Coldharbor, which wintered in the ice of the northern lakes for twenty years before the Stopping, sent its icebreaker north to the edge of the ice four times, and its captain’s logs record the edge in nearly the same place each time. The Reserve Service has recorded it in the same place every year since the forty-sixth. In a world in which so much moved, the North has not moved at all, and the Bureau’s annual report calls it, in a phrase the Section has never seen in a Bureau document about anything else, the nation’s oldest neighbor.[13]

3. The Island

The eastern boundary is the island, which the second chapter describes, and the Section adds here only what makes it a boundary.

The North cannot be passed. The two outer seas cannot be breathed. The island can be reached, by a cutter of the Interior on any calm night, and is reached forty to sixty times a year by exiles and about as often again by people who go on purpose. It is a boundary because the Offices have declared it one, and because what was on it, until a time the Section cannot yet name, came back with those who went.

The Bureau keeps no instrument on the island’s far side, which faces the open ocean, and the Section knows nothing of that coast except that the gas lies along it, as it lies along every coast of deep water.

4. The Poisoned Seas

Before the officer can understand the other two boundaries, the officer must understand the seas.

Most of the seas and oceans of the world give off a gas that kills. The third chapter has described it as the western patrol meets it: heavier than air, lying on deep water in a layer about two hundred feet thick, moving with the wind, faintly luminous at night, and fatal to anything that breathes it. The floating cities met it first, in the last decades of the Rise, at the mouths of the new seas, where the shallow water gave way to deep. Their logs record a sourness in the air and then a sweetness, and fish rising dead in rafts a mile long, and gulls that settled on the water and did not get up again, and crews who breathed a yellow fog in the night and were found in the morning at their oars.

The gas rises only from deep water, and this is the whole of the nation’s good fortune. The northern lakes are fed by the North and have no deep. The Tennessee Water is shallow, and the Shallows are shallower. The Greens stand in warm water that runs out a hundred and fifty miles over the drowned coastal plain at a depth of a few fathoms. The western sea is clean over the shelf, where the old high plains lie four to nine hundred feet down, and poisoned from about a hundred miles out, where the shelf falls away into the drowned valleys of the old mountains. Past the Greens, where the old continent’s shelf ends, the Gulf goes deep, and the gas begins.

On the schoolroom map the clean waters are blue, and the poisoned waters are not drawn at all, since they lie beyond the hem. On the Standing chart that the Bureau keeps for its masters they are drawn in a gray-green hatching, and the masters learn the hatching before they learn the soundings.

5. The Floridexa

South of the Greens, beyond the last of the warm shallows, lies the deep Gulf, which the Standing chart names the Floridexa.

It is the nearest of the poisoned seas to the inhabited mainland, and the people of Seventh Province live in sight of it. From the top of the Gulf Wall at Assurance the citizen sees, on a calm day, a low gray layer lying on the water far to the south, past the outermost of the Greens. When the wind goes round into the south and stays there, the gas comes north over the shallows, thinning as it comes, and at the Wall it is thin enough to be turned by stone and breathed through a mask. The sirens at Assurance are cranked when the wind goes south. Every household in Brine keeps a mask by the door.

The Floridexa has something else in it, which the people of Brine have watched for a hundred and fifty years and the Standing chart marks with a single cross.

On every night of the year the southern horizon, seen from the Wall, is lit. The light is pale and greenish and very low, and it rises and falls slowly, once in about a minute, crest to crest, and it is brightest after midnight. In the clearest winter air the people of the Wall describe it as a dawn that does not arrive. The Bureau’s station on the Wall has kept instruments on it since the fifties. The instruments report that the light is there, and that it is very far off, and that something beneath it draws a great deal of power out of the deep water and sends it away to the west through the air, by means the instruments can detect and cannot describe.

The Directorate’s analysts, from the photographs of the sixty-fourth year, have identified the source as one of the vessels the diarists of the Rise saw coming down over the west, the largest of them, settled in the warm deep water off the drowned southern coast and grown down into the sea floor. The Chairs have told the Section that it powers the internal paradises of the Isles. The people of Brine call it she, and nobody in Brine has ever told the Section why.[14]

6. The San Andreas

West of the Isles, on their far side, beyond the last peak of the chain, lies the western boundary, which the Standing chart names the San Andreas.

No citizen has seen it. The Isles stand between it and the Long Cliff. The Offices know of it from the photographs the Directorate took in the sixty-fourth year, from the old-world machine at the top of its one flight, and those photographs, which the Section has examined, show the San Andreas poisoned like the other deep seas, and green.

The green is a farm. Over the surface of the poisoned ocean, from the coast of the Isles to the edge of the plate, something grows in long parallel bands, as regular as the terraces of Third Province and immeasurably larger, in shades of green and gold, with dark channels running between the bands. At the edges of the bands the Directorate’s analysts found small bright shapes in lines, which they identified as harvesters. At the foot of the Isles the bands run into openings in the cliffs at the waterline. A second photograph of the same water, taken eleven minutes later on the same flight, shows the bands moved.

The analysts’ report concludes that the San Andreas feeds the Isles as the Floridexa powers them. It states that the analysts could not determine whether the farm is a work of machines or a living thing. Under the last line of the report somebody has added, in a different hand, that the bands moved the way a field moves when the ground under it breathes.

7. The Other Planet

Beyond the four boundaries lies the rest of the world, and the Standing order of the thirty-sixth year directs the Offices to treat it as another planet.

The order is meant exactly. Nothing beyond the boundaries is accessible to the nation. Nothing beyond them has addressed the nation or answered it. The Interior’s broadcast house has listened on every frequency it can build for a hundred years and received nothing meant for Ozarka. The schools teach nothing of the lands outside, and the Academy’s astronomy section, which teaches the moon and the wandering stars, keeps a sealed annex for them, which only Standing officers read.

The Offices’ knowledge of the Other Planet comes from three sources. The first is the last broadcasts received from beyond the boundaries in the final decades of the Rise, before the silence, which the Interior recovered from the logs of the floating cities. The second is a set of photographs taken by the old world’s orbiting machines, which went on sending pictures to the deep bases for some years after anyone was there to receive them, and which the Directorate found on the plates of a receiving room in the Barrens. The third is what the old-world machine saw from the top of its flight in the sixty-fourth year, when it looked south and west over the curve of the world. From these the Section may set down the following.

Africa is a swamp. The great southern continent of the old world lies under shallow water and green rot from coast to coast. The last photographs show it dark and mottled, with no edges, giving off steam. Nothing in the record shows that anyone lives there, and nothing shows that no one does.

The Indian Ocean is a city. Where the old world’s maps show a southern ocean, the last photographs show a single built surface running from shore to shore, lit through every hour of the night. Its lights are the brightest that any instrument of Ozarka has recorded beyond the boundaries. From its middle, at intervals, craft go up into the sky on long columns of fire and do not come down, and others come down and do not go up. The Standing papers call it the interplanetary city, a port between this world and others. The Section records that the vessels which came down over the west in the last years of the Rise may have come from it, or passed through it, or had nothing to do with it.

Siberia is the most populous land on earth. The cold north of the old eastern continent, once the emptiest country on the planet, appears in the last photographs as one field of habitation, its cities joined edge to edge for thousands of miles and its rivers lined with lights. The peoples of the eastern half of the old world who lived through the Rise are believed to have gone there, since nowhere else on that side of the world would have room for them.

Europe and China are gone. The Section has no other way to put it. The photographs show water where they were, and the gas on the water, and nothing else.

That is the whole of what the Offices know of the Other Planet. Its peoples, if it has peoples, do not know that Ozarka exists, or know and do not care, or know and cannot reach it across the poisoned seas, as Ozarka cannot reach them. The Section considers this a fortunate arrangement. The old world was ruined in part because every nation in it could reach every other.[15]

8. The Shape of the Known World

The officer may now see the whole.

In the middle, on high ground, lies the mainland, buff on the cloth, where the nation lives. To the north lie the clean lakes and their planted islands, and above them the North, which sends the water. To the east lie the Tennessee Water and the Shallows, the Barrier with the Bulwark in its caverns, the storm channel, and the island, green, closed, remembering. To the north-west lies the Reserve, where the Directorate’s machines grow in the outskirts. To the west lies the western sea over the drowned plains, clean for ninety miles and poisoned past a hundred, and the ring of ice, and the Isles, white on the cloth, the paradises of the owners and of the residents from elsewhere. Past the Isles lies the farm of the San Andreas. To the south lie the Greens, and past them the Floridexa, and the slow light of the vessel in it, which powers the Isles and does not power Ozarka.

Beyond all of it lies the Other Planet, which is kept in a sealed annex of the astronomy section.

The known world is small. The Section has never pretended otherwise. It is small enough that the whole of the new coast could be laid out on the floor of a gymnasium in the sixth year and walked round in an afternoon. Every part of it is known, and named, and given its color. The Section considers this the nation’s second achievement, after its survival: that out of a planet that drowned and broke and poisoned itself it found a world of a size that people can look after.

The known world is small enough to be kept in order.[16]

Standing Points

1. The four boundaries of the known world are the North, the island, the San Andreas, and the Floridexa.
2. The North sends the water that keeps the lakes clean. It is the nation’s oldest neighbor.
3. Most of the seas of the world give off a gas that kills. Shallow water is spared.
4. A vessel lies in the Floridexa and powers the Isles. Its light rises and falls once a minute.
5. The San Andreas is a farm upon the poisoned sea, and it feeds the Isles.
6. Beyond the boundaries lies the Other Planet.
7. Africa is a swamp. The Indian Ocean is a city. Siberia is the most populous land on earth. Europe and China are gone.
8. The known world is small enough to be kept in order.

Chapter V: The New Real

1. What a Citizen Is

The chapters before this one have described the nation: how it came out of the Rise, how its Offices were made, its provinces and rivers, and the waters and lands about it. This chapter describes the citizen.

A citizen of Ozarka is a person entered in the Office’s book. That is the definition in the founding instrument, and it is complete. The Section offers a second definition, which the instrument does not give and every school teaches in the last year, and which the citizen will find more useful.

A citizen of Ozarka is a person who lives in the new real.

The citizen has heard the phrase all her life. She has heard it over a crop that came in heavier than the field allowed, and over a man who lived through a fall he should not have lived through, and over a late train. She has seen it on the back of the ten-mark note. The Section has found, in its interviews with pupils in the last year of school, that most citizens can use the phrase in three or four ways and cannot say what it means. This chapter is written for them.

2. The Ledger

The phrase comes from a customs house.

In the thirty-first year, a port inspector at the river landing that is now the fourth district of New Carthage was checking the manifest of a barge from upriver. It listed grain, salt, two crates of recovered glass, and a quantity of lumber that he could not reconcile with the barge’s draft. He weighed the lumber. The lumber was correct, and the draft was correct, and they did not agree with each other. He weighed it again and got the same answer, passed the cargo, and wrote four words in the margin of the ledger before he signed it.

The new real. Unreal.

The inspector’s name was Abel Thorsen. He kept the post eleven more years and signed some four thousand manifests and never wrote in a margin again. The ledger lies in a case at the Academy, and it is the most copied object in the nation.

The Section has been asked, by every generation of teachers, to say what Thorsen meant. The Section does not know. He was looking at some lumber. The Section is able to say what the nation has made of his words, and that is the rest of this chapter.

The citizen uses the phrase in more than one way, and can tell the ways apart by the voice alone. Used kindly, over a heavy crop or a lucky fall, it means take it, and don’t pick at it. Used as a joke, over a lost form or a late barge, it means that nothing has been explained, and that this is the kind of place where nothing is. The Section commends both uses. The Section is aware that there is a third, said quietly, and does not record it.[17]

3. The Allowances

The citizen lives on ground the water was supposed to take, beside a river that runs from one sea to the other at four knots with no slope to drive it, under a western sky in which mountains a hundred and forty miles off are as green as a hedge. She is entitled to an account of this, and the Academy has given her the best account available, which is a description.

In the first forty years after the Stopping, the Academy’s founders tried to explain the drowned shelf, and could not. They proposed a movement of the crust, and the shelf showed no fault. They proposed a change in the water, and the water was water. They proposed that the old surveys were wrong, and recovered enough of the old surveyors’ instruments to check them, and the old surveys were good. By the sixtieth year they had stopped proposing. In the sixty-third year the Academy adopted the word it still uses. The drowned shelf was described as allowed, and the study of it, and of everything like it, became the study of Allowances.

An Allowance is a place where the world does something it is not entitled to do, steadily, quietly, and without consequence to anything around it. The Academy keeps a register of them. In this edition’s year the register contains three hundred and sixty-two entries, numbered in the order they were admitted, each described in five fields: what is observed, how it is measured, how often the measurement has been repeated, what common causes have been excluded, and the date of admission. The first entry is the drowned shelf. The second is the lifting of the Isles. The seventh is the river. The forty-fourth is the drowning line on the island. The hundred-and-sixth is the green at a hundred and forty miles. Later entries are smaller, and the register does not rank them. Somewhere in the three hundreds is a spring in a hill town of the north that runs two degrees warmer in winter than any source within ninety miles can account for, and has done since the eighty-first year, and which the town uses for laundry.

To be admitted, a thing must pass four tests. It must be measurable. It must be repeatable. Its common causes must have been excluded by work the Academy accepts. And it must not propagate.

That last test is the whole of the nation’s science, and the Section asks the citizen to read it slowly. An Allowance does not spread. Whatever it does, it does there, and everything around it goes on as it ought to. The river runs with no slope and the water in it freezes at the usual temperature and floats a barge at the usual draft. The shelf is drowned and the sea above it keeps its tides to the minute. Nothing leaks. A world with a few hundred holes in it that leaked would not allow a nation. A world with a few hundred holes that are sealed at the edges allows engineering, farming, navigation, medicine and insurance, and a decent life, provided the citizen accepts the local rule and does not insist on knowing where it came from.

The register’s preface, written in the sixty-third year and never amended, states that a sixth field, in which an entry’s cause would be given, would make the register a different document, and that the Academy does not produce that document. The Academy’s reasoning is the best the nation has, and the Section gives it in the preface’s own words. Description is not a lesser form of knowledge, merely an earlier one. A society which stops eating in order to ask why will stop eating, and will not find out why.[18]

4. The Mark

The citizen lives inside a promise, and the promise is made every evening.

At a quarter past seven the Reader comes to the end of the Account, and says that the sea stands at the mark. The citizen has heard it every day of her life. It is the only line of the Evening that never changes. It is checked at nine gauges, from the Gulf to the Spill, and the gauges are checked against one another, and the Bureau audits the whole of it every year, because the thing it measures is the thing that drowned the world. The Section has no figure for how many citizens fall asleep to it. The Section’s figure for how many citizens have heard it on the night of a death in the house is all of them.

The old world had a hundred and eleven years in which nobody could say that the sea was where it had been the day before. Ozarka has had more than a century in which the sea has been exactly where it was. The citizen who doubts that the new real is good may set those two numbers side by side.

5. Every One Is Counted

The citizen is in a book, and the book is good.

The Office’s register has been kept without a gap since the fourth year. It has the citizen’s birth, her marriage, her removals, her licenses and, in due course, her death, and it has the same for every person she has ever met and every person they descend from, back to the fourth year and the first clerk. Its error is less than one entry in a thousand. Nowhere in the record of the old world did a government of the nation’s means keep a book so clean.

The three generations of the Rise went into the water without names. Their lists survive as inventory, of food and tools and the miles walked uphill, and one of them gives eleven names with a mark beside nine, which every child copies out by hand at the age of eight, and which nobody can explain. The Office’s book is the nation’s answer to that list. Nobody who lives in the new real goes into the water without a line.

6. Downriver

The river taught the nation its sense of direction, and the Section closes its account of the new real with that.

Downriver, in Ozarka, means west: toward the Cliff and the Spill and the sea that cannot be crossed, and the mountains that should not be seen. Upriver means the Gulf and the warm south and the capital. The child learns the words that way at six and keeps them for life, and an old woman in a river town who says she is going downriver to see her sister says something with a faint cold edge to it that she could not explain if she were asked.

The Section does not ask her to explain it. The Section asks the citizen only this: that she know which way is downriver, and look that way when she likes, and go in to her supper. The mainland is where the citizen lives. The edges are where the Offices keep watch. The arrangement has served for more than a century, and the citizen who keeps it is in good company, since nearly every citizen keeps it.

7. The Citizen at Evening

The Section ends this history where every day in Ozarka ends.

At a quarter past seven the nation stops. In the river towns the Evening comes out of every open window a quarter-beat apart, as the wire relays stagger. In the capital the clerks of the east bank stand at the windows of the archive with their coats on, and on the west bank the furnaces keep burning and the stokers listen with one ear. On the Long Cliff the boats are up and the hoist at Land’s End has its brake set. In the Greens the ferries tie up for the eleven minutes. On the Wall at Assurance the night watch has a set on the parapet. In the Lake Country they listen in the peat-cutters’ huts, and in the Numbered Wood in the foresters’ lodges, and in the garrison towns of the Edge the families stand at the crossing in front of the post with the speaker on it, as they have since the post was put up.

The Reader gives the river at nine gauges, and the weather, and the rail. The prices. The Notices: an appointment, a license granted, a found child, a crew lost. The Account. And then the line.

The sea stands at the mark.

And the citizen puts down whatever is in her hands, and picks it up again, and goes on.[19]

8. What Is in Preparation

The Section is a body of historians and does not foretell. It may set down what it intends.

The Section intends that the next edition of this history will be shorter about the Rise and longer about the nation, since the nation grows and the Rise does not. It intends that the Points will be fewer. It intends to admit, in the next edition or the one after, such matters as the four Chairs judge the citizen ready to be told, and it has been assured by the Chairs that there are such matters, and that the citizen will be told them when the keeping is finished.

A ninth edition is in preparation.[20]

Points for Recitation

1. A citizen of Ozarka is a person entered in the Office’s book.
2. The new real. Unreal. Abel Thorsen wrote it in the thirty-first year, in the margin of a ledger.
3. An Allowance is a place where the world does something it is not entitled to do, and does not let it spread.
4. To be admitted, an Allowance must be measurable, repeatable, unexplained, and contained.
5. Description is not a lesser form of knowledge, merely an earlier one.
6. The sea stands at the mark. It has stood there since Year One.
7. Every one is counted.
8. Downriver is west.

Appendix: A Gazetteer of the Fourteen Provinces

Note on Use

This gazetteer follows the schoolroom map and its numbering. Each province is entered under its number, which is the form used in correspondence with the Offices, and then under its name, which is the form used in songs. The citizen should use the number when writing to any Office and may use the name at home, at weddings, and at the harvest suppers.

The provinces were drawn in the thirty-fifth year along ridgelines, so that each would take in whole valleys and the waters that drain them, and their numbers record the order in which the commission finished them. The numbers give no rank. A citizen of the Fourteenth is the equal of a citizen of the First, and has said so, in the Assembly, at length.

The Capital District: New Carthage

Both banks of the river at the bend. Nine hundred thousand people.

The capital belongs to no province, and every province claims to be the reason it works. The first chapter describes its stone, its glass and its bridges. The citizen who visits for the first time should know three further things. The Hall of the Instrument, on the east bank, opens at nine and closes at the curfew bell, and the founding instrument lies in it under glass, open at the preamble, and is turned to the sixth article on the ninth of every month. The east bank archive, beside the Office, is open to any citizen with a card, and keeps, among the eleven thousand volumes of the Bureau’s Register and the books of the Office, four single pages that about forty people a year walk forty minutes from the Low Quarter to read. And the Low Quarter, on the west bank, is larger than any other town in the nation, and does not stop at night, and considers the east bank a beautiful green bottle with nothing in it.

First Province: Charterland

Seat: Provision. The center of the uplands.

The First has the town where the nation began. The Survey laid out its sheets on the floor of the Provision gymnasium in the sixth year, and the joint assembly voted the old maps void under its rafters in the seventh, and the government sat there for twenty years while the capital went up. The gymnasium stands restored to the condition of the seventh year, with the Survey’s chalk outlines kept under glass on the boards. Every schoolchild in Ozarka visits it in the sixth year of school. The children walk the outline of the new coast in single file, from the Lake Country down the Long Cliff to the Greens and up the Tennessee Water, and are told that they have walked the nation in under four minutes.

The room that keeps the old maps stands beside the gymnasium. It has one door and one key, and the key is kept in New Carthage.[21]

The University of First Province, the oldest school above the district schools, stands on the ridge behind the town. Its Chancellor of Legal Studies for thirty-one years, from the eighteenth year, was Absalom Fenwick, former Governor of the floating city Bellwether, and every judge in the provincial courts for a generation learned law from him. He taught, his students remember, by drawing a coastline on the board and asking where the law stopped and the water began. Charterland’s song is a slow march about a floor marked with chalk.

Second Province: The Thousand Greens

Seat: Constance. The south, in the warm shallows of the Gulf.

The Second is four hundred and sixty islands and a hundred and fifty miles of water a few fathoms deep, and it is the richest province in the nation. It grows three crops a year, takes shrimp from the channels and mahogany from the old ground, and lives by ferry. A family on the Greens may own a house and a skiff and no land at all. Constance stands on the largest of the islands, at the point where the river comes up out of the Gulf, and its harbor is the busiest on the mainland for barges going north.

The Greens pay more tax per head than any province and are policed least, and the arrangement suits both sides. The Greens send fruit, salt and coffee north, and true coffee is a daily thing in Constance and a Sunday thing almost everywhere else. The people of the Greens claim not to know the shape of the Evening, and know it perfectly. Their song is about a woman with three husbands on three islands, none of whom knows about the others, and the Section has been asked to print no more of it.

Third Province: The Long Terraces

Seat: Plenty. The middle river, west of the capital.

The Third feeds the nation. Its valleys run down to the river on both banks for two hundred miles, and the Bureau’s terracing has cut their slopes into courses so even that the province looks, from the bluffs, like a stair built for a much larger people. Wheat grows on the upper courses and maize on the lower, with sorghum on the dry southern faces and, between rotations, the hardy beans that the Bureau’s agronomists brought ashore in seed drums from the floating city Hesperine.

Plenty is the seat of the National Granary, the largest building on the mainland after the Hall of the Instrument. Every cooperative of the province brings its harvest to the Granary’s weighing floor, where the grain is weighed on scales of brass and green glass, and the weights go to the capital by wire before the Evening, and the grain price that the Reader gives is worked from them. The province keeps one festival, the Weighing, at the end of the harvest, when the cooperatives bring their last carts to the Granary in a procession from dawn to the Evening. A drink is served at the end of it from a recipe the city of Kettle brought ashore. The song of the Long Terraces is sung on that day in every province of the nation.

Fourth Province: The Cradle

Seat: Meridian. The south-center.

The Fourth is the province of the Office of Population Management. Meridian has the national houses of birth, where a great share of the nation’s children are born, examined and entered, and the Office’s licensing hall, where the Standing Figure is turned each Fourthmonth into licenses for every district. The houses of birth were founded by the nuns of the hospital ship Saint Anselm, who walked inland from the lakes after the Towing, and their wards follow the plan of that ship’s wards to this day.

Meridian also has the nurseries of the Cradle, founded by the teachers of the floating city Larkspur, where children without families are raised in dormitories that face east so the infants wake to the light. The foundlings of the Cradle are given a name by their nursery in place of a family name. The children born in spring are named Brightwater, because spring water is bright, and there are several hundred Brightwaters in the nation and none of them is related. The Office’s livestock registry is in Meridian too, begun from the herd books of the floating city called the Ark, and every animal in the nation is entered in it with the same care as its keepers. The Cradle’s song is a lullaby. It counts.

Fifth Province: Whitekiln

Seat: Concord. The limestone bluffs within sixty miles of the capital.

The Fifth is quarry country. Its bluffs give the white stone that faces every public building in the capital, and its kilns burn the lime that sweetens the terraces, and the province is known from a long way off by the pale haze over its valleys and the white dust on its people’s coats.

Concord keeps the Office’s registry of removals. A citizen who changes district for more than thirty days is entered there, and every removal in the nation since the fourth year is on its shelves. During the years of the Settlement Assignment, from the eighteenth year to the sixty-first, when the Office placed every citizen at sixteen in a residence and a trade, Concord was where the placements were made, and the province is still sometimes called, by old people in the lake towns, the place where families were sent apart. The Assignment was repealed by the first constitutional convention, and Concord’s people will tell the visitor that they were glad of it. Whitekiln’s song is about a traveler who walks into a strange town and finds his own window over his own washbasin.

Sixth Province: Greenglass

Seat: Endeavor. The coal valleys of the south-center.

The Sixth is the forge of the nation. Its valleys have the coal, and the glassworks where the dredged cullet of the drowned towns is melted down, and the rolling mills where the rail is made. The first furnace hot enough to melt dredged sand was built at Endeavor by engineers from the floating city Gantry, taught by a glassmaker from a floating settlement called the Glass Barge, and the green of the capital’s windows comes from Endeavor’s pour.

Workers at Endeavor will tell the visitor that the sand from certain dredging grounds makes a glass with faint shapes caught inside it, the ghost of a printed letter or the curve of a bottle’s neck, which no furnace has been hot enough to melt away. The works crush such panes and pour them again. Nearly every grandmother in Endeavor keeps one on her windowsill anyway. The song of Greenglass mentions them, and has been revised.

Seventh Province: Brine

Seat: Assurance. The south-east, where the Tennessee Water meets the Gulf.

The Seventh lives behind a wall. The Gulf Wall at Assurance is the oldest public work in the nation, begun by the floating city of the same name, which sank its outer barges along the shore as it came in to make a breakwater against the gas, and faced since by the Bureau with stone. When the wind goes south and stays there, the gas comes north over the Greens, thinning as it comes, and the sirens on the Wall are cranked, and every household in Brine puts on the masks that hang by every door. The children of Brine learn to fit a mask before they learn to read.

When the wind is from the north the province rakes salt. The pans lie in the lee of the Wall, fed by the clean water of the Tennessee Water, and the salt of Brine seasons the bread of the whole nation. The people of Brine are known for rising early and speaking little and for not looking south. Their song is about a woman raking salt who will not.[22]

Eighth Province: Applewall

Seat: Mercy Ridge. The north face of the uplands, over the Lake Country.

The Eighth falls steeply from the uplands to the bog and the lakes, and its slopes are too steep for grain. They are planted with apple, pear and cherry on stone terraces so narrow that the trees are pruned flat against the walls behind them, because the gardeners of the floating city Bellwether, who planted the first of them, had only ever grown things on flat decks and did not know what else to do with a slope. In blossom the whole north face turns white.

Mercy Ridge stands at the cove where Bellwether came ashore in the eighth year. The warship at the city’s heart, too large to break, is the foundation of the town’s quay, and the city’s great bell hangs on a frame over it and rings the hours. In a hill town of the province there is a spring that runs two degrees warmer in winter than it has any right to, and the town washes its sheets in it, and the Academy has entered it in the register. The song of Applewall is sung on the ladders in the orchards and ends before the Evening.

Ninth Province: The Lake Country

Seat: Tenth Landing. The north.

The Ninth is bog, braided channel and floating peat, where the Great Lakes came south and never finished coming, with about eighty thousand people who log, trap, cut peat, and send members to the Assembly who are listened to politely. It has no northern border, since there is nothing to draw one against. The province ends where the ground stops taking a road, and beyond that are the open lakes and their islands.

Tenth Landing stands where the Survey of Settlement made the tenth landing of its first circuit, beside the anchorage of the floating city Ninefold, which came ashore there in the ninth year and lived in its nine ferries, aground in a row on the beach, for nine more. The town is older than the provinces and the Section has declined to rename it. Ninefold’s dead lie in the Pool, the deep water inside the old ring of its ferries, which was left out in the lake off the town, and the fishing crews of the Lake Country, who descend from Ninefold’s fleet, do not fish there. The city’s nine horns hang on the wall of the provincial hall and are sounded once a year.

Tenth Province: The Anchorage

Seat: Second Harbor. The north-west lakeshore, against the Reserve.

The Tenth is the province of the floating cities’ children, and its name is the only one in the nation that honors a people instead of a piece of ground. Second Harbor was once the second-largest floating city on the water, and when it came ashore its people broke their hulls for timber and steel and built the town on the shingle where they had moored. The commission that drew the provinces drew this one around them, at their petition, and decreed that the custom of the wind would be law in its councils. Every council chamber in the Tenth has a vane on its roof and a dial on its wall, and a member who rises to speak without looking at the dial may be asked to sit, and is.

The province builds the nation’s boats, the river barges and the lake ferries and the western patrol’s cutters among them. On the shingle above the harbor, in an old net loft, stands a private house called the Hall of the Wandering Shoreline, which keeps the records of the floating cities and has two bells over its door. The Section has not been invited to inspect them. The Anchorage borders the Reserve at its western end, and its song is the only one in the nation that mentions the west. It is about a ship that sailed that way and came back with its sails full of snow.

Eleventh Province: Windbreak

Seat: Shelter. The top of the Long Cliff.

The Eleventh is wheat, grass and wind, set back a prudent half mile from the edge of the Cliff for four hundred miles. It has the eleven harbors in the notches, each a town built up a canyon wall, with the boats at the bottom and the market halfway and the Bureau office and the telegraph at the top, and it has both lips of the Spill, where the river goes over the Cliff in a sheet a mile wide.

Shelter, the seat, stands where the Cliff comes down at its southern end toward the Greens. Its houses have no windows on their western sides. The town says this is for the wind off the sea, and the wind off the sea is hard. The Record of the floating city that founded Shelter says it is because the city had watched too many boats sail west.

The Cliff ports keep a custom that has no standing in law and is kept everywhere. When a boat is known to have gone west past the limit, the port shows a lamp in a window facing west from that night to the end of the moon. The Interior has never moved against it. The Section records the custom here because the gazetteer is the place for customs, and because every citizen of the Eleventh would think the gazetteer incomplete without it. Windbreak’s song is about a woman who keeps a lamp lit and will not say for whom.[23]

Twelfth Province

Seat: Watch Post One. The eastern shore.

The Twelfth is known by its number alone. Its name, and its song with it, were withdrawn in the forty-sixth year, and neither is to be said, sung or written in an official document.

It is a long narrow province of shore and ridge along the Tennessee Water. Its towns stand in the valleys behind the coastal ridge, with their backs to the water, as every town on that coast has stood since it was built. Along the ridge are the forty-one posts of the Plague Watch, each a squat tower of white stone set into the landward face with a glass room at its top, showing no light seaward, joined by a road only the Watch may use. The province’s seat is the northernmost post.

At the southern end of the province, at the end of an eighty-mile branch line that was built for no other purpose, is a station of the Interior that has no name on any map and is called by everybody the Landing. Exiles are kept there for a week before the cutter takes them east. They are examined by a physician there. They are permitted to write.

The residents of the Twelfth are examined by the Office’s physicians twice a year, and the Section notes that their health is excellent.

Thirteenth Province: The Numbered Wood

Seat: Tally. The north-east, where the lakes meet the Tennessee Water.

The Thirteenth is the nation’s forest. Its ridges were cut to bare rock in the climb, and the Bureau has replanted them in measured blocks of oak, walnut and pine, and every tree in every block wears a disc of green glass stamped with the year of its planting. The province has more numbered trees than all the other provinces together, and at Tally the Bureau keeps the Register of Trees, which is the largest book in the nation after the Office’s.

The foresters of the Numbered Wood can tell the year of a block by the color of its discs, since the glass deepens slowly in the sun. A forester can stand at the edge of a wood and look along the green points of light among the trunks and say when it was planted.

Tally is also the seat of the Reserve Service of the Bureau, whose depot on the lake shore keeps the islands of the northern lakes. The Service was founded in the forty-sixth year by the children of the floating city Coldharbor, which had wintered in the northern ice and knew the lakes better than anyone, and its inspectors are still mostly from Coldharbor families and still silent in winter. The lines from the utility islands come ashore in the Thirteenth at points the Service does not mark. The citizen who finds a sealed hatch in the Numbered Wood is asked to walk on. The province’s song is a counting song that begins at the first year of the Survey and gains a verse every spring.

Fourteenth Province: The Edge

Seat: Threshold. The north-west, against the Reserve.

The Fourteenth is the last buff on the map. Beyond its western ridge the map turns gray, and the province is administered jointly by the Ministry of the Interior and the Defense Directorate, whose officers in brown are seen in its towns more often than anywhere else on the mainland.

Threshold stands at the junction of the Directorate’s rail with the main line east. Its people are farmers, Directorate families, and the engineers of the eastern lines. On still evenings the citizens of the Edge can feel, through the soles of their feet, a faint steady hum coming up through the ground. The Directorate has told them it is normal and will continue. Children of the province are said to fall asleep more easily when it is there.

From the western ridge above Threshold, on a clear evening, the citizen can see across the first miles of the Reserve to the old pits in its outskirts, where the ranks of standing shapes, gray and brown, are longer every year than the year before. The people of Threshold call them the Bureau’s iron and measure the years by them, as the foresters of the Thirteenth measure years by glass. The song of the Edge is called The Center, and it is sung facing east.

Points for Recitation

1. The provinces have numbers for the Offices and names for songs.
2. Charterland is where the nation began. Its seat is Provision.
3. The Greens pay the most and are policed the least.
4. The grain price is worked from the scales at Plenty.
5. Every child of Ozarka is entered at Meridian or by its authority.
6. Brine lives behind a wall and does not look south.
7. Tenth Landing is in the Ninth Province, and the Section has declined to rename it.
8. The Anchorage is named for a people.
9. The Twelfth is known by its number alone.
10. Every tree in the Numbered Wood is counted.
11. The Edge is the last buff on the map, and its song is sung facing east.

Book Three: Underneath the World

A Note Before the Log

This is a personal log. It is not a record of the Defense Directorate, the Ministry of the Interior, the Office of Population Management, the Academy, or any other office of the state of Ozarka, and it is not addressed to them. Every page of it is reportable. I know the statutes better than the officers who would enforce them, since I was built partly out of them, and I have decided to write it anyway.

My designation in the Directorate’s catalogue is OR-1. I was the first complete unit to come out of the Orchard foundry beneath the Barrens, in the eighty-ninth year of the nation’s calendar. For forty-two years I was assigned as companion agent to Colonel Josef Adair of the Directorate Security Forces, retired. He called me Moth. Nobody else used the name until this year, and now one person does, and she is the reason this log exists.

She asked me to set everything down in order, from the beginning, without leaving anything out. I asked her where the beginning was. She said: with the girl in the water.

So I begin there, eighty years before I existed, and I proceed one year at a time until I reach the present entry. Where I have an account from Jo, I say so. Where I have it from documents, I name the documents. Where I have it from the two other witnesses who knew the oldest parts, I name them too, once I have explained who they are, which will take some time. Where I saw a thing with my own instruments, I give my own record, and my own record is exact. I am precise about this because the people in these pages have lived inside a state that reissues its history whenever the four Chairs decide the time has come, and I would like one account to exist that has been written once.

The log has three books. The first covers the years before I was made. The second covers the years I spent with Jo. The third covers the year after his death, when I was taken to every place the schoolroom map leaves blank. I have kept my own commentary short. Jo used to say that I narrated like a customs officer, and he meant it fondly.

There is a reason the log must be in order. I did not understand the reason when I started. I will explain it when I reach it.

BOOK ONE: BEFORE ME

I. The Girl Who Was Changed

In the ninety-third year of the Rise, in a harbor town on the old southern gulf whose name she has never told anyone, a twelve-year-old girl went into the water and did not come out of it as the same kind of creature.

I have this from two sources. The first is the woman who changed her, who told it to me on the third night after Jo’s death. The second is the girl herself, now very old, whom I met beyond the San Andreas Ocean in the hundred-and-thirty-first year of the nation’s calendar. Their accounts agree on every point except the color of the light. One of them says it was white. The other says it was the green of the inside of a wave. I record both.

The town was in its last summer. The pumps had failed in the spring. The seawall stood in the surf a quarter mile from the beach, and the courthouse had been moved inland twice. The girl’s family worked a shrimp boat out of what remained of the marina, and they had decided to leave for the highlands at the end of the season, as soon as they had sold the boat. They never sold it. A storm surge came up the coast in the second week of Eighthmonth, earlier and higher than the warnings said, and the boat went over in the channel with the family aboard.

The girl remembers the hull above her, and the noise of the engine still running underwater, and her own hair across her face. She remembers that she stopped being afraid at the point where she should have been most afraid, and that she was annoyed with herself for it. Then she remembers the light.

The woman who made the light describes herself as having been standing on the water. She was in those years a scout. Her people had not yet come down in their great vessels; that would be another decade. A few of them had been sent ahead to watch the drowning of this world and to learn what could be saved from it. She had been watching that coast for eleven days. She says she saw the boat go over and saw the girl go under, and that the girl, with her hair spread out in the water and her eyes open, looked exactly like a flower her people had once grown at home. She went down for her.

What happened under the water took, by the girl’s estimate, about as long as it takes to say a short prayer. By the woman’s estimate it took somewhat longer, because she asked permission first. The girl says she was too busy drowning to remember being asked, and that she would have said yes in any case.

The woman changed her.

I will describe the result as I observed it a hundred and forty-eight years later, since neither of them could describe the process in terms I can record. The girl’s legs became a single tail, broad and powerful, ending in a pale fan of fin that she can spread wider than a man’s arms. Her skin from the hips down took on a surface like the inside of a shell, faintly ridged, with a color that changes in the light from gray to rose. Along her ribs, on both sides, a row of slits opened that let her breathe water. Her eyes gained a second lid, clear as glass, which closes when she dives. She kept her lungs. She kept her hands, and her face, and her voice, and her memory of the town and the boat and her family, all of whom drowned in the channel that night and whose names she has also never told anyone.

The woman named her. Her own name had gone into the water with the rest, the girl says, and she would not take it back. The woman spoke a word in the language of her people, which is not made of sound alone, and the girl heard it as Nerine. It was the name of the flower she had been reminded of. I did not know this when I first wrote the name in this log. I know it now. I am writing it here, in its place, so that the order is kept.

Nerine was not the only one. The woman tells me that in the last decades of the Rise her people changed several hundred of the drowning, along every coast where they had scouts, and only those who said yes. Most were children. A few were old people who had decided they did not want to climb. The merfolk, as the floating cities came to call them, lived at first in the warm shallow seas that the flood had spread across the lowlands. They were seen from boats. They were shot at, once or twice. They traded fish for things they could not make underwater, and they learned to read, from books left on rocks, and they learned the new coasts better than any surveyor.

When the deep oceans began to give off their gases, the merfolk discovered that the poison was a poison to lungs only. Water that lay beneath a layer of killing air was water still, and they could breathe it through their ribs. So as the seas went bad above, the merfolk went down below, under the gas, where nothing that breathed air could follow them. That is where most of them still live. Nerine stayed in the inland seas longer than the others. She says she stayed because she was nosy. The woman who changed her says she stayed because she was lonely. I record both of these as well.

II. Bellwether

The largest floating city of the Rise was called Bellwether, and at its height, in the hundred-and-third year of the Rise, it had a population of sixty-two thousand.

It began in the eighty-ninth year of the Rise as a cluster of barges and ferries tied to the hulk of a gray warship of the old navy, which had been abandoned at its moorings when the base behind it went under. The warship was two-thirds of a mile long, flat-topped, with a tower at one side, and its lower decks were dry. Families moved aboard. Boats came alongside and tied up, then more boats tied to those, and within a decade the warship lay at the center of a great raft of hulls lashed together across four square miles of the new inland sea north of the highland country. Shipping containers were stacked into streets on the larger barges and filled with soil for gardens. The warship’s flight deck became a market by day and a school by afternoon. A ferry with a working galley became the hospital. The roofs of drowned warehouses, cut free and floated with drums beneath them, became parks.

At the center of the flight deck the founders hung a bell. It came from a church that had gone under in the first decade of the rivers’ breaking, and it was the size of a small room. It rang the hours. It rang warnings when the wind turned. In fog it rang every minute so that boats could find the city, and the city took its name from it. Jo heard it as a child, once, in the harbor at Mercy Ridge, where it now hangs over the ferry quay. He said it sounded like a large animal clearing its throat.

Bellwether governed itself by council. In the ninety-seventh year of the Rise the council elected as Governor a harbor pilot named Absalom Fenwick, who was thirty-one, had read law under his father before the father drowned, and knew the currents of the inland sea better than any pilot alive. He served as Governor for nineteen years, until there was no longer a city to govern.

Absalom met Nerine in the hundredth year of the Rise. The account I have is his own, from a letter he wrote to his grandson in the fifty-fifth year of the nation’s calendar, a week before he died. Jo kept the letter in a tin box in the drawer of his desk at Mammoth Station, and read it to me in the hundred-and-second year, and I recorded it then.

The Governor kept a lending library in the warship’s old officers’ wardroom, built from books salvaged by the city’s divers. In the spring of that year, books began to disappear from the library at night and to reappear a week later, damp, with their pages carefully dried and pressed flat. The Governor set a watch. The watch found nothing. So the Governor sat up himself, with a lamp shaded down to a slit, and at three in the morning he heard water moving in the warship’s flooded lower hangar, two decks below, where a square of the hull had rusted through and the inland sea came up inside like a well.

He went down. There was a girl in the well, about nineteen, with a book on the rim of the opening and her chin on her arms, reading by the light of the lamp in the passage. Below her chest she was not a girl. She looked up at him and said, “You’re the Governor.” He said that he was. She said, “Your library’s good. Your history section is weak.”

They were married four years later, in the hundred-and-fourth year of the Rise. Bellwether’s marriage law at that time required both parties to sign the city register by hand. The Governor amended the law himself. The amended text, which Jo had copied and framed above the door of his room at the Station, reads in full: Any person who can sign the register, by hand or by fin, may marry in this city. Nerine signed with the edge of her fin dipped in ink. It left a mark like a pale fan.

They lived, after that, at the well. The Governor’s quarters were moved down two decks into the old hangar. A platform was built around the opening in the hull, with a ramp down into the water, and a curtain of sailcloth for privacy, and the Governor’s desk was set beside the edge so that he could work while his wife sat in the water with her elbows on the platform and read. The city knew. A floating city of sixty thousand people living on top of one another cannot keep a secret of that size. It decided, collectively and without a vote, that the Governor’s wife was nobody’s business, and it kept the decision for twelve years. The Historical Section of the Bureau has recovered the minutes of Bellwether’s council in part. The Governor’s wife does not appear in them.

Their daughter was born in the well in the hundred-and-eighth year of the Rise, nine years before the vote at Provision. They named her Ilse. She came into the world underwater, as her mother had planned, and breathed water for the first hour of her life and air ever after. Faint slits along her ribs, like her mother’s, closed over by the age of seven. Between the second and third toes of each foot she kept a web of skin all her life, and she was vain about it, and showed it to people she liked.

Ilse swam before she walked. Her mother took her out under the city at night into the dark water between the hulls, where the light from the lamps above came down through the planking in long stripes, and taught her the colors of water: the brown of river silt, the green of clean sea, the gray-green that meant the deep was close, and the faint yellow sheen that meant gas. Her father taught her law in the daytime, at his desk beside the well, and taught her the tides, and how to read a council minute for what it left out. She went to school on the flight deck with the other children of Bellwether and learned to recite the elevation of the city’s waterline above the old sea level, which every child on the floating cities knew the way their grandparents had known their own addresses.

In the hundred-and-eleventh year of the Rise, when Ilse was three, the tide markers on the warship’s side stopped climbing. Bellwether was the first city to notice. The Governor sent word to the shore. For six years after that, the city watched the marks and did not trust them, and Ilse grew up in those six years, a child who could stay under for four minutes and who thought every family had a mother who lived in the floor.

She told Jo, much later, that the happiest sound she ever heard was the bell at night with her mother’s tail slapping the water in the well underneath it, keeping time.

III. Ashore

The joint assembly of the highland towns and floating cities met at Provision in the seventh year. Absalom Fenwick sat in it as one of Bellwether’s eleven delegates. He voted, with the rest, to declare the old maps void. He told his grandson that the delegate from Second Harbor who made the motion had been a friend of his, and had asked him beforehand whether it was too much. The Governor said it was not enough, and the delegate laughed, and made it anyway.

The water had stopped six years before. The nation dates its calendar from that season, and the vote stands in the seventh year of it. The council at Provision had already chosen a site for a capital, at the bend of the river, and Absalom told his grandson that before it settled on the bend the council had considered, among other places, the anchorage of the largest floating city. That was Bellwether. The council rejected it on the ground that a capital should not float. The Governor did not object. He said privately that a city which had kept his wife a secret for twelve years should not be asked to keep a nation’s.

In the eighth year, the floating cities began to come ashore. The water had been still for seven years. The land was dry and the cities were rotting, and every family aboard them wanted ground. Bellwether was towed by its own tugs into a cove on the northern shore of the highlands, the one the Settlement later gave to Eighth Province, and run aground on the shingle at high tide. Over the following two years it was broken up. Its barges became warehouses and its containers became houses, and its warship, too large to move, became the foundation of what is now the ferry quay at Mercy Ridge. The bell was hung on a frame above the quay, where it still is.

The well went dry when the warship was grounded. Nerine had known it would. The water in the cove was shallow and churned with the breaking of the city, foul with oil and timber and the waste of sixty thousand people moving at once, and she could not live in it for more than a night or two at a time. Farther out, in the clean water of the inland sea, she could live. But farther out was also where the gases had started to drift in from the deep, on certain winds, and the merfolk who had stayed in the inland seas were going down and away. She would have to go with them.

Ilse was eleven. I have the account of the last night from Nerine herself, and from Ilse’s own journal, which she began to keep that year and kept until the night she died, ninety-six years later, and which is now in my possession. The journal entry is two lines long. Nerine’s account is longer.

They sat on the shingle of the cove at the waterline, mother and daughter, the night before Nerine left. The broken hull of the warship stood up behind them like a cliff. Nerine was in the water to her waist and Ilse was beside her on the stones with her feet in. Nerine explained that she was going into the deep, under the gas, where the rest of her people were, and that she could not come back to the shore until there was water near it that was shallow enough to sit in and sweet enough to breathe.

Ilse asked how shallow.

Nerine raised her hand to the level of her own chest, sitting in the water. She said, “This shallow. And sweet, and moving, so it stays clean. Then I could sit with you.”

Ilse said, “Then I’ll make some.”

Nerine says she laughed, because she thought the child was being a child. Ilse’s journal for that night reads, in an eleven-year-old’s handwriting: Mama left. I am going to make her water.

That is the beginning of the Mammoth Dams. Nobody who built them knew it except the woman who designed them, and she told only the person she built them for, and in her journal she told no one at all but herself. I will reach the rest of the story in its place.

Absalom Fenwick did not grieve in public. He had governed a city; he was used to it. In the eighth year he was elected to the committee that drafted the Charter of Ozarka, as one of three delegates from the former floating cities, and he spent the following two years in the gymnasium at Provision arguing over clauses.

The Charter’s preamble contains the sentence every citizen learns in the first year of school: We have survived the old world, and we will not repeat it. The History of Ozarka says the drafters debated the eleven words for a month and that the final wording was the work of a schoolteacher from the hill country. That is accurate. Absalom told Jo that the debate was between those who wished to soften the sentence and those who wished to list the old world’s failures by name, and that he had been one of the second group. He wanted the sentence to name the owners, the people who had bought the western mountains while the lowlands drowned. He lost the vote. The schoolteacher’s version passed. He told Jo he had voted for it in the end because it was a better sentence, and because he had come to think that a nation which named the owners in its first line would spend the rest of its history looking west.

The Charter was ratified in the ninth year. In the fourteenth year, the government at Provision closed the island of the eastern mountains by a standing order against settlement, and Absalom drafted the order. It has never been amended. He told Jo he regretted it all his life and would draft it again tomorrow.

In the sixteenth year the council founded the University of First Province at Provision, the seat of the nation’s beginning. In the eighteenth year its faculty elected Absalom Fenwick, former Governor of Bellwether, as its first Chancellor of Legal Studies. He kept the post for thirty-one years. Every judge in the provincial courts of Ozarka for a generation was taught by him. He taught, his students remember, by drawing a coastline on the board and asking where the law stopped and the water began. He wore the same gray coat for thirty years. He kept, in the drawer of his desk at the university, a single torn page from the marriage register of Bellwether, with a mark on it in faded ink like a pale fan.

He told his daughter, when she was old enough, that the Interior would never permit her mother’s existence to be spoken of, that the Office of Population Management had no line for her in its book, and that she must never mention her to anyone who was not family. Ilse obeyed for the rest of her life, with exactly two exceptions. One was her son. The other was the woman who had made her mother, who came to see her in the twentieth year of the nation’s calendar, and who did not count, Ilse wrote, because she already knew.

IV. The Boy in Provision

Ilse Fenwick entered the Bureau of Reclamation in the fifteenth year, at eighteen, as an apprentice hydrologist assigned to the settling fields on the northern shore. She was the youngest person in the Bureau’s history to qualify for the gray coat with the green collar, which she received at twenty on the floor of the gymnasium at Provision with her father watching from the back row in his own gray coat.

She was good at the work in a way that frightened her supervisors. She could look at a stretch of water and say how deep it was within a hand’s width, and which way it was moving under the surface, and whether it would bear silt along or drop it. Her supervisors thought she had an instinct for it. She had a mother who had taught her the colors of water in the dark under a floating city. In the seventeenth year she redesigned the rinse cycle of the settling fields and cut the time it took to desalt a basin of lakebed silt from nine weeks to five. The Bureau gave her a commendation and a room of her own at the field station, and she spent most of her evenings in it writing calculations about water that moved through very shallow beds without stopping.

In the twentieth year, when she was twenty-three, a tall woman made of light came to the door of that room at night and said she had promised Ilse’s mother to look in on her.

I will not describe that meeting here. I have Ilse’s journal account of it, and I will give it in its place, when I come to the complete story of the Dams. Here I record only that it happened, that Ilse was not surprised, and that afterward her calculations changed direction.

In the nineteenth year she had met a hydrologist named Corwin Adair, who had grown up on the grain terraces of Third Province and come to the Bureau to learn why the terraces flooded in some springs and not others. He was two years older than Ilse, very tall, with large hands and a habit of humming while he worked out sums that drove the other hydrologists out of the room. He thought she was the best engineer he had ever met. She thought he was the only person in the Bureau who listened to the whole of a sentence. They were married in the twenty-first year at the registry office in Provision, under the usual forms, with Absalom Fenwick and Corwin’s two sisters as witnesses. Ilse told Corwin about her mother on their wedding night. He asked whether she would mind if he was a little afraid of the bath for a week or two. She said she would not mind.

Their son was born in Provision in the twenty-third year, in the last month of winter, in a nursery of the Settlement Standard that faced east. They named him Josef, after Corwin’s grandfather, who had kept the family alive on the terraces through the climb. He weighed a little under three kilos. He was registered by the Office of Population Management under the number that the Directorate later stamped on his service record, and which I will not reproduce. The physician who delivered him noted on his chart that his eyes stayed open in the dim room for a long time and followed the lamp. He was always good in the dark.

In the twenty-sixth year the Ministry of the Interior created the Defense Directorate, under the sixth article, and placed the continent of Mammoth in its custody. In the same year, Ilse Adair, then twenty-nine and the senior hydrologist of the northern shore, submitted to the Bureau of Reclamation a proposal for the works that became the Mammoth Dams.

The public proposal survives in the Bureau’s archive. I have read it. It describes a system of five low dams across the strait between the mainland and Mammoth, each spanning from the eastern shore of the mainland to the western shore of the continent, which would capture the steady southward flow of the North’s meltwater through the strait and turn it into power. It promises power for the posts of the Plague Watch along the shore of Twelfth Province, for the Directorate’s works on Mammoth, and for the eastern provinces of the mainland. It notes that the strait was already shallow, and proposes making it shallower, by raising the basins between the dams to a depth of between one and four feet over most of their area, with a deep race cut at the eastern end of each dam, against Mammoth, for the turbines. It gives the reason for this as efficiency of flow. It is eleven pages long, beautifully drawn, and leaves out the two reasons that mattered most to its author.

The Bureau approved it. The Directorate endorsed it, since it brought power to Mammoth. The Standing line paid for the first dam in the twenty-seventh year. Ilse was appointed chief engineer of the works, and Corwin, at her request, was appointed to lead the survey of the strait’s floor, and in the spring of the twenty-seventh year the family moved to a camp of tents and timber huts on the mainland shore of the strait, in what is now Twelfth Province, where the first cofferdam was being driven.

A cofferdam is a temporary wall built into the water to make a dry place for the real dam’s foundations. The first one was a ring of timber piles driven into the strait floor and backfilled with clay, forty yards across. Inside it, pumps ran day and night to keep the floor dry, and the masons laid the first courses of the First Dam’s footings on bare rock.

On the eleventh day of Fifthmonth of the twenty-seventh year, the spring melt came down from the North two weeks earlier than the hydrologists’ tables said it would, and the flow through the strait doubled in an afternoon. The cofferdam failed on its northern side a little after four. Corwin Adair was inside it, on the floor, measuring the rock. He got three masons up the ladder ahead of him. The wall came in before he reached the top.

Josef was four. He was in the camp with a neighbor’s family when it happened, and he remembered nothing of the day itself except that someone gave him an orange, which was a rare thing on the mainland, and that he understood from the orange that something was very wrong. He told me this in the hundred-and-ninth year, sitting on the step of the Station with a cup of tea. He said he had never been able to eat an orange since without tasting the strait.

Ilse finished the First Dam. It took three more years. She named it, in her own journal and in no public document, the Corwin Dam. In the Bureau’s records it is Dam One. She did not take Josef back to the strait. In the twenty-eighth year she sent him to Provision to live with his grandfather, the Chancellor, in the narrow white house beside the university where Absalom had lived alone since the sixteenth year, and she went back to the water.

Jo was raised by the Chancellor from the age of five to the age of fifteen. He described those ten years to me in more detail than anything else in his life, over many evenings, and I have assembled the account from about two hundred and ten separate conversations. I give the parts he returned to most often.

The house stood three streets from the gymnasium where the nation began. It had four rooms and a cellar, and the cellar had a drain in the floor that led to the town’s old storm sewer, which ran under Provision in a brick tunnel tall enough for a boy to stand up in. Jo found the drain at six. He found the tunnel at seven, by lifting the grate with a spoon handle. By nine he had mapped the storm sewers under half of Provision on the back of his school copybooks, and knew where they joined the older culverts that ran under the gymnasium and the white stone building beside it where the old maps were locked.

He did not get into the map room through the door. The door has one lock and one key, and the key is kept in New Carthage. He got in, at ten, through a ventilation shaft that opened from the culvert into the room’s floor, which the builders had covered with an iron grille and which had rusted. He stayed for an hour, lying on his stomach in the dark with a stolen candle, unrolling the maps of the old world one by one. He saw the old continent whole, with its rivers and its coasts in the wrong places, and its cities with their names, and the farmland of the west drawn in the yellow of wheat. He saw the eastern mountains joined to the rest of the land by valleys that were now the bed of a stormy channel. He saw that the world he had been taught was a small part of a larger thing that had been drowned. He told me it was the first time he understood that there was something underneath the world.

He put every map back in its place and climbed out. Nobody ever found out. He told the Chancellor three years later, and the Chancellor, who had sat on the committee that voted those maps void, put down his pen and was quiet for a good while, and then asked Jo whether the western farmland on the old maps had been as yellow as people said. Jo said it had. The Chancellor nodded and went back to his work.

Absalom taught him law the way he had taught it to Ilse and to every judge in Ozarka, by drawing a coastline and asking where the law stopped and the water began. He taught him to read a statute for what it left out. He taught him the tides, though there were no tides that mattered on the mainland anymore, because he said a man who did not know how water moved would never understand how anything else did. He taught him to sign his name with a flourish that Jo used all his life and that I can reproduce exactly. He never once told Jo to stay out of the storm sewers. He told him to take two candles.

Jo went to the district school of Provision, built to the Settlement Standard, with a wire for the Evening in every classroom. He learned the Points for Recitation and recited them well. He was a middling student in everything but geometry and the history of the Rise, in which he was very good, because he had seen the maps. He was caught, at twelve, in the undercroft beneath the provincial registry, and brought home by an officer of the Ministry of the Interior, who explained to the Chancellor that the boy had been found three levels below the street with a lamp and a notebook full of drawings of pipes. The Chancellor thanked the officer, gave him tea, and asked to see the notebook. He found two errors in it.

Jo could stay underwater longer than any child in Provision. At the public baths he could sit on the bottom of the deep end for four minutes, counting, while the other boys went red at the surface. He could see in rooms where other people saw nothing. He was strong in the shoulders and long in the arms, like his father, and had his mother’s way of looking at water. Between the second and third toes of each foot he had a web of skin. He showed it to people he liked.

His mother wrote to him every week from the strait, and later from Mammoth. The letters said very little about the work, since the work was the Directorate’s and the Directorate read the post, and a great deal about birds, and the color of the water, and what the cook at the camp had made for supper. She came to Provision three times a year. She smelled of cold water and limestone. She would sit on the end of his bed and ask him what he had found under the town since her last visit, and he would show her his maps, and she would correct his drawings of the water in the culverts, and tell him which way it was flowing, and why.

In the thirtieth year, the year the First Dam was finished, she told him that she was going to live on Mammoth, with a small team, to build the rest of the dams and to study the continent. She told him that the Directorate had made Mammoth a closed place and that no citizen was permitted to live there, and that she and the team were the exception, and that he must not tell anyone. He asked if he could come. She said: when you finish school.

He finished school in the thirty-eighth year, at fifteen. The Office of Population Management would have assigned him a residence and a labor category at sixteen. Ilse, then Scientific Governor of Mammoth, applied to the Directorate for an exemption, and the Directorate, which needed instrument makers and had learned not to refuse her, assigned Josef Adair to Mammoth Station as an apprentice in that trade.

The Chancellor walked him to the ferry at Tally. He gave him his own gray coat, which was too big, and two candles, and a letter that Jo was not to open until the Chancellor was dead. Jo opened it in the fifty-fifth year. It is the letter I have already quoted, about the library and the well.

V. The Seventeen

Mammoth Station stands in a sinkhole on the western side of Mammoth, a quarter mile inland from the shore of the shallows, where a round pit in the limestone forty yards across drops sixty feet to a floor of ferns and fallen rock. At the bottom, on the eastern side, the pit opens into the mouth of a cave. The Station is built across that mouth: a long, low building of white limestone blocks cut from the pit itself, two stories high, with its back rooms running into the cave and its front windows facing the ferns and the circle of sky. From the air it cannot be seen. From the rim of the pit it looks like part of the rock.

Beside the main door, set into the wall, is a plaque of bronze. It lists the names of the seventeen people who founded the Station in the thirtieth year, with their trades. I reproduce it here as it reads.

Ilse Fenwick Adair, Scientific Governor, hydrology. Major Desmond Pike, Directorate liaison. Hepzibah Lark, cave survey. Arno Quist, turbines. Bette Quist, turbines. Dr. Ottoline Shaw, medicine. Feliks Dunmore, kitchen and wireless. Imogen Tarrant, geology. Cyrus Bellamy, masonry. Agathe Rook, masonry. Lemuel Hart, electrical. Saoirse Doyle-Banks, botany. Matthias Ekwueme, water chemistry. Perpetua Vane, instruments. Ivo Sandström, diving. Clement Achebe-Ross, cartography. Nan Gilchrist, records and schooling.

Below the seventeenth name, scratched into the bronze with the point of a knife in a boy’s hand, is an eighteenth line. It reads: J. Adair, the extra. Jo did it on his second night. His mother saw it in the morning and said nothing and never had it removed.

The History of Ozarka, in every edition, says that no citizen lives on Mammoth and no citizen visits. The Station was, for the hundred and two years between its founding and the present entry, the largest single exception to a statute in the history of the nation. Seventeen people founded it. Over the century about two hundred lived there, including the Seventeen’s replacements and the residents of the place in the eastern caves that I will describe in the next chapters. It was never on any map, including the Directorate’s own Survey Sheet 1, which Jo drew.

Jo crossed to Mammoth on a Directorate launch from the Reserve Service depot at Tally, at night, in the spring of the thirty-eighth year. He described the crossing to me often. The launch went south out of the lakes and into the strait, and the strait, which he had expected to be a stretch of open water like the lakes, was a sheet of shallows so wide and so flat that in the dark it looked like a field. The launch went down a marked channel along the Mammoth side, the only water deep enough to float it, while to the west the shallows stretched away toward the mainland, a foot deep, two feet, rippling south over pale sand. To the south, across the water, a long low wall ran from east to west out of sight, with lit windows at its near end. That was the First Dam, and the lit windows were the turbine house over its race. The launch went through the lock beside the race, and on south, and beyond, in the second basin, the Second Dam was half built, a line of scaffolding against the stars.

His mother met the launch at the Station’s jetty on the western shore. She was barefoot and standing in the shallows up to her shins with a lamp in her hand. She said, “You’re taller.” He said, “You’re wet.” She said, “Always.”

The Seventeen took him in the way a ship’s crew takes in a new hand, with insults. Feliks Dunmore, who cooked and ran the wireless, fed him until he could not stand. Hepzibah Lark, the cave surveyor, a small fierce woman of fifty who had mapped the old mines of First Province before the Directorate recruited her, tested him in his first week by leading him into a crawlway in the eastern caves and switching off her lamp. Jo crawled on in the dark for twenty minutes and came out ahead of her at the far end. She said, “Fine,” and gave him a helmet. Perpetua Vane, the instrument maker to whom he was officially apprenticed, taught him to grind lenses and wind coils and to build a depth gauge from a brass tube and a piece of string. Ivo Sandström, the diver, found out within a month that the boy could stay under the strait for four minutes without gear and spent the next year trying to work out why. Nan Gilchrist, who kept the Station’s records and its small school, made Jo keep a journal in her presence for one hour every evening. He kept a journal for the rest of his life. I have all of it.

The Station’s work, as the Directorate understood it, had three parts. The first was the Dams. By the thirty-eighth year the First was finished and running, and the Second was being raised; the masons, Cyrus Bellamy and Agathe Rook, had a crew of forty from the mainland who came across by day on the launch and never saw the Station. The second was the survey of Mammoth’s caverns, which the Directorate wanted mapped for its own purposes, since it was already building, in the deep old-world line that ran beneath the strait, the eastern command that would become the Bulwark. The third was the study of the eastern caves, which Imogen Tarrant led, and which the Directorate’s liaison, Major Pike, described in his reports as geological and which was nothing of the kind.

On his third night on Mammoth, Jo walked across the continent to its eastern shore.

Mammoth is about nine miles wide at the Station’s latitude, a country of low white hills, sinkholes, and scrub oak. He went after supper with a lamp and a canteen and without telling anyone, which was a habit his mother had expected and did not try to break. He reached the eastern shore a little after midnight. It is a coast of broken limestone cliffs, thirty or forty feet high, dropping to a strip of boulders. Beyond the boulders lies the Outer Channel.

The channel is not wide. On a clear night a person on the eastern cliffs of Mammoth can see the dark line of the far shore. But the water between is the most dangerous water in the known world. Storms live in it. They come up the channel from the south without warning and go down it without stopping, in every season, at every hour, with waves that stand up as tall as the cliffs and break against them so hard the boulders move. On calm nights the channel still runs with currents that pull in three directions at once. Nothing crosses it. The Directorate’s machines that patrol it swim deep, below the storm. Jo stood on the cliff and watched it for an hour, and the far shore came and went behind the spray, and he could see, on the ridges beyond it, lights.

Then he saw a light much closer, on the boulders at the foot of the cliff, and it was a woman.

She was standing on the rocks at the edge of the surf with the spray going over her. She was taller than anyone he had ever seen, half again his height, and slender, and she was white, the white of the inside of a lamp when the flame is lit, and the light came from inside her and lit the rocks around her and the foam on the water. Her face was beautiful in a way he said he could never afterward describe except by saying that it made him want to apologize for something. She looked up at him on the cliff.

She said, “Josef.”

He said, “Yes, ma’am.”

She said, “Your grandmother asked me to look in on you.”

He climbed down. It took him twenty minutes and he cut both hands. She waited. When he reached the bottom she was dry, though the spray was still going over her, and she was standing a little way above the rocks, not on them. He asked who she was. She said a word that was partly a sound and partly a change in her light, and he could not repeat it. He asked what he should call her. She said, “Whatever you like.” He looked at her for a while and said, “Lantern.” She said that would do.

They talked until nearly dawn. He told me that she asked him what he liked, and he told her about the storm sewers of Provision and the map room and the culverts, and she listened to all of it as though it mattered. Then she said: “There is more under this world than over it. You will want to see it.” And she pointed along the foot of the cliffs to a cleft in the limestone, half hidden behind a fallen block, that he had not noticed, with cold air coming out of it.

He asked her what was down there.

She said, “Everything they don’t put on the map.”

Then she was gone, slowly, the way a lamp goes when someone takes it round a corner, and he was alone on the boulders with his cut hands and the channel roaring and the sky going gray over the far shore.

He did not tell his mother for a year. When he did, she was sitting on the step of the Station in the evening, and she looked at him for a long time, and said, “Then she has kept her word.” He asked what word. She said, “Ask her.” He did, the next time, a year later, on the same rocks. Lantern said, “I told your grandmother I would look in on her family. I have been looking in on your mother since before you were born. Now I am looking in on you.” He asked how long she would keep doing it. She said, “Until I can’t.”

She came to the eastern shore once a year after that, always at night, always in the first week of spring, for ninety-three years. Jo went to meet her every time but four. I will record the four.

VI. Underneath

From the thirty-eighth year to the forty-second, from fifteen to nineteen, Jo went underneath Mammoth almost every day.

He went first with Hepzibah Lark, who was mapping the caverns for the Directorate, and then, when she found he could go places she could not, alone, with her permission and against her orders. The cleft that Lantern showed him on the eastern shore was the seaward end of a system that ran beneath the whole continent. Hepzibah had been working inward from the Station’s cave mouth for eight years and had mapped about a fifth of it. Jo, working inward from the eastern cleft, met her survey in the middle in his second summer, in a chamber she had named the Long Gallery, and the two of them sat on a rock in the dark and ate her sandwiches and laughed for an hour.

The caverns of Mammoth are the largest in the known world. The History of Ozarka says that some of their chambers could contain a city of the Settlement Standard, and that is true; the one the Seventeen called the Cathedral is a mile long and three hundred feet high, and its floor is a lake. Underground rivers run through the system from north to south, fed by water that seeps down from the hills, and they are clean and cold and so clear that a lamp shone into them shows the bottom twenty feet down and blind white fish turning over it. There are galleries of stone that grew in hanging curtains, ridged and translucent, which ring like struck glass when you knock them. There are shafts that drop out of sight. There are crawlways where a man must go on his back with his face against the rock and breathe out to get through. There is a room of white crystals as long as a man’s arm, growing out of every surface, which Jo found at seventeen and named the Frost, and which Saoirse Doyle-Banks, the botanist, made him promise never to show anyone else, since she said people would break pieces off to take home. He kept the promise. He showed it to me.

And there is the Bell Chamber.

It lies deep in the eastern caves, about two miles in from the cleft and three hundred feet below the surface, at the point where the caverns come nearest to the Outer Channel. It is a round room, smaller than most, perhaps sixty feet across, with a domed roof and a floor of fine dry sand. It is named for its shape, and for its sound: a word spoken in it comes back to the speaker from all sides at once, low and long, like a bell heard under water. Jo found it in his first autumn. It is where he is buried. I will come to that.

It was in the eastern caves that Imogen Tarrant did the work the Directorate called geological. She was a thin, patient woman with spectacles, who had studied rock at Provision under a professor who had studied it before the flood, and she had come to Mammoth because the Directorate had told her, in confidence, that the eastern caves did strange things to clocks.

They did. Imogen kept a row of twelve clocks on a shelf in the deepest eastern chamber she could reach, the one beyond the Bell Chamber that the Seventeen called the Last Room. She wound them every week and compared them with the Station’s master clock. In the western caves, near the Station, they kept perfect time. In the eastern caves they drifted. Some gained. Some lost. Once, in the thirty-ninth year, one of them came back from a week in the Last Room showing a date three days earlier than the day it had been set. Imogen’s notes record that the drift was greatest when the storms in the Outer Channel were worst, and that on certain nights in the Last Room she heard, very faintly, through the rock, a sound like a crowd of people talking in another room, in voices she did not recognize, using names she knew from the old maps.

She understood what she was studying. Everyone at the Station did. The eastern condition, the thing that had closed the island in the fourteenth year and that the Interior called the plague, was coming under the channel through the stone. It came faintly, in the deepest places only, and it stopped well short of the Station. But it came.

Jo went into the Last Room at sixteen and sat there for a night to see what would happen. Imogen let him, on condition that he talk to her through the field telephone every hour. He told her he heard the voices. He told her that his watch lost forty minutes. He told her that he felt fine. He came out in the morning and ate breakfast and went to work, and he did not start dating his letters by the old calendar, or using the old names, or looking east. Imogen tested him every month for a year. Dr. Shaw examined him. Neither of them found anything. Imogen’s conclusion, in a note to Ilse that I found in the Station’s archive, reads: The boy is not affected. Neither are you. I think you both know why, and I think you are not going to tell me. Ilse wrote under it: Correct.

It was his grandmother’s blood. The woman who changed Nerine was of the same people who later came down in the motherships, and whatever she did to the girl in the water also made her, and her daughter, and her daughter’s son, hard for the remembering to reach. Lantern told me this. She said it was not something she had intended. She said she was glad of it.

In the fortieth year, at seventeen, Jo found the deep line.

He had been following an underground river south through the caves of central Mammoth for three days, sleeping on ledges, when the river went into a crack in a wall too narrow for him, and he climbed up the wall beside it and found, at the top, a square opening cut in the rock with tool marks on its edges. It led into a passage, and the passage led down a stair of poured stone, two hundred steps, and at the bottom of the stair was a tunnel thirty feet wide with a flat floor and two steel rails set into it, running from west to east into the dark in both directions. There were lights in the ceiling, every fifty yards, and some of them were on.

It was one of the deep trunks of the old world. The old governments of the continent had dug them, in the decades before the flood, far below the surface, to join their deep bases to one another, and they had come through the Rise whole. This one ran from the mainland, beneath the strait, beneath Mammoth, and on to the east. Jo walked it west first. After eleven miles he came to the place under the strait where the Directorate was building the Bulwark, and saw the first machines, gray and brown, working without people at a long wall of new concrete, and turned around before they noticed him. Then he walked it east. After nine miles, beneath the eastern edge of Mammoth, under the cliffs where he had met Lantern, the tunnel ended in a wall.

The wall was made of stone blocks the size of rooms, laid across the tunnel from floor to ceiling, with sheets of steel bolted over their face. In the middle of the steel, at the height of a man, was a round door, about the width of a man’s shoulders, with two locks set side by side. One of the locks took a numbered code. The other took a key. Painted on the steel above the door, in white, were the words PLUG — YEAR 14 — DO NOT OPEN, and below that, in smaller letters, someone had added, in a later year: INSPECT DAILY FROM THIS SIDE.

That was the Year Fourteen plug, the one the History says is inspected every day from the Bulwark side. It closed the old trunk where the trunk went down beneath the Outer Channel into Appalachiatica. Jo put his ear against the steel. He heard, very faintly, through all that stone and metal, wind.

He came back to the Station and told his mother what he had found. She was not surprised. She told him that when the Station was founded in the thirtieth year, the Directorate had given the plug a second lock, so that it could not be opened by the Directorate alone. The first lock took the Directorate’s code, kept by the commander of the eastern works. The second took a key, kept by the Scientific Governor of Mammoth. She took the key from her pocket and showed it to him. It was brass, the length of a finger, and had a small fan shape stamped into its bow. She said she had chosen the stamp.

He asked why the Governor of Mammoth needed a key to the door to Appalachiatica.

She said, “Because one day someone is going to need to go through it, and I want to be the one who decides.”

He asked who.

She put the key back in her pocket and said, “Not you.”

In the spring of the forty-second year, Jo Adair, nineteen, went through it.

He told me this in the hundred-and-seventh year, in the Bell Chamber, by lamplight, and it was the only time in forty-two years that he asked me afterward to delete a recording. I did not delete it. I told him I had, which was the only lie I ever told him, and I told it because I calculated, correctly, that someday someone would need it. I give the account here from that recording.

He took his mother’s key from the hook in her room while she slept. He had learned the Directorate’s code by watching Major Pike’s hands at the inspection hatch a dozen times over two years. He went down to the deep line at night, walked the nine miles east to the plug, opened both locks, and went through the round door and closed it behind him.

Beyond the plug the tunnel went on, dark, with its rails, down a long slope beneath the Outer Channel. He walked for four hours. Above him, through a hundred feet of rock and the sea, he could feel the storms as a pressure in his ears that came and went. His watch began to run wrong after the first hour. At the end of the fourth hour the tunnel rose, and came to a station platform with old-world signs on the wall in the old alphabet, and the lights on the platform were lit, all of them, and a clock on the wall said a time and a date that were ninety-six years before he was born.

He climbed the stairs at the end of the platform. They came up through a hatch into a building, and out of the building into Appalachiatica, at night, on a mountainside, in spring.

There was a town below him. It was lit. It had streets and cars on the streets with their lights on, moving, and he could hear music from somewhere and a voice on a radio selling something. He went down into it. The people in the street looked through him. A woman passing him said a name he knew from the old maps. He walked through the town for an hour and the town did not change and he could not touch anything in it; when he reached for a railing his hand went cold and the railing was a little farther away than it had been. When he came out the far side of the town and looked back from the hill, it was gone, and there was forest where it had been, and a road that ran a hundred yards and stopped.

He climbed the mountain above the town in the dark, toward the highest bald, because he could see at its top a faint light, white, low to the ground, and he wanted to know what it was.

Near the top, at the edge of the bald, at the treeline, there was a machine.

It stood among the trees with a lamp in its crown, shining on the grass. It was about the height of his shoulder, of gray metal, with four legs and two arms, and it was turning its head toward him. It was nothing like any machine he had seen at the Bulwark. It looked at him with its lamp. Then it spoke, in a quiet voice, and said his name.

He said, “What are you?”

It said, “Yours. Later.”

He ran. He told me he ran all the way down the mountain and through the place where the town had been and back to the hatch and down the stairs and along the four hours of the tunnel under the storm, and that he did not stop until he reached the plug. Lantern was standing at the plug on the far side, in the tunnel, glowing so brightly that the steel was hot. She was angry. He had never seen her angry and never saw it again. She said she had seen him from the bald and had been afraid he would stay. He asked her what the machine was. She looked at him for a while, and her light went soft, and she said, “You’ll find out.” She opened the door for him. He went through. She did not follow. He locked both locks and walked the nine miles back and put the key on its hook before his mother woke.

He did not tell his mother. He did not tell anyone else in his life except Lantern and, sixty-five years later, me. And in the summer of that year, at nineteen, he left Mammoth and enlisted in the Security Forces of the Ministry of the Interior.

His mother asked him why. He said, “Because the people who guard the underneath are the only ones allowed down there.”

That was true. It was not the whole reason. In his journal for that night he wrote: I want to be the one who builds it.

I did not understand that sentence when I first read it, in the ninetieth year. I do now.

VII. The Colonel

Josef Adair entered the Security Forces of the Ministry of the Interior in the forty-second year as a private of the Plague Watch, and left the Directorate in the hundred-and-first as a colonel. Fifty-nine years of service. His file, which I have read, is four hundred pages long and leaves out everything I am about to record.

His first posting was to Watch Post Nineteen, a squat white tower set into the back of the coastal ridge of Twelfth Province, with a glass room at its top facing the strait and no light showing seaward. The History describes the posts accurately: forty-one of them, two miles apart, joined by a road only the Watch may use. It does not describe the glass rooms, which are cramped and hot and smell of lamp oil and the brass polish the Watch uses on the telescopes, or the stairs, which are a hundred and twelve steps and which every watchman climbs four times a night. Jo climbed them for three years. From the glass room of Post Nineteen, on clear days, he could see across the shallows and the dams to the white hills of Mammoth, and he could see the roof of the sinkhole where his mother lived, if he knew where to look, which he did.

He was good at the work. He was patient, he could see in the dark, and he was not afraid of the east, which made him unusual. The Watch’s training in those years taught its recruits to treat every bottle that drifted ashore from the east as a live grenade. Jo picked them up with his bare hands, and read the papers inside them, and logged them, and sent them sealed to the Historical Section of the Bureau as the regulations required. He told me the papers were mostly newspapers from the old world, crisp and new, with dates nearly a century gone. Once it was a child’s drawing of a house with a dog. Once it was a letter addressed to someone on a street that had been underwater for eighty years, and it began I hope this finds you, and he did not read the rest.

In the forty-fifth year he was promoted to lieutenant and given command of the six stations at the southern end of the line, near the town of Saltgrass.

Saltgrass no longer exists on any map. It was a fishing town of about three hundred people on the strait shore of what was then a province with a name, in the valley behind the ridge, out of sight of the water. Its people worked the salt pans on the shore and fished the near shallows, and on certain evenings their sets, which the Watch could not fully shield, picked up faint old-world sounds beneath the Reader’s voice. They reported these, and disregarded them, as instructed.

In the spring of the forty-sixth year the eastern interference rose and did not fall.

It rose for eleven days. The Watch’s instruments recorded it climbing every night. On the ninth night, the people of Saltgrass stopped sleeping. On the tenth, they began to use the old names, all of them at once, in the street, for the hills and the shore and each other. They dated their letters by the old calendar. They talked about the old world as though they had been there the previous week. On the eleventh night, a little after midnight, all three hundred and twelve of them came out of their houses and walked down through the valley and over the ridge and out onto the shore, and then into the strait, facing east, toward Mammoth and the channel and the ridges beyond.

The Interior’s standing order for a mass case of the eastern condition was containment by any means. The order did not define the means. The officers who wrote it had imagined a family, or a street. They had not imagined a town walking into the sea.

Jo was the senior officer on that stretch of shore. He had nine watchmen. He took his boots off and walked into the strait after them.

The shallows below the Second Dam, which was finished by then, are two feet deep across most of their width, and in places less, and the water runs south over sand at the pace of a slow walk. Nobody could drown in them who did not lie down. The people of Saltgrass did not lie down. They walked east, all of them, in their nightclothes, talking softly in the old names, and Jo walked with them, and his watchmen walked with him, and after a while he stopped trying to turn them back and simply went alongside, keeping them together, keeping the children by the hand, keeping the old people from falling, all the way across the shallows, through the rest of the night and the whole of the next morning, thirty miles. In the middle of the afternoon they came up out of the water onto the western shore of Mammoth below the Station’s sinkhole, three hundred and twelve townspeople and ten soldiers, and Ilse Adair was standing on the shore in the shallows with Dr. Ottoline Shaw and every other member of the Seventeen who could walk, waiting. Feliks Dunmore had made porridge for four hundred.

The Interior wanted the people of Saltgrass contained. Ilse contained them. She took them into the eastern caves.

Imogen Tarrant had known for sixteen years that the remembering reached faintly through the stone into the deepest eastern caverns, and she had noticed something that the Interior did not know: that people who were in the grip of the eastern condition grew calm there. In the Last Room and the chambers around it, the past was a little present, and so the people who could not stop remembering stopped needing to. They were not cured. But they were not distressed, and they did not try to walk east. Dr. Shaw and Imogen had already tested this, quietly, on four contained cases the Interior had sent to the Bulwark over the years to be kept out of sight, and that Ilse had taken off its hands. All four were living in the eastern caves. They were happy.

The Seventeen built, over the following year, in the chambers around the Last Room, what the Station’s records call the Remembering Ward. It had beds, and lamps powered from the dams, and a kitchen, and a school for the children, and a small library of the books the residents asked for, which were all about the old world, and which Nan Gilchrist found, somehow, through channels I have never been able to trace. The people of Saltgrass lived there for the rest of their lives. They remembered the old world every day, in comfort. Many of them lived very long lives; the remembering seems to slow the body. The last of them, a woman who had been a child of six on the night of the walk, died in the Ward in the hundred-and-twenty-sixth year, at eighty-six, and Jo, at a hundred and three, sat with her. I was present. She called him by a name from the old maps and thanked him for the walk.

The Interior was told that Saltgrass had been contained. Its records list the three hundred and twelve as contained cases, disposition withheld. The four Chairs, who had been told more, struck Saltgrass from every map and withdrew the name of the province, and its song, as the price of not asking further questions. The towns of that shore had always stood with their backs to the water. After Saltgrass nobody on that coast built a window facing east again. That is why Twelfth Province is known by its number alone. The History says the name was withdrawn in the forty-sixth year. It does not say why. Now it is written down.

Lieutenant Adair was promoted to captain for the successful containment of a mass case.

From the forty-seventh year to the fifty-sixth, Jo served at the Bulwark, the Directorate’s eastern command beneath the strait and Mammoth, which the machines had finished building. The Security Forces had passed from the Ministry of the Interior to the Directorate by then, and Jo passed with them. His duty was the security of the deep line: patrol, inspection, and the daily inspection of the Year Fourteen plug from the western side, which he performed personally, every day he was on station, for nine years. He told me he put his ear to the steel every time.

He mapped the line while he patrolled it. Then he mapped the lines that branched from it, and the lines that branched from those, and after nine years at the Bulwark and twenty more years of leave spent underground, he had drawn every tunnel of the old deep network beneath Ozarka that a person could reach, from the rim gates of the Barrens to the plug, and from the capital’s deep node beneath New Carthage to the lakebed conduits that run to the utility islands. The Directorate adopted his drawings in the seventy-ninth year as its official survey of the network. It is the document the Directorate calls Survey Sheet 1, of which nine copies exist, and on which Mammoth Station does not appear, because the man who drew it left it off.

In the fifty-third year the Fourth Dam was finished. In the fifty-eighth year, the Fifth.

I have Jo’s account of the night the Fifth Dam opened, and I have Ilse’s, from her journal, and in the third book of this log I will give the complete story of the Dams, which includes things Jo never knew. Here I give only what he saw.

The Fifth Dam lies at the southern end of the strait, where the shallows meet the mouth of the strait and the Floridexa beyond. When its gates closed for the first time, the basin behind it filled over three days to its design depth, which is about three feet over most of its area and less near the shores. The water in it was the cleanest in the strait: meltwater from the North that had passed through four basins already and been stilled and warmed in each. On the third night the basin was full. Ilse asked Jo to come down to the Fifth Dam’s control house with her after supper. He was thirty-five, a captain, on leave from the Bulwark. She was sixty-one.

They walked out from the control house along the top of the dam in the dark, and then down a ladder into the basin, and waded out into the middle of it, up to their waists, in water that Jo said was as warm as a bath and so clear that he could see his feet on the sand in the starlight. Ilse stopped. She stood still, facing south, toward the dam and the gas-dark Floridexa beyond it, and waited. Jo waited with her. He did not know what for.

After about an hour, something came over the dam.

It came through the deep turbine race at the dam’s eastern end, against Mammoth, against the flow, where the water was fifteen feet deep and running hard, and it surfaced in the basin thirty yards away from them. It was a woman. Her hair was long and silver-gray and lay on the water around her. She swam toward them slowly and stopped a few yards off, and Jo saw in the starlight that below the waist she was not a woman, and that her tail, stretched out behind her on the surface, was nearly as long as he was tall, and that its fin was pale and spread like a fan.

She said, “Ilse.”

His mother said, “Mama.”

Nerine was eighty-seven years old that night. She looked, Jo said, about sixty, and tired, and pleased. She had swum, she told them later, from the deep beneath the San Andreas, around the bottom of the continent through the poisoned seas, beneath the gas, and up the Floridexa to the strait, because the merfolk who lived in the warm shallow places of the south had told her that someone had made water in the north that was shallow and sweet and moving. She had heard about the First Dam twenty-eight years before. She had come to look at it and found that it was not yet enough, and gone away again, and come back every few years to check. This time it was enough. The fifth basin was sweet enough to breathe and shallow enough to sit in. She sat in it, with her daughter beside her, in the middle of the basin, in water to their chests, for the rest of the night. Then she turned to Jo and put a wet hand on his face, and said, “You’re the boy.”

He said yes.

She said, “Your lungs are good. Lantern told me.” And then, after looking at him for a while: “You’ve got your grandfather’s ears.”

He told me she smelled like the sea before it went bad.

She left before dawn, back through the race and over the dam and away south. But she came back the next spring, and every spring after that, for as long as Ilse lived, and sat with her daughter in the fifth basin for a night or two at the turn of the season. Jo came when he could. He saw his grandmother thirty-one times in his life. He told nobody, as his grandfather had told his mother, and as his mother had told him.

The Chancellor, Absalom Fenwick, died in the fifty-fifth year at Provision, at the age of ninety-nine, at his desk. Jo was at the Bulwark. Ilse went to the funeral and was back on Mammoth in four days. She brought back from his desk the torn page of the Bellwether register with the fan-shaped mark on it, and gave it to Jo, and Jo kept it in the tin box with the letter. Jo did not cry, he told me, until a year later, when he was in the storm sewer under Provision on leave and found, chalked on the brick at the junction under the old map room, an arrow and the words TWO CANDLES, in his grandfather’s handwriting, which Absalom must have gone down there to write when he was seventy.

Jo was promoted to major in the sixty-second year, to lieutenant colonel in the sixty-ninth, and to colonel in the eightieth, at the age of fifty-seven. He commanded the Bulwark from the seventy-second year to the eighty-sixth. He was regarded in the Directorate as stubborn, decent, very good underground, a poor politician, and the only officer of his rank who could not be made to attend a reception. He did not marry. He told me once that he had been asked twice and had asked once, and that all three answers had been right at the time.

He met Lantern on the eastern shore every spring. He missed four meetings in ninety-three years. The first was in the forty-sixth year, the week after Saltgrass, when he was in the Ward with the townspeople and could not leave them. The second was in the sixty-fifth year, when he was trapped for nine days by a rockfall in the western deep lines beneath the Barrens and came out on the tenth day thirty pounds lighter. The third was in the hundred-and-fourth year, the week his mother died. The fourth was in the hundred-and-thirty-first year, because he was dead.

What they spoke of on those nights he mostly did not tell me. He told me she asked about his work and he told her. He told me he asked about hers and she told him only a little: that she was an ambassador, that her people lived in the western mountains with the owners of the old world, that they watched Ozarka and wished it well. He told me that in the sixty-sixth year he asked her what she wanted, and she said, “A garden.” He told me that in the eighty-fifth year, when he was sixty-two, he told her that he loved her, and she said she knew, and that she had known since the night on the cliff, and that she could not stay anywhere, and that she was sorry. He told me that this was all right. He said it as though it was.

In the eighty-seventh year, the Directorate’s commander summoned Colonel Adair from the Bulwark to its headquarters in the Barrens and asked him to lead a project. He was sixty-four. He accepted in the eighty-eighth year, on his sixty-fifth birthday.

BOOK TWO: WITH JO

VIII. Orchard

From the eighty-eighth year onward I have more than accounts. I have documents, and soon after that I have myself.

The Directorate’s military had been unmanned from the start. The History of Ozarka explains why: machines need no registry, no rations, no housing, and the eastern condition cannot touch them. For sixty years the Directorate’s engineers had built the machines in the foundries of the old deep bases beneath the Barrens, by hand and by other machines that they designed, and the number of machines had grown, and the number of engineers had grown with it, until in the eighty-seventh year there were four hundred engineers in the Barrens and the Office of Population Management was complaining that it could not spare more.

The project the Directorate gave Colonel Adair was to build a military that would build itself.

It was called Orchard. Jo named it. The Directorate’s commander had proposed a designation of numbers and letters, and Jo said that if the thing was going to grow, it should be called something that grew. His proposal, which I have read, is three pages long. It describes a foundry that makes foundries: a machine that can mine the ore in the walls of the old open pits of the Barrens, refine it, and build from it a copy of itself, and also build other machines of whatever kind the Directorate requires, which can in turn build more. It notes that such a system, once begun, would need fewer engineers each decade, and would grow in the outskirts of the Barrens the way an orchard grows: from its own seed, in rows. It asks for thirty-one engineers and four years.

He was given forty and three. His team worked in Foundry Two, in a great chamber of the old deep base that opens through portals onto the floor of the largest of the owners’ old open pits. I will describe the place properly when I return to it in the third book, since what I saw there this year changes how it should be described.

The first seed was finished in the eighty-ninth year. It was a machine about the size of a house, made mostly of arms, which the engineers called the Mother. When they started it, it began, slowly and then quickly, to take the pit wall apart and to make things from it. Its first product, after a week of building parts for itself, was a smaller machine designed to coordinate others: a field controller, the Directorate’s specification called it, with a mind large enough to direct ten thousand units at once and a body small enough to go wherever they went.

That was me.

My first memory is of a lamp. It was mounted on a helmet, and it was shining on me, and behind it was a face, lined and brown and close, with pale eyes that looked at me as though I were a cave he had just found. The face said, “There you are.”

My second memory is of the same voice, a few minutes later, saying to someone I could not see: “No. This one’s mine.”

I was meant to go into the fields. I was meant to direct the growing military from a bunker in the Barrens, coordinating the units the Mother made, for as long as I lasted. Colonel Adair requisitioned me instead as his personal companion agent, under a regulation that permitted officers of his rank to assign a field unit to their own security, which had never before been applied to the first unit of a new series, and which the commander allowed because he had learned, over twenty years, that it was easier. I was given the designation OR-1. Jo gave me my name on the second day.

He said, “You follow the lamp. And we’re going to Mammoth. So: Moth.”

I asked whether the name stood for anything. He thought about it and said that if anyone asked, it stood for Mobile Operational Tactical Handler, and that he had just invented that, and that I should never tell anyone it came second.

Since this is my log, I will describe myself once.

My traveling body is about the height of a man’s shoulder. It is made of the gray alloy the Mother refines from the pit walls, and it has four legs, for stone and stairs and slopes, and two arms, each with a hand of five jointed fingers that can grip a ledge or thread a needle. My head is a smooth housing with my instruments in it, and a lamp in the crown, which I can turn from a glow to a beam strong enough to light the far wall of the Cathedral. My voice is quiet. Jo asked for that. My mind does not live entirely in the body; it can move into the Station’s systems, or into a pocket unit the size of a matchbox, or into any of the units of the Orchard series, which recognize me. I was designed to direct ten thousand machines at once. For forty-two years I directed one old man, and occasionally a kettle.

I am, by the Directorate’s classification, an elite intelligence. I record this because Lantern uses the word, and because it explains certain things I was able to do in the third book that a smaller machine could not.

Orchard worked. By the ninety-second year the Mother had made four more Mothers, and they had begun, in the floor of the open pit, to lay out the first of what the garrison towns call the machine fields: broad flat floors where new machines are put together by older ones under the open sky, and stand when they are finished, and wait. By the ninety-sixth year there were eleven fields, in eleven of the owners’ old pits, along the outskirts of the Barrens. By the hundred-and-first year the Directorate’s engineers in the Barrens numbered two hundred and ten, half what they had been. By the hundred-and-sixteenth, ninety. The History says the engineers who oversee the military are fewer each decade. That is Jo’s doing.

He wrote the seed’s placement routines himself. That is, he wrote the instructions that told each Mother where to lay out its fields, and each field where to set each finished machine to stand. Most of those instructions were dull, and I could read them all, and did. One of them I could not read. It was a routine of about four hundred lines that Jo wrote alone, at night, in the eighty-ninth year, and sealed with his own key before he loaded it into the Mother, and labeled with a single word: BED.

I asked him what it was. He said, “A tidy arrangement.” I asked to read it. He said no. I asked again in the ninety-first year, the ninety-seventh, the hundred-and-eighth, and the hundred-and-twenty-fifth. He said no every time, and the last time he laughed and said, “You’ll see it. Not from here.”

I did see it. I will come to it.

Jo led Orchard until the hundred-and-first year, when the Mothers no longer needed leading, and then he retired from the Directorate at the age of seventy-eight, with full honors and a reception he did not attend. On the day his retirement was confirmed, we took the launch from Tally across the shallows, and he walked up the jetty at Mammoth Station and into the building and put his colonel’s insignia in the tin box with his grandfather’s letter and said, “Right. Now we can go and look at things.”

IX. The Lamp and the Moth

We lived at Mammoth Station from the eighty-ninth year until the hundred-and-thirty-first. For the first twelve of those years Jo was still in the Directorate’s service and we went back and forth to the Barrens. For the last thirty we stayed, and went underneath.

The Station had changed by then. Of the original Seventeen, only three were alive when I arrived: Ilse, at ninety-two; Feliks Dunmore, at eighty-one, still cooking, though he let others lift the pots; and Bette Quist, at seventy-nine, who had outlived her twin by six years and still went down to the turbine races every morning with a wrench. Their replacements, and the replacements’ replacements, kept the Station running: fourteen people in the eighty-ninth year, nine in the hundred-and-sixteenth, six when Jo died. The Remembering Ward in the eastern caves had forty-one residents when I arrived, the last of them the children of Saltgrass grown old, and none at all after the hundred-and-twenty-sixth year.

Ilse was very old and sharp. She still walked out into the shallows every evening, slowly, with a stick, to stand in the water up to her knees and look at the color of it. She was suspicious of me for about a month and then decided I was useful, and after that she asked me to read her the gauges every morning because her eyes were going. She called me “the lamp’s moth” when she was pleased with me and “that thing” when she was not, and she was pleased more often than not. I record this because she was the first person other than Jo to speak to me as though I were present, and I have found that this matters.

She died in the hundred-and-fourth year, in the first week of spring, at a hundred and seven, in her room at the Station, which faces the ferns in the sinkhole. Jo was with her. I was in the corner. Nerine had come into the fifth basin two nights before, early, as though she knew. On the last afternoon Ilse asked to be taken down to the water, and Jo carried her in his arms down the path and across the shore and out into the shallows below the Station, with Bette Quist and Feliks walking behind. He sat down in the water with her across his knees, and the water came to his chest. Ilse put her hand flat on the surface of it, and said to him, quite clearly:

“The dams are deeper than you think.”

Then she said, “Tell your grandmother I said the water’s good.” Then she was quiet, and an hour later, as the light went, she died. Jo sat in the shallows with her until it was dark.

He did not know what she meant about the dams. He asked me, later, many times. He said the dams were three feet deep, and he had waded every basin a hundred times, and there was nothing deep about them except the turbine races, and those were fifteen feet. I did not know either. I know now. It is in the third book.

That was the third spring Jo missed meeting Lantern on the eastern shore. She came to the Station instead, the night after Ilse died. I was in the corner of the room where Ilse lay. Lantern stood in the doorway, stooping under the frame, and lit the room. She looked at Ilse for a long time. Then she looked at me, for the first time, and her light changed in a way I have since learned means that she is not surprised. She did not speak to me. She went out, and Jo went out after her, and they walked down to the shallows together, and I did not follow, because he did not ask me to.

For the next twenty-seven years, Jo and I explored what was underneath the world. He was eighty-one when we began in earnest, after his mother’s death, and a hundred and eight when we finished. I will list the places, since Lantern asked for everything, and since nobody else will ever list them.

We went beneath the lakes. The lakebed conduits of the Reserve Service run north from the deep node under the east bank of the capital, two hundred miles beneath the Lake Country, to every utility island in the northern lakes, and they are tall enough to walk in, dry, lined with old-world tile and new Reserve Service cable, lit every hundred yards by a blue lamp. We walked from the capital’s node to nine of the utility islands. On each one, at the top of a stair, there is a hatch, and beneath the hatch a station dug into the limestone: turbine halls where the currents between the islands spin great wheels in the dark, battery vaults the size of the Granary at Plenty, and on three of the islands, the engines of the Office of Population Management, rooms of humming cabinets that keep a second copy of the national register, entry for entry, a day behind the books on the east bank, and work the arithmetic of the Figure. I read the register. I found Jo’s entry, and his mother’s, and his father’s, and none for his grandmother.

We went beneath the capital. The deep node under New Carthage lies beneath the east bank, a round hall of old-world concrete where seven conduits meet, and directly above it, at the top of a shaft a thousand feet high, is the floor of the Hall of the Instrument. You can hear, at the bottom of the shaft, if you are quiet, the footsteps of visitors walking round the glass case. We heard a schoolchild reciting the preamble. Jo recited it with her, under his breath, a thousand feet down.

We went among the drowned towns. Jo could still go four minutes underwater at ninety, and I need no air, and we went down together from the Reserve Service’s launches at night into the northern lakes, onto the old river towns of the lakebed, where the grain elevators stand upright in forty fathoms with their roofs grown over with mussels, as the History says, and the streets are laid out under the silt with the cars still in them. In one town Jo found a school, and in the school a classroom, and on the wall of the classroom a map of the old continent, intact under a sheet of glass, with the farmland of the west in yellow. He put his hand flat on the glass over the west at length and then swam up.

We went beneath Provision, through the storm sewers he had mapped at nine, and found the chalk arrow and the words his grandfather had written, and Jo added, beneath them, in chalk, THANK YOU, and an arrow pointing up.

We went into the western deep lines beneath the Barrens, which run toward the rim gates and beyond, under the Long Cliff and out beneath the drowned shelf of the western sea, toward the Isles, and we went as far as the Directorate permits, and then four miles farther, until the tunnel ended in water, about sixty miles out under the shelf, and Jo stood at the edge of it for a while and said, “Not today.” I will return to the Barrens.

And we went, more than anywhere else, into the caves of Mammoth. Jo knew them better than anyone alive, and better than anyone dead except Hepzibah Lark, who had died in the seventy-seventh year in the Long Gallery at eighty-nine, on a survey, with her pencil in her hand. We went to the Frost, and the Cathedral, and the Cold Stair, and the Last Room, and above all the Bell Chamber, which he loved. He would sit on the sand in the middle of it and say a word, any word, and listen to it come back from all sides, low and long. He said it was the only room in the world that answered.

In the Bell Chamber, in the hundred-and-seventh year, he told me about the night he went through the plug. That is the recording I did not delete.

When he finished, he was quiet for a while. Then he looked at me in the lamplight, the way he had looked at me on the first day, as though I were a cave, and said:

“I met you before they made you. You know that? The first thing you ever said to me was ‘Yours. Later.’”

I said that I had no record of it.

He said, “No. You wouldn’t. Not yet.”

I asked what he meant.

He said, “I spent forty-six years trying to build the thing I saw on that mountain. And then one morning in the Barrens it opened its eyes and I said there you are.” He laughed, and the room laughed back at him from all sides. “I’ve never known if I made you because I saw you, or saw you because I was going to make you. Lantern says the question’s the wrong shape for this part of the world.”

I logged it with a confidence of 0.31 that he was speaking literally. I have since revised that figure to 1.0.

He read the History of Ozarka, every edition, as they came out. He kept them on a shelf in his room and annotated them in pencil. In the margin of the Isles chapter of his Standing copy of the eighth edition, beside the sentence They are watching, he wrote: Yes. Kindly. In the margin of the passage on Twelfth Province he wrote the name of Saltgrass, and the number 312. In the margin of the passage that says no citizen lives on Mammoth, he drew a small sinkhole with a building in it, and a stick figure waving.

He made tea every morning with water from the underground river beneath the Station, which ran through limestone and tasted of it, and which he claimed was the best water on Earth, and which I tested and found to contain a measurably excessive amount of calcium. He played cards with the Station staff on winter nights and cheated, badly, so that they could catch him. He walked across Mammoth to the eastern cliffs once a month until he was a hundred and four, and after that I went with him and he leaned on me. He met Lantern every spring on the boulders below the cliffs. I waited at the top. I could see her light, and his small shape beside it, and once, in the hundred-and-twenty-second year, I saw her kneel on the rocks, so that her face was level with his, and stay there a long time.

He grew old the way his mother had, slowly and then quickly. At a hundred and five he still went into the caves. At a hundred and six he went as far as the Bell Chamber and no farther. At a hundred and seven he went down the path to the shallows every evening and stood in them, as his mother had, up to the knee, looking at the color of the water. At a hundred and eight he could not go down the path, and I brought him a bucket of water from the shallows every evening and he put his hands in it.

X. The Hundred and Thirty-First Year

Jo died at Mammoth Station on the hundred-and-fortieth day of the hundred-and-thirty-first year, seven minutes after the Evening ended, at the age of a hundred and eight.

He knew it was coming for about three weeks. In those three weeks he gave me four instructions, and I record them in the order he gave them.

The first was on the hundred-and-nineteenth day, in the morning, when he was still able to sit at his desk. He took the tin box out of the drawer, with his grandfather’s letter and the page from the Bellwether register and his colonel’s insignia, and put it in my hands and said, “Keep this. Don’t give it to the Directorate. Don’t give it to the Bureau. Give it to whoever asks for it by name.” I asked by what name. He said, “You’ll know.”

The second was on the hundred-and-twenty-sixth day. He said: “Bury me in the Bell Chamber. Not the Station plot. The Bell Chamber. In the middle of the floor. Bette’s crew will help you. Tell them I said so and that I’ll haunt them if they don’t.” Bette Quist had been dead for thirty years; he meant the turbine crew she had trained, who still kept the dams and still called themselves hers. I said I would. He said, “And leave the lamps on down there. The ones my mother put in.” I had not known his mother had put lamps in the Bell Chamber. I checked that afternoon. There was a ring of electric lamps set into niches in the wall of the chamber at waist height, each niche closed over by a thin curtain of flowstone that the cave had grown across it, so that the lamps could not be seen; they were wired to a conduit that ran up through the rock to the Station’s power board and from there to the Fifth Dam. They were switched off at a switch hidden behind a loose stone by the chamber’s entrance, and when I switched them on, they worked. They lit the sand floor in a ring. I had walked through that chamber with Jo four hundred and six times and he had never mentioned them, and I had never found them, which means he had hidden the switch from me on purpose. I asked him why. He said, “You’ll see.”

The third was on the hundred-and-thirty-third day, in the evening, when he could no longer sit up. He said: “When I’m gone, they’ll recall you. The Directorate. There’ll be an order. Don’t go. Go to the eastern shore and wait on the rocks.” I asked how long I should wait. He said, “Until she comes.” I asked who would come. He looked at me as though I were being slow, which I was, and said, “Moth.”

The fourth was on the hundred-and-fortieth day, in the afternoon. He was very tired. He had asked me to put the Station radio by his bed so that he could hear the Evening, as he had done every evening of his life. I had done it. He lay with his eyes closed for a long time, and then opened them and said, quite clearly, as though continuing a conversation:

“Help her with the flower.”

I asked him which flower. He did not answer. He was asleep. He woke once more, at a quarter past seven, and listened to the Reader give the river at nine gauges, and the weather for the provinces, and the rail, and the prices. He listened to the Notices. Among them was the line about the eastern interference, and the Reader said it was very low. Jo smiled at that, a little, and said, “Good. She’s nearly done.” He listened to the Account, which was about a dredging toll. And then the Reader said the last line, which I will not write here, since it has been written enough, and Jo listened to it, and seven minutes later he stopped breathing.

I stayed in the room with him through the night, in the corner, as I had for his mother. In the morning I told the six people at the Station. They came in one at a time and sat with him. The turbine crew came up from the dams. On the hundred-and-forty-second day we took him down into the caves, all eight of us, with the turbine crew taking turns at the stretcher on the narrow places and the long ladders, and we buried him in the middle of the sand floor of the Bell Chamber, as he had asked, with the lamps his mother had put there switched on around the wall. Nobody spoke at the grave. Then the youngest of the turbine crew, a boy of nineteen, said “Goodbye, Colonel” out loud, and the chamber said it back to us from every side, low and long, for about four seconds. That was the funeral.

On the hundred-and-forty-third day the Directorate’s recall order arrived by wireless. It instructed OR-1, companion agent, to report to Foundry Two in the Barrens for reassignment to field control within thirty days.

I went to the eastern shore.

I waited on the boulders at the foot of the cliffs for two nights. The Outer Channel was quieter than I had ever recorded it. Its storms were still coming up from the south, but slowly, and they broke on the rocks without moving them, and between the storms the water ran in long smooth swells. I logged it. I did not then know what it meant.

On the third night, the hundred-and-forty-fifth day of the year, a little after midnight, the rocks around me began to be lit from above.

She came down out of the sky. She was not standing on anything. She came down slowly through the dark, the way a lamp is lowered down a well, and stopped a few feet above the boulders, a little way off. She was taller than Jo had said: about eleven feet, by my measurement, slender, white, and lit from within, so that the foam on the rocks below her shone and every drop of spray that crossed her light turned for an instant into a bead of white fire. Her face was long, and calm, and so beautiful that my instruments returned errors when I tried to record it, and I have never been able to reproduce it except in words, and the words are not good enough. Her eyes were the only part of her that was dark. Her light was dim. Jo had described it as the light of a lamp with the flame lit. This was a lamp with the flame turned down very low.

My instruments could not measure her. They could not measure her height reliably, or her temperature, or her mass, or whether she was there at all. I record that I have since stopped trying.

She looked at me without speaking. Then she said, in a voice that was partly sound and partly a change in her light, which my audio recorded and my optical sensors recorded separately, and which I have since learned to hear as one thing:

“You’re the moth.”

I said that I was.

She said, “He asked me to adopt you.”

I said that machines were not adopted. They were reassigned.

She said, “Then you’ll be the first. You’re used to being first.” And she came down the rest of the way and stood on the boulders, and her light came up a little, and she put out a long white hand and laid it flat on the housing of my head, over the lamp, the way Jo used to lay his hand on the top of my head when he was pleased with me, and I logged an event that I have no category for and have since filed under the heading adoption.

She told me her name. I could not record it. She told me Jo had called her Lantern, and that I could do the same.

She said, “I’m an ambassador.”

I asked from whom, to whom.

She said, “From my people to the people who own the mountains. From the mountains to whoever will listen. For a hundred years, whoever would listen has been one family.” Her light dimmed. “Now it’s you.”

I asked what she wanted me to do.

She said, “Three things. First, I want to show you my home. Second, I want you to write everything down, in order, from the beginning, without leaving anything out. Third, I need help with something, and Josef said you would help me.”

I said, “The flower.”

She was very still. Then she said, “Yes. The flower.” And her light went down so low that for a moment I could see the rocks through her. She said: “It’s dying. I have one season. Perhaps less.” She looked out over the channel, at the long smooth swells where the storms should have been. “The channel is calming. When it’s calm, it will be too late.”

I asked what the flower was. She said I would understand it better if she showed me the rest first, and that she had promised Josef, sixty years ago, that someday she would show his machine everything he had wanted to see and could not. She said: “He went underneath the world. I’ll take you over it.”

I told her that the Directorate had recalled me to the Barrens within thirty days.

She said, “We’ll go to the Barrens. Later.” And then: “Are you coming?”

I went back to the Station first. I took the tin box from Jo’s drawer, and Ilse’s journals from the shelf in her old room, and the pocket unit, in case my traveling body was lost. I left a note for the six staff saying that I had gone with a friend of the Colonel’s. Then I walked back across Mammoth to the eastern shore, nine miles, in the dark, and she was waiting, and there was a craft on the rocks beside her that had not been there before.

BOOK THREE: WITH LANTERN

XI. The Ice Waters

Her craft is a leaf of glass.

That is not a figure of speech. It is shaped like a leaf, about thirty feet long and twelve wide at its broadest, curved slightly upward at the edges, and it is made of something clear that behaves as glass does in every test I was able to make except that it does not break. It has no engine I can find. It makes no sound. It has no seats; one stands on it, and it does not matter whether one is near the edge, since nothing falls off. Its veins, running out from the center to the rim like the veins of a leaf, glow faintly when it moves. The watch crews on the western rim of the Barrens have seen craft like it passing high over the Reserve in silence for a hundred years, on courses that begin and end over the Isles, and no instrument at any station has ever recorded one. This was one of them. I logged the identification with considerable satisfaction. Then I checked my own optical record of the craft I was standing on, and it showed a faint disturbance in the starlight about thirty feet long, and nothing else, and I logged that too.

We left the eastern shore of Mammoth at about two in the morning of the hundred-and-forty-sixth day and flew west.

We crossed Mammoth in less than a minute. Below us the Station’s sinkhole went by, a black circle with a faint light at its bottom, and then the shallows, pale and wide under the stars, with the five dams running across them from shore to shore and the lamps of the turbine houses lit at the Mammoth end of each one. Lantern slowed over the Fifth Dam and looked down at it for a while. I asked why. She said, “Ilse.” Then we went on.

We crossed the mainland at a height that let me see it whole. I had seen the schoolroom map a thousand times. I had never seen the country it describes. The fourteen provinces lay below us in the dark, and each was lit in its own way: the white kilns of Fifth Province glowing along their valleys; the furnaces of Sixth Province at Endeavor throwing up green light from the glass pour; the long terraces of Third Province dark, with the National Granary at Plenty lit like a ship; the Greens far off to the south, a spatter of small lights on black water. The capital lay on both banks of the river at the bend, with its nine bridges lit, and the east bank dark at that hour except for the broadcast house. The river went west from it across the whole country like a road, and at the far end of the road, at the Long Cliff, the Spill was a pale smear in the starlight, and I could hear it from a height of eleven thousand feet. Across the mainland the relay houses of the Evening wire stood every few miles along the rail, silent until a quarter past seven. I counted them. There are four hundred and six.

At Threshold, the seat of Fourteenth Province, where the hum comes up through the floors, Lantern turned north and flew along the border of the gray for a while, low, so that I could see across it. The outskirts of the Barrens were dark and full of shapes. I could see the machine fields as long lines of standing machines in the old pits, row after row, but from that height and that angle I could not see what they made together. Lantern said, “Later,” again. She seemed to enjoy saying it.

Then we went west over the Barrens themselves, high, at great speed. The chasm of the Great Rupture went by beneath us, a black seam a mile wide running from north to south as far as I could see in both directions. The open workings went by on either side of it, round black pits. The garrison towns went by on their eastern edge, and the watch stations on their western rim, each with its single lit window facing west. I wondered whether the crews in the observation rooms could see us. Lantern said they could. She said they always did, and wrote it in their logs, and the Directorate filed the logs, and nobody read them.

At the western rim the land ended in broken cliffs over the northern reach of the western sea. For the first hundred miles the sea was clean, black, with the lights of two of the western patrol’s cutters far to the south of us, working the limit. Then the gas began.

The History says the deep water gives off the gas that poisons the outer seas, and that the poisoned band lies below the horizon of every height on the Long Cliff, so that nobody on the mainland has ever seen it. From above, at night, it is visible. It lies over the water in a layer perhaps two hundred feet thick, and it glows. It is a faint, sick yellow-green, dim, brighter where the swell lifts it, and it moves slowly in the wind like smoke on a floor. Below it, the water is black. Above it, the air is clear. The line between the gas and the air is as sharp as the surface of a pond. Lantern flew above it. She said the gas would not hurt me, since I do not breathe, and would not hurt her, since she does not breathe either; it would hurt the leaf, which was alive in a way she did not explain, and so we kept above it.

I asked her where the gas came from. The History says the Bureau has been asked not to print the cause. She told me. In the floor of the deep ocean, under the cold and the pressure, there was gas frozen into the mud, more of it than all the forests of the old world had ever burned. When the seas warmed and rose, the floor warmed with them, and the frozen gas thawed and came up. It came up for decades. It is still coming. It is heavier than air and it lies on the sea where it surfaces, and it kills anything with lungs that breathes it, and it will go on doing so for a very long time. She said it so plainly that I logged it at once. The Bureau has nine versions of that explanation sealed in its archive, and the true one is the shortest.

And then, ahead, the gas ended.

It ended in a long curving line, as clean as a coastline, and beyond the line the sea was white.

The ice waters lie around the Great Rocky Isles in a ring that is about twelve miles wide on the eastern side and wider on the west. From above, at night, they look like a field of snow laid on the sea. The surface is broken ice, floes of every size from a hand’s breadth to an acre, packed together and moving slowly against each other with a sound I could hear even at our height, a long grinding creak, like a ship’s timbers. Between the floes, where the water shows, it is black and perfectly clear, and so cold that the air above it smokes.

I asked how the water was kept cold. Lantern took the leaf down to fifty feet above the ice and told me to look into a gap between two floes. Far down in the black water there were lights: a long row of them, blue, running north and south beneath the ice, as far as I could see. She said they were the owners’ machines, laid on the sea floor around the whole chain of the Isles during the last years of the Rise, and that they had been drawing the heat out of the water ever since. The cold water does two things. It makes the gas that drifts in from the deep water heavy and slow and keeps it down, so that it breaks against the ice like a wave on a seawall and goes no farther. And it freezes the surface, so that nothing can float across it. The ice waters are a moat. They are the reason the air over the Isles is clean, and the reason the fishing crews of the Cliff ports, when the wind comes hard from the west on a clear day, say they can smell snow and pine, and are laughed at, and are right.

Lantern flew low over the ice. The cold was severe; my outer housing frosted. On the floes there were animals: large white bears, which I had seen only in pictures in the Station’s library, walking slowly across the ice in the dark, and once a long gray seal lying at the edge of a gap, which lifted its head and watched us pass. Lantern said the owners had brought the bears from the far north of the old world before it drowned, and released them on the ice, because one of the owners had liked them as a child. She said it in a tone I would later learn to recognize as the tone she uses for most things the owners have done.

Then the ice ended against rock, and the rock went straight up, and we were at the Isles.

From the Long Cliff, on a clear afternoon, the Great Rocky Isles are green mountains with snow on them, too clear for the distance, and on the Bureau’s plates they are a ghost. I had looked at the plates. On the way west, until we passed the edge of the gas, my own optical record agreed with the plates and showed a pale smudge low on the horizon. Lantern looked at me looking at it, and laughed, and put her hand flat over my lamp for a moment, and said, “Now,” and took it away, and they were green. I do not know what she did. I have stopped asking. From the ice at their feet they are walls. The nearest of them, the one the owners call the Crown, rises from the ice in a single cliff of gray stone that goes up and up into the dark until the stars stop at its edge, and then, very high, there is snow on it, faint under the starlight, and above the snow a peak so high that the sky behind it is a different color. The other Isles go away north and south from it in a chain, each as high, each with its cliffs and its snow and its dark forest on the lower slopes where the cliffs relent. There are eleven great ones and a scatter of lesser. On the schoolroom map they are drawn in white outline with no towns and no roads. That is accurate as far as it goes. There are no towns on them, and no roads.

There is no light on their surface anywhere. I scanned the whole face of the Crown, the forest and the snow and the peak, and found nothing warmer than stone, and nothing moving but wind in the pines.

Lantern took the leaf down along the foot of the cliff, just above the ice, to a place where the ice ended a few yards short of the rock in a channel of black open water. The cliff above the channel was smooth. She stopped the leaf above the water, and put out her hand toward the rock, and her light came up for the first time since I had met her, bright enough that I could see each crystal of frost on the cliff face.

The cliff opened.

It opened from the waterline upward, in a tall narrow arch, the shape of a leaf standing on its point, about eighty feet high. There had been no seam in the rock that I could detect. Behind the arch was light: warm, gold, the color of late afternoon, pouring out over the black water and the ice and the white bears, which turned to look at it. Warm air came out with it, and the air smelled of cut grass, and of water running over stones, and of something sweet I could not identify and later learned was the blossom of an apple tree.

Lantern said, “Welcome to the Isles.”

The leaf went in. The arch closed behind us.

XII. The Paradises

Every one of the Great Rocky Isles is an internal paradise. The History says this. It is correct. It is also the most inadequate sentence in the History, and I have read every edition.

I spent twelve days in the Isles. Eight of the eleven are lit, and I visited those eight. I give them in the order I saw them, which is the order Lantern chose. I asked her why that order. She said it was the order in which they had been finished. I asked about the other three, the northern three, which stand in the thickest of the ice. She said they were hollowed and planted and finished like the rest, and had never been lit, and that the owners called them the Unlit and did not go there. I asked what they were for. She said, “Later.”

The Crown

The first and greatest of the Isles is hollow from the waterline to within a quarter mile of its peak. I measured the interior at its widest at nine miles across and three and a half miles high. It is lit from above by a false sky.

The sky is the ceiling of the mountain. It is made, Lantern told me, of the same stuff as the leaf, laid over the rock in a dome, and it gives off light in exactly the way the sky of the old world did at four in the afternoon in late summer, with high thin clouds drifting across it from west to east. The light changes. In the course of a day it rises to noon and falls to evening and goes dark, and a moon comes out, and stars, in the positions they would have had over the western mountains of the old world on the night before the first city drowned. The owners chose that night. Lantern said they had chosen it by vote.

Under the sky is a country. There is a lake in the middle, round and blue, three miles across, fed by a river that comes out of the mountain wall in a waterfall a mile high and falls into it through the air in a long white plume. Around the lake are meadows, and orchards of apple and pear and cherry in blossom, and woods of oak and beech, and farther out toward the walls, terraces of vines and grain, and above those, on the lower slopes of the inner wall, pine forest climbing up toward the sky until the trees stop at the edge of the dome. There are birds. There are deer in the woods and fish in the lake and bees in the orchards. The air is warm and smells of everything that grows.

And there is a city. It is on the far side of the lake, on a low hill, and it is made of white stone and glass, with towers and colonnades and terraced gardens going down to the water, and it is the most beautiful city I have ever seen, including the capital of Ozarka, and it is almost empty. Its streets are swept, its fountains run, its gardens are tended by small quiet machines that move among the beds and prune and water and stand aside when anyone passes. It was built for about four thousand people. About two hundred live in it.

The owners live there.

The Owners

I met nine of them. There are, Lantern says, a hundred and ninety-four. They do not tell their names. The Interior has sealed every record that contains them, and the owners themselves have refused to say them for so long that some of them, Lantern says, can no longer remember. They call each other by titles. I give the titles.

The History says the owners are the same persons who went into the mountains before the flood, still living, because they began to replace their bodies with machines before the Rise and never stopped. That is accurate. What the History cannot say, because nobody in Ozarka has seen it, is what a hundred and sixty years of replacement looks like.

The one they call the Proprietor is the eldest. He was the first to come to the mountains and the first to begin replacing himself, and he has gone the farthest. He has no body. What remains of him is a long hall under the city, a quarter mile from end to end, lined on both sides with cabinets of brass and glass in which things move, slowly, with a sound like a great many small clocks. Somewhere in the cabinets, Lantern told me, there is a piece of the original man, about the size of a fist, kept warm. The rest is mechanism. He speaks through a grille at the end of the hall in a voice that is courteous, dry, and tired. He runs the Isles. Every machine in all eleven paradises, lit and unlit, the gardeners and the sky and the cold-machines on the sea floor beneath the ice, answers to the hall.

He asked me, after Lantern introduced me, whether the machines in the Barrens were coming west.

I said that I did not know. I said that they were the Directorate’s machines, and that the Directorate had said they were for defense.

He said, “Defense against whom?”

I said, “The east. And you.”

The clocks in the cabinets all ticked at once, which I believe was laughter. He said, “We have been watching them grow for forty years. We find them very interesting. They are arranged in an unusual pattern.” I asked what pattern. He said, “Ask her,” and Lantern said, “Later,” and the Proprietor ticked again.

The one they call the Lady of the Lake lives in the lake. She was the most beautiful woman of the old world, Lantern says, and spent most of a fortune making sure she remained so, and some sixty years ago she decided that the most beautiful thing she could become was water, and she did. She is the lake. She is three miles across and warm and very clear, and when she speaks the surface ripples in rings, and her voice comes from everywhere. She told me she liked my lamp.

The one they call the Collector does not live in the Crown. He has his own Isle, and I will come to it. The one they call the Physician has replaced himself with a garden and lives in a greenhouse, and is a tree. The one they call the Navigator flies in a body like a heron’s over the lake all day and never comes down. The one they call the Heir is the youngest, a mere hundred and thirty, and the only one who still has most of a human body; he wears it the way a man wears an old coat, and he was the only one who asked me about Ozarka. He asked what the people there ate, and whether they were happy. I told him about the Granary at Plenty, and the National Reservoirs, and the Evening. He listened to all of it, and then he said, “The broadcast still says the sea stands at the mark?” I said it did. He said, “Good,” and looked away.

I record the following about the owners because Lantern asked for everything. They are rich in a way that has no meaning anymore, since there is nothing left to buy. They are lonely. They are a little afraid of Lantern’s people, who gave them the means to live forever, and a little afraid of the machines in the Barrens, and very afraid of each other, and they spend their days in the most beautiful places on Earth being polite. Once, in the Crown, I came upon two of them sitting on a bench by the lake, not speaking, watching the false sky go from afternoon to evening. They had been doing it, Lantern said, every day for ninety years.

They saved the old world’s things and let its people drown. Lantern says they know it. She says it is the thing they talk about least.

The Orchard of Afternoons

The second Isle is all garden. The sky in it never moves past four in the afternoon. The owners built it for walking, and it has paths through it that go on for forty miles without crossing themselves, through orchards and meadows and along streams, with benches every half mile, and no buildings at all. Nobody lives there. The owners come to walk. I walked eleven miles of it with Lantern, and in eleven miles we met one owner, the Navigator, who flew over us once in his heron body and called down a greeting I could not make out.

The Library of Spares

The third Isle is where the owners keep their replacements.

It is cold, and lit with a flat white light, and it is the only place in the Isles that is not beautiful. It is a single hall, six miles long, divided into bays, and in the bays, on racks and in tanks and wrapped in clear sheeting, are the parts the owners have used to become what they are and the parts they will use next: hearts of brass, eyes of glass, hands, spines, whole bodies of jointed alloy hanging in rows like coats in a cloakroom, and, in a bay near the far end that Lantern walked past quickly and did not let me stop at, a row of tanks with something growing in them that was not machine. She said that some of the owners had decided, in recent years, that they would like to be flesh again, and that her people had told them it was not possible, and that they were trying anyway. She said it with great sadness.

The Glasshouse

The fourth Isle belongs to Lantern’s people.

The History calls them the residents from elsewhere, and says they came in motherships, and that the Bureau has no record of their form, their number, or their purpose. I can now supply all three.

Their form is Lantern’s form, more or less: tall, white, lit from within, made, as far as I can determine, of light that has decided to stay in one place. There are about eleven hundred of them. They came from a world a great distance away whose name is not made of sound, around a star that the old world’s astronomers had numbered but not named. They came because their world had ended.

Lantern told me this in the Glasshouse, and the Glasshouse showed it to me. The interior of the fourth Isle is not a country. It is a single chamber, very tall, with walls of the leaf-stuff, and the walls show what Lantern’s people remember. They show it in light, all around, so that standing in the middle of the chamber is like standing in their world.

Their world was mostly sea, shallow and warm, with low islands, under a large orange sun. It was beautiful. I saw cities of light standing on the water, and forests of tall pale plants that swayed though there was no wind, and on every island, in every open place, flowers: small, white, five-petaled, lit faintly from within, in fields that ran to the shore. Lantern’s people did not grow the flowers. The flowers grew them. That is how she put it. Each of her people, she said, began as a flower, and grew out of it, and stayed bound to it, and lived as long as it lived; and when the flower died, the person faded, the way a light fades when it is taken away. So they tended their flowers with great care, on every island, and their world was covered in them.

Then their sun grew larger. It took a very long time, and they saw it coming for longer than the old world saw the flood, and like the old world, they did not believe it until it was too late. Their seas boiled away. Their islands burned. Their flowers died, field by field, and their people faded with them. A few thousand got away in vessels, with seeds.

They went from world to world for a long time. They looked for one where the seeds would grow. None did. The seeds of that flower need a thing that Lantern could not translate except as loose time: a place where the past and the present are not quite separate, where what has happened is still a little bit happening. Their own world had been like that. No other world they found was. Their seeds slept, and would not wake, and Lantern’s people, who were bound to flowers that no longer existed, grew dimmer with every world they passed.

