Episode 01
The city outside
The sixth child stood in front of the egg this morning, in her good clothes, for the prescribed eleven minutes, and the egg did not move.
I am writing that first because it is the finding, and findings go first. The rest of this notebook is conditions. Not a degree warmer. Not a hair of a tilt. I had the cushion measured before and after. I went upstairs and corrected the light table for the sleeping room, and I want to write down, honestly, since this is my own book and nobody reads it, that the light table did not need correcting. I know that. I corrected it anyway. That is six for six.
I'll explain what the egg is, in case this notebook outlives me, which notebooks do.
My brother's name was Chuan. He was nine. He wore a hat.
We rode out on the border road, the whole family, a spring morning, and I will not write down what the horses did because I have never been able to write it down and I have tried in three notebooks, and it doesn't matter to the plan. What matters: they carried him back through the east gate before noon and he was on the table for nine hours. Nine. I was in the theatre for all of them. The best physicians who have ever lived. In the seventh hour the earth moved, an earthquake, a real one, the lamps swinging, and they held him steady through it and went on, and in the ninth hour he was gone.
Before the second hour, when he could still talk, he asked Chanel to find the page. The boy from the garden. The one he'd given the hat to. He was clear about that. He wasn't clear about much else.
After that I didn't speak for eleven years.
People have written that down as grief and it was partly that. It was mostly work. When you don't speak, you can think, and I had one thing to think about, and it took eleven years, and when I had it I came to breakfast and said it to Chanel, in front of the page, who by then was hers, and who I'll come to, though I'd rather not.
"He needs to grow up," I said. "To hatch the egg. So he has to be born again and grow up. That's all. It's a problem of conditions."
"He's dead," said Chanel.
"Yes," I said. "I was there." And I buttered something, because I was hungry, and that was the end of the silence and the beginning of the project.
Chanel governs. I understand things. That's always been the split, and it's why I was let off the ledger and the ladders and the rail; I had better things to do, and everyone agreed, including me. I am, and I write this as a measurement and not a boast, the best scientist this city has produced, in a city whose physicians can keep a man walking for twelve thousand years. So it was mine to think about. And the egg, the brass one, on its cushion, that came with him and has sat in its room since without moving, is his. It's the only thing of his that's waiting. Everything else stopped.
Rule one of the plan: not here.
"You can't trust anybody in this city," I said, in the Kanzlei, on the rail, to a room of men who didn't look up, and I stand by it. A city where every household is four hundred small listening bodies is not a city where you raise a secret child. Too many walls with something in them.
So I built a city outside.
A day's ride, on the border with our closest ally, and I'd like whoever reads this to hear that phrase the way we hear it, which is: the only neighbour who has never yet tried to kill us. A small city. New. Clean, in a way nothing inside the walls has been for a thousand years. Straight streets. No service stairs. And, this was the point, no mice. Not one. Every wall solid. Every floor just a floor. It is the quietest place I have ever stood in.
I calculated everything. I mean that as a list: the soil; the water; the angle of the light in the room where the child sleeps; which foods, in which order, at which ages; which songs, and in which key. I had the temple tables, the mercury ones, from the mountain the page was sold down from, and I found the error in them, the one that nearly put him in a hole at eighteen months, and corrected it, in an afternoon, with a stylus. The page watched me do it and said nothing, which is the most he's ever said to me. The plan is cut into a diamond in the workshop and I have gone over it, every number, more times than I've recorded, and there is no mistake in it.
That's the thing. There isn't one. Not in the numbers.
The ally sent a princess.
They have the same fashion over there; it crossed the border the way fashions do, and their princesses all have the one face, six or seven of it, and the one they sent was the fourth. She was put into the clean city to marry and she did. Nobody asked her. I am writing that here because nobody else will and because she has been gracious about it for nine years and she deserves a better notebook than this one.
The husband I chose the way I choose everything: by the numbers. A man of the line. The right blood, the right age, the right hands, the right everything. And a nice man, as it turned out, quiet, likes gardens, which I had allowed for. I did allow for it. I want that noted.
They have had six children.
Six, one at a time, in a city of pairs, which is a scandal on its own, and I calculated that as well. No twins. You cannot split a soul the way you split a body, and I wanted a clean vessel. Six clean vessels, one every eighteen months, each one measured and fed and sung to according to the plan, and each one, when it was old enough to be carried down to the room where the egg sits, carried down.
And the egg has not moved. Not for the first. Not, this morning, for the sixth.
I have written it down every time in the same hand. That is what you do.
I said I would come to the page. This part is gossip and I disapprove of it and I am recording it because it is data.
He was on the floor of the war room for six years after the horses, with a cloth, watching Chanel run an empire by lunchtime and go out of her mind by dinner and do the ledger anyway. Then he put the cloth down and joined the army. Four years. He says the war room has a step in it, down, into the part where the maps are, and the men who went down the step came back up different, and he wanted to know what was in the maps. It's the sort of reason he has.
