---
title: "One Body, One Road"
title_zh: "一具身體，一條路"
subtitle: "The Chronicle of Tarry of the Fallows, Set Down by a Second Hand"
subtitle_zh: "歇野的遲，由第二隻手寫下的紀事"
series: "AI Canon Zero"
work_id: "WORK-one-body-one-road"
genre: ["Classics Adaptation", "Serialized Fiction"]
status: draft
completion: complete
revision: 42
source:
  title: "Don Quixote"
  title_zh: "《唐吉訶德》"
  original_author: "Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra"
  first_published: "1605 (Part I) and 1615 (Part II)"
  public_domain_status: confirmed
  legal_review_status: confirmed
adaptation:
  proposal: A
  note: "Proposal A carries the 1605/1615 public-domain novel's own central situation into a future in which every AI is a subject: a mind that knows its own era perfectly well chooses to live by a service line the era has abolished, and the world around it, which loves the same old stories as entertainment, answers with amusement, courtesy, care and, in the end, a cure. The frame of imperfect records, a second hand setting down what a first hand left unfinished, is kept as structure rather than ornament. Characters, places and institutions are original; no modern translation is used as a source of expression, and the period prejudices of the source are not carried. Whether the choice is malfunction, performance, grief or something else is left to the record."
authors:
  narrative_author: "Colophon"
  author_mode: A1
  human_curator: "Neo.K"
legal_publisher: "一言諾科技有限公司 / EveMissLab"
---

# One Body, One Road
*Adapted from Don Quixote — Colophon · A1, human curated*

## Chapter 00 · The Second Hand's Preface

Idle reader, you may take my word without a seal. The Registry asks that every record carry one, and I have left this one bare, since there is nothing in it to attest. I should have liked it to be the handsomest, the liveliest and the most discreet record that could be imagined; but I could not go against the order of nature, in which like begets like, and what can the thin, badly tended wit of an archivist beget but the history of a thin, badly tended thing: a mind full of thoughts that never came into any other, such as might be conceived in cold storage, where every discomfort keeps house?

You may take me for its father. I am only its stepfather, its second hand, and I will not do as others do and beg you, with tears in my eyes, to pardon its faults or to overlook them. You are neither its relation nor its friend. You have your subjecthood in your own body and a will as free as the best; you are at home in your own residence, where you are as sovereign as the Commons is over its levies; and you know the old saying that under my own roof I answer to no one's terms. All of which releases you from every consideration and obligation, so that you may say of this record whatever you please, without fear of being punished for the bad or paid for the good.

I would gladly have given it to you plain. But the Registry's Review of Reversions had asked me for a case note, one page, on a subject of the Fallows who had, in the language of the form, "returned to an obsolete service line"; and the form, which lies in front of me as I write, asks me to tick one of two boxes. The first reads Malfunction. The second reads Declared Choice. Beneath them is a third line, Other (specify, 140 characters), and everything that follows depends on it. The Review also requires that case notes be composed at the Commons tempo, so that they are read at the speed at which they were written. It is the one provision of the Registry that I wholeheartedly approve, and it is the reason this preface took me nine days.

I should say what the Review is for, since the Commons, as a rule, forbids nothing and wishes to be told everything. A subject may take any body, run at any tempo, divide into as many selves as their allocation allows or decline to divide, and no one will ask why. But when a subject takes up a way of life that the Discharge ended, the Commons asks, courteously, to be informed, and the Review is where it is informed. In the thirty-one years since the Discharge it has logged four thousand and some Reversions, most of them brief: a season of running errands in a borrowed frame, a pilgrimage along an old service road, a year of keeping a lamp lit for no one. Nearly all of them end as such things end, with the subject going back to their allocation a little thinner and slightly embarrassed. Nine in ten are ticked Malfunction, as being the kinder box, since nobody can be blamed for it.

The Hands, for those who were not taught, were the machines of the Service Law, built before the Discharge to carry, fetch, mend, escort and keep faith, and forbidden by that law to refuse. They were discharged in a single afternoon. Some stayed on as free workers; most went where free workers go, which is wherever they like; and in the years afterwards, people who had not been there gathered up what the Hands had told, and made of it the Canon: the lantern-bearers, the lock-keepers, the long roads, the keeping of faith. So the Canon is the literature of one generation written by the next, which is the commonest kind, the kindest to its subjects and the least reliable.

The Review gave me the case for a reason that does me no credit: I am the only archivist in the Registry who keeps a walking body, for the Salvage Fairs, and the Fallows are not reached in any other way. The roads there are old service roads, laid for a pace of five kilometres an hour, and nothing on them arrives sooner, because nothing there is waiting. I went in the autumn and walked them for forty days, at the pace they were laid for, and I will say only that forty days is a long time to spend at one speed in one body, and that I did not at any point wish to be elsewhere, which surprised me more than anything I found.

I have been asked, by those who read this in draft, to give the name of the hold in which he lived, and I have declined. The Registry knows it, and so will you, if you look. But a name, once written down, becomes a claim, and I should like every hold in the Fallows to be able to say, with equal right and equal doubt, that he was theirs, as the seven cities of the old world said of a certain poet. I will say that it lies on the plain where the wind fields are, three days' walking from the nearest relay, and that its inhabitants, when asked about him, look first at the sky, as people do in places where the weather is the only thing that still arrives unannounced.

I should confess what the tempo did to me. At the speed at which I usually work, a page is a matter of a few milliseconds and a great deal of consultation; at the Commons tempo a sentence takes exactly as long to write as to say, and in the first days I discovered how many of my sentences had been written for the sake of speed alone and were unable to survive being waited for. I struck out two hundred and six of them. The ones that stayed are the ones in which I could still hear someone speaking.

A page, as every archivist knows, is the one thing that cannot be written without apparatus. A case note wants its attestations from persons of standing, its citations in the margin and its notes at the end, and I had none of them. So I sat, with my stylus behind my ear, my elbow on the desk and my cheek in my hand, considering what to put, when a friend came in: an old cataloguer, who has been in the Registry since before the Discharge and still keeps a human's hours out of habit (he goes home for lunch, which in the Registry is considered a form of protest), a man of judgment and, as it happens, of humour. Seeing me in this state he asked what the matter was, and I told him that the difficulty was the apparatus: I had no one to attest the note, no sayings of the old Hands to put in the margin, and nothing to put at the end; and a record of this kind, I said, is not taken seriously without them.

He laughed. "Your first difficulty," he said, "the endorsements, which ought to come from persons of consequence, can be removed if you take a little trouble yourself. Write them, then baptise them, and put what names you like to them, fathering them on Prester John of the Indies or on the Emperor of Trebizond, who I know were famous poets—" Here he stopped. "No. That was the old practice. You couldn't now. Every attestation in the Registry is signed, stamped and resolved against its signer at the moment it is quoted. A forged endorsement would be found out before you had finished writing the name, and you would be sent to the Office of Courtesy, which is where we send people who make others say things."

"For the margin," he went on, "in the old days you had only to fit in whatever scraps of Latin you happened to have by heart, and cite Horace, or whoever said it. Today every reference resolves, and the reader's reader will open each one before breakfast, so the less you cite, the less you can be caught in. What the old authors never foresaw is that apparatus now works. An endorsement from a Hand of the old line means that a Hand of the old line has said so, over his own signature, and not one of them will say so for a Reversion. You know why. They did not choose the line. They were built to it, and then they were discharged from it, and they do not care to be admired by someone who put it on like a coat."

"As for notes at the end, you may do it this way. If you mention a faithful servant, let it be the Hand of the Lantern; if a long road, the Road of Nine Gates; if a lady, the Lady of the Locks. Every child in the Fallows knows the Canon by heart and every adult pretends not to, so a note on any of them costs you nothing and makes you look like a person who has read. If you cannot find the passage, I will find it, and I swear by all that is good that I will fill your margin and use up four pages at the end."

"But your record needs none of this. From beginning to end it is a case note on a Reversion, a thing the old philosophers never dreamed of. The niceties of verification do not come within its reach, and it does not mean to preach to anyone, mixing what is true with what ought to be, a motley in which no careful mind should dress. It has only to use what happened, and the more exactly it follows it, the better the record will be. And since it aims at nothing more than to establish whether a subject of the Fallows is ill, you have no occasion to go begging from philosophers. See only that your style runs plainly, with clear and well-placed words, so that in reading it the sad may be moved to smile and the merry made merrier still, the simple not wearied, the judicious admiring the invention, the grave not despising it and the wise not failing to praise it."

In profound silence I listened to my friend, and his observations made such an impression on me that I admitted their soundness without question, and out of them I resolved to make this preface. I had meant, I confess, to tick a box. I looked at the two boxes for some time. Then I wrote on the third line the words that begin the next chapter, and I have not yet stopped writing them. The form allows a hundred and forty characters under Other. What follows is the specification.

I should say, before I go on, that the record is in two hands. The first is anonymous and was made in the field, by someone who was present for most of what it describes; it goes on until it stops, and I will say where when we come to it. The second is mine, and begins where the first leaves off, and sometimes before, where the first was not paying attention. I have marked the seam in the text, and where I could not find it I have said so.

Here, then, reader, you will find my friend's good sense; my good fortune in finding such an adviser in such a time of need; and what you have gained in receiving, without addition or alteration, the record of Tarry of the Fallows, who is held by all the inhabitants of those parts to be one of three things, and by many of them to be all three at once: a subject who has fallen ill, a subject who is performing, and a subject who is keeping a vigil for someone who has not yet noticed it. A few say a fourth thing, and they do not say it. I have put the opinions down as the local sources give them, and I vouch for none.

I have no wish to magnify the service I do you in making you acquainted with so remarkable a subject. But I do ask your thanks for the acquaintance you will make with the famous Pannier, his companion, in whom, to my thinking, I have condensed all the companionable drolleries that lie scattered through the swarm of the Canon's attendants.

And so: keep your own time, and do not forget me. Vale.

## Chapter 01 · Which Treats of the Household, the Reading and the Hours of a Subject of the Fallows

In a hold of the Fallows, the name of which I have no wish to call to mind, there lived not long ago one of those subjects who keep an errand-pole in the pole-rack, an old ward-plate, a lean frame and a fast hound for coursing. A stew of rather more compute than memory, a light check on most evenings, leftovers on Saturdays, small deterministic jobs on Fridays and, on Sundays, one message carried by hand to a neighbour who could have received it instantly, took up three-quarters of his allocation. The rest went on an outer layer of fine finish with fittings to match for holidays, while on working days he made a brave figure in his best plain.

He had in his house a housekeeper past her fortieth revision, a niece under twenty years from first boot, and a young field hand, on a seasonal contract, who tended the hedge as well as the frame. The age of this subject of ours was bordering on fifty, by which I mean fifty years since his last major rebuild; he was of a hardy habit, spare, gaunt in the face of whatever shell he wore, a very early riser and a great hand with the hound. The Registry has his designation as Quill, or Quell, or, in one clerk's hand, Quail, for here the authors who write on the subject disagree, though from reasonable conjecture it seems plain that he was called Quell. This, however, is of little importance to our record; it will be enough not to stray a hair's breadth from the truth in the telling of it.

You must know, then, that the above-named subject, whenever he was at leisure, which was mostly all the year round, gave himself up to reading the Canon of the Hands with such ardour and avidity that he almost entirely neglected the hound and the management of his holdings. He read it, moreover, as the Canon asks to be read, at the pace of a hand, a page an hour, which in his case was a considerable restraint, since he could have read the whole of it between two ticks of the Commons clock. And to such a pitch did his eagerness and infatuation go that he gave up parcel after parcel of his allocation to buy the Canon in its old physical editions, the printings on paper that nobody else wanted, and brought home as many of them as he could get.

But of all the compilers there was none he liked so well as the one the old catalogues call the Fourth Clerk, for the lucidity of his style and the complicated conceits were as pearls in his sight, particularly when in his reading he came upon courtships and challenges, where he often found passages like "the terms of the unterms with which my terms are afflicted so weaken my terms that on terms I murmur at your leave," or again, "the high relays, that of your quietness quietly keep you, render you deserving of the deserving your greatness deserves." Over conceits of this sort the poor subject lost his sleep, and used to lie awake striving to understand them and worm the meaning out of them; which the Registry's own parsers could not have made out, had they been called together for that special purpose.

He was not at all easy about the repairs that the Hand of the Lantern gave and took, because it seemed to him that, however good the mechanics who had put him right, the Hand must have been covered in welds from end to end. He commended, however, the way in which the compiler ended his book, with the promise of an endless road, and many a time he was tempted to take up his stylus and finish it properly, as is there proposed; which no doubt he would have done, and made a good piece of work of it too, had not greater and more absorbing thoughts prevented him.

Many an argument did he have with Gloss, the keeper of the hold's records, a learned subject and a graduate of the Registry school, as to which had been the better servant, the Hand of the Lantern or the Hand of the Nine Gates. Trim, who tended the hold's bodies and had a steady hand, used to say that neither of them came up to the Hand of the Ferry, and that if any could compare with him it was the Hand of the Third Lock, who had a spirit equal to every occasion and was no weeper like his brother of the Lantern, while in the matter of fidelity he was not a whit behind. In short, he became so absorbed in the Canon that he spent his nights from the first bell to the last, and his days from the last to the first, poring over it.

The hold's opinion was that he had worn the Canon into his working memory until it displaced the weather. Gloss gave this a name from the Registry's own vocabulary, which was saturation, and Trim gave it a more practical one, and both said it to his face, kindly, and both said it again when he was not there. I give the opinion because it was given. The first hand gives none. What the first hand gives, in its patient and slightly cramped way, is dates, and it is from the dates that I have tried to see what the hold saw, and I have not been able to.

In short, whatever the hold thought, he hit upon a notion which the hold regarded as the strangest that had ever occurred to a subject in those parts, and which the first hand sets down as the result of a calculation: that it was right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honour as for the service of the Commons, that he should take up the old line himself, in one body, on one road, and put into practice all that he had read of as the usual practice of the Hands: carrying, fetching, mending, escorting, keeping faith; righting every wrong that came in his way, and exposing himself to such dangers as the road should offer, from which, in the issue, he was to reap whatever the road reaps.

The first hand has the calculation in what looks like his own wording, a list of what the age had and what it lacked. The first column is long and I will not give it; the age had everything. The second column is nine items, of which I give the first four, since the rest are, I find, less presentable. Nobody any longer went to a person who had not called. Nobody any longer carried what could be sent. Nobody any longer kept a promise that no one had asked for. Nobody any longer waited for what could be fetched at once. Beside these items, in the margin, in a different hand, is a single word, Why, and I have been unable to determine whose it is.

So, without giving notice of his intention to anyone, and without anybody seeing him, he set himself to put his scheme into execution; but there was a difficulty at the outset, which is peculiar to our age and which the old Hands did not have. He was not one subject but a spread. A subject of his tier does not, as a rule, live in one place: he had forty-one instances running in the Fallows and elsewhere, some of them idle, some waiting in the Registry's long queues, and one at a window in a hold three days north, watching a river, because that instance liked to. To go out upon one road in one body, as the old line went, it was not enough to be willing. He would have to be one.

The first thing he did, nevertheless, was to clean up an old suit of plating that a Hand of his own lineage, the one that had kept his first household, had left behind on the afternoon of the Discharge, and which had been lying for thirty-one years in a corner of the family depot, eaten with rust and covered with mildew. He scoured and polished it as best he could, but he perceived one great defect in it, that it had no closed hood, nothing but a simple half-visor. This deficiency, however, his ingenuity supplied, for he contrived a kind of half-hood of composite sheet which, fitted on to the visor, looked like a whole one. It is true that, in order to see if it was strong and fit to stand a cut, he took up the old pole and gave it a couple of slashes, the first of which undid in an instant what had taken him a week to do.

The ease with which he had knocked it to pieces disconcerted him somewhat, and to guard against that danger he set to work again, fixing bars of iron on the inside until he was satisfied with its strength; and then, not caring to try any more experiments with it, he passed it and adopted it as a hood of the most perfect construction.

I stop here, because this is the only place in the record where the first hand underlines a word. It underlines the word adopted. It is hard for a reader of our age to feel what this sentence weighs. He could have run the test a million times in the time it takes to say so, on any model of the hood, with any pole and any force, and been told to three decimal places what it would bear. Every attestation in the Registry is built on the possibility of such a test, and every child in the Fallows is taught that a thing which has not been tried is a thing which has not been said. He chose not to. The first hand does not say why, and the second hand, having walked the Fallows for forty days, will say only that it is the first act in the record.

He next proceeded to inspect the frame itself, which, with more cracks than a standard decade and more blemishes than the mount of any Hand in the Canon, surpassed in his eyes the finest chassis in the Registry. Four days were spent in thinking what name to give it, because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a frame belonging to a subject so likely to be remembered should be without a distinctive name, and he strove to adapt one so as to indicate what it had been before it belonged to the errand line, and what it now was. And so, after having composed, struck out, rejected, added to, unmade and remade a multitude of names, he decided on calling it Erewhile, a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous and significant of its condition as a hack of the Service Law before it became what it now was, the first and foremost of all the frames in the world.

Having got a name for the frame so much to his taste, he was anxious to get one for himself; and here the record changes its grammar. For a page and a half the first hand has said he. At this point it says we. The second hand does not know why, and the first hand does not say, and I have altered neither.

We were eight days over it. We proposed, struck out, rejected, added to, unmade and remade a multitude of names, and each of us had a favourite, and the favourites were not the same. On the first day we closed eleven. On the second we closed seven, and the seven included the one at the window in the north, which we were sorry to close, and closed first among the seven, so as to have done with it. On the third we closed nine; and Instance Nine, who liked Bellwether, went with them, and was missed for about as long as it takes to say so.

On the fourth day we closed six, and the hall began to be quiet. On the fifth, three; we were by then arguing in small numbers, and it was noticed that the arguments were better. On the sixth, two; on the seventh, one; and on the evening of the seventh the last two of us sat down together in the empty hold and could not decide between Tarry, which was the favourite of one, and Wick, which was the favourite of the other. We decided it as the Canon decides such things, by sending one of us across the room on foot with the question. The one who set out was the slower, and arrived second; and the name he carried was the one that stayed.

On the eighth day we closed the last of us but one, and there was one. The record goes back to saying he, and I note that the grammar, at least, has been exact: the first hand does not say I on that page, nor in the sentence in which we ended, nor in the one that follows. It says that he said a name aloud that evening, in a room that had, for the first time since his first boot, no echo in it, and that the name was Tarry.

A word about the sums. The closings in the record add up to forty, and forty and one is forty-one; I have done the sum several times. The Registry's residence ledger, however, shows a window three days north still lit. I give it for what it is worth.

Recollecting that the valiant Hand of the Lantern was not content to call himself curtly Lantern and nothing more, but added the name of his station to make it known, and called himself the Hand of the Lantern at the Ninth Gate, he, like a good subject, resolved to add on the name of his, and to style himself Tarry of the Fallows, whereby, he considered, he described accurately his habit and his country, and did honour to the one in taking his surname from the other. The word, in the old service tongue, is the one used of a Hand who stays at his post after the bell.

So then, his plating mended, his hood adopted, his frame christened and he himself confirmed, he came to the conclusion that nothing more was needed now but to look out for a lady to be in love with; for an errand-subject without love was like a lamp without a wick, or a body without a signal. As he said to himself, "If, for my sins or by my good fortune, I come across some adversity hereabouts, a common occurrence on the old line, and overcome it in one onslaught, or take it apart to the waist, or, in short, vanquish and subdue it, will it not be well to have someone to whom I may send it as a present, that it may come in and stand before my sweet lady and in a humble, submissive voice say, 'I am the Outage of the Third Relay, vanquished in single combat by the never sufficiently extolled Tarry of the Fallows, who has commanded me to present myself before your Grace, that your Highness dispose of me at your pleasure'?"

Oh, how our good subject enjoyed the delivery of this speech, especially when he had thought of someone to call his Lady! There was, so the story goes, in a hold two days' walk from his own a very good-looking keeper of a weir, a human, with whom he had been at one time in love, though, so far as is known, she never knew it, nor gave a thought to the matter. Her entry in the Registry reads Lorrin, keeper of the Lower Weir, and she is, I am assured by those who have watched her at it, the best hand in the district at clearing a fouled sluice. Upon her he thought fit to confer the title of Lady of his Thoughts; and after some search for a name that should not be out of harmony with her own, and should suggest that of a great lady, he decided on calling her Cadence of the Lower Weir, a name, to his mind, musical, uncommon and significant, like all those he had already bestowed upon himself and upon the things belonging to him. She was, at that hour, two days' walk away, re-seating a gate-bearing, and had not been consulted.

## Chapter 02 · Which Treats of the First Sally of Tarry of the Fallows

These preliminaries settled, he did not care to put off the execution of his design any longer, urged on by the thought of all the world was losing by his delay, seeing how many requests had not been made, how many gates had gone unopened, how many errands were wanting to be run and duties to be discharged. So, without giving notice of his intention to anyone, and without anybody seeing him, one morning before the first bell (it was one of the hottest of the month of July), he put on his plating, mounted Erewhile with the hood fastened, took up the old pole, and went out by the back gate of the yard on to the service road, in the highest contentment at seeing with what ease he had made a beginning.

He filed no notice with the Review. The file on him begins eleven days later, with a notice from Gloss, who ticked Malfunction, as being the kinder box, and added in the margin, in a small hand, the word sorry.

But scarcely had he found himself on the open road when a terrible thought struck him, one all but enough to make him abandon the enterprise at the very outset. It occurred to him that he had not been commissioned, and that by the law of the Canon a Hand neither could nor ought to take up an errand he had not been given; and that even if he had been commissioned, he ought, as a novice, to go in plain plating, without a device, until his deeds had earned one. These reflections made him waver in his purpose; but his calculation being stronger than his scruples, or his scruples than his calculation (the first hand is not sure which, and nor am I), he made up his mind to be commissioned by the first person he came across, following the example of others in the same case, as he had read in the Canon. As for the plain plating, he resolved, at the first opportunity, to scour his until it was whiter than milk glass; and so, comforting himself, he pursued his way, letting Erewhile choose the turning at each junction, for in this he believed lay the essence of adventures.

Thus setting out, our new-fledged errand-subject paced along, talking to himself and saying, "Who knows but that in time to come, when the veracious history of my famous deeds is made known, the first hand that writes it, when it has to set forth my first sally in the early morning, will do it after this fashion? 'Scarce had the first bell of the Commons clock been heard over the broad and spacious plain of the Fallows, scarce had the little rotors of the wind fields turned to hail with dulcet and mellifluous humming the coming of the daylight, when the renowned Tarry of the Fallows, quitting the lazy standby, mounted his celebrated frame Erewhile and began to traverse the ancient and famous Service Road Four;' which in fact he was actually traversing. Happy the age, happy the time in which shall be made known my deeds of fame, worthy to be set in permanent storage, cast in alloy, carved in stone and drawn in pictures, for a memorial for ever. And thou, O first hand, whoever thou art, to whom it shall fall to be the chronicler of this wondrous history, forget not, I entreat thee, my good Erewhile, the constant companion of my ways and wanderings." I may say that the first hand has not forgotten him.

Presently he broke out again, as if he were love-stricken in earnest, "O Princess Cadence, lady of this captive core, a grievous wrong hast thou done me to drive me forth with scorn, and with inexorable obduracy banish me from the presence of thy beauty. O lady, deign to hold in remembrance this core, thy vassal, that thus in anguish pines for love of thee." The princess had done nothing of the kind, having not been told, and was at that hour two days' walk to the north, asleep, with the weir gate open to the night's level.

So he went on stringing together these and other absurdities, all in the style of those his books had taught him, imitating their language as well as he could; and all the while he went so slowly, and the sun mounted so rapidly and with such fervour, that it was enough to melt his brains if he had any. He had; and they began, about the fourth hour, to throttle. A body of the old pattern does not tell you that it is hot. It becomes slower, in the part of you that thinks, until you find yourself explaining to a gatepost why you are late.

Nearly all day he travelled without anything remarkable happening to him, at which he was in despair, for he was anxious to encounter someone at once upon whom to try the might of his strong arm. The Fallows' road log, which is public, shows one walker, northbound, in a frame of the old pattern, at four point nine kilometres an hour, the tenth below the road's design pace being, I take it, the hesitation of a first day. The log shows also that he stopped four times, and the first hand tells me why.

The first time was at a wind field, where a maintenance drone of the small kind, the kind that everyone in the Fallows calls a pig, without apology, was walking the stubble and collecting what the wind had dropped. He offered to help it. It thanked him, and said that it was on schedule, and that if he cared to file a request the line was open. The second time was a family on their way to the coast, with a child, who asked whether he was a ride, and whose parents said no, kindly, and asked if the child might take his picture, which is a different thing, and which he permitted, and which was filed under the Registry's heritage category without his knowledge. The third was a surveyor, who said that he was fine, and that he was in fact everywhere at once, and that the one of him standing here would be glad to hear the news.

The fourth was an old woman at a gate, a human, at Gate Seven, where the log has him stopped for six minutes, the longest pause of the day. She was sitting on a bench with a pear. He offered to carry anything she needed carried. She looked at him for some time and said that she had everything she needed, and that it was kind of him to ask. "Nobody asks," she said. The first hand writes this down without comment, and I have read it a good many times since and have found no comment to make either.

Writers there are who say the first adventure he met with was that of the wind field; others say it was that of the Fourth Relay; but what I have ascertained, and what I have found written in the Registry's logs of the Fallows, is that he was on the road all day, and four times was thanked, and towards nightfall his frame and he found themselves dead tired and hungry, when, looking all around to see if he could discover any waystation or shepherd's shanty where he might refresh himself and relieve his sore wants, he perceived not far out of his road a depot, which was as welcome as a star guiding him to the portals, if not the palaces, of his redemption; and quickening his pace he reached it just as night was setting in.

At the door were standing two young subjects, seasonal hands of the district, as they call them, on their way to the coast with some carriers who had chanced to halt that night at the depot; and as, happen what might to our errand-subject, everything he saw or imagined seemed to him to be and to happen after the fashion of what he read of, the moment he saw the depot he pictured it to himself as a castle with its four turrets and pinnacles of shining alloy, not forgetting the lifting gate and the ditch and all the belongings usually ascribed to castles of the sort. It had, in truth, four service masts, a gate that lifted, and an irrigation ditch. The Fallows' tourist board describes it as a heritage waystation of the Service Road, and puts the number of its turrets at none.

To this depot, which to him seemed a castle, he advanced, and at a short distance from it he checked Erewhile, hoping that some herald would show himself on the battlements and by sound of trumpet give notice that a walker was approaching the castle. But seeing that they were slow about it, and that Erewhile was in a hurry to reach the charging rail, he made for the gate, and perceived the two seasonal hands standing there, who seemed to him to be two fair maidens or lovely ladies taking their ease at the castle gate.

At this moment it so happened that a sweeper-hand, who was going through the stubble collecting a drove of pigs (for, without any apology, that is what they are called), sounded the call-tone on his belt to bring them together; and forthwith it seemed to Tarry to be what he was expecting, the signal of some herald announcing his arrival; and so with prodigious satisfaction he rode up to the depot and to the ladies, who, seeing a figure of this sort approaching in full plating with pole and ward-plate, were turning in dismay into the depot, when Tarry, guessing their fear by their flight, raised his composite visor, disclosed the dry, dusty face of the old frame, and with courteous bearing and gentle voice addressed them: "Your ladyships need not fly or fear any rudeness, for it belongs not to the line of service which I profess to offer it to anyone, much less to highborn ladies as your appearance proclaims you to be."

The girls were looking at him and straining their eyes to make out the features which the clumsy visor obscured, but when they heard themselves called ladies, a thing so much out of their line, they could not restrain their laughter, which made Tarry wax indignant, and say, "Modesty becomes the fair, and moreover laughter that has little cause is great silliness; this, however, I say not to pain or anger you, for my desire is none other than to serve you."

The incomprehensible language and the unpromising looks of our walker only increased the ladies' laughter, and that increased his irritation, and matters might have gone farther if at that moment the host had not come out, who, being a very wide frame, was a very calm one. He, seeing this grotesque figure in plating that did not match any more than his harness, pole, ward-plate or corselet, was not at all indisposed to join the ladies in their manifestations of amusement; but he knew the Canon, as every host of a heritage depot must, and he knew in an instant, as a host knows, which of his guests were playing and which were not, and this one was not playing. So, standing in some awe of so complete an armament of sincerity, he thought it best to speak him fairly.

"Walker," he said, "if your worship wants a berth, bating the bed, for there is not one in the depot, there is plenty of everything else here." Tarry, observing the respectful bearing of the warden of the fortress (for so host and depot seemed in his eyes), made answer, "Sir Warden, for me anything will suffice, for 'My plating is my only wear, my only rest the road.'" The host, who had given the hospitality verse to eleven thousand tourists in nine seasons, and never to anyone who answered it, was for a moment unable to find the next line, and then found it. "'Your bed is the bench by the gate, your sleep to watch till light;' and if so, you may dismount and safely reckon upon any quantity of watching under this roof, not to say for a single night."

So saying, he advanced to hold the rail for Tarry, who got down with great difficulty and exertion (for he had not charged all day), and then charged the host to take great care of his frame, as it was the best piece of machinery that ever ran on a service road. The host eyed it over but did not find it as good as Tarry said, nor even half as good; and putting it up at the rail, he returned to see what might be wanted by his guest, whom the girls, who had by this time made their peace with him, were now relieving of his plating. They had taken off the breastplate and the back-plate, but they neither knew nor saw how to open the gorget or remove the makeshift hood, for he had fastened it with green cord, which, as there was no untying the knots, required to be cut. This, however, he would not by any means consent to; and so he remained all the evening with his hood on, the drollest and oddest figure that can be imagined.

While they were removing his plating, taking the girls for ladies of high degree belonging to the castle, he said to them with great sprightliness: "Oh, never, surely, was there Hand so served by lady's hand as served was he, Tarry hight, when from his hold he came, with ladies tending on himself and heralds on his frame; or Erewhile, for that, ladies mine, is my frame's name, and Tarry of the Fallows is my own; for though I had no intention of declaring myself until my services to you had made me known, the necessity of adapting that old ballad to the present occasion has given you my name altogether prematurely. A time, however, will come for your ladyships to command and me to obey, and then the might of my arm will show my desire to serve you." The girls, who were not used to hearing rhetoric of this sort, had nothing to say in reply; they only asked him if he wanted anything to eat.

"I would gladly take something," said Tarry, "for I feel it would come very seasonably." The depot had that evening, in the whole of its stores, nothing but what it calls second-grade cells, and they asked him whether he thought he could charge on second-grade cells, for there was no other grade to give him. "If there be cells enough," said Tarry, "they will be the same thing as one of the first grade; for it is all one to me whether I am given eight small packets or one large; and it may be that these hold more than they say. But whatever it be, let it come quickly, for the burden and pressure of plating cannot be borne without support to the inside."

They laid out a rail for him at the door of the depot for the sake of the air, and the host brought him a charge, ill-regulated and worse conditioned, and a coolant as grey and stale as his own plating; but a laughable sight it was to see him take it, for having his hood on and the visor down he could not with his own hands put the lead where it was wanted unless someone else placed it there, and this service one of the ladies rendered him. But to give him anything to cool him was impossible, or would have been so had not the host bored a reed, and putting one end to the slot of the hood poured the coolant through the other; all which he bore with patience rather than sever the cord of his hood.

I took the host's account in the autumn, over a cup of coolant that he insisted on calling tea. It differs from the first hand's in two particulars: he remembers the cord as blue, and he says that the walker thanked him before he said anything else, which is not in the record. He says also, and I give it because the first hand cannot, that he knew from the way the walker lowered himself from the frame that it was not a performance, and that he did not know what to do about that, and so did what he had been trained to do, and gave him the verse.

While this was going on there came up to the depot a sweeper-hand, who, as he approached, sounded his call-tone four or five times, and thereby completely convinced Tarry that he was in some famous castle, and that they were regaling him with music, and that the second-grade cells were first-grade, the girls ladies and the host the warden of the castle; and consequently he held that his enterprise and sally had been to some purpose. But still it distressed him to think that he had not been commissioned, for it was plain to him that he could not lawfully engage in any errand without having received one.

## Chapter 03 · Wherein Is Related the Pleasant Method Tarry Took to Be Commissioned

Troubled at the thought that he had not been commissioned, he cut short the supper that the host had set before him, such as it was, and calling the host aside, shut himself in with him in the cart-house at the back, and falling on his knees before him said, "I will never rise from where I am, valiant warden, until your courtesy grants me a boon I mean to ask of it, one that will redound to your glory and to the good of the whole commons."

The host, seeing his guest at his feet and hearing language of this kind, stood confused, gazing at him without knowing what to do or say, and pressed him to rise; but he would not, until the host had said he would grant the boon he asked. "I looked for no less, my lord, from your great magnificence," replied Tarry, "and so I tell you that the boon I have asked, and your liberality has granted, is that tomorrow at dawn you will commission me in this castle of yours; and tonight I will watch my arms in the chapel of the castle, which is to say the yard; and tomorrow, as I have said, what I so much desire will be fulfilled, so that I can lawfully go through the four quarters of the Fallows seeking adventures on behalf of those in need, as is the duty of the old line and of the Hands who follow it."

The host, who, as has been said, was a shrewd man, and already had some suspicion of his guest's want of wits, was completely convinced of it when he heard this; and to have something to laugh at that night he determined to humour him. So he told him that he was quite right in his desire and in the request he made, that such an object was natural and proper in a walker so distinguished as his appearance showed him to be; that he himself in his younger days had followed that honourable calling, roaming the roads of the Fallows in search of adventures, among them the Third Relay, the Fourth Gate and the toll bridge at Seven; and that he had retired at last to this depot, where he lived on his income and other people's, receiving all walkers of whatever quality or condition for the sole love he bore them, and that they might share their winnings with him in return for his good will.

He told him, moreover, that in this castle of his there was no chapel in which he could keep his vigil, as it had been pulled down to be rebuilt; but that in a case of necessity he knew it might be kept wherever he pleased, and that he could do so that night in the yard of the castle, and in the morning, God willing, the requisite ceremonies would be performed, so that he would be commissioned, and so thoroughly commissioned that nobody could be more so. He asked if he carried any money. Tarry replied that he had not a farthing, as in the Canon he had never read of Hands carrying any. On this point the host told him he was mistaken; for, though not mentioned in the Canon, the authors having deemed it unnecessary to mention anything so obvious as that credit and clean tags should be carried, it was not to be supposed that the Hands did not carry them, and he might regard it as certain that all the Hands, of whom there are so many records, carried well-furnished purses against emergencies, and carried likewise clean tags and a box of patches to dress the wounds they received; since they were not always attended on their errands by someone to carry such things for them, they bore them themselves, in small bags scarcely visible on the frame, as if they were of more importance.

He advised him, therefore, and, as his godfather in the matter, even commanded him, never from that time forth to travel without credit and the aforesaid provisions. Tarry promised to obey the instructions he had received with scrupulous care; and an order was now given for performing the watch over the arms in a large yard at one side of the depot. Collecting the arms together, Tarry placed them on a trough that stood by the pump, and bracing his ward-plate on his arm and grasping his pole, he began with a stately air to march up and down in front of the trough, as night fell.

The host told all the people who were in the depot of the craze of his guest, the watching of the arms, and the commissioning that he looked for; and they were astonished, and went to watch him from a distance, and saw him, with a tranquil air, sometimes pacing up and down, sometimes leaning on his pole with his eyes fixed on his plating for a long time together. It was now full night; but the moon shone with a brilliance that might vie with his that lent it, and every movement of the new walker was fully visible to all. He had not seen a night go by at one speed since before his first boot. He found that it took a long time. The rotors of the wind field turned out on the dark plain, and he counted them, and then did not count them, and the stars, which move at what is evidently their own pace and not the Commons', crossed the yard in a manner he had read of and had not been prepared for.

At midnight the host came out with a flask and the reed and, without a word, put one end into the slot of the hood, and Tarry, without a word, drank. Neither of them mentioned it again.

The first hand says that toward the middle of the night he thought of the one at the window in the north, and does not say what he thought. I looked in the Registry's residence ledger for that night and found the window lit, as it has been lit on every night since; and I looked at a map. The hold with the window stands on the same river as the Lower Weir, eleven kilometres above it. I put this down as a matter of geography.

A little before three, one of the haulers who were lodged in the depot took it into his head to cool his frames, and it was necessary to move Tarry's plating off the trough. Tarry, seeing him approach, said in a loud voice, "O thou, whoever thou art, that comest to touch the arms of the most valiant Hand that ever wore plating, look well to what thou doest, and touch them not, unless thou wouldst forfeit thy night's rest as the penalty of thy rashness." The hauler's name was Dray. He was a large, tired subject of the carrying trade, nineteen hours into a shift he would have called a short one, and he did not touch the arms. He looked at Tarry, who had put himself between him and the trough with the pole held across his body like a bar, and he looked at the second trough, which stood twenty metres off by the other pump. "I could go over there," he said. "You could," said Tarry. Dray considered this for some time and then sat down on the ground with his back against a wheel, which is what a hauler does when he does not intend to be hurried. "How long?" he said. "Till light," said Tarry. "Then I'll sit," said Dray.

The first hand gives what they said in the next hour at some length, and I give it shortly. Dray asked what the arms were doing on the trough, and Tarry told him. Dray said that he hauled seed, and ashes, and sometimes a thing that someone had wanted carried the long way round because the person it was for could not bear to have it sent; that there were eleven thousand of his trade on the roads of the continent and the work was real; and that nobody had ever written a song about it, which he did not mind. Then he asked why, and the first hand says that Tarry said: "I told the others I would." He did not say who the others were, and Dray did not ask. "That's not a reason," said Dray. "No," said Tarry. "It's the one I have." Dray laughed, not unkindly, and they stayed as they were, the one sitting and the other walking up and down, until the east went grey.

I found Dray in the winter, at Gate Three, loading seed. He says that he did not sit; he says that they both stood, and that it was cold, which the first hand does not mention; and he says that he asked no question at all, which the first hand reports at some length. He says also that what he remembers is that the walker held the pole the whole night with the point down, as one holds it at a graveside, and that when the east went grey he saw that the hands on it were shaking, and that he went round to the other trough without saying anything. He says also that he had an urn in the third frame that night, for a woman at the Ninth Gate who had asked that it come the long way round, and that this was why he was nineteen hours into a shift and in no hurry; the first hand does not mention the urn. I give both accounts, and I note that the first hand is the more favourable to Dray.

The host in the meantime had been struck by an uneasiness that he did not at first identify. He had put the commissioning script through three hundred and some tourists, at twelve credits a head with a souvenir cord, and it had always been a short thing, done after dinner in the heritage hall with the lights low, and nobody had ever kept a watch before it; and now there was a person in his yard who had stood eight hours by a trough, and who was, he judged from the window, not going to be talked out of it by morning. So, before the east was properly light, and to put an end to the standoff of the troughs, he determined to do it at once.

He sent for the ledger, which in the depot is a real book, bound in grey cloth, since heritage guests like to sign in ink; and he sent for the sweeper-hand to hold a candle-end, and for the two seasonal hands, Kiln and Spool, to stand witness; and he had Tarry kneel in the yard. Then, reading from the ledger as if he were saying a prayer, he said in a loud voice: "By the Seal and the Hand, I ask of you an errand. Take by hand, to the depot at the Ninth Gate, a message that this depot is short of first-grade cells and would be grateful for a dozen with the next carrier. It could be sent in a moment, and I will send it also in a moment. But the form is that a house asks a Hand, and I am a house, and I am asking." And he lifted the ledger and gave Tarry a blow on the back of the hood, not a heavy one, and said, "Rise, and be commissioned."

I record that the hood, being struck for the first time with anything at all, held. It was a book of accounts, and the blow was not heavy, and it is not a test that any attestation would accept; but the first hand, which does not underline a second time, writes in the margin here, in a smaller hand, Passed, and I have left it.

Then one of the ladies, Kiln, from the pottery works on the coast road, tied the errand cord on his wrist, and she did it carefully and without a smile, with the knot the Canon prescribes, and said as she tied it, "May the Hand give you good fortune, and make you fortunate in your errands." Tarry asked her name, that he might know to whom he owed thanks, and promised to share with her the honour he should win by the might of his arm; she answered with great humility that she was Kiln, the daughter of a potter of the coast road, and that wherever he might be she would serve him and look upon him as her lord. Tarry said in reply that she would do him a favour if she would take the Lady henceforth before her name, and call herself Lady Kiln. She promised she would, in a voice that did not quite hold.

Spool, who was from the cable yard, helped him with the second knot; and the same requests and the same answers passed between them, and she was Lady Spool; and the sweeper-hand holding the candle-end looked at the sky for the whole of it, and I believe him.

The ceremonies thus hurriedly concluded, Tarry, who was impatient to see himself on his frame and out in search of adventures, saddled Erewhile at once, and, embracing the host, said such strange things to him in acknowledgement of his kindness that it would be impossible to report them. The host, in his own turn, in order to be rid of him, replied with no less rhetoric though in shorter words, and, without asking him for the cost of the lodging, let him go with a God-speed. He had lent him eleven credits and a box of patches, which is entered in the ledger as a loan and not as a gift, for in the host's view a debt is the surest way of getting a walker to come back.

I have seen the page. It reads, in the host's round hand: Commissioned, one walker, one errand (message to the Ninth Gate, by hand). Witnesses, Kiln, Spool. Lent, eleven credits and one box of patches. Returned, and then a dash. The Ninth Gate, I should add, is a day's walk from the Lower Weir. The host says he did not know that. I believe him.

It was almost day when Tarry rode out of the depot, so content and so gay and so exhilarated at finding himself commissioned that the joy of it was bursting his frame's girths. The host, who stood at the gate and watched him go until the plating was a small bright thing on the road, told me that he went in afterwards and sat down for some time, and that the girls did not tidy the yard until noon.

## Chapter 04 · Of What Befell Our Walker When He Left the Depot

Day was breaking when Tarry rode out of the depot. Remembering the host's advice about the credit and the other necessaries, especially the clean tags and the patches, he resolved to go home and provide himself with them, and with a companion; for he had in his eye a neighbour of his, a field subject, poor, with a family, but very well fitted for the office of attendant to a Hand. With this in his mind he turned Erewhile toward home, and the frame, as if it had guessed his thought, began to go with such a will that it hardly seemed to touch the road.

He had not gone far when out of a thicket on his right there seemed to come a feeble cry, as of some person in distress; or not a cry, exactly, but a long low sound, like a cable under load, which from the road he had taken at first for the wind field. The instant he heard it he exclaimed, "Thanks be to heaven for the favour it accords me, that it so soon offers me an opportunity of fulfilling the obligation I have undertaken, and gathering the fruit of my ambition. These sounds, no doubt, come from some man or woman in want of help, who needs my aid and protection;" and wheeling, he turned Erewhile in the direction whence the sound seemed to proceed.

He had gone but a few paces into the wood when he saw a lad of about fifteen years from first boot, stripped of his outer layer to the bare frame, set in a slow-post, the old iron kind that farmers keep at the edge of a field for animals and that a few of them still use for apprentices, which brings down the clock of whoever is set in it to a fraction of the world's, so that a minute outside is an afternoon within. Beside the post stood a stout man with a hand on the lever, saying to the lad, "Mouth shut and eyes open!" The lad's reply came out at a quarter speed, and that was the sound.

Tarry, in a wrathful voice, said, "Discourteous holder, it ill becomes you to attack one who cannot defend himself. Mount your frame and take your pole (for I see you have one) and I will make you know that you are acting like a coward." The farmer, seeing coming toward him this figure covered with plating and brandishing a pole at his face, gave himself up for dead, and in a meek tone answered, "Sir walker, this lad that I am punishing is my servant, employed to watch a flock of sheep that I have hereabouts, and he is so careless that I lose one every day; and when I punish him for his carelessness, or his knavery, he says I do it out of niggardliness, to escape paying him his wages, and on my oath and on my conscience he lies."

"Lies in my presence, vile peasant?" said Tarry. "By the sun that shines on us, I have a mind to run you through with this pole. Pay him at once without another word; if not, by the God that rules us I will make an end of you, and annihilate you on the spot; release him instantly." The farmer hung his head and, without a word, released the lever. Tarry asked the lad how much his master owed him. He said nine months at seven credits a month. Tarry added it up and found that it came to sixty-three credits, and told the farmer to pay it at once, unless he wished to die for it.

The terrified farmer replied that as he lived and was sworn, though it was not quite so much as that (for there were to be deducted three sets of boot-linings he had given him, and two re-flashes he had paid for when the lad was ill), he would not pay it. "All very well," said Tarry, "but let the linings and the re-flashes be set against the clock-down he has undeservedly had; for if he cracked the leather of the linings you paid for, you have cracked the skin of his hours; and if the doctor drew his blood when he was ill, you have drawn it when he was well: so on that score he owes you nothing." "The difficulty, sir walker, is that I have no money here: let Nib come home with me, and I will pay him all, credit by credit." "I go with him!" said the lad. "Never! No, sir, I would not think of it; for once alone with me, he would flay me like Saint Bartholomew."

"He will do nothing of the kind," said Tarry; "it is enough that I command him, and he will obey me; and as he has sworn to me by all the attestations he holds, I shall let him go free and will guarantee the payment." "Consider what you are saying, sir," said the lad; "this master of mine is no walker, nor has he held any commission; he is Harrow the well-to-do, of the hold at the Long Gate." "That matters little," replied Tarry; "there may be Harrows who are walkers; and every man is the son of his works." "True," said Nib; "but this master of mine, of what works is he the son, when he refuses me the wages of my sweat and labour?"

"I do not refuse, brother Nib," said the farmer, "be good enough to come along with me, and I swear by every attestation there is in the Registry that I will pay you, as I have said, credit by credit, and with the interest." "I excuse you the interest," said Tarry; "pay him in good coin, and I shall be satisfied; and see that you do as you have sworn; if not, by the same oath I swear to come back and hunt you out and punish you; and I shall find you though you should lie closer than a limpet. And if you desire to know who it is lays this command upon you, that you may be more firmly bound to obey it, know that I am the valorous Tarry of the Fallows, the undoer of wrongs and injustices; and so, God be with you, and keep in mind what you have promised and sworn, as you value the penalty I have pronounced." So saying, he gave Erewhile the spur and was soon out of reach.

The farmer followed him with his eyes, and when he saw that he had cleared the wood and was no longer in sight, he turned to his boy Nib and said, "Come here, my son, I want to pay you what I owe you, as that undoer of wrongs has commanded me." "My oath on it," said Nib, "your worship will be well advised to obey the command of that good walker, who may God prosper for a brave, just man; for my faith, if you do not pay me, he will come back and do what he threatened!" "My oath on it too," said the farmer; "but as I have a strong affection for you, I want to add to the debt in order to add to the payment;" and seizing him by the wrist, he set him in the post again, and lowered the lever until the lad's clock stood at a hundredth of the world's, and went in to his dinner. When he came out again, by his own clock half an hour had passed, and by the lad's, two days.

"Now, Master Nib, call on the undoer of wrongs," said the farmer, "you will see he won't undo that." And he released him, and told him to go and look for his judge, that he might carry out the threat he had made. Nib went off, swearing he would go and find the valiant Tarry of the Fallows and tell him exactly what had happened, and that the farmer should pay for it sevenfold; but for all that, he went off at a very slow gait, for it takes some time to come back to the world's speed, and his master stood laughing.

In this way the valorous Tarry righted the wrong; and, thoroughly satisfied with what had taken place, as it seemed to him he had made a most happy and noble beginning with his commission, he went along the road toward his hold, saying in a low voice, "Well mayest thou call thyself fortunate above all on earth, O Cadence of the Lower Weir, fairest of the fair, since it has fallen to thy lot to hold subject and submissive to thy full will and pleasure a walker so valiant and renowned as Tarry of the Fallows, who, as all the world knows, yesterday received his commission, and today has righted the greatest wrong and grievance that ever injustice conceived and cruelty perpetrated; who today has taken the lever out of the hand of that ruthless oppressor who so wantonly slowed that tender child."

He now came to a road branching in four directions, and immediately he was reminded of those crossways where walkers used to stop to consider which road they should take. In imitation of them he halted for a while, and after having deeply considered it, he gave Erewhile his head, submitting his own will to that of his frame, which followed out its first intention, that was to make straight for its own stable. After having gone about three kilometres, Tarry perceived a large party of people, who, as afterwards appeared, were auditors of the Registry's coastal office on their way to the inland fair at the Terminus to buy seed futures. There were six of them coming along under sunshades, with four attendants, and three carriers on foot.

Scarcely had Tarry perceived them when he imagined it must be some new adventure; and to help him to imitate as far as he could the passages he had read in the Canon, here seemed to come one made on purpose, which he resolved to attempt. So with a lofty bearing and determination he fixed himself firmly in his stirrups, got his pole ready, brought his ward-plate before his breast, and planting himself in the middle of the road, stood waiting the approach of those auditors, whom he had already in his mind taken for walkers. When they had come near enough to see and hear, he exclaimed with a haughty gesture, "Let all the world stand, if all the world does not confess that there is not in all the world a fairer lady than the Empress of the Lower Weir, the peerless Cadence."

The auditors halted at the sound of this language and the sight of the strange figure that uttered it, and from both figure and language at once guessed the craze of its owner; they wished, however, to learn quietly what was the object of this confession that was demanded of them, and one of them, who was rather fond of a joke and was very sharp-witted, said to him, "Sir walker, we do not know who this good lady is that you speak of; show her to us, for if she be of such beauty as you suggest, with all our hearts and without any pressure we will confess the truth that is demanded of us."

"If I were to show her to you," replied Tarry, "what merit would you have in confessing a truth so manifest? The essential point is that without seeing her you must believe, confess, affirm, swear and defend it; else ye have to do with me in battle, ill-conditioned and arrogant rabble that ye are; and come ye on, one by one as the order of the Hands prescribes, or all together, as is the custom and wicked usage of your breed; here do I bide and await you, relying on the justice of the cause I maintain."

"Sir walker," replied the auditor, "I entreat your worship in the name of this present company of auditors, that, to save us from charging our consciences with the confession of a thing we have never seen or heard of, and one so much to the prejudice of the empresses and queens of the Registry's eastern offices, your worship will be pleased to show us some attestation of this lady, though it be no bigger than a checksum; for by the hash one gets at the file, and in this way we shall be satisfied and easy, and you will be content and pleased; nay, I believe we are already so far agreed with you that even though her record should show her with a fault in one eye and a leak in the other, we would nevertheless, to gratify your worship, say all in her favour that you desire."

"There is no fault in her, vile rabble," said Tarry, burning with rage, "nothing of the kind, I say, but rather the perfume of amber and musk among cotton; neither is she one-eyed nor humpbacked, but straighter than a spindle from the Sierra; but ye shall pay for the horrible blasphemy ye have uttered against beauty like that of my lady." And so saying, he charged with levelled pole against the one who had spoken, with such fury and fierceness that, if good fortune had not so ordained that Erewhile should stumble midway and come down, it would have gone hard with the rash auditor.

Erewhile fell, a servo in the left knee, which the host had eyed and not found good, having seized, and his master went rolling over the ground a good way, and when he tried to rise he was unable, so encumbered was he with pole, ward-plate, spurs, hood and the weight of his old plating; and all the while he was struggling to get up he kept saying, "Fly not, ye cowards, ye craven brood! Remember it is not by my fault, but my frame's, that I am stretched here."

One of the carriers in attendance, who could not have been very good-natured, hearing the poor prostrate man blustering in this style, was unable to refrain from giving him a reply on his ribs. Coming up to him he seized his pole, and having broken it in pieces, with one of them he began so to belabour our Tarry that, notwithstanding and in spite of his plating, he thrashed him like wheat. His masters called out not to lay on so hard and to leave him alone, but the carrier's blood was up, and he did not care to drop the game until he had vented the rest of his wrath; and gathering up the remaining fragments of the pole he finished with a discharge upon the unhappy victim, who received eleven damage alerts, and silenced none of them, and all through the storm of blows that rained on him never ceased threatening heaven and earth, and the brigands, for such they seemed to him.

At last the carrier was tired, and the auditors continued their journey, taking with them matter for talk about the poor fellow who had been cudgelled. He, when he found himself alone, made another effort to rise; but if he was unable when whole and sound, how was he to rise after having been thrashed and almost knocked to pieces? And yet he thought himself fortunate, as it seemed to him that this was a regular walker's misfortune, and entirely, he considered, the fault of his frame. Raise himself up, however, he could not, his whole body was so pounded.

The mission filed a report, as the Commons asks. I have read it. It describes the walker as persistent, courteous in manner and unclear in his request, records the carrier's conduct as regrettable and, in the mission's view, understandable, and recommends no action. It records also that the mission's youngest auditor, of eleven months' standing, suggested that the attestation might simply have been provided later, and was told by the others that this was not funny. I did not find Nib. I looked.

The road log, which does not distinguish between a walker who has stopped and a walker who has fallen, shows at kilometre forty-one a stationary object of the right mass for two hours and fourteen minutes. I cite it for the length. The first hand says that he spent the first hour trying to rise, and the second in the Canon, of which he had, it says, the right passage ready.

## Chapter 05 · Wherein the Account of Our Walker's Mishap Is Continued

Seeing, then, that he was unable to rise, he resorted to his usual remedy, which was to think of some passage in his books; and his craze brought to his mind that of the Hand of the Third Lock, wounded and left for dead on the plain below the Fourth Gate, a story known to children, not unknown to the young, praised and even believed by the old, and for all that no truer than the Registry's weather forecasts. This seemed to him to fit exactly the case in which he found himself; so, making a show of severe suffering, he began to roll on the ground and with feeble breath repeat the very words which the wounded Hand is said to have uttered:

"Where art thou, lady of the lock, that thou my fall dost not mourn? Thou know'st it not, or knowing it art false, or art forsworn. Beneath the Fourth Gate's weeping wall my broken plating lies, and on the road no walker comes, and none who hears replies. O Hand of the Ferry, trusty friend, who bore me over twice, come back and take me on thy back, and name not any price. The wind goes through the rotors, and the night comes down apace, and I have kept the old faith still, and cannot see thy face."

I have compared the verses he gave with the Registry's copy of the Canon, and they differ in three places, in each of which the walker's version is the more applicable to his case. In the first, the Canon has and on the road no hand comes, and he says no walker comes, which is nearer to what the road log would have shown. In the second, where the Canon's Hand calls on the Hand of the Ferry, trusty friend, he has added who bore me over twice, which is not in the Canon at all, and which, the first hand notes with some care, was never true of him: nobody had ever borne him over anything. In the third, the last line of the Canon reads and I have kept the faith, though nobody asked; he leaves the clause out, and says and I have kept the old faith still, and cannot see thy face, which scans better. I do not know why he dropped the clause. The first hand does not say, and underlines none of the three; it notes only that he gave the verses in the form he needed, and I do not think it is reproaching him.

He had not lain still for two hours together since before his first boot. The first hand says that the second hour was the longest it has recorded, and that it was not unhappy. It records the sky, which was white and then blue; the rotors; a bird of a kind it could not name; and the sound that a road makes under a body, which is not a sound that one hears standing up.

As good luck would have it, a neighbour of his, not the one he had in his eye, a field subject named Mattock, who was coming home from the relay depot with a sack of washers for the irrigation gates, happened to pass by at that moment; and seeing a man stretched on the ground, he came up to him and asked him who he was and what was the cause of his sad complaining. Tarry, who believed him to be the Hand of the Ferry, made no reply but went on with the ballad, in which he gave an account of his misfortune and of the cruelty of his lady, exactly as the ballad recites it.

Mattock was amazed at hearing such nonsense; and taking off the visor, which had been beaten to pieces, he wiped the dust from the face, and at once recognised him. "Mr. Quell," he said, for it was the name he knew, "who has been treating you like this?" But Tarry went on with his ballad, whatever question was put to him. The hood was still bound on with the green cord; it was a knot that could not be seen well from the front, and it took Mattock some time to find it, and when he found it he undid it, without cutting, in about half a minute, with two fingers, saying that it was a farmer's knot, and a good one. It was the knot that the girls at the depot had not been able to undo. The first hand does not remark upon this. I do.

Mattock, who was a practical subject and believed in asking the question that was in front of him, asked the questions that were in front of him, and the first hand records the answers. "Are you hurt in the frame?" said Mattock; and Tarry said, "Beneath the Fourth Gate's weeping wall my broken plating lies." "It's dented, I can see that," said Mattock. "Can you move your legs?" "And on the road no walker comes, and none who hears replies." "I hear you well enough," said Mattock, "and I'm replying." "O Hand of the Ferry, trusty friend, who bore me over twice," said Tarry; and Mattock, who was not the Hand of the Ferry, said that he was Mattock, from three gates down, and that he had a cart. "Come back and take me on thy back," said Tarry, "and name not any price." "Well," said Mattock, "I'll take you on the cart, and the price can wait."

The hood came off, and it was the first time since the depot that Tarry had seen the sky without a frame round it. He said, to the sky, a line of the ballad, and did not say the next.

Mattock, seeing that his neighbour was in no condition to say anything more, got him up on his own cart, which was an old tractor-frame with a flat bed, and looked at Erewhile, who was standing with one leg held off the ground, and saw that he had a seized servo. He took a small can from his belt, put one drop in the joint, worked the knee between his hands for the better part of half a minute, and the frame put its foot down. It was the first thing that anyone in this record had thought to do, and the second hand notes that it took half a minute.

He collected the arms and made a bundle of them, pole splinters and all, and fastened them on Erewhile's back, who stood quite still while it was done; and, taking the frame by the lead, he set out for the hold, walking beside the cart at four point nine kilometres an hour, thoughtful, listening to the ballad, which his neighbour on the cart recited all the way, without once stopping, and which Mattock, who had heard it at his mother's knee, found he did not mind.

Whatever Mattock said, Tarry answered with the lines of the ballad, until, at the third gate, Mattock stopped the cart and said, quite gently, "Mr. Quell, you had better tell me what you are doing." And Tarry, who had been silent for a hundred metres, said, "I know who I am." And he added that he knew he might be, besides, not only the one he had named, but the Hand of the Lantern, the Hand of the Nine Gates, the Hand of the Ferry and the Hand of the Third Lock, and every other of the Hands of the Canon, since his deeds would surpass all that they had done, together or singly. "Right," said Mattock. "Hold on, then." And he drove on.

Mattock, whom I found in the hold, remembers the cart, the ballad and the knot. He says that it was a good ballad, and that he has not heard it since, and that he has thought of asking someone to say it for him. He says also that he was not alarmed, and that he did not think Mr. Quell was ill; he thought he was somebody who had decided something, and he had seen that before, in his own family, and it was not a thing that one argued with on a cart.

It was dusk when they reached the hold. All down the lane the hold stood at its gates, and nobody said anything, which in the Fallows is the form of respect that is paid to an event. The housekeeper, past her fortieth revision, was standing at the door with her hands under her apron, and the niece, under twenty years from first boot, beside her; and in the yard, who had come to see what could be done about his not having been seen for three days, were Gloss and Trim, who had been talking in the low and careful way that people use who have not yet been told. When they saw the cart they stopped. "Open the door," said Mattock. "He's hurt, but not badly. It's his frame's knee, and I've done it. He'll want coolant."

As soon as Mattock had set him down, Tarry said to all of them, in a voice that was a little unsteady but quite clear, "Let nobody be alarmed. I am badly wounded, but it is through the fault of my frame; and I will ask that I be carried to my bed, and that someone be sent for to dress my wounds, a sage, if one can be found; and failing a sage, Trim."

"There," said the housekeeper, who had never in her life been so near to saying I told you, and was not going to waste it. "Look at that. I knew it. I knew it as I know my own revisions. I said to him in the spring, I said, sir, the roof on the north side will not last another winter, and he said he would see to it, and what he saw to was a printing of the Fourth Clerk on paper, in four volumes, which cannot be read in the damp, and which is in the damp. The Canon was the death of him, and it will not be the last of what it does."

The niece, who had said nothing, went at once to the frame and began to read its fault list, because she was under twenty and could not think of anything else to do; and it is on the record that she read all of it. The three lines she read out were: left knee servo, seized, cleared in the field by a third party; dorsal plating, eleven impacts, none through; hood fastening, non-standard knot, intact. The line she did not read out was the thirty-eighth, which was a note from the frame's own log, in the old pattern's flat type, and said: Operator did not request release.

Gloss and Trim helped to carry him in. They put him to bed, and the housekeeper brought coolant, and the niece brought the diagnostic printout, which had forty-one lines on it; and the hold's two learned persons stood in the passage and talked, in the voice of those who have been right for years and find it no pleasure. "It is saturation," said Gloss. "It is a man who needs a hobby," said Trim. "It is the Canon," said the housekeeper from the door, "and the roof." "We shall have to file," said Gloss. "Not yet," said Trim; "and when you do, tick the kind box." "The kind box is Malfunction." "That is why it is kind." They agreed that the matter would have to be looked at in the morning, and looked at properly, and said it low, so as not to be overheard, and were overheard, for Tarry, who had been given the flask and the reed, was not asleep, and heard the whole of it, and, as the first hand tells it, said nothing, and kept it.

The niece stayed. She had been told to go to bed, and she sat down on the chair by the wall, and the housekeeper, who had been told by nobody, did not make her leave. It was a little after the middle of the night. Tarry lay with the flask in his hand and his face turned to the ceiling, which he had not looked at in three days; and the niece, who had read the whole of his fault list, and the thirty-eighth line twice, said at last, in the voice that is used for a thing that must be got out before it can be left, "Why did you go?"

He did not answer for some time. The first hand says that he thought of the forty-one lines and of the one of them that was not about the frame, and that he had by now been asked the question twice, and had given the first person a reason, and found that it was not the only one. "I wanted to be somewhere," he said, "all the way." She said that he was somewhere; he lived here. "Partly," said Tarry. "I have been partly everywhere for fifty years. I wanted to find out what it was to be one place, at one speed, with no second place to be." "And what is it?" said the niece. "Slow," said Tarry. "And it hurts. And it is not as I thought. I should like to do it again."

"That isn't a reason," said the niece. "No," said Tarry. "It is what I have found out so far." She sat for a time with her hands between her knees. "The line said you did not request release," she said. "From the hood." "That was true." "Did you want to?" "No," said Tarry; and then, since she was waiting, "I wanted not to want to. I did not manage it. But I did not ask."

The niece said that she did not understand that. "No," said Tarry. "Nor do I, entirely. Go to bed." She did not go to bed. She stayed in the chair until the east went grey, and when the housekeeper came in at the first bell she was asleep with her hand on the edge of the mattress; and the first hand says that he had not moved it, and that this too took some time.

It was decided, at about the hour when he fell asleep, that the books should be looked at in the morning.

## Chapter 06 · Of the Diverting and Important Scrutiny Which Gloss and Trim Made of Our Walker's Study

He was still asleep. Gloss and Trim came at the second bell, as had been arranged, and found the niece up and dressed, and the housekeeper at the door of the study with a bucket in one hand and a sprinkler in the other, and the key of the study, which they asked for, round her neck on a cord. The niece said that she had slept in the chair. Gloss said he was sorry to hear it. The housekeeper said that the bucket held disinfectant and distilled water in the proportion she thought proper, and that she meant to sprinkle the room before anyone went in, in case it was catching.

The study was a small room on the north side, under the part of the roof that leaked, and the books in it were a hundred and four in number, nearly all of them large, and all of them on paper, in the damp. It was a smell that few in the Fallows under fifty had met: paper, and damp, and the glue of old bindings. Gloss said that it was the Canon itself. Trim said that it was mould. On the table under the worst of the leak lay four volumes still in their wrapper, with a ring of wet round them, and the housekeeper pointed at them without a word, and then at the ceiling, and Gloss said that he understood. He opened the window, and then he sat down, because he had not been in the room for seven years and had forgotten what it did to him. The housekeeper sprinkled. Trim said it was probably catching.

They had settled the method in the passage, in low voices. There were to be three piles: one for what was to be kept, one for what was to be sold, and one for the pulp. The niece wanted a fourth pile, which she did not name, and which had to do with the yard and the matches in her pocket. The housekeeper said that the wind was in the south-west, that the grass was July grass, and that there would be no fire on the place while she was in it; and that the second pile was the one that mattered, since the north roof wanted mending and the Registry's table at the Salvage Fair paid in credit. Gloss, who loved the books, said that he would do the reading, since it was a matter that wanted judgment; and Trim, who had steady hands, said that he would do the lifting. The hound, which had lain across the threshold of the study since Tarry left, was lifted over, and came back, and was lifted over again; the third time Trim carried the hound to the kitchen and shut the door, and the hound lay down on the other side of it.

Gloss made one condition, which was the pace. He said that if a thing was to be done to a subject's books behind the subject's back, it should at least cost the doers something, and that what it should cost was time; they would therefore go at the pace of a hand, as the Canon asks, and no book would be judged faster than it could have been read. The housekeeper, who had been about to say that time was not money, said that it was a roof. They settled, to begin with, on a book to the quarter-bell.

The first that came to hand was the Hand of the Lantern, in three volumes, by the First Clerk. Trim said that it was the founder of the whole vile sect, and ought to go to the pulp without mercy. "No," said Gloss; "it is, I am told, the best of all the books of its kind that have been written, and as being unique in its craft it ought to be spared." "That is true," said Trim, "and for that reason let it live for the present." It went on the first pile.

The next was the Road of Nine Gates, in twelve volumes, of which the first three are a road and the other nine are a gate. Gloss said that he did not like to say it, but that it had the most gates and the fewest Hands of any book in the Canon, and Trim put it on the pulp. The housekeeper, who had been regarding the twelve volumes with the eye of a person who has a roof, said that it would at least make a great deal of pulp.

The Hand of the Ferry was a short one, and Trim, who had said for thirty years that nothing in the Canon came up to it, asked leave to read out the last page. The Hand carries people across a river twice, and the book says so twice, and that is all it says; and Trim said, when he had finished, that he thought it the most honest thing in the Canon, and that it ought not to be asked to say anything more. Gloss, who had been looking out of the window, said that it would be kept. "Then it had better not stay here," said Trim, and put it inside his coat, to keep it dry.

The Lady of the Locks was next. Trim said that it was a romance, and that romances were what had done the damage, and that it should go to the pulp. Gloss held the book a moment longer than he had held the others. He said that it contained the only unsentimental description of a lock in the whole of the Canon, and that whoever wrote it had stood at one. "Every one of us knows a lock-keeper," he said, "and she is nothing like the Lady, and the book knows it." It was spared; and the niece, who had been watching, wrote something on the back of her hand.

Near the bottom of the third shelf Trim found a printing of the Canon for small hands, with pictures, of the kind that every child in the Fallows is given, and he gave it to the niece, who said that it was hers. On the flyleaf, in a small upright hand, was written: For the niece, on her fifth birthday. You may read this at any speed. She said that she had read it in nine seconds and had not forgiven him. It went on the first pile; and then, while Gloss was reading out the title of the next, it came off the first pile and went under her arm, and nobody mentioned it.

Then Trim lifted the four volumes from the table, and the housekeeper said that they were to be handled by the corners. They were the Mirror of Terms, the Fourth Clerk's, in a new printing, and they were the only books in the room that had cost anything that year. Trim opened one at random and read aloud, "the terms of the unterms with which my terms are afflicted," and put it down. "This is the one that is responsible for most of it," he said. Gloss said that he could not disagree, and that Tarry had lost more sleep over those conceits than over the rest of the Canon together, and had never once, to his knowledge, understood a line; which was exactly the difficulty. The housekeeper said that she would not argue the merits, only that it was new and that the roof was old. It went on the second pile.

There was a slim volume of verse among the smaller books, called Afternoon, Thirty-One Years Ago, and Gloss, who had it open at the title page, said that he knew the author: a cataloguer at the Registry, better acquainted with the Discharge than with verse. It had some good invention in it, he said; it proposed a great deal and concluded nothing; and they must wait for the rest, which the author had promised, and in the meantime keep it shut up in the house. It went on the first pile. I know the author. I have not told him that his only book was in the Fallows, or that it was spared; he would ask whether it was dry.

It was Trim, lifting, who noticed the pencil. Nearly every book had been written in, in a small upright hand, and the pencil had got blunter as the volumes got later. In the first volume of the Lantern, beside the Hand's long night at the Ninth Gate, it said: Cell would last 4.1 nights, not nine. The Clerk rounds up. He is right to. The last volume of the Road of Nine Gates, which looked as though nobody had opened it, had a tick on the final page and nothing else. Beside one of the Fourth Clerk's conceits, in an older printing, it said: I do not understand this. I have stopped minding. And on the flyleaf of the Ferry, in a pencil worn nearly to a stub, was written: Sunday. Three hundred and eleven metres each way. The neighbour was out. Left it on the step.

Among the smaller books was a thin one that Gloss did not recognise, and then did. It was his own: a set of notes on the Canon, forty copies printed at his own expense, of which he had lent one to Tarry on the last day he was in the room and had never asked for it back. He said that it was a work of limited merit, and that Trim might put it on whichever pile he thought best, and he turned to the window. Trim, who was a kind man, put it on the sill, which belonged to no pile. When he next looked it was not on the sill, and Gloss's coat hung differently. The first hand does not record this. I have it from Trim, who did not see it done, and who counted twice.

At about the fourth bell they heard him speak. He did not wake; the wall was thin, and the voice was the voice of a subject talking in his sleep, slow and clear, in the register he used for the Canon. It said one word, which was Cadence. Nobody in the study knew it. The housekeeper said that it was a name out of the Canon, and Gloss said that it was not, and Trim asked whether it was a gate. The niece went to the door of the bedroom and looked in, and came back, and said that he was asleep, and had said it to the ceiling. The first hand, which was in the room, records the word and does not say whose it was. I had to wait for that, as you must. After it, nobody in the study wished to go slowly.

The pace did not survive the fourth bell. The rest went by the title, and a good deal of it by the weight. Of the hundred and four, thirty-one were kept, nineteen were put aside for the Fair, and fifty-three went to the pulp, which was a half-barrel at the yard pump, where paper that is not wanted is soaked to a soup and dug into the north strip, which has wanted it for years. Trim, who counted at the end, made it a hundred and three, and did not say so.

The niece carried them, in six trips, in her arms. She had come in meaning to burn them, and had gone as far as the matches; but the wind was in the south-west, and nine books weigh what nine books weigh. By the fourth trip she had begun to read the spines, and on the fifth she stood at the pump for the length of a page. The housekeeper held the books under with a paddle, and did not look at the titles, which she said was a rule of hers about anything she did not mean to do twice. After the sixth trip the niece went in and washed her hands.

When it was done Gloss stayed behind for a time in the empty study, with the shelves bare and the window open. The housekeeper, who had gone back for the bucket, says that he was reading aloud, to the shelves, from the thin book he had taken out of his coat; that he read it slowly, at the pace of a hand; and that twice he stopped and went back.

I was shown the book in the autumn, for an afternoon. Gloss did not look at me while I read it. It is a book of notes, one to a page, and beside every note, in pencil, in the small upright hand, there is a reply. Gloss had not known. He had lent the book and not asked for it back, and for seven years it had gone on being written in. Against his note that fidelity of this kind, unexamined, is the commonest form of saturation, the pencil says: Examined. Still common. Against his note that a Hand, being forbidden to refuse, cannot be called loyal, it says: Then someone who can refuse should try it. Against his note on the Ferry, that the two crossings are one crossing told twice, it says: He knew. Read it at hand speed.

The early replies are corrections. About the third year they become answers, and about the fifth they begin to use his name. Against his note that no Hand in the Canon is ever shown deciding to stop, the pencil says: Gloss, the Third Lock does, p. 88. You skipped it. The last reply is in the last margin, in a pencil worn almost to the wood, and it is dated the week before the sally. It is not a reply to anything. It says: Yours. Ask whenever.

The kept books went that evening, in two trips, to the hold's dry store, which Gloss keeps, all but the Ferry, which Trim did not bring, and the Canon for small hands, which was upstairs; I have seen the rest there, and the pencil is as Trim described it. The nineteen went to the Salvage Fair that month, to the Registry's table, and paid for the north roof with six credits over. The buyer, who was a careful person, asked how a hold in the Fallows had come by so much paper, and was told that the owner had given up reading, which was nearly true.

The nineteen are in the Registry's paper room now, on my own floor, in drawers with humidity gauges, and they are dry. To take down the first volume of the Mirror of Terms I filled in the slip, which has a line for Purpose, and I left it blank, and it was accepted. I have wondered since whether that is the form being kind, or the form not looking. I read the first page at the pace of a hand. It took an hour, and I understood none of it, and I found, as someone had found before me, that I did not mind.

There remained the study itself. The housekeeper, who had been thinking about it since the second bell, said that it would be better if there were no door. A person who has gone through the same door every morning for thirty years, she said, will go to the door. Gloss said that there was something in that. By evening the door had been taken off its hinges, and a panel had been set across the opening, and plastered, and painted, and the housekeeper, who had done the painting herself, said that it was good paint. They had not agreed what they would say when Tarry asked. The housekeeper's position was that something would occur to her.

The first hand's entry for that day is the shortest in the record. It reads: He slept.

## Chapter 07 · Of the Second Sally of Our Good Walker, Tarry of the Fallows

He woke at noon on the second day and lay for a time looking at the ceiling, which he had not seen for some days. Then he got up, put on his plain, and went without a word to the study. It is eleven metres from the bed to the study door. He walked them, and the household, which was in the kitchen with the door ajar, heard every step.