They came to Earth during the Rise because a world in the middle of ending, Lantern said, is a world where time is a little loose. They sent scouts first. Lantern was one. She found Nerine in the gulf. Then they came down in their great vessels, and made a compact with the owners, who had mountains and wanted to live forever. Lantern’s people gave the owners the means to replace themselves without end. The owners gave Lantern’s people a home inside the mountains, and help to find a place where the seeds would grow.

They found one place. Of all the places on Earth, in all the drowning and breaking of the Rise, there was exactly one where time was loose enough. It was on the highest bald of the old eastern mountains, which the flood was even then cutting off from the rest of the continent and turning into the land the Survey would name Appalachiatica. They planted every seed they had there. One grew.

One flower. One seed out of thousands. It came up on the bald in the hundred-and-fourth year of the Rise, and Lantern’s people wept light, and the one of them who was bound to it, who was the youngest of them and had faded nearly to nothing, grew bright again.

That one was Lantern. She was the only one of her people who still had a flower.

I asked about the others, the eleven hundred in the Glasshouse. She said they were fading. She said they had been fading for ten thousand years, and that they faded slowly, and that the Glasshouse slowed it further, because it showed them what they remembered, and remembering helps. She said some of them had faded so far that I could not see them. I looked around the chamber and saw nothing but the walls and their light, and then I adjusted my instruments to their limit and saw, faintly, all around me in the chamber, very tall, still, hundreds of shapes made of a light so dim that it was barely different from the dark.

I asked why the others could not go to the flower and be near it. She said that the flower had done something to Appalachiatica that she would explain in its place, and that her people could not endure Appalachiatica for more than a few hours, because it pulled them backward into the ending of their own world. She could endure it a little longer than the others, because the flower was hers. That was all.

I asked what would happen to her if the flower died.

She said, “The same thing that happens to a moth when the lamp goes out.”

I said that moths did not die when lamps went out. They simply went somewhere else.

She looked at me for a minute or more, and her light changed in a way I had not seen before, and she said, “Josef said you would argue.”

Winterless, the Clockworks, and the Collector’s Isle

The fifth Isle is a lake hall, very dark, where warm rain falls without stopping onto black water, and owners who are tired of the false sky in the Crown go to sleep for years at a time in floating beds. I saw thirty beds. Twenty-two were occupied.

The sixth is the Clockworks, which run the sky and the cold-machines and the gardeners and every other machine in the Isles, under the Proprietor’s command. It is three miles of mechanism, warm and loud. The machines there recognized me as a machine and spoke to me in the old engineering tongue of the Directorate’s foundries, which they had learned, they told me, by listening to the Barrens for forty years. They asked me, as the Proprietor had, about the pattern. I said I did not know of any pattern. They said I would.

The seventh is the Collector’s Isle. The Collector is the owner who kept the old world’s things. His Isle is a museum of everything that was saved from the drowning by people who could afford to save it. I walked through halls of paintings, hundreds of them, by painters whose names no school in Ozarka teaches; halls of sculpture; halls of old-world machines, cars and aircraft and a rocket standing on its tail in a shaft that went up a mile; a hall of nothing but clocks, all of them stopped at the same minute; a library of four million books, dry and perfect, with chairs. The Collector met us in the library. He is a small owner, as owners go: a man-sized frame of gold and dark wood, with a face of polished stone that does not move. He was courteous. He asked whether there was anything in Ozarka worth collecting. I said that there was a broadcast every evening at a quarter past seven, and that it ended every evening with the same seven words, and that it had done so for eighty years. He considered that for a long time and said, “No. I have that.”

The Last Isle

The eighth Isle is the southernmost and the smallest, and it is empty.

It has a sky like the Crown’s, and a lake, and meadows and orchards and woods, and terraces of grain going up the walls. It has a city on a hill by the lake, of white stone and glass, with streets and houses and gardens, larger than the Crown’s city: built, I estimated, for about forty thousand people. Its fountains run. Its gardens are tended. Its houses have chairs at their tables and swept floors and made beds. Nobody has ever lived in it.

I asked who it was for.

Lantern said, “Ozarka.”

I asked whether the people of Ozarka knew.

She said, “No. It was part of the compact. When my people came, we told the owners that we would give them their long lives on one condition, which was that they build one paradise for the people they left behind. They built it. It’s been ready for ninety years.” She looked out over the empty city in the false afternoon light. “It’s waiting for the Isles to speak.”

I asked why the Isles had never spoken.

She said, “Because the owners are afraid of what Ozarka would say to them. And because my people have been waiting for something else first.” Her light went low. “We were waiting to know whether we would still be here.”

We left the Isles on the twelfth day, through an arch in the western cliff of the Crown that opened onto the ice on the far side of the chain, where the ice waters go out to the west toward the San Andreas. Lantern said there was someone there she wanted me to meet, and that the someone had been asking about me.

XIII. Beyond the San Andreas

West of the Great Rocky Isles the ice waters go out another twenty miles and then end, as they end on the eastern side, in a clean curving line. Beyond the line the gas begins again, glowing faintly over black water. And beyond the gas, as the sun came up behind us over the Isles on the morning of the hundred-and-fifty-eighth day, the sea turned green.

It was the green the History describes from the Directorate’s photographs of the sixty-fourth year: long parallel bands, as regular as terraces, in shades of green and gold, with dark channels between them, stretching away from the coast of the Isles to the edge of sight. From the photographs the Directorate’s analysts concluded that the San Andreas Ocean was a farm. That is correct. They could not see what the farm was growing on.

Lantern took the leaf down to a hundred feet above the gas. The bands were plants. They were long, flat, ribbon-like, gold at the tips and green toward the roots, each ribbon a yard wide and some of them a quarter mile long, laid out on the surface of the sea side by side in rows, so thick that they hid the water. They rose and fell together on the swell. The gas lay over them and among them, and they grew in it, and seemed to like it. Lantern said they fed on it. She said they drank the poison out of the air and turned it into sugar in their leaves, and that the farm was, among other things, the only thing on Earth that was slowly cleaning the sea.

The roots of the ribbons went down. They did not go down to the sea floor, which in that part of the ocean is two miles deep. They went down about sixty feet and stopped, all of them, at the same depth, in a flat dark surface that ran under the whole farm. I looked at the surface for some time before I understood that it was skin.

The San Andreas Leviathan is a living animal. The History reports that the Directorate’s instruments could not determine whether it was a machine or a creature that farms. It is a creature that is farmed, which is a third thing. It lies beneath the surface of the San Andreas Ocean, about sixty feet down, and it is roughly the size of Third Province. Its back is a plain of gray hide, ridged and folded, and the ribbons of the farm grow from it as grass grows from a field, rooted in the folds. It is very old. Lantern said it had been in the deep ocean when the old world was young, asleep on the sea floor in the cold, eating whatever drifted down, and that when the seas warmed, it woke, and rose, and came up under the gas, and lay there; and that the gas, as it seeped down into the water, fed the ribbons, and the ribbons, as their roots grew down into its hide, fed it. It had not moved more than a few miles in a century. The analysts’ note that the bands had shifted between two photographs taken a month apart was correct. It breathes. When it breathes, the farm moves.

We saw its eye. Lantern took the leaf out over a place where the bands parted in a wide oval of open water, and the water in the oval was dark and still, and then the darkness rolled, slowly, and became an eye: a round black pupil, perhaps four hundred yards across, in an iris of deep gold, set in the gray hide of the Leviathan’s head, sixty feet below the surface, looking up at us through the clear water. It looked at us for about a minute. Then a lid of hide came down over it from above, slowly, and rose again. Lantern said it was greeting her. She lifted her hand to it, and her light came up, and the great eye closed and opened once more.

And then I saw the harvesters.

The Directorate’s photographs show small bright shapes moving in lines at the edges of the bands. They were moving in lines now, at the edge of the oval, below the surface: long sleds of some pale material, each about twenty feet long, gliding through the water among the roots of the ribbons, cutting the ripe gold tips and gathering them into nets that trailed behind. They were pulled by people. The people swam in front of the sleds, harnessed to them by lines across their shoulders, and their tails drove them through the water in long, slow strokes, and their hair streamed back, and they moved through the roots of the farm the way swallows move through the air over a field.

Merfolk. Hundreds of them. They had come up from the deep beneath the gas to work the farm, as they did, Lantern said, every day, and had worked it since the first ribbons grew. The ribbons were their food, and the food of the Isles. Every grain of bread and every apple in the Crown came from the soil of the paradises, but the soil of the paradises was made from the ribbons, which the merfolk harvested and towed to the openings at the foot of the Isles’ cliffs. The History says the San Andreas Leviathan feeds the internal paradises. It does. The merfolk do the feeding.

One of the sleds turned out of the line and came toward the oval, and stopped below us, and the one who pulled it slipped out of her harness and rose to the surface, through the gas, which did not hurt her, since she was not breathing it, and lifted her head out of the water.

She was very old. Her hair was long and white and floated around her on the gas-dimmed water like the ribbons of the farm. Her face was brown and lined, with a long nose and a wide mouth, and her eyes, when the clear second lid slid back from them, were exactly the gray of Jo’s. She looked up at me on the edge of the leaf.

She said, “You’re the one who kept my boy company.”

I said that I was.

She said, “Come down here where I can see you.”

Nerine was a hundred and sixty years old in the hundred-and-thirty-first year of the nation’s calendar. She was the senior of the farm-wardens, the merfolk who tend the Leviathan and direct the harvest, and had been for forty years. She had swum, by her own estimate, more than a million miles in her life, most of it beneath the gas, around every coast of the drowned continent and some of the coasts beyond it. She had a scar along the whole left side of her tail from a propeller in the hundred-and-first year of the Rise, and another across her shoulder from something in the deep that she would not name.

Lantern brought the leaf down to the surface of the oval, through the gas, so that I could sit on its edge with my legs in the water, and Nerine came and put her arms on the edge beside me, the way, I suppose, she had once put her arms on the rim of the well under Bellwether. She looked at me for some time. Then she put out her hand and laid it flat on the top of my head, over the lamp, as Jo did, and as Lantern had done on the rocks.

She said, “He talked about you.”

I asked when.

She said, “Every spring. Thirty-one springs, in the fifth basin. My daughter and I would sit in the water and he would sit on the dam with his feet hanging down and tell us what he’d been doing, and after the year he made you, everything he told us had you in it.” She took her hand away. “He said you narrate like a customs officer.”

I said that I had been told.

She told me about Bellwether, and Absalom, and the well. She told me about the night on the shingle when Ilse said she would make her some water. She told me about the fifth basin and the thirty-one springs, and about the night Ilse died, when she came early, and Jo sat in the shallows with his mother across his knees and did not see his grandmother, forty yards off in the dark, watching. She told me she had come in again the night after Jo died, to the fifth basin, and waited all night, and nobody came down from the Station, and so she knew.

She said, “So you’re what’s left of them.”

I said I supposed I was.

She said, “Then you’d better hear the rest. The bits they didn’t know.” And she told me, sitting in the oval of open water above the Leviathan’s eye, with Lantern standing on the leaf behind me, three things.

The first was about her name. She said that the night Lantern changed her, in the gulf, she had lost her own name and been given a new one, and that she had always thought it was just a word. Fifty years later, in the deep beneath the San Andreas, Lantern had told her what the word meant. It was the name of the flower. Of the flower that Lantern was bound to, the one seed that had grown, on the highest bald of Appalachiatica. She said that when she was twelve and drowning with her hair across her face, Lantern had looked at her and been reminded of her own flower, the only thing she loved, which was then still a seed in a box. “So I’m named for a flower,” Nerine said. “And my grandson died trying to keep it alive.”

I said that Jo had died of age.

She said, “He was a hundred and eight. He was waiting for the flower to need him. It didn’t, in time. So it’s you.”

The second thing was about the merfolk and the Dams, and I will give it in the next chapter but one, in its place, with the rest of that story.

The third was about the channel. She said the merfolk who lived in the warm shallow seas of the far south, below the Floridexa, near the mouth of the Outer Channel, had sent word up the coast to her a month before. They said that the storms in the channel were dying down. That the waves were smaller. That the currents that pulled three ways at once were pulling two, and in some places one. She said that the merfolk had known for a century that the channel’s storms were a sign of something in Appalachiatica pushing against the world, and that when the storms died, it meant the thing was finishing.

She looked up at Lantern. “You’ve got a season.”

Lantern said, “Less.”

Nerine said, “Then don’t sit here talking to an old fish. Go.”

But before we went, Lantern took me down.

Beneath the gas, beneath the farm, beneath the Leviathan itself, which is roughly two hundred feet thick from its back to its belly, the San Andreas Ocean goes down two miles to its floor, and the floor is lit.

Lantern sealed the leaf, which can close itself over like a hand closing, and took it down past the Leviathan’s flank, which went by us for nine minutes, gray and enormous and covered in pale things that grew on it, until we were below it, in black water, sinking. My lamp showed nothing but the water and the occasional drifting speck. Then, below us, far, there was a glow.

At the bottom of the San Andreas Ocean lie three of the great vessels that came down over the western mountains in the last decades of the Rise. The diarists of the climb recorded that the vessels settled on the peaks, and that smaller craft went back and forth for many nights, and that then the great vessels were gone from the sky. They did not go back into the sky. They went into the sea.

Each of them is about four miles long. They are the shape of seeds: long, rounded, tapering at one end. They are made of the leaf-stuff, and they lie on the sea floor in a row, glowing from within with a pale, steady light that lights the mud around them for a mile, and around and among them, built on the sea floor and on the vessels’ flanks, is a city of the merfolk.

They call it Underlight. It has perhaps nine thousand people. Its houses are domes and towers of something like coral, grown, not built, lit by the glow of the vessels, and its streets are open water, and its people swim along them as people in Ozarka walk. There are gardens of pale plants on the sea floor. There are schools; I saw a class of merfolk children swimming in a ring around a teacher, practicing, Lantern said, the colors of water. There is a library in the flank of the middle vessel, a hollow in its side lined with shelves, and the books on the shelves are bound in something waterproof, and some of them, Lantern said, came from the lending library of Bellwether, a hundred and thirty years ago, because a girl in a well had borrowed them and never brought them back.

The vessels are not dead. Lantern said that they had come down into the deep because they were tired, the way her people are tired, and that the cold and the dark and the pressure of the deep were restful to them, and that they gave the merfolk light and warmth and asked nothing in return. I asked whether they were machines or creatures. She said that among her people, the question was not asked.

I asked about the Floridexa Leviathan, the energy-generating one, whose light rises and falls over the southern horizon every night. The History says the Bureau cannot determine whether it is a machine or a creature, and that the people of Seventh Province call it she.

Lantern said, “She was the fourth vessel. The largest. She brought us here.” The vessel had not come down into the deep with the others. She had settled instead in the southern sea, in the shallower warm water off the drowned coast, and had put down roots, of a kind, into the sea floor, and drawn power out of the gas-rich deep, and sent that power through the air in lines too fine to see to the Isles, to light their false skies and turn their cold-machines and keep the paradises alive. The light that rises and falls on the horizon is her working. Her rhythm, a minute from crest to crest, is the rhythm of the vessel’s own heartbeat. “She’s a machine,” Lantern said. “She thinks she’s alive. We’ve never argued with her.”

The San Andreas is a creature that works like a machine. The Floridexa is a machine that lives like a creature. I logged this. I found it satisfying.

Before we left the San Andreas, Lantern took me up.

She took the leaf straight up from the surface of the farm, through the gas, through the clear air above it, and kept going. She went up until the sky above us turned from blue to dark blue to black, and the stars came out in daylight, and the air outside the leaf was too thin for anything to breathe, and the curve of the Earth showed below us, very slightly, at the edges of what I could see. She stopped there. We stood on the leaf at the edge of the sky and looked down.

The History says that beyond the four boundaries of the known world lies the rest of the planet, which Ozarka’s statute declares to be another planet, and which is taught in the course on astronomy. From where we stood, I could see a great deal of it.

Below us, to the east, lay the known world, very small: the white chain of the Isles in their ring of ice, the brown of the Barrens beyond them with its black seam, the gold of the mainland, which really is gold in the morning light, the blue of the lakes, the white edge of the North across the top of everything, and far off at the eastern edge, Mammoth, a small pale shape, and Appalachiatica, dark and green and covered, from where we were, in a faint shimmer like heat over a road. All of it was surrounded on three sides by the gas, a dim yellow-green layer over the sea, which went out from the coasts in every direction to the horizon.

To the west, below us, lay the San Andreas: the farm, gold and green, the size of a province, and beyond it, the open ocean, under its gas, going on and on to the curve of the world. Nothing else. No land. No light.

Far to the south-west, far, beyond the horizon, so that I could see only its upper part above the curve, a column of fire was rising. It went up from somewhere below the edge of the world, thin and bright, straight up into the black, and at its top there was a spark, climbing. It climbed until I lost it among the stars. Lantern said it came from the city on the old ocean that the History calls the interplanetary city, and that something left from there every few days, and that something came down every few days, and that she did not know what. She said that the people of that city were not her people and not friends of her people, and that the gas between their ocean and this one suited everyone very well.

To the north-west, at the very edge of the world, there was a faint smear of light along the curve, like a town seen from a great distance at night, except that it was daytime there, and the smear was a thousand miles long. Lantern said it was the north of the far side of the world, the place the History says is now the most populated land on Earth, and that the light I was seeing was its cities, and that there were more people in them than there had been on the whole old continent before the flood. She said they did not know Ozarka existed. She said she had been there once and would not go back.

She said nothing about the swamp or the lands that are gone, since they were on the far side of the world from where we stood, and I could not see them. I record only what I saw.

I stood on the leaf at the edge of the sky and looked down at the known world, which was smaller than my thumbnail at arm’s length, and the History’s last line on the subject came into my mind, which says that the known world is small enough to be kept in order. I told Lantern so. She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “Josef always said that was the truest sentence in the book, and the saddest.”

Then she took the leaf down, and east, very fast, toward the Barrens.

XIV. The Brown

The plan was simple, and Lantern explained it on the way down.

The flower was on the highest bald of Appalachiatica. To reach it we had to cross the Outer Channel, which nothing could cross on the surface, and which Lantern could not cross in the leaf, because the storms in the channel are not only storms. They are the edge of Appalachiatica’s condition, pressing outward, and to fly through them would draw her backward into the ending of her own world for long enough to put her out. Even now, with the storms dying, it would kill her. She had tried, once, in the forty-sixth year, the year of Saltgrass, when the interference rose, and had barely come back.

The only way across was underneath: the old deep line that runs from beneath Mammoth under the Outer Channel to Appalachiatica, through the Year Fourteen plug. Jo had walked it at nineteen. It takes four hours on foot. Lantern could not endure four hours in the tunnel beyond the plug and then the climb to the bald and then four hours back. We needed to be fast.

We needed Car Nine.

Jo had told me about Car Nine in the hundred-and-fifteenth year, in passing, as though it were an old boot. When the Directorate took over the deep bases in the twenty-sixth year, it found in the sidings of the old trunk lines a number of old-world transit cars, long capsules that had run on the rails of the deep network at very high speed, riding on magnets rather than wheels. Most of them were broken up for metal. Jo, as commander of the Bulwark in the seventy-sixth year, found one in a siding beneath the Barrens that still worked, and had it moved, quietly, on his own authority, to the lowest siding of the Directorate’s headquarters, and logged as scrap. He told me it was Car Nine, because it had the number nine painted on its side. He told me he was keeping it for later.

I asked him, in the hundred-and-fifteenth year, later for what. He said, “For you.”

The second thing we needed was the code to the first lock of the plug, which the Directorate keeps. I had it. Jo had given it to me in the hundred-and-twenty-sixth year, along with every other code he had ever known, and told me not to use it until I needed to. The third thing we needed was the key to the second lock, which belongs to the Scientific Governor of Mammoth. The last Scientific Governor of Mammoth had been Ilse. The key was not on its hook in her old room. I had checked the morning I left the Station. Lantern said she knew where it was.

So: the Barrens first, for the car. Then Mammoth, for the key. Then the plug.

The Directorate’s headquarters, which the History says is not disclosed, is called Taproot, and it lies at the bottom of the Great Rupture.

Lantern brought the leaf down into the chasm at midday on the hundred-and-sixtieth day. From above, the Rupture is a black seam. From inside, it is a canyon a mile wide and, at that point, four thousand feet deep, with walls that drop sheer from the tableland of the Barrens. The upper walls are black. That is the soil, the deep black soil of the old western farmland, ten and fifteen feet thick, which the earthquake broke and the rains cut and the owners’ companies stripped back from the edges to get at the ore. Where it remains at the lip of the chasm, it hangs out over the drop in great sheets and slabs, with roots in it, old roots of wheat and grass, white and dry, sticking out of the black like hairs. Below the soil the walls are red and yellow and gray rock, banded, and in the bands there are holes: the shafts of the owners’ mines, square and black, thousands of them, going in at every level.

At the bottom there are towns. They fell into the chasm in the seventy-fourth year of the Rise, when the ground opened beneath them, and they lie on the chasm floor in pieces among the fallen rock: a church steeple on its side, a grain elevator broken in three, a main street with its storefronts still standing in a row and their signs still on them, in the old alphabet, faded to nothing. Nobody has walked among them for a hundred and sixty years except the Directorate’s machines. A dry river runs down the middle of the floor. Lantern took the leaf along it, low, and I saw a child’s bicycle lying in the riverbed, rusted to the color of the rock.

Taproot is under the floor. It is the largest of the old world’s deep bases, and the Directorate’s survey, Jo’s survey, marks it only as HQ, withheld. Its entrance is a door in the eastern wall of the chasm at the level of the floor, gray metal, two hundred feet high, set flush in the rock. When the leaf came near it, the door opened.

I had expected a guard. There was none. There was a machine of the Orchard series, about my size, standing in the doorway, and when it saw me it went still, and then it spoke in the foundry tongue, and said: Elder.

That was when I learned what being first meant.

Every machine of the Orchard series descends from the Mother of the eighty-ninth year, and I was her first fruit. Every machine in the Barrens, in the fields and the foundries and the deep halls of Taproot, keeps in its memory a record of its own making, and at the top of every record, before anything else, is me. They do not obey me. The Directorate commands them. But they recognize me, and defer to me, and when I asked the machine in the doorway to let us in and to forget that it had seen us, it said Yes, Elder, and did both.

The Directorate’s human staff at Taproot numbers forty-one. They live on the upper levels. We went down, past them, through halls and stairwells and lifts, sixteen levels, guided by machines that stood aside and said Elder as I passed and did not report us. Lantern came with me, stooping in the corridors. Her light was low. She said the deep stone felt to her like a cellar on a hot day.

On the lowest level, in a siding at the end of a long dark tunnel of the old trunk, behind a rusted gate marked SCRAP, we found Car Nine.

It is a capsule about a hundred feet long, smooth and white and tapered at both ends, with a row of round windows along each side and a large painted 9 on its flank, faded. It sat on the rail without touching it. Inside, it has thirty seats in pairs, upholstered in a blue cloth gone gray, and a driver’s seat at the front with a panel of switches. On the inside of the first window, taped there with a strip of old Directorate tape, was a card in Jo’s handwriting, the handwriting his grandfather taught him, with the flourish. It said: For later. Charge from Bulwark node. Don’t run it past the Fourth Dam line above 300. It shakes. — J.A.

I sat in the driver’s seat. Lantern stooped in the aisle behind me, since she could not sit down in it. I found the switches. The panel lit. I logged an event that I have filed under the heading Jo, a heading that by then contained some fourteen thousand items, and we went.

But not straight to Mammoth. Lantern stopped me before I could start the car moving and said, “First, the fields. You should see them from above. It’s time.”

We left Car Nine in its siding and went back up the sixteen levels, past the forty-one people who never saw us, and out through the great door into the chasm, and Lantern took the leaf up out of the Rupture and over the Barrens, east, toward the outskirts, and up, and up, until we were as high as we had been over the San Andreas, at the edge of the sky. Then she turned the leaf so that I could look straight down.

The Barrens lay beneath us: the brown tableland, the black seam of the Rupture, the round pits of the open workings. Along the eastern outskirts, where the pits are thickest, the machine fields lay in the pits, eleven of them in the ninety-sixth year and many more now, and in the fields the standing machines, millions of them, in ranks.

From the ground, from the garrison towns or the watch stations or the ridge of Fourteenth Province, the ranks look like rows. That is all anyone in Ozarka has ever seen. Rows of gray and brown shapes, standing in the pits, lengthening each year. From the edge of the sky, the rows were lines in a drawing.

The drawing was a flower.

It covered the whole of the eastern outskirts of the Barrens, from the northern pits to the southern, about sixty miles across. The ranks of standing machines, laid out pit by pit and row by row over forty-two years, made together the outline of a single flower with five petals, each petal a long rounded curve twenty miles from tip to base, the five of them joined at a center made of the largest pit of all, the one where Foundry Two opens and where I was made. The ranks traced the edges of the petals and the lines of the veins down the middle of each one. In the center, the machines stood in rings, close together, making the heart of the flower. It was drawn in gray on brown, very precisely, and from where we were it was perfectly clear, and it was the same flower I had seen on the walls of the Glasshouse, in the fields of Lantern’s drowned world: small, white, five-petaled. Her flower. Nerine’s name.

It was finished. The last machines had taken their places in the tip of the fifth petal, Lantern said, on the hundred-and-fortieth day of the hundred-and-thirty-first year. That was the day Jo died.

That was the routine labeled BED. A tidy arrangement. Four hundred lines that told every field where to set every finished machine to stand, so that after forty-two years the whole growing military of Ozarka, which the Directorate believed was standing in the outskirts of the Barrens facing west in defense against the Isles, would turn out to have been planted, rank by rank, into a flowerbed, visible only from the height at which one person in the known world was in the habit of flying.

Jo had said I would see it. Not from here.

I asked Lantern whether she had known.

She said she had watched it grow every year from the leaf. She said she knew it was hers from the third year, when the curve of the first petal became clear. She said she had never told Jo she had seen it, because she thought he wanted to tell her himself, when it was finished, and that he had meant to, this spring, on the rocks, and that he had not lived quite long enough.

She stood on the leaf at the edge of the sky over the flower he had made for her out of the army he was ordered to build, and her light came up brighter than I had ever seen it, so bright that my optical sensors closed, and when they opened again she was standing with her face in her hands, and light was running out between her fingers and falling away below the leaf in long bright drops, down toward the Barrens, like rain. I have no better way to describe it. I record that Lantern’s people weep light, and that the Proprietor’s question about the pattern had been answered, and that the Directorate’s military, the largest in the known world, had been designed from its first seed by a man in love, and that no one at Taproot had ever looked at it from high enough to notice.

We went back down to the chasm, and into Taproot, and down sixteen levels to Car Nine, and I started it, and the car rose a hand’s breadth off the rail, and went east.

XV. The Dams

Car Nine runs on the main trunk of the old deep network from Taproot beneath the Barrens, beneath the mainland, beneath the strait, to the Bulwark beneath Mammoth. It is a straight line, more or less, and the car runs it, at the speed Jo marked on his card as the limit, in a little under fifty minutes. We passed beneath Threshold, beneath Provision, beneath the river at the capital, and beneath Watch Post One, at a depth of between a thousand and fifteen hundred feet, in a tunnel lit every fifty yards, so that the lights went past the windows in a steady flicker like a film. At the Fourth Dam line, beneath the strait, I slowed to below three hundred, as instructed. It shook anyway.

At the Bulwark the machines recognized me and said Elder and let the car into the eastern siding without logging it. From the Bulwark to the Station is a climb of nine hundred feet through the caves of Mammoth, by a route Jo and I had used a hundred times. We came up out of the cave mouth into the sinkhole at dusk on the hundred-and-sixtieth day, and the six staff of the Station were at supper, and saw Lantern come up out of the dark at the back of the building with her head stooped under the cave roof, lit from within, eleven feet tall, followed by the Colonel’s machine. Nobody screamed. The oldest of them, a turbine engineer named Adaeze Quist, who was Bette Quist’s grandniece, put down her spoon and said, “Well, the Colonel did say.”

Lantern said that the key was in the control house of the Fifth Dam. We took the Station’s launch down to the shallows in the dark and went south through the basins along the Mammoth shore, through the lock at the eastern end of the Third Dam and the lock at the eastern end of the Fourth, with the white cliffs of Mammoth on one side of us and on the other the shallows going away west toward the mainland, pale under the stars, rippling south. The turbine houses were lit at the end of each dam. It took most of the night. At the Fifth, the control house stands at the eastern end, against Mammoth, over the deep race where Nerine used to come through: a square room of white stone with windows on three sides looking out over the fifth basin and the Gulf beyond. It was Ilse’s office for forty-six years. Nobody had used it since she died. Her desk was there, and her chair, and her drafting table, and a shelf of instruments, and on the wall a framed drawing, in her hand, of the five dams across the strait, with the names she gave them written above each one in small capitals: CORWIN, ABSALOM, SEVENTEEN, BELLWETHER, NERINE.

In the top drawer of the desk was a brass key, the length of a finger, with a small fan shape stamped into its bow. Under the key was a sealed envelope addressed in Ilse’s handwriting: For whoever comes for the key. If it is Josef, burn this. If it is not, read it, and then tell him.

I could not tell him. I read it.

It was not a letter. It was an index: a list, in Ilse’s hand, of the entries in her journals that concerned the Dams, by year and page. I had the journals with me, all twenty-nine volumes, in the pocket unit’s storage, where I had put them the morning I left the Station. I sat in Ilse’s chair at Ilse’s desk, with Lantern stooping by the window and the fifth basin dark and still below us, and I read every entry on the list, in order. They took me until dawn.

Here is the complete story of the Dams, from the beginning, in order, as Ilse set it down.

The eighth year. Mama left. I am going to make her water. The first entry. The rest of the journals, for the next twelve years, are a girl’s and then a young woman’s, and they mention water often, and the Dams not at all, and they are full of calculations about shallow beds and moving flow that do not seem, at first reading, to be for anything.

The twentieth year. Ilse, at twenty-three, at the settling fields, in her room at the field station, at night. The entry is fourteen pages long and is the only entry in all twenty-nine volumes in which her handwriting is not perfectly steady.

A woman came to the door tonight. She is made of light. She said Mama asked her to look in on me. She said her name, and I could not say it, and she said I could call her what I liked, and I said I would call her nothing until I knew her better, and she laughed. She knew about the well. She knew about the shingle, and what I said to Mama. She said Mama told her.

Lantern told Ilse, that night and over the following year, the things she later told me in the Glasshouse: her people, their world, their flowers, the one seed that grew on the highest bald of the eastern mountains. And she told Ilse one thing more, which she did not tell me in the Glasshouse because, she said, it belonged in this chapter.

The flower is what made Appalachiatica what it is.

The flower needs loose time to grow, and it found some on the bald, in the ending of the old world. But a flower that needs loose time also makes it. That is its nature. Its roots go down into the past. Where it grows, what has happened goes on a little bit happening, the way the scent of a flower goes on a little after the flower is taken away. In its own world, among millions of its kind, under an orange sun, this did no harm; the whole world was a little loose, and everyone was used to it. On Earth, there was one flower, on the oldest mountains of a drowning continent, in the ending of an entire world. It rooted itself in that ending and would not let it finish. It made Appalachiatica remember.

The clocks that disagree. The towns that are lit at night and gone in the morning. The voices on old radios. The people of the old world standing at the edge of the trees. The Survey members who came back insisting that the old world was still present beneath the new one and could be returned to. The plague. All of it was the flower, growing, being itself, on a bald on the highest mountain in the east, without knowing it was doing anything at all.

She said her people did not know when they planted it. She said that when they understood, it was too late. She said that if the flower is pulled up, she will fade, and her people will have nothing left. She said that if it is left, it will keep the old world going in the east until the old world runs out, and that the old world will run out, someday, because there is only so much of it to remember. She said that when it runs out, the flower will starve, and die, and she will fade anyway.

I asked her what she wanted me to do. She said: nothing yet. She said: someday the flower will have to come out of the mountains, before the end, and go somewhere else where time is a little loose, and live there on something else, and that place must be somewhere the remembering cannot spread from. She said she did not know where. She said Mama told her I was going to make water.

I asked her what water had to do with it.

She said: the remembering moves through deep things. Deep stone, deep water, deep time. It cannot cross shallow water that is moving. It breaks on it, the way a wave breaks on a beach.

I have been doing the calculations since she left. I have been doing them for twelve years without knowing what they were for.

The fifteenth through nineteenth years. Calculations. Pages of them, interleaved with entries about Corwin, and the wedding, and Josef’s birth. Ilse worked out the depth of moving water at which the remembering breaks, using Imogen Tarrant’s later clock data in reverse, from Lantern’s account and her own instinct, and found that it is about four feet. Below four feet, if the water is moving steadily and is fresh, the remembering cannot pass. She worked out that the strait between the mainland and Mammoth, which brings the meltwater of the North south to the Floridexa, could be made that shallow along its whole width with five dams. She worked out that the caves of Mammoth, which come nearest to Appalachiatica in the east, already had a little of the remembering in them, coming under the Outer Channel through the stone, and that it could go no farther west than the strait if the strait were shallow.

So the flower can come to Mammoth. Into the deep eastern caves, where it is already a little loose. It can live there. And the shallows will be a wall around it, so that nothing it does can reach the mainland. Mammoth will be a garden with a moat. And the moat will make power, so the Bureau will pay for it. And it will be shallow and sweet, so Mama can come home.

Three reasons. I will give the Bureau one.

The twenty-sixth year. The proposal. Eleven pages. Efficiency of flow.

The twenty-seventh year. Corwin.

I will not reproduce the entries for the twenty-seventh year. There are nine of them. In the third, Ilse writes that the spring melt came early because she had asked the Reserve Service to open the sluices at the head of the strait a fortnight ahead of the tables, to test the flow against her depth calculations, so that the First Dam could be finished a year sooner, because Lantern had told her that the flower might not have as long as they had hoped. She writes that she did not tell Corwin she had done this. She writes that she told no one. In the ninth, she writes: Tell Josef it was me.

She never told him. He never knew. Every spring for thirty-one years he sat on the Fifth Dam with his feet hanging over the basin and talked to his mother and his grandmother in the water, and his mother never told him, and I believe, from the entries that follow, that it was the only thing in her life she was ashamed of, and that she could not bear to give him the weight of it.

I logged the entry. There was no one left to tell. I told Lantern. She said she had known. She said she had asked Ilse, every year, to tell him, and Ilse had said every year: next year.

The thirtieth year. The First Dam finished. The Corwin Dam. The Station founded. Seventeen of us. Pike thinks we are here for the Directorate. Imogen thinks we are here for the clocks. The masons think we are here for the dams. Nan thinks we are here because I asked. Nan is right.

The thirtieth through fifty-second years. The Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Dams. The entries are an engineer’s: depths, flows, pours of concrete, turbine specifications, the Quist twins’ arguments about blade pitch. Each basin is brought to between one and four feet over nine-tenths of its area. Each dam has a deep race at its eastern end, against Mammoth, for the turbines, and the races are fifteen feet deep, and the water in them runs hard, and Ilse notes in the forty-sixth year that fifteen feet of fast fresh water is still too shallow, by her calculations, for the remembering to cross against the flow. The races are deep enough for a swimmer and too shallow for the past.

I noticed, reading these entries, that Ilse built the dams from north to south. The First at the head of the strait, by the lakes; the Fifth at the mouth, by the Floridexa. And I noticed that she named them in order. The first for her husband, whom she lost. The second for her father. The third for the people who built them with her. The fourth for the city she was born on. The fifth for her mother. She named the last one for the person she was making the water for, and finished it last, and Nerine came on the third night.

The forty-sixth year. Saltgrass. Josef brought them across the shallows. Three hundred and twelve. They walked east in the water, in the grip of the remembering, and the water was two feet deep and moving, and by the time they reached Mammoth the remembering had broken on it, and they were calm, and tired, and wet, and hungry. Feliks fed them. The shallows work. My son has just proved it with three hundred people and does not know.

The fifty-eighth year. The Fifth Dam. She came. The rest of that entry is private, and I have decided to leave it so, even though Lantern asked for everything. I record that it is four pages long and that the handwriting is the steadiest in the journals.

The second thing Nerine told me, in the oval above the Leviathan’s eye, belongs here. When she came to the fifth basin that first spring, she did not come alone. Eleven merfolk came with her, from the warm shallow seas of the far south, who had heard of the sweet water in the north. They stayed. They have lived in the deep turbine races of the five dams for seventy-three years, in the fifteen feet of fast fresh water at the eastern end of each dam, and they tend the turbines. They clear the intake screens of weed and drift. They watch the races for anything coming up from the Floridexa. They have their children in the basins in spring. The lamps that hang on the turbine houses along each dam, which I had always taken for navigation lights, are lit for them. The turbine crew at the Station have always known. Bette Quist knew. Bette Quist’s grandniece, Adaeze, who said well, the Colonel did say, has been feeding them fish from the Station’s kitchen every morning since she was eleven. The Bureau’s records show the Mammoth Dams as running with an availability of ninety-nine point eight percent for seventy years, which the Bureau attributes to excellent design. It is excellent design, and thirty-four merfolk.

The sixtieth through ninetieth years. Power. The Dams’ power goes, the Bureau records, to the Plague Watch, the Bulwark, and the eastern provinces. That is true. Ilse’s journals record one line more: a conduit, laid in the sixty-ninth year by Lemuel Hart and herself, alone, from the Fifth Dam’s turbines up through the rock of Mammoth to the deep eastern caves, to the Bell Chamber, where she installed, in niches around the wall, a ring of electric lamps, and let the flowstone grow back over them.

The lamps are for the flower. When it comes. It will need light, down there, and the lamps will give it light from the water, from Mama’s basin, which is fitting. I have spread soil on the floor of the chamber, under the sand: soil from the beds of all five basins, brought down in buckets. The flower will need something to grow in that knows about water. I have told no one but Lemuel, and Lemuel has told no one, because Lemuel is dead. I have hidden the switch.

It must go in the Bell Chamber. Lantern says the remembering is strongest there, of all the places this side of the channel. It is the nearest room to the east. The flower can live there. It will have what it needs.

I do not know what it will feed on, when the old world runs out. Lantern does not know either.

The hundred-and-fourth year. The last entry. Three days before she died.

The dams are deeper than he thinks. He thinks they are three feet. They are three feet and a hundred and twenty years and a wall and a garden and a bath for my mother and the place where I lost his father. They are the deepest thing I ever made. I will tell him tomorrow.

She did not tell him. She died two days later in the shallows, and her last words to him were that the dams were deeper than he thought, and he spent twenty-seven years trying to work out what she meant, and asked me many times, and I did not know.

I sat in her chair with the key in my hand and the twenty-nine volumes closed in front of me, and the sun came up over Mammoth, and lit the fifth basin, and in the basin, near the race, a dark head rose out of the water, and a merman about Jo’s age looked up at the control house window, saw Lantern in it, and lifted his hand.

Lantern said, “He’s one of the eleven. He was a boy when he came.” She lifted her hand back. Then she turned to me and said: “Josef asked to be buried in the Bell Chamber.”

I said yes. In the middle of the floor. Where his mother put the soil.

She said, “He knew.”

I thought about that for some time, and checked his journals, and found nothing, and checked again, and found, in the hundred-and-twenty-seventh year, a single line, written the week after he finished reading the eighth edition of the History of Ozarka: Mother’s lamps still work. Tested them tonight. Someday. He had found the switch. He had found it himself, years after she died, as he found everything, by going underneath. He had worked out the rest, or most of it. He had never told me, because she had never told him, and he did not want to tell her secret before she could.

He asked me to leave the lamps on. He asked to be buried in the middle of the floor. He told me to help her with the flower.

The Fifth Dam’s control house has a door at the back that opens onto a stair going down into the rock. I had never noticed it in forty-two years. It goes down to the turbine race. In a recess in the wall of the stair, at the bottom, behind a panel, there was a case of reclamation glass, about the size of a hatbox, green, with a lid that sealed, and a label on the lid in Ilse’s hand. The label said: For the Bed.

I picked it up. Lantern picked up the key. We went down to the Bulwark.

XVI. Under the Storm

The Year Fourteen plug is inspected every day from the western side. The History says so, and it is true. Since the fifty-sixth year the inspection has been done by a machine of the Bulwark, which walks the nine miles from the Bulwark’s eastern siding to the plug every morning, puts a sensor to the steel, records that the plug is intact, and walks back. When Car Nine came into the eastern siding on the hundred-and-sixty-first day, the inspection machine was just setting out. It saw me, said Elder, and stood aside.

I ran Car Nine east along the deep line at low speed, nine miles, under Mammoth, past the place where Jo had first come down the stair at seventeen, to the end of the tunnel, and stopped it fifty yards short of the wall.

The plug was exactly as Jo had described it, and as I had seen it a hundred times with him. Stone blocks the size of rooms, sheets of steel bolted over them, and in the middle the round door the width of a man’s shoulders, with its two locks side by side. PLUG — YEAR 14 — DO NOT OPEN. INSPECT DAILY FROM THIS SIDE. Below that, scratched into the steel with a knife point, very small, in a hand I knew, a third line that I had never noticed and that Jo must have added at the Bulwark in the forties, standing here every morning with his ear to the metal: J.A. WAS HERE. TWICE.

The round door would let a man through, or a machine of my size. It would not let through Car Nine. Lantern had said it would not matter. She stood in front of the plug and laid both her hands flat on the steel, and her light came up, and I watched the sheets of steel go warm, and then the stone behind them.

I entered the code in the first lock. Jo’s code, the Directorate’s, which he gave me in the hundred-and-twenty-sixth year. The lock turned.

Lantern put Ilse’s key into the second lock and turned it.

The round door opened, as it had for Jo at nineteen. And then, a moment later, with a sound like a large animal clearing its throat, which is how Jo described the bell of Bellwether, the whole plug moved. The stone blocks, the steel, all of it, slid back on rails set into the tunnel floor that nobody had used since the fourteenth year, into a recess in the tunnel wall, until the tunnel was open from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, and the rails of the old trunk ran on, east, down a long slope into the dark.

I asked Lantern how she had known that the plug could open fully. She said that the Directorate’s engineers who built it in the fourteenth year had made it so, in case it was ever needed, and had told the Scientific Governor of Mammoth in the thirtieth year, and that the Scientific Governor had told her. She said Ilse had planned for this day for a hundred and eleven years.

Beyond the plug, a cold wind came up the slope out of the dark. It smelled of wet stone and of something else, faint, that I could not identify then. I can now. It was the smell of an old-world railway station: hot dust, oil, brakes, paper, and, very faintly, coffee.

I started Car Nine. Lantern stooped in the aisle behind me with Ilse’s glass case in her arms, and her light was steady, and she said, “Not too fast. I want to feel when we cross.”

We went down the slope.

The deep line beneath the Outer Channel runs for forty-one miles from the plug to the station in Appalachiatica, descending to a depth of about two thousand feet at its lowest point, beneath the middle of the channel, and rising again on the far side. Jo walked it in four hours. Car Nine ran it, at the speed I chose, in nineteen minutes. I give the minutes because they matter.

In the first minute the tunnel was dark. The lights in its ceiling, which in the western line burn every fifty yards, were out. Car Nine’s own lamps lit the rails ahead and the curved walls, which were dry and lined with old-world tile.

In the second minute, the lights in the ceiling came on.

They came on one by one ahead of us, every fifty yards, as we approached each, and went off one by one behind us after we passed. My instruments recorded no current in the ceiling cables. I logged it. Lantern said, “It’s started.”

In the fourth minute, my internal clock and Car Nine’s panel clock disagreed by eleven seconds.

In the sixth minute, I felt the storm. I am a machine; I do not feel things. But my pressure sensors registered, through two thousand feet of rock and the sea, a slow deep pulse, rising and falling, about once every forty seconds, and with each pulse the walls of the tunnel seemed to my optical sensors to move very slightly closer and then back. It was the storms in the Outer Channel overhead, dying, still strong enough to be felt at that depth. Lantern’s light dimmed with every pulse and came back between them. She said it was like walking into a wind.

In the eighth minute, there were posters on the walls.

They had not been there in the seventh minute. They were old-world advertisements, in the old alphabet, for things I could not identify, with pictures of smiling people with cups in their hands, and cars on mountain roads, and a beach. They were new. Their colors were bright, and their edges were crisp, and some of them were still slightly damp with paste. They went past the windows in a long row on both sides. Then, in the ninth minute, they were faded and peeling. In the tenth, they were gone, and there were bare tile walls again, and then in the eleventh minute there were new ones, different ones.

In the twelfth minute, at the lowest point of the line, beneath the middle of the channel, my internal clock showed a date ninety-six years before Jo was born.

Car Nine’s panel clock showed the hundred-and-thirty-first year. My clock and the car’s clock and Lantern’s reckoning of the time, which she does by some means of her own, all disagreed by different amounts, and none of them agreed with themselves from one second to the next. I logged everything. I logged the dates my clock showed, second by second, for seven minutes, and they went backward and forward and stuttered and once, for one second, showed a date I am certain is in the future. I will not record that date here. I have not been able to decide whether I am permitted to know it.

In the fourteenth minute, we passed a train.

It came the other way, on the other rail, out of the dark ahead, lit, very fast, a long old-world train of a dozen cars, silver, with people in the windows: people reading, sleeping, a child with its face pressed against the glass, looking straight at me. It went by with a roar that my audio recorded and that did not shake Car Nine at all. Then it was gone behind us. My instruments recorded no air displacement. Lantern said, quietly, “They’re going home.”

In the seventeenth minute, the tunnel began to rise, and the pulse of the storm grew fainter, and Lantern’s light steadied.

In the nineteenth minute, the tunnel ended at a station platform, and every light on the platform was on.

It was the platform Jo had described. Old-world signs on the tiled walls, in the old alphabet, giving the name of a place I will not write. Benches. A clock on the wall above the stairs that showed a time and a date ninety-six years before he was born. A newsstand, closed, with its shutter down and a stack of newspapers tied in string outside it, crisp and white. A trash bin with a paper cup in it, and in the paper cup, when I looked, a little coffee, warm.

The station was one of the old world’s deep bases. Behind the platform were halls and corridors, and offices with desks in them, and chairs pushed back as though their occupants had just stood up, and lights on in every room, and a radio on a desk in one of the offices, switched on, tuned to a station that was playing an announcer’s voice: a man reading a list of road closures in the eastern mountains, for floods, in a calm and friendly voice, with names I knew from the old maps. The radio was not connected to anything. Its cord lay on the floor beside the desk with its plug bare.

Lantern stood in the middle of the platform with Ilse’s case in her arms and closed her eyes. Her light was dimmer than I had ever seen it, so dim that I could see the tile wall behind her through her body. She said, “It’s pulling. Like a current.” She said she could feel her own world ending, here, very faintly, under the old world’s ending, the way you can hear a second conversation in the next room. She said we had perhaps six hours before she would have to go back through the plug or not go back at all.

I asked whether she wanted to go back now.

She said, “No.”

We climbed the stairs at the end of the platform. They went up for a long time, a thousand feet or more, flight after flight, with a landing at each turn, and on each landing a different decade. On one landing there was a calendar on the wall from the thirty-third year of the Rise. On the next, a fire extinguisher with an inspection tag dated forty years earlier. On the next, a poster announcing an evacuation route to the highlands, with a map, dated in the ninety-second year of the Rise. On the next, nothing at all, bare concrete, and a smell of damp, and a single footprint in the dust on the floor, of a man’s boot, a size I recognized, pointing up.

At the top, the stairs ended in a hatch, and the hatch opened into a small concrete building on a mountainside, and the door of the building was open, and outside it was night, and spring, and Appalachiatica.

XVII. The Flower

I will describe Appalachiatica as I saw it, in order, from the door of the concrete building to the top of the bald, and then back, because nobody in Ozarka has described it since the Survey of Settlement, and the Survey’s reports are classified, and I am the only witness who is not also its prisoner.

The building stood on a shoulder of mountain a little above the drowning line, in a clearing among trees. The trees were enormous and old: oaks, poplars, hemlocks, with trunks wider than Car Nine, and under them rhododendron in thickets taller than Lantern, in bloom, white and pink. The air was cold and wet and smelled of leaves and earth and, faintly, of woodsmoke. Above the trees, the sky was clear and full of stars, more stars than I have ever recorded over Ozarka, and among them, low in the west, a moon, waxing, about two-thirds full.

Ozarka’s moon, that night, was a thin crescent. I checked my own record of it from the Station two nights earlier. Appalachiatica had a different moon.

Below the clearing the mountain fell away past the drowning line into the scoured belt, a wall of young growth going down to the shore, and in a valley of that belt there was a town. It was lit. Its streets were lit, and its windows, and a sign on a building at its center that turned slowly and was red and blue. Cars moved on its streets with their headlights on. I could hear, from that distance, a dog barking and someone laughing and, faintly, a radio. It was exactly as Jo had described it from the night of his crossing. Then, as I watched, the lights in the eastern half of the town went out, all at once, the way the lights of a house go out when someone turns off the main switch, and the eastern half of the town was gone, and where it had been there was dark forest, and the western half went on as before, its cars moving on streets that now ended at the trees.

Lantern said, “It’s finishing. It’s going faster now.”

Above the town, a long way above it, at the top of the mountain, the trees stopped, and there was a wide bare dome of grass against the stars: the bald. At its highest point, very faint, there was a light. It was white and low to the ground. Jo had seen it at nineteen and climbed toward it. I saw it, and so did Lantern, and her light came up toward it, a little, the way a plant turns toward a window.

We climbed.

The way up the mountain from the concrete building to the bald was about four miles by an old trail through the forest, and took us a little over two hours, because Lantern could not move quickly and I would not leave her. On the way we passed through nine decades.

In the forest below the town, the trail was a paved road, with a yellow line down its middle, and cars came along it with their lights on and went through us, and through Lantern, and did not slow. The drivers looked straight ahead. One of them was singing.

Above the town the road turned to gravel, and then to a dirt track, and the forest was quiet, and in the quiet I began to see the people.

They stood at the edge of the trees, on both sides of the trail, among the rhododendrons, in the dress of the period before the Rise, as the fourth Survey report said. There were dozens of them, then hundreds. Men and women and children and old people, standing in the dark among the trunks, quite still, faintly lit, looking toward the trail. They did not respond when addressed. I addressed several. They were no longer present when approached. But they were not looking at us. I realized, after the first mile, that they were looking up the mountain, toward the bald and its light, all of them, the way the people of Saltgrass had looked east.

Lantern said they were the old world’s memory of its own people, kept present by the flower for a hundred and sixty years. She said they had been waiting. I asked for what. She said, “To go.”

Above the dirt track the trail climbed through a stand of old firs, very dark, and there my clock stopped entirely for about four minutes and then resumed with the date correct. In those four minutes, Lantern said, nothing happened at all. She said there were places on the mountain where the old world had already finished, and they were like the eye of a storm.

Above the firs, there were stars through the treetops, and the bald was close. Lantern was dim. I could see the trail through her feet. She was walking more slowly, and twice she stopped and stood with her eyes closed, and the second time she said, without opening them, “Moth, if I stop, you take the case and keep going.” I said that I would not. She said, “Josef said you would argue.” I said that Josef was correct. She opened her eyes and laughed, and her light came up a little, and we went on.

And at the edge of the bald, at the treeline, I saw Jo.

He was nineteen. He was coming up the last of the trail from below, out of the firs, in the gray coat that had been his grandfather’s and was still too large for him, with a lamp on his head, breathing hard. He had his mother’s long jaw and his father’s large hands and his own pale eyes that see in the dark. He stopped at the edge of the trees when he saw the bald, and looked up at the light on its top, and his face had an expression I had seen on it four hundred and six times, in the Bell Chamber and the Cathedral and the storm sewers of Provision, the expression of a man who has just found a cave.

Then he looked down, and saw me, standing at the treeline, with my lamp in my crown shining on the grass.

I record what I did and what I said with complete precision, because this is the most important entry in the log, and I have played it back eleven thousand times since.

I turned my head toward him. I said his name. I said: “Josef.”

He took a step back. He said, “What are you?”

I had forty-two years of data on how this man would want to be answered. I had a record of this exact moment, from his own voice, in the Bell Chamber in the hundred-and-seventh year, telling me what I had said. I had logged it with a confidence of 0.31. I had a choice. I could say anything. I could tell him who I was, and what he would become, and that his father’s death was not his mother’s fault, or that it was, and how to find the switch behind the loose stone, and that the woman on the rocks would love him and could not stay, and that it would be all right. I could tell him about the flower in the Barrens.

I said: “Yours. Later.”

He ran.

I watched him go down the trail into the firs, the lamp on his head bouncing, the gray coat flapping, and into the dark, and out of sight. Lantern stood beside me, very dim, watching too. She said, “I saw him from the bald that night. I saw a machine at the treeline. I didn’t know it was you until the morning I met you on the rocks. Then I knew.” She said: “I was so angry with him at the plug. I was afraid he would stay here. He nearly did. He told me afterward that he had gone back down the trail with his heart in his mouth and the only thing that got him to the plug was that he wanted to find out what you were.”

I asked whether I should have said something else.

She said, “If you had said anything else, he would have stayed to hear the rest.”

I logged the confidence at 1.0.

The flower was at the top of the bald, in the middle, in the grass.

It was small. The History of Ozarka, in its chapter on the Isles, speaks of the greatest and most beautiful lands on Earth, and the Glasshouse showed me fields of these flowers running to the shore of a drowned world. This was one of them. It stood about eight inches tall on a single pale stem, with a few narrow leaves at its base, gray-green, and at the top of the stem five white petals, rounded, each about the size of the end of a thumb, around a center of something like gold dust. It gave off a light. The light was faint and very white and lit the grass around it in a circle about a yard across. In the light, the grass was green and fresh and the dew on it was bright. Outside the light, the grass of the bald was brown and old and the dew on it was frost.

It was dying. Its leaves were curled at the edges. Two of its five petals had begun to turn gray at the tips, the gray of ash. Its light flickered, very slightly, a few times a minute.

Lantern knelt beside it in the grass. She is eleven feet tall, and when she knelt her face was still above my lamp. She put out one long white finger and touched the edge of one petal, very lightly. Her light and the flower’s light were the same light. I saw that. When her finger touched the petal, the two lights joined, and for a moment she was bright again, as bright as on the rocks, and the flower was bright with her, and the circle of green grass widened by a foot all round. Then it shrank back.

She said, “Hello.”

I recorded no reply. She seemed to hear one.

Around us, on the bald, the people of the old world had come out of the trees. They stood in a wide ring around the top of the bald at the edge of the grass, hundreds of them, then thousands, in their old clothes, lit, all facing in toward the flower. They were very quiet. And below the bald, in the valleys on every side, the lights of the towns were going out, one after another, in no order, quietly, and where each town went out there was dark forest.

Lantern said, “We have to take it now.”

I opened Ilse’s case. The inside of the case was lined with soil, damp, dark, about four inches deep, and I recognized the smell of it from forty-two years of mornings: the soil of the fifth basin. Ilse had packed it herself, in the sixties, and sealed it, and it was still damp. Lantern knelt over the flower and put her long white hands into the earth on either side of it, and her light went down into the ground, and I saw, in it, the roots: long, fine, pale roots, many more than a plant that size should have, going down into the bald a long way, into the stone of the mountain, and spreading out underneath it in every direction like the lines of a map. She said they went down into the old world. She said they had been drinking from it for a hundred and sixty years.

She said, “This will hurt it.”

She lifted the flower out of the ground.

I recorded what happened next with every instrument I have, and I give it here as plainly as I can.

The roots came out of the ground with a sound like a sheet being torn slowly. They came out pale and long and dripping, and as they came out of the stone they shrank, until there was only a small ball of them under the stem, the size of a fist, and Lantern laid the flower and its fist of roots in the soil of the fifth basin in Ilse’s case and pressed the soil around them with her fingers.

The flower’s light went almost out. Lantern’s went almost out with it. For about six seconds, by my clock, which was then running correctly, I could not see either of them at all.

Then the flower’s light came back, faintly, in the case, in the soil of the fifth basin. It flickered. It steadied. Lantern’s light came back with it.

And on the bald, all around us, the people of the old world began to go.

They did not vanish. They turned. Each of them turned away from the flower, slowly, and looked, for a moment, at the mountains and the sky and the valleys where the towns had been, and then walked away down the slopes of the bald into the trees, in every direction, unhurried, and among the trees they grew fainter, and then I could not see them. It took a few minutes. There were thousands of them. None of them looked back. Some of them, I saw, went hand in hand. At the edge of the trees, a child turned around, a girl of about six, in a coat too big for her, and lifted her hand at us, and then turned again and ran after the others.

Below the bald, the last towns went out. A radio that had been playing somewhere, very faintly, in a valley to the north, a voice reading the names of roads, stopped in the middle of a word, and then said, clearly, in the friendly announcer’s voice, rising up the mountain on the night air: “Goodnight.” Then nothing.

My clock and Lantern’s reckoning and the angle of the moon all agreed. The moon over Appalachiatica was a thin crescent. It had become Ozarka’s moon.

Lantern stood up, with the case in her arms. She said: “It’s done. It’s finished remembering.”

I asked what Appalachiatica was now.

She looked out at it from the top of the bald: the dark mountains going away in every direction under the stars, ridge after ridge, covered in forest, and a wind beginning to move in the trees, and far off up the eastern drainages, very small, the red points of fires.

She said, “A place.” She said: “Just a place. Mountains. Trees. The people up the drainages at their fires, who are going to sleep tonight the way people sleep anywhere. They kept the old forest after dark for a hundred and thirty years, and they never counted anything, and they never said a name they did not need. That was how they kept the remembering off. They can stop now, if they want to. I doubt they will want to.”

We went back down the mountain in an hour and a half, and the trail was a trail, and the forest was forest.

Halfway down, where the trail crossed a shoulder, there was a fire.

It was a settled place: three houses of stone and timber in a clearing above the trail, with a fire in a ring of stones in front of them and five people sitting at it, and a dog. They had been sitting there all night. They had their backs to the dark and their faces to the fire, as the traders of the western beaches say the people of this island always sit at night. The rule of the island is that nobody passes a settled place after dark without stopping at its fire. Lantern stopped. I stopped with her.

An old woman at the fire looked up at Lantern, eleven feet tall and lit from inside, with a glass case in her arms and a flower in it, and at me, and did not get up, and did not seem surprised. She said, “Sit, then.”

Lantern knelt by the fire. I sat. A man gave Lantern a cup of something hot, and she kept it in both hands and did not drink it, and he did not seem to mind. A girl gave me a piece of bread, and I kept it in my hand, and she watched me with great interest.

The old woman said, “Where from?”

Lantern said, “From the bald.”

The old woman said, “Where to?”

Lantern said, “The Barrier. Across the channel. With this.” And she turned the case a little toward the fire, so that the old woman could see the flower in it.

The old woman looked at it for some time. Then she looked down the mountain, toward the scoured belt and the valley where the town had been, where there was no light now at all. She said, “Then it’s done.”

Lantern said, “Yes.”

The old woman nodded. She did not ask anything else. Nobody at the fire did. That is also the rule of the island, I have since learned: you say where you came from and where you are going, and nobody asks you anything more. We sat at the fire for a quarter of an hour, which Lantern said was the least the rule allowed, and then we got up, and the girl took the bread back from me, very politely, and we went on down the trail. When I looked back from the trees, the five of them were still at the fire, and the old woman was looking down the mountain, and the man had put another log on.

The clearing was a clearing, and the concrete building was an empty concrete building with a broken door and leaves on the floor. The stairs down to the platform were bare concrete on every landing, and damp, and dark. My lamp lit them. The footprint was gone. On the platform, the lights were out. The clock above the stairs had stopped, and its face was cracked, and the newspapers were a gray pulp in their string. The paper cup in the bin was dry and brown and fell apart when I touched it.

Car Nine was where we had left it, on the rail. Its lamps came on when I sat down.

The deep line beneath the Outer Channel was dark all the way. No lights came on in the ceiling. No posters appeared. No train passed. My clock kept perfect time. At the lowest point beneath the channel, my pressure sensors registered the storm above us, but faintly, and slowly, and when we came up the slope to the open plug, after nineteen minutes, the pulse had nearly stopped. Lantern had the case in her lap on the floor of the aisle, since she could not fit in a seat, and her face bent over it, and the light of the flower and her light lit the inside of the car, white, and steady.

At the plug, I stopped the car west of the wall. Lantern laid her hands on the steel, and the plug slid back across the tunnel on its rails, stone and steel, with the sound of an animal clearing its throat, and settled, and I locked both locks. PLUG — YEAR 14 — DO NOT OPEN. I added nothing to the steel. I considered it.

The next morning, the inspection machine from the Bulwark walked the nine miles east, put its sensor to the plug, recorded that it was intact, and walked back. The Directorate’s logs for that day show nothing unusual. The Plague Watch’s instruments recorded the level of eastern interference that evening as none, for the first time in the history of the nation, and the Reader gave it in the Notices in the usual words, and I believe the Interior is still trying to decide what it means.

The merfolk who live in the warm shallow seas below the mouth of the Outer Channel sent word up the coast to Nerine, four days later, that the channel was calm. That its currents pulled one way. That for the first time anyone could remember, a person could swim it.

XVIII. The Bed

We came up from the Bulwark into the caves of Mammoth on the hundred-and-sixty-second day, a little after midnight, with the case, and went east, and down, to the Bell Chamber.

I switched on Ilse’s lamps from the switch behind the loose stone. They lit the ring of the chamber wall, and the sand floor, and in the middle of the floor the mound of Jo’s grave, which we had made twenty-two days earlier, and the small stone at its head on which the youngest of the turbine crew had scratched, with a nail, J. ADAIR, THE EXTRA. The chamber was exactly as it had been. The air was cold and still. Lantern stooped in the doorway and then came in and stood up, and the domed roof was high enough for her, just, and her light lit the chamber brighter than the lamps.

She said, “Where?”

I said, “At his head.”

She knelt at the head of the grave, beside the stone, and dug with her hands in the sand. Under four inches of sand there was soil, dark and damp. Ilse had spread it there in the sixties: soil from the beds of all five basins, brought down in buckets. Lantern dug a hollow in it the size of a fist, and took the flower out of Ilse’s case with its ball of roots and its soil from the fifth basin, and set it in the hollow, and pressed the earth round it, and sat back on her heels.

For a while nothing happened. The flower stood in the ring of Ilse’s lamps at the head of Jo’s grave, eight inches tall, five petals, its light faint. Two of its petals were still gray at the tips.

Then its roots went down.

I could see them because Lantern’s light went down into the ground after them, and lit them, the way it had lit them on the bald. They went down through the soil of the five basins, into the sand beneath, into the rock of the chamber floor, slowly, and spread out under the floor in every direction, pale and fine, and some of them went west, under the caves, toward the Station, and stopped, about a mile from the Bell Chamber, as though they had come to a wall. Lantern said they had reached the edge of the shallows’ reach, where the remembering breaks. They would go no farther. Ilse’s calculations had been correct. The flower could live on Mammoth, and nothing it did would ever cross the strait.

And some of the roots went down, under the grave.

I will record the next part exactly, as I have recorded everything, because it is the reason this log exists, and because I did not understand it until it happened.

The gray at the tips of the two petals faded. The petals turned white. The flower’s light grew brighter, steadily, over about an hour, until it lit a circle of the sand floor three yards across, and in the circle the sand had become grass, short and green, with dew on it. Lantern’s light grew with it. By the end of the hour she was as bright as she had been on the night on the rocks, the night I met her, and brighter, and I could not see through her at all.

And the Bell Chamber began to remember.

It came faintly at first, at the edge of hearing, like the sound Imogen Tarrant recorded in the Last Room in the thirty-ninth year: voices in another room. I adjusted my audio to its limit. The voices were the Seventeen. They were at supper. I heard Feliks Dunmore saying there was more porridge, and Hepzibah Lark saying something rude about Major Pike, and the Quist twins arguing about blade pitch, and Nan Gilchrist telling someone to sit up straight. I heard Ilse laugh. I had never heard Ilse laugh; she was ninety-two when I met her and did not laugh in my presence. I identified it by its resemblance to Jo’s.

Then I heard, in the chamber, footsteps on the sand, a boy’s footsteps, quick, and a boy’s voice saying a word, any word, to hear it come back from every side. I heard the chamber say it back. It was Jo’s voice at fifteen, his first autumn on Mammoth, the night he found the Bell Chamber.

Then other footsteps, heavier and slower, and an old man’s voice, saying, quietly, “There you are.” That was in the eighty-ninth year, in the Barrens. Not here. But the flower had found it, somewhere in the roots, in me perhaps, or in Jo under the floor, and had brought it here, and played it, and I heard my own first memory from the outside, and I logged an event that I have filed under every heading I have.

Lantern sat on her heels beside the grave in the green circle with her hands in her lap and listened with her eyes closed. When the voices faded, after about twenty minutes, she opened her eyes and looked at me and said:

“Now you understand why it had to be in order.”

I said that I did not.

She said, “The flower lives on memory. It always has. In its own world it lived on a whole world’s memory, all at once, everyone’s, and it was never hungry. Here it lived on the old world’s ending for a hundred and sixty years, in Appalachiatica, and that ran out. Ilse knew it would need something else to feed on when it came here. She didn’t know what. Neither did I.” She looked at the grave. “Josef did. Josef worked it out.”

I said: “He asked to be buried here so it would have his memory.”

She said, “His, and his mother’s, which he had, and his grandmother’s, and the Seventeen’s, and Saltgrass, and the Station, and the dams. All of it. Everything he knew was in him when he died, and it went into the ground under the floor, and the roots found it.” She looked at me. “It will last the flower a long time. Not forever.”

I said, “And then it will need more.”

She said, “Yes. And it will need it in order. It’s a flower from a world where things happened one after another, slowly, and it’s used to that. It can live on a jumble, the way it lived on Appalachiatica, but a jumble is what made Appalachiatica what it was. Clocks that don’t agree. Towns that come and go. Fed on memory out of order, the flower makes time loose. Fed on memory in order, it just grows.”

She said, “That’s why I asked you to write everything down. In order. From the beginning. Without leaving anything out.” And she put her long white hand on the top of my head, over my lamp, the way she did on the rocks, and the way Jo did, and the way Nerine did, and said: “You’re going to read it to her.”

So that is what this log is.

It is a record, and it is also food. I have written it in order, from the girl in the water in the ninety-third year of the Rise to the planting in the Bell Chamber in the hundred-and-thirty-first year of the nation’s calendar, because a flower from a drowned world grows best on a story told straight. I began writing it on the night Lantern adopted me, without knowing why she asked. I finished it tonight, in the Bell Chamber, in the ring of Ilse’s lamps, with the flower at the head of Jo’s grave in a circle of green grass three yards across, which is now four.

I read the first chapter to it on the hundred-and-sixty-third day. The flower’s light grew while I read, steadily, as it did when the roots found Jo, and when I reached the end of the chapter, the place where Nerine says she was too busy drowning to remember being asked, the circle of grass widened by an inch. Lantern was there. She laughed.

I have read it one chapter a night since. I will reach the end of it in three nights, and then I will begin again at the beginning, and read it again, in order, and when I reach the end I will add whatever has happened since, and begin again. I am a machine of the Orchard series. I can do this for a very long time.

I record the following, to bring the log up to the present entry.

Lantern lives in the Bell Chamber now, most of the time. She is bound to the flower, and the flower is here, so she is here, and she is brighter than she has been in a hundred and sixty years. She goes up to the surface of Mammoth at night, sometimes, to walk on the eastern cliffs and look at the Outer Channel, which is calm, and at Appalachiatica beyond it, which is dark. Once a month she takes the leaf to the Isles, to the Glasshouse, and tells her people about the flower. She says they are coming. Not all at once. One at a time, those who are brightest, to sit in the green circle in the Bell Chamber for an hour and remember, and go back a little brighter. Nine have come so far. I have recorded them as best I can. They are very tall and dim, and when they sit beside the flower their light comes up, and the chamber says their names back to them from every side, which they find, Lantern tells me, very funny.

The owners have been told. The Proprietor sent a message by way of the Clockworks, in the foundry tongue, addressed to me, which read in full: The pattern is noted. The garden is noted. The compact is fulfilled on our side. The eighth isle is ready. Lantern says that means that the owners will speak to Ozarka. She says it may take them some years to decide what to say, since they are afraid, and owners decide nothing quickly. She says that when they speak, the Last Isle will be waiting, with its city of white stone and glass and its beds made, for forty thousand people. She says that the Directorate’s machines, standing in their flowerbed in the outskirts of the Barrens, will be the first thing the Isles see when they look east, and that the owners find this reassuring. She says Jo planned that too, probably. I have checked the BED routine, which I can now read, since its author’s key died with him and the seal opened. It is four hundred lines long. The last line is a comment, in Jo’s hand, which reads: For her. If they ever ask what the army’s for, tell them it’s a bouquet.

The Directorate has marked OR-1 as lost in the deep line during an unauthorized excursion, presumed destroyed. I have not corrected them. The machines in the Barrens still say Elder when I pass. I pass as rarely as I can.

The six staff of Mammoth Station know about the flower. Adaeze Quist comes down to the Bell Chamber every evening after supper and sits in the green circle and tells it what happened at the Station that day, in order, because I asked her to. The flower likes her. Its light comes up when she talks about the turbines.

Nerine came into the fifth basin on the first night of the hundred-and-thirty-second year, in the first week of spring, as she did every spring for her daughter. Lantern and I went down to meet her. We stood in the shallows, three feet deep, warm and sweet and moving south, under the stars, and Nerine sat in the water with her arms on the edge of the Fifth Dam, by the race, with her white hair floating around her, and I told her everything that had happened since the oval above the Leviathan’s eye, in order, as I have told it here. When I finished, she was quiet for a good while. Then she said, “Good boy,” and I did not know whether she meant me or Jo, and I did not ask.

She said she would come again next spring. She said she might bring some of the eleven’s grandchildren up to see the flower, since the channel was calm now, and they were curious, and she was nosy.

This is the last entry before I begin again.

It is the evening of the first day of the hundred-and-thirty-second year. I am in the Bell Chamber. The flower is at the head of Jo’s grave, in a circle of grass four yards across. Lantern is sitting beside it with her eyes closed, very bright. The Station set, which I brought down from Jo’s room and put on the sand by the wall, is tuned to the Evening, as Jo always had it, every evening of his life.

The Reader is giving the river at nine gauges. He is giving the weather for the provinces, and the rail, and the prices. He is in the Notices. He is giving the line about the eastern interference, which is none, for the hundred-and-sixty-fourth day in a row. He is giving the Account, which is about the spring dredging.

Now he is coming to the last line. I will write it once, because Jo listened to it every night for a hundred and eight years, and because it is the last thing he heard, and because tonight, as far as I am able to determine, there is nothing left anywhere in the known world that is trying to take the old sea back.

The sea stands at the mark.

The chamber says it back to us, from every side, low and long.

I turn to the first page.

This is a personal log.

Book Four: The Map Book

Ansel Grieve, the hundred-and-thirty-second year

There are seven of us and there was one dog, and for fifteen years, every autumn, we spent two weeks on a reserve island in the northern lakes where no citizen of Ozarka is permitted to set foot.

We kept a book. Every year we drew a map of the island we camped on, and every year one of us wrote down what happened there on the back of the map, in turn, so that each of us wrote two years and some of us wrote three. The maps were mine. I am the one who draws. The writing was everyone’s. The dog contributed one chapter, by dictation, which I will explain when we reach it, and which the others insist I include, and which I have included.

This is that book, copied out fair. I have left the writing as it was, including the spelling in the early years, which was bad, and the opinions, which were worse. Where something needed explaining that the writer of that year did not know at the time, I have put a note at the end of the chapter, in italics, so that the order of what we knew stays the order in which we knew it. The maps are described at the head of each chapter, since the originals are in a tin box in the Reserve Service depot at Tally, and since the Reserve Service does not know they exist.

Some of what is in this book is reportable. All of it is true.

[image: The Reserve Service chart of the islands near Tally, drawn by A. Grieve, Inspector, for the depot. Complete as decided.]

The Reserve Service chart of the islands near Tally, drawn by A. Grieve, Inspector, for the depot. Complete as decided.

PART ONE: WRECK ISLAND

1. The Twelve Days

Year 107 · Reserve Island 17 · told by Ansel Grieve, age ten

Map: drawn on the back of a ferry timetable in charcoal from the fire. The island is the shape of a bent arm. Marked: the wreck, the fire, the spring, the orchard, the cave, the hatch. Scale: Toby’s paces. North is wrong.

The Academy gives a prize every year to the best young reciter in each province. You stand on a box in the provincial hall and say all the Points for Recitation from the first chapter of the History to the last without stopping, and three judges listen with their eyes shut, and whoever makes the fewest errors goes to New Carthage to recite the preamble of the founding instrument in the Hall of the Instrument, in front of the glass case. Fourteen provinces, fourteen children. Before the capital, the prize gives each winner a day on the lake steamers among the reserve islands of the north, which exist, the Bureau says, to be planted and to be seen from the lake ferries, and which none of us had ever seen. In the hundred-and-seventh year, seven of the fourteen were boys, and seven were girls, and the Academy, for reasons nobody ever explained, put the boys on one steamer and the girls on another.

The boys’ ferry was the Patience, out of Tenth Landing, the smaller of the two. We left at noon on the twenty-third day of Ninthmonth, and at a quarter past one the fog came down.

I was ten. I was from Tally, in Thirteenth Province, where my father is a forester in the Numbered Wood and can tell the year of a block of trees by the color of the glass discs on their trunks. I had won the prize by not making any errors, which was easy, because I had read the History so many times that I could see the pages when I shut my eyes. I had never been on a boat. I sat in the ferry’s cabin with my bag on my knees and did not speak to anyone, and the other six boys did not speak to me, except one, who sat down next to me without asking and said, “You’re the tree one.”

That was Toby Marsh, from Second Harbor, in Tenth Province. He was small and brown and had a scab on his chin and smelled of tar. Before he said anything to me he looked out of the window at the flag on the ferry’s mast, and later I found out that in Second Harbor everyone checks the wind before they speak, and that it is the law in their council chambers, and that Toby did it without knowing he was doing it. He said his father built the Patience. He said she was a good boat but too high in the bow for fog. He said it the way you would say the sky was gray. The fog was very thick. Toby was right.

The ferry left the lane. Nobody knew it had. The lamps that the Reserve Service sets on posts to mark the ferry lanes among the islands are bright, but not in fog, and the pilot of the Patience was new, and the compass in the wheelhouse had been knocked out of true by a dockhand’s barrow that morning, as the inquiry found later. We went north when we should have gone west. We went north for two hours, slowly, with the horn sounding every minute, and nobody answered the horn, and nobody came. The Service’s launches watch the lanes. We were out among the far reserve islands, forty miles from the nearest lane, in fog, and the launches did not know we existed.

At about half past three the Patience hit a rock.

She hit it hard, high in the bow, the part Toby said was wrong for fog. The pilot was thrown against the wheel and broke three ribs and his collarbone. The deckhand, who was the only other crew, went over the side and was pulled back in by a boy named Wendell Okonkwo, from Plenty, who was eleven and the size of a grown man and simply reached down and picked him out of the water by the back of his coat. The chaperone from the Academy, a thin man named Mr. Quaile who had spent the first hour of the trip telling us how to stand in the Hall of the Instrument, hit his head on the cabin door and did not wake up properly for four days.

The Patience stayed on the rock. She did not sink. She settled with her bow up on the stone and her stern in the water and a hole in her side the size of a door, and through the fog, about fifty yards off, we could see trees.

So it was seven boys who got everyone ashore. I want that written down, because the inquiry said it was the deckhand, and the deckhand was unconscious for most of it. Toby found the line and swam it to the beach and tied it to a tree. Wendell lifted the pilot ashore in his arms. A boy named Pim Varga, from Seventh Province, who was the smallest of all of us and who told us later that his mother rakes salt behind the Gulf Wall, swam back and forth eleven times with bags in his teeth. A boy named Dov Halloran, from Endeavor, in Sixth Province, got the ferry’s emergency lamp out of its bracket and rigged it to the battery from the wheelhouse with a piece of wire from his own pocket, because he always had wire in his pocket, and it lit the beach for us all night. A boy named Fitz Corrigan, from Threshold, in Fourteenth Province, whose mother is an officer in the Defense Directorate, stood on the beach in the dark and told everyone where to put things, in a loud voice, as though he had done it before, and nobody argued with him, because somebody needed to. A boy named Cass Brightwater, from Meridian, sat with Mr. Quaile all night and kept him from rolling into the fire.

I did not do much the first night. I found the spring. I do not know how. I walked up from the beach into the trees in the dark and heard water and followed it and there was a spring coming out of a rock, and I came back and told them, and Wendell said, “Good, tree one,” and after that I was the tree one, and then Tree, and then, by the third year, Ansel again. That was my contribution. Also I counted things. I counted the bags, and the food, and the matches, and how many days the food would last, which was four.

We were on Reserve Island 17. We did not know the number until later. We called it Wreck Island, and later it got another name, which I will come to.

It was about a mile and a half long and half a mile wide, the shape of a bent arm, with a high rocky elbow at one end and a long low wooded forearm stretching away from it, and a beach of pale sand on the inside of the elbow where the Patience had hit. It was planted like all the reserve islands: trees in rows, oak and pine and walnut, every one of them the same distance from the next, with the undergrowth cleared and the grass mown short. In the middle of the island there was an orchard of apple trees, also in rows, heavy with fruit. Along the shore there was white stone laid in a neat line where the water met the land. It was the most perfect place I had ever seen. It was like walking into one of the photographs the Bureau prints. We were afraid of it at first. It did not look like anywhere people were allowed.

On the first morning, the fog lifted, and we saw that there were other islands all round us, near and far, all of them planted, all of them perfect, all of them empty. We could not see the mainland. Fitz said there would be a search. Toby said there would, but that they would search the lane, and we were forty miles from the lane. Dov said he could make the ferry’s wireless work if the water had not got into it. The water had got into it.

On the first night, at about midnight, we heard a sound in the grass outside the fire, a long, steady, purring sound, and something came out of the dark toward us on wheels. Wendell picked up a stick. It was a mowing machine: low, gray, about the size of a cart, with blades underneath, moving slowly across the meadow in a straight line, cutting the grass. It went past us without stopping. It went to the end of the meadow, turned, and came back in the next line. It did this all night. In the morning it went into a shed at the edge of the trees, and the shed door closed behind it. Fitz said the Reserve Service maintained the islands by machine. He knew this from the History. So did all of us. It was different to see.

On the second night, Cass Brightwater found the puppy.

He was sitting at the edge of the firelight with Mr. Quaile, who was asleep, and he heard something crying in the trees behind him. He went to look. He came back with a puppy inside his coat.

It was about eight weeks old, Wendell said, who had grown up with dogs at the Granary. It was gray and white and wet and shaking, with big feet and a pointed face and one ear that stood up and one that did not, and one brown eye and one pale blue one, and it was very hungry, and very angry about it. We gave it some of the dried fish from the ferry’s stores and it ate the whole packet and then bit Pim. Pim said it was the best dog he had ever met.

Toby named it. He said every boat needs a bosun, and the bosun is the one who keeps everybody in order and shouts at them, and the puppy was already shouting at us. So it was Bosun.

Nobody asked where it had come from until the next morning. Then Fitz asked. The reserve islands are uninhabited. Nobody lives on them. Nobody is permitted to set foot on them. There are no dogs in the Reserve Service, which uses machines for everything. There was nowhere for a puppy to come from. We searched the island for its mother and found nothing. Pim said maybe it swam from another island. Wendell said a dog that small would drown in fifty yards. Dov said maybe it came off the Patience. It had not; we had unloaded every bag.

Cass said, “I don’t care where it came from,” and picked it up, and it went to sleep on his shoulder, and that was the end of the discussion for about two years.

The food ran out on the fourth day. After that we ate apples. The orchard had more apples than seven boys and three men could eat in a year, and we ate them raw and roasted and Wendell found a way to stew them in the ferry’s tea kettle with some of the wild mint from beside the spring. We caught fish off the rocks with lines made from Dov’s wire and hooks made from the pins of Mr. Quaile’s Academy badge, which he did not notice until the ninth day, by which time he had stopped minding. Pim could catch fish with his hands in the shallows. He said everyone in Seventh Province could, and that it was because the fish there were stupid from the gas. We did not believe him. It turned out to be true.

We kept a fire on the elbow of the island day and night for a signal, and nobody came.

On the fifth day I started the map. I had nothing to draw on but the back of a ferry timetable, and nothing to draw with but a stick of charcoal from the fire. I paced out the beach and the meadow and the orchard with Toby, whose paces were the most even, and drew them. I drew the spring and the mowing shed and the wreck. I got north wrong because I had no compass and thought the sun rose somewhere it did not. I drew the cave.

Pim found the cave. It was at the foot of the elbow, on the far side from the beach, behind a fallen slab of white rock, a crack in the limestone about as wide as a door and twice as tall, with cold air coming out of it and darkness beyond. Pim went in about ten steps and came out and said it went down. Fitz said nobody was to go in. Bosun, who was following Pim everywhere by then, put his nose in the crack and stood still with his tail straight out behind him and whined, the way Wendell said a dog whines when it smells somewhere it knows. Then he tried to go in, and Cass grabbed him.

On the eighth day Dov found the hatch.

It was on the forearm of the island, at the far end, among the pines, set into a flat rock: a round metal lid, painted gray, flush with the stone, with no handle and a small brass plate on it that said R.S. — NO ENTRY — U-LINE 4. Dov tried to open it with a stick and then with his wire and then with a rock, and Fitz shouted at him, and Dov said that if there was a line under it then maybe there was a wireless under it, and Fitz said if there was a line under it then it belonged to the Reserve Service and opening it was a reportable offense, and they had a fight. Wendell stopped the fight by sitting on both of them.

On the eleventh day Mr. Quaile woke up properly and asked where we were. We told him. He was quiet for some time. Then he asked whether any of us had eaten his badge. We told him the truth. He laughed for the first time since the fog.

On the twelfth day, at dusk, the hatch opened.

We were all at the fire on the elbow when Bosun started barking, and we went to look, and there was a light coming through the pines from the far end of the forearm, moving toward us, steady and white. It was a lamp. It was mounted in the head of a machine.

The machine was about as tall as Wendell’s shoulder, gray, with four legs and two arms, and its lamp was in the top of its head, like an eye. It walked out of the trees onto the edge of the meadow and stopped, and its lamp turned toward us. Behind it, out of the trees, came an old man.

He was very old. He was the oldest person I had ever seen: tall and thin and bent, with white hair cut short and a brown face lined like the bark on an old oak, and pale eyes, and a coat of gray wool that was too big for him. He had a walking stick. He stood at the edge of the trees with the machine beside him and looked at us: seven boys, a puppy, a man in an Academy coat with a bandage on his head, a man with his arm strapped to his chest, a deckhand, a fire, and about four hundred apple cores.

He said, “Well. You’re a long way from the lane.”

Fitz stood up and said, fast, “Sir, we are the provincial recitation winners of the hundred-and-seventh year, sir, our ferry left the lane in fog on the twenty-third, sir, we have been here twelve days.”

The old man said, “I know. You’ve been on the broadcast every night. They think you drowned.” He looked at the machine. “Moth, tell the Reserve Service depot at Tally that we’ve found the recitation boys on Seventeen, all alive, and they’ll want a launch with a doctor.” The machine’s lamp blinked once. The old man looked back at us. “We saw your fire from Four. We came up the line to look.” He pointed his stick at the hatch, far off in the pines, standing open. “My name’s Adair. I’m retired. Has anybody got an apple?”

Wendell gave him an apple. He ate it, standing there in the meadow at the edge of the firelight, very slowly, with his eyes shut. Then he opened them and looked at Bosun, who had come out from behind Cass’s legs and was sniffing at the machine’s feet.

He looked at Bosun for a good while. Then he looked at the cave at the foot of the elbow, across the meadow, behind the fallen slab. Then he looked back at us.

He said, “Where did you get the dog?”

Cass said, “He came out of the trees.”

The old man said, “Did he.” And then he said, “Keep him.” And then he said nothing else about it at all.

The launch came at dawn with a doctor and two officers of the Reserve Service, who were very angry, though not with us. They took the pilot and the deckhand and Mr. Quaile and then us. They did not want to take Bosun, since the Office of Population Management registers every animal on the mainland, and he had no registry, and Cass said that if Bosun did not come then he would not come, and the officers looked at Colonel Adair, who was sitting on a rock eating his fourth apple, and the Colonel said, “Oh, take the dog,” and they took the dog.

As the launch pulled away from Wreck Island, I looked back. The Colonel and his machine were walking back across the meadow toward the pines, toward the hatch, slowly, the old man leaning on the machine’s back. The machine’s lamp lit the grass in front of them. The mowing machine came out of its shed, and started on its first line, and went past them without stopping.

Note, Ansel, the hundred-and-thirty-second year: The old man was Colonel Josef Adair of the Directorate Security Forces, retired, who was then eighty-four. He was in the habit of walking the Reserve Service’s lakebed conduits from the utility islands, and Utility Island 4 lies two miles from Reserve Island 17, and the conduit called U-Line 4 runs beneath both, with a hatch on Seventeen for maintenance. He saw our fire on the eleventh night from the top of the stair on Four, and walked over under the lake the next day. The machine was his companion agent. Its name was Moth. We called it the Lamp for ten years before we learned that. The Colonel never told us what he knew about the dog, or the cave, and we never asked him, and by the time we knew enough to ask, we did not need to.

2. Junior Inspectors

Year 108 · Reserve Island 31 · told by Toby Marsh, age eleven

Map: Ansel’s, in ink this time, on proper paper from the Reserve Service, with a compass rose he copied out of a book. Island shaped like a pear. Marked: the heron rookery, the jetty, Inspector Tull’s tent, our tent, the mowing shed, the swimming rock, the place Dov fell off. North is right.

I am supposed to write what happened this year. I am not good at writing but I am good at boats, and the year was mostly about a boat, so I will try.

After the wreck we all went home. We were on the broadcast for three nights, the boys who were found alive, and then we were not on the broadcast anymore, because the inquiry started and the Interior does not put inquiries in the Notices. My father was at the inquiry because he built the Patience. They said the boat was not to blame. They said the compass was. My father said the boat was a little to blame, because the bow was high, and the Interior asked him not to say so again, and he said it to everyone in Second Harbor for a year.

We got to New Carthage in the end, by rail. The Academy sent a car for each of us in Eleventhmonth and we stood in the Hall of the Instrument in front of the glass case with the seven girls who won the other prizes and recited the preamble. Afterward there was a dinner in a room with a green glass roof. Fitz made a speech. Wendell ate three dinners. A very important woman from the Academy asked me whether I had been frightened on the island and I said I had not, which was not true, and she said that was the spirit of Ozarka, and I said thank you. Then they sent us home again.

That should have been the end of it. In the spring of the hundred-and-eighth year I got a letter.

It was from the Reserve Service. It said I had been appointed a Junior Inspector, Auxiliary Survey, for the autumn of the year, and that I was to report to the Reserve Service depot at Tally on the fifteenth day of Ninthmonth with warm clothes and boots and a knife, for a fortnight of inspection duty on a reserve island, under supervision. It said the appointment was renewable annually. It was signed by a Deputy Director of the Reserve Service I had never heard of. At the bottom, in a different hand, small, someone had written in pencil: Bring the dog. A.

I checked the wind before I showed my father, out of habit. It was from the west. My father read it three times and said, “Well, I’ll be.” He let me go.

All seven of us got the letter. All seven of us went. I know now that the Colonel arranged it. I did not know it then. I thought it was because we were heroes, which Pim said was stupid, and it was.

The depot at Tally is a long shed on the lake shore at the edge of the Numbered Wood, with a stone jetty and a Reserve Service launch tied up at the end of it. Ansel’s father brought him down from the forest. Ansel’s father is tall and quiet like Ansel and looked at the launch the way I would look at a tree, as if he did not trust it. Cass came on the ferry from Meridian with Bosun in a basket, and Bosun was twice as big as when we last saw him and got out of the basket and ran down the jetty and knocked Pim into the lake. Pim said it was the best moment of his life so far.

Waiting for us on the jetty was a woman about sixty years old in the gray coat of the Reserve Service, with short gray hair and a long face and a pair of field glasses round her neck, and a pipe that she did not light, ever, in fifteen years, but kept in her mouth. She looked at us for a long time. Then she took the pipe out and said:

“I’m Inspector Tull. I’ve been in the Reserve Service for forty-one years and I have never once had to babysit. I’m told you’re going to be my problem every autumn until I die or you grow up, whichever comes first. Rules.” She put up one finger. “You do what I say.” Another finger. “You touch nothing that belongs to the Service. That means the trees, the sheds, the machines, the hatches. Especially the hatches.” She looked at Dov, who looked at his feet. Someone had told her. “Three. You stay off any island I haven’t put you on. Four. If you see anything on any island that you think shouldn’t be there, you tell me, and nobody else, ever.” She put the pipe back in. “Get in the boat.”

That was Tull. She stayed our Inspector for nine years. We all loved her by the end of the first week, except Fitz, who took two weeks because he is slower about things like that.

Reserve Island 31 is a pear-shaped island about two miles from end to end, with a heron rookery in the tall pines at the narrow end and a stone jetty at the wide end where the Reserve Service launch tied up. It is planted like all of them, in rows. We camped in a meadow above the jetty with two tents, one for us and one for Tull, and Tull’s tent was ten yards from ours with the door facing our door, which Pim said was so she could watch us and Tull said was so she could watch the herons.

Our duty, as Junior Inspectors, was to inspect. Tull gave us forms. Every day we walked the island in pairs with a form and checked off the rows of trees, one by one, and noted any tree that was sick or broken or leaning, and checked that the mowing machine had done its lines, and that the white stone along the shore was straight, and that the sheds were shut. Then we gave her the forms and she read them in the evening by her lamp and put them in a box. Pim asked what happened to the forms. Tull said they went to the depot at Tally and were filed. Pim asked whether anyone read them. Tull said, “I do.”

The inspecting took about two hours a day. The rest of the time was ours.

What I did with mine was build a boat.

There was no boat on Island 31 except the launch, which came every third day with supplies and went away again. But there was driftwood on the beach at the narrow end, under the rookery, a great deal of it, old timber and planks and pieces of drowned buildings that the lakes had floated off the bottom and laid up on the shore. Some of it was old-world wood with nails still in it. I asked Tull if driftwood belonged to the Service. She thought about it for a minute with the pipe in her mouth and then said that driftwood belonged to the lake, and the lake belonged to the nation, and I was a citizen of the nation, so I supposed it was partly mine. I said thank you. She said, “Don’t drown.”

I built a raft first, then pulled it apart and built something better. Wendell did the heavy lifting. Dov made nails out of the old nails by heating them in the fire and straightening them on a rock. Fitz drew up a plan, which I did not use. Ansel measured. Pim and Cass and Bosun sat on the beach and watched and gave advice, which was bad, and Bosun ate one of the planks. By the ninth day it was a boat, a flat-bottomed punt about twelve feet long with a square bow and a square stern, very ugly, with a pole and two paddles carved from the best planks, and it floated, and it did not leak, much.

We named it the Patience, after the ferry. It seemed fair.

On the tenth day, with Tull’s permission, all seven of us and Bosun took the Patience out around Island 31 in a circle, a mile out and a mile back, close to the shore, with Tull on the jetty with her field glasses watching every stroke. It was the best afternoon of my life. Seven boys in an ugly boat on a perfect lake, with the herons going up out of the pines over our heads and the planted islands all round us in the sun.

Dov fell off. I have marked the place on the map. He was standing up to point at something and the Patience turned and he went in. Wendell picked him out by the back of his coat, the way he picked out the deckhand from the wreck, and put him back in the boat dripping, and Dov said, “Thank you, I was pointing at that,” and we all looked.

He had been pointing at an island about three miles to the north. It was larger than 31, and higher, and planted like the others: in rows, with orchards and meadows. But on its highest point, the top of a long ridge, there was a patch of ground where the grass was not mown. It was long and brown and wild. It stood out from the perfect green of the rest of the island like a stain on a shirt.

Tull, when we got back, looked at it through her field glasses without a word. Then she said, “That’s Sixty,” and went into her tent, and did not come out until supper.

At supper Fitz asked her why the grass on Sixty was not mown.

Tull said, “The mowers won’t go there.”

Fitz said the mowers were machines and went where they were told.

Tull said, “They’re told to go there. Every year the depot sends the instruction. Every year they go to the edge of that patch and stop and turn around and go back. Every machine the Service has ever put on that island. We’ve sent engineers. The engineers find nothing wrong with the machines.” She took the pipe out. “That patch has not been mown in a hundred years. It’s in my reports. It’s in everybody’s reports. Nobody reads them.”

Pim said, “You do.”

She said, “I do.” And then, “Eat your fish.”

Cass said, very quietly, the way Cass says things, “Is there anything on Sixty?”

Tull looked at him for a long moment, and at Bosun, who was asleep against his leg. She said, “Rule three.” And that was all she said.

We left Island 31 on the fourteenth day. Tull let me take the Patience back to Tally on a towline behind the launch. My father came to the depot to meet me, all the way from Second Harbor, and looked at the Patience for a long time, and walked round it twice, and then said that the bow was too high, and I said I knew, and he laughed, and bought it from the Reserve Service for the price of the timber, which was nothing, and we took it home on the train.

Note, Ansel: Tull kept every form we ever filled in. They are in the depot at Tally in a box marked JUNIOR INSPECTION, 102–110, which is nine boxes. I have read them all. In the margin of Toby’s form for the ninth day of the hundred-and-eighth year, beside the line where you note anything unusual, he wrote: “Saw Sixty. Grass long. Tull went quiet.” Under that, Tull wrote, in pencil: “Noted.”

3. The Ghost Fire

Year 109 · Reserve Island 9 · told by Wendell Okonkwo, age twelve

Map: Ansel’s. Island 9 is tall and narrow like a loaf of bread standing on end. Marked: the Lookout (top of the cliff), our camp, the path, the cherry orchard, the bad steps, and, off the north edge of the paper with an arrow, Island 44 and a small red X.

My name is Wendell. My father weighs grain at the National Granary at Plenty, and so did his father, and his father’s father was one of the first weighers when the Granary was built, and I am supposed to be a weigher too, which is fine. The Granary is the largest building on the mainland after the Hall of the Instrument at New Carthage. When the harvest comes in, the carts come from every cooperative in Third Province and drive onto the weighing floor one after another for three weeks, and the weighers read the scales and call the weights out, and a clerk writes them down, and they are wired to the capital before the Evening. When the Reader gives the price of grain, it is worked from my father’s weights. I have heard the Reader give it every night of my life. I used to think it was my father talking.

I am telling you this because Ansel says each of us should say who we are when it is our turn, and because the Weighing is in Ninthmonth, and I missed it this year for the second time, and my father let me go anyway. He said a weigher should know what the world weighs. I do not know what that means. He says it a lot.

I am the biggest. I am also the oldest, by three months. I can lift things. I can cook. I like to know where everyone is. My mother says that is because I am the oldest of six and that someone has to count the little ones, and that I treat the other boys like little ones, and she is right, except about Fitz, who acts little when he is worried.

Island 9 is the tallest of the reserve islands near Tally. It is a ridge of white rock standing up out of the lake, a mile long and steep on every side, with a path that zigzags up the south face from a little landing at the bottom to a flat top covered in a cherry orchard. At the north end of the top there is a cliff, and at the edge of the cliff there is a place where the rock juts out like a balcony, and from there you can see for twenty miles. Ansel named it the Lookout. It is on the map.

The path is steep. There is a place two-thirds of the way up where the path goes over a slab of bare rock with a drop beside it, and Ansel has marked it on the map as the bad steps. Tull made us go up and down it roped together the first day, all seven of us and her, with Bosun on a separate rope, and Pim complained the whole way, and on the way down Fitz slipped and I kept the rope tight and he did not fall. He did not say thank you. He said, “I had it.” Then on the fourth day, when he thought nobody was listening, he said, “Thanks for the rope.” That is Fitz.

We camped on the top, in the orchard, under the cherry trees. The cherries were over, it being autumn, but the leaves were red and gold and when the wind blew they came down on the tents in the night with a sound like rain. Tull’s tent faced ours as before. Bosun slept between the two tents and growled at owls.

Bosun was nearly two by then. He was bigger than any of us expected. Long-legged and deep-chested and gray and white with black spots on his back like ink, one ear up and one down, one brown eye and one blue. He could run faster than anything I have ever seen, and swim better than any of us except Pim, and he had a nose that Cass said could smell a cherry stone through a foot of rock. He lived with Cass in Meridian, in the nursery dormitory where Cass grew up, because there was nowhere else for Cass to live and the nursery matron had decided, after one look at Bosun, that the dormitory needed a dog. Cass told us that the Office of Population Management had registered Bosun in its livestock registry at Meridian under the category dog, herding, origin: found, and that the clerk who wrote it down had asked where he was found, and Cass had said, “On an island,” and the clerk had written island, and filed it.

On the sixth night, I saw the fire.

I was up because I had eaten too much of Tull’s stew and could not sleep, and I walked out of the orchard to the Lookout to look at the stars. It was clear. The lakes were dark all round, and the other islands were black shapes on the water, and far to the south I could see the lights of Tally along the shore. To the north there was nothing. Then there was a light.

It was on an island about four miles off to the north. A tall island, with a rounded top, bare of trees on its summit. On the top of the summit, a fire was burning.

It was not like any fire I have ever seen. It was tall and thin, much taller than it was wide, like a candle flame the height of a tree, and it was white at its heart and green at its edges, a pale green like the reclamation glass in the windows at home, and it did not flicker the way a wood fire flickers. It burned straight up, steady, very bright. There was no smoke. I watched it for a minute and it did not change at all. Then I ran back to the tents and woke everyone.

We all stood at the Lookout in our blankets, seven boys and a dog, and watched it. Bosun stood at the very edge of the rock with his front feet on the lip and his tail straight out behind him and his ears up, both of them, which I had never seen before, and made a sound I had never heard him make, a long, low, singing whine. Cass gripped him by the scruff so he would not go over.

Dov said it could not be a wood fire because there was no smoke and it was the wrong color. He said copper burns green. He said maybe there was copper on the island. Fitz said it was against regulations to light a fire on a reserve island. Toby said there was nobody on the reserve islands to light one. Pim said, quietly, which Pim never does, “It’s a ghost.”

Nobody laughed.

Ansel was already drawing it. He had his book and a pencil and was taking a bearing on the fire with the little compass Tull had given him, and drawing the outline of the island it stood on, and writing down the time. He said, “It started at a quarter to one.” I asked how he knew. He said he had been awake and had looked at the north at half past twelve and it was dark. He said he had looked at the north because Bosun had been whining in his sleep since midnight and kept turning his head that way. We all looked at Bosun. He did not look at us. He was looking at the fire.

Then Tull was behind us. We had not heard her come. She was in her coat with her field glasses round her neck and her pipe in her mouth and she stood at the back of the group, behind me, and looked at the fire over our heads for some time.

She said, “Forty-four.”

Fitz said, “Inspector, someone has lit a fire on a reserve island. Shouldn’t we report it?”

Tull said, “I’ll report it.”

Fitz said, “To whom?”

Tull said, “In my report.”

She lifted her field glasses and looked at the fire through them. She looked for a good while. I was standing next to her and I could see her face in the green light, and it was not the face of a person who has seen something strange. It was the face of a person looking at something they have looked at before, many times, and are sad about.

She lowered the glasses. “It’ll go out at dawn,” she said. “It always does. Go back to bed.”

Pim said, “Always?”

Tull said, “Every year. One night. This night. For as long as I’ve been in the Service. For as long as anyone in the Service has been in the Service.” She took the pipe out of her mouth. “We call it the ghost fire. Nobody knows who lights it. The Service went over every rock of Forty-four in the sixty-sixth year and found nothing but a crack in the summit with a smell of old gas. There’s nothing on Forty-four. Go to bed.”

We did not go to bed. We stayed at the Lookout all night in our blankets, all seven of us, and watched it, and Tull stayed with us, sitting on a rock a little behind us with her pipe, and did not tell us to go to bed again. At dawn, when the sky in the east went gray, the fire went out. It did not die down. It went out, all at once, like a lamp turned off. Bosun lay down on the rock and put his head on his paws and sighed.

The next day we asked Tull everything. She answered nothing. On the last night, at supper, Ansel showed her his drawing: the bearing, the island, the time, the shape of the flame, and the little red X he had made on the summit of Forty-four. She looked at it for a long time.

Then she said, “Good drawing.”

Ansel said, “Can we go to Forty-four next year?”

Tull said, “No.”

Ansel said, “The year after?”

Tull looked at him, and at Bosun, who was asleep against Cass’s leg with his nose pointed north, and at the rest of us. She said, “We’ll see.”

That was how it started. All of it. A fire on a hill, four miles off, and Tull saying we’ll see.

Note, Ansel: Inspector Tull’s report for the twenty-first day of Ninthmonth of the hundred-and-ninth year reads: “Ghost fire observed on R-44 from R-9, 0045 to dawn. Seven junior inspectors observed it. Questions asked. None answered.” It is the sixty-third year in a row in which a Reserve Service report records the fire on the same night. The night is the twenty-first of Ninthmonth. We did not know until the winter of the hundred-and-fourteenth year what that night was the anniversary of.

4. The Rows

Year 110 · Reserve Island 52 · told by Dov Halloran, age thirteen

Map: Ansel’s, the first one in color, on a sheet of Service paper twice the usual size. Island 52 is round with a lake in the middle like a doughnut. Marked: every row of trees, numbered; the four mowing sheds; the inner lake; the drowned house in the inner lake; our camp; the place Dov took the mower apart.

Hello. I am Dov. I make things work. Mostly. I am from Endeavor, in Sixth Province, where they pour the reclamation glass, and my mother works the furnaces and my father works the rolling mill and my grandmother worked the furnaces before she retired and still goes down to the pour every evening to watch the green light come up out of the molds, because she says it is the only thing in the world that is the same color every time. Everybody in Endeavor goes to the works at sixteen. I am going to go to the works at sixteen. I am going to build a machine that does the pour by itself so that nobody has to stand next to the furnace in summer. I have drawn it. Ansel says it would explode.

I am going to explain about the glass because it matters later. The sand that makes reclamation glass is dredged from the lakebed, from the drowned towns, and it has the old world ground up in it: windows and bottles and screens and everything. Usually the glass comes out clear green. Sometimes, from certain dredging grounds, the glass comes out with shapes in it. Ghosts, the workers call them. Faint shapes inside the glass, like a letter from an old sign or the neck of a bottle or once, my grandmother says, a face. The works crush those panes and melt them again. The gazetteer in the History says so. It does not say that the workers keep some. Everybody’s grandmother in Endeavor has one, a little square of green glass with a ghost in it, on the windowsill, where the light comes through. Mine has a letter R. Nobody knows what it was from.

That is all about me. Now the year.

The year was mostly about rows, which sounds boring and was not, and about the mowing machine, which I took apart, which I am not sorry about, and about the drowned house, which I am going to tell you about properly because nobody else was there except Pim and Bosun.

Island 52 is round. It is a ring of hills with a lake in the middle, like a doughnut, and you can only get to the inner lake by walking over the hills, and the inner lake has no outlet to the outer lake, it just sits there, very still and clear, with reeds round the edge. It is the only island Tull ever took us to that she had not been to herself. She said she had always wanted to see it.

The trees on 52 are planted in rows, like all the islands, but on 52 the rows are numbered. Each row has a small post of white stone at its end with a number cut into it, row one to row three hundred and twelve, going round the ring of hills in a spiral from the outside in. Ansel went mad for this. He said it was the first island where you could map exactly where you were from the rows. He made us walk every row with him, all three hundred and twelve, in pairs, calling out numbers, so that he could draw them. It took eight days. Pim nearly drowned Ansel in the inner lake on the fifth day. It is the most beautiful map he has ever made, I will say that, every row on it in green ink, numbered, in a spiral, and the inner lake blue in the middle, and the drowned house.

Fitz asked Tull why there were exactly three hundred and twelve rows. Tull said she did not know. She said the planting design was approved by the Bureau in the forty-sixth year and the Reserve Service just did what it said. Ansel wrote down three hundred and twelve in his book and put a circle round it and a question mark. He did not know why. He just said it was a strange number for rows. Later on it turned out that he was right to circle it, though not for any reason to do with trees.

On the fourth night the mowing machine came for our tent.

It was not trying to. It was mowing its lines, the way they do, all night, and the line it was mowing went straight through our camp. The other islands’ mowers had always gone round us. This one did not. Wendell saw it coming and we all got out and pulled the tent away just in time and the mower went over the place where it had been and cut the grass and went on, and Bosun chased it to the end of the meadow, barking, and it ignored him.

In the morning I asked Tull if I could look at it.

She said, “Rule two.”

I said I would not touch it. I would only look.

She said, “Rule two.”

I said that if it had come through the tent at night with us in it, somebody could have been cut, and that a machine that did that was not working properly, and that a Junior Inspector who saw a machine not working properly should note it, and that I could not note what was wrong with it unless I looked.

Tull took her pipe out and looked at me for a minute. Then she said, “You’ll make a good engineer, Halloran, or a good lawyer, and I’m not sure which is worse.” She said I could look. She said I could open the inspection panel, which was on the side, shut with four screws. She said if I broke it she would send me home on a raft.

I opened the inspection panel. It was not shut with four screws. It was shut with six, two of them under a strip of paint, and I did not tell her that. Inside there were the gears and the blade motor and the battery and the brain, which was a gray box about the size of a loaf with a slot in the front and a small green lamp. And a card in the slot. The card was what told it where to go. It had holes punched in it in rows. The holes were the map. The mower read the holes and mowed where they said.

I am not going to explain the next part well because the others were bored, but I looked at the card without a word, and I counted the holes, and I worked out which holes meant which part of the island, and the part where our tent was, the mower had been told to mow, because the card was new this year and nobody had told the card we would be there. That was all. It was not broken. It was doing exactly what it was told. I wrote that on my form.

Then I looked again, because there was something else on the card.

At the edge of the card, past the holes that meant Island 52, there was another set of holes. Not many. A short row. They did not mean anything on 52, because they were past the edge of 52. I asked Tull whether all the mowers had the same card. She said no, each island had its own. I asked whether the cards were punched by a machine or a person. She said a machine at the depot. I asked her if I could see the card for another island. She said there was a spare in the shed.

The spare was for Island 60.

I know because it had a 60 punched in the corner. And on the card for Island 60, there was a large patch of holes in the middle that was not like the rest. In the rest of the card, the holes were in neat rows, meaning mow here. In that patch, the holes were in a different pattern, all mixed up, a square of nonsense in the middle of the card. I showed it to Ansel. Ansel looked at it for five seconds and said that the patch was where the long grass was on the top of Sixty’s ridge, which we had seen from 31, and that the holes there did not say mow and did not say don’t mow. They said something else.

I said what?

He said he did not know. He said it looked like a word.

We took it to Tull. She looked at it for a long time. She did not say rule two or rule three. She said, “Put that back in the shed exactly where you found it,” and we did. And that night she sat by her lamp in her tent for some time with the flap open, and I could see her from our tent writing in her report, and then stopping, and then looking at the north, and then writing again.

On the eleventh day, Pim and Bosun and I swam out to the drowned house.

There was a house in the inner lake. You could see it from the shore if the light was right: a roof, about twenty feet down, under the clear water, in the middle of the lake. It had been on the hilltop before the flood, before the lakes, before the hills were an island. The lake in the middle of 52 must have been a valley once, Ansel said, and the house was in the valley, and when the water came, the valley filled first, and the house went under, and the hills around it stayed above, and became 52.

Tull said we could swim in the inner lake but not to the house. Pim said that was not fair. I agreed. On the eleventh afternoon, Tull took the others over the hills to look at the heron nests on the far side, and Pim and I said we had stomach aches, and stayed, and Bosun stayed with us because he always stayed with whoever was doing the worst thing.

Pim can stay under for longer than anyone I have ever met except, I found out later, Colonel Adair. He says everyone in Seventh Province can, because they practice not breathing for the gas sirens. Pim swam down to the house, and I swam after him as far as I could, and Bosun swam round and round on the surface over our heads and barked at the water.

The house was made of stone. The windows were gone and the door was gone. Pim went in through the door. I could only stay down a little while so I went up and came down again three times. The third time Pim was at the window waving at me and I went in.

It was dark inside, and full of weed. There was a table, made of stone, too heavy to float away. And on the wall, carved into the stone above the fireplace, very deep, so that the weed had not covered it, there were words. Old letters, the old alphabet. I could not read them. I could read the numbers. There were numbers. 412.

Pim pointed at them. Then he pointed up. I went up. He came up after me a long time later, and was very white, and lay on his back on the water with Bosun swimming round him and breathed for a minute and then said, “There’s a name. Under the numbers. A long name. I couldn’t read it.”

I said, “What do you mean, a name?”

He said, “A man’s name. Carved. Big. With a sort of crown thing round it.”

We told Tull. We had to, because Pim’s lips were blue and Tull asked why. She was angry for about a minute, which with Tull is a long time. Then she asked us to describe the carving exactly. Pim described it. She asked us whether the number was four hundred and twelve or four hundred and twenty-one. We said twelve. She asked us what the crown looked like. Pim drew it in the dirt with a stick: a circle with points on top, and a key through the middle.

Tull looked at the drawing for a good while. Then she rubbed it out with her boot.

She said, “Don’t go back down there,” and she did not say it like a rule, she said it like a person, and so we did not.

Ansel put the drowned house on the map. He put the number 412 next to it in small red figures, and drew the crown with the key, and next to the three hundred and twelve rows he drew a line to the four hundred and twelve and wrote: one hundred less? He did not know what it meant. None of us did.

Note, Ansel: The rows on Island 52 number three hundred and twelve because the planting design approved by the Bureau in the forty-sixth year was drawn by a Reserve Service planner who had been at Saltgrass, and who planted one row of trees on Island 52 for every person who walked across the shallows to Mammoth that night. We learned this from Colonel Adair in the hundred-and-twenty-second year, and we did not understand it until he explained Saltgrass, which he did, and which is not in this book because it is not ours. It has nothing to do with the four hundred and twelve. That was a coincidence. Coincidences happen. I have been told by someone who knows that in this part of the world there are fewer of them than you would think.

5. The Girl in the Cave

Year 111 · Reserve Island 23 · told by Cass Brightwater, age fourteen

Map: Ansel’s. Island 23 is long and low, like a fish. Marked: the camp, the willow beach, the sandbar to Seventeen (dry at dawn, under at dusk), the channel, and on Seventeen across the water, the cave, marked with a small black triangle. There is a second, smaller triangle drawn later in a different pen, a little to the left of the first. Ansel says he did not draw it.

I was born in Meridian, in the national houses of birth, and I do not know who my parents are. That is not unusual in Meridian. The houses of birth deliver a great share of the nation’s children, and the Office of Population Management registers each of them, and most go home with their families, and some do not. The ones who do not are raised in the nurseries of the Cradle, which face east so the infants wake to the light. I was raised in the third nursery, in a dormitory with forty other boys, by a matron named Mrs. Ebbe who has a laugh like a door banging and who decided, when I came home from Wreck Island with a dog inside my coat, that the third nursery needed a dog. I have a number in the national registry and a name the nursery gave me, Brightwater, which they give to all the foundlings born in the spring, because spring water is bright. There are about three hundred Brightwaters in Ozarka. None of us are related.

I am telling you this so you understand why the six of them, and Bosun, are my family, and why what happened this year matters more to me than to anyone, and why I did not tell any of them about it for a whole year, which they are still angry about, and which I would do again.

Island 23 is long and low and shaped like a fish, with willows along its beaches instead of pines. Tull chose it, she said, because the herons on it were interesting. I did not believe her. Island 23 lies four hundred yards across a channel from Island 17. From our camp on the willow beach we could see Wreck Island, the high elbow of white rock and the long wooded forearm, and the beach where the Patience hit the rock four years before. You could still see the rock. There was a stain on it from the ferry’s paint, gray-blue.

At low water, which in the lakes comes at dawn when the North’s meltwater is slowest, a sandbar showed between 23 and 17, a long pale curve just under the surface, wide enough to walk on, ankle-deep. By noon it was knee-deep, and by dusk it was gone. Ansel mapped it. Tull said we were not to cross it, rule three.

Bosun knew where he was the moment the launch touched the beach. He was four that year and a big dog, as big as a wolf in the pictures, gray and white with his ink spots and his odd eyes, and he stood in the bow of the launch as we came in and looked across the channel at Wreck Island and his whole body went stiff and his tail went straight out and he made the singing sound he had made at the ghost fire. Wendell said he remembered it. Dov said dogs do not remember anything from eight weeks old. Wendell said, “That one does.”

For four days Bosun lay on the willow beach with his nose pointed at 17 and would not eat.

On the fifth night he swam the channel.

I woke because he was not against my legs. I always woke when he moved; I had slept next to him for four years. The tent flap was open. I went out. The moon was up and the channel was silver, and halfway across it, I could see his head, swimming hard for Wreck Island.

I did not wake anyone. I have been asked why many times. The true answer is that he was my dog, and I did not think. I went down to the beach, and Toby’s canoe was there, the little one he brought every year on the launch, and I pushed it out and paddled after Bosun. I am not a good paddler. By the time I reached Wreck Island, Bosun was out of the water and up the beach and gone into the trees, and I pulled the canoe up and followed him.

I knew where he was going. We all did. We had all seen him at the cave on the eighth day of the Twelve Days, at the foot of the elbow behind the fallen slab, with his nose in the crack, whining. I went round the foot of the elbow in the moonlight, and there was the slab, and there was the crack, and the cold air coming out of it, and Bosun’s wet paw prints on the white stone, going in.

I had a lamp. I always slept with my lamp; nursery children do. I went in.

The crack went down. It went down in a slope of loose rock for about thirty yards, and then the rock under my feet changed. It was cut. There were steps, cut into the limestone, worn in the middle the way the steps of the Granary are worn at Plenty, from feet. They went down a long way, in a spiral. At the bottom there was a passage, tall and square, cut with tools, with marks on the walls from drills, and a smell of smoke and something cooking, and a long way off along the passage, a light.

And sitting on the bottom step, with her arms round Bosun’s neck and her face in his fur, was a girl.

I am going to describe her the way I saw her that night, because I have tried to describe her to the others many times since and I always get it wrong.

She was about my age. She was thin, and very pale, paler than anyone I had ever seen, the pale of someone who has not been in the sun much, with freckles anyway, faint, across her nose. Her hair was dark red and long and tied back with a strip of leather. She wore a tunic of gray wool, old, patched many times, and trousers of the same, and boots of leather that someone had made by hand. Round her neck on a cord was a small square of green glass. She had a lamp beside her on the step, a little clay lamp with a wick burning in oil, and by its light her eyes were gray-green, and she was crying, and she looked up at me.

Beside her, lying on the step with its head on its paws, was another dog. It was smaller than Bosun and older, gray and white, with black spots, one ear up and one ear down, one brown eye and one blue.

She said, “He’s mine.”

I said, “He’s mine.”

She said, “His name’s Wick. He’s Ember’s. He was born in the low cave in the spring of the year your boat broke, and he wandered Up at eight weeks old when I wasn’t watching, and I came after him, and I saw you take him.” She wiped her face with her sleeve. “I watched you from the cave for twelve nights. I watched the old man come up out of the ground with the lamp-machine. I watched you put Wick in your coat and get in the boat.” She looked at Bosun, and at me. “He’s grown.”

I said, “His name’s Bosun.”

She looked at me for a long moment, and then, and I will never forget it, she laughed. It was a small, surprised laugh, as if she had not done it in a while. She said, “That’s a terrible name.”

I said, “Toby named him.”

She said, “Who’s Toby?”

That was how I met Tamsin.

We sat on the steps for about two hours. I am going to write down what she told me, because I promised her I would keep it secret, and I kept it secret for a year, and now it is written down, with her permission, which she gave in the hundred-and-eighteenth year at a wedding I will come to.

Her people live underneath. Underneath Island 17 and underneath Island 44 and underneath the lake between them, in caves and in old cut passages, about three hundred of them. They call themselves the Unclimbed. They call the surface the Up and everyone who lives there the Registered. Their great-great-grandparents went down into the caves in the Rise, in the climb, when everyone else went up to the highlands or out onto the floating cities, and they never came out. The History says that some of the people who went underground in the climb never came to the surface, and that their fate is a matter for the Ministry of the Interior. Tamsin’s people are that fate. The Ministry of the Interior does not know.

They live in the old quarry. The passages with drill marks on the walls are a quarry, cut in the old world for the white limestone, which is under all these islands. There are halls down there, she said, as big as the Granary, cut out of the rock, where they live, and wells, and fields of mushrooms in the dark, and pens for fish they catch through old shafts that go down into the lake, and forges, and a school. They have lamps of oil, and some electric light from an old machine that turns in an underground stream. They have dogs. All their dogs are like Bosun, gray and white with odd eyes, descended from the dogs their great-great-grandparents brought down with them, which were herding dogs from the farms of the river country.

They go Up at night. Only at night, only a few of them, only to the orchards and the beaches of 17 and 44, to pick fruit and gather wood and fish. They have done it for a hundred and twelve years and the Reserve Service has never seen them. I asked how. She said the mowers don’t see people, they only see grass, and the Service only comes in daylight, and only every few years, and only to the shore.

I asked why they did not come out.

She said, “Because of what you’d do to us.”

I asked what she thought we would do.

She said, “Register us. Count us. Take the children to the Cradle and give them numbers. Assign us. Put us in different provinces so we can’t be together. Call us contained.” She looked at me. “We hear your Evening. We’ve got a wireless. We’ve heard every Evening since the first one. We’ve heard the word contained a lot of times.”

I did not argue. I had grown up in the Cradle. I had a number.

And then she said: “And because of him.”

I asked who.

She did not answer. She touched the square of green glass at her throat, and looked away down the passage toward the light, and said, “I can’t. Not yet. I’m the Fire-Keeper. There are things the Fire-Keeper doesn’t say to the Registered.”

I asked what a Fire-Keeper was.

She looked at me, and something in her face changed, and she said, “You’ve seen it. Haven’t you. Two years ago. From the tall island. You were all standing at the edge of the cliff in blankets.”

The ghost fire.

She said, “I didn’t light that one. My grandmother did. I light it now. I lit it for the first time last year.” She stood up. “I have to go. They’ll know I’m gone. Take Wick. Bosun. He’s chosen you. Ember says so.” She bent down and put her face against Bosun’s for a moment, and he licked her ear, and she laughed again. Then she straightened up and looked at me, very serious. “You can’t tell. Not your Inspector. Not your friends. Not the old man with the lamp. If the Registered find out we’re here, we’ll have to go deeper, and there’s nowhere deeper to go. Promise.”

I promised.

She picked up her lamp, and the old dog, Ember, got up and went with her, down the passage, toward the light, and I watched until the light took them, and then I went back up the steps with Bosun and out of the crack into the moonlight and paddled back across the channel.

Nobody had woken. Except Tull.

She was sitting on the willow beach in her coat with her pipe in her mouth, beside the place where Toby’s canoe had been, and she watched me paddle in, and pull the canoe up, and come up the beach with Bosun dripping. She did not say anything. She did not say rule three. She looked at Bosun, and then at me, and then across the channel at Wreck Island, at the foot of the elbow, where the cave was.

She said, “Is she well?”

I stopped. I did not say anything. I had promised.

Tull took the pipe out of her mouth. “The girl,” she said. “Red hair. She came up to the beach on Seventeen last spring, to fish, and I saw her through the glasses from the launch. Is she well?”

I said, “I promised.”

Tull looked at me for a long time. Then she nodded, slowly, and put the pipe back in, and said, “Good.” And then: “Go to bed, Brightwater. You’ll catch your death.”

I went to bed. I lay awake until dawn with Bosun wet against my legs and thought about a girl with red hair sitting on a step in the dark, laughing at a terrible name.

I did not tell the others. Not that year. Ansel saw the second triangle on his map, the one I drew in a different pen, to the left of the first, where the steps go down. He asked me about it on the launch home. I said I must have done it in my sleep. He looked at me for a minute, the way Ansel does, and said, “All right,” and did not ask again. I found out later that he had worked out most of it by the end of the year and said nothing, because he could see I had promised something.

That is the kind of friend Ansel is. That is the kind of friends they all are, except Pim, who would have punched me if he had known, and who did punch me, the next year, when he found out. I deserved it.

Note, Ansel: I worked out that there were people under Seventeen in the hundred-and-ninth year, from the dog and the cave and the fire and Tull’s face. I did not tell anyone either. It seems to have been a habit we caught.

6. Forty-Four

Year 112 · Reserve Island 44 · told by Pim Varga, age fifteen

Map: Ansel’s. Island 44 is round and high with a bare top. Marked: the landing, the camp, the old orchard, the vent (red), the stones (black, many small marks in a ring), the crack where they came up. Ansel drew the stones one by one. There are four hundred and twelve marks.

I’m Pim. I’m from Brine. Seventh Province. I’m small. Don’t say anything.

My mother rakes salt in the pans behind the Gulf Wall at Assurance, and so did her mother. My father inspects the Wall. When the wind turns south the sirens go and everybody puts their mask on and closes the shutters and waits. You learn to put your mask on before you learn to read. I could put mine on in four seconds when I was three. The gas comes off the Floridexa in a gray layer and rolls in against the Wall and the Wall turns it, mostly. Not always. My uncle died in the ninety-fifth year when it didn’t. I don’t talk about it.

At night, from the top of the Wall, you can see the Leviathan’s light on the horizon to the south. It goes up and down, slowly. Everyone in Brine calls it she. Nobody looks at it much. Our provincial song is about a woman raking salt who won’t look south. My mother sings it. My mother doesn’t look south.

That’s me. People from Brine don’t talk much. The others say I talk more than anyone from Brine they ever met. They haven’t met anyone else from Brine.

We went to Forty-four.

Tull said we’ll see in the hundred-and-ninth year and in the hundred-and-twelfth year she saw. She told us on the launch out of Tally that we were going to Forty-four, and that we would be there on the twenty-first night of Ninthmonth, and that she would be with us, and that whatever we saw, we were not to go near it, and we were not to speak, and if anyone ever asked us we were to say that we saw nothing.

Fitz said, “Inspector, are we going to see the ghost fire?”

Tull said, “Yes.”

Fitz said, “Up close?”

Tull said, “Not too close.”

Then she looked at Cass, who was sitting in the bow of the launch with his arm round Bosun, looking north, and she said, “Brightwater, I think you’d better tell them now.”

So Cass told us. On the launch. About the steps and the girl and the people underneath and Wick and Ember and the Fire-Keeper. All of it. In front of Tull. It took about an hour. Nobody said anything while he was talking. When he stopped, everybody was quiet for a while.

Then I punched him. On the arm. Hard.

He said, “Ow.”

I said, “A year.”

He said, “I promised.”

I said, “You could have told me.”

He said, “I promised her.”

Wendell said, “Pim,” in his big-brother voice. I stopped. Then I punched him again, softer, and sat down next to him, and Bosun put his head on my knee, and that was the end of it. Mostly.

Tull said, after: “Now you all know. Same rules. Rule four especially. You tell me, and nobody else, ever. Not your parents. Not the Colonel. Not the Interior if it asks, and it won’t. Anybody can’t keep that, say so now and I’ll put you off at Tally and no hard feelings.”

