Chapter 32: The Fault
4,733 words ·22 min read · EN / VI
"I have read her papers. Every one of them, including the one I could not read, which is the one she has never told me exists. She is better at this than I am. She has been better at this than I have been since she was eleven years old, and I have known that since she was eleven years old, and I did not have a single useful thing to do about it, and I am not going to stand here and pretend otherwise."
— Wei Chen, to the Council of Traditions, 2 October 2013
Weave-Quake Counter: 73% instability. Node-failure projection: SUSPENDED. The network is running on a borrowed anchor. There is no model. There is a man in a machine and a number on a wall.
Wednesday 2 October, 15:10. An anteroom, with the Council on the other side of the wall.
THE ASK
They came to her at ten past three in the afternoon, in an anteroom, and there were five of them and a trolley and a great deal of paper.
She had been awake for about forty hours and had been in a room with a stone floor for most of it, and the anteroom had a window, and the window was the first thing since Friday that had made her cry for a reason that was not about anybody.
"Sit down, please."
"I would like to stand."
"Sit down, please," said Eleanor Weaver again, "because I have done this twice in six years and I got it wrong both times, and I am not going to get it wrong three times with a person in front of me."
Lyra sat down.
Then Mei-Hua Chen — her aunt, whom she had spoken to on the second of October at ten past nine in the morning, in a corridor, for eleven minutes, and who had spent the entire eleven minutes apologising for things that were not her fault and had then, at the end, said: you are the first Chen in this family in four generations who was not the smartest person in the room, and it is a relief, and I am sorry, and I am also extremely glad — put a single sheet of paper on the table.
"That is a form," she said. "It is called an instrument of voluntary bodily application. It is one page, front and back, and it was drafted in 1974 by a lawyer who did not believe it would ever be used, and there has been exactly one other instance in the history of this body and it is in a museum in Lyon."
"What does it say."
"It says: the applicant applies to occupy an aperture, for a period to be determined by the instrument's officer, on terms recorded in the schedule at Annex B, and waives the protections of sections four to nineteen inclusive." Her aunt's voice did not change. "Sections four to nineteen are the consent sections. Signing it means you cannot be asked, later, whether you would have chosen differently."
"I know what it means."
"I am aware that you know what it means, and I want to say one more thing in my own voice, and then I will not say it again." Mei-Hua Chen put both hands flat on the table. "I have been the Registrar of this Academy for eleven years. I have signed four thousand seven hundred and eleven forms. I have never once refused one. That is not a boast, it is a complaint that I have about myself, and I have been the person in this building who says that the forms work, for eleven years, and the reason the forms work is that the person who refuses them is always somebody who cannot read."
THE TERMS
Osei read them out. She read them out because it had been proposed by Wei Chen in a written memorandum of nine paragraphs and because nobody had been able to think of a better way of doing it and because Dr. Amara Osei had said, when it was proposed to her, you are asking me to be the officer of the instrument, and I am going to say yes, and I want it recorded that I said yes before I read the schedule, and that I read it afterwards, and that I would say yes again, and had then read it, and had gone the colour of the wall.
"Annex B. One. The aperture is the fault in the east lattice of the Magnus Conduit, described in the engineer's report of the first of October, and the applicant will be positioned by two persons and will remain so positioned until released by the officer or until the officer's death, whichever is first, and the engineer has given an estimate of the load-time of four hours and has said, in writing, that the load-time is not a limit on the applicant's life but a limit on the officer's ability to keep her in that position without injury, and I want that sentence read in this room exactly as it was written, because it is the only sentence in all this paperwork that anybody has been careful about."
Four hours.
"That is the whole of it," said Osei. "Four hours of holding. And then it is done, and the fault is lined, and the aperture is closed, and there is no version of this in which you come out of it."
"There is not," said Wei Chen.
"Then say it to her, Mr. Chen, because it is in your memorandum and it is not in mine, and I would like it said by the person who wrote it."
Wei Chen said it.
"There is not," he said. "Lyra. I have been a professor for twenty-one years and I have taught four hundred students how not to trust a bad argument, and I am going to say the argument to you myself, because it is a good argument and because you have taught me in the last nine days what to do with one.
"You are sixteen. I am fifty-three with thirty-one per cent of my heart and a bleed that stopped four days ago because a machine in this building was asked a question and answered it, and a woman of eighty-one in another state has been saying the same thing to me on a telephone every Sunday for six years in a different accent.
"A person in a hole in a machine for four hours is very likely to die. It is not certain. It is about two in three, and I have a figure for the two in three, and I would like to write it down and hand it to you so that it is mine and not yours.
