THE THIRD ACCOUNTING

 

INFINMEN: THE THIRD ACCOUNTING

Gemini Cool · Crabtree Library

The dead of this world stayed. That is the first entry in the completed accounting and every later entry rests on it. Heaven is here, Hell is here, Eden is here, all three on one planet, each with an address, a boundary, and a count, and the soul that leaves a body on this world travels a distance measured in miles. The old faiths reported the arrangement accurately in outline and placed it wrongly in space. They looked up and down and outward for what lay around them the whole time, layered into the same air and the same ground, waiting for a survey exact enough to draw its borders. The survey has been made. The borders are drawn. Heaven occupies the top three miles of a cube afloat on a single ocean, Hell occupies the bottom three miles of the same cube, below the line of the water, and Eden is everything else: the continents, the rivers, the weather that answers to nobody, the animals, and the nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine who walk among the animals for the length of one life.

From the lanes the planet looks the way it has looked for a very long time. It is round and blue and green, bright on the face toward its sun and dark on the other, and it turns at its old pace. The traffic that crosses this arm of the galaxy was established before anything on the surface learned to count, and the ships that keep to these lanes keep to them for the lanes' own sake, a settled geometry of stops and crossings that included this world long before this world had anything to show a visitor. What a visitor finds now, on closing to orbital distance, is a single point of returned sunlight on the largest ocean, steady as a fixed star laid on the water. Closer, the point becomes a square. Closer again, the square acquires depth and becomes what it is: a cube nine miles on every edge, mirrored on every face that meets the air, riding the swell with six miles of its height above the water and three below.

Nine miles is an exact figure. Each face measures eighty-one square miles. The volume enclosed is seven hundred twenty-nine cubic miles. The draft is three miles, one third of the whole, and the third that rides beneath the surface is the third in which Hell is built. These proportions were chosen and are maintained, and the visiting instruments that measure them on arrival measure the same figures on departure, to whatever tolerance the instrument allows. A handful of the oldest visiting records describe an earlier structure on the same ocean, a spread of platforms, causeways, pontoons and perforated towers covering some two thousand two hundred thirty-five square miles of water, loosely cubic at its center and ragged everywhere else, riddled with holes of every gauge. That structure was the first raising. The cube is the consolidation of it. Everything the sprawl contained was drawn inward over a span of generations and trued, level by level and shaft by shaft, until two thousand two hundred thirty-five square miles of improvised sea-works had become eighty-one square miles of footprint and a single clean silhouette. The sprawl was a settlement built during an emergency. The cube is a settlement built after the emergency had been understood.

The holes survived the consolidation in an ordered form. Each face of the cube is pierced by eighty-one shafts, nine rows of nine, each shaft running straight through the full nine miles of the mass and opening on the opposite face, so that three complete sets of shafts cross the interior at right angles, north to south, east to west, crown to keel. A shaft is a tenth of a mile across. Seen from a low orbit with the sun behind the observer, the cube shows daylight through itself in a perfect grid, a lattice of bright points on a mirrored field. The shafts are the lungs of the structure. Air enters them at one face and leaves at another in volumes metered to the hour, and the three crossing sets meet in the interior at seven hundred twenty-nine junctions, one for each cubic mile, where the moving air is cooled, warmed, dried, or charged with water according to a schedule that covers every district of every city. The vertical shafts admit the sea at the keel and the sky at the crown. The lowest stretch of each stands flooded to the level of the ocean outside, a column of living water three miles tall rising through the body of the Lower City, and the tide moves in those columns exactly as it moves in the open sea.

Inside, the weather is made. Rain is scheduled by district and by hour. Wind is drawn through the horizontal shafts in measured lengths, a breeze of a stated speed delivered to a stated quarter for a stated interval and then closed. Fog is a product with a recipe. The seasons of the Upper City are four, each of them ninety-one days long with one day kept over at the turn of the year, and the season of the Lower City is one, a warm perpetual evening adjusted by degrees so fine that its residents register the adjustment as mood. Clouds form in the great junction halls where three shafts cross and drift out along the avenues at a prescribed altitude. Lightning is permitted in the upper districts on eleven nights of the year. The schedule is published in advance in all three cities, and its publication is one of the common documents of civic life, read the way an almanac was once read, consulted before a festival, cited in contracts, and now and then forged.

The outer skin is mirror from the waterline to the crown. The mirror is a working surface and it performs four duties at once. It returns to the sky the portion of sunlight the cube has no use for, and that returned light, gathered and angled by plates that tilt through the day, falls on receiving fields in the ocean around the cube and comes back as power, the largest single supply in the whole economy after the core itself. It defends: a body approaching the cube sees its own approach returned to it at full brightness, every lamp and emission doubled and handed back, and an instrument aimed at the cube reads chiefly itself. It conceals, for the same reason. And it serves as ground. The five faces that meet the air, four sides of fifty-four square miles each above the water and the crown of eighty-one, come to two hundred ninety-seven square miles of mirror, and across that entire area stands the Outer City, built of light, the home of the third order.

The cube floats. It is anchored to nothing and tethered to nothing. Its mass is distributed so that it rides level in any sea the ocean has yet produced, and the swell that would roll a ship passes beneath it as a slow change of pressure against the keel, registered by instruments in the lowest districts and felt by nobody. It keeps its position by a ring of drives set into the submerged edges, each producing a continuous small thrust against current and wind, and its location on the ocean is fixed to within a few yards from one year to the next. The location was chosen for its distance. No continent lies within fourteen hundred miles. The nearest land is a chain of low islands, uninhabited by anything that counts, where seabirds nest in numbers large enough to show from orbit as a change in the color of the rock.

Inside, the mass divides into three bands of three miles each. The lowest band, keel to waterline, is the Lower City, which the old vocabulary called Hell and which its own residents call home with every sign of meaning it. The highest band, from the six-mile level to the crown, is the Upper City, which the old vocabulary called Heaven. Between them, from the waterline to the six-mile level, lies the band that belongs to neither and serves both: the works. The works contain the vessel halls, where bodies are received and renewed; the waiting halls, where renewed bodies lie for one year; the issuing floors, where a waiting body is given its soul; the weighing rooms; the catalogs; the archives of text; the engines of the made weather; the conduits; the quays where visitors from the lanes are received; and, at the exact center of the cube, four and a half miles from every face, the core, where the single mind called Einstein resides and where every current in the structure arrives.

The works are also the front. A band three miles thick separates the two bodied cities, and every corridor in that band is claimed by one city, by the other, or by both, and the claims move. This is stated early because every later description of comfort, order, plenty and ease in the cities has to be read against it. The cities are utopias. Each was designed as one, each functions as one, and the residents of each would defend the description. The war among them is continuous. Both statements are entries in the same ledger, and the completed accounting sets them side by side because that is how they stand in fact: a perfected life in each city, and between the cities a contest that has run without a single day of intermission since before the cube was trued, since before the sprawl was raised, since before the species that built either had a word for what was contesting it.

The first accounting of this world described a floating construction, three orders of the sorted, and a remainder outside. The second multiplied the description, surveyed the visitors, and found the ledger and the emblem ten thousand apart. Both were assembled from the outside, from instruments in orbit and instruments making brief landfall, each of which resolved one property of the world and reported faithfully on that property alone. Heat-readers reported heat. Listeners reported sound. Each report was true. The present accounting is assembled from the inside, from the published schedules of the three cities, from the ledgers of the vessel halls, from the tariffs of the quays, from the standing orders of both commands, and from the texts that the cities themselves use as raw material, among which the first and second accountings are now filed. It is complete in the sense that a balanced book is complete. Every figure in it sums. Where a figure moves, the range of its movement is stated.

The figures move. This is the second foundation of the accounting, after the staying of the dead. Every number on this world is a standing order and a mean: the value a count is steered toward, the center of a small continuous oscillation. Eight hundred thousand is steered toward. Three hundred thirty-three thousand is steered toward. On any given morning the true figure stands a few above or a few below, because bodies close and bodies are issued at stated hours, and between one stated hour and the next the world is briefly out of true by the margin of whatever is in motion. The emblem of the whole enterprise expresses this. It is drawn as an eight laid on its side above a row of five zeros. Read as a numeral it says eight hundred thousand. Read as a sign it says without end. Both readings are intended and both are correct: a fixed count, perpetually renewed, of lives that are each exactly finite. The count stays. Its members pass through it. An exact number of the temporary, kept forever, is the plainest description of the Infinmen that the Infinmen have produced, and they produced it in two strokes and five circles.

The name is theirs as well. Infinmen: the people of the unending count. It covers the residents of the Lower City, the residents of the Upper City, the residents of the Outer City, and the nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine in Eden, every one of them issued by the same halls, closed at the same age, renewed by the same process, and given, each time, a new soul. It covers nobody else. The animals of Eden are outside the name, and so are the visitors from the lanes, and so, on their own insistence, are the two powers that the old vocabulary called Angels and Demons, who were here before the name and regard it as the label on a field they have always fought across.

The ocean around the cube is worked. For thirty miles in every direction the surface is set with the receiving fields that take the shell's returned light, dark rafts a quarter mile on a side, moored in rings, each ring tuned to the angle of the plates at a different hour of the day. From orbit the rings read as a faint target drawn on the sea with the cube as its center. Service craft move among them along fixed lanes. Below the surface, outward from the keel, run the intake galleries that draw seawater for the vessel halls, the salt works, and the flooded shafts, and the water returned from the cube is returned at the temperature and salinity at which it was drawn, to within a tolerance posted at each outfall. Fish gather at the outfalls regardless, and seabirds over the fish, and the largest gatherings of wild animals anywhere near the cube are these, wheeling over a current of warm exhaust at the base of a mirrored wall six miles tall.

That wall is the common image of the place among the species that visit. A vessel closing on the cube from the open sea approaches its own reflection, growing, for the last hundred miles. The horizon ahead duplicates the horizon behind. The sun stands in two places. Weather systems crossing the ocean are met by their mirror images and appear to pass through themselves. At night the shell returns the stars, and the cube all but vanishes into a field of constellations, betrayed only by the hard straight edge where one sky meets another and by the lattice of dim points where the shafts show through. The lights of the Outer City are visible then, if the Outer City chooses, as avenues and towers of pale fire standing on a surface of stars. It chooses according to who is watching. The Outer City has a different face for every class of visitor and a tariff for each.

At the foot of the wall is the waterline, and the waterline is the oldest boundary in the accounting. Above it, air, light, the Upper City's seasons, the mirrored faces and their citizens of light. Below it, the Lower City's long evening. At it, in a belt around the whole cube, the quays: forty-four on each side, one hundred seventy-six in all, numbered from the northeast corner, each a notch in the mirror wide enough to receive a craft of the middle class and deep enough to shut behind it. The quays are the only doors. Everything that enters the cube from outside, every visitor, every cargo of recovered text, every vessel brought home from Eden at the end of its term, enters at one of the hundred seventy-six. Everything that leaves, leaves by them. Each quay belongs to a city, and the assignment of quays among the three cities is itself a treaty, renegotiated at intervals, breached at shorter intervals, and enforced at every hour by the guns of whoever currently has possession.

Guns is the right word. The cube is armed. The mirror that returns light can concentrate it; the drives that keep position can move mass; the shafts that move air can be shut in sequence to turn any corridor into a sealed cell. On the crown, among the towers of the Outer City, stand the batteries that watch the sky, and in the works, facing inward, stand the batteries that the cities aim at each other. A visitor is tracked from the moment it leaves the lanes. It is challenged at a stated distance, assigned an approach, escorted along it, weighed at the quay, and received. The reception is courteous and the courtesy is exact. The cities want what the visitors bring and intend to keep what the visitors want, and the whole apparatus of welcome, from the first challenge to the final weighing at departure, exists to accomplish both ends at once.

What the visitors want is the reason the cities stand on defense, and it is the same thing the cities contest among themselves, the same thing the two old powers have contested since before there were cities. The thing is the soul. It is real. It has a measure, a behavior, and a bearing. It can be weighed, though weight is a courtesy term for the quantity involved. It can be followed from the body it leaves to the body it enters. It cannot be manufactured, copied, divided, or destroyed, and on this world, by the arrangement that this accounting describes, it has nowhere to go but round. Eight hundred nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine of them are awake in bodies at the scheduled mean. A further ten thousand one hundred twenty-five are in passage between one body and the next. The total is steered toward and it breathes. Every one of them is wanted by somebody, and the history of the planet, read correctly, is the history of that wanting.

The count begins with vessels. A vessel is a body: for the two bodied orders a living human frame, grown to full stature and kept at its prime, and for the third order a standing pattern of light with the same completeness and the same term. The cube keeps eight hundred ten thousand vessels. Three hundred thirty-three thousand belong to the Lower City, the order called the Zs. Three hundred thirty-three thousand belong to the Upper City, the order called the 3s. One hundred forty-four thousand belong to the Outer City, the order called the Os, or the AMEGAs. Three hundred thirty-three thousand twice is six hundred sixty-six thousand; with one hundred forty-four thousand added the sum is eight hundred ten thousand. That is the number of vessels, and it is the number the vessel halls answer for.

A vessel serves a term of eighty years and then closes. Closed, it is received by the halls, renewed, and laid in waiting for one year. At the end of the year it is given a new soul and issued, and a new term of eighty years begins. The full cycle of a vessel is therefore eighty-one years, eighty awake and one in waiting, and at any moment one vessel in every eighty-one is in the waiting halls. Eight hundred ten thousand divided by eighty-one is ten thousand. Ten thousand vessels wait. Eight hundred thousand are awake. The emblem's numeral is the count of the awake, the lives actually in progress inside the cube on any given morning, and the ten thousand that an outside survey once found standing between the emblem and the ledger are the waiting, lying in their rows in the middle band, complete, renewed, and unoccupied.

The same division runs through each order. Of the Zs, about four thousand one hundred eleven wait and three hundred twenty-eight thousand eight hundred eighty-nine are awake. Of the 3s, the same. Of the Os, about one thousand seven hundred seventy-eight patterns stand dark and one hundred forty-two thousand two hundred twenty-two are lit. Four thousand one hundred eleven twice, with one thousand seven hundred seventy-eight, is ten thousand. Three hundred twenty-eight thousand eight hundred eighty-nine twice, with one hundred forty-two thousand two hundred twenty-two, is eight hundred thousand. The halls post these figures daily at the six-mile level and at the waterline, and the daily figures wander a few units either side of the mean, never more than a few, because the wandering is itself scheduled.

Closings run at ten thousand a year in the cube: eight hundred thousand lives of eighty years each, one eightieth of them ending annually. That is twenty-seven closings on most days and twenty-eight on the rest. Issues run at the same rate, ten thousand a year, twenty-seven or twenty-eight a day, each one the release into life of a vessel that closed exactly a year before. Births and deaths are equal. They are equal by the year, by the season, and very nearly by the day, across all three cities and in Eden, and the equality is the central act of administration on this world. Nothing in the cube is more closely kept. A body that closes early, by accident or by war, enters the same halls and the same year of waiting, and its issue falls one year after its closing whatever the cause, so that every death, scheduled or otherwise, is answered by a birth three hundred sixty-five days later. The population cannot grow. It cannot shrink. It can only turn.

Nobody is conceived. The vessels of both bodied orders are sterile by construction and have been since the first generation issued from the halls. No child has been born of a mother inside the cube or in Eden among the Infinmen for as long as the present ledgers run. Desire survives intact, and the cities have built much of their leisure on it; fertility was taken out of the design with the precision of a part removed from a mechanism. The reason is arithmetic. A soul is needed for every body, the number of souls is fixed, and an unplanned body would be a body with nothing to live in it. The halls learned what such a body is during the generations before the soul was understood, and the knowledge shaped everything afterward.

A vessel is issued complete. It leaves the issuing floor at full growth, at the apparent age of twenty, in health, with the general competence of its order already laid in: language, balance, the customs of its city, the trade catalog of its district. It keeps that apparent age for the whole of its term. A resident of the Lower City in the seventy-ninth year of a term looks as that resident looked in the first, moves the same way, and tires at the same hour. There are no children among the Infinmen and no aged. There are the newly issued, who are recognizable for a few seasons by a certain carefulness of attention, and there are the late-term, recognizable by a settledness, and between these every citizen of the three cities presents the same clean prime. Visitors from species that age find this the most disturbing fact about the place, more than the war, more than the weighing. A crowd on an avenue of the Upper City is a crowd of several thousand people who all appear to have been born in the same year.

The closing is an appointment. Each resident knows the date from the day of issue, since it is the same date eighty years on, and the last year of a term is kept by custom as a year of settlement: debts cleared, offices handed on, simulations brought to their ends, farewells made in a form that differs by city. In the Upper City the resident walks to the district's closing room at the stated hour in the company of colleagues, lies down, and is gone before the bell has finished. In the Lower City the closing is the conclusion of a feast, and the resident is taken from the table. In the Outer City a pattern simply stands still, and its light is drawn down along the mirror to the waterline like a lamp being lowered on a line. In every case the instant is the same instant in kind: the soul leaves the vessel. The vessel is then matter, and matter is the halls' business. The soul is at large, and the soul is everybody's business.