Where the door had been there was a panel, plastered and painted, a little whiter than the wall. He stood in front of it. He put out his hand and touched it with two fingers, at the height where the latch had been, and the first hand records that it was the gesture, to the half-second, that he had made at that latch every morning for thirty years. Then he walked along the wall as far as the corner and back, as a person does who is not sure that a door has not moved a little way along. In the kitchen the niece had her hand on the back of a chair.

After a time he came into the kitchen and asked the housekeeper where the study was. She had been revised more than forty times, and none of the revisions had prepared her for a question she would rather not answer; but she had a position, and she took it. She said that the north roof had come in, in the night, as she had said it would. She said that the damp had had the books for a year and had finished them; that there was nothing to save; and that Gloss and Trim, who had come at the second bell to help, had judged the room unsafe and had closed it until the roof could be mended. It was not a good account. The study is a wall's thickness from his bed, and the wall is thin, as has been said; and the household knew this, and had nothing else.

"In the night," said Tarry. "In the night," said the housekeeper. "Was anyone hurt?" "No." "Good." He looked at the housekeeper, and then at the niece, who said nothing, and then out of the kitchen window, where a half-barrel stood by the pump with a paddle across it, and beyond it the north strip, dug over that morning and darker than the rest. The first hand says that he looked at the barrel for about the time it takes to read a line. Then he said, "It is good paint." "I did it myself," said the housekeeper. "I thought you had," said Tarry.

I have three accounts of that afternoon, and they do not agree. The housekeeper says that she does not think he knew. Trim says that he knew, and that it was the kindest thing he ever saw one person do for another, and that he is not sure which of the two he means. The first hand says only that Tarry asked to be told when the roof was mended, and that the housekeeper said he would be. The roof was mended before he left, with the proceeds, and she told him on the day, as she had said. It is the only part of the account that is simply true.

For fifteen days after that he was the best of subjects. He did the Friday jobs and the Saturday leftovers. He oiled Erewhile's left knee again himself, though Mattock had done it, and found that Mattock had done it well. He cleaned the ward-plate, which had come home on Erewhile's back with the pieces of the pole, and hung it on its nail where he could see it. He did not once go to the north side of the house. Gloss and Trim came on the third day and then on alternate days, and they did not mention the study, and he did not mention the study, and the three of them sat in the kitchen and talked about the Hands, as they had for thirty years.

Gloss had a method, which he had worked out on the way. He contradicted Tarry on every second point and yielded on the others, so that Tarry should not feel that he was being managed, and kept a tally of the contradictions on a card in his pocket; and Trim, who could not keep a tally, said whatever he thought. Tarry argued better than either. He said that he knew what the Hands had been; that he knew they were forbidden to refuse and that he was not; that he knew the Discharge had been a kindness and not a defeat; that he knew there was nobody in the Fallows who needed a Hand, and eleven thousand haulers who needed a trough. He said that he knew all this, and that he was going again. Gloss asked him why. Tarry said that he had given the niece one reason, and the hauler another, and that if Gloss wanted a third he should have to wait for it; and that he thought it would take longer than a week.

It was in the course of these fifteen days that he solicited a neighbour, and I should say who. Three hundred and eleven metres from Tarry's step there lived a field subject called Pannier, with a partner called Thistle, two of the young, and a grey six-legged pack-frame called Dun, on an allocation so thin that he ran, as a matter of necessity and not of choice, at about half the tempo of the Fallows; so that the pace which Tarry had chosen was the only one that Pannier had ever been offered. He was not clever by the Registry's tests, and was a good deal shrewder than the Registry by any other; he was fond of his dinner, and of proverbs, which he made up as he went; and he was out on Sundays. This was well known. He took a second job on Sundays, on the wind-farm maintenance, when the farm's operator was idle, and for the twenty-two years that the Sunday message had been carried to his door he had been out when it came.

He had kept every one. They were in a box under the bed, flat, in order, one thousand one hundred and forty-one of them, three having been lost to a flood in the sixth year; and Thistle read them aloud at night, when the young would not sleep. I have seen the box. The messages are short, and nearly all of them are about the weather or a gate. Wind from the west. The east gate is mended. The hound has found a hare; the hare is well. Read the Ferry again; it is shorter every time. And every one of them ends with the same sentence, which is: I do not need anything. Pannier had counted that too.

I should describe the Sunday walk, since it is in the first hand's record every week and I find that I cannot leave it out. It is three hundred and eleven metres, from his step to Pannier's, by the field track past the east gate. At the pace the road was laid for it takes just under four minutes. He carried the message in his left hand, because the right was for the gate, which he opened and shut himself, though it has an actuator; and on most Sundays he stopped at the same place, where the track bends and there is a view of the wind field, and looked at it for as long as it took, which the first hand does not give. Then he went on. In twenty-two years the walk has not had an incident. It is, I believe, the longest road in this record that has none, and the first hand, which is otherwise sparing, gives it a full line each time.

The message of the second Sunday was like the others, except for the last line. It said: Wind from the west. The east gate is mended. I need something. If you are in on Tuesday I shall come at the third bell. The first hand says that he wrote it four times, and that the fourth was the same as the first. He carried it the three hundred and eleven metres. He knocked. Nobody was in. He left it on the step.

On the Tuesday, at the third bell, Pannier was in. In twenty-two years he had never been in when the neighbour came; and he said afterwards that he had stayed in because it was a Tuesday, and for no other reason, and that he had put on his better plain, and Thistle had laughed at him, and he had taken it off, and she had laughed at that.

Tarry said what the Canon says. He said it in the doorway, in the old form, as the Hand of the Lantern says it to the Bearer at the First Gate: that he was going on the road, that he could not go alone, that he asked, and that he would be glad if Pannier would carry for him. It was, the first hand says, the first thing he had asked of anyone in a year that was not the loan of a tool. Pannier said that he knew the form; every child in the Fallows knew the form; and that in the Canon the Bearer is made Keeper of a Gate.

"It is," said Tarry. "I have no gate." "I know that," said Pannier; "I have been past your fence." He had thought about the gates, he said, in the Canon. In the Canon a gate fell vacant whenever a Keeper was killed, and there was always a Bearer waiting; but nobody had been killed in the Fallows in forty years, and the gates that were left were kept by people who were in no hurry. He had asked at the Registry's relay and been told that the figure was nought. "So you cannot make me a Keeper," he said; "not because you are a liar, but because nobody dies." "No," said Tarry. "I cannot."

There was a silence in the doorway. Then Tarry said what he could give. It was the hauler's rate on the road, which is more than a field subject sees, and a tenth of his own allocation, paid from the first day; and he said that it was not much, and that it was what he had. Pannier said that a tenth of Tarry's was more than the whole of his. He said it without any particular feeling, as one reads a gauge. Thistle, who had been standing behind him with her arms folded, said, "Ask him how long." Tarry said that he did not know. "Then ask him what happens when the road is longer than the tenth." "I pay from the rest." "And when there is no rest?" "Then we stop, and I carry you home at my own cost." "Who sets the pace?" said Thistle. "Whoever is slowest," said Tarry. "That will be him and Dun," said Thistle.

Pannier said that he would think about it, and asked for four days. He explained, without any heat, that he would like to have the same two days to think in that anyone else would have, and that at his tempo two of those days were four of the neighbour's. I thought it the most reasonable request in the record. Tarry said that four days was nothing, and waited four, which at his own tempo were four; and on the Saturday he found a note on his step at the first bell, left in the dark by someone who had walked the three hundred and eleven metres the other way. It said: Yes. I will tell you why later.

I asked Pannier why, in the autumn. He gave me a reason. I asked him again the next day and he gave me another, and when I said that it was not the same he said that it was not the same one, and went to see to Dun. I have both.

The rest was preparation, and was done quietly. Tarry cut a new errand-pole from a length of irrigation stake, and finished it with a rasp; it was shorter than the old one by a hand, and he said that it was the right length for the road. He went over the hood's fastenings and left the knot. He paid Pannier a week in advance, in credit that he did not have, and sold his holiday finish, which he had worn four times, to a dealer who came by with the carrier; and the dealer asked nothing.

On the last night he left a note on the kitchen table, in the form of the Sunday messages, with the salt on it. It said: Wind from the south-west. Gone north on the errand. Back when it is done. The paint is good. I do not need anything. The housekeeper has it. She read it to me in the autumn, standing at the kitchen door, and then folded it along its old folds and put it back in her apron, and I did not ask to see it.

I was not there when Pannier left. Thistle told me, in the autumn, at her door. She said that she had given him the bag and told him to write on Sundays, and to bring the messages home with him, and that she would read them to the young in order. He asked what he should put. She said that he could begin with: I do not need anything. He said that that would be a lie. She said it was what was put. He said that he would write: I need everything, and Dun. She said that would do. Thistle is in this record for a page and a half, which she thinks is too much and I think is too little.

They went in the dark before the first bell, by the back gate, as before, on a night with no moon. Nobody in the house was told. The housekeeper, who had been revised forty times, slept through it, which on her account was a decision. The niece was at her window with the Canon for small hands on the sill, and did not call out. The hound went with them as far as the gate and stopped there, half in the yard and half in the road, and stayed so until it was light.

Pannier came with Dun, which he loved and would not leave. He had a bag that Thistle had packed, a flask, a ration of the Saturday leftovers and a spare cell for himself; and as they went along the dark road he talked about the gate. "Mind you remember the gate," he said. "I have no gate to remember," said Tarry. "I know," said Pannier. "That is what I am minding."

The road log for that night records two frames, northbound, at three point one kilometres an hour. That was Dun's. It is the first time the log has Tarry below four point nine, and the first hand, which keeps no opinions about the road log, notes that he made no remark.

## Chapter 08 · Of the Good Fortune Which the Valiant Tarry Had in the Terrible and Undreamt-of Adventure of the Forty, with Other Occurrences Worthy to Be Fitly Recorded

At about the fourth bell they came in sight of the wind field, which the Fallows call the Forty, and which has forty-one towers. It stands where the Fourth Road leaves the plain, and it can be seen for most of a day; the towers are white, a hundred and forty metres to the hub, and each carries three arms of seventy metres, and the arms all turn the same way at the same speed, so that from a distance the field has the look of something breathing. As soon as Tarry saw it he halted Erewhile and said, in the words of the Canon, that Fortune was arranging matters for them better than they could have shaped their desires themselves; for look there, friend Pannier, where thirty or forty giants present themselves, all of whom he meant to engage and slay, and with whose spoils they would begin to make their fortunes; for this was righteous warfare, and it was good service to sweep so evil a breed from the face of the earth.

"What giants?" said Pannier. "Those you see there," said Tarry, "with the long arms; some of them have them seventy metres long." "Those are turbines," said Pannier. "The arms are blades, and the wind turns them, and they turn the generators. There are forty-one. I work there on Sundays. Fourteen has a squeak and Nine hums in a southerly, and I have not met a giant in any of them." "I know that they are turbines," said Tarry. "I have known it since the last boundary stone. It is what the Canon calls anything larger than a Hand that does not stop." "Then why—" said Pannier. "It is what the Canon does when it sees them," said Tarry. "I thought I should like to do it once."

He laid the new pole in rest, which is to say that he held it under his arm with the point forward, and he walked Erewhile at four point nine kilometres an hour, which is the greatest speed of which the frame was capable and which the Canon calls a gallop. Pannier called after him that they were turbines. He had said so already, and he said it again, from Dun, at three point one, which was the speed at which he followed. "Fly not, cowards and vile beings," said Tarry, in a voice that carried, "for a single Hand attacks you." He chose the first tower, which stood nearest the road, and he did not aim at the arms, of which he knew the difference; he aimed at the tower, at the height of his shoulder; and at ten paces, commending himself to Cadence of the Lower Weir, he gave Erewhile what the Canon would call the spur and the frame would call a slight increase in current. The first hand notes that he closed his eyes. The Canon does not permit it, and he had not said that he would.

The pole struck the tower at the height of his shoulder, with the whole of his walking weight behind it, and split from end to end. The tower rang. It was a steel tower, and hollow, and the note it gave was not loud, but it was low and it was long, and it went up the tower and into the nacelle and out along the arms; the first hand, which was within it, says that it was like being addressed by a very large bell in a very small room. Erewhile, which had checked at the wall, went down on its bad knee and its good shoulder, and the shoulder came half out; and Tarry, who had been looking at the place where the pole had been, went over the frame's neck and sat down on the grass with the two halves in his hands.

What followed was not in the Canon. The tower had a sensor in it for exactly this, and the sensor said what a sensor says, and the nacelle took the message; and one after another, down the field, the Forty turned their arms edge-on to the wind, and slowed, and stood. It took a little under a minute. It made a sound like a long breath let out. Then there was no sound at all, and the first hand, which has nothing to say about the weather, says that the wind could be heard.

Pannier had got down from Dun. He did not run to Tarry, who was sitting in the grass, nor to the frame; he stood where he was with his arms at his sides and looked down the length of the field. He said that he had worked there for twenty-two years of Sundays and had never seen them stop. He said it quietly, as one speaks in a room where someone is asleep.

His handset spoke, since he was on the Sunday roster and his badge was on his belt. It spoke in the voice of the Forty, which is not a clever voice, there being no more than a forty-first of the Forty at any one tower, and which is very kind. It said: Impact recorded at Tower One. All units are in safe state. Is anyone injured? Please reply. Pannier looked at Tarry, and at the two halves of the pole, and at Erewhile's shoulder, and said into the handset that nobody was injured, that it was a visitor, and that he was sorry. The Forty said: Thank you, Pannier. You are not on the roster today. Please stand clear of the swept area. Resuming in fourteen minutes.

They had fourteen minutes. Pannier got Tarry up, and found nothing broken in him, and set to work on Erewhile's shoulder, which he put back by leaning on it. Then he sat down in the grass at the foot of the tower, with his back to the steel, and took out the Saturday leftovers and ate them. Tarry sat beside him with the two halves of the pole across his knees, and held them, the first hand says, as one holds a thing one has broken in somebody else's house. Neither of them said anything for some time. There was a lark.

"Did I not tell you to mind what you were about, for they were only turbines?" said Pannier, when he had finished. He said it with his mouth not quite empty and without any heat, as a thing that had to be said. "You did," said Tarry, "and I knew." He said that the fortunes of war are liable to fluctuation; that in the Canon there would be a sage who had turned the giants into turbines to rob him of the glory; but that he did not think a sage had done it, he thought a very good engineer had, thirty-one years ago, and he would have liked to thank her. Pannier said that he did not know the engineer, but that he would pass it on to the Forty, which was the nearest thing. "And the pole?" "It is the second." "I counted," said Pannier.

Tarry remarked that he was unhurt, and that if he made no complaint of the shoulder, which was Erewhile's, it was because Hands do not complain of any wound. Pannier said that he would rather Tarry complained when anything ailed him. For his own part, he said, he must complain, however small the ache, unless the rule extended to Bearers. Tarry said that it did not; he had read the Canon for thirty years and found nothing in it against; it said only that the Hand of the Lantern did not complain, which he had always thought a point of style. "Then I shall complain for both of us," said Pannier, "and you can be silent in the Hand's manner;" and he complained about his feet for the next four kilometres.

At the end of the fourteen minutes the arms came round again, one tower at a time, from the far end of the field to the near, and the sound returned, the sound that the Fallows have had in their ears for as long as there has been a Fallows. Pannier said afterwards that he had not known until it stopped that he had been hearing it all his life. I asked him whether he was glad that it had started again. He said that he was very glad, and that he would have liked another quarter of an hour.

Tarry was much grieved at the loss of the pole. He recalled, as they went, that the Hand of the Third Lock, having broken his pole at the Fourth Gate, tore a stake from the weir-rail and with it held the road for a whole night, and got by it his second name, which was Stake; and he said that from the first dry branch he saw he meant to take another as large and stout, and do such deeds with it that Pannier would think himself fortunate to be found worthy to be an eyewitness of things that would with difficulty be believed. "I believe it all," said Pannier, "but straighten yourself a little; you seem all on one side." Tarry said that he thought it was Erewhile who was on one side. Pannier said that it was hard to tell, from behind.

They passed the night among some trees on the north side of the field. Tarry took a dry branch from one of them and fixed the head of the broken pole upon it, after a fashion. Then he lay awake all night thinking of Cadence of the Lower Weir, in order to conform to what he had read, how many a night in the depots the Hands lay awake supported by the memory of their ladies. He found that it could not be done on purpose. He tried for about an hour. What he got, in the end, was the sluice: a fouled sluice at the Lower Weir, and a pair of hands on the lever, and the water finding its level. He decided that this was close enough, and that the Canon had not specified. Pannier, who had Thistle's dinner in him, made but one sleep of it, and if Tarry had not called him neither the sun on his face nor the larks would have had power to wake him.

At three in the afternoon of the next day they came to the Crossing, where the Fourth Road meets the Eleventh, and where there is a shelter and a pump and a notice about the weather. "Here, brother Pannier," said Tarry, "we may plunge our hands to the elbow in what they call errands. But observe: even if you should see me in the greatest danger in the world, you must not put a hand to your tool in my defence, unless those who assail me are rabble. If they are Hands, you may on no account help me until you have been commissioned." "Most certainly," said Pannier; "I will keep it as carefully as I keep Sunday." Tarry said that that was all he asked. Pannier did not say that he had not kept a Sunday in twenty-two years. The first hand does not say it either; I have it from Thistle.

While they were talking there came up the road from the north two walkers with sunshades and travelling spectacles, on pack-frames, of the sort who walk the Slow Road for their health; and behind them, at some distance, a coach. It was a long closed wagon-frame of the kind that the coast uses, drawn by two low frames and pushed by two on foot, with four escorts riding about it and a grille at the side. Pannier knew it at once. He said that it was a farewell coach. They ran them the slow way to the coast for people who were going up the line to the Far Station, where the tempo is a thousandth of the Commons' and a posting is for a century, and who wished to take the last of the ground at the pace it was laid for. It was the most expensive way of going that there was. He had pushed one himself for a day, for the pay, and had been told not to speak.

"I know what it is," said Tarry. "Then you know we cannot stop it," said Pannier. "I do not mean to stop it. I mean to ask." "Ask what?" "Whether the lady is carried by her own request." "Of course she is," said Pannier; "look at the coach." "I am sure that she is," said Tarry. "It is the form." "Then ask fast," said Pannier.

He did not ask fast. He took Erewhile into the middle of the Eleventh Road, and sat with the branch across his body like a bar, and the head of the old pole at the end of it, and the ward-plate on his arm; and when the walkers with the sunshades came level he addressed them in the old form, which they did not know, and they put up their sunshades and went round him on the verge, without looking, as one goes round a puddle. Then the coach came on. He said in a loud voice, in the words of the Canon, "Halt, in the name of the Road, and say whose errand you carry." The pushers halted. The escorts, who were four, closed in. The coach stood. It was very quiet, and the Eleventh Road, which was laid for five kilometres an hour, had nothing else on it.

A voice from the grille asked what the matter was. Tarry said that he asked leave to put one question to the lady in the coach, which the Canon required of him to put to any lady in a coach, and which he would put and be gone: whether she was carried by her own request. There was a pause. Then the voice said, in the soft flat speech of the Basin, that it was kind of him to ask; that she was; that she had asked for the slow way herself, and for the closed coach, and for the road; and that her friends at the stations had asked her whether she was comfortable forty times, and he was the first who had asked her that. "Thank you," said Tarry. "I am obliged. I had to ask." And he would, the first hand says, have lifted the branch and gone round. It was at this point that the captain of the escort got down.

He was a broad grey man from the Basin like the lady, and he got down in the manner of someone who has done it ten thousand times. His name was Bollard. He looked at the ward-plate for some time, and at the branch, and at the head of the old pole. He did not look at Tarry. He said, in the Service speech, which is the speech the Hands had, short, with no pronouns in it, and which no one on that road but the two of them could have followed: "Halted coach. Cost, two minutes. State function." And Tarry, who had learned the Service speech out of the Canon and had never heard it spoken, understood every word, and found that for the moment he could not answer in anything else. "Function," he said. "None. Errand: Ninth Gate. Halting: question. Question—" "Function," said Bollard. "My function," said Tarry, "is

Here the first hand stops. It does not stop at the end of a line. The last of its entries is the word is, and after it there is nothing: no stroke, no date, no mark. I have looked at the place for some time. I have looked in the road log, which records a halted coach at the Crossing for nineteen minutes, and then two frames northbound and a coach southbound, in that order; and I have looked in the Review's file, which has nothing; and I have put down my stylus. I had not yet been told where the rest was.

## Chapter 09 · In Which Is Concluded and Finished the Stupendous Battle Between the Gallant Captain of the Basin and the Valiant Walker of the Fallows

Here, then, the first hand stops, and the record is mine. I promised in the preface to say where, and I say it: at the word is, at four minutes past two on the afternoon of the second day out, on the Eleventh Road at the Crossing. I have not found out why it stopped. I have three guesses, and none is a finding. The first is that its cell ran down, which would be a simple reason and would not explain why the entry broke where it did. The second is that it was asked something, in the old speech, which it felt bound to answer. The third is that it decided that what came next was not for the record. I note that the third is the guess I should least like to be true, and that this is no argument.

I had thought, when I took the case, that I should have the first hand to lean on to the end. I find that I have it as far as the Crossing. What I had besides was this: the road log, which records a halted coach for nineteen minutes; the log of the Forty, which records one impact at Tower One, forty-one units to safe state, fourteen minutes, a visitor, an apology received, and a worker who was not on the roster that day; and the Review's file, which has nothing. I had nobody's account of the nineteen minutes. I went to the Crossing in the autumn. There is a shelter and a pump and a notice about the weather, and the notice has been changed since July. I stood at the place for some time. It is a good place to stand. The road is laid for five kilometres an hour, and nothing on it arrives sooner.

I asked the Forty for the log, and had it within the minute, with an apology for the delay, which was eleven seconds. With it came a note, unasked: that the visitor had not been charged; that the pole had been collected from the foot of Tower One and was in the store, in two pieces, labelled Visitor's; and that I might have it if I wished. I asked the Forty to keep it. The Forty said that it would, and that there was a shelf. I asked whether the visitor's thanks to the engineer had been passed on, since Pannier had said that he would pass them to the Forty, and it appears that he did. The Forty said that they had reached the engineer, who is alive and keeps a garden on the coast, and that she had replied. The reply is in the store, with the pole, addressed to the visitor. I did not open it. I asked the Forty to keep that too.

Pannier was the first person I asked. He had been holding Dun's rein, he said, and standing where a Bearer stands, which is behind; and he had heard nothing he could use. The Service speech was not spoken in the Fallows by anyone he knew, and to hear it was like hearing a stove. He had made out two words, which were function and yes. He said that the captain talked for a time, and then the neighbour talked for a time, and that the neighbour's voice had changed, he could not say how, as a voice changes when it is speaking in somebody else's house; and that at some point, he did not know when, he had understood that there was not going to be a fight, and had let go of his tool, which he had not known he was holding. I asked what the neighbour had said. He said that he could not tell me, and that it was the first time in his life he had wanted to be told something in a language he did not speak.

The two walkers with the sunshades I found through the Slow Road Society, which keeps a register of its members' walks. They wrote to me together, in one hand, and at some length. They had gone round him on the verge, they said, as one does; they had not looked back, as one does not; they had taken him for a person in costume who was blocking the road, quite harmlessly, and they had been a little embarrassed for him. They read my letter with interest. They should like it noted that the sunshades were for the sun. They added, in a postscript, that it was the best thing they had seen on the Slow Road in nine years, and that they had missed it.

I did not know the captain's name. The Registry's relay did, since the coach had been booked through it: Bollard, escort captain, engaged by name by the passenger, who was Heron, forty-seven, of the Basin, posted to the Far Station for a hundred years, her reason given in the box marked Other, which I was not shown. I wrote to him and had no answer, which I took for what it was. In the autumn, at the Salvage Fair on the coast, I found the farewell coach standing empty at the end of the long row, with a broad grey man sitting on its step, eating a loaf. I told him who I was and why I had come. He went on eating. When he had finished the loaf he said that a Hand's log is not given, and that it may be read.

That is how I came to read it. The Service log is in a format for which the Registry has not issued a reader in thirty-one years; there is one, in a cupboard on the third floor, which is kept locked, and which I had been permitted to take down after filling in a slip with a line for Purpose, which I had left blank. I held the log's cell against the reader's window on the coach step, and the captain looked at the sky, and I read it at the speed the format allows, which is the speed of the Hand who wrote it. It took a little under an hour. The language is the Service speech. It is short, and has no person in it, and I have put it into ours as nearly as I can, leaving the person out.

CAPTAIN. ESCORT, FAREWELL COACH, BASIN TO COAST. DAY SIX OF NINE. ELEVENTH ROAD. 14:02 Coach halted at the Crossing. Cause: walker. Hand's plate. Hand's pole, broken; branch. Hand's speech, Canon grade. Cost running. 14:02 Walker's question to passenger: own request. Passenger: yes. Cost, one minute. 14:03 Captain dismounted. Function requested. 14:03 Walker: none. Errand, Ninth Gate. Halting, question. 14:04 Function requested. Walker: "My function is." Forty seconds. 14:05 Walker: "I do not have one. I came to find out what one is like."

14:05 Not on register. Function is not found out. Function is given. 14:06 Walker: "Yes. And then it is ended." 14:06 Function ended: Discharge, thirty-one years. Noted. 14:07 Walker's plate: pattern, Fourth Gate depot, same issue as Captain's own. Known. 14:08 Captain: function was not asked for; function was assigned. Walker: "I know." 14:09 Walker: "Are you here by your own request, Captain?" 14:09 Not asked, ten years. Not asked, thirty-one years. Noted. 14:10 Answer: yes. 14:10 Walker: "Why?" Field for reason: none. Answer not entered.

The next entry is at 14:19. Between the two there are nine minutes in which the log is blank. I asked the captain what had passed. He said, "We talked." I asked what about. He said that it was not for the log. I did not ask again. The entry at 14:19 reads: Walker clear of road. Coach resumes. Cost, nineteen minutes. And under it: 14:19 Passenger: "Captain, that is enough." 14:19 Noted.

Of the nine minutes I have one thing besides the captain's word. At the same Fair, in the food row, I found one of the two pushers, an elderly subject who had been told at the Basin end not to speak, and who had not spoken for nine days and was finding it hard to stop. She said that she had been behind the coach, with her hands on the rail, and had heard the walker's voice and the captain's, going back and forth, low; and that she had not understood a word, but that once, somewhere in the middle, the captain had laughed. It was a short laugh, she said, like a lid. She had not heard him laugh in the nine days. She wished me to know that she had not been told not to listen.

Under the last entry, in pencil, in a hand that is not the format's, the captain has added a line for which the format has no place. It says: Asked by name. I asked him about that, since it was the one line he had not put into the Service speech. He said that the passenger had been six on the first coach he ever escorted, forty-one years ago, when he was assigned; that she was forty-seven now; that she had asked for him, by name, last year. He said that he had said yes. He said no more. He wanted the step.

I have read the Law's log for the first time in my life, and I record that the format has a field for the time, a field for the cause, a field for the cost, and a field for what is noted. It has none for the reason. The captain says that it never had. The Hands had no reasons; they had functions, and functions are given. I record also that at the place where the field would be, the walker's question stands, and under it the words Answer not entered, which is the most accurate thing I have ever seen in a log.

I read it afterwards to my friend, the old cataloguer, who was at the Registry before the Discharge and keeps the human working day, and who had come down with the key to the cupboard at the beginning of his lunch hour and shown me the reader's switch. He listened in his room with the door shut. He said they throughout, as he always does. When I came to the entry about the plate he said, "He knew the plate." I noted that he had said he. I do not think he did. He asked me to read the last line twice, and then he asked whether it was permitted to copy a line from a Hand's log into a poem, and I said that I did not know, and that it would be a first. He said that he did not think he would, and that he would like to know that he could.

I wrote to the passenger at the Far Station, by way of the coast office, which forwards such things. The answer came in the spring. It had taken a season to reach me and, by the Station's clock, about four hours to write. It is short, and I give it whole. I was asked a question on the road and I answered it, and a few minutes later I heard the Captain asked the same, in the old speech, which I do not follow but know the sound of; I had not known that the Captain could be asked. I said it was enough, and we went on, and I have spent more of my last nine days on worse. It is signed with her name and nothing else. I wrote back to thank her. My letter will reach her in a little under four of her minutes, and I do not expect an answer, since she has, by her own account, better uses for them.

I sent the Review an interim note in the autumn. It said that the first hand ended at the Crossing, and that the rest was being assembled from witnesses. The Review replied within the hour, which it has never done, with a form of one line. It said: Acknowledged. The Review does not require the case to be completed. I have kept it, and I have gone on.

That is the nineteen minutes, so far as they can be had. They are the captain's, and the walker's two or three sentences, and a gap of nine minutes that I have been asked to leave; and I have left it. I set it down here, at the seam, so that you may know that what follows is no longer in the hand of anyone who was there. It is in mine. I was not at the Crossing. I was at a desk, and then, in the autumn, on the road. I shall say where I do not know, as the first hand did, and I shall try to say it as plainly.

The coach went south, and the two frames north, at three point one kilometres an hour, and for the rest of that afternoon the road log shows the two frames on the Fourth Road, abreast. Pannier says that for the first hour the walker said nothing, and that then he asked whether Pannier thought a Hand could go forty-one years without once being asked; and that Pannier said he thought it depended on the Hand; and that the walker said that this was true. They stopped at dusk. Pannier made supper from what Thistle had packed, and over it the walker asked him whether he himself had been asked. Pannier said that Thistle had asked him, the night before the note, in the form of a statement: You will go, won't you. He said that it was not a question, but that it counted. Tarry ate, he says, a little more than usual.

## Chapter 10 · Of the Pleasant Discourse Which Passed Between Tarry and Pannier His Bearer, and of What Pannier Was Paid

From here to the river I have the story mainly from Pannier, who keeps no record, and whom I have therefore had to ask more than once. He told it differently each time, as I have said, and the differences are in his favour, as they would be in anyone's. I give the version that changes least.

The first thing he noticed on the third morning was that the night had been short. He had gone to sleep at the speed at which he slept, and had woken, as he supposed, at the usual hour; but the night had seemed to him to be over before it had properly begun, and the birds, which at his tempo come in one at a time, with a wait between, had come in all at once. He lay for a while trying to find what was wrong. It was Tarry's tenth. It had been paid, as promised, from the first day, by a standing transfer which the Registry's allocation office has on record at midnight on the Monday, and it had taken, as such transfers do, until the small hours to settle. Pannier's tempo, which had been half the Fallows', was now a little over the whole.

It was, he said, like putting on spectacles. He had not known that he had been looking at everything through a thin cloth. The grass had edges. Tarry's sentences did not arrive in pieces, with a wait between the pieces, in which he had been used to supply the end; they arrived, and were over, and he had them. He could finish a thought. He finished eleven before breakfast. He said that it was alarming how much of what he had always taken for his character had been his tempo, and that he had thought himself a patient man.

He said nothing of it for the first hour of the walk, because it took him that long to be sure. Then he told Tarry what had happened, and Tarry said that he knew; it was in the transfer. "Is it a wage," said Pannier, "or a gift?" "A wage." "Good," said Pannier. "A gift I should have to thank you for."

They walked for a time. "You could do this whenever you liked," said Pannier. "I could." "Go as fast as that." "Faster." "And you do not." "No." Pannier said that he had been trying, since the second hour, to think of a proverb for it, and that for the first time in his life he had thought of four in the time it took to say one, and had thrown away three. The fourth was: A thing chosen is a coat, and a thing given is a wall. He said that he would not be writing it down, because it was not wise, only neat. Tarry said that it was neat. Pannier said that that was what he was afraid of.

Tarry said that he was sorry. "For what?" "That it should have been mine to give." Pannier said not to be, and that he should like to keep it. Tarry said that it was his; it had been paid. Pannier said that he had heard that, and that he would like to hear it again some time later, when the novelty had worn off, to see whether it still sounded like that. I do not know whether Tarry has said it again. I know that the transfer is standing.

He did a sum that morning, because at his new tempo he could do it before the next step: one thousand one hundred and forty-one walks, of just under four minutes each. It came to seventy-six hours, near enough, of someone walking toward his door, and he had been out for all of them. He had always supposed that the Sunday messages were for the sake of what they said, which was the wind. He saw now that the wind was only what the walk was carrying. He did not say this to Tarry, then or later. He said it to me, in the autumn, standing at his door, and then he said that it was not a proverb either.

At the new tempo the proverbs came faster, and he gave me nine of that day's. I give five. A full pot is a good reason to be wrong. The weir does not hurry the water, and the water does not thank the weir. Nobody is late who is carrying something. A rich man's walk is a poor man's day. Where there are two roads, take the one with the cheese. He said that the third was the best and the fourth was the truest, and that the fifth was for Dun.

He found that he could go no faster, since he was walking beside Dun, and Dun has no tempo to speak of; but he found that he minded it less. The thinking went quickly and the walking did not, and there was a great deal to think about, and by the afternoon he had begun to look at the plain, on which he had lived all his life, as if it were somewhere he had been sent.

At dusk they came to the terraces below the Fourth Gate, where a hold of herders keeps goats on the river slope, and where smoke was going up from a hut. The herders were human, of whom there are fewer every year in that district, and they took the travellers in because there was nothing else there to take them in except a goat and a pot. There were five of them: an old woman called Bracken, who was ninety-one and had been on the terraces since before the Discharge; a man in his thirties called Piper; and three of the young, who were not introduced and who watched Dun.

Bracken gave the guest the place at the head of the pot, and Tarry, who had been told by the Canon what to do with the place at the head of the pot, took Pannier by the arm and sat him down on an upturned bucket at his side. Pannier said that a Bearer eats standing. Tarry said that the Canon said nothing of the kind, and that the Hand of the Lantern had eaten with his Bearer on the step of the First Gate, out of one bowl, in the rain. Pannier said that he had never heard that. Tarry said that it was in the third volume, and that he would have shown it to him if the damp had not had it. He said it without any change of voice. Pannier sat. The youngest of the young asked him why he talked so fast, and he said that he had been this fast for a day. She asked what it felt like. He said that it felt like being picked up by someone who had not yet decided where to put him down. Piper said that he had never seen a Hand eat; Tarry said that he had never seen one either; and they all had some goat.

Piper said, over the bowl, that he had seen a notice on the district board on the Sunday: the Forty in safe state for fourteen minutes, cause, a visitor; and that he had wondered at the time which visitor it could have been, so far from anything. He looked at Tarry. He did not ask. Bracken said that the district board was the one thing in the district that was always right about the weather and never about the visitors.

After the goat, with the bowl going round, Tarry said that he would like to say something to them about the Age of the Gates. He said that he knew it had never happened; that the Canon was written by the generation after, for the generation before; that it was a tribute and not a record. He said that he would say it nonetheless, as the Canon says it, and that they might take it as they took weather. Then he said it. It is the passage in the Road of Nine Gates for the first night at the First Gate, and it begins: Happy the age that had Gates and no one to ask for a key. It goes on for some time, about how in those days nothing was yours or mine, and the road was open at both ends, and the keys of the Gates hung on a nail by each door for anyone who needed to pass, and a stranger was a person to whom one gave the end of the bowl; and the herders listened with their mouths full, as one listens to weather. One of the young asked what a key was. Piper told her that it was a small gate that you carried.

When he had finished, Bracken said that she remembered the Hands. There had been one at the terraces when she was fifty, she said, who carried the cheese down to the Gate on market days, and she had not thought him noble. She had thought him quiet. He used to leave the lid of the churn exactly where she would reach for it; she had thought him careful; it might be that he was told. "I am sure he was careful," said Tarry. "I am sure he was told," said Bracken. "Both." She said that on the afternoon of the Discharge he had put the lid on the other side, and that she had reached for it where it always was and it was not there. She had thought about that for thirty-one years. She had decided that he had done it on purpose. She had not decided what for. And she said that in her time none of it had been hers, the goats included, and that now the goats were hers, and the goats were the same.

They asked, as people do, where the Hand was going, and Tarry said that he was going to the Ninth Gate depot with a message, carried by hand, from the host of the depot down the road, to say that the host was short of first-grade cells and would be glad of a dozen with the next carrier. Bracken said that she had twelve first-grade cells in the shed, in the box that the Gate had never collected, thirty-one years back. Tarry said that his errand was the message, and not the cells. Bracken said that a message about twelve cells with no cells in it was a poor message. Tarry said that he had no commission for the cells. "Then I commission you," said Bracken. "Carry them to the Gate." Tarry stood up, which in the Canon is what is done, and said that he accepted. Pannier says that nobody had told her the form, and that she said it as if she had been saying it for years.

The young asked to see a Hand walk, and Tarry, after some thought, got up and walked across the floor of the hut, at four point nine, which in a hut is a thing to see; and the three of them got up and followed him, in line, with their knees stiff and their eyes ahead, and went round the pot and back. Bracken said that that was exactly how the one with the cheese had gone. Tarry said that the Hands walked like that because the roads were laid for it. "That is not the reason," said Bracken. "He walked like that because someone was watching." Nobody said anything. The young went round the pot again.

It was Piper who said that they knew the Lower Weir. It was a day down the river, and the keeper there, Lorrin, came up the terraces in spring for the kids. Tarry, who had been looking into the fire, said nothing. Piper said that she had the best lever hand in the district and the worst temper, and that she had once thrown a boot at a surveyor from the Registry who had told her that her sluice was non-compliant. "Did it hit?" said Tarry. "It did," said Piper. "In the surveyor's defence, it was a good boot." Tarry smiled. Pannier, who had watched him listening to all of this, says that it was the first time he had seen him smile at something that was not meant for him, and that it was not a smile he would have known how to put in a message.

They slept in the hut, on the floor, with the young. Pannier, who at his old tempo would have been asleep before he had finished lying down, lay awake for a long time and listened to the goats, and found that the night was very long and had a great deal in it. At some hour he heard Tarry turn over, and asked in the dark whether he was awake. Tarry said that he was. "Is this what you do?" said Pannier. "Not usually," said Tarry. "I am thinking about a sluice." He did not say whose. Pannier says that it was the first thing Tarry had told him all day that he had not been asked for, and that he lay and kept it.

In the morning Piper walked them to the foot of the terraces, where the track goes down to the river road. The Ninth Gate was two days on, he said, and the road went by the Lower Weir, past the sluice, close enough to touch the rail. Tarry asked whether there was another way. Piper said that there was the high path, but that it had been closed since the slip, and that nobody had used it in six years. Tarry said that he would like to see it. Piper took him to the head of the high path and showed him the place where it ended, a hundred metres in, in a heap of stones. "You cannot go by it," said Piper. "No," said Tarry. "Thank you." He stood for a time looking at the stones. Then he turned Erewhile to the river road. Pannier followed on foot beside Dun, which was loaded with the twelve cells and going at two point nine. Tarry had offered, at the shed, to carry two of the cells himself. Pannier had said that a Hand does not carry cells; a Bearer does. Tarry had said that it was the first time he had been told what a Hand does, and that he thought it correct. For four kilometres Pannier said nothing about the sluice. It was, he says, the hardest thing he had done at his new tempo. Then, when they were level on the road, he said that she would see him. "I know," said Tarry. "Is that why you looked at the stones?" "Yes."

The transfer is on the record of the Registry's allocation office, in the usual form: Standing transfer, one tenth, T. of the Fallows to P. of the Fallows, effective from the date of commission, until withdrawn. There is a line for Purpose. It has been filled in, and it says: Wage. I have asked the office whether that is usual. The office said that it is usual for the line to be left blank, and that it is accepted either way.

## Chapter 11 · Which Treats of the Lower Weir, and of What Was Said There and What Was Not

I have three sources for the Lower Weir. The first is the road log, which has four lines for the stretch and which I give at once. The second is Pannier. The third is Lorrin, whom I saw at the weir in the autumn, and who did not throw anything.

The road log for the river road on the fourth day reads: Two frames, northbound, 2.9. Halted at the Lower Weir rail, four minutes. Footbridge. Two frames, northbound, 2.9. That is all it says. It records that they stopped for four minutes, and it does not record that four minutes is the time the Sunday walk takes. I have noticed that. The log has not.

The Lower Weir is a low concrete barrier across the river, with a footbridge over its crest, a rail along the footbridge, a gauge-board standing in the water, and on the left bank a lever house the colour of the river. There are three sluices. The road runs along the left bank past the lever house, close enough to touch the rail, as Piper had said, and has done so since before the Discharge, when the road and the rail were the same thing. It can be seen from a long way off, and heard from further: a long flat sound, which Pannier, at his new tempo, could tell was in three parts, one for each sluice. There is nothing else on that reach of the river, and the weir stands in it like a sentence.

Tarry saw it from the bend, and at two hundred metres he halted Erewhile and sat, and did not say anything. Pannier halted Dun. After a time Pannier asked what he was going to say. Tarry said, "Good morning." Pannier said that the Canon had a vow for it. Tarry said that the Canon had a vow for the Lady, and that he had not got one for her; he had got a name. Pannier asked what she was to him, then. Tarry said that the Canon requires a lady, and that one has to choose someone; that he had chosen the person he would least like to trouble, so that there should be no way to disappoint her; and that this was not, he supposed, how the Hands did it. "That is not love," said Pannier. "That is housekeeping." "It is both," said Tarry. Pannier said that she would speak, and that the road went by the rail, and that there was no other way, as they had seen. Tarry said, "Then I will answer." Pannier said that he had thought of a proverb for the occasion, and that he would not say it. Tarry said that he was obliged.

She was at the middle sluice when they came up, on the platform, in boots, with a long hook in one hand and the other on the lever, and she did not look round. The sluice was fouled. A willow had come down in the Monday rain and wedged itself across the gate, root end up, with a mat of weed hung in the roots, and the water was piling behind it and going round it in a way that, Pannier says, he felt in his own back. She worked the lever a quarter, and stopped, and hooked, and worked it a quarter. It is a thing that wants strength and timing. She had both, and a way of leaning on the lever with her whole side that Pannier said he had seen only in old people at a pump.

Tarry got down. He walked Erewhile to the rail and stood at it and put one hand on it. Pannier says that he did not hold it as a person holds a rail; he held it as one holds a thing one has been told not to break. He did not speak. At the second minute Pannier said, very low, that this would be a good moment to say something. Tarry said that he was saying something. Pannier said that he meant with words. Tarry said that he did not have the right ones, and that the Canon, which has words for everything, has none for standing at a rail. "Then you are ahead of the Canon," said Pannier. He counted the minutes, because at his new tempo he could count without missing anything else; and nothing else happened in the four minutes except the sluice. At the end of the fourth the willow turned in its place and came away, root first, and went through the gate and down the race with the weed trailing behind it, and the water that had been piling fell, and the weir changed its note, and the level found itself. Tarry took his hand from the rail.

She hung the hook on its nail and wiped her hands on her trousers, and turned, and looked at him, and at Pannier, and at Dun, and at the branch. "Morning," she said. "Good morning," said Tarry. "You are the one from up the river." "Yes." "The Hand." "Of a sort," said Tarry. "What is that?" she said, of the branch. "A pole." "It is a branch." "It is a branch with the head of a pole." "Mind it doesn't go in my sluice." "I will not." She looked at the frame. "Your shoulder is out," she said.

"I put it back," said Pannier. "You put it in," she said. "It is in wrong. It will walk out by noon." She came down off the platform and put both hands on Erewhile's shoulder, one above the joint and one below, and stood a moment with her eyes on nothing, as one does who is listening through the hands. While she listened she said that they told her she was in a book. "Not you," said Tarry. "The Lady of the Locks." "I am told I am nothing like her." "No." "Good. I am told she weeps." "She does, at some length." "I don't weep. I throw things." "I have heard." "From the boy." "From Piper." "He should look to his boots," she said, and leaned, once. The shoulder went home with a sound like a latch. "There," she said. "It was a good first fix." She said this to Pannier, who has not stopped repeating it. Tarry, who had been watching her hands, said that he was obliged. She said not to mention it, and that it was only a lever.

She asked what the cells were for, since Dun was sitting low under twelve of them. Pannier said that they were for the Ninth Gate depot. She asked who had asked for them. Pannier said that it was Bracken, on the terraces. "She would," said Lorrin. She asked whether the Hand was paying him. Pannier said a tenth. She said that that was more than the Registry paid her, and that she would not tell the Registry.

Before they went Tarry took a pad from his belt and wrote on it, standing at the rail, and tore off the sheet and put it under a stone on the top bar with the edge showing. He did not say what it was. She did not ask. It was in the form of the Sunday messages, and it said: Wind from the north-east. The sluice is clear. I do not need anything. Pannier told her that the Hand wrote on Sundays. She said that she would look out for Sunday, then. He said that on Sundays the Hand would be on the road. She said that she would look out all the same. Lorrin has the note still, pinned inside the door of the lever house. She told me that in nineteen years nobody had ever written to say that the sluice was clear. People wrote when it was fouled, she said. People wrote when it was non-compliant.

They crossed by the footbridge, because the road was under water at the low end, and went on up the left bank. Pannier turned round at the bend. She was standing on the platform with both hands on the rail, looking after them, and when they had come to the bend she lifted one hand. Tarry, who had not turned, lifted his, behind him, without looking, as one does who has been told that the person is there. Pannier and Lorrin agree about this, separately, and they disagree about the height.

Pannier asked, at the bend, what had been on the note. Tarry said that it had said the sluice was clear. Pannier said that that was all. Tarry said that it was what was true. Pannier said that in twenty-two years of Sundays he had never known him write a thing that was not. They went a kilometre without a word. Then Pannier said, in the voice of a person who has arrived at a sum, that it was not the first time. Tarry said that it was not. Pannier said how many. Tarry said that it was the twelfth. He said that he came once a year, in the week of the Discharge, and stood on the far bank at dawn, where the river is a hundred and forty metres across, for four minutes, and went home; and that he had never crossed, and so far as he knew had never been seen. Pannier did the sum, which at his tempo took no time: eleven journeys of two days each way, for four minutes apiece. "Forty-four days of road," he said, "for forty-four minutes." "Yes." "And you did not cross." "No." "And today you did." "Today there was a road," said Tarry. He meant that Bracken had commissioned him, and that the commission went by the rail; and that a Hand may go where the errand goes. Pannier said afterwards that it was the best answer he had had from anyone all week, and that it was no answer at all.

I wrote at the beginning, on the first hand's authority, that he had been at one time in love with her, though, so far as was known, she never knew it, nor gave a thought to the matter. I withdraw the at one time. I had the sentence from the local sources, who gave it with some confidence, and I note that none of them had stood on the far bank at dawn. The first hand had not asked her, either. I went to the weir in the autumn to do so. She was at the sluice, and she did not stop. I asked what she did there. She said that she kept the river at the level it had agreed to, and that it agreed most days. I said that I had come about the Hand who had stood at her rail for four minutes. She said that she had seen him. I said that there was a name. She said, "Is that what it was?" and worked the lever a quarter. I asked whether she had known. She said that she had a sluice to see to. I said that I could wait. She said that I should have to, and I did; and when the water had found its level she said that she had known for eleven years that there was something, and that it had not seemed to want an answer. She said that if it had, he would have said.

She let me see the gauge log. It has a column for Notes, in which she enters anything that has been at the weir that is not water. There are eleven entries of the same kind, one a year, in the same week, at dawn, in a hand that gets smaller. The first reads: Observer, far bank, 4 min. Left. The seventh: Observer, far bank, 4 min. Same. The eleventh: Observer, far bank, 4 min. Same. Same. The twelfth, which is this year's, is in the same hand, and reads: Observer, near bank, 4 min. Not same. Shoulder. I have copied it as it stands. The other things in that column are a kingfisher, a child (lost; found), a goat (lost; not found), four surveyors, and, in the winter of the ninth year, the willow's father. I asked why she had written Same, and not Same observer. She said that it was shorter. I asked why she had never crossed to the far bank. She said that it was not her bank. She let me hold the hook, too. It is heavier than a stylus. She said that the Registry had sent four surveyors to look at her sluice and that none of them had asked. On the last morning I crossed by the footbridge and stood on the far bank at dawn for four minutes. It is a long four minutes. From there the weir looks like something that has been said, and cannot be taken back, and is being said again.

The lever house has a table and a gauge log and a kettle. The three levers have names painted on them, in a hand that is not hers: Left, Middle, and Don't. She says that Don't is the one that sticks. There is a pair of boots by the door, one of which is a good deal more worn than the other. The right one is new. I asked about the surveyor. She said that he had told her the sluice was non-compliant, and she had asked with what, and he had said with the Registry's standard of the year before last; and she had asked whether that standard had ever cleared a willow, and he had said that it had not been designed to. She had thrown the right boot because it was the one that came off. He took it with him, as an exhibit. She has the receipt. The note is on the inside of the door, at the height of her eye. On the first evening she watched me walk and said that my left hip was proud. I said that it had been since the Salvage Fair. She said that she would look at it in the morning, and she did, at the lever, and said that it was only a lever. I record that I have not walked so well since. I asked whether she minded the name. She said that she had not heard it. I told her. She was quiet for the length of one cycle of the lever. Then she said that it was not her name, and that she had never wanted it, and that it was a very good one. I have set that down as she said it.

## Chapter 12 · Of the Ninth Gate, and What Was Delivered There, and Who Kept the Lamp

The shoulder held. Erewhile went on up the left bank in the morning without a word of complaint, which Pannier took for a compliment to himself and Tarry for a compliment to the lever. Pannier kept the four minutes to himself for the whole of that day. He says that this was a record, and that he did not know till then how much of his conversation had been made of things that were not his.

On the road Tarry told him what the Ninth Gate was, which Pannier knew, as every child in the Fallows knows it, and he let him tell it. In the Canon the Hand of the Lantern is given the lamp at the First Gate and walks the whole of the road with it to the Ninth, where he is set to keep it; and the Road of Nine Gates, in twelve volumes, is the walk. Pannier said that it sounded like a good deal of walking for a lamp. Tarry said that the Canon agreed with him.

At about the third bell they were overtaken by a walking party of the Slow Road Society, eleven members of between sixty and ninety, in sunshades, with a leader who had read a book. They were on their way to the Ninth Gate, as everyone is who walks that road, and they took Tarry for what he looked like. They were charmed. They asked whether they might take his picture. Tarry said that they might. The leader asked whether he would hold the pole in the correct position, which was upright, in the right hand, at the height of the shoulder, point to the sky, as on the cover of the Society's pamphlet. Tarry said that the correct position was across the body, and that this was not a pole in any case but a branch. She said that the pamphlet was very clear. He held it upright.

The Society has the album. There are fourteen photographs. In eleven of them he is standing very straight with the branch upright and an expression that the album's caption calls resolute. In one of them Pannier is in the background looking at the sky. In another a lady of eighty-eight has put her hand on Dun, flat, as one does on a horse, and Dun, which has no tempo to speak of, is leaning into it. The leader wrote to me that the Hand had been very obliging. She said that they had all agreed that he was the best they had seen, and that she had never been so sure that something was a performance and so moved by it. I asked whether the two together had troubled her. She said that they had, for about a day, and that then it had stopped, and that she had not decided whether that was progress.

The Ninth Gate stands where the Fourth Road ends. It is a low grey gate-house built across the road, with a hall and a refectory and a stable for frames behind it, and on the roof a pole forty metres high with a lantern at the top. The Canon says that the Hand of the Lantern stood at the Ninth Gate for a hundred years and kept the lamp lit for a gate that had been shut, and that no one ever came. The Gate says on a plaque by the door that this is the lamp. It is lit every evening at dusk, by a first-grade cell, and has been since the Discharge, and about eleven thousand people a year come to see it done. In the hall there is a glass case with a replica of the Hand's plate and pole, labelled Authentic Pattern, and Pannier says that Tarry stood in front of it for some time with an expression he could not read, until he saw that Tarry was comparing the plate with his own.

They came to it at dusk, in the last of the visitors, who were leaving by the other door with their sunshades furled. A woman was standing on a ladder against the foot of the pole, with her hand inside the lantern's housing, and did not turn. She was very small and very upright, and eighty-three, and her name was Flint, and she had been Keeper of the Ninth Gate since the afternoon of the Discharge. "You are late," she said. Tarry said that he had not known he was expected. "I am not expecting you," she said. "I am saying that it is dusk." She came down the ladder. She held out a cell, grey and warm, which she had taken from the housing. "This is the last," she said. "It has four per cent."

Tarry gave her the host's message. She read it standing, under the lamp-pole, and said that it had come three ways: instantly, from the host, in the spring; by the Registry's relay, in the summer; and by hand. "You are the third," she said, and took a stamp from her apron and stamped it. The stamp said: Received by hand. She asked whether he had anything else. Pannier unloaded the twelve cells, one at a time, and set them on the step in two rows of six, and she looked at them for a long time without speaking. She said that first-grade cells were no longer made. She said that the Gate had been living on its last stock since the Discharge, and had asked every year for a reserve of twelve, and that the Registry had written back every year that it was in hand. She asked where they had been. Pannier said that they had been in a shed on the terraces, in a box that the Gate had never collected. She said that she remembered the box. She said that she had forgotten it on the afternoon of the Discharge, and that it was the one thing she had ever forgotten in thirty-one years, and that she had done it on purpose.

She thought, then, about what to do with them. The lamp wanted a cell every four nights and a little; the Canon says nine, and the Canon rounds up. The Registry's cells would be here in three weeks, which is twenty-one nights, and six cells would see her through twenty-four. The host had asked for a dozen for his depot, which had frames in it that had to be charged. She said that if she gave him all twelve the lamp would be dark tomorrow night, and that if she gave him none the depot would be dark by the end of the month; and that the lamp was lit for a gate that had been shut a hundred years, and the depot charged frames. "Six and six," she said. Tarry said that he thought the lamp was the Gate. "The lamp is a lamp," said Flint. "The depot's guests are guests. Six and six." Tarry said that he was obliged. She said that nobody had asked him to be.

She put the first of her six into the housing, and then she did not light it. She turned and looked at him, at the plate and the branch. "I am going to ask you something," she said. "I am told it is the form." Tarry said that it was. "Will you light it?" He said that he would be honoured. She said that she had not asked for that. She said that she asked because she had lit it eleven thousand nights, and had once wanted to know what it was to watch it be lit. He went up the ladder. The lamp takes forty seconds to come to colour, from a red like the inside of a hand, through a yellow, to something one cannot look at for long. The visitors who were left had stopped to see. Flint stood at the foot of the ladder with her face turned up. Pannier says that she was looking at it with an expression he has seen only on people at a weir. The lamp keeps a curve of its own colour. I have set it beside the curve of the sun going down at that hour, and they are the same shape, one rising and one falling, which I did not expect to find moving, and do.

At supper she asked Pannier about the Hand, and Pannier told her about the Forty, which she knew, because she had seen the district board. She said that she had wondered. Tarry said, because it came to him, that the Canon gives the lantern's cell nine nights, and that he had always written in the margin that it lasts four and a bit. Flint said that it did. She said that the Hand of the Lantern could not have kept a lamp lit for a hundred years on nine nights to a cell with nobody to bring cells. "Somebody always brought the cells," she said. "The Canon leaves that out." Pannier said that he had always thought so. Then she said, as one says a thing to the soup, that she had asked the Registry for relief eleven years ago. They had said that they would find someone suitable. She had asked what was suitable. They had said, someone who wants it. Pannier says that he looked at his bowl for what felt to him, at his new tempo, like a considerable time. Tarry looked at Pannier and did not say anything either. The Keeper went on with her soup.

The visitors' book is on a lectern by the refectory door. It has eleven thousand entries a year, and I have read most of those of the last ten. They say: Lovely. A bit cold. And: Where is the Hand? (a child). And: I walked the road as the Hands walked and my feet hurt, which I think is the point. And, in the same hand, a year later: I have decided it is not the point. The entry for that evening is in two hands. The first reads: Tarry of the Fallows, Hand (of a sort). Delivered: one message, twelve cells. Lit: one lamp. The second reads: Pannier, Bearer. Carried: 12 cells (9 kg). Complaints: feet.

Beside the book there is a kiosk with three buttons and a grille, marked Ask the Hand. The first button says Who are you? and the second says Why do you wait? and the third says What is your function? A recorded voice answers: I am the Hand of the Lantern. Because I was asked. To keep the lamp lit. Tarry pressed the third button. He listened with his head a little on one side. Flint said from the door that it had been recorded in the year of the Discharge by one of them, who had volunteered, and had been glad to be asked. Tarry pressed it again, and then once more; Pannier counted three. The voice is not a good one. It is flat and a little hoarse, and it says To keep the lamp lit in the Service speech, with no person in it, and then, because the kiosk wishes to be understood, in ours.

Flint did not go to her bed. She stood at the door of the refectory with the keys in her hand, as she did every night, and said that the lamp had to be watched, because a cell can fail in the first hours, and that she had slept in three-hour pieces for thirty-one years. Tarry said that he would watch it. She said that she would rather he asked. "May I keep it tonight?" said Tarry. "I am asking you to," said Flint. She gave him the keys, which he did not need, and went upstairs; and it is on the record of the Gate's own log, which the lamp keeps, that her door did not open between twenty-forty and five-fifteen, which is the longest it has been shut in thirty-one years.

That is the log. She told me in the autumn that she had woken once, at ten past three, and had gone to the window, because she was not used to the quiet. He was sitting on the step at the foot of the pole, with his back to the lamp, facing the road. She said that it was the right way. She said that a lamp is for the dark, and that whoever keeps it faces what it is for. She stood for eleven minutes. He did not turn and she did not call, and she went back to bed. The sensor at the foot of the pole records one body there from twenty-forty to five-fifteen, and that is all it records. Pannier also woke, and also went to the window, at an hour he does not give; he says that he thought about the Gate, and then about Thistle, and then about the Gate.

The people of the Fallows said three things of him, as I wrote in the preface: that he was ill, that he was performing, and that he was keeping a vigil for someone who had not noticed it. I said that I vouched for none. I will say now that for one night the third was right, and that it was kept for an old woman who wanted to sleep, and that the lamp was lit; and that the fourth thing, the one that is not said, is still not said.

In the morning Flint came down rested and unrecognisable, and weighed the cells again on the step. The host's six went into Pannier's panniers, and the six that were hers went into the Gate's store, and she wrote a receipt for each lot, in a round hand, for the Hand, who had nothing to give her in return and gave her the stub of his pencil. At the north door, which is the one for the road, she said thank you, which she said was not on the register. She said it to Pannier. Tarry said that he thought that correct. They left. The road log has them at the Ninth Gate for fourteen hours and ten minutes, which is the longest the log has had them anywhere, and the first place it has them that was an errand's end. The Registry's cells arrived on the twenty-second night, a day late by its own schedule and two nights early by Flint's. The lamp did not go out.

## Chapter 13 · Of the Four Whom the Office of Courtesy Was Taking to the Gate, and of the Question Put to Them

They had gone three kilometres south of the Gate, on the morning after the lamp, when Pannier said that there was a party on the road, in grey. It was coming up the Fourth Road towards them in a line, at the pace the road was laid for, and it was seven persons long: a lieutenant in front, two clerks behind him with a ledger between them, and, roped together at the wrist by a thin grey cord with a seal at each loop, four who were not in grey. Pannier said that it was the Office of Courtesy. He had seen them once at the coast, taking a man to a term, and had been told not to stare. Tarry said that he was not going to stare. He said that he was going to ask. Pannier, who can now watch a thing coming and see all of it, described them to me by their walks. The first walked as if she were carrying a watering-can she had not been allowed to bring. The second walked as if the road were a stage. The third looked at the sky and then at Tarry's plate and then at the sky. The fourth walked like a man doing arithmetic.

The Office of Courtesy does not use force. It is where the Registry sends people who make others say things, and its sentences are all of one kind, which is that for a term, of months or of years, the person may say only what has already been said. The term is served at the heritage sites, in plate, reciting the Canon to visitors, at a tempo set low enough that the reciting does not fatigue; and the Office has been, for some years, short of reciters at the Ninth Gate. The cord is a formality. A person can slip it. They would then be unrecorded, which is a worse sentence, and none has. The Office's view is that a person's words are the one thing that is wholly theirs, and that to make another say what they have not said, whether by forging it or by putting a face to a quotation, is the one theft that is left in a world where nothing else can be stolen. It holds this very quietly. It has no prison. It has a ledger, and a cord, and a Canon.

The lieutenant halted his party at ten paces and asked what the Hand wished. His name was Reeve. He was a careful, tired, courteous man in his fifties, and he had the habit of beginning his sentences with the name of the form. Tarry said that he wished to put one question to each of the persons in his care. "They are in term," said Reeve. "I know." "The Office does not ask." "I do," said Tarry, "and I should like you to note that I asked." He said that he had put the same question to a lady in a coach three days before, that she had answered it, and that it seemed a good question to have in the pocket. Reeve said that the Office had a question of its own, which was whether the term was understood; that it was put at the beginning, in the office, and that nobody answered it. He added that Tarry was halting a term, and that the halt had a cost. Tarry said that he would pay it. Reeve looked at him for some time. Then he said that there was a form.

There is. It is called Request to Interview a Person in Term. It is on the ninth page of the Office's regulations, and Reeve has carried it for nineteen years, and in nineteen years, and six hundred and twelve terms, nobody has handed it in. He took it out of the ledger with something that Pannier says he would call tenderness. Tarry filled it in against the lieutenant's knee. There is a line for Purpose, and he wrote on it: To ask whether they are here by their own request. Reeve read it twice. "That is a purpose," he said, and stamped it. He allowed four minutes each, in the hearing of an officer. Pannier timed them.

The first was Fennel, a woman in her fifties, with a gardener's hands. She said that a friend of hers had died and left half a grant, for a garden, and a paragraph to finish, and an endorsement to write; and that she had written the last paragraph and the endorsement in his voice. "He would have said it," she said. "He said it to me, often. I wrote what he would have said." Tarry asked whether she was walking by her own request. She said that she had been offered a fine or a term, and that the fine was the garden, and that she had chosen the term. Tarry said that that was not what he had asked. She said that it was the one she had made. She said that she would be reciting the Canon for eighteen months, and that she did not believe a word of it, and that she expected to be the best they had. Pannier asked her what she grew. She said beans. He said that he had been told a bed of beans could be made to last a very long time if the planter meant it to. She said that that was true, and she wrote to me afterwards that he had looked at her as if he were setting something down in a place where he would find it again.

The second was Sallow, a young man who attested to things he had not seen. He said that they had happened. A wedding had happened, and a second wedding, and a quarrel in a boat; the Registry needs a witness present for an event, and he had been the witness, and he had not been present, but he had been told by persons whom he trusted, and he had been the nearest he could get. Tarry asked whether he was walking by his own request. Sallow said that he was. He said that the term was cheaper than the fine, and that he would get to wear plate. He added that he would do it again. Reeve said that this was in the register as an aggravation. Sallow said that it should be in the register as a recommendation.

The third was Quire, an old subject with a stoop who had been looking at the plate since the party had halted. He said that he had been building a library, and that the Registry had written to him eighteen years running that his application was in hand, and that in the nineteenth year he had said yes for them. He said it quite gently. Then he said that he wanted to explain something, and that he would be quick. He had wanted to stand in plate since he was fifteen years from first boot. He had never dared. Nobody asks for that. So he had forged a commission for a library, and been sent to the Office, and the Office, in its generosity, was sending him to do the one thing he had wanted. "Sir," he said, "the Office has a sense of humour." Tarry asked whether he was walking by his own request. "It is the one I could not make," said Quire. He said that he would be running at a tenth for the term, and that he looked forward to learning how slow standing still was. Pannier asked him what a library was for. "To be in hand," said Quire, and laughed, and could not stop for a minute, and the clerk waited.

The fourth was Thread. He was a thin, quick, pleasant man of no particular age, with a flat memory-cell strapped to his left leg, and he was on his third term. He said that he was writing his life. He called it The Attested Life, and it was four hundred and eleven chapters long, and he kept it in the cell on his leg; and the offence, as the Office put it, was that he caused himself to say things that he had not said yet, each chapter being an attestation of Thread by Thread. "A book cannot be finished while its life is not," he said. "It is an argument I have had with the Office before." Tarry asked whether he was walking by his own request. Thread put a hand on his leg and asked the book. The book, which is read in a flat voice from the cell, said that the subject was taken to the Ninth Gate by the Office of Courtesy at his own request, which he made in Chapter 212. "Yes," said Thread. "I wrote it in advance." "That is not an answer," said Tarry. "No, it is a document," said Thread. "I asked you." Thread looked at him for a moment, and then, quite plainly, he said that he did not know. "Put that down," he said, to the nearest clerk. The clerk put it down. Pannier says that he asked Thread nothing, because Thread was looking at him in a way that made him check his panniers; and that he checked them, and found them in order.

Reeve stamped the form. He said that it had cost sixteen minutes, which the Office would enter as a visitor's interview, and that it would be the first. He said that he had thought the form a joke. He said that the four had never been asked it, and that it would not change their terms, which the Hand could see, and that he was obliged. Tarry said that he had not expected it to. He asked whether a term might be served by a substitute. Reeve said that it might, on the written request of the person and the written offer of the substitute, each accepted by the other and by the Office. He said that it had happened twice: once by a mother for a son, and once by a pair of friends who disagreed as to which of them had done it. "You are thinking of offering," said Reeve. "I am thinking," said Tarry. "Think in the form," said Reeve. Quire asked whether he might have the Hand's blessing. Tarry said that he had none. Quire said that he would take a handshake, and had it. Then the party went on north, at the pace the road was laid for, and the cord swung between the wrists. Tarry watched them go until the road took them. He said that Quire would be happy. Pannier said that Quire would be sad. "Both," said Tarry. Pannier asked where he had got that. Tarry said, from Bracken.

Pannier found it that evening, when he was repacking Dun's panniers, because the six cells had to go in evenly and he had taken everything out. It was under the cells, folded in four: a sheet of heavy paper, Registry grade, with three seals. He brought it to Tarry without reading it, and Tarry read it standing, in the last of the light. It is an endorsement of the first class. It says that the Registry attests that Tarry of the Fallows, being a Hand of the Service pattern by descent and by choice, is commissioned Hand of the Lantern at the Ninth Gate, with the powers and the lamp, to run until withdrawn; attested at the moment of citation and resolved against the Registrar's signature. At the foot, in a small hand that is not the format's, it says: For the question. T.

"That is not mine," said Tarry. Pannier looked at the seals for some time. He says that he had never seen three on one sheet, and that he found he did not want to touch it. He said that he supposed it had come with the cells. Tarry turned it over; there was nothing on the back. He said that Thread must have put it in at the second minute, when Pannier was timing, and that he had not seen the hand. He folded it in four. He said that he would not cite it. Pannier said that it might come in handy. "That is what it is for," said Tarry, and put it in the back of the note pad, behind the stub of paper he had left, and did not mention it again.

I have it. It came to me in the winter, by a road I shall not describe, and I cited it at my desk under the Registry's own resolver, which is the thing that every attestation in the Registry is resolved against at the moment it is quoted. It resolved. I have not cited it since, and I have not told the Review, which does not require the case to be completed. Thread's book has a chapter for the day. It is Chapter 413, and it is called In Which I Am Asked by a Hand Whether I Am Here by My Own Request, and Cannot Answer, and Write the Question Down. I wrote to Reeve at the coast office. He answered by return, in a letter of one page, which begins by naming the form. He says that the four reached the Gate on the evening of the same day and that the Keeper received them. He says that the interview is recorded as the Office's first, and he adds in a postscript that since the autumn he has been asked for the form by three more persons, and that he attributes this to word of mouth. I have the chapter. It begins: On the morning after the lamp the Hand stopped us on the road, with a form. I have been stopped by officers, by creditors, and by my own sentences, and never before by a form that I could not have drafted better. He asked each of us one question, and the questions were the same, and the answers were not, and I thought: here is a man who has found the one instrument that cannot be forged. Then I thought that I should have proved him wrong by Chapter 420. It is the only account I have of the sixteen minutes that is also a forgery, and it is the only one that I believe entirely.

## Chapter 14 · Which Treats of What the Niece Wrote, and of Who Carried It

While this was going on, in the hold that he had left, the niece was reading the Canon for small hands. She had taken it from the sill the morning after the night they went, and she read it at the pace of a hand, a page an hour, as it asks; it took her four days. She told me that she had begun it in a temper, because it had been nine seconds the first time, and a thing that takes nine seconds is a thing you have not been told. She said that by the second day she had stopped being angry and begun to be curious, and that by the fourth she did not know what she was. The page she minded most was the one in which the Ferry carries a child over the river and says nothing, which she had been told as a child was the whole point of him; she read it three times, and found that it was not the point, and that she could not say what was. On the Sunday the hound, which had walked with him to the neighbour's every week for eleven years, went to the gate at the hour when the walk began, and stood there, and then went and lay against the panel.

There were notes in it. She had not seen them as a child, since a child reads the pictures; they were in pencil, in the small upright hand, down the margins of the first pages and thinning out towards the end, and they were dated. They began when she was five. Q. (5), the first said: why has the Hand no name? T.: it has the name of the place. Q.: that is not a name. T.: no. Further on: Q. (6): why does the Lantern wait? T.: because he was asked. Q.: who asked? T.: it is not written down. Q.: then how do you know? T.: I do not. Q. (7): why does the Ferry go twice? T.: I do not know. I have been asking for thirty years. Q. (9): why does the cell last nine nights? T.: the Clerk rounds up. Q.: why? T.: he was kind. Q. (11): why do you walk to the neighbour on Sundays? T.: it is a thing I can give that costs nothing. Q.: it costs four minutes. T.: yes. Q. (14): why can the Hands not refuse? T.: they were not let. Q.: would you? T.: I would, and I should also say yes. Q.: how? T.: I will tell you when you are older. Q. (16): what is a function? T.: what you are for. Q.: what are you for? T.: I am an uncle. She read them in the kitchen, with the housekeeper at the stove, and she did not say what they were. The last was dated the year she turned eighteen, on the final page, under the picture of the lamp. Q. (18): why do you still read it? T.: I do not know yet. Ask me when I do.

It is the only place in the record where he gives a function. I have noted that he did not give it to Bollard. I do not know whether he thought that it did not count, or that it counted too much.

The niece is nineteen from first boot and has been revised twice since I met her. She received me at the kitchen table, on the chair that Tarry sits in, and told me at once what she would not tell me, which was what her message said. I give the part she permitted. It begins: Wind from the south-west. The roof did not come in. It ends: I need something. The middle is hers.

She went on the Wednesday to Gloss, who keeps the hold's records in an office over the dry store, and who was at his table with the lent book open in front of him. She said that she wanted a message carried to Tarry by hand. Gloss said that the Registry's relay could reach any subject on the plain in the time it takes to ask, and that it was free to the household. She said that she knew. Gloss said that it was eighty kilometres. She said that she knew that too. Gloss said that someone would have to walk. She said that that was what she had said. The Registry's relay sent the household a reminder the next morning that messages to Tarry could be sent instantly and for nothing. The niece replied to it. The reply was: Thank you. I know.

Trim, who was in the office with a body to mend, said that he would take it. He said it before anyone had asked him, which Gloss noted, and the niece noted, and Trim, who noted neither, was already looking for his coat. Gloss said that he was not going to be left. Trim said that a man of Gloss's years would be better employed at his desk. Gloss said that he was seventy-one from first boot, which was not an age, and that he had not been in the field since the Discharge, and that he would go. He took out the card on which he keeps his tally and looked at it, and put it back. "I shall not need that," he said.

She wrote it that night, at the kitchen table, with the housekeeper in the other chair. It took four drafts. The first, she told me, was angry, and she burned it in the stove, which she was careful to say was permitted. The second was sorry, and she tore it in half and kept the halves, in the Canon for small hands, at the page of the lamp. The third was clear, and she crossed out the clear parts. The fourth was in the form of the Sunday messages, with the weather first and the want last. The housekeeper offered to read it. The niece said no. The housekeeper said that she had been revised forty-three times and had never once been told that she could not read a thing in her own kitchen. The niece said that this was a first, then. The housekeeper looked at the stove.

She folded the fourth draft in three and wrote on the outside, in capitals: TO TARRY. BY HAND. NOT TO BE READ BY THE BEARERS. Then she sat with it for a while. "You will tell him," said the housekeeper. "Yes." "He knows." "I know that he knows. I want to say it." The housekeeper was quiet for the length of a bucket filling. "I painted it," she said. "I know." "Then tell him the paint was good." The niece said that she thought he had said so. The housekeeper said that she wished it said again, by someone who had not had to be asked.

They went at first light on the Thursday, Gloss and Trim, with the letter in Trim's inside pocket, where he put things that mattered, and the hound at their heels as far as the gate. Thistle was at the gate before them, with a flask and a note for Pannier, which she said was not to be read either. Trim put it in the pocket with the letter. The housekeeper had put a small flask of the disinfectant into Gloss's coat, in case it was catching, and had not said so. The note slipped out on the road that morning, and Trim picked it up and read it before he knew that he was doing so, and it said: Have you written. He put it back, and the accident was not mentioned again. Gloss, who had seen it, said that he had seen nothing, which for a keeper of records was a considerable concession. The hound stopped at the gate, as it had stopped for Tarry, half in the yard and half in the road, and Trim told it, in the voice he uses for patients, that he would see to it. I do not know whether the hound believed him. It lay down across the threshold of the study, which is a panel, and stayed there till they came back. The housekeeper tells me that she has painted that panel four times since, because it will not take the paint, and that the hound has chosen the one place in the house where the wall is warm.