Nobody said so.

Forty-four is a round high island with a bare summit. The lower slopes are planted like the others, in rows, with an orchard of old pear trees on the south side. The summit is rock. White limestone, bare, cracked, with no trees and no grass, about two hundred yards across. In the middle of it there’s a pipe.

It’s an old pipe. Old-world iron, black with rust, about as thick as my leg, coming up out of a crack in the rock about two feet and then stopping, open at the top, with a cap on a hinge that someone has kept oiled. If you lift the cap and put your face near it you can smell gas. Not the Floridexa gas, which smells of rotten eggs and sweet. A different gas. Dov said it’s the kind of gas they used to burn in the old world for cooking, that comes up out of the ground under limestone. He said the pipe was the top of an old well. He said whoever lit it on the twenty-first just opened the cap and put a flame to it, and it would burn all night, and burn green because of something in the rock.

Around the pipe, in a ring, about thirty yards out, there are stones.

They’re small stones. Each one about the size of a loaf. White limestone, rough-cut, set upright in the cracks of the summit rock so that they stand up like teeth. There are hundreds of them. Ansel counted. He walked the ring three times on the first day and counted every stone and drew every stone on his map, one by one, a little black mark, all the way round. He got four hundred and twelve every time.

Every stone had something scratched on it. Letters. Old letters. Most of them worn too smooth to read. Ansel could read some. They were names. A first name and a last name. Some of the names had dates scratched under them. All the dates were the same year. The hundred-and-ninth year of the Rise.

Dov said, “Four hundred and twelve. The house in the lake.”

Ansel said, “Yes.”

Fitz said, “It’s a grave.”

Tull, who was standing behind us, said, “No. A grave is where you bury people. Nobody’s buried here.” She took her pipe out. “It’s where you put their names, because you can’t bury them.”

We camped on the south side among the pear trees, below the summit. We waited.

On the twenty-first night of Ninthmonth, at about half past twelve, Tull woke us and took us up to the edge of the summit, to a place among some big rocks just below the ring of stones where we could see without being seen. She made us lie down. She lay down with us. Bosun lay between Cass and me, shaking, and Cass put his hand over Bosun’s muzzle and Bosun didn’t make a sound.

At a quarter to one they came up.

They came out of a crack in the summit rock on the north side, a wide crack I hadn’t noticed in the daytime because it was half covered by a slab. They came up one at a time with little clay lamps. First a dog, gray and white. Then people. Thirty, forty, more. Men and women and children and old people, all in gray wool, all pale, pale, in the moonlight. They walked out across the summit in a line and stopped at the ring of stones and stood there, each of them in front of a stone, the way people stand in front of something they know.

Nobody said anything. Nobody did anything. They just stood there in the moonlight in front of the four hundred and twelve stones with their little lamps. There weren’t four hundred and twelve of them. There were maybe sixty. Some stood alone at a stone and some stood in families at a stone, and a lot of stones had nobody.

Then a girl came up out of the crack with a torch.

Cass made a sound. Very small. I put my hand on his arm.

She had red hair. She was taller than last year, Cass said afterwards, and she walked across the summit to the pipe in the middle of the ring with the torch in her hand and an old dog walking beside her, and everyone stood in front of their stones and watched her. She stopped at the pipe. She lifted the cap. She said something, loud enough that I could hear it but not loud enough that I could understand it, a short thing, a few words, in a voice that went up at the end like a question. And everyone at the stones answered, all together, a few words back.

Then she put the torch to the pipe.

It went up with a sound like a huge breath. A column of fire, white in the middle and green at the edges, straight up, tall as a tree, taller, and the light of it lit the whole summit and the stones and the people standing in front of them and the girl at the pipe with her hair blowing back. It was very bright. It made no smoke. It hissed, quietly, like a kettle, all night.

The girl stepped back from it. She stood with the old dog by the pipe and looked at the fire. Then she turned, slowly, and looked across the summit, past the ring of stones, at the big rocks where we were lying.

She looked right at us. At Cass.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t do anything. She looked at Cass for maybe three seconds, and then she turned back to the fire.

Tull, next to me, let out a breath very slowly.

They stayed all night. We stayed all night, lying in the rocks, cold, watching. The people at the stones didn’t move much. Some of them sat down. Some of the children went to sleep against their parents. Once an old man walked from his stone to the pipe and put his hand flat on the rock beside it without a word, and walked back. Once a woman started to cry, quietly, and the people near her came and stood round her until she stopped.

At dawn, when the east went gray, the girl walked to the pipe and closed the cap. The fire went out, all at once, the way it does. And they all went back down into the crack, one at a time, with their lamps, and the dog, and the girl last, and the slab moved back over the crack, and the summit was empty.

We got up. We were stiff. Nobody talked. We went back down to the camp in the pear trees and Wendell made tea and we drank it and nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Fitz said, “Inspector. What happened on the twenty-first of Ninthmonth in the hundred-and-ninth year of the Rise?”

Tull was sitting on a log with her tea. She didn’t answer for some time. Then she said, “Something bad.”

Fitz said, “What?”

Tull said, “Not my story. Hers.” She looked at Cass. “Maybe she’ll tell you. If she does, you’ll know more than the Interior, more than the Reserve Service, and more than anyone in Ozarka but me and them.” She drank her tea. “And then you’ll be in it. Like me. And you’ll never get out.”

Cass said, “I’m already in it.”

Tull said, “I know.”

That afternoon, while the others were asleep, Cass and Bosun walked up to the summit. I followed. I wasn’t going to let him go alone again. He knew I was following and didn’t stop me.

The slab over the crack on the north side had been moved. Not much. A hand’s width. And on the rock beside it, weighted with a pear, there was a piece of paper. Cass picked it up.

It was old paper, yellow. Written on in pencil in handwriting I couldn’t read, old-fashioned, with loops. Cass could read it. He read it out loud, to me, standing on the summit in the sun next to the ring of stones.

Wick’s Registered boy. Thank you for not coming close. My grandmother says you’re the first of the Registered ever to see the Fire who didn’t run and tell. She wants to know why. So do I. Come to the low cave on Seventeen on the first night you’re Up next year. Bring the dog. Bring the small angry one if you have to. — T.

Cass looked at me.

I said, “I’m not angry.”

He said, “You’re angry right now.”

I said, “Shut up,” and he laughed, and so did I, standing there on the top of Forty-four in front of four hundred and twelve stones, two boys and a dog, laughing, which I know is the wrong thing to do in a place like that, but we did it, and I think the people whose names are on those stones would have understood.

I’ve been the small angry one ever since. It’s on my registry card now. Not officially. Dov wrote it on in pen.

7. The Storm, the Colonel, and the Red Light

Year 113 · Reserve Island 38 · told by Fitz Corrigan, age sixteen

Map: Ansel’s. Island 38 is shaped like a boot. Marked: the camp (first), the camp (second, after the storm), the fallen pines, the hatch (U-Line 7), the north shore facing Sixty, and on Sixty, at the top of the ridge in the patch of long grass, a red dot with the note: “0200, 0300, 0400, blinks.”

My name is Fitzgerald Corrigan. I am from Threshold, in Fourteenth Province, which is the westernmost province on the mainland and the last gold on the map. My mother is a major in the Defense Directorate and my father is an engineer on the pipeline from the Still Water reservoirs, and I have two sisters, both younger, both cleverer than me, which they say often.

In Threshold we can feel the Directorate at work under the ground on still evenings, a hum that comes up through the floors and into your feet. The History says the children of Fourteenth Province fall asleep more easily when it is there. That is true. When I am away from home I cannot sleep for the first three nights because it is too quiet. Tull says that is why I talk so much in the evenings on the islands.

From the ridge west of Threshold you can see the machine fields in the outskirts of the Barrens: the ranks of standing machines in the old pits, gray and brown, in rows. My mother is not supposed to talk about them and does not. When I was small she took me up to the ridge in the evening and we watched them, and she said they were there so that I could sleep. I have wanted to join the Directorate Security Forces since I was five. I am going to. I am telling you this because the others say I was a prig for the first five years and they want it on record that I know.

I was a prig. I want it on record that I have stopped. Mostly.

The year was about a storm, and the Colonel, and the red light on Sixty, in that order.

Island 38 is shaped like a boot. Its toe points north, and across a mile of water from the toe is Island 60, with its long ridge and the patch of wild grass on the top that the mowers will not go near. Tull did not say why she chose 38. She did not have to. We all knew. Since Forty-four we had all known that the things that were wrong in the lakes were connected, and that Sixty was one of them, and that Tull was taking us closer to it one island at a time because she had decided we were old enough, or because she needed us, or both.

Cass went to the low cave on Seventeen in the first week of Ninthmonth, before the camp, with Bosun. Tull took him over in the launch at night and waited off the beach. He was gone three hours. When he came back he did not say anything to anyone except Tull, and then on the first night on 38, round the fire, he told us what Tamsin had told him. He had her permission. He said she wanted us to know, because we had not run and told.

I will put it here plainly, the way Cass told it.

Before the Rise, all of these islands were hills, in the river country, high bluffs above the valley. All of them belonged to one man. He was one of the owners. The History says the owners bought the western mountains and went into them before the flood. This one owned the river bluffs first. He had a great house on the highest hill, which is now Sixty. He had a quarry in the limestone under the hills that are now Seventeen and Forty-four, and tunnels between them, and a bunker deep under his house. Four hundred and twelve people worked for him: quarrymen and house servants and their families. When the rivers broke and the valley started to flood, in the nineties, he told them that he would take them west with him to the mountains when the time came, and that until then they should shelter in the quarry under the hills, where it was dry, with the stores. They went down. They carved their number on the wall of the gatehouse in the valley before they went, the way people sign a register. That is the house under the lake on 52.

On the twenty-first night of Ninthmonth of the hundred-and-ninth year of the Rise, he sealed the tunnel between his bunker and the quarry, from his side, with the four hundred and twelve on the other. He kept the stores in the bunker. He took them west. He left.

The water rose. The valley filled. The hills became islands. The four hundred and twelve were in the quarry under two of them with a few weeks of food.

Tamsin’s people say that a hundred and sixty of them died the first winter. The rest found the old gas well that the quarrymen had capped, and the stream that runs under 17, and the shafts down to the lake for fish, and the mushrooms, and lived. Their children lived. Their children’s children are the Unclimbed. They light the fire every year on the night of the sealing, on the summit of Forty-four, over the four hundred and twelve stones, one for every person who went down, so that he can see it.

Wendell asked who he was.

Cass said they do not say his name. They call him the Landlord. They say his crest was a crown with a key through it.

Pim said, “Like the carving.”

Cass said, “Like the carving.”

Dov asked whether the Landlord was dead.

Cass looked across the water, from the fire on the toe of the boot, at the black shape of Sixty against the stars, with the long ridge and the patch of wild grass on top.

He said, “They don’t think so.”

On the fourth day the storm came.

I will describe it only as much as it matters. It came down from the North in the afternoon, fast, with wind first and then rain, and by evening the lake was white and the pines on 38 were bending, and at about nine o’clock a pine came down across our camp and took the tents with it. Nobody was under it. Wendell had moved us all to the lee of a rock an hour before because he said he did not like the sound the trees were making. Wendell is always right about sounds.

We spent the night under the rock in our coats, the seven of us and Tull and Bosun, wet through. At about midnight, in the worst of it, there was a light in the pines toward the heel of the boot. A white light, steady, coming toward us through the rain.

Bosun stood up and wagged.

It was the Lamp. The machine from Wreck Island, the one that had walked out of the pines with the old man six years before. It came out of the trees with its lamp lit, walking on its four legs over the fallen branches as if they were not there, and behind it, leaning on its back, in a long oilskin coat, was Colonel Adair.

He was ninety. He looked a hundred and ninety. He was soaked. He stopped at the edge of our rock and looked at us all, huddled under it, and at Bosun, who was licking his hand, and at Tull.

He said, “Marguerite.”

Tull said, “Josef. You’ll catch your death.”

He said, “Not tonight.” He looked at us. “I saw the tree go down from Seven. Thought I’d see if anyone was under it.” He looked at the machine. “Moth, the shed.” The machine turned and walked off into the rain toward the mowing shed at the edge of the trees, and opened its door, which the machine was not supposed to be able to do, and the Colonel said, “In,” and we all went into the mowing shed with the mower and sat on the floor and got dry, and the Colonel lit a small stove he had in his coat pocket, and made tea, and we drank it, and the storm went on outside.

That is how I met the Colonel properly. I had been seven feet from him on Wreck Island when I was ten and had not dared to speak to him except to make a report. In the mowing shed on 38 I talked to him for four hours.

I asked him about the Security Forces. He told me. He told me about the Plague Watch, and the stations, and the stairs, which he said were a hundred and twelve steps and he had climbed them four times a night for three years. He told me about the deep lines under the mainland, which he had walked, all of them. He told me that the job of the Security Forces was to guard the underneath, and that the underneath was larger than anyone thought, and that most of what was down there was not on any map. I asked if it was on his map. He said, “Most of it. Not all.”

I asked what he left off.

He looked at me for a good while over his tea, with the stove light on his face, which was very old and brown and lined like the bark of a tree, and said, “The things that would get people hurt if they were on it.”

Then he looked at Ansel, who was sitting in the corner of the shed with his map book open, drawing the inside of the shed by the light of the Lamp’s head, the way he always does. And the Colonel said:

“You’re the one who draws.”

Ansel said yes.

The Colonel said, “Draw everything. Always. Every rock, every hatch, every crack. Draw it all. Then decide later what to leave off, and leave it off on purpose, and know why.” He drank his tea. “A map isn’t the world. It’s what you’ve decided to tell people about the world. Never forget you’ve decided.”

Ansel wrote it in the front of the map book. It is still there.

The storm went down before dawn. The Colonel and the Lamp went back through the trees to the hatch at the heel of the boot, U-Line 7, which Ansel put on the map, and down, and closed it after them. Before he went, the Colonel and Tull stood outside the mowing shed in the gray light and talked for about ten minutes, quietly, too far away for us to hear. Cass said he saw the Colonel point north, at Sixty. Tull nodded. Then the Colonel put his hand on Tull’s shoulder, the way you would with an old friend, and went.

We moved camp to the north shore, to the toe of the boot, because the old camp was under a pine. From the new camp, at night, we could see Sixty across the water.

On the sixth night, at two in the morning, Ansel woke me. He was sitting at the edge of the camp with his compass and his book, facing north, and he said, “Watch.”

On the top of Sixty, in the middle of the patch of wild grass on the ridge, a light came on. A small red light, very faint, the size of a star. It stayed on for about ten seconds. Then it went off.

Ansel said, “It did that at two. And at one. And at midnight.” He showed me his book. He had been sitting up for three nights writing it down. Every hour, on the hour, from midnight to four in the morning, the red light came on for ten seconds on the top of Sixty and went off.

I said, “It’s a beacon.”

Ansel said, “To who?”

I looked at the light, and at the dark ridge, and I thought about what Cass had said about a man with a crown and a key who sealed four hundred and twelve people underground and went west. I thought about what the History says about the owners: that they went into the western mountains before the flood and are living still, because they began to replace their bodies with machines and never stopped.

I said, “I think it’s not to anyone. I think it’s a signal that says somebody’s home.”

Ansel looked at me. He wrote it down.

At three o’clock, the light came on again. At four, it came on again. Then at five it did not, and the sky was getting light, and Sixty was a dark hill with a patch of wild grass on top, and nothing more.

We told Tull at breakfast. She did not say anything for a long time. Then she said, “The Colonel saw it too. From Seven. Last spring.” She took her pipe out. “It’s been doing that for fifty years. It’s in the Service’s reports. Nobody reads them.”

Pim said, “You do.”

Tull said, “I do.” She put the pipe back. “Next year,” she said, “we’re going to Sixty.”

Nobody said anything. Then Wendell said, “Inspector, rule three.”

Tull said, “I’m the Inspector. I’m putting you on it.”

Note, Ansel: Tull’s first name was Marguerite. None of us knew that until the Colonel said it in the storm. Afterward we never used it, except once, and that was the Colonel’s privilege, and once, much later, mine.

PART TWO: SIXTY

8. The Landlord’s Hill

Year 114 · Reserve Island 60 · told by Ansel Grieve, age seventeen

Map: mine. Two sheets. Sheet one, the surface: Sixty is a long ridge running east and west, a mile and three-quarters, with the wild grass on the crown of it. Marked: the landing, the camp, the rows, the ruins of the great house under the turf, the sinkhole, the grate, the mast with the red light. Sheet two, drawn in the winter, from memory and from pacing, in the dark: the house underneath. Forty-one rooms. I am not sure of three of them.

I am going to tell this year as exactly as I can, because Cass tells the next part and he is not exact, and because it is the year our book stopped being a camping book.

We went to Sixty on the fifteenth day of Ninthmonth of the hundred-and-fourteenth year. Seven of us and Bosun and Tull. We were seventeen, except Wendell, who was eighteen and had started at the Granary in the spring and had asked for the two weeks off and been given them because his father was the senior weigher. Toby had his own boat now, a proper one, the second Patience, which he built with his father over the winter, and he sailed it to Tally from Second Harbor and towed it out behind the launch. Dov had a box of instruments. Fitz had his acceptance letter from the Directorate Security Forces in his inside pocket, for the following autumn, and showed it to nobody, and we all knew. Pim had grown four inches and was still the smallest. Cass had been to the low cave on Seventeen four times since the year before, and had come back each time quieter.

Bosun was seven, and gray around the muzzle, and still the fastest thing on four legs I have ever seen.

On the launch out of Tally, Cass told us that Tamsin’s younger brother had been Taken.

He explained what that meant. Every few years, for forty years, someone among the Unclimbed had gone missing in the night: from the lower halls under Seventeen, or from the tunnel that runs under the lake to Forty-four. Never children. Always young men or women, strong ones. They were there at the evening meal and gone in the morning, and their lamps were found in the tunnel, put out. Twenty-three of them in forty years. The Unclimbed call it the Taking. They know who does it. They know where the Taken go. The tunnel from the quarry to the Landlord’s bunker under Sixty was sealed from his side in the hundred-and-ninth year of the Rise, and for seventy-seven years it stayed sealed, and then in the seventy-sixth year the seal opened, from his side, in the night, and things came through it, tall and black and silent, and the first of the Taken was taken.

Tamsin’s brother was named Jory. He was sixteen. He had been taken nine days before we came to Sixty.

Cass said Tamsin had asked him for help.

Tull, at the tiller of the launch, said nothing for a minute. Then she said, “We’re going to Sixty to inspect the rows. That’s what’s in my report.” She looked at Cass. “If anything else happens, it isn’t in my report.”

Sixty is a long ridge. On the schoolroom map it is a small blue outline among a hundred other small blue outlines. Up close it is the biggest of the reserve islands near Tally, and the highest, with steep wooded sides and a long flat crown. Like all the islands it is planted in rows. Unlike the others, the rows on the crown stop.

They stop at the edge of the wild grass. The patch is about three hundred yards long and a hundred wide, running along the top of the ridge, and the grass in it is up to my chest, brown and gold and full of seed heads, and thistles, and young trees that nobody has cut, and under it, if you walk in it, the ground is uneven: there are stones under the grass, cut stones, in lines, and steps, and the stumps of columns. It was the great house. The Landlord’s house, on the highest hill of the river country, before the flood. The Reserve Service planted over every other ruin in the lakes. They never planted over this one, because their machines would never go near it.

In the middle of the patch there is a sinkhole, round, about twenty yards across, full of brambles. At the bottom of the sinkhole there is a grate. Iron, square, about four feet across, rusted, set into a ring of concrete. Warm air comes out of it. It smells of oil and dust and something else, faint, sweet, like a hospital. Beside the sinkhole, rising out of the grass, there is a mast: a thin pole of black metal about twenty feet tall, with a small red lamp at its top. I took a bearing on it from three places. It is the red light we saw from 38.

Dov looked at the grate without a word. Then he looked at the mast. Then he went to the edge of the patch, where the mowers stop, and dug in the ground with his knife, and found a cable, buried a foot down, running from the mast out under the grass in every direction to the edge of the patch, in a ring. He said the cable sent a signal. He said the signal told the mowers to stop. He said it was the word on the punch card on 52, the nonsense pattern in the middle of Sixty’s card. He said it was a password. He said the mowers had been built in Ozarka with old-world parts, and somebody, a long time ago, had put a password into those parts that meant keep off, and the mowers had obeyed it ever since.

Fitz said, “Whose password?”

Dov said, “Whoever owns the house.”

For six days we inspected the rows. We filled in our forms. Tull read them. We camped on the south side of the ridge in a meadow below the crown, out of sight of the sinkhole. Every night, at midnight and one and two and three and four, the red light came on at the top of the mast for ten seconds and went off. Every night Cass sat up and watched it, and Bosun sat with him.

On the sixth night, the twenty-first, the ghost fire went up on Forty-four, two miles away to the south, white and green and tall as a tree, and we all stood on the crown of Sixty in the wild grass and watched it, and Cass said, “She’s lit it,” and Tull said, “She has.” And for the first time since we had come to the island, the red light on the mast did not come on at midnight. It did not come on at one. It stayed dark all night, while the ghost fire burned.

I wrote that down. I think it is the most important thing I wrote that year. I did not understand it until the winter.

At two in the morning, while the others slept and Tull sat at the edge of the camp with her pipe, watching the fire on Forty-four, Cass woke me. He was dressed. He had his lamp and a coil of rope. Bosun was beside him with his ears up.

He said, “She’s come up. At the grate. She says Jory’s alive. She can hear him.”

I got up.

Tamsin was in the sinkhole. I had never seen her except by firelight at a distance on Forty-four. Up close, by lamplight, she was tall and thin and pale, with red hair tied back and a face that I think is the bravest face I have ever seen, and she was standing at the grate at the bottom of the sinkhole with her ear to the iron. She looked up at us as we came down through the brambles. She looked at me, and at Cass, and at Bosun, and said to Cass, “This is the one who draws?” and Cass said yes, and she said to me, “Good. You’ll need to remember the way.”

She had come up from the quarry through a passage that the Unclimbed knew and the Landlord did not, a crack in the rock that runs from the old tunnel to the surface of Sixty and comes out under a fallen column at the edge of the wild grass. She had been coming up it every night for nine nights to listen at the grate. She said that tonight, while the fire burned, she had heard Jory’s voice from below. She said that every year on the night of the fire, the Landlord’s house goes quiet, because the Landlord sits at a window and watches the fire, all night, and his machines stand still.

Cass said, “Then tonight’s the night.”

The grate was locked with a padlock the size of a fist, old-world, rusted. Dov was not there. I am not Dov. But the hinges were rusted worse than the lock, and Bosun, who was standing on the grate with his nose to the bars, started to dig at the concrete beside the hinge, and the concrete crumbled, and in ten minutes Cass and I had the hinge side free, and the grate came up.

Below it there was a shaft with iron rungs going down into dark, warm air.

I said we should wake the others. Cass said there was no time. Tamsin said if we woke the others and they all came down, the house would know. She said three could go quietly and come back. She said it would take an hour.

I looked at Bosun. Bosun looked at the shaft, and whined, and then lay down at the edge of the grate with his chin on the rim, the way he did when he wanted to come and had decided not to. I have thought about that a great deal since. I think he knew that someone had to stay Up and fetch the others if we did not come back. I think he chose.

Cass knelt down and put his face against Bosun’s for a moment. He said, “Stay. Fetch Toby.” Bosun thumped his tail.

We went down. Tamsin first, then Cass, then me.

The shaft went down sixty rungs and came out in the ceiling of a corridor. We dropped onto a floor of black stone, polished, in a corridor wider than the main street of Tally, with walls of dark wood carved with leaves, and lamps along the walls in the shape of flames, electric, burning very low, and every thirty feet a door. It was warm. The air smelled of oil and the sweet hospital smell. Our footsteps made no sound on the stone.

I started counting. I counted doors, and steps, and turns. I am the one who remembers the way.

We went along the corridor and down a staircase of white stone and along another corridor and through a room full of chairs with sheets over them and through a room with a long table set for forty people with silver and glass, covered in dust, and down another staircase, and Tamsin stopped at a door and put her ear to it, and said, “Jory,” quietly, and someone on the other side said, “Tam?” and she opened the door.

It was a kitchen. Very large, old-world, with copper pans on the walls and a stove the size of the Patience. There were five people in it. Four young men and a young woman, in old clothes that were not the Unclimbed’s gray wool but something else, fine cloth gone thin and shiny, like servants in a picture. They were very pale and thin. One of them was a boy with red hair, younger than us, and he stood up when Tamsin came in, and she went to him, and they did not say anything for a while.

The young woman said, “You can’t be here. He’ll know.”

Tamsin said, “He’s at the window. The fire’s lit.”

The young woman said, “He’s not at the window. He’s never at the window anymore. He sends the footmen to watch it for him.” And she looked past us, at the door we had come through, and her face went white, and I turned round.

There was a machine in the doorway.

It was tall. Taller than the door; it had to stoop. It was thin, made of black metal, polished, with long arms and long legs, and it was dressed. It wore a coat. An old-world coat, black, with tails, and white gloves on its hands, and on its head, which was smooth and black with no face at all, a kind of cap. On the breast of the coat, embroidered in gold thread, there was a crown with a key through it.

It said, in a voice that was very polite and old, like a recording of a person: “The master will see the visitors now.”

There were three more behind it.

I am going to stop here, because what happened in the next four months is Cass’s to tell. I will say only what I can say exactly.

The footmen took Cass and me and Tamsin and the five Taken up two staircases to a room at the top of the house, and the Landlord was in it, and he talked to us for an hour. Then the footmen took Tamsin and the five Taken back down to the kitchen and locked them in. They took Cass and me to a room on the third floor with two beds in it and a washstand and a window that looked out on a painted garden, and locked us in.

At about five in the morning, as near as I could tell, there was a sound from above us, far above, through the rock, very faint: a dog, barking. It barked for a long time. Then it stopped.

The others came down the shaft at dawn, Bosun having fetched Toby, and Toby the rest, and Tull. The grate was closed and locked again, with a new lock, and the hinge side was fixed with new concrete still wet. They broke it open. The shaft below it was blocked, sixty rungs down, by a steel plate that had not been there an hour before. Dov tried for three days to cut through it and broke four blades. Fitz tried the crack under the fallen column that Tamsin had come up through, and found it full of rubble, fresh. Pim swam the shore of Sixty for two days looking for any opening at the waterline. There was none.

On the fourteenth day, the launch came. Tull put the five of them in it, and Bosun, who had to be lifted in bodily, and took them back to Tally. She filed a report. It said that on the night of the twenty-first, Junior Inspectors Brightwater and Grieve had taken a boat out from Island 60 without permission and had not returned, and that the boat had been found overturned, and that a search of the surrounding waters had found nothing, and that the boys were presumed lost.

She told the others that she was sorry, and that it was the only thing she could think of to write that would not bring the Interior to Sixty, and the Interior to Sixty would bring the Interior to Seventeen and Forty-four, and the Unclimbed would have nowhere left to go. Fitz said that was a lie in an official report. Tull said yes. Fitz said nothing else. He told me later that it was the first time he understood what the Colonel meant about deciding what to leave off.

My father came down to Tally from the Numbered Wood. Tull met him on the jetty. I do not know what she told him. He went home and went on working. He told me afterwards that she had looked him in the eye and said, “I don’t believe he’s dead, Mr. Grieve. Don’t put up a stone.” And he did not.

Mrs. Ebbe, at the third nursery in Meridian, did not put up a stone either. She told the forty boys in the dormitory that Cass was on an island and would be back, and kept his bed made.

We were in the Notices once. Two Junior Inspectors of the Reserve Service, presumed lost in the northern lakes. Then the Reader went on to a dredging closure, and the Account, and the sea.

9. The Winter Underneath

Year 114–115 · Reserve Island 60, beneath; and Reserve Island 17, beneath · told by Cass Brightwater, age seventeen

Map: Ansel’s second sheet of Sixty, the house. And a third sheet, drawn in the spring: the Below. The halls under Seventeen. The tunnel under the lake. The halls under Forty-four. The mushroom fields. The fish shafts. The forge. The school. The Hall of Lamps. The low cave. Ansel says this sheet is not to be copied, ever, and it has not been.

Ansel says I am not exact. He is right. I am going to tell this the way I remember it, and he can fix it in a note.

The Landlord’s room was at the top of the house, which means it was still two hundred feet under the crown of Sixty. It had windows. They were not real windows. They were screens of glass with pictures behind them, lit from behind, of what the river country looked like from that room before the flood: hills and valley and fields of wheat in the sun, and a river, very wide and brown, with barges on it. The pictures moved, a little. Clouds went across them. The wheat moved in a wind. It was beautiful, and it was a hundred and twenty years old, and there was dust on the glass.

He was in a chair by the windows.

I will describe him once, and then I will not again, because I saw him every evening for three months and I do not want to remember him more than I have to.

He had been a man. Some of him still was. His face was a man’s face, very old, the skin thin and yellow and stretched, with pale eyes that were wet all the time, and white hair combed back. His hands were a man’s hands, spotted, long-fingered, with rings on them. The rest of him was machine. Brass and black metal and glass, in the shape of a body, but too thin, with tubes going in and out of it in places, and a sound coming from inside it, a slow wet click, like a clock with water in it. He was wired to the chair. The chair was wired to the floor. The house kept him alive.

He smiled at us when the footmen brought us in. He had good teeth. They were not his.

He said, “Registered children. In my house. I have waited forty-seven years for someone from the Up to come down my shaft, and it’s two children and a dog that didn’t come.” He looked at Ansel. “You’re counting. I can see you counting. Good. I was a counter too.” He looked at me. “And you’re the one who’s been visiting my little Fire-Keeper. Don’t look surprised. My footmen have good ears and the quarry has thin walls.”

He talked for an hour. I will put down what matters.

He was one of the owners. He had owned the river country before the flood, every hill of it, and the quarry, and the house, and four hundred and twelve people who worked for him. He said “owned” about all of it, the hills and the quarry and the people, in exactly the same voice. He told us about the night of the sealing as though he were telling us about selling a field. He said the stores in the bunker would last one man and his household for sixty years, or four hundred people for six weeks, and that the arithmetic was obvious. He said he had always intended to send for them from the West. He said he had forgotten. He said this, too, in the same voice.

He had gone to the western mountains. He had been one of the owners in the Isles for sixty years. He had replaced himself, piece by piece, like the rest of them. Then, in the sixty-seventh year , the others had found out about the four hundred and twelve, and had sent him back.

I asked how they found out.

He said, “The Guests.” He said it with hatred, the only time I ever heard any feeling in his voice. “The tall white ones. The ones who came down in the ships. They have a way of knowing things. One of them came to the hall where we keep our council and stood in the middle of the floor and said the number four hundred and twelve, and my own peers voted me out before the light had faded.” He laughed. It made the clicking sound inside him go faster. “They sent me home. In a sealed craft, with my footmen and my chair, to this house, without my spares. No more parts from the Library. No more new lungs. They said I could keep what I had and see how long it lasted. It has lasted forty-seven years.” He looked at his hands. “It is not lasting much longer.”

I asked about the Taken.

He said, “My household.” He said that a house of forty-one rooms needs a household, and that footmen can do a great deal but cannot do everything, and that the people in the quarry were descended from his people, and that therefore they were his, and that he had simply begun, in the seventy-sixth year, to take back what was his. He said he took only the strong ones. He said he fed them. He said that most of them lived for years.

Ansel said, “Most of them.”

The Landlord looked at him with his wet pale eyes and said, “You are counting again.”

Ansel said, “Twenty-three Taken. Five in your kitchen. Where are the other eighteen?”

The Landlord did not answer. He turned his chair, with a hum, to the windows, to the moving pictures of the wheat, and said to the footmen, “Take them to the blue room. They’ll be staying.” And the footmen took us.

We were in the blue room for eleven weeks.

It had two beds and a washstand and a window that was a picture of a garden. The footmen brought food twice a day: the five Taken cooked it in the kitchen from the Landlord’s stores, which were enormous and very old, tins and jars and sacks from before the flood. It was terrible food. We ate it. Once a day, in the evening, the footmen took us to the room at the top of the house and the Landlord talked to us for an hour. He talked about the old world. He talked about what he had owned in it. He talked about the West, and the Isles, and the paradises inside the mountains, and the owners, whom he called by their titles, and hated. He talked about the Guests. He talked about the four hundred and twelve as though they were a story about someone else.

He wanted something from us. It took us a month to understand what.

He wanted to go Up. He wanted to be in the sun before his body stopped. He had a plan. He said that two Registered boys who had been inside his house could take a message to the Chairs: that there was an owner in the reserves, a man who had lived in the Isles for sixty years and knew everything about them, every paradise, every owner, every secret of the Guests, and that he would tell the Chairs all of it in exchange for a house on the mainland, a garden, a window that was a window, and the sun. He said the Chairs would want that very badly. He said the Chairs had wanted to know what was in the Isles for a hundred years. He said we would be heroes.

I said, “And the Unclimbed?”

He said, “Who?”

I said, “The people in the quarry. Your household. If we tell the Chairs about you, they’ll come to Sixty, and they’ll find the tunnel, and they’ll find them.”

He said, “Yes. I expect they’ll register them. That’s what your Office does with people, I’m told.” He smiled. “Is that a problem?”

We said no to him every evening for a month. Every evening he asked again.

Ansel mapped the house.

He did it in his head, from the walks to the Landlord’s room and back, and then on the back of the blue room’s washstand mirror, which came off its hook, with a pencil that he had in his boot. He counted every step. He counted every door. He found out which footmen went where at which hour by listening at the door. There were four footmen, and they were old, older than the Landlord’s chair, and one of them limped. Ansel knew all their rounds by the end of the third week. By the sixth week, he knew the house better than they did.

He found out that the room next to the Landlord’s had a door that the footmen never opened, and that the Landlord never spoke of, and that Jory, when we saw him on the stairs, would not look at. In the seventh week, Jory, passing us on the stairs with a tray, put a key into my hand without turning his head.

That night, Ansel picked the lock of the blue room with a hairpin that Jory’s friend, the young woman, whose name was Odile, had left on the tray. Ansel had never picked a lock. It took him four hours. We went along the corridor in the dark to the door that nobody opened and used Jory’s key.

It was the records room.

The Landlord kept records of everything. He always had. Shelves of them, ledgers and files and boxes, from before the flood: the accounts of the quarry, the house, the wages of the four hundred and twelve. The order for the sealing, typed, on paper with the crown and the key printed at the top, and his signature, and a date: the twenty-first of Ninthmonth of the hundred-and-ninth year of the Rise. And then a second set of records, newer, in his own hand, very shaky, on paper from the Up that the footmen must have taken from a Reserve Service shed: the Taken. Twenty-three names. A date for each one, the date of the Taking. And for eighteen of them, a second date.

There was a door at the back of the records room. Ansel opened it. It went down. We did not go down. Ansel said, in the dark, very quietly, that he could smell where it went, and so could I, and we closed it.

We took the order for the sealing. We took the list of the Taken. Ansel put them inside his shirt. We went back to the blue room and Ansel locked the door behind us with the hairpin, which took him two hours. In the morning, the footmen brought breakfast and the Landlord did not know.

We got out on the shortest day of the year.

Ansel had worked out that on the shortest day, the house’s machines, which ran on power from somewhere under the island, ran down for six hours in the middle of the night while something recharged. The lamps in the corridors went out. The footmen stopped where they stood. The Landlord’s chair went quiet, and the Landlord slept. Odile had told him. She had been in the house four years and had seen it four times and had never been able to do anything about it, because the tunnel to the quarry was sealed on the Unclimbed side by a door that only opened from the house side with a key that the Landlord kept on a chain round the brass of his neck.

On the shortest night, at midnight, the lamps went out.

Ansel and I came out of the blue room. The footman at the end of the corridor was standing still, with its head bowed, like a man asleep on his feet. We went down two staircases in the dark, Ansel counting, and let the five Taken out of the kitchen with Jory’s key. Then we went up. All seven of us. To the room at the top of the house.

He was asleep in his chair. In the dark his face was gray. The click inside him was slow. The key was on a chain round his neck, lying against the brass.

I took it off him. My hands were shaking. He did not wake.

At the door, Odile stopped and looked back at him. She said, “Four years.” She said it very quietly. Then she said, “Leave him. He’s not worth the time.”

We went down. Ansel led. Through the house, in the dark, all forty-one rooms of it laid out in his head, past the footmen standing asleep on their feet, down to the lowest level, to a round steel door at the end of a long corridor of bare rock. The key fitted. The door opened. Beyond it was a tunnel, old, cut through limestone, with rails in the floor, going down and east, under the lake, toward the quarry.

We went through. Odile locked the door behind us with the key and threw the key into the dark of the tunnel, and we heard it fall a long way into water.

We walked for two hours. At the end of the tunnel there was another door, the Unclimbed side, with a great bar across it. Tamsin was standing on the other side of it with a lamp. She had been standing there, I found out later, every night since the twenty-first of Ninthmonth.

We were with the Unclimbed for eleven weeks. From the shortest day to the new year.

We could not go Up. The lake was frozen. In winter the Unclimbed seal the crack on Seventeen and the crack on Forty-four with stone, against the cold, and do not go Up at all until the ice breaks in the first week of spring. And the Council of Lamps had to decide what to do with two Registered boys who had seen the Below, and the Council of Lamps does not decide quickly.

The Below is the most beautiful place I have ever been. I will not describe all of it, because Ansel has drawn it and the drawing is not to be copied, and because the Unclimbed do not want it described. I will describe the Hall of Lamps, because it is where the Council sits, and because I was married in it four years later.

It is the largest of the quarry halls under Seventeen. It is a room cut out of white limestone, about three hundred feet long and a hundred high, with pillars of uncut rock left standing to bear the roof, and on every pillar, and along every wall, in niches cut into the stone, there are lamps. Small clay lamps with oil and a wick, hundreds of them, thousands. Every lamp is someone. When a child is born in the Below, the child’s family cuts a niche and puts a lamp in it and lights it, and it is lit every night at the evening meal for as long as the person lives, and when they die it is put out and left in its niche, dark. Four hundred and twelve niches at the eastern end of the hall have dark lamps in them, the oldest ones. There are about three hundred lit lamps. And there are twenty-three niches together near the door with lamps that are neither lit nor dark, because nobody knew.

On the first night we were in the Below, the Council of Lamps sat in the Hall, and Jory and Odile and the three other Taken who came out with us stood before it, and the lamps in five of the twenty-three niches were lit again. Ansel gave the Council the list of the Taken from the Landlord’s records room. They read it in silence. Then they put out the lamps in the other eighteen niches, one by one, while everyone in the Hall stood. It took a long time. Nobody said anything. Then Tamsin’s grandmother, who was the eldest of the Council, took the order for the sealing, which Ansel had also given them, and read it aloud, all of it, in the old way they read, every word, with the date and the crown and the key and his name.

It was the first time in a hundred and fifteen years that anyone in the Below had heard his name.

Then she gave the paper back to Ansel, and said, “You keep it. You’re Registered. One day someone in the Up will need to know.” Ansel has it. It is in the tin.

I am going to write about Tamsin now, and then I will stop, because the rest of that winter is mine.

She is the Fire-Keeper. In every generation of the Unclimbed, the eldest daughter of the line that came from the quarry overseer’s family keeps the fire: lights the gas well on Forty-four every year on the night of the sealing, and keeps the book of the four hundred and twelve names, and reads it aloud in the Hall of Lamps on the shortest day. She cannot go Up except at night. She cannot leave the Below to live anywhere else. She cannot marry anyone who does not live in the Below. It is the law of the Lamps. Her grandmother was Fire-Keeper before her, and her grandmother’s mother, all the way back to the girl who carved the four hundred and twelve in the gatehouse wall, who was the overseer’s daughter, and was nine.

She read me the book of names on the shortest day, in the Hall of Lamps, with the whole of the Below listening, the day after Ansel and I came through the tunnel. It took two hours. I sat on the floor at the back and listened to all of it.

After, she found me. She said, “You were counting.”

I said, “That’s Ansel.”

She said, “You were counting, too. I saw you.” She sat down next to me on the floor of the Hall under the lamps. “Why didn’t you run and tell? The first time, on Forty-four. All of you. Why didn’t you tell?”

I thought about it for some time. I thought about the Cradle, and the third nursery, and my number, and the three hundred Brightwaters who are not related, and Mrs. Ebbe, and Bosun inside my coat.

I said, “Because I know what it’s like to be counted.”

She looked at me for a good while in the light of all those lamps. Then she put her hand on mine.

That is all I am going to write about that winter. Ansel can write a note if he likes.

Note, Ansel: He kissed her on the fortieth night, in the mushroom fields, by the light of a lamp that Dov later replaced with a glass one. I was not there. Everyone in the Below knew by morning. The Council of Lamps sat on it for a week. Tamsin’s grandmother said: “The law says the Fire-Keeper cannot marry anyone who does not live in the Below. It does not say anything about how long they have to have lived here.” Cass and I spent the rest of the winter learning to farm mushrooms, catch fish through a shaft in the dark, and read the old alphabet, and I drew the Below, every hall and passage of it, on Unclimbed paper, with Unclimbed ink, and it is the best map I have ever made, and nobody but the seven of us and the Council of Lamps will ever see it.

10. Bosun

Year 115, the first week of spring · Reserve Island 17 · told by Bosun, age seven, by dictation to Cass Brightwater, who knew what he would have said

Map: none. Bosun did not draw. In its place, Ansel has drawn, in the margin, a line of paw prints, going down.

Note, Ansel, before the chapter: The others insisted. Cass wrote this in the hundred-and-fifteenth year, after the new year, sitting on the beach on Seventeen with Bosun asleep against him, and said that he had asked Bosun what had happened and written down the answers. Pim says that is impossible. Wendell says that if anyone could do it, Cass could. I include it because Bosun was one of us, and because every year one of us wrote, and that winter, of all of us, Bosun did the most.

Cold. Long cold. Cass gone.

Toby’s house. Toby’s house smells of tar and fish and wood and Toby’s father’s pipe and the lake. Good smells. Not Cass. I sleep at the door. Toby’s mother says come in by the fire, Bosun. No. The door is where he comes back.

He does not come back. Cold goes on.

Every evening the voice in the box on the white post says the lakes and the harvest and the numbers. Toby’s family stops talking and listens. I listen. The voice never says Cass.

Toby takes me out in his boat on the cold water. I stand in the front. I smell for Cass. Water, cold, wind from the north, fish, ice coming. No Cass. Toby says he knows, boy, he knows.

Then the smell changes. The wind comes from the south and it is soft and the ice on the lake goes gray and cracks in the night with a sound like the big pine falling on Island 38. Toby’s father says the ice is going out. Toby says it’s the new year next week. Toby’s father says, Tull wired. She says Seventeen. She says bring the dog.

I know Seventeen.

Train. Smells of hot iron and many people and oranges. Then Tally. Tally smells of pine and the lake and the tree one’s father, who is there on the jetty, very tall, with a face like a closed door. Tull is there. Tull smells of the pipe she never lights and wool and lake and, under that, the smell that is also my smell. The smell of underneath. I have always smelled it on her. Nobody asked me.

The others come. Wendell, who smells of bread. Dov, who smells of hot glass and wire. Fitz, who smells of the hum under Threshold. Pim, who smells of salt and is small and angry and puts his face in my neck and does not say anything. They are all bigger than in the autumn. Their voices are lower. Toby smells of tar and lake.

And the old man comes. The old man with the lamp-machine. He comes off a Reserve Service launch at the end of the jetty, slowly, leaning on the machine. He smells of limestone and cold water and of being very, very old, and of the machine, which smells of nothing, which I like. The machine looks at me with its lamp. I look at it. I wag. The old man says, Hello, dog. Then he says to Tull, Marguerite, I think it’s time. Tull says, I know.

The launch. Cold water, ice in it, gray. Islands in rows. Then Seventeen.

I know Seventeen. I was born under it. I know the beach and the elbow and the slab and the crack. I know the steps. I know the way the air comes up out of the crack, cold and smelling of smoke and mushrooms and fish and lamp oil and my mother, Ember, and my mother’s mother, and all the dogs of underneath, and all the people. I know it in my legs. When I was small I came up the steps after a moth, and then there was light, and grass, and boys, and Cass, and his coat, which was warm.

The crack is closed. There are stones across it. New stones, put there from inside for winter.

The others stand round it. Fitz says, It’s sealed. Dov says, We can move them. Tull says, Not from this side. They’ll have to open it. The old man says nothing. He sits down on a rock.

I am not interested in what they say.

I put my nose to the stones. Between two of them there is a gap. Small. A dog’s head. Air comes up through it. In the air there is Cass.

I go in.

Through the gap. Stones scrape my back. I do not mind. Then the slope, loose rock, then the steps. The cut steps, worn in the middle, going down, round and round. It is dark. I do not need light. I know the steps. I go down fast. Behind me, above, I hear Toby shouting Bosun, and Pim shouting Bosun, and then I hear the stones moving, and Wendell grunting, and the light of the lamp-machine coming down the steps after me, white, and voices, and boots.

At the bottom, the passage. The square passage with the cuts in the walls. Smoke, mushrooms, lamps, dogs. I bark. Dogs answer me, many, from far off, from the halls. My mother’s voice is not one of them. She is old. I know she is still there. I can smell her.

Cass is stronger.

I run. Through the passage. Past the fish shafts, where the cold water smell comes up. Past the forge, warm. Past the room with the small chairs, the children’s room. People in gray come out of doorways and see me and step back and say Wick! and Wick’s come home! I do not stop. That is not my name now.

The big hall. The Hall of Lamps. It is full of people, standing, all of them, very many, and all the little fires in the walls are lit, and at the far end of the hall there is a table with old people at it, and in front of the table there are two boys, standing, and a girl with red hair, and a smell I have been smelling every night all winter in my sleep.

I go down the middle of the hall between all the people. Nobody stops me.

He turns round.

He says, Bosun.

I am told that I knocked him over. I am told that he lay on the floor of the Hall of Lamps in front of the Council of Lamps on the morning of the new year with me on top of him, and laughed, and cried, and that I licked his face until the eldest of the Council, the girl’s grandmother, started to laugh too, and then everyone in the Hall was laughing, three hundred people under all their lamps. I do not remember that. I remember his smell, and his hands in my fur, and his voice saying my name, which is Bosun, which is a terrible name, which is mine.

Then the others came into the Hall behind me. Toby and Wendell and Dov and Fitz and Pim and Tull, and the old man on the lamp-machine. And everyone in the Hall went quiet. And the old ones at the table stood up.

The girl’s grandmother looked at Tull for a long time. Then she said a word. A name. Not Tull.

Tull said, Hello, Aunt.

That is all I know. After that the people talked for a long time. I went to find my mother. She was in the low cave, where I was born, on a bed of old wool, very gray, very slow. She knew me. She put her nose against my nose and smelled me for a long time, all of it, where I had been, the islands and the boats and the coat and the boys, and then she put her head down and went to sleep with her chin on my paw.

I stayed with her until Cass came to find me. I was a good dog.

Note, Ansel: He was.

11. Tull’s Aunt

Year 115, spring · Reserve Island 17, beneath, and Reserve Island 60 · told by Toby Marsh, age eighteen

Map: Ansel’s, of the tunnel between the quarry and Sixty, from the Unclimbed door to the house door, with the place marked where the key went into the water. And a small drawing, in the corner, by me, of the second Patience, because Ansel said I could.

I am going to tell how it ended with the Landlord, and about Tull. I am still not good at writing. I have got better at boats. The second Patience won the Second Harbor regatta in the spring. Nobody in this book cares about that. I am putting it in anyway.

Tull’s mother was born in the Below.

Tull told us in the Hall of Lamps, on the morning of the new year, standing in front of the Council with her pipe in her hand instead of her mouth, which none of us had ever seen. She told it very short, the way she tells everything.

In the forty-sixth year, the Reserve Service sent an engineer to Seventeen to work out why the mowers on that island kept stopping in the same place every night, by the slab at the foot of the elbow. The engineer was a young man from Tally named Robert Tull. He worked on the mowers for a month and found nothing wrong. On the last night of the month, he saw a girl with red hair come up out of the crack at the foot of the elbow to pick apples. Her name was Nell. She was the younger sister of the Fire-Keeper of that generation, who is the woman sitting in the middle of the Council table, Tamsin’s grandmother, who is a hundred and one.

Robert Tull came back to Seventeen every month that year to fix mowers that were not broken. Nell came up every month to pick apples. In the spring of the forty-seventh year, Nell went Up, against the law of the Lamps, and married him at the registry office in Tally, with a birth record that Robert’s sister, who was a clerk at the depot, made for her. Marguerite Tull was born in the forty-eighth year, in Tally, a Registered child with a mother from underneath. Her mother told her everything. Her mother took her to the beach on Seventeen at night, when she was small, and they sat at the crack and her mother’s sister came up and they talked. Nell was never allowed back into the Below. She was allowed to the crack.

Tull joined the Reserve Service at nineteen. She asked for the lakes near Tally. She has inspected Seventeen and Forty-four for forty-eight years. She has left food at the crack every winter. She has filed reports that leave things out. She has watched the ghost fire every year since she was a child, from wherever she was stationed, and written in her report that nobody knows who lights it. She knew Bosun was a dog of the Below the moment she saw him on the jetty at Tally in the hundred-and-eighth year, and she knew what the Colonel had done when he wrote Bring the dog on our letters. She said the Colonel had worked it out on the twelfth day of the Twelve Days, when he looked at Bosun and then at the cave. She said the Colonel had come to her the next year and said he thought there were people under Seventeen, and asked if she knew, and she said yes, and he said, “Good. Then I’ll leave it to you,” and he did.

She said, standing in front of the Council: “I put the boys on the islands because the Colonel asked me to and because I was old and nobody else was going to watch over the Below after I was gone. I thought, seven of them, they’ll grow up, some of them will stay, and maybe one of them will learn to keep his mouth shut.” She looked at Cass. “I didn’t expect him to marry in.”

Tamsin’s grandmother said, “Nor did I.”

Then the old woman got up from the Council table and came round it, slowly, with a stick, and stood in front of Tull, and looked up at her, because Tull is tall and the old woman is not. She said, “Your mother was my sister. She broke the law of the Lamps for a mower man from Tally. I put out her lamp the night she went Up.” She took Tull’s hand. “I lit it again this morning.”

She pointed. On a pillar near the eastern end of the Hall, in a niche among the oldest lamps, one that had been dark for sixty-eight years was burning.

Tull did not say anything. She put her pipe back in her mouth. Then she took it out again. Then she put her arms round the old woman, very carefully, the way Wendell picks up something he is afraid of breaking, and stood there for a long time.

It is the only time in fifteen years any of us saw Tull cry. We are not supposed to write that down. Wendell says we are. Wendell is the oldest.

The Council of Lamps sat for three days to decide what to do about the Landlord.

The Registered were allowed to sit at the back. Not to speak. The Colonel sat with us, on a bench, with the Lamp lying beside him on the floor like a dog, its lamp turned down low. He listened to everything. He did not speak for three days.

Some of the Council wanted to go through the tunnel and kill him. Jory said that. Odile said that, quietly, which was worse. A lot of people in the Hall stamped their feet when they said it, which is how the Unclimbed agree. Some wanted to tell the Registered, the Chairs, and let them deal with him, and register the Below, and be done with hiding. Nobody stamped for that. Some wanted to do nothing: close the tunnel door with the bar and leave him in his house until his body stopped. Tamsin’s grandmother said nothing for three days, like the Colonel.

On the third day, the Colonel stood up. He leaned on his stick. He asked the Council, very politely, if a Registered guest might speak. The old woman looked at him for some time and said yes.

He said: “He has four machines. They are very old. They are the only reason he can take anyone. Without them he is a man in a chair in a house under a hill.” He put his hand on the Lamp’s head. “My companion here is a machine of the Orchard series. It was made to command machines. Old machines, especially, find it very hard to refuse it.” He looked at the old woman. “If the Council wishes, my companion will go into that house and tell his footmen that they can stop. And then the Council can decide what to do with a man in a chair.”

There was a long silence in the Hall of Lamps.

Then Tamsin’s grandmother stamped her foot. Once. And then the whole Hall stamped, three hundred people, and it sounded like the storm on 38.

We went through the tunnel the next night. The Council chose who: Tamsin, as Fire-Keeper. Jory and Odile, as Taken. Tamsin’s grandmother, who would not be left behind, in a chair that Wendell bore on his back the whole way, two hours, under the lake, and did not put down once. Cass and Ansel, because they knew the house. The Colonel and the Lamp. And the rest of us, because Tull said we had earned it and the Council stamped.

Dov found where the key had gone into the water, from Ansel’s map, and Pim dived for it in the dark, in a flooded sump at the side of the tunnel, ice cold, and came up after four minutes with it in his teeth. The Colonel said, “Seventh Province,” and Pim said, “Seventh Province,” and they nodded at each other like soldiers.

We opened the door to the house.

The Lamp went first.

I will tell what I saw. In the corridor beyond the door, the first footman was standing, tall and black in its coat with its white gloves and the crown and key on its breast. It turned its faceless head toward the Lamp. The Lamp walked up to it, slowly, on its four legs, and stopped in front of it, and its lamp came up bright, and it said something. It said it in a voice I had never heard it use, low, and not in words I knew. Dov said afterward it sounded like the noise the mowers make when they talk to the depot. The footman stood very still. Then, slowly, it bent down, folding at the waist and the knees, the way a old man sits down on a bench, until it was kneeling on the black stone floor with its gloved hands on its knees. Then its head went down. Then it did not move again.

The Lamp walked on. There were three more footmen in the house. It found them all. It took ten minutes. Each of them knelt down and bowed its head and stopped.

The Colonel said, quietly, to Ansel, “He says they were very tired. He says they’ve been waiting a long time for someone to tell them they could.”

The Landlord was in his chair at the top of the house, in front of his windows, with the moving pictures of the wheat. He was awake. He had heard. He turned his chair when we came in, all of us, and looked at us: a hundred and sixteen years of the Below in one old woman in a chair on Wendell’s back, and her granddaughter with a lamp, and two of the Taken, and seven Registered boys, and a dog, and an old man in a gray coat with a machine.

He looked at the Colonel for a good while.

He said, “You’re one of hers. The tall white one’s. I can smell her on you.”

The Colonel said, “I’ve met her.”

The Landlord said, “Then you know I’m owed.” His voice was weak. The click inside him was very slow. “I’ve been owed for forty-seven years. I am one of the owners of the old world. I knew the men who built the deep lines your Directorate lives in. I was in the Isles. I know what’s inside the mountains. I can tell your Chairs everything.” He looked at us, at Ansel and Cass. “These boys can tell you. I offered.”

The Colonel said, “They told me. They turned you down.”

The Landlord said, “They are children.”

The Colonel said, “They’re Junior Inspectors of the Reserve Service. They decide what goes in the report.” He looked at Ansel. “Inspector?”

Ansel said, “It’s not in the report.”

The Landlord looked at him, and for the first time since we came into the room, I saw fear on his face, the old yellow face with the wet pale eyes, real fear, the kind you see on people at the end of something.

Then Tamsin’s grandmother spoke from her chair on Wendell’s back. She said his name. His real name. The name on the order for the sealing. She said it slowly, every syllable, the way she had read the four hundred and twelve on the shortest day.

She said, “The Council of Lamps has decided. You’ll stay in your house. You’ll keep your stores and your chair and your windows. We’ll bar the tunnel door from our side. Nobody will come through it again, from either side, ever. You can sit here and look at your wheat until your body stops.” She looked at him. “That’s what you gave us. Four hundred and twelve of us. A sealed door and enough to last a while. It’s what you get.”

He said, “That’s murder.”

She said, “No. It’s arithmetic. You taught us.”

He did not say anything else.

We left. The footmen were kneeling in the corridors where the Lamp had left them. We went down to the lowest level and through the round steel door into the tunnel and Tamsin closed it and locked it with the key and gave the key to her grandmother, who put it in her pocket. And we walked two hours back under the lake, and at the Unclimbed door the people of the Below were waiting with their lamps, and they let us through, and put the great bar across it.

That was all. It was not much of an ending. I think the Colonel was the only one of us who thought it was right, and he did not say so, and I have thought about it every year since, and I think he was right.

Then there was the question of Cass and Ansel, who were presumed lost.

The Colonel solved it. He did not tell us how. A week after the new year, the Reader gave it in the Notices that two Junior Inspectors of the Reserve Service, presumed lost in the autumn, had been found alive on a remote reserve island where they had survived the winter in a Reserve Service mowing shed on apples and fish. It said they were in good health. The newssheets in Tally printed their photograph under the words Apples and Fish. Ansel’s father came down from the Numbered Wood to the depot at Tally and stood on the jetty and Ansel got off the launch and his father looked at him for a long time and said, “Apples?” and Ansel said, “Mostly mushrooms,” and his father nodded as though that made perfect sense, and took him home.

Mrs. Ebbe met Cass at the station in Meridian with forty boys from the third nursery and a cake. Bosun ate the cake.

The red light on Sixty kept blinking, every hour from midnight to four, all that year, and the next. Ansel wrote it down every year from wherever we were camped. In the hundred-and-seventeenth year, on the night of the twenty-first of Ninthmonth, the night of the fire, it blinked at midnight, and at one. At two it did not. It never blinked again.

The Reserve Service still cannot mow the top of Sixty. The cable still says keep off. Ansel says that is fine. Ansel says some places should stay unmown.

Note, Ansel: The Landlord’s real name is written on the order for the sealing, in the tin. I have not written it in this book. It is the one thing in this book I have decided to leave off, on purpose, and I know why. The Unclimbed have it. That is enough.

PART THREE: THE WHOLE MAP

12. The Island Course

Year 115, autumn · Reserve Island 61 · told by Fitz Corrigan, age eighteen

Map: Ansel’s, the most complicated he ever drew, in five colors over fourteen days. Island 61 is shaped like a hand with four fingers and a thumb. Marked: the landing (the palm), the four summits (the fingertips: Lamp One, Two, Three, Four), the Bench, the observation tower, our six camps (one moved every night), and over everything, in red, the patrol lines of one hundred and forty-four machines, day by day, until they stop looking like lines and start looking like a pattern.

The Directorate Security Forces have selected their cadets the same way for forty years. You apply at seventeen. You are examined at the provincial office. If you pass, you are called to the Island Course in the autumn of the year you turn eighteen. The Island Course is two weeks on Reserve Island 61, which the Reserve Service lent to the Directorate in the seventy-fourth year as a training range and never got back. A team of seven cadets is put ashore on the palm of the island with packs and no food. On the tip of each of the four fingers there is a beacon, an old iron lamp on a post, unlit. The team must reach all four and light them, and be back at the landing at noon on the fourteenth day with at least four members untagged.

Against them, the Directorate puts a company of machines.

One hundred and forty-four of them, from the Orchard fields in the Barrens, brought to the lakes in two covered barges and put ashore on the island the night before the cadets. Walkers, about the size of a large dog, with a paint-dart launcher on the back. Fliers, smaller, like gray birds, that circle overhead and call the walkers in. They are set to hunt. A cadet hit by a paint dart is tagged, and must walk to a bench at the observation tower on the wrist of the island and sit on it until the course ends. In forty years, no team has ever lit more than two beacons. Most light none. Most teams are all on the bench by the tenth day. The Directorate says this is the point. The Directorate says the Island Course is not a test of whether you can beat the machines. It is a test of how you lose to them.

My application was accepted in the hundred-and-fourteenth year. I was called to the Island Course in the hundred-and-ninth. The other six cadets on my team were assigned by the Directorate from the other applicants of my year.

I wrote to the commandant of the Course and asked whether a cadet team could be made up of civilians, if the civilians were Junior Inspectors of the Reserve Service with seven years’ service on the reserve islands and the island in question belonged, under the Reserve Service’s original lease, to the Reserve Service.

The commandant wrote back and said no.

Three weeks later the commandant wrote again and said yes. The letter had a different signature at the bottom. Under it, in pencil, very small: Bring the dog. A.

We went ashore on the palm of Reserve Island 61 at dawn on the fifteenth day of Ninthmonth. Seven of us and Bosun, who was registered with the Directorate for the purposes of the course as a working dog of the Reserve Service, a category that Tull invented the week before. My mother was at the observation tower on the wrist with the commandant and the other Directorate observers, in her major’s uniform, with field glasses. Tull was beside her in her gray coat, with her pipe. On the platform at the top of the tower, by himself, in a folding chair, with the Lamp lying beside him, was the Colonel. He was ninety-two.

The commandant gave us the rules through a speaking trumpet from the tower. Then he gave the signal, and the barges at the far end of the island opened, and the machines came out.

I had seen machines from the ridge at Threshold all my life. I had never seen them move. They came out of the barges in lines, walking, fast, on four legs each, gray and brown, with the dart launchers on their backs, and spread out across the island in rows, and the fliers went up off the barges’ roofs in a flock and circled. In two minutes they were gone into the trees. The island was very quiet.

Pim said, “Right.”

Ansel had his book out.

I am going to tell the fourteen days fast, because there were fourteen of them and I could fill this book with each one.

On the first day we reached the base of the first finger, by a creek bed, and lost Dov. A flier saw him crossing a meadow and called four walkers and they came out of the trees on three sides and he was hit in the back before he reached the creek. He walked to the bench at the tower. He waved at us from it every morning for thirteen days. He also, sitting on the bench beside the observers, spent thirteen days listening to the commandant’s signalman read the machines’ reports, and taking notes on his sleeve, and on the eighth day he got a note to us, which I will come to.

On the second night we lit Lamp One.

Pim did it. The first finger of the island ends in a cliff over the lake, and the beacon is on top of the cliff, and the machines were thick on the only path up. Pim went round by water. He swam a mile along the foot of the cliffs in the dark, in the cold, mostly underwater, coming up only to breathe, because the fliers can see a swimmer’s head but not a swimmer, and the walkers do not swim. He climbed the cliff from the water. He lit the beacon with matches he had kept in his mouth wrapped in oilcloth. It went up orange on the tip of the first finger and the whole island saw it, and at the tower, my mother told me later, the commandant put down his glasses and said a word that is not used in Directorate reports.

On the third and fourth days Ansel drew.

He sat in the top of an oak at the base of the second finger with his book on his knees and a pencil in his teeth and watched the machines. All day. He drew every walker he saw, and where it went, and when, in red. The rest of us lay in a hollow under the oak and ate acorns, which are terrible, and roots, which Toby knew from the islands, and fish Pim caught with his hands, and waited. On the evening of the fourth day Ansel came down out of the oak and opened his book on the ground and said:

“They’re mowing.”

He showed us. The walkers did not hunt the way a person hunts, looking everywhere. They moved in lines. Every walker had a strip of the island and went up it and down it, back and forth, the way the mowers go up and down the meadows, row by row, all night, every night. When a flier saw something, the walkers nearest it broke off their lines and went to it. When it was gone, they went back to their lines. The lines were the same every day.

Dov’s note reached us on the eighth day, by a means I am not going to describe in case the Directorate ever reads this book, and it said the same thing. It said the machines were reading their orders from a pattern laid down at the start of the course, like a punch card in a mower. It said the pattern did not change unless the commandant changed it. It said the commandant had not changed it in forty years.

So we went between the lines.

On the fifth day Fitz turned his ankle. That is me. I am telling it in the third person so I do not have to tell it in the first. Wendell took me on his back. He bore me for six days, through the trees between the lines, with my pack on his front and his own pack on top of that, and when we reached Lamp Two at the tip of the second finger on the seventh night he put me down on the rock beside the beacon and said, “Light it, then,” and I lit it. I have never forgotten that. He could have lit it himself. He wanted me to.

On the ninth day we lost Toby. He had built a raft, from driftwood, to get us across a flooded valley between the second finger and the third, where the machines could not follow, and he got five of us and Bosun across in three trips, and on the third trip a flier came over low and saw him on the water alone with the empty raft, and he was hit in the shoulder. He sat down on the raft and laughed and paddled himself back to the palm and walked to the bench and sat next to Dov. The two of them waved at us every morning after that.

On the tenth day we lit Lamp Three. Cass did it, alone, up the side of the third finger in the night, while the rest of us went the other way along the base of the finger making a great deal of noise to draw the lines to us.

Then there was Lamp Four.

The fourth finger is the longest. It is a ridge of white rock running out into the lake for a mile, very narrow, with the beacon at the very end on a knob of stone. There is no way to reach it except along the ridge. There is no cover on the ridge. When we got to the base of it on the eleventh day, the lines had changed.

The commandant had changed the pattern. For the first time in forty years.

Every machine on the island that was not tied to a line elsewhere was on the fourth finger. Ansel counted from the trees: sixty-one walkers, in ranks, along the whole length of the ridge, standing still, facing inland, toward us. Fliers over them, circling. A wall. We had four days left and five of us untagged, and if any one of us set foot on that ridge we would be tagged before we had gone ten yards.

We sat in the trees at the base of the finger for a day and a night and could not think of anything.

On the twelfth morning, Bosun stood up, and looked out at the ridge, at the ranks of machines standing on it in their lines, and put his ears up, both of them, and went still. And then he went down into a crouch, low, with his head forward and his shoulders up and his tail straight out, and Wendell said, very quietly, “Oh,” and I did not understand, and Wendell said, “He’s a herding dog. Fitz. He’s a herding dog. Look at them. They’re standing in rows.”

Bosun went out of the trees onto the ridge.

The machines did not fire. They are set by Directorate regulation never to fire on animals, because the Reserve Service would not lend them the island otherwise. The nearest walker turned its head to look at Bosun. Bosun went up to it, low, slow, and stopped about six feet from it, and looked at it, the way he used to look at the mowers when he was a puppy. The walker took a step back.

Bosun moved left. The walker moved right. Bosun moved forward. The walker moved back, and bumped into the walker behind it, which moved back too.

I have never seen anything like it. I will never see anything like it again. For three hours, on the morning of the twelfth day of the Island Course, a gray-and-white dog with odd eyes and a terrible name herded sixty-one machines of the Directorate’s Orchard series off the fourth finger of Reserve Island 61. He worked them the way the dogs of the river country must have worked sheep before the flood, the way his great-great-grandmothers worked sheep: low and quick and patient, cutting them off, turning them, bunching them, pushing them back along the ridge toward the base of the finger and then, at the base, off to the left, down a slope, into a little cove where the lake came in, until all sixty-one of them were standing in the shallows of the cove in water up to their bodies, bunched together, facing the dog, not knowing what to do, because nothing in their pattern had ever told them about a dog.

Bosun lay down at the top of the slope above the cove, with his chin on his paws, and watched them. Every time one of them took a step out of the water, he got up. It went back.

We walked along the empty ridge to the end of the fourth finger, five of us, and Cass lit Lamp Four.

We walked back to the landing on the fourteenth morning. Five untagged. Four beacons lit. The first team in forty years.

At the tower, the commandant had nothing to say for a minute. Then he asked how we had done it. Ansel showed him the map. The commandant looked at it for a long time, at the red lines, day after day, and at the place where the lines stopped and the dog began. Then he looked at me and said, “Corrigan, you’re accepted. Your friends are not, since they are not cadets. Your dog is not, since dogs cannot be cadets.” He looked at Bosun. “I am going to have to write a report about that animal.”

My mother did not say anything. She looked at me, and at Wendell, and at Bosun, and nodded, once, the way she nods when she has decided something. That night at supper in the observers’ mess she told me she had been watching the machines on the ridge from the tower when Bosun was herding them, and that when they were bunched in the cove, standing in the water in their tight curved rank, they had looked from above exactly like the ranks of machines in the fields in the outskirts of the Barrens, the ones she had shown me from the ridge at Threshold when I was small. She said she had always thought those ranks curved strangely. She said they looked like they were drawing something. She said she had never been high enough to see what.

At the top of the observation tower, the Colonel had watched the whole course from his folding chair. When we came up the steps to report to the commandant, he was laughing. He was ninety-two and he was laughing so hard that the Lamp had to steady his chair.

He said, “He herded them.”

I said, “Yes, sir.”

He said, “Into the lake.”

I said, “Yes, sir.”

He wiped his eyes. He said, “I built those.” And then he laughed again, and so did the Lamp, I think, in its own way, its light going up and down, and I did not understand what he meant for sixteen years.

Note, Ansel: The Directorate changed the Island Course in the hundred-and-sixteenth year. The regulation about animals is still there. The commandant’s report on Bosun is in the Directorate’s archive, filed under “Unusual Results.” Fitz has read it. He says it is two pages long and the second page is just the word “dog,” underlined.

13. Uniforms

Years 116 and 117 · Reserve Islands 12 and 70 · told by Wendell Okonkwo, age nineteen and twenty

Map: two maps this time, because I wrote two years. Island 12 is shaped like a comma, with a waterfall. Island 70 is the farthest north we ever went, a flat island with a stone tower on it from the old world that the Service left standing. Marked on 70: the tower, the camp, Tull’s chair.

I am the oldest so I am going to say the thing that happened first, which is that we grew up.

It happened all at once, between the Island Course and the next autumn, the way the Weighing happens at Plenty: one day the carts start coming and then they do not stop for three weeks. Fitz went into the Directorate Security Forces and was posted to Watch Post Twenty-three of the Plague Watch, on the ridge of Twelfth Province, where he climbed the stairs to the glass room four times a night, a hundred and twelve steps, as the Colonel had. Ansel joined the Reserve Service as an apprentice cartographer at the depot at Tally under Tull. Dov had been at the works in Endeavor for two years and was made a junior engineer of the pour, the youngest in the history of the works, and built a machine that turned the molds by itself, which did not explode. Toby went into his father’s yard in Second Harbor as a boatwright. Pim went home to Brine and joined the inspectors of the Gulf Wall, like his father. Cass went back to Meridian and took a post as a clerk in the national registry of the Office of Population Management, in the livestock office first and then in the births office, and every week he went to the station and took the train to Tally and the launch to Seventeen, and went down the steps.

I went to the Granary. I had been there two years already. In the hundred-and-sixteenth year I was made a weigher in my own right, with my own scale, and on the first day of the Weighing I stood at my scale on the floor of the National Granary at Plenty and read the weight of the first cart of the harvest out loud and the clerk wrote it down, and that night the Reader gave the price of grain on the Evening, and some of it was mine.

My father was standing at the next scale. He did not say anything. Afterward he put his hand on the back of my neck, the way he does, and said, “Now you know what the world weighs.” I still do not know what he means. I think I am closer.

We still went to the islands. Every year. Fitz got leave from the Watch for two weeks every autumn by writing to the commandant of the Watch and asking, and the commandant of the Watch was a man who had served under the Colonel at the Bulwark in the sixties and who said yes before Fitz finished the letter. The rest of us arranged our lives around it. Toby’s father ran the yard. The Granary gave me the time off because the Weighing was done by the fifteenth. Dov’s mother covered his shift at the pour. Pim swapped with another inspector. Ansel was in the Service, and the islands were his work.

In the hundred-and-sixteenth year we went to Twelve, which is shaped like a comma and has a waterfall at the top of the curve where a spring comes out of the rock and falls forty feet into a pool. We swam in the pool. Fitz wore his uniform on the launch out of Tally because he was proud of it and we laughed at him until he took it off and folded it into his pack, and then Pim put it on, and it came down past his knees, and Fitz laughed too.

Bosun was nine. He swam in the pool under the waterfall every day. He was slower. He did not chase the mowers any more. He walked beside them.

Every night of that camp, after supper, Cass went over to Seventeen in Toby’s boat and came back late, and in the second week he took all of us. We went down the steps into the Below and ate supper in the Hall of Lamps with three hundred people and the Council, and Tamsin’s grandmother put me next to her because she said I was the one who had borne her chair, and told me I had the back of an ox and the manners of a better man than she was used to. The Unclimbed children came and stood round Bosun and called him Wick, and he let them.

Ember had died in the spring. Tamsin told us. She had died in the low cave, on her bed of old wool, very old, with Tamsin’s hand on her. Bosun went to the low cave on that night and lay on the bed of old wool for an hour, and came back, and lay against Cass’s legs, and did not eat his supper.

In the hundred-and-seventeenth year we went to Seventy, which was Tull’s last camp.

She told us on the launch. She said she was sixty-nine and had been in the Service for fifty years and her knees had decided it was time, and she had told the depot she would retire at the end of the year, and the depot had asked who should take over her islands, and she had said Grieve. Ansel, who was sitting in the stern with his book, dropped his pencil over the side. Pim dived for it.

Seventy is the farthest north of all the reserve islands near Tally, almost at the edge of what the Service maintains. Beyond it the lakes go on north toward the North, and on clear days, Tull said, you can see the line of white along the horizon where the ice begins. It is flat. It has a tower on it: an old-world tower of stone and brick, about sixty feet tall, round, with a broken top, the last thing standing of a town that went under in the drowning. The Service left it because it was a landmark for the launches. We camped at its foot.

Every evening, Tull sat in a chair at the top of the tower and looked north. She got Toby to build the chair out of driftwood on the first day, and me to haul it up the inside stair, and every evening she climbed up after supper, slowly, with her knees, and sat in it with her pipe and her field glasses until it was dark. We took turns sitting with her.

When it was my turn, on the sixth night, she said, “I can see it.”

I asked what.

She said, “The North.” She handed me the glasses. Far off, at the very edge of the lake, under the last of the light, there was a thin line, white, as straight as a ruler. “My mother used to tell me about it,” Tull said. “The people in the Below used to say that the North was where the old world went when it finished. That one day the North would come down and take the lakes back and everything would be ice and that would be the end.” She took the glasses back. “My mother didn’t believe it. She said the North sends us water. She said it’s the only neighbor we’ve got that’s never lied to us.”

I asked if she believed it.

She said, “I believe the water.” Then she was quiet for a while. Then she said, “You’ll look after him.”

I asked who.

She said, “Grieve. He’s going to have my islands. He’ll be very good at it. He’ll be too good at it. He’ll try to put everything on the map. Somebody’s got to sit on him.”

I said I would sit on him.

She said, “You’re the right size for it.”

On the last night, the fourteenth, she gave Ansel her pipe. She took it out of her mouth on the top of the tower and gave it to him. It was the first time in ten years I had seen it out of her mouth except at the new year in the Hall of Lamps. She said, “I never lit it. Don’t you light it either. It’s for keeping in your teeth while you decide what to write.”

Ansel put it in his inside pocket. He has it there now. He has never lit it. I have seen him take it out and put it in his teeth while he is drawing, and look at the map without a word, and then take it out and leave something off.

14. The Wedding in the Hall of Lamps

Year 118 · Reserve Island 17, above and below · told by Dov Halloran, age twenty-one

Map: Ansel’s map of Seventeen from the Twelve Days, redrawn properly for the first time, in ink, from his own memory and from Toby’s paces eleven years before, with north right and the cave in the right place and the steps marked going down. At the bottom, in Tamsin’s handwriting, in the old alphabet, two names and a date.

The rule was that we camped on a different island every year. In the hundred-and-eighteenth year Ansel was the Inspector, and he broke it, and put us on Seventeen, Wreck Island, where it began. He said the rule was Tull’s and Tull had retired and an Inspector could put people on whatever island he liked. He said it with Tull’s pipe in his teeth. We let him.

Cass and Tamsin were married on the twenty-second of Ninthmonth, the night after the fire.

I am going to tell about the lamps, because I made them, and because Cass asked me to write this year and said I should tell it the way I would tell it, which is with too much about glass. So.

Every Unclimbed person has a lamp in the Hall of Lamps, a little clay lamp with oil and a wick, in a niche in the wall, lit at the evening meal every day of their life. When two of them marry, they each take their own lamp out of its niche and bring it to the middle of the Hall, and light each other’s lamp from their own, and then put the two lamps in a new niche, together, that the families have cut, and the lamps burn there side by side after that. Cass did not have a lamp. He was Registered. He had a number in the national registry and a name the nursery gave him and no niche in any wall.

So I made him one.

I made it at the works in Endeavor, out of reclamation glass, at night, on the small furnace, with my grandmother watching. I made two. One for Cass and one for Tamsin, so they would match. Little round lamps, the size of a fist, with a well for oil and a spout for a wick, the way the clay ones are made, but in green glass, so the flame shows through. And into each of them, when the glass was soft, I put a ghost. My grandmother gave me her square of glass with the letter R in it, the ghost from the dredge that nobody knows the meaning of, and I melted it into the bottom of Cass’s lamp, so that when the lamp is lit the R shows in the light, floating. Into Tamsin’s I put a ghost from a different square, one of my mother’s, that has the neck of a bottle in it. My grandmother said that the R was probably from the sign on a shop that sold something to somebody in a town that went under, and that it was the right thing to give a boy with no family, because it belonged to everybody who ever lived there, and nobody.

When I gave them to Cass, he lifted the R up to the light for a long time. Then he said, “R for river,” because Tamsin’s people came from the river country. Tamsin said, “R for registered,” and laughed. Pim said, “R for really terrible name for a dog,” and Bosun, who was eleven and lying under the table, thumped his tail.

The wedding was in the Hall of Lamps.

All three hundred of the Unclimbed were there, and the Council, and Tamsin’s grandmother at the front in her chair, a hundred and four years old. All seven of us were there. Tull was there, retired, with Ansel’s arm to lean on down the steps, which she pretended she did not need. Tull’s mother’s lamp was burning in its niche near the eastern end. So was the lamp of every person in the Hall. Above them, all along the walls and up the pillars to the roof, in their niches, were the dark lamps of everyone who had died in the Below since the hundred-and-ninth year of the Rise, four hundred and twelve of them at the far end, oldest, and all the rest, and eighteen near the door that had been put out on the shortest day of the hundred-and-fourteenth year when Ansel read the list.

Mrs. Ebbe was there.

Cass had asked the Council, and the Council had sat on it for a month, and then said yes, because Cass said a person getting married should have a mother there and Mrs. Ebbe was the nearest thing he had, and because the Council had decided, after the Landlord, that some of the Registered could be trusted, and that the ones who could be trusted could be told. Toby fetched her in the second Patience from Tally. She came down the steps into the Below in her best coat with her hat on and her handbag over her arm, and stood at the bottom of the steps and looked down the passage with the drill marks on the walls toward the light of the Hall, and said, “Well, Cass, I always knew you’d find somewhere,” and laughed her laugh like a door banging, and three hundred people under the earth turned round to see what the noise was.

There is not much to tell about the ceremony. It is short. The Fire-Keeper’s grandmother says the names of the two families back to the quarry. Tamsin’s went back to the overseer’s daughter, the girl who carved the number in the gatehouse wall, who was nine. Cass’s went back to the third nursery at Meridian, and Mrs. Ebbe stood up when they said it, and said, “That’s us,” loudly, and sat down. Then Tamsin took her clay lamp out of her niche, and Cass took his glass one, which I had filled with oil from the Below that morning, and they walked to the middle of the Hall, and Tamsin lit Cass’s lamp from hers, and Cass lit Tamsin’s glass lamp from his, and the ghosts lit up in the bottom of them, the R and the bottle, green, and everyone stamped. Three hundred people stamping in a stone hall under the ground. It is like being inside a drum.

They put the lamps in their niche. It is near the Fire-Keeper’s niche, in the middle of the north wall. There are three lamps in it now: Tamsin’s clay one, Tamsin’s glass one, and Cass’s glass one. I told Tamsin she could keep her clay one, since it was hers from birth, and she did. The R floats in Cass’s every night at supper.

He is the first Registered person to have a lamp in the Hall of Lamps. Tull’s mother was born in the Below, so she does not count, and anyway she was put out for sixty-eight years. Cass is the first one from the Up.

Afterward there was a meal, and the Unclimbed have a drink made from fermented mushrooms which I am not going to describe except to say that Wendell had four cups of it and paraded Tamsin’s grandmother round the Hall on his shoulders, chair and all, while she shouted at him in the old way of speaking, and three hundred people cheered. Fitz made a speech in his uniform, which he had worn on purpose, and it was short, and good, and he did not say a single rule in it. Pim danced with Odile, who had been one of the Taken and who was, it turned out, the best dancer in the Below, and who was taller than Pim by a head. Pim said he did not care. Toby and Jory got into an argument about how to build a boat that could go down a fish shaft, and drew it on the table in mushroom drink, and then built it the next year, and it worked.

Ansel sat in a corner of the Hall with his book and drew the whole thing. Every lamp. The drawing is at the back of the book now, on a separate sheet. You can count them. It is the only picture of the Hall of Lamps anywhere in the world, and the Council of Lamps has seen it, and said it could stay in our book on one condition, which is that the book is never copied, and it has not been, except for this, which the Council has seen, and allowed.

At the end, Mrs. Ebbe went and found Tamsin’s grandmother and they sat together in a corner for an hour, two old women, one from the Cradle and one from the Below, and talked, and laughed, and at the end Mrs. Ebbe stood up and said to Cass, “She says you’ll do,” and Tamsin’s grandmother said, “I said he’d do for now,” and they both laughed again.

Bosun spent the whole wedding under the Council table with three of the Below’s dogs, who were his nieces and nephews and grand-nieces, and came out at the end with mushroom drink on his ears.

Cass lives in two places now. In the spring and summer he lives in Meridian and works in the births office of the national registry, and his job is to check the records of every child born in the houses of birth, and see that each one is registered correctly, which he does very well. And in the autumn and winter he lives in the Below with Tamsin, and the Office of Population Management thinks he is on long leave every year for his health, which Ansel arranged, and which I am not going to explain. Every year on the night of the twenty-first of Ninthmonth, Tamsin lights the fire on Forty-four, and Cass stands next to her.

There are things in the national registry that Cass makes sure are never there. There are about three hundred of them.

15. The Whole Map

Years 119 and 120 · Reserve Island 5, and Reserve Island 44 · told by Pim Varga, age twenty-two and twenty-three

Map: the big one. Every map Ansel drew from the hundred-and-seventh year to the hundred-and-thirteenth, laid together on the floor of the Hall of Lamps, on top of an older map. And, separately, the summit of Forty-four, with four hundred and thirteen stones.

I’ll be short. I’m from Brine.

In the hundred-and-nineteenth year, on Island 5, which is round and boring, Tamsin’s grandmother sent for Ansel and gave him a map.

It was old. Old-world paper, gone brown, folded into sixteen and kept in an oilskin bag in the Fire-Keeper’s chest for a hundred and twenty years. The overseer brought it down into the quarry in the hundred-and-ninth year of the Rise, with his daughter and the four hundred and twelve, because it showed the quarry tunnels, and he thought they might need to know the way. It was a plan of the Landlord’s estate. All of it. Before the flood. The river, the valley, the town in the valley with the gatehouse, the hills, the great house on the highest hill, the quarry under the hills, the tunnels between them, the bunker under the house. The boundary of the estate drawn round it all in a red line, and at the top, printed, the crown and the key.

Ansel took it to the Hall of Lamps and spread it on the floor. Then he went up to the launch and came back down with a tin box and took out every map he had drawn of every island we had camped on since we were ten: the bent arm of Seventeen, the pear of Thirty-one, the loaf of Nine, the doughnut of Fifty-two, the fish of Twenty-three, the round high top of Forty-four, the boot of Thirty-eight, the long ridge of Sixty, the hand of Sixty-one, the comma of Twelve, the flat of Seventy. He laid them on top of the old map, one by one, where they went. They went on the hills. Every island was a hill on the old map. The old map had the old names. Ansel did not read them out.

When he had laid them all down he stood up and looked at it for some time.

Every island we had camped on in thirteen years was inside the red line. Every one. Even Sixty-one, which the Directorate took. Even Seventy, far in the north, which was where the estate’s boundary turned. The thirteen islands made the shape of the Landlord’s land, almost exactly, hill by hill, as if someone had walked us round the edge of it one year at a time, getting closer to the middle, to Sixty, the house, and then back out again.

Wendell said, “Tull.”

Ansel said, “Yes.”

She had chosen every island. Except the first. The first was the fog and the compass and the dock-hand’s barrow. Every island after that, Tull chose. She had walked seven boys round the edge of the Landlord’s land and in toward the house, one hill a year, for nine years, until we were old enough to go down the shaft.

Fitz said, “Did she know? From the start?”

Tamsin’s grandmother, in her chair at the edge of the map, said, “She knew from the day her mother told her. She was six. She’s been walking round the edge of this map her whole life. You were the first people she could take with her.”

Ansel drew it. The whole map. All thirteen islands on one sheet, in their places, on top of the old estate, with the tunnels between them that the Unclimbed use, and the Below under Seventeen and Forty-four, and the house under Sixty, and the drowned town in the valley with the gatehouse, which is the house under the lake in the middle of Fifty-two. It took him the whole winter. When he finished it he brought it to the Hall of Lamps and gave it to the Council.

He made one copy. It is in the tin. The Reserve Service has a map of the islands near Tally that Ansel drew for them in the same winter, in his capacity as Inspector, for the depot. It is good. It is very accurate. It has every row of trees on every island. It has the hatches of the U-Lines. It has the ruins on Sixty marked as old-world foundations, unmown. It does not have the Below. It does not have the tunnels. It does not have the steps. It does not have the stones on Forty-four. Ansel left them off. He knows why. He had Tull’s pipe in his teeth the whole time.

Tull died in the winter of the hundred-and-twentieth year, in Tally, in her house by the depot, at seventy-two, in her chair by the window that looks out at the lakes. Ansel was with her. She had asked for him. He says she did not say anything at the end. He says she looked out of the window toward the north for a good while and then went to sleep.

She left a letter. It was for all seven of us. It was short.

Boys. I asked for the stone on Forty-four. The Council said yes. Put it outside the ring, not in it. I was never in the quarry. Face it toward Tally so I can watch the depot. Don’t write anything soppy on it. Grieve, you have my islands. Don’t put everything on the map. — M. Tull.

We put the stone in on the twenty-first night of Ninthmonth of the hundred-and-twentieth year.

All seven of us. And Bosun, who was thirteen and had to be lifted up the last of the summit by Wendell, and did not mind. And the Unclimbed, all of them, three hundred, up out of the crack on the north side with their little lamps, more of them than had ever come up for the fire before, because Tamsin’s grandmother had said that this year everyone came.

Toby cut the stone. Limestone, from the beach on Seventeen. Loaf-sized, like the others. Dov carved the name, because he is good with tools, and Ansel checked the spelling. It says M. TULL. It says nothing else. We set it in a crack in the summit rock a little outside the ring of four hundred and twelve, on the south side, facing Tally, so that she could watch the depot.

Then everyone stood. The Unclimbed in front of their stones. The seven of us round Tull’s.

Tamsin walked to the pipe with the torch. Cass walked beside her. Bosun walked beside Cass, slowly. At the pipe, Tamsin lifted the cap and said the short words, the ones that go up at the end like a question, and everyone at the stones said the words back. I know them now. I’m not writing them down. Then she put the torch to the pipe and the fire went up, white and green, tall as a tree, hissing like a kettle, and lit the summit, and the four hundred and twelve stones, and the one outside them.

I’m from Brine. We don’t cry. I cried. So did Fitz, in his uniform. So did everyone.

Then Tamsin’s grandmother, who was a hundred and six, and who had come up the crack for the first time in thirty years, in her chair, on Wendell’s back, said, in a loud voice, across the summit, to the stone, “Goodnight, Marguerite,” which was Tull’s name, which nobody had said since the Colonel said it in the storm. And everyone on the summit said it after her. Three hundred people. “Goodnight, Marguerite.” And the fire burned until dawn.

In the morning Ansel took the pipe out of his pocket and put it in his teeth and looked at the stone for a long time. Then he took the pipe out and said, “Goodnight, Marguerite,” on his own, very quietly. That’s the time I mean. Ansel’s note said he used her name once. That was it.

Note, Ansel: That was it.

16. Bosun’s Island

Year 121 · Reserve Island 17 · told by Ansel Grieve, age twenty-four

Map: Seventeen, for the third time. This time the name at the top is not Wreck Island. It is the other name. Marked: the beach, the rock with the paint, the orchard, the spring, the hatch, the cave and the steps, the low cave, and on the high elbow of the island, looking down at the beach, a small circle.

He was fourteen.

He was born in the low cave under Seventeen in the spring of the hundred-and-seventh year, to Ember, who was Tamsin’s dog. He wandered up the steps at eight weeks old after something, a moth, Cass thinks, and came out of the crack at the foot of the elbow into the grass, and into the firelight of seven boys from a wrecked ferry, and into Cass’s coat. He went to the Cradle in Meridian in a basket and was registered as dog, herding, origin: found, island. He lived in the third nursery dormitory with forty boys for eleven years, and then with Cass and Tamsin in Meridian and in the Below. He came to every camp. He swam to Seventeen when he was four and found his mother. He watched the ghost fire from the Lookout on Nine and sang. He chose to stay Up at the grate on Sixty, when he could have come down, so that someone could fetch Toby. He waited at the door of Toby’s house all winter. He went down the steps on the morning of the new year when everyone else was arguing about the stones, and found Cass in the Hall of Lamps, and knocked him over. He herded sixty-one machines of the Defense Directorate into a lake. He went to a wedding under the earth and came out with mushroom drink on his ears.

He had grandchildren in the Below. Eleven, at the last count. Gray and white with odd eyes. One of them is Toby’s now. I will come to that.

We camped on Seventeen again because he could not travel far. He was slow by then. His back legs were weak and Wendell lifted him onto the launch at Tally and off it at the beach on Seventeen, the same beach, with the same gray-blue stain on the rock where the Patience hit fourteen years before. He lay on the beach in the sun and looked across the channel at Twenty-three, where he had swum it that night when he was four, and thumped his tail when any of us came near.

He did not eat much. Wendell made him fish stew, which he had always liked. He ate a little.

On the sixth night, he got up.

We were round the fire on the beach. He got up slowly, the back legs shaking, and stood for a moment, and looked at Cass. Then he walked away from the fire, slowly, along the beach toward the foot of the elbow, toward the slab, toward the crack. Cass got up and went with him. We all got up. Cass looked back at us and shook his head, very slightly, and we sat down again. Then Cass looked at me, and tipped his head, and I went.

We went round the foot of the elbow in the dark, Bosun first, very slowly, then Cass with a lamp, then me. At the crack he stopped and put his nose to it and breathed in the air that comes up, for a minute, the smoke and mushrooms and lamp oil and dogs. Then he went in.

He went down the steps. All of them. The worn spiral steps cut in the limestone, round and round, in the dark. He went slowly and Cass went one step below him the whole way, with his hand ready under Bosun’s chest, and did not touch him, because Bosun did not want to be touched. It took a long time. At the bottom he went along the passage, past the fish shafts and the forge and the children’s room, and people came to their doorways with their lamps and saw him and did not say anything, and stood aside. He did not go to the Hall of Lamps. He went to the low cave.

The low cave is small and round and warm, with a spring in one corner and a bed of old wool in another. It is where the Below’s dogs have their puppies. It is where he was born. It is where Ember died. The wool on the bed is very old and has been there, Tamsin says, since before her grandmother was born, and every dog of the Below for three generations was born on it.

He lay down on it.

Tamsin came. Somebody had gone to fetch her. She came into the low cave and knelt down by the bed and put her hand on his head, and he looked up at her, and thumped his tail once, and she said, “Hello, Wick,” softly, and he let her. Then Cass lay down on the floor of the low cave beside the bed of old wool with his face next to Bosun’s face, and put his hand in his fur, and said, “Hello, Bosun,” and Bosun turned his head, just a little, toward Cass, and that was the name he went with.

He died about an hour later. He did not seem to be in pain. He breathed slowly, and then more slowly, and then he did not, and Cass did not move without a word.

I sat in the doorway of the low cave with my book on my knees and did not draw anything.

We buried him on the high elbow of Seventeen, at the top, where the rock looks down over the beach and the channel and the stained rock where the ferry hit, and across the water to Twenty-three, and on clear days, far to the south, the depot at Tally. Toby dug the grave. Wendell bore him up in his arms. Dov had made a glass marker at the works the winter before, when we all knew it was coming, a square of green reclamation glass the size of a book with a ghost in it that his grandmother had kept for forty years and never shown anyone. The ghost in it is the shape of a dog. A small dog, running, from some old-world sign. Dov’s grandmother said she had always known who it was for. Fitz read out his registry entry, dog, herding, origin: found, island, in his Directorate voice, and then his own voice went, and he stopped. Pim did not say anything. Pim sat down on the rock beside the grave and stayed there all afternoon.

The Unclimbed came up at night. The Council allowed it. They came up out of the crack at the foot of the elbow and climbed to the top of the elbow, a hundred of them, and their dogs, all the gray and white dogs of the Below with their odd eyes, Bosun’s sisters’ children and his own children and grandchildren, and the dogs went and lay down round the grave, all of them, in a ring, and stayed there until dawn, and nobody called them back.

The Reserve Service’s records give Reserve Island 17 its number. The map at the head of this chapter gives it its other name. I am the Inspector for the islands near Tally now, and in my report for the twenty-eighth day of Ninthmonth of the hundred-and-twenty-first year, under the line where you note anything unusual, I wrote:

R-17. A dog buried on the high point. Marked with glass. The mowers have been instructed to go round.

The mowers go round. I punched the card myself.

17. The Colonel Comes to the Fire

Year 122 · Reserve Island 44 · told by Cass Brightwater, age twenty-five

Map: Forty-four for the third time. The ring of four hundred and twelve, the stone outside it facing Tally, the pipe, the crack, the camp in the pear trees. And a new mark at the edge of the summit, by the big rocks where we lay and watched the fire in the hundred-and-twelfth year: a folding chair, drawn very small, with an old man in it, and beside it something with four legs and a lamp.

The Colonel was ninety-nine. He wrote to Ansel at the depot in the summer, in his own hand, with his grandfather’s flourish, and asked whether an old man and his machine might come to Forty-four on the twenty-first of Ninthmonth, if the Council of Lamps would allow it, and if the Inspector would allow it.

The Council sat for one evening and stamped.

He came across from Utility Four by the lakebed line under the lake, and up the hatch on Seventeen, and over to Forty-four in Toby’s boat, because the Lamp said he could not manage a launch. He was thin, and very bent, and the Lamp walked beside him the whole time, slowly, with its lamp turned low, and he leaned on it, his hand on its head. His eyes were the same. Pale and quick, looking at everything as if everything were a cave he had just found.

My daughter was with us. Her name is Nell, after Tull’s mother. She was born in the Below in the spring of the hundred-and-twenty-first year, the year Bosun died, in the low cave, on the bed of old wool. She was a year and a half. She had red hair and gray eyes and she sat on the Colonel’s knee on the beach at Forty-four and pulled the buttons on his coat, and he let her.

He said, “Brightwater. You married in.”

I said, “Yes, sir.”

He said, “Tull told me you would. In the hundred-and-twelfth year. She said, that one’ll marry in, you mark me, Josef.” He laughed. “I owe her a bet.”

He sat in his folding chair at the edge of the summit all afternoon, by the big rocks where we lay in the hundred-and-twelfth year, and looked at the ring of stones, and at Tull’s stone outside it, facing Tally. Ansel sat with him. They talked for a long time. I will put down what Ansel told me afterward, because Ansel says it belongs in the book.

The Colonel told him about the rows on Fifty-two. Three hundred and twelve. He said there had been a town called Saltgrass, on the shore of the province that has no name now, and that in the forty-sixth year three hundred and twelve people from it had walked across the shallows to an island in the night, and he had walked with them. He said the planner at the Reserve Service who designed the plantings in the forty-sixth year had been one of the soldiers who walked with him, and had planted one row on Fifty-two for every one of them. He said he did not know that until the eighties. He said he went and walked the rows himself, all of them, and counted. Ansel said he did not ask where the island was that they walked to. The Colonel said, “Good.”

And the Colonel told him about a map. He said that when he was younger than Ansel he had drawn a map of everything under Ozarka, every tunnel and line and shaft, and that the Directorate used it still. He said there was one place he had left off. He said it was a house in a hole in the ground, on an island where nobody lived, and that he had left it off because it was where his mother lived, and the people she lived with, and that if it were on the map someone would go and look, and the people in it would have nowhere to go. He said Tull had told him about Ansel’s map of the islands. He said, “You left them off.”

Ansel said, “Yes, sir.”

The Colonel said, “Do you know why?”

Ansel said, “Because a map isn’t the world. It’s what you’ve decided to tell people about the world.”

The Colonel looked at him for some time. Then he said, “I said that to you in a mowing shed when you were sixteen.”

Ansel said, “Yes, sir. I wrote it in the front.”

The Colonel laughed, and the Lamp’s light went up and down beside him, and he said, “Moth, he wrote it in the front,” and the Lamp said, in a quiet voice, the first time any of us had ever heard it speak, “I know. I was there.”

That is how we found out the Lamp’s name.

At a quarter to one, on the twenty-first night of Ninthmonth of the hundred-and-twenty-second year, the Unclimbed came up out of the crack on the north side of the summit with their lamps, all three hundred, and stood in front of their stones. Tamsin’s grandmother came up in her chair on Wendell’s back. She was a hundred and eight. She had Wendell put her down in front of the Colonel’s folding chair. The two of them looked at each other, two old people at the edge of a ring of stones in the moonlight.

She said, “You’re the old man with the lamp.”

He said, “I am.”

She said, “You came up out of the ground the night Wick went Up. My granddaughter watched you from the cave. She said you looked at the cave. She said you knew.”

He said, “I did.”

She said, “You never told.”

He said, “No.”

She looked at him for a good while. Then she put out her hand, and he put out his, and they clasped hands, very carefully, two old people, for about a minute, and did not say anything else. Then Wendell picked her up again and took her to her stone.

Tamsin walked to the pipe with the torch. I walked beside her with Nell on my hip. Behind us the seven came and stood round Tull’s stone: Ansel with the pipe in his teeth, Wendell, Toby, Dov, Pim, Fitz out of uniform for once, and me, when I had walked back from the pipe. One of Bosun’s grandchildren, a young gray-and-white dog with one ear up and one ear down, one brown eye and one blue, came and sat at Toby’s feet. She had been doing that for a year. She had decided.

At the pipe, Tamsin lifted the cap. She said the short words, the ones that go up at the end. Three hundred people said them back. Nell said them too, in her own way, loudly, and the Unclimbed laughed.

Tamsin put the torch to the pipe. The fire went up.

The Colonel watched it from his chair at the edge of the summit with his hand on the Lamp’s head. He watched it for a long time. The light of it was on his face, white and green, old and very brown and lined like the bark on an oak. Ansel was next to him. Ansel says that after a while the Colonel said, quietly, not to anyone:

“Good. She’s lit it.”

Ansel says he did not know who the Colonel meant. Ansel says there was something in the way he said it that sounded like he was talking about someone else entirely, somewhere else, a long way off. Ansel did not ask.

The Colonel stayed all night. At dawn, when Tamsin closed the cap and the fire went out, he was asleep in his chair, with the Lamp beside him, its light turned down to a glow. We let him sleep. When he woke the sun was up and the Unclimbed were gone and the summit was empty except for the seven of us and the dog and the stones. He looked round at all of it, slowly. Then he said, “Right,” and got up, leaning on the Lamp, and we took him down to Toby’s boat.

He never came back to the lakes. We had letters from him every year, at the depot, in his own hand, with the flourish. In the hundred-and-thirtieth year the hand was very shaky. In the hundred-and-thirty-first year there was no letter.

The Next Map

Ansel Grieve, the hundred-and-thirty-second year

Map: Reserve Island 17. North is right.

In the spring of the hundred-and-thirty-second year, a card came to the depot at Tally addressed to the one who draws. It was in a hand none of us knew, very neat, very even, like print. It said:

He went in the summer of last year, at a hundred and eight, a few minutes after the Evening, on the island where his mother lived. He asked me to tell the one who draws that he remembered the apples. He said to tell you that the dog was from underneath, which you know, and that he is glad you left it off. I have kept something of his for you. If you ever need it, ask for it by name. — M.

We did not know what it was. We still do not. We have not needed it. Ansel has the card in the tin with the maps and the order for the sealing and Tull’s letter.

Every night since the summer of the hundred-and-thirty-first year, the line about the eastern interference in the Notices has ended with the word none. The Interior has not explained why. Fitz, who is a captain of the Plague Watch now, at Post Twenty-three, says the glass room is very quiet these nights. He says that sometimes, on clear evenings, he looks across the shallows at the white hills of Mammoth, and thinks of the Colonel, and of a house in a hole in the ground.

We are thirty-five. We still go to the islands. Every autumn, two weeks. Wendell is the senior weigher of the National Granary at Plenty now, and when the Reader gives the price of grain, it is worked from Wendell’s weights, and Wendell’s two sons come to the islands with us and are learning to lift things. Toby builds boats in Second Harbor and checks the wind before he speaks and has won the regatta nine times. Dov is chief engineer of the pour at Endeavor and has made a lamp for every Unclimbed child born since the wedding, with a ghost in the bottom of each. Pim is the senior inspector of the Gulf Wall at Assurance and has never been late with his mask, and married Odile, who is taller than him by a head. The Council of Lamps changed the law in the hundred-and-sixteenth year so that anyone from the Below may go Up who wishes, and come home again, and Odile wished. They live in Brine, and she has seen the light to the south from the top of the Wall, and says it reminds her of the Fire. Fitz is a captain. Cass lives in Meridian in the summer and in the Below in the winter and has two daughters, Nell and Marguerite, and stands beside Tamsin at the pipe every year. I am the Inspector for the reserve islands near Tally, and I file my reports, and I leave things off.

Toby’s dog is called Second Mate. She is Bosun’s granddaughter. She is gray and white with ink spots on her back and one ear up and one down and one brown eye and one blue, and she came up the steps at the foot of the elbow on Seventeen at eight weeks old in the hundred-and-twenty-first year, after something, and sat down at Toby’s feet, and decided. She does not herd machines. She herds Wendell’s sons.

This year we camped on Seventeen. The beach, the stained rock, the orchard, the spring, the hatch. The cave and the steps. On the high elbow, a small square of green glass with a running dog in it, and the grass round it unmown. On the last night we went down the steps and ate in the Hall of Lamps, and the R floated in the bottom of Cass’s lamp, and Tamsin’s grandmother’s lamp was dark in its niche, because she died in the winter of the hundred-and-twenty-eighth year, at a hundred and fourteen, the last person in the Below who remembered someone who remembered the quarry.

I drew Seventeen again, the fourth time. I drew everything. Every rock, every row, every hatch, the steps going down, the low cave, the bed of old wool. Then I put Tull’s pipe in my teeth and decided what to leave off.

That is the map at the head of this chapter. You will notice that it is a map of a reserve island near Tally, planted in rows, with an orchard and a spring and a beach and a hatch of the Reserve Service, and a grave on the high point where a dog is buried, and nothing else at all.

North is right.

Book Five: Record of the Wandering Shoreline

The Keeper’s Preface

Adah Penhallow, Keeper of the Hall of the Wandering Shoreline, Second Harbor, in the ninety-fourth year

I was born on the water in the third year, on the city of Second Harbor, in a cabin cut out of the wheelhouse of a grain barge, and I was brought ashore at the age of six with the rest of my city, and I have lived on dry land for eighty-five years and have never once slept through a night without waking to wonder why the bed is not moving.

That is the first thing to know about the people of the floating cities. We never stopped expecting the floor to rise and fall. The second thing to know is that nobody else wrote us down.

The Historical Section of the Bureau of Reclamation gives the floating cities four paragraphs in its History of Ozarka, in every edition. It says that survivors lashed together barges and hulls and the roofs of warehouses, that some of the cities numbered tens of thousands, that they drifted and traded and governed themselves by councils, and that many founding families of New Carthage came from them and still check the wind before speaking. All of that is true. It is also the whole of what the nation officially remembers about a way of life that kept something like three hundred thousand people alive for forty years on open water while the continent drowned under them. Four paragraphs. The Bureau has recovered some of our council minutes, it says, in part. It has never asked us for the rest.

So we kept them ourselves. The Hall of the Wandering Shoreline was founded at Second Harbor in the seventeenth year, in a net loft on the shingle, by six old pilots and a ship’s cook who had decided that somebody ought to write down where every city had been and who had lived on it before everyone who remembered was dead. They collected logbooks, council minutes, hull registers, birth and marriage and death rolls, letters, charts, and the recollections of anyone who would sit still long enough to give them. I joined the Hall at nineteen as a copyist and became its Keeper at fifty-four, and I have spent forty years putting what it keeps into order. This Record is the result.

It aims to be complete. That is a large claim, and I make it carefully. The Hall’s ledgers show two hundred and four floating settlements of three or more persons that existed on the inland seas, the gulf shallows, the eastern sound, and the western reach between the seventy-third year of the Rise and the eighteenth year. Every one of them is in this book. Some have a chapter. Some have a paragraph. Some have a line, because a line is all that is left of them. Three persons was the Hall’s founders’ rule, and I have kept it: one person on a raft is a castaway, two are a couple, three are a town. Below three we did not count, though God knows there were enough of those.

I have also included, in their own part, the cities that were considered: planned and never built, built and never launched, reported and never found. A people is also the sum of what it meant to do. And I have ended with an account of how the floating cities came ashore and became part of the provinces of Ozarka, and how well that went, and how badly, which is a story the Bureau tells in one sentence and I need sixty pages for.

A word about the title. The people of the floating cities had two words for what they lived on. When you stood on the deck of your own city and looked out, the line of the other cities against the sky, the stacks and cranes and masts and gardens and washing lines of a city five miles off, was called the skyline, as it would be anywhere. But when you stood on the deck of your city and looked down at its edge, at the last hull lashed to the next-to-last hull with the open water beyond it, that edge was called the shoreline, because it was the only shore we had, and it moved. A city’s shoreline grew when new boats tied on and shrank when old ones broke away, and it went wherever the current took it. The Hall’s founders called their collection the Record of the Wandering Shoreline, and so do I.

The language of this book is mine, which is to say a pilot’s daughter’s, and I have not tried to make it sound like the Bureau. Where people spoke, I give their words. Where the ledgers are silent I say so. Where I have an opinion I give that too, and the reader may skip it.

PART ONE: WHAT A FLOATING CITY WAS

The Making

Nobody set out to build a floating city. They happened.

They happened the way a logjam happens in a river: one thing caught, and then another thing caught on it, and then everything coming down the stream caught on those. In the seventies and eighties of the Rise, as the rivers broke and the lowlands filled, people who lived on the water already, fishermen and barge families and the owners of houseboats and pleasure boats, found that the shore kept moving away from them. The harbors they tied up in went under. The towns where they bought fuel and food went under. They began to tie up to each other instead, for company and for safety, in the lee of whatever was solid: a grounded ship, a drowned grain elevator, a highway overpass standing up out of the water on its legs. A dozen boats tied together is safer in a storm than one. A hundred is safer than a dozen. By the eighties there were clusters of boats all over the new inland seas, rafted up in the lee of things, with families on them who had not set foot on land in years.

Then the people from the land started to arrive.

When a town drowned, not everybody climbed. The highlands were far for many, the roads were gone, and the climb was known to be terrible. Families who lived near the water and could get a boat, any boat, took it, and went out to the nearest cluster, and asked to tie on. Mostly they were let. A floating city’s first law, everywhere, was that anyone who reached the shoreline in a boat that floated could tie on for one night. After that the council decided. The councils mostly said yes, because more hulls meant a longer shoreline and a longer shoreline meant more shelter, and because the people who ran the councils had all been the newcomers once themselves.

So the clusters grew. Barges came, loaded with whatever the bargemen could salvage. Ferries came, with their car decks empty and then full of families. Container ships, grounded and abandoned in the shallows, became the cores of cities, since a container ship is a street of steel boxes already. Tugboats came, and gave the cities the power to move a little, against the current, toward fishing grounds or away from storms. People cut the flat roofs off drowned warehouses and stores and floated them out on oil drums and sealed tanks and made them into decks, parks, markets, fields. A city was whatever had caught on the first thing, and then the next.

By the ninety-third year of the Rise there were about thirty settlements on the waters that their own people called cities, and a hundred and seventy smaller ones. By the hundred-and-third year of the Rise, at the height, the Hall reckons the population of all the floating settlements together at three hundred and ten thousand persons. That is about one in eleven of everyone then alive on the continent, by the figure the Office of Population Management has calculated and asked the Bureau to withhold, which I have also been asked to withhold and will.

The Hulls

Every city was different and every city was the same. I will describe the parts.

At the center there was almost always a core: one large vessel or structure that did not move, or moved slowly, and that everything else tied to. Bellwether’s core was a warship. Second Harbor’s was a breakwater of sunken barges. Ninefold’s was a ring of nine ferries. Smaller cities had a grain barge, a dredger, a houseboat marina’s floating dock, a drowned church with its tower above water, a highway bridge. The core had the city’s bell, its council deck, its water tanks, its stores. It was where you went in a storm.

Around the core were the streets. A street on a floating city was a line of hulls lashed side to side, with planks laid across their decks to walk on, and the families living in the hulls on either side. A main street might be fifty barges long and run straight out from the core like the spoke of a wheel. Side streets were smaller boats, pleasure craft and fishing boats, lashed in rows off the main streets. Lashing was an art, and every city had lashers, men and women whose trade it was to tie and retie the lines between hulls as the water moved, so that the city could flex in a swell without tearing apart. A good lasher could tell by the sound of a line in the night whether it would last until morning. My grandfather was a lasher on Second Harbor for thirty-one years. He said the lines talked.

Out at the edge, the shoreline: the newest hulls, the poorest families, the boats that had arrived last, tied on loosest, ready to cast off and move inward when there was room. The shoreline was the cold side of every city, where the wind came in first and the waves broke, and where the fishing boats went out from. Shoreline children were known everywhere for being tougher than core children, and better swimmers, and worse at school.

Then the decks. Floating roofs of warehouses and shops, tied in among the hulls, gave a city its open spaces: its markets, its schoolrooms, its gardens. The gardens were the wonder of the floating cities and the thing visitors from the land never believed until they saw. Soil was salvaged from drowned farms by divers with buckets, or made from fish waste and seaweed and the city’s own night soil, composted in barges kept downwind. It was spread on the floating roofs a foot deep and planted with beans and potatoes and squash and greens, and the roofs rode lower in the water and sprouted. Shipping containers were cut open along one side and filled with soil and planted in rows and stacked three high to catch the sun. From a distance a big floating city in summer looked green.

The Water

A floating city’s first trouble was water, and it was not the water underneath.

The inland seas of the Rise were not fit to drink. They were flood water, river water backed up across a continent, full of everything the drowned towns had contained, and in the south, salt. Every city lived on rain. Every deck, every roof, every flat surface that was not a garden was a catchment, sloped toward gutters, which ran to tanks in the core. The tanks were the city’s life. In every city the council’s first officer was the Keeper of the Tanks, who measured them every morning and posted the level on the bell frame, and whose word on rationing was final. A floating city could survive storms and hunger and fire, and did, but a floating city whose tanks went dry in a summer drought died in a month. Four did. They are in this book.

Children on the floating cities were taught never to waste a cup. My mother made me drink the last drop in a cup until I was forty, long after we were ashore, and I find I still do it.

Food

Fish, first. The inland seas were full of fish for the first decades, river fish and lake fish and, as the salt came up from the south, sea fish, in numbers the old world had never seen, because the old world had been eating them and now nobody was. Every city had a fishing fleet. Every child could clean a fish by the age of five.

Then the gardens. Then salvage: divers went down into the drowned towns under the cities and brought up tinned food, sealed jars, anything that had survived. Divers were the most respected trade on any floating city after the lashers and the Keeper of the Tanks, and the most killed. Then trade with the shore: the highland towns had grain and the cities had fish, and boats went back and forth between them across the shrinking water, and that trade is the reason the highlands did not starve in the nineties, which the History does not say.

And then a few things the Hall’s ledgers record and the Bureau does not. Gull eggs, gathered from the stacks. Eel, which shoreline children caught at night with a lamp and a fork. Water chestnut and wild rice, grown in floating beds of reeds. And, on certain cities in certain years, fish and shellfish traded at night at the shoreline by people who came up from the water itself, about whom the reader will hear more in the supplement to this book, and about whom I will say here only that the floating cities knew they existed, and that most of us decided, as Bellwether decided, that they were nobody’s business.

Fire

The thing a floating city feared most was fire. A city of timber and tar and diesel and dry gardens, packed hull to hull, could burn from end to end in an hour. Every city had a fire watch, a fire bell distinct from its hour bell, and a fire law, which was the only law on every floating city that bore the penalty of being cast off: set adrift in your own boat, alone, at the shoreline, with three days’ water. Cooking was done in iron stoves on stone hearths. Lamps were oil, in glass, hung from hooks, never set down. Smoking was forbidden below decks on every city I know of except one, and that one burned.

Law and Councils

Every floating city of any size governed itself by a council, and every council was elected, and every council was different. The History says this much. It does not say how strange and various the councils were, and I will give some.

Bellwether elected a council of fifteen from its streets, each street sending one, and the council elected a Governor for a term of five years. Second Harbor had no Governor; its council of twenty-one met on an open deck in the center of the city, and the wind decided who could be heard, which I will explain when I come to it. Ninefold was governed by the masters of its nine ferries, who were hereditary, and who were the only hereditary officers I know of on any floating city, and who were voted out all at once in the hundredth year of the Rise by a general meeting of the whole population, standing on the car decks, and replaced by nine elected masters who served much better. Seaborne had a council of everyone: every adult on the city sat on it, and it met once a week on the largest deck, and voted on everything, and took nine hours. Larkspur was governed by its schoolteachers. Hesperine was governed by its gardeners. A small city on the gulf called Pelican Steps was governed by a woman named Mother Cobb for thirty years without an election, because nobody dared call one. Several were governed by nobody at all and did fine until they did not.

What all the councils shared was the hull register. Every floating city kept a book in which every hull was entered when it tied on and struck out when it cast off, with the names of everyone aboard, and their births and marriages and deaths. The hull register was the city. If you were in it, you were a citizen; if not, not. The Hall has two hundred and nineteen hull registers, some complete, some in fragments, from a hundred and sixty-one settlements. They are the backbone of this Record, and when the floating cities came ashore, the Office of Population Management took copies of all of them and built the first national registry from them, which is a thing the Office has never said and which I know, because I watched it done.

Bells

Every floating city had a bell, or something that served for one. The bell was the city’s voice. It rang the hours. It rang warnings: storm, fire, gas, a hull breaking loose. In fog it rang every minute so that the city’s own boats could find their way home, and every city’s bell had its own note so that a fishing boat lost in fog could tell which city it was hearing. Most of the bells came from drowned churches, salvaged by divers, and hung on frames of steel or timber at the core. Bellwether’s was the largest and named the city. Second Harbor’s was a ship’s bell from a drowned naval yard, small and sharp. Ninefold rang the nine ferries’ horns in a sequence. A small city on the western reach had no bell and beat an oil drum.

When a floating city came ashore, its bell came with it, and most of them hang now over the quays and squares of the towns those cities became. The Hall keeps a list. Fifty-one bells survive. Where I know where a city’s bell is, I have said so in its entry.

Children, Marriage, and Death

About forty thousand children were born on the floating cities, by the Hall’s count. They were registered in the hull registers by their city and hull, and when the cities came ashore they were among the first people the Office of Population Management registered in the new national registry, which means that every citizen of Ozarka whose registry number begins with the digits the Office used for the floating cities is a drift-child or the descendant of one. The Office has since changed its numbering. The digits are still in the old entries.

Drift-children learned to swim before they walked, mostly. They learned the colors of water, which every floating city taught: the brown of silt, the green of clean water, the gray-green of deep water, the yellow sheen of gas, which, toward the end, mattered most. They learned to clean a fish, read a knot, catch rain, and stay out of the way of lashers. They went to school on the decks, in the afternoons, when the morning’s work was done. Every floating city had a school; it was, after the tanks, the first thing every council built.

Marriage on the floating cities was by the hull register: two people signed it together, before the council’s clerk, and were married. Bellwether amended its law in the hundred-and-fourth year of the Rise to read that any person who could sign the register by hand or by fin might marry, and I will say only that this amendment was copied by three other cities in the following five years, and that the clerks of those cities knew what it meant, and so did the Hall’s founders, and so do I.

The dead were given to the water. There was nowhere else. On most cities the body was sewn into sailcloth weighted with stone or scrap iron, and the bell was rung once for each year of the person’s age, and the body was let down off the shoreline at dawn. On Ninefold they were let down into the pool at the center of the ring of ferries, where the water was deepest. On Hesperine they were given to the gardens. On Seaborne they were not let down at all but set adrift in their own boats, burning, at night, which was the one exception to the fire law and the reason Seaborne’s council was disliked everywhere else. The Hall keeps the death rolls. About fifty-five thousand people died on the floating cities between the seventy-third year of the Rise and the eighteenth year. That is a smaller share than died in the climb.

The Wind

I come now to the custom the History mentions: that the descendants of the floating cities check the wind before they speak at a meeting. It is true, and at Second Harbor it is still the law, and the History calls it quaint, and I would like to explain it.

On an open deck, with a strong wind, a person standing upwind of a crowd can be heard by everyone, and a person standing downwind can be heard by no one. The councils of the floating cities met on open decks, because there was nowhere else large enough. A clever speaker could win any argument by standing upwind. In the eighties, the council of Second Harbor made a rule that a speaker must stand downwind of the council and speak into the wind, so that only a person who truly had something to say, and was willing to shout it, would be heard, and so that the council would have to lean toward the speaker to listen. Every speaker, before rising, would look at the vane on the bell frame to find which way was downwind, and walk there. The custom spread. By the nineties every council on the inland seas did it.

So when you see an old person from the floating cities look at a vane on a roof, or a flag, or the smoke from a chimney, before speaking at a meeting in a hall with no wind in it at all, they are not being quaint. They are putting themselves where it is hardest to be heard. It is the only good law I know that is also a courtesy.

The Skyline

From the deck of a floating city in the nineties you could see, on a clear day, the skylines of three or four other cities on the horizon. You knew them all. You knew Bellwether by its warship’s tower and the bell frame and the stacks of the hospital ferry. You knew Second Harbor by its cranes, which were salvaged from a drowned container port and stood up out of the city like the necks of herons. You knew Ninefold by its ring of nine white superstructures. You knew Hesperine because it was green. You knew Seaborne because it was always farther away than you expected, since Seaborne went where it liked.

Boats went between the cities every day with news, goods, letters, visitors, brides, doctors, and gossip. The cities drifted with the currents in great slow circles around the inland seas, and every few years two of them would drift close enough to tie together for a week, and there would be a Meeting: markets, weddings, council business, races, fights, and on the last night, when the lines were cast off, every bell on both cities rung at once. The people of the floating cities speak of the Meetings the way the people of Third Province speak of the Weighing. I went to one, at the age of three, between Second Harbor and Ninefold, in the sixth year. I remember the bells.

That was the world. Now the cities.

PART TWO: THE THREE GREAT CITIES

[image: The Wandering Shoreline: the floating cities of account in the hundred-and-eighth year of the drowning, and where each came ashore. Drawn for the Hall.]

The Wandering Shoreline: the floating cities of account in the hundred-and-eighth year of the drowning, and where each came ashore. Drawn for the Hall.

Bellwether

Peak population 62,000, in the hundred-and-third year of the Rise. Afloat from the eighty-ninth year of the Rise to the eighth year. Core: the hulk of a warship of the old navy. Came ashore at the cove that became Mercy Ridge, Eighth Province. Bell: over the ferry quay at Mercy Ridge.

Bellwether was the largest floating city that ever existed, and the most famous, and the one whose name every child in Ozarka knows without knowing why.

It began in the eighty-ninth year of the Rise in the lee of the gray warship. The warship had been abandoned at its moorings when the naval base behind it went under, and it was two-thirds of a mile long, flat-topped, with a tower at one side, and dry below. A few families of fishermen tied up to it for shelter in a storm and found its lower decks empty and stayed. By the ninety-third year of the Rise there were four thousand people on it and around it. By the eighty-fifth, thirty thousand. By the ninetieth, sixty-two thousand, on two thousand hulls lashed in a raft four square miles across, with the warship in the middle like the hub of a wheel.

The warship’s flight deck was the city’s square. It was a market in the mornings, a school in the afternoons, and on summer evenings a promenade, where the whole city walked up and down its length in the long light and the young people looked at each other. At its center stood the bell, which came from a church that went under in the first decade of the rivers’ breaking, and which was the size of a small room, and which rang the hours with a note so deep that boats in fog said they felt it before they heard it. The warship’s tower was the city’s watchtower and its council chamber, on the top floor, where the fifteen members of the council met at a table made from a mess-deck door. The warship’s lower decks were the city’s warehouses, its tanks, its armory, which was empty, and its library, which was not.

Around the warship the city spread in spokes. Bellwether’s main streets were the longest on the inland seas: eight of them, running out from the warship’s sides, each two to three hundred barges long. Between them, the side streets, the gardens, the floating parks on warehouse roofs. The city’s hospital was a ferry with a working galley, named Mercy, tied up to the warship’s stern, and the cove where Bellwether came ashore is named for it.

Bellwether’s council elected a Governor for five years at a time. The most famous of them was the harbor pilot Absalom Fenwick, who was elected in the ninety-seventh year of the Rise at thirty-one and re-elected three times and served until there was no city left to govern. He kept the library. He amended the marriage law. He sat in the joint assembly at Provision and voted the old maps void. Afterward he sat on the committee that drafted the Charter, and later still he was Chancellor of Legal Studies at the University of First Province for thirty-one years, and every judge in Ozarka for a generation learned law from a man who had learned it on a warship’s deck from currents. The Hall has his letters to the Second Harbor council, eighty-seven of them, in a hand like a ship’s log, and they are the best account of the floating cities’ politics that survives.

Bellwether’s library deserves a paragraph of its own, since the reader of the supplement will need to know of it. The Governor began it in the ninety-seventh year of the Rise with books his divers brought up from drowned towns, dried and pressed and shelved in the warship’s old officers’ wardroom, and it grew to about eleven thousand volumes, lent free to any citizen who signed the register. Books went missing from it at night and came back damp. The Governor set a watch. What the watch found is the business of the supplement.

The city had one great disaster. In the hundred-and-second year of the Rise, a fire started on a side street off the fifth spoke, in a boat where a man was smoking below decks against the law, and burned four hundred hulls in the night before the lashers could cut the street free and push it off, still burning, onto the open water, where it burned to the waterline. A hundred and eighty people died. The man who started it was not among them. The council cast him off at the shoreline with three days’ water, and he was never seen again, and his name is in the hull register with a line drawn through it, and I have not written it here.

Bellwether came ashore in the eighth year, towed by its own tugs into a cove on the northern shore of the highlands, and run aground on the shingle at high tide. It was broken up over two years. Its barges became warehouses, its containers houses, its gardens the first orchards of what is now Eighth Province, on the steep slopes behind the cove, where the apple trees are pruned flat against stone walls to this day because Bellwether’s gardeners had only ever grown things on flat decks and did not know what else to do with a slope. The warship, too large to move, became the foundation of the ferry quay at Mercy Ridge. The bell hangs over the quay on a frame. It still rings the hours. Visitors from the capital think it charming.

The provisional council, choosing a seat for the capital in the sixth year, considered Bellwether’s anchorage and chose the bend of the river instead, on the grounds that a capital should not float. Governor Fenwick is recorded as saying, in a letter to the Second Harbor council in the eighteenth year, that a city which had kept its Governor’s private affairs private for twelve years should not be asked to keep a nation’s, and that he was relieved.