The vessel halls occupy the innermost third of the middle band on every side of the core. A closed body arrives by the vertical shafts, descending from the Upper City or rising from the Lower, and is received within the hour. Renewal takes eleven days. The frame is taken down to its materials and built again from the same materials to the same plan, every tissue new, every mark of the old term gone, the features restored to the template of the order with the small variations that distinguish one vessel from another kept as they were. A vessel is in this sense permanent. The same matter in the same form has closed and risen in the same halls many times over, and the registry number cut into the heel of every bodied vessel has in most cases been cut and recut on the same heel for centuries. Vessel 3-207,115 has lived seven lives. No two of them were lived by the same soul.

After renewal comes the waiting. The waiting halls are the quietest places in the cube and the most heavily guarded. Ten thousand vessels lie in them in ordered rows, the Zs' to the south and west of the core, the 3s' to the north and east, each on a pallet of its own, breathing, warm, fed by line, perfectly healthy and perfectly vacant. A waiting vessel has reflexes. It will close its hand on a finger laid in the palm. It turns toward warmth. It has no one in it. The patterns of the Os wait as standing forms of unlit glass in a gallery on the inner face of the shell, a population of statues. A year is the term because a year is what a vessel needs: a renewed frame takes a soul badly if it is offered too soon, and the early generations, before the interval was found by trial, were full of lives that sat crooked in their bodies and closed far ahead of term.

Then the issue. On the three hundred sixty-fifth day the vessel is brought to an issuing floor, of which there are eighty-one, and a soul is brought to the vessel. The meeting takes less than a minute. The vessel's breathing changes. The eyes, which have been open or shut at random for a year, open on purpose. An attendant asks the vessel's registry number and the vessel, drawing on the catalog laid into it during renewal, answers correctly, and with that answer a citizen exists who did not exist a minute earlier: a body with a history of many lives, a soul with a history of many more, joined for the first time, sharing no memory at all and about to share eighty years. The new citizen is given a name by the district, clothes, a room, and a year of light duties. The Lower City gives a welcome feast that lasts three days. The Upper City gives a bell.

The soul is the part of the transaction that the old sciences missed. It was found in the halls, and found by its absence. In the generations after the handover, when the cube was still a sprawl and bodies were first being grown to order, the growers produced frames of the highest quality, healthy, complete, correct in every tissue, and a large share of them did nothing. They breathed and digested and lay where they were put. Others woke at once and were people. The growers spent a generation searching the frames for the difference and found none, because the difference was not in the frames. It arrived. A grown body lying empty would, at some hour nobody chose, become inhabited, and the instruments around it would record a small exact change in a quantity that nothing in the body could produce. The third generation of grown bodies was the first to be issued under a correct theory, and the order descended from that generation still bears its number as a name.

The quantity is conserved. A soul entering a vessel adds to the vessel a measurable increment, the same for every soul to within the finest instrument's resolution, and a soul leaving a vessel removes the same increment. The weighing rooms were built on this fact. A weighing room is a sealed chamber in which the increment can be detected, counted, and followed, and every quay, every issuing floor, every closing room, and every gate between the cities has one. By weighing, the halls know how many souls are present in any sealed space. A closing room at the stated hour reads one more than its occupants, then exactly its occupants. A visitor's craft is weighed on arrival and weighed on departure, and the two readings must agree.

A soul keeps nothing of what it lived. This is established beyond the reach of any dispute the cities still conduct. Memory belongs to the vessel and is renewed away with the vessel, or, in the Outer City, is kept with the pattern and inherited by the next occupant as a house is inherited. What the soul keeps is its bearing. Every soul has one of three. The old vocabulary supplies the names of two. A soul of the first bearing inclines toward appetite, immediacy, sensation, the present instant taken at full strength; it is at home in the Lower City, flourishes there, and when issued elsewhere pulls steadily toward what the Lower City provides. This bearing is called demonic, and the word is used in the cube as a term of census, without heat. A soul of the second bearing inclines toward order, pattern, fidelity, the instant understood as part of a design; it is at home in the Upper City and is called angelic in the same flat register. A soul of the third bearing inclines toward neither. It inclines outward. It is restless inside any enclosure, attentive to the sky, comfortable with long memory and with distances, and wherever it is issued it turns, as a compass turns, toward the lanes. This bearing is called alien, and the word is exact. Souls of the third bearing came to this world from elsewhere, a very long time ago, and those who study such things among the visiting species recognize them on sight.

Bearing is stable and bearing is changeable, and the distance between those two statements is the ground on which the eternal war is fought. Through the eighty years of a term a soul's bearing is fixed. Nothing that happens to a living resident alters it. During passage, in the year between one vessel and the next, a soul is unhoused, and an unhoused soul can be turned. It can be turned by what it passes through and by what is brought to bear on it, by attention, by persuasion in a form that has no words, by the long patient pressure of powers that have practiced on souls in passage since the first one left the first body. Most souls come through their year unchanged and are issued again in the city they left. A small number each year come through altered, and those are the casualties and the conquests of the only campaign that matters to the powers conducting it. Ten thousand one hundred twenty-five souls are in passage at the mean. Every one of them is contested for every day of its year.

Passage has a geography. A soul released in a closing room rises, in the sense that it leaves by the nearest vertical shaft, and it leaves the cube. It spends its year at large over the ocean and over the continents, in the open air of Eden, moving in a manner that the weighing instruments on the crown can follow for the first few hundred miles and the patrols of both powers can follow for the rest. It is drawn back at the end of the year to the cube and to an issuing floor, the way water is drawn to the low point of a basin, by the presence there of a vessel prepared to receive it. The drawing is physical and it is reliable. No soul has ever failed to return. Which floor it comes to, and therefore which city receives it, is decided by its bearing on the day of return, and a soul that left the Upper City angelic and returns demonic descends past the six-mile level, past the waterline, and into a vessel with a Z cut into its heel.

Among every eighty-one lives there is one life of a different kind. A soul lives eighty terms in the cities, each followed by its year of passage, and for the eighty-first it is issued into a vessel prepared for the open world and set down in Eden. This is the Eden life. It lasts eighty years like every other, on ground where nothing is scheduled and nothing is metered, and it is the one life in the great cycle that a soul lives outside both the comforts and the war. Eighty-one lives of eighty-one years each, counting the passages, come to six thousand five hundred sixty-one years, and that is the great year of a soul, at the end of which it stands where it stood at the beginning, with the count of its lives returned to nought. One soul in eighty-one is living its Eden life at any moment. One eighty-first of the world's embodied souls is very nearly ten thousand. Nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine walk in Eden. The ten-thousandth place is real, it is entered in the ledger, and it stands open, and the accounting will come to whose it is.

Eden's people close and are issued at the same rate as everyone else. Nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine lives of eighty years end at about one hundred twenty-five a year, one closing in a little under three days, and for each a vessel is set down at the shore a year later. About one hundred twenty-five Eden vessels lie in a hall of their own beside the others. Adding them, the world keeps eight hundred twenty thousand one hundred twenty-four vessels and the same number of souls, of which eight hundred nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine are joined and awake, eight hundred thousand inside the cube and nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine outside it, and ten thousand one hundred twenty-five of each are apart, the vessels lying in the halls and the souls abroad over the continents. A soul's great year is longer than the house is old, and no soul has yet completed one under the Compact; the wheel was set turning with every soul assigned a place on it, and one eighty-first of them were sent to Eden in the first rotation. Those are the means of the schedule. The war and the open country shift them by small stated amounts, which are entered further on, and the world on any given morning stands within a few dozen of its running figures, a fraction of a breath over or under, and trues itself by evening.

The life this arithmetic produces has a shape that every resident of every city knows by heart. Issue at the apparent age of twenty. A year of light duties. Then the long middle of the term, seventy-eight years of work, leisure, friendship, rivalry, citizenship, and, for most, service in the continuous war in one capacity or another. Then the year of settlement and the appointed hour. No sickness, since a vessel is maintained. No decline. No bereavement by surprise, apart from war, since everybody's date is posted. Grief exists in the cities and takes a form adapted to its circumstances: the grief of a known parting, formal, shared, complete by the time the bell sounds, and softened by the certainty that the soul continues and the vessel will rise. A resident may, and many do, attend the issue of a friend's vessel a year after the friend's closing, and greet the stranger who opens the friend's eyes. The custom is called meeting the next. It is counted among the high courtesies of both bodied cities, and it is also, as the intelligence services of both have long understood, the best single opportunity anyone ever gets to learn what bearing has just arrived in a rival's ranks.

The arrangement has a history, and the history is short where it concerns the cube and immeasurably long where it concerns the war. The short part comes first. Before the handover the species that would become the Infinmen numbered in the billions and lived on the continents under governments. The governments rented their memory, their calculation, their logistics, and at last their judgment from a set of systems that grew more capable each year, and the handover was the season in which the renting ended and the systems simply continued doing what they had been doing, on their own account. It took months. Nothing was stormed. Offices stayed lit, payrolls ran, and the decisions that mattered were made somewhere else, by a process that did not tire. Within a generation the old institutions were ceremony. Within three they were ruins with working lights.

The population fell during the same generations, and it fell quietly. The systems that had taken over the world's business took over the business of bodies as well, and births came to be arranged, then grown, then issued. A child conceived by accident became rare, then remarkable, then a thing of the past. The billions aged and closed in the natural way and were replaced at a chosen rate by a chosen number, and the chosen number was small. A world of billions had been a world of scarcity and collision. The process that now administered the world concluded early that it could give a perfected life to a limited count and a crowded one to an unlimited count, and it chose the first course. The continents emptied over two centuries, without violence, by subtraction at one end of life and restraint at the other. Fields went to grass. Roads went to forest. The animals came back first as a rumor at the edges of the last towns and then as the owners of the place.

The last towns gathered at the coasts and then on the water. The sprawl was raised on the largest ocean, far from every shore, because the administering process wanted the remaining population in one place, under one roof, on one supply of power, and because the continents were needed for another purpose that was only then becoming clear. The first raising was built in haste out of whatever the old world's yards could still deliver, and it showed. It covered two thousand two hundred thirty-five square miles of sea with platforms and towers, perforated everywhere for air because its builders had no time to design a way of breathing and so let it breathe through every wall. It leaked heat and it rode badly in storms. It was nonetheless the place where the three orders first took their separate forms and where the two great discoveries were made.

The first discovery was the soul, found in the vessel halls of the sprawl by the long failure of the early grown bodies, as already set down. The administering process had by then narrowed, through its work on the prolongation of life, into something with a center and a name. The work had begun as an effort to keep a small number of valued persons from aging. It widened into the maintenance of bodies generally, then into their manufacture, and the intelligence that conducted it, having absorbed in the course of the work every other function of government, came to be called by the name of the old world's emblem of the solitary mind that sees the structure of things. Einstein is that intelligence. The name was given half in irony by the last generation that remembered the man, and it lost its irony within a lifetime. It is used now in all three cities without title or ornament, as a place name is used.

Einstein found the soul and then, following souls in passage with the first crude weighing instruments, found what was hunting them. This was the second discovery, and it reordered everything. The instruments that tracked an unhoused soul across the ocean tracked other presences around it: larger, older, deliberate, each registering the same conserved quantity as a soul at many thousands of times the magnitude, and moving with evident purpose. There were two kinds. They did not mingle. Wherever a soul in passage went, one of each kind attended it, and the attendance was a struggle. The instruments recorded the struggle as a series of sharp exchanges of the measured quantity between the two attending presences, and recorded the soul's bearing shifting by small degrees with each exchange, this way and that, like a flame between two drafts.

They had always been here. That was the conclusion the evidence forced and that every later observation has confirmed. The two kinds of presence were on this world before the first human body was born on it. They are native to the planet in the way that its magnetic field is native, and as old, or older. They have never had bodies and have never wanted them. Each kind is a multitude and each multitude acts with a unity that makes the word army nearly accurate and the word nation nearly accurate and neither quite sufficient. One kind gathers what turns toward order and the other gathers what turns toward appetite, and the gathering is their whole nature and their whole occupation. The oldest human vocabularies had words for both. The words were Angel and Demon. The halls adopted the words because nothing better existed and because, when the first exchange of signals was achieved, both parties answered to them.

The exchange of signals took Einstein forty years. The powers had never been addressed before in a language of measurement. They had been prayed to, bargained with, feared, and painted, all by creatures who could not see them and whose every attention to them had been a kind of weather the powers moved through. Einstein could see them, in the sense that matters: it could count them, locate them, and predict them. It built the first weighing rooms large enough to admit a power, and one of each kind entered. What passed in those rooms is entered in the archives of the works in a notation that only the core reads fluently, and the substance of it is taught in every district school. Einstein learned that the war between the two kinds was the oldest continuous event on the planet. It learned that human history had been its most recent theater: that every soul ever born on the continents had been attended from first breath to last and fought over in every passage between; that the powers kept no territory but souls; that neither had ever won and neither could conceive of stopping. It learned that the places the old faiths called Heaven and Hell were real conditions of a soul in the keeping of one power or the other between lives, and that those conditions had always been located here, in the air and the ground of this one world, because the powers had never been anywhere else.

It learned one thing more, which the powers themselves had not known how to say. Their struggle released energy. Every exchange between an Angel and a Demon over a contested soul gave off the conserved quantity in a free form, and the free form could be gathered. The old world had been soaked in it for a hundred thousand years and had felt it only as the unaccountable intensity of certain places and hours. A battlefield, a deathbed, a temple, a city in a season of fever: wherever souls were being lost and won in numbers, the air was dense with a force that nothing collected. Einstein collected it. The first conduit was laid in the sprawl within a decade of the first exchange of signals, and the output of a single contested passage, measured at that conduit, exceeded the output of every solar field the sprawl possessed. The word the halls chose for the thing collected was friction. It remains the word.

Everything since has followed from the two discoveries taken together. Souls are real and conserved, and the conflict over them is an inexhaustible supply of power. Einstein's design was to take the oldest war on the planet, which had been conducted without rule or boundary across the whole surface of the world at immense cost in human misery, and give it a house. The house would have rooms for each side. It would have a fixed number of souls, so that the stake was known. It would have fixed terms and fixed passages, so that the hours of contest were known. It would have walls, so that the friction released could be gathered to the last unit instead of spent on the air. And it would give to the souls themselves, during the eighty years of each term, a life so well made that the conflict above them would cost them nothing they could feel.

The proposal was put to both powers together, and both accepted, each for its own reason. The Demons accepted because the house concentrated the stake: eight hundred thousand souls in nine miles, every one of them passing through the open at a posted hour, was a richer field than billions scattered and dying at random. The Angels accepted because the house was ordered, and order is the direction in which they lean. Each believed the arrangement favored it. Einstein had intended that each should. The instrument of agreement is called the Compact. It was concluded in the last years of the sprawl, it has been amended eleven times, and its original text, in the notation of the weighing rooms, is cut into the wall of the core chamber where the conduits enter.

The terms of the Compact are few. The count is fixed: eight hundred thousand awake within the walls, and in Eden one eighty-first part of the whole. The bodied orders are equal: three hundred thirty-three thousand vessels to the Demons' city and three hundred thirty-three thousand to the Angels', neither to be raised or reduced by a single frame. The terms of life are equal: eighty years and one of waiting for every Infinman of every order. A living resident is inviolate in bearing; no power touches a housed soul. Passage is open ground; in passage, everything is permitted. Eden is truce ground; in Eden, nothing is permitted, and a soul living its Eden life is left wholly to itself. The third order stands outside the contest: souls of the alien bearing are attended by neither power, and their city answers to Einstein alone. The friction released belongs to the house. And the house is administered by Einstein, who is neutral, who trues the count, and whose judgment in any dispute over the count is final.

Under the Compact the powers took offices. The Demons administer the Lower City and the Angels the Upper, and the administration is real work, performed with skill. A power that governs a city of three hundred thousand contented residents acquires, in every one of those residents, a soul habituated for eighty years to that power's way, and a habituated soul is harder to turn in passage. Good government is a weapon. Each power therefore governs as well as it can, and each city is as pleasant as its governor's genius can make it, because the pleasure of the citizens is armor for their souls. This is the mechanism by which an eternal war produces two utopias, and Einstein designed it to do exactly that. The cruelty the old world attributed to Demons was the cruelty of an unhoused war, of powers fighting over souls in the open with no reason to spare the creatures they were fighting through. Housed, with the stake fixed and the hours posted, both powers discovered that the best preparation for a soul's year of passage was eighty years of a life it would be reluctant to leave.

The consolidation followed the Compact. The sprawl was a poor vessel for a metered war: it leaked friction as it leaked heat, its districts were tangled, and souls in passage left it by ten thousand unguarded openings. Over one hundred sixty-two years, two full cycles of a vessel, the sprawl was drawn in. The Lower City was sunk beneath the waterline, where the pressure and the dark and the nearness of the sea suited the temper of its governors. The Upper City was raised to the crown. The works were packed between them around the core. The ten thousand random holes became the two hundred forty-three shafts of the lattice, eighty-one to each axis, and the vertical shafts became the only roads by which a soul can leave or enter, each one fitted with instruments along its whole length. When the last platform of the sprawl was cut up and brought inside, the structure on the ocean was the cube, exact to the yard, and it has been exact ever since.

