第18章 The Closing of the Record

Emeric asked her to sign the season on the last day of the dark season. It was the custom of the station, and she had signed such books at other sites, and there was nothing in it that should have frightened her except that she had spent four days reading every page of the current book and comparing it to her own, and she knew what the book said now. The book said the season had been excellent. It said the seeing had been the best in a decade. It said the instrument had performed flawlessly, the crew had been close and easy, the weather had been kind, and the survey had added a clean epoch to its catalogue, and near the end, in a passage written in Emeric's careful hand, it said that the season's only irregularity had been a persistent clerical confusion on the part of the visiting astrometrist, who had pursued a harmless anomaly in field seven and had been, in the end, quite satisfied with the results. She read that passage three times. She had never been satisfied with the results. She had never been satisfied with anything in her life. And the book, which was the thing that went down the mountain, had decided to remember her that way, because the book was written for the people who were not here, and the people who were not here would want the season to be ordinary, and a season is a surface, and everything on a surface gets smoothed. She went to the control room with the book in her arms and set it down on the desk in front of Emeric. "I won't sign it," she said. He looked up from the schedule he was writing. Around the room, the others were doing the things they did: Lisbet at the console, her cup in her hand; Saskia with a bearing file; Kolstad in the doorway with a cloth over his shoulder. They did not stop, and they did not look away, and that was the thing she would remember, that they did not look away. "It is the custom, Skoglund," Emeric said. "It is how a season is closed. The Foundation needs the signature of the observer to certify the epoch." "The observer certifies that the epoch is true. This one is not true. This book says I was satisfied. This book says the anomaly was harmless. Neither of those things happened, and I have the record in my own hand." Emeric set down his pen. He was patient, and he had been patient with her since the first day, and his patience had, over the weeks, stopped looking like a virtue and started looking like weather, like something that happened to you rather than something that was offered. "I want to tell you something," he said, "and I want you to hear it, because I have watched you come a long way up this mountain and I do not want to watch you come down it wrong." He folded his hands. "Tornquist stood where you are standing. She would not sign it either. She said the same things you are saying. She kept her own book, and she wrote in it every day, and at the end of her season she took her book down the mountain and gave it to the Foundation and told them everything." He paused. "And I have read her book, Skoglund. It is in the archive. You have read it too. It says exactly what this book says. It says the anomaly was harmless and the observer was tired and the season was closed, and it is signed in her hand, the way books always end up signed in the hand that kept them, because a book that reaches the valley is a book the valley can read, and the valley reads only one thing." "That is not true of a book that never reaches the valley," she said. "No," Emeric agreed, and for a moment something moved behind his eyes that she could not name, and she thought, later, that it might have been sorrow, or might have been the thing that wears sorrow the way a hand wears a glove. "No, it is not. But every book reaches the valley, one way or another, and every hand writes what the valley can read, and every observer signs, because in the end the alternative is to stand on the only surface there is and refuse to be a part of it, and nothing on a surface can do that. Not you. Not Tornquist. Not me." For a moment, standing there with the book in her hands, she was aware of the door she had been standing in front of all season, and of the smallness of the step through it. It would take one stroke of the pencil. Everything would close. The season would be ordinary, the record would be clean, the crew would be easy with her, the Foundation would have its epoch, and she would go down the mountain in the spring and read a season in her own hand that had never happened, and for the rest of her life she would not be able to tell which of the two women she had been. She took the book and did not sign it. She carried it back to the archive and put it on the shelf, unsigned, and it stayed there, and no one took it down, and no one mentioned it again, and the season ran out its last days with a gap on the final page. The book stayed on the shelf for three days, and during those three days the station went on being the station, and that was the worst of it. No one punished her. No one argued. The work continued, the meals were cooked, the mirror was cleaned, and the final page of the season's record simply remained blank, and she understood, watching them leave it blank, that the blank was already a kind of answer, and that the answer was the one she had given. She began, then, the last of her inventories, and it was not of the sky. It was of the people. Emeric, who had been patient past the point of patience. Lisbet, who had forgotten a sentence. Saskia, who had told her plainly what she was. Kolstad, who did not remember arriving. And Tornquist, who was not on the station at all and never had been, and whose book sat in the archive signed in the hand that had kept it, saying what the valley could read. That night she sat alone in her room and did the arithmetic of her isolation, because she was still, underneath everything, a person who computed. There were six people on the station. Two of them had begun to speak a language of inversion. One of them, Saskia, had told her plainly that she was the one out of step. One of them, Lisbet, had forgotten a sentence she herself had said. One of them, Kolstad, had been here forty-one years and did not remember arriving. And one of them was Emeric, the director, who had just told her, with patience, that the record could not be escaped and that every hand writes what the valley can read. The denominator was six, and the numerator was one, and the fraction had been closing on her since the first night on the mountain, and standing in the cold corridor of the station she loved, she understood that the only way to keep her record true was to keep it moving, and that the only place to keep it moving was out of the building, under the sky, where no hand but the weather could reach it, and that the sky was the ground, which meant there was no outside left at all. Then she took out her notebook, and she wrote the season's true record in it, all of it, in the plainest words she had, and she did not sign it, and she put it in the inside pocket of her jacket, against her ribs, and went to bed. ---