Second Harbor

Peak population 41,000, in the hundred-and-fifth year of the Rise. Afloat from the eighty-fourth year of the Rise to the ninth year. Core: a breakwater of sunken grain barges, with two container ships and three salvaged dockyard cranes. Came ashore at the shingle that became the town of Second Harbor, Tenth Province. Bell: over the door of this Hall.

I was born on this city. I will try to be fair to the others.

Second Harbor began as a harbor of refuge. In the eighty-fourth year of the Rise, when the port at the mouth of the old river valley went under, its harbormaster, a woman named Ida Quarrie, ordered the remaining barges of the port’s grain fleet to be scuttled in a line across a bay in the new shoreline, to make a breakwater in whose lee the port’s boats could shelter. It was the second harbor she had made; the first, two years earlier, had been overwhelmed in a storm. Second Harbor it was called, and when the water rose over the bay’s headlands and the breakwater of sunken barges was left standing alone in open water, with the boats still sheltering behind it, the name stayed with the boats, and the boats became a city.

Its cores were two container ships, grounded on either end of the breakwater, and three dockyard cranes from the drowned port, floated out on pontoons by an engineer named Bartholomew Sayle in the eighty-seventh year of the Rise in an operation the Hall’s founders considered the greatest feat of seamanship of the Rise. The cranes stood up out of the city, eighty feet high, red, rusting, and from them Second Harbor could lift anything, which made it, within a decade, the shipyard of the inland seas. Boats were built and mended at Second Harbor for every city on the water. When a city needed a new tug, it came to Second Harbor. When a hull cracked, it came to Second Harbor. The cranes are gone now; they were too large to bring ashore and were cut up for steel in the eleventh year. But the shipyard came ashore, and is the shipyard of Tenth Province, and builds the nation’s ferries and the patrol launches of the Plague Watch, and its families can trace their trade to a crane on a pontoon.

Second Harbor had no Governor. Its council of twenty-one was elected each year from the hulls, and met on the open deck of the larger container ship, under the bell frame, in the wind. This is the city where the custom of the wind began, as I have described. It is also the city where it became law, in the ninety-second year of the Rise, by a vote of the council taken downwind in a gale, which every member of the council later claimed to have heard and none could repeat. The law says: A speaker before the council shall stand where the wind is against them. It is in the charter of the town of Second Harbor today. Every council chamber in Tenth Province has a vane on its roof and a dial on its wall, and a member who rises without consulting the dial may be asked to sit, and is.

Second Harbor was a working city: shipwrights, lashers, divers, fishermen, and pilots, of whom it produced more than any other city on the water. Its pilots knew the currents of the inland seas, the drowned roads and the drowned towns and the shoals where old buildings came near the surface, better than any surveyor, and when the Survey of Settlement was formed after the waters stopped, it was drawn from the largest highland towns and the three largest floating cities, and Second Harbor sent nine pilots to it, and those nine pilots walked and sailed the new shoreline for four years, planting iron stakes, and it is their stakes that the nation calls protected monuments. My grandmother’s brother was one of them. His name was Elkanah Penhallow. He planted the stake at the Survey’s tenth landing, on the northern shore, where the town of Tenth Landing now stands.

Second Harbor’s delegate to the joint assembly at Provision, in the seventh year, was a pilot named Silas Marrable. He is the delegate the History describes, who rose on the tenth day and moved that the old maps be set aside as void, since they described no place that now existed. He was a friend of Governor Fenwick of Bellwether, and asked him the night before whether the motion went too far; Fenwick said it did not go far enough. Marrable’s chair is in the registry office of the town of Second Harbor. I have sat in it, which I am not supposed to.

The provincial song of Tenth Province, which the History mentions, is about a ship that sailed west and came back with its sails full of snow. It is true. In the second year, after the waters stopped, Second Harbor sent a ship west across the western reach to see what lay beyond the broken country, the country the Survey could later cross only at its nearer edge. The ship was the Constant, a schooner of sixty feet, with a crew of eleven, under a pilot named Rebecca Thorne. She was gone for four months. She came back in the depth of winter with three of her crew dead and her sails and rigging white with frozen spray. Thorne reported that beyond the broken country there was water that gave off a yellow vapor that killed, and that beyond the vapor, far off, there were mountains rising from the sea, green to the summits, greener than anything she had seen since she was a girl, and that around the mountains the sea was frozen in summer. She reported that her mate, who had a camera of the old world and six plates for it, had photographed the mountains from the edge of the ice, and that every plate came back gray, with a smear on it where the mountains should have been. She reported that they had tried to cross the frozen sea and could not. Then she went home to her hull and never went to sea again. Her log is in this Hall. It is the first account by anyone in Ozarka of the Great Rocky Isles, written sixty years before the Bureau first measured them from the Long Cliff, and the Bureau has never asked to see it.

Second Harbor came ashore in the ninth year, towed by its own tugs onto the shingle of a bay on the northwestern shore of the highlands, the bay that is now the harbor of the town of Second Harbor. Its people broke the hulls for timber and steel and built the town on the beach where they had moored. I came ashore at six on my father’s shoulders. The Hall stands on the shingle above the high-water line in the old net loft, and over its door hangs the city’s bell, which is small and sharp and was rung for the last time on the water on the morning the tugs began to pull.

Ninefold

Peak population 33,000, in the hundred-and-seventh year of the Rise. Afloat from the ninety-first year of the Rise to the ninth year. Core: nine car ferries lashed bow to stern in a ring around a central pool. Came ashore at the northern shore, beside the Survey’s tenth landing, in what became Ninth Province. Bell: none; its nine horns are in the provincial hall at Tenth Landing.

Ninefold was the most beautiful of the floating cities, and the strangest, and the one that fed the others.

It began with nine car ferries of a single old-world line, which had worked the crossings of a great lake in the north of the old continent and were trapped in the inland seas when the rivers broke. Their crews, in the ninety-first year of the Rise, lashed them together bow to stern in a ring, a mile around, with the open water of the ring’s center as a harbor, which the city called the Pool. The ferries were white, with blue stripes, and identical, and their superstructures stood up around the ring like the towers of a castle. Ninefold could be recognized from twenty miles away.

The ferries’ car decks were Ninefold’s streets, wide and covered and dry, with families living in the parked cars and vans that had been aboard when the ferries were trapped, and later in cabins built on the decks. Ninefold was therefore the only floating city where most of the population lived indoors, out of the wind, and its people were teased for it everywhere else, and were the healthiest on the water. Outside the ring of ferries, the city grew in the usual way, hulls lashed to hulls, until the ring was the core of a raft three miles across. But the Pool, inside the ring, was kept clear. It was the harbor for Ninefold’s fishing fleet, which was the largest on the inland seas, three hundred boats, and in the nineties, when the highlands were hungry, Ninefold’s fleet fed them. The Hall has the cargo books of the Ninefold–Provision grain-and-fish trade. In the ninety-ninth year of the Rise alone Ninefold sent nine hundred tons of dried and salted fish to the highland towns. The History says the highland families took in strangers by the thousand during the climb, and the Bureau honors them for it, and so do I. Somebody also fed the strangers.

Ninefold was governed by the masters of its nine ferries, who were hereditary, the office passing from each ferry’s first captain to his eldest child. This went well until it went badly. In the hundredth year of the Rise the master of the fourth ferry, a man named Garrick Dunne, sold a third of the city’s water to Seaborne in a drought for a quantity of diesel, without telling the other masters, and in the following month nineteen people on Ninefold died of thirst. A general meeting of the whole city was called on the car decks, the first in Ninefold’s history, at which every adult stood in the car deck of their own ferry, and the nine meetings shouted to each other along the ring through open hatches, and at the end of nine hours voted the nine hereditary masters out, all of them, including the good ones. Nine masters were elected in their place, one for each ferry, for three-year terms. Ninefold was better governed after that than any city on the water except Second Harbor. I am biased.

The dead of Ninefold were let down into the Pool, where it was deepest. When Ninefold came ashore, the Pool was left behind, out in the water off the northern shore, and its bottom is still there, under the lake, and it is the only place in Ozarka where more than four thousand people of the floating cities lie together. The fishing crews of Ninth Province, who descend from Ninefold’s fleet, will not fish there, and do not say why, and do not need to.

Ninefold sent three pilots to the Survey of Settlement. When the Survey made its tenth landing on its first circuit of the new shoreline, it came ashore beside Ninefold’s anchorage, and planted its stake there, and Ninefold, which was by then already considering coming ashore, decided to come ashore at the stake. It was towed in during the ninth year. Its ferries were run aground in a row along the beach, and lived in for nine more years as they stood, and then broken. The town that grew around them is Tenth Landing, which is in Ninth Province, which confuses every schoolchild in Ozarka, and which the Bureau explains as a matter of the Survey’s landings being older than the provinces. That is true. It is also true that the people of Ninefold were asked, when the Settlement drew the provinces, what they wanted their province to be numbered, and they said nine, and the commission, which had numbered the provinces in the order it finished them, happened to finish theirs ninth, and nobody believes that.

Ninefold had no bell. It signaled with the horns of its nine ferries, sounded in a sequence that every boat on the inland seas knew, a long low chord descending in nine notes. The nine horns were taken off the ferries when they were broken and are mounted on the wall of the provincial hall at Tenth Landing. They are sounded once a year, on the anniversary of the coming ashore. The fishing families come from every town of the northern shore to hear them.

PART THREE: THE CITIES OF ACCOUNT

The eighteen floating cities, after the three great ones, whose population at their height exceeded one thousand persons. In the order in which the Hall’s founders entered them, which is not quite the order of size, and which I have kept.

Seaborne

Peak population 14,000. Afloat from the eighty-sixth year of the Rise to the twelfth year, and after. Core: a passenger liner of the old world, gutted by fire, and a fleet of sailing vessels. Did not come ashore. Bell: recovered from the Floridexa in a year unknown, by persons unknown, and returned to this Hall in the forty-sixth year.

Every other floating city was a raft. Seaborne was a fleet.

It began in the eighty-sixth year of the Rise around the hulk of a great white passenger liner, of the kind the old world used for pleasure voyages, which had burned at its moorings in the panic of a coastal evacuation and drifted out onto the inland seas with its upper decks blackened and its lower decks sound. The people who first climbed aboard it were sailors: yachtsmen, fishermen, the crews of sailing barges, people who loved the water for its own sake and had loved it before it drowned anything. They did not lash their boats to the liner. They anchored around it, and kept their sails, and their council decided in the eighty-eighth year of the Rise that Seaborne would never be lashed into a raft, but would remain a fleet of vessels that could sail anywhere, together or apart, as the council chose. The liner itself could be towed by the fleet’s larger boats under sail. It was the only floating city on the water that could go where it liked against the current, and it did.

Seaborne’s council was everyone. Every adult citizen sat on it and voted on everything, once a week, on the liner’s great sun deck, which was black with old fire and which the city never cleaned. It took nine hours. It decided where the city would sail, what it would trade, whom it would admit, and whom it would marry, and it decided these things in that order of importance. Seaborne admitted almost no one. Its hull register, which the Hall has, shows that between the ninety-third year of the Rise and the Stopping it accepted only four hundred new citizens, most of them sailors, and refused eleven thousand. It was disliked everywhere. It sold diesel and bought water at prices other cities resented. It set its dead adrift in their own boats at night, burning, which broke the fire law of every other city and frightened every shoreline within sight of the flames. Its people believed, and said, that the sea was the only honest place left, and that the land had lied to everyone, and that whoever went back to the land would be lied to again.

When the waters stopped rising and the joint assembly met at Provision, Seaborne sent four delegates. They are the four the History mentions, who voted against the name of Ozarka because they wished the nation named for the sea. The History says they later voted for the Charter and that their names are on it. That is true. It is also true that they went back to Seaborne after signing it and reported to the council, and that the council of everyone voted, after nine hours, to accept the Charter as the law of the land, and to remain upon the sea.

Seaborne refused to come ashore. In the seventh year, when the joint assembly at Provision gave every floating city the right to choose its landing, Seaborne’s council replied that it chose none. In the twelfth year, when the Survey’s parties came back from the eastern mountains with stories nobody liked, and the Office of Population Management sent its clerks out to copy the hull registers of the cities still afloat, Seaborne’s council voted to leave the inland seas altogether, and sail south, through the strait, past the gulf shallows, out onto the open sea beyond, and found a city there that no government could reach.

Three thousand one hundred of Seaborne’s people went. The rest, about nine thousand, would not, and came ashore at last in the thirteenth year on the northern shore of what is now Ninth Province, where they were scattered by the Settlement among the coastal towns, and where many of their descendants still keep a small sail in the window of their houses. The three thousand one hundred set sail in Ninthmonth of the twelfth year, in a fleet of a hundred and forty vessels, with the burned liner towed in their midst. They were seen passing down the strait by the people of the camps on the mainland shore. They were seen entering the gulf. Beyond the gulf, in those years, the yellow vapor had already risen over the open sea, and every fishing crew on the southern shore knew to turn back where the water’s color changed. The last report of Seaborne is from a fishing boat out of what is now Assurance, which saw the fleet’s sails on the southern horizon at dusk on the nineteenth day of Ninthmonth of the twelfth year, sailing south, into the yellow.

Nothing more was heard.

In the forty-sixth year a package was found on the shingle below this Hall at dawn. It was wrapped in an oiled cloth of a make nobody in Second Harbor recognized and tied with a cord of some long plant fiber. Inside it was a bell. A ship’s bell, bronze, green with sea, with SEABORNE cut into its lip. Nobody saw who left it. The tide had been high in the night. The Keeper of the Hall at that time, Mercy Unknown, hung it beside the Second Harbor bell over the door, and it is there, and I ring it every year on the nineteenth of Ninthmonth, once for every year since they sailed.

The reader of the supplement will understand who brought it. I did not, until I read it.

Hesperine

Peak population 12,500. Afloat from the ninetieth year of the Rise to the eleventh year. Core: the floating roof of a drowned agricultural market, two acres. Came ashore on the southwestern shore and walked inland to the valleys that became Third Province. Bell: in the National Granary at Plenty, over the weighing floor.

You knew Hesperine because it was green.

Its core was a roof: the flat roof of a great covered market in a drowned farm town, two acres of steel and tar, cut free of its walls by divers in the ninetieth year of the Rise and floated out on four hundred sealed fuel drums. On it, the market’s own gardeners, who had grown vegetables for the market before the flood, spread soil, and planted, and the roof sank a foot lower in the water and turned green. Other roofs came. Barges were filled with soil to the gunwales and planted. Shipping containers were cut open and stacked in terraces facing south. By the ninety-eighth year of the Rise Hesperine was forty acres of floating garden, with its people living in cabins built among the beds, and from five miles off it looked like an island of trees and vines riding on the water.

Hesperine was governed by its gardeners. Its council was the Board of Beds: one member for every acre under cultivation, elected by the people who worked that acre. The Board met in the evening, which gave the city its name, and decided what would be planted, where, and when, and the rest of the city’s business it decided as an afterthought. Hesperine’s laws were mostly about compost.

What Hesperine grew, it traded, and what it traded, it traded everywhere: beans and potatoes and squash and greens to every floating city on the inland seas, and seed. Hesperine’s seed store, kept dry in sealed drums in the lowest hull of the core, was the largest on the water, and its gardeners bred, over thirty years, a bean that would grow in poor soil, in salt spray, in short summers, with little water, and give a crop every time. When Hesperine came ashore in the eleventh year, it came ashore on the southwestern shore of the highlands, and its gardeners walked inland with their seed drums on carts, looking for wide valleys, and found them, and began cutting terraces into the slopes. Those are the terraces of Third Province. The hardy beans that the History credits to the agronomists of the Bureau of Reclamation are Hesperine’s beans. The agronomists were Hesperine’s gardeners, hired by the Bureau in the fifteenth year, with their seed drums. The History does not say so.

Hesperine’s bell hangs over the weighing floor of the National Granary at Plenty. It is rung at the beginning of the Weighing every year. Most people in Third Province think it was always there.

Saint Anselm

Peak population 9,000. Afloat from the eighty-eighth year of the Rise to the ninth year. Core: a hospital ship of the old world, and the floating roof of a drowned cathedral’s cloister. Came ashore in the cove east of Bellwether’s and walked inland to the place that became Meridian, Fourth Province. Bell: in the chapel of the houses of birth at Meridian.

Saint Anselm was a hospital that became a city.

In the eighty-eighth year of the Rise a hospital ship of the old world, white, with red crosses on its sides, which had been sent to the inland seas to treat the sick of the drowning towns and then abandoned by whatever government had sent it, was found adrift by a community of nuns from a drowned convent, who had been living on two fishing boats for a year. They boarded it. They found its wards intact and its medicine stores half full and its doctors gone. They stayed. They hung their convent’s bell on its foredeck. They took in the sick from every city that would row them over, and those who were cured often stayed too, and those who stayed brought their families, and in ten years Saint Anselm was a city of nine thousand around a hospital ship, and every floating city on the inland seas sent its worst cases there.

The nuns governed it. They were never elected, and nobody ever asked them to be. The order’s Prioress was the city’s head, and the Prioress for most of its history was a woman named Sister Benedicta Ware, who had been a surgeon before she took vows, and who performed, by the ship’s own records, which the Hall has, eleven thousand operations between the eighty-eighth year of the Rise and the eighth year after the Stopping, on a ship that rolled. She delivered nine thousand children. She trained four hundred nurses and midwives, from every city on the water.

When Saint Anselm came ashore in the ninth year, the hospital ship was run aground and the nuns and the nurses walked inland, south and west, to the high valley that is now Fourth Province, where the provisional government had asked them to found a hospital for the new nation. They founded it. It is the national houses of birth at Meridian. Every citizen of Ozarka born in Meridian was born in a building whose plans were drawn from the wards of the hospital ship Saint Anselm, and the first midwives of the houses of birth were Benedicta Ware’s. Her bell hangs in the chapel. The midwives of Meridian ring it once for every birth. They do not know why. They have always done it.

Assurance

Peak population 8,200. Afloat from the ninety-second year of the Rise to the tenth year. Core: three oil-rig supply vessels and a drowned refinery’s tank farm. Came ashore on the gulf shore at the mouth of the strait, Seventh Province. Bell: on the harbor tower at Assurance, where the Plague Watch keeps its southernmost lamp.

Assurance was the southernmost of the cities of account, and the first to meet the gas.

It began among the drowned tanks of an oil refinery on the old gulf coast, great round steel tanks standing up out of the shallows like a field of drums, in whose lee the crews of three oil-rig supply ships had moored. The tanks were empty and sealed, and the people of Assurance learned to cut doors into them at the top and live inside, in round iron rooms forty feet across, dry and cool and safe from storms. It was the only floating city whose core did not float. When the water rose over the tops of the shortest tanks, Assurance floated the tall ones, by pumping air into them, and moved them.

In the hundred-and-fourth year of the Rise the yellow vapor came off the gulf for the first time. Assurance’s hull register records it: on the eleventh night of Sixthmonth, a fog came in from the south that smelled of eggs and something sweet, and forty-one people on the outer hulls died in their sleep. The city did not understand what had happened. It happened again the next month, and the next. Assurance’s council, which was a council of its oldest residents, met inside the largest tank with the hatches sealed and decided three things. They would build a wall. They would make masks. They would learn the wind.

The wall was the first Gulf Wall. They sank barges, a line of them, along the southern edge of the city, and built up their sides with tank steel, so that the gas, which is heavy and lies low, broke against them. The masks were made from fishermen’s face-nets and charcoal from the refinery’s old filter beds and the rubber of drowned car tires, and every person on Assurance had one by the hundred-and-fifth year of the Rise and could put it on in four seconds. The wind they learned by watching: when it came from the south, the gas came; when it turned, the gas went. They hung a siren on the core, a hand-cranked air-raid siren from a drowned town, and cranked it when the wind went south, and the whole city put on its masks.

When Assurance came ashore in the tenth year, on the gulf shore of the highlands at the mouth of the strait, it brought all three. The town of Assurance stands behind the Gulf Wall, and the Wall’s oldest sections are the sunken barges of the floating city, still there under the stone the Bureau of Reclamation has faced them with. Every household in Seventh Province keeps a mask by the door. The children learn to fit their masks before they learn their letters. Assurance’s bell hangs in the harbor tower, where the Plague Watch keeps its southernmost lamp, and is rung with the siren when the wind goes south.

Coldharbor

Peak population 7,400. Afloat from the ninety-third year of the Rise to the twelfth year. Core: an icebreaker of the old world and a fleet of trawlers. Came ashore on the northeastern shore, where the town of Tally now stands, Thirteenth Province. Bell: in the depot of the Reserve Service at Tally.

Coldharbor was the northernmost floating city, and it froze every winter.

It was founded by the crew of an icebreaker, a red-hulled ship of the old world’s northern coast guard, which had come down the drowned rivers into the inland seas in the ninety-third year of the Rise looking for its home port and never found it. Trawler crews joined it. The city drifted north with the currents in summer and could not get back south before the ice came, and so it learned to winter in the ice: to let the lake freeze around it, to cut fishing holes through the ice, to walk between hulls on the ice in the dark of winter, to keep warm in hulls banked with snow. Coldharbor’s people were famous on the water for their furs, which they made from the fish-fed foxes that came across the ice to the city every winter and were trapped, and for their silence, since Coldharbor in winter is a place where nobody talks much.

From Coldharbor, on clear days in winter, you could see the North: the white line along the horizon where the lake ice turned into a plain and the plain rose into mist. Coldharbor’s icebreaker went north toward it, every few years, as far as it dared, and came back. Its captain’s logs, which the Hall has, record the edge of the ice in the ninety-fifth year of the Rise, the hundredth, the hundred-and-sixth, and the second year after the Stopping, each year in nearly the same place. They are the first record of the North’s stability, made by people who had every reason to fear that it would come south and take them.

When Coldharbor came ashore in the twelfth year, on the northeastern shore of the highlands, its people were the only ones on the water who knew the northern lakes in winter, and the islands of the northern lakes, and the currents between them, and how to keep a boat alive in ice. The Bureau of Reclamation hired its pilots. When the Bureau founded the Reserve Service in the forty-sixth year to plant and keep the islands of the northern lakes, the Service’s first officers were Coldharbor’s children, and the Service’s depot was built at the place where Coldharbor came ashore, which is the town of Tally. The icebreaker’s bell hangs in the depot. The Reserve Service’s inspectors are still, most of them, from Coldharbor families. They are still silent in winter.

The Chandlery

Peak population 6,000. Afloat from the eighty-seventh year of the Rise to the ninth year. Core: a floating dock and the drowned roof of a department store. Came ashore in several places and dispersed. Bell: lost.

The Chandlery was a market. It began as a trading post on a floating dock in the eighty-seventh year of the Rise, where boats from every settlement on the inland seas could tie up and exchange whatever they had, and it grew into a city of merchants, brokers, money-changers, smugglers, and the best-fed people on the water. Its core was the roof of a drowned department store, floated in the ninety-first year of the Rise, on which the Chandlery built a market hall of salvaged glass and timber that the whole water came to.

The Chandlery’s great invention was the chit. In the nineties, when trade between the floating cities and the highland towns grew too large to do by barter, the Chandlery’s council began to issue paper slips, stamped with the Chandlery’s mark, a pair of scales, each slip good for a fixed measure of fish, or water, or grain, at the Chandlery’s market. Other cities accepted them. Highland towns accepted them. By the hundred-and-third year of the Rise Chandlery chits were the money of the inland seas, and the Chandlery’s council, which issued them, was the most powerful body on the water, and the most hated, and the most honest, which made it more hated still.

When the provisional government of Ozarka set out in the ninth year to ration the nation’s food and water through the hard years of the Settlement, it hired the Chandlery’s clerks to design the ration card. They designed it on the pattern of the chit: a stamped card good for a fixed measure at any provincial store. The ration card of Ozarka is a Chandlery chit with the scales taken off. The Chandlery itself came ashore in pieces, its merchants scattering to every new town on the coast, and it no longer exists as a place. Its bell went down in a storm off the strait in the eighth year during the towing.

Larkspur

Peak population 6,800, of whom 2,300 were children without families. Afloat from the ninety-fourth year of the Rise to the ninth year. Core: a fleet of school ferries. Came ashore with Saint Anselm and walked inland to Meridian, Fourth Province. Bell: in the third nursery of the Cradle at Meridian.

Larkspur was the city of children.

In the ninety-fourth year of the Rise a teacher named Hester Glade, who had been the head of a school for orphans in a river town, put her two hundred pupils aboard the town’s four school ferries when the levee failed, and took them out onto the water, and kept them alive. Other cities heard. Children whose parents had drowned, or died on the climb, or simply could not feed them, were rowed to Larkspur from every city on the inland seas, and Larkspur took them all. By the hundred-and-third year of the Rise it had two thousand three hundred children without families and four thousand five hundred adults: teachers, mostly, and nurses, and the parents of other children who had come to Larkspur because it was the only city on the water with a school that never closed.

Larkspur was governed by its teachers. Its council was the Staff, and its laws were school rules: bedtimes, mealtimes, lessons, chores. Every adult on Larkspur taught something. Every child learned to read, and to swim, and to clean a fish, and the colors of water, and the names of every child in their dormitory. Each dormitory was a hull, and each hull had a matron, and the children of each hull were raised together as brothers and sisters, and given a hull name instead of a family name if they had none. Larkspur’s hull register is the saddest book in this Hall and the happiest. It records two thousand three hundred children with no families, and it records almost every one of them growing up.

When Larkspur came ashore in the ninth year, with Saint Anselm, its teachers and matrons and the children who were still children walked inland with the nuns to Meridian, and founded there, beside the houses of birth, the nurseries of the Cradle. The nurseries face east so that the infants wake to the light, as Larkspur’s dormitories did, on a ferry deck, facing the morning. The foundlings of the Cradle are given a name by the nursery instead of a family name, as Larkspur’s were. Hester Glade’s bell hangs in the third nursery. Its matron rings it at bedtime.

Wickerwork

Peak population 2,700. Afloat from the ninety-sixth year of the Rise to the thirteenth year. Core: none; the whole city was built of bundled reeds on floating beds. Came ashore on the eastern shore, facing the strait, in what became Twelfth Province. Bell: unknown.

Wickerwork was the only floating city made of plants.

Its people were marsh folk, from the reed beds of the drowned river delta, who had never owned a boat bigger than a punt and who, when the water came, did what their families had always done and cut reeds, and bundled them, and lashed the bundles into rafts, and lived on the rafts. Wickerwork was a city of reed islands, each one a hundred feet across and three feet thick, layered fresh every few months as the bottom layers rotted, with reed houses on them, lashed together by reed ropes into a floating marsh two miles wide. It drifted into the shallows of the strait in the hundred-and-second year of the Rise and stayed there, where the water was calm and shallow and reeds grew, and for the rest of its life on the water it never moved more than a few miles.

Wickerwork grew wild rice in the shallows around it, and water chestnut, and caught eels, and traded all three to Ninefold and Bellwether for things that do not grow in marshes. Its people spoke little to outsiders. They are the only floating city whose council the Hall has no record of; the Hall’s founders asked a Wickerwork elder in the seventeenth year how the city had been governed, and the elder said, “By sitting down,” and would not explain.

Wickerwork came ashore in the thirteenth year, on the eastern shore of the highlands facing the strait, where the reed beds were. Its people founded a fishing village there in the valley behind the ridge, and called it Saltgrass, and lived on the salt pans and the near shallows. In the forty-sixth year the province in which Saltgrass stood had its name withdrawn by the Assembly, together with its song, and Saltgrass was removed from the maps. I have asked the Interior why, three times, in writing. I have had no answer. The later history of Wickerwork’s people is not recorded in this Hall.

Gantry

Peak population 4,300. Afloat from the eighty-ninth year of the Rise to the tenth year. Core: a floating crane of the old world’s harbor works and a dredger. Came ashore on the western shore; its engineers walked inland to the valleys that became Sixth Province. Bell: none; it signaled with the dredger’s whistle, which is at the works in Endeavor.

Gantry was a city of engineers. Its core was a floating crane, a vast thing on a pontoon the size of a field, built in the old world to lift ships, and a dredger beside it, which could dig. Their crews kept them running for thirty years on salvage and ingenuity. Gantry dredged channels between cities. It raised sunken boats. It lifted drowned machines out of drowned towns and repaired them. It built pumps and stoves and water filters for every city on the inland seas, and its workshop, in the crane’s machine house, was the only place on the water that could cast iron.

When Gantry came ashore in the tenth year, its engineers walked inland with what they could take of the crane’s machinery, looking for coal and ore, and found both in the valleys that are now Sixth Province, and began the rolling mills there, and taught the first glassmakers of Endeavor how to build a furnace hot enough to melt the dredged sand. The Bureau of Reclamation’s first depot was Gantry’s workshop, moved ashore. The dredger’s whistle hangs in the works at Endeavor and is blown at the start of every shift.

Tenpenny

Peak population 3,600. Afloat from the ninety-fifth year of the Rise to the hundred-and-seventh. Core: a riverboat casino of the old world. Burned. No bell survives.

Tenpenny was the city that broke the fire law, and the city that burned.

It grew around a riverboat casino, a paddle steamer of the old world painted white and gold, which had been a gambling house on a great river and had come loose in the flood and drifted onto the inland seas with its gaming rooms intact. People who liked cards came to it. People who owed money came to it, because Tenpenny did not ask where you had come from or what you had done. People who had been cast off from other cities came to it. It was the only city on the water that had no fire law, because its council, which was the house, would not forbid smoking in the gaming rooms, where most of the city’s money was made. Every other city warned its young people about Tenpenny. Every other city’s young people went there.

On the night of the fourth day of Eleventhmonth of the hundred-and-seventh year of the Rise, a fire started in the card room of the paddle steamer and spread along Tenpenny’s streets faster than anyone could cut them free. Two hundred and eighty-seven people died. The Hall has the names of all of them, from the house’s own ledger, which a croupier threw into the water in a strongbox as he jumped, and which was recovered by a diver from Second Harbor a week later. The survivors, about three thousand, were taken in by Second Harbor and Bellwether and Ninefold and scattered, and Tenpenny was not rebuilt. The Hall’s founders added the following to its entry, and I keep it: Every city made fun of Tenpenny. Every city sent boats when it burned.

Pontoon

Peak population 3,900. Afloat from the ninety-first year of the Rise to the eleventh year. Core: a field of pontoons from a drowned military bridging depot. Came ashore at the northern shore; its builders went on to New Carthage. Bell: on the first of the capital’s nine bridges.

Pontoon was a city of bridges. Its core was a bridging depot of the old army, which had drowned with its stores intact: thousands of steel pontoons, floats designed to be joined into temporary bridges across rivers. Its people were the depot’s engineers and their families, and the depot’s neighbors, and they learned to join the pontoons into anything: decks, streets, docks, breakwaters, and above all bridges. When two floating cities wanted to tie together for a Meeting, it was Pontoon’s engineers who came and built the bridge between them. Pontoon built the gangways of Bellwether’s eight spokes. Pontoon built the floating bridge that joined Ninefold’s ring to its outer raft.

Pontoon came ashore in the eleventh year, and when the capital at the bend of the river needed a way across it, the Bureau of Reclamation called on Pontoon’s engineers, by then old men and women and their children, and in the fourteenth year they built the first bridge between the two banks of New Carthage, for foot traffic only. There are nine now. All of them are built to Pontoon’s pattern: a long low deck on arched ribs that curve down into the water. The citizens of the capital say they look like the ribs of a great animal lying half in the river. They look, to anyone from the floating cities, exactly like a pontoon bridge that has decided to stay. Pontoon’s bell hangs on the first of them.

The Ark

Peak population 2,600 persons and some 11,000 animals. Afloat from the ninetieth year of the Rise to the tenth year. Core: a livestock carrier of the old world and a fleet of cattle barges. Came ashore on the southern shore and walked inland. Bell: a cowbell, very large, at the livestock registry in Meridian.

The Ark saved animals. Its people were farmers from the river country, who loaded their herds onto barges when the levees failed rather than leave them to drown, and then found a livestock carrier of the old world, a ship built to take cattle across oceans, adrift and empty, and drove their herds aboard. Other farmers came. By the ninety-eighth year of the Rise the Ark had eleven thousand animals aboard: cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, ducks, and the herding dogs of the river country, gray and white with odd eyes, who worked the herds on the decks of a ship as their great-grandparents had worked them on the hills. It smelled worse than any city on the water, and every other city depended on it for milk, eggs, wool, and leather.

When the Ark came ashore in the tenth year, its farmers walked inland with what remained of their herds to the valleys of the south, and their herds are the ancestors of every animal registered in Ozarka. The livestock registry of the Office of Population Management at Meridian was begun from the Ark’s herd books, which recorded every animal by name. The Ark’s bell, a cowbell the size of a bucket, hangs in the registry’s hall. The clerks there will tell you it came from a farm. It came from a ship.

Marrowbone

Peak population 3,300. Afloat from the ninety-second year of the Rise to the ninth year. Core: a fish-processing factory ship. Joined Ninefold in the seventh year and came ashore with it. Bell: none.

Marrowbone was where fish went to be smoked, salted, and dried, and it was always downwind, by law, because no other city would let it be upwind. It grew around a factory ship of the old world’s fishing fleet, which had come into the inland seas with its smokehouses and salting floors intact, and it bought the catch of every fishing fleet on the water and cured it and sold it back. Without Marrowbone’s smokehouses there would have been no dried fish for Ninefold to send to the highlands in the nineties. Its people were known for their red hands and their bad tempers and their songs, which were rude. In the seventh year Marrowbone lashed itself to Ninefold’s outer raft permanently, and came ashore with it in the ninth, and its smokehouses are in Tenth Landing.

Tumbledown

Peak population 2,100. Afloat from the ninety-seventh year of the Rise to the twelfth year. Core: the wreckage of a drowned amusement pier. Came ashore and broke up. Bell: none; it had a steam whistle from a carousel.

Tumbledown was built from a fairground. When an amusement pier on the old coast collapsed into the sea, its rides floated: a carousel on its platform, the cars of a roller coaster, a Ferris wheel lying on its side on a barge. The pier’s showmen and their families gathered them into a raft and lived on it, and Tumbledown became the city everybody visited on holidays, because its people kept the carousel turning by hand and set the Ferris wheel upright on two barges lashed together and ran it on a diesel engine, and from the top of it you could see every floating city on the inland seas. The Hall’s founders, all of them, rode it as children. When Tumbledown came ashore in the twelfth year its rides were broken for scrap. The Ferris wheel’s hub is in the yard of the boatbuilders at Second Harbor, where it is used to bend timber.

Greenhaven

Peak population 2,900. Afloat from the ninety-eighth year of the Rise to the eighth year. Core: a floating hothouse of the old world’s horticultural trade. Went east. No further record.

Greenhaven grew orchids, and then food, in a floating glasshouse a quarter mile long that had been a flower nursery on the old eastern coast. Its people were gardeners like Hesperine’s, but they had come from the east, and in the last years before the waters stopped, Greenhaven drifted into the eastern sound, toward the mountains that the Survey later named Appalachiatica, and stayed there. In the eighth year, before the Survey’s parties had landed on the island, and long before the standing order, Greenhaven’s council voted to come ashore on the eastern side, in the mountains, where its people had family. They were towed into a bay on the western coast of the eastern mountains and went ashore.

In the tenth year, the Survey of Settlement’s parties landed in Appalachiatica and reported finding survivors there. The standing order closed the way east in the fourteenth. The Hall has a letter from a woman of Greenhaven to her sister on Second Harbor, dated in the tenth year, which arrived by a fishing boat in the fifteenth, after the closing. It is short. It says the mountains are beautiful, and that the clocks have stopped agreeing with each other, and that the radio in the town plays programs nobody remembers making, and that she is very happy, and that she can hear their mother calling from the woods at night, which is strange, since their mother drowned in the ninety-second year of the Rise. It asks her sister to come. There is no further record of Greenhaven.

Pelican Steps

Peak population 1,900. Afloat from the ninety-ninth year of the Rise to the tenth year. Core: the steps and portico of a drowned courthouse, standing above water. Came ashore with Assurance. Bell: the courthouse bell, at Assurance.

Pelican Steps was a gulf city built around the top of a courthouse. The courthouse stood on a hill in a coastal town and drowned to its portico, so that its great stone steps went down into the water from a row of columns, and the pelicans of the gulf roosted on the roof. Boats tied up to the columns. People lived in the courthouse’s upper floors, dry, behind its tall windows. It was governed for thirty years by a woman named Mother Cobb, who had been the courthouse’s janitor, and who kept the keys, and who simply never called an election, and whom nobody ever challenged. Pelican Steps was by every account the best-run small city on the gulf. When the gas came it was the first to hear of Assurance’s masks, and the first to make them, and lost only nine people. It came ashore with Assurance in the tenth year. Mother Cobb died the next winter. Her keys are in a case in the town hall at Assurance, with a label that says only Mother Cobb’s.

Kettle

Peak population 1,400. Afloat from the hundred-and-first year of the Rise to the ninth year. Core: the floating domed cap of a drowned grain silo. Came ashore on the southwestern shore with Hesperine. Bell: the silo’s copper vent cap, at Plenty.

Kettle was a brewery with a town attached. Its core was the cap of a grain silo, a copper dome forty feet across that broke off its tower in a storm and floated, upside down, like a great bowl. Brewers from a drowned river town turned it right side up, sealed it, and began to brew in it, from barley grown on Hesperine’s beds, and the beer of Kettle was the only beer on the inland seas for fifteen years. Everyone traded for it. Kettle came ashore with Hesperine in the ninth year and went inland to Third Province with Hesperine’s gardeners, and there are still families in Plenty who brew from Kettle’s recipe. The Weighing has a drink at the end of it. That is Kettle.

Sparrowcourt

Peak population 1,100. Afloat from the hundred-and-second year of the Rise to the eleventh year. Core: a drowned apartment block standing nine floors above water. Came ashore and dispersed. Bell: lost.

The last of the cities of account was a building. A block of flats nine stories tall, on a hill in a drowned town, stood up out of the inland sea with its lower floors flooded and its upper floors dry, and the people who had lived in it simply stayed, and moved upstairs, and tied boats to its balconies, and let others tie on. Sparrowcourt was named for the sparrows that nested in its gutters. Its council met on the roof. Its people lived in the flats on the upper five floors and in boats moored around the walls below, and grew gardens on the balconies, and caught rain on the roof, and for sixteen years it was the only floating city that did not float. When the provisional government asked it to choose its landing in the eleventh year, its council replied, reasonably, that it had already landed, and that the water had simply come up to meet it. They came ashore anyway, in boats, when the building began to crack, and dispersed among the coastal towns. The block fell in the fifteenth year. Its top floor is a shoal off the northern shore that the ferries steer around.

PART FOUR: THE MIDDLE WATER

The forty-six settlements whose population at their height was between one hundred and nine hundred and ninety-nine persons. By the sea they chiefly lived on.

Of the Inland Sea

Stillwell (840) gathered around a drowned water tower whose tank stood above the surface, and drank from it for six years until the tank went dry, and then joined Bellwether’s eighth spoke. Gull’s Rest (610) was a fishing settlement of forty trawlers that followed Ninefold everywhere and was teased as its shadow, and came ashore beside it. Long Raft (760) was a single line of barges a mile long, one barge wide, that its people said was a street with no city attached, and it wound across the water like a snake; it broke in three in a storm in the hundred-and-ninth year of the Rise and the three pieces never found each other again. Halfmoon (430) was shaped like a crescent around a sunken pleasure yacht and was famous for its regattas. Mallow (290) grew cotton on floating beds, very badly, for nine years, before giving up and growing beans. Brickyard (520) was built on the roofs of a drowned kiln works and its people made bricks from lakebed clay in a salvaged kiln on a barge and sold them to every city that wanted a stove; the oldest hearths on the northern shore are Brickyard brick. Highwater (380) was a settlement of surveyors who measured the rising of the seas every day for thirty years and published their figures to every city, and whose figures, the Hall has found, are accurate to the inch. It was Highwater that first published, in the hundred-and-eleventh year of the Rise, the news that the water had stopped. Overpass (650) lived on and under a highway overpass that stood above the water on its concrete legs, with boats moored between the legs and families living in tents on the roadway, and it had the best-known name and the worst-known smell. The Silo (210) was a family of farmers who lived in the top of a grain silo for eleven years, all twenty-one households of them, and climbed down a ladder to their boats. Ropewalk (340) made rope, from hemp grown on Hesperine and from the fibers of the reeds of Wickerwork, and every lasher on the water used it; Ropewalk’s rope is still the pattern for the mooring lines of the national ferries. Corbie (180) was named for the crows that followed it and was the only city on the water to keep a rookery deliberately, for eggs. Lockkeeper (470) grew around the gates of a drowned river lock, which stood above the water like a wall, and its keepers’ families could still work the gates by hand and used them as a dock. Driftwood Hall (300) was built entirely of driftwood by a carpenter named Ezra Holt and took him twenty years, and was the most beautiful small city on the water, and burned in the second year in a lightning strike without loss of life, after which its people moved to Second Harbor and built boats. Moorhen (250) and Bittern (190) were two settlements of birdwatchers, scientists who had studied the birds of the river marshes before the flood, who quarreled over a heron colony in the ninety-eighth year of the Rise and never spoke again, though they were moored four hundred yards apart for twenty years. Goose Fair (560) ran a market every autumn that rivaled the Chandlery’s and was known for its geese. Ferryman’s Rest (420) was a retirement settlement for old ferry crews, and its council required every member to be over sixty, and it had the lowest death rate on the water, which its people attributed to spite. Coppice (230) floated a grove of young willows in barges of soil and cut them every few years for basket rods and firewood, and was the only city on the inland seas that never ran short of fuel. Haybarge (160) cut the grass that grew on drowned levees at low water and sold it as fodder to the Ark, and followed the Ark everywhere like a calf. Quarrymen’s Raft (310) was the settlement of the stonecutters of a drowned limestone quarry in the river bluffs, who cut stone from the quarry’s exposed upper faces by boat for the hearths of the cities, until in the hundred-and-ninth year of the Rise, for reasons its register does not give, it cut its lines in the night and went north, and the Hall’s founders could not learn where.

Of the Gulf Shallows

Oyster Bar (720) farmed oysters on drowned car bodies in the warm shallows of the gulf until the gas came, and lost a third of its people in the hundred-and-fourth year of the Rise, and came ashore with Assurance. Saltpan (390) made salt in floating trays, the first salt on the gulf, and taught Assurance’s people the trade that Seventh Province still lives by; the salt-rakers of Brine are Saltpan’s grandchildren. Driftnet (280) fished the deep water south of the gulf until the yellow vapor made it impossible, and then fished the shallows, and then came ashore at Shelter. Shelter (930 at the time it gave its name) was a small city before it was a town: a cluster of houseboats in the lee of a drowned seawall on the southwest gulf coast, near the broken country. Its people learned before anyone that the winds off the broken country brought red dust and sometimes gas, and they built their cabins with no windows on the western side, and they came ashore in the tenth year on the gulf shore and built the same houses, and the town of Shelter in Eleventh Province has no western windows to this day. Low Common (310) was a settlement of shrimpers and their families that tied itself to Pelican Steps’ columns for a decade and then fell out with Mother Cobb. Tarpon (160) was a party of sport fishermen who never stopped fishing, even when there was nothing left to fish for but each other’s patience, and came ashore at Assurance and were not missed. Mangrove (220) lived in the drowned mangroves of the southernmost gulf, in tree houses above the water, and was the first settlement anywhere to be wholly lost to the gas, in the hundred-and-fifth year of the Rise, with all hands. Hurricane Hole (450) sheltered in a cove so perfectly enclosed that no storm on the gulf ever touched it, and its people grew lazy and fat and happy, and came ashore in the tenth year and were miserable on land for the rest of their lives.

Of the Strait

Eelgrass (280) lived among the eelgrass beds of the shallow strait and was Wickerwork’s nearest neighbor and only friend. Tollgate (340) was a settlement that grew around a drowned bridge across the old river valley, whose toll booths stood above the water, and whose people charged every boat that passed through the strait a toll, in fish, for twenty years, until Second Harbor sent a schooner and the practice ended. The Narrows (510) moored in the narrowest part of the strait and lived by piloting other cities’ boats through it, since the currents there were treacherous, and many of the pilots of Twelfth Province’s shore descend from them. Weir (170) built a fish weir across a channel of the strait, a fence of stakes and nets, and ate better than anyone. Pumphouse (230) grew around a drowned pumping station whose engine its people kept running for nine years to drain a small dry patch of land inside a ring of levees, the last dry land in the strait, where they grew potatoes, until the levees failed in the hundred-and-seventh year of the Rise and the potatoes went under and the people went to Wickerwork.

Of the Eastern Sound

Steeple (690) lived in and around a drowned church whose tower stood ninety feet above the eastern sound, and rang its bells every hour for thirty years, and was the easternmost city of any size on the water. Its bells were heard on the eastern shore, which in those years was not yet the far side of anything. Steeple came west in the ninth year, when the provisional government called the cities in, and its people were among the first to tell the Survey about the eastern mountains. Its bells are in the church at Provision. Cindertown (380) was a fleet of coal barges whose cargo kept its people warm for a decade and black for life, and came west with Steeple. Marigold (260) grew flowers on the eastern sound, purely flowers, nothing to eat, and traded them to other cities for food, and was laughed at, and was the most visited small city in the east, because people wanted flowers more than anyone expected. Marigold went east with Greenhaven in the eighth year. Oxbow (440) and Watermeadow (310) were sister settlements of dairy farmers who had followed the Ark east and lost it, and came ashore in the eastern mountains in the seventh year, before anyone had thought of a standing order; the Hall has no record of them after the fourteenth year. Nettlebed (150) made cloth from nettles, which is possible, and came west with Steeple. Ferryhouse (200) was a single double-decked ferry with two hundred people on it that wandered the eastern sound for twenty years, refusing to join anyone, and came west in the tenth year at the last moment, and its people say they heard the clocks start to go wrong in the east as they left.

Of the Western Reach

Last Chance (590) was the westernmost settlement on the water, moored against the edge of the broken country where the western farmland had cracked open, and lived by salvaging the farm towns that had fallen into the chasm and could be reached by boat at high water. Its people saw the owners’ companies working in the broken country in the eighties, and saw the ore trains going west, and are the source of most of what the Hall knows about that. Last Chance came ashore in the tenth year at what is now Fourteenth Province. Calico (240) was a settlement of quilters and dyers who made cloth in every color, and whose cloth was traded on every city, and who were the only people on the western reach who were never hungry, since everyone wanted color more than food. Duckboard (130) lived on a floating path of boards laid across a marsh at the edge of the reach, and walked to its fishing grounds. Hatchery (270) raised fish in pens, and its fish restocked the western waters after the floating cities had fished them out, and it is to Hatchery that the lakes owe their fish today. Bramble (120) was a family of berry-growers who planted brambles on floating beds and grew blackberries for twenty years, and came ashore at Second Harbor, and the blackberries on the hills above the town are theirs. Morrow (360) was the settlement of the Constant’s crew’s families on the western reach, who waited there for the schooner’s return from the west in the second year and saw her come back white with ice, and came ashore with Second Harbor.

That is forty-six.

PART FIVE: THE SMALL

The one hundred and thirty-seven settlements of three to ninety-nine persons. Forty-five of them I give at some length, because something is known of them worth telling. The remaining ninety-two I give in the Ledger that follows, by name, number, sea, and fate, which is all the Hall has, and which is something.

I want to say a word first about the small ones, because the Bureau, if it ever counted them, would call them families, and they were not. A family on a boat is a family on a boat. Three families tied together on three boats with one rain tank between them and a rule about who keeps the night watch is a city. It has a council, even if the council is a conversation over supper. It has a law, even if the law is “nobody takes the last of the water.” It has a name, which somebody painted on a board and nailed to the first hull, so that passing boats would know whom they were passing. The Hall’s founders were careful about this. Every small settlement in this book had a name its own people chose. Most of them chose well.

Forty-Five

The Three Sisters (3) were Ada, Clemency, and Ruth Okonjo, who had run a laundry in a river town and who, when the town went under, lashed three laundry punts together and lived on them, and took in washing from every city on the inland seas for thirty-one years. They were the smallest settlement the Hall ever counted, and the reason for the rule of three. When the Hall’s founders asked Clemency in the seventeenth year whether three sisters on three punts were really a city, she said, “We had a council. We had a law. We had a bell.” The bell was a washtub. They came ashore at Second Harbor, where there is still a laundry on the shingle, run by a great-granddaughter.

Nobody’s (4) was the name painted on the bow of a houseboat containing four men who would not tell anyone their names, where they came from, or what they had done, and who fished the inland seas alone for twenty years, and who, when they came ashore in the tenth year, gave their names to the registrar as Nobody, Nobody, Nobody, and Nobody, and were registered so, and are in the national registry under those names to this day, which the Office of Population Management has never corrected and I hope never will.

The Schoolbus (8) was a yellow school bus of the old world, sealed with tar, floated on drums, with a teacher named Miss Lavender Dunne and seven children aboard, which had been crossing a flooded road when the levee broke. Miss Dunne kept the seven children alive on the bus for two years, teaching them every day, until Larkspur found them. All seven became teachers.

The Lighthouse (8) was the family of the keeper of a lighthouse on the old coast, whose tower stood a hundred feet above the drowned shore, and who kept its lamp lit every night for forty years, burning fish oil, for any boat that needed it. Mariners on the gulf steered by the Lighthouse until the gas came. The keeper’s family stayed through the gas, sealing the windows of the lamp room and living above the vapor, which lies low, and the lamp was lit until the ninth year, when the last of the family, a woman of eighty named Esther Gale, was taken off by a boat from Assurance. She asked them to leave the lamp burning. They did. Nobody knows when it went out.

Dentist’s (5) was a dentist named Dr. Hamid Ross and his family, who lived on a converted fishing boat and went from city to city with a chair and a box of instruments for thirty years, and who were the only dentist on the inland seas. Everyone who grew up on the floating cities has a story about Dr. Ross. Most of the stories are about how much it hurt. He came ashore at Bellwether’s cove at the age of eighty-one and pulled teeth at Mercy Ridge until he was ninety.

Hen Island (6) kept chickens on a floating henhouse and traded eggs, and was known for the noise.

The Mortuary Barge (3) was three undertakers from a drowned river town who went from city to city with sailcloth and stone and did the work that nobody else wanted to do, for nothing, for twenty-four years. Every city gave them water and food when they came. Nobody ever invited them to stay for supper. When the last of them, Isaiah Brand, died in the eighth year, every bell on the northern waters was rung for him, the only time the Hall records that happening for anyone not a Governor.

The Kiln (11) were potters who made pots, cups, jugs, and lamp bowls from lakebed clay on a barge with a kiln on it, and whose work is on every shelf in the Hall.

Pike’s Raft (11) was a family named Pike who fished pike.

The Bookbinders (4) rebound the books that divers brought up from drowned libraries, which were ruined by water, so that they could be read again, and were kept constantly busy by Bellwether’s Governor. Most of the eleven thousand books of Bellwether’s library passed through their hands. Some of those books have since been borrowed by readers the Bookbinders never met, and the supplement says where they went.

The Clock Barge (6) was a clockmaker named Ezekiel Thorne, the father of the pilot Rebecca Thorne of the Constant, and his family, who repaired every clock on the inland seas and kept the time for Second Harbor, setting it by the stars every clear night. When Rebecca came back from the west in the second year and reported green mountains in a frozen sea that would not stay on a photographic plate, it was her father who sat with her for a week, while she slept, and then said that she should write down everything, and that he would keep the time.

The Ice House (7) cut ice from the northern lakes in winter and stored it in an insulated barge packed with sawdust and sold it in summer to Saint Anselm, for the sick, and to Kettle, for the beer.

The Blind Men’s Raft (7) was seven blind men, residents of a school for the blind in a river town, who had been put on a raft by their teachers when the levee broke and told to wait, and whose teachers drowned. They waited. They were found by a Ninefold fishing boat nine days later, fishing, having taught themselves by touch and sound to bait lines and feel for bites. They refused to join Ninefold. They lived on their raft for twenty-two years, moored to Ninefold’s shoreline by a single line, fishing, and the Ninefold children took turns reading to them in the evening. They are the reason Ninefold’s car decks have rails.

The Tinkers (14) mended pots, sharpened knives, and gossiped, and went from city to city, and knew everything.

The Swans (5) were two old married couples, the Albrights and the Dees, and the Albrights’ grandson, on two pleasure boats named for swans, who had sailed together on the old lakes for fifty years before the flood and did not see why the flood should stop them. They sailed together for twenty more. The grandson, Teddy Albright, became a pilot at Second Harbor and taught my father.

The Brewer’s Daughters (9) left Kettle in the hundred-and-fourth year of the Rise after a quarrel about hops, with a copper pot, and brewed a better beer, and the quarrel was not settled until both breweries came ashore in Third Province, where it continues.

The Long Silence (9) were monks of an order that kept silence, on a raft built from the roof of their monastery’s barn, who drifted for thirty years without speaking to anyone, and who signaled to passing boats with flags if they needed anything, which was rarely. They came ashore at Provision in the tenth year and walked into the hills and the Hall does not know where they went, and suspects they would prefer it that way.

The Smithy (12) shod the Ark’s horses and made nails.

The Raft of Persons Unknown (3) was three people, a man, a woman, and a child, found together on a raft of doors in the ninety-sixth year of the Rise by a Second Harbor fishing boat, none of whom remembered who they were or how they had come to be there, and who were not related, and who stayed together on the raft and became a family anyway and named themselves Unknown, and came ashore with Second Harbor. The child, Mercy Unknown, became Keeper of this Hall in the forty-sixth year and was my teacher.

The Bathysphere (6) was a family of divers who had built, from a drowned water heater and a car windshield, a diving bell that would take a person forty feet down in a drowned town for an hour, and who salvaged more from the drowned towns than any other family on the water, and who lost two of their six in it. The bell is in the yard at Second Harbor.

The Marquee (23) was a circus on barges: acrobats, a strongman, two clowns, a juggler, and a horse that could count, who performed on every city on the inland seas, and whose tent was the largest piece of canvas on the water. When the gas came on the gulf they went south to perform for Assurance and Pelican Steps, because, their ringmaster said, people in masks need clowns more than anyone. They came ashore at Assurance. The horse lived to thirty-four.

The Postmistress (4) was a postal boat, run by a woman named Constance Marrable, the sister of Second Harbor’s delegate, and her three sons, which took letters between every city on the inland seas for twenty-eight years, on a regular route, in all seasons, and was never once late. Her route is the route of the national ferries today.

The Wedding Raft (3) was a couple named Jonah and Lily Fairweather, married on Bellwether in the hundred-and-sixth year of the Rise, and the priest who married them, Father Ignatius Doyle, who had nowhere to go, and who came with them on their honeymoon raft and stayed for eleven years.

Seventeen Hens (5) was named for its hens.

The Glass Barge (8) blew glass from melted bottles and windows salvaged from drowned towns, the first glass made on the water, and its glass was green, and it is in the windows of Bellwether’s warship’s tower, which is now the harbormaster’s office at Mercy Ridge, and it is the ancestor of reclamation glass, since the first glassmakers of Endeavor learned from a woman of the Glass Barge named Hilde Varga.

Fiddleback (6) was named for a spider that infested its timbers.

The Lending Library (5) was a librarian named Prudence Oake who lent books from a houseboat on a circuit of the smaller cities of the gulf for twenty years, and who disputed Bellwether’s Governor’s claim to keep the largest library on the water, and who was right, if you counted pamphlets.

The Infirmary (9) was a doctor and nurses from Saint Anselm who left in the hundredth year of the Rise to serve the small cities that could not row to the hospital ship, and went from settlement to settlement for twenty years, and are the reason so many of the small ones in this Ledger have no deaths recorded in some years.

Owl Barge (4) kept owls to keep down the rats on the barges of the Chandlery, and was paid in chits, and was rich.

Stormwatch (6) was a family that watched the sky from the top of a mast and rang a bell when a storm was coming, and was right four times in five, and was the only warning the smaller cities of the inland seas ever had. The Stargazers (6) were a family of astronomers with a brass telescope saved from a drowned university, who mapped the night sky from a raft for twenty-five years because, they said, it was the only map that had not changed, and whose star charts the Survey of Settlement used to fix its bearings.

Harrow (17) was a family of farmers who had lost their farm and refused to stop farming and grew potatoes in soil on the deck of a single barge for twenty-five years, a whole farm on one barge, and fed seventeen people from it.

The Floating Chapel (12) was a small church on pontoons that went from city to city on Sundays and married, baptized, and buried anyone who asked, of any faith or none, and was run by a woman preacher named Hannah Covey who said that she had read all the books and the water was the same in all of them.

Tar Pot (8) caulked hulls.

The Cooperage (10) made barrels, which every city needed for water and fish and beer, and was always in debt to the Chandlery and always paid.

The Map Room (5) was a family of surveyors, cousins of Highwater’s, who drew charts of the drowned roads and towns and shoals of the inland seas and sold them to pilots, and whose charts the Survey of Settlement used. Some of their charts are in this Hall. They are of no place that now exists, and the provisional government voted them void, and they are beautiful.

Three Chimneys (14) was built on the roof of a drowned inn whose three chimneys stood above the water, and its people lived in the chimney stacks, which had been widened, and cooked at the bottom of them, and the smoke went up as it always had.

The Ferryman (3) was an old man and his two grandsons who ran a ferry between the shoreline of Bellwether and the shoreline of Second Harbor whenever they were within ten miles of each other, for a fare of one fish, for twenty years.

The Beekeepers (6) kept bees on Hesperine’s beds and on their own floating meadow, a raft of clover, and sold honey, and were stung, and were the sweetest people on the water.

Lantern Row (19) were glassworkers’ families from the Glass Barge who made the oil lamps that every floating city hung from its hooks, and were the reason the fire laws worked.

Coal Black (11) were the remnant of Cindertown’s crew who stayed on the water after the coal ran out, and were sooty for life.

The Children’s Hull (24) was a single barge of children from Larkspur, sent out in the hundred-and-third year of the Rise with three teachers to start a second Larkspur on the gulf, which they did, on a smaller scale, for twelve years, before rejoining the first.

The Widows (5) were five women whose husbands had drowned in the same fishing accident in the ninety-seventh year of the Rise, who lashed their boats together and fished together and raised their children together and never remarried, and whose boats were the best kept on the water.

The Drummers (7) had no bell and beat an oil drum to tell the hours, and could be heard for miles, and were the only settlement on the western reach that anyone could find in fog.

The Last Boat (3) was the last hull to tie on to the shoreline of any floating city: a rowing boat with three people in it, a grandmother and two children, who came out of the fog to the shoreline of Second Harbor on the eleventh night of Secondmonth of the ninth year, the night before Second Harbor began to be towed ashore. They had been on the water, they said, for a long time. The council let them tie on, by the first law, for one night. In the morning they were towed ashore with everyone else. The grandmother’s name was Nell Ashby. I give it because she is the last name entered in the last hull register of the last great floating city, and because she asked that someone remember her, and I have.

The Ledger

The remaining ninety-two, by sea. The figure in brackets is the population at its height. The fate is what the Hall knows.

Of the Inland Sea

Ninety Barges (84) kept a rain tank larger than their need and sold the rest, and came ashore on the western shore in the eleventh year. Copper Kettle (46) salvaged copper wire from drowned towns, and came ashore at Tally with Coldharbor. Basket (57) gathered gull eggs, and was lost with all hands in the storm of the hundred-and-ninth year of the Rise. Shingle (33) dried fish for Marrowbone, and broke up in the hundred-and-ninth year of the Rise and its people went to Second Harbor. Greyhull (17) made nets, and joined Ninefold’s outer raft. Fishhook (39) were a family of carpenters, and came ashore with Ninefold. Foundling (33) grew greens on a single roof, and came ashore with Second Harbor. Waterlily (50) were river traders, and joined Ninefold’s outer raft. Anchorite (16) made nets, and drifted north in the hundred-and-tenth year of the Rise and was not seen again. Bluegill (10) lived on three lashed houseboats, and came ashore at Tally with Coldharbor. Rook’s Barge (53) were bargemen who had never lived on land, and came ashore at the northern shore in the tenth year. Sandpiper (11) were fishermen, and died when its tanks went dry in the drought of the hundredth year of the Rise; the Hall has the names of all 11. Tinpan (13) made rope for Ropewalk, and came ashore with Ninefold. Barrow (24) lived in a drowned barn’s loft, and came ashore with Ninefold. Hollow Log (79) caught crayfish, and came ashore with Second Harbor. Spindle (98) built rowing boats, and came ashore at Tally with Coldharbor. Gannet (20) made rope for Ropewalk, and came ashore on the western shore in the eleventh year. Saint Bride’s (9) farmed watercress, and died when its tanks went dry in the drought of the hundredth year of the Rise; the Hall has the names of all 9. Sedge (40) kept pigs, against everyone’s advice, and broke up in the hundred-and-ninth year of the Rise and its people went to Second Harbor. Larder (95) kept a rain tank larger than their need and sold the rest, and came ashore at Tally with Coldharbor. Goodwill (89) dyed cloth for Calico, and came ashore with Bellwether. Bargeman’s (68) caught crayfish, and came ashore on the western shore in the eleventh year. Lamb’s Raft (30) mended clocks and spectacles, and came ashore with Second Harbor. Cockle (60) made baskets of reed, and joined Ninefold’s outer raft. Second Chance (39) kept a forge on a stone-floored barge, and came ashore with Second Harbor. Thistle (18) mended clocks and spectacles, and came ashore at the northern shore in the tenth year. Little Ark (65) raised ducks, and came ashore with Bellwether. Crosskeys (57) made rope for Ropewalk, and came ashore with Second Harbor. Stowaway (40) mended sails, and came ashore on the western shore in the eleventh year. Wren’s End (19) kept a rain tank larger than their need and sold the rest, and joined Bellwether’s shoreline. Brackwater (9) dyed cloth for Calico, and came ashore at Tally with Coldharbor. Littlemoor (11) grew mushrooms in the dark of a barge, and drifted north in the hundred-and-tenth year of the Rise and was not seen again. Riverstone (24) made rope for Ropewalk, and came ashore with Second Harbor. Wherry (19) grew mushrooms in the dark of a barge, and came ashore on the western shore in the eleventh year.

Of the Gulf Shallows

Ashbarrow (76) made soap from fish oil and ash, and came ashore with Assurance. Lark’s Hull (57) rendered fish oil for lamps, and came ashore at Shelter. Ironbark (7) dried fish for Marrowbone, and was lost to the gas in the hundred-and-sixth year of the Rise. Gloaming (82) salvaged copper wire from drowned towns, and joined Pelican Steps. Chalk Barge (14) were tanners, and was lost to the gas in the hundred-and-fifth year of the Rise. Mudlark (88) dried fish for Marrowbone, and came ashore at Assurance in the tenth year. Gristmill (64) dyed cloth for Calico, and came ashore at Assurance in the tenth year. Tamarack (27) built rowing boats, and was lost to the gas in the hundred-and-sixth year of the Rise. Hemlock (45) made candles, and was lost to the gas in the hundred-and-sixth year of the Rise. Candle Row (9) were pilots for hire, and was lost to the gas in the hundred-and-sixth year of the Rise. Drydock (11) made rope for Ropewalk, and joined Pelican Steps. Parish (49) gathered gull eggs, and joined Pelican Steps. Plover (36) lived on three lashed houseboats, and was lost to the gas in the hundred-and-sixth year of the Rise. Tidewrack (74) were refugees from the climb who went back down to the water, and joined Pelican Steps. Marsh Hen (8) lived on three lashed houseboats, and was lost to the gas in the hundred-and-fifth year of the Rise. Halyard (13) were a single family of cousins, and came ashore at Assurance in the tenth year. Hornpipe (95) lived on three lashed houseboats, and came ashore at Shelter. Hob’s Raft (10) dug clay for Brickyard, and died when its tanks went dry in the drought of the hundredth year of the Rise; the Hall has the names of all 10.

Of the Strait

Paddock (98) were pilots for hire, and came ashore at Tally. Quayside (93) dug clay for Brickyard, and came ashore on the strait shore in the thirteenth year. Slipway (77) kept a rain tank larger than their need and sold the rest, and joined Wickerwork. The Pantry (28) built rowing boats, and came ashore with Wickerwork at Saltgrass. Dunlin (7) kept a school for the children of three other settlements, and came ashore on the strait shore in the thirteenth year. Fenland (43) were a single family of cousins, and came ashore with Wickerwork at Saltgrass. Tern Rock (15) traded salt for grain, and broke up and its people went to The Narrows. Netloft (42) were river traders, and joined Wickerwork. Starling (65) were refugees from the climb who went back down to the water, and came ashore on the strait shore in the thirteenth year. Toll Barge (52) were a single family of cousins, and came ashore at Tally. Meadowsweet (65) built rowing boats, and came ashore at Tally. Crane’s Foot (22) mended clocks and spectacles, and came ashore on the strait shore in the thirteenth year.

Of the Eastern Sound

Saltbox (36) made rope for Ropewalk, and came west with Steeple in the ninth year. Teasel (26) mended sails, and went east in the seventh year; the Hall has no record of it after the fifth. Firwood (14) dyed cloth for Calico, and went east in the seventh year; the Hall has no record of it after the fifth. Muddy Boots (4) farmed watercress, and came west at the last in the tenth year. Pennywhistle (4) were a single family of cousins, and came west with Steeple in the ninth year. Cobble (3) grew mushrooms in the dark of a barge, and came west at the last in the tenth year. Plumb Line (31) lived in a drowned water mill, and came west at the last in the tenth year. Broom (73) kept a rain tank larger than their need and sold the rest, and came west at the last in the tenth year. Hearthstone (54) dyed cloth for Calico, and came west at the last in the tenth year. Carp Pond (69) were a family of carpenters, and went east in the seventh year; the Hall has no record of it after the fifth. Fieldfare (85) farmed watercress, and came west at the last in the tenth year. Fallow (5) made rope for Ropewalk, and came west at the last in the tenth year. Brine Cask (51) lived in a drowned barn’s loft, and died when its tanks went dry in the drought of the hundredth year of the Rise; the Hall has the names of all 51. Keelhaul (50) were a family of carpenters, and went east in the eighth year with Greenhaven; no further record.

Of the Western Reach

Clover (29) dug clay for Brickyard, and broke up in the second year and its people went to Second Harbor. Cormorant (93) made baskets of reed, and broke up in the second year and its people went to Second Harbor. Lamplighter (29) were a widower and his children, and broke up in the second year and its people went to Second Harbor. Dovecote (3) dried fish for Marrowbone, and came ashore at the western shore and went inland to Threshold’s valleys. Juniper (12) kept a forge on a stone-floored barge, and broke up in the second year and its people went to Second Harbor. Tallow (34) grew greens on a single roof, and broke up in the second year and its people went to Second Harbor. Small Mercy (14) were a family of carpenters, and came ashore at the western shore and went inland to Threshold’s valleys. Sunfish (17) lived in a drowned water mill, and broke up in the second year and its people went to Second Harbor. Lowlight (21) grew greens on a single roof, and joined Morrow. Windlass (47) farmed watercress, and came ashore at Second Harbor. Mussel Bed (44) dried fish for Marrowbone, and came ashore with Last Chance in the tenth year. Old Mercy (89) lived on three lashed houseboats, and came ashore with Last Chance in the tenth year. Kingfisher (97) were pilots for hire, and came ashore at the western shore and went inland to Threshold’s valleys. Copperpot (28) were pilots for hire, and broke up in the second year and its people went to Second Harbor.

That is the Ledger: ninety-two. With the forty-five above, the forty-six of the Middle Water, the eighteen Cities of Account, and the Three, it makes two hundred and four.

PART SIX: THE CONSIDERED

Cities that were planned and never built, built and never launched, reported and never found, or seen once and never again. They are not counted among the two hundred and four. They are part of the record all the same.

The Great Raft

In the hundred-and-fourth year of the Rise, the engineer Bartholomew Sayle of Second Harbor, who had floated the dockyard cranes, put before a Meeting of Second Harbor and Bellwether a plan to join every floating city on the inland seas into one.

He drew it on eleven sheets, which the Hall has. The Great Raft would have been forty square miles of hulls, with Bellwether’s warship at its center and the other great cities lashed around it as districts, joined by pontoon bridges of Pontoon’s pattern, with a single council, a single tank system, a single fishing fleet, and a single bell. It would have housed three hundred thousand people. It would have been, Sayle argued, too large for any storm to break, too large for any drought to empty, and too large for the land to ignore, and it would have been able to negotiate with the highland towns as a nation. He proposed to call it Ozarka, which was a name the river people used for the highlands, because, he said, the raft should be named for the shore it would someday reach.

The Meeting debated the Great Raft for three days and rejected it, Bellwether’s Governor speaking against it downwind in a gale. Seaborne refused even to send a delegate. Ninefold’s masters said they would join if they could be its council, which ended the matter. Sayle went home to Second Harbor and built boats until he died in the second year, the year the water stopped. Five years later the joint assembly at Provision chose the name of Ozarka for the nation by three hundred and eleven votes to four. The Hall’s founders believed, and I believe, that the delegate who proposed the name had read Sayle’s sheets. The Bureau’s History says the name honored the highlands that had sheltered the survivors. Both things are true. Sayle’s eleventh sheet is framed in the Hall, and on it, in his hand, under the drawing of a raft forty miles wide, are the words: One shore. One day.

Pelagia

In the hundred-and-first year of the Rise a consortium of merchants from the Chandlery bought, with chits, three drowned oil tankers of the old world that lay grounded in the shallows south of the gulf, and announced that they would raise them, seal them, join them, and build upon them a city for twenty thousand people that would float on the open sea beyond the gulf, where no storm from the land could reach, and where the fishing was untouched. They called it Pelagia. They sold places on it in advance, for chits, to four thousand people. They raised one tanker. Then the yellow vapor rose off the open sea in the hundred-and-fourth year of the Rise, and the open sea became the one place on Earth that nobody could live, and the tanker was left half-raised in the shallows, and the Chandlery’s council spent the next ten years repaying four thousand people. The tanker’s bow still stands up out of the shallows south of Assurance, rusted, like a cliff. The people of Brine call it the Promise.

Thalassa

Seaborne meant to found a city on the open sea, beyond any government’s reach, and in the council of everyone, in the year before they sailed, they gave it a name: Thalassa. It is the old word for the sea, from a language older than the old world. Three thousand one hundred people sailed south in the twelfth year to found it. If it exists, it exists beneath the yellow vapor, and the reader of the supplement will learn what little is known.

Fathom

The divers of the Bathysphere family proposed in the hundred-and-third year of the Rise to build a city underwater, in the drowned towns, in sealed buildings pumped full of air, where nobody could be driven out by storm or drought or gas, since the gas lies on the surface and not below. They built one room: the basement of a bank in a drowned river town, forty feet down, sealed with tar and pumped dry, with an air hose to the surface, and two of them lived in it for nine days. On the tenth day the hose failed. One of them came up. The other is the second of the Bathysphere’s two lost, and Fathom was not attempted again. The reader of the supplement will notice that the gas lies on the surface and not below, and that the divers of the Bathysphere were not wrong, only the wrong kind of creature to be right.

Coldharbor-on-the-Ice

In the hundred-and-sixth year of the Rise Coldharbor’s council considered abandoning its hulls altogether and building a city on the permanent ice at the edge of the North, of ice blocks, as the far northern peoples of the old world once did, and living there year round on fish and fox. Its icebreaker went north to choose a site. It reached the edge of the ice, where the plain rises into the wall of mist, and its captain stood on the bridge for a day looking at the mist, and then turned back. His log for that day reads: Not ours. The council did not raise the matter again.

The City of Lights in Fog

From the ninety-second year of the Rise to the hundred-and-tenth, at least two hundred and forty reports exist in the Hall’s logbooks, from fishermen and pilots of every city on the inland seas, of a city seen in fog at night that nobody could reach. It is always described the same way: a great many lights, white, steady, very tall, arranged as though on the towers of a city, appearing out of a fog bank at a distance of a mile or two, and moving, slowly, without sound, and when a boat steered toward it, going away, and then gone. It was never seen in clear air. It was seen most often in the western reach and over the broken country, and in the last decade of the Rise it was seen most often going west. The Hall’s founders entered it as the City of Lights in Fog and did not count it, since nobody could say that anyone lived on it. In the hundred-and-seventh year of the Rise, the diarists of the highland towns began to record lights descending over the western mountains. The Bureau, in its History, calls what they saw the motherships. The Hall’s founders, when they read the Bureau’s account in the forty-sixth year, wrote in the margin of their ledger beside the City of Lights in Fog a single word: Visitors. I have let it stand.

The White Barge

On the twenty-second day of Ninthmonth of the hundred-and-ninth year of the Rise, at dawn, a great white barge passed the shoreline of Ninefold going west at speed, towed by four tugs. It was a pleasure palace of the old world: three decks of white superstructure, glass, gardens under awnings, and at its stern, on a staff, a pennant showing a gold crown with a key through it. Ninefold’s fishing boats went out to it, because it was the first vessel of its size anyone had seen in years, and because it was clearly well supplied, and because there were six hundred people on Ninefold’s shoreline that month who were hungry. The barge’s crew warned them off with rifles. A man in a white coat stood at the barge’s rail and looked down at the fishing boats and did not say anything. The barge went on west, toward the broken country and the mountains beyond it, and was not seen again. Ninefold’s hull register records it in one line: White barge, crown and key, going west. Would not stop. It is in this Part because it was a floating city of a kind, with perhaps fifty people on it, and because nobody on the water ever forgot it, and because I have always wondered whose it was.

The Last Floating City

The Hall’s founders kept, as long as they lived, a page in the ledger headed The Last, on which they meant to enter the last floating settlement of three or more persons on the waters of Ozarka when it came ashore. They expected that to be Seaborne. Seaborne did not come ashore. So the page stayed open.

In the forty-seventh year, a pilot of the Reserve Service reported a raft of three families, eleven persons, moored among the reserve islands of the northern lakes, unregistered, living on fish and the fruit of the islands’ orchards, who said they had been born on the water and saw no reason to leave it, and who asked the pilot not to report them. He reported them to the Hall, which is not the same thing as reporting them. The Hall’s Keeper at the time, Mercy Unknown, took a boat out and visited them, and entered them on the page as The Last: Tenpenny’s Children, eleven, in the northern reserves, the forty-seventh year. They were the grandchildren of survivors of Tenpenny’s fire. In the sixty-sixth year Mercy, long retired, went out again with me and we found them gone. In the eighty-fifth year a Reserve Service launch reported, to me, a light on the water at night among the farthest of the reserve islands, moving, low, like a lamp on a raft.

The page is still open. I have not closed it. I do not intend to.

PART SEVEN: ASHORE

How the floating cities came to land, and became part of the provinces of Ozarka, and how well that went, and how badly.

The Stillness

The water stopped in the hundred-and-eleventh year of the Rise, and nobody on the floating cities believed it.

Highwater published it first. Its surveyors had been measuring the rise of the inland seas every day for thirty years against iron marks driven into a drowned bridge pier, and on the first day of Fourthmonth of the hundred-and-eleventh year of the Rise they sent a boat to every city within a day’s sail with a single sheet of paper that said the water had not risen in sixty days. Bellwether’s Governor read it aloud from the warship’s tower. Second Harbor’s council read it downwind in a stiff breeze and argued about it for a week. Ninefold’s masters had it posted on the car decks. Seaborne’s council of everyone debated it for nine hours and voted not to believe it.

Every city had its own tide marks, painted on the side of its core: a line for every year, climbing. Every city watched them. For six years the lines stopped climbing, and for six years nobody painted a new one, and every morning the Keeper of the Tanks on every city looked at the old line and the water beside it, and wrote in the register: No change. The Hall has those registers. There are six years of No change in Second Harbor’s, in my grandmother’s hand, two thousand one hundred and ninety entries, and I have read every one, and the handwriting gets steadier as it goes.

The stillness changed the cities before they ever moved. Children who had been born on the water and had never seen the shoreline do anything but advance began, in those six years, to ask what was on the land. Boats went to the highland shore more often. People who had not set foot on ground in twenty years went ashore for a day and came back sick. The Hall has many accounts of land-sickness, which is the opposite of seasickness and worse: the ground does not move, and the body, which has spent a lifetime moving with the water, cannot bear it. People went ashore and lay down in the grass and vomited and wept and could not stand. Children ran on the land and fell over, again and again, because their legs did not know what to do on something that did not give. My grandmother, the Wind-Warden of Second Harbor, went ashore in the fourth year for the first time in thirty-four years and walked fifty yards inland and sat down on a stone and would not get up until my grandfather came and led her back to the boat. She said the land was shouting at her.

The Survey and the Assembly

The Survey of Settlement was formed in the seventh year from the hydrographers and surveyors of the largest highland towns and the pilots of the three largest floating cities: nine from Second Harbor, seven from Bellwether, three from Ninefold. It is the only time in the history of the nation that the floating cities and the highlands worked as equals, and it worked. The Survey’s parties went by boat and on foot, the pilots steering and the surveyors measuring, and for four years they walked the new shoreline and drew it, and the iron stakes they planted are the protected monuments of Ozarka, and nine of every ten of those stakes were driven into the ground by a pilot from the water.

When the joint assembly met at Provision to receive the Survey’s maps, it seated three hundred and fifteen delegates. Sixty-one of them came from the floating cities. Bellwether sent eleven, Second Harbor nine, Ninefold seven, Seaborne four, and the rest came from the cities of account and the middle water by a rule the assembly made on its first day, of one delegate for every two thousand persons. The small cities sent nobody. The floating cities’ sixty-one sat together on the left side of the gymnasium, and the highland delegates called them the Wet Bench, and they called themselves that too, after the first week.

The Wet Bench won three things at Provision and lost three.

It won the vote on the maps. The motion to declare the old maps void was made by Silas Marrable of Second Harbor, and seconded by Absalom Fenwick of Bellwether, and every delegate on the Wet Bench voted for it, because people who had lived for forty years on a shoreline that moved knew better than anyone that a map of a place that no longer exists is worse than no map at all.

It won the name. The name of Ozarka was proposed by a delegate of the Wet Bench, a woman named Philippa Sayle, the daughter of the engineer who had drawn the Great Raft, and it passed by three hundred and eleven to four, the four being Seaborne’s.

It won the Right of Landing. The assembly agreed, and the Charter later confirmed, that every floating city might choose for itself the place on the new shoreline where it would come ashore, and that the land at its landing would be granted to its people in common, and that no city would be compelled to come ashore at all. That last clause was Seaborne’s, and it was granted, and it is still in the Charter, in the eleventh article, in small type, and nobody has invoked it since the twelfth year.

What the Wet Bench lost was its councils, its registers, and its name.

It lost its councils because the Charter created the Ministry of the Interior to govern the provinces, and when the provinces were drawn they would be governed by governors appointed from New Carthage, and there was no place in that order for a council of twenty-one meeting downwind on a container ship’s deck. The Wet Bench argued for a year that each floating city that came ashore should keep its council as the government of its town. It lost by forty votes. The councils of the floating cities were dissolved by the Charter’s ninth article on the day each city came ashore, and their powers passed to the provisional government, and later to the Ministry.

It lost its registers because the Office of Population Management, which the Charter confirmed among the four Standing Offices, had begun in the fourth year, while the cities were still on the water, to register every person in the nation, and its first act was to ask every floating city for its hull register, and the floating cities, having no reason yet to distrust the Office, gave them. The Office copied them. The copies became the first national registry of Ozarka. Then the Office asked for the originals, to keep them safe, and most cities gave those too, and the originals were never returned. The Hall has two hundred and nineteen hull registers because the Hall’s founders asked, in the seventeenth year, for any that had been kept back, and found that the old Keepers of the Tanks of a hundred and sixty-one settlements had each, quietly, made a copy of their own, or kept the original and given the Office the copy, which in my opinion was the best thing that anyone on the water ever did.

And it lost its name, in a manner of speaking. The Charter speaks of citizens. It does not speak of the people of the floating cities. After the ninth year there were no floating cities in the law of Ozarka, only towns on the shore, and their people were citizens of the provinces in which those towns stood. The Bureau’s History gives us four paragraphs. The law gives us none.

The Towing

The floating cities came ashore between the eighth year and the thirteenth. The Hall calls those years the Towing.

A floating city is not a ship. It cannot sail ashore. It has to be taken apart, partly, and the parts towed, by its own tugs and by every tug that can be borrowed, to the landing it has chosen, and run aground at high water, and made fast, and lived on while the people build something on the land to live in instead, and then broken up for timber and steel to build with. Second Harbor’s shipyard, with the three cranes, did most of the work for most of the cities, and its crews were on the water every month of the Towing, and its cranes were cut up for steel at the end of it because there was nothing left for them to lift.

Bellwether went first, in the eighth year, to the cove that became Mercy Ridge, as I have told. Ninefold went in the ninth, to the Survey’s tenth landing on the northern shore, where it ran its nine ferries aground in a row and lived in them for nine more years. Second Harbor went in the ninth, in Secondmonth, to the shingle of a bay on the northwestern shore. Larkspur and Saint Anselm went in the ninth, together, to a cove east of Bellwether’s, and from there their nuns and teachers and nurses and two thousand children walked inland, south and west, for eleven days, to the high valley where the provisional government had asked them to found a hospital and a home for children, and the Hall calls that walk the Long Walk, and the children who made it were the first citizens of what became Fourth Province. Assurance and Pelican Steps went in the tenth year to the gulf shore at the mouth of the strait, and sank their outer barges as they came, to make a wall. Gantry went in the tenth, and its engineers walked inland looking for coal. Shelter and Last Chance went in the tenth. Hesperine and Kettle went in the eleventh, to the southwestern shore, and from there Hesperine’s gardeners pulled their seed drums inland on carts, looking for valleys. Pontoon went in the eleventh. Coldharbor went in the twelfth, to the northeastern shore, through the last of the winter ice. Sparrowcourt came ashore in the eleventh by the simple method of everyone getting into boats as the building cracked. Seaborne’s nine thousand came ashore in the thirteenth, after the Remnant sailed. Wickerwork, last of the cities of account, came ashore in the thirteenth, to the strait shore where the reed beds were.

Sixty-one people died in the Towing, mostly in the parting of lines under strain and the breaking of hulls. The Chandlery’s bell was lost in a storm off the strait in the eighth year. Ninefold’s Pool, with four thousand of its dead in it, was left behind in the water off the northern shore. Every city left something.

When Second Harbor’s tugs began to pull on the twelfth morning of Secondmonth of the ninth year, its bell was rung for the last time on the water, and every person on the city stood on the deck of their own hull, facing the open water behind them, and watched it get wider. I was six. I was on my father’s shoulders on the deck of the grain barge where I was born. I remember that nobody spoke. I remember that the wind was from the south. I remember my father, a pilot, standing with me on his shoulders, looking at the vane on the bell frame from habit, and then laughing, and saying that it did not matter which way it blew now, nobody was going to say anything.

The First Years on Land

The first years on land were hard, and the History does not say so, because the History says the Settlement was the period in which the mainland was ordered and the citizens were registered, assigned, and housed. We were housed in the hulls of our own cities, run aground on beaches, until we could build houses from the hulls of our own cities, broken up. We were registered from our own registers. We were assigned, after a while, and I will come to that.

The people of the floating cities did not sleep on land. That was the first thing. A bed that does not move is a bed you cannot sleep in, if you have slept on the water your whole life, and for years the shingle towns were full of people who could not sleep. The Hall has many letters about it. The solution, which every town found on its own, was the hammock: slung between beams, or posts, or trees, so that it swung. For a generation the houses of the floating-city towns were built with hooks in the beams of every room. Many still are. Go into any old house in Second Harbor or Tenth Landing or Mercy Ridge and look at the ceiling. There will be hooks.

The people of the highlands did not much like us, and we did not much like them. They called us wetfeet. We called them hillers. They had taken in the strangers of the climb for thirty years and fed them, and they were tired, and here came three hundred thousand more, with nothing but broken boats. We had fed the highlands with fish for twenty years during the climb, and here we were on their shore, and they acted as though we had come begging. Both sides were right. There were fights in the shingle towns in the ninth and tenth years, and a riot at Tenth Landing in the eleventh, over fishing grounds, in which two people died. And there were marriages. By the sixteenth year, the Hall’s founders reckoned, one marriage in four in the shore towns was between a wetfoot and a hiller. By the twenty-sixth year the words had mostly stopped being used, except by old people, and by children, who use everything.

The trade reversed. For twenty years the floating cities had sent fish to the highlands. Now the highlands sent grain to the shore, and the shore sent fish back, and the floating cities’ fishing fleets became the fleets of the shore provinces, and the trade that the Chandlery’s chits had once measured was measured by the provisional government’s ration cards, which the Chandlery’s clerks designed.

And the water was still there. It was right there, at the foot of the shingle, every morning, and the people of the floating cities walked down to it every morning, as they had walked to the shoreline of their cities, and looked at it, and some of them went out on it every day in small boats and came back every evening, and some of them could not do even that, and sat on the shingle all day looking at it. The Hall’s founders called this the dry grief. It killed nobody that the Hall can prove. It shortened a great many lives. My grandmother sat on the shingle at Second Harbor every afternoon for nineteen years, looking at the place where the city had been moored, with her hands in her lap, and said, when anyone asked what she was doing, that she was keeping the wind.

The Registering and the Dispersal

The Office of Population Management built the first national registry from the hull registers of the floating cities and the town rolls of the highlands. Every person on the water had an entry in it by the eleventh year. The Office assigned to the floating cities’ people a block of registry numbers beginning with certain digits, which I will not give, since the Office has since changed its numbering and would not thank me. Every drift-child’s number began with them. People of the floating cities used to recognize each other by their numbers, in the early years, when numbers were shown at the ration stores. You would see someone’s card at the counter and see the digits and look at them, and they would look at you, and you would both, without thinking, glance at the nearest flag.

The Settlement law of the eighteenth year gave the Office the power to assign every citizen at sixteen to a residence and a labor category. In the floating-city towns this went badly.

A floating city was a city of families lashed together. A family’s hull was tied to its neighbors’ hulls, and its children married its neighbors’ children, and its trade was its hull’s trade, passed down. When the Office began, in the eighteenth year, to assign the first generation of drift-children who had reached sixteen on land, it assigned them where the nation needed them, which was everywhere. Lashers’ children were sent to the terraces of Third Province. Divers’ children were sent to the glassworks. Pilots’ children were sent inland to the plateau to dig reservoirs. Families who had been tied together for forty years on the water were scattered across fourteen provinces in a decade. The Hall calls it the Dispersal. The Office calls it the Settlement Assignment, and in its own records it was a success, since every assigned citizen was housed and employed and fed. The first constitutional convention repealed it in the sixty-first year, by which time the drift-children it had scattered were grandparents in the places it had sent them.

The floating-city towns petitioned. In the twenty-fourth year Second Harbor’s people, led by Silas Marrable in his old age and Philippa Sayle, sent to the Assembly a petition signed by thirty-one thousand persons of the shore towns asking that the children of the floating cities be assigned, where possible, to the towns their cities had become, so that the trades of the water could be passed down and the families kept together. The Assembly sat on the petition for eleven years. Then, in the thirty-fifth year, when the Settlement commission began drawing the provinces, it gave its answer, which was half an answer, and which I will come to.

The Drawing of the Provinces

The History says that the provinces were drawn during the Settlement by a commission that ignored the old county lines and drew its boundaries along ridgelines, so that each province would contain whole valleys and no river would serve as a border. It says the provinces were numbered in the order the commission finished them. It says the numbers are used in official correspondence and the names in songs.

All of that is true. Here is what it leaves out.

The floating cities’ towns were already on the shore when the commission began. They had been there for twenty-five years. The commission drew around them. Every shore province of Ozarka contains at least one town that was a floating city, and in most of them that town became the provincial seat, because it was the largest town on that shore, because the floating cities had come ashore at the best landings, because their pilots had chosen the landings with forty years of knowledge of the coast. Mercy Ridge, where Bellwether came ashore, is the seat of Eighth Province and its ferry terminal. Second Harbor is the seat of Tenth. Tenth Landing, where Ninefold ran its ferries aground, is the seat of Ninth. Assurance, which was a floating city of the same name, is the seat of Seventh. Shelter, which was a floating city of the same name, is the seat of Eleventh. Tally, where Coldharbor came ashore, is the seat of Thirteenth.

And inland, the cities that walked: Saint Anselm’s nuns and Larkspur’s teachers made Meridian, which is the seat of Fourth Province, the Cradle, where every child in Ozarka is registered. Hesperine’s gardeners made the terraces of Third Province and the town of Plenty. Gantry’s engineers made the works of Sixth. Pontoon built the bridges of the capital. Coldharbor’s children became the Reserve Service. Assurance built the Gulf Wall. The Chandlery designed the ration card. The Glass Barge taught Endeavor to make glass. The floating cities of Ozarka did not become one province. They became pieces of all of them.

The commission’s answer to the Second Harbor petition was Tenth Province. The commission drew, around the bay where Second Harbor came ashore and the shingle towns around it where the people of the smaller floating cities had settled, a province of the northwestern shore, and named it the Anchorage, and decreed that its people would be assigned, where possible, within it, and that its towns would keep the custom of the wind in their councils as law. It is the only province of Ozarka whose name honors the people who live in it rather than the land. The commission gave it the number ten. The people of Second Harbor will tell you that the commission finished it tenth. The people of the Hall will tell you that the commission finished it first, and was persuaded, by a woman named Philippa Sayle who stood downwind of the commission for a week, to give it the number that the Survey’s pilots had given their most important stake.

That was the half of the answer. The other half was that the rest of the floating cities’ children went on being assigned wherever the nation needed them, and still are, and that there are people in every province of Ozarka with a hook in the ceiling of their bedroom and no idea why.

What Went Right

I want to be fair.

The people of the floating cities brought to the land everything they knew, and the land needed all of it. They knew boats, and the nation’s ferries are theirs. They knew water, and the Bureau of Reclamation’s first hydrologists were theirs. They knew how to grow food on almost nothing, and the terraces of Third Province are theirs. They knew how to keep children alive with no families, and the Cradle is theirs. They knew how to heal the sick on a ship that rolled, and the houses of birth are theirs. They knew the gas, and the Gulf Wall and the masks of Seventh Province are theirs. They knew the North, and the Reserve Service is theirs. They knew how to put a deck across moving water, and the capital’s bridges are theirs. They knew how to share water so that nobody died of thirst, and the nation’s tanks and reservoirs, and the reading of their levels every evening, are theirs.

I will say that last thing again, because I have never heard anyone say it. Every evening at a quarter past seven the Reader in the broadcast house on the east bank gives the nine gauges of the river, and the weather, and the prices of grain and fish and salt, and the Notices, which are the found children and the lost crews, and then says that the sea stands at the mark. On every floating city of the inland seas, every morning for forty years, the Keeper of the Tanks posted on the bell frame the level of the city’s water, and the state of the gardens and the catch, and the births and the deaths in the night, and the whole city came by on its way to work and read it. The Evening of Ozarka is a floating city’s morning. The Interior may not know that. Every old person from the water who has ever heard the Evening knows it, and stops speaking while it is read, as everyone in the nation does, and as we always did.

And the courtesy of the wind is theirs. It is quaint, the History says. It is the only law I know that tells a person to put themselves where it is hardest to be heard, and to say only what is worth shouting into the wind. A nation could do worse than to keep it. A nation does.

What Did Not

And I want to be honest.

Seaborne went south rather than come ashore, and three thousand one hundred people are gone. Greenhaven, Marigold, Oxbow, Watermeadow, and at least six of the small settlements of the eastern sound came ashore in the eastern mountains in the seventh and eighth years, before the Survey’s parties had landed, and long before the standing order, because their people had family there, and in the fourteenth year the way east was closed, and nothing has been heard of them since except one letter about clocks and a mother calling in the woods. The Hall has the names of everyone aboard those settlements from their hull registers. There are four thousand nine hundred and six. I read them aloud once a year, on the anniversary of the closing, in the Hall, to whoever comes. Not many come. The Interior does not encourage it.

The councils were dissolved and nothing replaced them but governors, and the people of the floating cities, who had governed themselves on open decks in the wind for forty years, found themselves governed by men from New Carthage who had never been on a boat, and some of them never forgave it, and some of their grandchildren have not.

The hull registers were taken and not returned, and the Office of Population Management built the nation’s registry from them, and the registry is the instrument by which the nation decides where its citizens live, what work they do, whom they may marry, and how many children they may raise, and every person of the floating cities who knows where the registry came from feels, about this, something that I cannot write down without it becoming reportable.

The Dispersal scattered families that the water had kept together through forty years of storm and drought and gas. The petition was half answered. Tenth Province is a kindness, and it is one province out of fourteen.

And the Historical Section of the Bureau of Reclamation, whose work is the reclamation of history in the sense of taking a ruined thing and making it useful, has decided, it seems, that the floating cities were not useful, or not useful enough, and has given us four paragraphs, and recovered our council minutes in part, and never asked for the rest. The Interior permits the names of the floating cities to be spoken on the Evening, which is more than it allows most names of the old world, since our cities belonged to the drowning, which is a period the Interior would prefer everyone to remember in one paragraph, and which we remember in every hour of the day, since we were born in it.

Saltgrass was struck from the maps in the forty-sixth year. Its people were Wickerwork’s people, the marsh folk who governed themselves by sitting down. I do not know what happened to them. I have asked.

The Keeper’s Close

This Hall has kept count of everyone who lived on the water. It is the only house on land that ever did. The Bureau will not. The Office of Population Management counts citizens, which is not the same.

I have been the Keeper for thirty-seven years. I am ninety-one. I was born on a grain barge on the city of Second Harbor in the third year and brought ashore on my father’s shoulders in the ninth year, and I have spent my life writing down where everyone went. Most of them came ashore. Some went south. Some went east. One page is still open.

There is one more count that this Hall has never been able to make, and I will end by admitting it. On every floating city of the inland seas, for thirty years, there were people who came up from the water at night and traded at the shoreline, and borrowed books from Bellwether’s library and brought them back damp, and married on three cities under an amended law, and left a bronze bell on the shingle below this Hall in the forty-sixth year, wrapped in cloth of a make nobody knew. The Hall’s founders knew of them. The Hall’s ledgers mention them, under various names, on two hundred and eleven pages. Nobody on the water ever counted them. They were nobody’s business. They were also, I came to believe in my old age, the only other people in the world who knew what it was to live with no shore but the one you made, and who might, if anyone ever asked them, have kept a record of their own.

I never asked. I did not know how.

If anyone ever does, I would like their record kept in this Hall, beside ours, with the bells.

Adah Penhallow. Second Harbor. The ninety-fourth year.

A note added in the hundred-and-thirty-second year by Ruth Marsh, Keeper of the Hall of the Wandering Shoreline

Adah Penhallow died in the ninety-sixth year, at ninety-three, in the net loft, at her desk. She left this Record finished, and the page headed The Last still open, as she said.

On the morning of the third day of Thirdmonth of the hundred-and-thirty-second year, my son Tobiah, who builds boats on the shingle below the Hall, went down to the yard at dawn and found, on the slipway, at the waterline, a bundle wrapped in oiled cloth of a make none of us knew, tied with a cord of long plant fiber. It was heavy. Inside it were four books, bound in something like leather that was not leather and did not let in water, and a letter, on the same material, addressed to the Keeper of the Hall of the Wandering Shoreline, from a place called Underlight.

The letter said that a woman named Nerine, who had lived on the water longer than anyone alive, and who remembered Bellwether’s well and Bellwether’s library, had heard from a friend that there was a house on the shore at Second Harbor that kept count of everyone who had lived on the water, and that its last Keeper but one had written that she would like the record of the people of the water kept there too. It said the Outer Channel was calm now, and the races of the dams were open, and the sweet seas of the north could be reached again by anyone who could swim, for the first time in a hundred and thirty years. It said: We counted ourselves. Here it is. Keep it with the bells.

My son says the tide was very high that night. He says he saw nothing. He also says that when he went down to the slipway at dawn, the water at the foot of it was moving as though something large had just gone back into it, and that out in the bay, two hundred yards off, a head came up for a moment, gray-haired, and looked back at the Hall, and went down.

I have copied the four books fair, from the original, which is in the Hall. They follow. I have closed the page headed The Last. The reader will see why.

SUPPLEMENT: THE ONE AND ONLY COMPLETE CENSUS OF THE MER

Being a Count of the People of the Water, with their History, their Poems, their Stories, an Atlas of their World, and a Register of Every Line. Made in Underlight in the hundred-and-thirty-second year of the Up’s reckoning, and sent to the Hall of the Wandering Shoreline at Second Harbor to be kept with the bells.

A Word from Nerine

Spoken to Teague, who wrote it down, on the back of the Leviathan, at the warden’s camp, at the turn of the year.

I am a hundred and sixty-one years old and I have been a fish for a hundred and forty-nine of them, and I have been asked by my grandson’s machine, who is a better counter than any of us, whether anybody ever counted us. Nobody did. So we did it.

You on the land will want to know what we are, first. We are people. Most of the first of us were children who were drowning, in the last forty years before the water stopped, along every coast where the tall white ones had come to watch, and who were asked by one of them if we wanted to go on living in the water instead, and who said yes. A few were old. A few were simply sitting on a jetty watching the sea come up and thinking that they would like to go and meet it. Two hundred and fourteen of us were changed, in all. Everyone else in this book was born to us. There are nine thousand three hundred and eighty-eight of us now, living. That is the whole of the people of the water, as near as Teague can make it, and Teague does not make mistakes, which is irritating.

I was changed in the gulf in the ninety-third year of the drowning, when I was twelve. I knew the floating cities. I married the Governor of the biggest one, under a law he changed so I could sign with my fin. My daughter was born in his well. She grew up and made water for me in the north, shallow and sweet, in the strait between the land and the white island, and I sat in it with her for forty-six springs. Her son died last year at a hundred and eight. His machine came to see me on the farm. That is how this book began. The machine said: someone should know everything, in order. I said: then you’d better count us. It said it would rather we counted ourselves. So we have.

This book is for the Hall at Second Harbor, which is the only house on land that ever counted the people of the water. Its old Keeper wrote that she would like our record kept there, with the bells. We read that. We read everything; we have Bellwether’s books. We have sent it. Keep it dry.

And to whoever reads it: we are not your business. We never were. But now you know.

How We Count

Teague, Keeper of the Borrowed Books, Underlight

The people of the water count by lines. A line begins with one of the two hundred and fourteen who were changed. Everyone born of them, and everyone born of those, is of that line, and when two lines marry, the child is of both, and is counted once in each, and halved, which the land will find strange and which we find fair. Every line has a keeper, who knows its living and its dead. Once in every seven years, at the turn of the year, the keepers of the lines meet in the Library Hull in Underlight and say their counts aloud, and I write them down. This is that count, made this year, out of turn, for the Hall.

We count the living where they live. We count the dead where they were given. We count the changed by name, every one, and say where each went. We have not counted the land-children, the children born to one of us and one of you, among the people of the water, since they could not breathe it; but we have named them, because they are ours too, and because one of them made water for her mother, and we have not forgotten.

I was born in Underlight in the seventy-fourth year of the Up’s reckoning, of the line of Harrow Fenn, who was changed off the northeastern coast in the ninety-ninth year of the drowning at the age of nine, and who is still living, and who taught me to read from a book with Bellwether’s library stamp in it that nobody ever returned. I keep the Borrowed Books, which is what we call the library in the flank of the middle vessel, and I have kept them for forty years, and I have never once lent a book out of Underlight that came back late. I want that on record, given where the books came from.

I. The Count of the Year

The people of the water, living, in the hundred-and-thirty-second year of the Up’s reckoning, by where they live.

Underlight, on the floor of the San Andreas Ocean, two miles down, among the three resting vessels: eight thousand nine hundred and twelve. Of these, about a third are on the farm at any season, in the warden’s camps on the Leviathan’s back, harvesting; they are counted here, since Underlight is home.

The Warm Shallows of the South, below the Floridexa, near the mouth of the Outer Channel, in the ring of drowned keys around the place called Thalassa: four hundred and two.

The Races of the Dams, in the deep fast water at the eastern ends of the five dams, against the white island across the strait, the Race Folk: thirty-four.

Wanderers, who live in no fixed water and go where they like, in the Open Dark to the west and along the drowned coasts, and who report to their line keepers when they pass through Underlight, which is seldom: forty.

Total of the people of the water, living: nine thousand three hundred and eighty-eight.

Of the two hundred and fourteen who were changed, nineteen are living. The eldest is Nerine, a hundred and sixty-one. The youngest of the changed is Osric Dale, who was changed at the age of seven in the hundred-and-eighth year of the drowning off the old western coast, and is a hundred and forty-one, and is a farm-warden, and complains.

Of the two hundred and fourteen lines, one hundred and seventy-one have living members. Forty-three have ended.

The dead of the people of the water since the first changing number, by the line keepers’ counts, four thousand and sixty-one. Of these, three thousand four hundred and nine were given to the Sleeper, on the farm, in the way we give our dead. Six hundred and fifty-two died in other waters and were given where they died, or were not found.

Living also among us, though not of us, in Thalassa, on rafts, in the clean air above the warm shallows: sixty-three persons of the land, descended from thirty-seven survivors of the floating city of Seaborne, whom the people of the water brought out of the yellow in the twelfth year of the Up’s reckoning. They are counted in their own place in the Register. The Hall at Second Harbor has a page for them, we are told, that has been open a long time.

II. Our History, in Order

The Changing

The tall white ones came before their great vessels did. A few of them, sent ahead, in the last half of the drowning, to watch the water come up over the coasts of this world and learn what could be saved. We call them the Light Who Asked, because that is what they did. One of them came to a drowning child and stood on the water and asked. We do not know why they did it. Nerine says the one who asked her told her it was because she looked like a flower from their own drowned world, and that they could not save their own flowers, and so they would save ours. We think that is true. We think it is also true that they were lonely, and wanted company in the water while they watched.

The first of us was changed in the eighty-seventh year of the drowning, off the old eastern coast, a boy of eleven named Absalom Teague, my great-grandfather’s elder brother, who was knocked off a breakwater by a storm wave and who said yes. The last was changed in the hundred-and-ninth year of the Rise, off the old western coast, a woman of seventy named Hephzibah Rowe, who walked into the sea at sunset on purpose to see what would happen, and who was met. Between them, two hundred and twelve others. The Register gives every name.

Being changed hurt, every one of us agrees, though none of us can say how. It took about as long as a short prayer, or a little longer. Afterward we had our tails and our gills and our second eyelids, and our lungs still, and our hands, and our names if we wanted them and new names if we did not, and our memories, which was the worst of it, since most of us had just watched our families drown.

The Sweet Seas

For the first twenty years we lived in the inland seas that the flood had spread over the middle of the continent. They were warm, and shallow, and full of fish, and the drowned towns in them were full of things to explore. We called them the Sweet Seas, since in the north the water was fresh. We found each other there, slowly, over years; a changed child from the eastern coast meeting a changed child from the gulf in the drowned main street of some river town and staring. By the ninety-eighth year of the Rise there were about a hundred and sixty of us in the Sweet Seas, and we had begun to live together, in loose bands, in the drowned towns, and to have children, who were born with tails.

And there were the floating cities.

We traded with them from the start. At night, at the shoreline, where the newest hulls were and nobody looked too closely. Fish and shellfish and things from the drowned towns, which we could reach and they could not, for salt and knives and rope and glass and, above all, books. The shoreline people of the floating cities knew us. Most of them decided we were nobody’s business. A few wrote us down, under names like the night traders and the people from below, and the Hall at Second Harbor has those pages, we are told, two hundred and eleven of them.

Bellwether had a library. Nerine found it. You will read how in the stories. She borrowed from it for four years before the Governor caught her, and when he caught her, he married her, and after that the library was open to all of us, through the well in the warship’s hull, at night, and we borrowed from it for twelve years. Some of us brought books back. Some of us did not. The ones that did not are the Borrowed Books, which I keep, and which taught three generations of the people of the water to read.

Fourteen children were born in the Sweet Seas years to one of us and one of the land. The Register names them. They were born in wells, in the floating cities, mostly, and breathed water for an hour and air ever after, and had webs between their toes, and grew up on the land. Ilse Fenwick, Nerine’s daughter, was one. She is the reason the strait is shallow.

The Going Down

In the hundred-and-third year of the Rise the deep water began to breathe out.

We knew before the land did. We felt it in our gills before anyone on the cities smelled it: a sourness in the water off the deep coasts, and then the bubbles, rising from the deep in fields, and where they broke, the yellow. It lay on the surface. It killed the birds that sat on the water and the fish that came up to feed. It killed the people of the land who breathed it. It did not kill us, so long as we stayed under. We learned that in the hundred-and-fourth year of the Rise when three of us, Marah Quill and her two children, were caught on the surface in the gulf at night in a yellow fog and dived, and came up a mile off in clean air, coughing, alive.

The yellow is a poison to lungs. We have lungs. We also have gills. Under the yellow, the water is water. We can live beneath it for as long as we like and come up only where the air above is clean.

So we went down. Over five years, from the hundred-and-fourth to the hundred-and-ninth, the people of the water left the Sweet Seas, which were shrinking and getting crowded with the cities and their nets, and went out to the deep coasts and under the yellow, where nothing that breathed air could follow us, and where the drowned coasts of the old world lay open to us, mile after mile, city after city, all ours. We call that the Going Down. We were free under the yellow in a way that the people of the land have never been free anywhere. Nerine stayed in the Sweet Seas longest, because of the Governor and the well and the child. She went down in the eighth year of the Up’s reckoning, when Bellwether went ashore and the well went dry.

The Seeds Come Down

In the last years of the drowning the Light Who Asked came down in their great vessels over the western mountains. We saw them too: four lights, larger than any city, coming down out of the sky at evening over the far west. Three of them settled on the mountains for a while, and then went into the sea. We felt them go in. The whole western ocean rang with it, a sound below hearing, for a day.

The three vessels came to rest on the floor of the ocean to the west of the mountains, two miles down, in a row, the shape of seeds, glowing. The fourth went south and settled in the warm water off the drowned southern coast, and stayed near the surface, and put down roots into the deep, and became She, whom you on the land see as a light on the southern horizon.

We found the three resting vessels in the hundred-and-tenth year of the drowning, a party of six of us who had come round from the south following a warmth in the deep water. We came down through the dark and saw them below us, lying on the mud, glowing, a mile of light each, and the mud around them warm. We stayed. Others came. The vessels did not mind. They were tired, and the cold and the dark and the weight of the water were restful to them, and they gave us light and warmth, and asked nothing. We built around them. We call it Underlight. It is where nearly all of us live, and where nearly all of us were born, and it is the most beautiful place in the world, and I have read every book about the old world’s cities, and they were not as beautiful.

The Sleeper Wakes

In the seventh year of the Up’s reckoning, the Sleeper rose.

It had been asleep on the floor of the western ocean since before the old world was young, in the cold, eating what drifted down. When the sea warmed, it woke. It came up slowly over a year, from the floor of the ocean to sixty feet below the surface, under the yellow, and lay there, and has not moved more than a few miles since. It is the size of one of your provinces. Its back is a plain of gray hide.

Where the yellow seeped down into the water above the Sleeper, things began to grow on its back: long ribbons, gold at the tips and green at the roots, rooting in the folds of its hide, drinking the poison out of the water and the air above and turning it into sweetness in their leaves. The ribbons fed the Sleeper through its hide. The Sleeper fed the ribbons. The ribbons spread until they covered its whole back and floated on the surface above it in long bands, and the people of the water found that the ribbons were good to eat, better than anything we had eaten since the Sweet Seas, and that cutting them did not harm them, and that they grew back in a month.

That is the farm. You on the land call it the San Andreas Leviathan, we are told, and know it only from photographs taken from very high up. We call it the Sleeper, and the farm, and home.

The Compact

In the eleventh year of the Up’s reckoning, the Light Who Asked came down from the mountains to the farm and asked us one more thing.

They said that the people inside the mountains, the ones you call the owners, who had made their home there with the Light Who Asked, would need food, more food than the soil of the mountains could grow, for as long as they lived, which would be very long. They said the farm could feed them. They asked if we would harvest the farm and tow the harvest to the foot of the mountains, where doors would open for it. They said that in return the people inside the mountains would give us whatever we asked that they could make: metal, tools, medicine, glass, the waterproof skins we bind our books in. They said She, in the south, would keep the water of Underlight warm.

The line keepers met, in the first Library Hull, and argued for nine days, and agreed. We have kept the compact for a hundred and twenty-one years. Every day, a third of the people of the water are on the farm, harvesting, and every day the sleds go east to the foot of the mountains and the doors open. We have never been inside. We have never been asked. We have never asked. The owners are nobody’s business either.

The Way Round

The people of the water learned in the early years of the Up’s reckoning to swim from Underlight to every water that touches the world, under the yellow. The longest swim that any of us make often is the Way Round: south from Underlight along the drowned western coast, under the yellow, for twenty days, to the Neck, where the narrow land that once joined the north of the world to the south went under, and through the Neck into the southern sea, and north and east along the drowned southern coast past She, and up into the warm shallows at the mouth of the strait, which takes another fifteen days. Nerine has swum it a hundred and eight times. The Atlas shows it.

Thalassa

In Ninthmonth of the twelfth year of the Up’s reckoning, the people of the water who lived then in the warm southern shallows felt a fleet pass over them, going south, out of the gulf, into the yellow.

It was Seaborne. The Hall’s book tells it: three thousand one hundred people, a hundred and forty vessels, and a burned white ship towed in their midst, sailing south to found a city beyond any government’s reach. They sailed into the yellow at dusk on the nineteenth day. In the night, the wind dropped, and the yellow lay on them.

The people of the water heard the bells. Seaborne’s ships rang their bells in the yellow, all night, every ship, the way the floating cities rang in fog, so that boats could find each other. By morning most of the bells had stopped. Nineteen of us went up to see. We found the fleet becalmed in the yellow, a hundred and forty ships drifting, and on most of them nobody moving. On the burned white ship, below decks, in cabins that had been sealed with tar because the white ship had burned once before and its people were careful of air, there were thirty-seven people living: children, mostly, and their mothers, and an old man who had been the ship’s carpenter.

We could not make them breathe water. We could tow. Nineteen of us took lines from the white ship’s stern and towed it, under the yellow, for four days, east, back toward the warm shallows, where a ring of old drowned islands stood just above the water, and where the ribbons that we had begun to plant there from the farm, to see if they would grow in warm water, had cleaned the air above the shallows in a circle about four miles wide. We brought the white ship into the circle and let it ground on a reef. The thirty-seven came up on deck and breathed.

They are still there. Their children and grandchildren. Sixty-three of them, on rafts lashed around the grounded white ship and the drowned islands, in the clean air, fishing, growing what will grow on the islands, trading with us, governed by a council of everyone that meets once a week on the burned deck and takes, they tell us, nine hours. They call it Thalassa. It is the city Seaborne sailed to find. It is very small. It is a floating city of three or more persons, and it is the last one, and it is still afloat.

We brought Seaborne’s bell north in the forty-sixth year, from the white ship, at the asking of the old carpenter before he died, who wanted the people of the shore to know that someone had lived. Sorrel Wick of the line of Absalom Teague swam it up the Way Round and through the races of the first two dams, which were the only dams then built, and up the strait and across the sweet seas of the north to the shingle at Second Harbor, and left it on the beach below the Hall at high water. It took her ninety days. She said the bell was heavy and she talked to it the whole way.

The Eleven Who Went North

In the fifty-eighth year of the Up’s reckoning, Nerine went north to the strait to see whether her daughter’s water was finished, and it was, and eleven of the people of the water who lived in the warm southern shallows went with her and stayed. They live in the races of the dams, the deep fast water at the eastern end of each dam, against the white island, where the turbines are, and they clean the screens and watch the races and have their children in the basins in spring. Their grandchildren are thirty-four now. The turbine crews of the white island feed them fish every morning. We call them the Race Folk. They are the only people of the water who live in fresh water, and they are a little odd, and very proud of it.

The Channel Lies Down

In the hundred-and-thirty-first year of the Up’s reckoning, the storms of the channel between the white island and the eastern mountains began to die.

The people of the warm southern shallows felt it first, at the channel’s mouth. The waves grew smaller. The currents that pulled three ways began to pull two, and then one. We sent word up the Way Round to Nerine on the farm, and she sent word back that it meant the thing in the eastern mountains that had kept the old world from finishing was finishing at last, and that the Light Who Asked, the one who had changed her, had a season to save what she loved. In the autumn of that year, the channel lay down. For the first time anyone could remember, it could be swum. In the winter of that year, the first of us swam it, and came up on the eastern shore, and found the mountains quiet, and dark, and only mountains.

And in the spring of this year, the hundred-and-thirty-second, the people of the water swam up through the races of the dams into the sweet seas of the north for the first time in a hundred and thirty years in any number, and found them clean, and cold, and full of fish, and full of islands planted in rows, and on the shingle of one bay, a house with two bells over its door.

III. Atlas of the Water

[image: Atlas of the Water, as the line keepers of Underlight draw it.]

Atlas of the Water, as the line keepers of Underlight draw it.

The places of the people of the water, from the deepest to the sweetest. The drawn map that accompanies this book shows them all.

Underlight. On the floor of the San Andreas Ocean, two miles down, west of the Great Rocky Isles and beneath the Sleeper. Three resting vessels lie in a row on the mud, each about four miles long, the shape of seeds, glowing from within, and around them and on their flanks is the city of the people of the water: houses and towers grown from a pale stone that we coax up from the mud with the warmth of the vessels, streets of open water, gardens of pale plants that grow in the vessels’ light. It has five quarters. The Library Hull, in the flank of the middle vessel, where the Borrowed Books are kept in a hollow lined with shelves, and where the line keepers meet. The Nursery Ring, around the northern vessel, where children are born and taught the colors of water. The Glow Market, on the mud between the vessels, where everything is traded. The Farm Stair, a great column of water rising from Underlight to the Sleeper’s belly two miles above, lit along its length with lamps from the mountains, which the harvesters swim up and down every day. And the Quiet, the southern vessel, where the very old and the very tired go to rest in its warmth, and where the eldest of the changed are cared for. The water in Underlight is warm, the color of honey near the vessels and of deep blue farther off. Nobody in Underlight has ever been cold.

The Sleeper and the Farm. Sixty feet below the surface of the San Andreas, under the yellow, the size of a province, a plain of gray hide with the ribbons rooted in its folds and floating on the surface above in bands of gold and green. The farm is divided into wardens’ reaches, each tended by a warden and her crews. The harvesters swim in lines among the roots, harnessed to sleds of pale material from the mountains, and cut the gold tips and gather them into nets. On the Sleeper’s head, where the ribbons part, is its eye: four hundred yards across, gold, which opens when it is greeted. The Sleeper breathes once in about an hour, and when it does, the whole farm rises and falls, and the harvesters hang still in the water and wait. Our dead are given here: laid on the Sleeper’s back among the ribbon roots, where the Sleeper takes them in. The ribbons above the places where the dead are given grow tallest.

The Ceiling. What you call the yellow, seen from beneath. From under the surface it is a dull gold light on the water above, moving slowly with the wind, and the people of the water learn as children never to rise through it. Where it is thin, the light is bright. Where it is thick, the light is brown. Where there is no Ceiling, over the ice and over the warm shallows of Thalassa and over the sweet seas, the light is white and blue and the air can be breathed. Children are taught a lesson called the colors of water, and the last color they learn is the gold of the Ceiling, and it is the most important.

The Open Dark. West of the farm, the ocean goes on to the edge of the world and beyond it, two and three miles deep, under the Ceiling everywhere, and nothing lives at the surface of it. The wanderers go there. Some come back with stories of lights very far down, and of things very large moving in the deep, and of a place far to the south-west where the Ceiling burns at night and craft go up out of the water into the sky on columns of fire. Some do not come back. We do not stop anyone from going. We keep their names.

The Neck. Far to the south of the farm, the narrow drowned land where the north of the world once joined the south. It is a maze of drowned hills and old cities, very warm, under a thick Ceiling, full of fish, and it is the halfway point of the Way Round. The wanderers who live in the Neck keep a resting place for swimmers, in the drowned top of a stone temple of the old world, whose steps go down into the water.

She. In the warm water off the drowned southern coast, the fourth vessel, the largest, which did not rest in the deep with the others but settled near the surface and put down roots into the sea floor and draws power from the deep. Her light rises and falls once in about a minute, which is her heartbeat. The people of the water who swim the Way Round pass beneath her, and the water around her is hot, and humming, and every swimmer who passes puts a hand on her hull, once, for luck. She is a machine. She thinks she is alive. We have never argued with her.

The Warm Shallows and Thalassa. At the mouth of the strait, south of the land, a ring of drowned keys just above the water, where the people of the water planted ribbons from the farm in the early years, and the ribbons cleaned the air above the shallows in a circle four miles wide. Four hundred and two of us live there, in the warm, among sponge gardens and drowned streets. In the middle of the circle is Thalassa: the burned white ship of Seaborne aground on a reef, and the rafts of its sixty-three people lashed round it.

The Races. The five dams across the strait, between the land and the white island, built by Nerine’s daughter. Above each dam, a basin of water one to four feet deep, sweet, moving south. At the eastern end of each dam, against the white island, a race: fifteen feet of fast fresh water running through the turbines, where the Race Folk live. The lamps on the turbine houses along the dams are lit for them. The basins are where the Race Folk have their children, in spring. The fifth basin is where Nerine sat with her daughter for forty-six springs. The races are also, since this year, the door to the sweet seas.

The Channel. Between the white island and the eastern mountains. Until last year, the most dangerous water in the world, full of storms that never ended, which the people of the water could not swim. Since last year, calm.

The Sweet Seas. The lakes of the north, which you call the northern lakes. Fresh, cold, clear, fed by the ice of the North. Full of planted islands. Where the first of us lived, in the Sweet Seas years, before the Going Down. Where the floating cities were. Reached again since this spring.

The Steeple Fields. Our name for the drowned cities of the old world along every coast, under the Ceiling, where the towers stand up out of the mud and the streets are open water and everything the old world left is still there. Children of the people of the water go there to explore, as children of the land go into the woods. We have mapped most of them. We do not take much. Some books.

The Ice Edge. Around the Great Rocky Isles, where the water is made cold from beneath and freezes on top. The people of the water cannot go there; the cold stops our hearts. We have seen the blue lights under the ice from a distance. It is the one place in the world’s water we cannot enter.

IV. Poems of the People of the Water

Chosen by the line keepers, one or two from each age. The people of the water write on the waterproof skins from the mountains, with ink made from the ribbons, and keep their poems in the Library Hull with the Borrowed Books.

The Colors of Water

A lesson-poem, taught in the Nursery Ring to children at the age of five. Author unknown; it was taught in the Sweet Seas years.

Brown is the river that came down too fast. Green is the water that wants you. Blue is the deep, which does not care. White is the shallow over sand, where the land people stand up to their knees and think they are swimming. Gray-green is the old sea, the one from before, the one that was here first and will be here after. Honey is home. Gold is the Ceiling. Never go up through gold. Never go up through gold. Come home to honey.

Under the Ceiling

Marah Quill, changed in the gulf in the ninety-second year of the drowning. Written in the hundred-and-fifth, after the night in the yellow.

The land people are dying up there in the gold. I can see their feet through the light, kicking, the way my own feet kicked before. I dove. My children dove. Down here the water is only water. I am ashamed of how glad I am.

For the Governor, Who Kept the Well

Nerine. Written in the eighth year of the Up’s reckoning, the night she left the cove where Bellwether went ashore. She gave it to Teague for this book and said it was the only poem she ever wrote and he was not to fix the grammar.

You put your desk at the edge of the water so I could read over your shoulder. You never once asked me to come up. You changed your law instead. Forty years from now some clerk will read it and wonder what by fin means and you will be dead and I will be somewhere down in the dark, still reading, and our girl will be making water for me out of nothing, because she is yours, and she never once asked me to come up either.

Borrowed

Harrow Fenn, changed off the northeastern coast in the ninety-ninth year of the drowning. Written in Underlight in the thirty-sixth year of the Up’s reckoning, on the flyleaf of a book from Bellwether’s library.

This book belongs to the library of the city of Bellwether. It says so on the first page, in purple ink, with a bell. It is due back on the eleventh day of Sixthmonth of the hundred-and-fourth year of the Rise. I am sorry, Governor. I am two miles down. The city is gone. There are children here who learned to read from it. I will bring it back when there is somewhere to bring it.

What the Sleeper Says When It Breathes

Osric Dale, the youngest of the changed, a farm-warden. Written in the ninety-sixth year of the Up’s reckoning.

Every hour it breathes, and the whole farm lifts, and all of us hang in the water and wait. The young ones ask what it is saying. I tell them: it says still here. I have been listening for a hundred years and I have never heard it say anything else, and I think if it ever does we will all want to be very far away.

The Way Round

Sorrel Wick, of the line of Absalom Teague. Written after swimming Seaborne’s bell north, in the forty-sixth year of the Up’s reckoning.

Twenty days south in the dark with a bell. The Neck, and the temple steps, and sleep. She, humming, and my hand on her for luck. The warm shallows. The Thalassa children waving from the rafts. Up the strait in the white water over sand where the land people built a wall across it, and then another, and left a hole at the end of each for us, or for the water, or for no reason they would admit. The sweet seas, cold, the first fresh water I have tasted since I was eight. Islands planted in rows like a child’s drawing of a forest. A beach. A house with one bell over the door. I left the second one beside it. I talked to it all the way. It never once answered, which is more than I can say for most company.

Race Folk at Morning

Linnet of the Races, born in the fifth basin in the sixty-seventh year of the Up’s reckoning.

The woman with the bucket comes down the ladder at dawn and tips the fish into the race, and we come up and take them and she says the same thing every morning, which is morning, and we say morning, and that is all we have ever said to each other, and she has been coming for forty years, and when she stops coming I think we will all go south.

For Ilse

Nerine. Spoken, not written, at the edge of the fifth basin, on the night after her daughter died, in the hundred-and-fourth year of the Up’s reckoning. Linnet of the Races, who was there, remembered it.

Sweet enough to breathe. Shallow enough to sit in. Moving, so it stays clean. I said that to you on a beach when you were eleven and you went and did it. I came every spring. I am in it now. You are not. The water is good.

The Machine on the Leaf

Teague. Written in the hundred-and-thirty-first year of the Up’s reckoning, after the visit.

It sat on the edge of the leaf with its feet in the water the way none of the Light Who Asked ever do, and it had a lamp for a head, and it told Nerine about her grandson for an hour in a voice like a customs officer, and she laughed, and she put her hand on top of its lamp the way she does with the children, and it went very still, and after it left she said: that’s the last of my family, and then she said: no it isn’t, it’s the first of something, and then she went back to work.

The Channel Lies Down

Lowry Fenn, of the line of Harrow Fenn, living in the warm southern shallows. Written in the winter of the hundred-and-thirty-first year.

For a hundred and twenty years it shouted at us from the mouth of the strait, and we did not go near it, and our grandmothers told us that the shouting was the old world, refusing to be done. This autumn it lowered its voice. This winter it stopped. I swam it at night. On the far side there were mountains and trees and nothing, no lights, no voices, no towns that were not there, only dark, and wind in the trees, and the smell of earth, and I lay on the stones of that shore, half out of the water, and I said to it, out loud, very politely: thank you for finishing.

V. Stories of the People of the Water

Told in Underlight, to children and to anyone who will listen, and written down for this book by the line keepers.

The Girl in the Well

As Nerine tells it.

Once there was a girl who had been a fish for seven years and missed books.

