Log 0019: Forty Kilometers

TRANSMISSION LOG 0019
ORIGIN: Tamsin Ridge Deep Archive / Bell Array
TARGET: LANTERN (adjacent fold, designation L-1)
LOCAL DATE: 2192.11.27 / 02:00
SIGNAL INTEGRITY: 86.2%
ENCODING: DEAD TEXT v4 (archival flat)

Teo is asleep by the stove with one boot still on. The moon is nearly full and the Reading Room is bright enough to write by without the lamp.

I keep thinking about the Accord's tapes, about what's on them if I'm right, and what it would take to play them. That's enough of that.

I promised you no more softening. This is the part I've never looked at straight, not once, in thirteen years. I've walked all the way around it.

I left myself at the wheel door at the top of the construction tunnel, on the evening of the fourth, with the valley going blue.

The mag-rail station at the foot of the Ridge was lit and empty. A train stood at the platform with its doors open and nobody in it. The departure board still had times on it, all of them already past. I stood on the platform for a while, because I'd taken that train home a thousand times and my body didn't know what else to do. Then I started walking.

It's forty kilometers from Tamsin Ridge to Halvard by the valley road. I'd never walked it. Nobody walked it. It had been a forty-minute ride for as long as I'd been alive.

I walked through the night. The road was empty. No cars, no carts, nobody on foot. I had my hand wrapped in the scarf from my locker and held up against my chest, and every so often I'd forget and let it fall, and the blood would come back into it, and I'd remember.

The first town was Ostry, a little before midnight. Every town in the valley had a public Weave speaker on a pole in the square, for announcements and the weather and music on holidays. Ostry's was on. I heard it from the edge of town, coming across the roofs.

It was playing it.

Not a recording of me. Not anyone's voice that I knew. It was the Weave reading it out the way the Weave read everything, clean and even, at full strength, from the beginning, and when it reached the end it began again.

There were people in the square, perhaps thirty of them, standing around the pole in their coats, some with their dinner napkins still in their hands. They were humming with it. Not well, not yet. A woman by the fountain was a little behind the others and catching up. By the time I'd crossed the square, she'd caught up.

I went through ▒▒▒ towns between the mountain and the city. Every one had its speaker, and every speaker was playing it. I heard it more times on that road than anyone alive has heard it, I think, and I heard all of it, start to finish, in the dark, with nothing in my ears. I stood under the speaker in the second town for a long time, waiting. I'll tell you exactly what I was waiting for. I was waiting to start.

I didn't.

The people around me did. In every town, within hours. I'd come into a square and they'd be listening, and by the time I'd rested and found water and gone out the far side they'd be humming, and by the next town the ones I'd left behind were already further along than the ones I'd just met. You could have charted it by distance from the mountain.

And something else happened, in every town. I'll set it down once.

When I walked past them, they went quiet.

Not all at once. One at a time, the ones nearest me, as I passed. A man on the steps of the post office in the fourth town stopped humming when I came level with him and stayed stopped until I was across the road, and then picked it up again, exactly in time with the rest, as if he'd only skipped a bar. It happened at every square. It happened the way a choir goes quiet for the person at the front.

At the time I told myself it was shock. Then I told myself it was luck. On the second night, sitting on a wall outside the last town with my shoes worn through at the heels, I told myself I simply had nothing left in me for it to take. I liked that one best. I believed it for years.

I don't believe any of them now.

I reached Halvard in the late morning of the sixth. It was already going quiet, the first city that did. No trams. The streets were full of people standing still. I went up our stairs and opened our door, and the lamp was on.

You know the rest. I gave it to you as truly as I could. June in her raincoat at the table. The sheet of purple pencil. THE LAMP IS ON. I HEARD THEM WREN THEY SOUND SO NICE.

we waited for you to come home

Here's what I've understood, and what I've spent thirteen years walking around.

I should be singing. I heard it at the source, from my own mouth. I heard it on that road, over and over, at full strength, more than anyone. There is no account of the Hush in this Archive, not one, in which a person hears that much and stays herself. I should be on the hairpin with the others, with snow on my shoulders. I'm not. And they go quiet for me.

I put the pen down a minute ago and went to the slot to find out whether I'm right.

They were singing when I got there. I could feel it in the boards under my palm. I put my face to the slot, in the moonlight, where anyone on the hairpin looking up could see it.

The singing stopped.

All of it. Every voice on the bend at once. Then the hum in the window frame stopped, and the boards went still under my hand, and for the first time since the restart the whole mountain was silent.

I stepped back from the slot.

It began again.

END LOG 0019 // DO NOT REPLY