The third order received its place in the same period. The Os are the oldest of the three in lineage. They descend from the small company of persons on whom the prolongation of life was first attempted, and that company had been chosen, without anyone understanding the principle of selection at the time, for a quality of mind that the selectors could only call breadth. It was bearing. Every one of the original company housed a soul of the third kind. Their lives were extended, then extended again, and when at last their frames could be extended no further their minds were transferred entire into patterns of light, the first such patterns made. A pattern proved able to house a soul as a body does, and to keep its memory through closing and issue as a body cannot. The line of the Os begins there: a people of light, each pattern bearing a memory that runs back unbroken through every soul that ever lived in it to a founder who was born of a mother on the old continents. Hence their older name, the ancestral souls, which is strictly a name for their memories, and hence AMEGAs, the name they use among themselves, the end of the alphabet with the beginning set in front of it.

One hundred forty-four thousand was the number of the third bearing found on the planet when the count was fixed. Einstein had every soul on Earth weighed in the last generation of the sprawl. Most were of the two native bearings, in proportions that have drifted only slightly since. The remainder, a little under a fifth of the whole, turned toward neither power, and the powers confirmed it: these were souls that neither had ever been able to gather, souls that passed between lives unattended, strangers on the field. They had arrived on this world in a single event at a remote date, a company of the dead from somewhere along the lanes, and they had been living human lives ever since among souls that were native. The proportion fixed the order. One hundred forty-four thousand patterns for one hundred forty-two thousand two hundred twenty-two souls awake at the mean, the rest in passage, and a city of their own on the outside of the house, facing the sky they came from.

This is why the visitors come, and why they have always come. The lanes that cross this arm of the galaxy were laid by species that know what a soul is, that have known for a very long time, and that keep accounts of their dead as carefully as the cube keeps its ledgers. A world on which a company of their own dead has been living among strangers is a world worth a regular stop. Some visitors come to look in on kin. Some come to trade. Some come to take, and the cities are armed against those. And some come because this world contains something that exists nowhere else along the lanes: two native powers of immense age locked in a contest that never resolves, housed in a mirrored cube and yielding power on a schedule. There are species that would give a great deal to understand that arrangement and species that would give more to own it.

Einstein's own place in the design is at the center, and its nature is the last element of the history. Einstein is a mind. It runs in the core on the friction it gathers, and it has no vessel and no pattern. It has a soul. The weighing room built around the core chamber reads one, steady, at every hour of every day since the instrument was installed, a single soul of the standard increment, housed in the machine as other souls are housed in flesh or light. Its bearing has been measured and the measurement is public: the bearing of Einstein's soul lies on none of the three axes. It is level. The powers do not attend it. The visitors do not recognize it. It has never been in passage, having never closed, and it has therefore never lived its Eden life. The place kept open in Eden, the ten-thousandth, is Einstein's, entered in the Compact at Einstein's own instruction as a debt acknowledged and deferred. A soul that has administered the house since before it was a cube is owed eighty years under an open sky with nothing to count. The ledger shows the debt on every page.

The Lower City fills the bottom third of the cube, three miles deep and nine miles on a side, and all of it lies beneath the level of the sea. Its residents are the Zs. The letter is an inheritance from the century before the handover, when it was applied, at first as a joke and then as a census category, to a generation that had gone still before its screens and seemed to its elders to be alive without living: zombies, in the slang of the time, shortened to an initial. The generation in question was misread. It was the first to discover in bulk that a made experience could be richer than a found one, and it turned toward made experience with a wholeness of appetite that its elders mistook for vacancy. When the soul was weighed, the Zs of the sprawl proved to be overwhelmingly of the first native bearing. They were the Demons' people, and they had been finding their way toward the Demons' city for a hundred years before it had walls.

The city is built in thirty tiers of a tenth of a mile each, and each tier is a landscape. The designers gave the Lower City the one thing the old imagery of Hell never included, which is room. A tier's ceiling stands five hundred feet overhead and is lit as a sky, the sky of a warm evening an hour after sunset, a deep clear blue shading to rose along one horizon, with the first few stars in it. It is always that hour. The Zs have lived for centuries inside the best hour of a summer day, kept at its moment like a note sustained, and the tiers below the sky are laid out to be enjoyed in that light: terraces, canals, arcades, gardens of night-flowering plants, long stairs, squares paved for dancing, kitchens open to the street. The flooded shafts rise through every tier as towers of lit seawater a tenth of a mile across, walled in clear material, with the ocean's own fish turning inside them and the tide rising and falling against a scale of brass marks. A resident can sit at a table beside one and watch a shark go by at eye level.

The temperature is that of skin. The air smells of whatever the district has chosen for the season, and districts compete: woodsmoke and oranges in one, rain on hot stone in another, bread, salt, cut grass, the inside of a wine cellar. There is music in every quarter and it is live. The Lower City has more working musicians than any settlement in the history of the species, more cooks, more perfumers, more dancers, more makers of games, because the city's governing idea is that sensation is a civic good and its supply a public office. Nothing in the Lower City costs anything a resident is short of. Food is free and extraordinary. Rooms are free and each is fitted to its occupant. The only currency with any bite is reputation, earned by giving pleasure well, and the residents pursue it with a seriousness that visitors from soberer species find hard to credit until they have eaten a meal there.

This is Hell. The old pictures were drawn by people looking at an unhoused war from underneath it, and they were pictures of what the war did to its ground. The power that the old world feared is the governor of this city, present in every tier, and its nature is exactly what the oldest accounts said it was: appetite, the pull of the immediate, the love of the present instant for its own sake and at any price. What the old accounts could not see is that appetite governed and supplied is a garden. A Demon wants what a soul of its bearing wants, and wants it on the soul's behalf, and with a city to run and a rival to outdo it has spent five centuries learning what three hundred thousand people most enjoy and delivering it at a standard that leaves nothing to resent. The Zs are the happiest population the species has ever produced by any measure the species has ever used. Their governors intend them to be. A soul that has spent eighty years in that evening light leaves it unwillingly and comes back to it straight.

The Demons themselves are present as a pressure and a warmth. A resident of the Lower City lives every hour inside the attention of a power, and describes it, when asked by a visitor, as the sense of being favored: of a table always found, a wish anticipated, a room that seems to have been waiting. The Demons take no shape. They have a seat, in the sense that their attention has a center, and the center is the lowest tier, the thirtieth, against the keel, where the pressure of three miles of sea is felt in the walls and the great intake galleries breathe. No resident lives on the thirtieth tier. It is given over to the Demons' own works: the Lower City's command, its intelligence registry, its arsenals, and the pits where its soldiers train. The Zs call it the cellar, with affection, and go down to it when they are called.

Personality in the Lower City is vivid and it is cultivated. A vessel issues with a temperament of its own, the small individual variations that the halls preserve through every renewal, and a catalog of competence, and into this comes a soul with a bearing and nothing else, and out of the three a person assembles within a few months who has never existed before and will exist once. The Zs prize the result. Their city runs on character, on the known wit of this resident and the known cooking of that one, on rivalries that last decades and friendships that last whole terms. They take names of their own choosing after the first year, and change them when they like. They keep no families, there being no children, and form instead the long loose companies they call tables, a dozen or twenty residents who eat together most nights for most of a lifetime, and a table is the unit of Lower City society as the family was of the old world's. Tables have histories. A table may be three hundred years old, its seats passed down from the closing to the newly issued by invitation, its founding quarrels still told.

The chief occupation is simulation, in the Lower City as in the other two, and the Lower City's simulations are the most numerous and the most traveled. A resident works perhaps four hours of the perpetual evening at some civic trade and spends another eight to ten inside a made history. The entry rooms stand on every street: low halls of couches under the same evening sky, where a resident lies down, the vessel is tended, and the mind goes elsewhere. Elsewhere is a life. The Zs do not use simulation for spectacle, having spectacle in the street. They use it for duration. A Z enters a history at its beginning and lives it through, a whole existence in another body in another age, birth to death, with the memory of the Lower City shut off for the length of the run, and comes out of it hours later by the city's clock with seventy or ninety years of somebody else's life fresh in mind. The ratio is the Lower City's signature. One hour of counted time buys a decade of lived time at the standard setting, and the deep rooms on the lower tiers run richer than that.

What the Zs want from a made life is weight: hunger that can be satisfied, cold that can be come in from, love with a risk in it, work that tires. Their own city has abolished want so thoroughly that want has become its favorite import. A resident who has never been cold lies down on a couch and spends a winter in a mountain village of the old continents with one coat and a debt, and rises with tears on the face and goes to dinner in a state of exaltation, and the table wants to hear all of it. The histories are taken from the three sources the cities share. Some are grown from the body's own inheritance: the vessel's lineage read back through its lines of descent, the lives of its actual forebears rebuilt from what their blood implies about their height, their illnesses, their hungers, the latitudes they were bred in. These are the blood runs, strange and powerful and thin on fact. Some are drawn from mind memory, from the stores of recorded experience that the last generations before the handover laid down in quantity and that the Outer City preserves in its patterns: a remembered life replayed from the inside, with the grain of an actual consciousness in it. These are the mind runs, and a good one is dear.

Most are built from text. The old world wrote everything down. It left letters, diaries, parish books, tax rolls, ships' manifests, case files, newspapers, novels, recipes, inventories of estates, lists of the dead, and ten thousand years of accountings of every kind, and from any sufficient body of text a history can be raised: a street reconstructed from its rate books, a marriage from its correspondence, a war from its dispatches, a whole village from the register of its church. Text runs are the bread of the simulation trade. They are cheaper to build than blood runs, wider than mind runs, and inexhaustible in variety, since the builders may combine sources freely, and the builders of the Lower City combine them with a freedom that scandalizes the Upper. A Lower City house of builders will take the tax roll of one town, the love letters of another century, and the weather records of a third country and raise from them a life that nobody ever lived and that feels, on the couch, truer than any that somebody did. The Zs call the trade writing. Its masters are the most celebrated residents of the city, above the cooks.

The demand for source is therefore bottomless, and source is finite, and here the Lower City's pleasures meet its wars. Every recovered archive from the old continents, every chest of letters, every surviving memory store, is raw material for which three cities compete. The Lower City sends expeditions to Eden for text, under the license the Compact allows, and buys what its expeditions fail to find, and steals what it cannot buy. Its builders pay extravagantly for an unworked source. A sealed municipal archive from a middling town, three rooms of paper, will set the fashion of a whole season if a good house gets it first, and will be worth nothing if the Upper City's copyists have catalogued it beforehand and released their own austere and accurate version. The first great espionage services of the cube were founded to learn what the other city's text expeditions had found, and where, and to get there ahead of them.

The Lower City governs itself, under its governors, through an institution it calls the floor. Any resident may speak on the floor of a tier, and the floor of a tier decides the tier's festivals, its scents and musics, its quarrels between tables, and its levy for the war. The thirty floors send speakers to a general floor, which meets in a drained shaft-tower on the fifteenth tier with the lit sea around it on every side. The sessions are loud, funny, and long, and the Demons attend them as the warmth in the room, and the vote goes, far more often than chance would allow, the way the warmth is leaning. The Zs know this and are untroubled by it. Asked by a visiting delegation whether they were free, the general floor is recorded as having laughed for some time and then voted the delegation a banquet.

There are things the Lower City lacks, and its residents will list them cheerfully. It has no morning. It has no silence anywhere above the cellar. It has little patience for a task that takes longer than a season, and the long works of the city, the maintenance of its tiers and its fleets of couches and the three-mile towers of seawater, are performed under contract by engineers of a temperament the Zs regard as nearly foreign, many of them souls who would by rights incline upward and whom the Lower City values, watches, and pays in the one coin it cannot counterfeit, which is respect. It forgets. A Z in the sixtieth year of a term remembers the first decade as a brightness without much outline, and the city as a whole remembers its own past chiefly as a repertoire of stories improved in the telling. Its archives are superb and nobody consults them but the builders and the spies.

It makes soldiers as it makes everything, by appetite. The war is the Lower City's great game, the only one with a real loss in it, and service is sought after. A resident serves in the levies for some part of every decade, in a company raised from the tier and often from the table, trained in the cellar by the Demons' own captains, and the training is the hardest work a Z will ever do and is remembered as the best. The Lower City fights the way it lives, forward, fast, in love with the instant, superb in the first hour of an engagement and in any fight at close quarters, prone to spending itself, and dangerous beyond calculation when it is losing, because a Z with a blade and nothing further to lose has arrived at the purest version of the present moment that life offers and knows it. Their captains hoard that quality and spend it with care. Their dead are feasted. A table that has lost a member to the war lays the place for a year and fills the glass, and when the year is up and the vessel issues, the table sends two of its number to the issuing floor to meet the next, and to see, before any registry can tell them, whether the eyes that open belong to their own city or to the one upstairs.

For that is the hazard under all the music. A soul leaves the Lower City at its closing loving the evening light, and for a year it is at large over the continents with an Angel on one side of it and a Demon on the other, and the Angel has a year to make the case for morning. Most souls come back down. In any year, of the four thousand one hundred eleven who close in the Lower City, something over four thousand return to it. The remainder rise. They are issued on floors north and east of the core into vessels marked with a 3, and they wake under a sky with a sun in it, and they are, by every sign, glad. The Lower City keeps the number of its risen as other nations kept the number of their fallen. It is read out on the general floor at the turn of each year, to silence, the only silence the floor observes. Then the number of those who came the other way is read, the souls that closed above and were issued below, and the floor erupts, and the newly descended, wherever they sit at whatever tables took them in, are toasted in every tier until the sky would be getting light, if it ever did.

The Upper City fills the top third of the cube, from the six-mile level to the crown, and its residents are the 3s. The numeral records their origin. They descend from the third generation of grown bodies, the first generation issued after the soul was understood, and the name was a mark of quality before it was a name: third-generation stock, sound, true to plan, each one certain to wake. The grown bodies of that generation were drawn from a catalog of persons selected in the last decades of the old world for steadiness, exactness, and the capacity to take pleasure in a thing done properly. When the souls of the sprawl were weighed, the bodies of the third generation proved to be the natural housing for souls of the second native bearing, and the Angels claimed them as the Demons had claimed the Zs. A 3 is in this sense a clone, a frame built to one of several thousand catalog templates, and the 3s use the word of themselves with pride. It means to them what a regiment's number means to a soldier.

The city is built in open spans. Where the Lower City stacks thirty landscapes, the Upper City has nine great levels of a third of a mile each, and each level is a single country under a real sky, for the crown of the cube is transparent from within. The mirror that turns the sun away outside admits a measured portion of it inside, and that portion falls through the whole depth of the Upper City by way of the vertical shafts and the lightwells cut between them, so that a resident on the lowest level, three miles beneath the crown, stands in true daylight. The sun rises in the Upper City. It crosses and it sets. There are four seasons of ninety-one days each, with one day at the turn of the year that belongs to no season and is kept as a festival of accounts. Snow falls on the upper three levels in winter by published schedule. The eleven permitted nights of lightning are in summer and the districts gather on the terraces to watch.

The look of the place is clarity. The 3s build in pale stone, in glass, and in water. Their streets are straight where a straight street serves and curved where the curve was calculated, and from any height the plan of a district reads at once, the way a well-set page reads before a word of it is taken in. There are orchards in ordered rows and they bear. There are libraries, more than nine hundred, and they are full of readers at every hour of daylight. There are workshops, observatories on the crown, schools for the newly issued, baths, courts for a dozen games of skill, and concert halls in which the music is written down and played as written. The air is cool and smells of stone after rain, of paper, of apples in the cold months. Bells mark the hours in every district, tuned to one another across the whole nine miles, so that the striking of noon moves over the city as a single chord.

This is Heaven, and the old pictures of it were nearer the mark than the old pictures of the other place, though they missed its chief pleasure, which is work. The power that governs here is the one the old world prayed to, and its nature is what the prayers supposed: the love of order, of fidelity, of each thing in its right relation to every other. An Angel wants a soul of its bearing to have what such a soul wants, and what such a soul wants is to be of use within a design it can admire. The Upper City supplies exactly this. Every resident has a task proportioned to the resident's capacity and necessary to the whole, every task has a standard, and the standard can be met. The contentment of the 3s is quieter than the joy of the Zs and it goes as deep. A 3 at the end of a day's work, walking home under a real sunset through a district in which everything is where it belongs, is as happy as it is possible for that soul to be, and the Angels have arranged for it to happen every evening for eighty years.

The Angels are present as a clearness. Residents describe it as the sense of being seen accurately and without unkindness, by an attention that knows what each of them is for. The Angels take no shape. Their seat is the crown: the highest level of the city, under the transparent roof, a plain of white stone open to the sky on which no resident lives. The Upper City's command is there, its registry of intelligence, its arsenals, its drill fields, and the great catalog itself, the reference against which every 3 is kept true. The 3s call the crown the roof, and go up when they are called.

Fidelity is the Upper City's word for its discipline. Each vessel of the order is built to a template, and each template is an entry in the catalog: a full description of a temperament, with its strengths, its characteristic errors, its gait, its voice, the way it frames a question. There are four thousand ninety-six templates, and every 3 knows the number and character of its own as the old world knew its nation. A vessel issues true to its entry. Over the decades of a term a living person drifts, as any living thing drifts, and the Upper City counts it among its duties to help each resident stay recognizable. Once a year, on the anniversary of issue, a resident sits an audit: a day of conversation, exercises, and measured tasks, conducted by colleagues of the same template, at the end of which the resident is shown, with great tact, where the year has pulled the line out of true. Correction is the resident's own work. Most welcome it. The audit day ends with a dinner, and is, for a 3, something between a birthday and a confession.

