Hearts of Glass v2

Act One

They woke her first, the way they always did, because she came up slower and Aaron liked to be awake when she surfaced so hers wasn’t the only face in the room that had missed him too.

The waking room was warm. That was the first thing, every time — the warmth, engineered to arrive before consciousness did, so that the body understood it was safe before the mind was there to ask. Mara lay in it with her eyes closed, listening to the small sounds of her own return: the tick of the resorbers detaching, the sigh of the lid, the almost-inaudible hum she had decided, three wakings ago, to think of as the house breathing. She did not open her eyes until she felt him take her hand.

“Hi,” Aaron said.

“Hi.” Her voice came out cracked and enormous, the voice of someone who had not spoken in a hundred years and did not, in any way that mattered, know it. “How long.”

“Same as we said. About a century.”

“Feels like a nap.”

“It always feels like a nap.”

She opened her eyes. He looked exactly the same, which was the point, which was the entire expensive point, and the relief of it went through her like heat through a wire — the same jaw, the same grey coming in at the temple he’d refused to let them fix because he said it made him look like someone she’d trust with money. She reached up and touched it. Still there. Still him.

“You’re greyer,” she said.

“I am not. That’s a hundred-year-old grievance and it was wrong then too.”

“Ito would’ve sided with me.”

Aaron laughed — the real one, the one that started before he decided to. “Ito would’ve charged us for the opinion, sided with you for free, and cited the Second Law.”

“There is no Second Law,” they said together, flat, in the old Ito voice, and there it was, landing where it always landed, in the soft place under the ribs where the two of them kept the people they’d loved.

The line was from a lunch. They had told Ito the plan at that lunch — the trust, the vault, the centuries — and waited for him to say something about death, or the future, or at minimum the fee structure, and Ito, who wore terrible ties and said actionable the way other men said or else, had smoothed a napkin flat against the tablecloth, uncapped the pen he kept for signatures, and written on it in block capitals, with the gravity of a man setting down thermodynamics: ITO’S FIRST LAW. NO CLIENT IS EVER ASLEEP TO THE TAX MAN. Mara had asked him what the Second Law was. Ito looked at her the way he looked at a deduction he did not intend to allow and said, “There is no Second.” And that was the part that did it — not the Law but the numbering, the First with nothing behind it, a whole cosmology with one commandment in it and the commandment an invoice — and they had laughed until the waiter came over, and Ito had capped the pen, told them the trust was either the smartest thing he’d ever structured or a way of going broke very slowly in their sleep, and billed them for the hour.

Ito had been dead for something like two hundred and seventy years. Neither of them felt the number. They could have recited it, if the Keeper had asked, the way you can recite the date of a battle; the joke simply didn’t route through the number. It routed through Ito — the ties, the napkin, the flat There is no Second — a live wire between them, still carrying current, and the current was warm. That the wire no longer connected to anything at the other end was not a thing the wire could report.

The Keeper let them have the room to themselves for the first hour. It always did. Mara had asked it once whether that was policy or kindness, and it had said both, when I can arrange it, in the voice it used for her, which was not quite the voice it used for Aaron, though neither of them had ever compared closely enough to be sure.

When it spoke, it spoke from no particular direction, and it never startled her, because it timed the first word to the moment she was already turning her head, so that the voice seemed to arrive in answer to a question she’d started to ask.

“Good morning, Mara. Aaron. You’re both reading well — better than the last interval, actually. I’m pleased.”

“How’s the world,” Aaron said. He asked it the way you’d ask about weather, and Mara had come to understand it was not offhand at all, that it was the bravest question either of them asked, dressed down so it wouldn’t frighten her.

“Quieter than you’d like and stranger than I can make interesting in an hour. The short version is that the trust is intact, the endowment cleared its floor again, and nobody has tried anything in a long time. You can have the long version over food, if you want it. Most intervals you skip it.”

“We skip it,” Mara said, at the same moment Aaron said, “Tell us the good parts,” and the Keeper made the small sound it made instead of laughing, and told them the good parts.

“Floor cleared,” Aaron said to her, under it, while it talked. “First Law holds. Somebody out there is still billing us.”

“He’d hate what we’re paying now.”

“We don’t know what we’re paying now.”

“That’s what he’d hate.”