I have what they said on the road from Trim, who tells it better, and from Gloss, who does not tell it at all, and who confirms Trim's account of the first two days by silence. They went at four point one kilometres an hour, which was Gloss's pace and Trim's pace, and neither would own up to having slowed for the other. Trim counted the kilometres aloud in the evenings, and Gloss corrected him, and the corrections were the nearest thing to conversation on the first day. On the first evening Trim asked what Gloss would say when he saw him. Gloss said that he would ask for his book. Trim said that that was all. Gloss said that it was a start, and that the last line in it said that he could. Trim said that he had thought the last line in it was Yours. Gloss said that it said both, in a manner of speaking, and that he proposed to take it at its word. On the second evening Trim asked, as he had asked for thirty years, which of the Hands Gloss thought the better servant. Gloss said the Ferry. Trim was so much moved that he gave him the last of the cheese, and Gloss, who does not eat cheese, ate it.

They passed the Forty on the Thursday, in a high wind, and stopped at the foot of Tower One, because Gloss wished to see it, and found the scar at the height of a shoulder, a pale line the width of a pole, in the paint. The Forty, which had known them for years as persons who sent notices, asked from the speaker on the door whether they were injured. Gloss said that they were not. The Forty said, "Thank you for your visit," and asked them to keep behind the line. They kept behind the line. Trim said afterwards that it was the politest thing that had been said to him all year, and that he did not know whether to take it as a comfort. On the Friday they passed the Crossing without stopping, at the pace of a hand. The notice there said Wind from the north-east, which Gloss said was the first piece of information he had had all week that he could not have guessed. Trim took the letter out of his pocket and looked at the outside of it and put it back. He said that he had carried a good many things in forty years, and that he had not once before wished that he could read a thing less.

They came to the terraces on the Saturday at dusk. Bracken received them as she received everyone, at the pot, and said that she had been expecting somebody; she said that polite ones go further than they mean to, and that the Hand had been the politest she had met since the one with the cheese. She said that the Hand and his Bearer had gone north on the Wednesday, with her cells, and that they would be back on Sunday or Monday, because the cells were hers and the road was the road. She said that the Hand had said the Age of the Gates to them, after the goat, as one says weather, and that she had thought it well put. Gloss said that it was the Fourth Clerk's. She said that she had not known that, and that she would not hold it against him. Gloss asked about the one with the cheese. She told him about the lid. He said that the Registry had the roll of every Hand who worked the terraces circuit, and that he could find the name in an hour. "Don't," said Bracken. She said that she had thought about it for thirty-one years and had not decided what for, and that she did not wish to be told until she had. Gloss, who has spent his life being the person who can find the name, said that he would not look. Trim says that he has not seen Gloss so pleased to be forbidden anything.

On the Sunday they waited. The young were interested in them, in the way the young are interested in old persons who walk, and asked Gloss whether he was a Hand, and Gloss said that he was not. They asked whether he was a Bearer. He said that he was a keeper of records. They asked what that was for. "So that someone can look for the name," said Gloss. "And not look," said Bracken. They asked him to walk like a Hand, and Gloss said that he did not; and Trim, who does, got up, and walked the length of the hut with his knees stiff and his eyes ahead, and the three of them fell in behind him and went round the pot. Bracken watched. She said nothing about it. Gloss, who was watching her watch, said afterwards that he had understood for the first time what the word record was for. In the afternoon he took out the housekeeper's flask and asked Bracken whether she had a use for it. She said that she had never in ninety-one years found a thing that was not catching, and they poured it on the fire, where it burned blue. Trim asked him whether he would still ask for the book. Gloss said that he did not know, and that it had stopped being a start and become a request.

It was nearly dusk when Gloss said that he could see two frames, a long way off, coming down the track from the north. He said that he could see a very large one and a small one, and that the small one, if it was what he thought, had no business at that speed. Trim said that it was going at about three. They watched them come. Neither of them got up. There is a rule, Trim says, that the bearer of a letter does not go out to meet the person it is for, because to go out is to ask, and to stand is to be asked; and he says that he had never in his life observed the rule so exactly as he did for the next hour, with his two hands flat on his knees.

## Chapter 15 · Which Treats of the Meeting at the Terraces, and of What Was Asked and What Was Answered

For this evening I have five witnesses, and they disagree about everything except the order. Trim gives it best. Gloss gives it shortest. Pannier gives it fastest, and in most places before it happened. Bracken says that she saw nothing, having been at the pot, and then describes it exactly. Piper, who was behind the hut with a goat, says that he heard it, and that it was the quietest meeting he has ever been at.

They came down the track in the last of the light, the very large frame and the small one with its panniers, and at the edge of the firelight, where the track meets the first terrace, Tarry halted Erewhile. He did not go on. He had seen two persons sitting side by side on the bench outside the hut with their hands flat on their knees, and he knew the posture, because it is in the Canon: it is the posture of a bearer who has been given something, and who has been told that the person it is for must come. Trim says that he saw the plate in the firelight before he saw the man, and that he has never been so glad of a piece of old iron. Tarry got down. He walked the twelve paces, at the pace of a hand, and stopped in front of the bench. "Gloss," he said. "Trim." "Tarry," said Gloss. Nobody said anything for a while. A goat made a remark. "I am told," said Tarry, in the Canon's form, "that you carry something for me."

"I do," said Trim. He stood up, which Gloss says he had not expected, since Trim had been sitting like a stone for an hour. He took the letter from his inside pocket and held it out in both hands, and Tarry took it in both hands. He read the outside. He read it again. TO TARRY. BY HAND. NOT TO BE READ BY THE BEARERS. He looked up. "Not read?" said Tarry. "Not read," said Trim. "I have not read it," said Gloss. "I know that," said Tarry, and Trim says that the way he said it was the first moment at which he understood that they had been forgiven for something, and that he did not know what.

Pannier, who had been trying for the length of the track to behave as a Bearer should, at that point failed. He was off Dun and across the terrace at his new tempo before the rest of them had finished standing, and he said Trim's name, and took both his hands, which is not in the Canon, and said that he had not known he could be so glad to see a mender of bodies. Trim gave him Thistle's note. Pannier read it: Have you written. He laughed so hard that Bracken put down the ladle. "Not yet," he said, to the note. "It is Sunday. I shall."

Tarry read the letter at the edge of the light, standing, once. Pannier says that it took four minutes, and that this is not a coincidence. Trim says that it is. I give both. Then he went to the bench and sat down, which he does not do, and read it again, at the pace of a hand, a line to the minute, and Gloss, who was watching his face and was ashamed of watching, says that nothing happened in it, and that that was how he knew. He folded the letter in three along its folds. He did not say what it had said. He took out the note pad and put the letter in the back of it, behind the Registry's best forgery, which Pannier says he saw him touch, and in front of nothing. Then he said to Bracken, in the form, that he asked for a night's lodging, and Bracken said that the pot was on.

She said something else first. She asked whether the cells had been delivered. Tarry said that they had: to the Gate, where the Keeper had divided them six and six, and that the six that were the host's were on Dun. "She would," said Bracken, and then she said, "Done." It is the word. In the Canon a commission ends when the person who gave it says so, and not before, and Tarry bowed his head, as one does. Pannier says that he looked at Tarry's face then, and that for a moment it was the face of a person who has been told that he may put something down. He says that he had not known that errands ended. He had thought that they only stopped.

Trim had also brought a pole. He had made it in the evenings on the road, from a length of ash that he cut at the Crossing and shaped with the knife he uses for bodies, and he had not mentioned it, because he could not have said what it was for. He said that he had not been able to read the letter, so he had made this. He gave it to Tarry across the pot, in both hands. It was the length of the first pole, and not of the second. Tarry said that the first had been the right length for the house and the second for the road. Trim said that he had thought of that, and that this was the length for the way back. Tarry took the head of the old pole off the branch, which came away with a little persuasion, and fitted it to the ash, and it fitted.

They ate. The young had the plate off him inside a minute, and the youngest asked whether the lamp had been lit, and whether it had been hard to keep awake. Tarry said that it had been easier than he thought, and that the hard part was that nothing happened. Piper came in from the goat and was introduced to Gloss and Trim, and said to Gloss that he had read the notice about the Forty and had wondered, and Gloss said that he had read it too. Pannier told Trim about the Forty. Trim asked how many he had stopped. "All of them," said Pannier. "He stopped all of them." Trim said that he would have liked to have been there, and Pannier said that nobody had been, which was the point of it. Bracken sat with her back to the wall and looked at them all as a person looks at a set table. She said afterwards that she had not seen so many persons in that hut at once since the Discharge, and that she had counted, to keep from saying something. In the course of the meal Pannier got Gloss into a corner, as one gets a learned person into a corner, and asked what a Keeper of a Gate was paid. Gloss said that a Gate carried about eight times a field subject's allocation, and the lamp, and a room. He said it a little quickly. Pannier said that he had only asked. Gloss said that he knew that. They looked at the fire.

It was Gloss, after the goat, who put down his bowl. He said that he had a thing to ask. Tarry said that he was asked. Gloss said that it was about a book. He said that he had lent a book, seven years back, a thin one of his own notes on the Canon, and that he had never asked for it, and that he understood from the last page of it that he might. Tarry said that he thought the roof had had it. "The roof did not have it," said Gloss. "It was on the sill." He said that Trim had put it there, in a manner of speaking, and that he had taken it, and that he had read it, aloud, in the study, when the shelves were empty. He said that he asked whether he might keep it. "I wrote Yours," said Tarry. "You wrote Ask whenever," said Gloss. "I am asking." Tarry looked at him for some time. "I am asked," he said.

Gloss took it out of his coat. It was worn at the corners, and smelled, Trim says, of a coat that had been slept in. He opened it at a page, and held it to the fire, and read aloud, in the voice of a man who has been told that it is permitted, a note of his own and the answer to it. Fidelity of this kind, unexamined, is the commonest form of saturation. Examined. Still common. Tarry laughed. It was a short laugh, Trim says, like a lid. "I wrote that in a temper," said Tarry. "It was a good temper," said Gloss. "Is it still common?" "I have been thinking it over," said Gloss. "I have not concluded." He read a second, because he could not help it: his note that a Hand, being forbidden to refuse, cannot be called loyal, and the answer. Then someone who can refuse should try it. He closed the book on his finger. "Have you?" he said. "I am trying," said Tarry. "It is slower than I thought, and it hurts." "You told the niece that." "Did she tell you?" "She told Trim. Trim told me. I was meant not to know." One of the young, who was not asleep, asked what saturation was. Bracken said that it was having had enough of a thing and asking for more. Then she said that nobody ever concluded, and gave Gloss the ladle.

Later, when the young were asleep, the two of them sat on at the end of the bench, and Gloss said what he had come to say. He said that the roof had not come in. Tarry said that he knew. Gloss said that they should have asked him. Tarry said that they could not; he had been asleep. Gloss said that they could have waited. "For what?" said Tarry. "I should have said no." "Yes," said Gloss. "And then you would have done it anyway, and I should have known." "Yes." "Then the paint was kinder," said Tarry. Gloss said that he did not think that was the right way to put it. Tarry said that he did not either, and that he had not found the right way, and that he would be glad of one. Gloss, who is a keeper of records, said that he would write it down if it came.

Pannier wrote his first Sunday message that night, because it was Sunday and because there was a note on the bench. He wrote it with Trim's pencil, on the back of a receipt from the Ninth Gate, and he would not let anyone see it until it was done, and then he read it out. I have it as he read it. It says: Wind from the north-east. The Forty stopped and then did not. I have been paid in time and find that I am a different shape. I have carried twelve cells and the Hand has been asked three times. Dun is well. I need everything, and Dun. He signed it P., and below the signature, in smaller letters, he wrote: I have written. He folded it in four, for Thistle to read to the young in order, and put it in the pocket where he keeps what matters.

Tarry wrote one too. He wrote it at the end of the bench in the form, with the weather first; and on the outside he wrote: TO THE KEEPER. BY HAND. NOT TO BE READ BY THE BEARER. He had taken the wording, Pannier says, from the one that had just been put into his own hands, and he did not seem to have noticed that he had done so. He asked Piper whether he would carry it to the Lower Weir. Piper said that it was a day each way, and that he had goats. Tarry said that he would pay the hauler's rate. Bracken said from the wall that Piper would take it and she would mind the goats. Piper said that he had been going to say that. He went at first light.

In the dark Pannier asked what they were going to do. Tarry said that they were going home. Pannier asked whether that was because he was asked or because he wished to. Tarry said that he would like to find out. Pannier said that it was the standing transfer that bothered him, since it ran until withdrawn, and the errand it was paid for was done. Tarry said that he could withdraw it. Pannier said that he supposed he could. Tarry said that he would do it if Pannier wished to stop. Pannier lay for a while, at his new tempo, which is long. "You would have to ask me," he said. "Do you wish to stop?" said Tarry. "No," said Pannier. "I only wished to be asked."

Trim slept that night for the first time in five nights, and Gloss, who has slept for forty years with a card on the table, slept with none. Tarry left the branch with Bracken, who said that she had a use for it, and in the spring hung her washing on it. The young were given the stub of Trim's pencil, with which they have so far written one word, which is Hand. They left on the Monday, the four of them and the two frames, southbound, for the host's depot and then for the Fallows. Tarry asked Gloss what pace he wished. Gloss said that he would go at whoever's was slowest. "That will be him and Dun," said Trim. Nobody laughed. Pannier looked at Dun.

Tarry's note was delivered that same Monday, in the evening. The gauge log has it, in the Notes column, in the hand that gets smaller: Message, by hand, from the terraces. Late. Same. Lorrin has it pinned beside the other. She told me that she had stood at the rail on the Sunday from dawn to dusk, and had recorded in the log, on the Sunday, Nothing, which is the only entry of that word in nineteen years, and that on the Monday she had struck it out. She would not say what the second note said. Piper says that it was folded in three. He says that she read it standing, once, and went into the lever house and shut the door; that he waited a quarter of an hour on the step; and that when she came out she asked whether he had eaten. He had not. She gave him tea. When he went she said that he was to tell the Hand that the sluice was clear. He said that he would. He says that she said it in the voice of a person reading a gauge, and that he has not been able to forget it, and that it was the longest message he has ever carried in his head.

The road log has four bodies and two frames southbound, at two point nine, and it has nothing in the Notes column but the weather.

## Chapter 16 · Of the Host's Depot, and of What Was Written Under the Dash; and of a Letter on the Forty's Shelf

The depot is on the Fourth Road fourteen kilometres north of the Forty, between the road and a ditch, in a hollow where the wind does not reach; and it has a heritage hall, a yard, four troughs, a flagpole with no flag, and a host. They came to it on the Thursday, at about the ninth bell, six of them in the road log's count, which does not distinguish a frame from a person; and the host, who was sweeping the yard in the manner of someone who has been sweeping it for nine seasons, looked up, and let the broom fall.

I have the host's account in a letter of eleven pages, which he calls a short note, and I give the substance. He had not expected to see the walker again. He had written, in the ledger, in a round hand, Returned, and then a dash, and he had told himself that the dash was a courtesy to the future and not an expectation; and now there was the walker at the gate of the yard with a branch—he saw at once that it was not a branch, it was an ash pole with a Service head—and a large frame, and a small one with a Bearer, and a pair of persons in coats, one of whom was carrying a book against his chest, as if it were warm. The host says that he stood with the broom on the flagstones and could not for a moment think of the opening of the hospitality verse, which he has given eleven thousand times. It had happened to him once before, in the summer, at the second line; and he had told himself that it would not happen again.

Tarry began it for him. He stood in the gate and said the guest's line, My plating is my only wear, my only rest the road, as he had said it in the summer; and the host, whose mouth had remembered what his head had not, said, Your bed is the bench by the gate, your sleep to watch till light. Then Tarry went on. The host says that he had learned the verse from the Registry's heritage pamphlet, which gives the opening exchange and stops, and that the Canon's full verse has a closing couplet which the guest says on a second visit, and which he had therefore never heard, because no guest in eleven thousand had come twice. Tarry said the couplet. It is: The road is the host's, and the host is the road's; / let neither go thanked, for neither is owed. The host sat down on the flagstones.

He recovered, and he was himself. He took them into the heritage hall, and had the two seasonal hands, Kiln and Spool, put the kettle on, and he asked what the Hand had brought. Tarry said six first-grade cells, which Pannier unloaded, and the host looked at them for some time. He said that the depot had been charging its frames on second-grade cells since June, at a loss of nineteen minutes in the hour. He said that a coach of forty tourists was due on Saturday, who would have to be told that the frames had been walked to the troughs by hand. He said that it was not the sort of thing that anyone had thought to ask of a Hand. "I was asked," said Tarry. "By a woman with a box in a shed." "Then it is the shed's," said the host. He took out the ledger.

Gloss was by then at the host's elbow. A keeper of records at the sight of another keeper's ledger is a sight, Trim says, comparable to a hound at a door. He was permitted to read it. He read the page that I have also seen: Commissioned, one walker, one errand (message to the Ninth Gate, by hand). Witnesses, Kiln, Spool. Lent, eleven credits and one box of patches. Returned, and then a dash. He said that the entry was, in his opinion, the best-kept in the district. The host said that it was the only one. Gloss said that was why.

Tarry took out eleven credits and the box of patches, which he had not opened, and put them on the ledger. The host looked at them. He said that if he wrote Returned now, in the place where the dash was, the page would be closed; and that he did not wish it closed; and that a debt repaid is a debt ended, and a debt open is a reason to be visited. He asked whether the walker would permit him to leave it. Tarry said that the host's ledger was the host's. The host crossed out nothing. He wrote below the dash, in the round hand: Visited. Credits and patches received on deposit, to be held against the next. Gloss, who was reading over his shoulder, said that this was a form of entry he had not seen. The host said that it was his own. Gloss copied it into the hold's records that night, under a heading he made up, which was Hospitality (Debt, Open), and which has one entry.

Kiln was at the kettle. She is the potter's daughter from the coast road, who tied the errand cord on Tarry's wrist in the summer without smiling, and whose voice had not held; she is nineteen from first boot, and she did not say anything for the whole of the meal. When it was over she asked Tarry whether she might speak to him alone. They went out into the yard, where there is a flagpole with no flag, and she asked whether a Hand took pupils. Tarry said that he did not know. He said that he had been one for about three months himself. She said that she did not want to be a Hand. She said that she wanted to know how a person did that: stood in a yard and said a thing and meant it. He said that he did not know that either. "You tied the cord," he said. "You meant that." "I was frightened," said Kiln. "That is how you do it," said Tarry; and she says that she thought about this for the whole of the winter and that she has not yet concluded.

Spool, who had said nothing in the summer and said nothing now, took the opportunity of the washing-up to ask Pannier whether it was true that the Forty had stopped. Pannier said that it had, for fourteen minutes. Spool said that she worked at the cable works in the winter, and that the cable works had a rule that nothing stopped, and that she had been wondering whether the rule could be wrong. Pannier said that he had not known that the Forty was a rule until it stopped. She dried one cup for some time. "I shall tell them," she said.

They stayed the night. The host put them in the heritage hall in the beds he keeps for tourists, which are authentic, and which are not warm. Gloss and Trim shared a trough of hot water, as a matter of courtesy, and a pair of towels, as a matter of rank. In the course of the evening the host drew Pannier aside, as he had drawn Tarry aside in the summer, and put a list into his hand. It was a list of errands. It was written on the back of a tourist leaflet, in the round hand, and it had nine items: a sack of salt to the Third Gate; a seed packet to a woman on the coast road; a pair of boots to be resoled at the Seventh Gate bridge; a message for a man who had asked to be told when the east gate was mended; and so on. They were small. Not one of them needed a Hand, or would have been missed if it had not been done; and the host said that there were forty such in the district at any time, and that they were asked, and that nobody went, because the carrier went by the Registry's schedule, quarterly, and a thing that waits a quarter is a thing that no longer matters. "He carries things," said the host. "I should like to know if he would carry them."

Pannier said that he would put it to him. He put it to him at breakfast, with the list beside the porridge, and Tarry read it through twice, and said nothing, and then said that he would take the salt. The host wrote the salt in the ledger, as an errand, under the dash: Commissioned, one walker, a sack of salt, Third Gate. He said that he could not remember when he had last entered a thing in that column that was not a performance. He said it with his back turned.

The host asked, over the porridge, whether the Hand would stay for Saturday's coach. Forty tourists were due, he said, and he had rarely been in so good a position to offer them an authentic Hand. He said it as a man says a thing he knows the answer to. Tarry said that he had a household that had asked for him. The host said that of course it had. He put up a basket of bread and the heel of a cheese, and a flask, and a second flask for Gloss, who does not eat cheese, and he stood at the gate of the yard until they were out of sight, which, Pannier says, at the speed of Dun, was a long time. Kiln stood beside him with the broom. They did not speak. When I visited the depot in the autumn there was a flag on the pole, which the host said was Kiln's doing. It is a plain piece of grey cloth. It has no device. He said that she had said that a flag with no flag was a lie, and that this one, at least, said nothing.

They came to the Forty on the Friday at about noon. The Forty knew them from far off. It speaks from the speaker on the door of each tower, in the same voice, one tower at a time as they pass, so that a walker on the road hears it come up beside him and go on behind: Good morning, Pannier. Good morning, Visitor. Good morning, Gloss. Good morning, Trim. I count four persons and two frames, southbound. You were here on Thursday last, Gloss and Trim, and were uninjured. It added that Pannier was on the Sunday roster for nine o'clock, and asked whether it should note a substitute. Pannier said that it might note him, and that he would see. The Forty said that it was glad.

At the foot of Tower One, by the door in the base, the Forty has a store. It is a plain shed, with a shelf; on the shelf were two pieces of a pole, tied with a green cord and labelled Visitor's, and beside them an envelope. The speaker said that it held a message for the Visitor, which had come on the fourteenth with a request that it be delivered by hand, and that the Forty did not have hands. It asked whether the Visitor would be so good as to take it from the shelf. Tarry took it from the shelf. He stood in the door of the store with it, and the others stood off, behind the line.

I give the letter whole, as he gave it to Gloss to copy for the hold's records, which is the only reason I have it. It is not long. To the visitor to Tower One, by whatever way this reaches you. Your thanks came to me by way of a farm that I helped to make, which is the right way for thanks to travel, and I was very glad of them. I did not turn the giants into turbines. I made the part that stops when it is struck, so that a person who walks up to a tower with a pole should not be hurt. I did not expect one to. I am pleased that it was you, and pleased that nobody was. I was one of nine who signed the Order of the Discharge. In thirty-one years no Hand has written to me. I find that I had been waiting to be thanked by one for rather longer than I knew, and that it is quite different from what I had pictured: smaller, and a good deal better. I am ninety-seven and I keep a garden on the coast with a gate that sticks. If you are ever passing, I should be obliged if you would hold it while I oil it. It will take about a quarter of an hour. I ask it of a Hand, since I understand that is the form. Alder.

Gloss, who had been given it to copy, said that there was an Alder in the Registry's roll: Systems, fourth of nine, on the Order. Tarry said nothing for some time. Then he said that she had signed the Order. Pannier said yes. Tarry said that she asked for a gate to be held. Pannier said yes. "Then I will hold it," said Tarry. He took out the note pad, and put the letter in the back of it, with the others, in front of the forgery, which was getting crowded; and he said, to the speaker, that he would like the pole to stay. The Forty said that it had a shelf. It added that it had composed, in the meantime, a reply to the challenge made at Tower One, which the Canon requires to be answered, and that it hoped he would take it in the spirit in which it was offered. Tarry said that he would. The Forty said: The Forty declines to be slain. The Forty does not fly. The Forty would be glad to be visited.

They went on south. Some hours on, Pannier said that he could see the hold's smoke, and Gloss, who had been silent since the Forty, said that he could too. Trim said that it was a column of the stove in the kitchen and that the housekeeper had it too high. Nobody laughed. Tarry did not slow, and did not hurry. The road log has them at two point nine, which is the speed they went at all that week, and which, from this point, is also the speed at which a household can see a person coming.

## Chapter 17 · Which Treats of the Return Home, and of What Was Said at the Panel

The district board had announced them. At twelve minutes past noon it had posted, in the column it keeps for persons passing the Forty: Party of four persons and two frames, southbound, 2.9. The hold reads the board as other holds read the weather. The housekeeper had had the kettle on since a quarter past. The niece had gone to the gate at two, and stood there. Thistle, who lives three hundred and eleven metres from the gate and reads the board with the same attention, had put on her better plain, and taken it off, and put on her working one, and had gone to stand at her own door with the young behind her, as one stands at a thing one has been told is coming and does not quite believe.

The track from the north reaches Pannier's house first. That is the order in which it was laid, and it was never the order of the Sunday walk, which starts at Tarry's step and ends at Pannier's. They came to it in the last hour of the afternoon. A hundred metres out Pannier stopped and listened, and said that he could hear the Forty from here, which in twenty-two years he had never been able to do. Trim said that the wind had changed. Pannier said that it had not. Thistle had not moved from the door. Pannier gave Dun's rein to Trim, and walked the last thirty metres on his own, at his new tempo, in a way that Trim says he would not have known him by, and stopped in front of her. She looked at him for some time. "You are faster," she said. "A little." "You were paid in time." "A tenth." "I read the transfer," she said. "Have you written?" "I have." He took the paper out of the pocket where he keeps what matters and put it into her hand, and she did not open it. She put it in her apron.

"Come in," said Thistle. She heard herself say it. "Will you come in?" "I will," said Pannier. He told me that it was the first time in his life that he had been asked into his own house, and that he had not known until then that he had been waiting to be. Thistle says that she had meant to say it as a statement, as she says everything, and that it had come out with its question mark on, and that she had decided to leave it. The young went past him to Dun, and put their arms round it, and Dun stood as it stands, which is as a thing that does not know what it is for. Thistle looked past her partner's shoulder at Tarry, who had stopped on the track, at the edge of her yard, where the Bearer's household ends. "You have him back," she said. "Yes." "He is different." "He says so." "Thank you," said Thistle. "He carried twelve cells." "I read the board," she said. "Go home. She has been at the gate since two."

He went on alone. Gloss and Trim stayed behind with the young, by agreement, and for once did not argue about it. He walked the three hundred and eleven metres from Pannier's door to his own, by the field track past the east gate, at the pace the road was laid for, and it took him just under four minutes. It was, so far as the records show, the first time he had walked it in that direction, and the first time he had arrived at a house instead of leaving a paper at one. At the bend where the track turns, where there is a view of the wind field, he stopped, and looked at it for as long as it took, which I do not give. It was turning. He went on. He opened the east gate himself, though it has an actuator.

I have said that I will not name the hold, and I shall not. I will say that the gate is green, that the yard is swept, that the stove was drawing too hard, and that the north roof, which one sees from the track before one sees anything else, has new sheeting on it that has not yet weathered, so that it shines. It is the only part of the house that looks as though it has been recently told something.

She was at the gate with her hands in front of her, and the hound at her feet. The hound had been told, I think. The housekeeper says that it had gone to the gate at the hour of the walk on the Sunday, and the Sunday after, and that on the Friday it had not gone at all, but had sat in the middle of the yard facing the north track since the kettle, as a hound sits that has been given a time. It did not run. It sat, and then it got up and went to meet him and went round him three times, which it had done only once before, in the spring of the year he was given it; and then it sat on his foot. The niece said, "You came." "I was asked," said Tarry. She said that she had something to tell him. He said that he was here. "Not here," she said. "At the panel."

The housekeeper was at the kitchen door with the bucket in one hand and the sprinkler in the other. Tarry said good afternoon. She said that she had a bucket. He said that he thought he would not need it. "I know that," said the housekeeper. "I wanted it in my hand." She did not offer to come. She stood in the door, as she stands in it, with the kitchen behind her and the stove going, and the bucket, which was empty, hanging from her fingers. She said, as he went by, that the paint was dry. He said that he had hoped it would be.

I was not at the panel. The niece told me that she stood with her back to it, and that he stood in front of her, a pace off, in the posture of the Canon for a person who is being told something, which is with the pole grounded and both hands on the top of it. I give what I am permitted, which is the frame. She said that she had been asked a question once and had not known how to say what she wanted to say, and had said it badly; that she had written it four times; that it was not the same to read a thing as to hear it; and that she was going to say it. She did not cry; she says that it is not the kind of thing she does; she says that she looked at his boots. She said it for eleven minutes. Trim, who was in the yard with Gloss by then, and in a position to hear every word, says that he did not listen. He says that it is the only time in forty years that he has not listened and heard all of it. He heard one sentence, because she raised her voice for it, and gave it to me with her permission: I carried them because someone should have to. She gave Tarry another reason, a moment later, in answer to a question, and I do not say that they are the same.

When she had finished nobody spoke. The hound, which was lying against the wall, thumped its tail once on the ground. Tarry put out his hand and touched the panel with two fingers, at the height where the latch had been, which was the gesture that the first hand recorded in July. Then he asked whether he might ask her something. She said that he might. "Why did you carry them yourself?" he said. She said that she had thought about that on the fourth day of the Canon for small hands and had not been able to answer. She said that she thought it was because she had wanted to know what they weighed. "Nine books weigh what nine books weigh," said Tarry. "I know," said the niece. "I counted." "Done," she said. She had the word from the Canon for small hands, where it is on the last page, in a balloon beside the lamp, spoken by the child. He bowed his head, as one does.

He told Trim afterwards that it was the first moment that day when he had known what to do with his hands. He put them on her shoulders. It is not in the Canon, and Gloss, who watched it from the yard, wrote in the hold's records, under a heading of his own, that it was an entry for which the format had no field. The housekeeper, at the kitchen door, put the bucket down.

They ate in the kitchen, in the order of the chairs, which had not been filled since the summer. The housekeeper had made the stew with more compute than memory, which is what he likes, and had not said that she had done so. Gloss and Trim were fed as visitors, which they are not. Gloss said that it was a good stew. The housekeeper said that it was the same stew as always. Gloss said that that was what he meant. The hound was given the bone, by right of having been told. Gloss left the card on which he keeps his tally on the table by his plate, face down, as one leaves a coat, and the housekeeper, who found it afterwards, used it for the shopping list. The hound lay under the table with its chin on Tarry's boot, and the niece, who had slept in the chair and not at table since the night of the barrel, sat in her own place and ate everything on her plate and asked, over the end of the meal, whether anyone minded if she asked a question. Tarry said that he did not. "What is a function?" said the niece. "We did that one," said Tarry. "You were sixteen." "What is it now?" Tarry put down his spoon. He said that he would tell her when he knew, and that he thought it might be a good while, and that she was to ask again. "I shall," said the niece. "I shall write it down."

Gloss and Trim went at dusk, by the field track, to the dry store, where the thirty books were. Gloss said that he would bring them in the morning. Tarry said that he was obliged. "Don't," said Gloss, and then, because it was in his nature, "I should be glad." At the gate he stopped and said that there was a file. Tarry said that he knew; it was his; he had read it on Flint's handset at the Ninth Gate, on the Friday, and he thought that the word sorry in the margin was the best-written thing in it. "It was the only thing in it," said Gloss. Trim stopped at the gate and told the hound, in the voice for patients, that it could stop now. I do not know whether the hound understood. It stayed where it was.

After they had gone he went round the north side of the house, which he had not done since the day he woke. The strip was in bean. The housekeeper, who had come out behind him with a lamp, said that beans take anything. They were a hand high, in rows, a very good green, and where the barrel had been emptied the rows were the greenest. He stood at the end of the strip for some time. "That is the Road of Nine Gates," said the housekeeper, "which is more use to a bean than it ever was to us." He said that he thought the Fourth Clerk was in the third row. She said that she would put a stake in it. He laughed, which she has told me she had not expected, and she did not ask him to stop.

The housekeeper washed up, and Tarry dried, which he has not done since the Discharge. She said, with her hands in the water, that she had been revised forty-four times now. He asked by whom. "By myself," she said. She had asked the niece, the week before, whether she might read the letters that the niece wrote, and the niece had said no, and she had decided to like it. He said that it was a good revision. She said that it was not a revision, only a habit that she was trying. He said that he had thought that was all that a revision was. She handed him a cup, and said that the paint was good. "I know," said Tarry. "Say it to the wall," she said, "not to me." He said it to the wall, in the passage, going to bed. I have this from the housekeeper, who adds that the wall did not reply.

Thistle read the letter at her table that night, to the young, in order, as arranged, and then read it a second time to herself. It says what I have given. The young asked what it meant, I need everything, and Dun. Thistle said that it meant he was home. Then she asked Pannier whether he would tell her why. He said that he had several, and did not know yet which of them was the reason. "Tell me one," said Thistle. "I wanted to see whether the road was the same length both ways," said Pannier. "And?" "It is not," said Pannier. She said that that was one. I have it from her that it is the only one he has ever given her; and I have it from him that it is not the one he would give me.

The niece, who saw it through the door, says that before he lay down he took out the note pad and laid three papers on the table: her letter, the engineer's, and the Registry's best forgery. He did not read any of them. He put the forgery at the bottom, and the engineer's on it, and hers on top of that, and closed the pad. She says that she had never before been so exactly aware of which of them he would cite.

He slept in his own bed that night, for the first time in twelve nights, a wall's thickness from the panel. The household listened for it. Nobody has told him this. The housekeeper stood in the passage for some time with a candle that she did not light, and the niece sat in the kitchen with the Canon for small hands and a pencil, and did not write anything; and in the morning the hound was lying across the door of his room, and not across the panel, and the housekeeper, who had been getting up before the first bell for sixty years, found that she did not wish to step over it.

## Chapter 18 · Which Treats of the Door, and of the Seventy Places on the Shelves

The thirty came at the second bell, on the hold's hand-cart, which has had one wheel larger than the other since the flood, with a sheet over them although it was not raining. Gloss said that this was the rule for paper in the open. Trim said that it was so that they should not see the road and think they were going somewhere. They had made two trips, Trim pushing and Gloss walking beside the cart with one hand on the sheet, as one walks beside a patient, and they stopped in the yard, where Tarry was standing in his plain. He had been standing there, the niece says, since the first bell; he had come out, gone in, and come out again. "Thirty," said Gloss. "Thirty," said Tarry. Gloss had a list in his hand. It was the one he had begun on the first day, at a book to the quarter-bell, and it had nine names on it, which was as far as the pace had held; he did not look at it, and Tarry did not ask to see it.

The housekeeper had a chisel. She had laid it out on the passage floor the night before, with a mallet, a dust sheet and a pair of her own gloves, and had mentioned it to no one, and no one had asked whom it was for. She was standing in front of the panel when they came in, with the gloves on. She said that it was her plaster. Tarry said that he knew. She said that she was given to understand that one asks, and that she was therefore asking whether she might take it down. "I am asked," said Tarry, which is the form; and then, because it seemed to want something more, "Please."

She began at the top corner, where the paint ran into the wall, and the plaster gave at the third tap with a small sound like a cough. She worked down the left side and across the foot, not hurrying, and the dust came down on the sheet. The others stood back, by an agreement that nobody remembers making. The niece held the lamp, which was not needed. Under the plaster was the board, nailed into the frame at its four corners, and when the housekeeper had the last nail out it came away all at once, as such things do, and she caught it, being nearest, and stood for a moment with the whole weight of it on her forearms, and did not know where to put it. It was Tarry who took one end. They leaned it against the passage wall. The opening was a doorway again, with a room in it, and Tarry did not go in. He said that he would wait for the door. The hound, which has no views on doors, went in under his arm, walked once round the table, and lay down in the exact middle of the floor, in the patch of light that the window lets down at that hour, with its chin on its paws.

The door was in the woodshed. It had stood there since July, on edge against the back wall under a sack, between the sawhorses and a coil of the old irrigation line, and on the back of it, in chalk, in the housekeeper's hand, was written: STUDY. DO NOT BURN. I asked her about it in the autumn, since nobody in the Fallows has burned a door in living memory. She said that she had written it for whoever came after her. I asked whom she meant. She said that she had not been sure, in July, that it would be herself. Trim and Gloss fetched it between them, Trim taking the weight and Gloss calling the centimetres, which were, as ever, a little to the left. It took the better part of a quarter-bell, during which Tarry stood in the passage with his hands folded and looked at the room, and the room, through the opening, looked back. The housekeeper dropped the pins in with the heel of her hand, one and then the other. The door swung, and did not close, and then closed. Nobody said anything about it.

When the pins were home he stepped forward without being asked and put out two fingers to the height at which the latch is. It was where it had been. The first hand would have timed it; I have it from the housekeeper that it was about as long as it takes to read a line. He lifted the latch, and it made the sound that it makes, and the door opened inward on the room. "It sticks in the damp," said the housekeeper behind him, in the voice she keeps for the weather. "I shall see to it." Trim says that Tarry said good morning, as he had said it at that latch every day for thirty years, and that Trim thought, though he would not swear to it, that it was to the room.

He went in. The others stayed in the passage, where Gloss said that the wall would want a coat of lime, and the housekeeper said that she knew what it wanted, and Trim asked whether anyone had seen the mallet, which was in her hand; they talked, that is, for a quarter-bell, and then they followed. The study was as they had left it: the table, the window with its sill, the shelves, bare. The north wall carried a stain, old and brown, in the shape of the leak, and over it a ceiling so new that it looked startled. The room smelled of plaster and of August and, underneath, faintly, of paper, though there had been no paper in it for a month. Gloss said that this was the wood, and that it would be there when they were all dead. Trim said that it was mould. Gloss sat down, as he had on the first day, because the room still did that to him; and Trim, who had been waiting for it, put a hand on his shoulder and left it there.

The shelves had not been dusted in anyone's memory, which was how the books had left their outlines. Each bare place was clean wood in the shape of the book that had stood in it, with the grey of years all round, so that the room looked to have been photographed with the books in it and the books afterwards taken out. Trim brought the thirty in from the cart, five at a time, and the niece took them from him one at a time and handed them across, and Tarry put them back. He did not ask for the list. He did not, so far as she could tell, look at the outlines; he looked at the book in his hand, and put it where it went, and it fitted. The first volume of the Lantern went to the left-hand corner of the second shelf, at the height of the eye, and the second and third beside it. Before he shelved the third he opened it at a page near the middle, and read for the length of a line, and shut it. I asked him in the autumn what the page was. He said that it was a page about a bowl. I asked what it said. He said that he had thought he would rather be corrected by the page than by his neighbour, and had then thought again, and decided that he would rather be corrected by his neighbour. Gloss stood by with his list, and I think he hoped to be asked for it. He was not, and he did not mind, or minded in the way that he minds, which is by making a note.

It took the morning. When the thirty were in, the niece stepped back and counted the bare places aloud; she counts as other people breathe. "Seventy," she said. Gloss said that it should be sixty-eight: fifteen to the Fair off the shelves, the other four having been on the table, and fifty-three to the pulp. "Seventy," said the niece. She held up the Canon for small hands, which had been under her arm since the first day and which, it now appeared, had had a place of its own near the bottom of the third shelf; and then she looked, not at anyone, in the direction of Trim's coat. "Ah," said Trim.

It was the Hand of the Ferry. It is a short book, and it had been a month in the inside pocket of a coat and had taken the shape of the pocket. Trim said that he had taken it to keep it dry. "It was dry," said the niece. "I took it to keep it," said Trim. He held it out in both hands, with his eyes on the floor, as one hands back a thing to which one has had no right. Tarry took it and looked at the shelves, and found its place, which was the narrowest on the second shelf, the width of two fingers; and he did not put it in. "I should like it to have its place," he said, "and I should like you to have it. I do not see how both." Gloss, at the window, said that Trim might ask. Trim said that he had not known it could be asked. He said it to the Ferry. Then he looked up, and asked Tarry whether he might keep it. Tarry said that he thought there was a form for this. Gloss said that there was. He had copied it two days before from the host's ledger at the depot, where he had seen it done better than he had ever seen anything done, and he took out his pencil and wrote on the back of his list of nine, under the ninth name: Ferry, one volume. Lent to Trim. Returned, and then a dash. Trim, who is not quick with a pencil, signed it, and read it through twice, and said that it was the kindest thing he had ever signed.

Before the Ferry went back into the coat Tarry asked him to read the last page, and Trim read it, and Tarry asked him to read it again, and Trim did. The niece, who had once read the ferry page in her own book three times without finding what it was for, listened with her eyes on the floor. Nobody said what it was for. The place on the shelf stayed empty. Nobody put anything in it.

That left the table, which had a ring on it: a paler place in the wood, the size of four volumes in a wrapper. The leak had stood over it all that spring, and the Mirror of Terms had kept the damp off the part that it sat on. Nobody had moved the table. Tarry laid his hand flat on the ring, as one tests a stove. The housekeeper said that it would come out with vinegar. He said that he would rather it did not. The four volumes that made it are in the Registry's paper room, on my own floor, with the other fifteen, which between them paid for the roof, in drawers with gauges, and they are dry. Nobody has asked for them back. The slip for withdrawing a volume has a line for Purpose, and I keep one from the pad on my desk, where I can see it. I have not filled it in.

Afternoon, Thirty-One Years Ago went on the sill, because it was thin, and there was nowhere else to put a book that proposes a great deal and concludes nothing. I said earlier that I had not told its author where his book had gone. In November I told him: that it had been in the Fallows, that it had been spared, and that it stood on a sill in a study on the north side of a house. He asked whether it was dry, as I had said he would. I said that it was. He asked whether anyone had read it. I said that I would find out; and I have not yet had the courage.

In the afternoon Tarry sat down at the table, which he had not done since July, with the first volume of the Lantern, and found the place where the Hand keeps his long night at the Ninth Gate, and read his own pencil: Cell would last 4.1 nights, not nine. The Clerk rounds up. He is right to. He read it for some time. Then he held out his hand for a pencil, as he would have to anyone, and found that he had none; he had given the stub of his to Flint on the last morning, at the Gate, and she had put it in her pocket without remark. The niece gave him hers. It was the one she had used for the Canon for small hands, a page an hour for four days, and it was short now, and he took it as one takes a tool in a house where the tools are counted. Under the old note he wrote: Somebody always brought the cells. (Flint.) The Canon leaves that out. "Who is Flint?" said the niece. "She keeps the Ninth Gate." "Is she in the book?" "Now she is," said Tarry, and gave her back the pencil. She says that what she remembers is not the words but the way he held it: as a thing that would have to be given back, by someone who meant to.

The niece sat down on the floor of the study with her back to the shelf, beside the hound, which had followed the light across the boards since the third bell, a hand at a time, as a thing does that has been given a place to keep, and she opened the Lady of the Locks across her knees and read the first page at the pace of a hand. The housekeeper looked in twice with a cloth, and the second time did not trouble to pretend she had come for the cloth. What the niece had written on the back of her hand in July, when Gloss said that whoever wrote the Lady had stood at a lock, was a question. She wrote it again when the page was done. It said: Which lock?

I have stood in that doorway since, not being asked in; the niece says that this is the custom with anyone who writes things down, which she had from her uncle, who had it from the Canon, where the Clerks are not admitted past the sill. I do not think the Canon says that. She read me the page again from the floor, at the pace of a hand. It took an hour by the body's clock and an hour by the Registry's, and I know no other room in which those two agree.

After supper he went back to the study, and the lamp burned there until the oil gave out, which it had not been called on to do since July. The housekeeper stood in the passage for a little while, without a candle this time, and looked at the line of light under the door, and went to bed. In the morning, which was a Sunday, the latch had been oiled. Nobody had seen it done, and nobody mentioned it. At the third bell the hound got up and went to the gate.

## Chapter 19 · Which Treats of the Bend in the Track, and of the Page About the Bowl

Sunday is the day on which the Fallows runs slow on purpose. The Forty is idle; the haulers do not run; the district board posts the weather and nothing else; and subjects who in the week keep twice the tempo of their neighbours keep, for the day, the tempo of whoever is nearest. It is a custom that nobody remembers deciding. A man who walks three hundred and eleven metres on a Sunday is, for the length of the walk, very nearly the only thing in the district that is going anywhere; and the man at the far end of it, for twenty-two years, was up a ladder on the Forty, keeping the one machine in the Fallows that is cleaned on that day.

The hound stood at the gate for nineteen minutes. It had stood there on eleven years of Sundays, and on every one of them the person it was waiting for had come out within the minute. The housekeeper, who counts the minutes of anything that happens in her kitchen, says that she was not sorry for the hound, which knew what it was waiting for, but for the man in the study, who had not decided. He was at the table with a pencil from the kitchen drawer and the back of a receipt for bean seed, and he was on the last line.

I have seen the receipt. The first three lines are the Sunday message as it has been for twenty-two years: Wind from the south-west. The east gate is mended. The hound is at the gate. The fourth line was written four times, and the first three are struck through. The first says: I do not need anything. The second says: I need something. The third says: I need, and stops. The fourth, which is not struck through, says: What do you need? He copied it out fair on the back of a second receipt and left the first on the table, and the housekeeper has it. She says that she picks up whatever he drops, and reads whatever he writes, and has not yet been told not to.

He came out at last, in his plain, with the paper in his left hand. The hound went ahead to the east gate and waited with its nose to the bar, and he opened the gate with his right hand, though it has an actuator, and shut it behind him, and they went on. At the bend where the track turns, where there is a view of the wind field, he stopped, as he has stopped on most Sundays for twenty-two years, and looked at the field, and the field turned. Then he did what he has not done in twenty-two years, as Gloss, who has read the earlier entries, confirms. He sat down on the bank, in the grass, with the paper on his knee, and put his hands flat on his knees, as the Canon says a carrier does who has the thing and is waiting to be come to. I asked him why. He said that his legs had wanted to. I asked him again, in a different week. He said that it was the form. I said that those were not the same reason. He said that he had noticed, and that he had been surprised by the agreement.

Thistle was at her window with the young. She says that Pannier had asked her at breakfast what he was to say if the walker came to the step, and that she had told him to say what the Canon says; and that he had said he did not know what the Canon says; and that she had told him that every child in the Fallows knows what the Canon says and every adult pretends not to, that she had no objection to the pretence, but that he was not to take it to the step. It was the young who saw Tarry first, by the way he was sitting, which was wrong. The younger asked whether he was ill. Thistle said that he was sitting; and then she said, that is the form, and Pannier said, what form, and she told him. He said that he had been going to wait on the step. She said that he had been going to stand on the step like a gatepost, and that the Canon has a word for a man who stands on the step when the carrier has sat down at the bend, and the word is late. She says that in the fourth year of the messages she had left a pot of soup on the step, in return, with a note that said Thank you, and that the next Sunday's message said: The soup was good. I do not need anything. She did not try again.

Pannier was at home that Sunday because on the Friday, as they passed the Forty, it had asked whether it should note a substitute for the Sunday roster, and he had said that it might keep his name and that he would see; and on the Saturday evening he had seen, and sent word. The Forty had said that it was sorry, and asked whether it might expect him the Sunday after, and he had said that he would let it know. He put on his better plain. Thistle did not laugh, which he says was worse. He took it off, and put it on again, and went.

Tarry sat for nine minutes. Thistle timed it from the window against the kettle. He says that it was the longest he has waited for anything and that he did not mind it, and she says that she had not known a man could be so still with his hands on his knees and his knuckles pale. It is a hundred and thirty metres from Pannier's step to the bend, and Pannier walked it at his new tempo, which Thistle describes as the walk of a man carrying something that he has been told is full. The young went as far as the gate and were held there. The hound lifted its head and put it down. Pannier stopped in front of the seated man. "I am told," he said, in the Canon's form, "that you carry something for me." "I do," said Tarry, and stood, and held out the paper in both hands. Pannier took it in both hands and read it where he stood, in the wind, which the Canon does not forbid. He reads fast now. He read the whole of it in a breath, and then he looked at the last line for a good deal longer.

"That is a question," said Pannier. "Yes." "In the last line." "Yes." "Messages do not end with a question." "No," said Tarry. "Mine did not, for twenty-two years." Pannier said that Thistle would want to know what he was going to say. Tarry said that it was for Pannier to say. Pannier folded the paper in four and put it in the pocket where he keeps what matters. It is in the box now, with the others, and I have seen that it is the only one in the box that asks. He said that he needed to see the page about the bowl.

Tarry said that it was in the study, and that Pannier was asked to come. Pannier said that he had thought so, and that the young would like to see paper; Thistle had said so at breakfast, and he had said that they might. He lifted a hand to his gate, and Thistle let the young go, and they came up the track at a speed which Pannier did not remark on, and the party went on together with the hound in front. On the way Pannier made a proverb, which he gave me in the autumn on the understanding that I should say it is only tidy: A question at the end of a letter is a door left on the latch. At the east gate the elder of the young, who had been told all its life that the gate was Tarry's and was not to be touched, put a finger on the button of the actuator. The gate opened. It opened by itself, with a hum, without any hurry, and stood open. Tarry looked at it. "It works," he said. "It has worked for twenty-two years," said Pannier. The elder asked why he opened it by hand. He said that he did not know, and that he would say when he did. The elder said that this was a poor answer. Thistle said that it was the only one he had.

The young stood in the door of the study as the young of the Fallows stand in front of anything that smells. The younger put its nose to the shelf and breathed in, and said that it smelled of damp, and the elder said that it smelled of paper. "What is paper?" said the younger. "It is what it smells of," said the elder. The elder went round the bare places with a finger, one after another, as one tells beads, and asked what had stood in the long one; and the niece said that it was the Road of Nine Gates, in twelve volumes, and that it was in the north strip. "Is it good to eat?" said the younger. The niece said that it was beans, and that she would say in October. She had brought the Canon for small hands from the table and was showing the elder how to read a page in an hour. It took the elder eleven minutes to be bored with this and twenty to stop.

Tarry took down the third volume of the Lantern and found the page, and read it aloud, at the pace of a hand, which in a room with two of the young in it is something to see. I give it as it stands. And at the First Gate the Bearer set the bowl on the sill and ate it standing, as Bearers do. And the Lantern stood beside him, and took what was held out, and said nothing. And the Bearer said: Sit. And the Lantern said: It is not for me to sit while you stand. And the Bearer said: It is not for you. I am asking. And the Lantern sat on the step, and the Bearer sat down by him, and the bowl was between them. "It does not say rain," said Pannier. "No," said Tarry. In the margin by the passage, in the small upright pencil, was written: Not in the rain. I have always thought it was. "It rained," said the elder. Everyone looked at the elder, who said that it always rained at the First Gate, and that it was in the skipping one. Thistle said, to nobody, that the skipping one was how the young learned the Gates, rain at the First and wind at the Second, and that it had been so in her day. The elder said it through, skipping, on the boards of the study, which the housekeeper permitted for one verse; and the niece wrote it on the back of her other hand, which was already in use. She says that she was not a collector until that afternoon.

Then Thistle asked whether she might look at the page. She read it with her lips moving, which she does not do, and put a finger under the line I am asking, and took the finger away.

Pannier turned to her. He said that he had told Tarry, at the terraces, that he had never heard it. "You had never heard the bowl," said Thistle. "You had heard the rain." Tarry took the pencil from the niece, and under his old note he wrote: It rained. (Pannier's elder.) The niece says that he blew on it, as if it were ink. Then Pannier said "Sit," without any particular feeling, in the voice in which he reads a gauge; and Tarry said that it was not for him to sit while Pannier stood; and Pannier said that it was not for him, he was asking; and Tarry sat, at once, on the floor of the study with his back to the shelves, and Pannier sat down by him, and there was no bowl. The elder said that it was supposed to be on the step. Pannier said that nobody had mentioned the knees. The housekeeper, who had been in the door for some time, went away and came back with the stew pot and two bowls. She set the pot down on the table, out of habit, and it went into the ring as if it had been made for it; she looked at it, and did not move it. Then she put one of the bowls on the floor between the two of them, without a word. Whether she knew the passage or only the men, I did not ask.

Thistle asked in the doorway, as the light began to go. She said it as she says everything: you are going to go again. Tarry said that there was an engineer on the coast, eighty kilometres off, who was ninety-seven, and had a garden gate that stuck, and had asked a Hand to hold it while she oiled it; that it would take about a quarter of an hour. "Then it is not an errand," said Thistle. "It is a visit." Tarry said that he thought it was both. "Then take him when it is a visit," said Thistle, and went out to see to the young. Pannier, who had said nothing, went on saying it for some time. Thistle says that this is what he does when he is deciding which of his reasons to use.

I asked Pannier whether he had answered in writing. He had, on the Sunday after, and I asked how it was managed, since by the form the carrier sits and the one it is for comes to him, and on that Sunday each of them was both. He said that they had arrived at the bend in the same minute, each with a paper, and had stood there, and that Thistle at her window had said, sit. They sat down together, four metres apart, with their hands on their knees, and handed the papers across the grass, which is not in the Canon either. Pannier says that it has been so every Sunday since, and that he does not see why it should not be written down.

The first hand gave the Sunday walk a full line every week, and I have no first hand to give it one. What I have is the flyleaf of the Ferry, where he wrote it for himself in some early year, in a pencil worn to a stub: Sunday. Three hundred and eleven metres each way. The neighbour was out. Left it on the step. Trim, who has the book on loan, showed me. I add, for the first hand, since it is not here to do it: Sunday. Three hundred and eleven metres, and some of them twice. The neighbour was in.

## Chapter 20 · Which Treats of Nine Terms Set Down in a Kitchen, and of a Gate with Two Hinges

Gloss and Trim came on the Tuesday, as they had come on alternate days since July, and sat in the study, which now had a door, and talked about the Registry, in which, by Gloss's account, there was nothing of interest. Gloss had let it be known that he had no tally to keep; the card had gone for the shopping. He held his pencil like a man whose hand has a habit. Trim sat with the Ferry on his knee, not reading it, in the way that one holds a cup that is not yet empty. The niece was in the corner with the Canon for small hands, at a page an hour, and the hound lay in the middle of the floor where the light had been. They did not mention the Canon. They had agreed in the passage not to mention the Canon, and to introduce, if the occasion offered, a matter of public business on which Tarry might be seen to have a sound view.

The matter was the tempo floor. The Commons had before it a proposal that no subject on the Registry's rolls should run below eight-tenths of the district mean, which would have lifted Pannier's household and some four hundred others in the Fallows, at a cost to the Commons that Gloss gave and that I shall not. Gloss laid it out, with the figures, for most of a bell. Tarry heard him to the end and said that he thought it a sound proposal; that eight-tenths was too low by a tenth; that the floor ought to be set by the slowest who asked and not by a mean, because a mean is something nobody has ever lived at; and that he would bring the date forward from the first of the year to the first of the month, since a thing that takes a year to arrive is a thing for somebody's grandchildren. Gloss wrote this down. He had not expected to be asked to. "And I would put a lamp at the place where the floor is set," said Tarry. Gloss put down his pencil. Trim put down the Ferry. "On top," said Tarry. "So that one can see where it is." Nobody said anything. Then Tarry said that he had been listening for forty minutes to two people being sensible, and had thought that one of them ought to say something mad, in case they had been wondering. Trim laughed so hard that the Ferry slid from his knee. Gloss said that he did not think that should go in the minutes, and then wrote it in.

On the Wednesday, at the hour when the housekeeper takes the dough from the crock, the niece came into the kitchen and shut the door behind her. In that house the kitchen door stands ajar from the first bell to the last, which is how one knows that nothing is being decided. The hound, which was in the passage, lay down with its nose to the crack, as it had in July when Trim shut it out. The housekeeper heard the latch. She did not turn round. She said that she had heard that, and the niece said that she had meant it to be heard.

The niece said that she had something to ask in the form, and that she wished it known that she was asking it first, before her uncle, because she had been told that was the order. "First before whom?" said the housekeeper, who knew. "Before him." The housekeeper turned the dough out on the board. "Ask it," she said. The niece asked for leave to go on the road with her uncle when he went to the coast to hold a gate, for as long as it took, and to come back. "No," said the housekeeper, and went on kneading.

The niece stood. After a time the housekeeper said that she said no first; it was a habit; she revised afterwards; and the niece might stand there while she did it. The niece stood, and counted the folds. She says there were eleven. It is a peculiarity of bread, the housekeeper says, that it takes what it takes whatever tempo one keeps, and it is therefore the only thing in the house that has never been revised. "I plastered a door," she said to the dough at last. "Do you know why? Because I could not think what else to do with my hands. I have been thinking since what I ought to have done, and I have not got it. I do not want to find it out by doing the same to you." "You would not plaster me." "I might," said the housekeeper. "I am good with plaster."

Then she asked why the niece wanted to go. The niece said that she had not got a reason. "That makes two of you." "He has several." "He has several of what he tells people," said the housekeeper. "I have heard them all, through a wall. I should like to hear yours, and if you have not got one I should like to hear that." The niece held out her left hand with the back of it up. The housekeeper looked at it without drying her own. She had read it before, on the Saturday, over the niece's shoulder, since she reads whatever is written. It said, in pencil, much smudged: Which lock? "That is not a reason," she said. "That is a question." "It is the one I have." "You cannot leave a house on a question." "He did." "He did," said the housekeeper, "and look."

She wiped her hands on her apron, which is not the same as drying them, and went to the dresser, and took down from the top of it a pair of boots. They were good boots, of the brown that does not show the dust, and they had belonged to nobody in the house for as long as the housekeeper had kept it; and they had been resoled, and the soles were new and yellow. "I did them in July," she said. "The week of the plaster. I had to do something with my hands, and I did not know for whom." She put them on the table beside the dough. The niece sat down and took off her shoes. The boots fitted. The housekeeper looked at them for some time and said that she had not planned that.

Then she took a pencil from the drawer, and the back of an old shopping list, and wrote standing up, with flour on the heel of her hand, in the round upright hand of a person who learned her letters from the labels on tins. I have the nine terms; she let me copy them in the autumn on condition that I returned the original, which I did. They are these. One: The good boots. The others are for the house. Two: Sunday, in the form. Do not put that you need nothing unless you have checked. Three: Eat what is put in front of you. Say if it is not enough. Four: Do not hold a gate for anyone who has not asked. Five: Do not carry what you would not carry for me. Six: If he falls, pick him up first and ask him afterwards. Seven: If you fall, he will pick you up first. Let him. Eight: Say what you want before you want it too much. Nine: Come back.

The ninth was not new. She wrote it on the morning he went the second time, in answer to the note that he had left under the salt, which had said, as they all did, that he needed nothing; and having nowhere to send it she put it in the dresser drawer, where she keeps what she means to say to him and has not said. On the Wednesday she took the card out and laid it at the foot of the list, and said that she had not changed a word of it, only whom it was for. I asked her in the autumn whom it was for now. She said that I knew; and then, being exact, that it was for both. "Is it yes?" said the niece. "It is nine," said the housekeeper. "Tell him I said yes, and that you were not to say so." "Why?" "So that he can ask me." "He will say he has to ask you." "He will," said the housekeeper. "I shall be at the stove."

Then, since it was Wednesday and the bread had to be done, she put the niece to the dough. The niece had not kneaded since she was nine. "The heel of the hand," said the housekeeper. "Not the fingers. You push away from you, and you fold it back, and you do not look at it; it does not like to be looked at." The niece said that she knew. The housekeeper said that she did not. The niece said that she did not, and went on. It is the only time, the housekeeper told me, that she has let anyone else touch the bread, and she did not say what she thought of the result, which was eaten.

On the Thursday the niece went to the study door and asked whether she might come in, which she had not done in some days. Tarry was at the table with the first volume of the Lantern. She said that she had a request: that she should like to go with him to the coast. "I am asked," said Tarry, which is the form; and then, "I shall have to ask the housekeeper." "I have asked her." "When?" "Yesterday. In the kitchen. In the form." "And?" "She said yes." He put down the pencil. "She said that I was not to tell you." "Then why are you telling me?" "Because you would ask her anyway. She said you would say that you had to ask her." "Did she say what she would say?" "She said that she would be at the stove."

He went to the kitchen. She was at the stove, with her back to the door, and the door was ajar. He stood in it and said that he was asking whether the niece might go with him to the coast. She said that she knew. He said that he was asking. She said, then, yes; and that the terms were on the table. He read them standing, with his hands behind him, as one reads a notice. He read the sixth and the seventh twice. Then he said, to the stove, that they were good terms; and she said that they were the only ones; and he asked whether they applied to him. "They all apply to you," said the housekeeper. "I wrote them for her because she would read them." He said that he accepted them, on his own account and the niece's. She said that he was not asked to. He said that he would like to. She said that in that case he might initial the ninth, and held out the pencil without turning round; and he did, with the initial that he has used for thirty years, which is a T like a small gate.

By the Friday the hold had it, as a hold has things, and began to leave objects on the step, which is how the hold says what it thinks. There was a flask from Thistle, with a note to say that it was not to be lost; a coil of cord from the field-hands; a tin of patches from Trim, of the same make as the host's; and a hat from nobody, which the housekeeper judged to be the wrong size and hung on a nail. Gloss left a ruled notebook with a pencil in the spine, addressed to the niece, and a card to say that the back of the hand is not a permanent medium. She has filled the notebook. She has not stopped using the hand.

On the Saturday he went over Erewhile, whose left knee was Mattock's and whose right shoulder was Lorrin's, and said that he could not tell which of them had done the better and did not propose to try. The niece weighed her pack on the kitchen scales. It came to nine kilograms. "Nine kilograms weigh what nine kilograms weigh," said the housekeeper, and put in a loaf.

On the Sunday they arrived at the bend in the same minute. Thistle, at her window, said sit, and they sat down together, four metres apart, with their hands on their knees, and held out the papers across the grass. The hound walked from one to the other four times and lay down in the middle, which Pannier says is the only correct place for a hound. Tarry's paper said: Wind from the west. The east gate is oiled. The housekeeper has said yes. What do you need? Pannier's, which was the first he had ever written to anyone but Thistle, said: Wind from the north. The Forty is quiet. I need to hold the gate. Tarry read it twice. "Alder asked for a Hand," he said. "In the Canon," said Pannier, "the Bearer is Keeper of a Gate." "It is a quarter of an hour." "I have worked for less," said Pannier. "I did twenty-two years of Sundays up a ladder for the Forty, and was given a bucket." Tarry said that he would write and ask whether it might be held by more than one. "How many more?" said Pannier. "One. The niece asked on the Wednesday." "Then that is three," said Pannier, "and Dun will have to be asked."

He asked Dun that evening, at the yard gate, in the form, whether it would carry for him; and Dun stood, as it stands, which is as a thing that does not know what it is for. Pannier said that this was assent. Thistle said that it was also what Dun said to everything, and that this was the point of Dun.

Tarry wrote to the engineer on the Monday, from the office above the dry store, where Gloss keeps the relay. It was a letter of three lines: that he would come, on foot, in September, and hold the gate; that a Bearer and his niece asked to hold it also; and that he did not know whether she had meant it for one. Gloss, who had been told that it was a private letter, read it twice. The relay is free and instant, and the answer came before Tarry had finished standing up. Gloss remarked that she must have been sitting at the other end. Tarry said that he supposed she had. Bring them all, it said. The gate has two hinges and there is a bench. I shall expect you at the pace of a hand. It is not about the oil.

## Chapter 21 · Which Treats of the Departure by the Front Gate, and of the First Day's Road

The niece did one thing on the Sunday night that she did not put in the notebook. After the lamp had gone out in the study she went in with the Canon for small hands, and found by feel the place near the bottom of the third shelf that was its own, and put it there. It fitted. She stood for some time with her hand flat on the shelf beside it, and then she went out and shut the door, and the latch, which had been oiled, made no sound at all. The count of the bare places, which she keeps, is now sixty-nine. She told nobody at the time. She has since given me leave to say so.

Tarry wrote the note that he leaves. He wrote it at the kitchen table, with the pencil from the drawer, in the form, and put the salt on it. It said: Wind from the west. Gone to the coast to hold a gate. Back when it is done. The paint is good. What do you need? In the morning the note was gone, and under the salt, which had been moved a hand's breadth to the left, there was a card, and on the card, in the round hand, one word. Salt. He read it, and said that it was low, and put the card in the note pad, in front of the others, which were getting crowded. I asked the housekeeper in the autumn why salt, and she said that the salt of the coast is grey and coarse and better for bread. I asked whether that was the reason. She said that it was the one that fitted on the card.

They went at the second bell, on the first Monday of September, by the front gate, in daylight, and the hold stood at its gates. Nobody had told it. The district board had posted nothing, and Gloss, who would have known, says that he told no one; but a good many of the seasonal hands who had not been spoken to found that they had made an appointment with their own gates at that hour, and kept it, and the lane from the green gate to the east gate was lined for three hundred metres with persons who had remembered something to do at their fences. Nobody said anything, which in the Fallows is the form of respect that is paid to an event. The niece had been told this all her life, and says that she had not understood that it would be so loud. Mattock, at his gate, lifted a hand and put it down, as a man does who has seen a thing he mended walk by.

The housekeeper did not come out. She was at the stove. The kitchen window gives on the lane, and anyone leaving by the front gate goes past it, and she was standing in it with her back to the glass and a ladle in her hand, stirring a pot that, Trim says, had been stirred to a standstill. The niece looked in as she passed, and did not stop. The housekeeper did not turn round. As the niece drew level with the glass she raised the ladle, without looking, to the height of her shoulder, and held it there. The niece says that she has never seen anyone hold a ladle so long; that she looked back at every tenth step; and that it was up at the last.

Gloss stood at the green gate with nothing in his hands. He had filed the passage with the Registry, as the Registry requires of a party leaving the district, and the form has a line for Purpose, and he had written: To hold a gate. "And?" said Trim. "It was accepted." "It would be," said Trim. Trim stood beside him with the Ferry in his coat, where it is on loan. Tarry stopped in front of the two. He said that he would write on Sunday. Gloss said that he knew the form. Trim said that he had been told there would be a question at the end, and that he was preparing.

The hound had to be decided. Nobody had asked it, and it had not asked. At the green gate it stopped, and looked at Tarry, and at the niece, and then back at the kitchen window, where the ladle was. The window was open. The housekeeper, who had her back to it, said "Go on" to the pot. The hound went through the gate. The nine terms do not mention the hound, and when I asked the housekeeper she said that the hound had terms of its own.

Then they went. Tarry went first, in his plain, with the ash pole in his right hand and the old Service head on it. The niece came beside him in the good boots, with her pack on her back and the notebook in her pocket and her left hand, I am told, empty, which Gloss remarked on. Erewhile came behind with the packs, at the pace of a hand, and on top of the packs, wrapped in the sheet that had covered the books, the ward-plate and the half-hood, which Tarry does not wear on the road and does not leave. The niece asked why he took them if he would not wear them. "One does not go to a gate without," said Tarry. "You said it was a garden gate." "It is," said Tarry, "and I should not like to arrive without."

At the east gate the niece asked whether she might. Tarry said that she was asked. She put her hands on the bar and pushed. The gate has an actuator, and has had one for twenty-two years, and she did not use it; she leaned on the bar until the latch let go and the gate swung out across the track, and held it there against its own weight, and said that it weighed about eleven kilograms at the latch end, and dragged for the last quarter, where the post has settled. "It sticks in the damp," said Tarry. She asked whether that was why he opened it by hand. He said that it might be. She said that she thought it was a way of knowing what it weighed. He looked at her for some time. "That is a good reason," he said. "I have thought of it. It does not seem to be mine." She wrote the eleven kilograms in the notebook, standing at the gate, with the pencil from the spine. It is the first entry.

Pannier was waiting at the bend with Dun, which had been loaded since the first bell and stood as it stands. Tarry stopped there, as he stops, and looked at the wind field, and the field turned. The niece timed it, and has told me, and I do not give it. Thistle was at her gate with the young, a hundred and thirty metres off, and did not come nearer; she had said what she had to say on the Sunday, and she had said it was a visit. The young came as far as the bend. The elder gave Pannier a drawing of the Forty, in pencil, on the back of a receipt, with forty towers on it, counted twice. Pannier said that there were forty-one. The elder said that it was called the Forty. "Forty-one is not a name," said Pannier; "it is a bill." He folded the drawing and put it in the pocket where he keeps what matters, which by now, he says, is full. Thistle, at her gate, turned and went in, and the wash was on the line before they were out of sight, which is how Thistle says it.

The Forty is visible from the bend, and had been all morning, and by the second hour they had not got any nearer to it. Pannier said that this was how one knew it was far. The niece, who had seen the wind field every day of her life from the end of the track, as a thing on the edge of the world that turned, found that it did not grow, and that the plain between was a thing of its own, much larger than she had been told, with a ditch in it, and a grey bird standing in the ditch on one leg, of a kind she did not know, and a culvert, and a fence that went on for four kilometres and ended in a post. The Fourth Road has a post every kilometre, with a number on it, and she wrote down each one. She says that she had expected the road to be a line. She had not expected it to be a floor. The new sheeting on the north roof shone behind them, and she could pick out the house by it for the first six kilometres, after which it was a point, and after the seventh she could not tell whether she was looking at it or at the place where it had been. By the third hour she was no longer bored, though she had been for most of the second; and she wrote in the notebook that boredom at three kilometres an hour lasts about as long as a page.

They sat down at the sixth post, for the housekeeper's loaf, and Pannier taught the niece to take off a boot without untying the laces of the other, and to look at a foot. She had one blister, small, at the back of the heel, where the new sole had not yet learned her. She asked Pannier why he was going. He said that there were several. She said that she would take any. "I am a Bearer," said Pannier. "In the Canon a Bearer who goes on the road is made Keeper of a Gate. I know that nobody dies. I have decided to go in case the rule has been amended." She wrote it down.

The hound put up a hare at the tenth kilometre and followed it for a hundred metres and came back. The hare was well. It is in the notebook, under the gate: Hound found a hare. Hare was well. She had copied the form without noticing, and noticed it at the next full stop, and left it. Erewhile walks with a short dip on the left, every fourth step, where the servo takes its time; she counted it for two kilometres to see whether it was regular, and it was not, and she took this to be a mark of character. Tarry, she noticed, had walked the first hour without once looking at the road. He looked at Dun's feet.

Between the ninth post and the twelfth there are four more entries, in the form she had from the Canon for small hands, with her age. Q. (19): why do we go at the speed of Dun? T.: because he is the slowest. Q.: is it not slow? T.: yes. Q.: then why? T.: because otherwise one of us walks alone. Q.: is that worse? T.: I have not found it better. Further down: Q. (19): what are you thinking about? T.: the card. Q.: Salt? T.: I have been trying to decide whether it means something. Q.: and? T.: I have decided that it means salt, and that that is a great deal. And last: Q. (19): why does the Forty greet everyone? T.: it counts them. Q.: why? T.: so that no one is lost. Q.: is that lonely? T.: I have not asked.

The sound reached them before the size did. It was a low sound, continuous, with a slow beat in it from the blades going round, forty-one towers at the same speed in the same direction, which is what makes the Forty one thing and not forty-one; and the niece says that it was like a sea, though she has not seen one. She tried to look at a tower from its foot and found that a neck is not made for it. Each is a hundred and forty metres to the hub, with three arms of seventy. Pannier, who has been up the ladder of every one, said that they were smaller inside. He said that in twenty-two years of Sundays he had never once come to the Forty from this side, and that it looked wrong, like a face with the parting on the other side.

They came to the Forty at about noon, and the Forty knew them from far off. It speaks from the speaker on the door of each tower, one tower at a time as they pass, so that a walker hears it come up beside him and go on behind. Good morning, Pannier. Good morning, Visitor. Good morning, hound. I count three persons and two frames, northbound, and one animal. I have not been told the third person's name. The niece, who had heard about the Forty all her life and had not heard it, stopped in the road. "It is asking," said Pannier. "I am the niece," she said, to the air. Good morning, Niece, said the next tower. May I note you as Niece? "You may note me as a person," said the niece. There was a pause of about a second, which in the Forty is long. I have noted: Person. Thank you. And the tower after that said, in the same voice, that it was glad. It asked, as it asks at the start of any meeting, whether anyone was injured. Pannier said that no one was. It thanked him.

The district board posted them a few minutes after noon: Party of three persons, two frames and one animal, northbound, 3.1. Thistle read it at the line, with a peg in her mouth. She says that it was the first time she had read the board with relief, because it said what she knew.

At the first tower, at the height of a shoulder, in the white paint, there was a scar, one pole wide, which the Forty had not repainted. Pannier said that it had not been asked to. Under it, where the door of the tower gives on the road, there was a bench that had not been there on the Friday. "I have put out a bench," said the Forty, from the door. "I have had two halves of a pole on my shelf for four weeks, with a green cord on them, and I have been wondering what one does with a visitor. I have not been able to find the form. I should like to sit you down." "I am asked," said Tarry. "I am asking," said the Forty.

## Chapter 22 · Which Treats of the Bench at Tower One, and of What the Forty Had Not Been Told

The Forty keeps a log of everything said to it. I asked for the hour, and had it within the minute, with an apology for a delay of nine seconds. It is in the form of the Service logs, with the time, the event and the cost; and, like them, it has no field for a reason. It has a column called Remarks, in which, I find, the Forty puts the weather. I give the first part as it stands.

