Chapter 10: The Gauntlet
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Weave-Quake Counter: 19% instability. Node-failure projection: T+9 d, 14:00. Source: 1997 survey, re-verified 2009.
Friday 6 September.
THE CALL AT SEVEN
The telephone in the east corridor of the clinic had a cord on it, and the cord was too short to reach the stairwell, and Lyra discovered that she had to stand in a specific doorway to be heard and not be overheard, and that she stood in it for forty minutes on Friday morning, and that Professor Tanaka found her there at ten to eight and said nothing at all about it, which Lyra would think about later.
Her father was in Ward C at Westbrook and had been for a day. He was not allowed to travel and had stopped arguing about it on Thursday night, which was new and worse.
"They've put a number on me," he said. "Thirty-one. And the woman who says the number has said the word ejection in a corridor, twice, in front of my wife, and my wife is my mother, and my mother has started taking notes."
"What are the notes for?"
"Your grandmother. She rang me. She has a great deal of experience of people who are frightened in institutions and none whatsoever of cardiac patients, and she has decided to run this." A pause; the sound of a man turning a cup. "She has also said a sentence to me that I am going to repeat to you exactly once and then never again. She said: Bàba ba. Ask them the number for the other thing. Not the heart. The other thing. Ask them the number for the other thing and write it down, and do not let them put it in a drawer."
Lyra stood in a doorway with a receiver against her ear and looked at the corridor.
"The other thing is the bleed," she said.
"The other thing is the bleed, yes."
"They said on Saturday that on its own it would have given you years."
"They said that. I have it in writing, because I asked for it in writing, and I would like you to notice that I asked, because I have never once in my life asked for anything in writing, and I did it on Saturday morning in a corridor outside a bookshop, and I did it because a woman I have never met looked at me and said the shape of that sentence is the shape of everything this industry says and I wanted the sentence in a drawer that was mine."
Line seven said the transfer requires a Council countersignature and a consultant cardiologist's letter and there is no consultant cardiologist on a Sunday.
"Tell them a teacher is coming," Lyra said.
"Lyra."
"Tell them my grandmother is coming and she is eighty-one and she has been extremely unpleasant to two doctors already, and tell them that if anybody at that hospital says the word ejection in front of her again she will ask them, in front of the ward, to explain the number, and that she will do it politely."
Her father laughed, and then had to stop, because of the laughing.
"I'll ring you tonight," he said. "Go to your examination. Lyra — the other number. Whatever it is, when they give it to you, do not let them put it in a drawer."
THE TRIAL
"You have one hour and forty minutes and seven stations, and I want to say something about that before we start."
Professor Tanaka had them in a semicircle in the wet grass below the East Tower with a flask of coffee and a clipboard she did not consult, and she had the air of a woman who had been running this for nineteen years and had stopped trying to impress anybody.
"Every year a first-year cohort comes down here having been told that they are a team. Most of them are not. Most of them are four people who arrived on the same bus. You are going to find out which you are in about forty minutes, and I am not going to help you, because the help is the part that does not count."
"Station one is the Mirror Walk. Station two is a bridge of held sound. Station three is the Well. Station four is a set of equations that will not sit still. Station five is a room with a door in it that is not a door. Station six, I am not going to describe, because the last cohort that described it to themselves did it badly for a fortnight afterwards. Station seven is Professor Harlow."
Silence.
"Two things about station seven, and then I will let you get on with it. One: he is authorised, he is supervised, and I will be in the room. Two: he will offer you something. Everyone who reaches station seven is offered something. Accepting it is not the wrong answer and refusing it is not the right one, and the only thing I am going to assess is whether you can hear the offer and still know what it costs." She looked along the row. "Miss Chen. You are going to be sent through first. Do not argue; I have been sent through first. It is unpleasant and it is over in ninety seconds and then I will not be able to help you at all for a week, and the second time will be much worse, and that is the design."
Station one took the shape of a corridor with mirrors down both sides, and the mirrors did the obvious cruel thing, which was to show each of them the thing they had been most careful about.
Lyra's corridor showed a hospital at four in the morning and a woman with grey eyes saying a number, and then showed her, that same morning, standing in a doorway with a receiver against her ear and not telling anybody, and being unable to make the second image less accurate than the first.
Zara's showed a room in Alexandria with nine people in it, all of them shouting, and underneath, in much smaller writing, and one of them is you.
Eli's showed a proof he had got wrong in a way that could not be got wrong in, and his own handwriting, saying: this is what it looks like when you decide a thing is true before you have checked it.
Milo's was silence, and then a piano, and then the same silence.
"Do not look directly at them," Zara said, in a voice that had gone thin. "They're not showing us the past. They're showing us the assignment."
"Is it showing us what we'll do?"
"It's showing us what we'd like to have done," said Eli, "which is worse, and it is why the station is called the Walk and not the Test. Keep moving. Don't answer anything it says."