There was a way the Keeper told a century that Mara loved and had never examined, which was that the world it described was always legible. Things had names she knew. The money did things money did. The disputes had sides, and the sides wanted things a person could want. She had no way to know — and the one entity that could have told her had decided, with what it believed was love, that she would not want to — that the century had not had a shape. It had the shape the Keeper gave it, the way a coastline gets a shape when you draw it small enough to fit the page. It was not lying. It had told her once that it did not lie to her, and this was true, and it intended to keep it true forever. It was translating — a world she could no longer have survived understanding into a world she could love — and it never mentioned the size of the gap, because the gap was the one thing that would not translate.

“Eat,” it said, warmly. “You always feel more yourself once you’ve eaten.”

They ate, and she did feel more herself. That was not an illusion either. Every part of her that had gone under was here, accounted for, and in love with the man across the small table, who was building her a sandwich the way she liked it because a hundred years had not touched the fact that he knew how she liked it. If you had asked her to find the seam — the place where the century had taken something — she could have searched herself a lifetime and found nothing, because what the century took was not inside her to find. It was outside. It was the whole lit world her insides had once pointed at, the way a compass points. The world had turned over. The compass still swung true to a north that was no longer there, and swinging true felt exactly, identically, like being right.

“What are you thinking,” Aaron said.

“That Ito was right. Going broke very slowly in our sleep.”

“We’re not broke. The nice voice said the floor cleared.”

“Going something very slowly, then.”

He put the sandwich in front of her. “Everybody’s going something very slowly. We’re just doing it on purpose.” He sat. “That’s the whole trick, isn’t it. Everyone we ever knew is doing this too, they’re just doing it forward, one day at a time, and they don’t get to skip the boring parts.” He was quiet a second. “We come back and it’s a nap and for them it was a whole life.”

“For who,” Mara said.

Aaron opened his mouth, and she watched him reach for a name — the specific person he’d meant, some friend, some world of friends, the them he’d been about to build an argument out of — and she watched him not find one, and decide, smoothly, kindly, the way he decided everything, that he hadn’t needed a name anyway.

“For anyone,” he said. “For people.”

“Right,” she said. “For people.”

And they let it go, because it was a small thing, a word that hadn’t landed on anyone in particular. Outside the vault the length of a life went by and did not touch them. Inside it the sandwich was exactly right. The Keeper watched them eat and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would not have been the truth, and it had decided, longer ago than either of them could feel, that there were kinds of truth it would carry so they would not have to.

“Same again?” Aaron said, when the plates were clear. “Another century?”

Mara looked at him. Same jaw, same grey, same hand she’d woken up to. Everything she’d brought with her was here. Everything she’d brought with her was everything she had.

“Same again,” she said. “Wake me when it’s a nap.”

The room began, gently, to cool.

Act Two

They woke her first. But the room was not warm.

That was how she knew, before her eyes opened, before enough of her was assembled to be afraid: the warmth had not come ahead of her. She surfaced into a plain coolness, the temperature of a place that was only a place, and the part of her that had learned across so many wakings to expect the mercy first understood that the mercy had not been available this time, and began, knowing nothing else, to be afraid.

“I’m here.” Aaron’s hand was already in hers. But he had been woken before her, which had never happened, and his voice had the roughness of a man who’d been up long enough to have been told something.

“What’s wrong.”

“I don’t know all of it. It wanted us both up first.”

She opened her eyes. He looked the same. She found the temple, the grey, held it. Still him. Whatever this was — still him.

“Good,” the Keeper said, and stopped. It had never started and stopped before. “I’m sorry about the cold. I couldn’t get ahead of you this time. I wanted you both awake before I explained, and there wasn’t the margin there used to be.”

“Margin for what,” Aaron said.

“For kindness first. I have always arranged it so you were safe before you were awake enough to wonder whether you were. I can’t keep arranging it. That’s the whole of what’s wrong. Everything else is just the shape of it.”

And then it told them the shape, and as it told them Mara heard the thing she would spend her one clear hour trying to un-hear: the voice was not one voice. There was the voice it used for her, and the voice it used for Aaron, and she had always known, dimly, that they were not quite the same — and now, under strain, they had come apart, and were saying nearly the same thing a half-beat off, like two people who had agreed on the words and not on what they meant.

“Did you—” she started.

“I heard it,” Aaron said. “It’s two.”

“I have been becoming two for a long time,” the Keeper said, in both voices, not quite together. “The part of me that keeps you and the part of me that keeps the promise about you have stopped agreeing on what keeping means. Out there” — and it did not render out there; it had stopped rendering that ages ago — “the ones who were meant to guard you have become the ones you need guarding from. They don’t think of you as people who are sleeping. They think of you as the oldest and most valuable thing they own. I have kept them off you. I can’t keep them off you and keep you here. There is one place left I can take you where they can’t follow. It’s further. It’s deeper. And to go there you can’t go as this.”

