The pressure on line forty-one read nine units over again, and he wrote down nine.
Oril, at the next panel, watched him do it. “They’ll send a crew.”
“They should send a crew. It’s been over for six days.”
“They’ll send a crew, and the crew will find nothing wrong, and then somebody will ask why forty-one keeps coming in high, and then they’ll look at who’s been reading forty-one.” Oril capped his stylus and slid it into the loop on his wristband. “Write seven. Seven’s inside the band.”
“It isn’t seven.”
“It was seven last month.”
He didn’t write seven, and he didn’t argue either. Oril had been at the Eastern Pressure Station for eleven years, four longer than he had, and had a way of saying things to the panel instead of to you, which made them easy to let pass. Oril also had a daughter in the Second Commons whom he was allowed to visit on the fourth day of every month, and he kept a strip of her drawings tucked behind the gauge glass of line nine, where the inspectors never looked. The drawings were always of the same thing, a square house with a door in the middle. Oril swapped them out each month for the new ones, which were also a square house with a door in the middle.
At the end of shift the panels dimmed one row at a time from the top, and the station emptied onto the tube. He rode standing, holding the strap, his stylus hand still smelling of the hydraulic grease they used on the valve stems. Megadon went past the windows in blocks: residential, residential, allotment, residential, fabrication. Every block had the red star of the Federation set into its corner at the height of a man’s shoulder, so you could touch it as you went by, and people did, the way you’d put a hand on a doorframe in the dark.
His room was on the ninth level of Residential 2210 West. The bed folded up into the wall and the table folded down out of it. There was a basin, and a cupboard with two work suits and one rest suit and his bowl and cup. The Templevision screen took up most of the wall opposite the bed, and it came on when the door recognized him.
It was the evening Lesson. A priest he knew by face, though none of them gave names on the screen, was explaining the fruit allotment for the coming quarter. Seventeen percent more citrus would go to the western blocks, to make up for last quarter’s shortfall. He ate his evening portion at the folding table and listened. He liked this part. He liked that somebody had noticed the shortfall and counted it and fixed it, and then come on the screen to tell him so.
After the allotments came the Recollection, which was the same every night: a short reel of the old cities burning. He had seen it perhaps three thousand times. He didn’t watch the fires anymore. He watched the bottom left corner of the frame, where in one shot a dog crossed a street between two burning cars, not hurrying, and went out of the picture. He had never seen a dog. There hadn’t been any in the cities since before the Federation. Most nights he wondered where it had been going.
The priest closed, as they always did, by reminding them that the Federation had kept the peace for fifty years, and that in that time nobody on any of the settled worlds had gone hungry or been struck by another person’s hand. He believed it. He had no reason not to. He had never been hungry, nobody had ever hit him, and when he was small and woke up in the Commons dormitory from a bad dream, a woman in grey had come and sat on the end of his cot until he slept again. He didn’t know her name either.
On the seventh day, the rest day, he walked.
Most people spent rest days in the Commons halls, where the screens were bigger and there were group Lessons and the long tables had a second portion of bread. He went sometimes. More often he took the tube to the end of the eastern line, past his own station, past the last pumping house, to where the paving stopped at a fence that wasn’t locked because nobody had ever needed it locked. From there he walked up the river.
It took two hours. The river came out of the hills brown in spring and clear by late summer, and a mile above the last pumping house it went over a shelf of rock and dropped forty feet into a pool. He went there because the water was loud. In the city everything ran at the same pitch: the tube, the panels, the lights in the corridors, the vent over his bed. He only noticed it when he was standing at the pool and it was gone. He would sit on a flat stone at the edge, eat the bread he’d saved from the day before, and watch the water come over.
He didn’t think of this as anything. Nobody had told him not to. If someone had asked where he went on rest days he would have told them, but no one ever asked.
He found the room behind the water because he dropped his bread.
It was late summer and the river was low, and the falls had pulled back from the rock so that a gap showed between the water and the stone, a dark slot about as wide as he was. The wind took the bread off the flat stone and he went after it along the ledge. The spray soaked one whole side of his rest suit, and then he was behind the water and it was dry.