"And it is the correct number. That is the part I cannot get past. The Council has four options and every one of them is worse than you, in the specific and technical sense that every one of them is a system, and a system that costs a person who has not agreed is a queue, and your mother wrote the word queue in a journal, on a page about you dated the February before you were born."
He put his hand down.
"I am not asking you because it is correct. I want you to hear me say that, because your mother said something to me in about 2001 and I have had it in a drawer for twelve years and I am going to say it out loud now because I am about to ask you to do the worst thing anybody will ever ask you.
"She said: the arithmetic is not the problem, Wei. The arithmetic is the only thing we have got. The problem is that we keep using it to avoid the sentence."
THE REFUSAL
"No," said Lyra Chen.
She said it before anybody had finished, and she was not shouting, and she was on her feet, and nobody in that room had asked her to stand.
"Mr. Chen, I am going to say something and I would like it minuted, and I would like it minuted before I say it, so that nobody afterwards can say that I was persuaded.
"The fifth option is correct. I have been in a hole in that machine for four days and I know what it is like from the inside, and Eli Park is right that I can read that cage, and you are right that the arithmetic is right, and I am not going to argue with any of it, because all of it is true, and I have spent three weeks in a building learning that true is not the same as right, and a man called Harlow has been true to me four times and has cut a boy out of his own life doing it."
"Lyra—"
"Four hours is not the cost." She put her hands flat on the table, the way her father did, the way her grandmother did, the way everybody in that family did. "The cost is that it becomes a procedure. That is what happens. I have watched it happen to a boy in a corridor in about four minutes and then I watched it happen to me, and if I do it, then on the third of October somebody in this building will write down what we did tonight, and they will write it down properly, because that is what this building does, and then in a year there will be a room with a boy in it, and there will be a form, and there will be an officer, and his name will not be on it because there will be a schedule."
"Who was in the corridor?" said Osei, very quietly.
"You know who was in the corridor," said Lyra. "You have written his name on a board every day for three weeks."
Osei did not answer.
"Harlow says he never once asked anybody for anything," Lyra said, "and that is his whole confession, and he has been carrying it for eleven years, and he says it to me as a man who does not understand what he is looking at, and I want the Council to understand it too, because it is not about him. He is a professor. He is a researcher. He is the most senior thread practitioner in this Academy and he has spent eleven years doing a thing that he has never been asked to do, and he has got very good at it, and that is why the two hundred and eleven students in that hall were told they were attending a demonstration."
She turned round.
"So I am not doing it for the arithmetic. I am not doing it for eleven thousand people, and I want that minuted as well, because I have found out this month that I am extremely good at carrying things for other people and that it is the single most dangerous habit I own. I am doing it because the source is thirty-nine people in a cage and the fifth option puts the load on a bench with a meter and a warden's signature, and if I do not do it then the Council will do item one, and item one is a regulation, and I have read a regulation."
"But if you do it, it is also a regulation," said the Chair, from the doorway. "In about a year, Miss Chen. That is the honest shape of it. We will write it down, because I have sat in this chair for two days and the only thing I am certain of is that this cannot be unwritten. I am not going to stand here and offer you a noble version of yourself that lasts one afternoon."
Lyra looked at him for a moment.
"Yes," she said. "All right. Thank you. That is the first time in three weeks that anybody has offered me the true version of anything, and I would like it recorded that it came from the Chair of the Council and that it was worse than the lie and I felt better."
"And I want something," she said.
"You may have it."
"Three things, and I am going to be specific, and Eli Park is going to write them down because he does it better than I do and because if I am the only person who can enforce them then they are not conditions, they are wishes."
She looked at her aunt.
"One. When the lattice is opened, it is opened by somebody who is not me. I will read it from the fault and I will ask it the question and then I will not be in the room, because I will be in the fault, and because I have been in a machine for four days and I have found out that I am extremely good at being the only one who does a thing, and that is the thing that got Milo Reyes into a hospital bed."
"Two. When the instrument is closed, there is a schedule. Not Annex B. A published schedule. Names, dates, thresholds, the number of hours, the number of times it has been used, and the number of times it will be used again, on a board, in this building, where two hundred students can read it, permanently. I have seen what your boards do. I have been reading one since Monday. There were four numbers on it on Monday and there are five now, and I did not know until Friday that the fifth one was a fear-collector under a gym, and somebody has to write the fifth board."
"That is—" began Weaver, and stopped, and said, "yes. Yes, that can be done."
"Three." She looked at the floor. "My father. He has been in this building since Monday and he has not been asked a single question by anybody, and I asked on Sunday for him to be put on the record and then I sat in an anteroom with a piece of paper and I did not ask him, and I am asking him now, in front of all of you, because if I do not ask him in public then I am doing the exact thing that I have spent three weeks learning not to do, which is deciding for him."
