Chương 61: Everything They Print

He went looking for the archive the morning after the drawer, because there was nothing to be done about the card and he had to be doing something. He had been there six weeks by his own count. Out in the world it was about the sixth day. He found it, and it nearly broke his heart. It was nine floors and it was open to the street, and there was no door on the front of it at all, only an arch you walked through. Mrs. Ashe's whole library in Calder was nineteen years of her buying what she could out of what was left.

All of it would have gone into one aisle of the second floor, with room at the end. Abe stood in the middle of the ground floor and turned around once. Practice manuals. Drill books. Diagrams of the body with the layers drawn on in six colors, on hinged boards you could fold out to the size of a door. Shelves of it went away from him in both directions until the aisles got dark. He read for eleven days. He read standing up, and sitting on the floor of the aisles.

Once he read for a whole bio-day flat on a table on the top floor, with his coat rolled under his head. He got real things out of it. There was a conditioning progression for Body past ten that Mrs. Ashe's donated shelf had never had, written by a man who had clearly done all of it himself. It ran out at twelve. It was the deepest thing on nine floors, and Abe had gone past the end of it in a marsh outside Prescot in the first week of January.

He got two ways of loading a hold that he had been doing wrong since October. This city had known both of them for sixty years, though nobody had ever told him, and being wrong had cost him about a month. He tried the first one that night, out of curiosity, on the floor of a room with a bucket under the leak. From the outside it was the same hold he had been doing since October. Same feet, same hands. One line in a book about where the load was supposed to sit.

He got about forty seconds into it and had to come out.

"Sixty years," Abe said, to the ceiling.

"Sixty years, and one line in a book." Then he got up and did it again, and got fifty seconds, and came out of that one shaking. The bar went up faster that night than it had gone up in the whole month before it. It kept doing that. He had been doing it wrong since October and it had felt like work the whole way. That was what he kept going back to. Three months of it, and his own body had never once complained.

After four days he stopped being surprised and started being annoyed about every hour he had spent doing it the easy way. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Mind 5 Foundation: 1, 140 / 2, 500 (Mind 6) He had not looked at that screen since December, because there had been no reason to. Since the night in the yard that screen had said sixty eight points and never moved. It said one thousand one hundred and forty now. Abe sat on the floor of an aisle with his back against the shelves. Reading was the fastest thing he had ever done.

Study had stopped paying him on a library table in Calder in November. He had put that down as a bad pick and stopped opening the screen at all. It had never been a bad pick. Mrs. Ashe had spent nineteen years buying what she could, and he had gotten to the end of all of it in a month. The fourth floor was records. Sixty years of what actually happened, trade by trade. Which door the divers took at each crossing, and the guards, and the haulers.

What each door had turned into ten years on, with the dead ends marked. Mrs. Ashe's shelf had held nine books like these, and every choice Abe made at seventeen had come out of those nine. He copied every table that touched a skill he owned into his notebook, small, in pencil, both sides of the page. The Meditation page had four doors on it, out of everybody who ever wrote one down. His own door was not one of them. The next time a screen gave him four seconds, he was not going to be guessing.

The third level came up in the middle of an aisle, while he was standing still with a book open. Turning-Wheel Trance · Apprentice Lv 4 (0 / 3, 200) Not the reading. The hold. He had spent more of this city inside a still than out of it, and in nine quiet floors it had gone up three times without him watching for one of them. Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. He stood and felt for the difference, and could not find one.

Then his stomach found it for him, about an hour on, and he sat on the stairs and ate most of what he had been keeping for the week. Then he ran out of practice books, which he had not expected to do, and started reading everything else. He had the hours. He had nothing else to spend them on. So he went up to the sixth floor, where the practice material stopped and the reference began. There was a map floor. Abe had known the shape of the world all his life off a screen, in names and weather and tables.

He had never seen it drawn. He found the piece of coast where his own kitchen should have been. There was a printed line, and some blue, and nothing else at all. Calder was not on it. Prescot was, as a dot with no name. He took a book about the north off a shelf on the seventh floor, because he had never heard anybody talk about the north. He found out why in about four pages. There was a plate in it of a thing standing on a ridge with its wings folded. Somebody had drawn a man next to it for scale.

The man came up to about the middle of its foot. Abe put that book back on the shelf and stood there a while, and then took it down again and read the whole thing. The next one he noticed because it was missing. He was three books into the Arrival itself, the actual years of it, and there was a country in all of them with no name on it. They called it other things. The western state. The one that fired. Once, in a book printed forty years ago by somebody who had clearly been there, just them.

