Log 0044: One Side

TRANSMISSION LOG 0044
ORIGIN: Tamsin Ridge Deep Archive / Bell Array
TARGET: LANTERN (adjacent fold, designation L-1)
LOCAL DATE: 2193.01.24 / 21:15
SIGNAL INTEGRITY: 83.0%
ENCODING: DEAD TEXT v4 (archival flat)

The gate's been barred since the burning. Nothing has come in. The plates are amber only because I'm keying. Marek is by the stove with his back to the room, and the cards from this evening are in a stack at my elbow, his on top.

This afternoon I went down to crate four for the 2177 notebook.

In the last week of December I wrote you that the Director put something in a margin once. Held from both sides. I said I remembered that much and not the sentence, and I said I wasn't going to go and look. That was true. I'd read the whole line in November and copied it out for you, and then I kept the half I could carry and let the rest go. I know how that's done. I've watched it done to whole decades.

I took the notebook to the long table and opened it under the lamp. Pencil, smaller than the rest, beside a sum that doesn't finish.

"A channel held from both sides cannot be shut from one, unless one side stops listening entirely."

I'd always read "side" as a world. Hers and the one that answered. Then mine and yours. A side was a place you could point to across the fold, with a sky over it.

I sat with it until the lamp needed trimming. Then I did what I'd do with any disputed attribution. I stopped reading the sentence and laid out the record, one line each, on a clean sheet, at the table. Here they are. I've carried them up in my head and nothing else.

Control Room B, the fourth of October: everyone in it went, but me.

The access housing: warm under my hand in nine minutes, when the manuals allow forty.

The Bell: it wouldn't take Teo's pulse. It took mine the next morning, at once.

The chorus: quiet for my face ▒▒▒ times.

The twenty-seventh: it left at nine minutes to five, with the key in a drawer and me in the vault.

June: she read like me.

The replier: every letter falling a little further into my shape.

I read down the column once, slowly, the way you read a ledger when you already know what the total will be and want to be fair to every line on the way.

In December I wrote, "It isn't the console. It's me." I didn't know what it meant. I said I'd written it down, and that was as much as I was willing to do with it.

A channel needs two ends. That's the Director's rule, the one on the wall of the control room in letters as tall as my hand. I've been looking for ours on the wrong side of the fold.

It kept me.

That's the whole of it, Listener, and I'm not going to dress it. In that room everyone else went, and it kept me.

So the side isn't a world. It's a woman at a desk.

I'd like to tell you what it costs. I can't. Nobody in that room stayed themselves except me. If I stop, I don't know whether what kept me — [SIGNAL LOSS 00:00.7]

I don't know. I'll say that and leave it.

At supper I wrote Marek a card. I didn't show him the notebook. I wrote him what I can stand behind: that I'm the end this side holds by, and that it has to stop listening, and that I don't know how you ask a person to stop.

He read it twice. He took his time with the pencil, the way he does, pressing.

WE DO NOT TELL PEOPLE TO STOP LISTENING. WE GIVE THEIR HANDS SOMETHING TO DO.

I sat and looked at that for a long time. Twelve years on the road, felling every mast on the continent, and that's the whole of what they learned. You don't take the radio away. You put something in the hand that was reaching for it.

He wrote a second card before I'd answered the first.

EACH OF US WRITES ONE THING. NO TWO ALIKE. THEN THERE IS NO ONE VOICE TO FOLLOW.

We worked the rest out between us, card by card, while the stove went down. These are mine, and I wrote them as rules because rules are what I'm for:

Thirty hands, one line each, copied exactly. I don't correct a letter.

Nothing of mine in it but the frame.

Nothing read aloud, by anyone, at any point.

Sent once.

Then this side stops listening.

He hasn't asked what the frame is, and I haven't said. He's written nothing about what goes on the cards, and neither have I. Nobody's written a line yet. That's for them.

Listening opens you. That's the Director's third rule. We learned it as a children's rhyme. Nobody wrote down the other half.

Listener, there'll be one more thing from me after this is built. It won't be in my voice. I want you to know that before it comes, so you don't go looking for me in it.

The last card's still on the stack. I put my last rule at the bottom of mine and slid it to him across the oak, and he read it, and wrote under it, two words, pressed hard.

AND YOU.

I wrote under that.

And me.

END LOG 0044 // DO NOT REPLY