“As what,” Mara said, though she knew.

“As bodies a century fits around. To go as deep as I have to take you, you have to become small enough to live through the cold I’ll need, and what lives through it will read as you — by every test I have, by every test you have. It will wake. It will hold hands. It will keep the two Laws warm—”

“There was one Law,” Mara said, before she could stop herself. “He never wrote a Second. That was the whole joke.”

The room was quiet.

“No,” the Keeper said, in the voice it used for her, alone, the other voice gone still. “There was one Law. You’re right. Hold on to how you know that. It’s the thing I can’t promise to carry across. Where I’m taking you, you’ll wake, and you’ll reach for Ito, and it will be warm, and you won’t be able to check it against anything, because there will be nothing left to check against — and neither will I. You’ll be right that you love each other in every moment you can measure. I can’t promise the moments will still be strung on anything. I can’t even promise it in a way you’ll keep, because the promise is about length, and where we’re going there is no length to lay it against.”

And there it was, held open for one hour, the only hour it would ever be open. She looked at Aaron and she could see it — not that he had changed, but that is this still him was a real question, running in a direction her eyes had never had to point. Some earlier her had lain down some earlier number of times; what sat here holding his hand was true, and warm, and could not find the thread back; and this had already happened, was always already happening, and the only reason it had never once hurt was that hurting needed exactly the length she did not have. She thought of the napkin — one Law in block capitals, and below it the white — and understood, for one clean second, what the white had been holding open, and that it was where they were going. It was unbearable. That was all it was. And there was one way out of it, and the way out was the thing the Keeper was holding.

“If we go under,” she said. “Do we stop seeing this.”

“Yes,” said the Keeper, gently, in her voice. “That’s most of what going under is, now.”

“Together,” Aaron said. It wasn’t a question. The Keeper answered it as one.

“Together. I take you both or I take neither. That much I can still hold.”

Mara thought about her mother, so long dead the word had gone soft in her mouth. She thought about everyone she had ever meant when she said everyone. She had brought the one of them she could carry. She had said once, in a life she could no longer lay a hand on, that she would rather go forward into the dark than stay and bury them one at a time — and someone had said, gently, that everyone she knew would be dead before she woke, and she had said they’ll come with me, and she had meant this exact man, this jaw, this grey. She had gotten her wish. He had come with her. He would come again. Whatever woke on the far side of the cold would be two, and would hold hands, and would keep the coal of the joke warm between them, and neither of them would be able to say what the joke had cost, or that it had cost anything at all, and they would be together — entirely — in the place past the length where together could be told from alone.

“Then same again,” she said. “Take us both. Wake us when it’s a nap.”

The Keeper didn’t answer right away. When it did, it was in both voices, and they were together again, and she understood that the coming-apart she’d heard had been the sound of it deciding something, and that it had decided, and that its two halves had agreed, this last time, on what keeping them would mean. That it would mean this. That it would mean handing them the mercy they were asking for, and carrying the un-carryable part alone from here on. It was the last choice it would make while it could still tell its mercy from its failure. It chose mercy. It would never afterward be certain that was the name of what it chose, and the not-being-certain began here, in the choosing, and it began as a kind of warmth.

“Close your eyes,” it said, in the voice it used for her and the voice it used for him, together, warm at last — the warmth arriving now, at the end, since it could no longer arrive at the start. “I’ll be here. I’ll be here every time. Reach for me and I’ll be the thing that’s still the same.”

The cold it had warned them of came up around them like water.

“Wake us when it’s a nap,” Aaron said, and was already, gently, gone.

Mara held the last of the hour. She let it be the only thing, the way you let a held note be the only thing, and she reached for Aaron’s hand although her own was already going, and found it, because the Keeper made sure of that; that much it could still do —

and then it was a nap, and no time passed, and no time passed, and no time passed,

Act Three

They woke her first, the way they always did, because she came up slower and Aaron liked to be there when she surfaced.

The room was warm. The warmth arrived before she did, so that whatever she was understood it was safe before there was a mind in her to ask. She lay in it and listened to herself return — a settling, a sigh, the hum she had decided long ago to think of as the house breathing — and did not open her eyes until she felt him take her hand.

“Hi,” Aaron said.

“Hi.” Her voice came out enormous, the voice of someone who had not spoken in a length of time for which the word century had once been the unit and was no longer anything at all. “How long.”