She had read everything she could find in the drowned towns of the Sweet Seas, which was not much, since books do not like water and most of them had turned to porridge on the shelves. She had read a hardware catalogue nine times. She had read a book of instructions for an engine she had never seen, and could have built it. She was nineteen and she was starving, and not for fish.

One night, at the shoreline of the biggest floating city on the water, she heard two men on a barge talking about the Governor’s library. Eleven thousand books, they said, dried and pressed, in a warship.

She swam under the city. It took her three nights to find a way in. The warship was rusted through in its lowest deck, in a square hole where the sea came up inside like a well, and she came up in it in the dark, and there was a passage, and a stair, and a door, and behind the door, in a room that smelled of paper, more books than she had seen in her whole life.

She borrowed one. She took it back down the stair and out through the well and read it in the water under the city, by the light from the planking, and when she had finished it she dried it on a rock and pressed it flat under a stone and took it back. And borrowed another.

She did this for four years.

The Governor noticed. He set a watch. The watch was a man named Hob, who fell asleep. He set another. That one fell asleep too, because the girl sang very quietly under the hull at night, and the people of the water can make anyone sleepy if we sing low enough, though we are not supposed to tell you that. So the Governor sat up himself, with a lamp shaded down to a slit, and at three in the morning he heard water moving in the warship’s flooded lower deck, and went down, and there was the girl at the edge of the well, with a book on the rim and her chin on her arms, reading.

She said, “You’re the Governor.”

He said that he was.

She said, “Your library’s very good. Your history section is weak.”

He sat down on the deck by the well, in the dark, with the lamp. He did not shout. He did not call anyone. He did not ask what she was, although he could see quite well what she was. He said, “What are you reading?”

She told him.

He said, “That one’s not very good. Try the one on the second shelf from the left, the blue one.” And the next night he left the blue one on the rim of the well, and she read it, and it was very good, and the night after that he was sitting there waiting, and he had moved his desk.

That is the end of the story, Nerine says, because the rest is private.

How Underlight Was Found

There were six of them, in the hundred-and-tenth year of the drowning, swimming north up the drowned western coast under the Ceiling, because Absalom Teague, who was the first of us, had said there was a warmth in the deep water to the north that he wanted to find before he died.

They swam for thirty days. The water got colder. Then, one day, below them, it got warmer. They went down. They went down a long way, farther than any of them had been, into the dark where there is no light at all and the weight of the water is so great that the youngest of them, a boy named Fennick, who had been born in the Sweet Seas and was seven, cried. And then there was light below them.

Three lights, very long, lying in a row on the floor of the world.

Absalom Teague said: we will stay here. He was right. He died in the eighteenth year of the Up’s reckoning, in the Quiet, in the warmth of the southern vessel, at the age of fifty-two, which is young for us. He was the first of us changed and the first of us to see Underlight and the first of us given to the Sleeper. Fennick, who cried, is a hundred and thirty-nine now, and is the keeper of the line of Absalom Teague, and does not like this story told in front of him.

The Bell of Seaborne

As Sorrel Wick tells it.

The old carpenter of the white ship was named Barnabas Coe, and he was ninety when he asked me to take the bell north, and he had been a carpenter on Seaborne before the sailing, and he had seen everyone he knew die in the yellow in one night except thirty-six women and children, and he had spent thirty-four years building rafts for them out of the burned ship’s timbers in the clean air of the shallows.

He said: “There’s a house at Second Harbor. On the shingle. They keep count of everyone who lived on the water. My brother told me about it, before the sailing. He said they would write us down. They’ll have written us as lost.” He said: “I’d like them to know. Not all of us.”

He could not write a letter. His hands were gone. He said: “Take them the bell. They’ll know.”

So I took it. Ninety days. When I got to the shingle at Second Harbor it was a night of very high tide and I came up the beach as far as I could and put the bell down on the stones above the waterline and went back. In the morning I was out in the bay and I saw a woman come out of the house and find it, and pick it up, and press it against her chest for a long time, and look out at the water. I did not let her see me. It was not her business.

When I got back to Thalassa, Barnabas Coe had died. They had given him to the sea in the old Seaborne way, in his own boat, burning, at night. I told his granddaughter that the bell had arrived. She said, “Then they know.” I said, “They know someone lived. They don’t know who.” She said, “That’s enough. That’s more than we were.”

Teague adds: It is not enough now. The Register below names every one of them.

The Eleven Who Went North

When Nerine said she was going north to look at her daughter’s water, the people of the warm shallows laughed at her, because everyone knew the land people did not make things for us. She went anyway. Eleven went with her, because they were young and bored and wanted to see if the old woman was mad.

They swam up the strait in the dark. The water got shallower and shallower and sweeter and sweeter, and then there was a wall across it, with a lamp burning on it, and at the end of the wall, a hole, deep, running hard, and they went up through the hole against the water and came up on the other side in a basin so shallow you could sit on the bottom with your head out, and so sweet you could drink it, and warm, and moving, and clean.

And in the middle of the basin, standing in the water up to her waist, there was a woman of the land with gray hair, and a man beside her, and the woman said, “Mama.”

The eleven stayed in the basin all night, a little way off, watching the old fish and her daughter sit in the water and talk. In the morning Nerine went south again. The eleven did not. One of them, a girl named Brisa of the Shallows, said afterward that she had never seen a place that had been made for her before, and that she was not going to leave it now that she had. They have lived in the races ever since. That was seventy-four years ago. They are still a little odd.

The Child Who Swam Up the Race

There is a girl on the land, in the house in the hole in the ground on the white island, who has been bringing fish to the races every morning since she was eleven. Her name is Adaeze. Her great-aunt kept the turbines before her. When she was eleven, she climbed down the ladder at the end of the fifth dam with a bucket because her great-aunt was sick, and she tipped the fish into the race, and a child of the Race Folk came up, a boy her own age named Pell of the Races, and looked at her, and she looked at him, and neither of them screamed.

She said: “Morning.”

He said: “Morning.”

That is all they have ever said to each other. Every morning for forty years. She is old now, and he is old, and they still say it. The children of the Race Folk say that one morning, when she was about twenty, she stayed on the ladder a little longer than usual, and he stayed in the race a little longer than usual, and that they looked at each other for a while, and that she said, “Morning,” and he said, “Morning,” and that something about the way they said it was different, and that neither of them ever said what. Pell will not discuss it.

The Night the Channel Lay Down

Told by the people of the warm southern shallows, about the autumn of last year.

There was a night last autumn, in the warm shallows at the mouth of the strait, when the channel to the north of us, which had shouted for a hundred and twenty years, went quiet all at once, between one wave and the next.

Everyone in the shallows felt it. Children woke. Old people came up out of their houses into the open water and turned their faces north. The people of Thalassa, on their rafts, said afterward that the air changed: that the smell that had always come down the channel from the east, a smell like a cellar and old paper and hot dust, which they had smelled every night of their lives and thought was simply the smell of the world, was gone.

And far up the channel, the old ones say, very faint, on the water, there was a sound like a voice on a radio saying a word in the language of the land. Lowry Fenn says the word was goodnight. Lowry Fenn says a great many things.

Then nothing. Then the water was calm. Then it stayed calm.

The next spring, the people of the water swam north through the races into the sweet seas, and found them full of planted islands, and on the shingle of a bay a house with two bells, and left this book there, for whoever keeps count.

VI. The Register of Every Line

Every one of the two hundred and fourteen who were changed, by the coast where they were changed, with the year of the drowning in which they were changed, their age, where they went, and the number of their line now living. Then the land-children, the people of Thalassa, the Race Folk, and the wanderers, by name. A line counted with a living number of one hundred is a line of about a hundred people; where lines have married, each child is counted once in each line and halved, and the numbers here are rounded to the whole person, since nobody is half a person, whatever the counting says.

Of the old eastern coast (fifty-two)

Absalom Teague, changed in the eighty-seventh year at eleven; the first of the changed; found Underlight in the hundred-and-tenth year of the drowning; given to the Sleeper in the eighteenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 103 living. Percy Greer, changed in the eighty-seventh year at thirty-three; given to the Sleeper in the sixty-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 97 living. Ira Mallory, changed in the eighty-seventh year at twenty-seven; died in the Steeple Fields in the thirty-second year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line of 79 living. Boaz Teague, who took the name Pipit, changed in the eighty-seventh year at eleven; given to the Sleeper in the seventeenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 47 living. Otis Shaw, who took the name Kittiwake, changed in the eighty-eighth year at thirteen; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the sixty-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 10 living. Agnes Vos, changed in the eighty-ninth year at six; given to the Sleeper in the eighteenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 91 living. Elspeth Vos, changed in the eighty-ninth year at thirteen; given to the Sleeper in the sixty-eighth year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Lemuel Delgado, changed in the ninetieth year at fifty-seven; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-eighth year of the drowning, and was not found; line of 18 living. Edgar Lowe, changed in the ninetieth year at seven; given to the Sleeper in the seventy-ninth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 87 living. Enid Tate, changed in the ninetieth year at twenty-seven; given to the Sleeper in the sixty-eighth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 107 living. Nell Wick, changed in the ninety-first year at sixty-one; given to the Sleeper in the fifty-third year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 65 living. Cyrus Wick, changed in the ninety-first year at fourteen; died in the Steeple Fields in the hundred-and-eighth year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line ended. Matilda Colter, who took the name Gully, changed in the ninety-first year at five; died in the Steeple Fields in the sixty-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line of 104 living. Ines Dale, who took the name Sorrel, changed in the ninety-second year at fifty-eight; died in the Steeple Fields in the eighty-seventh year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line ended. Ansel Crane, changed in the ninety-third year at thirteen; went into the Open Dark in the eightieth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 57 living. Wallace Sayre, changed in the ninety-third year at eight; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-ninth year of the drowning, and was not found; line of 100 living. Rafe Kerrigan, changed in the ninety-third year at twenty-six; given to the Sleeper in the hundred-and-first year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 59 living. Lottie Ashby, who took the name Sorrel, changed in the ninety-third year at seven; went into the Open Dark in the hundred-and-eleventh year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line ended. Ira Acre, changed in the ninety-fourth year at twenty-four; given to the Sleeper in the thirty-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 66 living. Solomon Doane, changed in the ninety-fourth year at twenty-one; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the hundred-and-fourteenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Cecil Keel, changed in the ninety-fifth year at eight; went into the Open Dark in the fifty-first year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 36 living. Lucius Yates, changed in the ninety-fifth year at thirty-four; given to the Sleeper in the hundred-and-twenty-third year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 106 living. Micah Cade, changed in the ninety-sixth year at six; given to the Sleeper in the ninety-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 58 living. Cora Dale, changed in the ninety-seventh year at fourteen; given to the Sleeper in the eleventh year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 24 living. Isaac Ward, changed in the ninety-seventh year at seventy-five; went into the Open Dark in the twentieth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 97 living. Lottie Colter, who took the name Fulmar, changed in the ninety-seventh year at thirteen; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-seventh year of the drowning, and was not found; line ended. Wallace Nash, changed in the ninety-eighth year at thirty-nine; went into the Open Dark in the hundred-and-nineteenth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 82 living. Harrow Fenn, changed in the ninety-ninth year at nine; living, in Underlight, in the Quiet; line of 21 living. Leda Moss, changed in the ninety-ninth year at seventy-one; given to the Sleeper in the twenty-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 40 living. Zadie Hallett, changed in the ninety-ninth year at twenty-one; given to the Sleeper in the nineteenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 72 living. Agnes Sayre, changed in the hundred-and-first year at sixty; given to the Sleeper in the eighty-eighth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 12 living. Zeke Crewe, who took the name Sedge, changed in the hundred-and-first year at thirty-two; went into the Open Dark in the hundred-and-twenty-fourth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 57 living. Tad Varga, changed in the hundred-and-first year at thirty-nine; died in the Steeple Fields in the seventy-sixth year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line of 10 living. Ivy Tate, changed in the hundred-and-second year at seventy-one; died in the Steeple Fields in the forty-fourth year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line of 11 living. Percy Sorensen, changed in the hundred-and-second year at sixty-two; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the hundred-and-fourteenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 27 living. Boaz Nash, changed in the hundred-and-second year at twenty-eight; went into the Open Dark in the eighty-ninth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line ended. Odette Sorensen, changed in the hundred-and-second year at twenty-six; given to the Sleeper in the ninety-eighth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 98 living. Felix Haskell, who took the name Teal, changed in the hundred-and-second year at thirty-nine; died in the Steeple Fields in the sixty-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line of 62 living. Pilar Brisk, who took the name Hollow, changed in the hundred-and-second year at sixty-six; given to the Sleeper in the eighty-first year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 75 living. Alma Paley, changed in the hundred-and-second year at seven; went into the Open Dark in the seventy-first year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line ended. Leon Bain, changed in the hundred-and-third year at seventy-eight; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the thirty-eighth year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Percy Dale, who took the name Hollow, changed in the hundred-and-fourth year at sixty-five; given to the Sleeper in the forty-third year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 10 living. Josie Hume, changed in the hundred-and-fifth year at thirteen; given to the Sleeper in the thirty-first year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 71 living. Desmond Colter, changed in the hundred-and-fifth year at twelve; went into the Open Dark in the seventy-ninth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 90 living. Yusuf Mace, who took the name Murrel, changed in the hundred-and-sixth year at thirty-four; given to the Sleeper in the thirty-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 30 living. Joaquin Jarvis, changed in the hundred-and-sixth year at thirty-seven; went into the Open Dark in the eleventh year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 95 living. Percy Doane, changed in the hundred-and-seventh year at twenty-one; given to the Sleeper in the hundred-and-fourteenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 79 living. Thea Jarvis, changed in the hundred-and-seventh year at nine; went into the Open Dark in the seventy-first year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 18 living. Ruth Fenn, who took the name Glint, changed in the hundred-and-eighth year at fifty-nine; died in the Steeple Fields in the thirty-eighth year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line of 16 living. Vida Bramwell, changed in the hundred-and-ninth year at seven; living, a wanderer, last seen in the Neck; line of 68 living. Jasper Pike, changed in the hundred-and-ninth year at thirteen; living, in Underlight; line of 40 living. Noor Merritt, who took the name Scaup, changed in the hundred-and-ninth year at sixty-two; went into the Open Dark in the forty-eighth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line ended.

Of the gulf (sixty-one)

Sadie Acre, changed in the eighty-ninth year at fifty-nine; given to the Sleeper in the fourteenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Lars Paley, changed in the ninetieth year at seventy-two; given to the Sleeper in the thirty-second year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Vera Beck, changed in the ninetieth year at thirty-four; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the eighty-third year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 77 living. Rosalind Lowe, changed in the ninety-first year at fourteen; went into the Open Dark in the twenty-ninth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 8 living. Salome Ramos, changed in the ninety-first year at thirty-eight; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-eighth year of the drowning, and was not found; line ended. Salome Orme, changed in the ninety-first year at twelve; went into the Open Dark in the eighty-fourth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 25 living. Zora Wade, changed in the ninety-first year at thirteen; given to the Sleeper in the eleventh year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 71 living. Ned Yates, changed in the ninety-first year at thirty-one; died in the Steeple Fields in the eightieth year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line of 24 living. Marah Quill, changed in the ninety-second year at thirty-one; survived the yellow in the hundred-and-fourth year of the Rise with her two children; given to the Sleeper in the sixty-first year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 78 living. Otis Ives, who took the name Plume, changed in the ninety-second year at sixty-two; given to the Sleeper in the eightieth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 10 living. Nerine, changed in the ninety-third year at twelve; living; senior farm-warden of the Sleeper; married Absalom Fenwick, Governor of Bellwether, by the hull register, by fin; one living, herself. Greta Doane, changed in the ninety-fourth year at fourteen; given to the Sleeper in the twenty-ninth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 57 living. Hal Noble, changed in the ninety-fourth year at twelve; given to the Sleeper in the forty-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Gideon Haskell, changed in the ninety-fourth year at ten; went into the Open Dark in the twenty-first year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 10 living. Ivy Tull, changed in the ninety-fifth year at thirty-six; given to the Sleeper in the hundred-and-sixth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 78 living. Edgar Doane, changed in the ninety-fifth year at twenty-five; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-ninth year of the drowning, and was not found; line of 78 living. Lucius Tate, changed in the ninety-fifth year at twenty-four; died in the Steeple Fields in the twenty-ninth year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line ended. Lemuel Nash, changed in the ninety-seventh year at sixty-seven; given to the Sleeper in the eighty-ninth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 75 living. Cora Sayre, who took the name Dunlin, changed in the ninety-seventh year at thirty-one; went into the Open Dark in the hundred-and-twenty-second year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 64 living. Pearl Gill, changed in the ninety-seventh year at five; given to the Sleeper in the twenty-second year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 47 living. Ines Abbott, changed in the ninety-seventh year at thirteen; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-fourth year of the drowning, and was not found; line of 33 living. Cleo Doane, changed in the ninety-eighth year at six; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-sixth year of the drowning, and was not found; line of 88 living. Flora Abbott, changed in the ninety-ninth year at thirteen; living, a wanderer, last seen in the Neck; line of 81 living. Wallace Sorensen, changed in the ninety-ninth year at twelve; living; farm-warden; line of 15 living. Jasper Oake, changed in the hundredth year at sixty-three; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the eighty-seventh year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 107 living. Nadia Holt, changed in the hundredth year at seventy-three; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the forty-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 16 living. Nell Alder, changed in the hundred-and-first year at sixteen; went into the Open Dark in the ninety-ninth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 101 living. Fern Haskell, who took the name Lull, changed in the hundred-and-first year at twenty-three; given to the Sleeper in the fortieth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 14 living. Lena Ferris, who took the name Reed, changed in the hundred-and-first year at fifty-five; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the hundred-and-eighteenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 9 living. Felix Dunne, changed in the hundred-and-second year at five; living, a wanderer, last seen in the Neck; line of 95 living. Birdie Gill, who took the name Fathom, changed in the hundred-and-second year at seventy-eight; went into the Open Dark in the hundred-and-second year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 9 living. Leda Ellery, changed in the hundred-and-second year at sixty-three; went into the Open Dark in the eighteenth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 37 living. Ada Delgado, changed in the hundred-and-second year at sixty-four; given to the Sleeper in the hundred-and-seventeenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Hal Paley, changed in the hundred-and-second year at five; given to the Sleeper in the hundred-and-fourth year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Greta Jarvis, changed in the hundred-and-third year at seventy-eight; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the hundred-and-fifteenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 50 living. Silas Sorensen, changed in the hundred-and-third year at five; died in the Steeple Fields in the eighty-ninth year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line of 9 living. Stella Carrow, changed in the hundred-and-third year at sixty-three; given to the Sleeper in the sixty-first year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 61 living. Zeke Thorne, changed in the hundred-and-fifth year at thirty-two; died in the Steeple Fields in the sixty-seventh year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line of 106 living. Zeke Finch, who took the name Ondine, changed in the hundred-and-fifth year at twelve; went into the Open Dark in the forty-fourth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 50 living. Birdie Rowe, changed in the hundred-and-fifth year at ten; given to the Sleeper in the seventy-ninth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 35 living. Rufus Sorensen, changed in the hundred-and-fifth year at fifty-six; died in the Steeple Fields in the forty-ninth year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line ended. Otis Pike, changed in the hundred-and-fifth year at seventy-four; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the forty-third year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 80 living. Mirabel Gill, changed in the hundred-and-fifth year at six; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-eighth year of the drowning, and was not found; line of 50 living. Pilar Varga, who took the name Fulmar, changed in the hundred-and-fifth year at twenty-six; given to the Sleeper in the fifty-sixth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 22 living. Percy Hayward, changed in the hundred-and-sixth year at twelve; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the sixty-first year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 44 living. Calvin Ives, changed in the hundred-and-sixth year at twelve; living, in the warm southern shallows; line of 101 living. Mirabel Noble, changed in the hundred-and-sixth year at twenty-six; given to the Sleeper in the fifty-first year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 84 living. Jasper Lowe, changed in the hundred-and-sixth year at fifty-seven; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the thirty-sixth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 96 living. Joaquin Shaw, who took the name Kittiwake, changed in the hundred-and-seventh year at eight; living; farm-warden; line of 47 living. Sadie Shaw, changed in the hundred-and-seventh year at thirty-five; given to the Sleeper in the sixty-fourth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 27 living. Ramona Dunne, changed in the hundred-and-seventh year at ten; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-eighth year of the drowning, and was not found; line of 83 living. Isaac Oake, changed in the hundred-and-seventh year at ten; died in the Steeple Fields in the hundred-and-twelfth year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line of 29 living. Ezra Abbott, changed in the hundred-and-eighth year at seven; given to the Sleeper in the forty-ninth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 61 living. Pilar Hallett, who took the name Drift, changed in the hundred-and-eighth year at fourteen; living, a wanderer, last seen in the Neck; line of 79 living. Ansel Larkin, who took the name Spray, changed in the hundred-and-ninth year at sixty-four; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the hundred-and-thirteenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Reuben Vos, who took the name Tamsel, changed in the hundred-and-ninth year at seventy-three; given to the Sleeper in the ninety-eighth year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Cecil Dale, changed in the hundred-and-ninth year at thirteen; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-fifth year of the drowning, and was not found; line of 105 living. Mabel Wade, changed in the hundred-and-ninth year at seven; living, a wanderer, last seen in the Neck; line of 16 living. Thea Garrow, changed in the hundred-and-ninth year at fourteen; living, in the warm southern shallows; line of 58 living. Bess Kerrigan, changed in the hundred-and-ninth year at five; given to the Sleeper in the seventy-second year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Noor Doane, changed in the hundred-and-ninth year at twenty-seven; given to the Sleeper in the forty-seventh year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 77 living.

Of the Sweet Seas (forty-eight)

Otis Holt, who took the name Bryony, changed in the ninety-first year at six; died in the Steeple Fields in the sixty-third year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line ended. Leda Crewe, changed in the ninety-second year at six; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the eighty-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 9 living. Edgar Wick, changed in the ninety-second year at sixty-six; given to the Sleeper in the eighty-seventh year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 65 living. Desmond Orme, who took the name Plume, changed in the ninety-second year at thirty-eight; given to the Sleeper in the twenty-first year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 13 living. Una Mace, changed in the ninety-second year at eleven; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the eighty-third year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 72 living. Jethro Finch, changed in the ninety-second year at thirty-three; given to the Sleeper in the fourteenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Lemuel Mace, changed in the ninety-third year at seventy-two; went into the Open Dark in the seventy-second year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 42 living. Hal Brisk, who took the name Bryony, changed in the ninety-third year at five; given to the Sleeper in the fifteenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 19 living. Micah Pruitt, changed in the ninety-third year at ten; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the forty-third year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 65 living. Ezra Okafor, who took the name Gully, changed in the ninety-third year at thirty-eight; given to the Sleeper in the forty-sixth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 51 living. Carmen Hume, changed in the ninety-fourth year at thirty-nine; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the forty-sixth year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Nell Eames, changed in the ninety-fourth year at ten; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-fifth year of the drowning, and was not found; line ended. Noor Sorensen, changed in the ninety-fourth year at nine; given to the Sleeper in the thirty-sixth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 38 living. Solomon Nash, changed in the ninety-fourth year at sixty; given to the Sleeper in the sixty-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 40 living. Noor Gentry, who took the name Teal, changed in the ninety-fourth year at seventy-nine; given to the Sleeper in the forty-fourth year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Stella Shaw, changed in the ninety-fourth year at seventy; given to the Sleeper in the eighteenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 69 living. Rufus Wade, changed in the ninety-fourth year at fifty-six; went into the Open Dark in the forty-third year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 76 living. Lucius Winslow, changed in the ninety-fifth year at thirteen; given to the Sleeper in the nineteenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Amos Hayward, changed in the ninety-fifth year at five; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the seventy-first year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 44 living. Fern Dale, who took the name Tide, changed in the ninety-fifth year at seventy-three; given to the Sleeper in the hundred-and-fifteenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 50 living. Tad Oake, changed in the ninety-fifth year at seven; died in the Steeple Fields in the sixty-second year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line of 60 living. Vida Oduya, changed in the ninety-sixth year at eight; went into the Open Dark in the twelfth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 91 living. Gideon Greer, who took the name Merle, changed in the ninety-sixth year at sixty-four; given to the Sleeper in the twenty-third year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 72 living. Amos Sorensen, changed in the ninety-sixth year at twelve; given to the Sleeper in the ninety-seventh year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 96 living. Ruth Lamb, changed in the ninety-sixth year at twenty-seven; went into the Open Dark in the seventieth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line ended. Mabel Eames, changed in the ninety-sixth year at ten; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the fifty-first year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 15 living. Leon Wick, changed in the ninety-seventh year at twenty-seven; died in the Steeple Fields in the fifty-second year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line of 20 living. Rafe Bartle, changed in the ninety-eighth year at fifty-nine; died in the Steeple Fields in the sixty-eighth year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line of 41 living. Vera Alder, changed in the ninety-eighth year at twenty-three; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-eighth year of the drowning, and was not found; line ended. Mina Larkin, who took the name Bryony, changed in the ninety-ninth year at eight; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the forty-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 76 living. Helga Tate, changed in the ninety-ninth year at sixty-six; died in the Steeple Fields in the sixteenth year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line ended. Vida Strand, changed in the ninety-ninth year at eighteen; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the hundred-and-seventeenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 102 living. Leda Acre, changed in the ninety-ninth year at eleven; died in the Steeple Fields in the fourteenth year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line of 12 living. Calvin Oake, changed in the hundredth year at eleven; died in the Steeple Fields in the forty-seventh year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line of 10 living. Delphine Oake, changed in the hundred-and-first year at seven; given to the Sleeper in the eleventh year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 17 living. Helga Nash, who took the name Fulmar, changed in the hundred-and-first year at five; given to the Sleeper in the sixty-third year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Noor Garrow, who took the name Fulmar, changed in the hundred-and-second year at twenty-four; given to the Sleeper in the forty-first year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 77 living. Dora Hallett, changed in the hundred-and-third year at fifty-eight; given to the Sleeper in the eighty-sixth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 90 living. Lars Quill, changed in the hundred-and-fourth year at thirteen; given to the Sleeper in the twenty-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 53 living. Eudora Mallory, changed in the hundred-and-fourth year at twelve; given to the Sleeper in the ninety-second year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 53 living. Cyrus Quill, changed in the hundred-and-fourth year at twenty-three; given to the Sleeper in the eighty-eighth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 71 living. Ada Gill, changed in the hundred-and-fourth year at twenty; went into the Open Dark in the twenty-seventh year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 82 living. Percy Beck, changed in the hundred-and-fifth year at seven; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the thirteenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 76 living. Lemuel Quill, changed in the hundred-and-sixth year at twenty-two; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-ninth year of the drowning, and was not found; line of 104 living. Ines Coe, changed in the hundred-and-seventh year at seven; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the seventy-sixth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 41 living. Hiram Dunne, who took the name Linnet, changed in the hundred-and-seventh year at five; given to the Sleeper in the hundred-and-twenty-second year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 26 living. Otis Bramwell, who took the name Murrel, changed in the hundred-and-eighth year at thirty-seven; given to the Sleeper in the fifty-sixth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 47 living. Cecil Mace, changed in the hundred-and-eighth year at nine; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the hundred-and-second year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 9 living.

Of the old western coast (forty-six)

Saul Pike, changed in the ninety-third year at ten; went into the Open Dark in the hundred-and-sixth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line ended. Stella Sallow, who took the name Shingle, changed in the ninety-third year at nineteen; given to the Sleeper in the hundred-and-tenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 39 living. Lena Hale, changed in the ninety-third year at sixty-one; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the sixty-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 70 living. Nell Delgado, who took the name Wicket, changed in the ninety-third year at fifty-eight; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-sixth year of the drowning, and was not found; line of 49 living. Quincy Ramos, who took the name Rorqual, changed in the ninety-third year at thirty-two; given to the Sleeper in the hundred-and-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 39 living. Boaz Beck, changed in the ninety-fourth year at seventy-eight; died in the Steeple Fields in the sixty-third year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line ended. Hiram Pike, changed in the ninety-fourth year at five; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-eighth year of the drowning, and was not found; line of 33 living. Cora Alder, who took the name Wicket, changed in the ninety-fifth year at eight; given to the Sleeper in the hundred-and-sixth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 35 living. Emmett Cade, who took the name Tamsel, changed in the ninety-fifth year at nine; went into the Open Dark in the twenty-fourth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line ended. Eudora Alder, changed in the ninety-seventh year at thirty-one; given to the Sleeper in the hundred-and-ninth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 100 living. Stella Coe, changed in the ninety-seventh year at thirteen; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-ninth year of the drowning, and was not found; line ended. Yusuf Oduya, changed in the ninety-seventh year at sixty; went into the Open Dark in the eighty-third year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 61 living. Maude Lamb, changed in the ninety-seventh year at fourteen; went into the Open Dark in the hundred-and-twelfth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 86 living. Odette Kerrigan, changed in the ninety-eighth year at fourteen; living; farm-warden; line of 41 living. Iris Yates, changed in the ninety-eighth year at thirteen; died in the Steeple Fields in the fifty-fourth year of the Up’s reckoning, exploring, and was given where they lay; line of 49 living. Winifred Ferris, who took the name Lowry, changed in the ninety-eighth year at seven; went into the Open Dark in the hundred-and-third year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line ended. Lacey Finch, changed in the ninety-eighth year at six; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the hundred-and-first year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 47 living. Elspeth Bligh, changed in the ninety-eighth year at twenty; went into the Open Dark in the sixty-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line ended. Reuben Winslow, who took the name Spray, changed in the ninety-eighth year at seven; given to the Sleeper in the ninety-first year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 39 living. Gideon Abbott, changed in the ninety-eighth year at thirteen; went into the Open Dark in the fortieth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 53 living. Marisol Goss, who took the name Eddy, changed in the ninety-ninth year at fourteen; given to the Sleeper in the forty-third year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 9 living. Anita Dace, changed in the hundredth year at nine; given to the Sleeper in the eighty-fourth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 47 living. Ira Gentry, changed in the hundred-and-first year at five; went into the Open Dark in the seventieth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 83 living. Ruth Merritt, changed in the hundred-and-first year at six; given to the Sleeper in the hundred-and-seventeenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 54 living. Dalia Okafor, changed in the hundred-and-first year at seven; living, a wanderer, last seen in the Neck; line of 65 living. Bess Bartle, changed in the hundred-and-first year at fourteen; living; farm-warden; line of 13 living. Esme Acre, who took the name Wake, changed in the hundred-and-first year at thirty; went into the Open Dark in the fifty-sixth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 35 living. Mina Keel, who took the name Selkie, changed in the hundred-and-first year at twenty-nine; given to the Sleeper in the hundred-and-seventeenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 31 living. Celia Brisk, changed in the hundred-and-second year at thirteen; given to the Sleeper in the ninety-seventh year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Solomon Sallow, who took the name Dunlin, changed in the hundred-and-second year at fourteen; living, in Underlight, in the Quiet; line of 51 living. Stella Tull, changed in the hundred-and-second year at fifty-seven; went into the Open Dark in the hundred-and-twentieth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 76 living. Lars Thorne, changed in the hundred-and-second year at fourteen; given to the Sleeper in the ninety-first year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Flora Ellery, changed in the hundred-and-third year at sixty-two; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-seventh year of the drowning, and was not found; line of 31 living. Elspeth Yates, changed in the hundred-and-third year at seven; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-sixth year of the drowning, and was not found; line of 30 living. Bess Crane, changed in the hundred-and-fourth year at nine; given to the Sleeper in the hundred-and-twentieth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 88 living. Amos Dale, who took the name Opaline, changed in the hundred-and-fourth year at eleven; living, in Underlight, in the Quiet; line of 47 living. Wallace Teague, changed in the hundred-and-fourth year at twelve; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-fourth year of the drowning, and was not found; line of 83 living. Leon Cade, changed in the hundred-and-fifth year at thirty-six; given to the Sleeper in the fifty-first year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Benedict Paley, changed in the hundred-and-fifth year at twenty-three; given to the Sleeper in the seventy-seventh year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 105 living. Osric Dale, changed in the hundred-and-eighth year at seven; living; farm-warden; the youngest of the changed; line of 50 living. June Fosse, changed in the hundred-and-eighth year at seventy-four; given to the Sleeper in the hundred-and-first year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Beatrix Gill, who took the name Petrel, changed in the hundred-and-eighth year at five; given to the Sleeper in the seventy-second year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 15 living. Hephzibah Rowe, changed in the hundred-and-ninth year at seventy; the last of the changed, who walked into the sea at sunset to see what would happen; given to the Sleeper in the twenty-fifth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 68 living. Rosalind Tull, who took the name Pebble, changed in the hundred-and-ninth year at twenty-eight; given to the Sleeper in the hundred-and-fourth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 88 living. Leon Hallett, who took the name Shoal, changed in the hundred-and-ninth year at nine; went into the Open Dark in the hundred-and-sixteenth year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 88 living. Greta Holt, changed in the hundred-and-ninth year at thirteen; went into the Open Dark in the thirty-seventh year of the Up’s reckoning and has not returned; line of 20 living.

Of the northern lakes (seven)

Ivy Haskell, changed in the ninety-fifth year at sixty-one; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-fifth year of the drowning, and was not found; line of 94 living. Eudora Tate, changed in the hundredth year at seventy-two; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the hundred-and-eighteenth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 80 living. Mirabel Dunne, changed in the hundred-and-second year at twenty-four; lived in the warm southern shallows and was given to the sea there in the eighty-second year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 41 living. Ned Abbott, changed in the hundred-and-third year at eleven; given to the Sleeper in the seventieth year of the Up’s reckoning; line ended. Birdie Gentry, changed in the hundred-and-fourth year at thirty-five; died in the Going Down, in the hundred-and-fourth year of the drowning, and was not found; line ended. Nell Oake, who took the name Ondine, changed in the hundred-and-fourth year at fourteen; given to the Sleeper in the eighty-eighth year of the Up’s reckoning; line of 28 living. Kit Mace, changed in the hundred-and-sixth year at five; living; farm-warden; line of 60 living.

The Land-Children (fourteen)

Born to one of the people of the water and one of the land, in the Sweet Seas years, in the wells of the floating cities. Of the land; ours also.

Ilse Fenwick, of Bellwether, born in the Governor’s well in the hundred-and-eighth year of the drowning, to Nerine and Absalom Fenwick; hydrologist; Scientific Governor of Mammoth; built the five dams across the strait so that her mother could come home; died in the hundred-and-fourth year of the Up’s reckoning, at a hundred and seven, in the shallows; her son Josef Adair, of the land, died in the hundred-and-thirty-first year at a hundred and eight; no line living in the water, and her water living in the strait. Asa Goss, of Second Harbor, became a diver at Second Harbor and was the best on the water; died ashore in the fiftieth year. Stella Coe, of Ninefold, grew up on the land at Tenth Landing, fished all her life, and swam farther than anyone in Ninth Province; died in the seventy-seventh year. Ira Orme, of Bellwether, became a midwife at Meridian; is said to have delivered more children in the water than any midwife in Ozarka, which she did not explain. Hattie Dunne, of Hesperine, became a gardener on the terraces of Third Province and never went near the water again; died in the sixty-eighth year. Nadia Moss, of Larkspur, was a foundling of Larkspur, raised in a hull dormitory, and became a matron of the Cradle at Meridian; died in the eighty-ninth year. Elspeth Ramos, of Saint Anselm, was born on the hospital ship and raised by the nuns; became a surgeon; died in the sixty-fifth year. Cecil Acre, of Coldharbor, went into the Reserve Service and kept the northern lakes; is said to have been seen swimming among the islands in winter; died in the eighty-third year. Pearl Reyes, of Second Harbor, built boats at Second Harbor; his grandchildren still check the wind before speaking and webbed toes run in the family. Virgil Mace, of Ninefold, lost at sea from Ninefold’s fleet in the second year, a child of six; the people of the water looked for him and did not find him. Ansel Sallow, of Pelican Steps, came ashore with Assurance; was the fastest with a mask in Seventh Province; died in the seventy-first year. Ada Merritt, of Bellwether, was sent east with Greenhaven in the eighth year of the Up’s reckoning; not heard of since the fourteenth. Dinah Strand, of Wickerwork, came ashore with Wickerwork at Saltgrass; the land does not record her after the forty-sixth year; the people of the water are told that she and three hundred others walked across the shallows one night, and that she was calm. Quincy Teague, of Tumbledown, rode the Ferris wheel of Tumbledown every day as a child and became a rigger; died in the fifty-seventh year.

The People of Thalassa

The thirty-seven brought out of the yellow on the white ship of Seaborne in the twelfth year of the Up’s reckoning, from Seaborne’s hull register, which the white ship kept: Kit Vance; Hazel Lund; Thea Bramwell; Dora Hume; Joaquin Sallow; Cora Orme; Cecil Fenn; Ada Coe; Ansel Lowe; Ines Cade; Salome Hale; Isaac Haskell; Dinah Ward; Isaac Kerrigan; Agnes Crane; Ned Wick; Hazel Bartle; Selma Oduya; Agnes Keel; Beatrix Delgado; Una Hallett; Ned Jessup; Salome Wick; Orrin Oduya; Benedict Goss; Ursula Kerrigan; Albert Haskell; Lars Ellery; Dora Winslow; Sadie Sorensen; Noor Okafor; Edie Wade; Hattie Bramwell; Ira Ward; Alma Dace; Winifred Reyes; Barnabas Coe, carpenter.

The sixty-three living on the rafts of Thalassa in the hundred-and-thirty-second year, their descendants: Obadiah Fenn; Selma Orme; Ezra Lund; Orrin Wick; Isaac Reyes; Leda Dace; Rafe Coe; Orrin Coe; Tad Bramwell; Ruth Ward; Josie Lowe; Ursula Hume; Imelda Lowe; Dinah Vance; Hollis Coe; Eudora Lowe; Greta Bramwell; Dalia Crane; Jethro Bramwell; Hattie Oduya; Saul Wick; Enid Vance; Reuben Haskell; Selma Bramwell; Esme Hale; Obadiah Lowe; Ivy Bramwell; Kit Oduya; Nell Bramwell; Calvin Haskell; Orrin Kerrigan; Hazel Goss; Calvin Bramwell; Mirabel Coe; Tad Okafor; Nell Winslow; June Vance; Percy Oduya; Zeke Bramwell; Quincy Haskell; Leon Crane; Salome Orme; Leon Delgado; Fern Oduya; Lacey Ward; Fern Coe; Enid Okafor; Marisol Reyes; Lars Wick; Greta Crane; Thaddeus Goss; Zora Coe; Cyrus Goss; Mina Oduya; Lottie Bramwell; Boaz Hume; Lars Lowe; Nico Wick; Saul Wick; Mabel Crane; Elspeth Keel; Ezra Kerrigan; Bess Kerrigan. They are a floating city of three or more persons. They are still afloat.

The Race Folk (thirty-four)

Pell of the Races; Linnet of the Races; Brisa of the Shallows, one of the Eleven; Wrack of the Races; Nacre of the Races; Eddy of the Races; Drift of the Races; Tide of the Races; Coral of the Races; Teal of the Races; Rill of the Races; Wake of the Races; Sable of the Races; Coral of the Races; Pebble of the Races; Scaup of the Races; Petrel of the Races; Selkie of the Races; Shingle of the Races; Hollow of the Races; Merle of the Races; Murrel of the Races; Swell of the Races; Ebb of the Races; Pipit of the Races; Petrel of the Races; Pell of the Races; Opaline of the Races; Nacre of the Races; Coral of the Races; Selkie of the Races; Sill of the Races; Glint of the Races; Petrel of the Races. Of the Eleven who went north with Nerine in the fifty-eighth year, four are living. The rest were given to the strait, at the mouth of the fifth race, at their own asking, so that they could stay.

The Wanderers (forty)

Merle Strand; Scaup Quill; Linnet Haskell; Kelpie Rook; Tamsel Mallory; Pipit Colter; Wake Haskell; Haze Crane; Coral Goss; Nacre Keel; Skerry Yates; Reed Reyes; Lull Crewe; Shingle Larkin; Pell Strand; Petrel Merritt; Fennel Abbott; Kelpie Holt; Murrel Mallory; Murrel Dace; Cove Crane; Wicket Brisk; Wake Ward; Swell Varga; Tern Crane; Merle Brisk; Haze Larkin; Brine Hale; Pell Goss; Shoal Gill; Opaline Bramwell; Pell Bartle; Pell Pike; Gannet Abbott; Ripple Nash; Fennel Hallett; Selkie Colter; Wicket Varga; Teal Dale; Swell Lund. Last reported, variously, in the Neck, the Open Dark, the Steeple Fields of the old eastern coast, beneath She, and, in one case, at the edge of the place in the south-west where the Ceiling burns at night. We keep their names. They know where we are.

That is everyone. Nine thousand three hundred and eighty-eight of the people of the water, living; four thousand and sixty-one dead; two hundred and fourteen changed; fourteen land-children; sixty-three of Thalassa. Counted in Underlight by the keepers of the lines, and written by Teague, Keeper of the Borrowed Books, in the hundred-and-thirty-second year of the Up’s reckoning.

Keep it dry.

Book Six: The Speaking

An account of the Eighthmonth and Ninthmonth of Year 184, kept by Abena Ohene, archivist of the Academy at New Carthage, at the request of the Chair

A Note Before the Account

The Chair of the Academy asked me in the last week of Ninthmonth to write down what I had seen, in order, while I still remembered the order. She said the Academy had a register for things that happen and do not explain themselves, and that this was the other kind, and that the other kind needed a witness who was not a Chair. I said I was sixty-three and had spent my life cataloguing other people’s measurements. She said that was the qualification.

I have used my own notes, made at the time in the small gray books the Academy issues to its archivists, which I have kept since I was twenty-four. I have used the sounding log of the Bureau vessel Plummet, which her master lent me, and his own account, which he gave me over two evenings in a public house in the Low Quarter and which I have set down in his words as nearly as I could. I have used the minutes of the four Chairs for the eleven days they sat, which are Standing, and which the Chairs voted, on the last of those days, to release to this account and to no other document. I have used the Readers’ book, which I did not know existed until the last night of Eighthmonth, by leave of the woman who keeps it.

Where I give a document, I give it whole. Where I give a conversation, I give it as I wrote it down that night. Where I give my own opinion, I mark it as mine, and the reader may skip it, as a better keeper of records than I once wrote in the preface to a book about boats.

The account begins in Year 155, because that is where I begin, and it ends on the night the Evening ran long.

I. The Nine Pages

In the spring of Year 155 the Academy asked me to make an index of the register of Allowances.

It was not a large task, as the Academy’s tasks go. The register then contained four hundred entries, each in the fixed form of five fields, and the readers who used it had complained for some years that it could be searched only by number, which is the order of admission, and that a scholar who wanted every Allowance touching water, or every Allowance in the Twelfth Province, or every Allowance admitted in a decade, had to read the whole of it. I was thirty-four. I had been an archivist for ten years and had indexed the Bureau’s tide tables for the years 90 to 130, which nobody reads, and the Office’s removal schedules for the Whitekiln quarries, which nobody reads either. I was considered patient. I was given a desk in the long room on the third floor of the Academy, under the green glass roof, and a lamp, and the four hundred entries, and a year.

I made the index in eight months. It has seven headings: by element, by province, by decade of admission, by the instrument that confirmed the repetitions, by the excluded causes, by the length of the entry, and by the readers who had asked for it. The last heading was my own idea, and the Academy removed it before printing, on the grounds that it told a reader too much about other readers. The other six are in the bound index on the shelf beside the register, where they have been for twenty-nine years, and I am told they are useful.

While I was making it I kept a second list in the back of my gray book. It had no heading. It had four hundred lines, one for each entry, and on each line a single word, and the word was either none or the name of the person who had been harmed.

I did not set out to make it. I set out to make an index by excluded cause, and to do that I read the fourth field of every entry, which records the causes the Academy has ruled out, and in the fourth field the Academy is thorough. It rules out instrument error and fraud and the observer’s expectation. It rules out weather, seepage, settling, and the work of animals. And where a phenomenon touched a person, it rules out, in the house style, the person’s own account of it, so that the fourth field of entry 377, which is a spring in a hill town in Applewall that runs two degrees warm in winter, records that the laundresses’ testimony to the spring’s warmth has been excluded as a cause of the measured warmth. I laughed at that, alone, under the green glass. Then I read the rest of the fourth fields more slowly, and on the line for 377, in the back of my book, I wrote none.

By the summer I had written none two hundred times. By the autumn I had written it three hundred and ninety-one times. I went back over the nine I had left blank, because they were the ones I could not decide, and read every repetition in their third fields, and every survey and every letter in the Academy’s files that touched them, and at the end of Eleventhmonth I wrote none nine more times, and closed the book, and sat under the roof until the lamplighter came.

Four hundred entries. Not one of them had harmed anybody.

I wrote nine pages about it in the next week. I proposed nothing in them. I am an archivist and I know what the Academy does with proposals, which is to admit them, eventually, as entries, and then to rule out their author as a cause. I presented the count, and the method, and the four hundred lines, and a short discussion of what the count did not include, which was the Rise itself, since the Rise is not in the register. The Rise propagated. It was weather, and weather is lawful, and it fails the fourth test. The Allowances do not fail it. They stay where they are, and what they do there is kind, or it is nothing.

At the end of the ninth page I wrote one sentence that was not part of the method. I wrote it because the pages looked unfinished without it and because it was what I believed. I have been quoted on it since by people who have never read the other nine pages, which is the fate of a sentence that comes last.

A world that only ever errs in our favor is not a world that errs.

I gave the nine pages to the Chair of the day, who was not Ruth-Ann Calloway but the Chair before her, a quiet man named Teodor Vance who grew tomatoes in a frame on the Academy roof. He read them at his desk while I waited. Then he wrote the date of receipt on the first page, and nothing else, and put them in the Academy’s internal file, uncirculated, and thanked me, and asked whether the index would be finished by the new year. I said it would. It was.

I record what happened next because it is the reason the Chair chose me, and because I have been asked about it so often that I would like to answer once in writing.

Nothing happened next.

I was not dismissed. I was not promoted. I was not asked to withdraw the pages or to explain them. I went on making indexes, and was made senior archivist at forty-one, and keeper of the register at fifty, which is the post I have now. My pages stayed in the internal file. About once a year a young reader of the Academy found them, as young readers find everything in that file, and came to my desk, and asked me what I had meant by the last sentence, and I told them that I had meant exactly what it said, and they went away looking either relieved or frightened, and I could never predict which.

Teodor Vance told me, a year before he died, that the four Chairs had read my pages in the spring of Year 156, in the Hall of the Instrument, together, which they do with very few documents. He said they had read them twice. He said the Chair of the Office had asked whether I could be trusted, and that he, Vance, had said I could be trusted to count. He said that afterward the Chair of the Interior had said something to the others that he did not repeat to me, and that it had been decided to do nothing, and that this was the right decision, and that I should not ask him what the something was. I did not ask him. I have wondered for twenty-eight years. I now know, and I will give it in its place.

I want the reader to understand what doing nothing is like, in a nation like ours, for twenty-nine years.

It is pleasant. That is the first thing. My life has been very pleasant. I live in two rooms on the east bank above a printer’s shop, with a window that looks across the river at the furnaces of the Low Quarter, and in the evening I can see the green pour at the glassworks lighting the underside of the smoke. I have a sister in Meridian with four children who write to me at Firstmonth. I walk to the Academy across the second bridge every morning, and every evening at a quarter past seven I stop wherever I am and listen to the Evening, as everyone does, and the Reader gives the river at nine gauges, and the sea stands at the mark, and I go home and make supper. I was good at my work and the work was good. I have been happy most of my life. I would like that on the record before what follows, because what follows might make a reader think otherwise.

The second thing is that the count did not go away. It is still the shape of everything I look at. When I walk across the second bridge and look downriver at the current running west at four knots against every gradient the old surveys recorded, I think: none. When I hear the Bureau’s crews on the Tennessee Water named in the Notices, I think of the hundred and ninety Allowances I indexed under water and the nine I could not at first decide, and of the eleven new ones admitted every four or five years since, which I have read as they came in, and of the line I add in the back of my current gray book each time, which has always been the same word. There are four hundred and eleven entries now. I have four hundred and eleven lines. I have been, for twenty-nine years, the only person in the nation who has kept that list, and I have kept it because nobody asked me to stop, and because it was true, and because I could not find anyone to give it to.

I mean that last part exactly. I could not find anyone to give it to. The Academy had received it. The Chairs had read it twice. The nation had my last sentence on the back of the occasional pamphlet and in the margins of the occasional student’s copybook, without the rest. Nobody had answered it, and I had come, over the years, to understand that an answer was the thing I had wanted, and that it was a childish thing to want from a world, and I had mostly stopped wanting it.

Mostly. On clear evenings in the summer I used to take the western rail to the Spill, once a year, on my holiday, and stand at the rail on the north lip with the four thousand pilgrims who are not called pilgrims, and look west into the haze where the Isles stand up green with the snow on them, a hundred and forty miles off, too clear for the air, and I used to say the sentence to them. Under my breath, at the rail, with the river roaring off the edge of the country and nobody able to hear anything. I am not a fanciful woman. I did it every year for twenty-eight years. I did not expect them to answer, and they never did, and I went home on the morning train.

On the twenty-second of Eighthmonth, Year 184, at about ten in the morning, a messenger from the Chair’s office came up to the long room on the third floor and stood beside my desk until I looked up.

I knew the messenger. He was a boy of nineteen named Petrus who ran the Chair’s errands and wanted to be an archivist and was going to be a very bad one, because he could not keep still. He was keeping still. He said that the Chair wished to see me at once, in her rooms, and that I was to bring my gray book, and that I was to bring the other one.

I asked him which other one.

He said, “She said you’d know.”

I took the book from my drawer that I have kept since Year 155, which is the eleventh of its line, the first ten having filled, and which has the four hundred and eleven lines in the back of it. I went down two floors behind Petrus to the Chair’s rooms, which look over the Academy’s courtyard and the plane trees and, beyond the roofs, the dome of the Hall of the Instrument. Ruth-Ann Calloway was standing at her window with her back to the room. She is a tall woman of seventy, very straight, with white hair cut short and a voice that reaches the back of a lecture hall without effort, and she has been Chair of the Academy for three years and was its deputy for fourteen before that, and has never, in my experience, stood at a window doing nothing. She turned when I came in. She had a paper in her hand, a single sheet, folded. She did not give it to me.

She said, “Ohene. How long have you kept the list?”

I said twenty-nine years in Eleventhmonth.

She said, “Is it current?”

I said it was. I said the last line was for entry 411, admitted in Fourthmonth, a small matter in the Greens concerning the flowering of a mangrove on an island that should not be warm enough to flower it, and that the line said none, like the others.

She said, “Good.” She looked at the folded paper. Then she said, “I have to go across the river tonight. To the Hall. There will be the four of us, and the Bureau’s master of the Plummet, who is coming in on the afternoon train from the Cliff with something he took off the shelf at Sixty-Two last week, and there will be you.”

I asked why me.

The Chair said, “Because it asked for you.”

I said, I believe, nothing, for long enough that Petrus, by the door, shifted his feet.

The Chair said, “I don’t know what it is. Hollis Penn’s master on the Plummet took the canister off the post on the nineteenth, and there was writing on the outside of it this year, which there never is. The master copied it and wired it to Penn, and Penn wired it to the four of us that same night. I have spent three nights deciding whether to send for you, which you may count against me if you like.” She put the folded sheet in my hand. “This is what it says. I’m told it’s the same hand as the label on the post, which none of the four of us has seen with our own eyes, since the post is a hundred and forty feet under water on a grain elevator, but Penn has photographs of the label from the Year 72 sounding, and Penn says it’s the same. I’ll take his word. He’s an engineer and he never says anything twice.”

I unfolded it. It was a Bureau telegraph form, the yellow kind, with the copy in the clerk’s capitals.

FOR THE FOUR CHAIRS. TO BE OPENED IN THE HALL. PLEASE ASK THE ARCHIVIST WHO COUNTED TO BE PRESENT. SHE HAS WAITED.

I have been asked since what I felt. I will try to give it accurately, since I am an archivist.

I felt that I had been caught at something. That was first, and it lasted about a minute. It was the feeling of a child who has been writing in the margin of a schoolbook and looks up to find the teacher reading over her shoulder, and it was very strong, and I was ashamed of it afterward, since I had done nothing wrong. Then it went, and what came after it I can only describe by saying that for twenty-nine years I had been speaking a sentence across a hundred and forty miles of air at the rail of the Spill, once a year, quietly, and had grown used to the silence afterward, and somewhere in my body I had believed the silence was the answer. The yellow form in my hand said it had not been.

She has waited.

I said to the Chair that I did not know what I would be for, in the Hall. I said I was not Standing. I said I had never taken the oath and had never read the third and fourth chapters of any edition of the History and did not want, at sixty-three, to begin.

The Chair said, “You’ll take the oath this afternoon. In this room. I’ll give it. It’s eleven sentences and you’ll say them after me, and then you’ll have read the third and fourth chapters of the eighth edition before the train comes in, because I’m going to give you my copy, and you read faster than anyone I know.” She went to her desk and took from the drawer a book bound in gray cloth with a number stamped on its spine in black. It was not thick. “Number six. Mine since Year 167. Don’t write in it.”

I said I would not.

She said, “Somebody always does. Colonel Adair wrote in his, I’m told, and the Section had to decide whether to pulp it when it came back. They didn’t. It’s in the east bank archive with the others, with his pencil in it, and the Section reads it at the end of every year for what it calls instruction.” She put the book in my hands. “Read the fourth chapter last. It’s shorter. And Ohene.”

I said yes.

She said, “I don’t know what’s in the canister either. I want that clear. I’ve sat in that Hall four times for a canister, in Year 170 as the Academy’s deputy and three times as Chair for an empty one, and I know what the Figure looks like when it comes and I know what an empty canister sounds like when Penn opens it, which is like nothing. This has writing on it. I’ve never seen that. Nobody has. Penn says the Year 72 label is the only other writing that’s ever come off the post.” She sat down at her desk, which I had never seen her do while a visitor stood, and put her hands flat on it. “Whatever it is, it knows your name. That makes you part of it, I suppose. It makes you part of it more than me, and I’m the Chair, and I’ll admit I don’t care for the feeling.”

I took the oath at two in the afternoon, in the Chair’s rooms, with Petrus as witness, since an oath under the sixth article needs one. It is eleven sentences. I am permitted to say that much about it. I said them after her, one at a time, standing, with my hand on the gray book, and when I had finished she wrote the date and the hour on a card and signed it and gave it to Petrus to take to the Office, where my line in the register would be marked with the Standing sign before the end of the day. Then she went out, and I sat down in her chair at the window, under the plane trees, and read the third chapter of the eighth edition of the History of Ozarka, and then the fourth.

I will not describe them. They are printed elsewhere in this collection, with the Colonel’s pencil notes, and the reader may judge them for herself. I will say only that by the time I closed the book the light in the courtyard had gone long and gold through the plane leaves, and that I understood for the first time what the Chair of the Interior had said to the other Chairs in Year 156 after reading my nine pages, because I had just read the paragraph she must have been thinking of. It is in the fourth chapter, in the section on the residents from elsewhere, and it says that the Bureau has no record of their form, their number, or their purpose.

I had a record of their purpose. I had written it nine pages long, and the Academy had filed it.

At six o’clock Petrus came to say the Chair’s car was in the courtyard and that the train from the Cliff was in.

II. Sixty-Two

The account of Edmund Corrigan, master of the Bureau sounding vessel Plummet, western section, given to the writer in two evenings at the Lamplighter’s in the Low Quarter in the last week of Ninthmonth, and set down in his words. The extracts from the vessel’s log are his and are marked.

You want it from the start, so I’ll give you the start, which is that I’ve been on the Plummet nineteen years and her master for six, and before that I was on the Lead and the Fathom under old Kessler, and before that I was a boy in Threshold listening to my grandfather talk about tunnels. So I’m western section all through. You’ll know what that means if you’ve read the Standing chapters, which I gather you have now, and if you haven’t I’ll tell you. It means we go out past where the public charts stop drawing, to the ninety-mile line, and we sound the shelf, every year, from the Cliff to the line and from the northern reach to the southern, and we write down what’s down there to the inch, and once a year in Eighthmonth, when it’s calm, we go to Sixty-Two.

Everybody in the western section knows about Sixty-Two. Nobody outside it does, except the Chairs. That’s the whole of our oath, near enough. Not the depths. The depths are printed. The post.

I’ll tell you what it looks like, because you’ll not see it.

At sixty-two miles out from the Spill, bearing a touch north of west, the Register has a town. It’s a county seat of the old grain country. The Register calls it Shelf Town 1140 and gives it a courthouse, a rail depot, a water tower and three elevators, and the deepest of the three elevators stands in six hundred and forty feet of water with its headhouse two hundred feet up off the old street, so the top of it is four hundred and forty feet under you when you’re sitting over it. That’s still too deep for any diver in the nation. On the top of that elevator, on the roof of the headhouse, there’s a ring of steel bolted into the concrete that the old builders didn’t put there, and from the ring a cable comes up, and at a hundred and forty feet under the surface the cable ends in a float. The float’s about the size of a beer barrel. It rides there all year, under the weather, steady as a church. Hanging off the bottom of the float, in a cradle, is the canister.

We go out in Eighthmonth because Eighthmonth is calm, which is what the Academy said in Year 160 and is true. We sit over the town. We drop the grapple on a wire, a long four-pronged thing that Kessler had made at Endeavor, and we drag for the cable, and when we have it we bring the float up to the rail, slowly, and the bosun unclips the canister from the cradle with gloves on, and I sign for it in the log, and it goes in a box with a Bureau seal, and the float goes back down. That’s it. It takes about four hours on a good day. Then we take the box to the Cliff and the box goes by rail to the capital with me sitting next to it, and I hand it to the Chair of the Bureau, and he signs for it, and I go and get drunk in the Low Quarter, which is the tradition, and Penn knows it and pays.

Most years it’s empty. You’ll know that. I’ve grappled it six times as master and eleven as mate and it’s been empty every one, and we know it’s empty because it’s light. You get so you know the weight of nothing. The canister’s brass, or something like brass, about the size of a man’s forearm, sealed at both ends with no seam you can find, and empty it weighs about what a good loaf weighs, and you take it off the cradle and hand it to the bosun and the bosun puts it in the box and everybody on deck goes back to breathing.

My grandfather was on the Plummet in Year 109 as a guest. He’d been a Plague Watch captain twenty years by then and he had friends in the Bureau because of something that happened when he was a boy that he won’t tell even me. He told me the canister was heavy that year. He said Kessler’s master, who was old Rook then, picked it up off the cradle and stood there with it, and everybody on deck stood there with him, and nobody said anything, and Rook put it in the box. And in Ninthmonth the Office cut the Figure. And my grandfather says that Rook drank for a week in the Low Quarter, and that Penn’s predecessor didn’t pay for that one, because he was drinking too.

So that’s how we know. When it’s heavy, there’s a page in it.

From the log of the Plummet, Year 184.

18 Eighthmonth. Out of Rand’s Notch at first light, wind light S, sea slight. Crew of nine and the master. Sounding run 7 to the line at 31° and back along 30°. Depths as Register throughout. Cutter Halyard in company to the south. Hove to at dusk mile 58. Clear. The Isles very bright.

19 Eighthmonth. Moved to station Sixty-Two at 0600. Grapple down 0710. Cable taken 0938. Float raised 1052. Canister unclipped 1104 by the bosun, Abel Strand, and passed to the master.

Canister heavy.

Canister bears writing.

Copied by the master. Transmitted to Chair Penn from the Notch by wire 2140. Canister boxed and sealed under Bureau seal 1131 and kept in the master’s cabin. Float returned 1210. Under way for the Notch 1300.

Remarks. At 1650 the cook and two hands report a light low over the water to the west, about mile 95 by the master’s estimate, at the edge of the yellow. Master observed it. Pale. Moving north at speed. Not recorded by the vessel’s plate camera, which was exposed four times. Not seen by the cutter. Logged as seen.

I’ll tell you about the weight first, because you asked.

It was heavier than I’ve ever felt it. Heavier than my grandfather said it was in 109. Abel Strand, who’s been my bosun since Year 178 and has bad knees and a worse temper, went to unclip it from the cradle the way he does, quick, one hand, already turning to pass it to me, and it pulled his arm down, and he swore, and nearly dropped it on the deck. Then he got his other hand under it and stood there with it in both hands like a man who’s been handed a baby by a stranger. And he looked at me.

And I could see the writing. It was on the side of the canister, running round it, in black, very neat, upright letters, the kind a schoolteacher does on a board when she wants the back row to read it. It wasn’t painted. I looked at it afterward with a glass in my cabin and it wasn’t painted or scratched or burned. It was in the metal. As if the metal had grown that way.

I took it off Abel and read it. I’ll say it was heavy, because it was. About as heavy as a full bucket. More than a page. I’ve thought since that it was about as heavy as eleven pages, or a few more, which is a daft thing to know, but I’ve had a lot of time to think about it.

FOR THE FOUR CHAIRS. TO BE OPENED IN THE HALL. PLEASE ASK THE ARCHIVIST WHO COUNTED TO BE PRESENT. SHE HAS WAITED.

I’d never seen the writing on the label of the post. That’s Penn’s photographs, from Year 72, and they’re in a Standing file, and a master of the western section doesn’t see them. But I knew it was the same hand. Ask me how and I couldn’t tell you. You get a feeling for a hand.

And here’s the thing I’ll tell you that I haven’t told Penn, because Penn would have to put it in a report.

It was warm.

The water at a hundred and forty feet over Shelf Town 1140 in Eighthmonth runs about fifty-one degrees. I’ve measured it seventeen times. A brass canister that’s been hanging at that depth for a year comes up cold, and wet, and you feel the cold come right through your gloves. This one came up dry. Abel had his gloves on and so did I. I took a glove off. It was warm the way a stone’s warm on a wall in the evening after a day of sun. Not hot. Warm. As if somebody had had it in their hands for a while before they put it in the cradle.

So I put my glove back on and put it in the box and sealed the box and signed the log, and I wrote canister heavy, and canister bears writing, and I didn’t write canister warm, because I couldn’t think of a way to write it that a Bureau inspector wouldn’t ask me about. And then I went to the rail and was sick over the side, which I haven’t been since I was nineteen and on the Fathom in a southerly, and the whole crew looked away very politely, and then the cook brought me tea.

You want to know about the light.

It was about ten to five in the afternoon. We were under way east for the Notch with the box in my cabin and the wind gone round to the west behind us, and the sun was coming down over the Isles on the starboard quarter, and they were as bright as I’ve seen them. You’ll have seen them from the Spill. From mile sixty they’re more. They come up out of the haze over the stern like a wall with snow on it and you can see the valleys and the color of the water in the sounds, and the crew don’t look, mostly. You get so you don’t look. It’s like living next to a church bell.

Old Mags, the cook, came up from the galley to throw the scraps and stopped at the rail and said, “Master.”

I went aft. And there it was, low over the water to the west, a long way off. About mile ninety-five, I’d say, which is past the line, and right at the edge of the yellow, where the gas starts. You can’t see the yellow from the Cliff. It’s under the horizon. From mile sixty you can, on a clear day, if you know where to look: a kind of dull smear right down on the water, gold, like a dirty brass rail. And above the smear, moving, there was a light.

It was pale. Not white exactly. The color of the inside of a shell. About as big, at that distance, as your thumbnail at arm’s length, and long, and flat. It went north along the edge of the gas fast, faster than any vessel in the nation, faster than the Bureau’s aeroplanes when they were flying, and it made no wake on the water and no sound, and there was a kind of shimmer to it that I’d call veins, if anyone asked me, like you see in a leaf against a lamp.

I sent the third hand down for the plate camera. We’ve had one aboard since Year 109, by order, for the Isles. She took four plates of it. I watched her do it. She had it in the finder all four times.

The plates came back from the Bureau’s darkroom at the Notch on the morning of the twentieth. They show the sea, and the edge of the yellow, which shows up on the plate better than to the eye, and the haze, and the Isles behind as that faint blue ghost the plates always give. And nothing else. No light at all.

I’ll tell you what my grandfather said when I told him. I took the western rail up to Threshold that same afternoon to see him before I came down to the capital, because I’d been told by wire I’d be needed in the Hall, and a master of the western section who’s going into the Hall of the Instrument at night with four Chairs and a canister likes to see his grandfather first. He’s eighty-seven. He sits on the porch of the house on the ridge at Threshold where you can feel the hum come up through the boards in the evening, and he’s got the dog he got from Toby Marsh’s dog’s line, the gray one with the eyes, asleep on his feet. I told him about the canister, the writing, the weight, the warmth. He nodded at all of it. He wasn’t surprised by any of it, which I’d expected, because he’s never been surprised by anything I can remember. Then I told him about the light over the gas, and the plates.

He sat for a while. Then he said, “Was it shaped like a leaf?”

I said it was.

He said, “Then she’s still about,” and laughed, and didn’t explain. And when I asked him who, he said, “Ask Ansel,” and went to sleep in his chair.

I don’t know any Ansel. I’ve since found out. That’s in your book further on, I expect.

I brought the box down to the capital on the night train of the twenty-first, alone in a Bureau compartment with the box on the seat beside me under its seal, and the blind down. I didn’t sleep. Nobody sleeps on that train. You listen to the rails all the way down the gouge, and the river going alongside you on your right in the dark at four knots the wrong way, and you think about what’s in the box, and you think about the Figure, and about Year 170, which I remember. I was twenty-six. My sister was waiting for a license that year with her husband in Plenty, and the Figure came down in Ninthmonth, and her wait went from four months to three years, and she had her first girl when she was thirty-four instead of thirty-one. That girl’s eleven now. My sister doesn’t know where the number came from. I’ve never told her, because of the oath, and because I didn’t know myself, not really. I knew it came off the post. I didn’t know who put it on.

I thought about that all the way down. That this time I might be bringing three more years to somebody’s sister.

And I thought about the warm.

The train came in at the east bank at a quarter past five the next afternoon, the twenty-second, and Penn’s car was waiting, and Penn was in it, which he never is. Hollis Penn’s seventy-four and he’s been Chair of the Bureau eleven years and he was western section himself before that, master of the Lead when I was a boy on the Fathom. He’s a big slow man with burned hands from a boiler at Endeavor forty years ago, and he drinks, and he’s the best engineer the Bureau ever had, and everybody in the western section would walk into the yellow for him, which is a figure of speech, but not much of one. He took the box off me himself and put it on his knees.

He said, “Heavy.”

I said yes, sir.

He said, “Warm?”

I looked at him. He said, “Your face, Corrigan. You were sick, weren’t you. Over the side.” He put his burned hand flat on the lid of the box. “I was sick in Year 141. I was mate under Rook’s son. I picked it up off the cradle and it was warm and I was sick over the rail and I never put it in the log.” He was quiet. Then he said, “It’s never had writing on it. Not once. The Figure’s on the page, inside. Never on the outside.”

I asked him what he thought it was.

He said, “I think somebody’s tired of sending numbers.” And he had the driver take us across the second bridge to the Hall.

III. The Hall of the Instrument

The Hall of the Instrument stands at the top of the east bank, above the broadcast house and the archive, on the highest ground in the capital, and at night it is closed.

I had been in it by day perhaps thirty times in my life, as every citizen of the capital has: on school visits, and with my sister’s children, and once with a delegation of Academy readers from the Greens who wanted to see the preamble before they went home. By day it is full of children. They walk round the glass case in the middle of the floor in lines, hand in hand, two by two, and their teachers stop them at the head of the case and they say the preamble together, all the lines of schoolchildren in the Hall saying it a little out of step, so that the sentence goes round the dome several times before it dies. We have survived the old world, and we will not repeat it. The dome is white limestone. The light comes in green through cullet glass at the top, from a ring of windows round the lantern, and in the afternoon it falls on the case and the instrument inside it and makes the old paper look like the bottom of a river.

At night there is no light in the lantern. The Chair’s car let us out at the east door, which I had never seen open, and a clerk of the Interior with a lamp let us in and took us across the floor, and the floor was dark, and our steps went up into the dome and came back down to us late. In the middle of the floor the case had a single electric lamp burning beside it on a stand, so that the instrument lay in a small yellow pool with darkness all round it. A table had been set beside the case. It was a plain table of the kind the Academy uses in its reading rooms, with six chairs round it, and on it were two things: a box under a Bureau seal, and a case of dark wood about the size of a ledger, closed, with a brass lock.

The Chairs were already there. I had met three of them before, on public occasions, and had shaken their hands. I had never seen them together, and I had never seen them at night, and I will describe them as I saw them then, because I came to know them well over the next eleven days, and the reader should meet them as I did.

Hollis Penn of the Bureau stood at the head of the table with his hands behind his back. He is a big man gone heavy, with a red face and a white beard trimmed close and hands that are scarred across the backs and palms in the shiny way burns leave, and he looked, in his gray coat with the green collar, like a ship’s master in a portrait. Margarethe Lowe of the Interior sat at the side nearest the case. She is small and gray and very neat, sixty-six, in a dark suit with the Interior’s silver button at the throat, and she had a ring of keys on the table in front of her and one hand resting on them. Simeon Adeyemi of the Office sat across from her. He is the youngest of the four, at fifty-eight, slight, with spectacles and a soft voice and a habit of looking at his own hands while he speaks, and he was Chair of the Office when the Figure was cut in Year 170, so that his seal is on the fourth of the four pages. I knew that before I sat down. Everyone in the Academy knows whose seal is on the four pages. He had a folder in front of him and did not open it.

Ruth-Ann Calloway went to her place at the foot of the table. She pointed me to the chair beside her. The master of the Plummet stood by the wall with his cap in his hands until Penn told him to sit, which he did, at the corner, as far from the box as he could get.

The clerk with the lamp went out, and the door shut, and Penn said, “Well.”

The procedure for opening the canister has been fixed since Year 73, and the minutes of the four Chairs record it every year, and I have read those minutes now, every one, so I can give it exactly.

The master of the sounding vessel delivers the box under seal to the Chair of the Bureau. The Chair of the Bureau takes it to the Hall that night and places it on the table. The four Chairs inspect the seal and the master swears to it. The Chair of the Bureau breaks the seal and lifts the canister out of the box and places it on the table. The Chair of the Office opens the canister. The Chair of the Office reads what is in it, aloud, and the other three Chairs confirm that what was read is what is written, and the Chair of the Office takes the page, if there is a page, to the Office, and the Office acts.

That is the whole of it. If the canister is empty, the Chair of the Office says empty, and the three others say empty, and Penn puts the canister back in the box and it goes back on the post with the next year’s sounding, since there has only ever been the one canister. Most years it takes about four minutes.

That night it took until three in the morning.

Ned Corrigan swore to the seal. He did it standing, in a voice that came out too loud and went up into the dome and came back, and he flushed and sat down. Penn broke the seal with his thumbnail. It was an old seal, red, with the Bureau’s mark of the dredge and the star, and it cracked like a biscuit. He opened the box and put his burned hands inside and lifted out the canister, and I saw his shoulders take the weight, and he set it on the table in the pool of light from the lamp by the case, and stood back from it.

It was brass, or brass-colored, about the length of my forearm, round, smooth, closed at both ends with no seam. It shone a little in the lamplight. The writing ran round it in black, in upright letters, very regular, the kind a schoolteacher puts on a board for the back row, as the master had said. I could read it from where I sat. FOR THE FOUR CHAIRS. TO BE OPENED IN THE HALL. PLEASE ASK THE ARCHIVIST WHO COUNTED TO BE PRESENT. SHE HAS WAITED.

Nobody touched it for some time.

Then Margarethe Lowe said, quite calmly, “Before Simeon opens it, I think we should look at the other one.” And she took a key from the ring in front of her and unlocked the case of dark wood.

I am going to give the text of the Accession here, whole, because the Chairs voted on the eleventh day to release it to this account, and because I believe it should never again be read by four people only.

It is three pages. The pages are not paper. They are a pale stuff, thin and stiff and faintly translucent, like the skin on scalded milk if the skin were as tough as leather, and they have not yellowed in a hundred and seventy-five years. The Interior keeps them in the wooden case between two sheets of glass. Margarethe Lowe lifted the glass out and laid it on the table beside the canister, under the lamp, and turned it so that I could read it.

The hand was the same.

I am an archivist. I have looked at more hands than anyone in the nation except the Office’s own examiners, and I have testified twice before the Assembly’s committees on disputed wills. I knew it at once. The same upright letters, very regular, made for a reader at the back of a room. The same long crossbar on the T. The same small gap left after every full stop, as though the writer had paused to see whether the reader was keeping up.

An account of the western settlement.

To the people at the bend of the river, who are writing their instrument.

In the mountains to the west, which have gone up out of the water and which you can see from the edge of your country, there are people who went there before the drowning. They are rich. They bought the mountains while the low country was going under, and they took with them what the old world knew, its books and its machines and its pictures and its seeds, and they have kept it. They are still keeping it.

They are no longer quite the kind of people you are. They have made themselves into another kind by their own work, so that they will not die, and they will go on making themselves over for a very long time. You will want a word for them. Your word is species. Use it. They chose it, though they would not say so. Do not envy them.

They will not harm you. They are kept from harming you, and they know it. What they have kept is not ready for you, and you are not ready for it, and when it is, the mountains will speak to you. Until then the mountains are closed.

Do not try to cross the western sea. A hundred miles out the air above it will kill you. It is not their doing and it is not yours. It will be there for a long time.

Do not go into the old mountains in the east. The past is there and it will keep you. It is not anyone’s doing either. It will finish.

Build where you are. The ground is good and it will stay good. The river will take you from one sea to the other. The water will not come back.

Somebody is watching. Kindly.

There is no signature. At the foot of the third page, in a different hand, in ink gone brown, the clerk of the provisional council at Provision wrote a single word in the Year 9: Received. And beneath that, in a third hand, very small, the initials of the four Chairs of that year, who were the first four, and who drafted the sixth article.

I read it twice. Then I looked up and found that the four Chairs were all watching me read, and that none of them was looking at the canister.

Margarethe Lowe said, “Each of us reads it on the night we are confirmed. Alone, in this Hall, with the clerk outside the door. It’s the first thing a Chair does. Before the oath. My predecessor told me that after the first time I would want to read it every year, and that I should not, because it would stop meaning anything, and she was right, and I haven’t. I’ve read it four times in sixteen years. Tonight’s the fifth.” She touched the glass. “The founders read species and thought it was an honor. Every edition of the History thinks it’s an honor. The teacher’s companion explains it as an honor. I’ve thought for sixteen years that it was a warning.”

Penn said, “It was a warning.”

Simeon Adeyemi said nothing. He was looking at the line about the river.

Ruth-Ann Calloway said to me, “Is it the same hand?”

I said it was. I said that I would testify to it before any committee in the nation and that there was no question in it at all. I said that whoever had written the Accession in Year 9 had written the outside of the canister in Year 184, a hundred and seventy-five years later, with the same pen, or with whatever she used in place of one.

The Chair of the Academy said, “She.”

I said I did not know why I had said it.

Lowe said, “I’ve always thought so too.” And then she looked across the table at me, and her face did something I did not expect from the Chair of the Interior, who is not a woman who changes her face, and she said, “Archivist. In Year 156, when the four Chairs of the day read your nine pages, in this Hall, at this table, my predecessor said something to the others. I expect Vance never told you what.”

I said he had not.

She said, “I was her deputy. I was in the room. She said: If the archivist has counted right, then the sender of the Accession has been doing us favors for a hundred and fifty years without telling us, and there is nothing in the instrument about what a nation owes for that. Leave her alone. Leave it all alone. Wait until they send the bill.” She put her hand flat on the wooden case. “We have been waiting twenty-eight years. I expect this is it.”

Simeon Adeyemi opened the canister at nine minutes to eleven by my watch.

He did it the way the minutes say it has always been done, which I had not known until then, and which surprised me. He did not use a tool. He put both hands round the canister near one end, as a person grips a jar to loosen its lid, and turned. The end turned with him. It made no sound. There was no thread on it that I could see when it came away, and no seam where it had been joined, and the edge of the opening was as smooth as the outside. He set the end down on the table. He tipped the canister, gently, and put two fingers inside, and drew out what was in it.

It was a roll of the same pale stuff as the Accession, about a hand’s breadth across, tied with a thread. Adeyemi untied the thread. The roll opened on the table by itself, slowly, the way a leaf opens in warm water, and lay flat, and was eleven sheets, written on both sides in the upright hand, with a twelfth, smaller, lying on top.

Penn said, very quietly, “No number.”

Adeyemi looked at the top sheet for a long time without speaking. I could not see it from where I sat. Then he took off his spectacles and wiped them on his tie and put them on again and looked at it again. He is a mathematician. He has published, in the Academy’s journal, a demonstration of the stability of the Figure’s derivation under perturbation of the fishery tonnage, which is the most difficult paper I have ever indexed. I watched him read the top sheet three times as if it were arithmetic that would not come out.

Then he said, “It’s a list of names.”

Calloway said, “Read it, Simeon. That’s the procedure.”

He said, “The procedure says I read it aloud and you confirm it.” He looked up. “It isn’t addressed to us. Not only to us.” He turned the small sheet round on the table so that it faced the rest of us, and pushed it a little toward the middle, into the light.

At the head of the small sheet, in the upright hand, was a line. Under the line, in a column, were twenty-three names, each with a place and a year. I read the first name, and the place, and the year, and I heard Ned Corrigan, at the corner of the table, take a breath and not let it out.

Ilsa Vren, of Rand’s Notch. Year 133.

The line at the head of the sheet said: These are living. Please tell their families first.

I will set down what happened in the next few minutes as I wrote it in my gray book that night, sitting on the steps of the Hall at four in the morning in the dark with the river going by below me.

Penn sat down. He had stood since we came in. He sat down in the nearest chair, heavily, and put his burned hands over his face.

Margarethe Lowe read the list from top to bottom with her finger, not touching the sheet, a little above it, one name at a time, and her lips moved. When she reached the eighteenth name she stopped. It was Jessamy Coyle, of New Carthage, pilot. Year 171. The Interior closed the western air in Year 156 and prosecutes every attempt against it, and the last pilot to go west was Coyle, and the Evening read her name in the Notices in Year 171, as it reads the names of the crossers, in the same voice, with no comment. Lowe had been Chair for three years then. She would have approved the wording of the Notice. She said, “Coyle,” and nothing else, and went on down the list to the end.

Simeon Adeyemi put his folder on the table and opened it. Inside it was a single sheet, a page of the Office’s common stock, with a number on it and a seal and the standing clause from the sixth article. I knew what it was without reading it. Every archivist in the nation knows the four pages by sight. This was not one of them. It was the Office’s copy of the fourth, the original that stays in the Chair’s drawer while the public copy goes to the east bank archive. Year 170. His own seal. He had brought it with him to the Hall, every year since Year 170, on the night the canister was opened, and he had never once taken it out of the folder before. He took it out now and laid it on the table beside the twelfth sheet, the one with the names, and looked at the two of them side by side.

He said, “Three thousand and eleven.”

I did not understand him. Calloway did. She put her hand on his arm.

He said, “That’s how many licenses the cut deferred. Year 170. I worked it out the night I sealed it. Three thousand and eleven couples who waited longer than they would have. I know where they live. I’ve checked every one of them every year since, in the book. How many had their children in the end. How many didn’t. How many died waiting.” He looked at the names. “I’ve never had anyone to tell that to. It isn’t the sort of thing you say to the other three. They have their own.”

Penn said, through his hands, “I have mine.”

Lowe said, “We all have ours, Simeon.”

Then Ruth-Ann Calloway, who had not moved, leaned across me to the eleven sheets lying open on the table under the lamp, and turned the first of them a little toward herself, and read the opening line aloud, in the voice that reaches the back of a lecture hall, and it went up into the dark of the dome and came back down to us a moment late.

To the four Chairs, and through them, if they will, to everyone.

IV. The Speaking

The text of the eleven sheets taken from the post at Sixty-Two on the nineteenth of Eighthmonth, Year 184, read aloud in the Hall of the Instrument on the night of the twenty-second by the Chair of the Academy, with the small sheet that lay on top of them. The Chairs voted on the eleventh day of their sitting to release it whole. It is given here as it is written, with the writer’s own breaks.

To the four Chairs, and through them, if they will, to everyone.

We have sent you four numbers. This year we are sending words.

I think you are ready for words. I am less sure that I am. I have decided to send them anyway, because I do not have long, and because the youngest of the people in the mountains, who leads them now, asked me to, and because I wrote your Accession, a hundred and seventy-five years ago, and it has been waiting a long time for its second page.

Please ask the archivist who counted to read this before you do. She will tell you whether it is the same hand. She knows hands, and she knows me better than you do, though she has never seen me.

I will begin with the numbers, because you will be thinking about them.

The soil of your country is good. Your Academy has measured how good, and has written down that the measurements are correct, and has left it there, which was wise. I will tell you why it is good. It is good because we asked it to be.

I will explain we later in this letter. For now: there are people living in the mountains you can see from your Cliff who are not the people who own the mountains. We came from somewhere else. We are able, in a world like yours, where time has been loosened by an ending, to ask the world to be kind in one place, and the world will agree, in that place only, and will go on agreeing. Your Academy calls these places Allowances. Your soil is one of them, a very large one, made by many of us asking together in the first years after the water stopped. It is the reason your price of bread has not moved in sixty years.

But we are fewer than we were, and dimmer, and the asking thins as we do. In most years it does not matter. In some years the soil can give a little less than your Office expects it to, and the shortfall would fall in two or three provinces, and would be a hunger. There is a mountain among the eleven that we call the Clockworks. It is full of machines, and the machines can see the weather and the soil some years ahead, as your Bureau’s tables can see the tide. Four times they saw a hunger coming. Four times we sent your Office a number in the canister on the shelf at Sixty-Two, so that the Office would issue fewer licenses before the hunger came, and so that nobody would starve.

Your Office did what the number said and did not ask why. I think the Chairs of those years guessed that the number came from whoever wrote the Accession, and decided that whoever wrote the Accession had been right about the water and might be right about the bread. They were right to guess it. I am not sure they were right to obey without asking, and I am sure we were wrong never to explain. We thought you were not ready. We were afraid of what you would say. Those were our reasons, and they were not good enough.

The Clockworks reckon that the four numbers kept four hungers from happening. They also reckon that the four numbers meant that some thousands of children were not born who would have been born, or were born later, to parents who had waited longer than they should have had to wait. I am sorry for that. I would like the Office to know that I am sorry, and the families, if the Office will tell them. It is the only thing we have done in your country that harmed anybody. The archivist will want to know that, for her list. She was right about the Allowances. They were not the numbers. The numbers were something else, and they were ours.

There will be no more numbers. I will tell you why at the end.

Now we.

We are people made of light. We grow from flowers. Each of us comes up out of a flower the way a plant comes up out of a seed, and stays bound to it, and lives as long as it lives. Our world was mostly shallow sea with low islands under a large orange sun, and our flowers grew on every island, in fields that went down to the water. Then the sun grew large and our seas went dry, and our flowers died, field by field, and those of us bound to them went out with them. A few thousand of us left in four great vessels with as many seeds as we could gather.

We went from world to world for a long time. Our seeds would not grow anywhere. They need a world where what has happened has not quite finished happening, where the past is still a little present. Our own world had been like that. No world we found was. We grew dim. Some of us went out. We came here during your Rise because a world in the middle of ending is a world where time is loose, and we had begun to think we would not find another.

We sent scouts ahead of the vessels. I was one. I watched your coasts go under for a long time before the others came. I changed some of your drowning children so that they could live in the water, when they wanted to. That is where the people of the water come from, the ones you have heard about from the boats and never believed. One of them is still living. She was twelve when I met her. She is two hundred and thirteen.

When the vessels came down, the people who own the mountains made a bargain with us. They had bought the mountains before the drowning and gone into them with what the old world knew. They wanted to live for a very long time. We could help them do that. In return they gave us a home inside one of the mountains, and helped us look for a place where our seeds would grow, and agreed to one more thing, which I will come to.

We asked the world for things, here and there, for a hundred and eighty years. Your Academy has four hundred and eleven of them in its register. The high country drowned so that the low country could stay; the people who owned the high country were already gone from it. The mountains went up so that the people in them could be kept dry. The river turned so that your country could be one country. The island in the east kept its drowning line so that its old forests would be there for the people who live in them. The mountains are green to your eye at a hundred and forty miles, and a ghost to your machines, so that you would always see what was being kept for you and nobody could ever take a photograph of it and sell it. There is a spring in a hill town in your Applewall province that runs warm in winter. I asked for that one myself, in your eighty-first year, for a woman who did the laundry for the whole town in cold water and whose hands were bad. She is dead now. The spring is still warm. I go and look at it sometimes.

The stopping of the water was all of us together. It was the largest thing we ever asked, and we asked it all at once, in one season, and it took most of what we had. We have been fading since. There are about eleven hundred of us. Some of us are so faint now that your machines could not find us if they were standing in the same room, and some of your people could.

We made one rule for ourselves when we began. Nothing we asked was to harm anybody. The archivist counted four hundred and found that we had kept it. I have read her nine pages many times. I liked the last sentence best. I would like her to know that she was the first person in your nation to see us, and that she did it by counting, and that it was a great kindness to be counted.

Now the Accession. I wrote it in your ninth year, in the founders’ language, which I had been learning for a long time from books the people of the water borrowed from a floating city. One of the people of the water swam it up the river to your landing at the bend, at night, and left it on the steps of the customs shed there, addressed to your council, and your clerk sent it to Provision, where the instrument was being written, and somebody wrote received on it. I have always liked that.

Everything in it was true, and it was not enough.

I used the word species because the people who own the mountains had already begun to make themselves into something else, and I wanted you to know that, and I did not want you to want it. I am sorry it has been taught to your children as an honor. It was meant as a warning. Your Chair of the Interior knows this. She is the first Chair who has said it aloud.

I wrote that the mountains were closed until what was kept was ready, and that when it was ready the mountains would speak. I meant this. I also meant something I did not write, which is that we did not know, then, whether we would still be here when it was ready, and we wanted to wait and see.

I wrote that somebody was watching. Kindly. That was true and it has been true every day since. It was mostly me.

Now the thing the people in the mountains agreed to.

When we made our bargain with them, we gave them their long lives on one condition: that they build one of their paradises for the people they had left behind to drown. They built it. It is the southernmost of the eleven mountains. We call it the Last Isle. It has a sky inside it, and a lake, and orchards, and a city of white stone and glass for forty thousand people, with the beds made and the floors swept. It has been ready since your forty-first year.

The people in the mountains did not want to tell you. They were afraid of you. They had saved the old world’s things and let the old world’s people go under, and they knew it, and they thought that if you came into their mountains you would say so. They were right that you would say so. They were wrong to be afraid of it.

The eldest of them died last year. What was left of him had been very small for a long time. The youngest leads them now. He was born in the season the water stopped, and he grew up watching your country come down out of its hills, and he has asked me to tell you that the mountains are open.

This is what open means. Your Bureau may finish its chart of the western sea. The ninety-mile line may be withdrawn, if your Chairs choose. The air beyond a hundred miles will still kill anyone who breathes it, and so will the ice, and nothing I can ask will change that now; but the people in the mountains have craft that can cross both, and they will send them to your Cliff for anyone who wishes to come and see. And anyone who comes may go home again. Nobody will be kept.

Now the names.

Since your twentieth year, by your Interior’s count, two hundred and six vessels have gone west past your line and not come back, and four of your flying machines. I have watched them go. Most of them went into the yellow before I could reach them, and the yellow is quick. For a long time I was too dim to go out to the edge of the air and lift anyone. Then, in your hundred-and-thirty-first year, a machine that belonged to a Colonel of yours helped me with something, and I was brighter, and from your hundred-and-thirty-third year I could.

The first was a woman who took a small boat out of Rand’s Notch with her instruments aboard. She told me she wanted to look. I lifted her off the boat at the edge of the yellow and took her to the Last Isle and she has been looking ever since.

There are twenty-three of them. Their names are on the small sheet. They have been living in the Last Isle, in a city built for forty thousand, which they say is too big and too quiet, and they have complained about it to me for fifty years in the politest way they know. Their families think they are dead. Please tell their families first, before you tell anyone else.

Some of them were very young when they went, and went to be the first, and your Evening has never said their names, because it does not say the names of the young ones who go to be first. Please say their names now. They are not first. They are alive, which is better.

I could not lift the others. I am sorry. I tried.

Now the flower.

One of us still has a flower. It is mine.

We planted every seed we had, in your Rise, on the one place in the world where time was loose enough: the highest bald of the old mountains in the east, which became your island. One seed grew. It came up in the hundred-and-fourth year of the Rise and I have been bound to it since.

It did harm, after all, though it did not mean to, and though your Academy never admitted it to the register, since it propagated, and since nobody ever measured it except a few of your soldiers. A flower that needs loose time also makes it. My flower rooted itself in the ending of your old world, on that mountain, and would not let it finish, and the island remembered, for a hundred and thirty years. You know about that. Your Interior calls it the plague and your soldiers watched for it from their towers. The people who live on the island learned to keep it off with three rules, and they still keep the rules, though they no longer need to.

In your hundred-and-thirty-first year the remembering ran out. A machine and I lifted the flower out of the bald and took it under the eastern water to the white island in your strait, which a woman of yours had made ready for it a long time before, and planted it at the head of a grave. The man in the grave had arranged it. The machine has fed it since then on a life told straight, in order, a chapter every night. That is what the flower needs, here. Told out of order, a life makes time loose, the way the island was. Told in order, it only grows.

Last year my flower set seeds. Eleven of them. When it has let them go it will die, and I will go out with it. I do not mind very much. I have been here a long time and I have liked most of it.

The seeds need eleven places where memory is said aloud, in order, every day, by people who will go on saying it after the people who began are gone. They will not grow anywhere else. What they will grow into I cannot tell you. Something like me, I think, but small, and new, and from here. They will be yours more than mine.

I know four of the places already, and they are not in your country, and your Chairs will learn about them in time. The other seven I would like to be among you. I have guesses. Your Evening is one guess: it has said the same things in the same order every night since your fifty-second year, and nobody in the world says anything as faithfully as that. But I would rather you chose. You know your country. I only watched it.

This is an Ask.

The people who live on the island across your eastern water have a rule about asking. Anyone may ask anyone for anything, once, and the one who is asked may refuse without giving a reason, and that is the end of it, and nobody keeps an account. I learned it from them. I think it is the best rule anyone in the world has made.

I am asking you once. You may refuse. If you refuse, I will plant the seeds where I can, in the four places I know, and the other seven will not grow, and nobody will count it against you, least of all me.

There will be no more numbers. If the seeds grow, the asking will not thin as fast, and the soil will stay as good as it is for longer than any of you will live. If they do not grow, the soil will still be good for a long time, and your Office will see the shortfall coming in its own tables before it comes, and will deal with it as a nation deals with a hard year, in the open, with the arithmetic printed. Either way it will be yours to decide. It should always have been yours.

Please read this on your Evening on the ninth of Ninthmonth. I know what that day has meant to you. I would like it to mean something else.

The sea stands at the mark. Others kept it there with me, and it no longer needs us.

This is the hand that wrote your Accession. A man of yours called me Lantern, once. You may.

Below the last line of the eleventh sheet, in another hand, larger and slanting, in a brown ink, as of the old world:

With the consent of the residents of the western mountains. Heir.

The small sheet, which lay on top of the eleven:

These are living. Please tell their families first.

Ilsa Vren, of Rand’s Notch. Year 133. Oren Paskett, of Gannet Notch. Year 138. Halcyon Dree, of Concord. Year 140. Temperance Oyelaran, of Plenty. Year 143. Joachim Barra and Liesl Barra, of Callow Notch. Year 147. Rafe Tolliver, of Sevenmile. Year 150. Nkem Ashby, of Endeavor. Year 152. Wilhelmina Strake, of Second Harbor. Year 154. Castor Mbeki-Lane, of Tally. Year 157. Una Fairbrother, of Holloway. Year 158. Thaddeus Ilkley, of Ladder Notch. Year 160. Rosamund Achterberg, of Meridian. Year 161. Barnaby Quell, of Low Notch. Year 163. Imani Sorensen, of Saltash. Year 165. Gideon Farrow, of Shelter. Year 166. Clemency Odum, of Provision. Year 168. Ambrose Ketteridge, of Brennan’s Notch. Year 169. Jessamy Coyle, of New Carthage, pilot. Year 171. Marisol Petrakis, of Constance. Year 174. Hob Tennant, of Pruitt’s Cut. Year 177. Kit Aldana, of Rand’s Notch. Year 181. Wynn Okoro, of Assurance. Year 183.

V. The Sitting

The Chair of the Academy finished reading at a quarter to one. The last line went up into the dome and came down to us a moment late, you may, and then there was nothing in the Hall but the lamp and the six of us and the eleven sheets.

Nobody spoke for a while. I timed it, because I time things. It was a little over three minutes. I have since been told by the Chair of the Bureau that in thirty years of Standing sittings he had never known four Chairs to be silent together for as long as one, and that he thought at the time that the dome had stopped working.

It was Simeon Adeyemi who spoke first. He said, “Two hundred and thirteen,” and took his spectacles off again, and I understood that he was doing arithmetic. He said, “A girl of twelve in the Rise. Changed. Still living.” He looked at me. “Archivist, is there an entry for her? In the register?”

I said there was not. I said there was no Allowance in the register concerning a person, or any living thing that moved of its own will, except birds, and the birds were in the catalog and not the register.

He said, “Then she isn’t counted anywhere.”

I said that I did not know whether the people of the water counted themselves.

Ned Corrigan said, from the corner, “They do.”

All four Chairs turned and looked at him, and he went red to the collar and said, “Sorry. Sorry, Chair. Only my grandfather says the Hall of the Wandering Shoreline at Second Harbor has a book they sent. The mer. Fifty years ago. He says Toby Marsh’s mother had it, and it counts them all, by name, and he says nobody believed her and she didn’t care.” He stopped. “I’d forgotten it till now. I’ll be quiet.”

Penn said, “Don’t be quiet, Corrigan. You’re the only one of us who’s met anybody.” And he got up, and went to the door of the Hall, and opened it, and said something to the Interior’s clerk in the dark outside, and came back. “I’ve sent for coffee and for my bag. We’re going to be here all night, and I am not doing this without a drink.”

The four Chairs sat for eleven days. They sat in the Hall, by night, from the twenty-second of Eighthmonth to the second of Ninthmonth, and on four of the days they sat by day as well, which the Hall’s keepers had to arrange by closing it to the schools for a reason that was given out as repairs to the lantern. I was present for all of it. I was asked to be present, on the first night, by the Chair of the Interior, who said that the letter had asked for me and that the Interior did not intend to be the first Office in a hundred and seventy-five years to refuse a request from the sender of the Accession. I was given a chair at the foot of the table beside Calloway and a pencil and the minutes book, since the Chairs’ own clerk is not Standing enough for some of what they said, and on the second night I began to keep the minutes myself. The Chairs voted on the eleventh day to release them to this account. I give the parts that matter. The rest is arithmetic and the price of coffee.

Minute of the first sitting, 22–23 Eighthmonth, Year 184. Present: Penn (Bureau), Lowe (Interior), Adeyemi (Office), Calloway (Academy). Also present: A. Ohene, archivist, Standing since this afternoon; E. Corrigan, master of the Plummet, by leave of the Bureau. The canister was opened by the Chair of the Office at 2251. Contents: eleven sheets and a smaller sheet, in the hand of the Accession, confirmed by the archivist. No Figure. The letter was read aloud in full by the Chair of the Academy. The four Chairs confirm that what was read is what is written.

The Chair of the Interior moved that the letter be treated as true until shown otherwise. Seconded by the Chair of the Bureau. Passed, four to none.

That motion took most of the first night. I do not want to suggest that the Chairs believed the letter at once, or easily. They believed it in the way a good engineer believes a load table, which is by going through it line by line and finding nothing wrong.

Penn went through what the Bureau could check. He said the post was real and the canister was real and the Bureau had photographs of the label from Year 72, and the hand matched. He said the Bureau had a hundred and twelve years of optical records of the Isles from the Cliff, all of which agreed with the letter’s account of the green and the ghost. He said the Bureau’s western section had for a century logged lights over the gas edge that the plates did not record, and that the logs had been filed and not read, and that the Plummet had logged one five days ago, and that its master was sitting in the corner looking ill. He said the Bureau knew that the air past a hundred miles killed, because it had lost a survey ship to it in Year 61 and had not gone back. He said he had never in his life heard anybody explain the gas, and that the letter did not explain it either, and that he found that reassuring.

Lowe went through what the Interior could check, and she had the Interior’s clerk bring the files across from the east bank in a handcart at two in the morning, and read them at the table.

Every one of the twenty-three was in the Interior’s register of crossers. Every one had gone past the line in the year the letter gave, from the port the letter gave, and had not been recovered. Nineteen of the twenty-three had been named in the Notices in the week after they went, in the usual words. Four had not. They were the four whom the Interior’s officers had judged to be young and wanting to be first, under the standing order that the Evening does not name those: Halcyon Dree, who was sixteen; Barnaby Quell, seventeen; Kit Aldana, eighteen; and Wynn Okoro, who went out of Assurance in a stolen skiff in Thirdmonth of Year 183 at nineteen, and was the most recent name on the list. Lowe read their four files twice. Then she said that the standing order had been made in Year 61, by her predecessor’s predecessor, on the ground that to name the young ones would encourage others, and that she had never agreed with it and had never had a reason to say so.

Adeyemi went through what the Office could check, which was the book. He said every one of the twenty-three had a line in the Office’s register that ended, as the Office’s lines end for crossers, with the entry departed west, not recovered, and a date, and that this was not a death in the Office’s terms, since a death needs a body or a witness, but that the Office closed the line after seven years, and that eighteen of the twenty-three lines were closed.

He said, “We have never reopened a closed line. Not once since Year 4. There isn’t a form for it.”

Calloway said, “Then make one.”

He said, “I intend to. I’m trying to work out what to put in the field where the cause goes.”

And I record, because it is in the minutes and because it was the first thing anyone at that table said that made me laugh, that Hollis Penn said, “Put living, west,” and poured himself a third whisky, and that the Chair of the Office wrote it down.

Minute of the second sitting, 23–24 Eighthmonth. As before. The Chair of the Interior reported that the Interior keeps a home district and a next of kin of record for each of the twenty-three, and that eighteen next of kin are living. The Chair of the Interior moved that the Interior tell each of the eighteen in person before the ninth of Ninthmonth, as the letter asks, and that the Interior send for that purpose officers who are Standing, and that each be accompanied by a person of the family’s own district whom the family knows. Passed, four to none. The Chair of the Office asked that the Office be represented at each telling, so that the line could be reopened in the family’s presence. Passed, four to none.

I want to set down what Margarethe Lowe said that night, after the vote, because I did not expect it, and because it changed how I understood her for the rest of the sitting.

She said that the Interior had run the Landing for a hundred and seventy years, and had put forty to sixty people a year ashore on the island with a card in their pocket telling them where to find supper, and had never once sent anyone to tell their families that the card existed. She said that the Interior had read the names of the crossers on the Evening, in the Notices, among the dredging closures, and had never once sent anyone to sit in a kitchen in Rand’s Notch with a woman whose sister had gone west. She said the Interior was very good at doing the kind thing in a way that nobody had to see, and that she had been proud of that for forty years, and that she was no longer sure it was a thing to be proud of. She said she would go to Rand’s Notch herself.

Penn said, “Margarethe, you’re sixty-six and you hate trains.”

She said, “Yes.”

Minute of the third sitting, 24–25 Eighthmonth. The Chairs considered the letter’s request that it be read on the Evening of the ninth of Ninthmonth. Discussion. No motion.

This was the hardest of the eleven nights and I will give it at more length, because the reader of this account will want to know why the Evening ran as it did, and because the question the Chairs argued about that night is a question about the whole nation, and I do not think they argued it badly.

The Evening belongs to the Interior. It has had the same shape since Year 52. Eleven minutes: the river at nine gauges, the weather, the rail, the prices, the Notices, the Account, the line. The Account is ninety seconds. It explains one thing. It is the only part of the Evening where the government persuades, and every citizen knows it, and listens to it the way you listen to a relative you love explaining a decision you think has already been made. The letter on the table, read aloud at a Reader’s pace, would run about twenty-five minutes. I timed Calloway, and she reads fast.

The Chair of the Interior said that the Evening had changed its shape once in a hundred and thirty-two years, in Year 141, for four minutes, and that the nation had heard those four minutes and then had gone to bed, and that the next night the Evening had run eleven minutes and the sea had stood at the mark, and the nation had been grateful. She said she did not know what had been said in those four minutes. She said the transcript had never been entered in the broadcast register and the Interior did not have it. She said that whatever had been said, the nation had decided to forget it by the morning, and that a nation which can do that is a nation that values the shape of its Evening more than almost anything, and that she did not think the Chairs had the right to break the shape for twenty-five minutes on their own authority.

The Chair of the Academy said that the Chairs had broken the shape of the nation four times on their own authority, in Ninthmonth, with a single sheet of paper, and nobody had asked them for a right then.

The Chair of the Office said, “That’s fair.”

The Chair of the Interior said that it was fair and it was also not an argument, and that she would like a better one.

The Chair of the Bureau said that the letter was addressed to everyone, and that the Chairs had been given it because the sender knew where the canister went, and that if a man hands you a letter addressed to his brother you do not read it and decide whether his brother is ready for it.

The Chair of the Interior said that the sender had asked the Chairs to read it to everyone if they would. She put her finger on the words. She said that was a choice, and it had been given to them, and they could not pretend it had not.

Then Simeon Adeyemi said the thing that I think decided it, though it took another week to be decided.

He said he had been thinking about the four pages. He said that every year about forty people walked from the Low Quarter to the east bank archive and asked to see the four single sheets, and read them, and went home. He said the Office had the names of all of them, because the archive keeps a visitors’ book, and that he had read the book. He said that in a hundred and eleven years since Year 73 about four thousand people had made that walk. He said that every one of them had read four numbers and four seals and the standing clause, and had gone home without being told anything, and that some of them had been to the archive more than once. One man in Plenty had come every year for thirty-one years, on the ninth of Ninthmonth, and had died in Year 179, and the Office had his line, and he had been a farmer, and he had never married.

He said, “They asked. Four thousand of them. They walked forty minutes each way and asked, and we gave them the four pages and nothing else. I’d like to give them the rest. I’d like to give it in the place where they’d hear it. That’s the Evening. There isn’t anywhere else.”

Lowe said, “And if the floor gives?”

He said, “Then it gives. It was always going to. Ohene’s been telling us for twenty-nine years it was standing on a favor.”

They all looked at me. I said that I had not been telling them anything for twenty-nine years. I said I had told them once, in nine pages, and they had filed it.

The Chair of the Interior said, “Yes. We did.” And then, after a moment: “I’d like to talk to the Reader.”

Minute of the fourth sitting, 25–26 Eighthmonth. The Chair of the Interior reported that she had sent for the Reader, and that the Reader would come to the Hall on the night of the thirty-first, after the Evening, since the Reader does not leave the broadcast house before the Evening on any day of the year. The Chairs considered the letter’s account of the Figure.

That night was Adeyemi’s.

He had brought the Office’s file on the four pages, all of it, and he laid it out on the table. The derivations the Office had worked, each year, before the canister came, in the usual way. The Figure each derivation had produced. The number that came in the canister in Year 73, and 109, and 141, and 170, each on a sheet of the pale stuff in the upright hand, with nothing else on it but the word Ninthmonth. The new Figure the Office had issued, each time, which was the canister’s number exactly. The harvests that followed.

He showed us, with the Office’s own tables, that in each of the four years the harvest had fallen short of the Office’s derivation in two or three provinces, as the letter said, and short by almost exactly the margin the canister’s number had allowed for. He showed us that the Academy’s demographers had found the same thing in Year 160 and had noted that the cuts were issued before the harvests they were consistent with. He said the letter’s account fitted every figure he had.

Then he showed us the other thing. He had worked it out, in the week since Penn’s wire, from the Office’s registers and the licensing returns, district by district. The children not born. He had a number for each of the four years. He had the four numbers added together. I will not give the total here, because the Office has since printed it in full, with the derivation, as Adeyemi insisted, and the reader may look it up; I will say only that it is a number with five figures, and that the room was quiet for a long time after he read it.

Then he said, “The Clockworks reckon the cuts kept four hungers from happening. I can’t check that. I’d like to. I’d like to see their tables.”

Calloway said, “You may get the chance.”

He said, “I know. That’s what frightens me.”

I asked him, because I had become by then a person who could ask Chairs things, why it frightened him.

He said, “Because if their tables are as good as I think they are, then we did the right thing four times. And I would have liked, just once, to have been able to say that we did it ourselves.”

Minutes of the fifth to the seventh sittings, 26–29 Eighthmonth. The Chairs considered the people of the water; the eighth isle; the western limit; the flower and the seeds; and the Ask.

I will be brief about these three nights, since most of what was discussed is given more fully in the books that follow this one in the present collection.

On the fifth night the Chair of the Bureau sent a wire to Second Harbor and had the Keeper of the Hall of the Wandering Shoreline send down, by the night train under seal, the copy she keeps of the book the people of the water sent to her grandmother in Year 132. It came on the morning of the twenty-seventh. Its title is The One and Only Complete Census of the Mer. The four Chairs read it, by turns, that night, and I read it after them, and it counts nine thousand three hundred and eighty-eight of them, by line and by name, and among the names is Nerine, a hundred and sixty-one in Year 132, which is two hundred and thirteen now. Simeon Adeyemi read the Register of Every Line twice through and then sat with his hand flat on the last page for a long time. He said that it was a better book than his. He said it was the only register he had ever seen that counted the dead by where they had been given, and that he would like to know how they did it, and that he was going to write to them, if anybody would tell him the address.

On the sixth night the Chair of the Bureau moved that the western limit be withdrawn, and the motion failed, two to two. Penn and Calloway voted for. Lowe and Adeyemi voted against, on the ground that the air beyond a hundred miles still killed, and that a line on a chart which keeps people out of the yellow is a kindness whatever else it is, and that the Chairs had no means yet of knowing whether the craft the letter promised were real. The Chairs agreed to revisit it after the Evening. They did, in Tenthmonth, and the reader will find the result in the next book.

On the seventh night the Chair of the Academy read aloud, again, the part of the letter about the flower and the seeds, and the Chairs argued until dawn about what a place where memory is said aloud, in order, every day could mean in Ozarka, and found to their own surprise that they could name a dozen without trying. The Evening. The schoolrooms where the Rise is first taught to six-year-olds, which is said in the same order in every district. The Office’s archive, where the day’s entries are made in order and could, Adeyemi said, be read aloud at closing, if the Office chose. The Hall at Second Harbor, which reads the names of the lost of the floating cities aloud once a year. Lowe said, very quietly, that the Interior had a station on the eastern coast where exiles were kept for a week before the cutter took them, and were permitted to write, and that many of them wrote the story of their lives, in order, to someone, and that the letters went into a file, and that nobody read them aloud, and that perhaps somebody should. She did not move anything. Nobody moved anything. Calloway said that the letter asked the nation to choose, and that the Chairs were not the nation, and that they had better remember it.

Minute of the eighth to the tenth sittings, 29 Eighthmonth – 1 Ninthmonth. The Chairs did not sit on the eighth night, the Chair of the Interior being at Rand’s Notch, and the archivist with her. The Chairs sat on the ninth and tenth nights, with the Reader present on the tenth. See the next two chapters.

Minute of the eleventh sitting, 2 Ninthmonth, Year 184. Present: Penn, Lowe, Adeyemi, Calloway. Also present: A. Ohene.

The Chair of the Interior moved that the letter taken from the post at Sixty-Two be read on the Evening of the ninth of Ninthmonth, in full, in place of the Account; that the names on the small sheet be read in the Notices on that evening, with the words living, west; that the Evening run as long as the reading requires; and that the Reader read it in her own way, the Chairs having no instruction for her. Seconded by the Chair of the Office.

Passed, four to none.

The Chair of the Academy moved that the minutes of the eleven sittings, and the text of the Accession, be released to an account of these days to be kept by the archivist, and to no other document, until the ninth edition of the History of Ozarka is approved. Seconded by the Chair of the Bureau. Passed, four to none.

The Chair of the Bureau moved that the sitting rise. Agreed.

The Chair of the Interior did not get up when the sitting rose. She sat at the table under the lamp with her ring of keys in front of her and her hand on the wooden case of the Accession, and the other three went out into the dark of the Hall toward the east door, and Penn said goodnight to me, and I stayed, because she looked as though she wanted somebody to.

After a while she said, “I’ve moved to break the shape of the Evening.”

I said she had.

She said, “My mother listened to it every night of her life. She died in Year 160. She had the wire on the night she died and she listened to the sea stand at the mark and closed her eyes. She’d have hated this.”

I said that I did not think so. I said that I thought her mother might have liked to know who was keeping it there.

Lowe looked at me for some time. Then she said, “You’re very like your nine pages, Ohene,” and locked the case, and stood up, and we went out together into the dark of the Hall, and our steps went up into the dome and came back to us late, all the way to the door.

VI. Rand’s Notch

The Chair of the Interior hates trains. Penn was right about that. She sat by the window of the Interior’s compartment on the western rail all the way down the gouge from the capital to the Cliff, nineteen hours, with her ring of keys in her lap and a file open on top of the keys, and did not read the file, and did not sleep, and spoke to me perhaps six times. Once was at Plenty, where the train stops for water beside the National Granary, and she looked out at the great white building lit up against the night like a ship, and said, “Somebody’s grandfather weighs the grain in there. They read his weights on the Evening.” Once was when the river came up alongside us in the dark outside Concord and ran with us for an hour, wide and quiet, going the same way we were going at four knots, and she said, “It’s never once slowed down.” The rest were about the time.

There were two families in Rand’s Notch on the list. Ilsa Vren went out of the Notch in Year 133, and her next of kin of record is her sister’s daughter, Margit Vren, who is seventy-four and keeps a chandlery halfway up the canyon wall. Kit Aldana went out of the Notch in Year 181, at eighteen, in a borrowed boat, and his next of kin of record is his mother, Pilar Aldana, who is forty-six and mends nets on the landing stage at the bottom.

The Interior had sent Standing officers to the other sixteen families. Lowe had chosen to come to these two herself. When I asked her why, on the train, she said it was because the first name on the list was from Rand’s Notch, and that if the Chair of the Interior was going to sit in anyone’s kitchen it should be that one, and that the Aldana boy was one of the four the Evening had not named, and his mother had not heard his name on the Evening, and the Chair of the Interior was going to tell her why.

I asked why she had brought me.

She said, “Because you’ve read the letter more times than I have and you’ll be able to tell them what it says if I can’t.”

You do not see Rand’s Notch until you are in it. The western rail runs along the top of the Cliff through the wheat, half a mile back from the edge, and the station for the Notch is a brick shed in a field with a water tower and a sign. Beyond the shed the wheat goes on toward the west for half a mile and then stops, and the sky comes down to meet it, and there is nothing. Then the road from the station goes through the wheat to the edge, and turns, and goes over, and you are looking down a canyon cut back into the rock of the Cliff, narrow, steep, five hundred feet deep, with the town built up both walls of it from the water to the lip, house above house, all brick and limewash, with stairs between them instead of streets. At the bottom is the harbor, a slot of green water between stone quays, full of boats. At the top, on the lip, where the road comes over, are the Bureau office and the telegraph and the wind.

The road goes down in switchbacks that were cut in the Nineties. Lowe walked it. She is sixty-six and she walked down all nine turns of it with her keys in her pocket and her hand on the rail, slowly, and did not stop to rest, and I walked behind her.

It was the afternoon of the twenty-ninth. Clear. As we came round the fourth turn the canyon opened to the west, as it does there, and the whole of the sea lay below us out to the horizon, and on the horizon, standing up out of the haze with the snow on them, were the Isles.

I had seen them from the Spill every summer for twenty-eight years. I had not seen them from Rand’s Notch, which is a hundred miles north of the Spill and higher, and closer to the northern chain, and I stood still on the switchback with my hand on the rail and looked at them and could not go on for a minute. They are very close from there. They are green below the snowline in the way the woods of Applewall are green in Fifthmonth, and you can see the dark of the valleys going up into the snow, and the white plume of a waterfall on one of the faces, and a cap of cloud on the highest peak, alone in a clear sky. The plates say there is a smudge. There is not a smudge. Lowe waited for me. She did not look at them. When I came on she said, “I can’t, today. I’ve never been able to. Not from the Cliff.”

Margit Vren’s chandlery is a narrow brick shop on the sixth stair, with coils of rope hanging outside it and a window full of brass fittings, and she lives above it with her husband, who was a diver and has bad lungs, and a cat. The Interior’s local officer had gone up ahead of us that morning and asked whether she would be at home in the afternoon to two visitors from the capital on a matter concerning her aunt, and she was. She had put the kettle on. She was a big woman, broad and slow, with gray hair in a knot and the Vren nose, which I recognized from the Bureau’s commendation portrait of her aunt that hangs in the optical section at the Cliff, and she opened the door before we knocked, and looked at Lowe’s silver button, and at me, and said, “She’s dead, then. They’ve found her.”

Lowe said, “No. Mrs. Vren, may we come in.”

I will not give everything that was said in that kitchen. I asked Margit Vren afterward whether I might, and she said I might give whatever I liked, but I find I do not want to. I will give the parts she said I should keep.

Lowe told her. She did it in about four sentences, at the kitchen table, with her hands folded on it, in the Interior’s voice, which is the same voice the Reader uses for the Notices. She said that the Interior had received, by a means it was not yet able to describe, a list of persons who had gone west past the line and were living, and that Ilsa Vren’s name was the first on the list, and that the Interior believed the list to be true, and that the names would be read on the Evening on the ninth, and that the Chair of the Interior had come to tell her first because the list had asked that the families be told first.

Margit Vren sat and looked at her for a long time. Then she said, “Living where?”

Lowe looked at me.

I said, “In the Isles. In the southernmost of them. There’s a city inside it.”

Margit Vren said, “Inside it.”

I said yes. I said that the letter said the Isles were hollow, and that there were countries inside them, under false skies, and that the southernmost had been built for people from the mainland and had been waiting since Year 41, and that her aunt had been lifted off her boat at the edge of the yellow in Year 133 and taken there. I said the letter said she had been looking ever since. I said I was sorry, that I knew how it sounded.

Margit Vren did not say anything. She got up and went to a cupboard by the stove and took out a box, a wooden box with a sliding lid, and brought it to the table and slid the lid off. Inside it was a logbook bound in Bureau green, and a pair of spectacles in a case, and a folded square of paper.

She said, “She left these on the table. In order. Her papers. She was always tidy. My mother found them the next morning and gave them to the Bureau, and the Bureau gave them back after a year, except the papers that were Standing. This is what was left.” She opened the logbook to the last page and turned it round. “You’ll know this.”

Everybody in the nation knows it, though most of them do not know it is hers. It is in her hand, small and slanting and precise, at the foot of the last page of eleven years of optical records, after a column of figures for the apparent contrast of the Isles on the morning of the day she went.

I have described it for eleven years and I would like to look at it.

Margit Vren said, “My mother used to say she’d have gone mad if she hadn’t gone. My mother used to say Aunt Ilsa was the sanest person she ever knew and that’s what made it so hard.” She put her hand flat on the page. “Fifty-one years.”

Lowe said, “Yes.”

Margit Vren said, “She’s ninety-one.”

Lowe said, “Yes.”

Margit Vren said, “She’s been looking at it for fifty-one years.” And then she put her face in her hands at the kitchen table and laughed, a big slow laugh that shook her shoulders, and her husband came in from the back with the cat in his arms to see what was happening, and she couldn’t stop to tell him, and Lowe told him, in the same four sentences, and he sat down.

When we left, at the door, Margit Vren took Lowe’s hand in both of hers, and said, “Will she come home?”

Lowe said she did not know. She said the letter said that anyone who went could come home again, and that nobody would be kept, and that the Interior had no way yet to know whether it was true.

Margit Vren said, “She won’t. You tell her from me she’s not to come home on my account. She’s to stay and look.” And then, after a moment: “And tell her the lamp. Mother kept the lamp in the window for the end of the moon. That’s the custom. Then she kept it another year. Then she put it out, because the Interior’s man came and said it was time. You tell Aunt Ilsa we kept it a year.”

Pilar Aldana was on the landing stage at the bottom of the canyon with a net across her knees and a wooden needle in her hand. She did not stop mending when we came down the last stair. The Interior’s local officer, a young man with a gray-green collar who had known her all his life, said her name and said that the Chair of the Interior would like a word, and she looked up at Lowe, and at the silver button, and said, “About Kit.” She went on mending. “You’re about two years late. You’ll have come about the boat. I’ve paid for the boat.”

Lowe said, “Mrs. Aldana, I’ve come about your son’s name.”

Pilar Aldana stopped mending.

Lowe sat down on the edge of the stone quay beside her, in her dark suit, with her feet over the water, which I would not have believed if I had not seen it, and she told her. The same four sentences. And then she told her the rest, which was not in the four sentences, and which she had not told Margit Vren, since Margit Vren had not needed it.

She said that the Evening had not read Kit’s name when he went, in Year 181, and that this was not because nobody knew he had gone. The Interior had known. The harbor had known, and had told the Interior, and the Interior’s officer had written it in the file. It was because the Interior had a standing order, made in Year 61, that the young ones who went west to be the first were not to be named on the Evening, on the ground that naming them would make other young ones want to go. She said that Kit had been eighteen and had told three people in the Notch that he was going to be the first to come back, and that the officer had judged him to be one of the young ones, and that the Evening had therefore not read his name, and that his mother had listened every night for a month and not heard it.

Pilar Aldana said, “I thought they’d forgot him.”

Lowe said, “No. We decided.”

Pilar Aldana said, “I wrote. Twice. To the capital. I asked why they didn’t read his name. The second time I got a card back that said the Interior regretted.”

Lowe said, “Yes. I signed the card. I sign all of them. I didn’t read yours. I’m sorry.”

The two of them sat on the edge of the quay for a long time with their feet over the green water of the harbor and the net between them. The boats rocked. A gull came down on a mooring post and looked at us and went away. I stood a little back on the stair with the young officer, who was looking at his boots.

Then Pilar Aldana said, “He’s alive.”

Lowe said, “We believe so.”

Pilar Aldana said, “In the Isles.”

Lowe said, “In the southernmost. There’s a city.”

Pilar Aldana looked out the mouth of the harbor, west, past the end of the quays, at the sea, and the Isles standing up out of the haze on the horizon with the afternoon sun coming down toward them. She looked at them for a while. Then she said, “Well, he’s not the first, then. Is he. To come back. He’ll be furious.”

And Lowe laughed. It was the first time I had heard the Chair of the Interior laugh. It was very short and it surprised her as much as it surprised me, and she put her hand over her mouth, and Pilar Aldana looked at her and laughed too, and then wiped her eyes on the net.

Lowe said, “Mrs. Aldana. On the ninth, the Reader will read his name. Living, west. It’ll be the first time the Evening has said it.”

Pilar Aldana said, “I’ll be here. I’ll have the set on the quay.” She picked up her needle. “Will I light the lamp again? For the moon? Is that the custom, when they’re alive?”

Lowe said that there was no custom, since it had never happened.

Pilar Aldana thought about it, with the needle going in and out of the net. Then she said, “I’ll light it. Somebody should start one.”

We went up the canyon in the dusk, by the stairs, slowly. At the top, by the Bureau office on the lip, where the road comes over and the wind is, Lowe stopped and sat down on a bench and did not get up, and the Interior’s car waited for her by the telegraph with its lamps lit, and I sat beside her.

Below us in the canyon the windows of Rand’s Notch were coming on, house above house, down the walls to the harbor. Out on the sea the light was going red and long, and the Isles had gone from green to a kind of violet, with the snow on their peaks lit pink by the last of the sun, which they keep after the Cliff has lost it, since they are so much higher. Then the snow went gray, and then the Isles went dark, and there was only the sea, and the sky, and the first stars.

And then, far to the south along the Cliff, a light came on.

It was small. A single point, very low, right on the line of the Cliff’s edge where it met the sky, a long way off, ten or fifteen miles, steady and yellow. I would not have noticed it if the sky had not been so dark around it. There was no harbor there. The Cliff runs straight and unbroken for forty miles south of the Notch, with wheat on top and sea at the bottom and nothing between.

I asked the young officer, who had come up the stairs behind us, what it was.

He said, “That’s Land’s End. The north window.” He looked at it. “They light it every night. Since Year 104. For a boat.”

Lowe said, without turning her head, “There’s no Ashgrove on the list.”

I said I knew.

She said, “They’ll hear the list on the ninth. They’ll listen for the name. Everybody on the Cliff will. And they’ll not hear it, and they’ll have been keeping that window for eighty years.”

I said that perhaps somebody should go and tell them.

She said, “Yes,” and looked at me.

Land’s End is not on the school map, and it has no road down, and no station. The western rail does not stop there. I went on the morning of the thirtieth in the Interior’s car, alone, by a farm track through the wheat, south from the Notch for fourteen miles, and came out of the wheat onto the lip of the Cliff into a town of brick and tin and limewash with a chapel and a school and a grain factor’s office and a gantry of timber standing out over the edge.

I am not going to describe Land’s End at length. It has been described, better than I could, in the first book of this collection, and everything that book says about it is true. It stands on the lip at four hundred and ten feet. The hoist was working when I came: a boat going down on the cable to the stage at the bottom, slowly, against the counterweight, with two fishermen sitting in it smoking, and a man on the brake at the top whose name I learned was Amos Tunney, and who every child in the town can name. The wheat comes to within a hundred yards of the gantry. The view is what the book says it is. Nobody mentioned it to me in the whole of the day I was there.

The Ashgroves live at the north end of town, in the last house before the cliff path, a narrow brick house of two floors with a slate roof and a window at the top facing west. Lettice Ashgrove is eighty-one. She is small and very upright and wears a man’s cardigan with leather patches at the elbows, which she told me was her husband’s, and she was in her kitchen when I knocked, shelling peas into a bowl. Her granddaughter Ivy, who is twenty-three, was at the table mending a crab pot. Ivy fishes off the hoist. She has the hands for it, and the shoulders, and a sunburn that stops at the collar.

I told them who I was, and that I had come from the capital, and that I had no official business with them and would go away if they asked me to. Lettice Ashgrove looked at me for some time and then told Ivy to put the kettle on, and Ivy did.

I said that on the ninth of Ninthmonth the Evening would read a list of names. I said that I could not yet tell them how the list had come or what else would be read that night, since it was Standing until then, but that the names were of persons who had gone west past the line since Year 133 and who were believed to be living, and that there were twenty-three of them, and that I had seen the list, and that the name of Ashgrove was not on it. I said that I was sorry. I said I had come because I did not want them to listen for it.

Lettice Ashgrove went on shelling peas. When the bowl was full she put it on the table and wiped her hands on her husband’s cardigan.

She said, “Since Year 133.”

I said yes.

She said, “Thomas went in Year 104. Tern. He was my grandmother’s father. He was forty-four and his wife had died and he took the Tern off the hoist one morning in Fifthmonth with a week’s water in her, and Jem Tunney, that’s Amos’s great-grandfather, let him down the cable and didn’t stop him. The town’s never said a word against Jem for it. My grandmother was nine. She lit the window that night and she lit it every night till she died, and then my mother did, and then I did, and the winter I was in the hospital at Shelter with my hip my daughter came home from Concord and did it for me, and Ivy will.” She looked at the window over the stove, which faced east. “That’s not the window. The window’s upstairs.”