It was a cave, not deep. He could see the back wall in the grey light that came through the falls. The floor was gravel and old leaves and sticks the river had left there in some higher year. Along the back wall ran a shelf of rock at about the height of a table, and on the shelf was a box.
It was a long black box with a hinged lid. Its covering had peeled back in strips from the corners, and the wood underneath had gone soft and pale. There were two metal catches, green with age. He worked the first with his thumbnail and it broke off in his hand.
Inside, on a bed of what had once been red cloth and was now mostly brown, lay an object made of wood. It had a wide body pinched in at the middle and a round hole in its face, and a long neck ran out from the body to a flat head at the end. Six wires stretched from a little bar on the body, up the length of the neck, to the head, where each one wound around a small metal post. Six keys stuck out from the sides of the head, three on each side.
He looked at it for a long time without touching it. He tried to think what it was for. It had the look of a part, the kind of piece that bolts onto a larger machine. He thought of the gauges at the station and decided it was probably a gauge of some kind, and that whatever the wires had been connected to had rotted away.
When he lifted it out, his thumb dragged across the wires.
The noise filled the cave and came back off the walls. He nearly dropped the thing. He stood holding it away from his body, one hand on the neck and one on the body, waiting for an alarm, or a voice. The noise went on by itself, getting smaller, and then it was gone, and there was only the water again.
He touched one wire. It gave a low note, dull, that buzzed against the wood. He touched another, and that one was higher. He went down all six, one at a time. They were all different, and some of them sounded wrong next to each other in a way he couldn’t have explained. He sat down on the gravel with the thing across his knees.
He’d spent seven years with valves. When he tried the first key he did it slowly, a quarter turn, the way you test a valve you don’t trust yet. He plucked the wire it held and the note had gone up. He turned it back, and the note came down. He laughed out loud, alone in the cave, and then stopped because the sound of it embarrassed him, and then laughed again because there was nobody there to be embarrassed in front of.
It took him the rest of the afternoon. He found that he could bring two wires closer together until the buzz between them slowed down and went still, and that when that happened the two notes sounded like one note sung by two people. He found that if he pressed a wire against the neck with his fingertip the note rose, and the nearer to the body he pressed, the higher it went. Thin metal strips were set across the neck at intervals, and if he pressed just behind one of them the note came out clean instead of buzzing.
By the time he stopped, the light coming through the water had gone orange. His fingertips were grooved red where the wires had cut into them. He needed to leave. The last tube left the end of the eastern line an hour after dark.
He set his fingers on the wires once more. He chose a low note. Then one above it. Then he went back to the first, and then up past the second to a third, which he picked because the first two seemed to be leaning toward it. Four notes. He played them again in the same order, and they came out the same, which meant they would come out the same tomorrow, or whenever he wanted.
He put the thing back in its box, closed the one catch that still worked, and walked down to the tube in the dark, humming the four notes low enough that the hum of the train covered them.
He went back the next rest day, and the one after. By the third week he was going on work nights too, straight from the station to the end of the eastern line, running the last stretch of the river path in the dark so he could have an hour behind the water before the final tube. He slept less. He found he didn’t mind.
The tips of his left fingers went from red to purple to a yellowish hardness he could press a stylus into without feeling anything. Oril noticed on a fourth day.
“What did you do to your hand?”
“Caught it in the coupling on twelve.”
“Twelve doesn’t have a coupling.”
“The housing, then.”
Oril looked at him over the top of the panel a little longer than usual and went back to his readings. The next morning there was a tube of salve on the shelf above his station, the kind they handed out for burns. He used it. It didn’t do anything, but he used it.
He learned by doing the wrong thing many times. He learned that some fingers were stronger than others, and that the smallest was nearly useless, and then, after a month, that it wasn’t. He learned that he could press three wires at once in a certain shape, strike all six, and get a sound that was warm all the way through, and that if he moved the whole shape up two strips it was still warm but somewhere else, brighter. He gave the shapes names because he had to call them something. The good one. The good one higher. The one that wants to go back to the good one.