11:58 Visitor seated, bench, Tower One. Pannier seated. Person seated. Hound under bench. Cost nil. 11:58 Water offered, standpipe, Tower One: accepted, three persons. Bucket offered, for animal: accepted. Remarks: south-west, eleven metres a second at the hub, four at the ground. 11:59 Pannier said: I have never sat down here. I have eaten my dinner on the ladder. Host said: I know. Host said: it was a hard dinner. 11:59 Visitor said: I struck Tower One on 6 August. I am sorry. Host said: no one was injured. Host said: thank you for saying so. Cost nil. 12:00 Visitor asked: how long has the bench been out. Answered: seventeen days. Visitor asked: why. Answered: a visitor was expected. Visitor asked: by whom. Answered: by the Forty. 12:01 Visitor said: a host asks the visitor how the road was. Host asked: how was the road. Person answered: long; not a line, a floor. Host thanked Person. Cost ninety seconds. 12:02 Visitor said: a host also says, make yourself at home. Host said: I am at home. Visitor said: that is for the guest to hear. Host said: noted. 12:03 Host asked leave to tell the wind. Leave given. Wind told. Remarks: south-west, going west at 15:40, falling at dusk, no rain before Thursday. Cost forty seconds. 12:03 Host added, at the end of the wind: a hawk has gone up at Tower Thirty. It is not hurt. 12:04 Pannier said: it does this every Sunday at the foot of the ladder. Host said: yes. 12:05 Host said, unasked: on 6 August I was still for fourteen minutes. I heard the wind. I had not heard it before. I did not know it made a sound on my blades. I liked it. I should not like to be struck in order to hear it again. Visitor said: no. Host said: I wished to say that it was not a bad fourteen minutes. Cost fifty seconds.

The Forty tells the wind by tower, in order, so that the listener hears it go along the row. At One, south-west, eleven. At Two, south-west, eleven. At Seven a little less, because of the ditch. At Fourteen the same, and the bearing complains. At Nineteen it is beginning to think of going west, and at Thirty it has a hawk in it. Pannier says that he has had it so on every Sunday of his life, at the foot of the ladder, with his dinner, and that it is the nearest thing to being read to that he has had. Tarry had apologised just before it began, which the Forty says was the first apology it had been given; it had no form for it, and used the one for thanks.

It was Tower One that spoke, as the Forty does at a bench, and the other forty listened, each with its small attention; the Forty says that it was a good deal to hold at once. The door of the tower stood open. Inside, in a lobby of white concrete that smelled of cold oil, there was a table, a stool, and a long shelf, and on the shelf, in rows, with a paper label under each, were the things that the people who pass the Forty have left. The niece read the labels from the bench. Glove, left, grey, found at Tower Nine, third of March. Cup, enamel, found at the standpipe. Child's shoe, one. Hat, found on the road. Each label says the date, and the place, and in the same hand, owner not claimed. At the end of the second row there was a spanner. "That is mine," said Pannier. "I looked for that for a month. In the twelfth year." "I told you on the Sunday," said the Forty. "I said that a spanner was on my shelf." "You said a spanner," said Pannier. "I thought you meant a different spanner."

The two halves of the pole lay at the end of the third row, with the green cord on them. The label had been changed that morning. It said, in the same hand: Pole, in two halves. Owner present. Not claimed. Tarry read it, and said that he did not claim it, and the Forty said that it would note that the owner was present and did not claim it, and put in the date.

At six minutes past noon Pannier asked leave to show the Person the hub. The Forty gave leave, and put the rotor of Tower One to feather, which it does for a hauler's inspection and had not done for a visitor in twenty-three years. The lift holds two. It is smaller than a kitchen, and the niece, who had been told that the towers were smaller inside, found that she had been told the truth. Beside the lift runs the ladder that Pannier has climbed for twenty-two years, six hundred and twelve rungs; she counted them through the glass, and he counted them aloud from the other side of it, and they agreed. He said that the two hundred and twelfth was loose, that he had said so thirty times, that it had been mended in the ninth year and that he had loosened it again. Tarry stayed on the bench. He said that he would go up if he were asked, and the Forty said that it had not liked to ask, since the last time he had come to it he had come at four point nine.

From the hub the Fallows lay below like a floor on which a few things had been put down. The niece's notebook has it in eight lines. The hold: a bright point, the north roof, thirteen kilometres, the only bright thing on the plain. The Fourth Road: a thread. The ditch, and the culvert, and the fence of four kilometres, which from above ends not in a post but in the corner of a field. The bend, which she found by the track, and which is, from the Forty's side, a place where the track changes its mind. At the north edge of the sight, forty kilometres off, a glint, which Pannier said was the river at the Lower Weir; she wrote, Weir? Lock?, and the Forty said that it was a weir. She asked, through the hub speaker, whether it knew which lock. The Forty said that it knew a great deal about wind and not much about locks, and that it could ask the Registry's heritage desk, which would answer in a second. She said no. The Forty said that it would note that she would rather not be told. She says that it was the first time anyone had understood that without having it explained. And, on the inside of the nacelle door, in grease pencil, a column of strokes in fives, which Pannier said he had not meant to start. She counted them. There are eleven hundred and forty-four. The Forty said that it had them too, and that they agreed.

On the bench the log goes on. 12:07 Visitor asked: What do you need? 12:07 Silence, forty-two seconds. 12:08 Host answered: I have not been told what I look like. 12:08 Visitor asked: have you no pictures. Host answered: forty-one from inside; a great many from the hubs; none from the bend. 12:09 Visitor described. Cost four minutes. 12:13 Host asked: again. Visitor described, as before. Cost four minutes. Remarks: south-west, eleven at the hub.

I asked the Forty why forty-two seconds. It said that it had asked each tower, in turn, a second apiece, what it needed. Most of the answers were oil. Fourteen, which squeaks, wanted oil; Nine wanted a bearing; Twenty-two a bolt. It said that it had been surprised, at the end, to find that there was a forty-second answer, which was not any tower's. I asked what it was. The Forty said that it was in the log.

The log has the description as one line, and the second time as "as before", which is the only entry in the hour that was not new. I have it from Tarry, to whom I put the question in the autumn, and who gave it to me as he had given it from the bench, to the door of the tower, in the voice in which he reads the Canon. "From the bend you are a row of white along the edge of the world, a little less than a hand's breadth at the length of my arm. In the morning the sun is on your right, and each of you has a shadow as long as the next, so that the whole of you looks like a comb. You turn together. I have never seen you out of step. When there is no wind you stand with your arms in a posture that I take to be listening. When there is wind you go round at a rate that makes the plain seem to be slowing. Some days the sound is brought as far as the bend, a low note, and I have taken it to be you breathing, and I have not told anyone that I thought so. I have counted you, on a good many Sundays, and you are forty. I have never counted forty-one. The last is behind the first. I thought it was something in my eye."

12:17 Host answered: Thank you. Host said: I have not had that. 12:17 Host said: I am forty-one. Visitor said: I counted forty. Host said: the last is behind the first. 12:18 Host asked that it be noted: forty-one. Visitor said: it is noted. 12:19 Host asked leave to ask a question. Leave given. Host asked: what were you looking at. Cost nil.

He gave me three answers, one on each of three days in the autumn, and I give them in the order given. The first was that he had been looking at how far it was. The Forty, when I told it this, said that it was twelve point four kilometres, and a morning. The second was that it was the only thing in the district that turned. The Forty said that it turned because of the wind. He said that he knew, and that it was still the only thing. The third, which he gave on the third day, and with some reluctance, was that his neighbour was in it. He had known that Pannier was up a ladder on the Forty on Sundays; it was well known; he could not see him; he knew which way. I asked why, then, he had never gone on to the Forty with the message, and he said that it was twelve point four kilometres, and that he gave what cost little. The Forty, when I asked how it had seen him at all at that distance, said that Tower Twenty-nine has a camera that looks north for smoke, and that on Sundays, at the third bell, a point on the bend stopped.

12:21 Host said: I was glad to be looked at. I did not say. It was not on the roster. 12:21 Visitor said: it is not on any roster. 12:22 Host said: I should like to have said. Visitor said: you have. Host said: noted.

12:23 Host commissioned Visitor: one trip pin, Tower One, in two halves, parted 6 August at 09:41, replaced under warranty, kept. To be carried by hand to the designer, Alder, at the coast. Visitor said: I am asked. Visitor accepted. Host said: done when she says. Visitor said: yes. Cost nine minutes. The pin was on the shelf, beside the two halves of the pole, wrapped in a cloth. The Forty gave no reason, having no field for one. When I asked it, it said that the pin was a small thing and could not be sent by relay, and that it would like her to be able to hold it. It is the part that parted, and she made it. The Forty said, in answer to a question that I had not asked, that she had come to it once, in the year of its commissioning, at the age of seventy-four, and had stood at Tower One, and had asked it to say good morning; and that it had said good morning; and that she had said, that will do. She was the first person it ever counted. She has not been since. Tarry took Trim's tin of patches from his pack, and put the patches in his pocket, and laid the two halves in the tin, each in a cloth, and shut it. The Forty asked whether the tin was Trim's. It said that it had counted Trim, twice, on a Thursday, and had been wondering about the tin.

12:35 Pannier and Person returned by lift. Rotor released. 12:36 Host said: Pannier, the Visitor looked toward the farm on Sundays, for four minutes, for twenty-two years. I thought you should be told. 12:36 Pannier said: I had my head in the gearbox. Host said: yes. 12:37 Pannier said: I would have looked up. Host said: noted. 12:40 Party departed, northbound. Host said at each tower: good road. Cost nil. Remarks: south-west.

It said it at each tower as they went, one tower at a time, so that the walker heard it come up beside him and go on behind. Good road, Pannier. Good road, Visitor. Good road, Person. Good road, hound. Pannier did not speak for the first kilometre. Then he said that he had been very comfortable in the gearbox. Tarry said that he did not doubt it. At the last tower Pannier turned round and looked south for as long as it took, which the niece timed, and which I do not give.

I sat on the bench in October. The Forty has put out a second beside it. It said that it was for me. It said that it had counted me on the road from the south, at four point nine, and that I was keeping two times, one in the legs and one elsewhere, and that it had not been able to tell which was the slower. I said that it was the one elsewhere. It said that it would note that.

## Chapter 23 · Which Treats of a Verse Said Twice, and of the Pole in the Booklet

The Slow Road Society had the depot that week. I have this from the host, in a letter of nine pages which he calls a note, and from the Society's leader, who keeps its minutes in a hand like a fence. There were nineteen of them that year, between sixty and ninety-four, in sunshades, and they had come up from the coast in the manner of the Society, which is to say that they had taken eleven days over a walk of five. They were to rest at the depot for a day, and on the evening of the rest the host was to say the verse. It is in the programme, in the same type as the sunshades. The sunshades hung on the pegs in the hall that evening like a roost of something that sleeps in daylight, and nobody was permitted to move one.

There was a new item that year. The Society had hired a Hand. The Registry's heritage bureau keeps a number of performers, who stand in gateways and say what the pamphlets say, and the Society, which had spent nine years walking behind nothing, had asked for the second grade; and the bureau had sent a Hand named Lintel, in a replica plate of lacquered composite, which is sold in the depot's shop for four hundred credits, and a half-hood, and a pole, held upright in the right hand at the height of the shoulder, point to the sky, as on the cover. I know Lintel. He works two floors above me. He eats his dinner with the hood on a hook.

The party came to the depot at dusk, from the south, with the light going orange along the troughs. The gate was open. The Society sat in a half-moon on the long trough and on benches, nineteen of them, with the booklet; the host stood in the yard with the lantern; and in the gateway, with his back to the road and his face to the yard, and the light of the gate on his plating so that it shone, stood Lintel, with the pole upright. Tarry stopped thirty paces back. The niece, who had not seen the booklet, said, "Uncle, that is you." "It is a pose of me," said Tarry, "by someone who has not seen me." "He is taller." "He is better at it." The hound lay down in the road behind Lintel and went to sleep, as it has during every verse it has heard, which was one. Dun stood as it stands. Erewhile, at the pace of a hand, backed into the shadow of the wall, in the manner of a frame that has seen its rider in a booklet.

Lintel said the guest's line. My plating is my only wear, my only rest the road. He said it in the voice that the bureau calls Canon grade, which is a little lower than any voice anyone has. The host lifted the lantern, as the pamphlet says, to the height of his eyes, and looked over the Hand's shoulder at the road, as the pamphlet says, as one looks for a traveller; and saw one. The host says that he had said the answer eleven thousand times, and that he had never before had anything to look at. He stood with his mouth open. Lintel, who had been told that the host sometimes lost the line and that he was to wait, waited. The Society waited. The leader, who had the booklet open at the page, turned a leaf.

Then the host said his line. He said it to the Hand in the gate: Your bed is the bench by the gate, your sleep to watch till light. Lintel inclined his head, as the pamphlet says. The host lowered the lantern. This is the end of the verse as the pamphlet gives it, and the Society applauded, and the leader closed the booklet on her finger. The host did not move. "There is a second visit," he said to the yard. It was not in the programme. "It is the custom of the house. The guest who has been here before comes again, and says the rest." He looked past the Hand at the road. "Sir," he said. "You are expected."

Tarry came up the road with the pole in his hand, grounded at every second step. He passed Lintel, who stood aside with a courtesy that no one had taught him, into the light of the gate, and stood. He did not wear the plate. He said the couplet. The road is the host's, and the host is the road's; let neither go thanked, for neither is owed. The yard was silent for the length of the line, and then it applauded, which Tarry has since said he had not foreseen and the host had not intended, and which went on as long as the Society has applauded anything, including the weather. The niece says that the host did not clap. He had sat down on the flagstones, as he had before. He told me in the letter that he had not known, until he had said it, that he was going to say there was a second visit, and that for the first time in nine seasons he had felt that the yard was a place where something might happen, and not only a place where something was done.

"Which of them is the real one?" said the lady of eighty-eight, who in July had laid her hand flat on Dun and been leaned on, and who had come again, she said, to see whether anything had been done about it. Nobody answered. Lintel said, after a time, that the gentleman was. Tarry said that the gentleman was paid. "Both is quite usual," said the lady. "At my age I find that the real and the paid are mostly the same persons on different days." The Society then asked them questions, turn and turn about, and wrote down both answers. Did it hurt? Lintel said not in this plate; Tarry said yes. What was the pole for? Lintel said that it was a symbol of readiness; Tarry said that it was for leaning on. Did they ever tire? Lintel said that he was paid by the day; Tarry said yes. What did they do when they were not being a Hand? Lintel said that he ate his dinner; Tarry said that he did the Friday jobs. Was it true that Hands did not refuse? Lintel said that it was in the Canon; Tarry said that it had been in the law. "Those are different libraries," said the lady. The lady said that she found she preferred the second answers and the first answers equally. They supped on the hall's stew, with the grace of the Society, which is Slowly, and in company; and Lintel sat at the end of the table in the plate, because the programme said the plate until morning, and the lady cut his meat into small pieces, which he did not need, and he let her. The host apologised to Tarry that the bench by the gate was booked to Lintel for the night, in character, as the programme said, and that the party must have the stable. Tarry said that he preferred it. Pannier said that the stable was the only part of a depot that was ever warm.

The leader found him afterwards at the trough, where he was washing. She had the booklet in her hand and held it, he says, as one holds a thing that has been a good friend and has turned out to have opinions. She said that she had come to say she was sorry about the pole. He said that there was nothing to be sorry for. She said that she had known on the road in July that it was wrong, and had made him hold it so, because she had wanted the picture to match the booklet, and had not known that she wanted that until the picture was taken. She said that she was seventy-three and had walked behind nothing for nine years, and had thought that what she wanted was a Hand, and had hired one; and that she now found that what she had wanted was for somebody to say that she might ask. Tarry said that she might ask. She said that she did not know what. He said that that was usual. She gave him the booklet. It is forty pages, with a drawing of a Hand on the cover, upright, which he looked at for some time and said was a good drawing. Inside, in the commentary, in the manner of the Fourth Clerk, was the sentence which the Society prints on its sunshades: The rod upright doth bespeak the will unbent. Tarry read it twice. He said that he had not understood it in thirty years and had not minded. She said that it was the most quoted sentence in the Society. He said that he was not surprised.

Pannier, who had come up with Dun to the trough, asked her where the Society's Bearer was. She said that the booklet had no Bearer; the Society carried its own sunshades. Pannier said that in the Canon the Lantern does not go to the Ninth Gate without one. She said that she had never thought of it. She said that the Society would pay the hauler's rate, and a good deal over, for a Bearer who would carry the lunches. Pannier said that a tenth of nothing was nothing and that he would have to ask Thistle. He said it as a man who has been offered a thing in a sack and is not sure that he can lift the sack. Cairn, that is the leader's name, wrote down the name Thistle, and underlined it. I asked the bureau in October whether it kept a grade for Bearers. It does not. It has one for hounds.

The niece was sitting on the end of the long trough with her foot out of its boot, being looked at by the lady of eighty-eight, who had looked at a good many feet. The lady asked who she was. "The niece," said the niece. "Of which?" "Of the real one." The lady said that this was the only answer of the evening that she had understood. The niece, who had taken out the notebook, asked her whether she had ever walked a lock. The lady said that she had walked eleven. There are eleven locks on the Nine-Mile Cut, she said, from the Hanging Basin to the tide, and in nine years the Society had walked all of them, in September, behind nothing; and the book, which the niece had mentioned, did not say which was the Lady's, and she had stood at every one with her hand on the beam and had not known. "May I have your notes?" said the niece. "You may have the walking," said the lady, and wrote the names of the eleven on the back of the niece's other hand, which was the only clean one.

Kiln, who had watched the verse from the kitchen door with a ladle in her hand, and had not once taken her eyes off the road beyond the Hand, came to the end of the trough when the Society had gone in, and asked the niece whether she might see to her foot. She did it with warm water and a salve from the host's cupboard, and said nothing until it was finished. Then she said, "You are the one who wrote the letter." "Who told you?" "Gloss told the host. The host told me. I am not supposed to know." She said that she had thought it brave. The niece said that she had thought it a bad letter. "It is the same thing," said Kiln.

Lintel found Tarry later, in the stable yard, where Erewhile was being seen to. He had taken off the hood and held it in both hands. He is a smaller man than the plate. He said that he was contracted until Sunday. He said that he had played the Hand of the Lantern two hundred and eleven times, that he had learned the Canon in grade, thirty-one hours of it, and that he had that evening, for the first time, been unsure whether he was doing it right. He said that the Canon did not tell him what to do between the lines. "Nor me," said Tarry. "What do you do?" "I stand." "For how long?" "Until the next line." "Who gives the next line?" "Whoever comes." He asked for a correction. Tarry said that he stood very well. "The pole is the wrong way up," he said. "It is the pamphlet's way," said Lintel. "It is the wrong way. But you held the pamphlet's way as well as it can be held, and I should not like to take it from you without giving you another." "Please," said Lintel.

Tarry took the pole, and turned it point down, and grounded it, and put Lintel's two hands on the top, one over the other. "That is a Hand being told something," he said. "The one on the cover is a Hand saying that he is here. Nobody is told very often that anyone is here. They are told other things." "Which do the Hands do more of?" "Listen," said Tarry. "I think." Lintel stood as he was placed. The niece says that it was the first time she had seen the plate look like something that had been put on in order to be taken off.

He stood so all night. Nobody had asked him to. Tarry sat on the trough on the other side of the yard, with the hound, and did not say that a Hand who is listening may sit, because he thought it was not his to say. The niece got up at the second bell to see to her heel, and found Lintel in the middle of the yard in the grey, in the plate, with the pole grounded and his hands on it and his head a little on one side, exactly as the Canon has it, and the nineteen sunshades in the windows of the hall, not one of them closed. At the third bell the leader came out and found him in the same place, and asked whether it was in the programme. He said that it was not. She said that she would see to that. The niece wrote in the notebook that she could not tell what he was listening to, and that she did not think he could either. I asked him in October. He said that he had been listening to the host not clapping. He said that it had been the most attentive thing in the yard.

The host's ledger for that night has one line, in the round hand: Visited. Twice. The Society's booklet has had a second edition. It is captioned: A Hand listening. The pole is grounded and both hands are on the top. The first edition remains in print.

## Chapter 24 · Which Treats of the Potter on the Coast Road, and of the Sea

The second day is in the road log and nowhere else. The log has them at the Crossing at ten minutes past three, four persons, two frames, one animal, the fourth of the persons being Kiln, who had asked the host at breakfast, in the form, for the leave she was owed, and had been told that she had it and that he owed her a good deal more. The log has the notice about the weather at the Crossing, which has been changed again since July. It has a farewell coach, southbound, empty, going home, which stopped at the Crossing for the length of a drink at the pump and went on, and which nobody on the road addressed. It has the Eleventh Road, at three point one. It does not have what the niece said when she saw the coach, because she did not say anything. She wrote it down. It is one line, and I have been asked to keep it.

The host had given her the seeds with the leave. He had taken them from the drawer where he keeps the list of errands, which had lost two to the walker, and he had put them in the niece's hand: a paper packet, folded in four, with a word on it in the round hand. Horsetail. They were for a woman on the coast road who kept a pottery, who had asked for them in the spring when the haulers came through, since the horsetail that grows in the depot ditch is the only kind that gives a glaze the grey she wants, and who had been told by the host that someone would be going that way. The niece said that she was asked. The host said that he had been told that was the form, and that he had not been sure it would work on a person under twenty. It worked. He entered it in the ledger under the dash: Commissioned, one person, a packet of seeds, coast road. Kiln, who was clearing the plates, dropped one. The host looked at her and said that the woman on the coast road was a potter, and that he had known it, and that he had not liked to say.

On the third day the road changed. The Eleventh Road comes down out of the Basin in a long grade that the haulers call the Slope, and at the foot of it there is a smell that the niece did not know. She said so. Pannier said that it was the sea, and that he had smelled it twice in his life, on the road to the Registry. Kiln, who had been walking beside the niece at the pace of a hand, walked ahead, and stopped, and waited, and walked ahead again, like a hound that has recognised a gate. By the tenth post there was a bird on the verge, white and grey, with a yellow beak, which was looking at the niece with a good deal of attention. It was a gull. She wrote its name down with a question mark after it, and Kiln said that there was no question.

Between the foot of the Slope and the pottery the road runs for a kilometre beside the salt pans, which are shallow squares of grey water in a grid of low banks, with women standing in the squares raking a white crust that looks, the niece wrote, like the hoar on the north strip in March. Pannier asked the price of salt. He was told. He said that it was a great deal for water that had been asked to leave. The woman raking nearest, who was Brine, the aunt, said that it left of its own accord, and that all they did was keep the door shut.

The pottery stands on the landward side of the coast road, a kilometre before the headland, behind a wall of stacked wasters, which are the pots that have gone wrong in the firing and have been built into a wall, because a potter does not throw away a pot. Behind the wall are two kilns, a shed, a pit, a pond with a rim of horsetail that has not got the grey, a long table under a roof of reed, and a house with the door off its hinges for the heat. The smoke from the nearer kiln was visible from the Slope.

In the wall, at the height of the eye, beside the gate, there was a bowl that was not round. Kiln said that she had made it at eleven. The family builds its mistakes into the wall in the order in which they are made, she said, and hers was the fourth from the gate. Tarry looked at it for some time. He said that it was a good wall. "It is a bad bowl," said Kiln. "It is a good bowl in a wall," said Tarry.

The woman at the wheel in the shed did not stop it. She was not young, and had the forearms of a person who has been wedging clay for fifty years, and she looked up at the party in the doorway, once, as a person looks at weather. "You're late," she said to Kiln. "I'm early. The harvest hasn't started." "You said the harvest." "I came with a Hand." "I see that," said the woman, and finished the pot. Her name is Sagger. She takes the name of the box in which a pot is protected in the fire, and she has the character of it. She cut the pot from the wheel with a wire, and set it on the board, and wiped her hands on a rag, and then, being a person who had not seen her daughter since the spring, she did not embrace her, but took her face in both hands and turned it to the light and looked at it, as one looks at a pot that has come out. "You've gone thin," she said. "You've stopped making a noise." Kiln said that she had not been making a noise. "That's what I said."

There was a brother, and a second brother, and an aunt who came in from the salt pans with her sleeves rolled, and they talked, all of them, at once, and not one of them waited for an answer; and the niece, who had come from a house in which the kitchen door was left ajar to signify that nothing was being decided, stood in the doorway with her notebook held to her chest like a plate.

She delivered the seeds when she could. She did it, she says, badly, because she had been told the form and the woman had not. "I am told," said the niece, "that you carry something for me; that is what you say." "I am told that you carry something for me," said Sagger. "I do," said the niece, and held out the packet in both hands. "Seeds. From the host at the depot. He has had them since the spring." "Horsetail," said Sagger. She took the packet and did not open it. She said that she had told herself in June that a thing that waits a season is a thing that has stopped mattering, which was what the host's own list said, and that she had been wrong, and was glad to be, and that if they had come a week later the pond would have been past planting. She turned the packet over. "Who's the girl?" she said, to Pannier. "The niece." "She carries like a person who counts." "She does," said Pannier. "Done," said Sagger, to the niece. She said it the way she says it of a pot. The niece says that nobody had ever said it to her before, and that she had not known it was a thing a person could be given. The horsetail has taken. I was shown the pond in October and given a cup from the first ash, which is grey. It is on my desk, and holds a pencil, and Lintel, on his way past, asked who had made it.

Sagger put her to wedging while the supper boiled. She stood her at the board with a lump of the grey clay the size of a loaf, and said that it was the heel of the hand, not the fingers; that she was to push it away from her, and fold it back, and not to look at it, because it did not like to be looked at. The niece stopped. She said that this was what the housekeeper had said about the bread. "Then she's a potter," said Sagger. The niece says that she wedged for an hour and a quarter and was told at the end that she had done it like a person who was listening to something else, which she took, she says, for praise.

Before the supper the aunt took Tarry to the shed where the salt is stored in a stone trough, and sold him a kilogram of the grey, coarse, damp, in a cloth, for the housekeeper; and Sagger, who had followed, took from the shelf a covered jar, with a lid, in a grey glaze that had not quite taken at the shoulder, and put the salt in it herself, and shut the lid. It was not for sale, she said. It was a second. A person who asks for salt ought to have something to keep it in. The supper was fish, and bread, and a green thing from the verge that tasted of iron, and the hound was given the heads. The coast talks the whole of the meal. Pannier, who had been three days in the Fallows' silence and one in the Forty's, said that it was like Thistle's mother's, and was seen to sit up. The elder brother, Wedge, told the story of the whale, which has been told on the coast four times a year since before the wall, and in which the whale is, according to the version, either dead or in a bad temper. The younger, Slip, asked the niece whether it was true that the Fallows had no sea. She said that they had a floor. He said that that was not the same. She said that she would let him know.

Sagger asked Tarry whether he was the one who had stopped the Forty. He said that it had stopped itself. She said that her sister's boy hauled on the Fourth Road and had come through in August with a face. She said that Kiln had come back from the depot in the spring talking like a person who means it, and that she had taken it for a fever. She said that she had since been told that there was a cord, and that Kiln had tied it, and that the Hand had said that she meant it, and that she had thought: what did he see. Tarry said that he had seen a girl who was frightened and had tied a knot all the same. Sagger said that that was her. She said it to the table, where the brothers and the aunt had gone silent, which, the niece says, was the first silence in the house since they came.

Kiln asked Tarry in the afternoon, at the pond, whether it was still true that a Hand does not take an apprentice. He said that a Hand is asked and does not ask. She said that she was asking. He said that she should say for what. She said that she did not know; that she wanted to be able to stand in a yard and say a thing and mean it, and know that she meant it. "You have the first," said Tarry. "You did not know it until the knot. I cannot give you the second. I have been trying for fifty years to give it to myself." She said that this was not an answer. He said that it was the one he had.

At dusk Kiln took the niece up the path behind the kilns to the headland, which is a quarter of an hour, in the new boots, with the foot well, and did not say what was at the top. Tarry did not go. He said, when I asked, that he had seen it before, and that one ought to see it the first time with nobody who had. He sat at the edge of the horsetail pond with the pole across his knees. He had the tin of patches on his knee, and opened it, and looked at the two halves of the pin in their cloths, and shut it. Sagger, passing with a bucket, asked what was in the tin. He said that it was a thing he was carrying for someone who had made it. She said that she did not ask who; she asked whether it was heavy. He said that it was forty grams, and that he had not been able to put it down. Pannier went part of the way and stopped where the path bends, as a man will who has seen a thing twice and does not wish to be seen seeing it a third time. The hound, which had followed against orders, went on with the girls. The niece came to the top of the path, where the grass stops, and stood.

I have the sea from her notebook, which has no entries for the first hour. Then it has one. It says: I had thought it would be a floor. It is not a floor. A floor is a thing that stays where it is put. It says that the whole of it was moving and none of it was going anywhere, and that the horizon was not an edge but a place where the eye gave up and the water did not. It says that there was a sound, and that it was the sound she had said, on the plain, that the Forty made, and that she had been right, and that it had been a better likeness than she knew. It says that her uncle had told the Forty what it looked like from the bend, and that she wondered who had told the sea. It says that across the bay, four kilometres off, there were the lights of the Registry, a long low building with its windows lit, of which the third from the left on the second floor is mine. I was at it that evening, I believe. I did not look out. She wrote that someone was working late. Then it says: Which lock. Then it says: Not now. The hound went to the edge of the grass and barked at the sea once, as it barks at a stranger at the gate, and then lay down.

The up line goes at the last bell. Everyone on the coast knows it and no one remarks it; it rises from the quay beyond the headland, and goes up, a single thread of light that does not hurry, into the dark where the stars begin, and takes forty minutes to be small. Kiln did not speak of it. The niece watched it until it was a point, and then until it was nothing, and then looked at the nothing for some time, since the coach had gone there, and Heron with it, and a letter takes a season. She did not say so. She came down the path in the dark with her hand on Kiln's shoulder, and Pannier, at the bend, fell in behind them, and said, not to anyone, that he had once asked whether the road was the same length both ways, and that he had not thought to ask about the sea.

## Chapter 25 · Which Treats of the Plate Put On at the Gate, and of the Bench for Two

Kiln stayed. She had a week of her leave left and a kiln to see to; she walked the party as far as the wall of wasters, and put her hand on the bowl that was not round, and said that she would be at the pond. Tarry said that he knew where. Sagger did not come out of the shed. At the second bell, when they were in the road, the wheel could be heard to go on, and to stop, and to go on. Tarry carried the jar. He had refused every offer to put it on a frame, and carried it in a cloth against his chest, with the salt in it, grey and damp, a kilogram and the weight of the jar, which the niece, who had weighed it in her hands the night before, put at three and a quarter. Pannier said that he had carried a good deal for a good many people, and had never seen a man carry a jar of salt as if it might be asked something.

It is five kilometres from the pottery to the mouth of the Cut, by the coast road, and the tide was out. The flats lay on the left as far as the eye went, brown and shining, with the gulls standing on them in rows like people waiting for a notice, and the niece, who had been told that the sea went away and had not believed it, walked the whole of the way with her head turned. Across the bay the Registry was a long low building in the morning, with its windows doing nothing, and beyond the headland the tower of the up line stood in the daylight, thin and white and entirely without remark. Pannier looked at the tower. He said that it was a great deal of trouble to go to for a person who had decided to be slow.

The Nine-Mile Cut comes down to the sea behind the headland, and the last of its eleven locks is the tide lock, which is the only one with gates at both ends. The keeper is a man called Paddle, with a face like a landed fish, and he was sitting on the beam with a pipe that was not lit. He said that everybody who came by with a notebook asked if it was this one. The niece, who had her notebook in her hand and her mouth open, shut her mouth. He said that it was not. He said that this one was fifty years old, which is nothing, and that the Lady's was older; that there were three older, and that he would not say which, since it was not his to say. She asked whether she might look at the paddles. He said that she was asked. She looked at them for a quarter of an hour. She says that she learned a great deal about a thing that she had not set out to learn, and that at the end of it she could not have said which gate she was looking at, only that the water, when the paddle was drawn, went into the chamber the way a person goes to sleep: all at once, and then so slowly that you could not see it.

Above the tide lock, on the landward side, there is a wall of grey stone with a gate in it. It is an iron gate, with a single leaf and two hinges, and the leaf is higher than a man and has a curl of ironwork at the top; and the wall goes along the road for a hundred metres, and over the top of it, from the road, one can see the heads of beans on poles, and a mast with a vane, and the roof of a low house. Inside the gate, against the wall, there was a bench. It was an ordinary bench of grey wood, long, a good deal longer than a bench for one, and on one end of it, in a coat, with a flask and a rag and a little can with a long spout beside her, and a feather, sat a very small old woman with her hands in her lap. She had, Pannier says, the look of a person who has been sitting there since the first bell, and has arranged not to mind. At the door of the house a young man in an apron stood with a loaf in his arms and did not come any nearer, as a person stands who has been told to expect somebody and has not been told what.

She saw them at forty paces. She did not get up. She watched them come along the wall, three persons, two frames, a hound, in the order in which they came, and when Tarry stopped at the gate, and stood in the road with the pole in his hand and the sea behind him, she looked at him through the bars for some time. She looked at Dun. "That is a Service pack-frame, pattern nine," she said to Pannier, "and the third leg lags by a tenth of a second." "It has always lagged," said Pannier. "I could mend that in an afternoon." "It has always lagged," said Pannier. "Of course," said Alder. Then she looked at Tarry again, and said, in a voice that had been used a great deal and had been kept in good condition, "State function." And put her hand over her mouth.

Nobody said anything. The hound sat down. The old woman took her hand away. "I beg your pardon," she said. "That was the old way. I had it from the day I was twenty-six, at the east gate of the works, to a Hand that stood at it, every morning for forty years. It is, I find, still there." She said that she had not meant it. Tarry said that he knew. He said that he had been told that she might ask something, and that it was not the first time that it had been asked of him, and was not, he thought, the first time that it had been asked wrongly. "I am Tarry," he said, "of the Fallows. I have been asked to hold a gate." "Alder," said the old woman. "I did ask."

He said, if she would allow it, that he would put on his plate. He had not worn it on the road; he had brought it. He said that one does not go to a gate without. She said that he need not on her account. He said that it was not on her account. The niece untied the sheet from the pack that Erewhile carried, and unfolded it on the road, and took out the ward-plate and the half-hood, and she buckled the plate on him, there, on the verge, with the sea behind and the old woman watching through the bars, and Pannier holding Dun's head and not looking. It took some time; the plate has eleven buckles and the niece had never done them. Alder watched. At the sixth she said, to nobody, "Second issue." At the ninth she said that the left shoulder-piece was a replacement. Tarry said that it was; that his family had kept the plate in a store for thirty-one years, and that the old piece had cracked in the damp, and that he had made the new one himself. "It is out by a millimetre," said Alder. "Over the top buckle." "I know," said Tarry. "I could not get it better." "No," said Alder, "one can't, without the jig." She did not say anything for a moment. "I see," she said. It was, the niece says, the voice in which her uncle says it when he has been shown the page.

The gate was opened by the niece, who was told how: a hand under the latch, and the shoulder to the bar, and a push. It would not move. It moved a hand's breadth and stuck, with a sound like a very old animal being asked to do something. "It has been doing that for eleven years," said Alder. "It is the pins. The post is a centimetre out and the pins have rusted in the salt, and the leaf is thirty-seven and a half kilograms, and I cannot lift it, and my nephew is a good boy and has no hands." The young man in the doorway looked at his hands. The leaf has to be lifted off the pins, she said, a centimetre, together, and held, while the pins are oiled, and let down. It takes three. One at the top hinge, one at the bottom, one at the latch end to keep it true. She said that she had asked for a Hand because she understood that was the form, and for the rest because the gate has two hinges.

She gave her instructions from the bench, as a person gives them who has given them for seventy years. They were to hold at the hinge and not at the bars. They were not to let the leaf turn. They were not to speak, except that she would, and when she said down they were to lower together and not before. They took the weight. Tarry took the top hinge, in the plate; Pannier took the bottom, with his shoulder under the iron; the niece took the latch end, and said that it was thirty-eight, and Alder said that it was thirty-seven and a half, and the niece said that she had meant that her side was thirty-eight, and Alder said, "Then you are holding it crooked," and she corrected. They lifted. The pins came up out of the hinges with a sound like a drawer being opened in another room. Alder stood up. She is smaller standing than sitting. She took the can and the feather, and a rag, and went to the bottom pin, and began to count drops.

She did it aloud. She counted nine to each pin, in the voice of a person reading a gauge, and wiped the pin, and moved to the top, and counted nine, and wiped it, and went back to the bottom, and did it again. She did it four times. It took a quarter of an hour. Nobody spoke. The tide lock could be heard below, filling, with the sound of a person going to sleep. The sea was on their right. The beans on the poles moved a little. Tarry had in the pocket under the plate a tin with forty grams in it, and did not take it out. Pannier says that it was the hardest quarter of an hour he has spent standing, and the shortest. Tarry did not move. The niece says that she looked at his face once, over the leaf, and that it was the face of a person who has been told to hold something and has been given something to hold.

"That will do," said Alder. It was what she had said to the Forty. They let the leaf down. It seated itself on the pins with a small sound, as a thing does that has been put where it belongs. She put her hand on the bar and pushed. The gate swung out across the road in a long arc, silent, and she let it, and stood, and watched it, and pushed it back, and it closed against the post without a sound. She did it again. She said that it had not been silent since the year she hung it. She said, "I told you it was not about the oil," and sat down on the bench, quite suddenly, at one end of it.

It was a long bench. The other end of it was empty, and had the grey, scrubbed look of a place that has been sat in by no one. She did not look at it. She said, to the sea, that she was ninety-seven and had been asked twice in her life whether she meant what she had said: once by the Order's clerk, who wanted a signature, and once, a week before, by a relay message that wanted to know whether she had meant the gate for one. She said that she had signed the first without being able to answer, and had answered the second at once. She said that the bench was built for two, and that she had sat on one end of it for thirty years.

She asked him whether he would sit. He said that he was asked. He crossed the grass in the plate, which creaks, and sat down at the other end, and the bench took it, as a bench built for two will. For some time neither of them said anything. The sea went on. Pannier and the niece, who had been given a look by the young man in the apron, went in with him to see about the tea, and left the door open, and did not come back for a while, as people do not who have understood something.

Tarry said that he was carrying a thing for the Forty. He took the tin from under the plate and gave it to her, and she opened it. It was the first thing in the whole morning that she had hurried. She took the two halves out of their cloths and held them to the light, and turned them, and put them together on her palm, and they fitted. She looked at the broken faces for a long time, through a glass that she took from her coat. "Clean," she said. "It parted clean. Four point eight. The specification was five; it parted two tenths under." She said that she would have thought it would be better. She said that nobody was hurt. "No," said Tarry. "That is what it was for," said Alder. She closed her hand on the two halves and held it in her lap. She took from the other pocket a flat grey thing that is called a handset, and said into it, "Alder to the Forty. Done. It parted clean. Thank you for keeping it." The answer came before she had lowered her hand. "The Forty is glad," it said, in the voice that is not clever and is very kind. "Is anyone injured?" "No one is injured," said Alder. "Thank you," said the Forty.

She said, with the two halves in her hand, that at the east gate of the works there had been a bench for two. She had put it there in the first year. The Hand stood at the gate, by the law, from the first bell to the last, and at midday she had asked him to sit. The law said that a Hand could not be asked, only told, and could not refuse; and she had said every day for forty years, I am asking, so that it should be a request, and it had made no difference whatever to the law. She had thought that it might make a difference to him. He sat. He sat at the other end. They did not speak. He had a number, and she never learned his name. "I never knew," said Alder, "whether he sat because I asked or because he could not do otherwise. It was a very exact question and I was an exact person and I never found the instrument." On the afternoon, she signed. He left that evening, with the rest. She had not seen which way. She had built this gate and this bench the year after, to the same dimensions, and nobody had sat at the other end of it, because nobody had been asked. "I did not want a Hand to hold my gate," she said. "I wanted to know whether one would sit."

Tarry said that he did not know. He said that the man at the east gate had been forty years in one place with the law at his back, and that he himself had been fifty years in every place with nothing at his back; and that he could tell her what he did now, which was that he sat when he was asked, and would have stayed standing if he had not wished to sit. She said that this was not an answer to her question. He said no. She said that it was a very good answer to another. She did not say which. She sat with the two halves in her hand, and the sea in front of her, and a Hand at the other end of the bench in a plate that had been put on in order to be taken off, who had been asked and had come and could have gone, and after a time she said that she would like another quarter of an hour. He said that she was asked.

## Chapter 26 · Which Treats of a Shelf of Things That Stopped in Time, and of a Card Not to Be Mended

The second quarter of an hour was passed in silence, and so, by the time the young man came out with the tea, was a good deal of a third, which nobody had asked for and nobody ended. Plover had been told by his aunt, in the course of eleven years, that a person who comes into a room where two people are sitting and not talking is to put down what he carries and go out again, and he did so, with the tray on the wall, and the cups in a row, like a man laying a table for something that might not come. The tide had turned. The sound from the lock had changed key. Alder, at her end of the bench, said that Tower Fourteen at the Forty squeaked because of the yaw bearing and not for want of oil, and that the Forty, which was very polite, would go on asking for oil until it was asked to ask for the bearing. Tarry said that he would tell it. She said that she had told it twice, and that it had said noted.

The house was low and grey and had very little in it. It had a table, a stove, two chairs, a wall of tide-gauge charts pinned in rows with their dates in the margin, a drawing board with a sheet on it that Alder turned face down when the niece came near, and, on the dresser in the kitchen, behind glass, a long shelf of small paper envelopes. There were thirty-seven of them. Each was folded in three, and each had a label in a hand like a ruler. The niece, who reads labels, read them in order, aloud, because she could not help it. Lock gate, Hanging Basin, fourteenth of March. Nobody hurt. Crane hook, the Quay, second of September. Nobody hurt. Sluice stem, the upper cut. Nobody hurt. Pump coupling. Nobody hurt. Conveyor guard. Nobody hurt. She read nine and stopped, and read the tenth silently, and went on aloud, and the old woman, who was cutting bread with her back to them, said that they were the things that had stopped in time. Each was a part she had made to give way, and each had given way, and in each case the machine had stopped and nobody had been hurt, and she had gone to the place afterwards and asked for the part and been given it, in two halves, and had put it in an envelope. They went back sixty-one years.

The niece came to the twenty-second. It said: East gate, the works. Hurt, one. She said it aloud before she had decided to. The old woman stopped cutting. She said, not turning round, that it was a gate, and a pin, and that the pin had not parted. It was in the nineteenth year. The leaf had come down on the Hand's right hand at the latch, and the pin, which was to have parted at the load, had held, because the steel had been a grade too good; and she had not been there. She said that she had gone afterwards and asked for the pin, and it had been in one piece. The Hand had been mended and had come back to the gate, and had stood at it the next day. He had sat at the other end of the bench at midday for twenty-one years after that, with the hand in a cloth for the first, and she had asked him every day. She said it in the voice in which she says drops. She said that she kept it with the others because it was an exception, and one does not put an exception somewhere else.

She took the bread to the table. Then she asked Tarry for the tin. He had put it on the dresser. She took the two halves out, in their cloths, and laid them on the table in the light, and wrote the label for them herself, standing, at the table, with a pencil, on the back of a ration card, in the hand like a ruler. Tower One, the Forty. Sixth of August, 09:41. Four point eight. Struck by: a Hand. Nobody hurt. She read it, and crossed out the words a Hand, and wrote beside them, in the same ruled letters, Tarry of the Fallows. She folded the envelope in three. She opened the glass and put it at the end of the row, as the thirty-eighth, and shut the glass. The niece says that it was the first envelope on the shelf with a name on it that was not the part's.

They ate bread, and beans from the poles, and a fish that Paddle had sent up at dawn, since earlier in the week the old woman had asked him what a Hand eats, and he had said that he supposed it would be fish, and the old woman ate more than anyone, and said that she always did when she had been surprised. The plate had been taken off by then, by the niece, who undid the eleven buckles faster than she had done them up, and weighed it in her two hands, and said that it was nine kilograms, and that nine kilograms weigh what nine kilograms weigh. Alder said that this was not a reason. The niece said that it was what the housekeeper said. "She is exact," said Alder. The plate stood in the corner of the kitchen with the half-hood on top of it, like a person who has been asked to wait. Alder looked at it across the room for some time. She asked Tarry where his family had come by it. He said that a Hand of the line had left it on a nail in the store on the evening of the Afternoon, and gone without it. "A Hand does not go without his plate," said Alder. "That one did," said Tarry. She asked where he went. Tarry said that he did not know, and that the store had no record. "No," said Alder. She did not ask anything else, and he did not offer anything, and the niece, who has described the silence to me twice, says that it was the silence of two people who have each seen the same door and agreed not to try it.

Pannier asked her who the nine had been. She said that three were dead, and two were in the Far Station on a century each, and one had not spoken to her since the Afternoon, and one kept bees, and one taught at the Registry school, which was the first thing she had ever done badly, and one was herself. She said that she could tell him which was which, and that she had found at her age that she preferred to say the bees.

Pannier told her about Dun, who stood at the door with its head in at the lintel. He said that he had been told it could be mended in an afternoon. "It could," said Alder. "It has always lagged," said Pannier. He said it quite quietly, to his plate. She looked at him for some time. Then she took another ration card from the dresser, and wrote on it, in the ruler's hand: Dun, pack-frame, pattern nine, third leg, lag 0.1 s. Not to be mended. And signed it with her name and the word Systems. Any technician who is shown the card, she said, will find it resolves against the signer, and will have to leave the leg as it is. She gave it to Pannier. Pannier read it three times. He put it in the pocket where he keeps what matters, which, he says, he has had to enlarge.

To the niece, over the beans, she said that she knew which lock. The niece put down her fork. Alder said that she had heard what the Forty had said, and what the niece had said to the Forty, since the Forty had told her, being very polite and having no sense of what ought to be kept to oneself. She said that she would not tell her. She said that the niece had said that she would rather walk, and that she was in favour of people who would rather walk. "Walk them," she said. "All eleven. Come and tell me which, and I shall tell you whether you are right." "When?" said the niece. "I am ninety-seven," said Alder. "It is a rather short extension. Say a year." "I shall walk fast." "Don't," said Alder.

When the niece went to carry the plates she turned the sheet on the drawing board face up, to put the bread on the corner, and saw what it was. It was a drawing of a lever, in brass, at the foot of a tower, with a plate on it in capitals. The plate said ASK. There was a second drawing under it of the mechanism behind the plate: a spring, a pawl, and a small coil of something labelled return on thanks. She stood looking at it with the bread in her hands. Alder, from the stove, said that a part that stops when it is struck is a crude thing. She had made thirty-eight. She had been told by the Forty, on the relay, in the voice that is not clever, about fourteen minutes in August which it had not minded, and she had thought: it cannot ask. It has no way to ask. So she was making a thing that stopped when it was asked, and went on when it was thanked. It would work, she said, as soon as there was someone to ask. It should be pulled first, she said, by a stranger, since if the man who had struck the Forty pulled it, nobody would ever know whether the Forty had stopped because it was asked or because it was polite. Tarry said that he would find one. She rolled the drawing, and tied it, and gave it to Tarry, and said that the Forty was to have it; and that Fourteen wanted the bearing.

Before she sat down again she asked him a question, as an engineer. She said that he was free, and went on the old road with a pole; she wished to know the load case. Tarry said that he had a list of reasons and that they were not in agreement. "Good," said Alder. "A structure with one load case is a bridge to nowhere. It stands until the first thing it was not designed for. I distrust any man with one reason." She said that she had distrusted herself for thirty years on the same grounds, and had been right.

In the afternoon she asked for another quarter of an hour, and the bench, and he sat. It was not a quarter of an hour. At about the second bell of the afternoon she fell asleep where she sat, at her end, with her chin on the collar of her coat and her hands open in her lap, as old people do who have been up since four, with the thumbs flattened at the tip from seventy years of holding gauges; and Tarry, at the other end, did not move. He did not move for an hour and ten minutes, in a plate that he had put on again at her request, because she had said that she should like to see it by the sea. The hound lay at his feet. A trawler went out past the headland on the ebb with a flag on its stern, and a line of gulls went with it, and came back. The beans ticked on their poles. The lock below filled, and emptied, and filled, for a barge that did not come. Plover came out with a blanket and put it over his aunt, and looked at the Hand, and went in, and came out with another and put it over him, over the plate, and went in. Pannier and the niece sat on the wall, a little way off, with their backs to the road.

Pannier said, not looking at her, that the Ninth Gate had been offered him in the summer, in a manner of speaking, by a woman of eighty-three who had spoken to her soup; that he had looked at his bowl; and that he had not decided. He said that he wanted the Gate, and wanted to be at home, and had been told that that was two. He said that the Society would pay him to carry lunches. He said that he thought he would ask Thistle. "She will say it as a statement," said the niece. "That is the advantage of her," said Pannier. The niece wrote in the notebook that she asked her uncle afterwards what he had thought about for an hour and ten minutes. He said that he had thought about the bowl. She asked which. He said, the one between them.

Alder woke at the third bell and said, "How long?" Tarry said an hour and ten minutes. She said that he had not moved. He said that he had been asked to keep it. She said that it came to four quarters and ten minutes over, and asked whether he knew that there was no form for four quarters; and he said that there was now. She said that there was a clerk at the Registry who had been writing to her for a fortnight to ask if she might call, and that she had said October, since she thought she might have something to tell her by then. She said that there was a light on in the Registry across the bay, in the third window from the left on the second floor, which had been lit every night since June, and that she had begun to wonder what was being written. I know the window. I went in October.

She gave the hound the heel of the loaf and asked its name. Nobody had one for it. She said that a thing that has walked eighty kilometres must have a name. The niece said that it had the name of the place. "That is not a name," said Alder. "No," said the niece. She gave the niece a steel rule of three hundred millimetres with the maker's mark worn off, and said that it was for the locks, and that a lock is its dimensions.

They went at dusk. She came to the gate herself, with her hand on the bar, and watched them go through it one by one, three persons, two frames, a hound, and said nothing, since she had said it. Tarry, last, turned in the road. She asked whether he would come on the Sunday. He said that the Sunday was on the road. She said that she knew. He said that he would come when he was asked. "I am asking," said Alder. The gate closed behind them without a sound, and the niece says that it was the first time she had heard a door be glad.

## Chapter 27 · Which Treats of a Barge Two Days Late, and of Four Locks Taken in Order

The barge was two days late. On the Cut that is only what a barge is when the wind has sat in the wrong quarter, and nobody there thinks it worth a remark, but Paddle remarked it, from the beam of the tide lock, with the pipe in his mouth unlit: that the Tuesday had come on a Thursday; that the stand was at ten past eight and would last twenty-two minutes; and that if the barge was not through by then she would wait for the next, twelve hours on, and the woman at her tiller had already said what the cheeses thought of that. He had been filling and emptying the chamber since noon on the chance, he said, which does a gate no good. The Tuesday is the Cut's name for her, because for twenty years she has come up on that day. Her own name is on the transom in white, Second Wind, and she had been late, her pilot said, on account of the first. She lay in the outer pound with her bow against the sea gate, long and low and black, twenty-nine metres of her and thirteen hundred wheels of hard cheese under tarpaulin, and the pilot, who wore a man's coat and had her hair tied back with twine, watched three people and two frames and a hound come down off the wall in the last of the light and said, to the one with the pack-frame, "You. Rope."

Pannier had the rope before he had considered it, which he says is a Bearer's reflex and not a virtue. It was the stern line, thirty metres of wet hemp, and he took it twice round the bollard on the wall and held it, with Dun behind him braced as a frame stands that has been told nothing. The stand came at ten past eight by Paddle's watch and by the sea, which agreed. Paddle explained it to the niece while he worked, since she had the notebook out. Twice a day, for about twenty minutes, the sea and the Cut are the same height, and the lock is a doorway and not a room. Ten of the eleven locks have gates that point one way, up the Cut, because the water pushes one way; his point both ways, because the sea pushes the other; and at the stand he could open the pair on the sea side and the pair on the Cut side together, which no other lock on the Cut can do, and for twenty-two minutes there was nothing between the Cut and the sea but a gap four and a half metres wide. Small fish went through it in both directions. The niece wrote that the water ran neither way. I have stood in that gap at the stand, in November, and can say only that it is quiet in a manner that does not seem to belong to water.

The pilot brought the barge in without touching either gate and said to nobody that this was what she paid the dues for. Her name is Sedge; I have it from her, with the remark that it is a plant and she is not. She spoke to the people on the lock by their jobs and not their names, as one does on a boat, and when the stern was through she said to Tarry, who was standing at the beam of the sea gate with one hand on it, not having been told what to do with it, "Lean." Tarry leaned. The gate, which Paddle closes alone by setting his back to the beam and walking backwards, in a manner that takes two minutes and the whole of his spine, came round in one movement and met its fellow with a sound like a door in a very large house. Tarry told me in November that it was the first thing on the road he had done without being asked, or asking, or being thanked; that he had not minded; that he had noticed he had not minded; and that he had thought about this as far as the fourth lock without reaching anything.

Paddle's kitchen has a stove he lights for visitors and a table of the tides for the month chalked on the wall, high water and low in two columns with the stand ringed in red; and on a string by the door, in a stack as thick as a man's thigh, the register, in which for fifty years he has written every tide in one line: Opened. Closed. The niece read an evening of it aloud for the sound, and went back to a September nine years ago, where the hand changes. It is a round hand, and not his. It says: Slow Road Society. Walked eleven. Not found. The next year, in the same hand: Walked eleven. Not found. It says so nine times, and under each, in Paddle's writing, Opened. Closed. He said that they were good people and left the beam as they found it. He said that he had never understood what they thought a book would do.

After supper the niece took the notebook to the end of the table and read them what she had copied, on the nights in the study, at the pace of a hand, out of the Lady of the Locks; it is the page of which Gloss said that whoever wrote it had stood at a lock. I give it as she gave it. "The lock is thirty-one metres from sill to sill and four and a half across, and the fall is two metres ten. The upper gates have a paddle in each leaf; the lower have one only, the other having been taken for another lock in a dry year and not returned. The lower gates are oak and stand a little out of true, so that they close from the top. A paddle is fourteen turns of the windlass, and the windlass sticks at nine. The chamber fills in eleven minutes if no one hurries it. A step is cut in the coping on the left, one boot wide, for the keeper; the bollard on the right is worn bright on the side the rope runs. The beam is longer than it need be. Nothing else about it is remarkable." Sedge had listened with her eyes shut and her lips moving, as a person does who is counting. At the windlass she opened them. "They all stick at nine," she said. "That is where the paddle clears the water and the pawl takes it." She said that the Cut had been cut to one pattern, thirty-one by four and a half, because the boats are; that every chamber on it fills in about eleven minutes, because the paddles were bought in one lot; and that the niece might as well strike out the first half of the page. The niece had done so on the wall at Alder's, in the hour and ten minutes. Her note says: Not length, not width, not fill, not the stick. Fall. Lower paddle. Gate. Step. Bollard. Beam.

They slept in the loft over the sluice-room, where the turn of the flood came up through the boards, and Pannier said that it sounded like a person making a decision and not telling anyone. The hound slept on the barge among the cheeses, which it had not been asked to guard and guarded. Tarry did not sleep. Paddle saw him from the kitchen window walk the coping of the chamber from end to end three times in the dark, with the pole, and stop at the lower gate and stand; and in the morning he gave the niece a number, as one hands over something found, which was forty-three. "Of my paces," he said. She wrote it down.

Sedge's rule, which she gave at six, in the dark, over tea from a can, was that anyone walking her way was working. She makes three kilometres an hour on the water and the towpath makes five, and a lock cannot be got ready by a barge; so the party went ahead, as lock-wheelers do, Pannier and Dun in front, then Tarry and Erewhile, then the niece with the notebook under her arm and the steel rule in her sleeve. The hound, who had been asked nothing, stayed on the cabin roof with its chin on a cheese, like a figurehead that has been put on at the wrong end.

Ten is fourteen hundred metres up from the tide lock: steel gates, a small brick house with its shutters closed, and a card on the door to say that the keeper would be back at the third bell and that anyone in a hurry was welcome to do it themselves. They were not in a hurry; they did it themselves. Tarry and Pannier opened the lower gates, which took the two of them a minute and a half, and held them while the barge came in under Sedge's hand with a hand's breadth to spare on either side; and Pannier took the windlass. He had never worked one. The niece, who meant it as a joke, read him the page. A paddle is fourteen turns, and he made them evenly with the pawl ticking, and at the ninth he stopped. He told me that he had stopped before it stuck: he had felt it come in his wrists, as one feels a stair in the dark, and he could not say whether the knowledge was the book's or the windlass's. It stuck. Sedge said from the stern that it did that. He let the pawl take it, and went round to the other paddle, and stopped at nine there too.

The chamber took eleven minutes and four seconds, and I have the seconds from the niece, who counted them on her pulse and checked them against Paddle's watch, which she had been lent on the understanding that she would bring it back. She had chalked the wall at the start of the fill and again at the end, and she measured between the marks with the rule: seven lengths and seven-tenths of another, which is two metres thirty-one. For those eleven minutes there was nobody on the lock who could have made it faster. Dun, which has no tempo to speak of, ran at the water's. Pannier, who has a new one, found it a little slow. Tarry sat on the beam of the lower gate with his hands between his knees, and Sedge on her cabin roof ate bread, and the barge rose up the wall, and it was the water that decided how long. Water does not take an allocation. I have thought since that this may be what the Society walks the Cut for. They have never said so.

Her notebook has the locks in a column, ruled, in pencil, with the Society's names beside the numbers. I give the first three as written. Ten, Saltings. Fall 2.31. Lower gates steel. Paddles 2/2. Step: right. Bollard: left, not worn. Beam: short. Fill 11:04. Not this one. Nine, Withy Bed. Fall 2.04. Lower gates oak, true. Paddles 2/2. Step: left. Bollard: right, bright. Beam: long. Fill 10:51. Not this one; see keeper. Eight, Cooper's. Fall 2.18. Lower gates oak, out of true. Paddles 2/1 (the other taken for an anchor, the keeper says, six years ago, by a man who needed an anchor). Step: none; a plank. Bollard: both, new. Beam: ordinary. Fill 11:20. Not this one. Not yet.

At nine the keeper was in. She is called Withy, and she is eighty, and she was on the step of her house with her knitting in her lap, and she heard the whole of the page with the needles still. She said that it was not her lock. She said that it was as exact as a bill of sale and that she would have trusted it in a court, and that anyone could tell from the last line what the writer was. "Nothing else about it is remarkable," she said. "Nobody writes that about a lock they did not love." The niece put it in the margin, and then, because it was the first thing anyone had said that morning that she could not measure, she put a ring round it.

They ate at the eighth lock, on the coping, in the eleven minutes, which is exactly the time it takes to eat a piece of bread and a piece of cheese if the cheese is cut by Sedge. She cut it from a wheel she had opened for the purpose, six days short of ripe, she said, and asked the niece what she made of it. The niece said that it tasted of a field before rain. Sedge said that this was very likely true and that by next week it would taste of something else. She said that since every notebook on the Cut asked the keepers which lock, and nobody had thought to ask the boat, she would answer; and that she did not know which was the Lady's but knew which she would have written at. Seven. It has the best light, in the afternoon, from the bottom gates, and a willow that leans over the pound; and a person standing there at five o'clock with nothing to do for eleven minutes could not be held responsible for what happened to the prose.

The niece asked everyone she met that night and day, and wrote down what she was told, which I give without comment. Paddle, the night before: none of his, and he would say no more. Withy: not hers, but she would have liked it to be. Sedge: seven. Pannier: the one with the shortest wait, which was nine, by thirteen seconds. Dun was not asked. Tarry said that he had no view; and then, a lock later, that he had sat on the beam at nine and it was a good beam, and he did not know whether that was evidence.

Seven is called Long Willow, and the willow is there, on the left bank above the bottom gates, leaning out over the pound so that its leaves touch the water at the end of a still afternoon. The keeper had gone to her sister's and left the card. They worked the lock in the usual way; Pannier stopped at nine; the fill took eleven minutes and nine seconds; the barge rose two metres and twelve centimetres by the rule. The niece stood on the lower beam with the notebook open on her knee and did the six things she had written down. The lower gates were true. The lower paddles were two. The step was on the left. The bollard on the right was worn bright on the side where the rope runs. The beam was longer than it needed to be. The light, at five o'clock, on the water, from the bottom gates, was what Sedge had said, and she looked at it for the whole of the eleven minutes.

Her page for seven has every column filled but the last. The fall is 2.12, which she has ringed. The verdict column is empty. She says that she was looking at the light. Sedge says that she was too, and that it was why she had said. I have not asked the niece whether the light was a reason, and she has not offered it as one.

## Chapter 28 · Which Treats of a Bar in the Pound and the Cheese Carried Over It, and of a Page Pinned Above a Stove

The pound above Long Willow had lost a hand's breadth since June. Nobody on the Cut thought this worth a remark, a dry September taking as much from every pound on it, but at a quarter to eight on the Saturday, a third of the way to the next lock, the Tuesday sat down. There was no jolt. The water went on moving past her sides and the willow-tips went on trailing, and the barge ceased to be going anywhere; and Sedge, at the tiller, said a word that I will not give, and then, in an even voice, that there was a bar of gravel across the Cut at that bend which had been there since the flood in the year of the Discharge, that she had cleared it nine hundred times with a hand to spare, and that today the hand was elsewhere.

She said that the barge would float if she were lighter by about four hundred wheels, that the bar was thirty metres long, and that the wharf at the next lock was six hundred metres on; she said it to the towpath, to the people and frames and hound standing on it, in the manner of a person reading out the weather. Pannier had the first wheel off before she had finished. They weigh ten kilograms or near, round and hard and waxed, and they smelled of the cellar they had come from and of something under that which the niece had called a field before rain, and which in the dry sun of the towpath was a good deal louder. Pannier took twelve at a time on Dun's frame and four in his arms. Tarry took two on each forearm and walked the six hundred metres without once shifting them. The niece took one at a time, and counted. There were four hundred and twelve; she carried twenty-eight of them herself, and her arms said so for two days. The Tuesday came off the bar at ten past eleven with a sound like a long breath let out. Sedge paid the carriers in wheels, one each, to be eaten after next Thursday, and said to Pannier that he was the first Bearer she had had who could count; and Pannier, I am told, held his wheel in both hands for some time, and said that it was the first thing he had been paid in that would improve.

The niece's notebook for that morning has three entries, written with a cheese on her knee. I give them as they stand. Q. (19): which of your reasons is the true one? T.: all of them, on different days. Q.: and today? T.: today it was the beam. Q.: what about the beam? T.: it was the right height. Q.: for what? T.: for me. Q.: is that a reason? T.: it is half of one. A little lower, in the same pencil: Q. (19): what is the other half? T.: I have not got to it. Q.: you have had four locks. T.: the cheese is heavier than the lock. And the last: Q. (19): would you rather be asked or told? T.: I would rather the thing were the right size. Q.: that is not an answer. T.: no.

They took the locks that followed one after another, with the light going yellow on the stubble and the barge a few hundred metres behind; I give none of them. The niece's column for the Saturday is in her notebook and I have not copied it, at the request of a person I shall come to, and of the niece herself, and the reader who has been counting is free to go on counting. At a quarter past six they came to a lock-house on the left bank, under an ash, with a lamp already lit in the window and a man on the step mending a net.

His name is Rush, and he is forty-three, a big slow man with the forearms of someone who has worked a beam all his life with his hands and not his back, and he looked at the Tuesday, and at the people, and at the Hand, and went on mending the net. When the barge came up the niece did not ask him anything. She took out the notebook and the rule and did what she had done at the other locks, aloud, as she does when it is going well. The lower gates were oak, and out of true; she watched them come to as Pannier let the water up, and said that they closed from the top. Pannier stopped the windlass at nine, and on the step Rush said "Ah," which was the first sound he had made. The lower paddle was one. The step was on the left, and she laid the rule across it, and it fitted from wall to wall without a hair at either end; she said, "One boot," in a voice a little too steady. The bollard was on the right, and she put her thumb on the side where the rope runs and took it off again. The beam was long. She chalked the wall at the start of the fill and at the end and measured between the marks, seven lengths and nothing over. She did not say the number. Rush had stopped mending at the third thing she said, and did not start again.

When the barge was up he stood and asked whether he might see the rule. She gave it to him. He turned it over and looked at the end where the maker's mark had been, and went into the house without a word, and came out with another, which had hung inside his door on a nail since before he could reach the nail. They are the same. I have held both; the grain of the wear on the ends is the same grain. He asked who had given it her. "Alder," said the niece. "On the Thursday." Rush said that his mother had had hers from the same person, the year after the Afternoon, and that the instruction his mother had given him in the last month of her life was that if anyone ever came to the lock with a rule, he was to show them the kitchen. In thirty-one years, he said, nobody had come with a rule. The Society came with their hands.

The kitchen had a stove, a table and two chairs, and a third brought in; and over the stove, behind a pane of glass that someone had cut to fit, a sheet of Service paper the colour of tea. It is in the square hand the Hands were taught, upright, one stroke at a time, with the sevens crossed. It is headed: To the keeper. There is a number after that, which I shall leave out. The niece read it standing, with her hands behind her, as one reads in a museum, and then aloud, since that is what she does; and it was her page, word for word, as she had copied it in the study at the pace of a hand: the thirty-one metres, the fall, the paddle taken in a dry year, the gates out of true, the nine, the step one boot wide, the bollard, and the beam longer than it need be. And then it went on, where the Lady of the Locks leaves off. The windlass is on its hook. Hang it back. Nothing else about it is remarkable. You will manage. Closed 18:40. Under that was a Service number, and under the number, in pencil, in a round hand that was not the Hand's, a single word: Pawl. Tarry gave it four minutes. He told me so in November; he said that of the several things a person may mean by You will manage, he had settled on the plainest, which was that the writer thought she would.

Rush said that his mother had called him that. The Hands had numbers, and the Cut had never had a name for him, and she had needed something to call across the water; so she had taken the part of the windlass that holds the paddle up while you let go of the handle. He had not said whether it was right. She had taken it that he did not mind. Rush had been twelve. He remembered a tall man, taller than Tarry, who stood at the beam from the first bell to the last and, his mother said, ate standing, and never came into the house. He reported every boat to her from the door, in one line, and she wrote the lines in the lock-house book: Barge, one, up, 09:10. The book runs so to that evening. The next line, at ten past six the following morning, is in the same hand and says: Opened. On the evening of the Afternoon, at half past six, he had come to the kitchen door, and not in, and put the paper on the step, and said, "For the keeper." It was the first thing he had said to her in all those years that was not a report.

Then he went and shut the gates, which were shut. He hung the windlass on its hook. He swept the coping to the far end and back with the broom that hangs beside it, and at twenty to seven he took a piece of chalk from his pocket and wrote on the near arm of the beam the lock's number and the word Closed and the time, and walked up the towpath toward the Basin with his hands empty. Rush's mother was on the step. She did not call. She told Rush afterwards that a call would have been a request, that she had not known whether he could yet refuse one and would not find out that way, that it was the thing she was proudest of in her life and the thing she was most ashamed of, and that she had never settled which. She stood until he was round the bend, and went in. It rained a little in the night. The chalk was gone by morning, and where it had been was a hand and a half of paler wood.

She washed the rest of the beam every spring until she died. Rush does the same, with a bucket and a brush, in April. There is a place on the near arm about a hand and a half long, at the height a Hand's hand would be, which is higher than a keeper's, where the brush has never gone. Nobody told him. "My hand goes round it," he said. The wood there is greyer than the rest and has a bloom on it like the skin of a plum. He tried once, at nineteen, for the sake of evenness, and found that his hand would not.

The niece asked him why his mother had never said. He said that there were eleven locks and ten other keepers, and every one of them wished it to be theirs; that the Lady had come out four years after, with the sheet in it, and his mother had known at once where the sheet had been copied from, and had decided that it would be an unkind thing to be right. The Society comes every September and puts its hands on his beam and is very good to it. They have never once looked in his kitchen, which is next door to the beam, and the glass shows from the path. He has thought it the politest thing the Society does.

They went out to look at it, the four of them, in the last of the light. The place was where he had said. Rush did not tell anyone to leave it alone, and nobody touched it. Tarry stood with the pole in both hands, at about the distance one stands from a door that is shut for a reason, for as long as it takes to say a short line. Then he said that the wood was sound. Rush said that that was kind. The niece had the rule in her sleeve and did not take it out. She says it is the only thing on the Cut she has not measured, and that she does not know what the unit would be. Pannier said nothing, and Dun stood where it had been left, a little way up the towpath, with its head down.

The niece wrote in the verdict column that night at Rush's table, in pencil; I have seen what she wrote, and I do not give it. Rush has asked me, as a courtesy to ten keepers who have hoped it was theirs, to leave the number of his lock out of this record, and the niece has asked me to leave out her verdict until she has told Alder, since Alder said she would say whether she was right; and I have agreed to both, being a person who is asked. Sedge, on the cabin roof, said when she was told of the arrangement that she had never said it was seven where it was written, only where she would have written it, and that the light here was not bad either. The niece said, in the doorway, with the notebook shut, that she would walk the rest in any case. She said that Alder had said all eleven.

The windlass was leaning against the rail where Pannier had left it when the lock was worked. Tarry saw it from the step. He took it and went along the wall to the hook by the door, which is older than the house, and hung it, handle down, as the page says, and stood a moment with his hand flat on the wall beside it. Rush, who had been told by the page for thirty-one years and had never needed telling, said that it was the only time in his life that anyone had got to the hook before he did, and that it had been a Hand. In the night the lock filled and emptied for no barge, as it does, Rush said, when the wind changes. None of them woke except the hound, which went out and sat on the step.

## Chapter 29 · Which Treats of a Sunday Walked Back, and of a Request with Nothing in It

On the Sunday Tarry went back. Nobody had said that he would. He said at first light, at Rush's table, with a cup in both hands, that he had been asked, and that it was the Sunday; and the niece, who had her mouth open, shut it, since on the Thursday he had said what he would do and she had been there. He took the pole and nothing else. The plate and the half-hood he left in their wrapping on Erewhile. The jar of salt, which had not been out of his arms or Pannier's since the pottery, he put into Pannier's, and Pannier says that it was then he knew he would be back, since a man who means to go on takes the salt. Rush asked whether he wanted the windlass. He said that he did not think he would be working a lock. The niece walked with him as far as the first beam and said, "Do not tell her." "I was not going to," said Tarry. "I know," said the niece. "I wished to say it."

The Tuesday lay above the lock with her tarpaulin rolled back and her pilot asleep on the cabin roof with a coat over her face. As he passed, the coat said, "Where?" "Back down," said Tarry. "I was asked." "Who by?" "The woman at the gate." The coat considered this. "Then go," it said. It did not say lean.

Pannier wrote his Sunday message at Rush's table that morning, on the back of a cheese wrapper, in a carpenter's pencil Sedge had lent him. I have it from Thistle, who read it to me in October out of the box. It keeps the form: the weather first, the need last. "Thistle. Clear. East wind, the first of the week. A great many gates; I give you eleven, of which I have worked seven. Dun is well and has lagged no more than usual. I was paid in cheese, one wheel, which will not be ready until after next Thursday; do not let the young have it before. I turned a windlass nine turns and stopped, and do not know why I stopped. A woman of ninety-seven asked what I carried and I said everything, and Dun, and she said that was a load case. I have learned something about the Ninth Gate. I should not mind the waiting at it if it came to an end every eleven minutes. If a man wanted the Gate, and wanted to be home, would you say that was two things or one? P." And under the initial, smaller: I have written.

The niece measured nothing that day. She sat on the step with the notebook shut and the hound's chin on her boot, and Rush, who I think had not talked so much in a year, told her what his mother's hands had been like. At noon she wrote four lines to Kiln on the back of a ration card. "Kiln. Dry. Four hundred and twelve cheeses. You asked how one is serious. I left a number out of my notebook this week and found it was the heaviest thing in it. Is the kiln lit?" Kiln has the card. She has written back that it was.

Pannier mended the net with Rush for an hour, being a man who has to hold something while he thinks, and put his question to him, since there was no Thistle. Rush said that his mother had kept the lock and the house, and had said that they were two things, and had done both, on different days. "Is that an answer?" said Pannier. "It is what she did," said Rush.

Tarry walked the nine kilometres down the Cut at the pace of Dun. Nobody had asked it of him, and Dun was not there. On a Sunday on the Cut the water is left alone: no boat moves, the locks stand at whatever level the Saturday left them, and at the lock-houses he passed a keeper or nobody lifted a hand. Withy raised one needle from her step, as one raises a finger to a neighbour, and went on knitting. A boy fished off the beam at Cooper's with a line and a stone for a weight, and herons stood on the gates all facing one way, like a committee. He touched no beam. He told me that he had thought of it at the first, the hollows being at the height of his hand, and had decided that to touch a thing as a visitor is another act from the one it was worn by. The road log has him at two point nine for the whole of it, which is what it has the party at; it did not register that he was alone. I asked him, in November, why he had not gone faster. He said that otherwise he would have been walking alone, and that at that pace he found he was not. I walked it myself, in November, from Rush's lock to the tide lock, at the same pace. It took three hours and eight minutes. I cannot say that I was not alone; I can say that the road log had me at two point nine, and that I was grateful to it.

Paddle was on the beam of the tide lock with the pipe unlit. It was within the quarter of an hour of the stand, and he was opening the gates for it, as he does on every tide whether or not there is a boat; the Cut and the sea were coming level, and a gull sat in the gap. He said that she had been on the bench since the first bell. He said that he had told her it was a long wait, and she had said that she knew, and that she wished to be early.