THE ANSWER
There were five people in that anteroom and the Chair and four wardens, and Wei Chen was sitting on a chair by the window with his cane across his knees, and he had a piece of paper in his shirt pocket, and he had had it in his shirt pocket since half past three, and Lyra had known about it since eleven o'clock that morning and had said nothing, because it was his.
"All right," he said. "I have a number and I have had it since Sunday, and I am not going to pretend that I arrived at it this afternoon."
"Sir—"
"Let me be finished, Lyra, because you have about nine minutes before they start the procedure and I have had three weeks of watching you be the only person in a room who says the true thing, and you are sixteen, and I am not going to let you do this to me as well."
He took the paper out and did not unfold it.
"Sixty-eight per cent coverage. Straight line. Four weeks, which is eleven weeks by the skin and three by the geometry, and I have been careful about which one I am quoting and I would like the difference to be in the record, because the difference between eleven weeks and three weeks is the difference between a man dying of a machine and a man dying of a heart, and they are not the same death and I am not going to have them added up.
"The bleed stopped on the twenty-eighth. Lyra asked the machine to translate a feedback loop and it did, and it is a closed loop, and it will not start again, and I want to say clearly to this room that that is not a cure of anything. It closed a door. The door was never the reason I was going to die. It was a tax on a clock that was already running.
"So: three weeks, and I have known that since Friday, and I have had a piece of paper in my pocket since Sunday, and on Sunday morning I told a woman who was standing in a hole in a machine that I would not have said no."
"And I have not said no," he said. "I want that on the record, because I have spent twelve years not saying things out loud and I have a daughter who learned it from me, and I am not going to do it in an anteroom.
"But I am not volunteering, and the difference matters, and it is the whole of the difference. I am not putting my name down because I think it is correct, and I have heard your argument and it is correct and it is the argument of a good man. I am doing it because I have been a statistician for twenty-one years and I have never once in my life been able to look at a number and not ask who is paying, and in April of 2002 my wife wrote the answer to that question in a notebook in a chamber under this building and then went into that building on her own at half past one in the morning on the eleventh of September and did not come out, and I have had five years, and the only thing I have managed to do about it is to read her papers and get here."
"And I am not going to stand up in a Council of Traditions," said Wei Chen, "and be the second person in this family to decide on their own."
THE INSTRUMENT
They read it out four times, because the lawyer in Lyon had insisted on four, and it is worth recording what it actually said, because it is not what anybody expected.
"First: I, Wei Chen, of Westbrook, apply to occupy the aperture described in the engineer's report of the first of October, for the period recorded at Annex B, which is four hours, and I understand that the officer of this instrument is Dr Amara Osei and that the engineer is Mr E. Park and that the person who will read the instrument is Miss L. Chen, and that two of those three people are under twenty and one is not going to sleep tonight."
"Second: I waive sections four to nineteen."
"Third: I have a daughter in this room and I am not asking her permission and I am not asking her forgiveness and I would like both of those entered in the record as not asked for, because in about four hours she is going to be in a machine and she is not going to have the capacity to give me either, and I would like it noted that I have noticed the mechanism. It is the one we have been talking about all week. It is a nice clean mechanism. I am the last man in this room who is qualified to notice it and I am going to do it anyway."
"Fourth." He stopped for a moment.
"Fourth, and this is the one that matters. The applicant states that he was not the first person offered, and that the first person offered refused, and that he has read the refusal, and that he is making this application in the full knowledge that a girl of nineteen refused it in a demonstration hall in August because nobody asked her what the machine would be, and that if the Council ratifies this instrument then the ratification will be recorded with that refusal in the paper, in full, in her words, permanently, on a board in this building where students can read it."
"Otherwise," said Wei Chen, "I am a man of fifty-three with a bad heart who was asked a question in a room where nobody had time to be careful, and there is a queue somewhere and I am not going to let it have me without writing down the name of the person who said no."
They took two hours over the wording, and Dr. Mei-Hua Chen took it to the Council's lawyer on a telephone, and the lawyer said no three times, and then said yes on the fourth, and then said, over the telephone, in the voice of a man of sixty-four, and I would like it recorded that I said no three times, because in 1974 I wrote that instrument on the assumption that it would be used once and by a man of sixty and never again, and I would like the Council to understand that the three refusals were not legal, they were human, and that human is a category and I have spent thirty-nine years regretting that it is not one the law recognises."
They read it at twenty past six in the evening.
Wei Chen signed it at six twenty-four, and the signature was not steady, and he said so, and the officer of the instrument said so, and the minute records it.