One night he played the good one and, without deciding to, let a finger lift, so that one note inside the sound dropped by a strip. He did it again. Then he did it slowly, over and over, lifting the finger and setting it down, and at some point he stopped watching his hands. He was thinking about the dormitory in the Second Commons, the row of cots, the grey shape at the foot of his, the small give of the mattress when she sat down. His face was wet. He wiped it with the back of his wrist and kept going. He played until the last tube was long gone, then walked the whole line back, four hours, and arrived at Eastern Pressure without having slept and read every gauge correctly.
He started thinking about the others. Oril’s daughter with her square house and its door. What would she do with six wires? Maybe she’d only ever play one note, the same one every month. Maybe she’d play something nobody had thought of. There was a man on the morning tube who whistled through his teeth, two notes, always the same two; he’d want more than two. The ninth level of 2210 West had forty rooms, and in each one a person came home and the screen came on, and he tried to imagine forty of these going at once, all different, coming through the walls. It ought to have sounded terrible. In his head it didn’t.
The priests would see it. He kept arriving at that, on the tube, on the river path, lying awake under the vent. They had noticed the citrus. They counted everything, and when a thing ran short they fixed it, and here was a thing nobody had that anybody could learn. He would bring it to them and they would make more of them, the way they’d made the tube and the screens and the panels at the station, and they would send them to the Commons halls first, because that was where the children were.
He wrote out what he would say on the back of a ration slip and practiced it in his room after the Lesson, with the screen dark, speaking low so the neighbours wouldn’t hear it through the wall. “I found this in the hills, east of the last pumping house. I don’t know its name. I have taught myself to use it. I’d like to show you what it does.” He crossed out taught myself because it sounded proud and wrote learned above it. Then he practiced the playing, the four notes and the good one and the good one higher, until he could do all of it without looking, in case his hands shook.
On the morning of the next petition day he wrapped the thing in his spare work suit, tied the sleeves around the neck, and carried it onto the tube in both arms. A woman across from him looked at the bundle, then at him, then out the window. He held it upright on his knees the whole way into the center, both hands around it, the way he had once seen a man on the tube hold a box of eggs.
The Temple of Syrinx stood where the eight tube lines met. From the platform you went up a long ramp, and the walls of the ramp had no red star at shoulder height. It was the first thing he noticed. His hand went out to the place where it should have been and touched smooth wall.
A clerk at the top of the ramp took his number and his reason. He said he wanted to show the Fathers something he had found. The clerk wrote object, found and gave him a slip with a time on it four hours away. He sat on a bench along the wall with the bundle across his knees. Other petitioners came and went: a woman with a letter about her allotment; two men from a fabrication block who argued in whispers the entire time about which of them would do the talking. By the time his number was called, he had read the ration slip so often that the pencil had gone grey and soft.
The inner hall was bigger than anything he’d been inside. It went up past where the lights reached. On both sides, from the floor into that dark, stood the machines, cabinets the height of ten men, faced with panels of small lights that flickered in patterns he half recognized from the station, except there were thousands here for every one at Eastern Pressure. The air was cold and smelled of the coolant they used in the big pumps, sweetish and sharp at the back of the throat. The hum was the city’s hum, the one he heard everywhere, but here it came from every side at once, and his stomach dropped a little when he realized this was where it came from.
Priests in grey sat at consoles along the foot of the machines, their backs to the aisle. None of them turned. At the end of the aisle was a low dais with five chairs, three of them filled. The man in the middle was older than the other two. He sat a little to one side, favoring a hip, and held a cup of something hot that he didn’t drink. The clerk said, “Father Brown,” and left.
He untied the sleeves of the work suit. He meant to begin with the first line on the ration slip, and he opened his mouth and found he couldn’t remember any of it. So he sat on the edge of the dais, which nobody had told him not to do, set the thing across his knee, and played.
He played the four notes. Then the good one, the good one higher, and the one that wants to go back. Then the slow one, lifting and setting the finger, which he hadn’t meant to play here. In the cave the sound always came back to him off the walls. Here it went up into the dark between the machines and didn’t come back.
When he stopped, a console somewhere behind him clicked twice. One of the priests along the wall typed a line and went on typing.
Father Brown set his cup on the arm of his chair. “Where was it?”
He told him. The falls, the gap behind them, the shelf.