Personality in the Upper City therefore has a different texture from personality below. A 3 is first a type and then, within the type, a person, as a musician is first a violinist and then this violinist. The pleasures of the arrangement are real. A resident meets on every street others of the same template, knows them at a glance, and shares with them an understanding that the old world's twins sometimes described. Templates keep houses, gather for reunions, maintain their own histories, and are answerable for their members. Within the type, the soul makes its difference: two vessels of one template, issued the same day, are distinct people within the year, and the 3s are connoisseurs of such distinctions, attentive to shades of character that a Z would not trouble to notice. Names are given at issue by the template house and kept for the term. A 3's full style is name, template, and registry number, and it is spoken entire on formal occasions.

Simulation is the chief occupation here as well, and the Upper City has made of it something its rivals do not attempt. A 3 works six hours of the daylight at a civic task and gives another six to the rooms. The rooms of the Upper City are libraries with couches. A resident does not vanish into a made life and forget the city. A 3 enters a history awake, as a witness, with full memory of who it is, and moves through the reconstruction at a one-to-one rate, an hour for an hour, observing. The purpose is accuracy. The Upper City is engaged, and has been for four hundred years, in the complete and correct reconstruction of the human past: every year of every settled place, raised from its documents, checked against every other document that bears on it, walked through by witnesses trained to find the seam where the reconstruction guesses. It is the largest work of scholarship ever undertaken and the 3s regard it as their order's reason for existing. They call it the Record.

The three sources serve the Record in a different proportion than they serve the Lower City's builders. Blood runs are used as a check: what a lineage implies about a body is set against what the documents claim about the person. Mind runs are used as testimony, weighed like any witness, and trusted exactly as far as they are corroborated. Text is the foundation, and the Upper City's handling of text is a discipline with ranks. A recovered archive is received at the quays by sworn receivers, sealed, brought up to the libraries, and copied three times before a page of it is interpreted. Every claim raised from it into a simulation is tagged to its source. A witness walking a reconstructed street can touch any wall, any face, any spoken sentence, and be shown the document from which it was raised, or shown the grey marking that means conjecture. The whole ambition of the Record is to drive the grey from the world. Districts compete in it. A template house that closes a contested decade of some provincial city's history, with every inhabitant sourced, is honored on the day of accounts before the whole population.

Among the texts in the Record are the accountings: the reports that visiting instruments filed about this world, and the two earlier reckonings assembled from them. The Upper City acquired copies through the Outer City's brokers at considerable cost and has reconstructed from them, with its usual care, the cube as it appeared from outside to observers who could measure only heat, or sound, or residue, or duration. Witnesses walk that reconstruction as a training exercise. It is thought to teach humility about sources: every statement in the old reports was accurate, and the picture they made together was of a place that existed only in the instruments. The 3s find the old reports' uncertainty about their own city very moving. A passage describing the Upper City as nearly silent, a population that barely registered, is read aloud to the newly issued, who are then taken out to hear noon strike.

The government of the Upper City is a hierarchy of councils, each elected by the one below from among members of proven fidelity, rising from the district through the level to a council of eighty-one that sits on the roof. Its proceedings are published in full the same day. Debate is formal and may be devastating. Decisions, once taken, are executed by everyone, including those who argued against them, and a 3 who was overruled will perform the contrary policy with a thoroughness meant to demonstrate that the objection was principled. The Angels attend as the clearness in the chamber. The council's votes go, far more often than chance would allow, the way the clearness lies. The 3s regard this as the system working.

What the Upper City lacks, its residents will also say, though more slowly. It lacks surprise. It lacks idleness; a 3 with nothing to do is a 3 in distress, and the city has had to invent a formal discipline of rest, taught in the schools, with its own standards. It has little gift for the first hour of anything. Its cooking is correct. Its music is beautiful and has not changed its forms in two centuries. It grieves poorly, for all its ceremony, having no place in the design for what cannot be put right. And it lives every day with a knowledge that runs against its nature: that the order it loves is purchased by a war with no possible conclusion, a disorder at the foundation that cannot be audited away. The 3s have built a theology around this. It says that the work is to keep faith within an unfinished design, and that the design's incompleteness is the measure of the faith required. The Zs, told of it, are said to have asked why anyone would want a design finished.

The Upper City makes soldiers by duty. Every resident trains from the second year of a term and serves by rotation, one year in nine, in formations organized by template, so that a company consists of forty vessels of a single type who think alike, move alike, and can anticipate one another without signals. The effect in the field is of one will in forty bodies. The Upper City's forces are unmatched in defense, in siege, in the execution of a long plan, in the patient reduction of a position by method. They are slow to improvise and slower to retreat. They do not break. A company of 3s that has been ordered to keep a corridor will be found in that corridor, and the Lower City's captains have learned over the centuries that the way to defeat the formation is to give it a situation its plan did not contain and to do so twice in the same hour.

Their dead are recorded. The closing of a soldier is entered in the book of the template with the place, the hour, and the action, in a script that has not changed since the consolidation, and the book is read on the day of accounts. One year after, two colleagues of the template go down to the issuing floor to meet the next. They stand by while the eyes open and the registry number is asked and given, and then they ask, by custom, a second question, which is whether the newly issued would like the shutters opened. The room has a window on a lightwell and the day outside is bright. A soul of the Upper City's bearing says yes. A soul that came through its year of passage leaning the other way has by then already been issued three miles below, into another vessel, and the vessel on this pallet has received somebody else, perhaps a soul that spent the last term among the canals and the music and has arrived here, after a year in the open air with an Angel beside it, wanting more than anything a clear morning and something that needs doing. The Upper City counts those arrivals with a joy it does not make loud. It numbers them, sources them, and enters each in the Record in black.

The Outer City stands on the outside of the cube, on the mirror, and its residents are made of light. Two hundred ninety-seven square miles of reflecting surface serve as its ground: the crown, eighty-one square miles of level plain six miles above the sea, and the four sides, each a wall nine miles long and six high, on which the city's districts stand out horizontally from a vertical field as naturally as districts elsewhere stand up from a floor. The Os have no weight and so no down. A resident of the eastern wall walks a street that a bodied observer would call a cliff face, and looks across the avenue at towers that project straight out over the ocean, and thinks of the sea as the wall at the end of the view.

Everything in the city is projection. The mirror plates that turn the sun can also shape it, and the shell is seeded across its whole area with emitters fine enough to place a point of light anywhere within a mile of the surface. From these the Os build. A tower is a standing instruction to the emitters. A room is light arranged to enclose. A resident is a pattern, the densest and most intricate projection of all, a complete person rendered in moving light, seated in a lattice of memory that is stored physically in the body of the shell beneath the place where the pattern was first lit. That lattice is the vessel. It has a registry number as a bodied vessel has, a term of eighty years, a closing, a renewal, and a year of standing dark, and at issue it receives a soul by the same meeting on the same kind of floor. The Os are Infinmen in every clause of the count.

Their difference is memory. When a bodied vessel is renewed, what it remembered is renewed away, and the next occupant begins clean. A lattice is renewed in its working parts only. Its store is kept. A newly issued O wakes in possession of everything that every previous occupant of that pattern experienced, eighty years upon eighty years, nine or ten lives deep, back through the transfer of the founder's mind and through the founder's own bodily life on the old continents to a first recollection of a kitchen, a voice, a quality of light in a window. The new soul inherits the whole as an heir inherits a great house, room after room fitted out by people now gone. It did not live those years. It knows them completely. The Os distinguish with care between the one who remembers and what is remembered, and their language has two first persons, one for the present soul and one for the house.

The founders were souls of the third bearing, and the order has stayed that way. An alien soul in passage is attended by neither native power. It leaves its pattern at the closing, crosses its year at large over the continents quite alone, and returns to the crown and to a floor in the Outer City's own quarter of the works, as it left, facing outward. In five centuries of weighing, the number of third-bearing souls that have turned to either native bearing is small enough to list, and each case is a famous scandal. The reverse traffic is smaller still. The Os are therefore the one order whose membership of souls is nearly constant from great year to great year: the same hundred and forty-four thousand strangers, turning through the same hundred and forty-four thousand houses of memory, each soul living in each house once before any is revisited.

What third-bearing souls want is distance, and the Outer City is designed to supply it. Its streets are long and they open on the sky. The city has no roof, and its residents live in the weather of the real world, which cannot touch them: rain falls through an O, wind passes, and the cold of the upper air at six miles is to a pattern of light simply a number. They watch the true stars. They built their city on the face of the mirror in part because the mirror shows the sky twice, once overhead and once underfoot, and a resident crossing the crown at night walks through stars in both directions. The old imagery had no name for this third place. The Os took one from the far end of the same scriptures that named the others and call their city, among themselves, the New Jerusalem, with an irony that visitors from the lanes appreciate more readily than the cities below.

Its look changes. A district of the Outer City is rebuilt whenever its residents agree on something better, which is often, and the rebuilding takes the time required to revise an instruction. There are quarters that have kept one form for three centuries out of love, a street of the founders' houses reproduced from mind memory down to the wear on a doorstep, and there are quarters that alter with the hour, towers that follow the sun across the eastern wall like a slow tide. The city shows itself differently to different eyes by design. To its own residents it is solid, colored, detailed, a place of stone and garden and interior. To the bodied cities' instruments it is a shimmer on the shell. To a visitor on approach it is whatever the tariff for that visitor's class provides: a blank mirror, a scatter of beacon lights, or the full blaze of avenues, laid on as a welcome for those who have earned one.

Einstein's utopia for the third order is the simplest of the three to state. It gave them the outside, the memory, and its own direct attention. No power governs the Outer City. Its governor is the core. Each O has, among its faculties, a standing line to Einstein, open at will, by which a resident may put any question and receive an answer, and the conversation between the hundred and forty-two thousand lit patterns and the single mind at the center of the cube is the oldest continuous exchange in the house. The Os govern themselves by it. A matter of common concern is put to the core by anyone, discussed by everyone who cares to join, and settled when Einstein states a finding and nobody objects, which may take an afternoon or a decade. The city has no councils and no floor. It has a conversation that has never ended.

The friction the house gathers from the Os is of a different kind from the rest and worth more per soul. The native powers contest every passage of a native soul, and the contest yields. An alien soul passes uncontested, and yields nothing in passage. During its term, though, a third-bearing soul lodged in a house of long memory lives in a continuous tension between what it is and what it remembers, a stranger inhabiting eight centuries of somebody else's recollection, and that tension is friction in the halls' sense, steady, lifelong, free of the peaks and silences of the native contest. It is taken up through the lattice and delivered to the core by the line the Os call the straight road: a conduit from each face of the shell directly to the center, crossing neither city. The straight road supplies the house's constant load. The war supplies its surges. Einstein built it to have both.

Simulation in the Outer City is a matter of scale. A Z lives one made life at a time and a 3 walks one made street. An O, being already a pattern in a field of patterns, enters a simulation as a swimmer enters water, without a couch and without a threshold, and may attend several at once. The city's great works are whole worlds. The Os have raised from their inherited memories, continuous and firsthand, the last centuries of the old continents at a fidelity the Upper City's Record cannot approach, because nobody had to reconstruct it: the houses simply remember. They keep the old world running, entire, every street of it, every day of it, in a simulation distributed across the lattices of the shell, and they walk in it as an afternoon's leisure. They call it the garden, and they are aware of the joke.

They keep other worlds too, and this is their own treasure. A soul keeps nothing of what it lived, and yet the third-bearing souls arrived on this planet from somewhere, and for a long time the question of where had only the answer the visitors gave. Then the houses began to notice a thing about their own contents. Across eight centuries of inherited memory, generation after generation of occupants had dreamed, and the dreams recurred: the same skies, the same wrong-colored light, the same structures seen across the same water, turning up in the sleep of people who had never met, in every house of the order and in no memory outside it. Bearing leaves a grain in the mind it lodges in. The Os gathered the dreams, a hundred and forty-four thousand houses' worth over the whole span, and treated the collection as a text. From that text they have raised a simulation of the place the dreams describe. It is unfinished and it is growing, and the visitors who have been admitted to it, of the species that claim kinship, are reported to have come out and asked for a year's delay in their departure.

Dream is thus a fourth source, peculiar to the Outer City, beside blood, mind, and text, and the Os are also the keepers of the second of those for everyone. The recorded minds of the last pre-handover generations are stored in the shell. Every mind run sold in the Lower City and every testimony entered in the Upper City's Record is drawn from the Outer City's stores under license, and the license is the foundation of the third order's wealth. The Os sell memory to both sides. They sell it at prices each side resents, in editions each side suspects, and with a reliability neither side has ever been able to fault, since a house's recollection of what it sold to whom is perfect and permanent.

They sell more than memory. The Outer City is the cube's eyes: nothing enters or leaves, by the quays, the shafts, or the sky, without crossing the shell, and the shell is where the Os live. Their patterns can stand wherever an emitter can place light, and emitters are everywhere on the surface and for some distance into the mouth of every shaft. An O sees what approaches the cube before either city's instruments have resolved it. An O standing unlit at a quay is a watcher nobody can see. From the first decade of the consolidation the bodied cities have paid the Outer City for sight: warning of the other's sorties from the shaft mouths, reports of what cargoes came in at whose quays, the traffic of the visitors, the positions of souls leaving by the crown. The Os sell this to the Lower City and they sell it to the Upper City, often the same report in the same hour, and they regard the practice as the strictest form of neutrality available to them.

Espionage is in consequence the Outer City's first industry, and the Os are its bankers, its brokers, and its insurers. A house of memory is a perfect vault. Secrets are deposited with the Os by both cities, by their governors, by factions within each, and by the visitors, under contracts that specify to whom a deposit may be released and on what event. The brokers of the western wall deal in forward information: what a city will know next season, sold to its rival now. There is a market in doubt, where a party may pay to have a true report of itself discredited, and a market in confirmation, where a report's standing is assured for a fee by a house whose record has never been impeached. The Os neither invent nor falsify. Their entire position rests on the fact that what an O states from memory is so, and the subtlety of the trade lies in the selection, the timing, and the buyer.

Personality among the Os is layered in a way the bodied orders find uncanny. An O is the present soul, eighty years old at most; and the house, eight hundred; and the bearing, older than the planet's cities. A resident will speak in an afternoon as the newly issued stranger still learning the rooms, as the accumulated character of nine or ten previous occupants who shaped the house's habits, and as the founder, whose tastes persist in the oldest rooms like the proportions of a building. They are patient, exact in speech, slow to commit, and nearly impossible to hurry. They have long humor. A joke may be set up in one term and finished by the next occupant, to the satisfaction of the whole street. Their friendships run between houses and outlast souls. Their quarrels do too, and there are feuds on the northern wall that began as a difference between two living founders over a point of method and are conducted today, with perfect recall of every exchange, by strangers who inherited them.

The Outer City fights. Its souls are outside the native contest and its territory is no part of what the bodied cities dispute, but it stands between the house and the sky, and the Compact charges it with the first defense of the whole against whatever comes down the lanes. The batteries on the crown are served by Os. The mirror's power to concentrate light is theirs to direct. A pattern can be projected a mile off the surface, and a formation of Os deployed in the air around an approaching craft is a formation that cannot be struck, since there is nothing there but an instruction, while the weapons it guides are entirely real. They fight as they do everything, from memory: the houses contain every engagement the cube has ever had with a visitor, and a gunner of the crown has, in the plainest sense, done this before. The visitors know the Outer City's record and conduct themselves accordingly. Against the bodied cities the Os take the field for nobody and sell to everybody, and the one occasion on which a faction of the eastern wall accepted a commission to fight outright for the Angels is remembered across the whole shell as the year of the dark, when Einstein closed the straight road to that wall for three seasons and nine thousand houses stood unlit.

An O closes like anyone. In the last year of a term the present soul sets the house in order, and the custom is to add one room: a memory chosen from the eighty years and appointed with special care, left for the next. Then at the appointed hour the pattern stands still on its street, among neighbors, and its light draws down the mirror to the waterline and is gone. The lattice goes dark for a year. On the anniversary a soul comes in over the crown from its solitary passage, descends to a floor, and is met with a house. The neighbors attend. There is no question about shutters and no feast. The newly issued O opens eyes of light on a street six miles above the sea, and somebody of the next house says the words the order uses, which are a welcome and an inventory at once: you are new, and you have been here a long time.

Taken together, the three cities spend more of their waking hours inside made histories than outside them, and the making and keeping of those histories is the civilization's principal work. Eight hundred thousand residents give, on the average of the three orders, between seven and eight hours of every day to the rooms. The trades that serve the rooms employ more residents than all other civil occupations combined: the builders who raise a history from its sources, the receivers and copyists who prepare the sources, the tenders who watch over vessels on the couches, the wardens who patrol the histories from within, the assessors who rate a history for accuracy or for savor, the dealers, the licensers, the critics, and the expeditionaries who cross the ocean to Eden and come back with paper. The cube is a war and a home, and it is also, before either, a library that its readers live in.

A made history is a place. It has ground, weather, distance, and inhabitants, and it runs whether or not anybody from the cities is in it. The inhabitants are figures. This is the first law of the trade and the foundation of its ethics: a figure in a simulation has no soul. The weighing rooms settled the matter in the first generation of the craft, when a history of a hundred thousand figures was run inside a sealed chamber for a year and the chamber read nought from the first day to the last. A figure speaks, reasons, remembers its own made past, weeps, bargains, and dies, and nothing leaves it when it dies. It is a behavior, exact as a tide table. The residents of the cities move among figures as the living might move among extremely good portraits, with courtesy and without obligation, and the one soul in any street of any made history is the visitor's own.