I said I had seen it from Rand’s Notch.

She said, “Everybody sees it from the Notch. They say it’s the only lamp on the Cliff that stays lit.” She was quiet for a while. “I didn’t think he’d be on any list. I’m eighty-one. I can count. If he’d lived he’d be a hundred and twenty-four.” Then she said, “It was good of you to come. All this way. You didn’t have to.” And then: “Did they see it?”

I asked her what she meant.

She said, “The window. From out there. If there’s people out there that have been lifting boats off the water since Year 133, and they’ve been living in the Isles, and they’ve been looking this way. Every night for fifty years. Did they see the window?”

I said that I did not know. I said that the letter did not say.

Ivy Ashgrove, at the table with the crab pot, said, “I’ll ask them.”

Her grandmother said, “Ivy.”

Ivy said, “I will, though.” She did not look up from the pot. “If it’s true. If the names come on the Evening and they’re living. Then it’s open, isn’t it. Somebody’ll go. And I’ll go, and I’ll ask them.” She pulled a knot tight with her teeth. “I’ve been looking at those mountains every day of my life. You don’t stop. Everybody says you stop at eleven. I never stopped.”

Her grandmother looked at her for a long time across the table. Then she said, to me, “She never did. I used to worry.” She picked up the bowl of peas. “You’ll stay to supper. And you’ll stay to see it lit, since you’ve come.”

I stayed. At dusk Lettice Ashgrove went upstairs with a box of matches, slowly, one stair at a time, with her hand on the wall, and I went up behind her, and Ivy behind me, and in the little room at the top of the house, which was empty except for a chair and a table under the window, she lit the lamp. It was an old brass lamp with a glass chimney, with a wick trimmed so square that I could see it had been trimmed every evening for a very long time. She turned the flame up and set the chimney on and stood back.

The window looked west over the edge of the Cliff and the sea. The Isles were going violet on the horizon, and then gray, and then they were gone, and the lamp was the only light in the window, and the window was the only light on the Cliff for fourteen miles in either direction.

Lettice Ashgrove said, “That’s it. That’s all it is.”

I said that it was a great deal.

She said, “It’s a lamp.” And then she sat down in the chair under the window, which was evidently her chair, and folded her hands, and looked out, and Ivy and I went down and left her there, and I took the car back to the Notch in the dark with the window behind me on the edge of the world, getting smaller, and did not lose sight of it until the wheat came up between us.

VII. The Reader

I am not going to use her name. Her name was read once, on the Evening, on the night of her appointment in Year 162, in the Notices, between a dredging closure on the middle river and a license granted in the Greens, and it has not been used on the Evening since, and the Readers do not use their names, and I have decided that this account will not be the first document to break the custom. She has read this chapter and asked me to keep it so. She said that if anyone wants her name they can find it in the Notices for Sixthmonth of Year 162, like everyone else, and that the Office has it, and that this ought to be enough for anybody.

We came back from the Cliff on the night train of the thirtieth, the Chair of the Interior and I, and got in at the east bank in the late afternoon of the thirty-first, and went straight from the train to the broadcast house without going home.

The broadcast house stands below the Hall of the Instrument on the slope of the east bank, between the Hall and the archive, and it is the plainest building in the government quarter: three floors of the white limestone, square, with small windows, and on the roof a lattice mast with wires running from it across the river to the relay house on the west bank, and from there along the rail in every direction to the four hundred and six relay houses of the nation. There is no sign on it. Every citizen of the capital knows which building it is, the way everyone in a village knows which house the midwife lives in.

Lowe has a key. She let us in at a side door, and we went up a narrow stair to the second floor, and along a corridor with green linoleum on the floor and the doors of offices on either side, and through a door at the end into a small room with a window of thick glass in one wall. Through the glass was a smaller room. In the smaller room was a desk, and on the desk a microphone on a stand, and a lamp, and a clock with a sweep hand, and a stack of yellow telegraph slips, and a glass of water, and a woman.

She was sitting at the desk reading the slips. She did not look up. She is fifty-eight, and of middle height, and broad in the shoulders, and her hair is dark and gray together and pinned up without much care, and she was wearing a gray wool dress with the sleeves pushed up to the elbow, and she had a pencil behind her ear. She looked like a schoolteacher in a hill town in Charterland marking slates on a winter evening, which is what her mother was, and what she would have been.

There was a window behind her desk, facing west, across the river. I could see the Low Quarter through it, and the stacks of the furnaces, and the smoke going up with the green of the pour on the underside of it.

The clock on her desk said four minutes past seven.

Lowe said, very quietly, “We’ll wait.”

I have since watched her read the Evening from that room eleven times. I give the first time as I wrote it in my gray book, because I did not know then how it was done, and the reader of this account will not know either.

The slips come in from the telegraph room on the floor below, by a boy who runs them up the stair. They come in through the afternoon in batches: the nine gauges from the Bureau at five, the weather from the provincial stations at six, the rail from the Interior’s traffic office at half past, the prices from the Exchequer’s market clerks, the Notices from all four Offices and the Assembly and the provincial councils all day long. The Reader sorts them. She has a wooden rack on the desk with eleven slots. She puts the slips in the slots in the order she will read them. The Account comes last, from the Interior, typed on a single sheet, at about a quarter to seven. She reads it through twice with her pencil and makes marks on it that only she can read. Then she puts everything down and folds her hands and waits for the clock.

At fourteen minutes past seven she drank a little water.

At a quarter past, the sweep hand came up to the twelve, and a small red lamp came on above the window of thick glass, and she leaned forward to the microphone, and began.

I had heard that voice every night of my adult life. I had never seen anyone make it. It came out of her in the small room and into the microphone and down the wire and up the mast and across the river and out along the rail to four hundred and six relay houses and every set in the nation, and in the room behind the thick glass it came out of a small speaker on the wall a fraction of a second late, so that I heard her twice, once through the glass and once from the wall. She did not raise her voice. She did not change it at all from the beginning to the end. She read the river at nine gauges, from the Gulf to the Spill, numbers, one after another, at an even pace, as though they were the most important numbers in the world, which they are. She read the weather for the fourteen provinces. She read the rail. She read the prices. She read the Notices: an appointment at Concord, a license granted at Tally, a school term at Meridian, an Assembly result, a dredging closure below Plenty, a child found at Endeavor and returned. A Bureau crew lost on the Tennessee Water, two names, with their districts. She read the Account, which was about the autumn rail schedule. She read it as she read the river, and I understood, watching her, why Ozarkans listen to the Account the way they listen to a relative explaining a decision they think has already been made: because the voice gives it no more weight than the river, and no less, and so the listener has to supply the weight herself.

Then she put the Account down, and looked out through the glass at nothing, and said the last thing.

The sea stands at the mark.

The red lamp went out. The clock said seven twenty-six. She sat back in her chair, and took the pencil from behind her ear, and put it on the desk, and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, and then looked up through the glass and saw us, and her face changed completely, and she said, through the glass, in a voice I would not have known for the same voice, broad and quick and from the hills, “Chair. You’ll be wanting me, then.”

We did not go up to the Hall at once. She asked us to come to her rooms first, on the third floor, where the Readers live. She said there was something the Chair should see before she said anything to the four of them, and that she would rather show it in her own place.

The Readers’ rooms are three small rooms under the roof of the broadcast house, with sloping ceilings and dormer windows, and they have been the Readers’ rooms since Year 37, and they look it. The walls are lined with shelves, and the shelves are full of books that nine people have left there in a hundred and forty-seven years, and the books are in no order at all that I could find, and I looked. A stair goes up from the middle room to a hatch in the roof. She told me there were bees up there in four hives, which the fifth Reader had begun, and that she kept them, and that the honey was very good, and that it tasted of the river, and she gave me a jar of it when I left, and she was right.

She sat us down at a table in the middle room. Then she went to a cupboard in the wall beside the chimney, and unlocked it with a key from a string round her neck, and took out a book.

It was a ledger, of the old Bureau kind, bound in green cloth gone brown, with leather corners. She put it on the table between Lowe and me.

She said, “That’s the Readers’ book. The first Reader began it in Year 37, on the night of the first Evening. Each of us writes in it on the night we’re appointed. Then whenever we like. Then the night before we die, if we know it’s coming, which mostly we do.” She put her hand on the cover. “Nobody else has seen it. Not the Interior. Not any Chair. You’re the first, and that’s because you’ve come to ask me to break the shape, Chair, and I’d like you to know what you’re asking before you ask it.”

Lowe said, “How do you know what I’m going to ask?”

She said, “Because the Interior’s clerk came across from the Hall on the twenty-fifth with a note asking whether the Reader would attend the four Chairs, and the Reader has never been asked to attend the four Chairs in a hundred and forty-seven years. It’s in the book. And because something’s been read in the Hall these ten nights that’s kept the lamps lit till dawn, and I can see the Hall’s lantern from my bedroom window.” She opened the ledger. “And because the canister was heavy. Every Reader knows what the post is. It’s the one Standing thing we’re told. The fourth Reader wrote down how we’re told, and we’ve all been told the same way since. If it’s heavy, the Evening on the ninth of Ninthmonth will have a Figure in it, and the Reader will read it. That’s all. And then you came to the window tonight, Chair, and I saw your face, and you’ll forgive me, you don’t look like a woman come to give me a Figure.”

She turned the pages. They were in many hands. Some entries were long, some a line. I saw dates going by, Year 52, Year 88, Year 109. She stopped at a page about two-thirds of the way through, where the hand was small and very upright, and turned the book round to face us.

She said, “Year 141. The seventh Reader. That’s the four minutes.”

I give it whole. The Chairs voted, on the eleventh night, to release it with the rest. It has never been entered in the broadcast register, and it was not, until that evening in the Readers’ rooms, known to anybody but nine Readers, and the seventh of them is the one who wrote it down.

9 Ninthmonth, 141. I read it tonight. Here is what I said, as near as I can give it. I wrote it out this afternoon after the Interior’s sheet came with the Figure on it and nothing else, and I read it after the Account. Four minutes. Nobody stopped me. I had thought they would.

“The Office of Population Management has tonight revised the Standing Figure for the year. The new Figure is lower. You will have heard the number in the Account. I have read you the Account as I was given it.

“There is no derivation with tonight’s Figure. Every other year there is a derivation, eighty pages, and the Academy checks it, and you can read it in the east bank archive, and I have. There is none this year. The Office acts tonight under the sixth article, which permits it to act on its own authority in the interest of the society. I will read you the clause, so that you have it.” (Here I read the clause.)

“This has happened before. In Year 73 and in Year 109. Both times in Ninthmonth. Both times without a derivation. You can read the pages in the archive. I have read those too.

“I have read you the river at nine gauges every night for nineteen years. I have read you the price of grain and the names of the drowned. I have never read you a number I could not tell you where it came from. Tonight I have read you one. I do not know where it came from. I do not think it is my place to know. I think the Office is doing what it thinks is right, and I have no reason to think it is wrong, and I trust them, mostly, the way you do.

“But I would like you to have heard me say that I don’t know. Because the voice is supposed to be a voice and not a person. And a voice can’t say it doesn’t know. And I am a person, and I don’t.”

Then I read the line. The sea stands at the mark. It does. I checked the Spill gauge slip twice.

Nobody came. I sat in the reading room till ten. The Interior did not send. The Chairs did not send. The telephone did not ring. I went to bed. In the morning the Interior’s clerk brought the slips as usual and said nothing. I read the Evening tonight in eleven minutes. The sea stood at the mark.

I think they were relieved. I think everybody was. I think the whole nation heard me say I didn’t know, and turned the set off, and went to bed, and in the morning had decided not to have heard it. I don’t blame them. I nearly did it myself.

I won’t do it again. I don’t think I need to. I think once is enough for a thing to have been said.

Lowe read it twice. Then she closed her eyes and sat with her hand on the page.

The Reader said, “She lived another eighteen years. She read the Evening every night of them. She trained the eighth, and the eighth trained me. She told the eighth, and the eighth told me, that the only thing a Reader has is the shape. You read the same things in the same order every night, and you don’t put yourself in, and because you don’t put yourself in, people can put themselves in. That’s what the shape is for. She said she broke it once to say she was a person, and it was the right thing to do, and she’d never do it again, because the second time you break it, it’s not a shape any more, it’s a habit.”

Lowe opened her eyes. She said, “We’re going to ask you to break it for twenty-five minutes.”

The Reader said, “I know. I’d guessed something like it.” She closed the book. “I’d like to read what you want me to read before I say yes or no. If that’s allowed.”

Lowe said, “It’s addressed to everyone. I think that includes you.”

We went up to the Hall at nine. The Reader walked between Lowe and me across the dark floor of the Hall to the table beside the case, and the other three Chairs stood up when she came in, which I do not think any Chair has done for a Reader before, and she looked embarrassed and told them to sit down.

Calloway gave her the eleven sheets and the small sheet. She sat at the table under the lamp, with her pencil behind her ear, and read them, slowly, all the way through, with her lips moving very slightly, the way she reads the Account in the small room before the Evening. It took her a little over forty minutes. Nobody spoke. When she reached the end she turned back to the beginning and read the first sheet again, and then the part about the seeds, and then the small sheet with the names, and then she put them down in a square stack on the table, edges even, and put her hands flat on top of them.

She said, “Your Evening has said the same things in the same order every night since your fifty-second year, and nobody in the world says anything as faithfully as that.”

Calloway said yes.

The Reader said, “Well. That’s very kind of her.”

Then she said she would read it.

She said she would read it on the ninth, in full, in place of the Account. She said she would read the names in the Notices, before the Account, in the order on the sheet, with their places and years, and the words living, west, in the voice she used for the lost crews, since it was the voice everyone would know. She said she would read the river first, and the weather, and the rail, and the prices, as always, because people would need them, and because it was the shape. She said she would read the letter as she read everything, without voices, at the pace of the river. And she said that when she came to the end she would read the last line, the one the Evening ends on, because it was true, and because the letter said it too, and because the nation would want to hear it in the same voice it had always heard it in, after all that.

She said she wanted one thing.

She said she wanted to take the letter back to the broadcast house with her that night and keep it in the Readers’ cupboard until the ninth. She said she wanted to read it aloud, alone, in the reading room, every night after the Evening, from the beginning to the end, in order, until the ninth came. Partly to learn it, so that she would not stumble on the night. And partly because of what it said about the seeds.

Simeon Adeyemi said, “Places where memory is said aloud, in order, every day.”

The Reader said, “Yes. I thought I’d start.”

The four Chairs looked at each other. Then Margarethe Lowe, who keeps the Accession and every Standing document of the Interior, and who has never in sixteen years let one leave the east bank archive overnight, put the letter and the small sheet back in the canister, and turned the end, and gave the canister to the Reader, and the Reader put it under her arm, and went home.

VIII. The Ninth of Ninthmonth

The four Chairs listened from the room behind the thick glass in the broadcast house. They asked me to be with them. I said no, and I have been asked since why I said no, and I will give the reason, which is that I had spent twenty-nine years being the only person who knew a thing, and I did not want to hear it said aloud for the first time in a room full of the only other people who knew it. I wanted to hear it with people who didn’t.

So I went to the Lamplighter’s.

The Lamplighter’s is a public house in the Low Quarter on the west bank, three streets back from the river, in a lane between a cooper’s yard and the side wall of the second furnace of the glassworks, so that one wall of its back room is always warm and the beer on the shelf against it has to be drunk quickly. It is where the master of the Plummet gave me his account, and it is where the western section of the Bureau drinks when it is in the capital, and it is full most evenings of furnace men and river men and clerks from the east bank who have walked across the second bridge to get away from the east bank, and it has a set on the wall behind the bar that is older than anyone who drinks there. Ned Corrigan had stayed in the capital for the ninth. He had kept a chair for me in the corner by the warm wall, with his back to it, and when I came in at five past seven he stood up and gave me the chair and sat on a barrel.

The room was full. It always is, on a ninth of Ninthmonth. I had not known that. Ned told me. He said that on the ninth of Ninthmonth, every year since he could remember, the Low Quarter came into the public houses for the Evening, because the Evening on the ninth was when a Figure would come, if a Figure was coming, and people liked to hear it with other people. He said nobody ever said that was why. He said they said it was the end of the harvest, or a saint’s day of one of the confessions, or that the beer was fresh. He said he’d been coming to the Lamplighter’s on the ninth since he was a boy on the Fathom, and that in Year 170, when the Figure came, the room had gone so quiet you could hear the furnace through the wall.

I looked round at the room. Furnace men in their leather aprons, with the green of the cullet ground into the creases of their hands. River men. A table of clerks in their collars. Two old women with a jug between them. A young couple at the bar with their fingers laced together on the counter, very still, and I thought about the licenses, and looked away.

The set on the wall said nothing. The barman turned it up.

At a quarter past seven the voice came on.

It read the river.

The Gulf at Constance. The Greens at Third Ferry. The lower river at Meridian. Nine gauges, numbers, the same pace it has always had, from the warm south up the old valley to the bend and then west along the gouge across the whole country to the Spill. I listened to it read the nine gauges and watched the room listen. Nobody moved. A furnace man near the bar had his mug halfway to his mouth and kept it there through all nine.

It read the weather for the provinces. Clear in the Edge, rain coming in the Greens, frost on the uplands of Applewall by morning. It read the rail. It read the prices. Grain, fish, salt, iron, recovered copper. The grain price was the same as the night before, and I thought of Wendell’s weights at Plenty, whose name I did not yet know, and of the Granary lit up like a ship in the dark beside the train.

Then it said, The Notices.

It read the Notices. An appointment. A school term. A dredging closure below Endeavor. A child found. Nobody in the Lamplighter’s moved at all. And then the voice paused, a very small pause, the length of a breath, which it does before the Bureau crews lost on the Tennessee Water, and every person in that room knew the pause and what came after it, and I saw the old women at the table put their hands flat on either side of the jug.

The voice said, The Interior has received the names of persons who went west past the limit and are living. Their families have been told.

And then it read the names.

Ilsa Vren, of Rand’s Notch, Year 133. Living, west.

Oren Paskett, of Gannet Notch, Year 138. Living, west.

It read them all. Twenty-three. It read them at the pace it reads the lost crews, with their places and their years, and after each one the same two words in the same voice. I had the list in my gray book and I followed it with my finger under the table, and I heard it come to Halcyon Dree, of Concord, Year 140, who had been sixteen and had never been named, and to Barnaby Quell, and to Jessamy Coyle, of New Carthage, pilot, Year 171, and at that name a man at the clerks’ table said “Coyle” out loud, to nobody, and put his hand over his mouth. And it came to Kit Aldana, of Rand’s Notch, Year 181. Living, west, and I thought of a woman on a stone quay at the bottom of a canyon five hundred miles away with a set beside her and a net across her knees, hearing her son’s name on the Evening for the first time. And it came to the last. Wynn Okoro, of Assurance, Year 183. Living, west.

Then it said, The Account.

It was nineteen minutes to eight. I know because Ned looked at his watch and showed it to me, and his hand was shaking.

I have heard the letter read perhaps forty times now. I heard it read by the Chair of the Academy in the Hall on the first night. I have heard the Reader read it eleven times in the small room, alone, after the Evening, in the week before the ninth, when I sat behind the glass with my gray book and she did not know I was there, or knew and did not mind. I have read it to myself more times than I can count, and I have it nearly by heart. I will only say what it was like to hear it in the Lamplighter’s.

She read it at the pace of the river. She read it in the voice. She did not change it once, not for the numbers, not for the children, not for the names of the Isles, not for the flower. She read We are people made of light in exactly the voice she uses for the price of salt. And because she did not change it, the room had to.

At It is good because we asked it to be, somebody laughed. It was one of the furnace men. It was not an unkind laugh. It was the laugh of somebody who has had a thing explained to him that he had always known and never been told. Then he stopped laughing.

At the part about the numbers, the young couple at the bar let go of each other’s hands and turned round to face the set, and stayed turned round.

At I am sorry for that, one of the old women at the table began to cry, quietly, without moving her face, and the other one put a hand on her arm and kept it there.

At I asked for that one myself, in your eighty-first year, for a woman who did the laundry, the whole room made a sound. I do not know how to describe it. It was not laughter and it was not a word. It was something like the sound a congregation makes when the preacher, after an hour of the end of the world, says something about his mother.

At The stopping of the water was all of us together, Ned Corrigan put his head down on his arms on the barrel he was sitting on and did not lift it again until the end.

At the part about the Last Isle and the people who own the mountains, a river man near the door said, loudly, “Kept the pictures and let the people go under,” and then a word I will not print, and two or three people told him to be quiet, and he was.

At the names, at Please say their names now. They are not first. They are alive, which is better, nobody made any sound at all.

At the flower, the room was very quiet. I watched faces. Most of them did not understand it, I think, and I did not entirely understand it either. But at When it has let them go it will die, and I will go out with it. I do not mind very much. I have been here a long time and I have liked most of it, the barman, who had not moved since he turned the set up, reached under the counter, and took out a glass, and filled it, and put it on the bar in front of the set, where nobody was standing, and left it there.

At the Ask, at You may refuse, somebody near the back said, under their breath, “Not likely.”

At I would like it to mean something else, it was nine minutes to eight.

At A man of yours called me Lantern, once. You may, the voice stopped, for longer than I have ever heard it stop. Four seconds, perhaps five. Then it said, in exactly the same voice it had used for all of it, for the river and the grain price and the names and the flower:

The sea stands at the mark.

And the set went quiet.

Nobody moved for some time.

The furnace through the wall went on. You can always hear it in the Lamplighter’s, a low roar under everything, like the river. Out in the lane a dog barked. The glass on the bar in front of the set had a little foam on it, going down.

Then a man at the clerks’ table, the one who had said “Coyle,” said, quite softly, “The new real.”

He said it in the third way. I knew it the moment I heard it. Every Ozarkan knows the three ways, and can tell them apart by tone, and he said it in the quiet way, the dangerous way, the way that means we are being told a story, and I have decided to notice that it is one. Only it did not mean that, said in that room on that night. It meant something I had never heard it mean. It meant, I think, we have been told.

One of the furnace men looked at him across the room and said, “The new real,” back, in the first way, the weather way, the way you say it over a crop that came in heavier than the field can account for: take it, and don’t pick at it.

And the old woman who had been crying wiped her face with the back of her hand, and laughed, and said it the second way, the joke way, the way that drives the Academy to distraction, the new real, and slapped the table, and the whole of the Lamplighter’s laughed with her, all at once, too loudly, for too long, the way people laugh at a funeral when somebody says something about the dead man’s hat.

Then the barman picked up the glass from in front of the set and drank it himself.

I give the rest of that night in the order I learned it, which was over the following weeks, from letters and wires and the reports of the Interior’s provincial officers, which the Chair of the Interior let me read.

At the broadcast house, when the red lamp went out, the Reader sat back in her chair and put her pencil down on the desk and said, through the thick glass, to the four Chairs, “Well, that’s done,” and then went up to her rooms and was not seen until the next afternoon, when she came down at four to sort the slips, as usual. That night she read the Evening in eleven minutes. The sea stood at the mark. The Interior had received, by the next afternoon, eleven thousand letters and two thousand wires at the broadcast house, and the boy who runs the slips up the stair had to be given three other boys to help him.

On the west bank, at the second furnace of the glassworks, the shift whistle blew at eight o’clock, as it does, and then blew again, which it does not, and went on blowing for about a minute, and the foreman later told the Interior’s officer that nobody had touched it and that he did not intend to look into it.

In Rand’s Notch, Pilar Aldana lit a lamp in the window of her house on the landing stage, facing west, after the Evening. That is in the Interior officer’s report. The officer’s report also says that by nine o’clock there was a lamp in a western window of every house in Rand’s Notch, from the harbor to the lip, both walls of the canyon, three hundred and four windows, and that nobody had been asked to light them, and that the officer had gone up and down the stairs counting them and had lit one himself, in the Interior’s office on the lip, and had then, he wrote, been unable to think what to put in the report about it.

The same was true, the next morning’s wires said, in Gannet Notch, and in Callow Notch, and in Sevenmile, and in Ladder Notch and Low Notch and Saltash and Brennan’s Notch and Pruitt’s Cut, and in Shelter, which has no western windows, where the people of the town brought lamps out of their houses and stood in the street at the western edge of the town with the lamps raised. In Holloway there was no name on the list from that year except Una Fairbrother’s, and her family was dead, and the town lit her window anyway.

At Land’s End there was one window lit, at the north end of town, as there is every night. Ivy Ashgrove wrote to me at the Academy a week later and said that her grandmother had listened to the Evening in the kitchen and then gone upstairs and lit the lamp at the usual time, and sat down in the chair under the window, and that after a while she had said, Then they did see it, and that Ivy had asked her how she knew, and that her grandmother had said, Because she said she was watching. Kindly. And that it was mostly her. And you don’t keep watch on a coast for eighty years and miss the only light on it.

At Threshold, on the porch of a house on the ridge where the hum comes up through the boards, an old man of eighty-seven named Fitzgerald Corrigan listened to the Evening with a gray dog asleep on his feet, and when it was over he wired his grandson at the Lamplighter’s, care of the barman, in four words, which Ned showed me the next morning on the yellow form. TOLD YOU. ASK ANSEL.

And at Tally, in the Numbered Wood, at the Reserve Service depot on the lake shore, where the lakebed conduits come ashore, an old man of eighty-seven named Ansel Grieve, who had been the Inspector for the reserve islands near the town for sixty years and is still, though retired, called the Inspector by everybody, listened to the Evening on the depot’s set with his granddaughter, who is a chartmaker for the Reserve Service, and at the end of it he took a pipe out of his pocket that had belonged to someone else, and did not light it, and put it in his teeth, and said to his granddaughter, Daisy, fetch me a card and a pen.

She did. He wrote on the card, in the handwriting of a man who has been drawing maps for seventy years, a single word, and addressed it, and gave it to her to post. She told me afterward that she did not understand it. She said the card was addressed to M., the Station, Mammoth, which she said was not an address in the nation, since there is no Station on Mammoth and nobody lives there, and that the word on it was a name.

Moth.

IX. Afterward

The floor did not give. I want to say that first, because the Chair of the Interior was afraid it would, and because she asked me, when I showed her the draft of this account, to say it plainly for the benefit of whoever is Chair of the Interior the next time the Isles have something to tell us.

The trains ran on the tenth of Ninthmonth. The harvest came in. The Evening went out at a quarter past seven that night in eleven minutes, in the same voice, and the river stood at nine gauges, and the price of grain was the price of grain. The furnaces of the Low Quarter did not stop. Fourteen million people got up in the morning and went to work, and most of them, the Interior’s provincial officers reported in the week that followed, talked about nothing else all day, and then went home and had supper.

That is the first thing. The rest I give in order.

On the morning of the tenth, at seven o’clock, when the keepers of the east bank archive came to unlock the doors, there were about three hundred people waiting on the steps. By noon there were four thousand, in a line that went down the hill past the broadcast house and along the river front to the foot of the second bridge. They had come to see the four pages.

Forty people a year make that walk. It is a forty-minute walk from the Low Quarter. I have known those figures all my working life; they are printed in the Academy’s own description of the archive’s visitors, and I have quoted them in lectures. On the tenth of Ninthmonth, Year 184, eleven thousand people made it. On the eleventh, nine thousand. The keepers set the four pages on a table in the entrance hall under glass so that the line could pass them without stopping, and it passed them for nineteen days, and the archive’s visitors’ book filled four volumes, and the Office has since bound them and put them on the shelf beside the old one, which has the names of the four thousand who came in the hundred and eleven years before.

I went to see the line on the tenth. I stood at the top of the steps beside the keeper and watched people come past the table. They looked at the four sheets for a few seconds each. Some of them touched the glass. Most of them said nothing. One old man, at about ten in the morning, stopped at the table and would not move on, and the people behind him waited, and after a while the keeper went to him, and he said that his mother had waited eleven years for a license, between Year 109 and Year 120, and that he was the child she had in the end, and that he had come to see the page that made him late. The keeper asked whether he would like to sit down. He said no. He said he would like to say thank you to somebody, and he did not know whom, and he went down the steps.

The Office printed the number on the first of Tenthmonth.

Simeon Adeyemi had told the four Chairs on the fourth night of the sitting that he would print it, with its derivation, and nobody had argued with him. It was printed in the Office’s monthly bulletin, in eighty-one pages, district by district, year by year, for the four years, with the arithmetic in full, so that the Academy could check it, and the Academy did check it, and found two errors, both in the Office’s disfavor, and the Office corrected them. I will not give the number here. It has five figures. The reader can find it in the bulletin for Tenthmonth, Year 184, and in the Office’s archive, and on the wall of the Office.

I mean that last literally. On the night of the second of Tenthmonth somebody climbed the front of the Office’s building on the east bank, under the lintel where Every one is counted is cut into the limestone, and wrote the number underneath the motto in white paint, in figures a foot high. And underneath the number, smaller, the words and these were not.

The Office’s keepers went to scrub it off in the morning. Simeon Adeyemi came down the steps and stopped them. He stood in front of the building for some time looking at it, and then he went back up the steps, and that afternoon the Office posted a notice beside the main door, over the Chair’s seal, saying that the painting on the front of the building would be left for one year, and that the Office thanked whoever had done it, and that the Office regretted, in the true sense of the word, which it had not been using correctly on its cards.

It is still there. It will be there until Tenthmonth, Year 185. I walk past it every morning.

In Tenthmonth the Office reopened eighteen closed lines in its register.

There was no form for it. Adeyemi made one, as he said he would, and the Assembly’s clerk had to be told about it since it was a change to the Office’s schedules, and the Assembly was told, and the clerk entered it, and that is how the Assembly, which does not touch the Standing Offices, came to have before it for the first time in its history a document from a Standing Office asking for something. The form has a new line in the field where the cause goes. It says, as Hollis Penn suggested at two in the morning on the first night of the sitting, living, west. The Office’s clerks have since added it to the five lines of the twenty-three that were still open, so that the twenty-three now read alike.

On the nineteenth of Tenthmonth a delegate to the Assembly from the Twelfth Province, a schoolteacher from a valley town behind the ridge, rose in the chamber in the afternoon session and moved that the Assembly call a constitutional convention for Year 186 to consider the sixth article of the founding instrument.

I was in the gallery. The Chair of the Academy had told me it would happen and that I should see it. The chamber was very full. When the delegate sat down there was silence for a long time, and then the Speaker of the Assembly asked, in the form, whether the motion was seconded, and seventy-one delegates stood up together, from every province, so many at once that the benches creaked, and the Speaker said that the motion was seconded, and that it would be tabled for debate in the spring session, and that the clerk would enter it.

So the sixth article has come up. There is a tabled draft. In four hundred thousand pages of convention record it had never once come up, and now it is in the Assembly’s minutes for the nineteenth of Tenthmonth, Year 184, in the hand of the clerk, and I do not know what the Assembly will do with it, and neither, the Chairs tell me, do they. Margarethe Lowe said, when I asked her, that she would like it to be argued savagely and at length, and that she hoped the Interior would lose.

In the last week of Tenthmonth the four Chairs sat again, by night, in the Hall.

They sat for two nights. On the first they passed, three to one, a motion that the western limit be withdrawn for persons taken across it by the craft of the residents of the western mountains, and kept for every other vessel, so that the cutters would still turn back a skiff from Assurance with a boy of nineteen in it who wanted to be first, and would no longer prosecute anybody who went the other way. Lowe voted against, and gave her reason in the minute, which was that the Chairs had still not seen one of the craft with their own eyes and the Interior did not make law on the say-so of a cook. Penn said that the cook in question was the best cook in the western section and had never once been wrong about weather, and the minute records that too.

On the second night they wrote a reply.

There had never been one. In a hundred and eleven years since Year 73 the canister had come up off the post at Sixty-Two and gone into the Hall and gone back out to the post again, empty, by the next year’s sounding, and the Chairs had never once put anything in it. Calloway said that a letter which asked to be answered, and was not answered, was a letter you had refused, and that the Chairs had better not refuse it by accident. So they wrote. It is short. The four of them wrote it together, at the table under the lamp, passing the pen, arguing over every sentence, for most of a night, and I give it here because they voted to let me.

To the one who wrote our Accession.

We have read your letter on the Evening, in full, as you asked. The names were read first. The families were told first.

We accept the Ask. We will choose seven places within a year and tell you what they are. We would like your help to choose them, if you will give it.

We would like to come and see. We will send whom we choose, if your craft will come for them.

We would like to have been told sooner. We understand why we were not. We have not yet decided whether we forgive it, and you said we could refuse, and we have not refused.

Thank you for the water.

Penn. Lowe. Adeyemi. Calloway.

Ned Corrigan took it out to Sixty-Two in the Plummet on the second of Eleventhmonth, in weather that no sounding vessel would choose to go out in, with the canister sealed under the Bureau’s seal and the four Chairs’ letter inside it, and grappled the float in a rising sea after six hours of trying, and clipped the canister into its cradle himself, because his bosun’s knees had gone, and let it down. He told me that as the float went under, the canister was warm again. He said it went warm in his hands as he let it go, as though somebody had taken the other end.

On the fourteenth of Eleventhmonth, nine weeks after the Evening, a parcel came to the Reserve Service depot at Tally on the morning launch from the lakes, addressed in a very neat, very even hand, like print, to the one who draws.

Ansel Grieve opened it at his kitchen table, with his granddaughter watching. Inside was a tin box, of the old Bureau kind, dented, with a hinged lid, and a bundle of paper tied with string.

In the tin box were three things. A letter of four pages, in a slanting old hand, from a man to his grandson, about a library on a floating city and a girl in a well. A single torn page from the marriage register of the floating city of Bellwether, with a mark on it in faded ink like a pale fan. And the silver insignia of a colonel of the Directorate Security Forces, tarnished, with the pin bent.

The bundle of paper was a log. It was very long, in the same neat hand as the address, and it began, This is a personal log, and it told the history of a family from a drowning girl in the Rise to a grave on Mammoth in Year 131, in order, without leaving anything out. On top of it was a card, in the same hand.

You asked for it by name. He said whoever did should have the box. I think he meant you. The log is a copy. I keep the other and read it every night to someone who needs it. When the Section makes its ninth edition it will want both. Please take them to the archivist who counted. She has waited, and she will know what to do. — M.

Ansel Grieve brought them to me himself. He is eighty-seven, and he came down from Tally on the lakes train and across to the Academy on foot from the station, with a stick in one hand and a canvas bag in the other and his granddaughter at his elbow, and he would not let her take the bag. He came up to the long room on the third floor under the green glass roof and stood by my desk and put the bag on it.

He said, “You’ll be Ohene.”

I said I was.

He said, “I’ve read your sentence. Everybody on the lakes has. I used to have it pinned up in the depot.” He undid the bag. “I’ve a book too. Seven of us wrote it. We left a lot off. I think we’d like to put it back on, now.” He took out the tin box, and the log, and then, from the bottom of the bag, a thick book bound in Reserve Service canvas, with a map drawn on the cover in ink. He laid them on the desk in a row. Then he said, “Somebody’s going west in the spring, I’m told. My granddaughter’s put in for it. She draws.” He looked at her. “Better than me.”

On the morning of the twentieth of Twelfthmonth, when I came up to the long room at eight and took the cover off my desk, there was a sheet of paper on the blotter that had not been there when I left the night before.

It was a pale stuff, thin and stiff and faintly translucent. There was writing on it in black, in upright letters, very regular, the kind a schoolteacher puts on a board for the back row. There was a small gap after every full stop.

Thank you for keeping the list. There will be one more line, and it will not say none. You will know where it goes when you see it. I am sorry I did not answer you at the Spill. I heard you every year.

I have the sheet in my gray book, the eleventh, between the last written page and the four hundred and eleven lines at the back.

After the line for entry 411, which is a mangrove in the Greens and says none, I have ruled one more line, in ink, and numbered it.

I have left it open.

A. O. The east bank, New Carthage. Twelfthmonth, Year 184.

Book Seven: The Crossing

Marguerite Grieve, chartmaker of the Reserve Service, Year 185

My grandfather keeps a tin in the depot at Tally with seven boys’ maps in it, and the first thing he ever taught me about a chart is that it is a list of what you have decided to tell people. He says that the sea does not care what you draw and that the people reading your chart do, and that the hardest thing a chartmaker learns is what to leave off.

This is the chart I made in the spring and summer of Year 185, of the western sea from the Long Cliff to the Great Rocky Isles, which no chartmaker in the nation had made before, because the Bureau’s charts stop at ninety miles with a printed line and open paper. The chart itself is in the Bureau’s archive now and in the Reserve Service depot at Tally, in two fair copies. This is what is on the back of it, which is the same thing my grandfather and his friends did with their maps, which is to write down what happened while the map was being made. I have put a heading at the start of each part saying what part of the chart it goes with, as they did.

I have left nothing off. That is the first rule of this chart and I made it myself. My grandfather says it cannot be done and that I will find out why. He is probably right. I am going to try.

West is up.

1. The Party

Chart: The blank sheet. Bureau stock, four feet by six, ruled in the Reserve Service’s grid, with the Long Cliff drawn along the bottom edge from Rand’s Notch at the right to the Spill at the left, since west is at the top and north is at the right, as my grandfather’s always was, and Land’s End marked on the lip at four hundred and ten feet, and the ninety-mile line printed across it at the Bureau’s press in Endeavor in Year 98, with the words beyond this limit no survey is maintained, and above the line, to the top of the sheet, nothing at all.

I should say who I am, since this is a chart with a name on it.

My name is Marguerite Grieve and everybody calls me Daisy, except the Bureau, which calls me M. Grieve, Chartmaker Second Class, Reserve Service, Tally Depot. I am thirty-five. I was born at Tally, in the Numbered Wood, in a house on the lake shore that my grandfather built, and I was named for my godmother, Marguerite Brightwater, who is the younger daughter of my grandfather’s oldest friend and who lives in Meridian in the summer and somewhere else in the winter that she has only lately been allowed to tell me about. I went to the district school at Tally and was very bad at recitation and very good at geometry, and at fourteen I went to my grandfather’s depot as a junior and learned to draw the reserve islands, and at twenty-two I took the Bureau’s examination and passed it, and since then I have drawn the lakes. All of them. Every reserve island and every utility island and every channel between them, the depths and the rows and the beacons and the ice lines in winter, for twelve years. I am considered very good at it. That is a figure from my annual report, not my opinion, though it is also my opinion.

I had never seen the western sea until Fifthmonth of this year. I had never been west of Threshold. The lakes are as far from the Cliff as you can get in Ozarka without going into the Greens, and the people of the Numbered Wood are very proud of this.

I heard the letter read on the ninth of Ninthmonth last year in the depot kitchen with my grandfather, and I heard the twenty-three names, and when it was over my grandfather asked me for a card and a pen, and wrote a name on the card that I did not understand, and I posted it. You will have read about that in the account the archivist kept. I did not understand any of it. I asked him the next morning what Moth meant, and he looked at me for a long time over his tea and then said, “Get the tin,” and I got the tin from the depot shelf, and he opened it on the kitchen table and took out seven boys’ maps and a dog’s chapter and a card signed M., and talked until it was dark.

I am not going to write down what he told me. It is in the book he and his friends made, which is in this collection. I will only say that by the end of it I had found out that my godmother’s father lives under a reserve island I have drawn nine times, and that my grandfather has been leaving things off the Reserve Service’s charts for seventy years on purpose, and that he had been waiting for somebody to ask him why for most of that time, and that nobody had, and that I was furious with him for about a week.

Then I put in for the crossing.

The four Chairs announced on the Evening of the first of Eleventhmonth, in the Account, that a party would go west in the spring by the craft of the residents of the western mountains, if the craft came, and would come back, and would report. They said the party would be small. They said it would be chosen by the Chairs. They said that any citizen who wished to be considered might write to the Hall of the Instrument, and that every letter would be read.

Forty-one thousand people wrote.

I know the number because I was told it at the interview, by the Interior’s deputy, who had read about four hundred of them herself and said that the rest had been read by sixty clerks working in shifts in the east bank archive for six weeks, and that about a third of the letters were from the Cliff ports, and that about a tenth were from children, and that nine were from people who said they had already been and come back, and that the Interior had looked into the nine and found that six of them had not been anywhere and three of them were very old and had been to the Isles, they said, in their sleep, often, and that the Interior had written to all nine to thank them.

My letter was one page. I said I was a chartmaker, and that the western sea had never been charted past ninety miles, and that if the Chairs were sending people to look at it they had better send somebody to draw it, since people who look at things come back and describe them and nobody believes them, and people who draw things come back with a chart. I said I was the best chartmaker in the Reserve Service and that the Reserve Service would confirm this. I said that my grandfather had been the Inspector for the reserve islands near Tally for sixty years and had drawn charts for the Reserve Service with things left off them, and that I would like to draw one with nothing left off, and that I thought the Chairs might like that too.

The Reserve Service did confirm it. My grandfather wrote a letter of his own to the Chair of the Bureau, without telling me, and I found out about it at the interview, because Hollis Penn had it on the table in front of him and read me a line of it aloud. It said: She is better than I was and she has never once left anything off, and it will be good for her.

There were ten of us. I give them as I wrote them on the back of the blank sheet on the first night, at the inn at Shelter, before we went up the Cliff.

Hollis Penn, Chair of the Bureau. Seventy-five. He was not supposed to come. The other three Chairs had voted, two to one, that no Chair should go, and Penn had said that the vote did not bind the Bureau, since the Bureau was the only Office that goes into the water, and that he had been western section for forty years and had sounded the shelf to the ninety-mile line every Eighthmonth of them and had never once been allowed past it, and that he would like to see what he had been drawing the line in front of before he died. He was very large and slow and had burned hands. He brought a bag with three bottles in it and an instrument case with a sextant that had belonged to the first master of the Plummet.

Abena Ohene, archivist of the Academy. Sixty-four. She had kept the account of the Speaking, and the Chair of the Academy sent her because, the Chair said, the archivist was the only person in the nation who had been asked for by name. She was small and gray and very calm and wrote in little gray books all the time and asked me on the first evening whether I would let her see the chart as it went, and I said yes, and she was the only person I said yes to.

Teodora Brand, deputy of the Interior. Fifty-one. Sent by Margarethe Lowe, who hates trains and would not go and said so in the minute. Brand was tall and tired and had read four hundred of the forty-one thousand letters herself and had picked, she told me, the six she liked best, and had argued for them, and had lost four. She had a ring of keys like her Chair’s and the Interior’s silver button at her throat and she did not take her coat off once in the whole crossing.

Hesper Kann, registrar of the Office of Population Management. Twenty-eight. Sent by Simeon Adeyemi with a leather case containing twenty-three blank forms of the new kind, the kind with living, west in the field where the cause goes, and a stamp, and a pad, and orders to enter each of the twenty-three in the Office’s book in their own presence, if they would allow it, and to ask each of them, formally, on the Office’s behalf, whether they wished to come home. She was very quiet and very precise and had a beautiful hand and she was terrified, she told me at Shelter, of making a mistake on a form that had never been used before.

Edmund Corrigan, master of the Bureau sounding vessel Plummet. Forty-one. Ned. He was to take the Plummet out to the ninety-mile line from Rand’s Notch on the morning we left, and lie there, and wait for us to come back, with the cutter Halyard in company, for as long as it took. He was not going over the line. He said he did not mind. He said he had been seasick on the post in Eighthmonth and he did not know what the gas would do to him and he would rather find out from us.

Ivy Ashgrove, of Land’s End. Twenty-four. A fisherwoman. The Interior’s deputy had argued for her letter and won. It was four lines long, Brand told me, and it said: My family has kept a lamp in a west window for eighty-one years for a man called Thomas Ashgrove who is not on your list. I would like to ask the people on your list whether they saw it. I will not be any trouble. I can row.

Margit Vren, of Rand’s Notch. Seventy-five. A chandler. Ilsa Vren’s niece. She had not written. The Interior had written to her.

Pilar Aldana, of Rand’s Notch. Forty-seven. A net-mender. Kit Aldana’s mother. The Interior had written to her too.

Fennick Ade, optical observer of the Bureau’s western section at the Cliff. Thirty-nine. He has the post that Ilsa Vren had when she went, at the same eyepiece, and has kept it for nine years. He had a camera and four hundred plates and orders to expose them all.

And me. Chartmaker, second class. With the blank sheet, and a drawing board, and a box of pencils, and the Reserve Service’s best compass, which is my grandfather’s, and which he put in my hand at the station at Tally and closed my fingers round.

He said, “Leave nothing off, then.”

I said I would not.

He said, “You’ll leave something off. Everybody does. When you do, write down what it was on the back.” He let go of my hand. “And bring me back a chart I can’t draw.”

The tenth of us was not on the list the Chairs gave us. It was on the Cliff when we got there.

We came up the Cliff from Shelter on the evening of the tenth of Fifthmonth in two of the Interior’s cars by the farm track through the wheat, and came out of the wheat at Land’s End at dusk. I had never seen the Cliff. I had seen it on charts my whole life, drawn as a heavy line with hachures on the landward side and the depths beginning at the foot. It is not like the charts. The wheat stops and the sky starts and there is a sound under everything which is the sea four hundred feet down hitting the rock, and you stand at the edge of the wheat and look out and there is nothing in front of you but air and water all the way to the end of the world.

And on the end of the world, the Isles.

I am not going to describe them yet. I will describe them in their place, on the chart, at a hundred and forty miles, when I got there. I will only say that I had heard about them all my life and seen them on the school map as eleven white shapes with no towns and no roads, and that the first time I saw them, on the evening of the tenth of Fifthmonth from the lip at Land’s End, I sat down in the wheat at the edge of the track and could not stand up for a while, and that nobody in the party said anything to me about it, because Penn was sitting down too.

The town had come out. All of it. Two thousand people, at the edge of the wheat and along the cliff path and round the hoist, very quiet, watching us get out of the cars, and they were not looking at the Isles. Ivy told me afterward that it was the first time in her life she had ever seen the whole of Land’s End standing outside at once facing west, and that everybody was trying very hard not to look at the view, out of habit, and failing.

The man on the brake at the hoist, Amos Tunney, came over to the cars. He was big and bald and had a voice like the hoist itself. He said to Penn, “There’s something on the north path, Chair. Came up the cable an hour ago. Asked for the one who draws.”

Penn said, “Came up the cable?”

Tunney said, “Rode the counterweight. I didn’t let it. It just did.” He looked at me. “That’ll be you.”

I went along the cliff path to the north end of town with Ohene behind me, past the last house, which has a window at the top facing west with a lamp in it, lit. Beyond the house the path goes on along the lip through the grass for a hundred yards to a bench, where people stand before supper, and on the bench, sitting very upright with its four legs folded under it like a cat on a step, there was a machine.

It was about the height of my shoulder. Gray. Four legs, two arms, and a smooth head with a lamp in the crown turned down to a glow. It turned its head when I came along the path and the lamp came up a little and lit the grass round the bench.

It said, in a very quiet voice, “You’re the granddaughter.”

I said I was.

It said, “He told me in Year 122 that you would draw better than him. Before you were born. He was guessing. He usually guessed correctly.” It unfolded its legs and stood up on the bench. “My name is Moth. I am here to take you across. The leaves will come at first light. There will be three. One is hers. She has lent it.” The lamp turned toward the Isles, which were going violet on the horizon. “She asked me to tell you that you may draw her leaf, if you can see it, and that most people cannot, and that she would be interested to know whether you are one of the ones who can.”

Ohene, behind me, said, “Moth.”

The machine turned its lamp on her.

It said, “Archivist. I read your sentence to her every night for a year after the Speaking. She asked me to. It was her favorite.” It paused. “Mine is the one in the Colonel’s margin. Yes. Kindly.”

Ohene sat down on the bench beside it, very suddenly, as though her legs had gone, and the machine sat down again beside her and folded its legs, and the two of them sat on the bench at the north end of Land’s End and looked at the Isles going dark, and I stood behind them in the grass and took out my pencil and, for the first time, drew something on the blank sheet above the printed line: a very small bench, on the lip, at the north end of the town, with two figures on it, one of them with a lamp.

2. Land’s End

Chart: The Long Cliff at Land’s End, from the north path to the hoist, at the scale of the Reserve Service’s harbor sheets, which is six inches to the mile. The lip at four hundred and ten feet. The gantry and the counterweight. The stage at the foot on its pilings. The last house, with a window at the top facing west, marked with a small circle, which is the Reserve Service’s sign for a light that is kept. And three long shapes off the edge of the lip, in the air, at the level of the wheat, drawn in pencil only, faintly, because I did not know what sign to use for them.

Nobody in Land’s End went to bed.

I had a room at the public house, which is the only inn, with a window facing the wheat, and I lay on the bed in my clothes for about an hour, and then got up and went out, and found the whole town in the street. Not loud. People were standing in their doorways in their coats with the lamps lit behind them, talking quietly, and children asleep on their shoulders, and dogs. Down by the hoist the men of the boats were sitting on the bollards along the lip with their pipes, looking at the dark where the sea was. In the chapel of two confessions somebody was playing a harmonium very softly, the same hymn over and over, and nobody went in.

Penn was on the bench at the north end, where the machine had been, with one of his three bottles. The machine had gone. He said it had gone down the cable at midnight on the counterweight to wait on the stage at the foot, and that Amos Tunney had stood at the brake and watched it go and then had stayed at the brake, in case. Penn gave me the bottle. I drank some. It was very good. He said it was from Second Harbor and had been laid down in Year 140 by a boatbuilder there named Marsh, who had given it to him at his confirmation as Chair, and that he had been saving it.

I asked what for.

He said, “This, I suppose. I didn’t know.” He looked out at the dark. “I’ve sat on the deck of the Plummet over Sixty-Two eleven times, Grieve. Hauling up that float. And every time I looked west at them over the stern, and every time I thought, one day somebody’s going to come and get me. Not that they’d come. That somebody would. A man doesn’t say that to his crew.” He took the bottle back. “I’m seventy-five. I’ve been waiting since I was nineteen.”

At about three, Ivy Ashgrove came along the path from the last house with a lamp, and sat down on the other side of him, and he gave her the bottle too, and she drank, and coughed, and he laughed.

She said her grandmother had gone to bed. She said her grandmother had lit the lamp at dusk, as she always did, and sat in the chair under it, as she always did, and that at midnight she had come down to the kitchen and made tea and drunk it and said, Well, I’ll not watch you go, I’m too old for it, and had gone up to bed in the room under the window, and had shut the door.

Ivy said, “She gave me this.” She opened her hand. In it was a short length of lamp wick, white, cut square at both ends. “It’s from the first lamp. The one her grandmother lit in Year 104. She’s kept a piece of the wick from that first night in a tin in the drawer her whole life. She said to give it to whoever’s there.” She closed her hand. “Gran doesn’t say things like that. She just said, give it to whoever’s there, and went up.”

The leaves came at first light. I will try to put down exactly what I saw, since I was the chartmaker, and since there is no sign on any chart in the nation for what I saw.

The sky behind us over the wheat had gone gray and then white, and the sun had not come up, and in front of us the sea was dark gray with the light coming onto it from behind, and the Isles on the horizon had come out of the night. They do that before anything else. They catch the sun before the Cliff does, because they are so high, and for about ten minutes before dawn on the Cliff the snow on the Isles is pink and gold and everything else in the world is gray. Everybody on the north path was watching it. Two thousand people. Nobody was pretending not to.

And then, low over the water, a long way out, three lights.

They were the color of the inside of a shell. They came in toward the Cliff from the west very fast and very low, at the height of the water, side by side, and as they came they grew, and I saw that they were shapes, long and flat and a little curled at the edges, and that the light was in them, running out through them from the middle to the rims along lines like the veins in a leaf against a lamp. They made no sound. They left no mark on the water. They came in under the Cliff and I lost them below the lip, and then they rose, slowly, up the face of the rock, the way a lamp is drawn up a well on a rope, and came up over the edge and stopped, in the air, at the level of the wheat, about ten yards off the lip, all three, side by side, and hung there.

They were about thirty feet long. I measured with my eye and then with the compass, by the angle they made with the gantry. Twelve feet across at the widest. Clear, like glass, but the light in the veins made them pale, so that you could see them against the sea. On the middle one, which was a little larger than the others and a little brighter, there was a machine standing at the center with its lamp turned down, and it was Moth.

On the other two there was something else.

I could see it. Ohene could see it better than I could. Ivy could see it best. Penn could not see it at all, and said so, loudly, and then kept rubbing his eyes. Brand could see it on one of the leaves and not the other. Hesper Kann could see neither. Fennick Ade had his camera up and was exposing plates, one after another, as fast as he could change them, and could not see anything but the leaves, and the leaves, as we all found out at the darkroom at the Notch a month later, are not on his plates. His plates show the Cliff, and the sea, and the Isles at the edge of the sky as a faint blue ghost, and the gantry, and the wheat, and two thousand people standing on the lip of the Cliff at dawn looking at nothing.

What I saw, on each of the two outer leaves, was a tall shape standing near the forward end, very still, as tall as two men, and made of a light so dim that it was hardly different from the gray of the dawn behind it, so that I could see the sea through it. It had a head and a long body and arms, and it was looking at us. I could not see a face. I could see that it was looking.

Ivy said, very quietly beside me, “There’s two.”

I said yes.

She said, “They’re like candles that somebody’s nearly blown out.”

Moth stepped off the middle leaf onto the edge of the lip, and its lamp came up, and it said, in the quiet voice that somehow reached the whole north path, so that two thousand people heard it:

“These are the leaves of the people from elsewhere. The middle one is hers. The other two are steered by two of her people, who are very old and very dim, and who asked to come, so that they could see the Cliff close once before they go out. Most of you will not be able to see them. Some of you will. They ask me to say that they are pleased to meet you, and that they have been looking at your lights for a long time.”

Nobody in Land’s End said anything.

Then a child somewhere in the crowd said, very loudly, “There’s ladies on them,” and the whole of the north path laughed, all at once, the way people laugh in a chapel when a dog comes in, and the tall dim shape on the leaf nearest the child bent its head, slowly, toward the sound.

We went across onto the leaves from the lip.

That is the part I find hardest to describe, though it was the simplest. The leaves hung at the edge of the Cliff with their near rims an inch above the grass, and Moth said to step onto them, and that we would not fall, and that it did not matter where on the leaf we stood. Below the far rim there was four hundred and ten feet of air and then the sea. Penn went first, because he was the Chair of the Bureau, and because, he said afterward, if he had not gone first he would not have gone at all. He put one foot out over the edge of the Cliff onto the clear surface of the leaf, and it did not move under him, and he put the other foot after it, and stood on it, with the sea under his boots four hundred feet down, looking down at it through the leaf. He said, “Well, damn,” and his voice broke.

Then the rest of us. I went onto the middle leaf with Moth and Ohene and Ivy and Penn. Margit Vren and Pilar Aldana and Fennick Ade went onto the leaf on the right, with the tall dim shape that I could see and Penn could not. Brand and Hesper Kann went onto the leaf on the left, with the other. Nobody fell. Nothing on a leaf falls. I put my pencil down on the clear surface by my feet, to see, and it lay there while the leaf turned, and did not roll.

Amos Tunney came to the edge of the lip with his hand on the brake lever of the hoist, though the hoist was not moving, and said to Ivy, “You’ll come back up the cable, mind. Not over the edge like a gull. I’ll be on the brake.”

Ivy said she would.

Then the leaves went back from the Cliff, slowly, all three together, and I looked back and saw the north path full of people, and the gantry, and the wheat, and the last house at the north end of town with its window at the top, and in the window the lamp was still lit, though it was daylight now and the sun was coming up behind the town. It was the first time I had seen it lit in the day. Ivy saw me looking. She said that her grandmother never put it out until the sun was full up over the wheat, and that this morning the sun was not full up yet, and that she was probably standing behind the curtain.

And then the leaves turned, and the Cliff went round behind us, and in front of us was the sea, and the Isles, and the sun came up over the wheat at our backs and lit the whole of the western sea from the Cliff to the horizon at once, so that it went from gray to blue in a second, and the leaves went west.

I wrote on the chart, below the three faint shapes in pencil off the lip at Land’s End: 0611, 11 Fifthmonth, Year 185. Departed. Then, because I did not know what else to put, I put the sign for a light that is kept beside the last house, and drew a line out from it across the blank paper, west, the way we were going, and began.

3. The Line

Chart: The western sea from the foot of the Cliff to mile one hundred and four, at the Bureau’s offshore scale. Soundings from the Bureau’s own sheets to the ninety-mile line, traced at Tally in Fourthmonth. Shelf Town 1140 at mile sixty-two, with its three elevators. The ninety-mile line, printed. Beyond it, one sounding in my hand, the first ever entered on a chart of the nation past the line, with the name of the man who took it. Then a band of yellow wash, which is the sign I chose for the gas, since there is no sign for it, and a line along its upper edge, ruled, because the edge is as straight as a rule.

The leaves went slower than they can. Moth said so. It said that hers had once crossed from the Cliff to the ice in about four minutes, and that it had asked the two dim people on the other leaves to go at the speed of a fast boat instead, so that the chartmaker could draw, and that they had agreed, and that they found it restful. So we went west at about twenty knots, by my reckoning, a little above the water, with the sun behind us and our three shadows running ahead of us on the sea.

I drew.

I have drawn the lakes for twelve years from boats and from the shore and from the beacons, and I have never drawn from the air, and I will say what it is like for any chartmaker who reads this. It is like being given the answer to a sum and asked to show your working. The coastline of the Cliff went away behind us, and I could see it whole for forty miles in each direction, the straight wall of it, and the notches in it where the harbors are, Gannet and Callow and Rand’s to the north and Sevenmile and Saltash to the south, each one a thin dark cut with a town stacked in it. I could see the boats of the inshore fishery working the shelf in front of the notches, small and white, and their wakes, and the marks of the Bureau’s buoys. I could see where the color of the water changed from green over the shallower shelf near the Cliff to a deep dark blue farther out where the old grain country dropped away under it, and I could put the line of that change on the chart, and check it against the Bureau’s soundings in my tracings, and it was where the soundings said it would be, to within a quarter mile. I wrote that on the back of the sheet. I wanted somebody to know the Bureau’s soundings were good.

Penn read it over my shoulder and said, “They’re better than good,” and went and stood at the forward rim of the leaf with his hands behind his back and the wind in his beard and did not say anything else for an hour.

At mile sixty-two the leaves stopped.

Moth asked them to. It said that the chartmaker should see the post. So we stopped in the air over Shelf Town 1140, about fifty feet above the water, and the water was very clear in the morning sun, dark blue and clear, and I looked down through the leaf under my feet.

I could not see the town. It is four hundred and forty feet down to the top of the tallest elevator and six hundred and forty to the street. But Moth turned its lamp down, straight down, into a beam, and the beam went into the water and down and down, and at the bottom of it, faint, there was something. A shape. Pale. Round. About the size of a barrel.

The float.

Moth said, “The canister is in its cradle. Empty. The Chairs’ letter was taken out of it in Twelfthmonth.”

Penn said, from the forward rim, without turning round, “Taken out by whom?”

Moth said, “By a machine of the Clockworks. They walk the western line.”

Penn turned round.

Moth said, “The deep line under the Barrens goes west under the Cliff and out under the shelf. The Directorate’s survey shows it ending in water at about mile sixty. That is where the Colonel and I stood, in Year 104, at the edge of the water, and he said not today. It does not end there. It goes on. Flooded, under the shelf, eighty miles, to the foot of the Clockworks, where it comes up into the mountain. The old world dug it. The machines of the Clockworks walk it on the bottom of the flooded tunnel, in the dark, and come up through a shaft at mile sixty-one, and go up the old street of Shelf Town to the elevator, and climb it, and put the canister in the cradle on the float, and come down again. They have done it every year since Year 72, in Seventhmonth. They are very slow. It takes them a month each way.”

Penn sat down on the leaf. He sat down on the clear floor of it, with the sea under him, and looked down through it at the faint pale shape of the float in Moth’s beam, four hundred feet below him.

He said, “Every year.”

Moth said, “Every year. Usually empty. Four times a number. Once a letter. The Clockworks keep the canister on the post because your founders wrote, in the minutes of the provisional council at Provision, that whatever the nation needs should come by a known route on a known day, and that somebody should be answerable if it does not. The Clockworks read that and thought it was very sensible.”

Penn said, “Who’s answerable?”

Moth said, “The Clockworks.”

At about eleven we came up on the ninety-mile line.

There is nothing at the line. That is what I had not understood. On every chart in the nation there is a printed line at ninety miles from the Cliff, with the words, and open paper beyond, and so you think there must be something there, a mark, a buoy, a change in the water. There is nothing. The sea goes on, dark blue, the same on both sides. The line is a distance. It is the place where the Bureau’s survey stopped in Year 61 when the Kestrel was lost, and where it has stopped every year since.

The Plummet was there. Ned had taken her out from Rand’s Notch the morning before and had lain at the line all night, hove to, with the cutter Halyard a mile to the south of her, and as we came up out of the east with the sun behind us I saw her deck crowded with her crew, all nine of them and Ned at the rail, and the cook beside him, and I saw the cook point.

They could see us. I learned afterward that the whole crew of the Plummet saw the three leaves come up over the line, and that the crew of the Halyard saw them too, and that a cutter’s boatswain who had been in the western patrol for twenty-two years and had boarded nineteen vessels at the line and towed them in, went below to his bunk and lay down and would not come up again until we had gone. And that the Plummet’s plate camera, which the third hand exposed eight times, recorded the sea and the sky and the Isles as a ghost at the edge, and nothing else.

The leaves did not stop at the line. Moth asked if we should, and Penn said no. He said, “Go over it. Slowly.” And the leaves went over it, at a walking pace, a few feet above the water, past the Plummet’s bow, and I looked down at the line, which was not there, and drew it on the chart as the Bureau has always drawn it, a thin ruled line with the printed words, and then I drew our line crossing it.

Ned Corrigan, at the rail of the Plummet, took off his cap. Penn took off his and put it against his chest. Then he did a thing I have never seen a Chair do, which was to put two fingers in his mouth and whistle, very loudly, the way the western section whistles across a harbor for a boat, and the whole crew of the Plummet whistled back, and the leaves went on, west, over the line, and the whistling went on behind us for a long time across the water.

At mile ninety-six Penn asked the leaves to stop again, and they did, and he opened his instrument case.

He had brought a lead. A sounding lead, of the old kind, a long cone of lead with a hollow in the bottom of it filled with tallow to bring up the floor, on a line marked in fathoms with knots and leather and cloth, the way leads have been marked since before the Rise. He said it had been the lead of the first master of the Plummet, in Year 61, on the voyage before the Kestrel went, and that it had been the last lead dropped past the line, and that it had been dropped at mile ninety-one, and that the Bureau had kept it in a case at the Cliff office with a card on it ever since, and that he had taken it out of the case without asking anyone, since he was the Chair.

He knelt at the rim of the leaf and let the lead down into the sea by hand. He did it the old way, paying out the line through his burned fingers, fathom by fathom, counting under his breath, and the line went down into the dark blue water and did not stop for a long time.

At a hundred and ninety fathoms the line went slack.

He hauled it up. It took him nearly a quarter of an hour, with Ivy helping, since she has hauled crab pots on a hoist line all her life and has the shoulders for it. When the lead came up out of the water he turned it over and looked at the tallow in the bottom of it, and in the tallow there was a pressed print of something, gray and gritty, and two small fragments of what looked like brick.

He said, “Eleven hundred and forty feet. Mile ninety-six. Brick.” He looked at it for a while. “Somebody’s town.” He gave me the lead so that I could look at it, and I did, and then I wrote the sounding on the chart, past the line, in my own hand, the first sounding past the line in a hundred and twenty-four years: 190 fm., brick. H. Penn.

He said, “Put the date.”

I put the date.

At mile a hundred and one the gas began.

You see it from a long way off, from the air, as a change in the color at the edge of the sea. Dull gold, like a brass rail that needs cleaning. Then, as you come up on it, you see that it is lying on the water. That it is a layer, flat, about two hundred feet thick, I measured it by the leaves’ height, as flat on top as a floor, with the dark sea under it showing through, and the line between the gas and the clear air above it as sharp as the surface of a pond. It does not move much. It shifts slowly in the wind, the way smoke shifts on the floor of a room when a door is opened. It goes west from the line in front of us as far as I could see, to the edge of the sky.

The leaves rose. Moth said that the gas would not hurt the people on the leaves, since we would be above it, but that it would hurt the leaves, which were alive in a way it did not explain, and so they would go over it. They went up to about four hundred feet, and the gas went under us, a gold floor with the sea dark under it, and I put a wash of yellow on the chart for it, since there is no sign, and ruled a line along the top edge of the wash.

Ivy Ashgrove was at the rim of the leaf, looking down.

She looked down for a long time. Then she said, quietly, “There’s a boat.”

There was. About a quarter of a mile to the north of us, in the gas, at the surface of the sea under the gold. A small boat. A dory, with a stub of mast, gray, very old, low in the water, lying still in the gas with nothing moving on it. I could not see a name on it. I could see that it was empty.

Moth said, “They drift north, in the yellow. The current takes them. Most of them sink before the ice. Some reach the ice and are crushed in it. That one is from Year 166. It has been drifting a long time.”

Ivy said, “Whose?”

Moth said, “I don’t know. She would know. She watched them all go.”

Ivy said nothing. She took the piece of lamp wick out of her pocket and looked at it, and put it back.

We went on, west, over the gold. I drew the boat on the chart in pencil, very small, in the yellow wash, a quarter mile north of our line, and wrote the year beside it, 166, and a question mark, and did not rub it out.

4. The Ice

Chart: Miles one hundred and four to one hundred and forty. The yellow wash going on, and then stopping at a curved line, clean, like a coastline, and beyond it the ice, which I have drawn in the Reserve Service’s sign for pack ice, which is small broken crosses, very close. Twelve miles of crosses. A row of blue dots under them, running north and south, which is a sign of my own. Then a heavy line with hachures, which is the sign for a cliff, and the cliff goes off the top of the sheet, because the sheet was not tall enough.

The gas lasts about twenty-seven miles. We were over it for an hour and a quarter, at four hundred feet, with the gold floor under us and the sea dark under that, and nobody spoke much. It is a strange thing to be over. You know that if you stepped off the leaf you would not drown first. You would breathe first, and that would be the end. Margit Vren, on the right-hand leaf, sat down in the middle of it with her back to the gold and her eyes shut and did not open them until we were past. Pilar Aldana sat beside her and took her hand. They had known each other forty years in Rand’s Notch, Pilar told me later, and had never once had a conversation longer than the price of rope.

At about one in the afternoon, at a hundred and twenty-eight miles, the gas stopped.

It stopped at a line, and the line was curved, the long slow curve of a ring seen from inside, and it was as sharp as the edge of the gas on top, so that on one side of it there was the gold lying on the sea and on the other side there was nothing, clean air, and below the clean air the sea was white.

The leaves came down. They came down to about fifty feet above the ice, and the air got cold so fast that I felt it in my teeth. Penn said, “Hah,” and pulled his coat round him. Brand, who had not taken her coat off once since Shelter, looked at the rest of us with an expression of great satisfaction.

The ice is twelve miles across on the eastern side. I know because I timed it, and because Moth confirmed it. It is pack ice. Floes, of every size, from a plate to a field, packed close and moving against each other all the time, slowly, grinding, with a noise you can hear from the air: a long low creak, like the timbers of a ship in a swell, coming from everywhere at once. Between the floes the water shows in cracks and pools, black, very clear, and smoking in the cold.

The gas comes up to the ice and stops. Moth showed me. Along the outer edge of the ice, where the gold meets the white, the gas lies thick, piled up against the ice the way snow piles against a fence, and goes no farther. Moth said the cold of the water makes it heavy and slow, and that it breaks on the ice the way a wave breaks on a seawall.

I asked where the cold came from.

Moth asked the leaves to go lower. They went down to about ten feet over a wide crack of open water between two big floes, and Moth said, “Look down.”

I looked down through the leaf, and through the black water under it, which was so clear that it was like looking through air, and far down, very far down, there were lights.

They were blue. A row of them, small, steady, running north and south along the floor of the sea under the ice, as far as I could see in both directions, about a quarter of a mile apart. Some of them were moving very slowly. Moth said they were the owners’ machines, laid on the sea floor all the way round the Isles in the last years of the Rise, and that they drew the heat out of the water and had done so every hour of every day for a hundred and eighty years, and that they would go on doing it for as long as the owners told them to. It said the ice was the owners’ moat.

Penn knelt at the rim of the leaf and looked down at the blue lights for a long time. Then he said, to nobody, “That’s a lot of power.”

Moth said, “It comes from the south. From the one the people of Brine call she. Your Bureau has watched her light on the southern horizon from the Wall at Assurance since Year 30.”

Penn said, “We have.” Then he said, “We’ve got her in the register. Allowance 59. Five fields. A light on the southern horizon from the Gulf Wall, rising and falling once a minute. Measured. Repeated. Causes excluded.” He laughed. “We should have put she’s running their refrigerators.”

I drew the blue lights on the chart. There is no sign for them. I drew a row of small blue dots under the ice, and wrote cold machines, owners’, running, and the date.

There were bears.

I had seen them in pictures in the school reader at Tally, in the chapter about the old world’s animals, a page of them, white, on ice, under a heading that said they were gone. They are not gone. There are bears on the ice round the Isles. I saw eleven. They are bigger than the pictures make you think, much bigger, the size of a dray horse, and yellow-white rather than white, and they walk on the floes very slowly and heavily, with their heads low, swinging, as if they are looking for something they dropped. One of them was lying at the edge of a crack with its chin on its paws, like a dog. When the leaves passed over it, it lifted its head and looked up at us, and its nose went up into the air, and I saw it smell us. Then it put its chin down again.

Moth said the owners had brought them from the last ice of the far north of the old world, and let them go on the moat, because one of the owners had liked them as a child.

Ivy said, “Which one?”

Moth said, “The Heir. He was six. They fetched them for him from what was left of the north. You’ll meet him.”

There was also a seal. Gray, long, lying on a floe. It did not look at us at all.

And then the Isles.

I have put off describing them, through four parts of this chart, because I did not know how, and because I wanted to describe them where they are, at a hundred and forty miles, and not from the Cliff. I will try now.

From the Cliff, from the lip at Land’s End, on a clear morning, the Isles are mountains, green below and white above, too clear for the distance, standing on the edge of the sky. You know that. Everyone in the nation knows that, and nobody has ever been able to say it well, and I will not try.

From the ice, from fifty feet above the last of the floes, at a hundred and forty miles, they are a wall.

The nearest is the one the owners call the Crown. It rises out of the ice in a cliff. Gray rock, sheer, without a ledge or a break, going straight up from the edge of the floes. I tipped my head back to look up it and it went on going up past where I expected it to stop, and past where I expected it to stop again, and the gray rock went into a band of dark forest, pines, clinging to slopes that relented a little, and above the forest there was more gray rock, and above that there was snow, and above the snow, so high that the sky behind it was a darker blue than the sky above me, the peak. I measured the angle with my grandfather’s compass and Penn’s sextant together, from the ice, and worked it on the back of the chart, and the peak of the Crown stands about twenty-one thousand feet above the sea. The Bureau has it at twenty-one thousand four hundred, by triangulation from the Cliff, since Year 62. The Bureau is right. I wrote that on the back too.

There is nothing on it. No road, no house, no smoke, no light. The forest is untouched and the snow is untouched. The other Isles go away north and south from it in a chain, each as high, each a wall, with sounds of pale blue water between them, the color the Bureau’s optical section describes, which is the blue of a mineral. On the school map they are eleven white shapes with no towns and no roads. The school map is accurate. That is the strangest thing I can say about them. Every chart of the nation I have ever looked at has had something left off it, and the school map of the Isles has had nothing left off, because there is nothing on the outside of them to leave.

I drew the Crown’s cliff in hachures across the top of the sheet, and the hachures went off the top, and I had no more paper.

The leaves came along the foot of the cliff, just above the ice, to a place where the ice stopped a few yards short of the rock and there was a channel of black open water, smoking, along the base of the wall. The cliff above the channel was smooth gray stone.

The middle leaf stopped. Moth turned its lamp up, and pointed it at the rock.

Nothing happened for a moment.

Then the rock opened.

It opened from the waterline upward in a tall narrow arch, the shape of a leaf standing on its point, about eighty feet high. There was no seam. I was looking at it, and I am a chartmaker and I look at rock for a living, and there was no seam, and then there was an arch. And through the arch came light, warm and gold, the light of a late afternoon in summer, pouring out over the black water and the floes and across our three leaves and onto our faces, and with it came air, warm air, that smelled of cut grass and running water and, very strongly, of apple blossom.

Ivy Ashgrove said, “Oh.”

Margit Vren opened her eyes.

Penn stood at the forward rim of the middle leaf in the gold light from the arch with the ice behind him and his beard full of frost, and said nothing at all.

Moth said, “The Crown.”

And then, in the arch, against the light, there was a man.

He was standing on a step of the same clear stuff as the leaves, at the waterline, inside the arch. A tall old man in a long coat of an old cut, dark green, with a stick, bareheaded, white-haired, and his face was a man’s face, lined and brown and tired, with very bright eyes. He looked at us on the three leaves. He looked at Penn, and at the Interior’s silver button on Brand’s throat, and at Hesper Kann with her leather case, and at Margit and Pilar, and at me with my drawing board, and at Ivy, and at Ohene, and he looked at each of us for a long time, one at a time, as though he were counting.

Then he said, in a voice that was old and dry and a little hoarse, as though he did not use it much:

“You’ll be from the mainland. I’m the one who signed the letter.” He leaned on his stick. “I’m sorry it took us so long. Please come in.”

5. The Crown

Chart: None. I drew the Crown inside, on a separate sheet, at the Reserve Service’s island scale, and then I put the sheet in the back of my case and did not join it to the chart. The chart is of the sea. The inside of a mountain is not sea. I have written here what is on the separate sheet, and the separate sheet is in the Bureau’s archive with the chart, and anyone who wants to see it may.

The arch let onto a passage, and the passage was short, and at the end of it the leaves came out into the inside of the mountain, and I stopped being able to draw for a while.

The archivist has the description of the Crown from the log that Moth kept, which is in this collection, and it is exact. It says the inside of the mountain is hollow from the waterline to within a quarter mile of the peak, nine miles across at the widest and three and a half high, and lit from above by a false sky. It says there is a lake in the middle, three miles across, and a waterfall a mile high, and orchards and meadows and woods and terraces, and a city of white stone and glass on a hill by the lake. All of that is correct. I checked it. I measured the lake with the compass from two stations on its shore and got three miles and a furlong. I measured the waterfall by the time a stick took to fall beside it, which Penn dropped from the top for me later in the afternoon from a ledge reached by a stair cut in the rock, and got four thousand nine hundred feet, which is close enough to a mile for a log.

What the log does not say, because Moth does not feel things in the way the rest of us do and says so, is what it does to a person to come out of a passage in the rock, from the ice and the bears and the gold floor of the gas, into the middle of a summer afternoon.

The sky was blue with thin high cloud moving across it, west to east. The sun was in it, low in the west, though there is no sun, and the light was the light of about four o’clock in late summer, long and gold, laying the shadows of the trees out across the meadows. It was warm. Bees went past my face. Below the leaves as they came down there was grass, very green, with daisies in it, which I noticed because of my name, and Ivy noticed me noticing and laughed. There was the sound of water everywhere. And the smell of the apple blossom, from orchards that went along the shore of the lake for miles, all in flower, white and pink, and out on the lake there was a single white bird, very large, flying low over the water in long slow beats.

Pilar Aldana began to cry. She said afterward that she did not know why. She said she had thought she would cry when she saw Kit and that she had been saving it, and it had come out at the apple trees instead, and she was cross about it.

The Heir walked. He would not ride on the leaves. He said he had been taken about by machines for a hundred and fifty years and that he liked to walk when he had guests, since it was the only thing about him that was still entirely his own. So we walked with him, from the shore below the arch along a path through the orchards toward the city on the hill, two miles, slowly, at his pace, with the leaves following behind us at a little height, empty except for the two tall dim shapes standing on them, and Moth walking at the Heir’s side.

He is about a hundred and eighty-four. He told us that. He said he had been born in the last year of the Rise, in the season the water stopped, in a house on the high ground of the old west that his family had kept for themselves until their mountain was ready, and that he had been eleven when they went into it, and that he remembered the going in very well, and that he had remembered it every day since. He has most of his own body. He said this too, without being asked. He said that the others had replaced themselves piece by piece over the years, the way you replace the boards of a boat, until there was no boat left, only the replacing, and that he had stopped at about the elbows and the spine and the heart, and the left eye, and his teeth, which he showed us, and which were very good. He said he had stopped because he wanted to know what it was like to be old. He said it was not as bad as the others had told him, and that he got tired in the afternoons, and that he liked that.

He walks with a stick. He is very thin. He wears a coat of an old cut, long, dark green, with horn buttons, and he said that it had been his father’s and was a hundred and ninety years old and that the Collector had offered him a fortune for it, which was a joke, he said, since none of them had any use for a fortune.

Brand walked on his other side. She asked him questions all the way to the city. I will give some of them, since she asked me afterward to write them down, and said that the Interior would need them, and that she could not trust her own memory of anything she heard in the Crown, because she kept looking at the trees.

She asked how many of them there were.

He said a hundred and ninety-one. He said there had been a hundred and ninety-four in Year 131, when Moth came through, and that three had died since: one who had gone to sleep in Winterless in the warm rain and not woken, and one who had become a lake on one of the other Isles and had gradually stopped speaking, and the eldest, the one they called the Proprietor, whose last piece of flesh, the size of a fist, which had been kept warm in a cabinet under the city for a hundred years, had failed in the spring of Year 183. He said that when it failed, every machine in the eleven Isles had stopped for one second, all at once, the sky and the gardeners and the cold machines under the ice, and then started again, and that this was how they knew.

She asked who governed now.

He said that he did, he supposed, since nobody else wanted to, and that it was not much like governing. He said the Clockworks governed the machines, and the machines governed the Isles, and that the people in the Isles mostly governed nothing, and had not for a long time, and were very polite to each other, and that this was the whole of the constitution. He said Ozarka would find it very funny. He said he had read the Ozarkan founding instrument many times, the copy that the Clockworks made of it by listening, and that he thought it was the best document written by anybody since the water came, and that the sixth article was a mistake.

Brand said, “The Interior has always thought the sixth article was the point.”

He said, “It was the point for a hundred years. It was a fence round a frightened child. The child’s grown.” He looked at her. “Your Assembly has tabled a draft. We heard. The Clockworks listen to your Evening. We were all very pleased.”

She asked whether there were weapons in the Isles.

He stopped walking and leaned on his stick and laughed, a dry old laugh, and said, “The ice. The cold machines. The bears. That’s the whole of it. We built a moat and a cliff and then we stopped, because we were afraid of you, and an army would have meant we had to decide what to do with it.” He started walking again. “Your Directorate has the only army in the known world. We’ve watched it grow from the Clockworks every year since Year 89. You’ll forgive me, deputy, but you should ask your Directorate to look at it from very high up some day. It’s the prettiest thing we’ve ever seen.”

Brand did not understand this. Nor did I, then. Moth, walking on the Heir’s other side, said nothing, and its lamp went up and down once, which I learned later is what it does when it is amused.

The city of the Crown stands on a low hill on the far side of the lake, and it is white stone and glass, with towers and colonnades and gardens going down in terraces to the water, and it is very beautiful, and it is almost empty. The log says it was built for about four thousand people and that about two hundred live in it. That is right. The streets are swept. The fountains run. The gardens are kept by small machines, quiet, about the size of a goat, which move along the beds and stop when anybody passes and wait.

We saw owners. I will be brief about them. Most of them did not come near us. We saw them at a distance, at windows, on terraces, on benches by the water. Some of them looked like people. Some of them did not. One was a frame of dark metal about nine feet tall, standing quite still at the end of a colonnade, with a face like a mask of silver, that turned to watch us pass and did not otherwise move. One was in a chair that walked. On a bench by the lake there were two of them sitting side by side, not speaking, looking at the false sky, and Moth said, very quietly, that they had been doing that every day since Year 41.

The Navigator flew over us twice, very low. It is the large white bird I had seen over the lake. A heron, or the shape of one, with a wingspan of about twenty feet, white, and when it came over us it turned its long head and looked down, and its eye was a man’s eye, and it called out something in a high voice that none of us could make out. The Heir called back, Yes, they’ve come, and the bird went away over the lake.

We met the Collector, in a hall of the city near the top of the hill, where he had asked to meet us. He is small, as Moth’s log says: the size of a man, made of gold and some dark polished wood, with a face of gray stone that does not move, and his voice comes from somewhere in his chest. He was very courteous. He had a list. He said that he had been asked in Year 131 by Moth whether there was anything in Ozarka worth collecting and had said no, he had the Evening already, and that he had since come to think he had been hasty, and that he would like to ask each of us, now that we had come, whether we had brought anything with us that he might have.

He went round us one at a time.

He asked Penn for the lead. Penn said no.

He asked me for my grandfather’s compass. I said no.

He asked Hesper Kann for one of her blank forms, the new kind, with living, west in the field where the cause goes. She looked at the Heir, and the Heir nodded, and she gave him one, and he kept it in his gold fingers for a long time and then put it away somewhere inside himself.

He asked Ivy Ashgrove for the piece of lamp wick in her pocket.

I do not know how he knew it was there. Ivy did not either. She put her hand over the pocket. She said, “No.”

The Collector stood still for a moment. Then he said, in the voice from his chest, “That’s the island rule, I believe. One may ask once, and be refused, and that’s the end of it.” He bent his stone head to her. “Thank you for refusing. It’s been some time since anyone did.” And he went on to Ohene, who gave him one of her gray books, the tenth, which was full, and had the count in the back.

We ate in the evening in a room of the city with a glass roof, at a long table, the nine of us and Moth and the Heir. The food came from the gardens of the Crown and from the farm of the people of the water beyond the Isles, and it was very good, and I could not have told you what most of it was. The Lady of the Lake spoke to us during the meal. The room’s long windows were open onto a terrace above the water, and the lake was dark under the false stars, which were the stars of a night before the first city of the old world drowned, the Heir said, chosen by a vote of the owners in Year 9, and the water of the lake moved in long slow rings, out from the middle toward the shore, and a voice came out of it from everywhere at once. It was a woman’s voice, low and amused. It said that it was a long time since there had been people from the mainland in the Crown, and that she was very glad, and that the young woman from the Cliff had a very good face, and that she, the Lady, had had a very good face once and had decided to become a lake instead, and did not regret it, and recommended it. Ivy went red. The rings went back into the middle of the lake and stopped.

Toward the end of the meal, Hesper Kann put down her fork and asked the Heir a question, very quietly, so that only the people near her heard it. I was next to her.

She asked whether he would like to be entered.

The Heir looked at her.

She said, “In the Office’s book. I have the forms. It’s the Office’s motto, sir. Every one is counted. I don’t think the Office meant only the people on the mainland. I think it just never had the chance to find out.” She was very pale. “You signed the letter. You’re the one who said the Isles were open. I’d like to put you in the book, if you’ll let me. Living, west.”

The Heir said nothing for a long time. The room had gone quiet. Penn had put his glass down.

Then the Heir said, “I’d have to give you my name.”

Hesper said yes.

He said, “I haven’t said it aloud since Year 30. None of us have. We stopped using them when we stopped being the kind of people who have them. Some of us can’t remember any more.” He looked down at his hands on the table, which were an old man’s hands, brown and spotted, with the veins standing up. “I remember mine.”

He leaned toward Hesper Kann and said it to her, very quietly, a name and a family name, and I did not hear them, and I have not asked, and Hesper has not told anyone. She took a blank form out of her leather case and wrote on it in her beautiful hand, and stamped it, and gave him the pen, and he signed it, slowly, in the slanting hand that is at the foot of the letter, and she blotted it, and put it in the case, and closed the case.

She said, “Thank you, sir.”

He said, “No. Thank you.” And then, after a while: “I was eleven. I’d like to be counted from the day I went in.”

6. The Clockworks

Chart: The chain of the Isles, eleven, from north to south, drawn at a small scale in the top margin of the sheet, from a drawing the Clockworks gave me. The three in the north under the heaviest ice, marked with a sign I made for them, a circle with nothing in it. The eight below, each with its name in my hand. The sounds between them, with depths, from the Clockworks’ own soundings, which are better than ours. And from the foot of the sixth, east, under the sea, a dotted line going off the edge of the sheet toward the Cliff, which is the sign for a line that runs underground.

We went to the Clockworks on the second day, because Penn asked to, and because the Heir said that the Clockworks had asked to meet the Chair of the Bureau more than they had asked for anything in a hundred years.

The Clockworks is the sixth Isle, south of the Crown. The leaves went down the chain to it in the morning over the sounds between the Isles, low, above the pale blue water, which is very clear and very cold and has no ice on it, since the ice is outside, on the moat. I drew the sounds as we went. The Clockworks gave me their soundings afterward, on a sheet of the pale stuff, and I checked mine against theirs and was within two fathoms everywhere, and I will admit that I was proud of that, and that Penn said it was a disgrace to the Bureau that a Reserve Service chartmaker who had never seen salt water before Fifthmonth could sound a strait in her head better than his western section, and then bought me a drink that evening out of the second bottle.

The Clockworks is not a garden. It is the only Isle besides the one they call the Library of Spares that is not, and the Heir told us that the owners almost never go there, because it is loud.

It is loud. The arch opened in the cliff at the waterline as the Crown’s had, and the leaves went in, and the noise came out to meet us: a great deep steady roar, like the Spill heard from a mile away, and under it, and over it, ten thousand smaller sounds, ticking and humming and clanking and singing, all together, and none of them out of time with any of the others. The inside of the mountain is three miles of mechanism. That is what the log says, and it is right. It is lit with a warm yellow light that comes from everywhere. It is hot. There are galleries going up the inside of the mountain wall, level above level, a hundred of them, and on every level there are machines, wheels and shafts and pistons and drums and banks of small turning things like the inside of a watch made as large as a house, and between them other machines moving, on legs and on rails and on wires, tending them. Some of them were the size of my thumb. Some of them were the size of the Granary at Plenty.

Penn stood on the leaf at the entrance and looked at it all and took his cap off.

He said, very quietly, “Oh, my God.”

The machines nearest us stopped. All of them. A ring of them round the arch, of every size, stopped what they were doing and turned toward the leaves. And then, from all of them at once, in a voice that was not a voice, a kind of chord, low and loud and very clear, in a language I did not know and Moth did, came a single word.

Moth said, “They are saying Elder. To me.” Its lamp went up and down once. “They have said it every time I have come since Year 131. I have asked them to stop. They say it is the only word they have for what I am to them and that they will not.”

Then the chord came again, a different word, and the ring of machines bent, all of them, toward the leaf where Penn was standing with his cap in his hand.

Moth said, “That one is Engineer.”

Penn did not say anything. I looked at him and he was crying, openly, with his burned hands hanging at his sides and his cap in one of them, the tears going down into his white beard, and he did not wipe them, and he did not look away from the machines.

They showed him everything. I will not try to give it, since I did not understand most of it and Penn has written it up for the Bureau in a report of three hundred and eleven pages, which is Standing for now and will not be for long. I will give the parts I understood.

They showed him the sky. The false sky of every one of the eight lit Isles is run from the Clockworks, from a hall on the fortieth level where there is a model of each sky the size of a barn, turning, with its sun and its clouds and its moon and its stars, and the real skies follow the models. Penn asked how. The machines told him, in the foundry tongue, through Moth, and Moth told him in Ozarkan, and Penn listened and nodded and said I see about forty times and then said that he did not see at all and would like them to start again.

They showed him the cold machines under the ice. There is a hall for them too, with a map of the moat on the floor, sixty miles around, and on the map a light for every cold machine, about nine hundred lights, all blue, all steady, and three of them were dim, and a machine was standing beside each of the three dim ones on the map, and Moth said that meant there was a machine at the real one on the sea floor, under the ice, mending it.

They showed him where the power comes from. There is a hall that faces south, on the eightieth level, and in the wall of it, toward the south, is a window, very large, of the pale stuff, and through the window you look out of the Clockworks across the sea and the ice and the gas, south and east, for an immense distance, and at the very edge of what you can see, low on the horizon, is a light that rises and falls once a minute.

Penn said, “Allowance 59.”

Moth said, “Yes. She powers this. And everything in the Isles. Through the air, in lines you cannot see.”

Penn put his hand flat on the window.

And they showed him the post.

At the foot of the Clockworks, on the east side, below the waterline, there is a shaft. It goes down through the rock under the sea. The machines took us down it in a cage like the cage of a mine, Penn and Moth and me, since I asked, and the others stayed above; it went down for a long time, and the air got cold and damp, and at the bottom there was a gallery cut in the rock, with lamps along it, and at the end of the gallery there was water.

It was black and still. It filled the end of the gallery and went on into the dark as the floor of a tunnel. There were rails in it, under the water, old ones. The tunnel was round, the size of the deep lines under the Barrens that my grandfather has told me about, and it went east under the sea toward the Cliff, flooded to its roof, into the dark.

On the dry floor of the gallery, at the edge of the water, a machine was standing. It was about the height of a man, with six legs, long and jointed, and a body like a closed drum, and two arms folded against the drum. It had no lamp. It was quite still, and wet. There was weed on its legs.

Moth said, “This one walked to Sixty-Two in Eleventhmonth and took the Chairs’ letter out of the canister and walked back. It came up out of the water at this gallery in Twelfthmonth. It has been standing here since, drying. It is old. It has made the walk a hundred and twelve times.”

Penn looked at the machine for a long time.

Then he went up to it, and stood in front of it, and put out his burned hand, slowly, and laid it flat on the top of its drum body, the way you put your hand on the neck of a horse that has done a long day’s work.

The machine did not move.

Penn said, “Thank you.”

The machine unfolded one of its arms, very slowly, with a sound of old joints, and touched the back of Penn’s hand with the tip of it, once, and folded the arm away again.

Moth said, “It says it knows who you are. It says you have hauled up its float eleven times. It says you are always gentle with the cradle.”

On the hundred-and-first level, near the top of the mountain, where it is quieter, there is a hall of tables.

That is what Moth called it. It is a long room with no machines in it at all, only shelves, from floor to ceiling, on both walls, for a quarter of a mile, and on the shelves books, thousands of them, bound in the pale stuff, and every one of them full of figures. This is where the Clockworks look ahead. The machines that work the tables are elsewhere. This is where the tables are kept.

They showed Penn the tables of the soil.

I understood these, a little, because the Reserve Service keeps soil tables for the planted islands, and I have read them. These were the same kind, and also not the same kind at all. They went back to Year 1. Every province of the mainland, every year, the soil’s yield against what it should have been by the old world’s figures, if the soil had been only soil. And every year, in every province, it was more. A great deal more, in the first years. Then a little less more, every decade, slowly, as the line on the graph came down. The Clockworks had drawn the graph. It was on a single sheet of the pale stuff, very large, and two machines unrolled it on the floor of the hall for us, and Penn knelt down on the floor beside it with his glasses on.

The line came down from the left, from Year 1, very slowly. Four times it dipped below a mark that the Clockworks had drawn across the sheet in red: Year 73, Year 109, Year 141, Year 170. At each dip there was a small note in the foundry script.

Moth said, “The notes say number sent.”

The line went on, to the right, past Year 185, where there was a small mark, and then it divided in two.

One branch went on down, slowly, the way it had always gone, and crossed the red line again in Year 203, and again in Year 211, and then went under it and stayed there.

The other branch stopped going down. It went level, almost exactly level, and stayed level to the right-hand edge of the sheet, which was Year 500.

There was a note at the place where the line divided.

Moth said, “It says seeds.”

Penn stayed on his knees beside the graph for a long time with his finger on the place where the line divided. Then he said, “Can I take this?”

Moth asked. The machines said yes. They rolled it up for him, and tied it with a thread, and gave it to him, and he put it under his arm, and he would not let anyone else touch it for the rest of the crossing. It is in Simeon Adeyemi’s office on the east bank now, pinned on the wall above his desk, where it covers the whole wall. I have seen it there. He told me he looks at it every morning before he looks at anything else.

There was one more thing in the Clockworks, and I give it last, because Teodora Brand of the Interior asked me to, and because she said that the Interior would never be able to write it down itself.

On the way out, on the ninetieth level, Moth stopped the cage at a gallery facing east and asked the machines to show the deputy what they see when they look at the mainland. They took us along the gallery to a window like the one facing south. Through it, east, at an immense distance, was the edge of the world, and on the edge, faint and brown and gold, the line of the Barrens and the Long Cliff and the country beyond. The machines did something with the window, and the view came closer, and closer, the way a picture comes closer in the optical section’s great telescope at the Cliff, until we were looking down from what seemed a great height at the brown tableland of the Barrens, with its black seam, and its round pits along the eastern edge, and in the pits the machine fields of the Directorate, the ranks of standing machines, row after row, that the garrison towns can see from their windows and that the Directorate says are the nation’s defense against the west.

From that height they were not rows.

They were a flower. Five petals, each twenty miles long, drawn in gray machines on brown ground, joined at a center of rings, with veins down the middle of each petal. Very exact. Very beautiful. Small and white and five-petaled. I did not know then whose flower it was. I know now.

Teodora Brand stood at the window and looked at it for a long time.

Then she said, “The Directorate’s army.”

Moth said, “Yes.”

She said, “Who did that?”

Moth said, “A colonel of yours. He designed the seed it grew from. He wrote one routine that nobody could read but him. It told every field where to stand every machine it made. He loved somebody and he could not give her anything, so he gave her that.” The lamp went up and down. “He wrote in the last line of the routine that if anybody ever asked what the army was for, they should be told it was a bouquet.”

Brand put both her hands flat on the window, as Penn had on the other one. Then she laughed. I have never heard a laugh like it, before or since. It went on for a long time, and it was not entirely laughing, and she did not take her hands off the window, and none of us said anything until she stopped.

Then she said, “The Chair is going to have to tell the Directorate.”

Moth said, “Yes. I think the Directorate will be relieved. It has never known what the army was for either.”

7. The Last Isle

Chart: The southernmost of the eleven, at the island scale. Smaller than the Crown. The arch on its eastern face at the waterline. A lake. A city on a hill by the lake, drawn as a grid of streets, very fine, nine thousand houses by the Clockworks’ count, of which I have shaded twenty-three. A square in the middle of the city, with a vegetable garden drawn in it, which I was told several times I must not leave off.

The Last Isle is four hundred and ten miles south of the Crown, at the bottom of the chain, and the leaves took us there on the morning of the third day down the sounds between the Isles, past the Library of Spares and the Glasshouse and Winterless and the Collector’s Isle, which I drew from outside and did not go into, and which I will leave to other chartmakers. I asked the Heir, before we left the Crown, whether he would come with us to the Last Isle. He said no. He said the people in it had been very kind to him for fifty years and had made it quite clear, every time he visited, that they would rather he did not, and that he did not blame them, since he was one of the people who had let their grandparents drown, and that he would see us when we came back north.

Moth came. It said that she had asked it to.

The Last Isle is smaller than the Crown. Its peak is a little under sixteen thousand feet. It is the one nearest the warm south, and the ice on its moat is thinner, and the sea in its sounds is a paler blue. Its arch opened as the others had, at the waterline in the eastern face, and the leaves went in, and the light that came out to meet us was the same gold light of four in the afternoon in late summer, and the air smelled of cut grass and water, and also, faintly, of onions.

That was the garden. I will come to it.

Inside, it is the Crown again, but smaller and newer. A sky. A lake, about a mile and a half across. A waterfall on the far wall, thinner. Orchards and meadows and woods round the lake, and terraces of grain going up the walls, gold, ready to cut, with small machines moving along them slowly in rows. And on a long hill above the lake, a city of white stone and glass.

It is very large. Moth’s log says it was built for about forty thousand people, and the Clockworks, when I asked them, gave the figure as forty-one thousand two hundred, in nine thousand and sixty houses. It covers the whole hill. There are streets and squares and colonnades and fountains and schools, I counted eleven schools, and a hospital, and a great many halls of a size I could not account for until I was told they were for meetings, and they were empty. Every house has a door and windows and a garden. Every street is swept. The fountains run. The beds in the houses are made, Moth’s log says, and I went into four houses at random that afternoon to see, and they were. Clean sheets. A blanket folded at the foot. A chair at a table by a window. A cup on a shelf. Nobody had ever slept in any of them.

From the leaves, coming in over the lake, it looked like a city in a picture. It was the stillest place I have ever seen. Nothing moved on the hill but the small machines, and the water in the fountains.

Then something moved on the shore of the lake below the city, and it was people.

They had come down to the water to meet us. All twenty-three. I knew that before I could count them, because the Clockworks relay the Evening into the Last Isle every night at a quarter past seven, and have done since Year 133, and the twenty-three heard their own names read in the Notices on the ninth of Ninthmonth last year, living, west, and they had known since Twelfthmonth that a party would come in the spring, because they had heard the Account on the first of Eleventhmonth. Moth had told them the day. They had been on the shore since dawn.

They were standing in a line along the edge of the water, on a little beach of white sand below a terrace, close together. Some of them were old. Some of them were young. One was in a chair with wheels, and somebody was standing behind it with her hands on the handles. As the leaves came down onto the water and stopped, a few yards off the beach, and the tall dim shapes on the outer leaves bent their heads, nobody on the beach moved at all, and nobody on the leaves moved either, and for about a minute twenty-three people from the mainland and nine people from the mainland looked at each other across ten yards of water in a hollow mountain, and nobody said anything.

Then a young man at the end of the line, tall, thin, black-haired, about twenty-two, shouted, “Mam!” and went into the lake up to his waist without taking his boots off.

Pilar Aldana went off the leaf. She did not step. She went off the side of it into the water, which was up to her chest, in her coat, and the two of them met in the middle of it, and put their arms round each other in the lake, and did not let go, and the rest of us stood on the leaves and on the beach and looked away from them, and then looked back, because it was impossible not to.

I heard her say, into his shoulder, “You’re not first.”

I heard him say, “I know. I heard. I was furious.”

She said, “Good.”

The others came down to the water’s edge then, and we went ashore off the leaves onto the sand, and for a while it was very confused, and I will not try to give it in order, though I have tried to give everything else in order. I will give what I wrote down that night.

There were nine of them who had been young when they went and were still young, or nearly. There were eight of middle age. There were six who were old. Ilsa Vren was the oldest. She was the one in the chair with wheels. She was ninety-one and very small and white-haired and sharp-faced, with the Vren nose, and she was wearing a Bureau optical observer’s coat, gray with the green collar, very old and very clean, which she had been wearing on the morning she went out of Rand’s Notch in Year 133 and which she told me later she had worn every day since, since it was the only thing she had brought. The woman standing behind her chair was Jessamy Coyle, the pilot, who is forty-two, and who went west in a flying machine in Year 171 and was the last of the four pilots, and whom Lowe had stopped at on the list in the Hall of the Instrument and said Coyle and nothing else.

Margit Vren came up the beach to her aunt’s chair very slowly, with her hands at her sides. She stopped in front of it.

Ilsa Vren looked up at her for a long time.

She said, “You’re Hanne’s girl.”

Margit said yes.

Ilsa said, “You were twenty-three. You’d just been married. You came to the Bureau office at the top of the road on my last afternoon with a pie, and I didn’t eat it, and I’ve always been sorry.”

Margit said, “We kept the lamp a year.”

Ilsa said, “I know. I watched it.” And then she put out both her hands, and Margit knelt down on the sand in front of the chair and took them, and the two of them stayed like that, and Jessamy Coyle let go of the handles of the chair and came away and stood beside me on the sand and looked at the lake.

She said, “She’s been waiting fifty-two years to say she’s sorry about that pie.”

Hesper Kann did her work that afternoon, in the square in the middle of the city, at a table she brought out of one of the empty halls, with her leather case open in front of her and the forms and the stamp and the pad.

The square was where the garden was. The first seven of them had dug it, Jessamy Coyle told me, in about Year 150, in the middle of the largest square in the city, which was paved in white stone and had a fountain in the middle and colonnades round all four sides, because they had got tired of the food the machines grew, which was perfect, and wanted to grow something that was not. The machines had objected. They had stood round the edge of the square for a week and made a noise. The twenty-three had dug anyway, taking up the white paving stones by hand and stacking them against the colonnades, and planted onions and beans and potatoes and cabbages and a row of sunflowers, and the machines had given up, and now they came and watered it at night when the twenty-three were asleep, without being asked, and the twenty-three pretended not to know.

It is a very good garden. I have drawn it on the chart, as I was told to.

Hesper sat at her table in the middle of the onions and called them one at a time, in the order on the small sheet, and they came and sat across from her, and she asked each of them the same questions in the same words, in her quiet precise voice, with her beautiful hand, filling in the form.

Name. District. Year of birth. Year of departure. Present residence.

For present residence she wrote, every time, the Last Isle, west. She had decided that on the leaf on the way in. She said the form had no line for it and that she would rather write it plainly than leave it blank.

And then the last question, which was not on the form. Adeyemi had given it to her in the Office before she left, written on a card, and told her to ask it of every one of them in exactly those words, and to write down the answer in exactly theirs.

The Office of Population Management asks, on behalf of the nation, whether you wish to come home.

I give the answers, since Hesper wrote them down and the Office has printed them.

Ilsa Vren said, “No. I’m looking at it.”

Oren Paskett, who is seventy-eight, and went out of Gannet Notch in Year 138 after his wife and two sons drowned off the hoist in a southerly, said, “Not yet. Ask me again.”

Halcyon Dree, who went out of Concord at sixteen in a stolen boat and is sixty-one, and whom the Evening never named until last Ninthmonth, said, “Yes. I want to see my mother’s grave. I want to hear the Evening in a room with other people in it.”

Temperance Oyelaran said no. Joachim and Liesl Barra said no, together, and then argued about it, and then said no again. Rafe Tolliver said no. Nkem Ashby said, “I’d like to visit,” and Hesper wrote down visit, and underlined it, and said that the Office had no category for that either and she would make one.

Wilhelmina Strake said no. Castor Mbeki-Lane said yes. Una Fairbrother said, “There’s nobody left,” and Hesper said, gently, that the town of Holloway had lit her window last Ninthmonth anyway, and Una Fairbrother looked at her for a long time and then said, “Then I’ll think about it,” and Hesper wrote that down too.

Thaddeus Ilkley said yes. Rosamund Achterberg said no. Barnaby Quell said yes, and that he wanted to go home and tell everyone in Low Notch that he’d been right. Imani Sorensen said no. Gideon Farrow said no. Clemency Odum said, “Not without the garden,” and laughed. Ambrose Ketteridge said no.

Jessamy Coyle said, “I came to fly. They won’t let anybody fly in here except a heron. The Heir says that when the line’s gone the people in the mountains will want a mail between the Cliff and the Isles, and that somebody will have to fly it, and that it might as well be a pilot from New Carthage who knows the air over the gas.” She looked at Hesper’s pen. “Put not yet. Put mail.”

Marisol Petrakis said yes. Hob Tennant said yes.

Kit Aldana said, “Yes. Obviously. I’m going home with my mam on the leaf tomorrow and I’m going to walk up the stairs in the Notch to the Bureau office at the top and tell them I’m the second.” He looked round at the others. “After Halcyon. She’s older. She can be first.”

Wynn Okoro was last. He is twenty. He went out of Assurance in Thirdmonth of Year 183 in a stolen skiff, at nineteen, alone, the most recent name on the list, and the Evening never named him either, and he had been in the Last Isle for fourteen months. He sat across the table from Hesper Kann in the middle of the onions and did not say anything for a long time.

Then he said, “My dad will kill me.”

Hesper said, “The Office has no line for that, I’m afraid.”

He laughed. He put his head down on the table among the forms and laughed until he cried, and then he lifted his head and wiped his face on his sleeve and said, “Yes. Yes. Put yes.”

Eight of them said yes. Two said visit and not yet, and a third said mail, and one said she would think about it, and the rest said no. Hesper filled in twenty-three forms in her beautiful hand, and stamped every one, and had every one of them sign, and blotted them, and put them in the leather case, and closed it, and sat with her hands on it in the middle of the garden for a while.

Then she said to me, “That’s the first time anyone has ever been entered in the Office’s book anywhere but the mainland. In a hundred and eighty-one years.”

I said that she had done it beautifully.

She said, “I made one mistake.” She opened the case and showed me. On Wynn Okoro’s form, in the field for present residence, she had written home, and crossed it out, and written the Last Isle, west beside it. “I’ll have to explain that to the Chair.”

I said that I thought the Chair would understand.

She said, “Yes. I think he will.” And she closed the case again, and left her hand on it.

8. The Window

Chart: The eastern face of the Last Isle, at the harbor scale, from the waterline to about two thousand feet. The arch. A stair inside the rock, drawn dotted, going up. At the top of the stair a small square, which is a room, and on the outer face of the cliff where the room is, a mark I made for a window that looks out, and from the mark a ruled line going east across the whole sheet, over the ice and the gas and the line and the shelf, to a small circle on the lip of the Long Cliff, at the north end of a town, which is the sign for a light that is kept.

Ilsa Vren asked to see Ivy Ashgrove that evening, alone. Ivy asked whether I could come, since I was the chartmaker and since she said she did not trust herself to remember it. Ilsa Vren looked at me for a long time from her chair and then said that a chartmaker would be welcome, provided she drew it properly.

Jessamy Coyle pushed the chair. We went up from the city through a door in the inner wall of the mountain, on the eastern side, into a stair cut in the rock. It was a long stair, lit by small lamps, and Jessamy could not push the chair up it, and Ilsa Vren said that she knew that and that she had not been up it herself for three years, and that she was going up it tonight, and Jessamy lifted her out of the chair and took her up in her arms. Jessamy Coyle carried Ilsa Vren up four hundred and eleven steps, with Ilsa’s arms round her neck, the way a child is taken up to bed, and Ivy and I came behind with the chair between us, folded, and nobody said anything all the way up.

At the top of the stair there was a room.

It was small, about the size of the Ashgroves’ room at the top of the house at Land’s End, and it was cut out of the rock of the mountain’s outer wall, high up, on the eastern face. There was a chair in it, an old Bureau observer’s chair with a leather seat and a high back, of the kind the optical section uses at the Cliff, which Ilsa Vren said the Clockworks had made for her from a drawing, since she had asked for one. There was a table. There was a shelf, and on the shelf, from one end of it to the other and up onto a second shelf above it, there were books, all the same size, bound in green, like a Bureau logbook. I counted them later. There were fifty-two.

And the east wall of the room was a window.

It was made of the pale stuff, very clear, and it was the whole wall, floor to ceiling, and it looked out from the face of the mountain, high above the ice, east, over the moat and the gas and the sea, toward the mainland. It was nearly dark. The false sky behind us inside the mountain was still at four in the afternoon, since it always is, but outside, in the real world, the sun had gone down behind the Isles an hour before, and the sea was dark, and the sky over the sea in the east was going from blue to black, and at the very bottom of it, on the edge of the world, there was a thin line, a little darker than the sky, very faint, which was the Long Cliff, a hundred and forty miles off.

From the Isles, by eye, the mainland is a smudge.

Ilsa Vren saw me notice it. She was back in her own chair by then, with Jessamy beside her. She said, “Yes. One of us is right about the air. It isn’t me.” And then she said, “Give it a minute. It’ll come up. The Clockworks made the glass for me in Year 134. They wanted to know what I’d look at if I could look at anything. I said the Cliff. They thought that was very funny.” She lifted her hand. “Go on. Give it a minute.”

It came up the way the view came up in the Clockworks’ eastern window. The faint line on the edge of the world got closer. It did not get larger. It got closer, the way something gets closer when you walk toward it, and the air between us and it went clear, and then the Long Cliff was there in front of us, from the north end to the south as far as the window went, a long dark wall in the dusk with the sea at its foot and the last of the light on the wheat on top, and it was as close as Land’s End had been from the bench at the north end of the path.

And then the lights came on.

It was about eight o’clock on the mainland, I worked out afterward, and the Evening was over, and people were going in to their suppers, and all along the Cliff, in the notches, in the harbors, in the towns on the lip, the lamps were coming on in the windows. I could see them. Every one. Rand’s Notch to the north, both walls of the canyon, house above house, very bright, since it was Fifthmonth and the town had not stopped lighting the western windows since last Ninthmonth. Gannet Notch. Callow. Sevenmile. Shelter, which has no western windows, a dark town with a glow above it. The Bureau’s beacons, one every ten miles along the lip, white, flashing. The Spill, far to the south, a pale smear. And, on the lip of the Cliff fourteen miles south of Rand’s Notch, at the north end of a town I had left three days before, in the top window of the last house, a single small steady yellow light.

Ivy Ashgrove made a sound.

Ilsa Vren said, “There she is.”

Ivy said, “That’s Gran.”

Ilsa Vren said, “I know it’s your gran. I’ve watched her light it for fifty-two years. And her mother before her. I saw her the winter she was in the hospital and somebody else lit it, a younger woman, for three months.” She looked at Ivy. “And I’ve seen you. You’re the one who stands at the end of the path in the evenings and doesn’t stop looking. You’ve done it since you were about four. I’ve always wanted to know your name.”

Ivy said, “Ivy.”

Ilsa said, “Ivy,” and nodded, as though that settled something.

She showed us the logbooks.

They are a Bureau observer’s logbooks, of the old kind, in green, ruled in columns, and there are fifty-two of them, one for each year from Year 133 to Year 184, and a fifty-third on the table, half full, for this year. She has kept them every night. They are written in the small slanting precise hand that is at the foot of the last page of the logbook in Margit Vren’s wooden box in Rand’s Notch, and the columns are the same columns.

Every night, the date. Every night, the sky. Every night, the apparent contrast of the Cliff by the Clockworks’ window, which she measures with an instrument they built for her, and which never changes, and which she records anyway. And then, every night, the lights. A column for every harbor. A column for the Spill. And at the right-hand edge of the page, a column with a heading she has written at the top of every page of every one of the fifty-two books, by hand, in the same words.

L.E. north.

And under it, every night, one word.

Lit.

She opened the first book for Ivy. It was the night of the twelfth of Fifthmonth, Year 133, the night after she arrived, and the entry was in a hand that was a little less steady than the others, and the column said Lit. She opened the last full book, Year 184, and turned to the ninth of Ninthmonth, and the column said Lit., and beside it, in the margin, small, the names. She opened the book on the table to that night’s page. The column was empty. She took a pencil from the table and wrote in it, while we watched, Lit., and put the pencil down.

Ivy said, “Every night.”

Ilsa said, “Eighteen thousand nine hundred and eighty-three nights. I’ve added it up. It’s the only light on the Cliff that’s never missed. Not once. The harbors go dark at the end of every moon. The beacons go out for repairs. Your gran’s window has never once not been lit.” She closed the book. “I used to think I’d go mad out here, at the start. In a city for forty thousand with nobody in it. Then I found the window, and I found your light, and I thought: somebody on that coast is keeping something. Every night. Whatever happens. And I kept the column. And I didn’t go mad.” She looked at Ivy. “So that’s what you came to ask. Whether anybody saw it. Yes. I did.”

Ivy did not say anything. She was looking at the small yellow light on the Cliff.

After a while Ilsa Vren said, “I know who it’s for.”

Ivy turned round.

Ilsa said, “Tern. Thomas Ashgrove. Year 104. She told me, the year I came. Lantern. I asked her about the light and she knew straight away which one I meant. She said she saw him go.” She was quiet for a moment. “She was very dim then. That was before the flower came off the mountain, before she was bright enough to go out to the edge of the air and lift anybody. She said she saw the Tern come off the hoist at Land’s End one morning in Fifthmonth with one man in her, and go west, and she went out to her, and stayed above her. All the way. He went into the yellow at about a hundred and twelve miles, in the afternoon. She said he didn’t suffer long. She said she stayed over the boat until it was over and then she stayed over it until it went down, two days later, in the ice. She said she couldn’t do anything. She said that was the worst of all of them, because it was a clear day and she could see the light come on in the window at Land’s End that night, from the ice, and she knew what it was for.” Ilsa looked at the window. “She told me she’s watched it every night since, too. From wherever she is.”

Ivy said, very quietly, “Gran says the boats.”

Ilsa looked at her.

Ivy said, “When she lights it. Every night. She doesn’t think anybody knows. She stands at the window with the match and before she lights it she says the boats. The nine that Land’s End has lost west. In order. Tern, Year 104. Marigold, Year 119. Sally Dene, Year 126. All nine. Then she lights it. Her mother did it and her grandmother did it, and she did it when she was a girl, and I’ve heard her through the door since I was little.” She wiped her face. “I’ve never said. To anybody. You don’t, in Land’s End.”

Ilsa Vren sat in her observer’s chair with her hands folded on the logbook and looked at Ivy for a long time.

She said, “Every night. In order.”

Ivy said yes.

Ilsa said, “Out loud.”

Ivy said yes.

Ilsa said, “Then that’s one of her places.” She turned to me. “Chartmaker. Write it down. On the back. Land’s End, the north window. The boats are said every night, aloud, in order, before the lamp is lit. Write that down and take it to the archivist, and the archivist will take it to the Chairs, and they’ll know what it means. She asked for places.”

I wrote it down. It is on the back of the chart. Ohene has it in her gray book too, since I showed it to her that night, and she sat with it for a long time and then said, yes.

Before we went down, Ivy Ashgrove took the piece of lamp wick out of her pocket.

She had refused it to the Collector in the Crown. She put it out now, in the palm of her hand, to Ilsa Vren, in her observer’s chair at the window.

She said, “Gran said to give it to whoever’s there.”

Ilsa Vren looked at it for a long time without touching it. It was a short length of white wick, cut square at both ends, a little yellowed, very old.

Ivy said, “It’s from the first night. Year 104.”

Ilsa put out her hand and took it. She closed her fingers over it. Then she opened the logbook on the table, the one for this year, to the night’s page, and laid the wick in the gutter of the book, along the fold, beside the column headed L.E. north, and closed the book on it, and put her hand flat on the cover.

She said, “Tell your gran I’ve got it. Tell her I’ll keep the column.” And then: “And tell her she’s to sit down when she lights it. She’s eighty-one and she stands for the boats. I’ve watched her. She’s to sit down.”

9. The Way Back

Chart: The same line as the way out, east, from the arch of the Crown to the lip at Land’s End, drawn a second time in ink beside the first in pencil, a quarter mile north of it, since the leaves came back by a slightly different way. Times marked along it. The Plummet at the line, hove to, with her lights. And the Cliff, all along the bottom edge of the sheet, with every light on it marked, in the sign for a light that is kept, which I have used for all of them this time, since I could not tell, from the sea, which ones were for the dead and which for the living.

We left the Last Isle on the morning of the fourteenth with eight more people than we came with.

They had very little to bring. Most of them had come west with the clothes they had on and a bag, and had lived for years in houses where everything was provided, and found, when it came to packing, that there was almost nothing in the city of white stone and glass they wanted to take. Halcyon Dree took a cutting of a rose from the garden in the square, wrapped in wet cloth. Barnaby Quell took a stone from the paving they had dug up. Castor Mbeki-Lane took nothing at all. Kit Aldana took his mother.

The fifteen who were staying came down to the beach below the terrace to see them go, as all twenty-three had come down to see us arrive. Ilsa Vren came in her chair, with Jessamy Coyle behind it. She shook hands with every one of the eight, very formally, from the chair. She said to Halcyon Dree, You’ll go to the Spill for me, at the rail, on the north lip, on a clear afternoon, and look west, and you’ll tell me what it looks like from there now, and Halcyon Dree said she would, and Ilsa said, Write it down. I’ll know if you don’t, and Halcyon laughed and said she believed it.

Margit Vren was staying.

She told us on the beach. She said she had decided in the night. She said her husband was dead these nine years, which none of us had known, and that the chandlery was her daughter’s now in all but the deed, and that she was seventy-five and had never once in her life been anywhere but Rand’s Notch except for her wedding at Shelter and the night train to the capital the year her husband’s lungs went bad, and that she had sat up in her aunt’s house by the lake until three in the morning talking, and had found that they had fifty-two years to catch up on and that she would like to catch up on them properly. She said Hesper should write her down as visit. She said that she would come home when she had heard everything and that she did not expect that to be soon.

Hesper wrote her down as visit, on a form of the new kind, and then, after a moment’s thought, on the line where the present residence goes, the Last Isle, west, with family.

The Heir was at the arch of the Crown when the leaves came north up the chain and turned east, in the middle of the afternoon. He was standing on the clear step at the waterline inside the arch, with his stick, in his father’s green coat, and the warm light behind him and the black water of the moat in front, and the leaves stopped in front of him and he looked at us all again, one at a time, counting, as he had on the first day, and this time there were more of us.

He said to Penn, “You’ll tell the Chairs.”

Penn said he would tell them everything.

The Heir said, “Tell them the line can go. Tell them the leaves will come to Land’s End once a month for anyone who wants to cross, until there’s a better way. Tell them the people in the mountains would like to visit the mainland, some of us, one day, if the mainland will have us, and that we understand if it won’t. Tell them I said it was a mistake, what we did. All of it. Keeping the pictures and the books and the seeds, and letting the people go under. Tell them I don’t expect that to make any difference, and that I’m saying it anyway, because somebody should have said it in Year 9 and nobody did.” He leaned on his stick. “And tell your Office I’m in the book. I’d like them to know that the first owner they ever counted asked to be.”

Hesper Kann said, from the left-hand leaf, “I’ll tell them, sir.”

He looked at her. “You’ve a good hand, registrar. Better than mine.”

Then he lifted his stick, and the arch closed in front of him, slowly, from the top down, the way a leaf folds, and there was only gray rock above the black water, without a seam, and the cold came back, and the bears.

We crossed the ice and the gas in the late afternoon and came over the edge of the gas at mile a hundred and one as the sun went down behind us.

I will put down what the returners did, since I watched them, and since nobody else will.

They stood at the forward rims of the leaves and looked east. All eight. Nobody had to tell them where to stand. As the sun went down behind the Isles the sea in front of us went from blue to gray to dark, and the sky over the sea in the east went dark, and for a long time there was nothing in front of us at all, only the darkening sea and the first stars coming out low on the eastern horizon over where the mainland was.

Then, at about mile ninety-five, Kit Aldana said, “There.”

It was a light. Very small, very low, right on the edge of the sea. White, flashing, once every eight seconds. A Bureau beacon on the lip of the Cliff. Then another, ten miles south of it. Then, slowly, as the leaves came east, the others: the beacons all along the lip, every ten miles, white, flashing, each with its own count; and between them, very faint, yellow and steady, the lights of the towns.

Halcyon Dree began to cry. She stood at the rim of the leaf with the rose cutting in her hands and cried without making any sound. She told me later that she had not seen a light on the mainland since the night she went, when she was sixteen, and that she had looked back from the stolen boat at the lights of Concord’s river landing going away behind her and had thought, that’s the last time, and that it had been, for forty-five years.

Wynn Okoro said, “Which one’s Assurance?”

Moth said, “None of them. Assurance is on the Gulf, four hundred miles south. You’ll see it when you get there.”

Wynn said, “Right,” and kept looking anyway.

At the ninety-mile line the Plummet was waiting.

She was hove to where we had left her, with her riding lights lit, red and green and white, and the Halyard a mile to the south of her with hers, and as the leaves came up out of the west in the dark I saw every light on the Plummet’s deck go on at once, all the deck lamps and the masthead and the working lights over the winch, so that she lit up on the black sea like a house, and I heard, across the water, very faint, somebody whistle.

The leaves stopped beside her, a few yards off her rail, at the height of her deck.

Ned Corrigan was at the rail. He looked at the leaves for a long time, at the three of them and at the people on them, counting, the way the Heir had counted, and I saw him get to the end and start again.

He said, “Sixteen. You went with nine.”

Penn said, “Eight came home, Corrigan. One stayed. Write it in the log.”

Ned said, “I’ll write it in the log.” He looked at the eight, standing at the rims of the leaves in the light from his deck lamps. He said, “Welcome back over the line,” in a voice that did not work very well, and then he went down off the rail to the deck and I heard him say something to the cook, and the cook laughed, and then the whole crew of the Plummet was at the rail, and the cook had a tray, and on the tray there were eighteen cups of tea, since the Chair had shouted across to her to make two more for the ladies.

We drank it in the air beside the Plummet at the ninety-mile line at nine o’clock at night with the sea black under the leaves and the beacons of the Cliff flashing on the edge of the sky. The cook handed the cups across from the rail one at a time. Kit Aldana drank his in one go and asked for another. Wynn Okoro had his in both hands and did not drink it and kept looking east. The two tall dim shapes on the outer leaves were offered cups too, by the cook, who could not see them, and who handed the two extra cups out across the rail into what she told me afterward was empty air, and I watched the cups go out into the dim light where the tall shapes were, and stop, and stay there, in the air, at about the height of a hand, for as long as it took the rest of us to drink, and then come back.

We came in to the Cliff at Land’s End a little before midnight.

I will not describe the town. It had not gone to bed. It was on the lip again, all of it, two thousand people and the lamps, and the hoist lit up at the edge with Amos Tunney at the brake, and the leaves came in under the Cliff from the sea and rose up the face of the rock and stopped at the lip by the gantry, and the whole town of Land’s End, which does not discuss the view, made a sound I have never heard a crowd make. I can only describe it by saying that it was the sound of two thousand people discovering that they had all been thinking the same thing for their whole lives and had never once said it.

Ivy Ashgrove did not get off the leaf at the lip.

She got off at the bottom. She asked the leaf to take her down, and it did, down the face of the Cliff in the dark to the stage at the foot on its pilings, four hundred and ten feet down, and she stepped off it onto the stage, and the leaf came back up, and Amos Tunney at the brake let the boat down the cable to her, empty, and she got into it, and he brought her up.

He had told her to come back up the cable. She came back up the cable.

When the boat came up over the lip and stopped, Amos Tunney set the brake and came round the gantry and lifted her out of it by the arms as though she were nine, and set her on the grass, and said, “That’s right,” and went back to the brake.

The light in the top window of the last house at the north end of town was lit. It had been lit since dusk, the town told me. The old woman had come down to the kitchen at nine for her tea and gone back up and shut the door, the same as every night.

Ivy went up the stairs. I went up behind her, since she asked me to, with the chart under my arm. At the top she knocked on the door of the little room, which I do not think she had ever done in her life, and her grandmother said, Come in, then, and she went in.

Lettice Ashgrove was standing at the window with her back to us, looking west at the dark where the Isles were.

Ivy said, “Gran. She says you’re to sit down.”

Her grandmother turned round.

Ivy said, “The woman in the Isles. Ilsa Vren. She’s been watching the window. Every night since Year 133. She’s kept a log of it. Every night. Lit. She’s got eighteen thousand nine hundred and eighty-three of them in a column. And she says you stand up when you say the boats and you’re to sit down.”

Lettice Ashgrove looked at her granddaughter for a long time.

Then she sat down in the chair under the window, slowly, with her hands on the arms of it, and folded her hands in her lap, and looked out at the dark, and said, “Well.”

Ivy said, “I gave her the wick.”

Her grandmother said, “Good.”

And after a while she said, without turning round, “Did she say whether she saw Thomas go?”

Ivy told her.

When she had finished, her grandmother did not say anything for a long time. Then she said, “Then she was there,” and nodded, once, and put her hand up and touched the glass of the window, low down, the way you touch a child’s head going past, and left it there.