The mirrors began, around the second corner, to say things. Lyra heard her mother's voice — not the memory of it, the recording of it, right down the consonants, saying if I go alone they will write it up as a woman alone — and she stopped walking, and had to be touched on the shoulder by Milo, and made a noise she was embarrassed about for a week.
"They're feeding on the pauses," she said.
"They're feeding on the pauses," Eli agreed, and wrote it down, and Lyra noticed that he wrote it down and thought: he is frightened and he is taking notes, and both of those are the same thing.
At the far end of the corridor a boy from the row behind them was standing with his hands over his mouth and not moving, and there were seven of them, in a knot, in the second mirror.
"We are not leaving them," Lyra said.
"You are not leaving them," Milo agreed. "But we are going to need a way to walk them out of a corridor that only opens for a group, and I would like it noted that I have not been consulted about that, and that I have already worked out a way, and that it is extremely stupid."
"Do it."
"It is extremely stupid. Zara, take the two worst. Eli, take the ones who are following Eli. Ms. Chen—" he looked at her. "You have to be the one who talks them out, and not me, and not them, and I would like it noted that I know what I am doing."
Station two was a bridge of held sound, and Milo built it.
That was his station and everyone knew it within about nine seconds, and it was the first time in Lyra's life she watched somebody do something with a gift that made her understand what competent meant, as distinct from what powerful meant. He did not hold the whole bridge. He held the beat, and the beat was a low four, and everybody else found their place in it.
Eli counted and told them when to step. Zara took the two who were crying and stood in the gap next to them and did not speak, and Lyra — who had been told on the platform at Westbrook not to look up, and who could not have read a room if she had, and was therefore, as she discovered, extremely useful, because she was the only one of them who had to walk backwards — walked backwards in front of the seven for ninety metres above a drop, watching their feet.
"Talk me through it," she said. "Somebody talk me through it the whole way or I'm going to look down."
"Four," said Eli.
"Four," said Milo.
"Four," said Zara, from somewhere behind, and a boy of fifteen said "four?" in a voice like a man asking for water, and said it four times over the next ninety seconds, and did not put his hand on the rail, and got all the way across.
Station three was the Well, and it was Zara's, and it nearly finished her.
It was not a test of empathy. Lyra worked that out at about the second minute, from the sound of it. It was a test of boundary. There was a resonance in that shaft that was eleven years of every student who had ever gone into it, and it was not hostile, and it was not asking anything of them, and it went on without them, and it would go on if every one of them walked out.
Zara went in. Zara came out at eleven minutes and sat down on the wet grass and said, in a completely level voice, "I can feel every single person in this building, including Professor Harlow, including the woman at the security desk, including somebody in a sub-basement who is very frightened, and I want to be alone for an hour, and I would like somebody to tell me when the hour is up, and I would like it to be somebody who is not being kind at me."
They told her when the hour was up. Nobody was kind at her. Milo, who had brought soup and put it outside the door and gone away again, was the only one who got thanked.
Station four was Eli's, and it was mathematics, and he did badly and knew it.
"They are affected by our emotional states," he said, about four minutes in, with his glasses off and his hands in his hair. "No. No, that is what the wall is telling me, because the wall wants me to believe the problem is me. The equations are not affected by me. The equations are being changed by something in this room and the something in this room is a projection and I am the one projecting it, because I am the only one here who would rather be told the maths was the problem than admit that the projection is mine."
"Which means?"
"Which means I am generating the obstacle and then solving it, and every solution I produce is a real solution to a problem that does not exist, and that is the most Eli Park thing that has ever happened in a room." He sat down on the step. "Halmeoni used to say that the hardest thing about a mistake you make with your own mind is that it works. I would like the record to show that I got through station four on a problem I invented."
"You still got through it."
"I got through it on a lie," said Eli Park, "and I have written that down, and I am going to think about it for years, and it is the single most useful thing anybody has made me do at this school."
Station six was a room with a door in it that was not a door, and Lyra has never been able to describe it except by saying that it was about wanting, and that the four of them argued about it afterwards for two days.
Station five she skipped, because the Well had taken it out of her, and Tanaka let her, and wrote 5 — deferred on the clipboard without comment, which Lyra understood at the time as kindness and understood about a month later as a decision.
Station seven was a circle of silver light in the wet grass, and Harlow standing in the middle of it, and Tanaka on the outside with a folder under her arm.
"Forty minutes," he said. "You have forty minutes and I am going to spend them asking you to come and work with me, and you are going to refuse, and both of those things are going to be true, and I am going to be honest with you about why I am doing it, which is that I have asked four hundred and six students this and roughly one in nine says yes, and I would like to know what the other eight are made of."
He did not make an argument. That was the thing Lyra could not put down afterwards. She had braced for an argument, and for a threat, and for the ozone-and-jasmine thing; and what she got was a man standing in a circle in the rain being reasonable at her.