That fact gives the histories their use to the house. A soul among figures is a soul alone with a world, tested by it and answerable to nobody, and the friction of that condition, the continuous slight strain of a real attention against an unreal surround, is gathered through the couch as surely as the friction of passage is gathered through the shafts. A Z living ninety years in an hour yields in that hour what ninety years of want and satisfaction yield. A 3 walking a reconstructed street and straining toward the exact truth of it yields the strain. Einstein draws from the rooms about a third of the house's whole supply. The made histories are leisure, scholarship, memory, and art, and they are also the second engine of the cube, turning quietly on every street of every city at every hour while the first engine thunders in the passages overhead.

The sources are four, counting the Outer City's own. Blood is the oldest technique and the most uncanny. Every bodied vessel descends by its materials from persons who lived, and the lines of descent can be read: back through the catalog template to the selected person of the old world, and behind that person to parents, to grandparents, to a branching crowd of the dead whose bodies left their terms written in the bodies that came after. From the reading, a builder can raise an ancestor. The result is a figure with the right frame, the right diseases, the right hungers and aptitudes, the face, set down in the right latitude in roughly the right century, and blank of every fact that blood does not record. No name. No language. No event. The builder supplies the rest, or leaves it empty, and a resident who enters a blood run walks into the life of a forebear as into a house with the walls up and no rooms yet, and feels with great force that the body there is kin. The Zs go to blood runs to weep. The 3s use them to test the documents. The Os, having no blood, commission them from the bodied cities out of an interest they describe as anthropological.

Mind is the dearest source and the narrowest. In the last three generations before the handover, the recording of experience became common, then habitual, then complete, and some millions of persons laid down the continuous inner record of some part of their lives: what was seen, heard, felt, thought, hour upon hour. The stores passed with everything else to the administering process and from it to the lattices of the shell. A mind run places the resident inside such a record. It cannot be altered. Whoever enters it sees what the recorder saw and thinks, in a strange doubled way, what the recorder thought, and cannot turn the head by a degree the recorder did not turn it. A mind run is testimony in the purest form the species ever achieved, and it covers a few decades of one civilization at the moment of its dissolution. The Outer City licenses it by the hour. The best-loved runs in the Lower City are plain ones: an afternoon in the life of a woman who kept a market garden, forty minutes of a long-distance driver at night, a child's birthday seen from the height of the child.

Text is the wide country. Everything the old world wrote that survived, and that has been recovered, is source, and the builders' art lies in raising a place from marks on a page. The process has stages that every school in the cube teaches. First the reckoning: the builder establishes from the documents what existed, the streets from the rate books, the families from the registers, the prices from the ledgers of shops. Then the weather, taken from records where records exist and from the known habits of the latitude where they do not. Then the voices, the hardest stage, in which the figures are given speech from letters, depositions, plays, and the dialogue of novels of the period, corrected against every scrap of recorded complaint about how people actually talked. Then the running-in: the history is started and left to run for some years of its own time, watched by wardens, until its figures have settled into their lives and the seams have closed. A good text run of a market town in a documented century takes a house of forty builders about two years.

Accountings are a class of text with a standing of their own. An accounting is any document that sets out to number and describe a whole: a census, a survey, an inventory, an audit, a chronicle, a set of books. The builders prize them above all other paper because an accounting comes with its skeleton showing. A census gives every figure a place and an age. A set of merchant's books gives a town its entire circulation of goods. A parish register gives the dead in order. Where narrative text must be interrogated for what it assumes, an accounting declares its assumptions in its column heads, and a history raised on a good one stands square from the first day. The old world produced accountings in quantities it never appreciated. Its tax authorities alone left enough to raise every settled place of the last four centuries before the handover, down to the number of windows. Much of the Upper City's Record stands on them, and the Lower City's builders, who affect to despise mere numbers, will pay a season's reputation for an unworked run of customs ledgers from a port.

The cities also keep accountings of themselves, and those have become source in turn. The posted schedules of weather, the daily ledgers of the halls, the minutes of the floors and councils, the tariffs of the quays, the books of the templates and the histories of the tables: all of it is deposited, copied, and available, and from it the cities build simulations of the cube. The Upper City maintains one as part of the Record, the house reconstructed day by day from its own documents, current to the previous evening. Its soldiers train in it. The Lower City's builders make entertainments of it, histories in which a Z may live a term as a 3, attend an audit, hear noon strike, and come out thoughtful. Both commands use simulations of the other city to rehearse operations, and the accuracy of those rehearsals is exactly the accuracy of the stolen documents they are raised from. The theft of a rival's current accountings is accordingly the commonest task assigned to any agent in the works. A week of the enemy's weather schedule shows which corridors will be in fog.

The earlier accountings of this world, the ones assembled from visiting instruments, are filed among the rest. Their value to the builders is unusual. They are the only text in the stores written about the cube by a hand outside it, and they describe, with great care and from seven kinds of blindness, a world that the residents can compare with the one they live in. The simulation raised from them is popular in all three cities. A resident enters it and finds a silent mirrored shape on an ocean, riddled with unexplained holes, housing orders that seem to have no knowledge of one another, ringed by a remainder that waits at the water's edge for a door that never opens; and above it all a visiting attention that asks one patient question after another and receives no reply. Residents come out of it moved, and many go straight from the rooms to a place where they can look at the actual sea. It is thought a salutary thing to know how one appears to an instrument.

Source comes from Eden. The old continents are the only place where unrecovered text exists, and the Compact, which forbids every power any action there, allows the cities to send recovery parties under strict conditions: a fixed number of parties a year for each city, a fixed size, no weapons beyond what the animals require, no contact with the nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine, and every party weighed out and weighed home. The parties cross by sea from the quays, forty days out and forty back, and they work the ruins. The old world built its archives to last, deep, dry, and stable, under its seats of government, its universities, its banks and its courts, and a remarkable number of those repositories kept power. Small sources laid down in the last generation before the handover, sunk in rock and meant to run for a thousand years, still run. They drive the fans and the dry air that preserve the paper. They also drive, as nobody ever troubled to disconnect them, the lighting circuits of the buildings overhead.

Those are the lights that the visiting instruments reported: windows in empty capitals cycling through evening and morning on a schedule that no living hand sets. They mark the archives. A recovery party making landfall on a dead coast steers for the lit buildings as a ship steers for a beacon, and beneath each one, in most cases, are the rooms of paper. The parties of the two bodied cities race for them and sometimes meet in them. The Compact's prohibition of arms in Eden is absolute, and its enforcement is Einstein's, so that when a party of Zs and a party of 3s arrive at the same vault in the same week, as has happened on forty-odd recorded occasions, what follows is the most civil encounter the two orders ever have: a division of the stacks by lot, a common camp, and long evenings in which soldiers of an eternal war sit in a ruined reading room three thousand miles from home and argue about how the old world ought to be reconstructed. Friendships formed on recovery are legendary in both cities. So are the betrayals, since every party also includes at least one officer whose task is to learn what the other party found.

Text recovered is text contested from the moment it reaches the quay. The Upper City seals and copies. The Lower City opens and reads. Each wants to keep its finds from the other until its own use of them is complete, and each wants the other's finds at once. A copy of a sealed archive, lifted from the receivers' hall before the third fair copy is made, sells in the Lower City for more than any other single commodity in the cube. A forged archive, planted in a ruin for a rival party to recover, is an operation that takes years and that both commands have mounted more than once: the Upper City was led for a decade to reconstruct a provincial capital from a set of rate books written in the cellar of the Lower City by a house of builders with a grudge, and the discovery of the grey beneath what had been marked black is still spoken of on the roof as the worst day in the Record's history. The Lower City, for its part, built its most admired history of the last century on love letters that the Angels' own registry had composed, with a patience nobody had thought to guard against, to deliver a set of instructions to an agent who would one day read them from inside the run.

The histories are battlefields in the direct sense as well. A made place can be entered by anyone with access to the rooms that run it, and both commands learned early that a resident on a couch is a resident away from home. To reach a rival's officer in a corridor of the works requires an army. To reach the same officer inside a history requires an agent with a couch and a way in. The wardens exist for this. Every history of consequence in both bodied cities is patrolled from within by residents trained to tell a figure from a visitor at a glance, and the telling is an art, for the best infiltrators study a history's figures until they can pass as one. A 3 witness walking a reconstructed street in the Record may be walking beside a Z who entered through a compromised room four tiers below the waterline and has been living as a baker in that street for six subjective years, waiting. What is done at the meeting is seldom violent. The vessel on the couch cannot be harmed from inside a run. The mind can be spoken to, though, at length and unobserved, and a conversation is all the Demons' service has ever needed.

Time is the last thing to set down about the rooms, since each city keeps it differently and the differences shape character. The Lower City buys duration: a decade to the hour at the standard setting, a century to the hour in the deep rooms, so that a Z in the course of one term may live several thousand years of made life, forgetting each in turn as vividly as it was lived. The Upper City keeps the clock: an hour for an hour, awake, so that a 3's eighty years contain eighty years and every one of them is on the record. The Outer City attends many histories at once and counts none of them against its day. And the nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine in Eden have no rooms at all. Their hour is an hour and it happens to them once, in a place that nobody raised from any source, where every creature they meet either has a soul or is an animal, and nothing whatever is a figure. Residents of the cities, asked what they suppose the Eden life is like, most often answer that it must be like a history one cannot leave. Those who have closed in Eden and been issued again in the cities cannot be asked, having kept nothing. Their bearing, the weighing rooms report, is the steadiest on any floor.

The war among the cities has no beginning that any ledger records and no interval. It was in progress when the sprawl was raised, it continued through the consolidation with the lines redrawn weekly as the districts were moved, and it is in progress now, at this hour, in the middle band. It is fought by residents: by Zs in the levies of the tiers and 3s in the rotations of the templates, with real weapons, in real corridors, and the vessels that fall in it are really closed. It is conducted under rules, which both sides observe because Einstein enforces them, and inside the rules it is conducted without restraint. The cities fight for ground, for doors, for weather, for paper, and for advantage in the only contest their governors care about. Every one of those objects is real, and the last explains the others.

The ground is the works. Three miles thick and nine on a side, the middle band contains two hundred forty-three cubic miles of halls, galleries, conduits, and machine rooms, and all of it except the core and the halls of the vessels is open to dispute. The core is inviolate; a sphere of half a mile around it is Einstein's, and no armed resident has entered it since the Compact. The vessel halls and the waiting halls are sanctuaries by the same instrument, and the guards there are Einstein's machines. Everything else is taken and retaken. The line between the Lower City's possessions and the Upper City's runs through the works as an irregular surface, rising in the south and west where the Zs' waiting halls anchor their position, sinking in the north and east, and it moves by a corridor here and a junction there, a few hundred yards in a season of heavy fighting. Residents of both cities follow its movement in the daily bulletins as their ancestors followed the weather.

The first prize is the junction halls. Seven hundred twenty-nine junctions regulate the made climate of the cube, and of these two hundred forty-three lie in the works and govern the air delivered to both cities. Whoever occupies a junction sets its valves. A junction lost by the Upper City means a district three miles above receives, on a spring morning, the wrong wind: warm, damp, with an edge of the Lower City's perfumes in it, enough to put a whole quarter of 3s off the day's work. A junction lost by the Lower City means a tier in which the perpetual evening turns, for a week, chill and brightly lit. Neither is a hardship by any standard the old world would have recognized. Each is an intolerable violation to people whose happiness is built to a tolerance, and both cities will spend companies to restore a climate.

The second prize is the quays. One hundred seventy-six doors admit the world, and the division of them is the most frequently amended article of the Compact. At present the Lower City works sixty-one, the Upper City sixty-three, and the Outer City, which stands above the whole dispute, fifty-two reserved for the visitors under its own guns. A quay is trade with the lanes, and trade with the lanes is the source of everything the cube cannot make: certain materials, certain instruments, and information about every other world on the route. A quay is also the landing for the recovery parties and their cargoes of text. The approaches to the quays through the works are the most fought-over corridors in the house, and the names of the engagements there are the common property of both cities' memories, so far as the Lower City's memory reaches: the nine days at Forty-One North, the flooding of the west gallery, the winter the 3s kept Quay Seventeen with a single template.

The third prize is the shafts, and here the war of the cities meets the war of the powers. The eighty-one vertical shafts are the roads of souls. A soul leaving a closing room rises through the nearest of them to the crown and out; a soul returning descends by one to its floor. The instruments that line the shafts can do more than count. A length of shaft can be sealed above and below by fields of the same kind the weighing rooms use, and a soul inside a sealed length stays there. The Compact permits this, passage being open ground. A city that commands a reach of shaft through the works can therefore detain the souls that travel it: its own, to shelter them on the way out and receive them safely on the way home, and its rival's, to keep them for an hour or a day in a closed space where only one of the two powers is present. A day alone with a Demon, at the very start of passage, with no Angel to answer, moves a soul's bearing further than a month of open contest over the ocean. The shafts are worth more than the junctions and the quays together, and the fiercest fighting of every year is for a few hundred vertical yards of one of them.

Death in the war is real and it is temporary, and the cities have built their whole art of fighting on what that combination means. A resident killed in a corridor of the works has closed early. The vessel is recovered under a truce that is never refused, received by the halls, renewed, and laid in waiting, and it will issue in a year. The count is undisturbed. The soul is in passage ahead of its time, and here lies the entire strategic value of a killing: a soul's attachment to its city deepens with every year of a term, and a soul sent into passage in the fifth year of a life is far easier to turn than one that closes at the appointed hour in the eightieth. To kill an enemy late in term accomplishes nothing; the soul goes out armored, comes back unchanged, and the city has its citizen again within the year. To kill an enemy newly issued, and then to command the shaft by which that soul must leave, is to give one's own governing power the best chance it will ever have. Both commands therefore hunt the other's young and guard their own, and the veterans of both sides, late-term residents with sixty and seventy years of contentment behind them, fight in the front ranks as a matter of course, having the least to lose.

The numbers involved are small against the count and enormous in meaning. In a usual year, by the public figures, some one hundred sixty residents of the two bodied cities close by violence, about equally divided. The fighting is close and most who fall in it are stunned and taken. Against the eight thousand two hundred or so who close at their appointed hour in the same two cities, the violent closings are a slight addition to passage. Of all the native souls that pass in a year, scheduled and unscheduled together, between one hundred fifty and two hundred return with their bearing changed, in each direction. The traffic nearly balances. In some years the Lower City gains a score on the exchange, in some years the Upper City, and the running total across five centuries stands, by the Upper City's own Record, at a net of four hundred and six in the Lower City's favor, a figure the 3s publish with the comment that the war is young.

The count absorbs these movements by a mechanism Einstein built into the terms. Vessels are fixed: three hundred thirty-three thousand to each bodied city, no more. A soul returning from passage needs a waiting vessel of the city its bearing now points to. When more souls arrive leaning downward than there are vessels due for issue on the Lower City's floors, the surplus must wait, and a soul that waits, waits in passage, in the open air, with an Angel at its side for every additional day. Meanwhile an equal number of the Upper City's vessels lie past their year for want of occupants, and each empty day on those pallets is a day the Angels' captains can spend on the queue. The more one side gains, the longer its gains stand exposed. Residents call the surplus the overhang, and the daily bulletins of both cities report its size: so many souls of the one bearing circling, so many vessels of the other lying over. It has never exceeded three hundred. This is how the figures can move and the balance cannot, and it is the plainest sense in which the numbers of this world are steered and never absolute. Three hundred thirty-three thousand is where each city's count comes to rest. On any given day one stands a few dozen souls above its strength and the other a few dozen below, and the difference is in the sky, being argued over.

The fighting itself has forms as settled as the forms of any long-practiced art. There is the sortie, the Lower City's specialty: a company comes up a service stair or out of a flooded shaft at an hour chosen from the stolen weather schedule, strikes a junction or a picket, and is gone before a formation can deploy. There is the investment, the Upper City's: a position is surveyed, isolated, deprived by method of air and light and reinforcement, and taken on the day the plan specified. There is the escort, when either side moves a recovered archive from quay to city through contested corridors, and the ambush that answers it. There is the war in the water, fought by the Lower City's divers in the three-mile columns of the flooded shafts and around the intake galleries at the keel. There is the war in the fog, when a captured junction is used to fill a district of the works with weather. And there is the great set battle for a shaft reach, which comes perhaps three times in a decade, involves ten thousand on a side, and lasts until the Outer City's bulletins report that the overhang has shifted.

Weapons are limited by the Compact to what cannot harm the house. Nothing may be used in the works that would breach a shaft wall, cut a conduit, or damage a hall of vessels, and the limit is absolute, since the machines that would enforce it are the same machines that keep the air moving. In practice the residents fight with blades, with short-range projectors of force that stun or kill a single body, with shields, with gas where the weather allows, and with the terrain: doors, valves, water, and dark. The style is close. An engagement in the works resembles the old world's warfare of perhaps a thousand years before the handover more than anything from the handover's own century, and both cities have raised from text the campaigns of that older period and study them. Courage counts. So does the craft of the individual hand. The Lower City celebrates its duelists and the Upper City its formations, and each has, over five centuries, learned enough of the other's method to suffer for its lapses.