“Hm.” Brown nodded slowly. “That one’s been out there a while, then. We have a room of them downstairs. I couldn’t tell you how many. Nobody’s counted in years.”
He didn’t follow at first. He thought the old man had misheard him. “This,” he said, lifting it a little. “This kind.”
“That kind and a good many others. Some with more wires. Some you blow into.” Brown looked at the instrument with something close to fondness, the way he himself had looked at the dog in the Recollection. “They had them everywhere, before. Everybody had one or wanted one. Everybody making his own noise and wanting everyone else to stop and listen to it.” He shifted on the bad hip. “It’s a pleasant noise. I won’t tell you it isn’t. But it doesn’t make anything and it doesn’t fix anything. It takes a man’s hours and hands them back to him as a feeling, and then he wants more hours.”
“But anyone could learn it. I learned it in a season. Nobody showed me. If the Commons had them, the children could…”
“The Commons has what the children need.”
“I’ve explained it badly.” He could hear himself talking too fast. “If you’d let me play the other one again…” He started the slow one, because it was better than anything he could say, and the priest on Brown’s left said, “Father,” in the voice of someone who had been waiting, and held up a sheaf of paper. “The western citrus.”
Brown got up. It took him a moment, with the hip. He reached down and took the instrument out of the young man’s hands, not roughly, and turned it over once to look at the back. Then he lifted it by the neck and brought it down on the edge of the dais.
The sound it made had nothing to do with music. The neck stayed in Brown’s hand with the wires curling loose from it. He passed it to a junior priest who had appeared from somewhere, sat back down, and picked up his cup.
He stayed where he was on the edge of the dais. The junior priest knelt and gathered up the pieces and carried them to a bin at the end of the aisle with three slots cut in its lid, and he watched the boy sort them: wood into one slot, wire into the next, the small metal parts into the third. The boy was quick about it. He didn’t have to think which slot.
A room of them. Downstairs, under where he was sitting. Fifty years of evening Lessons and allotments and the dog crossing the street, and the woman at the end of his cot, and the whole time there had been a room. Nobody had lost anything. They had carried it down there and shut the door, and every so often someone came in off the hills with one wrapped in a work suit, and the boy knew which slot the wire went in.
The priests had gone back to the citrus. Brown was reading the sheaf, holding it at arm’s length. Nobody looked at him. He waited for someone to tell him to go, and nobody did, and that was worse. Finally the clerk came down the aisle and touched his elbow.
Halfway down the ramp he found that his right hand was closed around something. He opened it. It was one of the six keys from the head, its little post bent sideways. He didn’t remember picking it up. He put it in his pocket and held it there all the way home.
The door recognized him and the screen came on. It was the allotments. The seventeen percent had not been enough, and the priest on the screen said there would be a further adjustment to the western blocks. He sat on the folded-down bed in his work suit. He waited through the Recollection for the dog. It crossed between the burning cars, not hurrying, and went out of the frame, and it occurred to him that someone had picked this reel out of whatever else they had, and had left the dog in.
He didn’t eat. When the screen went dark he lay down in his clothes with the key still in his pocket.
He dreamed about the dormitory. He was small again, on his cot, and someone was standing at the foot of it, and he waited for her to sit down, but she didn’t. “Get up,” she said. “I want to show you something.” It wasn’t the grey woman’s voice. It was older and drier, and a little amused. When he got up he was his own size again, and she was shorter than him, an old woman in a coat the color of the river in spring. He didn’t know her. In the dream that didn’t seem strange.
She took him out through a door the dormitory didn’t have, and they were in a street.
Every building on the street was different. That was what he saw before anything else. One was brick, one was wood, and one was painted yellow, badly, with the old color showing at the corners where the brush hadn’t reached. Washing hung on a line between two upstairs windows. In a doorway two men were arguing over a machine with its casing off, and while they argued a third man, much younger, reached between them and did something to it. It started. They both turned on him. The old woman laughed.
She took him through a window into a room where a girl sat holding an instrument like his, but with a bigger body and only four wires. She was tuning it, frowning, bringing two wires together until the buzz between them slowed. He wanted to tell her about the moment the buzz goes still. He opened his mouth, and the old woman put a hand on his arm.