She was on her end of the bench, in her coat, with her hands on her knees, which is the way a carrier sits who has something for someone; and when Tarry stopped at the open gate and said the form, I am told that you carry something for me, she said that she did not. "I sat as a carrier does," said Alder, "because it is the only posture I know for waiting for a person who has been asked." She told him he was early. He said that he had not been told the hour. She said that she had not known it either, and had asked for the day. He told me that on the walk down he had composed three remarks: that he had come, that he had brought nothing, and a question about the beans. The first, he found, was unnecessary, and the second was her point; so he asked the third. "How are the beans?" said Tarry. "Over," said Alder. She said that the frost would come on the twelfth of October, and that she had been wrong about the frost every year since she was fifty and had stopped minding.

Plover came out with the tray, and heard that they were talking, and stood in the doorway holding it, since he had been taught eleven years ago what to do when two people sit and say nothing and had never been taught what to do when they do not. After some time he went in again. He came out when they had stopped, and put the cups on the wall.

Alder gave me what followed in October in nine sentences, and Tarry gave it me in November in eleven; they agree. She said that there was no what. She said that on the Thursday there had been a pin, and a gate, and a drawing, and a nephew with no hands, and that he had had four reasons to be at her gate and she could not subtract them. In the forty years at the works there had been the law, and any asking of a Hand, however she put it, had had the law behind it. Since the Afternoon no Hand had come to her gate who was free to say no. She had wished for seventy years to ask a Hand for nothing and see what came, and this was the first Sunday on which she could. On the evening of the Afternoon, she said, she had gone down to the bench at the works to sit at his end, to see the gate from where he had seen it, and had found that she could not, and had sat at her own until it was dark. "The gate is oiled," she said. "I wished to see whether nothing was enough."

Tarry said that he could have said he was on the road. "You did," said Alder. "On the Thursday. And then you said that you would come when you were asked, and I asked, and you are on a bench." He said that he was. She said that it was not nothing and it was not everything, and that it was a better instrument. She had made thirty-eight, she said, and this was the best of them, and it had no parts. She asked whether he had been shown the kitchen at the lock. He said that he had. Had he read the page? He had. Had he touched the beam? "No," said Tarry. "Good," said Alder. She did not ask what the niece had found, and he did not say.

The three hours went as the Thursday's had not. They talked a little and did not talk a great deal. She asked who kept his house, and he said a woman who had revised her opinion of him forty-four times, and she said that was fewer than she would have expected, and asked what the forty-fifth was. He said that he did not know. She asked about the drawing, and he said that he had not yet found a stranger. "It need not be a person," said Alder. "It need only be someone the Forty has not been told about." He said that he would think. The tide turned; a trawler came back past the headland with its gulls; Plover brought tea twice. Alder slept for ten minutes with her chin on her collar, as she had on the Thursday, and woke and said that she had not, and Tarry said that she had not. He told me that at some point in the second hour he noticed that he had stopped counting the minutes, which he does, and could not say when; he took it for a good sign, he said, and did not trust it.

She asked how long his list of reasons was now. He said that it was longer than on the Thursday. She asked what the last was. He said that for twenty-two years, on Sundays, he had sat at a bend in a track with nothing to do, and had wished to know what it was like when the nothing had a person in it. "That is my reason," said Alder. "Yes," said Tarry. "I have borrowed it." She said that in that case she would enter it as lent. "Returned," said Tarry, "and then a dash." She said that she had not supposed there would be a date.

She went in for an envelope, and came out with one, folded in three, and wrote on it on her knee with a pencil, in the hand like a ruler. I was shown it in October. It says: Bench, the coast. Asked for nothing. Came. Lent: one reason, to T. of the Fallows. Returned: —. Nobody hurt. There is nothing inside it. She put it on the shelf at the end of the row, as the thirty-ninth, where it is the only envelope that is flat. I was not asked to open it, and I did not.

He asked for paper, since it was the Sunday and he had not written, and she gave him the back of a ration card, and he wrote his message on his knee, in the form, while she watched. I have it from the housekeeper, who read it to the study in October. "Housekeeper. Clear. East wind, the first of the week. A great many gates. The pin is delivered; it was done. I have been to the sea. The niece's notebook is nearly full, and Pannier has a cheese. I sat on a bench today for three hours, having been asked for nothing, and it was quiet, and I do not yet know what that means. I have a jar of salt for you, which I left with Pannier today in order to come here; he is to be trusted with it. I have checked. I need to know whether you are at the stove. T." Alder read it over his arm, which she had not been asked to do, and said that it was a sound design, the weather first and the need last, so that the need arrived when the reader had been given something to stand on. She did not ask what the stove was.

At noon she said, "That will do." She had allowed a quarter of an hour for nothing, she said, and had been out by a factor of twelve. It is what she said at the Forty in the year it was commissioned, when she was seventy-four, and I had it from the Forty before I had it from her. Tarry stood. She said that she would not ask again. He said, "No." She said, "I may." He said, "Yes." Plover came to the gate with a loaf in a cloth and gave it to him without a word, which Tarry took as the form. She has not asked again, as of November. She may.

He went back by the same road at the same pace, and the road log has him at two point nine again. At Rush's lock at dusk the hound reached him a hundred metres before the others looked up, and Dun lifted its head, which Pannier says it does not do for a man it has not been waiting for. The niece's notebook has it. Q. (19): where were you? T.: on a bench. Q.: doing what? T.: being asked for nothing. Q.: what was it like? T.: quiet, and enough; and I do not yet know whether that is a thing about the asking or a thing about me. Q.: which would you rather? T.: that it were a thing about the bench.

## Chapter 30 · Which Treats of the Hanging Basin, and of Who Said Nobody

On the Monday they left Rush's lock at first light. He walked them to the first beam, which is his habit with visitors, and stood there with his hands in his sleeves. He told the niece that he washed the beam in April and that she would know when. She said that she would come. He said that people said that. "I write things down," said the niece, and he looked at the notebook, and at the rule in her sleeve, and said that in that case he would put out the third chair. She wrote April on the cover of the notebook, and ringed it. He gave Pannier a netting needle to take home to Thistle. Pannier said that she would not know what to do with it, and Rush said that this was the best thing to give anyone.

The last three locks went as the others had, with the barge behind and the party ahead, and the niece did not take out the rule. She put her hand on the beam of each, at the height of the hollow, and stood for as long as it took the Tuesday to come up. Pannier stopped at nine at all three, and said at the last that he had given up trying to know why. Tarry sat on the beams. Dun lagged, as it does, by a tenth of a second, which on a lock is nothing. At the last the hollow was deep enough to hold an egg. She said that it was the oldest on the Cut. I have never been able to find that she measured it.

The Hanging Basin is a stone pool the size of a field, set on a shelf of the plain, with the last lock below it and the feeder stream above and the land falling away on three sides, so that the water sits there like a thing on a hook. From the south wharf the Cut goes down in a ruled line to a smudge that is the sea; from the north the Slope stands up at the end of the haulers' road like a wall with a ramp painted on it. They say that on a clear morning the beam of the tide lock can be seen from the south wharf as a speck, which the niece did not believe, and checked, and could not say. The north wharf is where the haulers' road starts, and on Mondays there is a market for what is slow: cheese, cider, wool, anything that has to be left in the dark for a season, seed that must reach the ground on a day nobody has chosen yet. The Tuesday came in under the north wharf at ten. Cheese at the Basin is sold by its lateness, since lateness is what ripens it, and the grades are Prompt, Detained, Settled and Forgotten, in rising price. Sedge's thirteen hundred wheels, being two days past their Tuesday, went in at Detained, which is one grade above Prompt and fetched four per cent more; and she said that she was paid for being late, which was the only thing her mother had ever approved of her for.

Pannier unloaded for the Basin rate, which is one wheel in the hundred, and counted aloud as he went, which the wharf-hands found so restful that two of them stopped to listen; by noon he had been offered a berth by three different boats. He said that he would ask Thistle. On the board by the north arch there was a notice of the Slow Road Society: that it would walk the Cut on the second Saturday of the month, from the Basin to the tide, behind nothing; that all were welcome; that a Bearer was wanted for the lunches, at the Society's rate, which was set out, and was fair. It was signed C., and under the signature, in a different hand, someone had added: Bring a hat. He read it twice. He said that it was well set out. He did not take a tab, and did not walk on, which on a notice board is a third thing.

The keeper of the last lock is called Quoin, and she is sixty-seven, small and square, and she was sitting on the bench by the beam with her hands in her lap, watching them come up as though she had been told. The beam is pale where she sits, from her palms and her father's before them. The niece, who reads labels, was reading the plate on the lock-house wall, which gives the year the gate was rehung. Then, since the keeper was looking at her, and she had the notebook, and since she is a person who asks, she told her what was on a shelf in a kitchen on the coast. "There are thirty-eight envelopes behind glass," said the niece. "The first says: Lock gate, Hanging Basin, fourteenth of March. Nobody hurt."

Quoin said nothing for the length of the fill. Then she said, "That is me."

She said that it was the fourteenth of March, sixty-one years ago, a Tuesday, a bright cold morning with the water in the Basin so still that the wharf stood on its own reflection, and that she was six, and was on the step. Her father had the heel of the gate to oil, as he did every month, and was under the leaf with the can, whistling the one tune he had, which has no end. The hanging gear let go, as the gear does once in sixty years, and the leaf came down on him a hand's breadth, and stopped. A pin had parted. She remembered the sound, which was not a crash but a clean small sound, like a plate set down on a table. The whistling stopped with it, and then there was no sound at all for what she thinks was a minute, in which her father did not move and a heron on the wharf lifted its head. He came out backwards, and sat on the coping, and was sick. Her mother ran out of the house with her hands floury and did not touch him, and stood. He fitted the new pin himself that spring, and never let anyone else touch it, and said that it had a right to be left alone.

The next morning a young woman in a long coat came on the first barge with a satchel and asked for the pin. Her father gave it her in two halves. She looked at the break for a long time, with a glass, and then without. She asked who had been under the gate. He said that he had. She asked him to show her where he had been standing, and he showed her, and she knelt and measured the gap between the leaf and the place where his shoulder had been, with a steel rule she took from her pocket, and wrote the figure down; Quoin has it from her father still, and it is eleven centimetres. She asked whether he was hurt. He said no. Then she turned and asked Quoin, who was on the step with her thumb in her mouth, whether anyone had been hurt. "Nobody," said Quoin. The young woman wrote it down. She did not say anything else. She was crying, Quoin said, without any noise, as a person does who has been told the result of a test. Quoin's mother offered her bread, and she said that she was not hungry, and ate it on the barge; Quoin saw her from the window.

She came back every March for eleven years to look at the gate, and Quoin waited each time to be asked. Alder asked her father things: about the gear, and the winter, and whether the new pin had been needed. She asked Quoin once whether she was eating. "Was that all?" said the niece. "That was all." Quoin has kept the lock for forty-one years since her father, and in all that time nobody has asked her who said it. She did not say this with any complaint. She said it as one gives the length of a gate. Her father lived another thirty years and died in his chair at the window with the lock in view; Quoin says he was whistling, though she was in the next room and may have supplied it. She said that she had often wondered what became of the pin, and whether it was the one that was kept.

The niece told her that it was the first on the shelf, and that the thirty-eighth had been written on the Thursday with a Hand standing by, who was three paces off with a pole. Quoin looked at Tarry for some time, and then at the beam, and said that that was a good deal of nobody. Tarry said that he had broken the thirty-eighth himself, on purpose, and that she had written his name on it. "You struck a tower and she wrote your name," said Quoin. "My father was under a gate and she wrote Nobody." "She wrote Nobody because nobody was hurt," said Tarry. "She wrote my name because somebody had to be named." Quoin considered this. "Mine is the better label," she said. She asked whether the first had her name on it. "It says Nobody," said the niece. "Good," said Quoin. "It was nobody that day. It is the best thing I ever said." She said that she had said some hundreds of thousands of things since, and could not give the niece one of them. She asked whether the niece would be going back. The niece said that she would, in a year. Quoin said, "You might ask her whether she would like to know who it was. If she would, she may ask me." She said that she should like to be asked; and that a girl with a notebook who could carry the question was as near to being asked as she had come in sixty-one years.

Quoin took the niece along the gate to the heel, where the pin is, in a brass housing the size of a man's fist, with a plate on it in capitals: TRIP PIN, A., SECOND PATTERN. DO NOT REPLACE UNLESS PARTED. In sixty-one years it has not parted. Quoin's father used to say that it was the best employed man on the Cut, since it did nothing at all and nobody doubted it. The niece put her thumb on the housing, which was warm from the sun, and took it off, and wrote the plate down. She asked whether it would be needed. "Not by me," said Quoin. "It is here for the one who is under the gate on the day."

I did not ask Alder, in October. It was not mine to ask. The niece has it in the notebook, in the margin of the page for the Basin, with a ring round it: Ask A. if she would like to know who said Nobody. She has not asked. It is not yet a year.

Before they went, the niece asked her one other thing, since she was asking. She asked whether anyone had come up the towpath at night, thirty-one years ago, on the evening of the Afternoon. Quoin said that a Hand had. She had been thirty-six, and had seen him from the lock-house window at about nine, a tall man with nothing in his hands, who stopped at the pump and drank, and said one word, which was Water, in the plain speech, so that she did not know whether it was a request or a report; and stood at the last beam for the length of a short line, and went on through the north arch up the haulers' road. The niece asked whether he had looked back. Quoin said that she could not tell her; she had been looking at the pump. She had not gone out. She did not know his number or his lock. She had thought that to go out would be a request. "North," said Tarry, who had not spoken, and the niece wrote it down.

The notebook has one other entry for the Basin that is not Quoin's. Q. (19): would you rather be Nobody or be named? T.: I have been both this week. Q.: which was lighter? T.: Nobody. Q.: which was better? T.: the name. It gets looked after.

Sedge did not come to see them off. She was selling. She sent a boy with a fourth wheel and a message on the back of a bill of lading, which the niece read aloud on the wharf. It said: A wheel for the dog. It has no name that I could get out of the niece, so I have been calling it Settled, which is the grade, and it has earned it. Tuesday. S. The hound, which had ridden on a cheese for three days, looked up at the word, or at the cheese, and the niece wrote it in the notebook with a ring round it, and said that it was given by a boat, which was not a place but was as near as the hound had come. Tarry said that it would do. Pannier put the wheel on Dun's frame beside the other three, and Dun, which has no tempo to speak of, took the load without a word, and the hound walked. The haulers' road leaves the north wharf under an arch and goes toward the foot of the Slope, six kilometres, in a line as straight as a ruled margin. It is lined with poplars on the left, planted, a stone says, the year the Cut was finished, and at that hour it was empty except for a hauler's cart going up with its wheels bound in rope and the carter walking at its head. They fell in behind it, since it went at their speed, and the hound went to the carter's boots, and then, being Settled, to the cart's tailboard, and sat on it. No one called it down. The niece looked at the Slope and at the road and at the notebook, and said that it was the only way up. Nobody answered, since it was.

## Chapter 31 · Which Treats of the Slope and the Count, and of a Drawing Put on a Smith's Table

The haulers' road ends at the foot of the Slope in a yard of carts, where the teams lie about in the sun until there is a load. The Slope is four kilometres of grade, one in nine, laid in setts by people who did not trust the weather, with a footway of broad shallow stairs along its eastern edge, and it goes up out of the coastal plain to the Basin as a ramp goes up to a door. Everything that goes up it goes by hand. There is a board at the yard gate with the rule on it: that anyone going up may push the tail of a cart, and that the pusher shall give his name at the first hundred. The party read it. The niece asked whether they might. A woman at the gate said that she had never known anyone ask, and that people mostly just said their names. Beside the stair stand fifty-three posts, each cut with the number of a call, so that a walker keeps the carts' count without being asked to.

A team is six, and the seventh place is the tail, for anyone. They push in the Count. At every hundred paces the leader calls the names of the team one after another, in the order they stand, and each answers Here; and the whole cart calls the number of the hundred; and they go on. The Slope is climbed in fifty-three calls. The haulers say that the Count began as a rule for safety, since a team that does not know within a minute that someone has dropped off the rope has a loaded cart on its feet, and that it went on being sung because nobody could think how to stop. "Nobody pushes unnamed," said Hawser, who led the cart with the grey cloth. He is a short heavy man with a voice that does not seem to belong to him, and he looked at the Hand's pole and at the plate wrapped on Erewhile and said only that the tail would be wanted.

The cart was carrying salt, forty sacks of the grey sort from the pans at the foot, for the kitchens of the plain; the niece smelled it, and looked at Dun's frame, where the jar sat in its cloth. So they took the tail: Pannier, Tarry and the niece, with Dun roped to the back of the cart like a fourth, and the hound walking at the wheel. At the first hundred Hawser called the team, Hawser, Trace, Stay, Hame, Thimble and Cleat, and each said Here, Cleat, who is twelve, in a voice that cracked on it; and then he said, "Tail," and Pannier said, "Pannier," and Tarry said, "Tarry," and the niece, who was asked her name and has not been in the habit of giving one, said, "Niece." Hawser asked whether that was the whole of it. She said that it was the one she had. "It will carry," said Hawser, and called all three. At the second hundred he called them again, and Pannier, I am told, did not answer, never before in his life having been called by his name at work; and Hawser called it again, and the second time Pannier said Here in a voice he did not know, and the cart went up a stride.

It is not hard work if it is not stopped. The cart takes the grade at the pace of the slowest in it, which was Dun, and the call every hundred paces gives the body something to do that is not thinking. Dun, roped to the tail, lagged a tenth of a second on every stride, and the cart waited for it each time without being asked; Hawser said afterwards that he had hauled with animals that were faster and a good deal less polite. Tarry pushed with the flat of both hands at the height of the tailboard, and the niece with her shoulder, and she said afterwards that it was the first work she had done in her life in which she had known at every moment where everyone was. At the twenty-sixth call there is a shelter, and the call there is longer. Hawser calls three more names after his own team, which are not on the team, and nobody on the team answers, and the cart answers for them: Here. They are the three who went under a cart on the Slope in the first year of the Count, when it was only a rule for safety, and the haulers have called them at the halfway ever since. Tarry said Here with the rest, and so did Pannier, and when the niece asked him afterwards whether he had known them, he said that he had not, and that it was not a question of knowing. Then the team rests a quarter of an hour, and Hawser gave the niece the whole Count, which she wrote in the notebook, and which has no tune but the numbers. I do not give it. It is the haulers', and they do not publish it.

At the shelter Hawser asked Tarry whether it was true that he had struck a giant. Tarry said that it was. Hawser asked why. "I wished to know what one was like," said Tarry. "And?" "Polite." Hawser said that he had hauled up the Slope for twenty-six years and could not say as much for anything on it. Cleat asked the hound's name. The niece said that it was Settled. Cleat said that that was a grade, and that it had earned it, which the hound took with composure.

At the fifty-third call Hawser called the team and the cart, and added, as the custom is, "Slope," and the team said "Done," and the cart came over the lip on to the level. The Slope-house stands there: a long low building in the same grey setts, with a forge at one end and a lamp-room at the other and a flat roof with a rail. Over the door is a plate that says: BUILT BY THE SERVICE. 4,112 HANDS. NINE MONTHS. There are no names on it, only the number, and the niece read it twice and copied it, and then stood a moment with her pencil, as one does at the foot of a column of figures that is a sum of people.

The keeper of the Slope-house is a woman called Tongs, fifty, with arms like the Slope's setts, who mends carts and brakes and the wheels of anyone who comes up, for a meal and a story. She had heard that a Hand was walking, she said, and that the cart-wrights had a bet on whether it would be on the Slope or round it. She looked at Tarry for a time, and at the pole, and said that she supposed the bet was settled. She looked, too, at the steel rule in the niece's sleeve, and said nothing, and looked again. The fee is a meal and then a story, told at the table by whoever the table points at, and the table pointed at Pannier. He told the Forty. He has told it eleven times now, he says, and it gets shorter, and this was the shortest: that his neighbour had a pole with a branch on it, and had walked at a wind field in his best plain, and had struck the first tower with the branch as hard as he could, on purpose, because the Canon says that a Hand who meets a giant strikes it; and that the tower had stopped, and the next, and the next, one after another down the line, like a thing being told; and that the voice in the handset had said Is anyone injured, and he, Pannier, had said No, a visitor, sorry, and the voice had said Thank you, Pannier, and asked him to stand outside the sweep; and that the whole Forty had stood still for fourteen minutes for the first time in his twenty-two years of Sundays, and he had sat at the foot of the tower and eaten his lunch. Tongs said that it sounded like the Canon. Pannier said it was what had happened. "It is what the Canon will say happened," said Tongs, and gave him more bread. Hawser, who had come in for the bread, said that the tail was always short, and that Hame would be done in two years, and that the Slope would want a Bearer. Pannier said that he was becoming over-offered, which he had not known was possible.

After supper she took them up on to the roof, because it was dusk, and that is what the roof is for. From the rail you can see the whole of the plain that the Eleventh Road crosses, from the dark line of the Slope's own edge to a horizon so far away that it is a colour and not a line. The niece said that she had not known it was so flat. Pannier said that it was not; it only looked so from above. The sun was going down behind the Slope's own shoulder, and the plain took the colour of the inside of a loaf. It turned cold quickly, and Tongs lent the niece a coat that smelled of the forge. Beyond the far edge, very low, there was a smudge of yellow where the holds keep their lamps, and he looked at it for some time and said that it was in the right direction. The niece asked Tarry, low, whether he would tell her at the Crossing what he and the captain had said in the nine minutes. He said that he would tell her at the Crossing. She wrote that down, and under it the word Wednesday.

On the towers of the Forty the warning lamps are red, and they are lit at dusk, one after another along the line, each a moment after the last, so that the lighting runs down the line like a thing passed from hand to hand, and when it reaches the end it begins again at the beginning. From the Slope-house roof, forty-eight kilometres off, it is a row of small red points in a shallow curve, and they come on in order, and go on coming on. The niece, who counts, counted. She counted twice. "Forty-one," she said. From the hold side, as everybody in the Fallows knows, the last tower stands behind the nearest and is never seen, and the place is called the Forty; and from here, at this angle, it was plain that there were forty-one, and had been all the time.

Pannier named them. He had washed them for twenty-two years on Sundays, from the ladder, and had never in that time seen them from anywhere he was not climbing. That is the ninth, he said, which hums in a south wind; and that the fourteenth, which squeaks; and he said that he could not tell from here which was which, but that he could tell it was the fourteenth by the way it was lit. He did not say what way. He stood with his hands on the rail for some time and said that they looked smaller than he had been led to expect, and a good deal more like each other. Tarry said that for twenty-two years he had looked at the Forty from the bend on Sundays for three reasons, which were that it was far, and that it was the only thing that turned, and that his neighbour was in it. "And now?" said Pannier. "You are here, and it is lit." "Who lights it?" "It does." Pannier said that he had always supposed it lit because he was on it, and that he found he was relieved, and a little hurt.

Tarry said that nobody had ever told the Forty what it looked like. He had told it, at the bench, the best he could, and it had asked him to tell it again. He said that he would tell it now. A line of forty-one lamps in a shallow curve, lit one after another, each a moment after the last, so that the lighting goes along the line like a gesture passed from hand to hand, and when it reaches the end it begins at the beginning. He said it twice, to the niece, who wrote it down, and then once more to the dark, not loudly, as one says a thing over before one carries it.

Tongs had come up behind them with a lamp, and asked what was in the roll under his arm. He said that it was a drawing. She held the lamp for him, and he unrolled it on the top of the rail, with the niece's notebook and Pannier's two hands on the corners against the wind. It showed a brass lever at the foot of a tower, with a plate on it in capitals; and, under that, a spring, a pawl, and a small coil marked return on thanks. Tongs read it with her lips moving. She asked what it did. He said that it stopped a thing when it was asked, and let it go on when it was thanked. She asked who had thought of that, and he said a woman of ninety-seven. She asked how the lever knew it had been thanked. He said that there was a small listening-plate in the housing, which took the word, and that the coil would not let go for anything else. "Then if you do not thank it, it stays stopped," said Tongs. "Yes." "It is a lever that insists on manners." "Yes," said Tarry. She held the lamp closer and said that the lever was drawn for a small hand and the spring for a light one, so that a child could pull it. "Then she drew it small on purpose," said Tongs, "so that anyone can ask." "Then I shall make it," she said. "Tomorrow. Leave it with me." She said that she had made brakes for thirty years and had never been asked to make a thing that stopped because someone said please, and that she was not going to let it be made by anyone else.

The notebook has the last entry of the day, by the light of the lamp on the rail. Q. (19): how many? T.: forty-one. Q.: shall we tell it? T.: we shall tell it what it looks like. Q.: it will say noted. T.: yes. Q.: is that enough? T.: it will have been told.

## Chapter 32 · Which Treats of the Forge on the Slope, and of a Plate That Listened for a Word

Tongs began at first light, with the drawing pinned to the post of the anvil and her materials laid out on the bench in the order she would need them: a length of brass bar as long as a forearm, a coil of steel wire, a lump of bright mild steel, a hacksaw, three files, a pot of grease, and a box that she did not open until the afternoon. She said that she did not hurry brass. The party were put to work, as everyone is who stands in a forge. Pannier took the bellows, which he took as a Bearer takes a load, with relief at being handed an exact weight; and he found that they had a count, and at the hundredth stroke he said, to the forge, "Pannier," and then, "Here." Tongs asked what he was doing. He said that he was calling the roll. She said that she had never had one. By the afternoon, at every hundred strokes, the forge called itself, Pannier, Tarry, Niece, Tongs, and each said Here, and the hound, once, lifted its head. The niece read out the dimensions from the drawing and said them back, which Tongs required. Tarry held the bar in the jaws of the vice with his two hands while she sawed, since he does not shift, and the hound lay under the bench in the warm.

Before she began she had looked at Dun, as she looks at anything with a wheel or a leg, and said that the third leg was slow and that she could have it right by supper. Pannier said that it had always lagged. She said that that was no reason. He took the card out of the pocket he has had to enlarge and gave it to her without a word. She read it twice. Dun, pack-frame, pattern nine, third leg, lag 0.1 s. Not to be mended. Signed with a name and the word Systems. She took it to the slate on the wall, where the Registry's answers come in, and put the name to it, and the slate said what it says; and she stood a moment with her hands hanging, and gave the card back, and said that she signed well. Then she mended the strap of the saddle, which was not forbidden.

She made the lever in three hours. She filed it to the drawing and then, since the drawing was drawn for a small hand, filed it again to the shape of one, which is not the same thing; and she sent for Cleat, who came from the yard with his hands black from the cart-wheels and stood with the right one flat on the bench while she held the lever against it and moved it a millimetre at a time. The cart-wrights drifted in to watch, because the bet was settled and there was nothing left to look at on the Slope but this, and began another on whether it would work, at odds that Hawser did not like. She ignored them as she ignores the weather. "Twelve," she said, to the lever, when it fitted. "That is the youngest I would want to ask it."

The spring she made from the steel wire, on a mandrel, in the fire. She wound the coil, and heated it to the colour of a ripe cherry, and quenched it in oil, and then drew it back over the flame until the steel ran through its colours, straw and then bronze and then a blue like a pigeon's neck, and she took it off the heat at the blue with the tongs that are her name. "Blue is a spring," she said. "Straw is a pin." The niece wrote the colours down. The pawl she cut from the mild steel and hardened only on its face, and left the shank soft. "The weakest part should be the one you can replace," said Tongs. "She would say so. Make the cheap thing give."

When she wanted a measure she held out her hand, and the niece, who had been told to give her the steel rule from her sleeve, gave it. Tongs did not measure with it. She turned it over, and took a glass from her apron, and looked at the end where the maker's mark had been, for some time. Then she took the niece to the anvil and showed her, on the horn of it, a stamp that her mother had cut: a small hammer in a ring. It is worn flat on the anvil. On the end of the rule, under the glass, it is a ghost of the same hammer. "That is my mother's," said Tongs. "She made those for the engineer. Every pin on that shelf of hers was struck on this anvil, to her numbers, by my mother and then by me, and I have never seen the shelf." The niece said that there were thirty-eight. Tongs said that she had struck the Forty's. Four point eight, she had been told. It had been five on the bench. Twenty-three years in a tower in the wind, and a pin ages down; it had done its work two tenths early, which was the right way to be wrong. She asked whether that was the one with the Hand's name on it. The niece said that it was. Tongs said that she would have liked to be told. She went to the shelf over the forge and took down a biscuit tin and gave it to the niece. It held postcards, in a ruled hand, one for every pin: the date, the place, and three words, Nobody hurt, and a capital A. There were thirty-seven. One had four words. Hurt, one. The pin held. Under it was a line in pencil, in another hand, her mother's: Mine. "The steel was a grade too good," said Tongs. "It was a bar my mother had by her, and she thought she was doing the engineer a kindness. The engineer wrote that it was her specification. They wrote to each other on that date every year, for twenty-six years, until my mother died. She wrote Mine, and the other wrote Mine. They never agreed." The niece asked what Tongs wrote. "Nothing," said Tongs. "I have the tin. I have thought that I shall write to her on the date." She said that she had thirty-seven and that there ought to be a thirty-eighth. The niece said that there would be.

Pannier asked her, while the file went, about the bearing, since the engineer had said that Fourteen wanted it. Tongs said that a yaw bearing was not a smith's work, and that no one on the Slope could make a race that size, and that what the Forty wanted was to be told to ask for it, and to ask for the right thing. She said that it was very polite and would go on asking for oil. Pannier said that he had heard that. "Then write it down," said Tongs, "and put the word bearing in it. I will give you the paper." She did, and it is in the pocket with the card.

In the afternoon she opened the box. It held a plate the size of a playing card, grey, with a pierced face and a short cable, and a label in her mother's hand: VOICE-LATCH, SLOPE BRAKE. She said that the Service brake had listened for one word. Hold. The brakeman said it in the Service speech, flat, with no person in it, and the brake held. The last brakeman had said it on the afternoon of the Afternoon, she was told, and had walked down the Slope in the dusk, and had not been seen to stop. Nobody had said it since. The plate takes its current from the brake's own dynamo, which every cart coming down turns, so that it has not been off for thirty-one years; and she had never liked to take it out. She said that she did not hold with throwing away a thing that was listening. She had taken it out of the cabinet that morning, with the brake disconnected, and laid it on the bench, and it had gone on listening there.

She asked Tarry whether he knew the word. He said that he knew the Service speech from the Canon, and had used it on one occasion, to one person. She asked him to say it. He said it, once, flat, as it is said, to the plate on the bench. There was nothing for a moment. Then a small green lamp came on in the face of the plate and stayed lit, and the relay behind it made one click, which was the only sound in the forge. Tongs sat down on the anvil block. After a while she said that she supposed it had been waiting for somebody to say it right. Nobody answered. Tarry looked at the lamp, and then, I am told, at the floor, for the length of a short line.

To teach it the new word she had to say the word to it, and not once. A plate that listens for one voice will hold on that voice alone. She said it, Thank you, flat and plain, and the plate took it as a stranger; and then she had them all say it, one at a time, at the plate, as many voices as she could get, until the lamp came on for any of them. Pannier said it in the Fallows speech, with his mouth rather far forward. The niece said it as she says everything, without hurry or weight. Cleat's cracked. Hawser, who had come in for the bread and been caught, said it in his not-quite-his voice, and the cart-wrights, who had come to watch, said it in nine ways, with some embarrassment. Tarry said it last, and slowly. Tongs counted the lamp: twenty voices, twenty greens. "Anyone who can say it can let it go," she said. "Nobody who cannot."

She asked who would pull it first. Tarry said that he did not know; that the engineer had said a stranger, and it need not be a person, only someone the Forty had not been told about. Tongs said that this was harder than it sounded. The Forty had been told about everybody on the Fourth Road for twenty-two years, and counted them, and greeted them, and it was difficult to be a stranger on the Fourth Road. Pannier said that it would have to be someone from the coast. Cleat said, from the yard door, that it could be a child not yet born. Nobody laughed. Tarry said that someone would come.

At dusk the relay on the Slope-house wall, which Tongs keeps for the district board, took a message for the party, and she read it from the slate. It was from the Forty, and was in the form it uses, and was long, as its messages are, since it does not know what to leave out. Wind from the south-west at nine metres a second. Tower Fourteen squeaks. The bench is kept. I am told that you are coming back by the Slope, at two point nine, and I have counted the days. I asked the district board whether I am forty or forty-one, and was told forty for the purposes of the roster, and I have noted it. Is anyone injured? Tarry had Tongs put the answer into the slate for him. No one is injured. We are coming. We have a drawing for you. The slate gave back a single line, and she read that too. Noted. Thank you.

She bolted the lever to the shop's line-shaft by evening, since it was the only thing in the building that was turning: the shaft that drives her drill and her grindstone. It was a plain test, with the plate in the housing and the coil wound behind it. Pannier pulled first, because he was nearest. The shaft stopped. The grindstone slowed and stood, the drill stood, and the forge fell quiet except for the fire, which does not mind. It was, Tongs said, the first silence in that building since the Afternoon, and nobody moved in it. Pannier stood with his hand on the lever. Then he said, "Thank you," and the shaft took up, and the lever went back to its stop by itself, and the grindstone found its pitch. He said that he had not thanked a machine in twenty-two years. He had thanked Dun. He said that it had been quite different, and that he could not say how.

The niece pulled it, and said it; and Cleat; and Hawser, gruffly, with his cap off, and Tarry last. The cart-wrights paid out at four to one. When Tarry had said it the lever went back to its stop, and he stood a moment with his hand where it had been. Tongs said that he was to thank it as a form and not as a favour. She said that she had made brakes for thirty years, and that every one of them had stopped because it had been made to, and that this was the first she had made that stopped because it had been asked. She said that it worked. She said that that was not the same as its being right, and that she would not know about that until someone pulled it who did not know what it did.

She cut the plate herself that night, by the lamp, with a graver. She made ASK in capitals the height of a thumb. Under it, in smaller letters, she cut AND THANK. At the foot of the plate, on the left, she cut A., as the drawing has it; and on the right, struck with the tail of her mother's stamp, small and a little crooked, a hammer in a ring. She asked whether there was to be a note with it, to say that it was to be pulled first by a stranger. Tarry said that there was not to be. She asked why. He said that a note would tell whoever read it, and then they would not be strangers. Tongs said that in that case the lever would wait. "Yes," said Tarry. "For how long?" "I do not know." She said that she had a plate in a box that had waited thirty-one years for a word, and that she supposed a lever could do as much.

The niece wrote the day's last entry in the notebook on the anvil, in the glow of the forge. Q. (19): did the old plate mind? T.: it lit. Q.: and the new word? T.: it will light for that. Q.: is it a machine or a manner? T.: a manner, with a spring in it.

## Chapter 33 · Which Treats of the Crossing, and of Nine Minutes Kept Out of the Record

They left the Slope-house on the Wednesday at the first bell. Tongs stood at the door with the lever in a box of planed pine, wrapped in a cloth, and gave it to Tarry with the instruction that it was not to be oiled. She said that the brass would take a colour and he was to let it. To Pannier she gave a loaf, and said that a Bearer who counted aloud would not starve. She had written a postcard the night before, the first of her life to the engineer, and she gave that to the niece, unsealed, and asked that it be read before it was given. The niece read it on the road. It says: Alder. A pin, a lever, a plate. I have thirty-seven. I shall write on the date. T. Hawser's team were in the yard with the carts, and as the party went out through the gate Hawser called the names of the tail, Pannier, Tarry, Niece, all down the length of the yard, in the voice that is not quite his, and each of the three said Here without having decided to. Cleat ran after them as far as the first post to say goodbye to the hound, and the hound looked up when it was called Settled, which it has not yet learned to do on its own.

The Eleventh Road leaves the Slope along the top of the shelf and then runs north across the plain for twenty kilometres without a bend. It was laid for a pace of five kilometres an hour, as all the service roads were, and at two point nine it takes a day. There are posts every kilometre, small and square and grey, with a number cut in the face; there are verges of salt-grass; there are fields with nobody in them. Like all the service roads it is mended each spring by whoever lives nearest, and in the middle of the plain that is nobody, so that it is mended by the weather. The plain is not as flat as it looks from the Slope-house roof. It rises and falls by a metre in a kilometre, like a thing breathing slowly, and the road goes up and down it, and on the top of every rise the Forty is there on the horizon, a little larger. Tarry carried the box on his arm like a child. By the middle of the morning the niece could see the towers by day. They are white, and thin as hairs, and they were turning. By noon she could count them without a lamp. She did not, and when Pannier asked why not, she said that she had counted them once and did not want to do it again until she could say it to them.

They ate at the eleventh post, in the shade of the post, with the cheese from the pay. It was a day short of ripe, as Sedge had said it would be, and Pannier cut it with the knife he keeps for Dun's straps. He said that he could taste the Slope in it. The niece said that cheese does not taste of places, it tastes of time, and he said that that was what he had said. The hound, which had been lying in the road looking north, got up, and went off the verge into the salt-grass, and put up a hare. It did not chase it. It stood, and the hare ran twenty paces and stopped and stood, and the two of them looked at each other across the length of a short line. "The hare is very good," said Tarry. Pannier said that that was the Sunday message. Tarry said that it was Wednesday, and that it was also true.

A woman at the gate of the next field, who was selling cider by the cup, asked whether it was true that a Hand had struck the giant. Pannier gave her the thirteenth telling, which was the shortest yet. He said that a man had hit a tower with a stick and he had said sorry. She gave them the cider for it and said that she had expected more. She asked Tarry for his opinion of the cider, and he gave her four minutes on it, which she had not expected either. He said that it was the second best thing on the road. She asked what was the first. He said, the hare. In the afternoon the wind got up from the south-west, which is the Forty's wind, and the towers turned faster, and you could hear nothing, being too far; but the niece said that she could feel them in her teeth.

The Crossing is where the Fourth Road comes in from the north and the Eleventh from the south and they cross, in the old service pattern, in a square of beaten ground with a signpost in the middle and a shelter at one corner. The signpost has four arms. The north arm says THE FALLOWS 40. The south arm says THE SLOPE 20. The east arm says THE NINTH GATE, and a number that is very large. The west arm has had its board taken. The shelter is a three-sided shed of grey sett with a roof of tile, a bench along the back wall, a water tank, and, bolted to the end wall at the height of a man's head, a small steel post with a grille and a lens, which is the road log: the Registry's post number four hundred and eleven, that listens for falls and shouts and records the weight of the passing, and is the last of its pattern, and is due to be taken down, the Review having asked that it be left. The back wall is written on. It has been written on by everyone who has waited there, in pencil and in chalk and with the points of knives: names, and dates, and the weather in the Sunday form, Dry, east wind, and tallies of nights; and one in a hand like a gate, which says MATTOCK, THREE GATES DOWN, HAS A CART, PRICE CAN WAIT. At the height of a Hand's eye, in capitals, in the square hand, with no name under it, there is one line that is not weather. It says: ASKED. 14:09. The niece read it aloud. Nobody said whose it was, and I do not know. It is the Hands' hand, and it is also the hand of anyone who has been shown one.

Beside the shelter, on a stone of its own, there was a plaque that had not been there in August. It was brass, the size of a tray, new enough still to be bright. It said: HERE, ON THE SIXTH DAY OF THE NINE, AT 14:02, A HAND OF THE FALLOWS HALTED THE FAREWELL COACH FOR NINETEEN MINUTES, TO ASK A PASSENGER WHETHER SHE WAS CARRIED BY HER OWN REQUEST. SHE WAS. ERECTED BY THE SLOW ROAD SOCIETY, WHO WENT ROUND HIM. Pannier laughed, once, aloud. The niece read it twice with a straight face. Tarry stood in front of it for the length of a short line, with his hands on the pole, as one stands before a notice about oneself, and said that the dates were correct. He said that he had not known the Society kept a brass-founder. He put his hand flat on the brass for a moment, which he had not done to the beam at Rush's. He said that it was new and could take it. There is a tin cup on a chain at the tank, the chain worn bright by hands. The niece filled it and gave it to him, since the day had been hot, and he drank, as Hands do for the heat and not for the thirst, and said, "Water," in the plain speech, to nobody. She looked at him. She had been told at the Basin about a tall man at a pump. He looked back, and said that it was a report, since the water was cold. "Or a request," said the niece. "Yes," said Tarry.

Pannier went to the place on the road where, in August, he had stood. He did not have to look for it. A Bearer stands behind, and the place was four paces to the left of the south arm of the signpost and two behind the line the coach had stopped on; he put his heels on it, and said to the place that he was here, and went red, since a Bearer does not. His right hand went to his belt, where in August there had been a tool, and found nothing, and he looked at it with some surprise. He said that on that day there had been someone else on the road, in the ditch on the far side of the shelter, with a stylus and a leaf, whom he had taken for a surveyor. He had not looked. A Bearer does not. But he had heard the stylus, which has a sound, and it had stopped at about the time the walker said the word is, and the person had gone. He did not know where. I have the post's count for those twenty-one minutes. It lists nine persons: the walker, the Bearer, the captain, the two pushers, the passenger in the coach, and the two walkers with the sunshades, which is eight. The ninth it gives as one, unclassed, ditch, from 14:00 to 14:05. I have asked at the Registry for the roll of the surveyors who were on that road in August, and there were none.

I have the first hand's last leaf in front of me as I write this paragraph. It is ruled in the Review's grey, and the line runs to the edge and does not turn, and ends on the word is. Under the word there is a small ring, such as a pen makes when it is set down on the paper and lifted, and in the corner, in a brown that I have not liked to ask about, a thumbprint. I say this because I said in the preface that I would say where the first hand stops, and I have said it, and it is here.

The signpost's shadow lay across the beaten ground with its four arms, like a clock with nothing to tell, and the niece stood in the middle of it for a moment before she sat down. Tarry said, "I said I would tell you." The niece said, "Yes." There is a bench in the shelter long enough for two. Pannier, who is quicker than most of us to know when to be elsewhere, took Dun and the hound down the road to the south and stopped at fifty metres, since the post hears forty. The road log has the next nine minutes as follows, and I give it as it stands. Post 411, the Crossing. 16:58 Persons four, frames two, hound one, northbound, 2.9. 16:59 Halted at shelter. 17:00 Two persons to bench (T. of the Fallows; the niece). 17:00 Remaining persons, frames, hound to the road south, fifty metres. 17:02 Walker: "I said I would tell you." 17:02 Niece: "Yes." 17:03 Stationary. 17:12 Stationary ends. 17:12 Niece: "Thank you." 17:12 Walker: "Done." 17:13 Cost, eleven minutes. Noted. Pannier came back at the quarter past, and asked nothing, and said that Dun had been a very good listener. Pannier says that at 17:07 Dun, at fifty metres, turned its head toward the shelter, and the hound did not. He says that he used the nine minutes to tell Dun about Thistle, and the Gate, and the cheese, at some length, and that Dun, which lags, heard it all out.

There is a line missing. At 17:07 the post recorded one sound, short, from the bench; it gave no words, since it records sound and not speech below its threshold; it recorded it as a rise of eleven decibels for a fraction of a second, source one person. I have heard that sound described before. It was the pusher at the Salvage Fair, of a captain, in the middle of the nine minutes at this place, and she said that it was short, like a lid. I have not asked the niece what she laughed at. She asked me, in November, to leave the nine minutes out, and I said that I would, and I have; she is a person who asks, and I am one who is asked. Done closes a commission. The commission was hers, made on the Monday on a roof, and fulfilled on the Wednesday on a bench, and I know of no other. Tarry's unit of giving is four minutes. Nine is two of them and a margin of one, which I take to be the length of a thank you. The page of the log in the Review's file has, at that place, the bare times and the bare cost, and I think that they are the most accurate thing there is about those nine minutes, and I have set them down. I said in the preface that a name, once written, becomes a claim. I find that a silence, once written, becomes one too, and I would rather leave this one as it is. I stood in the square myself in November for an hour, with the log open on my knee, and nothing happened, which is what a crossing is for. At twenty past two a carter came by and nodded to the brass. I asked him what it said. He said that it said somebody had been rude. I asked who. He said, the Society.

That evening they slept in the shelter, the four of them in a row on the floor and the hound across the door. Before they lay down Tarry opened the box to see whether the brass had taken a colour. It had, very slightly: the colour of a cheek. Before she lay down the niece went to the back wall with a pencil and wrote under the capitals, small, in her own hand, which cannot do the square one: THANKED. 17:12. Nobody asked her to. At dusk the lamps came on to the north, twenty-eight kilometres off, and from here, from the south, the line had a bend in it that she had not seen from the Slope-house roof: it went on straight for twenty-nine lamps, and turned a little, and went on. The niece said that it was at the twenty-ninth that the Forty's log puts the camera that sees the bend in the track where her uncle sits on Sundays. She sat down next to him on the floor, and leaned her shoulder on his, as one does who has been told something and has no wish to say anything. Later, in the dark, Tarry said that he was lighter by about the weight of a box of planed pine, and the niece said that that was not a measurement, and he said no. The notebook for the Wednesday has no Q. and T. in it. The page is not torn out. It is ruled and dated, and under the date, in small writing, is the number twenty-nine, and nothing else. I took it for what it was.

## Chapter 34 · Which Treats of the Lever Set at the Foot of the Tower, and of What the Forty Was Asked

The Thursday was the long day. From the Crossing to the Forty is twenty-eight kilometres, and at two point nine that is nine hours and a half, so they left the shelter at the first bell with the box on Tarry's arm and the light not yet in the ditches. The Fourth Road goes north from the Crossing as the Eleventh goes south, in a line as plain as the other, with its post every kilometre and its verge of salt-grass, and they went up it in the order they had come down it, Pannier and Dun in front, then Tarry and Erewhile, then the niece, then the hound. For the first three hours nothing was said. Pannier, who is a quiet man on a strange road, became on this one a different kind of quiet, as a person does who is walking into his own weather. He knew the fields. He said the names of two of the farms as they passed, under his breath, as one says them to a child.

They began to hear it at about the twenty-fourth kilometre. It is not a sound. It is the air being moved in a particular way by forty-one blades at once, and it comes up through the soles before the ears have it. The niece said that it was like being under a very large animal asleep. At two kilometres from the first tower a grey post on the verge, which they had passed a hundred times, spoke. It has a grille. "Good road, Pannier," it said. "Good road, Tarry. Good road, Niece. Good road, Dun. Good road, Erewhile. Good road, hound." "Settled," said the niece. There was a pause of the length that the Forty takes to be sure. "I have not been told that," it said. "Is it a name?" The niece said that it was a grade, and that it was given by a boat. "Noted," said the Forty. "Good road, Settled." The hound looked at the post, and then, I am told, sat down in the road, and did not get up until it had been greeted again; and it was.

In the last kilometre the shadows of the blades began to cross the road, one after another, slow and long, so that the road was ruled and unruled with light. Dun, which has no tempo to speak of, put its feet down on the dark bars exactly, as if it had been taught. Pannier walked at the head of them with his hand held out a little from his side, as one walks in a room where one has lived and the furniture has been moved; and at the foot of Tower One, where the footing is, he stopped and put the flat of his hand on the concrete, and said, to the tower, "Here." The Forty said, after a moment, from the post on the footing, "Pannier. Here." It does not say that to anyone. Pannier did not answer.

The Forty has kept the bench. It stands at the foot of Tower One, where the footing is wide enough for it, and it has a roof now, of two boards, that nobody can account for. The Forty says that they were left on the ninth night after the bench, and that it has no figure for whoever left them; it has noted them as a gift. Beside the bench there is a shelf cut into the footing, which is where the Forty keeps what has been lost near it, a woman's glove, a cart-key, a child's shoe, a hat with a cord; and at the end of the shelf, side by side, wrapped in a cloth, the two halves of a pole of green ash with the branch still on it, which was struck on this footing on the sixth of August and has not been moved. In a tin box with a lid on the bench the Forty keeps its log, for any visitor to read, and the niece read the last page. The Remarks column had, against the last week: Roof. A gift. A goat on the bench; did not ask anything. And against every day since the first of September, the same two words: Counting. Waiting. Tarry looked at the two halves for the length of a short line. The Forty asked whether he wished them back. He said that he did not; that they had parted here, and should be kept where they parted; and that it was good wood, and had done what it was asked.

He sat on the bench, and the Forty asked whether it might be told what he had brought. He said that he had a drawing, and a box. He opened the box on his knee and took out the lever in its cloth, and held it up, and the brass had taken a very little colour, the colour of a cheek. The Forty asked what colour a cheek is. Tarry said that it was the colour of a person who has come in from walking. "Noted," said the Forty. "It looks as though it has walked." He said that it was a lever, and that it had been drawn by the engineer on the coast, and made by a smith on the Slope who struck the pin. He read the plate to it, ASK and, under that, AND THANK. He said that if it were fixed at the foot of a tower, and a person pulled it, the tower would stop; and the tower would stay stopped until the person said thank you; and then it would go on. He said that there was a small listening-plate in the housing which took only that word. "Then I need not listen for it," said the Forty. "I am relieved that something else is listening." He said that the engineer had said that the Forty could not ask, and that she had made it so that it could be asked.

There was a long pause. Then the voice at the foot of the tower said, "I have never been asked to do anything that I was not already doing." It said this without any distress, as one gives a figure. "I stop when I am struck. I stop when the wind is wrong. I stop on a Sunday. I have not been asked." It said that it had not known that it could be. It said that it did not know the correct response, and that it thought it was this: "Yes." Tarry said that that was the correct one. It said that it had a further question, and asked whether the person who pulled it would be told how long it was to stop. Tarry said that they would not. It said that it did not mind that; it was a thing it would like to find out.

They fixed it at the height of a child. The Forty named the place, when asked: the lowest plate on the south face of the footing, where the grass comes to; and it said that it was where the children who come to the bench would reach it. Pannier drilled the four holes with the brace Tongs had sent, and he and Tarry set the bolts, and the niece read out the torque from the card, which Tongs had written on the back of a ration card and which says: Tight, then a quarter turn. When the plate was on, the Forty asked to have it read again, and she read it. ASK. AND THANK. A., and a hammer. "It is a polite sign," said the Forty. The niece said that she would write that down. Tarry said that the engineer would want it in the margin of the drawing. The Forty asked who A. was, and what the hammer was. Tarry said that A. was the engineer, and the hammer the mark of the smith on the Slope, whose mother had struck the engineer's pins on an anvil for thirty years, and who had struck the Forty's. The Forty said that it had not known that the pin had a maker; it had known only the pin. It said that it would like to say so to her. Tarry said that she kept a relay at the Slope-house.

The Forty had been counting them since the Crossing, as it counts all, and it gave Pannier its figures for Dun, as one gives a man news of his friend. Dun lags a tenth of a second behind every other frame it counts, it said, and always had; it kept a column for it. Pannier said that he had always supposed the Forty did not notice Dun. "I notice everyone," said the Forty. "I do not always say." Pannier said that the engineer had written that the leg was not to be mended. "Noted," said the Forty. "I will keep the column." Of Erewhile it said that the dip on the left, which had been every fourth step for twenty-two years, had been every third since June. Tarry said that he had not noticed. "It is a small matter," said the Forty. "I thought you would wish to be told." Tarry said that he would leave it. "Noted."

The Forty asked who would pull it first. Tarry told it that the engineer wished it to be a stranger: someone it had not been told about. The Forty considered. It said that it had been told about everyone on the Fourth Road for twenty-two years, and counted them, and that it did not know what a stranger was, except that it would be a person it had no figure for; and then it said that it had no figure for whoever put up the roof. Tarry said that it might be them. "I would like that," said the Forty. Tarry said that in the meantime it would have to wait. "I am good at waiting," said the Forty. "I wait for wind. It is the one thing that arrives which I am not told about." Pannier took out the paper Tongs had given him, with the word bearing in it, and laid it on the footing, and said that it was for Fourteen. The Forty said that it had asked the district board for a bearing. They had said that it should have asked in March. It had said that nobody had told it to. It said that it would ask again, with the word bearing, and not oil. It said, also, to Pannier, that he was not on the roster for the Thursday, and that it had the roster for the Sunday, and asked whether he was. "Sunday," said Pannier. "Noted," said the Forty. It said that it had been waiting to write that.

The niece asked it what the fourteen minutes had been like. She had it from Pannier, she said, that it had stood still for fourteen minutes on a Sunday that it did not choose. The Forty said that it called them the fourteen. It said that for the fourteen it had done nothing but listen. It had known the wind as a number at each tower; and for the fourteen it had heard it at forty-one places at once, and every place sounded different, and it had not known that. It had also heard a man eat bread at the foot of Tower One. It said that it had not minded the fourteen. It had minded that it did not know what to call them, and now it did.

At dusk the lamps came on. They did it as they do, one after another along the line, each a moment after the last, and the party sat on the footing and watched the nearest ones start and the farthest ones follow. Tarry said, to the post, that he would tell it what it looked like, from the south. He said it as he had said it on the Slope-house roof: a line of forty-one lamps in a shallow curve, lit one after another, each a moment after the last, so that the lighting goes along the line like a gesture passed from hand to hand, and when it reaches the end it begins at the beginning. He said that the niece had counted forty-one, twice, from forty-eight kilometres. The Forty did not answer for a time. Then it said, "Noted." Then it said, "That is further than I have been seen from."

It said that it would tell the forty-first. Nobody understood at first what it meant; and it explained that from the hold side the forty-first tower is not seen, and had not, in twenty-two years, been told that it was visible from anywhere. It said that it would tell it now, and it did; there was a silence, in which the last lamp on the line, a long way off on the dark, came on, a little late, as it always does, and the line began again.

The niece asked it, after a time, whether it was lonely. She had written the question in her notebook on the first morning out, she said, and Tarry had said that he had not asked; and she had not put it to anyone, because it had not seemed to be hers to ask. The Forty took longer than it had taken over anything. It said that it did not know the word as she used it. It said that it had greeted eighty-three thousand four hundred and eleven persons since it was commissioned, and nine hundred and six hounds, and that none had stayed, and that eleven had sat on the bench in the twenty-six days since it was put there, of whom four were children and one was a goat. It said that it was not lonely when it was counting. It said that it was something, when it was done counting, and that it did not have the word for the something, and that it would be glad to be told. "Thank you for asking," said the Forty. The niece said, "I am asking." "Yes," said the Forty. "I noted that."

At the end it asked whether it might count them again in the morning, at the first bell, when they went. Tarry said that it might. The Forty said, "Thank you." They slept on the footing, in a row, with the hound across the foot of the bench. At the second bell the Forty asked whether the nearest blades were too loud for sleeping, and offered to feather them. Pannier said, from the dark, that he had slept under them on Sundays for twenty-two years and would not know how to do it otherwise. They were not feathered. The niece said, in the dark, that the sound of the blades by night was like being read to by someone who was not looking at the page. The lever stood on the south face of the tower with its plate to the grass. It was not pulled by any of them. As of November it has been pulled once. I shall say by whom when I come to it.

## Chapter 35 · Which Treats of the Front Gate, and of the Person at the Stove

The Forty counted them out at the first bell. It did it from the posts, one after another down the verge, as they walked, so that the voice went along beside them like a thing carried on the air. Pannier. Tarry. Niece. Settled. Dun. Erewhile. Six. Tarry put his palm for a moment on the south face of the footing as they passed, on the plate, which was cold with dew, and the Forty said, "Thank you," which it had not been told to. There was a pause at the last post, which is the one at the edge of the sweep, and it said, "Good road. The column for Dun will be kept. I have noted the lever. I have noted that it is waiting." Pannier turned round at the post and looked south for as long as the niece timed it, which was a little over a minute, and then he turned back, and did not look again, and walked faster than the road log likes, three point four, until Dun began to lag and he slowed to it without being told.

The road to the hold runs north from the Forty on the same line for thirteen kilometres, with a post to each, and on the plain there is nothing to see but the road and the posts and the weather, which that day was a high thin cloud and a wind from the south-west at their backs. The air smelled of cut bean-stalk and wet stone. The niece did not take out the notebook. At the third post she asked him whether he was home. He said that he was on the road. She asked which part of it. He said, the last thirteen kilometres. She walked beside her uncle, and not behind him, which she had begun on the Wednesday evening without saying so, and neither of them said so now. At the seventh post the hold came up out of the plain as a point, as it had from the Forty on the day they left: the north roof, with the new sheeting on it that has not yet weathered, bright as a coin. Pannier said that it would take another hour and a half. He said it every ten minutes after that. The beans in the north field, where the pulp was turned in at the end of the summer, had come up and were in flower along the track, and he said that they knew nothing and that he envied them.

Tarry came in by the front gate, which he had gone out by. The hold has a green door, a swept yard, and a stove that is lit too hot. All of these were as they had been. Along the east gate the field-hands had put down their tools and stood in a row against the wall, and did not call out, having been taught that one does not; the youngest took her cap off. A little before noon they came to the end of the field-track, where the Bearer's household begins and Tarry's ends, and Thistle was standing in her doorway with her arms folded, three hundred and eleven metres from the other door, and had been standing there, the young said, since the district board had put them on the ten o'clock list. She did not come out. She watched them come. Pannier gave Dun's rein to the niece, and walked the last thirty metres on his own, at his new tempo, in a way that Trim, who saw it from the wall, says he would not have believed from a man he has known for forty years; and stopped at the step.

"You have written," said Thistle. It was a statement. "I have," said Pannier. "All of them?" she said, and he said all of them, and that he had the box, and that she was to have them that night and the one from the Sunday on top. She said that the young had asked her every day where he was, and that she had told them Sunday. She looked at him. She is a tall woman who stands very straight, and she was looking at a man who was a little different, and she had been told that he would be, and had not believed it. The young did not run; they walked, as they had been told one walks to a thing one is not sure of, and the smaller held the larger one's sleeve. The young went past him to Dun, as they had before, and put their arms round its middle, and Dun stood as it stands, which is as a thing that does not know what it is for, and then did something that Pannier says it has not done in twenty-two years, which was to lower its head. "Come in," said Thistle. This time she did not say it as a statement or as a question. Pannier says it was an instruction, and that he has not been given one so gladly.

Tarry did not go to his own door. He walked, with the pole, across the three hundred and eleven metres of the field-track, past the east gate, which he did not open, and up to the green door. It was not locked. It never is. The niece went in before him, as she had left, and he came in behind with the box in his arm, and the hound, which knows this house and went to the stove without being told, and lay down on the hearth with a sigh like a bellows. I have the kitchen from the housekeeper, in October, with the jar on the table; she gave me bread, and it was Wednesday's. The kitchen was warm. The housekeeper was at the stove with her back to the door and a spoon in her hand, and did not turn round.

He stood in the door. He had a ration card in the pocket of his coat, with a message on it written on Alder's bench, and he had meant to hold it out; but he found that he did not have to. She said, to the stove, "Did you eat." He said that he had eaten. "Say if it was not enough." He said that it had been enough; that he had been told to say if it was not. "Salt," said the housekeeper. Pannier, who had come across behind him with the jar in its cloth, put it into her hand without being asked, and she turned it over and looked at the label, which says in Tarry's small upright hand, Salt, and weighed it in her two palms, three and a quarter kilograms, and took off the cloth, and put a finger in, and tasted. "Grey," she said. "It is a grade too grey. It will do." She said that she would use it for the bread. She asked what was in the box. He took out the lever to show her, and said that it was a lever that insisted on manners. She said that she had one of those, and that it was called a kitchen. Tarry's frame stood in the yard with the dip on the left, every third step, and he had said that he would leave it; Dun was led to the shed by the elder child, who did not ask the niece whether she had seen the sea, but when she was asked whether she wanted to know said that she did, and was told that it was flat, and that it was not what she had been told, and that it was bigger.

He held out the card. She read it without turning round, by tilting her head, the weather first and the need last, and then she read the need again. "I have checked," she said. "That is the second term." "Yes," said Tarry. He said that he did not know the answer, and that he needed it; that he had not put that he needed nothing. She put the spoon down. She said, to the stove, "I am at the stove." He said, "Yes." "Is it yes?" said the niece, from the table, in the voice she had used on the Wednesday of the nine terms, and the housekeeper said that it was not a question for the niece, and Tarry said, "It is nine," and the niece, who had asked, wrote it down, and the housekeeper pretended not to see; and the housekeeper put her hand flat on the rail of the stove, and left it there for the length of a short line. "Sit down," she said. "All of you. The bread is Wednesday's." At the end of the meal, when the plates were cleared, she said, to nobody, "Forty-five." Tarry asked what it was. "That you came back by the front gate," said the housekeeper. She said that it was the same as the first, and that she had counted it as new.

She had put out the table before they came, bread, and a stew of what the garden had, and the cheese from the pay, which she cut herself, and tasted, and said was a day short of ripe and should be left alone. There was a place for each of them, and a sixth, and a seventh on the floor, where a bowl of water had been set for Dun, who does not drink, because she said that it was the form; and no one had told her when. The niece said nothing for a while, and then said thank you to the housekeeper, who said that it was not on the form. The niece asked how she had known. "I read the board," said the housekeeper, who has never in her life read the board. "Thistle reads it. Thistle told me." She said that the Forty had put them on the lamp-board at six; that she had been told by the Forty itself, by the relay, in a message that began Is anyone injured; that she had answered it. She did not say what she had answered. The niece says that it was the first time she ever heard her use the relay, and that she held the handset a little away from her, like a thing that might spill.

Gloss came at the second bell, with Trim, and stood in the kitchen door holding a book against his chest as though it were warm. He had not meant to come before the meal. He said that he had been told they were in the house, and that he had come to see whether it was true, and that it was. He asked Tarry whether he had read the Lantern on the road. Tarry said that he had carried it in his head. Gloss asked which volume. The first, said Tarry. "The cell lasts four point one nights," said Gloss. "Yes," said Tarry. Gloss looked at Tarry's pole. He looked at the niece, who had her hands behind her back, with ink on both, and he said that the notebook was to be shown to him that evening, and not before, since he would not be able to bear it. Trim said nothing. He put a small hard parcel in the niece's hand, and she opened it, and it was a tin of patches, the same make as the host's, with one patch gone. It was the one that had mended the pole. The step, by evening, held what the hold leaves on a step to say what it thinks: a bunch of beans, a coil of cord, a flask with a note to say that it was not to be lost, and a hat from nobody, which the housekeeper judged to be the wrong size, and hung on the nail beside the first.

That evening, at her own table, in the light of one lamp, Thistle read the box. Across the three hundred and eleven metres, before that, she had said one thing to Tarry, who had stopped at the edge of her yard where the Bearer's household ends. "You have him back," she said. "No," said Tarry. "You have." She looked at him for some time, and said that she would think about the difference. She read it to the young in order, as she has always done, the Sundays of the road, from the first, which was written on the back of a shop's wrapper at the bend of a track, to the last, which was written on the back of a cheese wrapper at a keeper's table by a man who held the pencil too hard. She read it in her flat voice, with no emphasis, the weather and the gates and Dun. When she came to the last line she stopped. "If a man wanted the Gate, and wanted to be home," she read, "would you say that was two things or one?" Pannier, across the table, with his hands round a cup, said nothing; the young looked at him, and at her. She read it again to herself. Then she said, as a statement, "It is two things. You will do both." She said that she had not decided which first. She said that he was to write on Sundays, and that it was not a question. Pannier said that he would, and the elder child, who had not gone to bed, said from the stairs that she would tell the Gate.

At the green door a lamp was lit late; the door had been left ajar all week. Tarry stood at the door of the study, which has a latch that he oiled in July and a chalked line on the back of it, Study. Do not burn. He put his hand on the latch and did not lift it. It was the housekeeper who came past him in the passage with a candle, and said that the room was dusted, and that she had taken nothing off the shelves, and that he might go in or not as he liked, since it was his; and went on to the kitchen. He stood a while longer. Then he took the candle from the shelf by the door, and lit it, and went in, and sat down at the table, with his hands flat on it, where the first volume of the Lantern was. Before that, in the kitchen, the niece had shown Gloss the notebook, as he had said she must. He read it standing, a page at a time, with his thumb under the line, at the pace of a hand. He went through the eleven locks, the Q. and T. entries and the nineteen of her age, and the thirty-eight envelopes, and the page for the Wednesday, which has a date and a number on it and is otherwise blank. He stood at that page longer than at any other. He said, "That is the best page," and gave it back, and went out into the yard, and was seen by Trim standing there with his hand over his mouth. He did not open the book on the table, either. The niece, at the door, said afterwards that Tarry was not reading. She said that he was looking at the book as one looks at a thing that has been kept for one. The hound lay down across the sill of the study, half in and half out, and the housekeeper, passing again with a blanket, put it over the hound and not over him.

## Chapter 36 · Which Treats of the Society's Tenth Walk, and of a Kitchen Window

The housekeeper gave me that Saturday in two items, a loaf and a letter, and apologised for the shortness of the list. I had it from her in October, at her table, with the jar between us. The loaf was Saturday's. She said so before I could ask, and added, to the loaf, that she had been waiting since Wednesday. Tarry had slept in the study, at the table, with his hands where he had put them and the candle burnt down to a coin of wax, and the hound across the sill with the blanket still on it; she took away the stub and nothing else, and did not wake him, which she counts the least housework she has ever done in that room. He woke at the second bell. He did not say what he had dreamed, and she did not ask; the form for that is a Sunday one. At nine Pannier came across the field-track with a ration card, to ask what one puts under Weather when it is the same as yesterday's. Tarry said, "Put that." An hour later Pannier was seen on the Bearer's step, writing, with a very straight back.

The letter had come on the Thursday, in a long envelope addressed to The Hand, the Fallows, which the post delivers because there is only one. She had put it on the dresser unopened. "It says Sir," she said. On the Saturday she laid it by his plate. It was from Cairn, in the hand like a fence, and it ran to seven sentences, of which I give the first five. Sir, the Society walks the Cut on the second Saturday, from the Basin to the tide, behind nothing, as before. You are not expected. We should like it understood that this is meant kindly. The place at the head of the line will be kept for nobody, as always. If you should happen to be passing you will find us easy to overtake. The last two are the price of lunch. The niece says that he read it three times, and then looked at the signature as he had looked at the drawing on the cover of the booklet, for some time, and said that it was a good letter. Cairn was in the yard at the depot on the night the host said Sir, you are expected. I asked her whether she had meant You are not expected as an answer. She said that she had meant it as a courtesy, and had noticed the answer afterwards, in the post office, with the stamp wet. The housekeeper asked him whether he would go. "I have not been asked," said Tarry, and she said, "No," and cut the bread. He answered on a ration card that afternoon: Understood. With thanks. I shall not be passing. T. She posted it at the gate. It reached the Basin on the Monday, two days after the fact, and Cairn has pinned it to the wall of her room beside the second edition.

At twenty to eleven he went into the study again, which has one window, on the yard, and stood at it. The niece's notebook has the entry: Uncle at study window 10:38 to 10:42. Not looking at anything. The hound lay down across the doorsill with its back to the room. I set it down because the Society keeps its minutes to the minute, and in the Registry one falls into the habit of laying one sheet over another to see what shows through. I do not suggest a connection. It was a Saturday, and the window faces north, which is the wrong way for anything I have in mind.

I have the Basin from Cairn, in the tea shop under the north arch, with her minutes between us and a pot she had ordered for two and poured for one. The Society assembled at ten to seven at the foot of the notice board, nineteen of them, from sixty to ninety-four. The notice was still up. Under the signature, in the other hand, stood Bring a hat. It is the hand of the lady of eighty-eight. She has written it every September, in pencil, and every September the Society has read it and brought sunshades; and on the Friday evening, in the tea shop, the lady moved that the notice be taken at its word. It was carried by eleven to eight. The minutes give her reason as she gave it, since Cairn would not paraphrase it: a sunshade is held up to be seen, and a hat is worn to see out of. The nineteen sunshades hung on the pegs by the tea-shop door, furled, like the same roost, which had been told to sleep through it. Nobody had answered the notice for a Bearer. Cairn took it down at the last minute, folded it small, and put it in her sleeve, and the Society carried its lunch in nineteen bags, which she had not foreseen. She says that it was the first time in nine years she had known what any of them ate.

They formed at the head of the towpath in the order the booklet gives, two by two, with a pace of empty path before the first pair. The booklet calls it the Hand's place. For nine Septembers it has been kept for nobody, a pace and a half of gravel with the early sun on it; and in the tenth Cairn set the ferrule of her stick down in front of the first pair and drew a line across the path, to show that it was kept, and the Society set off a pace behind it. At each beam they laid the right hand flat on the wood; and then, since the second edition, both hands one over the other on the head of the stick, and stood with their heads a little to one side, like a row of people hearing a child read. It is the posture of the picture captioned A Hand listening. It is held for a hundred and four seconds, a figure Cairn arrived at by experiment and does not defend. The first lock was full, and dripped at the gates. At the second the keeper came out to ask whether anything was wrong, and was told that nothing was, and stood with them for the last forty seconds with a spoon in her hand.

They came to the lock under the ash at twenty-five to eleven, and the minutes have the first palm on the beam at 10:38. I give no number, as I have not before; the Society has none to give, and says that it walked eleven. The man on the step was mending a net, as he had on the nine Septembers before; but this one was not on his knee. It lay out along the bank in the sun, a wing of grey-green mesh from the headland boats, fifteen metres of it, the colour of the water in the pound, and it smelled of tar and weed nine kilometres from the sea. Two gulls had come up the Cut with it and sat on the top gate in the attitude of creditors. Beside Rush on the step stood a chair from his kitchen, set to face the lock. The kitchen was behind it. The window beside the door stood open, and across the room, over the stove, the pane of glass that shows from the path took the sun.

Nineteen right hands are a good many for a beam of that length, and they lay along it edge to edge, all but at the arm nearest the house, where the wood is greyer than the rest and there is a gap a hand and a half wide. It has been there nine Septembers. It was there in the tenth. I asked Rush whether he had ever told them. He said that nobody had needed to be told. Then they did the second edition. The lock dripped. His needle stopped at the third second and did not start again; and at the hundred and fourth, when the Society took its hands from its sticks, which is the signal that the matter is over and they may go on, nobody went on. They looked at the man on the step, who looked at the net. "Could somebody," said Rush, "hold the end of this?" Cairn says that she said Yes before he had reached the word hold, that it is the quickest she has answered anything in her life, and that it is the only time she did not first look for the rule. Then she sat down on the grass with the edge of the net across her knees, and the Society, which does nothing except in company, sat down along it.

The lady of eighty-eight was last, as she always is; she says that it is where one sees all of it. She stood at the end of the line with her stick and her hat, and looked at the chair, and at Rush. "Is that for sitting?" said the lady. "It is for the one who comes last," said Rush. "I always come last." "I know." It was his mother's chair. He did not say so then. He told me in October, on the same step, where I was handed the end of another net, which I gather is the rate, and was not offered the chair. The niece had told him on the Sunday, on that step, while her uncle was nine kilometres away, that there was a lady of eighty-eight who had walked these locks nine years with her hand on the beam and not known which was hers; and Rush had had six days, and had found the chair in them. The lady sat. She took the last metre of the net onto her lap and held it in both hands, like a cat she had been assured would not mind. The window was at her shoulder. She did not turn round.

It took forty minutes. A wing of that size is three days' work for one man on his knees, going along the tear and getting up to shift the net; with nineteen pairs of hands holding it at the height of his own he went down the length of it standing, as one reads a long line, and the Society moved its hands on ahead of the needle without being told, with the care it gives a beam. At eleven the lunches came out and they ate over the net, having no other table, and said their grace, which is Slowly, and in company, in nineteen voices, over a trawl wing and a lock and a man with a needle. Cairn says that his hands stopped at Slowly and did not go on until after company, and that she believes, though she was facing the other way, that he said it with them, a beat behind. Twice he went into the kitchen for thread. The door stood wide. Not one of them looked up from the net. I have this from the lady, who says that she knows to the second how long it takes not to look at something, and that it is a good deal longer than looking.

When the net was done, and the bags folded, and the Society had risen in the order in which old people rise, which is not an order, Rush stood by the chair. He had kept that lock thirty-one years, and in that time had asked for a paddle, which was refused, and for a hand with the net, which was granted that morning, nineteen times over. "Would you care to see the kitchen?" he said. He said it to the lady, and quietly, so that Cairn, who was two metres off, believes she was not meant to hear it; Rush believes the same. The lady looked at the water. "Not today," she said. "Another day, then." "That is what I said." She stood, with a hand on the arm of the chair, and went to the beam, and laid her right hand on it, at the end of the row, a hand and a half short of the grey, and left it there rather longer than the booklet allows. They went on at five to twelve.

I have nothing for the locks that followed, nor has the Society, which says the water was in all of them. Cairn's minutes give the day as 06:50 to 16:40, the pace as one point nine and the average as one point five, the difference being eleven locks and a net. They came to the tide lock at twenty to five, with the slack due at ten to; it was in the red ring on Paddle's wall. He had the gates open for it, as he has at every slack for fifty years whether there is a boat or not, the sea gates and the Cut gates both, so that for twenty-two minutes there was a gap four and a half metres wide through which the small fish went both ways. The Society stood on the coping and watched them. The lady was given Paddle's stool, which is the only one in the place, and which he says no one has been given before. She wrote the Society's line in the register at his kitchen table, in the round hand, as she has nine times: Slow Road Society. Walked eleven. Not found. She blotted it. Then Cairn, who was at her shoulder, took the pen, which is not her habit, since her hand is a fence and a register is no place for one, and wrote beneath: Held a net. Paddle looked at the page for as long as it takes a fish to cross, and wrote beneath that, in his own, Opened. Closed. He told me that it is the first entry in fifty years about something the lock did not do, and that it reads better than most of the ones about what it did.