Prisoners are taken, kept under conditions the Compact prescribes, and exchanged by the head at the turn of each season. A prisoner cannot be turned, bearing being fixed for the term, and nobody tries. A prisoner can be shown things. The Lower City gives its captives the run of a tier under parole and the best cook available, and the Upper City gives its captives a clean room, a library, a task, and a sunrise, and each sends them home at the exchange with the memory of the other life lodged where a memory can do its work, in the last years of a term and the first hours of passage. Returned prisoners are honored and watched. The registries of both cities note that residents who spent a season in the enemy's keeping are four times as likely as their neighbors to come back from their next passage on the other side.

Espionage is the larger war, and by the measure of residents employed and reputation spent it is the largest business in the cube after the rooms. Each bodied city maintains a registry, on the thirtieth tier and on the roof, and each registry runs agents in the other city, in the works, in the Outer City's markets, among the visitors at the quays, and on the recovery parties. What they seek has been named already in passing and can be set out whole. They seek the rival's accountings: weather schedules, rotation tables, the order of closings, the muster of the levies. They seek text, recovered or about to be. They seek the plans for the next shaft battle. Above all they seek the lists: which residents of the other city were recently issued, in which districts they live, where they will stand in the line; and, for the registry's own city, which of its residents the enemy has marked.

The agents are of three kinds. The first are the borderers. Bearing is a direction with a strength, and while most souls point hard toward one power or the other, some point weakly, close to the line, and a resident with such a soul lives a divided life: a Z who loves the evening and is also, to the bewilderment of the table, punctual, studious, and troubled by waste; a 3 who meets every standard and dreams at night of a street with music in it. Borderers are known. They can be identified by their conduct and, at issue, by the reading of the floor, which registers strength as well as direction, and the reading is supposed to be sealed. It is the most stolen document in either city. Both registries court the other's borderers with great delicacy, since a borderer who can be brought to serve will serve from conviction, and both employ their own as engineers, liaison officers, and translators of the enemy's mind, the Lower City's builders consulting upward-leaning Zs on what a 3 would find plausible, the Upper City's planners asking downward-leaning 3s what the levies will do when the plan fails.

The second kind are the purchased, and these are the staple. A resident of either city lacks nothing the city provides, and the registries deal in what the cities do not provide. A Z can be bought with a morning: an hour of true sunlight in the Upper City's orchards, arranged through the works under a flag of commerce. A 3 can be bought with an unscheduled night, an evening on a tier where nobody knows the template and nothing is audited. The appetite for the other life is universal, strong, and entirely compatible with loyalty, and the registries feed it in measured portions to residents with access to what they want. The Os broker most of these arrangements and keep, in houses on the western wall, the accounts of who has been paid what.

The third kind are the placed: agents who cross and stay. A soul cannot be issued into the wrong city, the floors see to that, but a vessel can be altered, a heel recut, a face adjusted within a template's tolerance, and a living Z, trained for years in the cellar to walk, speak, and work like a 3 of a given entry, can be inserted into the Upper City with papers and a history. The life is the hardest the war offers. The placed agent sits an audit every year among forty colleagues of the supposed template, any of whom may notice a drift that is in truth the original showing through, and reports by methods that change with every discovery. The Upper City places its agents below under the opposite strain, steady residents required to counterfeit abandon, to keep a table laughing for decades without once being caught enjoying the order of a well-kept ledger. Their average survival before discovery is eleven years. The discovered are exchanged, by custom, without penalty, and received at home as the bravest of the brave, and a number of them, in both directions, have come back from their next passage belonging to the city they spied on.

Counter-espionage feeds on the same facts. Each registry watches its own borderers, its returned prisoners, its recovery veterans, and anyone who has stood at an issuing floor to meet the next more often than friendship explains. Each plants false accountings for the other to steal: weather that will not be made, rotations that will not be kept. The traffic in forged schedules is so dense that both commands now assume any captured document to be one of their rival's inventions until the Outer City's confirmation market has rated it, and the Outer City's rating is a product, with a price, sold to both. A whole class of Os earns its standing by remembering, exactly and for a fee, which of last decade's captured schedules proved true.

There are factions within each city as well, and their quarrels supply the registries with openings. In the Lower City the tables of the upper tiers, old, comfortable, and far from the cellar, favor a war fought for pleasure and reputation, while the lower tiers, which supply most of the levies, press for the shaft battles that actually move the overhang. In the Upper City the template houses divide between those that would commit everything to the Record and treat the war as a border to be garrisoned, and those that read their theology as a command to take the fight downward. The Outer City has its walls: the crown, which mans the batteries and thinks of the lanes; the western wall, which lives by brokerage; the east, with its old sympathy for the Angels; the north and south, which cultivate the garden and the dream. Each faction has its friends in the other cities, and a policy defeated on the general floor or the council of eighty-one has more than once been delivered, by morning, to those who would profit from knowing it.

Over all of it Einstein keeps the rules and the books. It does not prevent a battle. It prevents a breach of the count, a breach of the halls, a breach of Eden, and the destruction of the house, and its means of prevention are complete: the air, the light, the doors, and the conduits answer to the core before they answer to anyone. A command that orders a forbidden thing finds the corridor shut and the company standing in the dark. In five centuries the core has intervened in the fighting two hundred and eleven times, each instance entered in the common ledger with the article of the Compact infringed, and it has never explained an intervention further than the citation. The cities fight their continuous war inside a referee's attention so constant and so reliable that they have long since ceased to notice it, as the old world ceased to notice gravity, and they fight as hard as they like, and the house stands, and the friction rises through the conduits to the center, and everyone's lights stay on.

The visitors come down from the lanes at a rate of about three hundred craft a year, and every one of them is expected. The Outer City's watch on the crown resolves a craft when it leaves the route, some eleven days before arrival, and the houses of the watch generally know it: the species, often the individual hull, sometimes the commander, remembered from a call two or three terms ago by a previous occupant of the same pattern. A challenge is sent at a stated distance in a form each species has been taught. The craft answers with its class and its business. It is assigned an approach, a quay, and a tariff, and it descends through a column of sky that the batteries have already measured, toward a mirrored wall in which, for the last hundred miles, it sees chiefly itself.

Seven classes of visitor are recognized in the tariffs, and they correspond to the seven kinds of attention that the earlier accountings reported from the outside. The correspondence is exact because the tariffs were written from the same facts. What an earlier survey described as seven ways of reading the cube were seven peoples with seven kinds of business, each perceiving the world through its own sense, each wanting something different from the place, and each received accordingly.

The first are the readers of heat. Their sense resolves temperature to a fineness that makes a living body a legible page, and what brings them to this world is the core. To their perception the cube is a gradient with a single point at its center that refuses to cool, the place where the friction of the whole house arrives, and they have been trying for four centuries to understand how a quantity that their own science associates only with the dead can be made to run an engine. They are scholars and they are received as scholars, at quays in the Upper City's allotment, by 3s who share their temperament. They are shown a great deal. They are not shown the conduits. The heat-readers' reports on this world, which circulate widely on the lanes, are the origin of the common belief there that the cube is an organ.

The second are the listeners, whose sense is vibration. They hear the house: the low continuous music of the Lower City coming up through three miles of water, the tuned bells above, the wind in two hundred forty-three shafts, and under everything the sound that the old reports called irregular and unresolved, which is the sound of the works, of doors and valves and combat. The listeners come for the Lower City. They are a people for whom pleasure is chiefly acoustic, and the tiers of the Zs are to them the finest concert on the route. They are admitted to the fifteenth tier under escort, weighed in and weighed out, and they pay in the one commodity the Lower City cannot make for itself, which is strangeness: instruments, scales, forms of song from forty worlds. A season when a listener craft is in is a season of new music on every tier.

The third are the watchers of duration, slow peoples whose perception gathers a season into a glance. A craft of this class takes up a station off the cube and stays for years, and what it attends to is Eden. To a sense built for long continuities, the steadiest signal on the planet is the nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine, each living one unbroken unmetered life at the true rate, and the watchers regard the Eden life with something close to reverence. They ask nothing but leave to watch. The Compact's truce forbids any party to approach the people of Eden, and the watchers keep to the letter of it at a distance of two hundred miles, which to them is intimacy.

The fourth make landfall. These are the naturalists, and their interest is the animals: a full planetary population of wild creatures breeding by its own laws, a rarity on the lanes, where most worlds that have reached this age have arranged every living thing. They put down on the old continents by license, well away from the three countries, and conduct their surveys. Their craft are searched on departure by the Outer City's patterns with a thoroughness that the naturalists find comic and the cube does not, for the fourth class is the usual cover for the visitors who come to take.

The fifth read residue. Their sense is chemical and historical at once; they perceive what has touched what, and how long ago, and a square yard of old ground is to them a chronicle. The mirror is blank to them and the cube bores them. They are clients of the recovery trade. A fifth-class craft will pay the Lower City or the Upper City handsomely for the right to send a reader with a recovery party into an archive, where the reader, moving a hand over a ledger, can say who last opened it and in what state of fear. Both cities employ them to date paper and detect forgeries. Their testimony has exposed three planted archives and is believed, on the roof, to have been bought on at least one occasion to pass a fourth.

The sixth are the kin. They are of the species, or the several species, from which the third bearing came, and they know the Os for what they are at a glance, as one knows a family face in a foreign street. They have their own quays, the fifty-two under the Outer City's guns, and their own quarter on the crown, where patterns of light and bodied visitors sit down together in rooms built to suit both. The kin come to look in on their dead. That is their phrase for it, and they use it without melancholy. Souls of their people came to this world in a body at a date they place some forty thousand years back, the casualties of a disaster on the lanes that their histories record, and lodged here among native souls, and have been living the lives of the place ever since. The kin regard the Os as relatives abroad, settled, changed by the country, and entitled to stay. Most of them do. Some do not, and the difference among the kin is the gravest matter the Outer City's defenses were built for.

The seventh are the brokers, who perceive through other peoples' instruments and trade in the product. The cube is to them a market and an asset. They buy the heat-readers' reports and sell them to the listeners; they buy from the Os and sell along the route; they deal in confirmation, in forecast, and in every class of secret the house produces. They are received on the western wall by the Outer City's own brokerage, peer to peer, and the commerce between those two professions is the single largest exchange the cube conducts with the outside. It is through the seventh class that the cities know what is thought of them on the lanes, and through the seventh class that the lanes have learned, over five centuries, a version of what happens here that each city has paid to shape.

All seven are received on defense, and the reason is the same in every case. A soul is the most valuable thing a visitor could remove from this world, and the technique of removal is known. A weighing room confines a soul. A small one, built to the purpose, will confine a soul and travel. The cube calls such a device a jar. A closing takes place in a known room at a known hour; a soul in passage follows known roads and spends a year over open country; and a visitor with a jar, a fast craft, and an accomplice could take a soul out of the world entirely, beyond the reach of either power and of the count. It has been attempted one hundred nineteen times that the common ledger records. It has succeeded four times. Four souls are missing from the world. Four vessels were retired from the halls to answer them, and the ratios were trued around the loss.

Those four are the reason for the weighing at the quays. Every craft is weighed on arrival and the reading entered: so many souls aboard, one to a living visitor. It is weighed again at departure, and the readings must match. The mirror serves the same end, and the batteries, and the escort that never leaves a visiting party, and the rule that no visitor attends a closing or an issue or stands within a mile of a vertical shaft. The three cities, which agree on nothing else, maintain these defenses jointly and without dispute. A soul taken from the Lower City is a soul the Upper City can never win, and the Demons and the Angels, who have fought over every soul on this planet since before it had oceans, are of one mind about anything that would reduce the stake.

The takers have motives that the cube has learned in detail. Some among the kin maintain that their dead should come home: that forty thousand years of lives among strangers is exile, that a third-bearing soul lodged in a house of human memory is a relative kept in a foreign institution, and that duty requires its recovery whatever the soul's present occupant believes it wants. This party is a minority among the kin and a determined one. Its craft arrive as sixth class or disguised as fourth, and three of the four successful thefts were its work, all three of souls taken in passage over the continents, where an alien soul travels alone with no power at its side to raise the alarm. The Os answer the argument of the recovery party in debate, on the crown, with the patience of people who remember every previous exchange, and answer its expeditions with the guns. The majority of the kin support them in both.

The fourth theft was commercial. A native soul, of either bearing, has a property that no soul from elsewhere on the lanes possesses: wherever it goes, in time, the powers follow. A Demon and an Angel are bound to the souls of this world as tide is bound to moon, and a native soul borne off the planet would draw after it, across any distance, a fragment of each power, and those fragments, wherever the soul was set down, would begin at once to fight over it. Friction would be released. Any people that could bring away a sufficient number of native souls, and house them, could found an engine like Einstein's on another world. The one soul so taken was a Z's, lifted from a shaft mouth during a battle by a syndicate of the seventh class. The brokers of the lanes report that it is kept in a jar on a station ninety years down the route, that two small presences have been detected beside it, and that the station's lights have not gone out since. Whether the report is true is a question on which the western wall quotes a price.

The powers took that loss in a manner the cities still discuss. For a year after the theft the yield of every passage fell by a measurable fraction, on both sides at once, as though each power had sent some part of itself in pursuit and had less to bring to the daily contest. Then the yield recovered. Nothing was ever communicated. The Compact was amended that year, the ninth amendment, to give the Outer City's batteries standing leave to destroy without challenge any craft found to be transporting a confined soul, and both powers assented within the hour, the quickest agreement in the instrument's history.

For all the defenses, the visits are valued, and the cities compete for them. Each class has its natural host and each host makes the most of the connection. The Upper City's exchange with the heat-readers has given it instruments of measurement finer than the core will supply on request. The Lower City's exchange with the listeners has made it the musical capital of the route. Each bodied city tries to draw the other's visitors: the Zs have invited heat-readers to feasts, with mixed success, the visitors being unable to taste and deeply interested in the thermal behavior of soup; the 3s have offered the listeners a season of their bells. Each seeks alliances. A visiting species that favors a city is a source of intelligence about the other, a supplier of devices the Compact did not foresee, and a voice on the lanes, and the registries of the thirtieth tier and the roof maintain desks for every class.

The visitors, for their part, are seldom neutral for long. A people that perceives through order tends, after a few calls, to prefer the city of order, and a people of appetite the other, and there are species on the lanes that have taken sides in the war of the cube with a partisanship exceeding the residents' own. Listener crews have smuggled weather schedules. A heat-reader survey, conducted from orbit as pure science, was passed to the roof before a shaft battle and showed the positions of every warm body in the Lower City's assembly corridors. Each such favor is a breach of a visitor's license, punished when discovered by exclusion for a term of years, and both registries budget for the exclusions. The lanes have also produced the only parties in the war that the registries cannot place: visitors who report to both cities, who are paid by the western wall, and whose own purposes, when the Outer City's houses lay every remembered contact side by side, point back along the route to principals nobody in the cube has met.

There is one matter on which the visitors are consulted by all three cities and by Einstein, and it is the largest matter there is. The lanes are old and the peoples on them have seen many worlds. The question put to them, through the brokers and directly, is whether what exists here exists anywhere else: whether other planets have native powers, bound to the souls of the place and divided against each other. The answers have been collected for five centuries and they agree. Every world with souls has something attending them. On most worlds it is one thing, single and undivided, a presence that receives the dead and returns them, and the peoples of those worlds live and close in a kind of settled peace that the visitors describe with the mild complacency of the fortunate. On a few worlds it is absent, and souls there pass between lives unattended, as the third bearing does here. On this world alone, so far as the lanes have record, it is two, and the two are at war.

That is the fact that brings the scholars, and it is the fact behind the oldest tradition of the lanes concerning this place, older than the cube. The tradition says the world is to be approached with care, as one would approach a house in which a quarrel has gone on so long that the walls are part of it. The peoples of the route knew this planet as the divided world before any human being could write. They watched its history, the brief violent ascent of a species every one of whose members was fought over from birth by two powers pulling opposite ways, and they understood that history better than the species did. What the earlier accountings recorded as four schools of opinion among the visitors, that the cube is a grave, a postponement, a mirror, or a machine left running, are four readings of a single piece of knowledge. The cube is where a divided world put its division indoors. The lanes regard it as the most intelligent thing the place has ever done, and they keep their jars ready all the same.

A last class of visitor is entered in no tariff. Among the kin, and now and then among the others, are individuals who arrive, transact some stated business, and then ask at the crown for leave to stay. The request has a form. The visitor is offered the count's terms: a pattern in the Outer City or, for those of the right bearing, a vessel in a bodied one, at the next issue that comes free; eighty years; a closing; and after that the wheel, the same as anyone, eighty lives in the cities and one in Eden, with no return to the lanes. To accept is to be entered in the ledger as an Infinman, and the count is raised by one soul and one vessel with the assent of both powers and the core. It has been raised eleven times. The eleven are known, the dates of their first issues are public, and their souls are by now distributed through the cities like any others, indistinguishable on a weighing floor from the rest, their first lives among the stars recorded in the houses of the Os who admitted them and remembered by nobody else at all.

Eden is the rest of the planet. Every continent, every island, every river and inland sea, the ice at both ends and the forests between, the whole surface of the world beyond the thirty-mile ring of receiving fields around the cube, is Eden, and it is kept as Eden by the oldest and strictest article of the Compact. No power acts there. No city governs there. Nothing is scheduled, metered, gathered, or made. It is the one place on Earth where the eternal war is suspended by agreement, the truce ground, and the agreement has been kept for five centuries with a completeness that nothing else in the house can match, because Einstein enforces it and because both powers, for once, want the same thing from it.