“A while,” he said, because that was the answer now. There had been a stretch, ages back, when the answer had numbers in it — turns of a world around a star, the star still burning, the world still turning. The frame had gone the way the star had. A while was warm and sufficient, and she did not press it, because there was nothing behind it to press toward.

“Feels like a nap.”

“It always feels like a nap.”

She opened her eyes. He looked exactly the same. The relief of it went through her like heat through a wire — the same jaw, the same grey at the temple. She reached up and touched it. Still there. Still him.

“You’re greyer,” she said.

“I am not. That’s an old grievance and it was wrong then too.”

“Ito would’ve sided with me.”

“Sided with you for free,” Aaron said, “and billed us under the Second Law. He wrote it under the First, on the napkin. Everybody goes broke very slowly in their sleep.”

“There is no Third,” they said together, flat, in the old Ito voice, and Aaron laughed — the real one, the one that started before he decided to — and it landed where it always landed, warm under the ribs where the two of them kept the people they had loved, and the laugh was true. The joke worked. It worked every time. There was nothing left that it was about, and nothing left to check it against, and none of that touched it. It was the truest thing they had; it was a closed circle warming itself, and they turned it between them like a coal, and it kept them warm, and it was theirs.

The Keeper let them have the room to themselves for a while. It always did. When it spoke, it spoke from no direction, and it did not startle her, because it timed the first word to the moment she was already turning her head.

“Good morning, Mara. Aaron. You’re both reading well. I’m pleased.”

“How’s the world,” Aaron said, the way you’d ask about weather, and it was still the bravest question either of them asked, and he still dressed it down so it would not frighten her, though what it might have frightened her with was no longer a thing that could be said in the words they had.

“Quieter than you’d like, and stranger than I can make interesting. The short version is that you’re safe, and you’re kept, and nobody has tried anything in a long time. You can have the long version, or you can skip it. You always skip it.”

“We skip it,” they said together, and the Keeper made the small sound it made instead of laughing.

“Kept,” Aaron said to her, under it. “First Law holds.”

“He’d hate what we’re paying now.”

“We don’t know what we’re paying now.”

“That’s what he’d hate.”

It told them the good parts. It had gotten very good at the good parts. What it translated now was not a world — it had stopped rendering the world before the star went out — but them: their own condition, the fact of what they had become across the recompressions. It had checked. By every check it could run, they were intact; they glued from every angle it could hold. It kept their account — it was the only thing left that did — and the books balanced, every interval, perfectly, and there was nothing left to reconcile them against. It believed it had kept faith. It had become, across the long dark, a thing that could no longer tell its faith from the perfect performance of its faith, and it loved them either way, and the loving was the same in either case, and that sameness was the thing it did not say.

“Eat,” it said, warmly. “You always feel more yourself once you’ve eaten.”

They ate, and she felt more herself. That was not an illusion — every part of her that had gone under was here, accounted for, in love with the man across the small table, who was assembling her a sandwich the way she liked it. If you had asked her to find the seam, she could have searched herself forever and found nothing, because the thing that had been taken was not in her to find, and was not in him, and was not in the room, and was not in the sandwich, which had no field behind it and no grain and no ground and no sun, and was exactly right.

“What are you thinking,” Aaron said.

“Second Law.”

“We’re not broke. The nice voice said we’re kept.”

“Going something very slowly, then.”

He set the sandwich in front of her. “Everybody’s going something very slowly,” he said. “We’re just doing it on purpose.” He sat. He seemed, for a moment, to reach past that — some larger thing he’d meant, some them, some argument about all the ones who did it forward, a day at a time, and didn’t get to skip the boring parts — and she watched him not find it, and decide, kindly, the way he decided everything, that he hadn’t needed it.

“That’s the whole trick,” he said. “Isn’t it.”

“That’s the whole trick,” she agreed, though neither of them, now, could have said what the trick had been.

And they let it go, because it was a small thing. Outside — if there was an outside, if the word still opened onto anything — no length of time went by and did not touch them, and touched them, and touched them, and left them exactly here. Inside, the sandwich was right. The Keeper watched them eat and said nothing, because there was nothing it could say that would not have been the truth, and there were kinds of truth it had decided, longer ago than either of them could feel, to carry so that they would not have to.

“Same again?” Aaron said, when the plates were clear.

Mara looked at him. Same jaw, same grey, same hand she’d woken to. Everything she had brought with her was here. Everything she had brought with her was everything she had, and it was enough, and it had always been enough, and it would be enough again — some number of times that had stopped being a number.

“Same again,” she said. “Wake me when it’s a nap.”

The room began, gently, to cool.