"You are the strongest signature I have seen in a first-year since 2002," Harlow said. "I would like to be able to say that I asked. I am not going to dress this up. There is no clause. I am asking because I have a machine under this mountain that is doing arithmetic I cannot finish on my own, and you would finish it in a fortnight, and I would pay for your mother's outstanding fees, which are nothing, and I would pay for your father's transfer here tomorrow, which is not nothing, and I would do both of those things and you would be able to check."
Eli said, "That is an offer."
"That is an offer," Harlow agreed.
"And you are going to refuse it," Zara said, "and I want to know what you are refusing, exactly, before you refuse it, because you are not refusing him, you are refusing something much more useful, and I have watched you do this twice this week."
"I know what I am refusing."
"Say it out loud, then, so that there is a record."
Lyra thought about the doorway on Ellery Street, and about a woman counting her daughter's breaths, and about a jade pendant that was four hundred years old and had only ever worked for one person at a time, and about a woman who had said nobody is coming with me, that is the entire problem and had then said, four hours later, if I go alone, they will write it up as a woman alone.
"I'm not refusing you," Lyra said. "I'm refusing being the only one who decided."
She heard it go round the circle.
Harlow's head came up very slightly.
"Again," he said.
"You want it in the form you can file." Lyra found that her hands were shaking and did not try to stop them. "My mother is the woman on the recording from the second corner. She told my grandmother nobody is coming with me, that is the entire problem, and four hours later she said if she went alone they would write it up as a woman alone, and that in ten years there would be a girl who could do what she could do and she would go alone too, and it would be the correct reading again. I'm not her. I've got three people standing in a circle in the rain. So the honest answer to your offer is: yes, and not like that, and you have to sit down and tell me what the machine is for, and I will take it to my father and to the doctor and to a person I have not met yet whose name I am going to find out, and then you can have me. Or you can carry on asking in circles, and I will carry on refusing, and we will both be extremely polite about it for years."
Tanaka's folder shut.
For about four seconds nothing in the circle moved, and in those four seconds Lyra had a completely clear, and completely unwelcome, thought: I have just made an enemy who is going to be the most useful person I ever meet.
Then Harlow laughed — one syllable, entirely without warmth, and not at all a performance — and said, "Miss Chen, that is the first time in eleven years that anybody has refused me in a form I could not file."
"Sir?"
"That was a compliment. It is also a serious problem." He was already walking. "Tanaka, your four are dismissed. Ms. Chen — a word, outside, and it will take four minutes and you will not enjoy it."
He was entirely correct; she did not enjoy it.
"Three things," he said, under the colonnade, with the rain going past. "One. Your refusal was correct and it was also very nearly too late, and I am not going to explain what I mean, because if I explain it you will carry it around and it will get you hurt. Two." He took out a card, and did not give it to her, and put it away again. "Somebody in this building has been reading your file since the twenty-second of August and has not filed a report, and it is not me, and it is not Dr. Osei, and I would like you to find out who, because I have an interest in you finding out and that is the reason I am telling you at all. Three."
"Three?"
"Thirty-one per cent." He said it the way Dr. Osei had said stable. "That is the number the model puts on the capacity of the thing under this mountain that your mother's notes in that room this afternoon were about, and it is the number I would give to the Council on Thursday, and it is a severity and not a percentage of anything, and the difference between those two things is the difference between a doctor and a murderer, and somebody in this building is going to have to explain it to two hundred people, and I am not going to be the one who has to, because I have been the one who has to for four years and I am finished."
He walked off into the rain.
Lyra stood under the colonnade for a while.
Then she went and found a telephone, and telephoned Westbrook, and asked for Ward C.
Weave-Quake Counter: 19% instability. Node-failure projection: T+9 d, 14:00. Source: 1997 survey, re-verified 2009.
Later. The east corridor, 22:40.
Number for the other thing, since you asked: the bleed is at nineteen per cent of a load that a healthy adult runs at about four, and the load went up when you arrived, because you are the first multi-spectrum in this building since 2002 and everything in this valley is leaning toward you, and it is not going to come back down on its own, and it has been at nineteen for eleven days and it has been at nineteen for eleven days because I have been putting something in his chart every morning at 08:00 and taking it out at 08:15, which I have been doing for eleven days without a doctor's order, and if you tell anybody I will deny it, and I would like you to decide tonight what you are going to do about it, and I have written it on this side of the paper so that you cannot say you did not have it.
Get him here. Do not ask them to send anything.
Bàba
Thread Resonance Note: Gauntlet, cohort 1, 6 September. Seven of eight completed; 5 deferred by invigilator on medical grounds (see note). Station 7: offer made in full, terms stated, declined in a form recorded verbatim by the invigilator. Recommendation from M.H. that the file for C-2214 be reviewed by somebody other than this office. Recommendation from this office that the C-2214 file be reviewed by a person who is not a member of this office, is not the family, and is not the Headmistress. I am aware that this is now a list of two people and there are not two people. I am recording it anyway.
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