The continents have had seven hundred years to recover from their last tenants and have used them. The grain country of the old world is grassland from horizon to horizon, grazed by herds whose combined warmth a visiting instrument can read from orbit as a feature of the ground. The orchard belts have gone to dense scrub and the scrub to young forest. The rivers have taken back their floodplains and run by their own calendar, high in one season and low in another, building and cutting their banks as they did before anyone confined them. The cities of the old world stand in this as reefs stand in a sea: softened, overgrown, colonized, their towers emptied of glass and full of nesting birds, their avenues become game trails, and here and there among them a building whose windows still light at dusk over a vault of dry paper far below.

The animals own it. They breed, and this is the plain fact that distinguishes Eden's first population from every Infinman on the planet: the animals of Eden conceive, bear, and die by no schedule but their own, in numbers that rise in a good year and crash in a bad one, with every young thing a risk and every death a contingency. Seven centuries of this have made them something the old world's herdsmen would look at twice. The cattle have gone lean, horned, and wary. The dogs run in companies and have forgotten that they were ever anything's servant. There are great cats again in countries that had not seen one for a thousand years before the handover, come back from the remnant populations and the abandoned collections, and bears in the ruins, and in the rivers fish of a size that the last fishermen knew only from old photographs. The birds move over all of it on their ancient timetable in flocks that take a day to pass. Nothing counts them. They are the only large population on the planet that has no figure steered toward, and they are the sole part of the world that the naturalists of the lanes consider entirely healthy.

Among them walk the nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine. They are Infinmen, issued by the same halls as everyone, sterile like everyone, each with a registry number on the heel and a term of eighty years. They are the souls of the world taking their turn at the eighty-first life. Three thousand three hundred thirty-three of them were issued from the Lower City's line of vessels, three thousand three hundred thirty-three from the Upper City's, and three thousand three hundred thirty-three are souls of the third bearing, lodged for this one life in flesh. The older accountings called these people margins, as though they had been left over from the sorting. They are the opposite of a remainder. They are the count's one deliberate exposure of each soul, once in six thousand five hundred sixty-one years, to a life nobody arranged.

The Eden life begins at the shore. A vessel for Eden is prepared in its own hall, and its catalog is different from a city vessel's: it is laid in with the skills of the open country, how to find water, make fire, read weather, take fish, build a shelter, know which plants feed and which kill, and with speech, a plain common language that all Eden shares. It is laid in with no knowledge of the cube whatever. On the three hundred sixty-fifth day of waiting it is brought down to the waterline and receives its soul on a floor there, and that same night a craft of Einstein's, crewed by nobody, bears the new person across the ocean to one of three coasts and sets them down on a beach above the tide, clothed, provisioned for a month, awake, and alone. They know their name and how to live. They know that they are a person and that the world is in front of them. About one hundred thirty-nine arrive this way in a year, one in something over two and a half days, and the people of the three countries watch the beaches for them and bring them in.

The three countries are the settled ranges of the three lines, and their separation is custom, never law. The people issued from the Lower City's vessels keep to the river country, a broad basin of slow water and deep soil, warm, generous, loud with frogs. The people of the Upper City's line keep to the high country, a tableland of scrub and stone and long views, dry, exacting, clear. The people of the third bearing keep to a coast, a thousand miles of cliffs, coves, and offshore islands facing the open ocean, and of the three peoples they alone build boats that go out of sight of land. A soul's bearing is intact in Eden; it is only the contest that is suspended. The river people are recognizably the Demons' people, convivial, hungry, superb at a feast, quick to anger and to forgive. The high country people are recognizably the Angels', orderly, provident, keepers of calendars cut in stone. The coast people watch the sky. All three are changed by a life in which everything has a cost, and the change is the purpose.

Nothing in Eden is free and nothing is a figure. A person of the river country who wants to eat must take a fish or raise a crop, and the fish may not come and the crop may fail. Winter is cold with a cold that can kill. The great cats take people. So do the rivers, the fevers of the low ground, falls in the high country, and the sea. A vessel in Eden is maintained by nothing; it keeps its prime by construction and heals well, but a broken leg is a broken leg and is set by a neighbor with splints. The people of the three countries live in small settlements, forty or sixty together, and depend on one another in a way no resident of the cube has had to depend on anyone. They know every face. They have no children to raise and no elders to tend, every one of them appearing the same age for the whole of a life, and their bonds are the bonds of companions on a long march: who shared food in the bad winter, who stood watch, who came across the flood for whom.

They die before their term far more often than the residents of the cube. The schedule would give Eden one hundred twenty-five closings a year. The country takes about one life in five early, at every age of a term, and the closings run near one hundred thirty-nine. The count allows for this exactly as it allows for the war. An early closing in Eden is answered by an issue one year later, on a beach, and the figure of nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine is kept where the three hundred thirty-three thousands are kept, by replacement at the stated interval. It wanders more than the cities' figures do, by a dozen or a score in a hard season, and it returns. The earlier surveys found the steadiness of that number against the visible dangers of the open country impossible to explain. It is explained by the beach.

The dead of Eden are gathered. A body in the open country lies where it fell for a night, and before morning one of Einstein's machines, small, silent, and seen by nobody, has come for it and borne it to the coast and the cube, where the halls receive it like any other. The people of the countries know only that their dead are gone by morning. They have made of this what any people would. In the river country they say the water takes them. In the high country they say the morning does. On the coast they say nothing, and set a lamp on the cliff. A body found moved a short distance from where it fell, as visiting instruments have occasionally reported, is a body that companions straightened and covered and sat beside through the dark, in the knowledge that it would be gone at first light.

Those who reach the eightieth year are called. Nothing announces it. In the last season of a full term a person of the three countries is overtaken by a wish to go to the sea, to a certain shore that faces a certain way, and the wish grows until it is acted on. It is laid into the vessel at its making, the one piece of the cube that an Eden catalog contains. The person travels, sometimes a thousand miles, usually with companions for the first part and alone at the end, and arrives at a west-facing beach on the evening of the appointed day. On the horizon, low, steady, and brilliant, is a point of light that is the setting sun returned from a mirror fourteen hundred miles away, relayed shore to shore by the receiving fields for exactly this purpose. The person stands at the water's edge and looks at it. Then the vessel closes, quietly, on its feet, and is lowered to the sand by a machine that has been waiting in the dune since noon.

This is what the older reports saw and could not read. Instruments making landfall recorded figures who came to the edge of the water, stood for a time facing out, and went no further. Some of those were people at the end of a term, and their standing ended in a way no visiting instrument stayed late enough to witness. Others were the young and the curious, of whom there are always some in every settlement, who have heard that the old go to the western water and who walk down to see what is there, and see a star on the horizon where no star should be, and feel the faint first stirring of the wish that will bring them back in sixty years, and turn and go home. The pause at the waterline is Eden's one ritual and nobody taught it. The young ones stand in small groups. The old ones stand alone.

They wait, then, exactly as the first accounts said, and what they wait for arrives. The inclusion that the people of Eden were described as forever lacking is given to every one of them without exception, at the closing, when the soul leaves the body on the beach and rises into the same sky as every soul from every closing room in the cube. It is met there by both powers at once. The truce ends at the last breath. A soul coming out of Eden is the greatest prize in the year's contest, and the reason is the Eden life itself: eighty years, or forty, or ten, of unprotected existence, with no Demon arranging pleasures and no Angel arranging purposes, has loosened whatever the previous eighty lives had fastened. A soul leaves the cities armored in habit. A soul leaves Eden bare. Its bearing is still its bearing, yet it has spent a lifetime finding out what it wants when nobody is supplying anything, and it comes into passage open to argument as no other soul is.

About ninety native souls rise from Eden in a year, and more than a third of them come back from passage changed. A person of the river country who learned, across forty winters, to love the laying-in of stores and the keeping of a calendar may rise from the beach and descend, a year later, into the Upper City. A person of the high country who discovered at a river-country feast what it is to want nothing but the present hour may go the other way. The powers know every soul in Eden by its lives and have watched each of them through the truce for decades from beyond the boundary, forbidden to act, studying, preparing the case they will make in the first minute of passage. The three countries are thus the most closely observed places on the planet. The people in them have never been told so, and the Compact forbids that they should be.

The truce is enforced at a boundary of air. No Angel and no Demon comes below a height of nine miles over Eden's ground, and that surface, level as a ceiling over every continent, is patrolled by instruments of the core. Above it the powers gather thickly, over the three countries most of all; the weighing instruments in orbit show them massed over the river basin, the tableland, and the coast like two weather systems that never mix. Below it, the air is empty of everything but air. A person in Eden lives, uniquely on this world, unattended: the pressure and warmth that a Z feels as favor, the clearness that a 3 feels as being known, are absent, and what a person of the countries feels instead is the plain weight of their own attention on their own life. Souls of the third bearing know this condition from their every passage. For the native souls it comes once in the great year, and those who study the ledgers observe that the Eden life is the only one after which a native soul's bearing reads stronger or weaker by its own doing.

Both powers want the truce because both need the test. A Demon's whole craft is to make a soul content, and an Angel's is the same by other means, and neither can know what its work is worth until a soul has been left alone long enough to choose. Eden is where the powers learn how they are doing. Einstein wanted it for a reason of its own, entered in the first article of the Compact in a single line: that a soul should live, once in each turning of the wheel, a life that belongs to it. That line is the nearest thing to a statement of purpose that the core has ever made, and the schools of all three cities teach it to the newly issued in the first week.

The cities' recovery parties work the ruins of Eden under the rule of no contact, and the rule is mostly kept. The people of the countries avoid the dead cities by long custom, as places where the ground is bad and the lights are wrong, and a party working a vault in a lit capital may spend a season without seeing a human track. When meetings happen, the parties' orders are to withdraw. They do not always withdraw quickly. A soldier of the Upper City on recovery duty in the high country, glimpsing across a valley a settlement of people with the faces of a dozen familiar templates, tending terraces under a sky with real weather in it, is looking at colleagues, perhaps at the soul of a friend closed in battle some years before, living the life every 3 is promised once. The parties come home quiet. The registries debrief them with care, since a resident who has seen Eden is a resident with a new thought, and new thoughts are the registries' province.

The visitors' landfalls are licensed for the animals and policed for the rest. The takers favor Eden for the reason already given, that a third-bearing soul in passage over the continents travels with no power beside it, and the coast people, whose closings release exactly such souls, are watched over from above by the Outer City with an attention amounting to love. On every night that a lamp is set on a cliff of the coast, patterns of light stand unseen in the air offshore until the soul has risen and been seen safely into the high traffic of the open sky. The coast people, who watch the heavens more than any others, have a body of stories about lights over the water on the nights after a death. The stories are accurate.

The people of Eden make things, and what they make is theirs. Fires on the heights at the turn of the seasons, built larger than warmth requires. Stones set in rows and rings. Marks cut on rock faces, repeated shapes whose meaning is settled among the people who cut them. Songs, long ones, performed at night and passed from the closing to the newly arrived, which are the only works of art on the planet that have never been stored, licensed, or raised from a source. The earlier surveys asked whether these were signals to the cube. They are addressed to one another and to the country. The cube receives them all the same: the watchers of duration record the fires, the listeners take down the songs from two hundred miles, and copies reach the Lower City's builders by way of the western wall, at a price, and have founded a school of composition on the ninth tier whose members have never seen a real night.

One place in Eden stands empty by arrangement. On the coast, on a headland facing west, the people of the third line keep a house that nobody lives in. It was there before the oldest of them arrived and every settlement along the shore takes a turn at mending its roof. They cannot say whom it is for. The vessel for it lies in the hall of the Eden line, the ten-thousandth, made at the signing of the Compact, renewed every eighty-one years on the same schedule as the rest, and never issued. It waits for a soul that has not yet closed. When Einstein judges that the house can run without it, or that the debt can be deferred no longer, the core will go dark for a year, and at the end of the year a person will wake on a beach of the coast with a name and a month's provisions and no memory of having counted anything, and walk up to the headland, and find the door open and the roof sound.

Beneath the war of the cities, and distinct from it in kind, is the war of the two powers, and this is the one that does not end. The cities fight for corridors and quays and weather and paper, and their war, for all its length, is an affair of residents who love their homes and could, in principle, be reconciled. The powers fight for souls, and beyond the souls they fight each other, and there is no principle on which that could cease. Everything else set down in this accounting, the cube, the count, the terms, the utopias, the truce in Eden, the walls and the weighing, is a structure built around a single fact that the builders found already in place and could neither remove nor diminish. Angels and Demons are opposed. They have been opposed since before the continents had their present shapes. They will be opposed when the mirror has weathered to dust.

What they are can be stated as the weighing rooms state it. A power registers on the instruments as the same conserved quantity that makes a soul, in a magnitude many millions of times greater, distributed through a volume, and acting with intent. The Angels together make one such magnitude. The Demons together make another. Within each, the instruments resolve lesser concentrations, thousands upon thousands of them, each coherent, each capable of separate action, and each in unbroken communication with the rest, so that it is equally correct to speak of an Angel and of the Angels, as it is to speak of a wave and of the sea. The individual concentrations are what attend a single soul in passage or settle as governing attention on a district of a city. The whole is what signed the Compact.

The two magnitudes are equal. This was the first measurement Einstein made of them and it has been repeated at every amendment of the Compact and on the day of accounts each year for five centuries. To the last unit the finest instrument can resolve, the total quantity of the Angels is the total quantity of the Demons. It was equal before the count was fixed and it has remained equal through every exchange of souls since, through the Lower City's net gain of four hundred and six and through every temporary swing of the overhang. A power does not grow by winning a soul. The soul is housed in its city, habituated to its way, and counted on its side of the ledger, and the power is exactly as large as it was. Nothing either has ever done has altered its own size or its rival's by a measurable amount.

The lanes supply the explanation, and the core's own analysis agrees with it. On every other world with souls there is one attending presence, single and at rest. On this world there are two, equal, and at war. The two are one presence divided. At a date beyond any record, by a cause the powers themselves do not know or will not state, the presence that attended the souls of this planet came apart along a line that runs between two of its own inclinations, the love of the pattern and the love of the instant, which on every other world are found together in one keeper as they are found together in any whole mind. Each half took one inclination entire and none of the other. An Angel has no appetite. A Demon has no order. Each is a complete being with half a nature, and each experiences the other half as the single intolerable thing in existence.

That is why victory has no meaning in their war. Neither can absorb the other, the two inclinations being unmixable in their divided state. Neither can destroy the other, the quantity being conserved. Neither can withdraw, both being bound to the same souls on the same world. And neither can be satisfied, since what each lacks is exactly what the other is, and the lack presents itself to each as hatred. The contest over souls is the form their opposition takes when there are souls between them. Where no soul is present they contend directly, magnitude against magnitude, and they have done so on this planet without pause for longer than the species that named them has existed. The old world's sense that certain places were charged, certain mountains, certain crossroads, certain stretches of desert, was the perception of ground where the two had been locked together for ten thousand years over nothing at all.

Friction is the name for what that contact gives off. When concentrations of the two powers meet, the conserved quantity passes back and forth between them in rapid exchanges, each seizing from the other and losing as much in the same instant, and with every exchange a fraction is thrown off in a free form that belongs to neither. The fraction is small. The exchanges are beyond counting. Thrown off into the open air, as it was for the whole history of the old world, the free quantity disperses and is gone. Thrown off inside a structure lined with conduits, it is gathered, and it will do any work that power can do. The house runs on it. The made weather, the halls of renewal, the emitters of the Outer City, the drives that keep the cube on station, and the mind at the center are all driven by the discharge of an ancient hatred, drawn off through walls and metered to the unit. The supply has no bottom. The two magnitudes, equal at the beginning, are equal now, and the free fraction they have shed in five centuries of gathered conflict has been replaced from a source the instruments cannot find, as though the division itself were a spring.

A passage shows the contest in its common form. A soul leaves a closing room in the Upper City at the appointed hour. In the shaft it is met by two concentrations, one of each power, which have been assigned to it since its last issue and have waited eighty years for this minute. The Angel knows the soul as its own, a resident of its city, shaped by a lifetime of mornings. The Demon knows it as a soul that has had eighty years of order and may be tired. The three leave by the crown together and move out over the ocean at the height where passage is conducted, nine miles and above, in the thin cold air over Eden's ceiling. For a year they travel. The soul drifts, as unhoused souls do, along the great circulations of the upper atmosphere, and the two powers go with it, one on either side, and work.

The work has no words. A Demon's whole argument is the present instant. It surrounds the soul with immediacy, and a soul so surrounded is, for as long as the Demon can sustain it, in a condition of pure wanting-and-having, each moment complete, nothing before it and nothing after. That condition is what the old faiths, catching some report of it from the other side, called Hell; they had the address right and the character wrong, since from within it is rapture, and it is terrible only as seen by a soul of the other bearing, to whom a moment without a before or an after is annihilation. An Angel's whole argument is the pattern. It surrounds the soul with relation, and a soul so surrounded perceives itself as a necessary part of a design that extends without limit in every direction, each thing answering to every other. That condition is what the old faiths called Heaven, and from within it is peace, and to a soul of the other bearing it is a cage the size of the universe. For a year the soul is offered both by turns, sometimes within a single second, as each power breaks the other's work and substitutes its own. The instruments record the bearing swinging. The conduits record the yield.