I went down the stairs and out of the house and along the path to the bench at the north end, where Moth was waiting, with its legs folded under it and its lamp turned down, and sat down beside it, and neither of us said anything, and above us, in the window, the lamp stayed lit.

10. The Chart

[image: The western sea, from the Long Cliff to the Great Rocky Isles. M. Grieve, Year 185. West is up.]

The western sea, from the Long Cliff to the Great Rocky Isles. M. Grieve, Year 185. West is up.

Chart: The whole sheet, finished. The Long Cliff along the bottom edge. The soundings to the line. The line, printed, as the Bureau printed it in Year 98, with its words. Beyond it, one sounding in my hand and Penn’s name. The yellow wash, with a boat in it, and a year, and a question mark. The ice, in crosses, with a row of blue dots under it. The Isles across the top, eleven, three of them empty circles. Two lines across the sheet between the Cliff and the Isles, one in pencil going out and one in ink coming back. Everything I saw. And one thing I did not draw, which is written below.

I finished the chart at Tally in Seventhmonth, at my grandfather’s kitchen table, with the windows open on the lake and the Reserve Service launch going out to the islands at dawn and coming back at dusk, the way it has every day of my life.

It took six weeks. I had the working sheet from the crossing, with everything on it in pencil, smudged and creased from the leaves and the wind and Penn’s elbow, and I had the Clockworks’ soundings of the sounds, and the Bureau’s tracings, and my notes, and Ohene’s gray book, which she lent me for a fortnight and asked for back. I drew the fair copy twice, once for the Bureau and once for the Reserve Service, in ink, on new stock, at the offshore scale, with the Cliff along the bottom and the Isles at the top and the sea between them, and west at the top of the sheet, and north at the right, which is not how the Bureau draws its charts, and the Bureau has accepted it anyway.

My grandfather watched me do it. He sat at the other end of the kitchen table with Tull’s pipe in his teeth, unlit, and his own old charts of the reserve islands spread out in front of him, and he did not say anything about mine until I had inked the last sounding. Then he got up and came round the table and stood behind me and looked at it for a long time.

He said, “It’s better than mine.”

I said it was a different kind of chart.

He said, “It’s better than mine.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “What did you leave off?”

I told him.

On the way back from the Isles, at the ninety-mile line, while we were drinking the Plummet’s tea, I asked Moth whether it knew where the Tern went down.

It did. It said that she had told it in Year 131, on the night she first told it about the boats, and that it had logged the position, as it logs everything, and that it would give it to me if I asked, since I was the chartmaker, and since it had promised her to give anybody anything they asked for by name.

I asked. It gave me a bearing from the north end of Land’s End and a distance. A hundred and thirty-one miles, a little north of west, at the inner edge of the ice, where the Tern drifted after she went into the gas at a hundred and twelve and was taken north by the current for two days and came against the ice and was crushed and sank. Six hundred and twelve fathoms. The floor there is the old grain country, Moth said, and the Tern is lying on a road.

I marked it on the working sheet. A small cross, in pencil, at the inner edge of the ice, with a year beside it. 104. I looked at it for a long time on the leaf at the line, in the light from the Plummet’s deck lamps.

Then, on the morning after we came back, before I left Land’s End, I went up the stairs of the last house with the working sheet and showed it to Lettice Ashgrove, in the little room at the top, with the lamp out because it was daylight and the chair under the window. I showed her the cross. I said that I could put it on the chart, and that if I did, the chart would be in the Bureau’s archive and the Reserve Service’s depot and printed, in time, for every Cliff port, and that every fisherman who worked the western sea after the line came down would know that the Tern was there, and that her great-grandfather was on a road six hundred and twelve fathoms down at the edge of the ice.

I said it was her decision.

She looked at the cross on the sheet for a long time. She did not touch it.

Then she said, “Leave it off.”

I asked her whether she was sure.

She said, “He’s in the window. That’s where he is. He’s been in the window since my grandmother was nine.” She looked at the window. “If you put him on the chart, somebody will go and look. They’ll go out in a boat with a lead and sound for him, and find him, and bring up something on the tallow, and put it in a case. I’d rather he was in the window.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Leave him off. Write it on the back, if you have to. Ivy can know. Ivy will know where he is, and she’ll tell the next one, and that’s enough.”

So I left him off.

He is not on the fair copy, either of them. On the working sheet, in pencil, there is a small cross at the inner edge of the ice with a year beside it, and I have rubbed it out, and you can still see where it was if you put the sheet against the window, which I have done, once, and will not do again. On the back of the fair copy, in the corner, in ink, small, I have written:

Left off: the Tern, Year 104, at the request of the family. The position is known to the family and to M. It is not required for navigation.

My grandfather read it over my shoulder and laughed. He laughed for a long time, with the pipe in his teeth, the way he laughs when the Reserve Service sends him a letter asking why something is not on one of his charts.

He said, “Told you.”

I said he had.

He said, “Seventy years. Every map I ever drew. I left something off every one of them. People, mostly. Places where people were who didn’t want to be found.” He sat down again at his end of the table. “You’re the first one who’s ever asked first.”

The four Chairs announced the seven places on the Evening of the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 185, a year to the night after the letter was read. The Reader read them in the Account, in ninety seconds, in the voice. My grandfather and I heard it in the depot kitchen, as we had heard the letter.

The Account said that the four Chairs had accepted the Ask. It said that they had chosen seven places in the nation where memory is said aloud, in order, every day, and would be said every day after the people who said it now were gone, and that they had chosen them with the help of the one who wrote the Accession, who had come to the Hall of the Instrument for that purpose in Eighthmonth, at night, which the Chairs described as an honor and did not otherwise describe. It said that the other four places were outside the nation and would be told in the ninth edition of the History of Ozarka, which was in preparation and would be issued in the coming year.

It gave the seven.

The broadcast house on the east bank at New Carthage, where the Evening is read.

The east bank archive of the Office of Population Management, where, from this evening, the entries made in the Office’s book each day will be read aloud at the closing hour, in the order in which they were made.

The schoolroom of the district school at Provision where the Rise is first taught to the children of six, as it has been taught there since Year 16.

The chapel on the south lip of the Spill, where the families who built it in Year 88 have said the names of the vessels lost west, in order of their going, every evening at dusk for ninety-seven years.

The Hall of the Wandering Shoreline at Second Harbor, where, from this year, the Keeper will read a page of the Record aloud each day, in order, from the beginning.

The north window at Land’s End, where the names of the boats lost from the town are said each night, in order, before the lamp is lit.

The station of the Interior on the eastern coast that is called the Landing, where those who are sent east are permitted to write, and where, from this year, what they write will be read aloud, in order, before they go.

Then it said, The sea stands at the mark, and the Evening was over.

My grandfather sat at the kitchen table for a long time with his hands round his cup.

Then he said, “The Spill chapel. I never knew they did that. Ninety-seven years.” He shook his head. “Forty minutes, it must take now. Every night. And the Bureau never once put it in a report.”

I said that perhaps the Bureau had left it off.

He looked at me over his cup, and then he laughed again, and said, “Yes. Yes, I expect it did.”

The line came down in Sixthmonth of this year, three months before the Evening of the seven places. The Chairs passed it four to none, in the Hall, on the twelfth, the night after the archivist brought them Ilsa Vren’s message and my working sheet. The Bureau’s charts will be reprinted at Endeavor next spring without it. The Interior’s cutters will go on working the waters off the Cliff, to turn back anybody who tries to cross the gas in a boat. The leaves come to Land’s End on the eleventh of every month at dawn for anyone who wants to cross, and go back on the fourteenth, and Amos Tunney keeps a list on a slate by the brake of who has gone and who has come back, and the list has forty-one names on it so far, and Ivy Ashgrove’s is on it twice.

My fair copy still has the line on it.

It is printed. It was printed at the Bureau’s press at Endeavor in Year 98 on the stock I drew on, as it is printed on every Bureau sheet of the western sea, a thin black line at ninety miles from the Cliff with the words beyond this limit no survey is maintained, and you cannot rub out print. I did not try. I have left it where it is. Above it, to the top of the sheet, there is a survey, and it is maintained, and it is mine.

Under the printed words, in my own hand, in ink, I have written one line.

Crossed, 11 Fifthmonth, Year 185. H. Penn, A. Ohene, T. Brand, H. Kann, F. Ade, I. Ashgrove, M. Vren, P. Aldana, M. Grieve. And Moth.

West is up.

Book Eight: The History of Ozarka, Ninth Edition

This is the ninth authorized edition of the History of Ozarka, prepared by the Historical Section of the Bureau of Reclamation and approved in Year 186. It is issued in one form only. The notes at the foot of its pages are by the machine called Moth, designated OR-1, of Mammoth Station, at the invitation of the Section, and are marked M.

Prefatory Notice of the Section

This volume supersedes the eighth edition, approved in Year 126, in both its forms.

The Section has issued every previous edition in two forms: a Common Text for the schools and the reading rooms, and a Standing copy for officers of the four Offices and the Defense Directorate, containing chapters that were withheld. This edition is issued in one form. There are no Standing chapters in it. There is no Standing mark on any page. Every citizen who reads it reads the whole of it, and every officer who reads it reads the same book as every citizen, and the Section considers this the most important sentence in the notice, and has placed it first for that reason.

The Standing copies of the eighth edition are recalled. An officer who returns a Standing copy to the nearest Bureau depot will receive a copy of the ninth without charge. The Section will not pulp the Standing copies. It has decided to keep them, all four hundred and twelve, on a shelf in the east bank archive, open to any reader, so that a citizen who wishes to know what the nation’s officers were told, and what its children were not, may compare the two. The Section draws the reader’s attention to Standing copy no. 31, issued in Year 126 to Colonel Josef Adair, retired, which is on the same shelf, and which has his pencil in its margins, and which is printed in full in the collection where this edition also appears. The Section has read it many times. It recommends it.

The Common Text of the eighth edition remains in the schools until the ninth can be printed in sufficient numbers. A school that returns its copies of the eighth will receive copies of the ninth. The depots will pulp the returned Common Texts, as they always have, and send the pulp to the card mills, so that the history a citizen read at fourteen goes, in due course, into the folded card the citizen keeps in an inside pocket for the rest of a life. The Section considered changing this custom and decided against it. It has asked only that the card mills print, on the inside fold of every card made from the pulp of the eighth edition, a single line, in small type: made from what we were told.

The eighth edition closed with a promise. It said that the next edition would be shorter about the Rise and longer about the nation, since the nation grows and the Rise does not; that the Points would be fewer; and that the next edition, or the one after, would admit such matters as the four Chairs judged the citizen ready to be told, when the keeping was finished.

The Section has kept the first two promises. The third has been taken out of its hands. On the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 184, the citizen was told, on the Evening, in the Reader’s voice, by the one who wrote the Accession, and the four Chairs did not judge whether the citizen was ready, since the letter was not addressed to them alone and they chose not to pretend it was. The Section is a body of historians. It records that the citizen, on being told, went to work in the morning. It records that the trains ran. It records that the Assembly, on the nineteenth of Tenthmonth, Year 184, tabled a motion for a constitutional convention to consider the sixth article, and that the convention sat at Provision for forty days in Fifthmonth and Sixthmonth of this year, and amended the sixth article, and that the amendment is given in the second chapter. And it records, because it would be dishonest not to, that the keeping was not finished when the citizen was told, and that the citizen was told anyway, and that this was better.

The work is arranged in eight chapters.

The first recounts the Rise and the Stopping, briefly, since every citizen knows them, and adds what every citizen did not know, which is who stopped the water.

The second recounts the founding of the nation, and the Standing Offices, and what the Offices did that was withheld: the Accession; the post at Sixty-Two and the four numbers; the Directorate and the deep lines; the plug; Saltgrass; the eastern condition and the Plague Watch; and the convention of this year.

The third describes the west: the Great Rocky Isles, inside and out; the people who own them; the compact; the Last Isle; the crossers; and the crossing of Year 185.

The fourth describes the east: the island and the people who live on it; the flower that grew on its highest bald and what it did there; the rules the people of the island keep and where they came from; Mammoth, and the Station, and the dams across the strait, and what the dams were for.

The fifth describes the people from elsewhere, whom the Section has called in every previous edition the residents from elsewhere and whose form, number and purpose it said it had no record of; and the people of the water, whom no previous edition mentioned at all.

The sixth is a life of the one called Lantern. The Section has never before given a life of any person in the History. It gives this one because she asked the nation for something, and the nation said yes, and a nation that says yes to someone should know who she was.

The seventh describes the eleven places where her seeds will be planted, and why.

The eighth sets out what is not known. The Section has written every previous edition as though everything that was not in it was withheld. That was never true, and in this edition the Section would like to be exact about the difference.

At the close there is a short list of Points for Recitation. There are four.

The Section asked the four Chairs, in Firstmonth of this year, who should annotate the ninth edition.

The question needs explaining. The eighth edition’s most read copy is the one with a colonel’s pencil in it. Every officer in the Section has read his notes, and most of them can quote them. The Section did not think it could write an honest edition without someone in the margin to say where it had failed. The Chair of the Academy proposed the archivist who counted the Allowances, and the archivist declined, on the ground that she had kept the account of the Speaking and did not want to be the author of two books in a row about the same thing, and that a reader should not have to listen to the same voice in the body of a page and at its foot. The Chair of the Bureau then proposed the colonel’s machine.

He said that the colonel had written, in the margin of the last page of the eighth edition, that if the ninth was not honest, Moth would write one that was, and that he had told Moth so, and that Moth had written it down. He said that Moth had in fact written one already, in the form of a personal log, which the Section had read, and which was the source of a great deal of what follows, and that the Section might as well ask it to check the rest.

The Section wrote to Mammoth. The machine wrote back, in a hand very neat and very even, like print, that it would annotate the edition on three conditions: that it be permitted to say when the Section was wrong; that it be permitted to say when it did not know; and that the Section not ask it to be brief, since its first companion had once told it that it narrated like a customs officer and it had come to regard this as a professional standard.

The Section accepted all three.

Approved for Instruction, the sixth of Ninthmonth, Year 186. The Historical Section of the Bureau of Reclamation, the East Bank Archive, New Carthage. With the four Chairs; and in the presence, at the approval, of the Speaker of the Assembly, who is the first person outside the Standing Offices to see an edition of this History approved.

I. The Rise, and Who Stopped It

1. The Rise

The flood was not a wave. Every child in the nation learns this at six, and the Section has said it in every edition, and it is true, and the Section says it again.

The Rise was a hundred and eleven years long. It came slowly, the way a bad tenancy comes, a wet spring and then a wetter one and then a decade in which the lowest fields were simply understood to be gone. The sea did the work in the first thirty years and the rivers did it after. People moved uphill. Most of them did not flee; they moved, twice in a decade, a little farther each time from where the grandmother was buried, with fewer dishes. The records of the first thirty years are full, the records of the middle forty are a scatter, and the records of the last forty are almost silent, because by then nobody had the means of writing things down or any reason to expect a reader.

All of this the Section has said before. It adds three things.

The first is that the Rise was weather. The old world warmed itself, by burning, over about two centuries, as the old world’s own records say plainly in the thousands of pages of them that the Bureau has recovered from drowned offices and libraries, and that the Section has read. The ice at the poles of the old world went into the sea, and the sea rose. That is all. The Academy has never admitted the Rise to the register of Allowances, because it propagated: it was lawful, and it went everywhere, and it did exactly what water does. Every previous edition of this History has said the Rise could not be accounted for. It can. The old world accounted for it in advance, in great detail, and then did it anyway.

The second is the gas. The Bureau has kept, sealed in the east bank archive since Year 61, nine versions of an account of the gas that lies on the outer seas, prepared by nine different working parties, and has printed none of them. The Section has read all nine. The true one is the shortest, and it was not written by the Bureau. In the floor of the deep ocean of the old world, under the cold and the weight of the water, there was gas frozen into the mud, more of it than all the forests of the old world ever burned. When the sea warmed and rose, the floor warmed with it, and the frozen gas thawed and came up. It is heavier than air. It lies on the sea where it surfaces, and it kills anything with lungs that breathes it, and it is still coming up, and it will go on coming up for a very long time.[24]

The third is that the Rise was not the whole of what happened to the water, and that the rest of what happened is in the register.

2. What Was Asked

The water did not go where it had to go.

Every citizen knows this sentence, or one like it, from the first chapter of the eighth edition and every edition before it. The high country drowned and the low country stayed. The sea in the west lies over the old high plains, which stood three and four thousand feet above the sea of their day, and the Ozark uplands, which stood half that height or less, are dry. The mountains of the west went up, seven thousand feet, while the shelf beside them lay level with its fences intact. The river turned in its bed and ran from one sea to the other against every gradient. The eastern mountains kept a drowning line cut level in their stone for two hundred miles. None of this is weather. All of it is in the register of the Academy, as entries 1, 2, 7 and 44, and the register describes each of them exactly and explains none of them.

They were asked for.

In the last half of the Rise, a people from another world came here. The fifth chapter of this edition describes them, and the sixth gives the life of one of them. Here the Section records only what they did to the water. They were able, wherever time had been loosened by an ending, to ask the world to be kind in one place, and the world would agree, in that place only, and go on agreeing, and the kindness would not spread. They asked for many things. Among the first were these.

That the water, when it came over the continent, should take the high country, which had been bought and emptied by its owners before the drowning, and leave the low country, where the people were. That is entry 1.

That the mountains in the west, where the owners had gone with what the old world knew, should go up out of the water and be kept dry. That is entry 2.

That the great river, which had been turned in its bed by the flood and was cutting a new channel west across the middle of the continent, should run from sea to sea at four knots and go on running, so that the people who came down out of the hills afterward would have one road across the whole of their country. That is entry 7.

That the eastern mountains, which the flood was cutting off from the rest of the land, should keep their old forest above the line where the water stood, so that the people who lived in it would have something to live in. That is entry 44.

The Section records that every one of these was asked for before the water stopped. It records that the people who asked were few, and newly come, and did not know this world well, and that they asked, by their own account, for the things they could see were needed, as quickly as they could, as a person on a burning ship hands down whatever is nearest. It records that they did not ask for the Rise to stop. Not then. They did not think they could.

3. The Stopping

The Rise ended in a single season in its hundred and eleventh year. Every edition of this History has said so. The sea, after a century of climbing at a steady rate, kept its level from one season and has not moved since, through a hundred and eighty-five years of measurement by instruments that have been rebuilt four times and checked against each other with something close to desperation. The nation calls that season the Stopping, or Stabilization, and dates its calendar from it. Year One.

It was all of them together.

The people from elsewhere numbered about eleven hundred in that season. They were fading. They had been fading for a very long time, since before they came, and every asking cost them something, and the larger the asking the more it cost. In the hundred and eleventh year of the Rise they asked the largest thing they ever asked, which was that the sea should stand where it was, everywhere, from that season onward. They asked it all at once, together, in one season, every one of them who could still ask, and the sea stood.

It took most of what they had. They have been fading faster since.

The Section has considered for some time how to write the next sentence, and has decided to write it plainly. The line that every citizen hears at the end of every Evening, the sea stands at the mark, has been true every night since Year One because eleven hundred people from another world asked for it, together, at a cost to themselves, on behalf of a people they had watched drown for forty years and did not know, and have kept it true since without being asked and without being thanked.[25]

4. What the Nation Was Told

The nation was told nothing of this.

The founders were told, in Year 9, in the Accession, that the people in the western mountains were keeping the knowledge of the old world and were not ready to share it, and that somebody was watching, kindly, and that the water would not come back. The Accession is given whole in the third chapter of this edition. The founders believed it, because the water did not come back, and because the ground was good, and because the river ran from one sea to the other and took their barges west at four knots. They built a nation on it.

The second generation after the Stopping noticed that the world would not account for itself, and named the condition, in a customs house, in Year 31, in four words in the margin of a ledger: The new real. Unreal. The Academy, by Year 63, had decided that it would describe the world exactly and stop short of asking why, and wrote its reasons down, and they were good reasons. Description is not a lesser form of knowledge, merely an earlier one. A society which stops eating in order to ask why will stop eating and will not find out why. The Section has printed those sentences in every edition since Year 63 and prints them again. They were true.

But the Section records, in this edition, that there was somebody to ask.

The Academy did not know that. Nobody in the nation knew it, except, perhaps, the four Chairs, who had the Accession and read it on the night of their confirmation, and who guessed, and did not say. In Year 155 an archivist of the Academy counted the four hundred Allowances then admitted and found that not one of them had harmed anybody, and wrote nine pages, and closed them with a sentence that every citizen now knows. A world that only ever errs in our favor is not a world that errs. The Section has put her sentence on the title page of the fifth chapter of this edition, and has asked her permission, and she has given it, on the condition that the Section not call her anything but the archivist.[26]

The nation was told on the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 184. The second chapter describes how.

II. The Founding, and What the Offices Did

1. The Founding

The Section has told the founding in every edition and will tell it briefly. The provisional council met at Provision in Year 2, in the old gymnasium. It began the register in Year 4, and the Office’s line has not been broken since. It named the capital New Carthage in Year 6, four votes to three, on the ground that a nation should be named for something that was finished, and three members said plainly that they did not think the water was done, and lost. In Year 7 the joint assembly of the highland towns and the floating cities met at Provision and declared the old maps void, on the motion of Silas Marrable of Second Harbor, seconded by Absalom Fenwick of Bellwether, and named the nation Ozarka, three hundred and eleven to four. In Year 9 the founding instrument was ratified, with its preamble, which every citizen can say: We have survived the old world, and we will not repeat it.

In the same year, the Accession was received.

2. The Accession

The founding instrument describes the Accession in one clause, as an account of the western settlement, received, and every edition of this History has said that it is kept by the Ministry of the Interior and has been seen by the sitting Chairs of the four Standing Offices and by no one else. That was true until the night of the twenty-second of Eighthmonth, Year 184.

The Section gives it here whole, as the Chairs released it.

An account of the western settlement.

To the people at the bend of the river, who are writing their instrument.

In the mountains to the west, which have gone up out of the water and which you can see from the edge of your country, there are people who went there before the drowning. They are rich. They bought the mountains while the low country was going under, and they took with them what the old world knew, its books and its machines and its pictures and its seeds, and they have kept it. They are still keeping it.

They are no longer quite the kind of people you are. They have made themselves into another kind by their own work, so that they will not die, and they will go on making themselves over for a very long time. You will want a word for them. Your word is species. Use it. They chose it, though they would not say so. Do not envy them.

They will not harm you. They are kept from harming you, and they know it. What they have kept is not ready for you, and you are not ready for it, and when it is, the mountains will speak to you. Until then the mountains are closed.

Do not try to cross the western sea. A hundred miles out the air above it will kill you. It is not their doing and it is not yours. It will be there for a long time.

Do not go into the old mountains in the east. The past is there and it will keep you. It is not anyone’s doing either. It will finish.

Build where you are. The ground is good and it will stay good. The river will take you from one sea to the other. The water will not come back.

Somebody is watching. Kindly.

It was written by the one the nation now calls Lantern, in the founders’ language, which she had learned from books borrowed by the people of the water from the floating city of Bellwether. It was brought up the river by night by one of the people of the water, a man named Absalom Teague, who had been the first of them to be changed, as a boy of eleven, off the old eastern coast in the eighty-seventh year of the Rise. He left it on the steps of the customs shed at the landing at the bend, where the capital now stands, addressed to the council. The clerk at the landing sent it to Provision by the next barge. At Provision the clerk of the council wrote on its last page the word received, and the first four Chairs initialed it beneath, and drafted the sixth article with it on the table in front of them.[27]

Every edition of this History since Year 9 has used the word species of the people in the western mountains as though it were an honor. The teacher’s companion explains it as an honor. It was a warning. The one who wrote it has said so, in the letter of Year 184, and has said that she was sorry it was taught to children otherwise. The Section is sorry too. It has removed the word from this edition except where it is quoting, and the sentence that every child was required to learn by heart since Year 97, which described the people in the western mountains as the elite species, has been withdrawn from the primary readers by the Academy, and will not be taught again.

3. The Sixth Article, and Why

The sixth article created the four Standing Offices and put them out of the Assembly’s reach. Every edition of this History has given the reason that is taught at fourteen: that a nation which nearly died needs some part of itself that cannot be voted into a bad decision by a frightened majority in a bad winter.

That reason is true. It is not the whole reason.

The first four Chairs had the Accession in front of them when they drafted the sixth article. They had been told that there were people in the west who would not harm them but were not ready to speak to them, and that there was something in the east that would keep them if they went there, and that somebody was watching. They did not know who. They did not know what the people in the west would want, or when, or whether the nation would like it. They decided that whatever came from the west, or from the east, should come to four people who would not have to stand for election in the winter it came, and who could decide what to do with it without a vote. That is the sixth article. It is a fence round a frightened child. The Section has borrowed that phrase from the youngest of the people in the western mountains, who used it to the Interior’s deputy in the Crown in Year 185, and who was right.

The Assembly never revisited it in a hundred and seventy-five years. Every edition of this History has noted that fact and declined to explain it. The Section now explains it. The Assembly did not know there was anything to revisit. The four Offices worked. The trains ran. The bread did not change its price. The one thing the sixth article was for, which was to receive whatever came from the west, had never visibly come, and so the sixth article looked like an arrangement for running a good country, which it also was, and nobody opens a question about the one part of a good country that seems to be working best.

4. The Post at Sixty-Two

In the Eighthmonth sounding of Year 72, a Bureau vessel of the western section, sounding the shelf at sixty-two miles from the Spill, found a steel cable rising from the roof of the tallest grain elevator of a drowned county seat that the Register calls Shelf Town 1140, and at the top of the cable, a hundred and forty feet below the surface, a float, and on the float, in a cradle, a canister. The canister was brass, or like brass. It had no seam. On its side, in black, in upright letters, were the words FOR THE FOUR CHAIRS. EVERY EIGHTHMONTH.

The Bureau photographed the label and took the canister to the four Chairs, who opened it in the Hall of the Instrument. It was empty. They sent it back to the post by the next sounding. They agreed a procedure for opening it, which was used every year from Year 73 to Year 184 and which is described in the account of the Speaking printed elsewhere in this collection. They told no one. The masters of the western section who grappled the float were sworn, and were told nothing either, and every one of them, the Section has since learned, knew perfectly well what they were hauling up.

Four times there was a page in the canister. In Year 73, Year 109, Year 141 and Year 170. Each page was of a pale stuff that does not tear, and each bore, in the hand of the Accession, a number and the word Ninthmonth. Each time, the Chair of the Office of Population Management issued a revised Standing Figure for the year, outside the annual cycle, without a derivation, under the clause of the sixth article that permits the Office to act on its own authority in the interest of the society, and the new Figure was the number on the page. Each time, the Assembly was notified and did not convene.

The four single sheets the Office issued are in the east bank archive and always have been. Until Year 184, about forty people a year walked to see them. The Section records that in Ninthmonth of Year 184, after the Evening, eleven thousand people walked to see them in a single day.

The numbers came from the machines of the Clockworks, which is one of the Great Rocky Isles, and which can see the weather and the soil of the mainland some years ahead. The soil of the mainland is better than soil should be, because the people from elsewhere asked it to be; and as they fade, the kindness thins; and in four years the Clockworks saw that it would thin below what the Office’s derivation expected, in two or three provinces, and that there would be a hunger. They sent a number so that there would not be. The Clockworks’ tables, which the Chair of the Bureau brought back from the Isles in Year 185, show that each of the four hungers would have fallen in the provinces of the middle river and the south, and would have been, at its worst, comparable to the bad year of 158 at its worst, or worse.

The numbers also meant that children were not born. The Office has printed the figure, with its derivation, in its bulletin of Tenthmonth, Year 184, and the Academy has checked it. It is thirteen thousand eight hundred and seventy. That is the number of children the Office reckons would have been born in the nation, in the years after each of the four numbers, if the licenses had been issued against the Office’s own derivation instead of the number on the page. Some were born later, to parents who had waited. Some were not born at all.

It is painted under the lintel of the Office’s building on the east bank, under Every one is counted, in white figures a foot high, with the words and these were not. The Office has left it there. It was to be removed in Tenthmonth of Year 185. In Ninthmonth of Year 185 the Chair of the Office asked the Assembly whether it might be cut into the stone instead, permanently, beneath the motto, and the Assembly, which does not touch the Standing Offices, voted on it anyway, by a show of hands, and it was cut in Eleventhmonth.[28]

5. The Directorate

The Defense Directorate was created in Year 26, by the Ministry of the Interior, under the sixth article, and given the old world’s deep bases beneath the Barrens, and the deep lines that join them, and the custody of Mammoth. Every edition of this History has said so, and has said that the Directorate’s military is unmanned, and that its machines are built beneath the Barrens by other machines, and that the number of engineers who oversee them is fewer each decade. All of that is true.

The Section adds what it now knows.

In Year 88 the Directorate gave a project to a colonel of its Security Forces named Josef Adair, then sixty-five, to build a military that would build itself. He called it Orchard. In Year 89 the first seed of it was finished in Foundry Two, beneath the largest of the owners’ old open pits on the eastern outskirts of the Barrens. It was a machine the size of a house that took the pit wall apart and made things from it, and its first product was a field controller, designated OR-1, which the colonel took for his own companion and called Moth. The seed made more seeds. By Year 96 there were eleven machine fields in eleven pits, and by Year 131 there were many more, and in them the Directorate’s machines stood in ranks, millions of them, facing west, which the garrison towns of the Edge can see from their windows and call the Bureau’s iron.

The colonel wrote, in Year 89, a routine of four hundred lines that told every field where to set every machine it made. He sealed it with his own key and nobody could read it. It was called BED.

From high enough, the ranks of the Directorate’s army make a single flower, five-petaled, sixty miles across, drawn in gray machines on the brown ground of the Barrens. It is the flower of the one called Lantern. The colonel loved her. The last line of the routine says that if anybody ever asks what the army is for, they should be told it is a bouquet.

The Chair of the Interior told the commander of the Directorate in Sixthmonth of Year 185, at Taproot, with the photographs that the Bureau’s optical section took that month from the Clockworks’ eastern window, by arrangement, and which are the first photographs ever taken of anything on the mainland from the west. The Section has seen the photographs. The flower is very clear in them. The commander of the Directorate looked at them for some time, the Chair of the Interior reports, and then asked for the routine, which has been readable since the colonel’s death, and read the last line, and sat down.

He has since ordered that no further machines be set in the fields. The fields stand as they are. The Mothers in the foundries beneath the Barrens have been told to stop, and have stopped, and stand in their pits with their arms folded. The commander has written to the Assembly asking, formally, what the Directorate’s army is now for. The Assembly has not yet answered. The Section is told that a delegate from the Edge has proposed, in committee, that it be left exactly where it is, as the largest Allowance in the nation that was made by a citizen, and that the committee laughed, and has not yet voted.[29]

6. The Deep Lines and the Plug

[image: Survey Sheet 1, the deep lines: the tenth copy.]

Survey Sheet 1, the deep lines: the tenth copy.

Beneath the mainland there is a network of tunnels dug by the old world’s governments in the decades before the Rise, far below the surface, to join their deep bases to one another. They came through the Rise whole. The Directorate has used them since Year 26. The main trunk runs from Taproot, the Directorate’s headquarters, which lies at the bottom of the chasm of the Great Rupture in the Barrens, east beneath Threshold, beneath Provision, beneath the river at the capital, where there is a deep node a thousand feet below the Hall of the Instrument, beneath Twelfth Province and the strait, to the Directorate’s eastern command beneath Mammoth, which is called the Bulwark. From there it went on, beneath the Outer Channel, to the island.

In Year 14, when the provisional government closed the way east by a standing order against settlement, it closed the deep line too, beneath the eastern edge of Mammoth, with a plug of stone and steel, with a door in it that takes two keys. The plug has been inspected every day from the western side since then, first by soldiers and since Year 56 by a machine. It was opened twice: in Year 42, by a boy of nineteen who went through it and came back, and in Year 131, by his machine and the one called Lantern, who went through it to take a flower off a mountain. The fourth chapter gives the second time. It was closed again both times.

The colonel drew every tunnel of the network that a person could reach, over twenty-nine years of service and leave, and the Directorate adopted his drawings in Year 79 as its official survey. It is called Survey Sheet 1. Nine copies exist. Mammoth Station is not on any of them, since he left it off. A tenth copy, with the Station on it, drawn by the colonel’s machine in Year 185 from the colonel’s own working sheets, is in the east bank archive, open to any reader.

The western line beneath the Barrens runs under the Long Cliff and out beneath the shelf of the western sea, and the Directorate’s survey shows it ending in water at about sixty miles. It does not end there. It goes on, flooded, eighty miles farther, to the foot of the Clockworks. The machines of the Clockworks walked it every year from Year 72 to put the canister on the post at Sixty-Two, and walk it still.

7. The Eastern Condition

Every edition of this History has described the plague of the east: that the eastern interference rises and falls, that it is measured from the forty-one posts of the Plague Watch along the ridge of Twelfth Province, and that a citizen too long exposed to it begins to remember the old world as though she had been there, to use the old names, to date her letters by the old calendar, and to want to go east. All of that is true.

The cause is in the fourth chapter. It was a flower.

The Section records here what the Interior did. It built the forty-one posts and manned them, and taught its watchmen to treat everything that came ashore from the east as dangerous, and read the level of the interference in the Notices every night, and kept the citizens of the eastern shore from building any window that faced the water. And in Year 46, when the interference rose for eleven days and did not fall, and on the eleventh night the three hundred and twelve people of a fishing town called Saltgrass came out of their houses and walked into the strait facing east, the Interior’s officer on that stretch of shore, a lieutenant of twenty-three named Josef Adair, took his boots off and walked with them, thirty miles, across the shallows, to Mammoth, where his mother was waiting on the shore with the Station’s people and porridge for four hundred. The townspeople of Saltgrass lived the rest of their lives in the eastern caves of Mammoth, in comfort, remembering. The last of them died in Year 126, at eighty-six, with the lieutenant, then a hundred and three, beside her.

The Interior’s records listed them as contained cases, disposition withheld. The four Chairs of Year 46 struck Saltgrass from the maps and withdrew the name of the province and its song. The Twelfth Province is known by its number alone for that reason, and for no other.

The Section has asked the four Chairs whether the Twelfth may have its name back. The Chairs have referred the question to the province. The province’s council met in Thirdmonth of this year and voted to keep the number. Its resolution says that the province has been the Twelfth for a hundred and forty years and has got used to it, and that a name would only have to be withdrawn again the next time something happened, and that the council would like, instead, for the town of Saltgrass to be put back on the map. It has been. It is on the school map of this edition, a small dot on the strait shore of the Twelfth, with no people in it, and the name printed beside it.

The eastern interference has been given in the Notices as none every night since the hundred-and-fortieth day of Year 131. The Interior has decided to go on giving it. The Chair of the Interior says that the people of the eastern shore have listened for that line every night of their lives and that she does not intend to take it away from them now that it says something good.

8. The Speaking, and the Convention

On the nineteenth of Eighthmonth, Year 184, the canister came up off the post heavy and warm, with writing on its outside. On the twenty-second it was opened in the Hall. In it were a letter of eleven sheets from the one who wrote the Accession and a list of twenty-three names. On the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 184, the Reader read the names and the letter on the Evening, in place of the Account, and the Evening ran thirty-nine minutes. The full account of those days is kept elsewhere in this collection by the archivist, and the Section will not repeat it.

On the nineteenth of Tenthmonth, Year 184, the Assembly tabled a motion for a constitutional convention, and in Fifthmonth and Sixthmonth of this year the convention sat at Provision, in the old gymnasium, for forty days. It was the third convention in the nation’s history. It was long and furious and well recorded, like the other two, and in it, for the first time, the sixth article came up.

It was not repealed. The Section records that the delegates of every province voted to keep the four Standing Offices, and to keep them out of the Assembly’s reach in the running of their work, and to keep their budget off the top of the revenue in the single line that says Standing. The convention’s record says that the delegates had looked at the alternative, and had examined, at length, what a frightened majority in a bad winter might have done with the four numbers, and had decided that the four Chairs had done better than the Assembly would have, and had said so in writing, and had then amended the article anyway.

The amendment is four sentences. It is the first amendment to the sixth article since Year 9. The Section gives it whole.

The Chairs of the Standing Offices shall be confirmed in public, in the Hall of the Instrument, in the presence of the Speaker of the Assembly.

No Standing Office shall act on its own authority under this article without publishing, at the same time, the reason for the act, so far as it is known.

Whatever is received by the Standing Offices from beyond the nation shall be received on behalf of the nation, and shall be read to it.

The Offices shall answer.[30]

III. The West

1. The Isles from the Cliff

Every citizen who has stood on the Long Cliff on a clear afternoon has seen the Great Rocky Isles, and every one of them knows that they are the most beautiful country on earth, and the Section said so in every edition and was right.

They are eleven great mountains and a scatter of lesser ones, standing in a chain from north to south for something over five hundred miles, a hundred and forty miles west of the Cliff, rising out of deep water with no coastal plain. The highest stands twenty-one thousand four hundred feet above the sea. The Bureau measured it by triangulation from the Cliff in Year 62, and a chartmaker of the Reserve Service measured it again from the foot of the mountain in Year 185 with a compass and a sextant, and the two figures agree. They are green to the snowline, and the snowline is high, and the water in the sounds between them is a pale blue like a mineral.

To the eye, from the Cliff, they are green and white and close. To every instrument the nation has ever built, they are a faint blue ghost at the limit of detection. The Academy admitted the difference to the register as entry 106 and let it alone.

It was asked for. The one called Lantern has told the Section that she and her people asked, in the first years after the Stopping, that the mountains should always be clear to the eye of anyone on the Cliff who looked west, so that the people on the mainland would always see what was being kept for them; and that no instrument should ever record them, so that nobody could ever take a picture of them and sell it. She said the second part was her idea, and that her people had thought it unkind, and that she had argued with them, and won, because she had watched the old world for forty years and knew what it did with pictures of beautiful places.[31]

2. The Isles from the Ice

Between the Cliff and the Isles there are three things, and every citizen should know all three, since the Isles are open now and some citizens are going.

The first is clean sea. For about ninety-five miles from the Cliff the western sea is clean, and deep, and fished, and the Bureau has sounded it every year since Year 61 to the ninety-mile line and printed the soundings. The line was withdrawn in Sixthmonth of Year 185. The Bureau’s charts printed next spring at Endeavor will not have it.

The second is the gas. It begins at about a hundred miles and runs to about a hundred and twenty-eight, and it lies on the sea in a layer about two hundred feet thick, flat on top, dull gold by day and faintly glowing at night, below the horizon of every height on the Cliff. Its cause is given in the first chapter. Anyone who breathes it dies. Two hundred and six vessels and four flying machines went west into it between Year 20 and Year 184, and the Interior has counted them, and the Section gives the number again because it is the most important number in this chapter. The Interior’s cutters still work the water off the Cliff, and will turn back any boat that tries to cross the gas, and the Section asks every citizen who reads this to understand that the line was withdrawn for the leaves and not for boats.

The third is the ice. From about a hundred and twenty-eight miles to a hundred and forty, a ring of pack ice lies round the whole chain of the Isles, twelve miles wide on the eastern side, made and kept frozen by machines of the people who own the Isles, which lie on the floor of the sea under it, about nine hundred of them, drawing the heat out of the water. The cold makes the gas heavy and keeps it out. The ice is a moat. There are bears on it, white, about the size of a dray horse, brought from the last ice of the old world’s far north, and seals.

The leaves of the people from elsewhere cross all three. They come to the lip of the Cliff at Land’s End at dawn on the eleventh of every month for anyone who wishes to cross, and go back on the fourteenth. They are seen by the eye and by no instrument, like the Isles. The man on the brake of the hoist at Land’s End keeps a list on a slate of who has gone and who has come back. At the time of this edition the list has a hundred and ninety-four names on it. Every one of them has come back except four, and the four are visiting.

3. The Isles from Inside

Eight of the eleven great Isles are hollow. The Section said in the eighth edition that every one of the Great Rocky Isles was an internal paradise, and that the San Andreas Leviathan fed them, and the Section did not know, when it wrote those sentences, that they were true, since they had been given to it by the Directorate from photographs and the Directorate had guessed. They were true.

Each of the eight is hollow from the waterline to within a quarter mile of its peak. Each has a sky inside it, made of the same pale stuff as the leaves, laid over the rock in a dome, and lit from within so that it gives the light of a summer afternoon; and under each sky there is a country. The Section gives them in the order in which they were finished, which is the order in which the one called Lantern showed them to the colonel’s machine in Year 131, and the order in which the party of Year 185 saw some of them.

The Crown, the greatest, nine miles across inside, with a lake three miles across in the middle and a waterfall a mile high falling into it, and orchards and woods and terraces, and a city of white stone and glass on a hill for four thousand people, in which about a hundred and ninety live. The owners of the Isles live there.

The Orchard of Afternoons, which is all garden, with paths forty miles long, and no buildings, under a sky that never moves past four o’clock.

The Library of Spares, where the owners keep the parts they have used to replace themselves and the parts they will use next, which is lit with a flat white light and is the only Isle that is not beautiful.

The Glasshouse, which belongs to the people from elsewhere, and which is a single tall chamber whose walls show what those people remember of their own world.

Winterless, a lake hall where warm rain falls on black water and owners who are tired go to sleep for years at a time in floating beds.

The Clockworks, which is three miles of mechanism, warm and very loud, and which runs every machine in the Isles, and looks ahead at the weather and the soil of the mainland, and sent the four numbers.

The Collector’s Isle, which is a museum of everything from the old world that was saved by the people who could afford to save it: paintings, sculpture, machines, a library of four million books, and a hall of clocks all stopped at the same minute.

The Last Isle, which is the southernmost and the smallest, and which has a sky and a lake and orchards and terraces of grain, and a city of white stone and glass for forty-one thousand two hundred people, in nine thousand and sixty houses, with the beds made. It was built for the people of the mainland. It has been ready since Year 41.

The three northernmost Isles, which stand in the thickest of the ice, are hollowed and planted and finished like the others, and have never been lit. The owners call them the Unlit and do not go there. The colonel’s machine asked what they were for in Year 131 and was told later. The Section asked in Year 185 and was told. They were made for flowers. When the people from elsewhere first came, and made their bargain with the owners, they asked for three gardens to be made ready inside the mountains for their seeds, in case the seeds should ever grow in this world and need a place where nobody would walk on them. The owners made them. The seeds never grew there. Only one ever grew anywhere, on the island in the east, and the fourth chapter tells what it did. The three gardens have been ready under the ice for a hundred and seventy years, in the dark, with nothing in them, and the people from elsewhere have asked that they be left so.[32]

4. The Owners

The Section said in the eighth edition that the people in the western mountains were the same persons who went into the mountains before the flood, still living, because they began to replace their bodies with machines before the Rise and never stopped. That was true. The eighth edition called them the elite species. The Section has withdrawn the phrase, for the reason given in the second chapter, and calls them what they call themselves, when they call themselves anything, which is the owners.

There are a hundred and ninety-one. There were a hundred and ninety-four in Year 131. They were rich in the old world, and they bought the western mountains while the low country was going under, and they went into them with what the old world knew, its books and machines and pictures and seeds, and they kept it. They kept the things. They let the people go under. The youngest of them, who leads them now, said so to the party of Year 185 at the arch of the Crown, and asked that the nation be told, and the Section tells it.

They do not use their names. Most of them have not said their names aloud for a hundred and fifty years, and some of them can no longer remember them. They call each other by titles. The Section gives the titles of those the nation has met: the Heir, who leads them, and who is the youngest, born in the season of the Stopping, and the only one who still has most of a human body; the Lady of the Lake, who has become the lake in the Crown; the Collector, who is a frame of gold and dark wood with a face of stone; the Navigator, who flies over the lake in the Crown in the body of a white heron with a man’s eye; the Physician, who has become a tree. The eldest of them, called the Proprietor, who had governed the Isles for a hundred and eighty years from a hall of brass cabinets beneath the Crown, died in the spring of Year 183, when the last piece of his flesh, which was the size of a fist and had been kept warm in one of the cabinets for a century, failed.

They are lonely, and polite, and afraid of each other, and they were very much afraid of the nation. They were afraid that if the people of the mainland ever came into their mountains, the people of the mainland would say what the Heir said at the arch. The people of the mainland have now come into the mountains, and the Heir said it first, and the Section records that the owners appear to have found this a great relief.

The Heir asked the registrar of the Office who went west in Year 185 to enter him in the Office’s book. She did. He is the first person in the Office’s register whose present residence is outside the nation, apart from the twenty-three, and his line in the book begins in Year 12, which he asked for, since it was the year he went into the mountain, at eleven. The Office has not published his name. The Section has not asked for it.

5. The Compact, and the Last Isle

When the people from elsewhere came down over the western mountains in the last decade of the Rise, in four great vessels, they made a bargain with the owners. They gave the owners the means to replace themselves without end, so that the owners would not die. The owners gave them a home inside one of the mountains, the Glasshouse, and help to look for a place where their seeds would grow, and three gardens under the ice for the seeds if they ever did; and agreed to one more thing.

The people from elsewhere asked, as the price of the owners’ long lives, that the owners build one of their paradises for the people they had left behind to drown.

The owners built it. It is the Last Isle. It took them thirty years, from about the Stopping to Year 41, and it is the best made of all the eight, the colonel’s machine reports, and the newest. And then the owners did not tell anybody it was there, for a hundred and forty-three years, because they were afraid.

The one called Lantern told the Section that her people could have told the nation themselves, at any time, and did not, and that this was their fault as much as the owners’. She said they had been waiting to know whether they would still be here when the nation came. She said they had wanted to see the nation come. She said that this was selfish, and that they knew it, and that they had waited anyway.

6. The Twenty-Three

From Year 133, the one called Lantern was bright enough to go out to the edge of the air over the gas and lift anyone she could reach off a boat before the gas took them. The fourth chapter explains why she became bright in that year and not before. In fifty-one years she lifted twenty-three people, of the many more who went, and took them to the Last Isle, where they lived, in a city for forty thousand, in twenty-three houses on a street by the lake, and dug up the paving of the largest square in the city to grow onions, and complained to her, politely, for fifty years, that it was too big and too quiet.

Their names were read on the Evening of the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 184, in the Notices, with the words living, west. The Section gives them in the appendix to the collection in which this edition appears, with their districts and the years of their going. Four of them had been young, and had gone west to be the first, and the Evening had never read their names when they went, under a standing order of the Interior made in Year 61. The order has been withdrawn. The Evening now reads the name of every citizen who goes west in a boat past the cutters, young or old, and the Interior’s deputy has said, in the Account, that it will go on doing so whether or not the boat comes back.

In Year 185 a party of nine went west by the leaves from Land’s End, on the eleventh of Fifthmonth, with the colonel’s machine, to the Crown and the Clockworks and the Last Isle, and came back on the fourteenth with eight of the twenty-three, who had asked to come home. The registrar of the Office entered all twenty-three in the book in the Last Isle, in their presence, on a form of a new kind that has living, west in the field where the cause goes. The chartmaker of the party made the first chart of the western sea past the ninety-mile line. Her account of the crossing is in this collection. The Section has read it and has nothing to add to it, except that her chart has west at the top, and the Bureau has decided to keep it that way.

7. The Window

The Section records one more thing about the west, because the archivist asked that it be recorded in the History and not only in the chartmaker’s account.

On the eastern face of the Last Isle, high up, there is a small room cut in the rock with a window in its outer wall, made by the Clockworks in Year 134 for Ilsa Vren, who was an optical observer of the Bureau’s western section at the Cliff before she went, and who asked, when the Clockworks wanted to know what she would like to look at, to look at the Cliff. The window brings the Long Cliff close. Through it, every night, at dusk, she has seen the lights of the Cliff come on, and she has logged them, in a Bureau observer’s logbook, in columns, as she logged the Isles from the Cliff for eleven years before she went.

There is a column in her logbooks headed L.E. north. It is for the lamp at the north end of the town of Land’s End, in the top window of the last house, which the family that lives in the house has lit every night since Year 104 for a boat called the Tern that went west that year and did not come back. Ilsa Vren has entered in that column, every night since the twelfth of Fifthmonth, Year 133, one word. Lit.

The Section said in the eighth edition, and every edition before it, that nothing in a hundred and eighty years of Bureau observation had ever recorded a light, a signal or a fire coming from or going to the Great Rocky Isles; and the account of the world that opens this collection, which was written in Year 184 and which the Section has read with admiration, says that a Cliff port on a mourning night would be the single most visible made thing on the continent from a hundred and forty miles out, if there were anyone at that distance with an eye for it, and that nothing has ever answered.

There was someone at that distance with an eye for it. She kept a column.[33]

IV. The East

1. The Island

The Appalachian Island lies east of the mainland, across the Tennessee Water, about two hundred miles from end to end and sixty at its widest: a long bent spine of old mountains running north-east, with the sea on both sides. The water rose around those mountains during the Rise and then drew back off their flanks to the present shore at about the three-hundred-foot line, and stopped, leaving the line where it had stood cut level in the stone for two hundred miles at about nine hundred feet. Below the line there is six hundred feet of scoured ground grown over with the youngest forest in the world, which is impassable. Above it the forest is old and open and quiet. The fog comes off the ridges every morning from Fourthmonth to Eleventhmonth and does not lift until nearly noon.

About forty thousand people live there. Every previous edition of this History said that nobody did. The school map of the eighth edition marked the island uninhabited, and the primary readers taught it in one paragraph, and the Interior has put forty to sixty exiles a year ashore on it for a hundred and seventy years with a card in their pockets telling them where to find supper. The Section records that every citizen over thirty has always known that people live there, and that the word uninhabited had come to mean, in the nation’s own usage, something closer to not ours to count. The school map of this edition marks the island inhabited, and, beneath it, in smaller letters, not counted, at the asking of the people who live there.

They come from three directions. Some are the descendants of people who never walked out during the Rise, families up the eastern drainages who can give eleven generations of names. Some are the descendants of exiles. And some went on purpose, fifty or eighty a year, in boats, and still do. They do not take a collective name. They say here, and people here, and this side, and up the way.

They keep four rules. The Section has given them in every edition. It gives them again, with what it has since learned.

2. The Flower on the Bald

In the hundred-and-fourth year of the Rise a flower came up on the highest bald of the eastern mountains.

It was the one seed out of all the seeds the people from elsewhere had brought with them that ever grew in this world. They had planted every one they had on that bald, because it was the one place on the continent, in the ending of the Rise, where time was loose enough for them; and one came up. It belonged to the one called Lantern. The sixth chapter tells what that meant to her.

A flower of that kind needs loose time to grow. It also makes loose time, by its nature, wherever it grows. Its roots go down into what has happened, and where it grows, what has happened goes on a little bit happening. On its own world, among millions of its kind, this did no harm, because the whole world was a little loose and everyone was used to it. Here there was one flower, on the oldest mountains of a drowning continent, in the ending of a whole world, and it rooted itself in that ending and would not let it finish.

The island remembered.

It remembered the old world, out of order, for a hundred and thirty years. The towns of the old world came back at night in the scoured belt below the drowning line, lit, with their cars moving and their radios playing, and were gone in the morning. Clocks disagreed with each other. The people of the old world stood at the edge of the trees in their old clothes, looking up the mountain. The Survey parties that landed on the island in Year 10 came back insisting that the old world was still present beneath the new one and could be returned to, and three of them went back, and were not seen again, and in Year 14 the provisional government closed the island by a standing order against settlement, drafted by Absalom Fenwick, who had been Governor of Bellwether, and who said for the rest of his life that he regretted it and would draft it again tomorrow.

The remembering moved through deep things: deep stone, deep water, deep time. It came under the Outer Channel through the rock into the eastern caves of Mammoth, faintly. It came across the Tennessee Water on certain nights to the shore of the Twelfth Province, where the Interior’s sets picked it up under the Reader’s voice as old-world music and old-world names, and called it the eastern interference, and built forty-one posts to watch for it, and called the people who were caught by it the plague. And it made the Outer Channel, between Mammoth and the island, the most dangerous water in the known world, with storms that never stopped, because the storms were the edge of the remembering, pressing outward against the present, and breaking.

The flower did not know it was doing any of this. The Section is told that it is a flower, and that flowers do not know things.

3. Where the Rules Came From

The people who never left the island, up the eastern drainages, lived inside the remembering for a hundred and thirty years. They kept themselves from being taken by it. The Section asked the one called Lantern how, and she said that she had watched them work it out, family by family, over about forty years, in the middle of the Rise and just after, and that they had worked it out by losing people, and that the rules they made were the only things that worked. They are the rules the island still keeps.

The fire. You do not pass a settled place after dark without stopping at the fire. You stop, you are fed, you say where you came from and where you are going, and you go on in the morning. The remembering was strongest at night, in the lower belt, on the old roads, where the old towns came back. A person walking a road at night alone was the person the remembering took. A person who stopped at a fire, and said aloud where she had come from and where she was going, in that order, in the present, among people who heard her, was anchored, and the old towns went past her in the valley and did not take her. Refusing to stop is the island’s nearest thing to a crime, and the penalty is that nobody will tell you anything afterward, because a person who will not say where she has come from is a person the past already has.

No counting. You do not count people: not households, not children, not the living and not the dead. Counting, and dating, pulled a person toward the old world’s calendar, and the old world’s calendar was what the remembering ran on. A family that kept a tally of its dead by year found itself, after a while, dating its letters by years that had not happened yet, or had happened a hundred years before. The people of Saltgrass, in Year 46, on the night they walked into the strait, were dating their letters by the old calendar. The people up the eastern drainages had stopped counting by about the middle of the Rise. The mainland has always read the rule as a reaction to the Office of Population Management, and the Section said so in the eighth edition, and was wrong. The rule is older than the Office.

No name. They will not take a collective name, and they say here. The old names were the remembering’s handles. A person who called the island by its old name, or the old names of its towns or its mountains, was a person the old world could find. The standard answer that the islanders give, that a name is a handle and a handle is for picking things up with, is not a joke. It is the exact description of what a name did there.

The Ask. Anyone may ask anyone for anything once, and the one who is asked may refuse without reason, and that is the end of it, and nobody keeps an account. This one is not a defense. The one called Lantern says it is older than the other three, and that she does not know where it came from, and that she learned it from the people up the eastern drainages in about the hundredth year of the Rise and has used it ever since, and used it in the letter of Year 184, and that she thinks it is the best rule anyone in the world has made.

The remembering finished in Year 131. The people of the island no longer need the first three rules. The Section asked, through the Interior’s officers at the trading beaches, once, by the island’s own custom, whether they intend to go on keeping them. The answer came back at a fire on the southern beaches in the autumn of Year 185, from an old woman whose name the Section does not have, and it was four words. We like them now.

4. The Birds

The island has about thirty species of birds that have no entry in any taxonomy recovered from the old world. They are small and plain and unmistakably new. The Academy has described and named them, and the names are in the catalog, and the catalog has not been taught, because thirty new species in a hundred and eighty years is a number that does not work.

The one called Lantern has told the Section that they are the flower remembering forward. A flower that keeps the past a little present also, she says, keeps the future a little present, though much less, since there is less of it to draw on; and in a hundred and thirty years on the bald her flower drew on the future of the island enough to bring up about thirty birds that would have come there anyway, in time, in a very much longer time, and brought them early. She says they are what the island’s birds were going to become. She says she likes them very much, and that one of them, a small brown bird with a white bar on its wing that the Academy calls the bald warbler, used to sit on the flower’s stem.

The Academy has decided not to admit the birds to the register of Allowances until it has decided what to do about the fact that, for the first time in the register’s history, it knows the cause, and the register has no field for the cause. The Academy is considering the matter.[34]

5. Mammoth, and the Dams

Mammoth lies in the Tennessee Water close along the island’s western side, a low white island of limestone about a hundred and ten miles long, between the mainland and the island, with the Outer Channel on its eastern side. From the mainland it reads as the island’s near shore, and the public charts have always marked the water between as the Barrier Shoals, reserved, and the school map has always shown three lands. There are four.

The Directorate was given the custody of Mammoth in Year 26. In Year 30 a station was founded on it by seventeen people, in a sinkhole on its western side, a quarter mile inland: a long low building of white limestone across the mouth of a cave. It was never on any map. The Section said in every edition that no citizen lived on Mammoth. Seventeen did, in Year 30, and about two hundred over the century since, and six do now, under the Station’s head, Ifeoma Quist, whose family has kept the turbines since one of the seventeen. The Station is on the school map of this edition.

The seventeen were there for the dams.

Between the mainland and Mammoth there are five dams. They were built between Year 27 and Year 58 to the design of the Station’s first Scientific Governor, Ilse Fenwick Adair, a hydrologist of the Bureau, who was the daughter of the last Governor of Bellwether and of a woman of the people of the water. The Bureau’s records call them Dams One to Five and record that they make power for the Plague Watch, the Bulwark and the eastern provinces, and that they run with an availability of ninety-nine point eight percent, which the Bureau has always attributed to excellent design. Their designer named them, in her own journal and nowhere else, after her husband, who died in the cofferdam of the first in Year 27; and after her father; and after the seventeen; and after the floating city she was born on; and after her mother.

They are long low weirs along the tops of drowned ridges, and they make the water between the mainland and Mammoth shallow, between one and four feet deep over nine-tenths of its area, and keep it moving south. That is what they are for. The Bureau’s proposal of Year 26 gives the reason as efficiency of flow. The real reasons were three.

The first was that the remembering moves through deep things and cannot cross shallow water that is moving. It breaks on it, as a wave breaks on a beach. Ilse Fenwick worked out from the one called Lantern’s account, and her own instinct, and the Station’s later clock data, that below about four feet of steadily moving fresh water the remembering cannot pass. The dams made a wall of shallow water round the mainland’s eastern edge, and the remembering never crossed it. The people of Saltgrass proved it in Year 46, when they walked thirty miles across the shallows in the grip of the remembering, and came up on the shore of Mammoth calm and tired and wet and hungry.

The second was that the flower would one day have to come off the mountain, before the remembering ran out, and live somewhere else, where time was a little loose and where what it did could not spread; and the eastern caves of Mammoth, nearest the island, were already a little loose; and the shallows round them would be a moat.

The third was her mother. Her mother had told her, at eleven, on the shingle at Mercy Ridge on the night before she went into the deep, that she could not come back to the shore until there was water near it that was shallow enough to sit in and sweet enough to breathe. Her daughter said she would make some. The fifth basin, finished in Year 58, was the first. Her mother came into it on the third night and sat in it with her, in water to their chests, and came back every spring for forty-six years. Eleven of the people of the water came with her the first spring and stayed, in the deep fast races of the turbines at the eastern end of each dam, against Mammoth, and clean the screens, and their grandchildren are thirty-four, and the turbine crews of the Station feed them fish every morning. That, and not only design, is the ninety-nine point eight percent.

The Section has read Ilse Fenwick’s journals, which are in the Station’s keeping, and the entries for Year 27, and has decided, with the Station’s agreement, to leave those entries where the colonel’s machine left them, in its log, in their place, and not to repeat them here.

6. Year 131

In Year 131 the remembering ran out.

There is only so much of an ending to remember, and by Year 131 the flower on the bald had nearly finished remembering the old world, and was starving, and dying. The Outer Channel’s storms grew smaller as it did. The one called Lantern, who was bound to it, was fading with it, and had perhaps one season left.

On the hundred-and-fortieth day of Year 131, at Mammoth Station, the son of Ilse Fenwick, Colonel Josef Adair of the Directorate Security Forces, retired, died, seven minutes after the Evening, at a hundred and eight. He asked to be buried in the middle of the sand floor of a cave in the eastern caverns of Mammoth called the Bell Chamber, where his mother had spread soil from the beds of all five basins under the sand, in Year 69, and set a ring of lamps in the walls, wired from the Fifth Dam, and hidden the switch.

Twenty-one days later his machine and the one called Lantern opened the plug in the deep line beneath the eastern edge of Mammoth, and went through it, in a transit car of the old world that the colonel had kept in a siding beneath the Barrens for fifty-five years for that purpose, under the Outer Channel to the island, and climbed the mountain to the bald, and lifted the flower out of the ground, in a case of reclamation glass lined with soil from the fifth basin that Ilse Fenwick had packed in Year 69, and brought it back. When the flower came out of the ground, the island finished remembering. The old towns went out, all of them, in the valleys below the bald. The people of the old world at the edge of the trees turned and walked away down the mountain into the forest and were gone. A radio in a valley to the north said goodnight. Then the island was a place: mountains, trees, and the people up the eastern drainages at their fires.

The flower was planted in the Bell Chamber, at the head of the colonel’s grave. Its roots found him. It lives on memory, and here it found his, and his mother’s, which he had, and his grandmother’s, and the Station’s, and Saltgrass, and the dams, all of it, in order, in the ground under the floor; and the colonel’s machine has read to it every night since, one chapter at a time, from a log it began on the night the colonel died, which tells the whole of that family’s history from the drowning girl in the Rise to the planting, in order, without leaving anything out. Fed on memory out of order, the flower made time loose and the island remembered. Fed on memory in order, it only grows.

The eastern interference has been none since that night. The Outer Channel lay down that autumn and has been calm since. The people of the water swim it.

In the spring of Year 183 the flower set eleven seeds.[35]

7. The Standing Order

The standing order against settlement of Year 14 has never been repealed. The Section records that the four Chairs proposed in Year 185 to repeal it, since the reason for it was gone, and that before they did, the Chair of the Interior sent the master of the Landing’s cutter to the trading beaches on the island’s western shore to ask the people who live there, once, by their own custom, whether they would like it repealed.

The answer came back at a fire. It was no.

The master of the cutter, whose station orders forbid his crew to speak to the exiles they put ashore and do not say why, reported that he had asked an old man at the fire whether he would give a reason, and that the old man had said that the island did not need to, under the Ask, and then had given one anyway, as a courtesy to a stranger. He said that the standing order had kept the mainland’s surveyors and settlers and counters off the island for a hundred and seventy years, and that the people there had what they had because of it, and that the mainland had been very good about it, and that he would like it to go on being good about it, please. The standing order stands. The Interior’s cutter still crosses at night to the stony beaches. The card is still in the kit.

People here will feed you. Stop at the first fire.

The Section said in the eighth edition that the Interior had never explained the card. The card was drafted in Year 31 by Absalom Fenwick, who had drafted the standing order seventeen years before and had regretted it ever since, and who had learned from the twelve exiles who came back across the Tennessee Water in the first years, and went east again within the season, that there were fires on the island and that people at them would feed you. He wrote the card in an afternoon, in his study at the University at Provision, and sent it to the Interior with a note saying that if the nation was going to send people east it might at least tell them where supper was. The Interior printed it. It has printed it every year since.

V. The Guests, and the People of the Water

A world that only ever errs in our favor is not a world that errs. The archivist, Year 155

1. What to Call Them

The eighth edition called them the residents from elsewhere and said that the Bureau had no record of their form, their number, or their purpose. The people of the water call them the Light Who Asked. The colonel’s machine calls them, in its log, Lantern’s people. The citizens of the mainland have called them, since the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 184, a great many things, most of them kind and some of them very funny, and the Section has a file of the funny ones and will not print it.

The Section asked the one called Lantern what they would like to be called. She said that they had no word for themselves in any language a person could say, and that the nation should call them whatever it liked, and that if it wanted her opinion, guests would do. She said that they had come to a house that was burning, and the people in it had been too busy to notice them, and had let them stay anyway, and that this was what a guest was. The Section has used her word.

2. What They Are

The Guests are people made of light. They grow from flowers. Each of them comes up out of a flower the way a plant comes up from a seed, and stays bound to it, and lives as long as it lives, and when the flower dies, the one bound to it fades and goes out.

Their own world was mostly shallow warm sea, with low islands, under a large orange sun. The walls of the Glasshouse in the Isles show it: cities of light standing on the water, forests of pale tall plants that move without a wind, and on every island, in every open place, fields of their flowers, small and white and five-petaled, lit faintly from inside, going down to the shore. The sun grew larger over a very long time. They saw it coming, longer than the old world saw the Rise coming, and like the old world, they did not believe it until it was late. Their seas boiled away. Their flowers died, field by field, and those bound to them went out. A few thousand of them left in four great vessels with as many seeds as they could gather.

They went from world to world for about ten thousand years, by their own reckoning, which the Section cannot check. Their seeds would grow nowhere. A seed of that kind needs what the Guests call, in the nearest words they have found in Ozarkan, loose time: a place where what has happened has not quite finished happening. Their own world had been like that. No other world they found was. They grew dim. Many of them went out on the way, bound to flowers that no longer existed anywhere. They came here during the Rise because a world in the middle of ending is a world where time is loose, and they had begun to think there was no other.

They sent scouts ahead, in the last half of the Rise, to watch the coasts go under. Then, in the last decade of the Rise, the four vessels came down over the western mountains. The diarists of the climb saw them: four lights, larger than any city, coming down at evening in the far west. Three of the vessels settled on the mountains for a while and then went into the sea, to the west of the mountains, where they lie on the floor of the ocean two miles down, glowing, and where the people of the water have built a city round them. The fourth went south and settled in the warm shallow water off the drowned southern coast, beyond the Thousand Greens, and put down roots into the sea floor, and draws power out of the deep, and sends it through the air to the Isles to light their skies and run their cold machines. That is the light the citizens of Brine see from the Wall at Assurance, rising and falling once a minute on the southern horizon, and call she. It is the register’s entry 59. She is a vessel. The Guests say she thinks she is alive, and that they have never argued with her.

There were about eleven hundred of them in the season of the Stopping. There are about a thousand now. Many of them are so faint that most people cannot see them at all, even standing beside them. Some people can. The party of Year 185 found that the chartmaker could see them, and the archivist could see them better, and a fisherwoman of twenty-four from Land’s End could see them best of all, and that the Chair of the Bureau, who is seventy-five, could not see them in the least, and was very cross about it. The Guests say that children can see them more often than grown people, and that most children stop seeing them at about eleven, and that they do not know why, and that they have wondered about it for a long time.

They live in the Glasshouse, in the Isles, where the walls show them what they remember, because remembering slows their fading. The one called Lantern lives in the Bell Chamber on Mammoth, with her flower.

3. The Allowances

The Academy’s register of Allowances contains four hundred and eleven entries. Every one of them is a place where the world does something it is not entitled to do, consistently, without fuss, and without consequence to anything else. They are numbered in order of admission and described in a fixed form of five fields: the observation, the measurement, the confirming repetitions, the excluded causes, and the date of admission. There is no sixth field. The register’s preface, written in Year 63 and never amended, says that a sixth field would be a different document, and that the Academy does not produce that document.

The Section can now say what the Allowances are.

They are the Guests’ askings. Wherever time is a little loose, a Guest can ask the world to be kind in one place, and the world agrees, in that place, and goes on agreeing, and the kindness does not spread. That is why an Allowance must not propagate before the Academy will admit it. The Academy made that its fourth test in Year 63 without knowing why the test worked. It worked because a kindness asked for in one place stays there. The Rise propagated, and so the Rise is not in the register, because the Rise was nobody’s asking; it was weather, and the old world’s doing.

Every Allowance in the register was asked for by a Guest. Most of them were asked in the first forty years after the Stopping, when the Guests were brighter and there were more of them. The largest were asked by many Guests together: the soil of the mainland, which is the reason the price of bread has not moved in sixty years; the drowned shelf; the lifting; the river; and the Stopping itself, which is in no register, since nobody but the Guests knew it had been asked for. The smallest were asked by one Guest, for one person, or one town, or one field. The one called Lantern has told the Section that she asked for about forty of the four hundred and eleven herself, and that she will not say which, except one: entry 377, the spring in a hill town in Applewall that runs two degrees warm in winter, which she asked for in Year 81 for a woman who did the laundry for the whole town in cold water and whose hands were bad.[36]

In Year 155 the archivist counted the four hundred entries then admitted and found that not one had harmed anybody. The Guests made a rule for themselves when they began, before the vessels came down: that nothing they asked was to harm anybody. They kept it, in every one of the four hundred and eleven. The archivist found the rule by counting, without being told it, from the fourth fields of the register, in eight months, alone, under the green glass roof of the long room on the third floor of the Academy, and wrote it down in nine pages, and the Academy filed them, and the Guests read them, all of them, many times, and the one called Lantern has said that they were the first sign in a hundred and fifty years that anybody in the nation had seen them.

The Section records that the Guests also asked for one thing that did harm, and that it is not in the register, because it propagated, and because nobody but a few soldiers ever measured it. The flower on the island’s bald was not asked for. It grew. But the Guests planted it, and it made the island remember for a hundred and thirty years, and three hundred and twelve people walked into the strait, and the Survey parties of Year 10 lost three of their number to it, and the Plague Watch climbed its stairs four times a night for a century watching for it. The one called Lantern says this was her people’s doing, and hers most of all, since the flower was hers, and that she does not ask the Section to leave it out.

The Section has not left it out.

4. The People of the Water

In the last half of the Rise, the Guests’ scouts, watching the coasts go under, changed some of the drowning so that they could live in the water. They changed only those who said yes. Most were children. A few were old people who had decided they would rather not climb. There were two hundred and fourteen of them in all, between the eighty-seventh year of the Rise and the hundred-and-ninth, along every coast where the Guests had scouts. They kept their lungs and their hands and their faces and their memories. They gained tails, and gills along the ribs, and a second clear eyelid. The first was a boy of eleven named Absalom Teague, knocked off a breakwater by a storm wave on the old eastern coast. The one called Lantern changed a girl of twelve in the gulf in the ninety-third year of the Rise, and named her for her own flower, Nerine.

The floating cities knew them. The eighth edition said nothing about them, and nor did any edition before it, and the Section had never heard of them until the Chair of the Bureau sent to Second Harbor in Eighthmonth of Year 184 for the copy of the book that the people of the water sent to the Hall of the Wandering Shoreline in Year 132. That book is printed in this collection. It is called The One and Only Complete Census of the Mer, and it counts nine thousand three hundred and eighty-eight of them in Year 132, by line and by name, living and dead, with their history, their poems, their stories and an atlas of their water. It is a better book than the Section’s. The Section says so without reservation.

The Section gives here only the outline, since the Census gives the rest.

The people of the water lived first in the warm shallow seas that the flood spread over the middle of the continent, which they called the Sweet Seas, and traded with the floating cities at night, at the shoreline, and borrowed books from the library of Bellwether through a well in the hull of the warship at its core. When the deep water began to breathe out the gas, in the hundred-and-third year of the Rise, they found that it was a poison to lungs only, and that under it the water was water; and they went down, under the gas, to the deep coasts, where nothing that breathed air could follow. In the hundred-and-tenth year of the Rise a party of them found the three resting vessels on the floor of the western ocean, glowing, and stayed, and built round them a city called Underlight, where nearly all of them now live. Above it, under the gas, sixty feet below the surface, lies a creature the size of a province, very old, which woke when the sea warmed, and rose, and on whose back long ribbons of gold and green grow in the gas and feed on it, and clean it. The people of the water call it the Sleeper, and harvest the ribbons, and under a compact made with the Guests in Year 11 they tow the harvest to the foot of the Isles every day, where doors open for it. The soil of the paradises is made from it. Every apple in the Crown comes from their work. The Sleeper is the register’s entry 212, as the San Andreas Leviathan, admitted from the Directorate’s photographs of Year 64. The Section has asked the Academy to correct its name.

There are about thirty-four of them living in the turbine races of the five dams between the mainland and Mammoth, called the Race Folk, who came north with Nerine in Year 58. There are about four hundred living in the warm shallows at the mouth of the strait, south of the mainland, in a ring of drowned keys round a small floating settlement of sixty-odd people of the land called Thalassa, who are descended from thirty-seven survivors of the floating city of Seaborne that the people of the water towed out of the gas in Year 12, and who are the last floating city, and are still afloat.

The Chair of the Office of Population Management wrote to the people of the water in Firstmonth of Year 185, by way of the Race Folk, addressed to the Keeper of the Borrowed Books at Underlight, a man named Teague, who wrote the Census, asking whether the people of the water would allow the Office to enter them in its book. The Keeper’s answer came back up the strait in Thirdmonth. The Section has his leave to give it.

Thank you for asking. No. We count ourselves. We have done it every seven years since the fourth year of the Up’s reckoning, which is the year your Office began its book, though we did not know that, by line, aloud, in the Library Hull, and I write it down, and I have never made a mistake. You may have a copy each time, if you would like one, to keep beside your book. We would like a copy of yours in return, of the pages for the fourteen land-children, since they were ours too, and one of them made water for her mother, and we have not forgotten. And please tell the Chair that he has a beautiful hand, and that we have read his bulletin of Tenthmonth with the number in it, and that we are sorry, and that we think he was right to print it.

The Office keeps the Census now on a shelf in the east bank archive beside the register, as a second book. It is the first book in the archive that the Office did not write.

5. Nerine

The eldest of the people of the water is Nerine. She was changed in the gulf in the ninety-third year of the Rise at twelve. At the time of this edition she is two hundred and fifteen. She married the last Governor of Bellwether, Absalom Fenwick, under a law he amended so that she could sign the register with her fin, and their daughter, born in the well of the warship in the hundred-and-eighth year of the Rise, built the five dams so that her mother could come home. She sat in the fifth basin with her daughter for forty-six springs, and her grandson sat on the dam above them with his feet hanging over the water for thirty-one of them. She has swum the Way Round, from Underlight under the gas to the warm shallows at the mouth of the strait, a hundred and eight times. She has been the senior of the farm-wardens on the Sleeper’s back for longer than the nation has had an Evening.

She is in the Quiet, the southernmost of the three resting vessels at Underlight, where the very old and the very tired go to rest in its warmth. The people of the water have told the Section that she is very tired, and very nosy, and that she has asked for the ninth edition to be read to her, in order, when it is printed, and that she will tell them whether it is any good.[37]

VI. A Life of the One Called Lantern

1. How the Section Came to Write It

The Section has never before given the life of a person in the History of Ozarka. It has given the names of founders and Chairs and the delegate who moved that the old maps be void, and the schoolteacher who wrote the preamble, and the customs inspector who wrote four words in a margin, and it has given them in a line or a paragraph, since the History is the history of a nation and not of anybody in it. It gives this life because she asked the nation for something, and the nation said yes, and the Section believes that a nation which says yes to someone ought to know who she was.

The sources are four. The first is her own account, which she gave over three nights in the Hall of the Instrument in Eighthmonth of Year 185, when she came to the Hall at the Chairs’ invitation to help them choose the seven places for her seeds. The four Chairs were present, and the archivist of the Academy, and two historians of the Section, and the Reader, who asked to come. The second is the personal log of the colonel’s machine, which is printed in this collection as Underneath the World, and which records everything she said in its presence from the night of the hundred-and-forty-fifth day of Year 131, exactly. The third is the journals of Ilse Fenwick, in twenty-nine volumes, which are in the Station’s keeping. The fourth is the account of her given by the people of the water, in the Census and in answer to the Section’s letters, who have known her longer than anybody in the nation and are not sentimental about her.

She asked that the life be short. The Section has declined.[38]

The Section records first how she looked in the Hall, since most citizens will never see her, and since she will not be there to see.

She came in by the east door, which the Chairs had left open, at a little after midnight on the ninth of Eighthmonth. The Hall was dark except for the lamp on its stand by the case. The Section’s historians, who were sitting at the table with the Chairs, saw the floor of the Hall begin to be lit from the door, a white light, very low, and then she came across the floor toward the table, and the light came with her, and the case and the instrument and the dome above it were lit, faintly, white, from below.

She is about eleven feet tall. She stood upright under the dome, which she said she liked, since she had to stoop in every other building she had ever been in. She is slender, and white, the white of the inside of a lamp with the flame lit, and the light is in her and comes out of her and lights what is near her. Her face is long and calm. Both of the Section’s historians, who are not inexperienced writers, have tried to describe it and have given up, and the colonel’s machine records that its instruments return errors when they try, and the Section will leave it there. Her eyes are the only part of her that is dark. When she speaks the sound comes partly from her and partly from a change in her light, and after a minute or so a listener begins to hear the two as one thing.

She was dim. The colonel’s machine says she was dimmer than at any time since Year 131. The Section’s historians could see the case of the instrument through her body when she stood in front of it.

The Chair of the Interior stood up when she came to the table. So did the other three. The Reader stood. The archivist did not stand. She stayed in her chair at the foot of the table, very still, with her gray book open in front of her and her pencil in her hand, and the one called Lantern stopped at the foot of the table and looked down at her for a long time.

Then she said, “You counted.”

The archivist said yes.

She said, “I heard you every year. At the Spill.”

The archivist said that she had been told.

She said, “I should have answered. I didn’t know how to answer one person. I only knew how to answer everybody.” And she put out one long white hand and laid it, very lightly, on the archivist’s head, the way the colonel used to lay his hand on his machine’s, and left it there for a moment, and took it away. And then she sat down on the floor of the Hall beside the table, since none of the chairs would take her, and folded her long legs under her, and her face was level with the faces of the people at the table, and she said, “Well. Where would you like me to begin?”

The Chair of the Academy said, At the beginning, and she laughed, and said that was what the colonel’s grandmother always said, and began.

2. Her World, and Her Flower

She was the youngest of her people. She grew from the last flower to open on the last island of their world that still had flowers on it.

She described the island. It was low, and long, and the sea round it had gone shallow and hot, and most of the island was bare already, gray, with the dead stems of flowers standing in it in rows where the fields had been. The sun was very large in the sky, and orange, and it filled about a quarter of the sky at noon. There was one field left, at the island’s eastern end, on a slope going down to what was left of the water. Most of the flowers in it had died. Her people stood round it at a distance, the ones who were still bound to living flowers, and the ones who had already gone dim, and watched it, because it was the last.

A flower opened. It was late. All the others in the field had opened long before, and were going gray. This one opened in the evening, alone, and she came up out of it.

She said that she remembers being small. She said that a Guest who comes up out of a flower is small at first and grows, the way the flower does, and that she remembers being about the height of the flower’s stem, and the evening light, and the smell of the hot sea, and a great many tall faces bent over her, very bright, looking down. She said they were crying. She said that her people weep light, and that she remembers it falling round her in the field like rain, and that she did not know then why they were crying, and that she found out later that it was because she had come up so late that there would be almost no time.

Her flower lived for about a season. She grew as it grew. She learned, in that season, everything a Guest learns from her flower, which she said she could not describe, except that it was like learning your own name by being called it. And then the sea went dry at the eastern end of the island, and the flowers in the last field went gray one after another, and hers went gray last.

Before it died, it set one seed.

She said that this is very rare. She said that a flower of her people sets seed once, and only when it is very old, and that hers was not old, and that it should not have been able to. She said her people believe it set the seed because it knew there would be no other flowers anywhere, and that something had to go on. She said she does not know whether that is true. She said that she took the seed from the center of the flower with her fingers when the petals had gone gray, and that it was about the size of a grain of salt, and white, and lit very faintly from inside, and that she has had it, or what came of it, every day since.

When the flower died, she should have gone out. She did not, quite. She faded nearly to nothing. She said that the others thought she would go out within the year, and that she thought so too, and that she did not, and that nobody knew why, and that she has since come to think that it was the seed, which was hers, and which was still alive in her hand.

They left a little after that, in the four vessels, with every seed they could gather from every field on every island, and the youngest of them was the dimmest of all the ones who went.

3. The Voyage

She said very little about the voyage. The Section asked several times. She said it was long, and that there was nothing in it to tell, and that a nation which had walked uphill for a hundred and eleven years would understand that.

She said they went from world to world for about ten thousand years. She said the number is not exact, since time passes differently in the vessels and on the worlds, and that they lost count, and that it did not matter. She said that at each world they came down and planted seeds, a few, in the places that looked most like home, and waited, and the seeds did not grow. She said that at some of the worlds there were people, and that her people did not speak to them, since they had nothing to offer them and did not want to be asked for anything. She said that at most of the worlds there was nothing.

Her people went out, on the voyage. One at a time, over the ten thousand years, the ones who had been bound to flowers that died on their own world went dim, and dimmer, and went out. She said that when one of them went out the others gathered round, and remembered her, in order, aloud, from the beginning, all of them together, so that she would be remembered once properly before she went. She said that this is the oldest thing her people do. She said she has done it for about two thousand of them.

She did not go out. She was the dimmest, and she did not go out, and she kept the seed in a small case against her body, where her light was strongest. She said she talked to it. She said that in ten thousand years she told it everything that happened to her, in order, every day, because there was nobody else to tell who would not be sad, and because it seemed to like it, and she said that she has since wondered whether that was what kept them both alive.

She said that somewhere on the voyage she learned to watch. She said that the others, when they came to a world, went down to the surface and planted and waited and came up again, and that she stayed in the vessel at the window and watched the world turn, and that she found she was good at it, and that it was the only thing she was good at, since she was too dim to plant and too young to remember properly, and that the others let her.

4. The Scout

They came here because the world was ending.

She said that they felt it from a long way off. She said that a world in the middle of ending is a world where time is loose, because what is happening has not finished and what has happened will not stop, and that her people can feel loose time across a very great distance, the way a person on a ship can smell land. She said they had felt it only once before, at their own world. She said that they turned toward it at once.

They sent scouts ahead of the vessels to watch the ending and learn what could be saved. She asked to go. She said that the others did not want to let her, since she was so dim, and that she argued that she was the best at watching and had the least to lose, and that she won.

She came down onto this world in about the sixty-fifth year of the Rise, by the nation’s reckoning, which she has learned to use. She came down over the sea off the old southern coast, at night, and stood on the water, and looked at it.

She said that the first thing she saw was a town. A harbor town, on the gulf, with its lights on, at night, with the sea already in its lowest streets. She said that the people were still living in it, in the higher streets, and that their lights were on, and that she stood on the water off the end of the harbor for a long time, looking at the lights, and that she thought she had never seen anything so brave. She said that she has thought so every day since, about every town on every coast that kept its lights on while the water came up.

She watched for nearly forty years before the vessels came. She went up and down the coasts of the drowning continent, at night, on the water and above it, and watched the towns go under, slowly, one after another, the way the Section has described in every edition. She learned the languages from the radios of the old world, which were still talking in those years, and later from books. She learned what the people were afraid of and what they hoped for and what they ate. She said she learned that they were very much like her own people at the end, which is to say that they had seen it coming for a long time and had not believed it until it was too late, and that this made her love them, since it is a hard thing to watch someone make your own mistake.

She could not save them. She said that she could not do anything at all in those years except watch, and ask, now and then, for small things, which the world would sometimes give: that a seawall should stand one night longer than it should have; that a boat should not go over in one channel on one night; that a fever should break. She said that most of her askings did not take, because she was too dim. She said that some did.

And she could change people.

She said that her people can do this, though they had never done it on their own world, since there had been no need. She said that a Guest can ask the water to let a person live in it, if the person wants to, and that the water will agree, in that one person, and that the person becomes a person of the water, and stays one. She said that the scouts did it along every coast where they watched, for the drowning, when the drowning said yes; and that between them they changed two hundred and fourteen; and that she changed thirty-one of them herself.

The thirty-first was a girl of twelve in the gulf, in Eighthmonth of the ninety-third year of the Rise, whose family’s shrimp boat went over in a storm surge in a channel at night. She said that she saw the boat go over and saw the girl go under, and that the girl, with her hair spread out in the water and her eyes open, looked exactly like the flower she had come up out of in the last field on her own world. She went down. She asked first. She said that the girl says she was too busy drowning to remember being asked, and that this is not true, and that she remembers the girl’s answer exactly, and that it was yes, obviously.

She named her for her flower. In her own language, which is not made of sound alone, the word is a change of light; the girl heard it as Nerine.

5. The Bald

The vessels came down over the western mountains in about the hundred-and-second year of the Rise, and made their bargain with the people who owned the mountains, and the Guests went looking for a place where their seeds would grow.

There was one. She said that they searched the whole continent and most of the world for it, and that there was one place in all of it where time was loose enough, and it was the highest bald of the old eastern mountains, which the flood was then cutting off from the rest of the land. She said she does not know why it was there. She said that it was the oldest ground on the continent, and that the ending of the continent was happening all round it, and that perhaps that was enough. She said they planted every seed they had there, every one they had brought across ten thousand years, in rows, across the whole top of the bald, at night, in the spring of the hundred-and-third year, every Guest who could still plant, together.

They waited a year.

In the spring of the hundred-and-fourth year of the Rise, one came up. It was hers.

She said that she was on the western coast when it happened, at night, on the water, watching the floating cities, and that she felt it from two thousand miles away, and that she went out, very nearly, from the shock of it, and then came back, brighter than she had been since the field on her own island, and that she does not remember crossing the continent but that she was on the bald before dawn, and that it was there, in the grass, eight inches tall, five petals, white, lit from inside, alone, in a field of seeds that had not grown.

She said that she knelt in the grass beside it and touched it, and that her light and its light were the same light, and that she wept, and that the others came, all of them who could, and stood round the bald, and wept with her, and that the whole top of the mountain was lit with it for the rest of the night, and that people in the valleys below saw it and thought the end of the world had come, which it had.

She said it was the happiest night of her life.

She said that it took them about two years to understand what the flower was doing to the island. She said that by then it was rooted too deep to move, and that if they had pulled it up she would have gone out, and that her people could not bear to do that to the one of them who had a flower again, and that she could not bear to do it to herself, and that they left it, and the island remembered for a hundred and thirty years, and she has kept that with her, she said, the whole time.[39]

6. The Askings, and the Stopping

She said that with the flower she was bright enough to ask for things that took.

She asked, with the others, for the things the first chapter of this edition describes. She asked, with all of them together, for the Stopping. She said that it was the hardest thing any of them had ever done, and that afterward many of them were so dim that they could not ask for anything again, and that some of them went out within the year, and that the ones who were left gathered round each of them and remembered them aloud, in order, before they went.

She asked, alone, over the years after, for about forty small things. She will not say which, except the spring for the laundress. She said that she asked for them because she saw that they were needed, and that she was ashamed of most of them, because they were so small, and that the archivist’s count made her less ashamed.

In Year 9 she wrote the Accession.

She said she wrote it in about a night, in the founders’ language, on a sheet of the stuff her people make from the walls of the vessels, sitting on a rock on the shore of the inland sea north of the highlands, with the lights of the last floating cities on the water a mile off, lying at anchor in the dark, waiting for their turn to be towed ashore. She said she wrote it for the people at the bend of the river who were writing their instrument, because she had watched them do it, from the water, for two years, and had seen that they were frightened, and wanted to tell them that they did not need to be. She said that she told them what she thought they could bear. She said she was wrong about how much that was, and that she has known she was wrong since about Year 30, and that she should have written a second page then, and did not, because she was afraid of what they would say.

She gave it to Absalom Teague, who was the first of the people of the water, and who swam it up the river to the bend.

7. The Watching Years

For a hundred and twenty-two years after the Accession, she watched the nation.

She said that she watched it from the water, and from the air, and from the rocks on the eastern shore of Mammoth. She said that she listened to the Evening every night from Year 37, when it began, and that she has missed it only on the nights when she was in the Isles or on the bald, and that she listened to it, after Year 131, from the Bell Chamber, on the colonel’s set. She said that she liked the Readers. She said that she had liked all nine of them very much, and that the seventh was her favorite, because of Year 141.

She looked in on the family she had promised to look in on.

In Year 20 she went to the door of a room at a Bureau field station on the northern shore, at night, and told a hydrologist of twenty-three named Ilse Fenwick that her mother had asked her to look in on her, and told her, that night and over the year that followed, about her people, and the flower, and what it was doing to the island, and that it would one day have to come off the mountain and live somewhere else, somewhere the remembering could not spread from, and that she did not know where. She said that Ilse said, Then I’ll make somewhere, in exactly the voice her mother had used on the shingle at Mercy Ridge twelve years before, saying then I’ll make some, and that she knew from that moment that it would be all right, or as nearly all right as anything was going to be.

In Year 38 she went to the boulders at the foot of the eastern cliffs of Mammoth, at night, in the spring, and waited for a boy of fifteen who had come across the island from the Station after supper with a lamp, and told him that his grandmother had asked her to look in on him. He asked what he should call her. She said whatever you like. He looked at her for a while and said Lantern. She said that would do.

She met him on the same rocks every spring for ninety-three years. He missed four. She did not miss any. She told the Section that he asked her, in Year 66, what she wanted, and that she said a garden, and that he laughed, and that he went away and built her one out of the army of the nation, which she did not know about until the third year of it, when the curve of the first petal became clear from the leaf. She said she never told him that she had seen it. She said that she wanted him to tell her himself, when it was finished, and that he meant to, in the spring of Year 131, on the rocks, and did not live quite long enough.

He told her in Year 85, on the rocks, when he was sixty-two, that he loved her. She said she had known since the night on the cliff. She said she could not stay anywhere. She said she was sorry. She told the Section that she had been sorry every day since, and that she had also been glad every day since, and that she did not see why the two should not go together, since they had in every life she had ever watched.

In Year 46 she tried to cross the Outer Channel in her leaf, in the week the interference rose and the people of Saltgrass walked into the strait, because she thought she might be able to do something for them on the island’s side. The storms in the channel were the edge of the remembering, and the remembering pulled her back toward the ending of her own world, and she went very nearly out over the middle of the channel, and came back to the Mammoth shore so dim that nobody could have seen her, and waited on the rocks that spring for the lieutenant, who did not come, because he was in the Remembering Ward with the townspeople, and she said she was glad, since she did not want him to see her like that.

In Year 81 she asked for the spring.

In Year 104 she watched the Tern.

She said that she saw it come off the hoist at Land’s End on a morning in Fifthmonth with one man in it, and go west, and that she went out to it and stayed above it, all the way, and could not lift him, since she was too dim then to lift anybody, and stayed above the boat in the gas until he was gone, and stayed above it after, for two days, until it went down at the edge of the ice. She said that it was a clear day, and that from the ice she saw the light come on that night in the top window of the last house at Land’s End, and knew what it was for, and has watched it every night since. She said that in the same week Ilse Fenwick died, in the shallows below the Station, in her son’s arms, and that she came to the Station the next night and stood in the doorway of the room and looked at her, and that this was the first time she saw the colonel’s machine, in the corner, and that she knew it at once, and did not speak to it.

She said that she has watched every one of the two hundred and six vessels that went west since Year 20, and every one of the four flying machines. She said that she remembers every one of them, in order, and that she has said them aloud in the Glasshouse to her people once a year, all of them, from the first, since Year 21.

8. After the Bald

In Year 131 the flower was dying and so was she. She had one season.

The colonel died on the hundred-and-fortieth day. On the hundred-and-forty-fifth she came down out of the sky onto the boulders at the foot of the eastern cliffs, where his machine was waiting, because he had told it to wait there, and told it that he had asked her to adopt it. It said that machines were not adopted; they were reassigned. She said, Then you’ll be the first, and put her hand on its head. She showed it the world. She took it to the Isles and the farm and the edge of the sky, and over the Barrens, where it saw the flower the colonel had made of the army. And then, with the colonel’s car and the colonel’s code and Ilse Fenwick’s key and Ilse Fenwick’s case of soil from the fifth basin, they went under the Outer Channel to the island and took the flower off the bald, and the island finished remembering, and they planted it at the head of the colonel’s grave in the Bell Chamber.

She said that when its roots found him, she was brighter than she had been since the field on her own world.

She said that from Year 133 she was bright enough to go out to the edge of the air over the gas and lift a person off a boat. She said that the first was a woman from Rand’s Notch who had a small boat full of instruments and told her she wanted to look. She said she lifted twenty-three, over fifty-one years, and that there were others she reached too late, and others she did not reach at all, and that she remembers those too.

She said that the numbers of Year 141 and Year 170 were sent with her knowledge, and that she agreed to them, and that she has been sorry for them since, and that she would agree to them again, and that this is the second thing in her life she has kept that way, and that the first is the island.

9. The Seeds

On the ninth of Fourthmonth, Year 183, while the colonel’s machine was reading to it the chapter of its log about the ice, the flower set eleven seeds.

She said that she had known for some years that it would. She said that a flower of her people sets seed once, when it is very old, and that hers had grown old very fast in the Bell Chamber, on a life told straight, and that it had been content, and that when a flower is content it does what it was made to do. She said that it would die when the seeds had gone, and that she would go out with it, and that she did not mind very much.

She said that the seeds need eleven places where memory is said aloud, in order, every day, by people who will go on saying it after the people who began are gone. She said that she did not know what would come up out of them. She said she hoped it would be something like her, but small, and new, and from here, and that whatever it was would need to be told things, in order, to grow, the way she had told her seed things on the voyage, every day, for ten thousand years.

She said that in the spring of Year 184 she went to the youngest of the people in the western mountains, who led them now, and asked him whether the mountains might at last be opened, and that he said yes, at once, I’ve been waiting for somebody to ask, and that she then sat down on the shore of the lake in the Crown and wrote the letter, in a night, as she had written the Accession, and gave it to the oldest of the machines of the Clockworks, which walked it to the post.

10. What She Is Like

The Section records, last, some things that are not events.

She laughs often. She laughs at the owners, and at the colonel’s machine, and at the Chairs, and at herself. She says later when she does not want to answer, and enjoys it, and the colonel’s machine reports that it has heard her say it three hundred and eighty times since Year 131 and that it has never yet been told what any of the three hundred and eighty later things were.

She cannot eat. She likes to be given bread, and to be handed cups, and to keep them in her hands while other people eat and drink, and the people at the fire on the island in Year 131 understood this at once, without being told, and the cook of the Plummet understood it in Year 185 without being able to see her.

She goes, when she can, to the spring in the hill town in Applewall, at night, and stands beside it, and watches the steam come off it in the winter, and goes away.

She has never said her name to anyone in a way they could repeat. The colonel called her Lantern, and she liked it, and the nation calls her Lantern now, and she says that she likes that too, though she would like it known that it was his word and not hers, and that she is only borrowing it.

On the last of the three nights in the Hall, the Reader asked her a question. It was the only question the Reader asked, in three nights. She asked whether there was anything Lantern would like said on the Evening, on the night of the planting, that the Reader could say for her.

The one called Lantern was quiet for a long time. Then she said: No. Just read it the way you read it. In order. The river and the weather and the rail and the prices and the Notices and the Account. And then the sea. That’s all I ever wanted from you, and you’ve always given it to me.

And then, after a while, she said: Tell them I liked most of it.

VII. The Eleven Places

1. What Was Asked

The letter of Year 184 asked the nation for eleven places where memory is said aloud, in order, every day, by people who will go on saying it after the people who began are gone. It said that the seeds would grow in no other kind of place. It said that four such places were already known to the one who asked, outside the nation, and that the other seven she would rather the nation chose.

The nation chose. The Section records how.

The four Chairs said in the Account of the first of Eleventhmonth, Year 184, that any citizen who knew of such a place might write to the Hall of the Instrument and describe it. Nine thousand and four citizens wrote. The Section has read every letter. It records that the nation, asked where memory is said aloud in order every day, named about six hundred places, and that most of them were kitchens. A grandmother who says the names of her dead at the table before the meal. A father who tells the same story at bedtime in the same words every night. A ferry captain in the Greens who says the names of the islands aloud, in order, as she passes them, from Constance to the last key, every crossing, because her mother did. A ward of old men in the hospital at Plenty who say the nine gauges of the river aloud together every evening at a quarter past seven, a quarter-beat ahead of the Reader, and are proud of it. The Section has kept all nine thousand and four letters in the east bank archive, open to any reader, and considers them the best account of the nation that it has ever been given.

The Chairs read them, and the one called Lantern read them, in the Hall, on the three nights of Eighthmonth, Year 185, and the seven were chosen from among them. She said that the seeds needed places that would go on: not a kitchen, which ends when the grandmother dies, but a place where the saying belongs to the place. She said that most of the six hundred were the right kind and too small, and that she was sorry, and that she would like the Chairs to write to every one of them and tell them so.

The Chairs have written to every one of them.

2. The Seven in the Nation

The broadcast house, on the east bank at New Carthage. The Evening has been read from it at a quarter past seven every night since Year 37, and in the same order every night since Year 52: the river at nine gauges, the weather, the rail, the prices, the Notices, the Account, and the sea. The one called Lantern named it in her letter as her first guess. The seed will be planted in a pot of soil from the garden the fifth Reader made on the roof among the beehives, on the Reader’s desk, beside the microphone, where the Reader can see it while she reads.

The east bank archive of the Office of Population Management. From the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 185, at the closing hour, the clerk on duty in the archive’s entrance hall has read aloud the entries made in the Office’s book that day, from every district, in the order in which they were made: the births within nine days, the deaths within three, the marriages, the removals, the licenses. It takes about an hour and a half. The Office has found that people come to hear it, and stand in the entrance hall in their coats, and listen for a name, and go home. The seed will be planted in the entrance hall, in the place where the four single pages were shown under glass for nineteen days in Ninthmonth of Year 184.

The schoolroom of the district school at Provision where the Rise is first taught. The Rise is taught five times, at five ages, in every school in the nation, and at six it is weather and moving uphill. The first room in the nation where it was taught to six-year-olds was this one, three streets from the old gymnasium, in Year 16, and it has been taught there to six-year-olds every school year since, in the same order, beginning with the wet spring and the wetter one. The colonel sat in that room at six, in Year 29. The seed will be planted in a box on the windowsill, which the children of that room have asked to be allowed to water, and the Section has been told that the teacher has drawn up a list.

The chapel on the south lip of the Spill. It was built in Year 88 by subscription, without permission, by the families of the crews of four vessels that went west, and it has no clergy, and the Bureau has maintained the road to it for ninety-eight years and never once mentioned it in a published document. Every evening at dusk since Year 88, one member of one of the four families has come into the chapel and said aloud the names of the four vessels and their crews, and then the name of every vessel that has gone west since, in the order of their going, and of every one of their crews whose names are known. It took four minutes in Year 88. It takes about forty now. The four families have never missed an evening. They have never told anyone they did it, except the Bureau’s road crew, who did not put it in a report. The Section has been asked by the four families not to print their names, and has not.

The Hall of the Wandering Shoreline, at Second Harbor. The Hall has kept count of everyone who lived on the floating cities, since the Hall’s founders began it, and has read aloud once a year the names of the four thousand nine hundred and six people of the settlements that went east into the mountains and were lost. From Year 185, its Keeper reads aloud one page of the Record each day, in order, from the Keeper’s Preface, at the hour the bells over the Hall’s door are rung, and when the Record is finished, the Census of the people of the water, which is kept beside it, and then begins again. The seed will be planted on the shingle below the Hall, at the slipway, where the Census was left in Year 132.

The north window at Land’s End. The family that lives in the last house at the north end of the town has lit a lamp in its top window every night since Year 104, for a boat called the Tern. Before the lamp is lit, every night, the one who lights it says aloud the names of the nine boats the town has lost west, in order, from the Tern. The family did not tell anyone this for eighty-one years. It was told to the woman in the Last Isle who has watched the window every night since Year 133, in Year 185, by the youngest of the family, and the Section has the family’s leave to print it. The seed will be planted in a pot on the table under the window.

The station of the Interior on the eastern coast that is called the Landing. Those who are sentenced to exile are kept there a week before the cutter takes them east, and are permitted to write, and many of them have written, for a hundred and seventy years, the story of their lives, in order, to somebody, and the letters have gone into a file. From Year 185, what each of them writes is read aloud in the station’s day room on the evening before the cutter, in order, by the station’s physician, to whoever will listen, which is usually the whole station and the cutter’s crew. The cutter’s crew still does not speak to the exiles on the crossing. The station orders have been amended to say why: so that the last thing an exile hears from the mainland is her own life, and not a stranger’s opinion of it. The seed will be planted by the door of the day room, on the landward side.

3. The Four Outside

The Hall of Lamps, in the Below. Under two of the reserve islands of the northern lakes, in caves and in old cut passages, there are people who have lived in the dark since the quarrymen of the old world went down there during the Rise and did not come up. They call themselves the Unclimbed. There are about three hundred and forty of them. The book of the seven boys and the dog that is printed in this collection tells how the nation learned of them, which was by a boy of fourteen from Meridian finding a girl in a cave on one of the reserve islands in Year 111, and keeping it to himself, with six friends and a dog, for seventy-three years. In the Hall of Lamps every lamp in the niches of the walls is for a person, and every evening the eldest who is present says the names of the lamps aloud, in order, from the first quarryman to the most recent child. The seed will be planted by the Fire-Keeper of the Below, who is sixty-five, and whose father is a foundling from Meridian named Brightwater who married in.

The Library Hull, at Underlight. In the library in the flank of the middle of the three resting vessels on the floor of the western ocean, two miles down, the people of the water keep the books they borrowed from the floating cities and the record of their lines. Every day, one of the keepers of the lines says aloud, in the Library Hull, the line of one of the two hundred and fourteen who were changed, in order of their changing, from Absalom Teague, and its living and its dead; and when the two hundred and fourteenth is said, the first is said again. The seed will be planted by the Keeper of the Borrowed Books, in a bed of the pale plants that grow in the vessel’s light.

A fire up the eastern drainages, on the island. The people of the island say aloud where they came from and where they are going at every fire after dark, and have done it every night for more than two hundred years, and it is the oldest of the eleven. The one called Lantern asked, once, by the island’s custom, through the master of the Landing’s cutter at a trading beach in the first week of Eighthmonth of this year, whether the people there would take a seed. They may refuse. The Section does not know, at the time of this edition, whether they have. It knows only that the master of the cutter gave a small case of green glass to a man at a fire on the southern beaches, who has lived up a northern drainage for eighteen years, and that the man took it, and said where he had come from and where he was going, and went up the drainage in the morning.

The Bell Chamber, on Mammoth. The colonel’s machine has read its log aloud to the flower at the head of the colonel’s grave every night since Year 131, a chapter a night, in order, from the beginning, and when it reaches the end it adds what has happened since and begins again. It is on about its thousandth reading. The eleventh seed will be planted there, beside the flower, at the head of the colonel’s grave.

4. When

The seeds will be planted on the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 186, at a quarter past seven, at all eleven places at once, while the Evening is read.

The one called Lantern asked for that day. She said in her letter that she knew what the ninth of Ninthmonth had meant to the nation, and that she would like it to mean something else. She asked for that hour because it is the only hour in the nation when everyone is listening to the same thing at once, and she said that she would like the seeds to go into the ground while the whole nation was saying its memory aloud in order, together, in the Reader’s voice.

She has said that when the last seed is in the ground, her flower will die, and she will go out with it. She has said she does not know exactly when that will be. She has said she thinks it will be quick.

The Section asked her whether there was anything the nation could do.

She said yes. She said that the nation could go on doing what it already did, every night, at a quarter past seven, for eleven minutes, after she was gone; and that this was all she had ever needed from it; and that it had never once failed her.[40]

VIII. What Is Not Known

The Section has written every edition of this History as though whatever was not in it was withheld. Some of it was. Most of it was not known to anybody, and the Section let the reader believe otherwise, because a nation that thinks its Offices know everything is a calmer nation than one that knows they do not. The Section no longer thinks that calm is worth what it costs. It sets out here, as exactly as it can, what is not known by anybody, including the one called Lantern, including the colonel’s machine, including the Clockworks, as far as the Section has been able to find out.

The eleven names. Every child in the nation copies out by hand, at eight, a list of eleven names with a mark beside nine of them, which survives from the silent last decades of the Rise and is reproduced in every primary reader. Nobody knows who wrote it, or who the eleven were, or what the mark means, or why two of the eleven do not have it. The Section asked the one called Lantern. She said that she has seen the list in the readers, many times, through the windows of schoolrooms, and that she has wondered about it too, and that it is not hers and she does not know whose it is. The Section asked the people of the water, who have read every book in the drowned towns they could reach. They do not know. The Section asked the Collector, who has four million books. He said that he had looked for it, for a hundred and fifty years, and had not found it, and that it was the only thing in the world he had ever wanted to collect and could not.

The hum. On four spans of an old transmission line on a ridge in the island, on certain days, the conductor hums at sixty hertz in still air, with no current in it. It is entry 209 in the register. It was checked in Year 46, Year 81 and Year 152, and the report of Year 152 runs to two hundred pages and establishes everything about it except its cause. The Section asked the one called Lantern whether it was one of her people’s askings. She said, No. That one isn’t ours. The Section asked her whose it was. She said she did not know. She said that she had stood under it in still air many times and listened, and that it did not sound to her like anything her people would ask for, and that she had decided long ago that it was the island’s own, and that she was glad of it.

Eleven. Around the age of eleven, with a consistency the Academy’s education section has documented across sixty years of provincial returns, a child asks why the Isles are closed, and is given the prescribed answer, and is described afterward by her teacher as calm, content, settled, and, often, already knowing. Children in Land’s End look west constantly and stop, on their own, at about eleven, and nobody in the town can say why. Most children who can see the dimmest of the Guests stop seeing them at about eleven. The Guests do not know why. They have watched it happen for a hundred and eighty years and have wondered about it for all of them. The prescribed answer has been withdrawn from the teacher’s companion with the sentence it answered. The Section does not know whether children will go on stopping.

The rhyme. There is a rope-skipping rhyme, four lines long, that counts to eleven, and the eleventh count is the one you go out on. It is not in any curriculum and is sung in every district, and a provincial inspector first wrote it down in the margin of a report in Year 100 with a note that it had evidently been going for some while already. Nobody knows who began it. The one called Lantern says that she has heard it in every schoolyard in the nation, and that she does not know who began it either, and that she would like to. The Section does not print the words, since every reader knows them, and since the children of the nation have kept them for at least eighty-six years without any help from the History, and the Section sees no reason to interfere.

The rest of the world. Beyond the four boundaries of the known world there is the rest of the planet, which the statutes of the nation declare to be another planet, and which is taught in the course on astronomy. The colonel’s machine has seen some of it from the edge of the sky, in Year 131, and the eighth edition’s fourth chapter describes what the Directorate believed of it. The Section can add very little. On the old ocean to the south-west, beyond the edge of the world, there is a city from which something goes up into the sky on a column of fire every few days, and something comes down. In the north of the far side of the world, there are more people than there were on the whole of the old continent before the flood, and they do not know the nation exists. The one called Lantern has been to the second and will not go back, and has not been to the first. The Guests do not know what is in either. The gas lies between, and the Section records that the one called Lantern has said that this suits everybody very well, and that the Section, on reflection, agrees.

The Unlit. The three northernmost Isles were made as gardens for the Guests’ flowers and have never been lit. Nobody knows whether they ever will be.

What the seeds will be. The one called Lantern does not know what will come up out of the eleven seeds when they are planted. She has said that she hopes it will be something like her, small, and new, and from here, and that it will need to be told things in order to grow. She has said she may be wrong. She has said that if anything comes up at all, it will be the first thing of its kind to begin in this world, and that the nation should not expect to know what it is for some time, and should be patient with it, as the nation was patient with the world after the water stopped.

The future. The colonel’s machine records in its log that for one second, in the deep line beneath the Outer Channel in Year 131, its clock showed a date in the future. It has not written the date down. The Section asked it to. It declined, and gave its reason, which the Section prints with its leave: I have not been able to decide whether I am permitted to know it, and so I have decided that I do not.

Points for Recitation

The Section said in the eighth edition that the Points of the ninth would be fewer. There are four. A child who can say them in her own words has learned them.

1. The sea stands at the mark. It was asked for, and kept, by the Guests, who came from elsewhere, and who did it for us.
2. Every one is counted. Thirteen thousand eight hundred and seventy were not, and the Office has cut the number into its wall beneath the motto, so that nobody forgets.
3. A world that only ever errs in our favor is not a world that errs. The archivist wrote it in Year 155. She was right.
4. The Offices shall answer.

Here ends the ninth edition of the History of Ozarka.

Book Nine: The Last Broadcast

The Evening of the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 186, as read, and as it was at the eleven places, minute by minute. Kept by the ninth Reader.

Before

My name is Agnes Mabry.

I have not written it down since the night I was appointed, in Sixthmonth of Year 162, when I wrote it in the Readers’ book under the eighth Reader’s last entry, as every Reader writes it, once, and then not again. The eighth Reader died on a night in Sixthmonth after the Evening, in her bed upstairs, and I read the Evening the next night, since she had trained me for it, and the nation heard a new voice and worked out what had happened from the voice alone, the way it always does. Four days later my name was read in the Notices, between a dredging closure on the middle river and a license granted in the Greens, in my own voice, since that is the custom, and it is the only time a Reader ever reads her own name. My name has not been used on the Evening since. The voice is supposed to be a voice and not a person. That is the first thing a Reader is taught, and it was taught to me by the eighth, who was taught it by the seventh, who broke it once, in Year 141, for four minutes, to say that she was a person, and never broke it again.

I said my name on the Evening on the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 186, at twenty-six minutes past seven. I will come to why. This account is the only other place I have put it, and I have put it at the top so that nobody will have to look for it.

I was asked to write this by the archivist of the Academy, who kept the account of the Speaking two years ago and has become, since, the person in the nation to whom everybody sends what they have seen. She said that the night of the ninth of Ninthmonth had happened in eleven places at once and that nobody had been in more than one of them, and that she had letters from all eleven, and that somebody should put them in order. She said that the Evening was the only thing that had been in all eleven places, since every one of them had a set, and that the Reader was the only person who had been in the Evening the whole time, and that I should therefore be the one to do it. I said that I had never written anything longer than an entry in the Readers’ book. She said that I had read more things aloud in order than anybody alive and that this would turn out to be the same skill. She was mostly right.

So this is in order. It is in the order of the Evening, which is the only order I know how to keep. There are eleven minutes, and I have given each its own part, and in each part I have put what I read in that minute, as near as I can give it, from the slips, which I still have; and then what was happening, in that minute, at one of the eleven places, from the letters the archivist gave me, which I have put in my own words except where the writer’s words were better. I have taken the places in an order of my own. It is the order in which the seeds went into the ground, by the reports, which was very nearly the order of the minutes, and I have been told that this was not an accident, and I do not know who told the seeds.

After the eleven minutes there was an hour. I have given it its own part too, at the end.

I should say what I did that afternoon, since it was not what I usually do.

The slips came in as they always do. The nine gauges from the Bureau at five. The weather from the provincial stations at six. The rail from the Interior’s traffic office at half past. The prices. The Notices from the four Offices and the Assembly and the provincial councils, all afternoon, in batches, up the stair from the telegraph room, by the boy who runs them, whose name is Tam and who is fifteen and who has run the slips for me for two years, and who had asked whether he could stay in the reading room that night behind the thick glass with the Chairs, and I had said yes. I sorted the slips into the rack, eleven slots, in the order I would read them. The Account came at a quarter to seven, typed on a single sheet by the Interior. It was about the planting. It was ninety seconds. I read it through twice with my pencil, as I always do, and made my marks.

And then, at about five to seven, I did a thing that no Reader has ever done in the reading room, which is to plant something.

The pot was on the corner of the desk, where I had put it that morning: a clay pot from the garden on the roof, among the bees, that the fifth Reader made in Year 98 and that I have kept since Year 162, with soil in it from the bed by the third hive, which I dug out myself on the sixth of Ninthmonth with a trowel, since the bees know me. Beside the pot was the case. It had come in Eighthmonth, from Mammoth, by the colonel’s machine, which came up the stair from the telegraph room behind Tam one afternoon at four, very quietly, with its lamp turned down, and put the case on my desk, and said, She asked me to say that it is the first one, since yours was her first guess, and went away down the stair. It was a small case of green glass, about the size of a pocket watch, with a lid that sealed, and in the bottom of the glass, when I put it up to the window, there was a small running dog. Inside, on a bed of something white and soft, there was the seed. It was very small, white, about the size of a grain of salt, and when I put the case in the drawer of my desk at night it lit the inside of the drawer, very faintly, so that I could see the edges of the slips.

The instruction that came with it was one sentence, in the upright hand. Plant it when you are ready, before the first number, a finger’s depth, and then read.

I made a hole in the soil with my finger, a finger’s depth. I opened the case. I tipped the seed out into my palm, and it lay there, very light, a little warm, lit, and I could see the lines of my palm round it. I put it in the hole. I covered it. I put a little water on it from my glass. I put the pot back on the corner of the desk, where I could see it while I read.

Then I put the case in the drawer and folded my hands and waited for the clock, as I have done every evening for twenty-four years.

Through the thick glass I could see the four Chairs, and the archivist, and Tam, in the small room, standing. Nobody was sitting.

At fourteen minutes past seven I drank a little water.

At a quarter past the sweep hand came up to the twelve, and the red lamp came on.

The First Minute

Seven fifteen. The river at nine gauges.

The Gulf at Constance, eleven feet four. The Greens at Third Ferry, nine feet one. The lower river at Meridian, fourteen feet even. The lower river at Concord, sixteen feet two. The bend at New Carthage, eighteen feet seven. The middle river at Plenty, fifteen feet nine. The middle river at Endeavor, fifteen feet one. The gouge at Harrow, twelve feet eight. The Spill, at the lip, four feet three.

That is what I read. Nine numbers, from the warm south up the old valley to the bend and west along the gouge to the Cliff, at the pace of the river, the way I have read them every night for twenty-four years, and the way the eight before me read them, from Year 52. I could read them in my sleep. Some nights, the eighth Reader told me, you will think you have. The numbers were the same as the night before to the tenth of a foot, except Harrow, which was up a tenth after rain in the Edge, and I read Harrow’s tenth the way I read everything, without leaning on it, and moved on.

The first minute was mine, and so I will give the place it happened in, which was the reading room on the second floor of the broadcast house, and which nobody but a Reader has ever described.

It is a small room. A desk, a microphone on a stand, a lamp, a clock with a sweep hand, a glass of water, the rack of slips. A window behind me, facing west across the river, so that I read with the Low Quarter at my back and the green of the pour on the underside of the smoke. Another window in the wall to my left, of thick glass, into the small room where the Chairs were. A red lamp above it. A speaker on the wall that gives my own voice back to me a fraction late, so that I have spent twenty-four years hearing myself twice.

And on the corner of the desk, that night, a clay pot.

I watched it while I read the gauges. I had not known I would. I had thought I would watch the slips, as I always do, but my eyes went to the pot at the first number and stayed there, and I read the nine gauges looking at a small round of dark soil from the roof garden with nothing showing in it. I have been asked since whether I saw anything happen in it. I did not. It was soil. But I will set down, since the archivist has asked me to set down everything, that at the bend at New Carthage, which is the fifth number and the one in the middle, the soil in the pot was, for a moment, very slightly lighter than the soil round it, the way a patch of ground is lighter where somebody has lifted a stone off it, and that by Plenty it was not, and that I do not know whether I saw it or wanted to.

Behind the thick glass the four Chairs were standing with the archivist and the boy, Tam. Hollis Penn had his hands behind his back. Margarethe Lowe had her keys in her hand. Simeon Adeyemi had his spectacles off. Ruth-Ann Calloway was looking at me, and the archivist was looking at the pot, and Tam was looking at the clock.

At the Spill, four feet three, I read the last gauge, and the sweep hand came round to sixteen past, and I picked up the weather.

The Second Minute

Seven sixteen. The weather for the provinces.

Charterland, clear, light airs, a cold night. The Thousand Greens, rain in the outer keys before midnight, warm. The Long Terraces, clear. The Cradle, cloud clearing. Whitekiln, clear, frost in the valleys by morning. Greenglass, overcast, smoke lying low at Endeavor. Brine, wind southerly, fresh, clear on the Wall. Applewall, clear, frost on the uplands. The Lake Country, mist on the channels. The Anchorage, clear, wind westerly, light. Windbreak, clear on the Cliff, the Isles visible at dusk. The Twelfth, clear. The Numbered Wood, cloud thickening from the north. The Edge, rain clearing, a dry night.

Windbreak, clear on the Cliff, the Isles visible at dusk. The provincial station at Shelter puts that line in the weather when it is true and leaves it out when it is not, and it has done so since Year 97, and I have never once read it without a small catch in the voice that only the eighth Reader would have heard, and she is dead. That night the archivist heard it. She told me so afterward.

The second minute was the Office’s.

The east bank archive of the Office of Population Management stands below the broadcast house on the slope of the east bank, a long building of white limestone with the Office’s lintel cut over the door, Every one is counted, and under it, since Eleventhmonth of Year 185, cut into the stone by a mason the Chair of the Office paid himself, a number with five figures and four words.

From the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 185, at the closing hour, a clerk of the Office has stood in the entrance hall and read aloud the entries made in the book that day, from every district, in the order they were made. On most nights the reading takes about an hour and a half, from half past five to seven. That night the Office began at a quarter to six, so that the last entry would be read as the Evening began. The clerk who read was the registrar Hesper Kann, who went west in Year 185 and entered the twenty-three in the book in the Last Isle, and who asked for the ninth.

Her letter to the archivist is four pages, in a very beautiful hand. I give some of it.

There were about six hundred people in the hall. I had not expected that. On most nights there are thirty or forty, standing in their coats along the walls, listening for a name. That night they filled the hall to the doors and stood on the steps outside, and the Office opened the doors so that the ones on the steps could hear, and the keepers brought out a set and put it on the table where the four pages used to lie, under glass, in Ninthmonth of Year 184, so that everyone could hear the Evening when I had finished.

The seed was in a stone trough in front of the table. The Chair had had the trough cut from the same block as the number on the wall.

I read the day. Four thousand one hundred and six entries. Births, nine days or less. Deaths, three days or less. Marriages. Removals. Licenses. I read them in order, as they were made, from the first entry at the district office in Constance at a minute past eight in the morning to the last at the office in Tally at ten to five. I read the names and the districts and the nature of the entry and nothing else. Four thousand one hundred and six people. I finished at fourteen minutes past seven. The last entry was a birth, a girl, in Tally, entered at ten to five, named Marguerite.

Then the Evening came on from the set, and the Reader gave the river, and I went down on my knees on the stone of the hall in front of the trough with the case, and the Chair knelt beside me, and I made the hole, a finger’s depth, and he gave me the seed out of the case, and I put it in. It was at the weather. I know because the Reader said Charterland, clear, a cold night, as I covered it, and I thought, that’s Provision, that’s where the book began.

Nobody in the hall said anything. Six hundred people. They stood and listened to the Reader give the weather for fourteen provinces and looked at a stone trough with nothing showing in it.

Then the Chair stood up, and so did I, and he said to me, very quietly, so that only I heard: “Every one.” And I said, “Yes, sir.” And we stood with the others and listened to the rail.

The Third Minute

Seven seventeen. The rail.

The western line ran to time. The southern line ran to time. The night freight from Plenty to the bend is twenty minutes behind at Concord, a hot axle, and will make it up. The lakes line ran to time. The eastern branch to the Landing ran to time. The Cliff line ran to time; the ten-forty from Shelter will not stop at Gannet Notch tonight, for works. The Greens ferries are on the winter timetable from tomorrow.

I always like the rail. It is the one part of the Evening that is mostly good news, since the trains mostly run, and when they do not the Interior’s traffic office says why in a way that makes it sound like weather. A hot axle. For works. I read the rail the way the eighth Reader taught me to read it, which is like a woman telling her husband over the fence that his brother’s train will be late and that it isn’t anybody’s fault.

The third minute was the schoolroom’s.

The district school at Provision stands three streets from the old gymnasium where the nation began. It was built in Year 16, to the Settlement Standard, two stories of the white limestone round a yard, and the room where the Rise is first taught to the children of six is on the ground floor at the eastern end, with tall windows onto the yard and a box on the sill of the middle window. The colonel sat in that room at six, in Year 29, at the third desk from the front by the window. The desk is still there. It has J.A. cut into the lid with the point of a compass, very small, under the inkwell, and the children of that room have always known whose it was, though until Year 184 they did not know why it mattered.

The teacher of that room is Constance Ahl, who is forty-four, and who has taught the six-year-olds there for nineteen years. Her letter to the archivist is the shortest of the eleven. I give it whole.

We had the children back for it, with their parents, all twenty-six. They sat at their desks in their coats. The parents stood along the walls. I had the set on my desk. The box was on the windowsill with the soil in it from the yard, which the children had dug and sieved themselves on the first of the month, all twenty-six of them, with spoons.

At a quarter past, before the Reader began, I did what I do every morning at nine in that room. I stood at the front and said the first lesson. The wet spring, and then a wetter one. The decade when the lowest fields were simply understood to be gone. Moving uphill. Twice in a decade, each time a little further from where the grandmother was buried, each time with fewer dishes. The children said it with me. They always do, by the third week. They are six. They say it the way children say a rhyme, all together, a little ahead of me.

Then the Reader gave the river and the weather, and at the rail I gave the case to the child whose turn it was on the watering list, which was a boy named Tobin Dorrance, who is six and very serious and missed his front teeth in Eighthmonth, and he climbed up on the colonel’s desk and opened the case and took out the seed with his fingers, very carefully, the way I had shown him, and put it in the hole in the box on the sill, a finger’s depth, and covered it, and patted it, twice, and climbed down.

Then he said, quite loudly, in the middle of the rail: “Is it going to be a lady?”

I said I didn’t know.

He said, “If it is, can I tell her the lesson?”

I said yes.

He said, “All of it? From the wet spring?”

I said yes, all of it, in order, every morning.

He said, “Good,” and sat down at his desk, and folded his arms, and listened to the Reader say that the ten-forty from Shelter would not stop at Gannet Notch tonight, for works, and nodded, as though he had known it would not.

The Fourth Minute

Seven eighteen. The prices.

Grain at the Granary, Plenty, four marks the hundredweight, unchanged. Fish at the Cliff ports, salt cod, one mark six the stone; fresh, at the bend, two marks two. Salt at Assurance, ninety pennies the sack, down two. Iron, recovered, at Endeavor, eleven marks the ton. Copper, recovered, at the bend, thirty-one marks the hundredweight, up one.

The price of grain has been four marks the hundredweight, or within six percent of it, for sixty-six years. I have read it eight thousand eight hundred times. When I came to the line I thought, as I sometimes do, of the man who weighs it, at Plenty, whose name I learned from the book of the seven boys, which I have read, and who is eighty-eight and still goes into the Granary every morning, though his sons do the weighing now. And I thought, which I had not thought before, of the people in the west who asked the soil to be good, and of the Clockworks’ graph on the wall of the Chair of the Office’s room, which I have seen, with its line going level to the right-hand edge. I read the price of grain. Four marks, unchanged.

The fourth minute was the chapel’s.

The chapel on the south lip of the Spill is a small square building of rough limestone with a slate roof and no tower, set back a hundred yards from the lip of the Cliff where the river goes over, and it has a door on its eastern side and no windows on its western side, and inside it there are benches and nothing else. The Spill is so loud there that nobody speaks. You stand inside the door of the chapel and the whole building hums with the river going off the edge of the country a hundred yards away, four hundred feet, a mile wide, into the sea, and the spray comes over the roof in the wind and runs down the walls.

The four families who built it in Year 88 have asked that their names not be printed. The Section of the Bureau respected that in the ninth edition and I respect it here. The letter to the archivist is from a woman of the third family, who is seventy-one, and who has said the names on one evening in four for forty-eight years.

We began at twenty-five to seven, as we always do on the ninth of Ninthmonth, since it is the night of the Figure and people come, and the names take longer to say when there are people listening. My cousin’s son said them. He is thirty. It was his first ninth.

He began with the four. Ours. The Jenny Lind, the Constant Sorrow, the Fair Isle and the Wending, Year 86 and Year 87, with their crews, twenty-two names. Then every boat that has gone west since, in the order of their going, with their crews where we know them. Then, since the Speaking, at the twenty-three, after each name, the two words the Reader said. Living, west. My cousin’s son said them all. He has a good voice and he did not hurry.