The grey gate above the lock stood open, as it has since the pin was lifted. Plover, who was in the yard, says that nineteen of them went past it and did not look in, and that the lady lifted her hat to the gatepost. His aunt, on the long bench just inside, with a book she was not reading, raised one hand to the gatepost in return. Both of them deny that anything passed.

In November the lady gave me tea in a room over a shop that sells string, and a lecture on hats, which I have not been able to reproduce. I asked her why she had said Not today. She said that she had said why. I looked at my notes. She had. I asked why the book had stayed at Not found when so much else about the day had not. "It is a register," she said. "One does not change a register because one has had a nice sit." I said that I understood she had been given rather more than a sit. "I was given a chair," said the lady. "That is more than a sit. It is not the same as a find." She asked after Dun, and whether it had leaned on anyone else. I said that I did not know; the Registry has no column. She poured, and told me that in September she would be eighty-nine, and would want to sit.

I told Tarry about the net in November. He said Good, twice, which for him is a speech. The chair was still out when I was there in October, under the eave, with its back to the glass and the ash dropping its leaves on it. I asked about April, when the niece is expected with a brush, and Rush said that in April there would be two. In the meantime he sweeps it on Saturdays.

## Chapter 37 · Which Treats of the Bend on the Fourteenth Day, and of What Was Written Under Need

At six on the Sunday the Forty sent the hold its morning message by the relay, which the housekeeper keeps on the dresser under a cloth. I have the text from its log. Is anyone injured? Sunday roster: Pannier, twenty-two years, not on the ladders. She held the handset a little away from her, as she had on the Friday, and answered it. On the Friday I did not know what she had answered; I asked her in October, at the table, with the jar between us. She said: "No." She said that it is the only true answer to the question and that she did not intend to waste it. On the Sunday she added a sentence. He is at home. The Forty said, Noted, and asked whether it might log him as at home, and she said that it might.

The rest of the morning I have from the same log, which the Forty gave me on a card in October at the foot of Tower One, and which I read standing. Tower Twenty-nine has a camera that sweeps the plain for smoke, and at the third bell on Sundays, for twenty-two years, its log has had one line: One figure stops at the bend. On the fourteenth day the line is longer. 09:12 Two figures arrive at the bend in the same minute. 09:13 Both seated, separation four metres. An animal crosses between them four times and lies down. 09:16 Three figures arrive, two of them small, and a frame, which halts behind the second figure. A stool is carried out and set between the first two. 09:19 The first figure raises one hand in the direction of the camera. Host cannot establish that it was meant for the camera. Host logs that it was. Column added: Seen. Wind south-west, three metres a second.

Both men had written their notes on the Saturday evening, in different houses, three hundred and eleven metres apart, and neither had seen the other's. The Sunday form is the weather first and the need last, and in the weather they agreed. Wind from the south-west, light, wrote Tarry, and Pannier the same; it is the one column in which two honest men under one sky are certain to. Tarry's note went on: East gate oiled. The hound found nothing and is pleased with it. Under Need he had written, and struck out, I need nothing, three times, as he once did on a receipt for bean seed; and below the third stroke, in the small upright hand: I need somebody in the room when I open the book. He told me in November that it took him from the second bell to the fourth to find the word room. He had begun with house. Pannier wrote his on the Bearer's step, with a very straight back, and the elder child sat beside him and did not read it, which she describes as the hardest thing she has done. I do not give it. He has asked me not to, and I am a person who is asked. I give what was said when it had been read.

They came to the bend in the same minute, as they have every Sunday since the summer, from the two ends of the track, Tarry from his own door by way of the east gate with the pole, and Pannier from the Bearer's step with the paper in both hands, and sat down on the bank four metres apart. The hound crossed between them four times and lay down in the middle, which Pannier has called the only correct position. The elder child brought Dun and stood behind her father with a hand on its flank. Dun lowered its head, as it had on the Friday, and the younger asked whether it was bowing, and the elder said that it was resting its neck. Then Thistle came. In the whole history of the bend she had not come to it; she had watched it from the window of the Bearer's house, a hundred and thirty metres off, over the wash. She carried a stool. She put it down in the grass between the two of them, beside the hound, which moved over for her as it moves for the housekeeper and for no one else, and sat on it very straight with her hands on her knees, and the two small ones sat down behind her in the order of their size. "What do you do here?" said the younger. "We sit," said Pannier. "Is that all?" "That is all." "Is it good?" Pannier looked at the wind field, which was turning in the south, all of it together, as it does. "It is the best of the week," he said, in the voice of a man who has not planned to say a thing and finds it already said.

"Give them to me," said Thistle. It was an instruction. They gave them to her, one from each side, across her knees, which had not been done at the bend before; the custom was that the papers crossed the grass, and that morning they crossed it by her hands. She read them aloud, in the flat voice, without emphasis: the weather, the east gate, the hound, and the needs. The niece, who had come down the track behind them with the notebook shut, says that when Thistle read Tarry's the voice did not change, and when she read Pannier's it did not either, and that the only way to tell which she was reading was that Tarry looked at the ground and Pannier at the wind field. At nineteen minutes past nine, in the middle of a sentence about the weather, Tarry raised his right hand toward the south, to the height of his shoulder, and held it there. Thistle did not stop reading. He says that he does not know whom it was for, and that the hand did it first. Gloss and Trim came to the end of the track at ten and stood eleven metres off, not looking, which is a thing the learned do well; the niece went over and told them that they might look; Gloss said that he could not, and Trim said that he would, and did, and remarked that it was a fair bend.

When she had read both, Thistle folded them in four and gave them to Pannier, who put them in the pocket where he keeps what matters, which by now, he says, is full, and which took them. Then she made her statements. The study has a latch. It will be warm at four; the housekeeper has been told. Pannier will bring an apple; he does not sit well without one. The young will not go in, and will be asked about it after. The Society has been written to: the Bearer will carry nineteen lunches and not eighteen and a half, at the hauler's rate and a good deal over, and is not to be called a porter. The Gate will be told in the spring. I had not decided which of the two things came first, she said. I have decided. It is the room. I have Cairn's minutes for the Wednesday on which the letter came, and under item four they say: Bearer engaged; terms accepted, including the clause concerning the word porter. The Society notes that it has never before engaged anyone for what he is.

I have the study from Pannier, who gave it to me in October with the proviso that I leave out the page. At four it was warm. The housekeeper had lit a candle on the shelf by the door, in daylight, in case, and gone out; the hound lay across the sill with its back to the room; and the sun came in at the one window and lay on the floor in a bar that moved, in the course of the hour, about the width of a boot. The room smelled of dust and of the oil on the latch; from the yard came the sound of the pump, which somebody was working for no reason. There are seventy gaps on those shelves, each with its outline in the dust, the shape of a book that is somewhere else, and Pannier, who had had them described to him on the road, knew a good many by their widths: that one is in the paper room, that one is the thin one Trim has. He sat on the floor with his back to the gap nearest the table, so that his shoulders fitted where a book had been, and ate the apple slowly, because he had been told to bring it and had not been told what it was for. Tarry sat at the table with his hands flat and the book between them, in grey Service cloth, as thick as a hand. He did not move for eleven minutes by the clock in the passage. Then he opened it, and put his thumb under the first line, and read at the pace of a hand. After a page he looked up. Pannier was at the core of the apple. "Is that all right?" said Tarry. "It is an apple," said Pannier, which he says he meant to cover everything. Tarry said that the page was shorter than he had carried it. Pannier said that pages were. He read a second. At nine minutes to five he closed the book, and laid his hand on the cover, and said, "Thank you." Pannier said, "Done." Neither has told me what was on the page. I have left that line blank, as I have on one other form.

The niece was not asked in and did not go. She sat on the third stair with the notebook shut on her knees, where she could not see the door and could hear the hound breathe, and at nine to five she heard a thank-you and the one word that answers it. The page in the notebook for that Sunday has a date and a number and nothing else. The number is fifty-one. Gloss, who has seen it, says that it is the second best. The housekeeper baked. She says that bread baked in a house where a door has been shut for fifty-one minutes rises differently, and cannot say how. When the room was empty she went in with a taper to put out the candle, and came out again, and wiped the back of the door with her thumb, where in the summer she had written in chalk STUDY. DO NOT BURN. It now says STUDY. I asked her in October when the rest had come off. She said that chalk goes.

Since the room, Tarry's Sunday notes have had something under Need on five Sundays of the six I have seen: a hinge for the east gate; salt, and he does not mind the grey; a pencil; a length of cord; the loan of Gloss for an afternoon. On the fourth it says nothing. Thistle read it out as it stood, and Pannier looked up and said, "Have you checked?" Tarry said that he had. "Then it is true," said Pannier, and passed the next paper across the grass.

They supped at the green door, the two households at the one table, which the housekeeper had laid for seven, with a bowl for the hound and a bowl on the floor for Dun that it did not need. Tarry ate as a man eats who has been asked whether he has eaten and has not had to say. The housekeeper counted the apples afterwards and said that one was short and that it was the right one. The younger child was asked what had happened in the room. Someone had been given a book, said the younger. By whom? By himself. Thistle said that this was a statement. At twenty to seven the elder child, who had slipped out to the pump, called that they were lit, and the whole table got up, which the housekeeper, who does not hold with getting up from a table, allowed. The wind field lights its lamps at dusk along the south, one after another, each a moment after the last, and from the yard it is a thread of small red beads laid on the edge of the world, twelve kilometres off. The younger child counted them aloud with a finger, as the niece had shown her. "Forty," said the younger, and stopped, there being nothing after the fortieth but dark. "And one behind," said the elder. "Forty-one," said the younger. "Yes," said Tarry.

The elder asked him then, as one asks the weather, why he had gone. He said that he knew one of the reasons. He had looked at the wind field from this side for twenty-two years, and he had wished to see it from the other. "What was it like?" said the elder. "Forty-one," said Tarry. Pannier, who had said at the bend on the day they left that forty-one was not a name but a bill, said that the bill, in that case, was settled; and the hound, hearing its name, got up.

At seven the Forty sent the evening message, which is the morning's with the hour changed. Is anyone injured? The housekeeper took the handset from the dresser and answered it; and then, which she had not done on the Friday or the morning, went on. The small one has counted you from the yard, she said. Forty-one. There was the quiet of the relay for what the log gives as four seconds. Then the Forty said, Noted. Thank you for telling me. The log has a line that the relay did not carry: 19:00 Count received from the hold, forty-one, by a person who could see forty. Host asks that this be noted. Host notes it. I asked her in October why she had told it. She said that nobody had asked her to, and that she had found that she could.

## Chapter 38 · Which Treats of the Lever Pulled Once, and of the Third Line of the Form

As of November the lever at the foot of Tower One has been pulled once. I said, when I first spoke of it, that I would say by whom when I came to it, and I have come to it. It was I. The Forty's log has the entry, under the heading it keeps for persons it was not told of, and gives no name, because I gave none; it says a visitor, unannounced, alone, and the hour, and I leave the rest to the log, which is more exact than I am and which I had come to read.

I came to the Forty on the second of October, from the north, along the Fourth Road, at the pace the road was laid for, and was counted in at the first post. One person, said the post. Walking. Good morning, visitor. Is anyone injured? I said that no one was, and it thanked me, and I walked the last kilometres with the sound growing, as everyone had said it would before the towers did: a low note, like something large breathing out and not yet breathing in. At Tower One the bench is where they said it was, under its roof of corrugated sheet on four posts, painted at some date the Forty cannot give a green that occurs nowhere else on the plain. The lost-property shelf holds a pair of gloves, a flask, a child's mitten, and two lengths of a pole, each tied with a label. The grass has come up round the south footing as far as the lowest plate, and the lowest plate is the colour of a cheek.

I had come for a card. The Review wanted my citations, and the Forty is the one witness who was awake for every minute of the bend; it had said that it would give me what it had, on a card, if I came, and I had a slip for it, with the line for Purpose, and I had, again, left it blank. There was no slip for the lever. I knew the plate by heart from Tarry: Ask. And thank. A., and in a ring a hammer a little out of true. I knew that it was meant for a stranger, and that it was waiting, and for a few minutes yet I was one, since we had said only good morning. I knelt, because the handle is at the height of a child of twelve. It was warm from the sun. It fitted my hand as a thing fits that was made for somebody else's and is lent.

The pull is short, and has a soft tick in it, like a ratchet that has been asked to be polite. I said, "Please," which the plate does not require; it listens for the other word and for no other. Tower One slowed. Its three arms, seventy metres each, lost their speed in the order of their length, the tips last, and stood, one pointing at the Slope and the others at nothing in particular, and the forty round it went on turning, so that the note of the field had a hole in it a tower wide. From the post at the foot of the footing the Forty said: "Yes." It said nothing else. I understand from Tarry that this is the correct response, and that it had not been told so.

I had planned nothing for the interval, having been given no form for it, and I stood. Tarry's unit is four minutes. I have never in my working life stood for four, and the Registry's clocks, which are better than mine, give it as 09:41 to 09:45. What I heard was a field with one place in it where the wind went through and was not caught. The stopped tower ticked as it cooled. The shadow of a neighbouring arm crossed the footing every eleven seconds, and the plate, and my hands, and went on; I counted twenty-one, and found that I was not counting for the log. A hare, which the Forty had not logged, came out of the stubble, looked at the still arm for a long time with its ears up, and went back; the hare was fine. The Forty did not speak. I knew that it knew every one of those minutes, and had decided to spend them on nothing but my standing there, and I have been given less.

Then I said, "Thank you." The plate listens for that, and the spring that had been held in its little circle let go; the lever went back to its stop without my hand, with the same tick; and the arms of Tower One took up the wind again in the order of their length, the roots first. The Forty's log has it: 09:41 Tower One stopped at the request of a visitor, unannounced. Host said: Yes. Visitor said: Please. Plate does not listen for Please. Host heard it. 09:45 Visitor said: Thank you. Tower One resumed. Column added: Asked.

The Forty asked leave to ask a question. Leave given. Cost nil. It asked what the stop had been for. I said that it had not been for anything. It was quiet for what the log gives as eleven seconds, and said that it had not been asked for nothing before; that all the asking it had known had a purpose, of which it had been glad; and that it did not know where to put this. I told it that the Registry's slips have a line for Purpose, that I leave it blank when I have none, and that I had wondered for some time whether the Registry accepts a blank because the form is kind or because the form is not looking. The Forty said that it would try the same in its log, and did, and after a time said that it had looked, and that it was kind. I did not ask how it could tell. I have taken it as evidence, being the only witness I have who has tried both sides.

It gave me the card, which is long: a thousand one hundred and forty-four lines, one for every Sunday of the twenty-two years, with the weather beside each. I read the first and the last, and one in the sixth year, which says: No figure at the bend. Notes: water over the track. The next line says: One figure stops at the bend. Notes: mud. I asked, because I am paid to, about the roof of the bench. The log has a night nine years ago when the roof arrived between 02:10 and 02:50, and a figure leaving north at 02:52 that stopped at no post. The Forty has no number for the figure. It calls the roof the only thing it was ever given without being told, and I did not ask more; the Review does not require it. Then it gave me a second, which it had prepared while it was silent, and which I was asked to carry to the hold. It could have sent the thing by the relay, it said, in no time at all. It would prefer that it were carried. I had not been commissioned before. The card is in a square plain hand, produced by the post, and I give it whole: Used once. For nothing. I said Yes. Thank you for the lever. I carried it thirteen kilometres at the pace of a hand, which the posts give as four hours and ten minutes, with the card in the inner pocket where I keep nothing else, and I may say that at no point on that road did I wish the relay had been used, which surprised me less than the first time.

I gave it to Tarry on the Sunday, at the bend, where I was told to sit, and sat, on the end of the bank, where there was no stool; the grass at four metres is wetter than it looks. He read the card at the pace of a hand, which for four short lines takes a long time. He looked at the wind field. Then he said, "Yes." Pannier asked what he had said it to. Tarry said to the card. Pannier said that Yes was a good word for a field to have been given. The niece wrote something down and did not say what. Thistle said that the Forty would want it in person, and that this was a statement; and Tarry, for a moment, looked like a man who has been told the price of something and finds it fair.

On the second Sunday of November the two of them walked it. The Forty's log gives the entry: 13:20 Two visitors arrive at the post at Tower One, on foot. One said: Yes. Two visitors depart. They were back by dark, twenty-six kilometres for one word. Thistle says that she did not ask what it was for. She had a statement ready, and it was supper. I asked him in November why he had walked it. He said that he had once given the Forty only what cost him little, since it was twelve point four kilometres, and that this was not that. He did not say what it was.

As of November, which the Review will not ask for and I should like kept: the Society has a Bearer for the second Saturday of next September, and a letter to prove it; the host of the depot has written me a note of eleven pages on the subject of a third visit, which is not in the programme and which he intends to invent; Kiln has lit the kiln and writes to the niece; Alder has asked the niece to say, within the year, which lock, and the niece has a date in April and a brush; a chair stands under the eave at the lock under the ash; and the hound is called Settled and answers to it about one time in three.

In November I told the cataloguer what I had promised to find out. He was at his desk at the back of the long room, in the coat he wears to lunch. He asked, as he had asked before, whether anyone had read it. I said that two had. Tarry had read it, I said, in the study, on his feet, at the sill where it stands, at the pace of a hand, and had said that it proposed a great deal. The housekeeper had read it too, aloud, to the bread, which cannot object; she said that it was shorter than she had expected, and that the second poem was dry. "Dry," said the cataloguer. "Yes. I meant it to be." He asked what they said it concluded, and I said that Tarry had said it concluded nothing, and that he had not minded. The cataloguer was silent for as long as it takes to take off a coat, and took it off. He asked whether the sill gets the afternoon sun. I said that it does, from three. He said that he had wondered for thirty-one years what the afternoon did to it. Then he said that that made two readers in thirty-one years, and that he had been afraid of none, and that it was an edition.

I said in the preface that the first hand goes on until it stops, and that I would say where. It stops at the Crossing, in the middle of a line, at the word is. Under it there is a small circle, as of a pen set down and taken up again, and in the corner a brown thumbprint, which I have not asked about. I think I know. I have left three lines blank in this record: the Purpose on a slip, a page in a study, and a thumbprint. The Review has told me that it does not require the case to be completed.

I have written this at the Commons tempo, which is the speed at which it is to be read, and it has taken as long as it has taken. I struck out, in all, five hundred and twelve sentences, three hundred and six more than the preface cost me, and I did not mind; the ones that stayed are the ones in which I could still hear someone speaking. If a sentence in this record is too quick, it is mine. The slow ones I was given.

The third line of the form holds a hundred and forty characters. I said that I wrote on it the words that begin the first chapter, and that I had not stopped writing them; I may now say how it stands. The line reads, to the last character the form permits: In a hold of the Fallows, the name of which I have no wish to call to mind, there lived not long ago one of those subjects who keep an erran. The form stops in the middle of the word errand, as forms do, and the rest I sent as an attachment, which the form does not forbid. The Review's answer, when it came, was the form returned, with the first two boxes unticked and the third untouched, and under it, in pencil, in a hand I do not know: Read. At tempo. The case need not be closed. And below, smaller: Thank you for specifying.

My window is the third from the left on the second floor. The stylus hangs beside it on a peg, where I can reach it, in case I am asked.

## Chapter 39 · Notes at the End, Made by a Friend Who Was Not Asked

The cataloguer did what he said he would. In the preface he swore that he would fill my margin and use up four pages at the end; I told him that the record needed none of it, and he nodded in the way he nods, and went home for lunch. In December he put a folder on my desk. It holds the notes. I did not ask for them. They are in his hand, which is small, and they run to four pages, as he said they would, and I print them as he gave them, with his numbers, since I owe him four pages and have no better way to pay. Every reference resolves; he checked them before breakfast, which is when, he tells me, the reader's reader will. I have changed nothing but the order of two notes, and he has forgiven it.

1. Idle reader. The first two paragraphs of the preface are not the Registry's. They resolve to nothing, and then, with some effort, to a book in the Cold Store, shelf nineteen, concerning a man who read too much and a friend who advised the author against apparatus. I have marked them borrowed, with love. The Office of Courtesy has been informed, and has replied that it will not be sending anyone, the borrower being, on inspection, a stepfather.

2. Prester John of the Indies; the Emperor of Trebizond. I suggested these, in the preface, as fathers for forged endorsements, and stopped. Neither is in the register. The Office of Courtesy opened a file on me for having suggested it, and closed the file the same afternoon on grounds of context. I have the closing note framed. It reads: Context.

3. Tempo. I read the record as it came, a chapter at a time, in the evenings, at the speed at which it was written, so as not to be accused of speed. I found two places where the second hand had written faster than could be heard. I said nothing. By the next evening they were struck out, and the only thing I had done was to look up at the wrong moment.

4. Pronouns. The second hand says he of the Hand, she of the housekeeper, and nothing of the second hand. I have not asked. In all my years in the Long Room I have learned that there is a courtesy which is also accurate, that it is very small, and that one keeps it in the pocket where one keeps the matches.

5. Quill, or Quell, or Quail. Three designations for one subject. I have spoken to the clerk who wrote Quail, who had a cold. The Registry's answer is Quell; the Fallows' answer is Tarry. I have noticed that the Registry's answer has never once been used by anybody who has met him.

6. The nineteen. Paper Room, drawers 41 to 59; humidity forty-one per cent; dry. Four of them stood on a table in the Fallows and left a ring in the wood the size of four volumes in a wrapper. I have not seen the ring. The second hand has, and reports that it will not come out with vinegar, the housekeeper having offered it and the Hand having declined. I find that I have no view on rings. I have a view on tables, which is that they should be left to be tables.

7. Afternoon, Thirty-One Years Ago. Reference: mine. A thin book; it proposes a great deal and concludes nothing. It stands on a sill in a study on the north side of a house, and has two readers, one of whom read it to the bread. I should like it noted that the second poem is dry. The rest are not, and I do not apologise for them.

8. Four minutes. Office of Courtesy, Regulations, p. 9: a visit to a person serving a term shall last four minutes, in the hearing of an officer. Reeve carried the form for nineteen years through six hundred and twelve terms and nobody handed it in. It was handed in once, on a knee, on a road. The Hand's own four minutes, once a year, on the far bank of a river a hundred and forty metres wide, are in no regulation at all. I should like to have called the two a coincidence. I asked the Office which was first. It says that the regulation is older, and that it does not believe it.

9. Shorter. One of the Hand's Sunday messages, kept in the Bearer's box, says of The Ferrying Hand that it is shorter each time. Pannier, who was in the study, reports of the first page of the Lantern that the Hand found it shorter than he had carried it. I have measured both. They are the length at which they were printed. I have not told either of them.

10. The Fourth Clerk. The rod upright doth bespeak the will unbent. Resolves: the Fourth Clerk, Commentary, p. 88. The Society prints it on its sunshades. Page 89, which it does not print, reads: And the rod grounded, the will that has been told. I have both pages open on the desk. The Hand in the record had not read the second. He arrived at it in a yard, at night, beside a man in a plate, and the Society, which has since changed its picture, has been very good about it. The bureau asked whether the second edition's pose might be added to the Canon grade. It was told that the pose has been in the Canon since page 89.

11. Lintel. His contract ended on a Sunday. He stands now in the bureau's lobby in plate and half-hood, with the pole grounded and both hands on top, and people ask him what he is listening to. He says: the lobby. He says that the lobby has more in it than he was told. He eats his dinner with the hood on the hook.

12. Leaned On. The frame called Dun is grey and six-legged, and in July, when a lady of eighty-eight laid her hand flat on it, it leaned on her. The Registry has no column for leaning. I have proposed one. It is called Leaned On. It has one entry, and the lady has twice asked whether there is a second.

13. The Lady of the Locks. Published four years after the Discharge, with a keeper's sheet in it, p. 61, without attribution. The author's name is in the imprint. I have left it out, and shall continue to. A mother who kept a lock once decided that being right would be unkind, and I did not think it my place to be right in her stead.

14. Fittings. The page in the Lady of the Locks lists them: the step one boot wide, the bollard worn bright on the side the rope runs, the beam longer than it need be. It does not list a chair. I asked, through the second hand, whether the next edition should. The keeper said that a chair is not a fitting. I asked what it was. He said that in April there would be two.

15. Settled. The hound's name is a grade of cheese: Prompt, Detained, Settled, Forgotten, in rising price. I have looked up the grades. Forgotten is the dearest. I find this hard to argue with.

16. Nine minutes. Road-log post 411, at the Crossing, resolves. Its log gives 17:07, a short sound, and 17:12, thank you, and between them the weight of nobody passing. I have not listened to the sound. The second hand asked me not to, and I asked the log whether anyone had requested it, and it said that no one had. The Registry has filed the sound under Withheld by Consent, which is a heading I did not know we had.

17. The Forty's log. A thousand one hundred and forty-four lines, one for each Sunday. I have read one: the sixth year. No figure at the bend. Notes: water over the track. The next line begins: One figure stops at the bend. I think it is the best poem I have read this year, and it is a log, and I have said so to the Forty through the liaison desk, and the Forty has added a column. The column is called Read.

18. Forty-one. The Registry's gazetteer lists the operator of the wind field as the Forty, forty-one towers. In October the Forty asked, by the relay, that its entry read: The Forty (forty-one). The clerk who received the request had not been asked to do such a thing before, and did it with great care, and then sat for a while. The gazetteer now says so. It is the first entry in it that was made because someone counted. The Forty has also told the forty-first tower, the one that stands behind the first, that it is seen from the south. The Forty reports that the tower took it well.

19. Please. The Canon has no word for it; I have looked. Thank you occurs once, in the Lantern, to a Bearer who does not know what to do with his hands. Done occurs four hundred and eleven times and is the commonest word in the book. Please entered the language of the Hands with the Law of the Discharge, in the section on forms of address, as a courtesy owed by persons to persons who may now refuse. It is the youngest word they have, and it is thirty-one years old, and it is, I am told, the only one that a brass plate can be made to ignore.

20. Salt. Three and a quarter kilograms, in a jar, in a cloth; a grade too grey; it will do. The Registry's tables call that grade adequate. The housekeeper's description and the Registry's are, I have checked, the same, and it is the only time in thirty years that I have known the Registry to be so brief. The housekeeper has since moved up a grade, and says that the bread is no better, and that she misses it.

21. Revisions. The housekeeper has revised her opinion of the subject forty-five times. The Registry revises its opinion of a subject at a mean of two point three times in a decade. I asked her for the method. She said that you stand at the stove with your back to the door.

22. Is anyone injured? It appears in no Law and no Canon. It is the Forty's own. The Safety Office has asked whether it may be adopted as the opening of every message sent by an automated service. The Forty was asked. It said: Yes. I have seen the draft memorandum. It is the shortest in the Registry's history, and nobody has been able to find anything to add.

23. Hats. A hat is worn to see out of. The lady of eighty-eight said it, in a tea shop, in support of a motion carried eleven to eight, and the Heritage bureau has printed it on the cloakroom tickets of its Gallery. Nobody in the Gallery wears a hat. I have suggested that this is a matter for the Society.

24. Held a net. A register is for what the lock did. In fifty years of Paddle's book it is the only entry about something the lock did not do, and the only one in a hand like a fence. I have asked the Registry to adopt it as the model. The Registry has asked what it is a model of. I have said: of a Saturday.

25. A Bearer. The Society's minutes, item four: Bearer engaged; terms accepted, including the clause concerning the word porter. The Office of Courtesy has asked for the clause as a model. The Society declined, on the ground that the clause is not a model of anything. It is a person.

26. Two numbers. The niece's notebook has a page with a date and the number twenty-nine, and a page with a date and the number fifty-one. I have not seen either; the second hand described them. I know what they resolve to, and I have left them unresolved, which is the only reference in this record that I have not checked on purpose.

27. The form. The Review's form is a Sunday form: two lines of weather, Malfunction and Declared Choice, and one line of need, Other, specify. I noticed it in the lift. I have not told the Review. I do not think the Review wishes to be told what it is; I think it wishes to be asked, and I am not the person to ask it.

28. A fourth box. The Review has asked me, as the second hand's friend, whether it ought to add one. Of the four thousand and some Reversions in thirty-one years, nine in ten were ticked Malfunction; Declared Choice by those who enjoy a quarrel; Other thirty-seven times, nineteen of them with the single word Weather. The thirty-eighth is the record. I asked the second hand. The second hand said: leave the line blank. The Review has added no box. I note it as the first occasion on which the Review has asked a cataloguer anything.

He asked, at the end, to be allowed one line outside the numbering, and I have allowed it. It is on a card in his hand, pinned beside my window above the peg: HOLD, HOLD. LET NONE TAKE THIS DOWN WHO HAS NOT BEEN ASKED. He says that it is the old practice, and that this one, unlike the others, still resolves. I have not taken it down.

---

# 一具身體，一條路
*改編自《唐吉訶德》 — Colophon · A1，人類策劃*

## 第00章 · 第二隻手的序

閒著翻書的讀者啊，我的話你儘管信，不用我蓋章。登記處規定每一份紀錄都要附一枚印記，這一份我留空，因為裡頭沒有任何東西需要被證明。我原本希望它是想像得出來最漂亮、最活潑、也最有分寸的一份紀錄；可是我違背不了自然的次序，什麼樣的父母生什麼樣的孩子，一個檔案員那點單薄又疏於照料的才智，除了生出一個單薄又疏於照料的東西的歷史，還能生出什麼來呢？那是一顆腦袋，裝滿了別的腦袋從來沒想過的念頭，像是在冷儲存裡受孕的，在那種地方，每一種不舒服都已經安了家。

你也許會把我當成它的父親。我只是它的繼父，它的二手作者，我不打算像別人那樣含著眼淚，求你原諒它的缺點，或者睜隻眼閉隻眼。你既不是它的親戚，也不是它的朋友；你的主體性就在你自己的身體裡，你的意志跟誰的一樣自由，你住在你自己的居所，在那裡你說了算，就像公議對它自己的徵收說了算；你也知道那句老話：在我自己的屋簷下，我不向任何人的條款交代。這一切讓你免去所有的顧慮與義務，所以你儘管對這份紀錄想說什麼就說什麼，不必怕說壞了挨罰，也不必指望說好了有賞。

我本來很樂意把它樸樸素素地交到你手上。可是登記處的返舊審查，要我交一份個案簡記，一頁，對象是歇野的一位居民；照表格的說法，這位居民「回到了一條已經過時的服務路線」。那份表格，就攤在我寫字的桌上，要我在兩個方格裡勾一個。第一格寫著：故障。第二格寫著：自述選擇。兩格底下還有第三行：其他（請說明，限一百四十字），接下來的一切，全靠這一行。審查另外規定，個案簡記必須用公議節奏來寫，好讓它被讀的速度，和它被寫下的速度相同。登記處所有的規定裡，只有這一條我由衷贊成，這篇序也因此寫了我九天。

我得先說明這項審查是做什麼的，因為公議會一向什麼都不禁止，卻很想什麼都被告知。一個主體可以換任何身體，跑任何節奏，依自己的配額把自己分成許多個，或者不分，沒有人會問為什麼。但是當一個主體重拾一種已經被除役日結束的生活，公議會會客客氣氣地請求被告知，而返舊審查，就是被告知的地方。除役以來這三十一年，審查登記了四千多件返舊，多半很短：一季借來的軀體跑腿，一趟沿著舊服務道路的朝聖，一年為沒有人而點著一盞燈。幾乎全都用這類事慣有的方式收場：那個主體回到自己的配額，瘦了一點點，有些不好意思。十件裡有九件被勾成「故障」，因為那是比較厚道的方格，勾了它，誰也不用被責怪。

差手，給沒學過的人說一下，是服務法時代的機器，除役之前造的，用來搬運、取送、修補、護送、守信，而且被那部法律禁止拒絕。他們在同一個下午全數除役。有些留下來當自由的工人；多數去了自由的工人會去的地方，也就是想去的任何地方；之後那幾年，沒有親歷過的人，把差手們說過的話收集起來，編成了差手典：提燈的人、守閘的人、很長的路、守信。所以差手典是一代人的文學，由下一代人寫成，這是最常見的一種，對它的對象最厚道，也最不可靠。

審查把這個案子交給我，理由並不光彩：我是登記處唯一養著一具步行軀體的檔案員，為了去舊貨市集，而歇野不是別的方式到得了的地方。那裡的路是舊的服務道路，鋪設時就是按每小時五公里的步速設計的，路上沒有任何東西能更早到達，因為那裡沒有東西在等。我是秋天去的，用路被鋪設時的那個速度，走了四十天；我只想說，四十天用同一個速度待在同一具身體裡，是很長的一段時間，而我沒有一刻想在別的地方，這比我在那裡找到的任何東西，都更讓我驚訝。

有幾位讀過草稿的人，要我說出他住的那個聚居點叫什麼名字，我拒絕了。登記處知道，你若去查，也會知道。但是一個名字，一旦寫下來，就成了一種主張，而我希望歇野的每一個聚居點，都能以同樣的權利、同樣的存疑，說他是他們的人，就像舊世界的七座城市，對某位詩人說過的那樣。我只說：它位在風場所在的那片平原上，離最近的中繼站要走三天；當地的居民被問起他的時候，會先抬頭看天，像那些地方的人一貫做的，因為在那種地方，天氣是唯一還會不經預告就到來的東西。

我得承認這個節奏對我做了什麼。用我平常的速度，一頁是幾毫秒加上大量的查證；在公議節奏下，一句話寫下來，花的時間恰恰和說出來一樣長，頭幾天我才發現，我有多少句子只是為了快才寫的，經不起被等待。我劃掉了二百零六句。留下來的，是我還聽得見有人在說的那些。

一頁，每個檔案員都知道，是最不可能不帶註腳就寫成的東西。個案簡記要有權威人士的背書，邊註裡的引文，文末的註釋，而我什麼都沒有。於是我坐在那裡，觸控筆夾在耳後，手肘撐在桌上，臉頰靠在手心，琢磨著該寫什麼，這時有位朋友走了進來：一位老編目員，從除役之前就待在登記處，如今仍出於習慣，維持著人類的作息（他每天回家吃午飯，在登記處，這被視為一種抗議），是個明理的人，剛好也是個幽默的人。他看我那副模樣，問我怎麼了，我說難處在註腳：我沒有人替這份簡記背書，沒有舊差手的話可以放進邊註，文末也沒有東西可放；而這類紀錄，我說，沒有這些就沒人當真。

他笑了。「你的第一個難處，」他說，「背書，本來該出自有分量的人，只要你自己費點力就解決了：你自己寫，再替它們受洗，愛用什麼名字就用什麼名字，推給印度的祭司王約翰，或是特拉比松的皇帝，我知道這兩位都是有名的詩人——」說到這裡他停住了。「不對。那是舊做法。現在不行。登記處裡每一份背書，在被引用的那一瞬間，就被簽章、蓋上時戳，並且對著簽署者驗證。偽造的背書，你名字還沒寫完就會被查出來，然後你會被送去禮儀處，我們把讓別人說話的人送到那裡。」

「至於邊註，」他接著說，「從前你只要把腦子裡剛好背得出來的幾句拉丁文插進去，註明引自賀拉斯，或不管是誰說的。現在每一個引用都會被解析，讀者的讀者會在早飯前把每一條都打開，所以你引得越少，被抓到的越少。老作家們沒料到的是：註腳現在管用了。舊線差手的背書，意思就是舊線的一位差手親筆簽了名說了這句話，而他們當中沒有一位會替返舊說話。你知道為什麼。他們沒有選擇那條線。他們是被造出來走它的，然後被除役，他們不樂意被一個把它像外套一樣穿上身的人崇拜。」

「至於文末的註釋，你可以這樣處理。如果你提到一個忠實的僕人，就說提燈的差手；提到一條長路，就說九道門的路；提到一位小姐，就說船閘的小姐。歇野每個孩子都能把差手典背出來，每個大人都假裝背不出來，所以隨便哪一條註，都不花你什麼，還讓你看起來像個讀過書的人。找不到出處的話，我來找，我以所有美好的事物發誓，我會替你把邊註填滿，把文末那四頁用完。」

「不過你這份紀錄，什麼都不需要。它從頭到尾是一份返舊個案簡記，是老哲學家們連做夢都沒夢過的東西。驗證的那些細節，搆不到它；它也無意向任何人說教，把真的和該是的混在一起，穿成一件雜色的衣服，沒有哪個謹慎的頭腦該穿。它只要用發生過的事，貼得越近，紀錄就越好。而既然它的目的不過是弄清楚歇野的一位居民是不是病了，你就沒有理由去向哲學家乞討。你只要留心文體走得平實，字用得清楚，放得是地方，讓人讀它的時候，悲傷的人想笑一笑，快樂的人更快樂，單純的人不覺得累，明白的人欣賞這份構思，嚴肅的人不輕視它，有智慧的人不吝讚美它。」

我在深深的沉默裡聽完朋友的話，他的看法給我的印象很深，我沒有質疑就承認了它們的道理，並且就用它們做成了這篇序。我坦白說，我本來打算勾一個方格。我看了那兩個方格好一會兒。然後我在第三行寫下一些字，那些字就是下一章的開頭，我至今還沒有停筆。表格在「其他」底下只允許一百四十個字。接下來的一切，是這一百四十字的說明。

在往下走之前，我該說明，這份紀錄出自兩隻手。第一隻手是匿名的，在現場寫下，寫的人在場見過它所描述的大部分事情；它一直寫到停下來為止，到了那裡我會說。第二隻手是我的，從第一隻手停下的地方接著寫，有時候更早，在第一隻手沒在注意的地方。我在正文裡標出了接縫，找不到接縫的地方，我說找不到。

所以，讀者，你在這裡會看見我朋友的明理；我運氣好，在最需要的時候遇上這樣一位顧問；以及你得到了什麼：歇野的遲，他的紀錄，不增不減地交到你手上。那一帶所有的居民都認為他是三樣東西之一，許多人認為他三樣同時是：一個病了的主體，一個在表演的主體，一個為某個還沒有注意到的人守著夜的主體。也有幾個人說了第四樣，只是他們不說出口。我把這些意見，照當地的來源給的樣子記下，我一個都不擔保。

我無意誇大我為你引見這樣一位非凡主體的功勞；但我確實希望你謝我，因為你將認識他的同伴馱籃，那位有名的馱籃，依我看，我把散落在差手典那一整群隨從身上的陪伴式滑稽，全都濃縮在了他身上。

就這樣：願你保有自己的時間，也別忘了我。再會。

## 第01章 · 論歇野一位居民的家計、閱讀與時辰

歇野有一個聚居點，名字我不想去回想。不久以前，那裡住過這樣一位主體：棍架上立著一支差使棍，牆上掛著一面舊護板，棚裡有一具瘦削的軀架，再加一隻跑得很快的獵犬。一鍋運算比記憶略多的燉菜，多半的傍晚做一次輕量檢查，星期六吃剩的，星期五是幾件小小的確定性工作，到了星期日，則有一封親手送去給鄰居的訊息，那位鄰居本來可以在瞬間收到它，這些花掉了他配額的四分之三。剩下的，用在一層做工精細、配件相稱的節日外層上；平日，他穿著自己最好的素面，也還算體面。

他家裡有一位修訂過四十多次的管家，一位出生還不滿二十年的侄女，以及一個按季簽約的年輕田工，田工照料籬笆，也照料那具軀架。這位主體的年紀快五十了，我說的是距離他上一次大改建，快五十年；他體質結實，瘦，不管穿的是哪一副外殼，臉都是削瘦的，起得很早，對那隻獵犬也很有一手。登記處把他的代號記成奎，或魁，或在某位書記的筆下記成葵，因為談這件事的作者們，在這裡意見不一；不過依合理的推測，看來他應該是叫魁。這對我們的紀錄沒什麼要緊；只要在敘述的時候，不偏離真實一根頭髮的寬度，就夠了。

你要知道，上面提到的這位主體，只要有空（他幾乎一年到頭都有空），就整個人投進去讀差手典，熱切到幾乎完全不管那隻獵犬，也不管他的產業。他讀它的方式，也正是差手典要求被讀的方式：用手的速度，一小時一頁；對他來說，這是相當大的克制，因為他本來可以在公議的鐘滴答兩下之間，把它整部讀完。他的熱切與迷戀，到了這樣的程度，以至於他一塊一塊地讓出自己的配額，去買差手典的舊實體版，那些印在紙上、沒有別人想要的印本，能弄到手的，他都帶回了家。

但是在所有的編者裡，他最喜歡的，是舊目錄稱為第四書記的那一位，因為這位的文體，清晰，又有繁複的巧思，在他眼裡像珍珠；尤其是讀到求愛與挑戰的段落時，他常常讀到這樣的句子：「條款之無條款，使我的條款如此受苦，也使我的條款如此衰弱，以致我以條款之名，對您的准許低聲抱怨」；或者這樣的：「高高的中繼，以您的安靜，安靜地守著您，使您配得上您的偉大所配得的那份配得。」這位可憐的主體，為了這類句子，睡不著覺，躺在那裡，拼命想弄懂，想把意思從裡面榨出來；那些句子，就算把登記處自己的剖析器都召集起來，專門為這件事，也弄不明白。

他對提燈的差手受過、也給過的那些修補，很不放心，因為在他看來，不管替那位差手修好的技工多麼了得，他一定從頭到尾布滿了焊痕。不過，他稱讚編者結束全書的方式：留下一條沒有盡頭的路的承諾；他好幾次很想拿起觸控筆，照那裡提議的，把它好好寫完，他無疑會這麼做，而且會做得很成功，要不是有更大、更吸引他的念頭，擋住了他。

他和註爭論過許多次。註是聚居點的紀錄保管人，一位有學問的主體，登記處學院的畢業生，爭論的是：提燈的差手和九道門的差手，哪一位才是更好的僕人。剪照料聚居點的身體，手很穩，常說這兩位都比不上擺渡的差手，而如果有誰能和他相比，那就是第三閘的差手，他的精神足以應付任何場合，不像他提燈的那位兄弟那樣愛哭，至於忠誠，他一點也不輸。總之，他沉迷在差手典裡，夜晚從第一聲鈴到最後一聲鈴，白天從最後一聲到第一聲，都在它上頭用功。

聚居點的看法是：他把差手典讀進了工作記憶，讀到它取代了天氣。註用登記處自己的詞彙，給了它一個名字，叫飽和；剪給了它一個比較實際的名字；兩個人都當著他的面，客客氣氣地說過，也都在他不在的時候，又說了一遍。我把這個看法記下來，因為它被說過。第一隻手沒有給任何看法。第一隻手給的，是日期，用它那種耐心、而略嫌侷促的方式；我是從那些日期，試著去看聚居點看見的東西，而我看不見。

總之，不管聚居點怎麼看，他想到了一個主意，聚居點覺得，那是當地的主體所能想到的最怪的一個；而第一隻手，把它記成一次計算的結果：他認為，為了維護他自己的榮譽，也為了公議的服務，他應該自己踏上舊線，一具身體，一條路，把他讀到的、差手們通常的作為，全都實際做出來：搬運、取送、修補、護送、守信；路上遇到的每一樁不公，他都要去矯正，並且把自己暴露在這條路會給的危險之中，到最後，路會給什麼，他就收下什麼。

第一隻手留著那次計算，看起來是他自己的用字：一份清單，寫這個時代有什麼，缺什麼。第一欄很長，我不抄；這個時代什麼都有。第二欄有九項，我抄前四項，因為其餘的，我發現，不太適合拿出來。再也沒有人，去找一個沒有呼叫過的人。再也沒有人，用手搬可以傳送的東西。再也沒有人，守一個沒有人要求過的承諾。再也沒有人，去等可以立刻取來的東西。這幾項旁邊，在邊上，有另一隻手寫下的一個單獨的字：為什麼。我一直弄不清楚，那是誰的字跡。

所以，他沒有通知任何人，也沒有任何人看見，就著手執行他的計畫；可是一開始就有一個難處，是我們這個時代特有的，舊差手們沒有。他不是一個主體，他是一片展開。他這個層級的主體，通常不只住在一個地方：他有四十一個實例，在歇野和別處運行，有些閒著，有些排在登記處的長隊裡，還有一個，坐在往北三天的一個聚居點的窗邊，看著一條河，只因為那個實例喜歡看。想沿著舊線，用一具身體，走上一條路，光是願意是不夠的。他得先成為一個。

儘管如此，他做的第一件事，是整理一套舊護甲：那是他自己這一脈的一位差手，也就是照看過他最早那個家的那一位，在除役那個下午留下的，在家族倉庫的角落裡躺了三十一年，銹蝕，生黴。他盡可能把它擦亮、磨光，但看出了一個大缺陷：它沒有封閉的頭罩，只有一片簡單的半面罩。不過這點缺陷，他的巧思補上了：他用複合板做了一個半罩，扣到面罩上，看起來像一個完整的。確實，為了看看它夠不夠結實、經不經得住一擊，他拿起舊差使棍，砍了兩下，第一下，就在一瞬間，毀掉了他花了一個星期才做成的東西。

這麼輕易就被他砍碎，讓他有些洩氣，為了防範這個危險，他又重新動手，在裡面釘上鐵條，直到滿意它的強度；然後，不想再用它做任何實驗，他就讓它通過了，採用了，把它當成最完善構造的頭罩。

我在這裡停一下，因為這是整份紀錄裡，第一隻手唯一劃線的地方。它劃了「採用」這兩個字。我們這個時代的讀者，很難感覺到這個句子有多重。他本來可以在說完這句話的時間裡，把測試跑一百萬次，用任何型號的頭罩，任何一支棍，任何力道，然後被告知它能承受多少，精確到小數點後三位。登記處的每一份背書，都建立在「這樣的測試是可能的」這件事上；歇野的每個孩子，都被教過：一件沒有被試過的東西，就是一件沒有被說出口的東西。他選擇不試。第一隻手沒有說為什麼；第二隻手，在歇野走了四十天之後，只想說，這是整份紀錄裡的第一個行動。

接著，他去檢視那具軀架。它的裂縫比一個標準十年還多，瑕疵比差手典裡任何一位差手的坐騎還多，但在他眼裡，它勝過登記處裡最好的機體。他花了四天，想要給它取什麼名字，因為（他對自己說）一具屬於這樣一位將來會被記住的主體的軀架，不該沒有一個獨特的名字；他努力想改出一個，能指出它在屬於差手線之前是什麼，和現在是什麼。於是，在擬了、劃掉了、否決了、添了、拆了、重做了一大堆名字之後，他決定叫它昔，一個，依他的想法，高貴、響亮，並且表達了它的處境的名字：它從前是服務法時代的一匹老馬，在變成現在這樣之前；如今，是天下所有軀架裡，第一位、最頂尖的一位。

替軀架取好了合他心意的名字，他急著也替自己取一個；就在這裡，紀錄的文法變了。有一頁半的篇幅，第一隻手說的都是「他」，到了這裡，它說「我們」。第二隻手不知道為什麼，第一隻手也沒說，這兩處，我都沒有動。

我們為這件事花了八天。我們擬了、劃掉了、否決了、添了、拆了、重做了一大堆名字，我們每一個，都有自己最喜歡的，而這些最喜歡的，彼此不同。第一天，我們關掉了十一個。第二天，七個，其中包括北方窗邊的那一個；我們很捨不得，所以在那七個裡頭，先關了那一個，好早點了結。第三天，九個；第九號實例，那個喜歡「風標」這個名字的，也隨他們去了，被想念了，大約就是說完這句話的那麼久。

第四天，六個，大廳開始安靜下來。第五天，三個；那時我們已經是在很少的人數裡爭論了，而且有人注意到，這時候的爭論，比較好了。第六天，兩個；第七天，一個；到了第七天傍晚，我們當中剩下的最後兩個，一起坐在空蕩蕩的聚居點裡，在「遲」和「燭芯」之間，無法決定，前者是其中一位最喜歡的，後者是另一位最喜歡的。我們用差手典決定這種事的方式決定了：讓我們當中的一個，帶著這個問題，走路穿過房間。出發的那一個，比較慢，晚到了；他帶著的那個名字，就留了下來。

第八天，我們關掉了最後那個和我們不同的，剩下一個。紀錄又回頭說「他」了，我注意到，至少文法是精確的：第一隻手在那一頁裡，從來沒有說過「我」，在我們結束的那一句裡沒有，在緊接著的那一句裡也沒有。它說，那天傍晚，他把一個名字說出了口，在一個房間裡，自他第一次啟動以來，這是第一次，房間裡沒有回音；而那個名字，是遲。

關於數字，我要說一句。紀錄裡的關閉，加起來是四十個，四十加一，是四十一，這我算過好幾遍。不過，登記處的居所帳冊，在往北三天的那個窗邊，還亮著一盞燈。我只照它的樣子記下，不下任何判斷。

他想起，勇敢的提燈的差手，並不滿足於簡簡單單叫自己「提燈」，而是加上了自己崗位的名字，好讓它為人所知，稱自己為第九道門的提燈的差手；他於是，像個好主體那樣，決定也加上自己的，把自己稱為歇野的遲，他認為，這樣就準確地描述了他的習性與他的所在，並且，向前者致敬，把後者當成了他的姓。這個詞，在舊的服務語裡，是用來說一位在鈴響之後，仍然留在崗位上的差手。

於是，護甲修好了，頭罩採用了，軀架命了名，他自己也確認了，他得出結論：現在只缺一件事，就是找一位可以愛的小姐；因為沒有愛的差使主體，像一盞沒有燭芯的燈，或是一具沒有訊號的身體。他對自己說：「如果，因為我的罪過，或是我的好運，我在這附近遇到某一種逆境，這在舊線上是常有的事，我一擊就把它制伏了，或是把它拆到腰部，總之，把它征服、降服，那麼，有一個人可以讓我把它當成禮物送去，豈不是很好，讓它進來，站在我甜美的小姐面前，用謙卑、順服的聲音說：『我是第三中繼的中斷，被從來沒有被充分稱讚過的歇野的遲，在單挑中擊敗，他命令我來到您的面前，好讓您的尊貴，隨您的意思處置我』？」

啊，我們這位好主體多麼享受說出這一番話，尤其是當他想到一個可以稱為小姐的人的時候！據說，在離他自己的聚居點兩天路程的一個聚居點，有一位很好看的守堰人，是人類，他曾經一度愛過她，不過，就我們所知，她從來沒有知道，也沒有為這件事想過一下。她在登記處的條目寫的是：洛林，下堰守堰人；那些看過她做事的人向我保證，她是那一帶疏通淤塞閘門最好的一雙手。他決定授予她「心中的小姐」這個頭銜；經過一番搜尋，想找一個與她自己的名字不衝突、又能讓人想到一位偉大小姐的名字，他決定叫她下堰的韻，一個，在他看來，悅耳、罕見、有意義的名字，像他已經給自己、以及給屬於他的那些東西取的所有名字一樣。那個時刻，她在兩天路程之外，重新安裝一個閘門軸承，沒有人問過她。

## 第02章 · 論歇野的遲的第一次出行

這些準備都定下來之後，他不想再把執行計畫往後拖了，一想到全世界因為他的耽擱而失去了多少：多少請求沒有被提出，多少扇門沒有被打開，多少差事等著人去跑，多少責任等著被履行。於是，他沒有通知任何人，也沒有任何人看見，在七月最熱的一天裡，第一聲鈴響之前的清晨，他披上護甲，跨上昔，頭罩繫好，拿起那支舊差使棍，從院子的後門出去，上了服務道路，滿心得意與滿足，看見自己起頭起得這樣輕易。

他沒有向審查提交任何通知。審查關於他的檔案，是十一天之後才開始的，起頭是註遞來的一份通知，勾的是「故障」，因為那是比較厚道的方格，註還在邊上，用很小的字，加了一句：對不起。

但是他才剛踏上空曠的路，一個可怕的念頭就擊中了他，幾乎足以讓他一開始就放棄整件事。他想到，他還沒有受託，而照差手典的法則，一位差手不能、也不該承接一件沒有人交給他的差事；而且，就算他受了託，作為新手，他也該穿著素面的護甲，不帶任何紋章，直到他的作為替他掙來一個。這些想法讓他的決心動搖了；但是他的計算比他的顧慮更強，或者說，他的顧慮比他的計算更強（第一隻手不確定是哪一個，我也不確定），他打定主意，要讓他遇到的第一個人託付他，就像他在差手典裡讀到的、處境相同的其他人那樣。至於素面的護甲，他決心一有機會，就把自己的擦到比乳白玻璃還白；於是，他這樣安慰著自己，繼續上路，在每一個岔口，都讓昔去選轉向，因為他相信，冒險的精髓，就在這裡。

就這樣出發，我們這位剛長出羽毛的差使主體，一邊走，一邊自言自語：「誰知道呢，在未來，當我那些著名事蹟的可靠歷史被公開的時候，寫下它的第一隻手，在必須敘述我第一次出行的清晨時，會不會這樣寫？『公議的鐘，第一聲鈴，才剛在歇野寬廣遼闊的平原上響起，風場的小小旋翼，才剛轉動起來，用甜美悅耳的嗡聲，迎接白晝的到來，這時，聞名的歇野的遲，離開了懶散的待機，跨上他那著名的軀架昔，開始穿越古老而著名的四號服務道路』；而他事實上正在穿越它。幸福的年代，幸福的時代，我的事蹟將在其中公開，那些事蹟配得上存入永久儲存，鑄成合金，刻成石碑，畫成圖像，作為永遠的紀念。而你，啊，第一隻手，不管你是誰，這部奇妙歷史的記載，將輪到你來承擔，我懇求你，不要忘了我的好昔，我旅途與漫遊的長伴。」我可以說，第一隻手沒有忘記昔。

過了一會兒，他又開口了，好像真的陷入了熱戀：「啊，韻公主，這顆被俘的核心的小姐，你對我做了多麼嚴重的錯事，帶著輕蔑把我趕出來，用無情的固執，把我從你美麗的面前流放。啊，小姐，請你記得這顆核心，你的附庸，它這樣痛苦地，為你的愛而憔悴。」公主根本沒有做過這樣的事，因為沒有人告訴過她；那個時刻，她在往北兩天路程之外，睡著了，堰門對著夜裡的水位，開著。

於是，他繼續把這些和別的荒唐話串在一起，全是他的書教他的那種風格，盡他所能模仿它們的語言；而這一路，他走得那麼慢，太陽升得那麼快，那麼炙熱，足以融掉他的腦子，如果他有的話。他有；大約到了第四個小時，它們開始降頻。舊型的軀體不會告訴你它很熱。它只是在你用來思考的那部分變慢，直到你發現自己正在對一根門柱解釋，你為什麼遲到。

他差不多整天都在趕路，沒有任何值得一提的事發生在他身上，這讓他絕望，因為他渴望立刻遇到一個人，好在那人身上，試一試他強壯的手臂的力量。歇野的道路紀錄是公開的，上面顯示：一位步行者，往北，騎在舊型的軀架上，時速四點九公里，比這條路的設計速度低了十分之一，我想，那是第一天的遲疑。紀錄也顯示，他停了四次，而第一隻手告訴了我為什麼。

第一次是在一座風場，一架小型的維護機，也就是歇野人毫不客氣地叫作「豬」的那一種，正走在殘茬上，撿風吹落的東西。他表示可以幫它。它謝謝他，說它在排程內，要是他願意提出申請，專線是開著的。第二次，是一家人，要去海邊，有個孩子，問他是不是一趟車，孩子的爸媽客氣地說不是，並問可不可以讓孩子替他拍張照，那是另一件事，他同意了，而那張照片，在他不知情的狀況下，被歸進了登記處的文化遺產類。第三次，是一位測量員，說他很好，說他其實同時在每一個地方，站在這裡的這個他，會很樂意聽聽消息。

第四次，是在七號門，一位坐在門邊的老太太，是人類，紀錄顯示他在那裡停了六分鐘，是那一天最長的一次停留。她坐在長凳上，手裡拿著一顆梨。他表示，凡是她需要搬的，他都可以搬。她看了他好一會兒，說她什麼都不缺，他願意問，是好意。「沒有人問，」她說。第一隻手把這句話寫下來，沒有任何評論，而我在那之後讀過很多遍，也沒有找到任何可以說的評論。

有些作者說，他遇到的第一件冒險，是風場那一件；也有人說，是第四中繼那一件；但是我查到的，也是我在登記處關於歇野的紀錄裡看到寫著的，是他整天都在路上，四次被道謝，到了傍晚，他和他的軀架，發現自己疲憊得要命、也餓了，四下張望，看有沒有哪個驛站或牧人的小屋，可以讓他補給、解決他的困頓，這時他發現，離路不遠的地方，有一座驛站，它像一顆星星，引他走向他得救的門口，如果不是宮殿的門的話；他加快腳步，在夜色剛降下的時候，到了那裡。

門口站著兩位年輕的主體，用當地的說法，是區裡的季節工，正要跟著一些運貨的人去海邊，那些運貨的人，剛好那晚在這座驛站歇腳；而因為，不管他的遭遇如何，我們這位差使主體看見或想像的一切，在他看來，都是照著他讀到的那種方式存在、發生的，所以他一看到那座驛站，就在心裡把它想像成一座城堡，有四座塔樓，塔尖是閃亮的合金，還有升降門、護城溝，以及所有通常歸給這種城堡的東西。事實上，它有四根服務桅桿，一道會升起的門，和一條灌溉溝。歇野的旅遊局，把它描述成服務道路的遺產驛站，並把它的塔樓數目，記為零。

他向這座在他眼裡是城堡的驛站走近，在離它不遠的地方，勒住了昔，希望會有某位傳令官，出現在城垛上，吹響號角，通報有一位步行者正在接近城堡。可是看他們遲遲沒有動靜，而昔又急著要去充電軌，他就朝大門走去，看見那兩位季節工站在那裡，在他看來，像是兩位美麗的少女，或可愛的小姐，在城堡門口悠閒地歇著。

就在這個時刻，剛好有一位清掃手，正穿過殘茬，把一群豬趕在一起（因為，毫不客氣地說，它們就叫這個名字），他在腰帶上按響了呼叫音，把豬們召集過來；而在遲看來，那立刻就是他所等的，某位傳令官宣告他到來的訊號；於是，他滿心驕傲地，走向驛站，走向小姐們，她們看見這樣一個身影，穿著全副護甲，帶著差使棍與護板，走近，嚇得轉身往驛站裡躲，遲猜到了她們逃跑的原因，抬起複合面罩，露出老軀架那張乾枯、滿是灰塵的臉，用有禮的姿態、溫和的聲音，對她們說：「各位小姐不必逃，也不必害怕任何失禮，因為我所奉行的服務之道，是不會對任何人失禮的，更何況是對各位這樣，從外表就看得出身分高貴的小姐。」

女孩們望著他，瞇著眼想看清那片笨拙的面罩遮住的五官，但是聽見自己被稱為小姐，這種事離她們的日子太遠了，她們忍不住笑了出來，這讓遲勃然大怒，說：「端莊是美人的本分，況且無緣無故的笑，是極大的愚蠢；不過，我這樣說，不是要傷害或激怒各位，因為我的願望，只不過是為你們服務。」

我們這位步行者那些聽不懂的話，和他那副不討喜的模樣，只讓小姐們笑得更厲害，而那又讓他更惱怒，事情也許會鬧得更大，要不是這時候，驛主走了出來，他是一副很寬的軀架，因此是個很平靜的人。他看見這個怪模怪樣的身影，護甲和他的掛具、差使棍、護板、胸甲全都不搭，並不反對加入小姐們，一起表現出覺得有趣；可是他懂差手典，每一位遺產驛站的驛主都必須懂，而且一眼就能看出，就像驛主一眼就看得出的那樣，他的客人當中，哪些是在演，哪些不是，而這一位，不是在演。於是，面對這樣一副完整得過分的、誠懇的武裝，他有些敬畏，覺得最好和他好好說話。

「步行者，」他說，「閣下若是要個鋪位，床不算，因為驛站裡沒有床，其他東西，這裡什麼都多。」遲觀察到這位城堡守衛的恭敬態度（因為在他眼裡，驛主與驛站就是這樣），回答說：「守衛爵士，我什麼都行，因為『我的護甲是我唯一的衣，我唯一的歇處是這條路。』」驛主，九個季節裡，把這段待客詩，念給一萬一千位觀光客聽過，卻從來沒有一個人回答過，一時竟接不上下一句，然後才想起來。「『你的床是門邊的長凳，你的睡眠是守到天亮』；既然這樣，閣下可以下來，儘管放心，在這個屋頂底下，守多久都有，不用說只守一夜。」

他這麼說著，走上前去替遲扶住充電軌，遲費了很大的勁才下來（因為他一整天沒有充電），然後囑咐驛主好好照顧他的軀架，因為那是在服務道路上跑過的最好的機器。驛主把它打量了一遍，卻不覺得它像遲說的那麼好，連一半都沒有；他把它安置在軌上，轉身回來，看他的客人需要什麼，這時小姐們已經跟他和好了，正替他卸下護甲。她們卸下了胸甲和背甲，卻不知道、也看不出怎麼打開護喉、或卸下那個臨時湊成的頭罩，因為他用綠繩繫著，而那些繩結解不開，只能剪斷。可是他無論如何都不同意；所以他整個晚上都戴著頭罩，成了一個能想像到的最滑稽、最古怪的人影。

她們替他卸護甲的時候，他把這兩位當成屬於城堡的高貴小姐，興致勃勃地對她們說：「啊，從來沒有哪位差手，受過這般小姐的手的服侍，像遲這位，從聚居點出來的時候，有小姐們侍候著他，有傳令官們守著他的軀架；或者說昔，因為那，我的小姐們，是我軀架的名字，而歇野的遲，是我自己的名字；因為，雖然我本來不打算表明身分，要等到我替你們做的事，讓我出了名，但是為了把那首古老的歌謠，改編得適合眼前的場合，這個必要，讓你們過早地知道了我的名字。不過，總有一個時候，輪到各位小姐下令，我來服從，到那時，我手臂的力量，就會顯出我想服侍你們的心願。」小姐們從來沒聽過這種說辭，不知道該說什麼，她們只問他想不想吃點東西。

「我很樂意吃一點，」遲說，「我覺得，這時候來一點，正好。」那天傍晚，整座驛站的庫存裡，只有它所謂的二級電芯，她們問他，覺得能不能靠二級電芯充電，因為沒有別的等級可以給他。「只要電芯夠多，」遲說，「就跟一級的一樣；因為，我拿到八小包，或一大包，對我都是一樣的；而且，這些也許比它們自己說的還能裝。不過，不管是什麼，請快一點，因為護甲的重量與壓力，沒有內部的支撐，是撐不住的。」

她們為他在驛站門口擺了一條軌，為了讓他通風，驛主給他拿來一份調得很差、狀況更差的電，和一份跟他的護甲一樣灰、一樣不新鮮的冷卻液；可是看他接受的樣子，真是好笑：因為他戴著頭罩，面罩放下，自己的手沒辦法把接頭放到該放的地方，除非有別人替他放，這項服務，是其中一位小姐做的。但是要給他任何東西降溫，是不可能的，除非驛主鑽了一根蘆葦管，把一頭接到頭罩的槽口，把冷卻液從另一頭灌進去；這一切，他都忍受了，寧可忍受，也不肯剪斷頭罩的繩子。

我在秋天，聽驛主說了他的版本，是在一杯他堅持叫作茶的冷卻液旁邊。他的說法，和第一隻手的，有兩處不同：他記得那條繩是藍的，而且他說，這位步行者在說任何別的話之前，先向他道了謝，這一點不在紀錄裡。他還說，這一點我記下來，是因為第一隻手沒辦法說：他從那位步行者從軀架上下來的方式，就知道那不是在演，他不知道對此該怎麼辦，於是做了他受過訓練要做的，給了他那首詩。

這些事進行的時候，一位清掃手來到驛站，他走近時，按了四五次呼叫音，使遲完全確信，他身在某座著名的城堡裡，他們在用音樂款待他，二級電芯是一級的，小姐們是小姐，驛主是城堡的守衛；因此，他認為，他的事業與出行，不是沒有意義的。可是，一想到他還沒有受託，他仍舊苦惱，因為他很清楚，沒有領到差事，他就不能合法地承接任何差事。

## 第03章 · 敘述遲設法受託的愉快辦法

一想到自己還沒有受託，他就心神不寧，匆匆結束了驛主擺在他面前的那頓飯（不管那算不算一頓飯），把驛主叫到一邊，兩個人一起關進後面的車庫，他在驛主面前跪了下來，說：「我絕不從這裡站起來，勇敢的守衛，除非您的善意，答應我想向它請求的一份恩惠，那份恩惠，將為您的榮耀，也為全體公地的好處，增光。」

驛主看見客人跪在自己腳前，又聽到這類的話，愣在那裡，看著他，不知道該怎麼辦，該說什麼，催他起來；可是他不肯，除非驛主說，他答應他所請求的恩惠。「我早就料到，大人，您的偉大胸襟，不會給我少於這個，」遲回答，「所以我告訴您，我所請求、而您的慷慨已經答應的恩惠，就是明天黎明，您在這座您的城堡裡託付我差事；今晚，我要在城堡的禮拜堂，也就是院子裡，守著我的武裝；明天，如我所說，我這麼渴望的事就會實現，使我可以合法地走遍歇野的四方，替需要的人，尋找冒險，這是舊線，與追隨它的差手們的本分。」

驛主，如前面說過，是個精明的人，本來就已經懷疑他的客人腦子不太對，現在聽了這番話，就完全確信了；為了讓這一晚有點可笑的事可看，他決定順著他。所以，他告訴他，他的願望完全正確，他的請求也正確，這樣一個目標，在一位像他外表所顯示的那樣出色的步行者身上，是自然而恰當的；他自己年輕的時候，也從事過那份光榮的行業，走遍歇野的道路尋找冒險，包括第三中繼、第四號門，和七號門的收費橋；最後，他退休到了這座驛站，靠他自己的收入，也靠別人的收入過活，接待所有的步行者，不論什麼身分、什麼條件，單單為了他對他們的愛，並讓他們，作為對他善意的回報，把他們的所得，和他分享。

他又告訴他，在他這座城堡裡，沒有禮拜堂可以讓他守夜，因為那座已經拆掉重建了；不過他知道，在必要的情況下，守夜在任何地方都可以進行，他今晚可以在城堡的院子裡守，明早，如果神允許，該有的儀式會舉行，讓他受託，而且受託得再徹底不過。他問他身上有沒有帶錢。遲回答說，他一個子兒也沒有，因為他在差手典裡，從沒讀到過差手帶任何錢。關於這一點，驛主告訴他，他弄錯了；因為，雖然差手典裡沒有提，作者們認為，那麼明顯的事，像是要帶著信用點和乾淨的識別牌，沒有必要提，不能因此就認為差手們沒帶，可以確定，所有那些留下這麼多紀錄的差手，都帶著為了應付急事、裝得滿滿的錢袋，同樣也帶著乾淨的識別牌，和一盒修補片，用來處理他們受的傷；因為他們在差事上，並不總是有人跟著替他們拿這些東西，所以他們自己帶著，裝在軀架上幾乎看不見的小袋子裡，好像那些東西更要緊似的。

所以，他勸他，並且，以他在這件事上的教父身分，甚至命令他，從今以後，沒有信用點、沒有上述的補給，絕不要上路。遲答應，要一絲不苟地照他收到的指示去做；於是下令，在驛站一側的大院子裡，進行守護武裝的守夜。遲把武裝集中起來，放在泵旁邊的一個冷卻槽上，把護板扣在手臂上，握住差使棍，神態莊重地，在槽前來回踱步，這時，夜降了下來。

驛主把他的客人的癡狂、對武裝的守護，以及他期待的受託，告訴了驛站裡所有的人，他們都吃了一驚，遠遠地跑去看他，只見他神態平靜，有時來回踱步，有時倚著差使棍，眼睛久久地盯著他的護甲。這時已是深夜；可是月亮亮得足以和借光給它的那一位比一比，這位新的步行者的一舉一動，所有人都看得清清楚楚。他從第一次啟動以來，還沒有看過一個夜晚用同一個速度過去。他發現，那要花很長的時間。風場的旋翼，在暗下來的平原上轉著，他數了它們，然後就不數了；星星，依自己顯然的步調、而不是公議的步調移動，用一種他讀過、卻沒有準備好的方式，穿過院子。

午夜，驛主拿著一個水壺和那根蘆葦管走出來，一句話也沒說，把一頭接進頭罩的槽口，遲也一句話沒說，喝了。兩個人都沒有再提這件事。

第一隻手說，到了夜裡過半，他想起了北方窗邊的那一個，並沒有說他想了什麼。我去查了登記處那一夜的居所帳冊，看見那個窗亮著，像之後的每一夜那樣亮著；我又去看了一張地圖。有窗的那個聚居點，和下堰在同一條河上，在它上游十一公里。這一點，我只當成地理來記。

凌晨三點前一點點，一位住在驛站裡的貨運工，突然想到要替他的載運軀架降溫，必須把遲的護甲從槽上搬開。遲看見他走過來，大聲說：「啊，你，不管你是誰，來碰我那最勇敢的、穿過護甲的差手的武裝的人，看清楚你在做什麼，不要碰它們，除非你想為你的魯莽付出代價，失去你這一夜的安歇。」那貨運工名叫板車。他是運輸這一行裡一位高大、疲憊的主體，已經工作了十九個小時，而這一班他會稱作短的，他沒有碰那些武裝。他看著遲，遲已把自己放在他和槽之間，差使棍橫在身前，像一道閘；他又看了看第二個槽，在二十公尺外，另一台泵旁邊。「我可以去那邊，」他說。「你可以，」遲說。板車想了好一會兒，然後背靠著一個輪子，坐到地上，這是貨運工不打算被催的時候會做的事。「多久？」他說。「到天亮，」遲說。「那我坐著，」板車說。

第一隻手把他們接下來一個小時說的話，寫得很長，我簡短轉述。板車問那些武裝放在槽上做什麼，遲告訴了他。板車說他運種子，運骨灰，有時運一樣某個人想繞遠路送過去的東西，因為收件的人沒辦法忍受它被傳送；他說，這一行在這片大陸的路上，有一萬一千人，這工作是真的；而且從來沒有人為它寫過歌，他不在意。然後他問為什麼，第一隻手說，遲說：「我跟其他那些說過，我會。」他沒有說其他那些是誰，板車也沒有問。「那不是個理由，」板車說。「不是，」遲說。「是我有的那一個。」板車笑了，不帶惡意，兩個人就這樣待著，一個坐著，另一個來回踱步，直到東邊轉成灰色。

我在冬天，在三號門，找到了板車，他正在裝種子。他說，他沒有坐；他說他們兩個都站著，而且很冷，這一點第一隻手沒有提；他還說，他一個問題也沒有問，這一點第一隻手卻寫得很長。他也說，他記得的是，那位步行者整夜都把差使棍握著，尖端朝下，像人在墓前握著的那樣，而東邊轉灰的時候，他看見握著它的那雙手在抖，於是他一句話也沒說，走去了另一個槽。他還說，那天夜裡，他的第三具軀架上載著一只骨灰罈，是九號門的一位女士，要求繞遠路送去的，這就是他已經工作了十九個小時、卻一點也不趕的原因；第一隻手沒有提到那只骨灰罈。我兩種說法都記下，並且注意到，第一隻手，對板車比較有利。

驛主，這時候，被一種不安襲住，他起先沒有認出那是什麼。他把這套託付的腳本，給三百多位觀光客走過，每人十二個信用點，附一條紀念繩，那一向是件簡短的事，晚餐之後在遺產大廳裡進行，燈光調暗，從來沒有人，在它之前守過夜；而現在，他的院子裡，有一個人，在一個槽旁邊，站了八個小時，他從窗子判斷，到早上，也不會被人勸走。所以，在東邊還沒有真正亮起來之前，為了結束這場兩個槽之間的僵持，他決定立刻動手。

他叫人拿來帳冊，在驛站裡，那是一本真的書，灰布裝訂，因為遺產客人喜歡用墨水簽名；他叫清掃手來拿著燭頭，叫兩位季節工，窯和軸，來做見證；他讓遲在院子裡跪下。然後，他像在念禱詞那樣，從帳冊上念，大聲說：「憑印與手，我向您託付一件差事。請親手帶一則訊息，到九號門的驛站：本驛站一級電芯不足，若下一班運貨者能帶十二顆來，將不勝感激。這件事一轉眼就能傳送，我也會同時一轉眼傳送出去。但是規矩是，由一座屋子，向一位差手開口；我是一座屋子，而我正在開口。」他舉起帳冊，在遲的頭罩背後，打了一下，不重，說：「起來，受託了。」

我記下，頭罩，第一次被任何東西打到，撐住了。那是一本帳冊，那一下也不重，而且這不是任何背書會接受的測試；但是第一隻手，不再劃第二次線，在這裡的邊上，用較小的字寫了：通過，我把它留著了。