Abe went and got a fourth book to check. It was a school textbook for eleven-year-olds and it did the same thing. Everybody knew, though. Abe had known the name himself since he was small, off the same feeds and forums that also went around it. They had launched. All four books used that word and no other one. The things were coming out of the water faster than anybody could kill them, and somebody had decided that was that.

During the worst of it they had put warheads down on them in other countries, on other people's ground, without asking any of them. Barcelona was one. London was one. Abe read that line, and then went back to the top of the page and read the whole thing again. He had grown up knowing London was gone. Everybody knew London was gone. Mrs. Farrant had spent most of a term on the Arrival. What she said about London was that the water came up the estuary and the city could not be held. That part was true.

She had stopped there. Nobody had ever finished the sentence for him, in eighteen years, in any classroom or off any feed. Abe sat with the fourth book open on his knees in a stopped aisle for a long time. He had walked past a burned-out gas station on the Prescot road with the prices still up on the board and thought it was old. This was older, and somebody had decided to do it. Somebody had done it, and then everybody had agreed, without ever agreeing, to stop saying who.

And the government had gone north and never gone back. It had come here. Flags on a mill city, because the old one was gone and not one of the four books would say who did it. On the ninth floor the free material ran out. There was a counter, and a bell on it, and a woman frozen behind the counter with a form in her hand. Behind her was a door with a keypad on it and no handle on this side. Beside the door, facing out, there was a chair, and a man in it. Over the door was the seal he had been seeing since the gate.

OFPRAC. Abe stood and looked at that for a while. He had walked a gray street with four buildings of it down one side, a week back by his own count. A man on the steps had turned his head and watched him go past. The same office decided who got taught. Everything a trade is willing to write down was in that building. Sixty years of it, on eight floors, free to anybody who walked in off the street. In Calder the same material was one aisle, because that is what nineteen years of one woman's buying comes to.

The deep material was not on any shelf in that building, and it was not on a shelf anywhere, because it is not printed. You did not take it down and read it. You applied, and got certified, and then a person taught it to you, face to face, with the world running. The whole system existed because untrained deep work maims people, and the world has three generations of proof. Abe put his hand flat on the door and did not push. He had known since October what a door does in a stopped world.

Pull at a handle and the world comes back with him standing there holding it. So: a woman six feet behind him with a form in her hand, and a man on a chair three feet to his left, and both of them looking at a boy with no business on that floor. Four days ago he had sat on a wet floor four flights up in an empty room, with one stranger on the stairs two floors below him, and it had taken four tries to get quiet. There were two of them in this one and they would both be looking straight at him.

He took his hand off the door. Then he went and stood in front of the man in the chair and looked at him properly, close up, the same as he had done with Dyer. He was about sixty. He had a paperback face down on one knee and a flask on the floor by the chair leg, and a cardigan on under the jacket because the ninth floor was cold. He was somebody's granddad doing a shift on a Tuesday, and nothing at all like the two off the OFPRAC steps. Abe had gotten past every lock in two cities by now.

A warehouse, a lockup with a padlock on it, eleven shops, a market, and a man who sat up all night in a chair beside a crate. Dyer had been one man in a lane at four in the morning, and Abe had spent three nights learning which board in his floor gave under a foot. This one had his eyes open and a book on his knee and eight hours left on his shift, and Abe stood in front of him for a while and could not think of one single thing to do about him.

He could leave this city tonight and be home before Peg got up, and nobody on Earth would see him go. He could not get past one tired man on a chair. He went and sat on the stairs for a while. He had hit this wall in November, and again in the cupboard, and on Christmas Day in a house on the hill where a family kept their method in a box. Every one of them had a person on the other side of it. Croft's grandfather. Tench's cupboard, and the nineteen years Mrs. Ashe spent buying what was left.

A family on a hill with a box. Abe had fifty hours a day and there was not one hour of it he could spend on being somebody a person would teach. He went down to the third floor and read the last of the conditioning book standing up, and put it back on the shelf square, the way Mrs. Ashe liked them. Then he went out through the arch into a street with a bicycle halfway through falling over. He stood in the road and worked out what he actually had. Eight floors of everything the world would hand him for nothing.

And one floor it would not, ninety feet over his head, in the only city in the country where that floor existed at all. He looked back up at the building. Nine floors of windows, all of them lit, all of them still. Then he went to find the other place. He had known it was somewhere in this city since his second day, and he had been walking a long way around it ever since.