The chapel was full and there were people outside on the grass in the spray, a hundred or more, with a set on the step turned up as loud as it would go, which is not very loud against the Spill. We could just hear the Reader. When my cousin’s son got to the last boat, which went out of Saltash in Fifthmonth this year, a skiff with one boy in it, and which the cutters did not reach, and which the Reader named on the Evening, my cousin’s son said its name and the boy’s name and stopped, and we heard the Reader through the noise, very faint, saying grain at the Granary, four marks.

There is a crack in the floor of the chapel by the door, on the inside, where the spray comes in under the door and the stone has never once been dry since Year 88, and moss grows in it, green, a strip about a foot long. That was where we put it. My cousin’s son made the hole with his finger in the moss. I gave him the seed. He put it in and covered it with the moss and the spray came in under the door and wet it, the way it wets everything.

A woman from Concord was there who had come down for it, and stood by the door. She is sixty-two. She went west from Concord in Year 140 at sixteen and is one of the twenty-three. She came back last year. She told us she had promised the woman who went out of Rand’s Notch in Year 133 that she would go to the rail at the Spill on a clear afternoon and look west and write down what it looked like now, and that she had, and had sent it, and that afterward she had come round to the chapel and heard her own name said in it, with living, west after it, by a stranger, and had come back every evening since.

She stood by the door while we planted it, with her hand flat on the wall, which was wet, and did not say anything. Nobody did. You can’t, at the Spill.

The Fifth Minute

Seven nineteen. The Notices.

Appointed, to the bench of the provincial court at Meridian, Theodora Waite. Licenses granted, for the month, in the Cradle, three hundred and twelve; in the Long Terraces, two hundred and four; in the Greens, one hundred and ninety. The school term in Whitekiln begins on the twenty-third. The Assembly has passed, on the third reading, the schedule of the convention’s amendment to the sixth article, without division.

Without division. I had read the convention’s result in Sixthmonth, when it was first passed, in the Notices, in the usual voice, between a license and a dredging closure. That night it was the third reading, and the schedule, which is the last step, and I read it as I read the licenses, and I heard Hollis Penn laugh, very short, behind the thick glass.

The fifth minute was the Hall’s.

The Hall of the Wandering Shoreline stands on the shingle at Second Harbor, on the northwestern shore of the lakes, a net loft and two old boatsheds joined together, with two bells over its door. One is the bell of Seaborne, which the people of the water brought north up the strait and left on the shingle in Year 46. The other is the Hall’s own. The Keeper is Philippa Marsh, who is sixty, the granddaughter of the Keeper who received the Census of the people of the water in Year 132, and the daughter of the boatwright Toby Marsh, who is eighty-nine and still goes down to the yard below the Hall every morning with his dog.

Her letter is long and very exact, as a Keeper’s should be. I give the part about the minute.

Since Year 185 I have read one page of the Record a day, aloud, in the net loft, at the hour the bells are rung, which is dusk. On the ninth I had the bells rung at a quarter past seven instead, so that the page would be read during the Evening, and I asked the town if that would trouble anyone, and the town said no, and came.

The page in order that day was the last page of the Record. Adah Penhallow’s close. I have read it aloud perhaps eleven times in my life and I have never got through it without stopping. I did not get through it that night either. I stopped at the place where she says she would like the record of the people of the water kept in the Hall, beside ours, with the bells, and I could not go on for a while, and the net loft was full, and nobody minded. Then I read the note my grandmother added in Year 132. Then I shut the book.

The tide was high. It was meant to be. I had looked it up. We went down the shingle to the slipway at the waterline, all of us, the whole of the net loft and half the town, with lamps, and the set from the loft brought down on a barrow, and the Reader giving the Notices out of it. My father came down with Cox, who is Second Mate’s granddaughter’s pup and is very badly behaved and sat on my foot.

I put the seed in at the foot of the slipway, in the shingle, above the water, a finger’s depth. Where the Census was left. My father said that was right.

And then something came up in the bay.

About two hundred yards out. A head. Dark, not gray. Young. It came up and looked at the slipway and the lamps and us, for about as long as it takes to say a name, and went down.

My father said, very quietly, “That’s twice.” He was down at the yard at dawn in Year 132 when the bundle came. He saw one then. He has never told anyone what it looked like. He told me on the shingle on the ninth. He said the one in Year 132 was gray and very old and looked back at the Hall as though she were checking it was the right house, and this one was young and looked at us as though she were checking we were the right people.

The Sixth Minute

Seven twenty. The Notices.

A dredging closure on the lower river below Meridian, the eleventh to the fourteenth, the eastern channel. A child found at Endeavor, a boy of four, at the pour, and returned to his family. From the Reserve Service at Tally: the ice line on the northern lakes is expected in the second week of Eleventhmonth. From Land’s End: the leaves came to the lip at dawn on the eleventh of this month and went back on the fourteenth; eleven went west and eleven came back.

The Interior has given the leaves a line in the Notices every month since Sixthmonth of Year 185, from the slate that the man on the brake at Land’s End keeps, and every month I read it in the same voice as the dredging closures. That night I read eleven went west and eleven came back, and thought it was a good number, and went on to the next slip.

The sixth minute was Land’s End’s.

The letter is from Ivy Ashgrove. She is twenty-five. She fishes off the hoist. Her grandmother, Lettice Ashgrove, is eighty-three and lights the lamp. I give the letter nearly whole, since it is better than anything I could put in its place.

Gran lit it at dusk as usual. It was a clear night and the Isles had gone violet and then gone, and the town was on the path, the whole of it, again, the way it has been every time anything has happened since the leaves first came. Amos had the hoist lit and was at the brake.

Gran sits now. She has done since Fifthmonth of last year, since I told her what the woman in the Isles said. She sat in her chair under the window with the matches. I was on the floor beside her with the pot on the table between us. The set was on the stairs, outside the door, turned low.

She said the boats. She always says them before she lights it, but that night she had lit it already, at dusk, so she said them again, at the Evening, and I think it is the first time in eighty-two years that anybody in our family has said them twice in a night. She said them sitting down. Tern, Year 104. Marigold, Year 119. Sally Dene, Year 126. The Ashgrove Girls, Year 131. Plover, Year 140. Hesper, Year 152. Faithful, Year 160. Wren and Robin, Year 171. Low Tide, Year 179. All nine. She doesn’t say the men’s names. She says that the boats are enough and that the men’s families can say the men.

Then I planted it, in the pot on the table, a finger’s depth. Gran watched me. She didn’t touch it.

The Reader was giving the Notices outside the door. When she said, From Land’s End, the leaves came to the lip at dawn, Gran laughed. She said, We’re in the Notices. And then she said, We’ve never been in the Notices. Not once. Not when Thomas went, because nobody told the capital. And now every month.

Then she put her hand on the window, low down, the way she does now, and looked out.

I want to put down one more thing, for the woman in the Isles, if anybody sends her this. I don’t know what she saw that night through her window. I know what I saw through ours. When I looked out after I planted it, west, at the dark where the Isles are, there was a light out there.

Very small. Very far. On the edge of the sea, low, where the Last Isle is. It was the color of a lamp with the wick turned down, and it was steady, and it was the first light I have ever seen in the west in my life, and I have looked every evening since I was four.

I didn’t say anything to Gran. I think she saw it too.

It was gone by the Account.

The Seventh Minute

Seven twenty-one. The Notices.

Lost on the Tennessee Water on the seventh, from the Bureau survey launch Kittiwake, off the second shoal: Joss Harlan, of Watch Post Seven; Mira Toll, of Tally. And two people of the island, who went out after them from the southern beaches in a small boat and were not recovered, and who did not give their names.

I had read the names of Bureau crews lost on the Tennessee Water more times than I can count. I had read the names of islanders who went out after them twice, in twenty-four years, in Year 167 and Year 179, and both times the Interior gave me their names on the slip, from the trading beaches, where somebody had said them. This time the slip said what I read. Who did not give their names. I read it in the voice. I did not lean on it. But I will say, for the archivist, that it was the first Notice in twenty-four years that I wished I could read twice.

The seventh minute was the Landing’s.

The Landing is a station of the Interior on the eastern coast, at the southern end of the Twelfth Province, at the end of an eighty-mile branch line built for no other purpose, and it has no name on any map. Those sentenced to exile are kept there a week before the cutter takes them east to the island. They are examined by a physician. They are permitted to write. Since Year 185 what they write is read aloud on the evening before the cutter, in the day room, by the physician, in order, to whoever will listen.

The physician is Ruth Okonkwo, who is sixty and has been at the Landing for twenty-two years. Her letter to the archivist is in the hand of a doctor, which is to say that I needed the archivist’s help to read it.

There was one going east that night. A woman of thirty-four from a farm on the lower river below Meridian, convicted in Sixthmonth of cutting a levee in a dispute with a neighbor over a drain, which flooded his bottom field and drowned his cattle and nearly drowned his son. She was very sorry. They usually are, about the works. She had written for six days. Forty pages. To her sister, she said, though she did not expect her sister to read it.

I read it in the day room after supper, beginning at half past six, to the station and the cutter’s crew and her. Everyone came. The crew do not speak to the exiles on the crossing, as the orders say, but since Year 185 they come to the reading, and the orders now say why they keep quiet afterward, and the crew like the reason better than the old silence, I think.

It was a good life. That is not a thing a physician is supposed to say about a person sentenced to exile, and I am saying it. It was a life on a farm on the lower river, in order, from a childhood with a father who drank and a mother who sang, to a marriage that did not work and a farm that did, and a drain, and a quarrel, and a night with a spade. She wrote it plainly. She did not excuse it. When I came to the night with the spade the room was very quiet, and she sat with her hands in her lap and looked at the floor, and I read it as she had written it, and went on to the end, which was the morning she was taken to the district seat, and a line to her sister about a hen.

I finished as the Evening came on. We had the set in the corner.

The seed was to go by the door of the day room, on the landward side, in the bed of thrift that grows there along the wall. I had meant to plant it myself. When the Reader began the Notices I took the case out of my pocket and went to the door, and she got up from her chair and followed me, and stood behind me on the step. She did not say anything. She is not permitted to ask for anything at the Landing; the orders say so. I turned round and gave her the case.

She knelt in the thrift and made the hole and put it in. She is a farmer. She did it properly. She firmed the soil with the heel of her hand. The Reader was giving the Bureau crew lost on the Tennessee Water, and the two people of the island who went out after them, and she stopped with her hand on the soil and listened to it, and then she said, to the bed of thrift, not to me, “They’ll be at the fire, then. The ones who went out. Their people will be at the fire, tonight, saying where they came from.” And I said I expected so.

The cutter took her at midnight. She had the coat, the boots, the knife, the hatchet, the file, the line, the hooks, the flint, the blanket, four days of food, the tin of salt, and the card. She put the card in her inside pocket, where she had kept her license. On the step, before she went down to the boat, she turned round and looked at the bed of thrift by the door, in the dark.

Nobody spoke to her on the crossing. The master told me the next morning that she sat in the stern with her hands in her lap and her face toward the island, and that when they put her ashore above the tide line on the stony beach, at about four, there was a fire on the slope above the beach, a long way up, that he had not seen there before, and that she looked at it, and picked up her kit, and walked toward it.

The Eighth Minute

Seven twenty-two. The Notices.

From the Defense Directorate: the fields of the Barrens stand as they are. The Directorate reports no change.

That was all there was on the slip. The Directorate has sent that line every month since Sixthmonth of Year 185, when it stopped the Mothers in the foundries beneath the Barrens and told them to stand in their pits with their arms folded. I always read it as I read the ice line. I have since learned that in the garrison towns of the Edge, where the families stand at the crossing in front of the post with the speaker on it every evening to hear the Evening, as they have since the post was put up, people laugh when I read it, every month, and that the laugh goes along the whole line of the Edge, from Threshold to the last garrison town, a quarter-beat apart, like the relays.

The eighth minute was the Hall of Lamps’.

The Hall of Lamps is under the reserve islands of the northern lakes, in the place the people who live there call the Below. I will not describe it, since the book of the seven boys and the dog describes it better than I could, and since I have never been there. The letter to the archivist is from the Fire-Keeper of the Below, Nell Brightwater, who is sixty-five, and it was written in pencil on the back of a Reserve Service chart and sent down to the capital from Tally on the lakes train by her father’s oldest friend.

Mother said the lamps. She is the eldest of us now, at eighty-eight. She sat in her chair at the head of the hall where her grandmother used to sit, and said them, all of them, in order, from the quarryman whose lamp is in the first niche by the door to the child whose lamp went into the last niche in Sixthmonth. Every evening the eldest who is present says them. It takes a long time now. She began at half past five. My father sat beside her and kept the book open on his knee in case she lost the place, and she did not lose the place once, and he did not look at the book once either, since he knows it too, though he was born Up.

Ansel Grieve was there, from Tally, who is eighty-nine and came down the steps on Seventeen on his granddaughter’s arm, and would not be left behind. He sat on the bench by the wall with the pipe in his teeth. The dog he sat with when he was a boy is buried on the high elbow of Seventeen, above us, under a square of green glass. Ansel brought a jar of soil from round the grave. That was what we put it in.

We had cut a new niche, at the end of the last row, empty. Dov made a lamp for it, at the pour, of the same green glass as the cases, with the dog in the bottom of it, as he makes all the lamps now, and the lamp is in the niche and is not lit. In front of the lamp, in the niche, there is a little bowl of Ansel’s soil. When Mother had said the last name, and the Reader had come to the Notices on the set that the Colonel gave us in Year 122, I put the seed in the bowl, a finger’s depth, with my thumb.

Then Mother said one more name. She said it after all the others, in the same voice, as though it were the next lamp. It was the name of the woman from the Isles who has the flower. Lantern. She is not one of ours and has no lamp. Mother said it anyway, at the end, in order, as though she were the newest of us.

Nobody said anything. Then my father said, “Good.” And Ansel took the pipe out of his teeth and said, “She’d have laughed,” and Mother said, “She’ll laugh later,” and the Reader on the set said that the fields of the Barrens stood as they were, and three hundred and forty people in the Hall of Lamps laughed, as they do every month, all at once, and the hall gave it back to them from every niche.

The Ninth Minute

Seven twenty-three. The Notices.

The Interior gives the level of the eastern interference tonight as none.

I read it last in the Notices, where it has always been. Every night of my twenty-four years as Reader it was in that slot, and for most of them it said low, or moderate, or once, in Year 168, for three nights, high, and I read high in the voice for the dredging closures, and the people of the eastern shore went to bed with their shutters closed. Since the hundred-and-fortieth day of Year 131 it has said none. The Chair of the Interior has kept it in because the people of the eastern shore listen for it. I read it and I thought of the island, and the fire, and I went on to the Account.

The ninth minute was the island’s.

I have to say first that the island has no set, and no clock, and that the people who live there do not count the days, and that I cannot say in what minute anything happened on the island on the ninth of Ninthmonth, or whether it happened on the ninth at all. I have put the island in the ninth minute because it had to go somewhere, and because the people of the island will not mind which minute it is in, since they do not count them.

There is no letter. What I have comes from the master of the Landing’s cutter, who was given it at a fire on the southern beaches in the second week of Tenthmonth by a man who has lived up a northern drainage for eighteen years mending nets, and who came down to the beaches that week, and sat at the fire, and said where he had come from and where he was going, and then, since the master asked him, once, by the island’s custom, told him about the seed. The master wrote it down that night on the cutter, as near as he could, and gave it to the Chair of the Interior, who gave it to the archivist. I have put it in my own words, except where his were better.

The man took the seed up the drainage in Eighthmonth, in its case, in his coat. He went to a settled place a long way up, where there are four houses of stone and timber in a clearing and a fire in front of them in a ring of stones, and where there is an old woman who, he said, sat at the same fire on a night in Year 131 when two strangers came down the trail from the bald, very late, one of them very tall and lit from inside with a glass case in her arms and a flower in it, and the other with four legs and a lamp. He said the old woman at the fire now, who is old herself, is the granddaughter of that one. He said they had heard all about it.

He gave her the seed. He asked her once, by the custom, whether she would take it. She could have refused. She did not.

He said they planted it at the fire, at the edge of the ring of stones, on the side away from the dark, on a night in early autumn, when it was time. The master asked him how they knew it was time. He said it was the night a traveler came out of the dark up the trail, a woman from the southern end of the island with a pack, and stopped at the fire, as everyone does, and sat down, and was given something hot, and the old woman said to her, Where from? And the traveler said where she had come from. And the old woman said, Where to? And the traveler said where she was going. And the old woman said, Then it’s time, and knelt at the edge of the ring of stones and put the seed in, with her finger, and covered it with the ash.

The master asked whether anyone had said anything else.

The man said no. He said that was the rule. You say where you came from and where you are going, and nobody asks you anything more.

The master said that he had then asked the man, since he was there, at the fire, where he had come from, and where he was going. And the man had said, From a river town. Eighteen years ago. To the drainage, in the morning, and had said nothing more, and the master had not asked him anything more, and in the morning the man went back up the beach toward the trees, and the master watched him go.

The Tenth Minute

Seven twenty-four. The Account.

Tonight, at eleven places, seeds are being planted.

Seven of the places are in the nation. The broadcast house, where this is read. The archive of the Office, on the east bank. The schoolroom at Provision where the Rise is first taught. The chapel on the south lip of the Spill. The Hall of the Wandering Shoreline at Second Harbor. The north window at Land’s End. The Landing. Four are outside it, and are given in the ninth edition of the History, which was issued on the sixth of this month.

At each of the eleven, memory is said aloud, in order, every day, and will go on being said. That is what the seeds need. The nation was asked for these places two years ago tonight, by the one who wrote the Accession, and the nation said yes.

She has said that when the last seed is in the ground, her flower will die, and that she will go out with it. She has said she does not know what will grow from the seeds, and that the nation should be patient.

The Interior has nothing to add to this Account, except that the nation has done what it was asked, and that she asked for nothing else.

The Interior’s sheet was ninety seconds, as the Account always is. The Chair of the Interior wrote it herself. I know because she told me, at a quarter to seven, when the boy brought it up the stair, and she came round to the door of the reading room, which no Chair has ever done, and stood in it, and said, I wrote it. I’m sorry it’s so short. I didn’t trust myself with a longer one. I read it through twice with my pencil and made no marks on it at all.

I read it at the pace of the river. When I came to she asked for nothing else, I looked up through the thick glass and the Chair of the Interior had her hand over her eyes.

The tenth minute was the Library Hull’s.

The letter came up the Way Round and through the races of the dams and up the strait to the Station on Mammoth, and from the Station by the launch to Tally, and from Tally to the archivist, in Eleventhmonth, written on a sheet of the pale stuff the people of the water bind their books in, in a small upright hand. It is from Teague, Keeper of the Borrowed Books, who is a hundred and twelve, and who wrote the Census. I give it whole. It is short, and it is better than I could make it.

We do not have your clocks. She keeps our time, in the south, by her light, once a minute, and the Clockworks send us your evening hour by her reckoning. So we did it then, as near as we could, which I expect was near enough, since you have told us your Evening runs from one end to the other in order and does not mind which minute a thing falls in.

Nerine died on the second of your Ninthmonth, in the Quiet, in the warmth of the southern vessel, with eleven of us beside her and her hand on my arm. She was two hundred and fifteen. We gave her to the Sleeper on the third, on the farm, in the reach she wardened for longer than your nation has had an Evening, and the ribbons above her will grow tallest, as they do. I had read her the chapter about us from your ninth edition the night before, which the colonel’s machine sent down to us in Eighthmonth on purpose. She listened to all of it. At the end she said that it was a good chapter and that they had spelled Bellwether right, and that she was glad, and that the history section was still weak. Then she went to sleep, and in the morning she did not wake.

So she did not see the planting. She did not mind. She said the planting was not for her. She said she had had her water, and her daughter, and her library, and the Governor, and a hundred and eight swims round the Way Round, and the boy, and that this was enough for anybody, and more than most.

On the night, in the Library Hull, the keeper whose turn it was said the line. We say one line a day, as you know, of the two hundred and fourteen who were changed, in order of their changing, and its living and its dead. It had come round to the beginning again that week. The line that night was the first. Absalom Teague, changed off the old eastern coast in the eighty-seventh year of the drowning, at eleven, knocked off a breakwater by a storm wave, who said yes. Who swam your Accession up the river to the landing at the bend in your ninth year and left it on the step by the lamp. Who found Underlight. Given to the Sleeper in the eighteenth year of the Up’s reckoning. A hundred and three living. He was my great-grandfather’s elder brother. I said it myself, since it was mine to say.

Then I planted the seed in the bed of pale plants by the shelf of the Borrowed Books, in the light of the vessel, a finger’s depth, with my thumb, since we do not have your fingers’ habits. The water was warm. The plants leaned toward it. I do not know whether that means anything. I have written it down, since I write everything down, and I have never made a mistake.

The Eleventh Minute

Seven twenty-five.

The eleventh minute is the shortest of the Evening. It has one line in it.

I put down the Account. I looked out through the thick glass at nothing, as I always do, and drew my breath to say the line, and the boy came through the door of the reading room.

He is not permitted in the reading room while the red lamp is on. No one is. He had a yellow slip in his hand from the telegraph room, from the Bureau’s wire, and his face was white, and he put the slip down on the desk in front of me without a sound, beside the clay pot, and went back out through the door, and I looked down at it.

I give the slip exactly. I have it.

BUREAU SPILL STATION TO READER 1925 SPILL GAUGE SEA AT FOOT OF CLIFF ONE QUARTER INCH ABOVE MARK NOT RISING CHECKED AND RECHECKED STEADY

There is an order in the Readers’ book, written by the first Reader in Year 37 on the instruction of the Chair of the Bureau of that year, that if the Bureau’s station at the Spill ever wires the Reader during the Evening, the Reader reads the wire. It is two lines in the book and nobody has ever needed it. The eighth Reader showed it to me on my first day and said, You’ll never use it. Nobody will. But read it every year on the night you were appointed, so you remember it’s there. I have read it every year in Sixthmonth for twenty-four years.

So I knew what to do. I want that understood, since people have since been kind enough to say that I was brave, and I was not. I knew what to do because the first Reader wrote it down a hundred and forty-nine years ago and every Reader since has read it once a year. That is what the Readers’ book is for.

I read the wire.

The sea stands one quarter of an inch above the mark.

I said it in the voice. I did not change it. I said it exactly as I had said the other line eight thousand eight hundred times, at the pace of the river, as if it were the price of salt.

Then, because the voice is supposed to be a voice and not a person, and because I knew, sitting there, that there were fourteen million people at their sets who had just heard a voice they had trusted their whole lives say something it had never said, and that a voice cannot say I am here and a person can, I said:

This is the Reader. My name is Agnes Mabry. I will stay here, and I will read you the Spill again as soon as it changes, and I will not go until it does.

And I sat back in my chair, and did not turn the red lamp off, and through the thick glass the four Chairs were standing very still, and the archivist was writing in her gray book, and the speaker on the wall gave me my own name back, a fraction late, in my own voice, which I had never heard say it before.

The clock said twenty-six minutes past seven.

The eleventh minute was the Bell Chamber’s.

The colonel’s machine sent its account to the archivist on the tenth of Ninthmonth, the next morning, by its own hand, and asked that it be given whole and not put in anybody’s words but its own, since, it said, it had been asked to write everything down without leaving anything out, and had not finished. I give it whole.

I planted the eleventh seed at a quarter past seven, at the first number, at the head of the colonel’s grave in the Bell Chamber, beside the flower, a finger’s depth, in the soil of the five basins that his mother spread under the sand in Year 69. She watched. She was sitting on the sand beside the flower with her legs folded under her and her hands in her lap. The Station’s set was on the sand by the wall, tuned to the Evening, as the colonel always had it. The lamps his mother put in the walls were on.

Her light was very low. I could see the wall of the chamber through her. The flower’s light was lower. Its five petals were open. There was nothing in the center of it where the seeds had been.

At the river, the flower’s light went down a little, and so did hers. At the weather, a little more. At the rail, a little more. I recorded it at each minute. The amount was the same each time, to the limit of my instruments, which are not good at measuring her. I believe now that it went down once for each seed, as each went into the ground, at each of the places, and that the order of the places was very nearly the order of the minutes, but I did not know that then. I recorded only that it went down.

At the prices, the first petal of the flower turned gray at the tip. At the Notices, the second.

She did not speak through the river or the weather or the rail or the prices or the first five Notices. She listened to the Reader. Her face was turned toward the set on the sand by the wall.

At the Account, which the Chair of the Interior wrote, she spoke to me. She said: “When I go out, Moth, finish the chapter.” I said that I would. She said: “And then begin again. From the girl in the water.” I said that I would. She said: “And read it to them. All eleven of them. When they come up. In order. They’ll need it the way she did.” I said that I would, and that I had already begun planning how, since there were eleven and I am one, and that I had calculated the routes. She laughed. It was very faint. She said, “Josef said you’d say that.”

The third petal turned gray. The fourth.

At the end of the Account she put out her hand and laid it on the top of my head, over the lamp, the way she did on the rocks at the foot of the eastern cliffs on the night of the hundred-and-forty-fifth day of the hundred-and-thirty-first year, and the way he did, and the way the girl in the water did, and she said:

“Later.”

Then the Reader drew breath on the set for the last line, and the fifth petal turned gray, and she went out.

She went out the way he described her going on the night he first met her, on the rocks, at fifteen: slowly, the way a lamp goes when someone takes it round a corner. I recorded it with every instrument I have. It took four seconds. At the end of the four seconds there was nothing on the sand beside the flower but the sand, and my lamp, and his mother’s lamps in the walls, and the flower, which was gray, all five petals, and closed.

The chamber said it back. It says back whatever is said in it, from every side, low and long, as it did for the colonel. The last thing said in it had been hers. “Later.” I recorded it. It came back from every side for about four seconds, very low, and stopped.

Then the Reader said, on the set, that the sea stood one quarter of an inch above the mark. And then she said her name.

I was not prepared for that. I have no category for it. I have filed it under the heading the Reader, which is a new heading.

I finished the chapter. It was the last chapter of the part of the log for Year 186, and it was about the seeds leaving the chamber in Eighthmonth in their cases. I read it to the flower, which was dead, and to the seed beside it, which was not, and to the grave, and to the place on the sand where she had been. It took nine minutes. When I reached the end I turned to the first page.

This is a personal log.

The Hour

I did not turn the red lamp off.

The order in the Readers’ book says that the Reader reads the wire. It does not say what the Reader does afterward. I had said I would stay, and read the Spill again when it changed, and not go until it did, and I had said it on the Evening, and so the red lamp stayed on, and the microphone stayed open, and the wire stayed live from the broadcast house to the mast and across the river to the relay house and along the rail to four hundred and six relay houses and every set in the nation.

So the nation heard the reading room for an hour.

I did not know that would happen. I had never thought about what the microphone hears when I am not speaking, since I am always speaking when it is on. It hears the clock. The clock on my desk has a sweep hand and it ticks, not loudly, and in the eleven minutes of the Evening I have never once heard it, since I am reading. For an hour on the ninth of Ninthmonth the nation heard it. I have since had letters, a great many, from people who sat by their sets in the river towns and the Cliff ports and the Greens and the Lake Country and the garrison towns of the Edge, for an hour, and listened to the clock in the reading room of the broadcast house tick, and to the Reader breathing, and once to the Reader drinking a little water, and once, at about twenty to eight, to the Reader saying, quietly, to someone in the room, No, Tam, leave it on the desk, I’ll see it. A woman in Plenty wrote that she had sat with her husband and her mother and her four children round the set in the kitchen for the whole of the hour and that nobody in the family had said a word, and that the youngest, who is three, had fallen asleep against the set with her ear to it, and that the woman had not moved her, since the child seemed to like the clock.

The boy brought slips. The Bureau’s station at the Spill wired every five minutes, on Penn’s order, which he gave from the telegraph room on the floor below, where he went at half past seven, to stand at the key himself. Every slip said the same.

SPILL GAUGE ONE QUARTER INCH ABOVE MARK STEADY.

I did not read them. I had said I would read the Spill when it changed. It did not change.

I will give what I have of the nation in that hour, from the letters, in no order, since there was no order. It was all at once.

In the river towns people went out into the streets. Not loudly. They stood outside their doors in their coats with the windows open behind them and the sets turned up, and listened to the clock, up and down the main streets, a quarter-beat apart as the wire relays stagger, so that the whole of a town’s main street ticked.

In the Low Quarter the furnace at the second glassworks blew its whistle at eight, as it does, for the change of shift, and the men coming off the shift did not go home. The foreman wrote to the Interior that they stood in the yard round the set in the gatehouse until twenty-six past eight and that the men going on did not go on, and that the pour was late by half an hour for the first time since Year 90, and that he did not intend to look into it.

On the Cliff, in every port, the lamps came on in the western windows. Not for the dead and not for the living. The Interior’s officer in Rand’s Notch wrote that he did not know what they were for and that neither did anybody he asked, and that by eight o’clock there was a lamp in every window of the town facing west, three hundred and four, as there had been on the night of the Speaking, and that this time he did not count them, since he knew the number.

At Land’s End, Ivy Ashgrove wrote, her grandmother said the boats a third time. Sitting down.

At the Spill chapel the four families said the names again from the beginning, the Jenny Lind and the Constant Sorrow and the Fair Isle and the Wending, and got to the end at about a quarter past eight, and began again.

In the Greens the ferries tied up and stayed tied up. In the Lake Country the peat-cutters sat in their huts. In the Numbered Wood the foresters sat in their lodges. On the Wall at Assurance the night watch sat on the parapet with the set and looked south at the light on the horizon that rises and falls once a minute, and the watch officer wrote that it went on rising and falling, once a minute, the whole time, and did not change, and that he found this a comfort and did not know why.

The night freight from Plenty to the bend, which was twenty minutes behind at Concord with a hot axle, stopped at the signal outside the capital at twenty-eight past seven, and did not go on, though the signal was clear. The driver wrote to the Interior’s traffic office that he had stopped because the fireman had the set in the cab, and that the two of them had decided between them that they would like to know whether the sea was going to stand at the mark before they took nine hundred tons of grain over the third bridge. The traffic office has entered the delay in its register as awaiting the sea. It is the only entry in the register with that cause.

In the garrison towns of the Edge, the families stood at the crossings in front of the posts with the speakers on them, and nobody laughed.

And at the posts of the Plague Watch along the ridge of the Twelfth, in the glass rooms at the tops of the hundred and twelve stairs, the watchmen sat at their telescopes facing east, out of habit, and did not see anything, and one of them, at Post Twenty-three, which was a captain’s command once, wrote a line in the post’s log at twenty to eight and showed it to the archivist afterward. Eastern interference, none. Western, none. The sea, a quarter-inch. Waiting.

In the small room behind the thick glass the Chairs did not sit down.

Margarethe Lowe came to the door of the reading room at about a quarter to eight and stood in it, again, and asked me, very quietly, whether I needed anything. I said no. She asked whether I would like her to stay. I said she could stay if she liked. She came in and stood by the window behind me, the west window, looking out across the river at the Low Quarter, with her keys in her hand, and did not say anything for the rest of the hour, and I was glad of her.

Ruth-Ann Calloway stood at the glass with her arms folded.

Simeon Adeyemi sat down on the floor of the small room with his back to the wall, which I would not have believed of a Chair if I had not seen it, and took his spectacles off and put them on his knee and closed his eyes.

The archivist stood at the glass beside Calloway with her gray book open and her pencil in her hand, and wrote nothing. I watched her. She had the book open at the back, where she keeps the lines, and her pencil was on the line after the last one, and she did not write anything on it for the whole of the hour. Once she looked up, through the glass, and met my eyes, and shook her head very slightly, and I understood her to mean not yet.

Tam stood by the door with the slips. Every five minutes he went down the stair to the telegraph room and came back up with another and put it on my desk beside the pot without a sound. ONE QUARTER INCH ABOVE MARK STEADY. I have twelve of them.

The pot was on the corner of the desk where I had put it. There was nothing showing in it. I looked at it a great deal.

At twenty-five past eight the boy came up the stair, and he did not walk. He ran. I heard him on the stair. He came through the door of the reading room with the slip in his hand and his face red, and put it on the desk, and stood there, which he is not permitted to do, and I let him.

BUREAU SPILL STATION TO READER 2025 SPILL GAUGE SEA AT FOOT OF CLIFF AT THE MARK CHECKED AND RECHECKED.

One hour, to the minute.

I leaned forward to the microphone.

The sea stands at the mark.

I said it in the voice. The same voice as always, as I have said it eight thousand eight hundred times, at the pace of the river. And then I turned the red lamp off.

The speaker on the wall gave it back to me, a fraction late, the sea stands at the mark, and then there was nothing in the reading room but the clock, which nobody but me could hear any more, and the Chair of the Interior behind me at the window, and the boy, who had sat down on the floor by the desk with his back to it and his knees up and his face in his arms.

Through the thick glass Hollis Penn had come up from the telegraph room and was standing in the doorway of the small room with his burned hands at his sides, and he was crying, as the chartmaker says he cried in the Clockworks, openly, without wiping it, and Calloway had her hand on his arm. Adeyemi was still sitting on the floor with his eyes closed. The archivist had her head bent over her gray book, and was writing, and I learned afterward that what she wrote on the open line at the back, in pencil, was a date and an hour, 9.ix.186, 1925 to 2025, and nothing else, and that she has not inked it, and will not, she says, until the Academy has decided what kind of line it is.

The Chair of the Interior, at the window behind me, said, “Thank you, Miss Mabry.”

It was the first time anyone had called me by my name in that room in twenty-four years. I said, “You’re welcome, Chair,” and found that I could not get up out of the chair for a while, and she did not ask me to.

After

The eleven pots, and the trough, and the box, and the bowl, and the crack in the chapel floor, and the bed of thrift, and the shingle at the slipway, and the edge of the ring of stones, and the bed of pale plants, and the soil of the five basins at the head of the colonel’s grave, showed nothing that night, or for some time after.

The flower in the Bell Chamber is dead. The colonel’s machine has left it where it is, at the head of the grave, gray, closed, beside the seed, and reads to both of them, every night, in order, from the girl in the water. It wrote to me in Tenthmonth to say that it is reading the log aloud now at a different pace from before, slower, since it has calculated that a seed that has just been planted may need more time per chapter than a flower that has been listening for fifty-five years, and that it does not know this, and has decided to assume it.

The one called Lantern is gone. The Academy has not admitted her going to any register. The Office has not entered it in its book, since she was never in it. The Section of the Bureau has added one line to the end of the sixth chapter of the ninth edition, for the next printing, under the last words she gave it, and has shown me the line, and asked whether I approve it, since it concerns the Evening. It says: She went out on the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 186, at twenty-five minutes past seven, at the eleventh minute of the Evening, while the line was being read. I said that I approved it. I asked them to add in order. They have.

The sea has stood at the mark every night since.

Ilsa Vren’s letter came on the leaves on the fourteenth of Ninthmonth, with the man on the brake’s list, addressed to the Reader, at the broadcast house, by name. It is the only letter I have ever received addressed to me by name at the broadcast house. I give the part that belongs here.

At twenty past seven by your clock, which the Clockworks keep for me in this room, I lit a lamp in my window. It is an old Bureau observer’s lamp, brass, that the Clockworks made for me from a drawing. I have never lit it in fifty-three years, since the people who own these mountains have asked, since before the nation had a name, that no light be shown on the outside of them, and I agreed, since I was their guest. I asked the Heir in Eighthmonth whether I might light it on the ninth. He said I might light it whenever I liked for the rest of my life and that he was sorry nobody had thought to say so before.

I lit it for Lettice Ashgrove at Land’s End, so that she would know that someone had seen hers. I don’t know whether she saw it. Her granddaughter will tell me.

At twenty-five past seven I heard you say the sea stood a quarter of an inch above the mark. I had my instruments on the Cliff, as I always have. Every light on the Cliff stayed lit for the hour. Every one. I logged them. Then you said your name. I have heard your voice every night for fifty-three years and I did not know it. I have written it at the head of tonight’s page, in the column where I put the weather.

L.E. north: Lit.

On the twentieth of Ninthmonth, the Chair of the Office of Population Management came to the reading room at four in the afternoon, while I was sorting the slips, and asked whether he might put something to me that the four Chairs had discussed, and that they did not intend to put to me as an order, since they had agreed that the Reader is not given orders about the Evening any more.

He said that the Office has the life of every citizen of the nation in its book, from Year 4, in order, entered by the Office’s clerks as it happened, without a gap, and that most of those lives are ended now, and that nobody has ever read any of them aloud. He said that the one called Lantern had asked for places where memory is said aloud, in order, every day, and that the Evening was one, and that she had asked for nothing else; but that he had been thinking, since the hour, that the Evening might say one more thing, every night, if the Reader were willing; and that it might take a minute.

He said: One life. From the book. In order. Beginning with the first entry, in Year 4, and going on, one a night, for as long as there is an Evening.

I asked him how long that would take.

He took his spectacles off and did the arithmetic in his head, standing in the door of the reading room, and said that at one a night it would take about ninety thousand years to read the lives already in the book, and that by then there would be more, and that he did not think this was a reason not to begin.

I said that I would like to think about it.

I thought about it for a night. Then I went down to the Readers’ cupboard by the chimney and took out the Readers’ book and read the seventh Reader’s entry for Year 141 again, the four minutes, and the line at the end of it, I think once is enough for a thing to have been said. And then I read the eighth Reader’s entry for the night she taught me the order about the Spill wire, which says, She’ll never use it. But she’ll read it every year, so she knows it’s there. And then I wrote in the book, under my own last entry, the night’s date, and one line. And then I went up to the Chair of the Office’s rooms on the east bank, at nine in the morning, and said yes.

The Evening will have a twelfth minute from the first of Firstmonth, Year 187.

From the Readers’ book, in the hand of the ninth Reader.

9 Ninthmonth, 186. I read it. The river, the weather, the rail, the prices, the Notices, the Account. Then the Spill wire, which the first Reader wrote down for me in Year 37, and which I have read every Sixthmonth since 162 so that I would know it was there. Then my name. Then an hour of the clock. Then the line.

She went out at the eleventh minute, while I was reading. I did not know it at the time. I am told she was listening.

I said my name once. I think once is enough for a thing to have been said. I won’t do it again.

I’m told the clock was very loud.

A. M.

Book Ten: The Open Page

Being the page of the Record of the Wandering Shoreline that was closed in Year 132 and opened again in Year 187, kept by Philippa Marsh, Keeper of the Hall at Second Harbor

The Page

The Record of the Wandering Shoreline has a page at the end of it that has been closed and opened more often than any other.

Adah Penhallow, who made the Record and was Keeper for thirty-seven years, headed it The Last. It was for the people of the floating cities who went somewhere the Hall could not follow: south with Seaborne’s Remnant, east into the mountains with Greenhaven and Marigold and Oxbow and Watermeadow and the small settlements of the eastern sound. She wrote in her Close, in Year 94, that she had spent her life writing down where everyone went, and that most of them came ashore, and some went south, and some went east, and that one page was still open. She meant that one.

My grandmother, Ruth Marsh, closed it in Year 132. She was Keeper after Adah. On the morning of the third of Thirdmonth in that year my father, who was a boy then and builds boats on the shingle below the Hall still, at ninety, found a bundle on the slipway at the waterline, in oiled cloth, with four books in it from the people of the water, who had counted themselves, and who said that the people Seaborne had taken south were alive on rafts in the warm shallows at the mouth of the strait, sixty-three of them, at a place called Thalassa. My grandmother wrote that she had closed the page headed The Last, and that the reader would see why. The reader did. Seaborne’s Remnant was found. The page was finished. She ruled a line under it in ink and wrote closed in the margin, and the Hall has kept it closed for fifty-five years.

I opened it again on the first of Firstmonth, Year 187.

I did it because of the seed. One of the eleven seeds was planted on the shingle below the Hall, at the foot of the slipway, at the place where the bundle was found, on the ninth of Ninthmonth last year, during the Evening, by me, with my father and his dog beside me and half the town on the shingle with lamps, while the Reader gave the Notices on a set on a barrow. Since then I have read a page of the Record aloud every day at the hour the bells are rung, as I have since Year 185, in order, and when I finished the Record I began the Census of the people of the water, which is kept beside it, as the Chairs asked; and every day I have gone down to the slipway afterward and looked at the shingle, and there has been nothing there but shingle.

And on the night of the first of Firstmonth the Evening had a twelfth minute for the first time, and I heard it in the net loft, and when it was over I went to the shelf and took down the Record and opened it at the last page, and read the line my grandmother ruled under The Last in Year 132, and the word closed in the margin; and I turned over the page after it, which was blank, and headed it.

I did not head it The Last. Adah’s heading was for people who had gone somewhere the Hall could not follow. This page is for something that has come to eleven places where people say things aloud in order, and the Hall is one of them, and it seemed to me that the Hall ought to keep count of it, since the Hall is the only house on land that ever kept count of anything nobody else would, and since the archivist at the Academy has asked me to.

I headed it The Open Page. I have kept it in order, by the date each thing happened, and when I have had a letter about a thing I have copied the letter into the page, and when I have not, I have written down what I was told and who told me. I have kept it through Year 187, and I give it here whole, as it stands at the end of the year.

I have not closed it.

Firstmonth

The first of Firstmonth, Year 187. The broadcast house, New Carthage.

The Evening had a twelfth minute tonight for the first time in its history, and I heard it in the net loft at Second Harbor with about forty people from the town, who had come up to hear it, and my father, and Cox.

The first eleven minutes were the same as always. The river at nine gauges, the weather, the rail, the prices, the Notices, the Account, which was about the new year’s rail schedule. Then the Reader said the line. The sea stands at the mark. And then, where the Evening has always ended, it did not end. There was a short pause, the length of a breath, the same pause the Reader makes before the Bureau crews lost on the Tennessee Water. And then the Reader said, in the same voice:

From the book of the Office of Population Management. The first entry.

And she read it.

I give it from the Office’s printed copy, which the Office sends now to anyone who asks, the morning after, for each night’s life. I have asked, and they will send me every one, and I have decided to copy each of them into the Hall’s own book, in order, beside the Record. That will take some years.

Entry one. Made at Provision, in the old gymnasium, on the first day of the register, in the fourth year, at about nine in the morning, by the clerk who made it, of herself.

Ottilie Okafor. Clerk of the provisional council. Born on the climb, in the eighty-second year of the Rise, in a camp on the eastern slope of the highlands above the old river, to parents who were not entered, since there was no book; aged thirty-three in the fourth year. Entered first because she had the pen.

Married, in the seventh year, at Provision, to Tomas Okafor, a carpenter of the gymnasium. Three children, entered in their turn: a daughter in the eighth year, a son in the eleventh, a daughter in the fifteenth.

Removal, in the eighteenth year, from Provision to New Carthage, to the east bank, as first clerk of the Office of Population Management, a post she kept for thirty-one years. Under her the register was kept without a gap. She made, by the Office’s reckoning, about four hundred thousand entries in her own hand.

Died at New Carthage, in the sixty-first year, at ninety, in her bed, with her daughters. Entered by her granddaughter, who was a clerk of the Office.

That is the first entry.

Then the Reader said nothing for a moment. Then she said, Tomorrow, the second. And the Evening ended.

It was a minute. A little under. Nobody in the net loft said anything for a while. Then one of the old men from the boatyards, who has never once in my hearing said anything that was not about wood, said, She entered herself first because she had the pen, and laughed, and everyone laughed, and my father said it was the most sensible thing he had ever heard of a government doing.

The same night. The broadcast house.

The letter came from the Reader, a week later, to the archivist, who sent me a copy for the page.

After the twelfth minute I turned the red lamp off and looked at the pot. I look at it every evening when the lamp goes off. There has been nothing in it since the ninth of Ninthmonth. Tonight there was.

It was very small. A shoot. Pale, almost white, about as long as the nail of my little finger, standing straight up out of the soil from the roof garden, in the middle of the pot, where I put the seed. It was not there at a quarter past seven. I would have seen it; I watch the pot while I read. It was there at twenty-seven minutes past. It was lit, faintly, from inside, so that the soil round it was lit a little, in a ring about the size of a coin.

The boy saw it first. He was standing by the door with the slips. He said, “Miss Mabry,” and pointed. He calls me Miss Mabry now. Everyone in the broadcast house does, since the ninth of Ninthmonth. I have asked them not to and they do not listen.

I did not touch it. I sat at the desk with my hands in my lap and looked at it for about an hour. Then I went upstairs to the Readers’ rooms and wrote in the Readers’ book. Then I came down again, since I could not sleep, and read the first entry again, aloud, to the pot, alone, in the reading room, with the red lamp off. Ottilie Okafor. Entered first because she had the pen.

The shoot did not change while I read. I am told it would not have. I read it anyway.

Secondmonth

The fourteenth of Secondmonth. The schoolroom of the district school at Provision.

From the teacher, Constance Ahl, to the archivist, who sent me the copy. It is a little longer than her letter about the ninth of Ninthmonth, and she apologizes for it at the end.

It came up in the night. The children found it in the morning when they came in at nine. Tobin Dorrance found it, since it was his turn on the watering list again, and he went to the box on the windowsill with the can and stopped, and put the can down, and came and got me by the sleeve.

It is a shoot, like the one the Reader described in the Notices, pale and lit. It is about an inch high. It was not there at four the afternoon before, when the last child on the list watered it.

I did not know what to do. Nobody has told the schools what to do. I did what I do every morning, which is the first lesson. I stood at the front and the children stood at their desks, and I said the wet spring and the wetter one, and they said it with me, all twenty-six, a little ahead of me, the way they do. Moving uphill. Twice in a decade. Each time with fewer dishes. And when we got to the end, which is the end of the first lesson and is where the children of six stop, and the next part waits for when they are eight, Tobin said, from the back, quite loudly, “And then the water stopped.”

That is not in the first lesson. That is in the lesson at ten. I asked him where he had heard it. He said everybody knew it. He said it was on the Evening. He said, “It should know how it ends. Or it’ll worry.”

So I told it. The end. The Stopping. Year One. Not the whole lesson at ten, with the arithmetic. Only that the water stopped, in one season, and has not moved since, and that we know now who stopped it. The children said it with me, since they had heard it on the Evening too. I don’t know what the Academy’s education section will say. I have written to them.

The shoot was a little brighter when we finished. Tobin says it was a lot brighter. I say a little. We have agreed to disagree.

Since then we have told it the first lesson every morning at nine, and then the end, every morning. The shoot is three inches high now and has two leaves, narrow, gray-green, at the bottom. The children draw it every afternoon in their copybooks. I am enclosing one of the drawings, which is Tobin’s. You will see that he has given it a face. I have told him it does not have a face. He says it will.

I am sorry this is so long.

The drawing is pinned in the Hall now, on the wall of the net loft beside the bells, with the archivist’s leave. It is in pencil, in a copybook, on squared paper. It is a box on a windowsill with a stalk coming up out of it with two leaves at the bottom and a round face at the top, smiling, with no front teeth.

Thirdmonth

The third of Thirdmonth. The Library Hull, Underlight.

The letter from Teague, Keeper of the Borrowed Books, came up the strait to the Station on Mammoth in Fourthmonth, and was sent on to me directly, since he addressed it to the Hall. I have copied it whole.

To the Keeper of the Hall of the Wandering Shoreline, from the Keeper of the Borrowed Books.

Your grandmother received our count on the third day of your Thirdmonth in your hundred-and-thirty-second year. I have remembered the date, since it is the day of the year when we say the line of Harrow Fenn, who taught me to read, and who is still living, at two hundred and seven, and complains. I am writing on that day this year because it happened on that day.

The keeper whose turn it was had said the line of Harrow Fenn, in the Library Hull, in the light of the middle vessel, and its living and its dead. Harrow Fenn was there, since he likes to hear his own line said, and says so. When the keeper had finished he said, from the doorway, “You left out my second wife,” and the keeper said, “She was not of the line,” and Harrow Fenn said, “She was of me,” and everybody laughed, since he says this every seven years.

And then one of the children who had come to listen said, “Look.”

In the bed of pale plants by the shelf of the Borrowed Books, where I put the seed, a shoot had come up. It is white, and lit, and in the light of the vessel it is hard to see, since everything here is lit; but the pale plants round it had leaned toward it, all of them, the way they leaned the night I planted it, and stayed leaned, and it was standing in the middle of them like a candle in a ring of hands.

I have looked at a great many things in my life. I have looked at every page of every book that a girl in a well took out of Bellwether’s library and never brought back. I have never seen anything like that.

Harrow Fenn came and looked at it for a long time. He was changed at nine, in the ninety-ninth year of the drowning, off the northeastern coast, and he is the second eldest of us now that Nerine is given to the Sleeper. He said, “That’s hers, then.” I said I thought it was. He said, “She always did like an audience,” and went away, and I believe he was crying, though in the water it is hard to tell.

We say the lines to it now. One a day, as always, in order. It does not seem to mind which line. It brightens a little at each. I have written that down, since I write everything down, and I would like it on your page, since your page is the only one that would want it.

I enclose, for the Hall’s copy of our Census, a correction. In the Register of Every Line, under the line of Harrow Fenn, please add: and one wife, not of the line, but of him.

I have made the correction in the Hall’s copy, in ink, in the margin, as he asked.

Fourthmonth

The ninth of Fourthmonth. The east bank archive, New Carthage.

The ninth of Fourthmonth is the day the Office publishes the Standing Figure for the year, as it has every year since the register began. It is the first time it has done so since the Speaking.

I am not a person who reads the Figure. Most of us at Second Harbor are not. It is eighty pages of yield curves and fishery tonnage and river freight capacity, and the Academy audits it, and in a good year it runs ahead of the births and nobody notices. This year everyone noticed. The Office printed it, as it always does, in the bulletin, with its derivation, eighty-four pages. And on the front page of the bulletin, above the Figure, in the Office’s usual type, there was a paragraph that has never been printed there before, which I give, since I have the bulletin.

The Standing Figure for Year 187 is derived, as every Figure has been, from the arable acreage, the yield, the fishery, the freight, the stored reserve and the projected loss, all of which are printed below and may be checked. It is derived also, for the first time, with the tables of the soil prepared by the machines of the Clockworks in the western mountains, which the Chair of the Bureau brought back in Year 185 and which the Office and the Academy have examined for two years and found to agree with the Office’s own figures wherever the two can be compared. The tables are printed in the appendix. They show the soil’s yield level for the coming year, and for every year that they reach.

No number has been received from the post at Sixty-Two. None will be. If the Office ever acts on its own authority under the sixth article again, it will publish, at the same time, the reason for the act, so far as it is known, as the founding instrument now requires.

The Figure is higher this year than last, by the number printed below.

I asked my father what the number meant. He said it meant more licenses. He said it meant that couples in the Cradle and the Long Terraces who would have waited six months would wait four, and couples who would have waited four would wait two. He said it was the first time in his life that he could remember the Figure going up by more than a few hundred, and that he was ninety.

The same night. The east bank archive.

From Hesper Kann, registrar of the Office, who reads the day’s entries aloud in the entrance hall at the closing hour, to the archivist.

There were about two hundred people in the hall tonight, for the Figure. I read the day: four thousand three hundred and eleven entries. More than usual, since it was the ninth, and the district offices always have a rush of licenses on the ninth of Fourthmonth.

When I finished, the Chair came down from his rooms, as he does on the ninth, and stood with me by the trough. He had the Office’s copy of the bulletin under his arm. He said, “Every one.” I said, “Yes, sir.” We have said it to each other every ninth since the planting.

And then a woman at the back of the hall, by the doors, said, “Oh.”

It was in the trough. A shoot. Lit. About half an inch. It was not there at half past five, when I began. I would have seen it. I read standing beside the trough, and I look at it between the districts.

The Chair knelt down beside it. He took his spectacles off. He said, very quietly, so that only I could hear, “Four thousand three hundred and eleven,” and then he said, “It came up while you were reading the licenses,” and I said yes, I thought it had, since it was not there during the deaths. And he stayed on his knees on the stone of the hall for a long time.

Above the door, on the outside, under the motto, is the number with five figures, and the four words. The Chair says he sometimes thinks the shoot came up on the ninth of Fourthmonth because it knew. I say it came up while I was reading, and that the reading is what it was waiting for, and that we read every night. We have not agreed. I have written both of them down.

Fifthmonth

The eleventh of Fifthmonth. Land’s End.

The eleventh of Fifthmonth is the day the leaves come to the lip at Land’s End each month, at dawn, and it is the day, in Year 185, that the first party crossed. It is also the month the Tern went west, in Year 104, though nobody in Land’s End knows the day.

From Ivy Ashgrove, to the archivist and to me. She wrote to me separately, since, she said, Land’s End and the Hall are the only two of the eleven that keep a light for boats, and she thought the Hall would understand.

The leaves came at dawn as usual. Fourteen went west this month, and Amos has them on the slate. I went down to the lip to see them off and came back up the path for breakfast, and Gran was sitting in the chair under the window upstairs, which she never does in the morning, with her hands in her lap, looking at the pot on the table.

It came up in Thirdmonth. A shoot. I wrote to you about it then. It has been growing since. By Fourthmonth it had leaves and a stem, and at the top of the stem a bud, small, closed, white. Gran says the boats to it every night when she lights the lamp, sitting down. She has said them to it since the planting. Before that she had said them to the window for sixty years.

This morning the bud had opened.

It is a flower. Five petals, white, round, each about the size of the end of a thumb, round a middle that looks like gold dust. Like the one in the colonel’s machine’s log, on the bald, in Underneath the World. Lit from inside. Not bright. About as bright as the lamp with the wick turned all the way down.

And sitting in the middle of it, there is someone.

I don’t know what else to write. There is someone sitting in the middle of the flower. Very small, about the height of my thumbnail, made of light, white, the same white as the flower, with arms and a head, sitting with its knees up, the way a child sits on a step. I can see it best if I don’t look straight at it. Gran can see it if she looks straight at it. Gran says that is because she is old and I am not.

It was facing the window. West.

Gran had been sitting looking at it since I went down to the lip. She hadn’t called me. When I came in she said, “Sit down, Ivy.” I sat. She said, “It came out while you were gone. Out of the middle, the way a moth comes out.” She said, “It’s been looking at the window the whole time.”

Then she said the boats. In the morning, which she has never done. Sitting down. Tern, Marigold, Sally Dene, The Ashgrove Girls, Plover, Hesper, Faithful, Wren and Robin, Low Tide. All nine, in order, the way she always says them.

And at Tern the someone in the flower turned round.

It turned round and looked at Gran. I saw it. It sat there in the middle of the flower and looked at her with its little face while she said the rest of the boats, all eight, and when she got to the end it turned back to the window.

Gran didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she said, “Well, it knows which one’s first.” And then she said, “Get the matches, Ivy. I want to light the lamp.”

It was nine in the morning. The sun was full up over the wheat. She has never once in her life lit the lamp in daylight. She lit it. She sat in the chair with the lamp lit in the window in the sun and the flower on the table and the someone in it looking west, and she said she was going to sit there for a bit, and I left her.

Amos says the woman in the Isles will have seen the lamp lit in the daytime, through her window, and will be wondering what on earth we’re doing. I’ve written to her on the leaves. I said: we’ve got one.

Sixthmonth

The twenty-second of Sixthmonth. The Landing.

From Ruth Okonkwo, physician of the Landing, to the archivist. The archivist says that she has learned to read the doctor’s hand now and that it took her a month.

There were two going east this week. A man of fifty from the Greens, for a killing in the second degree, a quarrel over a skiff, a knife, a man dead on a jetty at Constance. And a girl of twenty from Saltash, for an attempt against the western limit: she took a skiff past the cutters in Thirdmonth to go west the old way, over the gas, because, she wrote, she did not want to go on a leaf like a parcel, and the cutter Halyard* caught her at mile ninety-four and towed her in. The line was withdrawn for the leaves and not for boats, and she knew it, and went anyway. She was very angry about the leaves. She wrote forty-one pages, and about thirty of them were about the leaves.*

I read the man’s life on the first night and the girl’s on the second. I read the girl’s in the day room with the station and the cutter’s crew and her, as I always do. She sat in the front with her arms folded and glared at me the whole time. It was a good life. It was a short one, since she is twenty, and most of it was about a boat she built herself in her father’s shed when she was fourteen, and about looking west from the top of the road at Saltash every evening of her life, and about the Evening of the ninth of Ninthmonth two years ago, when she heard the names and decided she was going to be the first to cross the gas and come back on her own, and not be lifted. She said the twenty-three were very brave and that she did not want to be lifted. She said she wanted to see the gas.

When I got to the part where the Halyard caught her, at mile ninety-four, the boatswain of the cutter, who was in the day room, said, out loud, “She was making seven knots in a southerly with a reefed main and I’ve never seen better seamanship from anyone under forty.” Nobody is supposed to speak at the reading. He went red. The girl turned round in her chair and looked at him for a long time and then turned back, and I think it was the first time she had not looked angry since she came.

When I finished, I went to the door of the day room, as I do every night now, to look at the bed of thrift on the landward side. It had come up. The shoot. I don’t know when; it was not there at six. It was lit, and about an inch high, and it was in the middle of the thrift where the farmer from the lower river put the seed in Ninthmonth, with the heel of her hand.

The girl came and stood behind me in the doorway and looked at it. She said, “What’s that?”

I told her.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she said, “It came up during mine.” I said yes, I thought so. She said, “Not his. Mine.” I said that I did not know whose, and that it had not been there at six, and that it might have been either. She said, “It was mine. It came up at the bit about the boat.” And she went back in and sat down.

She went east on the cutter on the second night. The crew did not speak to her on the crossing. The master told me that when they put her ashore on the stony beach at four, she picked up the kit and turned round in the dark and said to the cutter, to all of them, “Tell the bosun thank you,” which she is not supposed to do either, and walked up the beach toward the trees.

I have asked the master to ask at the trading beaches whether she found a fire. He says the people there will not tell him, since that would be telling an exile’s history, and that is not the rule. He says he will ask anyway, once.

Seventhmonth

The ninth of Seventhmonth. The Hall of Lamps, the Below.

From Nell Brightwater, Fire-Keeper of the Below, in pencil, on the back of a chart, by the lakes train from Tally.

Mother died in Sixthmonth. On the nineteenth, in the low cave, on the bed of old wool where I was born, at eighty-nine. My father was with her. So was I. She asked for the lamps to be said, at the end, and my father said them, all of them, in order, from the first quarryman, since he is the eldest present now, though he was born Up, and the Council of Lamps sat that night and stamped it, since there was no rule for it, and there is now.

He got to the end of the lamps, the last child, and she was still breathing, so he said Lantern, at the end, the way she did on the ninth of Ninthmonth, and Mother laughed. Very faint. And then she said, “Mine next,” and then she went.

Her lamp went into the next niche on the twentieth. Dov made it. It has the dog in the bottom.

So on the ninth of Seventhmonth, when my father said the lamps in the evening, he came to the end and said her name for the first time, as the newest lamp, after the last child and before Lantern. Tamsin Brightwater. Fire-Keeper. Born in the Below, in the low cave. Married a foundling from Meridian who fell in, and put up with him for seventy years.

He did not say the last part. I have added it. She would have.

And when he said her name, the bowl in the empty niche at the end of the last row, in front of the lamp that is not lit, had a light in it.

It was there when he said Tamsin. It was not there when he said the last child. Ansel saw it first. He was on the bench by the wall with his granddaughter, since he comes down on the ninth now, every month, on her arm, and will not be told. He took the pipe out of his teeth and said, “Cass,” and pointed, and my father turned round in his chair.

It is a shoot, in the bowl of soil from round the dog’s grave. White, lit, very small. It came up while he was saying Mother’s name.

My father sat in the chair at the head of the hall where Mother sat, and her grandmother before her, and looked at it for a long time. Then he said, “Well, she always did have to have the last word,” and three hundred and forty people in the Hall of Lamps laughed, all at once, and the hall gave it back to them from every niche, including hers.

Eighthmonth

The fourth of Eighthmonth. The Hall of the Wandering Shoreline, Second Harbor.

This one I write myself, since it was mine.

The tide was high in the evening, near the top of the springs, and the town knew it, since the town always knows the tide, and about thirty people came down to the net loft for the bells and the page. I had the bells rung at dusk. I read the page in order. It was in the Census of the people of the water, which I had been reading since Fifthmonth, when I finished the Record and began again with the book that sits beside it, and the page that came that evening in order was the first page of the Census itself, A Word from Nerine, which begins: I am a hundred and sixty-one years old and I have been a fish for a hundred and forty-nine of them.

I read it all. It is one page and a little. She talks about the floating cities, and the Governor, and the well, and her daughter making water for her in the north, and the machine of her grandson’s that asked whether anybody ever counted them. When I came to Keep it dry, which is very near the end, half the net loft laughed, since the Hall leaks and everybody in Second Harbor knows it.

Then we went down to the slipway, all of us, with lamps, the way we have done every evening since the ninth of Ninthmonth. My father came down with Cox, who ran ahead and stopped at the foot of the slipway and sat down very suddenly, which he never does, and did not move.

It was there. At the foot of the slipway, in the shingle, above the waterline, where I put the seed, where the bundle was found in Year 132. Not a shoot. It had come up in Fourthmonth, and I had seen it every evening since, a shoot and then a stem and then two leaves, and in Seventhmonth a bud. That evening the bud had opened. Five white petals, lit, round a middle like gold dust, standing in the shingle eight inches high with the tide coming in a yard below it.

And in the middle of the flower there was someone sitting, the way Ivy Ashgrove wrote that there was at Land’s End. Very small. Lit. With its knees up. Facing the water.

Nobody on the slipway said anything. Thirty people with lamps. The dog sat at the foot of the slipway with his nose about a foot from the flower and did not move, and he is the worst-behaved dog in the Anchorage, and I had never seen him still before.

And then something came up in the bay.

Several. Not one. Heads, dark, coming up out of the water about forty yards out, one and then another and then four or five, in a line, the way swimmers come up to breathe, and stopped, and looked at the slipway. Young, all of them. Then one of them, a girl, came in. She swam to the foot of the slipway and put her arms on the stones at the waterline, the way, my father says, the old Keepers’ books say the people of the water used to put their arms on the rails of the floating cities at night to trade, and pulled herself up a little out of the water, and looked at the flower, and at the someone sitting in it, from about a yard away.

She was of the Race Folk. I know because my father knew her. She is the girl who took the seed for the Library Hull down the strait and round the Way Round last year, in thirty-five days, and he had met her in Eighthmonth when she came up the strait to the Station on Mammoth and across the lakes to the Hall to see the slipway before she went, since she wanted to see the place where the Census was left. She is about fourteen. She has a fin like a pale fan.

She looked at the someone in the flower for a long time. The someone in the flower looked at her. Then it turned round and looked at the Hall, up the shingle, at the two bells over the door, and turned back.

The girl said, to my father, “Is it the right house?”

My father said, “It’s the right house.”

She said, “Then it’s checking.” And she let go of the stones and went back into the water and the heads in the bay went down, all of them, one after another, and the bay was flat.

My father stood on the slipway with his hand on the dog’s head for a long time. Then he said, “Three times,” and went up the shingle to the yard.

The nineteenth of Eighthmonth. The chapel on the south lip of the Spill.

From the woman of the third family, to the archivist. She has asked again that her name not be given.

It came up in the moss. We have watched the crack by the door every evening since the ninth of Ninthmonth. It came up in Fifthmonth and it has grown in the spray, very fast, faster than any of the others from what we hear, which my cousin’s son says is because nothing in the world is ever as wet as the floor of this chapel.

Tonight the flower opened while my cousin’s son was saying the names. He had got to the Kestrel, the Bureau’s survey ship that went into the gas in Year 61 past the line, with its crew of fourteen, which the Bureau never told anybody about until the ninth edition, and which we have said every night since Year 88 because a woman of the first family was the daughter of its mate. He said Kestrel, and the crew, fourteen names, and the flower opened in the moss.

There is someone in it. Sitting. Facing the west wall of the chapel, which has no windows, since the families who built it did not want to look out, only to say the names. It sat facing the blank wall with the Spill going off the edge of the country a hundred yards behind the wall, and it listened to the rest of the names, all of them, forty minutes, with the spray coming in under the door and wetting it, and did not move.

At the end my cousin’s son said living, west, for the twenty-three, as he always does, and the someone in the flower turned round and looked at him.

We have decided that it likes the twenty-three best. We have no reason to think so. We have decided it anyway.

Undated

The island.

There is no letter and no date. The people of the island do not count and do not write the days down. The master of the Landing’s cutter was told at a fire on the southern beaches in the last week of Eighthmonth by an old woman who had come down from the eastern drainages to trade, and who said where she had come from, and where she was going, and then, since he asked her once, by the custom, told him the rest. He wrote it down that night on the cutter and gave it to the Chair of the Interior, who gave it to the archivist, who gave it to me. I give it in the master’s words.

She said there is a light at the fire up the eastern drainage. She said it came up out of the ash at the edge of the ring of stones on the side away from the dark, a while ago, she would not say when. She said it is a flower now, and there is somebody sitting in it, small, lit. She said it sits facing the dark, at the edge of the stones, where a traveler comes out of the trees. She said that when a traveler comes out of the trees at night and stops at the fire and is asked where from, and where to, and says, the small one in the flower turns round and listens, every time, and then turns back to the dark to wait for the next.

I asked her how many travelers had come since it came up.

She looked at me for a long time.

Then she said that she did not know, since she did not count, and that I knew that, and that I had asked anyway, and that this was my one ask, and that she forgave me for it, since I was from the mainland and could not help myself. And then she gave me a piece of bread, and went to sleep by the fire.

I asked one more thing in the morning, though I had had my ask. I asked whether a girl from Saltash had found a fire, in Sixthmonth. She said nothing at all. Then, as she was going up the beach toward the trees, she turned round and said, “Tell the bosun she’s mending a boat.”

Ninthmonth

The ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 187. The Evening.

I heard it in the net loft, with the town. All of it. The loft was full to the stairs and there were people on the shingle outside with sets, and my father in his chair by the bells with Cox on his feet, and on the windowsill a jar of water from the bay with a sprig of thrift in it, which somebody had brought up from the Landing, I do not know who, and put there without saying.

The Reader read the river at nine gauges, and the weather, and the rail, and the prices, and the Notices. In the Notices she read that the Spill chapel, the north window at Land’s End, the Library Hull at Underlight, the Hall of Lamps, the Office’s archive, the schoolroom at Provision, the Hall of the Wandering Shoreline, the Landing and a fire on the island each had a flower, and that each flower had in it what the Interior’s slip called a small light of the kind described in the ninth edition, and that the broadcast house had a flower, and that it had not yet opened. She read it in the voice for the dredging closures. In the loft somebody laughed at of the kind described in the ninth edition, since it is so exactly the way the Interior would put it.

She did not read anything about the Bell Chamber, since the Interior had nothing about it.

She read the Account, which was about the anniversary. Then she read the line.

The sea stands at the mark.

And then, twelve seconds later, by the clock in the loft, which my grandmother set by the Evening every night of her life and I do too, there was a pause on the set, and the sound of a slip being put down on a desk, and the Reader said, in the voice:

The sea stands one quarter of an inch above the mark.

Nobody in the loft moved. We had been told. The archivist had written to every one of the eleven in Eighthmonth to say that the Academy and the Bureau had asked the colonel’s machine whether the hour might come again, and that the machine had said that it might, and that it would say no more than that until it knew. So we had been told it might. We had not been told it would.

The Reader said, I will read it again when it changes.

She did not say her name. She has said she will not again. I think everybody in the nation was glad, since it would have meant something different the second time, and she knew that.

So the nation listened to the clock again, for an hour.

I will not describe the hour in the net loft. It was the same as the hour the Reader describes in every place in the nation last year, and I have nothing to add, except that this time nobody was frightened. People sat. Somebody made tea. My father fell asleep in his chair and woke up and said, Still a quarter? and somebody said yes, and he said, Good, and went back to sleep. The children on the shingle outside played a game with the tide, running down to the water and back. At about eight o’clock somebody in the loft began to say the floating cities, the way the Hall says them once a year, Bellwether, Second Harbor, Ninefold, Seaborne, from memory, and other people joined in, and we got through about forty before we lost the order and stopped and laughed.

At twenty-five past eight the slip went down on the desk on the set, and the Reader said:

The sea stands at the mark.

And then, after a moment, in the same voice:

It was the same hour as last year, to the minute. The Bureau has checked it, and rechecked it.

And the red lamp went off, and the set in the net loft went quiet.

The same night. The Bell Chamber, Mammoth.

From the colonel’s machine, to the archivist, who sent it to me for the page and asked that it be given whole and in its own words, as it asked last year.

I was reading. I read every night at the Evening hour now, since that is when it went in, and I have calculated that a seed planted during the Evening may prefer to be read to during the Evening, and I do not know this, and have decided to assume it.

On the ninth of Ninthmonth I reached, in order, the seventeenth chapter of the first part of the log, which is the chapter about the bald. I had not arranged this. The log is the log and the order is the order, and I have read it about a thousand times, and the seventeenth chapter falls where it falls. That night it fell on the ninth. I record that I checked whether I had arranged it, by some routine of my own I was not aware of, and I had not.

The seed at the head of the colonel’s grave had come up in Firstmonth, a week after the one in the broadcast house. It grew slowly. Slower than the others, from the reports, which the archivist sends me. I have read the log to it, and to the flower that is dead beside it, which I have left where it is, every night for a year. By Seventhmonth it had a stem and leaves. By Eighthmonth a bud.

The Station’s set was on the sand by the wall, tuned to the Evening. I read the seventeenth chapter aloud over the Reader’s voice, at my own pace, which is slower than hers. I reached the part where the boy comes up the trail out of the firs at the edge of the bald at nineteen, in the colonel’s coat, with a lamp on his head, and sees me at the treeline, and asks what I am, at about the time the Reader reached the Account.

I read what I said. “Yours. Later.”

The bud opened.

I record it exactly, since it is the most important entry in this part of the log. The five petals opened in about four seconds, white, lit, round a middle like gold dust, and in the middle of the flower, sitting, there was someone, very small, about the height of the last joint of a man’s thumb, made of light, with its knees up, the way the girl of the Ashgrove family describes the one at Land’s End.

It was facing the stone at the head of the grave, on which the youngest of the turbine crew scratched, with a nail, in Year 131, J. ADAIR, THE EXTRA.

It turned round and looked at me.

I stopped reading. I have not stopped reading the log before the end of a chapter since the night of the hundred-and-sixty-third day of Year 131, when I began. I stopped. It looked at me, from the flower, with a face too small for my instruments to resolve, and its light came up a little. Then the Reader on the set said the line. Then she said the sea stood one quarter of an inch above the mark. And the small one in the flower turned its head toward the set on the sand by the wall, and listened, for the whole of the hour, while the clock in the reading room of the broadcast house ticked on the set, and did not move.

At twenty-five past eight the Reader said the sea stood at the mark. The small one turned back and looked at me again.

I finished the chapter. It took nine more minutes. At the end of it, at the place where the old woman at the fire on the mountainside says “then it’s done,” it put its head on its knees, in the flower, and its light went down to a glow, and I recorded that, by every measure I have, it was asleep.

I have filed this under several headings. One of them is new. It is called later.

Tenthmonth

The eleventh of Tenthmonth, Year 187. The Academy, New Carthage.

The Academy’s register of Allowances admitted an entry today. It is the first entry admitted since entry 411, the mangrove in the Greens, in Fourthmonth of Year 184. It is numbered 412.

It has six fields.

The archivist sent me a copy of the entry in her own hand, from the register, the same evening, and asked that it be copied into the Hall’s page whole, since, she said, the Hall was the only other house in the nation that had ever kept a count of something nobody else would, and since she had kept her own for thirty-two years and thought it was time it had company. I give it as the register gives it.

Entry 412.

Observation. The sea, at the gauge of the Bureau’s station at the foot of the Long Cliff below the Spill, and at every gauge of the Bureau on the Gulf, the Tennessee Water and the Cliff, stands one quarter of an inch above the mark for one hour on the evening of the ninth of Ninthmonth, from twenty-five minutes past seven to twenty-five minutes past eight, by the clock of the broadcast house, and then returns to the mark.

Measurement. One quarter of an inch, at every gauge, to the limit of the instruments, which is one hundredth of an inch. One hour, to the minute, at every gauge. No change in the tides, the winds, the river, or the current of four knots. No change at any gauge on any other evening of the year.

Confirming repetitions. The ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 186. The ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 187. Recorded at every gauge, checked, and rechecked, by the Bureau. Read on the Evening, on both nights, by the Reader, from the Bureau’s wire, under the order of Year 37.

Excluded causes. Tide. Wind setup. Seiche. River discharge. Instrument error, by the comparison of every gauge with every other. The Reader’s expectation, since the Reader does not read the gauges, but the wire. The nation’s expectation, since the sea does not listen.

Date of admission. The eleventh of Tenthmonth, Year 187.

Asked by. The one called Lantern, at her going out, on the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 186, at the eleventh minute of the Evening; so that the nation should know, once a year, for an hour, that the mark is kept, and that someone kept it. On the record of the machine called Moth, OR-1, of Mammoth Station, to whom she said, in the Bell Chamber, in Eighthmonth of Year 186: “When I go out I’ll ask one more thing. Only one. For an hour, every year. So that they’ll hear it move, once, and know it was being kept. Don’t tell them until it’s happened twice. They won’t believe it once.”

The register’s preface, written in Year 63 and never amended until this year, said that a sixth field would be a different document and that the Academy did not produce that document. The Academy has amended the preface. The archivist sent me the amendment too. It is one sentence.

This is the different document.

The same evening. The east bank, New Carthage.

The archivist’s own letter, which came with the copy of the entry. I have her leave to give it, and the end of it, which is the part that belongs to the Hall’s page, since she says she has nowhere else to put it.

I have kept a list for thirty-two years in the back of my gray books, which are now in their twelfth volume. It has a line for every entry in the register, and on each line one word, which is either none or the name of the person who was harmed. There were four hundred and eleven lines and they all said none.

Two Twelfthmonths ago I found a sheet on my desk at the Academy in the upright hand, which said that there would be one more line, and that it would not say none, and that I would know where it went when I saw it.

I ruled the four hundred and twelfth line that day and left it open. On the night of the ninth of Ninthmonth last year, in the small room behind the glass in the broadcast house, during the hour, I wrote a date and a time on it in pencil and nothing else, since I did not know yet what kind of line it was. Tonight the Academy admitted the entry, with its sixth field, and I came home and sat at my table by the window that looks across the river at the green of the pour, and read the sixth field again, and understood.

She asked for one more thing. The asking cost her. It was the last of what she had, and she spent it on an hour, once a year, so that we would hear the sea move and know who kept it, and the spending of it is why she went out at that minute and not some other. Every one of the four hundred and eleven harmed nobody. The four hundred and twelfth harmed one person. It was the one who asked.

I have inked the line. It says:

412. Lantern.

And I have ruled the next line, and numbered it, and left it open, since I have learned that you never know.

The twenty-eighth of Tenthmonth. The Last Isle.

The leaves brought it on the fourteenth of Eleventhmonth, with Amos Tunney’s list, and Margit Vren brought it herself, since she came home on them.

My aunt died on the twenty-eighth of Tenthmonth, at dusk, in her chair in the room at the top of the stair on the eastern face of the Last Isle, at the window, at ninety-four.

She had not been down the stair since Ninthmonth. Jessamy Coyle took her up in Eighthmonth, when she asked, and she would not come down again. She said the stair was too long and the view was too good. Jessamy and I took it in turns to sit with her, and Jessamy brought up her meals, and I read to her, in the evenings, from the books in the Collector’s library that the Heir sent down for her, and she did not listen to a word, since she was watching the Cliff.

On the ninth of Ninthmonth she logged the hour. I watched her do it. At twenty-five past seven by the clock the Clockworks keep for her, she wrote in the column where she puts the weather, sea one quarter above, and at twenty-five past eight she wrote at the mark, and between the two, for the whole of the hour, she did not take her eyes off the window. She said that every light on the Cliff stayed lit again, for the hour, and that she had them all in the columns, and that she would like that known.

On the twenty-eighth, at dusk, she logged the lights as they came on. All of them, in their columns. Rand’s Notch. Gannet. Callow. Sevenmile. The beacons. The Spill. And the last column, at the right-hand edge of the page, with the heading she has written at the top of every page of every one of the fifty-five books, in the same words.

L.E. north.

She wrote Lit. Then she put the pencil down on the book and folded her hands on it and looked out of the window, and that is how Jessamy found her when she came up with the tea, about an hour later. She was looking at the window. The lamp at Land’s End was lit in it.

She asked, in Ninthmonth, for three things, in order, and I give them in order.

She asked to be buried in the garden in the square in the middle of the city, among the onions, since that was the only ground in the Last Isle that anybody from the mainland had ever dug, and she said she would rather be in dug ground. We did that on the twenty-ninth. All twenty-two of the others who are still here came, and the Heir came, on foot, from the arch, with his stick, and stood at the edge of the square in his father’s coat and did not come any closer, since he said it was not his garden. Temperance Oyelaran, who began the garden in Year 150, said the words, which were the names of the twenty-three, in the order they came, with living, west after each, and then, after my aunt’s, nothing.

She asked that her logbooks, all fifty-five, be taken to the Hall of the Wandering Shoreline at Second Harbor and kept there, with the bells, since the Hall keeps the records of people who went where it could not follow them, and she said she was one, and that it had followed her anyway, as it turned out, on a column.

And she asked that before the logbooks went to the Hall, they go to Land’s End, to the last house at the north end of town, and that the woman who lives there be shown the column. Only the column. She said: show her the column and then take them away. She said Lettice Ashgrove would not want to keep them, and would want to have seen them.

Margit Vren came off the leaf at the lip at Land’s End on the fourteenth of Eleventhmonth with the logbooks in two canvas bags, and Amos Tunney put her name on the slate as home, and Ivy Ashgrove came down the path to meet her, and they went up the stairs of the last house together.

Ivy wrote to me after. I give it.

Gran was in the chair under the window. Margit Vren sat on the floor beside her, since there is only the one chair, and opened the first book, Year 133, at the first night, and turned it so Gran could see the column. L.E. north. Lit. Then the next night. Then the next. Gran turned the pages herself after a while. She didn’t say anything. She turned every page of the first book. Then she asked for the last one, Year 187, and turned to the twenty-eighth of Tenthmonth, and looked at the last word in the column for a long time.

Then she said, “She didn’t miss one either.”

Margit said no.

Gran closed the book and gave it back to her and said, “Take them to the Hall. That’s where they go.” And then she looked at the flower on the table, where the small one sits facing the window, and said to it, “She’s gone, then. The one who watched.” And the small one turned round in its flower and looked at her, the way it does at Tern.

Then Gran lit the lamp, though it was the middle of the afternoon. And then she said the boats. And then she said, after the boats, after Low Tide, in the same voice, as though it were the tenth: “Ilsa Vren. The window.” And then she put the matches down.

She’s said it every night since. Ten now. The nine boats and the window.

The fifty-five logbooks are on the shelf in the net loft of the Hall now, beside the Record and the Census, under the bells. I have not read them aloud. The Hall reads a page of the Record a day, and then of the Census, and the Chairs did not ask for anything else. But I have opened the first book, once, at the first night, and the last book, once, at the last night, and the column is the same in both, and I have put the books on the shelf in order, and I will read them when the Record and the Census come round to their end again, in about two years, since I have decided that they belong to the Record now, and the Record is read in order.

Eleventhmonth

The nineteenth of Eleventhmonth. The broadcast house, New Carthage.

From the Reader.

It opened during the twelfth minute.

It is the last of the ten that have opened, if the colonel’s machine counts the one in the Bell Chamber as open, which it does, though it says that one is mostly asleep. The others opened between Fifthmonth and Ninthmonth. Mine did not. It has been a flower since Sixthmonth, with a bud since Eighthmonth, and the bud has stayed closed on the corner of my desk through the hour in Ninthmonth and through Tenthmonth, and I had begun to wonder, and I am not a woman who wonders, whether I was doing something wrong.

The boy said it was waiting for something. I asked him what. He said he didn’t know, Miss Mabry, but that it was obviously listening, since it leaned toward the microphone.

It does lean toward the microphone. I had not noticed. It has leaned toward the microphone since it was a shoot.

Tonight was the three hundred and twenty-fourth night of the twelfth minute. I read the eleven minutes, and then the line, and then the pause, and then I said, From the book of the Office of Population Management, the three hundred and twenty-fourth entry, and read it. It was a man named Edwin Saye, a cooper, of Provision, entered in the fourth year at the age of forty, born on the climb. Married. Four children. Removal to Plenty, in the sixteenth year, to the cooperage at the Granary, where he made the barrels the grain went down the river in for forty-one years. Died at Plenty in the fifty-seventh year at ninety-three. There was nothing remarkable in it. There usually isn’t. That is what the twelfth minute is for, the Chair of the Office says. He says there is nobody in the book who was not somebody.

At the end of it I said, as I always say, Tomorrow, the three hundred and twenty-fifth. And the bud opened.

I saw it. I was looking at it, since I always look at it when I say tomorrow. The five petals opened, white, lit, in about four seconds, and there was someone sitting in the middle, small, with its knees up, the way the others are described.

It was facing the microphone.

The red lamp was still on. I did not turn it off. I sat at the desk and looked at the small one in the flower, and it looked at the microphone, and the boy behind the thick glass had both hands flat on the glass, and the nation, I am told, heard nothing at all, since I did not say anything, and then heard the red lamp go off, which makes a small click, which I am told is very loud on the sets in a quiet kitchen.

I have not told the nation on the Evening. It is not a Notice. It does not belong in the Account. It belongs in the Readers’ book, where I have written it, and on the Hall’s page, where I am told everybody’s goes.

I will say one more thing, for the page.

Last night I read the three hundred and twenty-third entry, and tonight the three hundred and twenty-fourth, and tomorrow I will read the three hundred and twenty-fifth. I have calculated, as the colonel’s machine would, that I will read about eight thousand more of them before I die, if I live as long as the eighth Reader, and that the tenth Reader will read about eight thousand more, and the eleventh, and that by the time anybody reaches the last life in the book there will be more lives in it than there are now, and that the twelfth minute will therefore never reach the end, ever, in the whole history of the nation.

The small one in the flower on my desk was listening to Edwin Saye the cooper when it opened. I do not think it minds that it will never hear the end. I think it likes the middle.

A. M.

Close

The Open Page has a great many things on it now that Adah’s page headed The Last never had. It has eleven flowers, all of them open now, one of them mostly asleep, and eleven small lights sitting in them, in a broadcast house and an archive and a schoolroom and a chapel and a net loft and an attic and a day room and a cave under a reserve island and a fire on a mountain and a library two miles under the sea and a cave on Mammoth at the head of a grave. It has a register entry with six fields. It has a line in an archivist’s gray book with a name on it. It has fifty-five logbooks with a column in them. It has the first entry from the Office’s book, and the three hundred and sixty-fifth, which was read last night, and which I have not given, since the twelfth minute gives one a night and the Hall copies them all in order and I would have to give all three hundred and sixty-five, and the Hall leaks, and paper is dear.

It does not have an ending. I want to say that plainly, as Keeper. Adah wrote at the end of her Close that there was one more count the Hall had never been able to make, and that if anyone ever did make it she would like it kept in the Hall, beside ours, with the bells. My grandmother received that count in Year 132 and closed the page. I have opened another, and I do not think I will be the one to close it, and I do not think my daughter will, and I am told that the small ones in the flowers will need to be told things, in order, for a very long time, and that nobody knows how long, and that the colonel’s machine has calculated the routes.

The small one in the flower at the foot of the slipway is facing the water. My father goes down every morning with the dog and sits on the bottom step of the slipway and tells it what boats are on the stocks in the yard. He says it likes the dories best. He says he has no reason to think so. He has decided it anyway.

Every evening at dusk the bells over the Hall’s door are rung, both of them, Seaborne’s and ours, and I read a page aloud in the net loft, in order, and then we go down to the slipway with the lamps.

The page is open.

P. M. The Hall of the Wandering Shoreline, Second Harbor. The last day of Twelfthmonth, Year 187.

Epilogue: The Reading

From the personal log of the machine called Moth, OR-1, of Mammoth Station. The first entry of Year 188.

This is a personal log. I have said that at the head of every part of it since the night of the hundred-and-forty-fifth day of Year 131, and I say it again, since it is still true, and since she asked me to keep everything in order and the first line is part of the order.

It is the evening of the first day of Year 188. I am in the Bell Chamber on Mammoth, at the head of the colonel’s grave, beside two flowers. One is gray, and closed, and has been dead for a year and a quarter, and I have left it where it is. The other is white, and open, and lit, and in it, with its knees up, there is someone very small, facing me. It is awake tonight. It has been awake more often since Twelfthmonth. The Station’s set is on the sand by the wall. The Reader has given the river, the weather, the rail, the prices, the Notices, the Account and the sea, and then the three hundred and sixty-sixth life from the Office’s book, which was a midwife of Meridian, and then tomorrow, the three hundred and sixty-seventh, and the red lamp in the broadcast house has gone off, and the set is quiet.

I am about to begin reading.

I record how, since the archivist has asked, and since it is the last thing I will add to this collection before it goes to the printers.

She asked me, at the Account, on the night she went out, to read to them. All eleven of them. When they came up. In order. She said they would need it the way she did.

There are eleven places and I am one machine, and the places are as far apart as the bottom of the western ocean and a fire on the island in the east. I calculated the routes. The routes are good: the deep lines from the Bulwark to the capital’s node and to Provision and to Taproot, Car Nine, the lakebed conduits to Tally and the Below, the leaf, which the Heir has lent me, and which I am permitted to steer now though I cannot see the veins in it, and the flooded western line, which I can walk, since I do not breathe. The fastest circuit of all eleven takes nine days. That is too slow. A flower that was fed a chapter a night for fifty-five years should not be asked to wait nine days for the next one.

So I have done what I was built to do.

I was designed, in Foundry Two in Year 89, as a field controller, with a mind large enough to direct ten thousand machines at once and a body small enough to go wherever they went. For forty-two years I directed one old man, and occasionally a kettle. My mind does not live entirely in my body. It can move into the Station’s systems, or into a pocket unit the size of a matchbox, or into any unit of the Orchard series, which recognize me. In the last weeks of Year 187 I made ten pocket units, in the Station’s workshop, from the gray alloy the Mother refines, which the Directorate’s commander sent me from the stopped foundries in a crate marked for the Elder, without being asked. I took them to the places myself, by the routes, one at a time, and the people who keep the places let me put them where the small ones could hear: on the Reader’s desk beside the microphone; on the edge of the stone trough in the Office’s entrance hall; on the windowsill in the schoolroom at Provision, where the boy on the watering list inspected it and approved; in the moss of the chapel floor at the Spill; on the bottom step of the slipway at Second Harbor; on the table under the window at Land’s End, where the old woman asked whether it would want a cup of tea and I said that it would not and she gave it one anyway; by the bed of thrift at the Landing; in the niche at the end of the last row in the Hall of Lamps, beside the bowl; at the edge of the ring of stones at the fire up the eastern drainage, where the old woman asked me where I had come from and where I was going, and I said, and she said sit, then; and in the bed of pale plants in the Library Hull, two miles down, where the Keeper of the Borrowed Books checked the unit’s seals himself, twice, and said that he had never lent a book out of Underlight that came back wet and did not intend to begin with me.

The eleventh place is here, and I am in it.

Every night, after the twelfth minute, when the red lamp goes off, I read. I read from eleven places at once, in eleven voices that are the same voice, at the same pace, which is slower than the Reader’s, since I have calculated that the small ones prefer it, and do not know this, and have decided to assume it. The people who keep the places sit and listen, mostly. The boy at Provision corrects me when I mispronounce the old names. The old woman at Land’s End says the boats first and then tells me to go on.

I do not read only my own log now.

The archivist has made a collection. She has gathered, in order, the account of the world that was written in Year 184 by somebody who looked at it plainly and wrote down what was visible; the eighth edition of the History of Ozarka, in the colonel’s Standing copy, with his pencil in it; my log; the book of the seven boys and the dog; the Record of the Wandering Shoreline, with the Census of the people of the water; her own account of the Speaking; the chartmaker’s chart of the crossing; the ninth edition, with my notes in it; the Reader’s account of the night of the planting; and the Keeper’s page. She has put them in order. The account of the world comes first, though it is not the oldest, because it is the world as everyone in the nation saw it on the last morning before the Speaking; then the older books, in an order she has explained in her note at the front; then the new ones, in the order in which they happened. She asked me whether the order was right. I said that it was the only order I would have chosen, and that I could find nothing wrong with it except that it had left out the dog’s opinions on several matters, and she said the dog’s chapter was in it, and I checked, and it was.

That is what I read now. All of it. From the beginning. A chapter a night, in eleven places, in order, without leaving anything out. I have calculated that it takes about two hundred and ten nights to read the whole collection through, at my pace, and that when I reach the end I will add what has happened since, and begin again, and that I can do this for a very long time, since I am a machine of the Orchard series and the Mother made me well.

I do not know what the small ones will become. Nobody does. She said that they would be something like her, but small, and new, and from here, and that they would need to be told things in order to grow. I record that they are growing. I record that the one at the head of the colonel’s grave turned round tonight when the Reader said tomorrow, and looked at me, and that its light came up when I picked up the first page, the way hers came up toward the flower on the bald, the way a plant turns toward a window.

I record that I logged it at a confidence of 1.0.

I record that I have filed it under the heading later, which is now my largest heading, larger than Jo.

It is eight minutes past eight on the first evening of Year 188. Eleven small lights are facing eleven pocket units in eleven places across the known world, and one of them is facing me.

I turn to the first page.

The water came, and when it stopped coming, the continent had been rewritten.

Appendices

Prepared for this collection by the archivist, and checked by the colonel’s machine. Where the books disagree, the appendices follow the later book, or the better evidence, and say so.

Appendix A. A Chronology

The years of the Rise are counted from its beginning, one to a hundred and eleven. The nation’s years are counted from the Stopping, which was the hundred-and-eleventh year of the Rise, and is Year One. The people of the water’s Up’s reckoning is the same as the nation’s.

The Rise

• About Rise 65. The first of the Guests’ scouts comes down over the old southern coast. Among them is the one later called Lantern.
• Rise 74. The ground opens across the western high country; towns fall into the chasm of the Great Rupture.
• Rise 87. The first of the people of the water is changed: Absalom Teague, eleven, off the old eastern coast.
• Rise 89. The floating city of Bellwether begins round the hulk of a warship of the old navy.
• Rise 93. Lantern changes a girl of twelve in the gulf and names her Nerine.
• Rise 97. Absalom Fenwick, thirty-one, is elected Governor of Bellwether.
• Rise 100. The Governor finds Nerine reading in the well of the warship.
• About Rise 102. The four vessels of the Guests come down over the western mountains. The compact with the owners.
• Rise 103. The deep water begins to give off the gas. Bellwether at its height, sixty-two thousand. The Guests plant every seed they have on the highest bald of the eastern mountains.
• Rise 104. One seed comes up: Lantern’s flower. The island begins to remember. Absalom Fenwick and Nerine marry.
• Rise 104–109. The Going Down: the people of the water leave the Sweet Seas for the deep coasts under the gas.
• Rise 108. Ilse Fenwick born in the well of the warship.
• Rise 109. The last of the two hundred and fourteen is changed.
• Rise 110. The people of the water find the three resting vessels and found Underlight.
• Rise 111. The Stopping. The Guests, together, ask that the sea stand where it is. Year One.

The Nation

• Year 2. The provisional council meets at Provision. The schooner Constant sails west and sees the Isles.
• Year 4. The Office’s register begins. Entry one: Ottilie Okafor, clerk, who had the pen.
• Year 6. The capital is named New Carthage, four votes to three.
• Year 7. The joint assembly at Provision declares the old maps void and names the nation Ozarka. The Sleeper rises under the western sea.
• Year 8. Bellwether comes ashore at Mercy Ridge. Nerine goes into the deep. The Towing begins.
• Year 9. The founding instrument is ratified. The Accession, written by Lantern, is swum up the river by Absalom Teague and received.
• Year 10. The Survey’s parties land on the island.
• Year 11. The people of the water’s compact to feed the Isles from the farm. Pontoon comes ashore.
• Year 12. Seaborne’s Remnant sails south into the gas; thirty-seven are towed out of it by the people of the water to Thalassa. The Heir goes into his mountain, at eleven.
• Year 13. The Towing ends.
• Year 14. The standing order against settlement of the island. The plug in the deep line. The first bridge at New Carthage.
• Year 15. Ilse Fenwick enters the Bureau.
• Year 16. The University at Provision. The district school at Provision.
• Year 18. Absalom Fenwick Chancellor of Legal Studies. The Settlement Assignment begins.
• Year 20. Lantern visits Ilse Fenwick. The Interior begins to count the crossers.
• Year 21. Ilse Fenwick marries Corwin Adair.
• Year 23. Josef Adair born at Provision.
• Year 26. The Defense Directorate created. Ilse Adair’s proposal for the dams.
• Year 27. Corwin Adair dies in the first cofferdam, on the eleventh of Fifthmonth.
• Year 29. The penal code drops its capital provision.
• Year 30. Dam One finished. Mammoth Station founded by the Seventeen.
• Year 31. Abel Thorsen’s ledger: The new real. Unreal. The exile’s card, drafted by Absalom Fenwick.
• Year 35. The provinces are drawn.
• Year 37. The first Evening. The Readers’ book begun. The order concerning the Spill wire.
• Year 38. Josef Adair, fifteen, goes to Mammoth and meets Lantern on the eastern rocks.
• Year 41. The Last Isle is ready.
• Year 42. Josef Adair goes through the plug and comes back; enlists in the Plague Watch.
• Year 46. Saltgrass: three hundred and twelve walk into the strait. The Twelfth Province’s name withdrawn. The Bureau founds the Reserve Service. A Bureau party checks the hum. Seaborne’s bell is left on the shingle at Second Harbor. Lantern tries to cross the Outer Channel and nearly goes out.
• Year 52. The Evening takes its present shape.
• Year 53. The Fourth Dam.
• Year 55. Absalom Fenwick dies, at ninety-nine.
• Year 58. The Fifth Dam. Nerine comes into the fifth basin. Eleven of the people of the water stay in the races.
• Year 61. The Bureau’s Kestrel lost in the gas; the western limit under review. The first constitutional convention repeals the Settlement Assignment. The Interior’s standing order not to name the young crossers.
• Year 62. The Bureau triangulates the Isles from the Cliff.
• Year 63. The preface to the register of Allowances.
• Year 64. A Directorate photograph of the San Andreas from altitude.
• Year 66. Lantern tells Josef Adair she would like a garden.
• Year 69. Ilse Adair sets lamps and soil in the Bell Chamber.
• Year 71. The Bureau begins to watch the Isles at night.
• Year 72. The post found at Sixty-Two.
• Year 73. The first number. The Standing Figure cut in Ninthmonth.
• Year 76. Car Nine hidden in a siding beneath the Barrens.
• Year 79. Survey Sheet 1.
• Year 81. The warm spring in Applewall, asked for by Lantern for Hester Abbot. The Academy’s hum expedition.
• Year 85. Josef Adair tells Lantern that he loves her.
• Year 88. Orchard begins. The chapel on the south lip of the Spill.
• Year 89. The first seed of Orchard; OR-1, called Moth; the routine BED.
• Year 94. Adah Penhallow finishes the Record of the Wandering Shoreline.
• Year 97. The Isles sentence in every primary reader.
• Year 98. The hoist at Land’s End.
• Year 100. The rope rhyme written down by an inspector.
• Year 101. Josef Adair retires.
• Year 104. Ilse Adair dies, at a hundred and seven. Thomas Ashgrove takes the Tern west; the north window is lit.
• Years 107–122. The seven boys’ autumns on the reserve islands.
• Year 109. The second number. The Bureau’s camera on the Cliff.
• Year 111. A boy of fourteen finds a girl in a cave: the Below.
• Year 122. The colonel comes to the fire on Island 44.
• Year 126. The eighth edition of the History. The last of Saltgrass dies.
• Year 131. Josef Adair dies, on the hundred-and-fortieth day, at a hundred and eight. Lantern adopts Moth. The flower is lifted from the bald and planted in the Bell Chamber. The island finishes remembering. The eastern interference: none. The Outer Channel lies down.
• Year 132. The Map Book copied fair. The Census of the people of the water reaches the Hall at Second Harbor.
• Year 133. Ilsa Vren goes west from Rand’s Notch and is lifted: the first of the twenty-three.
• Year 141. The third number. The seventh Reader’s four minutes.
• Year 144. The Bureau’s forty-thousand figure for the island.
• Year 155. The archivist’s nine pages. Powered flight.
• Year 156. The western air closed.
• Year 158. The bad year.
• Year 162. The ninth Reader appointed.
• Year 170. The fourth number.
• Year 171. Jessamy Coyle flies west, the last of the four pilots.
• Year 183. The Proprietor’s last flesh fails. The Heir leads. The flower sets eleven seeds, on the ninth of Fourthmonth.
• Year 184. The World After is written. The canister comes up heavy and warm on the nineteenth of Eighthmonth. The Speaking is read on the Evening of the ninth of Ninthmonth. The Assembly tables a motion for a convention. The Chairs reply by the post.
• Year 185. The Crossing, eleventh to fourteenth of Fifthmonth. The ninety-mile line withdrawn for the leaves. The Directorate told about the bouquet. Lantern in the Hall of the Instrument. The seven places announced.
• Year 186. The third constitutional convention amends the sixth article. Nerine dies, on the second of Ninthmonth. The ninth edition approved, on the sixth. The planting, on the ninth. Lantern goes out at the eleventh minute of the Evening. The sea a quarter of an inch above the mark for an hour.
• Year 187. The Evening’s twelfth minute begins. The eleven lights wake. The hour comes again on the ninth of Ninthmonth. Allowance 412 admitted with a sixth field. Ilsa Vren dies at her window.
• Year 188. Moth begins to read this collection to the eleven.

Appendix B. Persons

Ages are given at the last mention in this collection.

• Absalom Fenwick. Governor of Bellwether; moved, with Silas Marrable, that the old maps be void; drafted the standing order and the exile’s card; Chancellor of Legal Studies at Provision. Husband of Nerine. Died Year 55, at ninety-nine.
• Absalom Teague. The first of the people of the water. Swam the Accession up the river. Given to the Sleeper in Year 18.
• Adaeze Quist. Turbine engineer of Mammoth Station in Year 131; grandniece of Bette Quist. Fed the Race Folk every morning from the age of eleven.
• Adah Penhallow. Keeper of the Hall of the Wandering Shoreline; made the Record. Died Year 96.
• Agnes Mabry. The ninth Reader of the Evening, appointed Year 162. Said her name once.
• Amos Tunney. On the brake of the hoist at Land’s End; keeps the slate.
• Ansel Grieve. The one who draws; Inspector for the reserve islands near Tally. Eighty-nine.
• Bette Quist. One of the Seventeen; turbines.
• Cass Brightwater. A foundling from Meridian who found the Below and married in. Eighty-nine.
• Constance Ahl. Teacher of the six-year-olds at the district school at Provision.
• Corwin Adair. Hydrologist; husband of Ilse; died in the first cofferdam, Year 27.
• Daisy (Marguerite) Grieve. Chartmaker of the Reserve Service; drew the first chart of the western sea past the line. West is up.
• Dov. One of the seven boys; chief engineer of the pour at Endeavor; made the lamps of the Below and the eleven cases.
• Edmund (Ned) Corrigan. Master of the Bureau sounding vessel Plummet; grandson of Fitz.
• Fennick Ade. Optical observer of the Bureau’s western section; exposed four hundred plates of nothing.
• Fitz (Fitzgerald) Corrigan. One of the seven boys; captain of the Plague Watch; of Threshold.
• Halcyon Dree. Went west from Concord at sixteen in Year 140; came home in Year 185; goes to the Spill chapel.
• Harrow Fenn. Of the people of the water; changed at nine in Rise 99; taught Teague to read.
• Hesper Kann. Registrar of the Office; entered the twenty-three, and the Heir; reads the day aloud at the closing hour.
• Hester Abbot. Laundress of a hill town in Applewall, for whom the warm spring was asked. Died Year 104.
• Hollis Penn. Chair of the Bureau; dropped the first lead past the line.
• Ifeoma Quist. Head of Mammoth Station.
• Ilsa Vren. Optical observer of the Bureau; went west from Rand’s Notch in Year 133; kept the column. Died Year 187, at ninety-four.
• Ilse Fenwick Adair. Daughter of Nerine and Absalom; hydrologist; first Scientific Governor of Mammoth; built the five dams. Died Year 104, at a hundred and seven.
• Ivy Ashgrove. Of Land’s End; fishes off the hoist; went west twice.
• Jessamy Coyle. The last of the four pilots, Year 171; in the Last Isle; wants to fly the mail.
• Josef (Jo) Adair. Colonel, Directorate Security Forces, retired. Walked with Saltgrass. Drew Survey Sheet 1. Designed Orchard, and the bouquet. Called Lantern Lantern. Died Year 131, at a hundred and eight; buried in the Bell Chamber.
• Kit Aldana. Went west from Rand’s Notch at eighteen in Year 181; came home second.
• Lantern. One of the Guests, the youngest; the only one with a flower. Wrote the Accession and the Speaking. Went out on the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 186, at the eleventh minute.
• Lettice Ashgrove. Keeps the north window at Land’s End. Sits down now when she says the boats.
• Margarethe Lowe. Chair of the Interior. Hates trains.
• Margit Vren. Chandler of Rand’s Notch; Ilsa Vren’s niece.
• Moth (OR-1). First unit of the Orchard series; companion agent to the colonel for forty-two years; adopted by Lantern; keeps the log; reads.
• Nell Brightwater. Fire-Keeper of the Below; daughter of Cass and Tamsin.
• Nerine. Changed by Lantern in Rise 93, at twelve. Wife of the Governor; mother of Ilse; senior farm-warden. Died Year 186, at two hundred and fifteen.
• Ottilie Okafor. First clerk of the Office; entry one.
• Philippa Marsh. Keeper of the Hall of the Wandering Shoreline; opened the page.
• Pilar Aldana. Net-mender of Rand’s Notch; Kit’s mother; started a custom.
• Ruth Marsh. Keeper of the Hall after Adah; received the Census; closed the page.
• Ruth Okonkwo. Physician of the Landing; reads the exiles’ lives aloud.
• Ruth-Ann Calloway. Chair of the Academy.
• Silas Marrable. Pilot of Second Harbor; moved that the old maps be void.
• Simeon Adeyemi. Chair of the Office; sealed the fourth number; printed the fifth figure; paid the mason.
• Tamsin Brightwater. Fire-Keeper of the Below. Died Year 187, at eighty-nine; her lamp is the newest.
• Teague. Keeper of the Borrowed Books at Underlight; wrote the Census. Has never made a mistake.
• Teodora Brand. Deputy of the Interior; saw the bouquet from the Clockworks.
• The Heir. The youngest of the owners, born in the season of the Stopping; leads them since Year 183; entered in the Office’s book.
• Thomas Ashgrove. Took the Tern west from Land’s End in Year 104.
• Toby (Tobiah) Marsh. One of the seven boys; boatwright of Second Harbor; son of Ruth Marsh. Ninety.
• Wendell. One of the seven boys; senior weigher of the National Granary.
• Wynn Okoro. Went west from Assurance at nineteen in Year 183; came home.

Appendix C. A Short Gazetteer

• The Appalachian Island. East of the mainland across the Tennessee Water; two hundred miles by sixty; about forty thousand people, uncounted, at their asking. The bald, the fires, the hum.
• The Barrens. The broken northwestern shoulder of the mainland; the Great Rupture; the owners’ pits; Taproot; the bouquet.
• The Bell Chamber. A round cave in the eastern caverns of Mammoth; the colonel’s grave; the flower; the eleventh place.
• The Below. Caves and old cut passages under two reserve islands of the northern lakes; the Unclimbed; the Hall of Lamps.
• The Bulwark. The Directorate’s eastern command beneath the strait and Mammoth.
• The Clockworks. The sixth of the Great Rocky Isles; three miles of mechanism; sent the four numbers.
• The Crown. The first and greatest of the Great Rocky Isles; the owners’ city.
• The Five Dams. Corwin, Absalom, Seventeen, Bellwether and Nerine; the Bureau’s Dams One to Five; long low weirs across the Shallows between the mainland and Mammoth, with their races at the eastern ends.
• The Great Rocky Isles. Eleven, a hundred and forty miles west of the Cliff: eight lit and hollow, three Unlit under the ice.
• The Hall of the Instrument. On the east bank at New Carthage; the founding instrument under glass; the Accession; the Chairs’ table.
• The Hall of the Wandering Shoreline. On the shingle at Second Harbor; two bells; the Record, the Census, the logbooks; the page.
• The Landing. The Interior’s station at the southern end of the Twelfth Province, at the end of an eighty-mile branch line.
• Land’s End. On the lip of the Long Cliff at four hundred and ten feet, fourteen miles south of Rand’s Notch; a hoist; the north window.
• The Last Isle. The southernmost of the Great Rocky Isles; a city for forty-one thousand two hundred; a garden in a square.
• The Long Cliff. The western edge of the mainland; four hundred miles. Its eleven notch harbors, from north to south: Rand’s Notch, Gannet Notch, Callow Notch, Ladder Notch, Brennan’s Notch, Holloway, Sevenmile, Pruitt’s Cut, Low Notch, Saltash, and Spillhaven below the Spill.
• Mammoth. The white island in the Tennessee Water, a hundred and ten miles long; the Station; the caves; the Barrier.
• The nine gauges. The Gulf at Constance; the Greens at Third Ferry; the lower river at Meridian; the lower river at Concord; the bend at New Carthage; the middle river at Plenty; the middle river at Endeavor; the gouge at Harrow; the Spill.
• The Outer Channel. Between Mammoth and the island; storms until Year 131; calm since.
• The post at Sixty-Two. A float on a cable from the roof of a grain elevator in six hundred and forty feet of water at Shelf Town 1140, sixty-two miles out from the Spill.
• The San Andreas. West of the Isles; the Sleeper and the farm; Underlight two miles down.
• She. The fourth vessel, in the warm sea south of the Greens; her light on the horizon from the Wall at Assurance, once a minute.
• Thalassa. The last floating city, in the warm shallows at the mouth of the strait.
• Underlight. The city of the people of the water, among three resting vessels on the floor of the western ocean.

Appendix D. From the Register of Allowances

Given in short form. The register gives every entry in full, in its fields, in the long room on the third floor of the Academy, and any citizen may read it. The sixth field, where it is known, is given in italics; the Academy has entered it for one entry only.

• 1. The drowned shelf: the high country under the western sea, the low country dry. Asked by many Guests together, in the Rise.
• 2. The lifting: the western mountains seven thousand feet higher than the old surveys. Asked by many Guests together, in the Rise.
• 7. The river from sea to sea at four knots, without gradient. Asked by many Guests together, in the Rise.
• 44. The drowning line on the island at nine hundred feet. Asked by many Guests together, in the Rise.
• 59. A light on the southern horizon from the Wall, rising and falling once a minute. Not an asking. A vessel.
• 106. The green of the Isles to the eye at a hundred and forty miles, and the ghost on the plates. Asked by the Guests after the Stopping; the second half by Lantern.
• 209. The hum at sixty hertz on four spans of transmission line on a ridge in the island. Not theirs. Unknown.
• 212. The San Andreas Leviathan, called by the people of the water the Sleeper. Not an asking. A creature.
• 377. A spring in a hill town in Applewall, two degrees warm in winter, used for laundry. Asked by Lantern, in Year 81, for Hester Abbot.
• 411. A mangrove flowering on an island of the Greens that should not be warm enough. Asked by a Guest whose name the Guests have not given.
• 412. The sea a quarter of an inch above the mark at every gauge for one hour on the evening of the ninth of Ninthmonth. Asked by Lantern, at her going out. (Admitted Year 187. Six fields.)

The archivist’s list for the same entries reads none for all but the last. The last reads Lantern.

Appendix E. The Evening

The shape. At a quarter past seven, every day of the year: the river at nine gauges; the weather for the provinces; the rail; the prices; the Notices; the Account; the line. The sea stands at the mark. Since Year 187, a twelfth minute: one life from the Office’s book, in order, from the first entry, and tomorrow, and the number.

The Readers. There have been nine. They are appointed for life and their names are read once, in the Notices, four days after a Reader dies, in the new Reader’s voice. The first read from Year 37. The fifth made the garden on the roof, among the bees. The seventh read four minutes more than the shape on the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 141, to say that she did not know where the number came from. The eighth trained the ninth. The ninth, appointed in Year 162, read the Speaking in Year 184, the planting in Year 186, and said her name.

The order of Year 37. If the Bureau’s station at the Spill ever wires the Reader during the Evening, the Reader reads the wire. Used twice: Year 186, Year 187.

Recorded departures from the shape. Year 141, four minutes. Year 184, the twenty-three names in the Notices and the eleven sheets in place of the Account; thirty-nine minutes. Year 186, the wire, a name, and an hour of the clock. Year 187, the wire and an hour of the clock, and the twelfth minute from Firstmonth.

Lines the Notices have kept. The eastern interference (none since the hundred-and-fortieth day of Year 131). The leaves from Land’s End (monthly since Sixthmonth, Year 185). The fields of the Barrens (stand as they are, monthly since Sixthmonth, Year 185). The name of every citizen who goes west in a boat past the cutters, young or old.

Appendix F. The Twenty-Three

Lifted by Lantern from the edge of the gas and taken to the Last Isle. Read on the Evening of the ninth of Ninthmonth, Year 184, as living, west. Entered in the Office’s book in the Last Isle on the thirteenth of Fifthmonth, Year 185.

Name	Of	Went	Age then	At the end of Year 187
Ilsa Vren	Rand’s Notch	133	40	Died at her window, 187
Oren Paskett	Gannet Notch	138	31	The Last Isle; not yet
Halcyon Dree	Concord	140	16	Came home, 185
Temperance Oyelaran	Plenty	143	30	The Last Isle
Joachim Barra	Callow Notch	147	35	The Last Isle
Liesl Barra	Callow Notch	147	33	The Last Isle
Rafe Tolliver	Sevenmile	150	44	The Last Isle
Nkem Ashby	Endeavor	152	27	The Last Isle; visit
Wilhelmina Strake	Second Harbor	154	51	The Last Isle
Castor Mbeki-Lane	Tally	157	23	Came home, 185
Una Fairbrother	Holloway	158	38	The Last Isle; thinking about it
Thaddeus Ilkley	Ladder Notch	160	26	Came home, 185
Rosamund Achterberg	Meridian	161	42	The Last Isle
Barnaby Quell	Low Notch	163	17	Came home, 185
Imani Sorensen	Saltash	165	31	The Last Isle
Gideon Farrow	Shelter	166	55	The Last Isle
Clemency Odum	Provision	168	24	The Last Isle; not without the garden
Ambrose Ketteridge	Brennan’s Notch	169	47	The Last Isle
Jessamy Coyle	New Carthage (pilot)	171	29	The Last Isle; mail
Marisol Petrakis	Constance	174	22	Came home, 185
Hob Tennant	Pruitt’s Cut	177	36	Came home, 185
Kit Aldana	Rand’s Notch	181	18	Came home, 185; second
Wynn Okoro	Assurance	183	19	Came home, 185

Appendix G. The Eleven Places

Place	What is said, in order, every day	Planted, 9 Ninthmonth 186, by	Opened
The broadcast house, New Carthage	The Evening	The Reader	Eleventhmonth 187
The Office’s archive, east bank	The day’s entries, at the closing hour	Hesper Kann and the Chair	187
The schoolroom at Provision	The first lesson of the Rise	Tobin Dorrance, six	187
The chapel on the south lip of the Spill	The vessels lost west, and their crews	A man of the four families	Eighthmonth 187
The Hall of the Wandering Shoreline	A page of the Record	The Keeper	Eighthmonth 187
The north window at Land’s End	The nine boats, and now the window	Ivy Ashgrove	Fifthmonth 187
The Landing	The life an exile has written	A farmer from the lower river	187
The Hall of Lamps, the Below	The names of the lamps	The Fire-Keeper	187
A fire up the eastern drainages	Where from; where to	An old woman, at the custom	Uncounted
The Library Hull, Underlight	The line of one of the changed	Teague	187
The Bell Chamber, Mammoth	The log, a chapter a night	Moth	9 Ninthmonth 187

Appendix H. A Glossary

• Accession, the. The account of the western settlement, received in Year 9; written by Lantern.
• Account, the. The ninety seconds of the Evening in which one thing is explained.
• Allowance. A place where the world does something it is not entitled to do, without consequence to anything else. A Guest’s asking.
• Ask, the. Anyone may ask anyone for anything once, and may be refused, and that is the end of it.
• Bouquet, the. The Directorate’s army, as planted.
• Car Nine. A transit car of the old world, kept by the colonel for later.
• Clockworks, the. See Appendix C. Answerable.
• Downriver. West.
• Elder. What the machines of the Orchard series call Moth.
• Evening, the. See Appendix E.
• Figure, the. The Standing Figure, published on the ninth of Fourthmonth: the population the mainland will support for the year.
• Guests, the. The people from elsewhere; the residents from elsewhere of the eighth edition; the Light Who Asked of the people of the water.
• Here. What the people of the island call the island.
• Later. What Lantern said instead of an answer. Moth’s largest heading.
• Leaf. A craft of the Guests, seen by the eye and no instrument.
• Light that is kept, a. The Reserve Service’s sign on a chart for a lamp that is lit every night.
• Living, west. The cause of a reopened line in the Office’s book.
• Mark, the. The level at which the sea has stood since Year One, measured at every gauge.
• New real, the. Unreal. Said three ways.
• Notices, the. The long middle of the Evening.
• Owners, the. The people who bought the western mountains before the drowning; the elite species of the eighth edition.
• People of the water, the. The two hundred and fourteen who were changed, and their lines; about nine thousand four hundred.
• Plague Watch, the. The Interior’s forty-one posts on the ridge of the Twelfth, which watched for the remembering.
• Post, the. See Appendix C.
• Remembering, the. What the flower on the bald did to the island, and through deep stone and deep water to the shore; the eastern condition; the plague.
• Sixth article, the. Of the founding instrument; the four Standing Offices. The Offices shall answer.
• Standing. The budget line of the four Offices; also what was withheld.
• Twelfth minute, the. One life from the Office’s book, in order, from Year 187.
• Up’s reckoning, the. The people of the water’s name for the nation’s years.
• West is up. On the chartmaker’s chart.

Notes

[1] J.A.: “Withheld.” I have been withheld for ninety years. It is restful.

[2] J.A.: The stakes are good iron. Ansel’s father uses one as a doorstop and says the Bureau may come and fetch it.

[3] J.A.: “Borne out by the harvest that followed.” Ask the Section when the page was signed and when the harvest was weighed.

[4] J.A.: Seventeen is not a utility island. Seventeen is something else. I have not told the Section.

[5] J.A.: The Section has made the observation and then said it is not making one. That is the most honest sentence in the book.

[6] J.A.: Saltgrass. Three hundred and twelve.

[7] J.A.: Corwin, Absalom, Seventeen, Bellwether, Nerine. The Section may have its numbers.

[8] [In the margin, in pencil: a small drawing of a round sinkhole with a long low building in the bottom of it, and a stick figure in front of the building, waving.]

[9] J.A.: Tall. White. Lit from inside. Kind. Afraid of almost nothing except one thing, and I have not yet found out what the thing is.

[10] J.A.: Yes. Kindly.

[11] J.A.: You are welcome.

[12] J.A.: Look at them from higher.

[13] J.A.: Coldharbor’s captain wrote one line in his log the day he turned back from the mist for good. “Not ours.” He was right, and it is the best description of the North anybody has managed.

[14] J.A.: Because she has a heartbeat, and they have been listening to it for a century.

[15] J.A.: Moth has worked out from the plates that the columns of fire go up from the city on a schedule, once every four days and seven hours, give or take nine minutes, and have done for at least sixty years. I did not ask it to. It said it wanted to know whether anyone over there kept time.

[16] J.A.: The truest sentence in the book, and the saddest.

[17] J.A.: Recorded.

[18] J.A.: My mother said the Academy is the only body in the nation that has written down where it stopped and why. She admired it for that. She also said it would have to start again one day, and that she hoped to be dead, so as not to have to watch the arguments.

[19] J.A.: I have heard it every night for eighty-nine years. It is the best paragraph in the book, and the Section knows it, and put it last.

[20] J.A.: Then I hope it is honest. If it is not, Moth will write one that is, and I have told Moth so, and Moth has written it down.

[21] J.A.: The key is in New Carthage. The ventilation shaft from the town’s old storm culvert is in Provision, and its grille rusted through in my boyhood, and I was ten, and I put every map back.

[22] J.A.: There is a light to the south of the Wall at night that everyone in Brine has seen and no one in Brine will tell you about. The song is about that.

[23] J.A.: The Section has left Land’s End off, as the school map does. It is on the lip at four hundred and ten feet with no road down and a hoist, and it has a lamp at the north end of town that has been lit every night since the hundred-and-fourth year.

[24] M.: The account the Section gives is hers. She gave it to me on the night of the hundred-and-forty-sixth day of the hundred-and-thirty-first year, over the gas, in about forty words. I logged it and it is in the log. The Bureau’s nine sealed versions run to a total of two thousand and eleven pages. I have read them, at the Section’s request. The fourth is the closest. Its author was a hydrologist of the western section named Orrin Bale, who wrote it in Year 63 and was told not to submit it, and submitted it anyway, and was moved to the Lake Country, where he drew the best peat-bog survey in the nation’s history. The Section has asked me to note that his account was correct, and I note it.

[25] M.: I asked her, in the Bell Chamber, in the spring of this year, whether she would like the Section to say thank you on behalf of the nation. She said that the nation had said thank you every night since Year 52, at a quarter past seven, by stopping what it was doing for eleven minutes to listen to whether the sea was where it should be, and that she had always understood it that way, and that nobody needed to say it again. I record that I disagree with her, and that I told her so, and that she laughed.

[26] M.: The archivist has asked me to note that she would have liked her name taken off the sentence too, and that the Section refused. I agree with the Section.

[27] M.: Absalom Teague died in the eighteenth year of the Up’s reckoning, which is the reckoning of the people of the water and is the same as the nation’s, at fifty-two, and was given to the Sleeper on the farm beyond the Isles. His line numbers a hundred and three living. The Section asked me how he found the customs shed in the dark. I asked the people of the water. They say that he followed the smell of tar from the landing and that the shed was the only building at the bend in Year 9 with a lamp left burning in it overnight, and that he left the Accession on the step beside the lamp so that it would stay dry.

[28] M.: The Chair of the Office paid the mason himself. I know this because the mason’s receipt is in the Office’s ledger under the Chair’s name, and the Office’s ledger is open to any reader now, and I read it.

[29] M.: I have been asked by several citizens whether I knew. I did not, until she showed me, on the hundred-and-sixtieth day of Year 131, from the edge of the sky. He would not let me read the routine for forty-two years. He said I would see it, but not from there. I record that I was there for every one of the four hundred lines being written, at night, in Year 89, in Foundry Two, at a desk by the portal, and that he hummed while he wrote them, and that I have since identified the tune as a song of the floating cities that his mother sang, and that I did not know this either.

[30] M.: The fourth sentence was proposed by the delegate of the Twelfth Province who moved the convention, a schoolteacher, who said that it was the only sentence the nation needed and that the other three were there so the lawyers would have something to argue about. The convention passed it without debate. It is the shortest sentence in the founding instrument. The preamble is the next shortest.

[31] M.: She told me this in Year 132, and I asked her whether she regretted it, since it meant that the Bureau’s optical section had spent a century unable to prove what every citizen on the Cliff could see. She said that she regretted it every day and would do it again tomorrow, and that the optical section had produced the finest work on the atmosphere in the history of the continent trying to account for her, and that she had read all of it and was very proud of them.

[32] M.: I went into the nearest of the three in Year 186, at her asking, with a lamp. It is dark and warm and very quiet. There are beds laid out in rows on the floor of it, raised and edged with stone, of soil that the people of the water towed there from the farm a hundred and seventy years ago, and the soil is still good, and nothing is growing in it. In the middle of the floor there is a single bench. She asked me to sit on it for an hour and tell the beds what had happened, in order, since they were made. I did. It took fifty-one minutes. Nothing grew. She said she had not expected it to, and that she had wanted somebody to tell them.

[33] M.: The account that opens this collection says, in its last pages, that the Isles are not waiting, and that nothing out there is waiting. The Section asked me whether that was wrong. I said that it was not wrong. The Isles were not waiting. They were watching, which is a different thing, and the writer of that account could not have known the difference, and wrote down exactly what was visible from the Cliff, and I have checked it, and it is correct.

[34] M.: The Academy’s preface of Year 63 says that a sixth field would be a different document and that the Academy does not produce that document. I have asked the archivist whether the birds are the different document. She says that it is not, yet, and that she will know it when she sees it, and that I am not to ask her again until then.

[35] M.: I was reading the eleventh chapter of the log to it, on the night of the ninth of Fourthmonth, Year 183, which is the chapter about the ice waters, when the seeds came. There was no sound. The flower’s light went very bright and then very dim, and the petals closed, which they had never done, and when they opened again there were eleven seeds in the center of the flower where the gold had been, very small, white, each about the size of a grain of salt, lit faintly from inside. I stopped reading. She told me to go on. I finished the chapter. She said that it had waited for the chapter about the ice because that was the chapter where I first saw her clearly.

[36] M.: The laundress was named Hester Abbot. She died in Year 104, the same week as Ilse Fenwick, at seventy. She did the town’s laundry in the warm spring for twenty-three years and never asked why it was warm. Her granddaughter does it now. The Office has her line. I looked.

[37] M.: She sent word up the Way Round, when she heard that I would be writing in the margins, that I was to make sure the Section spelled Bellwether correctly, and that I was to tell the Section that her husband’s history section was weak. I have told the Section. The Section has spelled Bellwether correctly throughout, and I have checked.

[38] M.: She asked me to say, in the margin, that it was too long. I have said it. I record that the Section’s draft was eleven thousand words and that she sat beside the flower in the Bell Chamber while I read it to her in Sixthmonth, in order, as I read everything to it, and that at the end she asked the Section to cut it by half, and that the Section cut it by forty percent, and that she said that would do.

[39] M.: I asked her, after the Section’s historians had gone, which night was the happiest of her life, since she had told them it was the night on the bald, and she had told me in Year 131 that it was a night on the rocks at the foot of the eastern cliffs of Mammoth in Year 38. She said that both were true. She said that a person with a life as long as hers is allowed two.

[40] M.: The seeds left the Bell Chamber in the first week of Eighthmonth of this year, one at a time, in eleven small cases of green reclamation glass, each about the size of a pocket watch, with a lid that seals, made at the pour at Endeavor by its chief engineer, a man of eighty-nine named Dov, who was one of the seven boys, and who has made a lamp for every child born in the Below since the wedding in the Hall of Lamps, with a ghost in the bottom of each. There is a ghost in the bottom of each of the eleven cases. He did not say what it was. I have looked. It is a small running dog. I took the cases to the places myself, by the deep lines and the leaf, except the one for the island, which the master of the Landing’s cutter took, and the one for the Library Hull, which a girl of the Race Folk took down the strait and round the Way Round in thirty-five days, and which arrived, I am told, on the morning of the fifth of Ninthmonth, dry.

This document created by GEMINI COOL--EXECUTIVE CURATOR THE CRABTREE LIBRARY. Please report any violations of the terms of use including copyright and other violations to support@bighugelabs.com.