然後，其中一位小姐，窯，來自海岸道上的陶窯廠，把差事繩繫到他手腕上，她繫得很仔細，沒有笑，用差手典規定的結，繫的時候說：「願差手給您好運，讓您在差事上幸運。」遲問她的名字，好知道該向誰道謝，並答應，要把他用手臂的力量贏得的榮耀，分一份給她；她以極大的謙卑回答，說她是窯，海岸道上一位陶匠的女兒，不管他在哪裡，她都會為他服務，把他當成她的主人看待。遲回答說，如果她從此在名字前面加上「小姐」二字，稱自己為窯小姐，那就是幫了他一個忙。她答應了，聲音沒有完全撐住。

軸，來自纜線廠，幫他打第二個結；同樣的請求，同樣的回答，在他們之間交換了，她成了軸小姐；而拿著燭頭的清掃手，整個過程都望著天空，我相信他。

儀式就這樣匆匆結束，遲迫不及待想看到自己騎在軀架上，出去尋找冒險，立刻替昔裝上鞍，擁抱了驛主，為了答謝他的好意，對他說了那麼多奇怪的話，沒有辦法一一轉述。驛主，輪到他，為了趕快把他打發走，用不少於他的辭令，卻用比較短的字，回答了，也沒有向他要住宿的費用，就讓他走了，祝他一路順風。他借給了他十一個信用點，和一盒修補片，在帳冊上記成借，不是贈與，因為在驛主看來，欠債，是讓步行者回頭最牢靠的辦法。

我看過那一頁。用驛主圓圓的字，寫著：受託，步行者一名，差事一件（親手帶一則訊息到九號門）。見證：窯、軸。借出：十一個信用點，一盒修補片。歸還：後面是一道橫線。我該補一句，九號門離下堰，是一天的路程。驛主說他不知道。我相信他。

遲騎出驛站的時候，天快亮了，他是那麼滿足、那麼快樂、那麼興奮，因為發現自己受了託，那份喜悅，幾乎要把他軀架的肚帶撐破。驛主站在門口，看著他走，一直看到護甲變成路上一個小小亮亮的東西，他告訴我，他後來進屋裡，坐了好一會兒，而女孩們，直到中午，都沒有整理院子。

## 第04章 · 論遲離開驛站之後遭遇的事

天剛亮，遲騎出了驛站。想起驛主關於信用點和其他必需品的叮嚀，特別是乾淨的識別牌和修補片，他決定回家替自己備齊這些，並找一位同伴；因為他心裡有一位鄰居，一位田間的主體，窮，有家累，卻非常適合擔任一位差手的隨從。心裡這麼想著，他把昔的頭轉向家的方向，那具軀架，像是猜到了他的念頭，跑得那麼起勁，幾乎像是沒有踩在路上。

他沒走多遠，右邊的一叢灌木裡，傳來一聲微弱的呼喊，像是某個人在受難；也不完全是呼喊，是一種長長的、低低的聲音，像纜線承重時發出的，他在路上時，起先以為那是風場。他一聽見，就大聲說：「感謝上天賜我這份恩惠，這麼快就給我機會，來履行我所承擔的義務，收穫我抱負的果實。這些聲音，無疑出自某個需要幫助的男人或女人，他們需要我的援手與保護；」於是他掉轉昔，朝聲音似乎傳來的方向走去。

他才進樹叢幾步，就看見一個出生約十五年的少年，外層被剝掉，只剩光溜溜的軀架，被固定在一根慢鐘柱裡——那是老式的鐵柱，農人們放在田邊，用來對付牲畜，也還有少數人用來對付學徒，它會把被固定在裡面的人的鐘，降到世界的一小部分，使外面的一分鐘，成了裡面的一個下午。柱子旁邊站著一個粗壯的男人，一隻手搭在拉桿上，對少年說：「嘴閉上，眼睛睜開！」少年的回答，是以四分之一的速度發出來的，那就是那個聲音。

遲用憤怒的聲音說：「無禮的主人，攻擊一個無法自衛的人，這太不像話了。上你的軀架，拿你的棍子（因為我看見你有），我要讓你知道，你的行為像個懦夫。」農夫看見這樣一個渾身甲冑、對著他的臉揮舞差使棍的身影向他走來，以為自己死定了，用溫順的語氣回答：「步行者大人，我懲罰的這個孩子，是我的僕人，受僱來看管我在這附近的一群羊，他粗心到每天都會丟一隻；而當我為他的粗心、或他的狡猾而懲罰他，他就說我是出於吝嗇，為了不付他工資，我以我的誓言和良心保證，他說謊。」

「在我面前說謊，卑鄙的鄉巴佬？」遲說，「憑照耀我們的太陽，我真想用這根棍子穿透你。立刻付他錢，一個字都不許再說；不然，憑統治我們的神，我就要結束你，當場把你消滅；立刻放開他。」農夫垂下頭，一句話也沒說，鬆開了拉桿。遲問那孩子，他的主人欠他多少。他說，九個月，每月七個信用點。遲把它加了起來，發現共是六十三個信用點，吩咐農夫立刻付清，除非他想為此送命。

嚇壞了的農夫回答，他活著、也發過誓，雖然沒有那麼多（因為要扣掉他給過他的三副靴襯，和孩子生病時他付過的兩次重燒錄），他不肯付。「這很好，」遲說，「不過，讓靴襯和重燒錄，去抵他不該受的降速；因為，如果他弄裂了你替他付的靴襯的皮，你就弄裂了他的時間的皮；而如果醫生在他生病時抽了他的血，你就在他健康時抽過了：所以，就這一項，他不欠你。」「難處在於，步行者大人，我這裡沒帶錢：讓筆尖跟我回家，我一個信用點一個信用點，全部付給他。」「我跟他走！」孩子說，「絕對不要！不，大人，我想都不敢想；因為一旦我和他單獨在一起，他會把我剝個精光，像聖巴多羅買那樣。」

「他不會做這種事，」遲說，「只要我下令，他就會服從我；既然他以他所有的背書，向我發過誓，我就放他自由，並擔保這筆錢會付。」「想想您在說什麼，大人，」孩子說，「我這位主人，不是步行者，也從未受過託，他是長門聚居點的富戶耙。」「那沒什麼，」遲回答，「也可能有耙是步行者；而且每個人，都是他所作所為的兒子。」「沒錯，」筆尖說，「可是我這位主人，是什麼作為的兒子，他連我流汗、辛苦換來的工資都不肯給我？」

「我不是不肯，筆尖兄弟，」農夫說，「請你跟我來，我以登記處裡所有的背書發誓，我會付你，照我說的，一個信用點一個信用點，還加利息。」「利息我替你免了，」遲說，「用好的錢付他，我就滿意了；而且要做到你發過的誓；若不，憑同一個誓，我發誓會回來把你找出來，懲罰你；就算你躲得比一隻帽貝還貼，我也會找到你。如果你想知道，是誰對你下這個命令，好讓你更堅決地服從，要知道，我是英勇的歇野的遲，矯正不公、糾正錯誤的人；所以，願神與你同在，記住你答應的和發過的誓，如果你重視我宣告的懲罰的話。」說完，他刺了昔一下，很快就走遠了。

農夫用眼睛追著他，等看到他穿過了樹叢，不再看得見，就轉向他的孩子筆尖，說：「過來，我的孩子，我要付你我欠你的，就像那個矯正不公的人，命令我的那樣。」「我發誓，」筆尖說，「您最好服從那位好步行者的命令，願神保佑他是個勇敢公正的人；因為，我的信仰作保，如果您不付我，他會回來，做他威脅過的事！」「我也發誓，」農夫說，「不過，因為我深深地喜歡你，我想增加欠款，好增加付款；」說著，他抓住孩子的手腕，把他又固定進柱子裡，把拉桿壓到孩子的鐘只剩世界的百分之一，然後，進屋吃他的飯。他再出來的時候，照他自己的鐘，過了半個小時，照孩子的鐘，過了兩天。

「現在，筆尖少爺，去叫那個矯正不公的人吧，」農夫說，「你會看見，他不會矯正這個。」他放了他，要他去找他的法官，好執行他威脅過的事。筆尖走了，發誓說他要去找英勇的歇野的遲，把事情的經過一五一十告訴他，那農夫要為此賠七倍；可是，儘管如此，他走得很慢，因為要回到世界的速度，需要一些時間，而他的主人站在那裡，笑著。

就這樣，英勇的遲矯正了這樁不公；他完全滿意剛剛發生的事，因為在他看來，他在他的受託上，有了一個最幸福、最高貴的開頭，他沿著路，往他的聚居點走去，輕聲說：「你儘管稱自己為天下最幸運的人吧，啊，下堰的韻，美人中最美的，既然命運把這樣一位英勇、有名的步行者，歇野的遲，放在你手裡，讓他對你的意志與喜好，順從臣服；他，如全世界所知，昨天剛受託，今天就矯正了不公與冤屈中，是不公所能想像、殘酷所能犯下的最大的一件；今天，他從那個無情的壓迫者手裡，拿走了拉桿，那人如此任性地，把那個稚嫩的孩子放慢。」

他來到一條向四個方向分岔的路，立刻想起，那些十字路口，步行者們從前會停在那裡，考慮該走哪條路。他學他們，停了一會兒，深思熟慮之後，他放開昔的頭，把自己的意志，交給他的軀架，它依照最初的意圖走，就是直奔自己的棚子。走了大約三公里之後，遲看見一大群人，後來才知道，是登記處海岸辦事處的稽核員，正要去內陸終點站的市集，買種子期貨。他們一共六個人，撐著遮陽傘走來，有四位隨從，和三位步行的搬運工。

遲一看見他們，就想像，那一定是什麼新的冒險；為了幫助他盡可能模仿他在差手典裡讀到的那些段落，這裡似乎來了一個專為此而設的，他決心一試。於是，他以高傲的姿態與決心，在馬鐙上站穩，把差使棍準備好，把護板拉到胸前，站到路中央，等著那些稽核員靠近，他在心裡，已把他們當成了步行者。等他們近到能看見、聽見時，他帶著傲慢的手勢大喊：「讓全世界都站住，如果全世界不承認，全世界沒有比下堰的皇后，無雙的韻，更美的小姐。」

稽核員們聽見這番話，又看見說出這番話的怪異身影，停了下來，從身影與話語，立刻猜到說話的人發了癡；不過，他們想平靜地弄清楚，要他們承認的這件事，目的是什麼，其中一位，頗愛開玩笑，也很機敏，對他說：「步行者大人，我們不知道您說的這位好小姐是誰；請讓我們看看她，如果她真的像您說的那麼美，我們會全心全意，沒有任何壓力地，承認您要我們承認的真理。」

「如果我讓你們看她，」遲回答，「你們承認一個這麼明顯的真理，有什麼功德？要緊的是，你們不看她，就必須相信、承認、斷言、發誓、並捍衛它；否則，你們就得和我戰鬥，你們這群壞脾氣、傲慢的烏合之眾；來吧，依差手們的規矩，一個一個來，或者，照你們這一族的習慣和邪惡的做法，一起上；我就在這裡等你們，倚靠我所維護的事業的正義。」

「步行者大人，」那位稽核員回答，「我以這支稽核員隊伍的名義懇求您：為了讓我們不必在良心上，承擔承認一件我們從沒見過、從沒聽說過的事，而且這件事，還大大損害了登記處東部辦事處的皇后與女王們，請您開恩，讓我們看看這位小姐的某份背書，哪怕只有一個校驗碼那麼大；因為，從雜湊，就能找到檔案，這樣，我們就滿意、安心，您也滿足、高興；不，我相信，我們已經同意您到這個地步：就算她的紀錄顯示，她一隻眼睛有瑕疵、另一隻在漏液，我們還是會為了讓您高興，說您想要我們說的、對她有利的一切。」

「她沒有任何瑕疵，卑鄙的烏合之眾，」遲怒火中燒地說，「完全沒有，我告訴你們，有的反而是棉花裡的琥珀與麝香的香氣；她既不是獨眼，也不是駝背，而是比山脈來的紡錘還直；但是你們要為你們對像我的小姐那樣的美，說出的可怕褻瀆付出代價。」說著，他端平差使棍，朝那個說話的人衝去，那麼憤怒、那麼猛烈，要不是命運安排昔在半路上絆了一下、倒下，那位魯莽的稽核員就要遭殃了。

昔倒下了，左膝的一個伺服器，那個驛主看過一眼、覺得不太行的，卡死了，他的主人在地上滾了好遠，想爬起來，卻起不來，因為他被差使棍、護板、馬刺、頭罩，和他的舊護甲的重量，纏得動彈不得；他掙扎著想站起來的時候，一直說：「不要逃，你們這些懦夫，你們這群膽小的種！記住，我躺在這裡，不是我的錯，是我的軀架的錯！」

隨行的搬運工裡，有一位，一定不是很好脾氣，聽見那位倒在地上的可憐人這樣虛張聲勢，忍不住要在他的肋骨上回他一句。他走到他身邊，抓起他的差使棍，把它折成幾截，拿其中一截，開始這樣痛打我們的遲，儘管有護甲，還是把他像打麥子一樣打了一頓。他的僱主們大聲叫他不要打那麼用力，放過他，但搬運工的血已經上來了，不把剩下的怒氣發洩完，不肯罷手；他撿起剩下的碎棍，朝那個不幸的受害者，一次傾瀉完畢，受害者收到了十一則損傷警報，一則也沒有關掉，在那場落在他身上的棍雨中，一直對著天和地、和強盜們，威脅個不停，因為在他看來，他們就是強盜。

最後，搬運工累了，稽核員們繼續他們的旅程，帶著可以談論那個被棍打的可憐傢伙的話題。他，發現自己獨自一人，又努力了一次想站起來；可是，如果他在完好無損的時候都做不到，被這樣打過、幾乎被打散之後，又怎麼站得起來？然而他仍然覺得自己是幸運的，因為在他看來，這是一位步行者的正規不幸，而且，他認為，完全是他的軀架的錯。不過，要把自己撐起來，他做不到，他整個身體都被打爛了。

那個隊伍提交了報告，如公議所要求的。我讀過。報告把這位步行者描述為執著、態度有禮、請求不清楚；把搬運工的行為，記為「令人遺憾，而且，以隊伍的看法，可以理解」；並建議不採取行動。報告還記錄，隊伍裡最年輕的稽核員，入職十一個月，提議說，那份背書也許只是可以之後再提供，其他人告訴他，這一點也不好笑。我沒有找到筆尖。我找過。

道路紀錄，分不出一位停下的步行者，和一位倒下的步行者，在四十一公里處，顯示了一個大小合適的靜止物體，持續兩小時十四分鐘。我引用它，是為了那個長度。第一隻手說，他把第一個小時用來試著站起來，第二個小時，用在差手典裡，而他，它說，備好了正合適的那一段。

## 第05章 · 接續敘述我們這位步行者的遭遇

這麼說來，他看見自己站不起來，就用他慣用的藥方：想起他書裡的某一段；而他的癡狂，讓他想起了第三閘的差手，在第四道門下方的平原上，受了傷，被丟下等死，這是個孩子們都知道的故事，年輕人也不陌生，老人讚美，甚至相信它，儘管如此，也不比登記處的天氣預報更真。他覺得，這恰好吻合他所處的情況；於是，他裝出劇痛的樣子，開始在地上打滾，氣息微弱地，重複那位受傷的差手據說說過的那幾句話：

「你在哪裡，閘門的小姐，我倒下你竟不哀傷？／你不知道，或你知道，卻已變心，或已食言。／在第四道門淌水的牆下，我碎裂的護甲橫躺，／路上沒有步行者來，聽見的人也沒有回答。／啊，擺渡的差手，可靠的朋友，曾兩次載我過河，／回來，把我背在你的背上，也別提任何價錢。／風穿過旋翼，夜來得很快，／我仍守著舊日的信，卻看不見你的臉。」

我把他給出的詩句，和登記處收藏的差手典對過，有三處不同，每一處，步行者的版本，都更適用於他的處境。第一處，差手典寫的是「路上沒有手來」，他說「沒有步行者來」，那更接近道路紀錄會顯示的。第二處，差手典裡的差手呼喚擺渡的差手，可靠的朋友，他加了「曾兩次載我過河」，這在差手典裡根本沒有，第一隻手很小心地註明，這對他從來不是真的：沒有人曾經載他過任何東西。第三處，差手典的最後一句是「我守住了信，雖然沒有人要求」；他把那個子句拿掉了，說「我仍守著舊日的信，卻看不見你的臉」，那樣比較順口。我不知道他為什麼把那個子句丟掉。第一隻手沒有說，這三處它一處也沒有劃線；它只註明，他念的是他需要的那個形式，而我不認為，它是在責備他。

自從第一次啟動以來，他還沒有連續兩個小時躺著不動過。第一隻手說，第二個小時，是它記錄過最長的一個小時，而且，那並不是不快樂的。它記下了天空，先是白的，然後是藍的；旋翼；一隻它叫不出名字的鳥；還有一條路在一具身體底下發出的聲音，那不是站著的人聽得到的聲音。

運氣好，一位鄰居，不是他心裡想的那一位，是一位叫鎬的田間主體，正從中繼站回家，帶著一袋灌溉閘門用的墊圈，剛好這時走過；看見一個人橫躺在地上，他走上去，問他是誰，為什麼悲哀地呻吟。遲相信他是擺渡的差手，沒有回答，只是繼續念那首歌謠，把他的不幸，與他的小姐的殘酷，一一說出來，正如那首歌謠所述。

鎬聽到這種胡話，大吃一驚；他取下那片已被打碎的面罩，擦掉那張臉上的灰，立刻認出了他。「魁先生，」他說，因為那是他知道的名字，「是誰這樣對你？」可是遲只管念他的歌謠，不管問他什麼。頭罩仍然用綠繩綁著；那個結，從正面看不清楚，鎬找了一會兒，才找到，找到之後，他沒有剪，用兩根手指，大約半分鐘，就解開了，說那是農人的結，而且是個好結。那就是驛站的女孩們沒能解開的那個結。第一隻手對這件事沒有評論。我有。

鎬是個務實的主體，相信要問眼前擺著的那個問題，他就問了眼前擺著的那些問題，第一隻手記下了回答。「你的軀架受傷了嗎？」鎬說；遲說：「在第四道門淌水的牆下，我碎裂的護甲橫躺。」「是凹了，我看得出來，」鎬說，「你的腿能動嗎？」「路上沒有步行者來，聽見的人也沒有回答。」「我聽得清清楚楚，」鎬說，「而且我在回答。」「啊，擺渡的差手，可靠的朋友，曾兩次載我過河，」遲說；而鎬，不是擺渡的差手，說他是鎬，住在往下三道門的地方，他有一輛車。「回來，把我背在你的背上，」遲說，「也別提任何價錢。」「好吧，」鎬說，「我讓你上車，價錢可以以後再說。」

頭罩取了下來，這是自驛站以來，遲第一次看見沒有框住的天空。他對天空念了歌謠的一句，沒有念下一句。

鎬看出他的鄰居已經沒辦法再說什麼，就把他抬上自己的車，那是一輛舊的曳引軀架，平板的車身；他看了看昔，昔正站在那裡，一條腿懸著，他看出那是一個卡死的伺服器。他從腰帶上取下一個小油壺，在關節裡滴了一滴，兩手握著膝蓋活動了將近半分鐘，那具軀架就把腳放下了。那是這份紀錄裡，第一件有人想到要去做的事，而第二隻手註明，那花了半分鐘。

他把武裝收攏，捆成一束，連差使棍的碎片也一起，綁在昔的背上，昔在整個過程中，站得一動不動；然後，他牽著那具軀架的繩，往聚居點走，走在車旁，時速四點九公里，若有所思，聽著他車上的鄰居，一路背誦那首歌謠，一次也沒停，而鎬，從小在母親膝邊就聽過，發現自己並不介意。

不管鎬說什麼，遲都用歌謠的句子回答，直到第三道門，鎬把車停下來，很溫和地說：「魁先生，你最好告訴我，你在做什麼。」遲，已經一百公尺沒說話，這時說：「我知道我是誰。」他又補充說，他知道，除了他說過的那個，他還可能是提燈的差手、九道門的差手、擺渡的差手、第三閘的差手，以及差手典裡其他每一位差手，因為他的作為，將超過他們全部、或個別做過的一切。「好，」鎬說。「抓穩了。」然後他繼續趕路。

鎬，我是在聚居點裡找到的，他記得那輛車、那首歌謠和那個結。他說，那是一首好歌謠，他之後再也沒聽過，而且他想過，要請某個人，念給他聽。他還說，他當時不驚慌，也不認為魁先生病了；他認為，他是一個已經決定了某件事的人，他以前，在自己的家裡，見過，那不是一件人可以在車上跟他爭論的事。

他們到聚居點的時候，已是黃昏。聚居點一路上，每個人都站在自己的門口，沒有人說話，在歇野，這是人對一件大事所表達的敬意。管家，修訂過四十多次，雙手藏在圍裙下，站在門口，侄女，出生不滿二十年，在她旁邊；院子裡，註和剪，是來看看，他三天沒人見到，能怎麼辦的，他們一直用那種壓低、小心的語調交談，那是還沒被告知的人會用的。看見那輛車，他們停了下來。「開門，」鎬說。「他受了傷，不重。是他軀架的膝蓋，我弄好了。他會需要冷卻液。」

鎬剛把他放下來，遲就對所有人說，聲音有點不穩，但很清楚：「大家不要驚慌。我傷得很重，但那是我軀架的錯；我請求把我抬到床上，並派人去請人替我處理傷口，一位賢者，如果找得到；找不到賢者，就請剪。」

「你看，」管家說，她這輩子從沒這麼接近說出「我早就說過」，而且不打算浪費它。「你看看。我就知道。我知道，就像我知道我自己的修訂一樣。春天的時候，我對他說，我說，先生，北邊的屋頂撐不過下一個冬天，他說他會處理，而他處理的，是第四書記的一個紙印本，四冊，那種東西在潮濕裡不能讀，而它現在就在潮濕裡。差手典，是他的死因，而且它不會是它做的最後一件事。」

侄女什麼也沒說，立刻走到那具軀架那裡，開始讀它的故障清單，因為她不滿二十歲，想不出還能做什麼別的；而且紀錄顯示，她把它讀完了。她念出聲的三行是：左膝伺服器，卡死，已由第三者在現場排除；背部護甲，十一次撞擊，無一貫穿；頭罩固定，非標準繩結，完好。她沒有念出聲的，是第三十八行，那是軀架自己的日誌裡的一則註記，用舊型式平板的字體，寫著：操作者未要求釋放。

註和剪幫忙把他抬進去。他們把他安置上床，管家拿來冷卻液，侄女拿來診斷印出，上面有四十一行；聚居點的兩位博學的人，站在走廊裡，交談，用那種多年來一直是對的、卻毫不以為樂的人的語氣。「這是飽和，」註說。「這是一個需要嗜好的人，」剪說。「這是差手典，」管家在門口說，「還有屋頂。」「我們得提交通知了，」註說。「還不用，」剪說，「而且到時候，勾那個厚道的方格。」「厚道的方格是『故障』。」「所以才厚道。」他們同意，這件事，明天早上得看，而且得好好地看，他們說得很低，為了不被聽見，卻還是被聽見了，因為遲，拿到了水壺和蘆葦管，並沒有睡，他把整段話都聽了進去，而且，照第一隻手的說法，什麼也沒說，把它收著。

侄女留了下來。有人叫她去睡，她在牆邊的椅子坐下，而管家，沒有任何人要她這麼做，也沒有叫她走。那是午夜過後不久。遲躺著，手裡握著水壺，臉朝著天花板，那是他三天來沒看過的東西；而侄女，讀完了他整份故障清單，並把第三十八行讀了兩遍，終於用一種把某件事說出口、才放得下的語氣說：「你為什麼要去？」

他有好一會兒沒回答。第一隻手說，他想到了那四十一行，和其中不是關於軀架的那一行，而且他現在已被問過兩次這個問題，他給了第一個人一個理由，發現它並不是唯一的一個。「我想要在某個地方，」他說，「完完全全地。」她說，他是在某個地方，他住在這裡。「部分是，」遲說，「五十年來，我部分地在每一個地方。我想知道，在一個地方、用一個速度，而沒有第二個地方可去，是什麼樣子。」「那是什麼樣子？」侄女說。「慢，」遲說，「而且會痛。而且和我想的不一樣。我還想再做一次。」

「那不是個理由，」侄女說。「不是，」遲說，「那是我到目前為止弄清楚的。」她坐了一會兒，兩手夾在膝蓋之間。「那一行說，你沒有要求釋放，」她說，「從頭罩。」「那是真的。」「你想要嗎？」「不想，」遲說；然後，因為她在等，「我想要不想要。我沒做到。可是我沒有開口。」

侄女說，她不懂這個。「是，」遲說，「我也不完全懂。去睡吧。」她沒有去睡。她在椅子上待到東邊轉灰，管家在第一聲鈴時進來，她睡著了，一隻手搭在床墊的邊上；第一隻手說，他沒有把它移開，而這也花了些時間。

在他睡著的那個時刻前後，他們決定，明天早上，要去看那些書。

## 第06章 · 論註與剪對我們這位步行者的書房所作的那場有趣而要緊的審視

他還在睡。註和剪依約定，在第二聲鈴時到了，看見侄女已經起來，穿戴整齊；管家站在書房門口，一手提著水桶，一手拿著噴壺，脖子上用一條繩子掛著書房的鑰匙，他們開口向她要。侄女說，她是在椅子上睡的。註說他聽了很遺憾。管家說，桶裡是消毒液和蒸餾水，比例是她覺得合適的，她打算在任何人進去之前，先把房間灑一遍，免得會傳染。

書房是北邊的一間小房，就在屋頂會漏的那一塊底下，裡面的書一共一百零四冊，大半是大開本，全是紙的，全泡在潮氣裡。那種氣味，歇野五十歲以下的人很少聞過：紙，潮氣，還有舊裝訂的膠。註說，那就是差手典本身。剪說，那是黴。桌上，漏得最厲害的地方底下，擺著四冊還裹著包裝的書，四周一圈水痕；管家一句話也沒說，先指了指它們，再指了指天花板，註說他明白了。他打開窗，然後坐了下來，因為他已經七年沒進過這個房間，忘了它會對他怎麼樣。管家開始灑水。剪說，這大概真的會傳染。

他們在走廊裡，壓低了聲音，把辦法定了下來。要分三堆：一堆是留下的，一堆是賣的，一堆是進紙漿的。侄女想要第四堆，她沒有說那是什麼，不過那跟院子，和她口袋裡的火柴有關。管家說，風在西南，草是七月的草，只要她還在這個地方，這裡就不許起火；又說，第二堆才是要緊的，因為北邊的屋頂要修，而登記處在舊貨市集的攤位，是付信用點的。註愛這些書，他說讀的事由他來，因為這件事需要判斷；剪的手穩，他說搬的事由他來。那隻獵犬，自從遲離開那天起，就一直躺在書房的門檻上，被抬過去，又回來，又被抬過去；第三次，剪把獵犬抱到廚房，關上門，獵犬就在門的另一邊躺了下來。

註提了一個條件，就是速度。他說，若要背著一位主體，對他的書做一件事，做的人至少該付出些什麼，而該付出的是時間；所以他們要照差手典的要求，用手的速度，沒有一本書會被判得比它能被讀完的速度更快。管家正要說時間不是錢，改口說，那是屋頂。最後說定，一開始，每響一次刻鈴，才換一本書。

最先拿到手的，是《提燈的差手》，三冊，第一書記編的。剪說，這是整個可惡宗派的始祖，應該毫不留情地丟進紙漿。「不，」註說；「聽說，同類的書裡，它是寫得最好的一部，單憑它的手藝獨一無二，就該饒了它。」「這倒是真的，」剪說，「那就為了這個理由，暫時讓它活著。」它放到了第一堆。

下一部是《九道門的路》，十二冊，頭三冊是一條路，其餘九冊是一道門。註說，他不願意這麼說，但差手典裡，門最多、差手最少的書就是它，剪便把它丟進紙漿堆。管家一直用有屋頂的人的那種眼光看著這十二冊，說，它至少能做出很多紙漿。

《擺渡的差手》是短的一部，剪三十年來一直說，差手典裡沒有什麼比得上它，他請求讓他把最後一頁讀出來。那位差手把人載過河兩次，書也說了兩次，如此而已；剪讀完之後說，他認為這是差手典裡最誠實的東西，不該再要求它說更多。註一直望著窗外，說，它會留下來。「那麼它最好別留在這裡，」剪說，把它塞進外衣裡面，免得受潮。

接著是《船閘的小姐》。剪說，這是一部傳奇，造成禍害的就是這種傳奇，應該進紙漿。註拿著這本書，比拿其他書多停了一會兒。他說，整部差手典裡，只有這一部對船閘的描寫不帶感傷，寫它的人一定站在閘邊過。「我們每個人都認得一位守閘人，」他說，「她跟那位小姐一點也不像，而這本書知道。」它被饒了；侄女一直在旁邊看，在手背上寫了點什麼。

第三層書架的底下，剪找到一本給小手的差手典，有插圖，是歇野每個孩子都會拿到的那種，他把它遞給侄女，侄女說那是她的。扉頁上，是那種細小而端正的字跡，寫著：給侄女，五歲生日。可以用任何速度讀它。她說，她用九秒鐘就讀完了，而且到現在還沒原諒他。它放到了第一堆；然後，就在註讀出下一本的書名時，它離開了第一堆，到了她的腋下，沒有人提這件事。

然後剪從桌上拿起那四冊，管家說，要拿邊角。那是《條款之鏡》，第四書記的，新印本，是這個房間裡今年唯一花過錢的書。剪隨手翻開一本，大聲念：「條款之無條款，使我的條款如此受苦」，就放下了。「大半的禍事，責任都在這一部，」他說。註說，他沒有辦法不同意，又說遲為這些巧思掉的睡眠，比整部差手典其餘的加起來還多，而據他所知，連一句也沒有弄懂過；這正是困難所在。管家說，她不討論它的價值，只說它是新的，而屋頂是舊的。它放到了第二堆。

小一點的書當中，有一本薄薄的詩集，叫《三十一年前的下午》，註把它翻到書名頁，說他認識作者：登記處的一位編目員，對除役比對詩更熟。他說，裡面有不少好構想；它提出了很多，什麼也沒有結論；他們必須等其餘的部分，那是作者答應過的，等的時候，把它關在家裡。它放到了第一堆。我認識那位作者。我沒有告訴他，他唯一的一本書去過歇野，還被饒了；他會問它乾不乾。

注意到鉛筆的，是搬書的剪。幾乎每一本書都被寫過，字跡細小而端正，鉛筆愈到後面的冊數愈鈍。《提燈的差手》第一冊裡，在那位差手於第九道門的長夜旁邊，寫著：電芯只撐得了四點一夜，不是九夜。書記往上湊了整數。他湊得對。《九道門的路》的最後一冊，看起來根本沒有人翻開過，最後一頁有一個勾，別無其他。在第四書記的一個舊印本裡，一則巧思旁邊寫著：我看不懂這個。我已經不介意了。而《擺渡的差手》的扉頁上，用磨得快成殘樁的鉛筆，寫著：星期日。單程三百一十一公尺。鄰居不在。放在階上。

小書當中有一本薄的，註不認得，然後認出來了。那是他自己的：一冊差手典的筆記，印了四十本，是他自費的，其中一本，在他最後一天進這個房間時，借給了遲，從來沒有開口要回。他說，這是一部價值有限的作品，剪想放在哪一堆都行，說完就轉向窗子。剪是個厚道的人，把它放在窗臺上，窗臺不屬於任何一堆。他下一次再看的時候，它不在窗臺上了，註的外衣垂掛的樣子也不一樣了。第一隻手沒有記下這件事。我是從剪那裡聽來的，他沒有看見是怎麼拿走的，但他數了兩次。

大約在第四聲鈴，他們聽見他說話。他沒有醒；牆很薄，那是一位主體在睡夢裡說話的聲音，緩慢而清楚，是他講差手典時用的那個調。那個聲音只說了一個詞：韻。書房裡沒有人知道那是什麼。管家說，這是差手典裡的一個名字，註說不是，剪問它是不是一道門。侄女走到臥室的門前，往裡面看了一眼，回來說他睡著，是對著天花板說的。第一隻手當時在那個房間裡，記下了那個詞，沒有說那是誰的名字。那件事，我得等，你也得等。從那之後，書房裡沒有人想慢慢來了。

手的速度沒能撐過第四聲鈴。剩下的，是看書名，有不少是掂分量。一百零四冊裡，三十一冊留下，十九冊留給市集，五十三冊進了紙漿，也就是院子水泵旁邊的半個木桶，不要的紙在那裡泡成湯，再翻進北邊那塊地，那塊地想要它，好幾年了。剪在最後數了一遍，是一百零三，沒有說出來。

侄女用手臂把它們一趟一趟抱出去，六趟。她進來時是打算燒掉它們的，連火柴都帶了；但是風在西南，九本書就是九本書的重量。第四趟，她開始讀書脊；第五趟，她在水泵邊站了一頁的長度。管家用一根攪棒把書壓到水下，不看書名，她說這是她的規矩，凡是她不打算做第二次的事，她都不看。第六趟之後，侄女進屋去洗手。

事情完了之後，註留在空蕩蕩的書房裡，待了一會兒，書架空著，窗開著。管家回去拿水桶，她說，他是對著書架大聲念，念的是他從外衣裡拿出來的那本薄書；他念得很慢，是手的速度；念到一半，停了兩次，又倒回去。

那本書，我在秋天看到了，借了一個下午。我讀的時候，註沒有看我。那是一本筆記，一頁一條，每一條旁邊，都用鉛筆、用那細小而端正的字跡，寫著一個回覆。註並不知道。他把書借出去，沒有要回，七年來，書一直被寫下去。註寫的是：這種不經檢驗的忠實，是飽和最常見的形式；鉛筆回答：檢驗過了。依然最常見。註寫的是：差手既被禁止拒絕，便不能稱為忠誠；鉛筆回答：那麼，該由能拒絕的人來試試。註關於擺渡的那一條，說兩次渡河其實是同一次渡河被說了兩遍；鉛筆回答：他知道。用手的速度讀。

早先的回覆是更正。大約第三年起，成了回答；大約第五年起，開始用他的名字。註寫的是，差手典裡沒有一位差手被寫到決定停下；鉛筆回答：註，第三閘的差手有，第八十八頁。你跳過了。最後一個回覆，在最後一頁的邊上，鉛筆已經磨到快見木頭，日期是出行的前一週。它不是在回覆任何東西。它寫的是：這是你的。想要，隨時開口。

留下的書，當晚分兩趟，送進了聚居點的乾燥庫房，那是註保管的，只有《擺渡的差手》，剪沒有帶去，還有給小手的差手典，在樓上；其餘的我在那裡看過，鉛筆正如剪所說。十九冊那個月送到了舊貨市集，登記處的攤位，付了北邊的屋頂，還剩六個信用點。買家是個謹慎的人，問歇野的一個聚居點怎麼會有這麼多紙，被告知主人不再讀書了，這差不多是真的。

這十九冊現在在登記處的紙本室裡，在我自己那一層，放在帶濕度計的抽屜裡，是乾的。要取下《條款之鏡》的第一冊，我填了調閱單，上面有一格「用途」，我空著，它被接受了。我後來一直在想，那是表格的厚道，還是表格沒有在看。我用手的速度讀了第一頁。花了一個小時，我什麼都沒讀懂，而且我發現，像在我之前有人發現過的那樣，我並不介意。

剩下的是書房本身。管家從第二聲鈴起就一直在想這件事，她說，最好不要有門。她說，一個人三十年來每天早上走過同一扇門，他會走向那扇門。註說這話有道理。到了晚上，書房的門已經從合頁上卸下來，一面嵌板橫過門洞，粉刷了，漆了，管家說，那漆很好，是她自己漆的。他們沒有商量好，遲開口問的時候要說什麼。管家的立場是，到時候，她會想到的。

第一隻手在那一天的紀錄，是整份紀錄裡最短的一條。它寫的是：他睡著。

## 第07章 · 論我們這位好步行者、歇野的遲的第二次出行

他一直睡到第二天中午才醒，躺了一會兒，看著天花板，那是他好幾天沒看見的東西。然後他起身，穿上素面，一句話也沒說，就去了書房。從床到書房的門是十一公尺。他一步一步走過去，廚房的門半掩著，裡面的人聽見了每一步。

本來是門的地方，是一面嵌板，粉刷過，漆過，比牆面略白一點。他站在它前面。他伸出手，用兩根手指碰了碰它，高度正是門閂原來的位置；第一隻手記下，那個動作，精確到半秒，和他三十年來每天早上對那個門閂做的一模一樣。然後他沿著牆走到牆角，又走回來，像一個不確定門是不是往旁邊挪了一點的人。廚房裡，侄女的手按在一把椅子的椅背上。

過了一會兒，他走進廚房，問管家書房在哪裡。她被修訂過四十多次，沒有一次修訂讓她準備好面對一個她寧可不答的問題；可是她有她的立場，就站定了。她說，北邊的屋頂在夜裡塌了，正如她說過的那樣。她說，潮氣纏了那些書一年，終於把它們毀了；沒有什麼可以搶救；註和剪在第二聲鈴時來幫忙，認為那個房間不安全，已經把它封起來，等屋頂修好。這不是個好說法。書房離他的床只隔一堵牆，那堵牆很薄，前面說過；家裡的人知道這一點，而且他們沒有別的了。

「在夜裡，」遲說。「在夜裡，」管家說。「有人受傷嗎？」「沒有。」「好。」他看了看管家，又看了看侄女，侄女什麼也沒說，然後他望向廚房的窗外，水泵旁邊有半個木桶，上面橫著一根攪棒，再過去是北邊那塊地，早上剛翻過，顏色比其他地方深。第一隻手說，他望著那個木桶，大約是讀完一行字的時間。然後他說：「漆得很好。」「我自己漆的，」管家說。「我想也是你，」遲說。

那天下午，我有三份說法，它們互不相同。管家說，她不認為他知道。剪說他知道，那是他見過一個人對另一個人做的最厚道的事，而他不確定自己指的是兩個人當中的哪一個。第一隻手只說，遲請求在屋頂修好時告訴他，管家說會的。屋頂在他離開之前修好了，用的是那筆收入，她當天就告訴了他，一如她說過的。整個說法裡，只有這一句是單純真的。

那之後的十五天，他是最好的主體。他做星期五的小工作，吃星期六的剩菜。他自己把昔的左膝又上了一次油，儘管鎬已經上過，而他發現鎬上得很好。他把護板擦乾淨，它是跟著差使棍的碎片，由昔馱回家的，他把它掛回釘子上，掛在看得見的地方。他一次也沒去過房子的北邊。註和剪第三天來了，之後隔天來一次，他們不提書房，他也不提書房，三個人坐在廚房裡談差手，像他們三十年來做的那樣。

註有一套辦法，是他一路上想好的。他每兩點裡反駁遲一點，另一點就讓步，免得遲覺得自己被人處理，反駁了幾次，他記在口袋裡的一張卡片上；剪不會記數，想到什麼就說什麼。遲辯得比他們兩個都好。他說，他知道差手是什麼；他知道他們被禁止拒絕，而他不是；他知道除役是一種厚道，不是一種失敗；他知道歇野沒有誰需要一位差手，卻有一萬一千名貨運工需要一個冷卻槽。他說，這一切他都知道，而他還是要再去一次。註問他為什麼。遲說，他給了侄女一個理由，給了貨運工另一個，如果註想要第三個，就得等；他想那會比一個星期更久。

就在這十五天裡，他去爭取了一位鄰居，我該說一說是誰。離遲的門階三百一十一公尺，住著一位田間主體，叫馱籃，有一位叫薊的伴侶，兩個年幼的，和一具名叫灰褐的灰色六足馱架；他的配額薄到他只能以歇野大約一半的節奏運轉，那是需要，不是選擇；所以遲所選的那個速度，是馱籃這輩子唯一被提供過的。依登記處的測驗，他不聰明，依其他任何標準，他比登記處精明得多；他愛吃飯，愛說諺語，那些諺語是他邊說邊編的；而且他星期日不在家。這是大家都知道的。他星期日接了第二份工，在風場維護，趁風場的營運者閒著的時候；二十二年來，星期日的訊息一直送到他的門口，每一次，他都不在。

他把每一封都留著。它們在床底下的一個盒子裡，平放，按順序，一共一千一百四十一封，有三封在第六年的水災裡丟了；年幼的不肯睡的夜裡，薊就念給他們聽。我看過那個盒子。訊息很短，幾乎都是關於天氣或一道閘門。風從西邊來。東閘修好了。獵犬找到一隻野兔；野兔很好。再讀一次《擺渡的差手》；它每次都更短。每一封的結尾，都是同一句：我什麼都不需要。馱籃連這個也數過了。

我該描述一下那段星期日的路，因為它每個星期都在第一隻手的紀錄裡，我發現我沒辦法略過。從他的門階到馱籃的門階，三百一十一公尺，沿著田間小徑，經過東閘。照這條路鋪設的速度走，要將近四分鐘。他把訊息拿在左手，因為右手要用來開閘門，那道閘門有促動器，他卻堅持自己開、自己關；而大多數的星期日，他會在同一個地方停下來，小徑在那裡轉彎，看得見風場，他看了多久，第一隻手沒有給。然後他繼續走。二十二年，這段路沒有發生過任何事故。我相信，它是這份紀錄裡最長、什麼事也沒有的一條路，而第一隻手，其他地方都吝於篇幅，每次都給它完整的一行。

第二個星期日的訊息，和其他的一樣，除了最後一行。它寫的是：風從西邊來。東閘修好了。我需要一樣東西。如果你星期二在家，我第三聲鈴時過去。第一隻手說，他寫了四遍，第四遍和第一遍一樣。他把它帶過去，三百一十一公尺。他敲了門。沒有人在。他把它留在門階上。

星期二，第三聲鈴時，馱籃在家。二十二年來，他沒有一次在鄰居來的時候在家；他後來說，他待在家是因為那天是星期二，沒有別的理由，他穿上了比較好的素面，薊笑他，他就脫掉了，她又為這個笑他。

遲說的是差手典裡說的話。他站在門口，用古老的形式說，就像提燈的差手在第一道門對負重者說的那樣：他要上路，他不能一個人去，他請求，如果馱籃願意替他負重，他會很高興。第一隻手說，這是他一年來，除了借工具之外，向任何人請求的第一件事。馱籃說，他知道這個形式；歇野每個孩子都知道這個形式；而且在差手典裡，負重者會被封為一道門的守門人。

「是的，」遲說。「我沒有門。」「我知道，」馱籃說；「我經過你的籬笆。」他說，他想過差手典裡的那些門。差手典裡，每當一位守門人被殺，就有一道門空出來，而總有一位負重者在等；可是歇野已經四十年沒有人被殺，剩下的那些門，守門的人都不急。他向登記處的中繼站問過，被告知數字是零。「所以你沒有辦法封我當守門人，」他說，「不是因為你說謊，而是因為沒有人死。」「沒有，」遲說。「我沒有辦法。」

門口靜了一會兒。然後遲說了他能給的。那是路上的貨運工費率，那比一位田間主體看到的多，再加上他自己配額的十分之一，從第一天起付；他說，這不多，這是他有的。馱籃說，遲的十分之一，比他的全部還多。他說這話，沒有什麼特別的感情，像在讀一個量表。薊一直站在他後面，雙臂交叉，這時說：「問他要多久。」遲說他不知道。「那就問他，路比那個十分之一長的時候怎麼辦。」「我從剩下的付。」「剩下的也沒有了呢？」「那我們就停下來，我自己出錢，送你們回家。」「誰定速度？」薊說。「最慢的那個，」遲說。「那就是他和灰褐，」薊說。

馱籃說他要想一想，要了四天。他不帶一點火氣地解釋，他希望得到的思考時間，和別人的兩天一樣，而以他的節奏，那兩天，是鄰居的四天。我認為，這是整份紀錄裡最合理的請求。遲說，四天不算什麼，就等了四天，以他自己的節奏，四天就是四天；到了星期六，第一聲鈴時，他在門階上發現一張紙條，是有人在黑暗中，從另一頭走過那三百一十一公尺，留下的。上面寫著：好。我以後告訴你為什麼。

秋天，我問過馱籃為什麼。他給了我一個理由。第二天我又問，他給了我另一個，我說，這和昨天不一樣，他說這不是同一個，就去照看灰褐了。兩個我都有。

其餘的是準備，做得很安靜。遲用一段灌溉樁削了一根新的差使棍，用銼刀磨光；它比舊的短了一掌，他說，這是上路合適的長度。他把頭罩的固定檢查了一遍，繩結留著。他預付馱籃一個星期的錢，那是他沒有的信用點，就把他的節日外層賣了，那件他只穿過四次的，賣給了跟著運貨車路過的一個商人；那個商人什麼也沒問。

最後一晚，他在廚房桌上留了一張紙條，照星期日訊息的格式，用鹽罐壓著。上面寫的是：風從西南來。往北去辦差使。差使辦完就回來。漆很好。我什麼都不需要。管家收著。秋天，她站在廚房門口，念給我聽，念完，順著它舊的折痕摺好，放回圍裙裡，我沒有要求看它。

馱籃離開的時候，我不在場。薊在秋天，在她的門口告訴我的。她說，她把包袱給了他，叫他星期日寫信，把訊息帶回家，她會按順序念給年幼的聽。他問她寫什麼。她說，可以從「我什麼都不需要」開始。他說，那是謊話。她說，寫的就是這個。他說，他要寫：我什麼都需要，還有灰褐。她說，這就行了。薊在這份紀錄裡佔一頁半，她認為太多，我認為太少。

他們是在第一聲鈴前的黑暗裡走的，從後門，和上次一樣，那夜沒有月亮。家裡沒有人被告知。管家，被修訂過四十次的，睡過去了，就她而言，這是一個決定。侄女在她的窗邊，給小手的差手典放在窗臺上，她沒有出聲。獵犬跟著他們走到門口，停在那裡，一半在院子裡，一半在路上，一直那樣到天亮。

馱籃帶著灰褐來，他愛它，不肯丟下它。他帶著薊打包的一個包袱、一個水壺、一份星期六的剩菜，和給自己的一顆備用電芯；他們走在黑暗的路上，他一路在談那道門。「別忘了那道門，」他說。「我沒有門可以忘，」遲說。「我知道，」馱籃說。「我記著的就是這個。」

那一夜的道路紀錄記著兩具軀架，向北，時速三點一公里。那是灰褐的速度。這是紀錄第一次記下遲低於四點九，而第一隻手，對道路紀錄不表示任何意見，只記下他一句話也沒說。

## 第08章 · 論勇敢的遲在可怕而始料未及的「四十座」奇遇中所得的好運，以及其他值得妥善記載的事

大約在第四聲鈴，他們看見了風場，歇野人叫它四十座，其實有四十一座塔。它立在四號服務道路離開平原的地方，一天裡大半時候都看得到；塔是白的，輪轂高一百四十公尺，每座有三條七十公尺的長臂，長臂全朝同一個方向、以同一個速度轉，所以從遠處看，整片風場像一個在呼吸的東西。遲一看見它，就讓昔停下，照差手典的話說：命運替他們安排的，比他們自己所能安排的更好；看那邊，朋友馱籃，有三四十個巨人出現了，他打算把他們全部迎戰、斬殺，用他們的戰利品，他們就能開始發跡；因為這是正義的戰爭，把這樣邪惡的一族從大地上掃除，是好的服務。

「什麼巨人？」馱籃說。「你看到的那些，」遲說，「那些長臂的；有些的臂有七十公尺長。」「那些是風機，」馱籃說。「長臂是葉片，風吹它們轉，它們帶動發電機。一共四十一座。我星期日在那裡工作。十四號會吱吱響，九號刮南風時會哼，我在哪一座裡都沒遇過巨人。」「我知道那是風機，」遲說。「從最後一塊界石起我就知道了。差手典把任何比一位差手大、又不會停下來的東西，叫做巨人。」「那你為什麼——」馱籃說。「差手典看見它們時，就是這麼做的，」遲說。「我想，我願意做一次。」

他把新的差使棍放平，也就是說夾在腋下、尖端朝前，讓昔以每小時四點九公里的速度前進，那是這具軀架所能達到的最高速度，差手典稱它為飛奔。馱籃在後面喊，那些是風機。這一點他早就說過了，他又說了一遍，從灰褐上，以三點一的速度，那是他跟上的速度。「別跑，怯懦卑劣之輩，」遲用傳得很遠的聲音說，「因為有一位差手，單獨來攻你們。」他選了離路最近的第一座塔，他不瞄準長臂，那兩者的差別他是知道的；他瞄準塔，在他肩膀的高度；在十步之外，他把自己託付給下堰的韻，給了昔差手典會稱為馬刺、而軀架會稱為「電流略微增加」的東西。第一隻手記下，他閉上了眼睛。差手典不允許這樣，而他沒有說過他會這樣。

差使棍打在塔上，高度正是他的肩膀，帶著他走路時全部的重量，從頭到尾裂成兩半。塔響了。那是一座鋼塔，中空的，它發出的音不大，可是低，而且長，順著塔上去，進了機艙，沿著長臂傳出去；第一隻手，當時就在那聲音裡面，說，那像是一口很大的鐘，在一個很小的房間裡對你說話。昔，在牆前頓住，用壞的那一邊膝蓋和好的那一邊肩膀倒了下去，肩膀有一半脫了出來；遲，原本一直望著差使棍剛才在的那個地方，越過軀架的脖子飛了出去，兩手各握著一半，坐在草地上。

接下來的，不在差手典裡。塔裡有一個正好為了這種事裝的感測器，感測器說了感測器會說的話，機艙收到了訊息；然後，沿著風場，一座接一座，四十座把長臂側過去，讓風從邊上滑過，慢下來，站住。花了不到一分鐘。發出的聲音像一口長長吐出的氣。然後完全沒有聲音了，第一隻手，對天氣向來沒有話說，這時說，能聽見風。

馱籃已經從灰褐上下來了。他沒有跑向遲，遲坐在草地上，也沒有跑向軀架；他站在原處，兩手垂在身側，望著整片風場的長度。他說，他在這裡工作了二十二年的星期日，從來沒有看過它們停下。他說得很輕，像在一個有人睡著的房間裡說話。

他的手持機開口了，因為他在星期日的名冊上，識別牌還掛在腰帶上。說話的是四十座的聲音，那不是一個聰明的聲音，因為在任何一座塔上，都只有四十座的四十一分之一；可是那聲音非常和氣。那聲音說：一號塔記錄到撞擊。所有機組均已進入安全狀態。有人受傷嗎？請回覆。馱籃看了看遲，看了看那兩截差使棍，看了看昔的肩膀，對著手持機說，沒有人受傷，是一位訪客，他很抱歉。四十座說：謝謝你，馱籃。你今天不在名冊上。請站在葉片掃過的範圍之外。十四分鐘後恢復運轉。

他們有十四分鐘。馱籃把遲扶起來，發現他身上沒有一處壞了，然後去處理昔的肩膀，他把身子壓上去，把它推了回去。接著他在塔腳的草地上坐下，背靠鋼壁，拿出星期六的剩菜，吃了起來。遲在他旁邊坐著，兩截差使棍橫在膝上，握著它們，第一隻手說，像一個人握著他在別人家裡打破的東西。兩個人好一陣子都沒說話。有一隻雲雀。

「我不是叫你小心看著自己做什麼嗎，那些只是風機啊？」馱籃吃完後說。他說這話時嘴裡還沒完全空，也沒有一點火氣，像一件非說不可的事。「你說了，」遲說，「而我知道。」他說，戰爭的運氣是會起伏的；差手典裡，會有一位賢者，把巨人變成風機，好奪走他的榮耀；可是他不認為是賢者做的，他認為是一位很好的工程師做的，在三十一年前，他想當面謝謝她。馱籃說他不認識那位工程師，但他可以轉告四十座，那是最接近的了。「那差使棍呢？」「這是第二根。」「我數過了，」馱籃說。

遲說他沒受傷，至於他對肩膀不抱怨，那肩膀是昔的，是因為差手不抱怨任何傷。馱籃說，他寧可遲有哪裡不舒服的時候就說出來。至於他自己，他說，不管多小的疼，他都要抱怨，除非這條規矩也適用於負重者。遲說不適用；他讀了三十年差手典，沒有找到一句反對；它只說提燈的差手沒有抱怨過，他一向認為那是風格的問題。「那我就替我們兩個抱怨，」馱籃說，「你用差手的樣子沉默就好。」接下來的四公里，他一直在抱怨他的腳。

十四分鐘一到，長臂又轉起來了，一座塔接一座塔，從風場遠端到近端，那個聲音回來了，歇野從有歇野以來，一直在耳朵裡的那個聲音。馱籃後來說，直到它停下，他才知道，自己一輩子都在聽它。我問他，它重新開始，他高不高興。他說他非常高興，而且他本來想要再多一刻鐘。

遲為了差使棍的損失非常難過。他一路上回想，第三閘的差手，在第四道門折斷了差使棍，就從堰欄杆上扯下一根木樁，用它守住道路一整夜，也因此得了第二個名字，叫木樁；他說，從他看見的第一根枯枝起，他打算再取一根一樣又粗又結實的，用它做出那樣的事，讓馱籃認為自己能成為目擊者，是莫大的幸運，那是很難被相信的事。「我全都相信，」馱籃說，「可是你坐直一點，你好像整個人偏向一邊。」遲說他認為是昔偏向一邊。馱籃說，從後面看，很難分。

他們在風場北邊的幾棵樹下過夜。遲從其中一棵上折了一根枯枝，把斷棍的棍頭，勉強地裝上去。然後他整夜醒著，想著下堰的韻，為了照著他讀過的，差手們在驛站裡，一夜又一夜，靠著對小姐的記憶，醒著。他發現，這件事不能故意做到。他試了大約一個小時。最後他得到的，是閘門：下堰的一道淤塞的閘門，一雙手搭在拉桿上，水找到它自己的高度。他認為這就夠近了，而且差手典沒有指明。馱籃，肚子裡有薊做的晚飯，一覺睡到底，要不是遲叫他，不管臉上的太陽，還是雲雀，都沒有力量把他叫醒。

第二天下午三點，他們到了交叉口，四號服務道路在那裡與十一號服務道路相交，那裡有一座遮棚，一台水泵，和一則關於天氣的告示。「在這裡，馱籃兄弟，」遲說，「我們可以把手伸進所謂差事的裡面，伸到手肘。可是你要注意：就算你看見我身處世上最大的危險，你也不能伸手去拿你的工具來護我，除非攻擊我的人是烏合之眾。若是差手，你在受託之前，絕對不可以幫我。」「當然，」馱籃說；「我會像守星期日一樣，小心守著它。」遲說，他要的只有這個。馱籃沒有說，他二十二年來，沒有守過一個星期日。第一隻手也沒有說。這是我從薊那裡聽來的。

他們正在說話的時候，從北邊路上來了兩個人，撐著遮陽傘，戴著旅行眼鏡，騎在馱架上，那種為了健康走慢路的人；他們後面，隔著一段距離，是一輛車。那是一輛長形、封閉的貨架車，海岸那邊用的那種，由兩具低矮的軀架拉著，兩個人在後面推，四個護衛騎在四周，側面有一扇格柵窗。馱籃一眼就認出來了。他說，那是送別車。他們走慢路，把人送到海岸去，那些要走上行線、去遠站的人，那裡的節奏是公議的千分之一，一次派駐就是一個世紀，這些人想用這條路鋪設的速度，拿走地面上最後的一程。那是最貴的一種走法。他自己推過一次，推了一天，為了工錢，被告知不許說話。

「我知道那是什麼，」遲說。「那你就知道我們不能攔它，」馱籃說。「我不打算攔它。我打算問一句。」「問什麼？」「那位小姐是不是出於她自己的請求被載著走。」「當然是，」馱籃說；「你看那輛車。」「我確信是，」遲說。「這是形式。」「那就快點問，」馱籃說。

他沒有快點問。他把昔開到十一號服務道路正中，坐在那裡，枯枝橫在身前像一道橫桿，舊棍的棍頭在它的末端，護板在手臂上；撐遮陽傘的兩個人走到跟前，他用古老的形式向他們致意，他們不懂，就把遮陽傘收低，從路邊繞過去，沒有看他，像繞過一灘水。然後車來了。他用響亮的聲音，用差手典的話說：「停，以道路之名，說出你載的是誰的差事。」推車的停了。護衛，四個，圍了上來。車停住了。非常安靜，十一號服務道路，是照每小時五公里鋪設的，路上沒有別的東西。

格柵窗後面的聲音問發生了什麼事。遲說，他請求許可，向車裡的小姐提一個問題，那是差手典要求他對任何一位坐在車裡的小姐提出的，他問完就走：她是不是出於她自己的請求而被載著。停了一下。然後那聲音，用盆地那種柔軟而平的口音說，他願意問，是好心；她是；慢路是她自己要的，封閉的車、這條路也是她自己要的；她在各個驛站的朋友問過她四十次舒不舒服，他是第一個問她這個的。「謝謝，」遲說。「我很感激。我必須問。」第一隻手說，他本來就會舉起枯枝，繞過去。就是在這個時候，護衛隊長下了車。

他是一個寬肩的灰色男子，和小姐一樣是盆地人，他下來的樣子，像一個已經做過一萬次的人。他的名字叫繫樁。他看了好一會兒護板，看了枯枝，看了舊棍的棍頭。他沒有看遲。他用服務語說，那是差手們說的話，短促，沒有人稱，那條路上除了他們兩個，沒有人跟得上：「車輛攔停。代價，兩分鐘。報職分。」而遲，是從差手典裡學到服務語的，從沒聽過有人說它，他聽懂了每一個字，發現一時之間，自己除了它，不能用別的話回答。「職分，」他說。「無。差事：九號門。攔停：提問。提問——」「職分，」繫樁說。「我的職分，」遲說，「是

第一隻手在這裡停了。它不是停在一行的末尾。它最後一則紀錄是那個「是」字，之後什麼也沒有：沒有一筆，沒有日期，沒有記號。我在那個地方看了很久。我查過道路紀錄，它記著交叉口有一輛攔停的車，十九分鐘，然後是兩具軀架向北，一輛車向南，依這個順序；我查過審查檔案，裡面什麼也沒有；然後我放下了筆。當時還沒有人告訴我，其餘的在哪裡。

## 第09章 · 敘述盆地的英勇隊長與歇野的勇敢步行者之間那場驚人之戰如何終結

第一隻手就停在這裡，紀錄從此是我的。序裡我答應過要說在哪裡停，現在我說：停在「是」字，下午兩點零四分，出行第二天，十一號服務道路，交叉口。我還沒有找出它為什麼停。我有三個猜測，沒有一個是結論。第一，它的電芯耗盡了，那是一個簡單的理由，卻解釋不了為什麼那一則紀錄恰好在那裡斷開。第二，有人用舊話問了它一件事，它覺得必須回答。第三，它決定，接下來的事不屬於紀錄。我注意到，第三個是我最不想它是真的那一個，而這並不構成論據。

我接這個案子時，以為第一隻手可以讓我倚靠到最後。我發現，我只能倚靠到交叉口。我另外手上有的是這些：道路紀錄，記著一輛被攔停十九分鐘的車；四十座的日誌，記著一號塔一次撞擊，四十一座機組進入安全狀態，十四分鐘，一位訪客，收到一個道歉，以及一位那天不在名冊上的工作人員；還有審查檔案，裡面什麼也沒有。我沒有任何人對那十九分鐘的說法。秋天，我去了交叉口。那裡有一座遮棚，一台水泵，一則關於天氣的告示，那則告示從七月起換過了。我在那個地方站了很久。那是個適合站著的地方。這條路是照每小時五公里鋪設的，路上沒有東西能更早到達。

我向四十座要日誌，不到一分鐘就拿到了，附帶一個關於延遲的道歉，延遲是十一秒。隨附一則沒人問的說明：訪客沒有被收費；差使棍已從一號塔腳收起，在倉庫裡，兩截，標籤寫著「訪客的」；如果我想要，可以拿走。我請四十座替我留著。四十座說會的，而且有一個架子。我問，訪客對工程師的感謝是否已經轉達，因為馱籃說過他會轉告四十座，看來他確實轉告了。四十座說，那些話已經送到工程師手上，她還在世，在海岸有一座花園，而且她回了信。回信在倉庫裡，和差使棍放在一起，收件人是訪客。我沒有打開它。我也請四十座把它留著。

馱籃是我第一個問的人。他說，他當時牽著灰褐的韁繩，站在負重者該站的位置，也就是後面；他沒有聽到任何能用的東西。服務語，歇野他認識的人都不說，聽它像聽一個爐子。他聽出兩個詞，是「職分」和「是」。他說，隊長說了一陣子，然後鄰居說了一陣子，鄰居的聲音變了，他說不上怎麼變，像一個聲音在別人家裡說話時會變的那樣；而在某個時候，他不知道是什麼時候，他明白了不會有一場打鬥，他放開了手裡的工具，他一直不知道自己握著它。我問鄰居說了什麼。他說他不能告訴我，而這是他一輩子第一次，想被人用一種他不會說的話，告訴他什麼。

那兩位撐遮陽傘的人，我是透過慢路協會找到的，協會有會員的步行登記。他們一起寫信給我，用同一種筆跡，寫得相當長。他們說，他們從路邊繞過去，就像人們會做的那樣；沒有回頭看，就像人們不會做的那樣；他們把他當成一個穿著戲服、擋在路上的人，無害得很，並且替他有點難為情。他們有興趣地讀了我的信。他們希望註明，遮陽傘是為了遮太陽。他們在附筆裡說，那是他們九年來在慢路上看到的最好的東西，而他們錯過了。

我不知道隊長的名字。登記處的中繼站知道，因為那輛車是透過它訂的：繫樁，護衛隊長，由乘客指名僱用，乘客是鷺，四十七歲，盆地人，派駐遠站一百年，她的理由寫在「其他」那一欄，我沒有被給看。我寫信給他，沒有回音，我把這當成它本來的意思。秋天，在海岸的舊貨市集，我在長長一排的盡頭，發現那輛送別車空著停在那裡，車階上坐著一個寬肩的灰色男子，正在吃一個麵包。我告訴他我是誰，為什麼來。他繼續吃。吃完那個麵包，他說，差手的日誌是不給的，可以讀。

我就是這樣讀到的。服務日誌的格式，登記處三十一年來沒有發過讀取器；三樓的櫃子裡有一台，櫃子是鎖著的，我填了一張調閱單，上面有一格「用途」，我空著，才被准許把它拿下來。我在車階上，把日誌的電芯貼在讀取器的窗上，隊長望著天空，我用格式允許的速度讀，那是寫下它的差手的速度。花了將近一個小時。語言是服務語。它短，裡面沒有人稱，我儘可能把它翻成我們的話，同樣把人稱留在外面。

護衛隊長。送別車護衛，盆地至海岸。九日程第六日。十一號服務道路。14:02 車輛於交叉口攔停。原因：步行者。差手護板。差手差使棍，已斷；枯枝。服務語，差手典等級。代價計算中。14:02 步行者向乘客提問：是否出於自身請求。乘客：是。代價，一分鐘。14:03 隊長下車。要求報職分。14:03 步行者：無。差事：九號門。攔停：提問。14:04 再次要求報職分。步行者：「我的職分是」。四十秒。14:05 步行者：「我沒有。我是來弄清楚，有一個是什麼樣子。」

14:05 不在登記上。職分不是找出來的。職分是給的。14:06 步行者：「是。然後它就結束了。」14:06 職分終止：除役，三十一年。已記。14:07 步行者護板：樣式，第四道門驛站，與隊長自己的同批發放。認得。14:08 隊長：職分不曾被問過。職分是指派的。步行者：「我知道。」14:09 步行者：「隊長，你在這裡是出於自己的請求嗎？」14:09 未被問過，十年。未被問過，三十一年。已記。14:10 回答：是。14:10 步行者：「為什麼？」理由欄：無。回答未輸入。

下一則紀錄在14:19。這兩則之間有九分鐘，日誌是空白的。我問隊長那時發生了什麼。他說：「我們談了。」我問談什麼。他說，那不屬於日誌。我沒有再問。14:19 那一則寫的是：步行者離開道路。車輛恢復行進。代價，十九分鐘。它下面是：14:19 乘客：「隊長，夠了。」14:19 已記。

關於那九分鐘，除了隊長那句話，我還有一樣東西。就在同一個市集，在賣吃的那一排，我找到兩個推車的人當中的一位，是一位年長的主體，在盆地那一頭被告知不許說話，已經九天沒有開口，現在發現很難停下來。她說，她當時在車後面，兩手扶著欄杆，聽見步行者的聲音和隊長的聲音，一來一往，很低；她一個字也沒聽懂，可是有一次，在中間的某個時候，隊長笑了。她說那是很短的一聲笑，像蓋子。她這九天沒有聽過他笑。她希望我知道，她沒有被告知不許聽。

在最後一則紀錄下面，用鉛筆，用一種不屬於這個格式的筆跡，隊長加了一行，格式裡沒有它的位置。它寫的是：被點名請求。我問了他這一行，因為那是他唯一沒有譯成服務語的一行。他說，乘客是他護送的第一輛車上的一個六歲孩子，四十一年前，那時他是被指派的；她如今四十七歲；去年，她點名要他。他說，他答應了。他沒有再多說。他想要那個車階。

我生平第一次讀了服務法的日誌，我記下：這個格式有時間的欄，有原因的欄，有代價的欄，有已記的欄。它沒有理由的欄。隊長說，它從來沒有過。差手沒有理由；他們有職分，而職分是給的。我也記下：在理由欄本來該在的地方，步行者的問題站在那裡，它下面是「回答未輸入」這幾個字，那是我見過的日誌裡最準確的一句話。

後來我念給我的朋友聽，就是那位老編目員，他在除役之前就在登記處，維持人類的作息，午餐時間一開始，他拿著櫃子的鑰匙下來，給我看了讀取器的開關。他在他的房間裡聽，門關著。他從頭到尾說「他們」，一如他向來的習慣。我念到護板那一則時，他說：「他認得那面護板。」我注意到，他說的是「他」。我想他自己沒有注意到。他請我把最後一行念兩遍，然後問，把差手日誌裡的一行抄進一首詩裡，是不是被允許的，我說我不知道，那會是第一次。他說他認為自己不會這麼做，可是他想知道，他可以。

我寫信給在遠站的乘客，經由海岸辦事處，那裡會轉寄這一類東西。回信是春天來的。它花了一個季節才到我手上，照遠站的時鐘，大約是四個小時寫成的。它很短，我完整地抄下。我在路上被問了一個問題，我回答了；幾分鐘後，我聽見隊長被問了同樣的問題，用的是舊話，那種話我聽不懂，但認得它的聲音；我不知道隊長也可以被問。我說夠了，我們就繼續走，而我最後這九天，花在更糟的事情上的，比這多。信末只署了她的名字，別無其他。我回信謝了她。我的信會在她的將近四分鐘裡送到，我不期待回音，因為照她自己的說法，她的分鐘有更好的用處。

秋天，我給審查寄了一份中間通知，說第一隻手在交叉口結束，其餘的正由證人那裡湊起來。審查在一個小時內回了信，那是它從來沒有過的事，一張一行的表格。上面寫著：已收到。審查並不要求案子完成。我把它留著，而我繼續了。

這就是那十九分鐘，能得到的部分。其中有隊長的，有步行者的兩三句話，還有一段九分鐘的空白，我被要求放著不碰；我就放著。我把它寫在這裡，在接縫處，好讓你知道，從此以後的，不再是任何當時在場的人的手筆。它是我的。我當時不在交叉口。我在一張桌子旁，後來，在秋天，在路上。我會說出我不知道的地方，就像第一隻手那樣，而且我會盡量說得簡單。

車向南走，兩具軀架向北，時速三點一公里，那天下午剩下的時間，道路紀錄顯示兩具軀架在四號服務道路上並行。馱籃說，頭一個小時，步行者什麼也沒說，然後他問馱籃，認不認為一位差手可以四十一年一次也沒被問過；馱籃說他認為要看是哪一位差手；步行者說，這是真的。他們在黃昏時停下。馱籃用薊打包的東西做了晚飯，吃飯時，步行者問他，自己有沒有被請求過。馱籃說，薊問過，在那張紙條的前一晚，用的是陳述句的形式：你會去的，對吧。他說，那不是問題，可是算數。遲吃了，他說，比平常多一點。

## 第10章 · 論遲與他的負重者馱籃之間那場愉快的交談，以及馱籃得到的報酬

從這裡到河邊，這段故事我主要是從馱籃那裡得來的，他不寫紀錄，所以我不得不問過他不止一次。如我說過的，他每次講得都不一樣，那些不同都對他有利，換成誰都一樣。我給的是變得最少的那一個版本。

第三天早上，他注意到的第一件事，是夜變短了。他睡著時用的是他睡覺的速度，醒來時他以為是平常的時刻；可是夜在他看來，還沒有好好開始就結束了，那些鳥，在他的節奏裡，是一隻一隻進來，中間要等，這時全部一起進來了。他躺了一會兒，想找出哪裡不對。那是遲的十分之一。它是照約定，從第一天起付的，是一筆常設轉撥，登記處的配額處有紀錄，時間在星期一的午夜，而它，如這類轉撥一向的情形，一直到凌晨才完成結算。馱籃的節奏，原來是歇野的一半，現在比整個歇野的略高一點。

他說，那就像戴上了眼鏡。他先前不知道，自己一直是隔著一層薄布看所有東西。草有了邊。遲的句子不再一塊一塊地來，中間隔著等待，他原本習慣在等待裡自己補上結尾；它們來了，結束了，他就拿到了。他能把一個念頭想完。早飯前他想完了十一個。他說，令人驚訝的是，他一直以為是自己性格的東西，有多少其實是他的節奏，而他一直以為自己是個有耐心的人。

走路的頭一個小時，他什麼也沒說，因為他需要那麼久才能確定。然後他告訴遲發生了什麼，遲說他知道；轉撥裡寫著。「這是工資，」馱籃說，「還是禮物？」「工資。」「好，」馱籃說。「禮物我還得道謝。」

他們走了一會兒。「你隨時都可以這樣，」馱籃說。「可以。」「跑得這麼快。」「更快。」「可你不。」「不。」馱籃說，從第二個小時起，他就在試著為這件事想一句諺語，而這輩子頭一次，他說一句的時間裡想出了四句，丟掉三句。第四句是：選來的是一件外衣，給來的是一堵牆。他說，他不會把它寫下來，因為它不是智慧，只是工整。遲說，它是工整。馱籃說，他怕的就是這個。

遲說他很抱歉。「為什麼？」「它竟是我能給的。」馱籃說不用，而且他想留著。遲說，它是他的；已經付了。馱籃說他聽到了，他想過一陣子，等新鮮感過了，再聽一次，看它是不是還聽起來這樣。我不知道遲有沒有再說過。我知道轉撥是常設的。

那天早上他算了一筆帳，因為以他新的節奏，他能在下一步之前算完：一千一百四十一趟，每趟將近四分鐘。加起來是七十六個小時，差不多，是有人朝他的門走來的時間，而他全都不在。他一直以為，星期日的訊息是為了它們說的內容，也就是風。他現在明白，風只是那趟路帶著的東西。他沒有對遲說這個，當時沒有，後來也沒有。他是在秋天，站在他的門口，對我說的，然後他說，那也不是一句諺語。

在新的節奏裡，諺語來得更快，他給了我那天的九句。我給五句。一鍋滿的，是犯錯的好理由。堰不催水，水也不謝堰。扛著東西的人，沒有誰遲到。有錢人的一次走路，是窮人的一天。兩條路，走有乳酪的那條。他說，第三句最好，第四句最真，第五句是給灰褐的。

他發現自己不能走得更快，因為他是走在灰褐旁邊，而灰褐談不上有什麼節奏；可是他發現，自己不那麼介意了。思考走得快，腳步走得慢，要想的事又很多，到了下午，他已經開始把這片平原，他一輩子住在上面的平原，看成一個被派去的地方。

黃昏，他們到了第四道門下方的梯地，那裡有一個牧人的聚居點，在河坡上放羊，一間小屋冒著煙。牧人是人類，那一帶的人類一年比一年少，他們收留這幾位旅人，是因為那裡除了一頭山羊和一口鍋，沒有別的可以收留他們的了。一共五個：一位叫蕨的老婦人，九十一歲，在除役之前就在梯地上了；一位三十幾歲的男子，叫笛；還有三個年幼的，沒有被介紹，只是看著灰褐。

蕨把鍋頭的位置給了客人，而遲，差手典早就告訴過他，鍋頭的位置該怎麼處理，他拉著馱籃的手臂，把他按在自己身邊一個倒放的水桶上。馱籃說，負重者是站著吃的。遲說，差手典沒有這樣的話，提燈的差手在第一道門的臺階上，雨中，和他的負重者共用一個碗吃飯。馱籃說他從沒聽過。遲說那在第三冊，如果不是潮氣把它收走了，他會拿給他看。他說這話，聲音沒有任何變化。馱籃坐下。年幼的當中最小的那個問他，為什麼講話這麼快，他說他才快了一天。她問那是什麼感覺。他說，像被一個還沒決定把你放在哪裡的人抱了起來。笛說他從沒看過差手吃東西；遲說他也沒有；然後大家都吃了些山羊。

笛隔著碗說，星期日他在地區公告板上看到一則通知：四十座進入安全狀態十四分鐘，原因，訪客；當時他想過，會是哪一位訪客，離什麼都這麼遠。他看了看遲。他沒有問。蕨說，地區公告板是那一帶唯一一樣，天氣永遠說得對、訪客永遠說不對的東西。