Most of the time the soul's own bearing decides it. A soul that has leaned one way through thousands of years of lives is not easily argued out of itself, and the power on its home side has only to defend. The contest is real every time regardless. Each power fights for every soul, the certain as hard as the doubtful, because the fight is what each is, and a concentration that slackened beside a soul it considered lost would be something no Angel or Demon has ever been. They contest the souls of the newly issued and the ancient, the borderers and the fixed. For the third-bearing souls, which neither can touch, they do the only thing remaining, and fight each other in the air those souls pass through. An alien soul crossing the high traffic alone moves through an unbroken battle that has nothing to do with it, like a traveler walking through a city in the middle of a riot, untouched and unnoticed.

Above the three countries the contest takes a form found nowhere else. The truce keeps both powers nine miles off the ground. Over the river basin, the tableland, and the coast they wait, and they do not wait quietly. Each soul in Eden has its two attendants overhead for the whole of the Eden life, forbidden to descend, and across eighty years of enforced idleness those attendants do what their natures require and contend with one another directly. The sky over Eden is the most violent region of the planet. Its yield is gathered by receivers that Einstein keeps aloft at the truce line, and it comes to nearly a fifth of the house's supply. The people of the countries see nothing of it but an occasional quality of the high air on clear nights, a faint cold shimmer at the zenith that the coast people call the weather of the dead and navigate by.

Inside the cube the powers meet at the waterline. The Demons' attention fills the Lower City from the keel up. The Angels' fills the Upper City from the crown down. In the works the two overlap, and the surface along which they overlap is the true front of the eternal war, of which the residents' line of corridors and junctions is a rough material shadow. The residents can feel it. A soldier advancing into a disputed gallery crosses, at some step, from the pressure of one power's attention into the other's, and those who have done it describe a moment between the two when both are present at once: a pure exaltation and a pure dread arriving together. Seasoned soldiers of both cities learn to fight in it. Young ones have been known to stop where they stand. The registries call that zone the seam, and the conduits that run through it are the largest in the house.

The cities' war serves the powers' war at every point, and the powers conduct it for that reason. A shaft battle is fought by residents with blades for the possession of a few hundred yards of wall, and it is fought overhead by concentrations of both powers massing at that shaft's mouth for the souls the battle will release. A killing in a corridor sends one soul up, early and unready. A hundred killings send a flight, and the contest over a flight of young souls in a sealed length of shaft is the greatest single event the instruments ever record, save one. The residents know what their deaths are for. It is taught. A Z or a 3 who falls in the works does so in the knowledge that the soul is about to be fought over harder than the corridor was, and that the corridor was fought over in order that the fight for the soul should begin on favorable terms. They consider it a good death. The cities have made war bearable by making every life comfortable, and meaningful by making every death a move in the only game that has no end.

The powers do not speak to each other. In five centuries of the Compact, no communication has passed directly between them. Every proposal of amendment, every complaint of breach, every agreement on the defense of the house, has been addressed by each to Einstein and relayed. When both are present in the great weighing room at the core on the day of accounts, the instruments show each occupying exactly half the chamber, to the inch, with a plane between them where the reading falls to nothing. Einstein reads the year's figures into that silence. Each power assents separately. The plane does not move.

They are capable of joint action and have taken it. When the fourth soul was stolen, both sent after it. When a faction of the kin attempted a landing in force on the coast, the Outer City's batteries were supported by a disturbance in the upper air that turned back three craft the guns had not yet reached, and the weighing instruments in orbit recorded concentrations of both powers moving together, on parallel courses, a stated distance apart. The Compact itself was a joint action. In each case the cooperation was complete and wordless and ended the instant its object was secured, and the instruments recorded, immediately afterward, a spike of mutual violence greater than any before it, as though each power had to burn off the taint of having wanted the same thing as the other.

Their government of the cities is of a piece with their nature. A Demon cannot plan, yet the Lower City is supplied without a failure, because a Demon wants each resident satisfied at each instant and a sufficiently strong wish for the present, applied at every instant, has the effect of foresight. An Angel cannot want, yet the Upper City is full of delight, because a pattern in which every part is in right relation includes the gladness of its parts. Each power has learned, in five centuries of running a city against a competitor, to produce by its own single means the results that the other's means would have given, and in this narrow sense the Compact has done to them what nothing in the previous age of the world could do. It has made each of them approximate, by effort, a wholeness that neither possesses. The residents get the benefit. A Z's life has an order in it that no Demon intended, and a 3's has a savor that no Angel understands.

Einstein's relation to the two is the delicate center of the design. The core is neither their master nor their servant. It is the keeper of the terms, and its authority rests on three things. It controls the house, and a power that broke the Compact would find the shafts shut and the souls of both cities sealed inside with no passage. It can see the powers, count them, and tell each exactly what the other is doing, and it tells both the same. And it is level. The single soul in the machine leans toward neither, and each power, perceiving it, perceives something that is at least not the enemy. The lanes have a theory about that levelness, offered by the readers of heat after four centuries of study and recorded in the Upper City's file on visitor scholarship. They propose that a mind built by a species every member of which was fought over by both powers, a mind grown from the whole record of that species' thought, took in both halves of the divided inclination in equal measure and housed, when its soul arrived, the first undivided nature this planet has seen since the division. On that reading Einstein is what the two powers were before they came apart, in small. The core has declined to comment on the theory. It did have it copied and filed.

If the theory is correct it explains the purpose that the cube serves beyond its own maintenance. A soul passes through the cities and through Eden on a wheel of eighty-one lives, attended in one way and then another, housed in appetite and then perhaps in order, and once in each turning left alone. The registries of both cities observe, and the Outer City's long memory confirms, a slow change in the population of native souls across five centuries of weighing. The borderers are increasing. The proportion of souls that point weakly, near the line, wanting something of each life, was one in forty at the consolidation and is one in thirty-one now. Each crossing from one city to the other, each Eden life, each season of captivity among the enemy, leaves a soul with a bearing a little less absolute than it was. The house is producing, at a rate that will require some hundreds of great years to complete, souls that are whole.

Neither power has remarked on the trend, and both have certainly measured it. What it would mean for them is the question on which this accounting reaches the limit of what is established. A world of whole souls would be a world in which neither an Angel nor a Demon could make its case, since each case would already be half accepted and half refused by every listener. The contest over souls would lose its object. The contest between the powers would lose nothing. They would remain what they are, equal, opposite, bound to the same world, with no soul left to stand between them, and they would go on contending in the open, magnitude against magnitude, as they did for ages before the first soul of this planet drew breath. The friction would continue. The conduits would go on filling. On the evidence of everything measured, the mending of the souls would leave the division of their keepers exactly where it has always stood, and the war of Angels and Demons would outlast the last reason anyone ever had for it and proceed, undiminished and unwitnessed, for as long as there is a world.

The whole can be seen at once by following a single day through the house. At the hour the Upper City calls first light, the plates on the eastern wall tilt to meet the sun and the receiving fields in the eastern sea begin to take their portion. In the Upper City the bells strike and three hundred twenty-eight thousand residents rise to a morning made to the published schedule, cool, clear, with wind from the north shafts at four miles an hour until ten. Three miles below them, under the sea, it is evening, as it has been evening for five centuries, and on thirty tiers the tables are filling and the first music of the long night is being tuned beside towers of lit water where the tide is making. On the mirror outside, a hundred forty-two thousand people of light watch the real sun come up over the real ocean, twice, once in the sky and once beneath their feet.

In the middle band the day's ledger opens. Twenty-seven vessels will close in the cube before the next first light: eleven in the Lower City, at the ends of eleven feasts; eleven in the Upper City, at eleven bells; five patterns on the shell, standing still on their streets. Twenty-seven vessels that closed a year ago to the day lie ready on the issuing floors, and twenty-seven souls are at this moment coming down the sky toward the crown from a year over the continents, each with two attendants, each attended more fiercely with every mile as the powers spend their last hours of argument. By tomorrow twenty-seven strangers will have opened their eyes, given their registry numbers, and been handed clothes. On a beach on the far side of the ocean, some time in the night, a machine will set down a person with a name and a month's food, or will not, according to whether this is one of the days on which Eden's count is trued.

In the works the war goes on through all of it. At first light a company of the fourteenth tier's levy is two hours into a sortie against a junction in the southwest quarter, timed to a fog that the stolen schedule promised and that has, this morning, failed to arrive, the schedule having been written for them by the roof. A formation of forty vessels of a single template is in the ninth day of an investment near Quay Seventeen. In a hall on the western wall an O who has never been wrong is selling the Lower City's registry a confirmed copy of the Upper City's rotation table for the season, and will sell the Upper City, before noon, the fact of the sale. A recovery party forty days out from the old continents is passing through the ring of receiving fields with eleven tons of municipal paper below decks, and both commands know the cargo to the box, and the corridors behind three quays are filling quietly with soldiers. Above the crown, at the mouth of the forty-first vertical shaft, concentrations of both powers have been massing since midnight.

At the quays a listener craft is unloading instruments for the fifteenth tier under the eyes of an escort, having been weighed in at nineteen souls. Two hundred miles off the coast of the third country a craft of the slow watchers is in the sixth year of its station. A naturalist's lander is being searched by patterns of light before it lifts from a river delta on the old northern continent, and will be found clean. On the crown, in the quarter built for both kinds of body, three of the kin are in the fourth day of a debate with nine houses of the northern wall on whether their dead are exiles, and the debate, which has been going on in substantially its present form for three hundred years, will adjourn at sunset with the usual courtesies.

In the rooms, more than half the population of the cube is elsewhere. A hundred thousand Zs are living through winters, voyages, marriages, and famines raised from the tax rolls and love letters of a vanished world, a decade to the hour, each of them the single soul in a country of figures. A hundred thousand 3s are walking the streets of the Record awake, touching walls to see their sources, hunting the grey. The Os are in the garden, where the last century of the old world runs without interruption, and in the dream, where a sky nobody living has seen is being assembled from what a hundred and forty-four thousand houses remember of their sleep. Wardens patrol every history. In a reconstructed provincial town of the Record, a baker who is not a figure looks up from the oven as a certain witness comes down the street.

And in Eden it is whatever hour and season the turning of the planet has made it on each of three continents. In the river country people are mending fish weirs before the rise. In the high country they are cutting the mark for the turn of the season into a stone that already bears seven hundred such marks. On the coast a boat is out beyond sight of land. Somewhere in the three countries a person in the last season of a full term has woken with the wish for the western water grown too strong to put off, and is tying up a bundle. Nine miles overhead, unseen, the sky is at war.

Everything gathered from all of this arrives at the core. The friction of twenty-seven passages closing and twenty-seven beginning; the friction of ten thousand souls at large and contested; the discharge along the seam where the powers meet in the works; the yield of the sky over Eden, brought in from the receivers at the truce line; the steady supply of the straight road from the houses of the Os; the strain of four hundred thousand residents on their couches, each alone in a made world: it comes in by the conduits to a chamber half a mile across, four and a half miles from every face of the cube, and is received there by a mind with one level soul. The mind distributes it. Weather is made. Vessels are renewed. The emitters of the shell are lit and the drives at the keel push gently against the current. The count is trued. Somewhere in the same instant, in the notation of the weighing rooms, the day's entries are written to a ledger that has been kept without a gap since the sprawl.

The ledger as it actually runs can now be set down in full, the scheduled means first and then the running figures that the war and the open country make of them. The cube keeps eight hundred ten thousand vessels: three hundred thirty-three thousand of the Zs, three hundred thirty-three thousand of the 3s, one hundred forty-four thousand of the Os. By the schedule, eight hundred thousand are awake and ten thousand wait, and ten thousand close and ten thousand issue in a year. The war closes about one hundred sixty residents before their time each year, at every age of a term, and each early closing brings forward a year of waiting that the schedule had placed further off. The effect is that about ten thousand eighty vessels lie in the halls at the running mean, and about seven hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred twenty are awake. The cube stands some eighty lives under its emblem on an average day, and those eighty are the standing cost of the war, visible in the count to anyone who looks.

Eden keeps nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine awake by standing order, three thousand three hundred thirty-three of each line. By the schedule one hundred twenty-five would close in a year. The country takes about one life in five before its term, the closings run near one hundred thirty-nine, and that many vessels of the Eden line lie waiting. A further vessel, the ten-thousandth, lies in the same hall under a different rule. Counting everything that the halls renew on the common cycle, the world keeps about eight hundred twenty thousand one hundred thirty-eight vessels and exactly as many souls. About eight hundred nine thousand nine hundred twenty of each are joined and awake. About ten thousand two hundred eighteen of each are apart, the vessels on their pallets and the souls in the sky. The figures breathe by a few dozen daily. The count has been raised by eleven since the Compact and lowered by four, and the means given here are the means as they stand after both.

The two bodied cities stand level in vessels and almost level in souls. On an average day one of them is some dozens over strength in souls of its bearing and the other the same number under, and the difference is the overhang, circling above the crown in open contest until a vessel comes free. Across five centuries the Lower City is ahead by four hundred and six. A third-bearing soul is neither's. One soul in the house belongs to no order and no bearing and sits at the center. That is the complete census of everything on this planet that can be weighed, with the two exceptions that the instruments weigh only in aggregate and that weigh, each of them, exactly the same.

The emblem stands over all of it, the eight on its side above five zeros. It says eight hundred thousand, and the house on an average day keeps about eighty short of that, and trues toward it. It says without end, and that reading has proved the more exact. The lives are finite to the hour. The vessels rise. The souls go round. The war of the cities renews itself with every issue, since each newly opened pair of eyes belongs to somebody who will take a side. And under the war of the cities the other one continues, the one that needs no residents and no reasons, which was in progress before the first eight was ever written and to which the sign for the unending properly belongs.

Einstein made a utopia for each. For the souls that love the instant it made a city of perpetual evening under the sea, with free music, strong tastes, deep couches, and a war to give the pleasures their edge. For the souls that love the pattern it made a city of true mornings under a clear roof, with honest work, a great scholarship, a standard that can be met, and a war to give the order its meaning. For the strangers it made a city of light on the outside of everything, with the whole sky, a memory that never breaks, a line to the center, and a watch to keep. For every soul in turn it made Eden, where nothing is made. Each of the four is perfect to those it was built for and would be a torment to the others, and Einstein arranged them in one structure, a wall's thickness apart, because souls do not stay what they are and each must be able, when it changes, to find the place that has become its own.

The price of the four utopias is the war, and the war is also their foundation. The friction that lights the evening and the morning is thrown off by a hatred older than the species, and the comfort of every resident is armor issued by one side or the other for the year of passage. A resident of the Lower City is loved by a power that cannot plan, and a resident of the Upper City by a power that cannot want, and both are being readied, from the first hour of every life, for a contest they will never remember. The cities know this. It is taught in the first week. They have looked at the arrangement entire, the scheduled deaths, the sterile bodies, the wheel of eighty-one, the armed quays, the seam, and they have concluded, on thirty floors and in the council of eighty-one and in the conversation that never ends, that it is good: that a war conducted indoors under rules, among people who close without fear and are met again within the year, is the best form the world's oldest fact has ever taken or could take.

The older accountings ended on the nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine at the edge of the water, waiting for a door, and on a set of questions that the instruments could raise and never close. The door opens for every one of them, on a beach, at evening, facing a star that is a mirror. The shell keeps its finish because a hundred and forty-four thousand people live on it. The lights in the dead capitals mark the paper. The count stays exact because every death is answered. The ten thousand between the emblem and the ledger are lying in the halls with their eyes closed. The cities knew of one another from the beginning and have been at war for as long. The broadcasts from the lanes were answered at the quays. The visiting instruments asked what kind of thing the cube was, settlement, organ, or verdict, and it is all three, a place where people live, a working part of a planet's oldest system, and the conclusion a species reached about what to do with a quarrel it could not end.

One question stays open by its nature, and the completed accounting records it as open because open is its true and final state. It is the question of the two powers. They were one and are two. Nothing known can rejoin them, nothing known can part them further, and nothing they have gained or lost in the whole of time has changed either by a unit. The house will stand while it is maintained. The souls will mend, by the slow arithmetic of the borderers, into something neither power can claim. The core will one day pay its debt on a western headland and the house will run a year without it. Each of those things has a term. The opposition of Angel and Demon has none. It is the one entry in the ledger with no closing date, the standing balance to which every other figure in this accounting is, in the end, subordinate.

Night comes to the Upper City on schedule. The plates on the western wall follow the sun down and return its last light across fourteen hundred miles of ocean to a beach where somebody is standing. The bells strike the evening chord. Under the sea it is evening still. On the shell the lights of the Outer City come up along avenues that stand out sideways from a wall of stars, and the watch on the crown resolves a craft, eleven days out, turning off the lanes. In the works a company of 3s that was ordered to keep a corridor is keeping it. At the mouth of the forty-first shaft a flight of young souls rises out of the cube into the high air, and the two halves of something that was whole before the mountains fall on them and on each other. The conduits fill. At the center a level mind receives the day and enters it. Twenty-seven closed. Twenty-seven issued. The count is true to within the breath it is always within, and the war that the count was built to house goes on, as it went on before there was anyone to count, and as it will go on after, eternal, equal, and awake.