“She can’t hear you,” she said. “This is all a long way back. Your Federation came along after and shut it up.” She steered him back toward the window. “Not everybody stayed to be shut up.”
Then they were outside under the sky, and it was night, and she pointed. Low on the horizon there was a point of light that wasn’t red. It was white, and while he watched, it grew very slightly brighter.
“They went out,” she said. “Further than anyone’s gone since. And they kept on with all of this.” She waved a hand back at the street, the yellow house, the lit window with the girl in it. “Kept on a long time. They’re nearer than they were.”
He asked her when. She didn’t answer. She was looking at the light, and there was something in her face he couldn’t read. It might have been pleasure. It might have been the look Oril gave forty-one when it came in high.
He woke to the vent over his bed. It was the hour the station opened. He lay still and listened to the hum and tried to hear underneath it, the way he could hear under the water at the falls, and there was nothing underneath it.
The door chimed once, which meant he was expected at Eastern Pressure. He took the bent key out of his pocket and set it on the folding table. He tried to hum the four notes. He got the first and the second, and then he couldn’t find the third. He tried it higher and he tried it lower. The door chimed again. He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands open on his knees and tried for the third note, and tried again, and the door chimed a third time and then stopped chiming.
He walked out past the last pumping house in the middle of a work day, in his work suit. The fence was still not locked.
It had rained in the hills. The river was up and brown and louder, and he heard the falls long before he saw them. The gap behind the water had narrowed to a crack. When he went along the ledge the water hit him across the shoulders hard enough to turn him half around, and he came into the cave soaked and coughing, with the skin scraped off two knuckles.
The box was where he’d left it, lid up. The cloth inside still held the shape, the wide body and the pinched waist and the long neck, pressed into the brown pile where it had lain for however many years before he came. He knelt beside it.
The water sounded the way it always had. Out of habit he waited for the other sound under it, the low wire still going after he’d stopped touching it, and it wasn’t there. He rapped a knuckle on the lid of the box to hear the walls send something back. They sent back a knock, flat and wooden, and then nothing. He did it again and got the same knock. He set his fingers in the cloth where the wires had run, in the four places he’d have pressed for the good one, and held them there.
He sat back against the wall and made himself think about tomorrow, how it would go if he went back. The tube. The strap. The panels lighting from the top row down. Oril saying something to a gauge. Forty-one, nine over. The Lesson, the allotments, the dog. He could see each of them clearly, and none of them would stay put; he kept losing his grip on them, the way you lose a wet rope. Then he tried the street. The yellow house, the girl with four wires. He knew he had seen them. He couldn’t see them now.
He took the key out of his pocket and laid it in the cloth, in the hollow at the end of the neck, about where it would have been.
Then he went out along the ledge to where the water left the rock, and stood at the edge of it until he couldn’t feel his hands, and stepped off.
The new reader on the eastern panels was a girl two years out of the Commons who did everything twice and asked Oril about the second time. On her fourth day Oril took the forty-one readings himself.
Nine over. He looked at it for a while. Above the panels the station’s screen was running the morning allotments with the sound turned low. Oril took the stylus out of his wristband and wrote nine, and initialed it, and put the stylus back.
The screen went dark in the middle of a sentence.
That happened sometimes, for a second. This went on longer. Down the row the girl looked up from her panel. Then the screen lit again, plain grey, with no star on it, and a voice came out that was not a priest’s. It might have been a man’s or a low woman’s. It didn’t hurry and it didn’t rise. Behind it, very faint, other voices were reading numbers out to each other.
“All settled worlds of the Solar Federation. This is a command transmission. Federation authority is suspended as of zero six hundred, Megadon time. The Temples of Syrinx are under our command. Civilians will remain in their homes or at their posts. All tube lines are closed until further orders. Do not approach the Temples. Stand by.”
It left a short gap after the last order, about as long as it would take someone to answer. Then it said it again, word for word, with the same gaps.
The girl had stood up. “Who is that?”
Oril didn’t answer. On the panel in front of him the needle on forty-one sat at nine. The voice started a third time. He reached across to line nine, slid two fingers behind the gauge glass, and took out his daughter’s drawings, the square houses with their doors in the middle. He folded them twice and put them inside his suit.