Then the war room again, on the right side of the step, and one night over a map Chanel looked up and said, "You're the page. From the garden. The one he gave the hat to."
"Yes, highness."
"He asked me to find you. Afterwards. In the theatre. Before the second hour." She looked back at the map. "I've been busy."
Ten years busy. Since then he calls himself, at parties, good friends with the most frightening woman in the world, and the sentence has done a lot of work for him.
Two things about him that belong in a notebook. He has stopped ageing, at about twenty; it's the serum, and everyone has politely decided not to mention it, so I'm mentioning it here. And he has the hat. Chuan's. The blue one. On a hook in his room, still too big for him, never worn since, never moved either.
The bathhouse. He was thirty, by the count from the morning he sat up. I did not want this in here and it's in here.
The one in the east quarter, warm, green tiles. Some ladies about, three or four, looking at his face and waiting for him to listen, which is what they do, and I have never understood it, and I am one of them. And his heart started to go. Not fast; up, he says, like somebody turning a dial. Then his brain began to hum, a low sound, the sound a room makes when there's a machine on in the next one. Then his eyes did the thing he can't describe to a physician and has tried with the best that have ever lived: everything went telescopic. The far end of the bath came right up to him and the woman beside him went a mile off, and both were exactly as sharp as each other, and neither was where it was.
His heart felt as though it would break. Not stop. Break, along a line, like a tile. His words.
He sat on the edge of the warm bath with a towel for a long time, breathing the way the monks taught them to breathe when the serum was in them, and the ladies went away one by one because he had stopped being interesting, and eventually it came down, and he walked home along the long walk with his hand on the wall the whole way like a man who's been drinking. Two of the guard saw that. The rest I asked him for.
And since then he sees something. Clearly. All the time. Like a green star, small, sharp, five points if you look for them, and it isn't out there, it's in, on the inside of the left eye, where the dark is when you close them. It doesn't move when he moves. It doesn't go when he sleeps.
Chanel said, "So you've got a star, don't be dramatic," which is what she says about everything, and then looked at him a moment too long, which she does about nothing.
I have a theory. It is written in the back of this book, upside down, so that I don't read it every time I open the front. I don't know how to test it.
More gossip, and worse, because this is art.
A city with twelve thousand years in it gets bored, and boredom here turns into wars or into equipment, and we have, in a workshop off the war room, the best equipment in the history of the world. A camera: a lens the size of a dinner plate, and a laser, which is a word we have and the ally doesn't yet, takes what the lens has and cuts it into a diamond, facet by facet, a film in the stone. You read it back by turning the stone in light, and it never fades, because diamonds do not have opinions about time. Music the same way: sing into a horn, a needle of light writes the sound into a stone, and it plays back the same for a thousand years, with the same breath in it before the third verse. The Ältestenrat has a file on all this with a question mark on the cover. I put the question mark there.
He makes films. Chanel sings. Yes. Chanel.
And she is bad. I am her sister and this is a notebook, so: truly, completely bad, flat on the high notes and early on everything, and she knows, and she does it anyway, at night, in the workshop, with the door shut, because it is the one hour of her day with no ledger in it, and he cuts every one into stone and keeps them in a bag. I have heard three. She has the plan of a whole continent in her head and she cannot find the note.
Chanel says I can't tell the difference between what I want and what's good for people. I have thought about it. It has never come up.
Then the father. This is the ninth year and I am writing it the week it happened and my hand is fine.
He found out what he was. I will say it plainly because it was plain: he likes men. Has always. Married a princess he was handed because it was the plan and because he is a decent man who does what he's asked, and was faithful, and kind, and raised six children, and one night, in the one place in the clean city that has music, he stopped pretending.
He was shot in the club. Immediately. Standing up. By a man whose name I know and am not writing, on behalf of people who thought they were protecting the plan. My plan. They thought that was what it was for.
And he woke up in the hospital.
I don't understand it and neither do the physicians. A bullet through him, dead on a floor with the music still going, and three days later awake in a bed asking about the children. He healed. Weeks. He was walking in the garden by the end of the month, thinner, and quieter, and I have sat with him every day, and I have not said a word about the plan, and I am not going to.
He talks about the garden. Which beds want shade. I bring the children down in the afternoon and he counts them, all six, every time, the way I count the egg.
I think, and I am putting this here because there is nobody else to put it to: I have just about got through the hardest thing in my life, sitting by that bed. Just about. A few more weeks of it and I'll be a person again, a whole one, and then I'll go back to the numbers and find what the six of them are missing, because there is something, and it isn't in the tables.
Next week I've cleared the days. I'm going to sit in the garden with him and not calculate anything, and see what that's like.
He's asked me to bring the small trowel. He says the shade bed wants turning before the weather changes.