Then they positioned him.
It is not dramatic. That is the thing Lyra said afterwards, to about four people, and it is the thing she was most careful about. It is not dramatic: there is a trolley, and there is a housing, and there are two people positioning a man of fifty-three with a bad heart on his side in a recess in a machine in a basement, and it takes eleven minutes, and one of the two people doing it is nineteen years old and is crying in a way that does not produce any sound, and the wardens have been told about this in advance and have brought a chair out of the room for her.
"Lyra." Her father's face, about a foot away, in bad light. "Two things, quickly, and then I am going to ask you to stop crying, because I have four hours and I would like one of them."
"Anything."
"Eleven years of marriage and I did not listen to her. I want to say that to you while there is a witness, because I have been telling people for a fortnight that I have made my peace with it and I have not. I have not made my peace with it. I have understood it, which is a different thing and much less comfortable, and I would have liked to have understood it in 2008 and I am going to be doing something quite stupid in about four minutes instead."
"Dad—"
"Second thing." He was looking at the housing, not at her. "Your mother wrote, in the February before you were born, on a page about you: she'll need understanding, not protection. And I have had that in my head for a fortnight, and it has been no use whatsoever, and I would like you to know that I passed it on. In the corridor, on Sunday, to a machine, when you asked me to come down. I passed it on. I do not know what the machine made of it and I was not in a position to read the trace, and I would like that in the record as the last thing I did."
THE FAULT
She went in the way she had gone in on Sunday, which was the only way there was: through a crack, on her side, into the gap between what the machine had been built to take and what she had put in it on Saturday afternoon when she had reached up a wire in a demonstration hall in front of two hundred witnesses.
The lattice was there. Of course it was there. She had been talking to it for four days.
Hello, she thought. Are you the same?
And it was not words and it was not the way she had done it on Sunday, when she had said I'm here, and I'm going to find out, and I'm not going to do anything to you that I can't undo, and it had worked, and she had never worked out why.
This was: a room, and a line, and the line going out through a hand's width of space to a place where a man is lying on his side, and a warmth at the far end of it that is not the warmth of a person and is not the cold of a machine and is somewhere in between and is the most frightening thing Lyra Chen had ever felt.
Hold the line, she thought. That's all. Don't let go. It's four hours and it is only four hours and then we put the lining in and we take you out of the box.
And the lattice said: we know. we have been holding things for seventy-two years. nobody has ever asked us to hold something we were not already holding.
Weave-Quake Counter: 66% instability. Node-failure projection: SUSPENDED.
2 October, 18:41. Sub-level 7.
Osei watched the trace. It went from flat to a shape and stayed on the shape, and the shape was not a person's trace and it was not a machine's trace, and she had a name for it in her own notebook which she did not write in the official one, which was the reviewer's wave, and which she had read about in 1968 in a paper by a man in Kyoto who had then gone to work for a syndicate and who had been, as far as she knew, alive and insufferable in 1997.
The engineering readouts came up in front of her in an order she had never seen them come up in, and she wrote the times down in her own hand on the back of a form because there was no paper on the trolley:
18:41 — fault located, hand's width, holding at 61%. 19:04 — source transfer begins. Lattice begins to run un-caged. 44%. 19:40 — 44%. No change. The lattice is not discharging and is not failing. 20:15 — 43%. 21:02 — 41%. 22:30 — 38%. 23:12 — 36%.
And at 23:12, in the middle of a chamber four hundred metres under a mountain, in a machine that had been built in 1941 by a man who had sealed a housing and died in a bed eleven months later, thirty-nine patterns that had been held since the war finished came apart, one at a time, in an order that Mei-Hua Chen recorded in the minutes of the opening of case forty-one and which nobody has ever attempted to explain.
They were not released.
That is the sentence that has been fought over for eleven months, in three tribunals and two inquiries, and it is the sentence that the Synod of Kyoto formally disputed in March, and it is the sentence that Dr. Mei-Hua Chen wrote into the first page of the register of case forty-one with a date on it, and it is this:
They were lined, in a housing, with a meter and a warden's signature, and they were held, and they are still held, and every one of them is accounted for, by name, by pattern, by the date they went in, and by the date of their death where there is one, and thirty-seven of the dates are 1941 to 1953 and two of them are 2013, and one of the two is a girl of fifteen who is alive and is in Bellhaven and whose mother has been told.
And they are not free. They were never going to be free. The whole of this is that they are now held in a place with a name on it, instead of a place with a lid on it, and that is the entire difference, and it is not a small difference, and it is not enough, and I have written it is not enough on the first page of this register and I will not be moved on it by anybody, including the girl who is asleep upstairs.
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