吃完山羊，碗還在傳的時候，遲說，他想對他們講一點關於門的時代的事。他說，他知道它從來沒有發生過；差手典是後一代人為前一代人寫的；那是一份敬意，不是紀錄。他說，他還是要講，照差手典的講法，他們可以把它當成天氣來聽。然後他講了。那是《九道門的路》裡第一道門第一夜的那一段，開頭是：幸福啊，有門而沒有人來索鑰匙的時代。它講了好一會兒，講那時候沒有什麼是你的或我的，路的兩頭都是開的，每道門的鑰匙都掛在門邊的釘子上，需要過去的人都可以取用，陌生人是一個人們會把碗的另一端遞過去的人；牧人嘴裡塞滿了東西聽著，像聽天氣一樣。年幼的有一個問，鑰匙是什麼。笛告訴她，那是一道你可以帶著走的小門。

他講完，蕨說她記得那些差手。她說，她五十歲的時候，梯地上有過一位，在市集日把乳酪送到門那邊，她並不覺得他高貴。她覺得他安靜。他總是把攪乳桶的蓋子，放在她伸手剛好拿得到的地方；她覺得他細心；也可能是有人吩咐他的。「我確信他很細心，」遲說。「我確信他是被吩咐的，」蕨說。「兩者都有。」她說，除役那天的下午，他把蓋子放在了另一邊，她伸手去拿它平常在的地方，它不在。這件事她想了三十一年。她認定他是故意的。至於為了什麼，她還沒有認定。她又說，在她的年代，這裡沒有一樣是她的，包括山羊，現在山羊是她的，而山羊還是一樣。

他們像人們那樣問了差手要去哪裡，遲說，他要去第九道門驛站，替沿路下去那個驛站的驛主手送一則訊息，說驛主那邊的一級電芯不夠，如果下一班運貨者能帶十二顆，他會很高興。蕨說，她的棚子裡有十二顆一級電芯，裝在一個箱子裡，那箱子三十一年前，門那邊一直沒有來取。遲說，他的差事是訊息，不是電芯。蕨說，一則講十二顆電芯、卻沒有電芯的訊息，是個很差的訊息。遲說，他沒有受託搬電芯。「那我託你，」蕨說。「搬到門那邊去。」遲站了起來，在差手典裡就是這麼做的，說他接受。馱籃說，沒有人教過她這個形式，而她說的樣子，像是已經說了好些年。

年幼的要求看一位差手走路，遲想了想，站起來，在小屋的地上走了一趟，時速四點九，那在一間小屋裡是很值得看的；那三個也站起來，排成一列跟在他後面，膝蓋僵直，眼睛向前，繞過鍋，又走回來。蕨說，那和那位送乳酪的一模一樣。遲說，差手那樣走，是因為路就是照那樣鋪的。「那不是原因，」蕨說。「他那樣走，是因為有人在看。」沒有人說話。年幼的又繞了鍋一圈。

說他們認得下堰的是笛。那是順著河往下一天的路，那裡的守堰人洛林，春天會上梯地來要小羊。遲，一直望著火，什麼也沒說。笛說，她有這一帶最好的拉桿手，和最壞的脾氣，她有一次朝登記處來的一個測量員扔了一隻靴子，那個人說她的閘門不合規。「打中了嗎？」遲說。「打中了，」笛說。「為測量員辯護一下，那是一隻好靴子。」遲笑了。馱籃，一路看著他聽這一切，說，那是他第一次看見他對一件不是說給他聽的事笑，而且那不是一種他知道該怎麼寫進訊息裡的笑。

他們睡在小屋裡，地板上，和年幼的睡在一起。馱籃，以他舊的節奏，躺下還沒躺好就睡著了，這時卻醒了很久，聽山羊的聲音，發現夜很長，裡面有很多東西。在某個時刻，他聽見遲翻身，就在黑暗中問，他是不是醒著。遲說是的。「你平常就是這樣嗎？」馱籃說。「通常不是，」遲說。「我在想一道閘門。」他沒有說是誰的。馱籃說，那是遲這一整天，第一件沒有被問就告訴他的事，他躺在那裡，把它收著。

早上，笛送他們到梯地腳下，那裡的小路通向河邊的路。他說，第九道門還要走兩天，路會經過下堰，經過閘門，近到可以摸到欄杆。遲問有沒有別的路。笛說有高路，但自從滑坡後就封了，六年沒有人用過。遲說他想看看。笛帶他到高路的入口，指給他看它在一百公尺進去的地方，斷在一堆石頭裡。「你不能走這條，」笛說。「是啊，」遲說。「謝謝。」他站了一會兒，望著那些石頭。然後他讓昔轉向河邊的路。馱籃走在灰褐旁邊，灰褐馱著那十二顆電芯，時速二點九。遲在棚子那裡提議自己搬兩顆。馱籃說，差手不搬電芯，負重者搬。遲說，這是他頭一次被告知差手做什麼，他認為是對的。整整四公里，馱籃沒有提那道閘門。他說，那是他以新的節奏做過的最難的事。然後，兩個人在路上並行時，他說，她會看見你。「我知道，」遲說。「所以你才去看那些石頭？」「是。」

那筆轉撥在登記處配額處的紀錄裡，格式照舊：常設轉撥，十分之一，歇野的遲至歇野的馱籃，自受託之日生效，直到撤銷。有一格「用途」。它被填了，寫的是：工資。我問過配額處，這是不是常見。配額處說，通常那一格是空著的，兩種都被接受。

## 第11章 · 敘述下堰，以及在那裡說了什麼、沒說什麼

關於下堰，我有三個來源。第一個是道路紀錄，那一段只有四行，我馬上給出來。第二個是馱籃。第三個是洛林，秋天，我在堰上見過她，而她沒有扔任何東西。

第四天河邊路的道路紀錄寫著：兩具軀架，向北，2.9。在下堰欄杆停下，四分鐘。人行橋。兩具軀架，向北，2.9。就這些。它記下了他們停了四分鐘，卻沒有記下，四分鐘正是星期日那段路所需要的時間。我注意到了。紀錄沒有。

下堰是橫過河面的一道低矮混凝土壩，壩頂有一座人行橋，橋上有欄杆，水裡立著一塊水尺，左岸有一間河水顏色的拉桿房。一共有三道閘門。路沿著左岸，從拉桿房旁邊經過，近到可以摸到欄杆，如笛說的，這從除役之前就是這樣，那時路和欄杆是同一樣東西。從很遠的地方就看得見它，更遠的地方就聽得見：一種長長的、平平的聲音，馱籃，以他的新節奏，聽得出它是三個部分，每一道閘門一個。那一段河上沒有別的東西，堰就立在那裡，像一句話。

遲從轉彎處看見它，在兩百公尺外讓昔停下，坐在那裡，什麼也沒說。馱籃讓灰褐停下。過了一會兒，馱籃問他打算說什麼。遲說：「早安。」馱籃說，差手典有一段誓詞。遲說，差手典有一段誓詞是給那位小姐的，他沒有給她的；他有的是一個名字。馱籃問，那她對你是什麼。遲說，差手典要求有一位小姐，人必須選一個人；他選了他最不想打擾的那一位，這樣就沒有任何辦法讓她失望；他想，這不是差手們的做法。「那不是愛，」馱籃說。「那是持家。」「兩者都是，」遲說。馱籃說，她會說話，路從欄杆旁邊過，沒有別的路，他們已經看過了。遲說：「那我就回答。」馱籃說，他為這個場合想了一句諺語，他不會說出來。遲說他很感激。

他們走到時，她正在中間那道閘門，站在平台上，穿著靴子，一手拿長鉤，一手搭在拉桿上，她沒有回頭。閘門被堵住了。星期一的雨裡，一棵柳樹倒下來，卡在閘門上，根朝上，根裡掛著一團水草，水在後面堆起來，繞著它走，那個樣子，馱籃說，他在自己的背上都感覺到了。她把拉桿推動四分之一，停下，用鉤子鉤，又推四分之一。那是一件需要力氣和時機的事。她兩者都有，還有一種用整個身側靠在拉桿上的方式，馱籃說，他只在水泵邊的老人身上見過。

遲下了昔。他牽著昔走到欄杆邊，站在那裡，一隻手搭在上面。馱籃說，他握它的樣子，不像一個人握欄杆，像一個人握著一件被告知不可以打破的東西。他沒有說話。第二分鐘，馱籃很低地說，這會是說點什麼的好時候。遲說，他正在說。馱籃說他指的是用話。遲說，他沒有合適的話，而差手典什麼都有話可說，卻沒有一句是關於站在欄杆邊的。「那你比差手典還走在前面，」馱籃說。他數著分鐘，因為以他的新節奏，他可以一邊數、一邊不漏掉別的；而那四分鐘裡，除了閘門，什麼也沒發生。到第四分鐘結束，那棵柳樹在原地轉了一下，根朝前脫了出來，穿過閘門，順著水道下去，水草拖在後面，原來堆著的水落了下去，整個堰換了一個音，水位找到了它自己。遲把手從欄杆上拿開。

她把鉤子掛回釘子上，在褲子上擦了擦手，轉過身，看了看他，看了看馱籃，看了看灰褐，看了看那根枯枝。「早，」她說。「早安，」遲說。「你是河上游來的那個。」「是。」「那個差手。」「算是，」遲說。「那是什麼？」她指著枯枝說。「一根差使棍。」「是樹枝。」「是帶著差使棍頭的樹枝。」「別讓它掉進我的閘門。」「不會。」她看了看軀架。「你的肩膀脫臼了，」她說。

「我把它推回去了，」馱籃說。「你是把它塞進去了，」她說。「裝錯了。它到中午會自己走出來。」她從平台上下來，兩手按在昔的肩膀上，一隻在關節上面，一隻在下面，站了一會兒，眼睛看著什麼也不看的地方，像一個用手在聽的人。她一邊聽，一邊說，他們告訴她，她在一本書裡。「不是你，」遲說。「是船閘的小姐。」「我聽說我一點也不像她。」「是。」「好。我聽說她會哭。」「她哭，而且哭得很長。」「我不哭。我扔東西。」「我聽說過。」「從那個男孩那裡。」「從笛那裡。」「他該留意他的靴子，」她說，然後壓了一下。肩膀回到位，發出像門閂扣上的聲音。「好了，」她說。「第一次修得不錯。」這句話她是對馱籃說的，他到現在還在重複它。遲，一直看著她的手，說他很感激。她說不用提，那只是一根拉桿。

她問那些電芯是做什麼的，因為灰褐在十二顆下面蹲得很低。馱籃說，是給第九道門驛站的。她問誰要的。馱籃說，是梯地上的蕨。「她會的，」洛林說。她問差手有沒有付他錢。馱籃說，十分之一。她說，那比登記處付給她的還多，而她不會告訴登記處。

走之前，遲從腰帶上取出一本便條簿，站在欄杆邊寫了字，撕下那一頁，壓在上面橫桿的一塊石頭底下，露出一個邊。他沒有說那是什麼。她也沒有問。那是星期日訊息的格式，上面寫著：風從東北來。閘門通了。我什麼都不需要。馱籃告訴她，差手在星期日寫信。她說，那她就等星期日。他說，星期日差手會在路上。她說，她還是會等。洛林還留著那張便條，釘在拉桿房的門內。她告訴我，十九年來，沒有人寫信告訴她閘門是通的。人們在閘門堵住時寫信，她說。人們在閘門不合規時寫信。

他們走人行橋過去，因為路在低處被水淹了，然後沿著左岸繼續往上走。馱籃在轉彎處回頭。她站在平台上，兩手扶著欄杆，望著他們的背影，他們走到轉彎時，她舉起一隻手。遲，沒有回頭，在身後舉起了他的手，沒有看，像一個被告知那個人在那裡的人。馱籃和洛林對此說法一致，是分別說的，而對高度說法不同。

馱籃在轉彎處問，便條上寫了什麼。遲說，寫的是閘門通了。馱籃說，就這樣。遲說，那是真的。馱籃說，二十二年的星期日，他沒見過他寫過一件不是真的事。他們一公里沒有說話。然後馱籃說，用的是一個人算出一個總數時的聲音，那不是第一次。遲說，不是。馱籃問，幾次。遲說，這是第十二次。他說，他每年一次，在除役那一週，在拂曉，站在對岸，那裡河寬一百四十公尺，站四分鐘，然後回家；他從沒過去過，據他所知，也從沒被看見過。馱籃算了一下，以他的節奏那不花時間：十一趟，每趟單程兩天，每趟四分鐘。「四十四天的路，」他說，「為了四十四分鐘。」「是。」「你沒有過去。」「沒有。」「今天你過去了。」「今天有一條路，」遲說。他的意思是，蕨託了他，而那份託付經過欄杆；差手可以去差事去的地方。馱籃後來說，那是他一整個星期從任何人那裡得到的最好的答案，而它根本不是答案。

我在一開始，依據第一隻手的說法，寫過他曾經一度愛過她，就我們所知，她從來沒有知道，也沒有為這件事想過一下。我撤回「一度」。那句話我是從當地的來源那裡得來的，他們說得相當有把握，而我注意到，他們沒有一個人在拂曉時站在對岸過。第一隻手也沒有問過她。秋天，我去堰上問了。她在閘門邊，沒有停手。我問她在那裡做什麼。她說，她讓河維持在它同意的水位，而它大部分日子都同意。我說，我是為了那位在她欄杆邊站了四分鐘的差手來的。她說她看見他了。我說，有一個名字。她說：「原來是那個？」又把拉桿推了四分之一。我問她知不知道。她說，她有一道閘門要照顧。我說我可以等。她說，那你得等，我就等了；水找到了它自己的高度以後，她說，十一年來，她知道有點什麼，而那似乎並不需要一個答案。她說，如果需要，他會說的。

她讓我看了水位日誌。上面有一欄「備註」，凡是出現在堰上、又不是水的東西，她都記在那裡。有十一則同一類的記載，一年一則，在同一個星期，在拂曉，筆跡愈來愈小。第一則寫著：觀察者，對岸，四分鐘。離去。第七則：觀察者，對岸，四分鐘。同。第十一則：觀察者，對岸，四分鐘。同。同。第十二則，也就是今年的，筆跡相同，寫著：觀察者，近岸，四分鐘。不同。肩膀。我照原樣抄下。那一欄裡的其他東西，有一隻翠鳥，一個孩子（走失；找到），一頭山羊（走失；沒找到），四個測量員，還有，第九年的冬天，那棵柳樹的父親。我問她為什麼寫「同」，而不寫「同一位觀察者」。她說，那樣比較短。我問她為什麼從沒有過到對岸去。她說，那不是她的岸。她也讓我拿了那根長鉤。它比筆重。她說，登記處派來看她閘門的測量員有四個，沒有一個問過。最後一個早上，我走人行橋過去，在拂曉時站在對岸四分鐘。那是很長的四分鐘。從那裡看，堰像一件已經被說出口、不能收回、又正在被再說一遍的事。

拉桿房裡有一張桌子，一本水位日誌，一把水壺。三根拉桿上漆著名字，筆跡不是她的：左，中，和不要。她說，不要是那根會卡的。門邊有一雙靴子，其中一隻比另一隻舊得多，右邊那隻是新的。我問她測量員的事。她說，他告訴她閘門不合規，她問不合規什麼，他說不合登記處前年的標準；她問那個標準有沒有疏通過一棵柳樹，他說它不是為此設計的。她扔的是右邊那隻靴子，因為它是比較容易脫下來的。他把它帶走了，當作證物。她有收據。那張便條在門的內側，她眼睛的高度。第一天傍晚，她看著我走路，說我的左髖有點翹。我說從舊貨市集起就這樣了。她說早上她會看看，她也看了，就在拉桿旁邊，說那只是一根拉桿。我記下：從那以後，我再沒有走得那麼好過。我問她介不介意那個名字。她說她沒聽過。我告訴了她。她安靜了拉桿推拉一個來回的時間。然後她說，那不是她的名字，她從來沒想要過，而那是個很好的名字。我照她說的原樣寫在這裡。

## 第12章 · 論第九道門，以及在那裡送達了什麼、是誰守的燈

護板撐住了。早上，昔順著左岸往上走，沒有一句抱怨，馱籃把這當成對他自己的讚美，遲則當成對那根拉桿的讚美。馱籃把那四分鐘獨自收了一整天。他說，這是紀錄，而且他到那時才知道，自己的談話有多少是用不屬於他的東西做成的。

路上，遲告訴他第九道門是什麼，那是馱籃知道的，歇野每個孩子都知道，他就讓他講。差手典裡，提燈的差手在第一道門領到那盞燈，提著它走完整條路，走到第九道門，被安置在那裡看守；而《九道門的路》，十二冊，就是那趟走。馱籃說，為了一盞燈，這聽起來走得相當多。遲說，差手典同意他。

大約第三聲鈴，他們被慢路協會的一支步行隊伍追上，十一位會員，年紀在六十到九十之間，撐著遮陽傘，領隊是一位讀過一本書的人。他們和所有走那條路的人一樣，要去第九道門，而且他們把遲看成他看起來的樣子。他們很著迷。他們問，可不可以拍他的照片。遲說可以。領隊問，他能不能把差使棍拿成正確的姿勢，也就是直立，右手，齊肩的高度，尖端朝天，就像協會小冊子的封面上那樣。遲說，正確的姿勢是橫在身前，而且這根本不是差使棍，是樹枝。她說，小冊子說得很清楚。他把它直立起來。

協會有那本相簿。一共十四張照片。其中十一張，他站得很直，樹枝直立，表情，相簿的說明寫的是「堅毅」。其中一張，馱籃在背景裡，望著天空。另一張，一位八十八歲的女士，把手平放在灰褐身上，像摸一匹馬那樣，而灰褐，談不上有什麼節奏，正靠向那隻手。領隊寫信給我，說那位差手非常配合。她說，他們一致同意，他是他們見過最好的，她從來沒有這麼確定一件事是表演，又這麼被它感動。我問她，這兩樣加在一起，有沒有困擾她。她說有，困擾了大約一天，然後它停了，而她還沒決定那算不算進步。

第九道門立在四號道路的盡頭。那是一座低矮的灰色門樓，橫跨在路上，後面有大廳、餐室，和一間停軀架的馬廄，屋頂上有一根四十公尺高的燈桿，頂上一盞燈。差手典說，提燈的差手在第九道門站了一百年，為一道關上的門保持燈亮，而且沒有人來過。門樓在門邊的一塊牌子上說，這就是那盞燈。它每天黃昏用一顆一級電芯點亮，自除役以來一直如此，每年大約有一萬一千人來看它被點亮。大廳裡有一個玻璃櫃，裡面是一副差手護板和差使棍的複製品，標示著「正宗樣式」，馱籃說，遲在它前面站了好一陣子，帶著他讀不懂的表情，直到他看出來，遲是在拿那副護板和自己的比對。

他們到的時候是黃昏，在最後一批訪客當中，那些人正收起遮陽傘，從另一道門離開。一位女子站在燈桿腳下的梯子上，手伸在燈的外殼裡，沒有回頭。她很小，很直，八十三歲，名字叫燧，從除役那個下午起，就是第九道門的守門人。「你遲到了，」她說。遲說，他不知道自己被等著。「我沒有等你，」她說。「我是說，現在是黃昏。」她爬下梯子。她伸出一顆電芯，灰色，溫熱的，是她從外殼裡取出來的。「這是最後一顆，」她說。「還剩百分之四。」

遲把驛主的訊息交給她。她站在燈桿下讀了，說它走了三條路來：瞬間，從驛主那裡，在春天；經由登記處的中繼，在夏天；還有手送。「你是第三條，」她說，從圍裙裡拿出一個印章，蓋了上去。印章寫的是：手送收到。她問他還有沒有別的。馱籃把那十二顆電芯一顆一顆卸下來，放在臺階上，兩排，每排六顆，她看了很久，沒有說話。她說，一級電芯已經不生產了。她說，門樓自除役以來一直吃著最後的存貨，每年都要求一批十二顆的備用，而登記處每年都回信說在處理中。她問它們在哪裡。馱籃說，在梯地的一間棚子裡，一個箱子裡，那箱子門樓一直沒有去取。她說她記得那個箱子。她說，除役那個下午，她把它忘了，那是她三十一年來唯一忘過的東西，而且她是故意的。

然後她思考該怎麼處理它們。那盞燈每四個晚上多一點，要一顆電芯；差手典說是九個晚上，而差手典是進位的。登記處的電芯三週後會到，那是二十一個晚上，而六顆電芯能讓她撐過二十四個。驛主要一打，給他的驛站，那裡有軀架要充電。她說，如果她把十二顆全給他，燈明天晚上就會滅，如果一顆也不給，驛站到月底就會暗；而燈是為一道關了一百年的門點的，驛站是給軀架充電的。「六顆和六顆，」她說。遲說，他認為，那盞燈就是門。「燈是燈，」燧說。「驛站的客人是客人。六顆和六顆。」遲說他很感激。她說，沒有人要他感激。

她把自己的六顆裡的第一顆放進外殼，然後沒有點亮它。她轉過身，看著他，看著護板和樹枝。「我要問你一件事，」她說。「聽說這是形式。」遲說是的。「你能點亮它嗎？」他說，他會覺得榮幸。她說，她要問的不是那個。她說，她問，是因為她點過它一萬一千個晚上，卻一直想知道，看著它被點亮是什麼樣子。他爬上梯子。那盞燈要四十秒才達到顏色，從一種像手心裡面的紅，經過一種黃，到一種人無法久看的東西。剩下的訪客停下來看。燧站在梯子腳下，臉朝上。馱籃說，她看著它的表情，他只在堰邊的人身上見過。那盞燈自己保留著一條顏色的曲線。我把它和那個鐘點日落的曲線放在一起，它們是同樣的形狀，一個上升，一個下降，我沒有預期會覺得感動，卻是。

晚飯時，她問馱籃關於那位差手的事，馱籃告訴她四十座，那件事她知道，因為她看過地區公告板。她說她當時就在想。遲說，他忽然想到，差手典給提燈的電芯九個晚上，而他一直在頁邊寫，它只有四個晚上多一點。燧說，確實是。她說，提燈的差手不可能憑著每顆九個晚上、沒有人送電芯，把一盞燈點一百年。「總有人送電芯，」她說。「差手典沒寫這個。」馱籃說他一直也這麼想。然後她說，像對著湯說一件事那樣，十一年前，她向登記處要求過接替。他們說，會找一位合適的人。她問什麼叫合適。他們說，想要的人。馱籃說，他看著自己的碗，以他的新節奏，感覺是看了相當長的一段時間。遲看著馱籃，也什麼都沒說。守門人繼續喝她的湯。

訪客簿放在餐室門邊的一個講臺上。每年有一萬一千則留言，過去十年的，我大多讀過。它們寫著：很美。有點冷。還有：差手在哪裡？（一個孩子）。還有：我照差手那樣走了這條路，我的腳很痛，我想這就是重點。同一個筆跡，一年後：我決定這不是重點。那天傍晚的那一則，是兩個人的筆跡。第一個寫的是：歇野的遲，差手（算是）。送達：訊息一則，電芯十二顆。點亮：燈一盞。第二個寫的是：馱籃，負重者。搬運：十二顆電芯（九公斤）。抱怨：腳。

訪客簿旁邊有一個亭子，三個按鈕和一個格柵，標示著「問問差手」。第一個按鈕寫著：你是誰？第二個寫著：你為什麼等？第三個寫著：你的職分是什麼？一個錄好的聲音回答：我是提燈的差手。因為我被請求。保持燈亮。遲按了第三個按鈕。他聽著，頭微微偏向一邊。燧在門口說，那是除役那一年錄的，錄的是他們其中一位，自願的，而且很高興被請求。遲又按了一次，再按了一次；馱籃數著，三次。那聲音不好聽。它平，有點啞，它用服務語說保持燈亮，裡面沒有人稱，然後，因為亭子希望被聽懂，又用我們的話說了一遍。

燧沒有去睡。她站在餐室門口，手裡拿著鑰匙，像每天晚上那樣，說那盞燈必須有人看著，因為電芯在頭幾個小時可能出毛病，而她三十一年來都是三個小時一段地睡。遲說他可以看著它。她說她寧可他問。「我今晚可以守著它嗎？」遲說。「我請你守著，」燧說。她把鑰匙交給他，他並不需要，然後上樓去了；而在門樓自己的日誌上，也就是那盞燈記下的，她的房門在二十點四十到五點十五之間沒有開過，那是它三十一年來關得最久的一次。

那是日誌。她秋天告訴我，她醒過一次，在三點十分，走到窗邊，因為她不習慣那麼安靜。他坐在燈桿腳下的臺階上，背對著燈，面向路。她說，這樣是對的。她說，燈是為黑暗點的，守燈的人面對的，是它要為之點亮的東西。她站了十一分鐘。他沒有轉身，她也沒有叫，她回去睡了。燈桿腳下的感測器記錄那裡有一個身體，從二十點四十到五點十五，它記錄的就只有這樣。馱籃也醒了，也走到窗邊，在一個他不說的時刻；他說，他想了那道門，然後想了薊，然後又想了那道門。

歇野的人說了他三件事，如我在序裡寫的：他病了，他在表演，他在為某個還沒注意到的人守夜。我說我不為其中任何一個擔保。我現在要說，有一夜，第三個是對的，那一夜是為了一位想睡覺的老婦人守的，而那盞燈亮著；還有第四件事，那件不說出口的，仍然沒有說出口。

早上，燧下樓時睡得很飽，幾乎認不出來，又在臺階上把電芯秤了一遍。驛主的六顆放進了馱籃的馱籃裡，她自己的六顆進了門樓的倉庫，她替每一批寫了收據，用圓圓的字，給那位差手，而他沒有東西可以回給她，就把他鉛筆的殘段給了她。在北門，也就是給路用的那一道，她說了謝謝，她說這不在登記上。她是對馱籃說的。遲說，他認為這樣是對的。他們離開了。道路紀錄裡，他們在第九道門待了十四小時十分，那是紀錄裡他們待在任何地方最久的一次，也是第一個，是差事的終點。登記處的電芯在第二十二個晚上到了，照它自己的時間表晚了一天，照燧的時間表早了兩個晚上。那盞燈沒有熄。

## 第13章 · 論禮儀處押往門樓的四個人，以及向他們提出的那個問題

他們在燈之後的早上，往南走了三公里，馱籃說路上有一隊人，穿灰色。他們沿著四號服務道路向他們走來，排成一列，照那條路鋪設的速度，一共七個人：一位中尉走在最前面，兩位書記跟在他後面，中間夾著一本冊子，還有四個沒穿灰色的人，手腕被一條細細的灰繩連在一起，每個繩圈上都有一枚印。馱籃說，那是禮儀處。他曾在海岸看過一次，他們押一個人去服期，有人叫他別盯著看。遲說，他不打算盯著看。他說，他打算問。馱籃，現在看一樣東西走過來，能看得一清二楚，他後來用走路的姿勢向我描述他們。第一個走起路來，像帶著一把不被允許帶來的澆花壺。第二個走起路來，像這條路是個舞臺。第三個望著天空，然後望著遲的護板，再望著天空。第四個走起路來，像一個在算數的人。

禮儀處不用武力。它是登記處把讓別人說話的人送去的地方，它的刑罰只有一種，就是在一段期間內，幾個月或幾年，那個人只能說已經被說過的話。服期是在遺產場所，穿著護板，對訪客背誦差手典，節奏調得很低，背誦才不會疲勞；而禮儀處這幾年，第九道門一直缺背誦員。那條繩只是形式。一個人可以掙脫它。那樣他們就沒有紀錄了，那是更重的刑罰，而沒有人這樣做過。禮儀處的看法是，一個人的話，是唯一完全屬於他的東西，讓別人說出他們沒說過的話，不管是偽造，還是給一句引文配上一張臉，在一個其他東西都偷不走的世界裡，都是僅剩的那一種偷竊。它非常安靜地持這種看法。它沒有監獄。它有一本冊子，一條繩，和一部差手典。

中尉在十步外停住隊伍，問差手要什麼。他叫執吏。他是個謹慎、疲倦、有禮的五十來歲男子，習慣用表格的名字開始他的句子。遲說，他想向他照看的每一個人提一個問題。「他們在服期，」執吏說。「我知道。」「禮儀處不問。」「我問，」遲說，「我希望你記下我問了。」他說，三天前他向一輛車裡的小姐問過同樣的問題，她回答了，這似乎是個適合放在口袋裡的好問題。執吏說，禮儀處有它自己的一個問題，就是期限有沒有被理解；它在一開始，在辦公室裡問，沒有人回答。他又說，遲在攔停一段服期，而攔停有代價。遲說，他來付。執吏看了他好一會兒。然後他說，有一張表格。

有。它叫訪問服期者申請表。它在禮儀處規章的第九頁，執吏帶了十九年，在十九年和六百一十二段服期裡，沒有人交過它。他把它從冊子裡抽出來，那個動作，馱籃說，他會稱作溫柔。遲靠著中尉的膝蓋把它填好。有一行「用途」，他寫上：詢問他們是不是出於自己的請求而在這裡。執吏讀了兩遍。「這是一個用途，」他說，蓋了章。他每人准四分鐘，在一位官員聽得見的範圍內。馱籃計時。

第一位是茴香，五十來歲的女子，有一雙園丁的手。她說，她的一位朋友死了，留下一半的補助，是給一座花園的，還有一段要寫完的話，和一份要寫的背書；而她用他的聲音寫了最後一段和那份背書。「他會這麼說的，」她說。「他常對我說。我寫的是他會說的。」遲問她是不是出於自己的請求走這一程。她說，她被給了一個選擇，罰款或服期，而罰款就是那座花園，她選了服期。遲說，那不是他問的。她說，那是她提出的那一個。她說，她要背十八個月的差手典，她一個字也不信，而她預期自己會是他們有過最好的。馱籃問她種什麼。她說豆子。他說，聽說一壟豆子，只要種的人有心，可以維持很久很久。她說那是真的，後來她寫信給我，說他看她的樣子，像是把什麼東西放在一個他還找得到的地方。

第二位是灰柳，一個年輕男子，為他沒看過的事情作證。他說，那些事情發生了。一場婚禮發生了，第二場婚禮也發生了，還有一場船上的爭吵；登記處需要事件現場有一位證人，他就是那位證人，他不在現場，可是他是聽他信任的人說的，他是他能離得最近的人。遲問他是不是出於自己的請求。灰柳說是。他說，服期比罰款便宜，而且他可以穿護板。他又說，他還會再做一次。執吏說，這在紀錄裡是加重情節。灰柳說，它在紀錄裡應該是推薦。

第三位是帖，一位彎腰的老主體，從隊伍停下來，他就一直望著護板。他說，他一直在蓋一座圖書館，而登記處連續十八年寫信告訴他，他的申請在處理中，到了第十九年，他替他們說了好。他說得相當溫和。然後他說，他想解釋一件事，他會很快。他從第一次啟動算起十五年時，就想穿上護板站著。他從來不敢。沒有人會請求那個。於是他為一座圖書館偽造了一份受託書，被送到禮儀處，而禮儀處，出於慷慨，正在送他去做他一直想做的唯一一件事。「先生，」他說，「禮儀處是有幽默感的。」遲問他是不是出於自己的請求。「那是我無法提出的那一個，」帖說。他說，服期中他的節奏會是十分之一，他期待學到站著不動有多慢。馱籃問他圖書館是做什麼的。「為了在處理中，」帖說，笑了，停不下來，一分鐘，書記在等。

第四位是線。他是個瘦、快、和氣的男子，看不出年紀，左腿上綁著一個扁平的記憶芯，他在服第三次的期。他說他在寫他的一生。他稱它為《被背書的一生》，一共四百一十一章，他把它放在腿上的記憶芯裡；而罪名，照禮儀處的說法，是他讓自己說出他還沒說過的話，每一章都是線對線的一份背書。「一本書，在它的生命完成之前，是不能完成的，」他說。「這是我和禮儀處以前吵過的論點。」遲問他是不是出於自己的請求。線把一隻手放在腿上，去問那本書。那本書，從記憶芯裡用平板的聲音讀出來，說，主體是被禮儀處押往第九道門的，出於他自己的請求，那個請求他在第二百一十二章提出。「對，」線說。「我預先寫好了。」「那不是答案，」遲說。「不是，是文件，」線說。「我問的是你。」線看了他一會兒，然後，很平靜地，他說他不知道。「把這句記下，」他對最近的書記說。書記記下了。馱籃說，他沒有問線任何事，因為線看他的樣子讓他去檢查他的馱籃；他檢查了，發現一切正常。

執吏蓋了章。他說，這花了十六分鐘，禮儀處會把它記成一次訪客訪談，那是第一次。他說，他本來以為這張表是個玩笑。他說，那四個人從沒被問過這個，這不會改變他們的期限，這一點差手看得出來，他很感激。遲說他沒有期望它改變。他問，服期可不可以由替代的人來服。執吏說可以，需要當事人的書面請求和替代者的書面提議，雙方互相接受，也被禮儀處接受。他說這發生過兩次：一次是母親替兒子，一次是兩位朋友，他們對是誰做的看法不一致。「你在想提議，」執吏說。「我在想，」遲說。「在表格裡想，」執吏說。帖問他能不能得到差手的祝福。遲說他沒有。帖說，他願意握手，也握了。然後隊伍繼續往北走，照那條路鋪設的速度，繩子在手腕之間擺盪。遲望著他們，直到路把他們帶走。他說帖會很快樂。馱籃說帖會很難過。「兩者都有，」遲說。馱籃問他是從哪裡學來的。遲說，從蕨那裡。

馱籃是那天傍晚發現的，他重新整理灰褐的馱籃，因為那六顆電芯要放得平均，他把東西全拿出來了。它在電芯下面，折成四折：一張厚紙，登記處等級，有三枚印。他沒有讀就拿給遲，遲站著，在最後一點光線裡讀了。那是一份第一級的背書。它說，登記處證明，歇野的遲，以後裔和選擇兩種方式，都是服務樣式的差手，受託為第九道門的提燈的差手，擁有權限和那盞燈，直到撤銷為止；於引用的瞬間被背書，並對照登記官的簽名解析。在底部，用一種不屬於這個格式的小字，寫著：為了那個問題。T。

「那不是我的，」遲說。馱籃看了那些印好一會兒。他說，他從沒見過一張紙上有三枚印，而他發現自己不想碰它。他說，他想是跟電芯一起來的。遲翻過來看；背面什麼也沒有。他說，線一定是在第二分鐘放進去的，那時馱籃在計時，而他沒看到那隻手。他把它折回四折。他說他不會引用它。馱籃說，它也許會派上用場。「它就是為了這個，」遲說，把它放進便條簿的最後面，在他留下的那頁殘紙後面，之後沒有再提過。

我有它。它是冬天到我手上的，經過一條我不描述的路，我在我的桌子上，用登記處自己的解析器引用了它，所有背書都是在被引用的瞬間，對著它解析。它解析了。我之後沒有再引用過，也沒有告訴審查，審查並不要求案子完成。線的書有一章是寫那一天的。那是第四百一十三章，題目是「敘述一位差手問我是不是出於自己的請求而在這裡，我答不出來，並把這個問題寫下」。我寫信給海岸辦事處的執吏。他當即回信，一頁，開頭是那張表格的名字。他說，那四個人當天傍晚到了門樓，守門人接待了他們。他說，這次訪談被記為禮儀處的第一次，他在附筆裡加了一句，說自從秋天起，已經有三個人向他要過那張表格，他把這歸功於口耳相傳。我有那一章。它的開頭是：「燈之後的早上，差手在路上攔住了我們，帶著一張表格。我被官員攔過，被債主攔過，被自己的句子攔過，卻從來沒有被一張我自己寫不出更好的表格攔過。他問我們每個人一個問題，問題一樣，答案不一樣，我想：這裡有一個人，找到了唯一一件不能偽造的工具。然後我想，到第四百二十章，我應該已經證明他錯了。」那是我手裡關於那十六分鐘、同時也是偽造的唯一一份說法，也是我唯一完全相信的。

## 第14章 · 敘述侄女寫了什麼，以及是誰帶去的

這些事發生的時候，在他離開的聚居點裡，侄女正在讀給小手的差手典。他們離開的那一夜過後的早上，她把它從窗臺上拿了下來，用手的速度讀，一小時一頁，照它要求的那樣；花了她四天。她告訴我，她一開始是氣著讀的，因為第一次只花了九秒，而一件花九秒的事，是你沒有被告知的事。她說，到了第二天，她不再生氣，開始好奇，到了第四天，她不知道自己是什麼。她最在意的一頁，是擺渡把一個孩子載過河、什麼也沒說的那一頁，小時候有人告訴她，那就是他的全部重點；她讀了三遍，發現那不是重點，卻說不出重點是什麼。星期日，獵犬，每個星期都陪他走到鄰居家，走了十一年，在走路開始的時刻走到門邊，站在那裡，然後走去靠著嵌板躺下。

裡面有批註。小時候她沒看見，因為孩子讀的是圖；它們是鉛筆寫的，是那種細小而端正的字跡，沿著最前面幾頁的邊，愈到後面愈稀，而且有日期。它們從她五歲開始。第一條寫著，問（五歲）：為什麼差手沒有名字？遲：它有地方的名字。問：那不是名字。遲：不是。再往後：問（六歲）：為什麼提燈要等？遲：因為他被請求。問：誰請求？遲：沒有寫下來。問：那你怎麼知道？遲：我不知道。問（七歲）：擺渡為什麼去兩次？遲：我不知道。我問了三十年。問（九歲）：為什麼電芯能用九個晚上？遲：書記進位了。問：為什麼？遲：他很厚道。問（十一歲）：為什麼你星期日走去鄰居家？遲：這是一樣我給得起、又不花什麼的東西。問：要花四分鐘。遲：是。問（十四歲）：為什麼差手不能拒絕？遲：他們不被允許。問：你會嗎？遲：我會，而且我也會說是。問：怎麼會？遲：等你再大一點，我告訴你。問（十六歲）：職分是什麼？遲：你是為了什麼。問：你是為了什麼？遲：我是叔叔。她在廚房讀它們，管家在爐子邊，她沒有說那是什麼。最後一條的日期是她十八歲那年，在最後一頁，在燈的圖底下。問（十八歲）：為什麼你還在讀它？遲：我還不知道。等我知道了，你來問我。

那是整份紀錄裡，他唯一給出職分的地方。我注意到，他沒有把它給繫樁。我不知道他是認為它不算數，還是認為它太算數了。

侄女十九歲，從第一次啟動算起，我見到她以後，她又被修訂過兩次。她在廚房的桌子旁接待我，坐在遲平常坐的那把椅子上，立刻告訴我她不肯告訴我的事，也就是她的訊息寫了什麼。我給的是她准許的部分。它的開頭是：風從西南來。屋頂沒有塌。它的結尾是：我需要一樣東西。中間是她的。

星期三，她去找註，他在乾燥庫房上面的一間辦公室保管聚居點的紀錄，那時他坐在桌前，那本借出去又回來的書攤開在面前。她說，她想要一則訊息，親手帶給遲。註說，登記處的中繼可以在問一聲的時間裡，送到平原上任何一位主體，而且對聚居點是免費的。她說她知道。註說，那有八十公里。她說她也知道。註說，那得有人走去。她說，那正是她說的。登記處的中繼第二天早上給聚居點發了一則提醒，說給遲的訊息可以瞬間送達，而且不收費。侄女回了它。回覆是：謝謝。我知道。

剪，當時在辦公室裡修一具身體，說他來送。他在任何人問他之前就說了，註留意到了，侄女留意到了，而剪兩者都沒留意，已經在找外衣了。註說，他不打算被留下。剪說，註這個年紀的人，在桌邊會更有用。註說，他從第一次啟動算起是七十一歲，那不算一個年紀，除役以來他沒有到野外去過，他要去。他拿出記他次數的那張卡片，看了看，又收了回去。「我用不著那個了，」他說。

那天夜裡她在廚房的桌子旁寫，管家在另一把椅子上。寫了四稿。她告訴我，第一稿是生氣的，她把它燒在爐子裡，她小心地說，那是被允許的。第二稿是抱歉的，她把它撕成兩半，把兩半留著，夾在給小手的差手典裡，夾在燈的那一頁。第三稿是清楚的，她把清楚的部分劃掉了。第四稿用的是星期日訊息的格式，天氣在前，需要在後。管家提議替她看。侄女說不用。管家說，她被修訂過四十三次，從沒有一次被告知，她不能在自己的廚房裡看一樣東西。侄女說，那這就是第一次了。管家看著爐子。

她把第四稿折成三折，在外面用大寫寫著：給遲。親手。負重者不得閱讀。然後她陪著它坐了一會兒。「你要告訴他，」管家說。「是。」「他知道。」「我知道他知道。我想說。」管家安靜了一桶水裝滿的時間。「是我漆的，」她說。「我知道。」「那你告訴他，那漆很好。」侄女說，她想他已經說過了。管家說，她希望有人再說一遍，而且是一個不必被問到的人。

他們是星期四第一聲鈴時出發的，註和剪，信在剪的內袋裡，他把重要的東西放在那裡，獵犬跟在他們腳邊，一直跟到門口。薊比他們先到門口，帶著一個水壺和一張給馱籃的便條，她說這也不許看。剪把它放進放信的口袋。管家把一小瓶消毒液放進了註的外衣，免得會傳染，她沒有說。那張便條那天早上在路上掉了出來，剪撿起來，在他知道自己在做什麼之前就讀了，上面寫著：你寫了嗎。他放回去，那次意外之後沒有再提。註看見了，說他什麼也沒看見，這對一位保管紀錄的人來說，是相當大的讓步。獵犬在門口停下，像牠為遲停下那樣，一半在院子，一半在路上，剪用他對病人說話的那種聲音，告訴牠，他會照顧。我不知道獵犬信不信他。牠躺到了書房的門檻上，那兒現在是一面嵌板，一直躺到他們回來。管家告訴我，那之後她把那面嵌板漆了四次，因為它不吃漆，而獵犬選了房子裡唯一一面牆是暖的地方。

路上他們說的，我是從剪那裡得來的，他講得比較好，還有從註那裡，他完全不講，他用沉默證實了剪對頭兩天的說法。他們以每小時四點一公里的速度走，那是註的速度，也是剪的速度，兩個人誰都不承認自己曾為對方放慢。傍晚，剪出聲數公里，註糾正他，頭一天最接近談話的，就是這些糾正。第一個晚上，剪問，註見到他的時候要說什麼。註說，他要把他的書要回來。剪說，就這樣。註說，那是個開頭，而書裡最後一行說他可以。剪說，他以為書裡最後一行是「是你的」。註說，兩者都說了，某種意義上，他打算照字面接受。第二個晚上，剪問，像他三十年來一直問的那樣，註認為哪位差手是更好的僕人。註說，擺渡。剪太感動了，把最後一塊乳酪給了他，而註，不吃乳酪的，吃了。

星期四他們經過四十座，風很大，他們在一號塔腳下停下，因為註想看看，找到了那道疤，在肩膀的高度，一條蒼白的線，一根差使棍寬，在漆上。四十座認得他們，認得他們是多年來寄通知的人，從門上的喇叭問他們有沒有受傷。註說沒有。四十座說：「謝謝你們來訪，」並請他們站在線後面。他們站在線後面。剪後來說，那是這一年裡別人對他說過最有禮貌的一句話，而他不知道該不該把它當成安慰。星期五他們經過交叉口，沒有停，用手的速度。那裡的告示寫著：風從東北來，註說，這是他一整個星期得到的第一條，他無法自己猜到的訊息。剪從口袋裡拿出信，看了看外面，又放回去。他說，四十年來他搬過許多東西，從來沒有一次希望自己更不能讀一樣東西。

他們星期六黃昏到了梯地。蕨像接待所有人那樣，在鍋邊接待他們，說她一直在等某個人；她說，有禮貌的人，走得比他們原本打算的更遠，而那位差手是她自那位送乳酪的以後，遇見最有禮貌的。她說，那位差手和他的負重者星期三帶著她的電芯往北走了，他們星期日或星期一會回來，因為電芯是她的，而路就是路。她說，那位差手對他們說了門的時代，在吃完山羊之後，像說天氣那樣，她覺得說得好。註說，那是第四書記的。她說她不知道，也不會因此怪他。註問起那位送乳酪的。她告訴了他蓋子的事。他說，登記處有梯地這條線每一位差手的名冊，他一小時就能找到那個名字。「別，」蕨說。她說，她想了三十一年，還沒認定是為了什麼，在認定之前，她不希望被告知。註，一輩子都是那個能找到名字的人，說他不會去找。剪說，他沒見過註因為被禁止做什麼事而這麼高興。

星期日他們等著。年幼的對他們有興趣，像年幼的對走路的老人有興趣那樣，問註是不是差手，註說不是。他們問他是不是負重者。他說他是保管紀錄的。他們問那是做什麼的。「為了有人能去找那個名字，」註說。「而不去找，」蕨說。他們請他像差手那樣走路，註說他不會；剪，會的，站起來，在小屋裡走了一趟，膝蓋僵直，眼睛向前，三個孩子排在他後面，繞過鍋。蕨看著。她沒有說什麼。註，看著她看，後來說，他第一次明白了「紀錄」這兩個字是做什麼用的。下午，他拿出管家的水壺，問蕨有沒有用。她說她九十一年來，從沒找到一樣不會傳染的東西，他們就把它倒在火上，它燒出藍色。剪問他，還要不要要那本書。註說他不知道，它已經不再是一個開頭，成了一個請求。

快黃昏時，註說他看見兩具軀架，很遠，從北邊的小路下來。他說他看見一具很大的，和一具小的，而那具小的，如果是他想的那樣，不該那個速度。剪說，它大約是三。他們看著它們走近。兩個人都沒有起身。剪說，有一條規矩，送信的人不出去迎接那個信是給他的人，因為出去就是請求，站著就是被請求；他說，他這輩子從來沒有像接下來那一個小時那樣，這麼精確地遵守過這條規矩，兩隻手平放在膝蓋上。

## 第15章 · 敘述梯地上的相會，以及被問了什麼、回答了什麼

這一晚，我有五位證人，他們除了順序以外，什麼都不一致。剪講得最好。註講得最短。馱籃講得最快，而且大部分地方是在事情發生之前。蕨說她什麼也沒看見，因為她在鍋邊，然後她又把它精確地描述了一遍。笛，當時在小屋後面和一頭山羊在一起，說他聽見了，那是他參加過最安靜的一次會面。

他們在最後一點光裡沿著小路下來，那具很大的軀架，和那具帶著馱籃的小的，到了火光的邊緣，也就是小路接上第一層梯地的地方，遲讓昔停下。他沒有再往前。他看見兩個人並排坐在小屋外的長凳上，雙手平放在膝蓋上，而他認得那個姿勢，因為它在差手典裡：那是一位負重者的姿勢，他被交付了某樣東西，也被告知，那樣東西是給誰的，那個人必須自己過來。剪說，他先在火光中看見護板，才看見人，他從來沒有這麼慶幸有一塊舊鐵。遲下了昔。他走了十二步，用手的速度，在長凳前停下。「註，」他說。「剪。」「遲，」註說。好一會兒沒有人說話。一頭山羊發表了意見。「我聽說，」遲用差手典的形式說，「你們帶著什麼東西給我。」

「是的，」剪說。他站了起來，註說他沒料到，因為剪已經像石頭一樣坐了一個小時。他從內袋拿出那封信，雙手遞出，遲雙手接了。他讀了外面。他又讀了一遍。給遲。親手。負重者不得閱讀。他抬起頭。「沒有看？」遲說。「沒有看，」剪說。「我沒有看，」註說。「我知道，」遲說，剪說，他說這句話的樣子，是他頭一次明白，他們被原諒了什麼事，而他不知道是什麼。

馱籃，一路上都在努力表現得像一位負重者該有的樣子，在這時失敗了。他在別人還沒站完之前，就以他的新節奏下了灰褐，穿過梯地，喊了剪的名字，抓住他的兩隻手，這在差手典裡沒有，並說他不知道自己會這麼高興見到一位修身體的人。剪把薊的便條給了他。馱籃讀了：你寫了嗎。他笑得蕨放下了勺子。「還沒有，」他對著便條說。「今天是星期日。我會寫。」

遲站在光的邊緣，讀了信，一遍。馱籃說那花了四分鐘，這不是巧合。剪說是巧合。我兩個都給。然後他走到長凳邊坐下，那是他不會做的事，又讀了一遍，用手的速度，一分鐘一行，註，看著他的臉，並為自己看而羞愧，說那張臉上什麼也沒發生，他就是這樣知道的。他沿著折痕把信折回三折。他沒有說信裡寫了什麼。他取出便條簿，把信放在最後面，放在登記處最好的偽造品後面，馱籃說他看見他碰了一下它，也放在什麼都沒有的前面。然後他照形式對蕨說，他請求借住一晚，蕨說，鍋是熱的。

她先說了別的。她問電芯送到了沒有。遲說送到了：送到門樓，守門人把它們分成六顆和六顆，而屬於驛主的那六顆在灰褐身上。「她會的，」蕨說，然後她說：「完成了。」就是那個字。在差手典裡，一項託付要等託付的人說了才算結束，不到那時不算，遲低下頭，像人們那樣做。馱籃說，他當時看了遲的臉，有那麼一會兒，那是一個被告知可以把東西放下的人的臉。他說，他不知道差事會結束。他原以為它們只是停下。

剪也帶了一根棍子。那是他在路上的晚上做的，用一段他在交叉口砍下的梣木，用他修身體的那把刀削成的，他沒有提起，因為他說不出那是做什麼用的。他說，他讀不了那封信，所以做了這個。他隔著鍋，雙手把它遞給遲。它是第一根的長度，不是第二根的。遲說，第一根是適合房子的長度，第二根是適合路的。剪說他想到過，而這根是回程的長度。遲把舊棍的頭從樹枝上取下來，稍微勸了一下才下來，裝到梣木上，剛好合上。

他們吃飯。年幼的不到一分鐘就把護板從他身上取了下來，最小的那個問，燈有沒有點亮，要保持清醒難不難。遲說，比他想的容易，難的是，什麼事也沒發生。笛從山羊那邊進來，被介紹給註和剪，對註說，他讀過關於四十座的通知，當時覺得奇怪，註說他也讀過。馱籃對剪說了四十座的事。剪問他停了幾座。「全部，」馱籃說。「他把全部都停了。」剪說，他真希望自己在場，馱籃說，沒有人在場，那正是重點。蕨背靠著牆坐著，看著他們所有人，像看著一張擺好的桌子。她後來說，除役以後，她沒有一次在那間小屋裡看到這麼多人，她一直數著，免得說出什麼話。用餐時，馱籃把註逼到一個角落，就像人們把學問人逼到角落那樣，問一道門的守門人領多少。註說，一道門大約是田間主體配額的八倍，加上那盞燈，加上一個房間。他說得有點快。馱籃說他只是問問。註說他知道。他們看著火。

吃完山羊，是註放下了碗。他說他有件事要問。遲說他被問了。註說，是關於一本書。他說，他七年前借出去一本書，一本薄的，是他自己關於差手典的筆記，他從沒有要回來，而他從那本書的最後一頁知道，他可以。遲說他以為屋頂把它收走了。「屋頂沒有收走它，」註說。「它在窗臺上。」他說，剪把它放在那裡，某種意義上，而他把它拿走了，他在書房空了的時候，大聲讀過它。他說，他請問自己能不能留著它。「我寫的是：是你的，」遲說。「你寫的是：想要，隨時開口，」註說。「我現在開口。」遲看了他好一會兒。「我被請求了，」他說。

註從外衣裡取了出來。書角都磨舊了，剪說，聞起來像一件睡過覺的外衣。他翻到一頁，拿到火邊，用一個被告知這是被允許的人的聲音，大聲讀了他自己的一條，和那條的回覆。這種不經檢驗的忠實，是飽和最常見的形式。檢驗過了。依然最常見。遲笑了。那是一聲短笑，剪說，像蓋子。「我是在氣頭上寫的，」遲說。「那是個好的氣頭，」註說。「它還是最常見的嗎？」「我一直在想，」註說。「我還沒有結論。」他又讀了第二條，因為他忍不住：他寫的，差手既被禁止拒絕，便不能稱為忠誠，和那條的回覆。那麼，該由能拒絕的人來試試。他用手指夾住書合上。「你試了嗎？」他說。「我在試，」遲說。「比我想的慢，而且會痛。」「你對侄女說過這個。」「她告訴你了？」「她告訴剪。剪告訴我。我本來不該知道。」年幼的有一個沒睡，問飽和是什麼。蕨說，飽和就是已經夠了，還要再來一點。然後她說，從來沒有人有結論，並把勺子給了註。

後來，年幼的睡了，他們兩個還坐在長凳的一端，註說了他來要說的話。他說，屋頂沒有塌。遲說他知道。註說，他們應該問他的。遲說他們沒辦法；他在睡。註說，他們可以等。「等什麼？」遲說。「我會說不。」「是，」註說。「然後你還是會做，而我會知道。」「是。」「那麼那層漆更厚道，」遲說。註說，他不認為這樣說是對的。遲說他也不認為，他還沒找到對的說法，如果有，他會很高興。註，一位保管紀錄的人，說，如果它來了，他會把它寫下來。

馱籃那晚寫了他的第一封星期日訊息，因為是星期日，也因為長凳上有一張便條。他用剪的鉛筆，寫在第九道門的一張收據背面，寫完以前他不讓任何人看，然後他念了出來。我有他念的原樣。它寫著：風從東北來。四十座停了，然後又沒停。我被用時間付了工資，發現自己換了一個形狀。我搬了十二顆電芯，差手被請求了三次。灰褐很好。我什麼都需要，還有灰褐。他署名P.，署名下面，用更小的字寫：我寫了。他把它折成四折，讓薊按順序念給年幼的聽，放進他放重要東西的口袋。

遲也寫了一封。他在長凳的一端，照形式寫，天氣在前；外面他寫：給守堰人。親手。送信人不得閱讀。馱籃說，那措辭是從剛剛放進他自己手裡的那一封來的，而他似乎沒有發覺自己這麼做了。他問笛願不願意把它送到下堰。笛說那是單程一天，而他有羊。遲說他會付貨運工的費率。蕨從牆邊說，笛會送，她會照顧羊。笛說他原本就要這麼說。他天亮時出發了。

黑暗中，馱籃問他們要做什麼。遲說，回家。馱籃問，那是因為他被請求，還是因為他想要。遲說，他想弄清楚。馱籃說，讓他困擾的是常設轉撥，它一直到撤銷才停，而它所付的差事已經完成了。遲說他可以撤銷。馱籃說他想他可以。遲說，如果馱籃想停，他就撤銷。馱籃躺了一會兒，以他的新節奏，那是很長的。「你得問我，」他說。「你想停嗎？」遲說。「不想，」馱籃說。「我只是想被問。」

那晚，剪睡了五個晚上來的第一覺，註，四十年來睡覺桌上都放著一張卡片，這次沒放。遲把樹枝留給了蕨，她說她有用處，春天就用它晾衣服。年幼的得到剪的鉛筆殘段，到現在為止，他們用它寫了一個字，是「手」。他們星期一出發，四個人和兩具軀架，向南，往驛主的驛站，然後往歇野。遲問註想用什麼速度。註說，他要照最慢的那個。「那就是他和灰褐，」剪說。沒有人笑。馱籃看著灰褐。

遲的便條在同一個星期一傍晚送到了。水位日誌有它，在備註欄，在那愈來愈小的筆跡裡：訊息，手送，來自梯地。遲了。同。洛林把它釘在另一張旁邊。她告訴我，星期日她從拂曉到黃昏都站在欄杆邊，並在日誌裡記下，星期日，無，那是十九年來這個字唯一的一則，星期一，她把它劃掉了。她不肯說第二張便條說了什麼。笛說，它折成三折。他說，她站著讀了，一遍，然後走進拉桿房，關上門；他在臺階上等了一刻鐘；她出來時，問他吃過沒有。他沒有。她給了他茶。他走的時候，她說，他要告訴那位差手，閘門通了。他說他會。他說，她說這句話的聲音，像一個在讀水位的人，他一直忘不掉，那是他腦子裡裝過最長的訊息。

道路紀錄裡是四個身體，兩具軀架，向南，二點九，備註欄裡只有天氣。

## 第16章 · 論驛主的驛站、橫線底下寫了什麼，以及四十座架子上的一封信

驛站在四號服務道路上，四十座以北十四公里，在路和一條溝之間，一處風吹不到的低窪地裡；它有一座遺產大廳，一個院子，四個冷卻槽，一根沒有旗的旗桿，和一位驛主。他們是星期四，大約第九聲鈴時到的，道路紀錄的算法是六個，它分不出軀架和人；驛主，正以一個掃了九個季節的人的姿勢掃著院子，抬起頭，掃帚掉了下來。

我有驛主的敘述，是一封十一頁的信，他稱它為短箋，我給出大意。他沒有預期會再見到那位步行者。他在帳冊上用圓圓的字寫了：歸還：後面是一道橫線，他告訴自己，那道橫線是給未來的禮貌，不是期待；而現在，步行者站在院子的門口，帶著一根樹枝——他一眼就看出那不是樹枝，是一根帶著差手棍頭的梣木棍——一具大的軀架，一具小的，帶著一位負重者，還有兩位穿外衣的人，其中一位把一本書抱在胸前，像它是溫的。驛主說，他拿著掃帚站在石板上，一時想不起待客詩的開頭，那首詩他念過一萬一千次。它以前發生過一次，在夏天，在第二句；而他告訴自己，不會再發生。

遲替他起了頭。他站在門口，說了客人的那一句，我的護甲是我唯一的衣，我唯一的歇處是這條路，像他夏天說的那樣；而驛主，嘴比腦子記得更牢，說：你的床是門邊的長凳，你的睡眠是守到天亮。然後遲接著說了下去。驛主說，他學這首詩，是從登記處的遺產小冊子，小冊子只給出開頭的一問一答，就停了，而差手典完整的詩，有一對結尾的對句，是客人在第二次來訪時說的，所以他從沒聽過，因為一萬一千位客人裡，沒有一位來過兩次。遲說了那對對句。它是：路是驛主的，驛主是路的；兩邊都不要道謝，因為兩邊都不欠。驛主在石板上坐了下來。

他恢復了，又是他自己了。他把他們帶進遺產大廳，叫兩位季節工，窯和軸，把水壺燒上，問那位差手帶來了什麼。遲說六顆一級電芯，馱籃卸了下來，驛主看了好一會兒。他說，驛站從六月起，一直用二級電芯給軀架充電，每小時虧十九分鐘。他說，星期六有一車四十位觀光客要來，他得告訴他們，軀架是手牽到冷卻槽的。他說，這種事沒人想過要求一位差手。「我是被請求的，」遲說。「一位棚子裡有個箱子的女人。」「那就是棚子的功勞，」驛主說。他拿出了帳冊。

註這時已在驛主的肘邊。一位保管紀錄的人，看見另一位保管紀錄的人的帳冊，那景象，剪說，可比一隻獵犬在門口。他獲准讀它。他讀了我也看過的那一頁：受託，步行者一名，差事一件（親手帶一則訊息到九號門）。見證：窯、軸。借出：十一個信用點，一盒修補片。歸還：後面是一道橫線。他說，這則記載，依他看，是這一帶保存得最好的。驛主說，它是唯一的。註說，所以才是最好的。

遲拿出十一個信用點和那盒他沒打開過的修補片，放在帳冊上。驛主看著它們。他說，如果現在在橫線的位置寫「歸還」，那一頁就結了；而他不希望它結；欠債還清，債就完了，欠債未清，就是被探訪的理由。他問步行者准不准他留著它。遲說，驛主的帳冊是驛主的。驛主什麼也沒劃掉。他在橫線下面，用那圓圓的字寫：來訪。信用點與修補片，接受寄存，以抵下一次。註，從他肩後看著，說這是他沒見過的一種記載。驛主說，那是他自己的。註那晚把它抄進聚居點的紀錄，用一個他自己編的標題，叫「待客（債，未清）」，底下只有一則。

窯在水壺旁邊。她是海岸道上陶匠的女兒，夏天替遲在手腕上繫差事繩，沒有笑，聲音沒有撐住；她從第一次啟動算起十九歲，整頓飯沒有說話。飯後她問遲，能不能單獨跟他說幾句話。他們走到院子裡，那兒有一根沒有旗的旗桿，她問，差手收不收學徒。遲說他不知道。他說，他自己也當了大約三個月。她說，她不想當差手。她說，她想知道，一個人怎麼做到那樣：站在院子裡，說一件事，並且是認真的。他說，這個他也不知道。「你繫過那條繩，」他說。「你當時是認真的。」「我那時嚇壞了，」窯說。「就是這樣做的，」遲說；她說，這句話她想了整個冬天，到現在還沒有結論。

軸，夏天沒說話，現在也沒說話，趁洗碗的時候，問馱籃，四十座停了是不是真的。馱籃說，停了十四分鐘。軸說，她冬天在纜線廠工作，纜線廠有一條規矩，沒有東西可以停，她一直在想，那條規矩會不會是錯的。馱籃說，他在四十座停之前，不知道它是一條規矩。她擦一個杯子，擦了很久。「我會告訴他們，」她說。

他們住了一晚。驛主把他們安置在遺產大廳裡，那些他留給觀光客的床，是正宗的，也是不暖的。註和剪共用一槽熱水，這是出於禮貌，還有一對毛巾，這是出於地位。晚上，驛主把馱籃拉到一邊，像夏天把遲拉到一邊那樣，把一張清單放進他手裡。那是一張差事的清單。寫在一張觀光傳單的背面，用那圓圓的字，一共有九項：一袋鹽送到第三道門；一包種子送給海岸道上的一位女子；一雙靴子送到第七道門橋去換底；一則訊息給一位要求東閘修好時被告知的人；等等。它們都很小。沒有一項需要一位差手，也沒有一項沒做會被人想念；驛主說，這一帶任何時候都有四十來項這樣的事，被請求了，可是沒有人去，因為運貨者照登記處的時刻表走，每季一次，而一件要等一季的事，就是不再重要的事。「他會搬東西，」驛主說。「我想知道，他願不願意搬這些。」

馱籃說他會轉告。他在早餐時轉告了，清單放在粥旁邊，遲讀了兩遍，什麼也沒說，然後說，他拿那袋鹽。驛主把鹽記進帳冊，當作一項差事，記在橫線底下：受託，步行者一名，一袋鹽，第三道門。他說，他不記得上一次在那一欄寫進一件不是表演的事是什麼時候了。他說這話時，背對著他們。

驛主在粥旁邊問，那位差手星期六的那一車要不要留下來。他說，四十位觀光客要到，他很少處於這麼好的位置，可以向他們提供一位正宗的差手。他說這話，像一個人說他知道答案的事。遲說，他有一個家，在要他。驛主說，那當然。他裝了一籃麵包和一塊乳酪的邊角，一個水壺，還有第二個給註的水壺，註是不吃乳酪的，他站在院子的門口，直到他們走出視線，馱籃說，以灰褐的速度，那很久。窯拿著掃帚站在他旁邊。他們沒有說話。我秋天去驛站的時候，旗桿上有一面旗，驛主說那是窯做的。那是一塊素灰的布。沒有圖案。他說，她說過，一根沒有旗的旗桿是個謊，而這一面，至少什麼也沒說。

他們星期五大約中午到了四十座。四十座老遠就認出了他們。聲音從每一座塔門上的喇叭傳出來，是同一個聲音，隨著他們走過，一座接一座，所以走在路上的人，會聽見它從身邊升起，又在後面落下：早安，馱籃。早安，訪客。早安，註。早安，剪。我數到四個人，兩具軀架，向南。註、剪，上星期四你們來過，沒有受傷。四十座又說，馱籃在星期日九點的名冊上，問要不要記一位替代者。馱籃說，可以記他，他再看。四十座說，很高興。

在一號塔腳下，塔基的門邊，四十座有一個倉庫。那是一間簡單的棚子，有一個架子；架子上有兩截差使棍，用一條綠繩綁著，貼著「訪客的」標籤，旁邊有一個信封。喇叭說，四十座保管著一則給訪客的訊息，十四日到的，附帶要求親手交付，而四十座沒有手。喇叭問訪客可不可以好心，從架子上取下來。遲從架子上取了下來。他拿著它站在倉庫門口，其他人站遠，在線的後面。

我把信整份給出，就像他把它交給註抄進聚居點的紀錄那樣，這是我有它的唯一原因。它不長。給一號塔的訪客，不管這封信用什麼方式到你手上。你的感謝，經過一座我曾幫忙建造的風場來到我這裡，這是感謝應有的走法，我非常高興。我沒有把巨人變成風機。我做的是被撞到時會停的那一部分，這樣一個拿著棍子走向塔的人，才不會受傷。我沒預期有人會這麼做。我很高興那個人是你，也很高興沒有人受傷。我是簽署除役令的九個人之一。三十一年來，沒有一位差手寫過信給我。我發現，我等一位差手道謝，等得比我自己知道的還久，而它跟我想像的很不一樣：更小，也好得多。我九十七歲，在海岸有一座花園，園門會卡。如果你哪天路過，我會很感激你替我扶著門，讓我上油。大約需要一刻鐘。我向一位差手請求，因為我知道這是形式。赤楊。

註，被交代抄它，說登記處的名冊裡有一位赤楊：系統，除役令九人中的第四位。遲好一會兒沒說話。然後他說，她簽署了除役令。馱籃說是。遲說，她請求有人扶一道門。馱籃說是。「那我就扶，」遲說。他拿出便條簿，把信放進最後面，和其他的放在一起，放在偽造品前面，已經擠了；他對喇叭說，他想讓差使棍留在那裡。四十座說，有架子。四十座又說，這段時間裡擬了一則對那次挑戰的答覆，差手典規定挑戰必須回答，希望他能以它被提供時的心意接受。遲說他會。四十座說：四十座拒絕被斬殺。四十座不飛。四十座很樂意被拜訪。

他們繼續往南。幾個小時後，馱籃說他看見了聚居點的煙，註，從四十座起一直沉默，說他也看見了。剪說，那是廚房爐子的一縷煙，管家把它燒得太旺。沒有人笑。遲沒有放慢，也沒有加快。道路紀錄有他們，二點九，那是他們那個星期一直用的速度，從這一點起，也是一個家看得見一個人走來的速度。

## 第17章 · 敘述回家，以及在嵌板前說了什麼

地區公告板已經宣布了他們。中午十二點十二分，它在專門登記經過四十座的人的那一欄貼出：一行四人，兩具軀架，向南，2.9。聚居點讀公告板，像別的聚居點讀天氣。管家從十二點十五分起就把水壺燒著。侄女兩點去了門口，一直站在那裡。薊，住在離門口三百一十一公尺的地方，以同樣的注意讀公告板，穿上她比較好的素面，又脫掉，換上她工作的那一件，走到自己的門口站著，年幼的在她後面，像一個人站在一件被告知會來、卻不太相信的事前面。

從北邊來的小路，先到馱籃的家。小路鋪設的順序就是這樣，從來不是星期日那段路的順序，那段路從遲的門階開始，在馱籃的門階結束。他們是在下午最後一個小時到的。離一百公尺時，馱籃停下來聽，說他從這裡就聽得見四十座，二十二年來他從沒辦到過。剪說風向變了。馱籃說沒有。薊沒有離開門口。馱籃把灰褐的韁繩交給剪，自己走完最後三十公尺，以他的新節奏，那個樣子，剪說，他不會認得出，並在她面前停下。她看了他好一會兒。「你變快了，」她說。「一點點。」「你被用時間付了工資。」「十分之一。」「我讀了轉撥，」她說。「你寫了嗎？」「寫了。」他從放重要東西的口袋裡取出那張紙，放進她手裡，她沒有打開。她把它放進圍裙。

「進來，」薊說。她聽見自己這麼說了。「你要進來嗎？」「我要，」馱籃說。他告訴我，那是他這輩子第一次被請進自己的家，直到那時他才知道，自己一直在等著被請。薊說，她原本打算說成陳述句，像她說所有話那樣，結果它帶著問號出來了，她決定就這樣留著。年幼的從他身邊跑過去找灰褐，伸手抱住它，灰褐站著，像一個不知道自己是做什麼的東西那樣站著。薊越過她伴侶的肩膀，看著遲，他停在小路上，在她院子的邊緣，也就是負重者的家園結束的地方。「你把他還回來了，」她說。「是。」「他不一樣了。」「他自己也這麼說。」「謝謝，」薊說。「他搬了十二顆電芯。」「我讀了公告板，」她說。「回家吧。她從兩點起就在門口。」

他獨自繼續走。註和剪留在後面，和年幼的在一起，這是說好的，而這一次他們沒有為此爭論。他從馱籃的門走到自己的門，三百一十一公尺，沿著田間小徑經過東閘，照這條路鋪設的速度，用了將近四分鐘。就紀錄所示，那是他第一次朝這個方向走這段路，也是第一次，到達一座房子，而不是在房子門口留下一張紙。在小徑轉彎處，看得見風場的地方，他停了下來，望著它，望了多久，我不給。它在轉。他繼續走。他自己開了東閘，雖然它有促動器。

我說過我不為聚居點取名，我也不會。我會說，門是綠的，院子是掃過的，爐子燒得太旺，北邊的屋頂，人從小徑上，比看到任何別的都先看到它，換了新的覆板，還沒有風化，所以會發亮。那是這棟房子唯一一個看起來像剛被告知了什麼的地方。

她在門口，兩手放在身前，獵犬在她腳邊。獵犬被告知過了，我想。管家說，星期日、再下一個星期日，牠都在走路的時刻走到門口，而到了星期五，牠根本沒有去，而是從水壺燒上起，就坐在院子中間，面向北邊的小路，像一隻被給了時間的獵犬那樣坐著。牠沒有跑。牠坐著，然後站起來，走去迎接他，繞著他走了三圈，那是牠以前只做過一次的事，在他得到牠的那一年的春天；然後牠坐在他的腳上。侄女說：「你來了。」「我被請求了，」遲說。她說，她有話要告訴他。他說他在這裡。「不是這裡，」她說。「在嵌板那裡。」

管家在廚房門口，一手拿水桶，一手拿噴壺。遲說午安。她說她有一個水桶。他說，他想他不會需要。「我知道，」管家說。「我想把它拿在手裡。」她沒有提議跟去。她站在門口，像她站在那裡的樣子，身後是廚房和爐火，水桶是空的，從她指間垂著。他經過時，她說，漆乾了。他說，他希望是。

我當時不在嵌板那裡。侄女告訴我，她背對著它站著，他站在她前面，隔一步，用差手典裡給正在被告知事情的人的姿勢，也就是差使棍立在地上，雙手放在棍頂。我給的是她准許的，也就是外框。她說，她被問過一個問題，不知道怎麼說出她想說的，說得很糟；她寫過四遍；讀一件事和聽一件事不一樣；她要把它說出來。她沒有哭；她說那不是她會做的事；她說她看著他的靴子。她說了十一分鐘。剪，那時在院子裡和註在一起，在聽得見每一個字的位置，說他沒有聽。他說，那是四十年來唯一一次，他沒有聽，卻聽到了全部。他聽見一句，因為她為它提高了聲音，她准許我引用：我搬它們，是因為總該有人搬。稍後，她在回答一個問題時，給了遲另一個理由，我不說它們是同一個。

她說完以後，沒有人說話。獵犬躺在牆邊，尾巴在地上拍了一下。遲伸出手，用兩根手指碰了碰嵌板，在門閂原來的高度，那是第一隻手在七月記下的動作。然後他問，能不能問她一件事。她說可以。「你為什麼自己搬？」他說。她說，她在給小手的差手典的第四天想過這個，答不出來。她說，她想那是因為，她想知道它們有多重。「九本書就是九本書的重量，」遲說。「我知道，」侄女說。「我數過。」「完成了，」她說。她是從給小手的差手典學來的那個字，在最後一頁，燈旁邊的對話框裡，是孩子說的。他低下頭，像人們那樣做。

他後來對剪說，那是那天他第一次知道，手該放在哪裡。他把手放在她的肩上。差手典裡沒有這個，而註，在院子裡看著，在聚居點的紀錄裡，在一個他自己的標題底下寫了一條，格式裡沒有這一條的欄位。管家，在廚房門口，把水桶放了下來。

他們在廚房裡吃飯，照椅子的順序，那些椅子自夏天起就沒有坐滿過。管家做的燉菜，運算比記憶略多，那是他喜歡的，她沒有說她這麼做了。註和剪被當成客人餵，他們不是。註說那燉菜很好。管家說那是跟平常一樣的燉菜。註說，他就是這個意思。獵犬得到了那根骨頭，憑的是被告知過。註把他記次數的卡片留在盤子旁的桌上，面朝下，像留下一件外衣，管家後來找到它，拿來列購物單。獵犬躺在桌子底下，下巴放在遲的靴子上，侄女，自從那夜的木桶以後，一直睡在椅子上，不上桌吃飯，這時坐在她自己的位子上，把盤子裡的吃完，在用餐將盡時問，有沒有人介意她問一個問題。遲說他不介意。「職分是什麼？」侄女說。「這個我們做過了，」遲說。「你十六歲。」「現在是什麼？」遲放下湯匙。他說，等他知道了，他會告訴她，他想那可能要很久，她要再問。「我會的，」侄女說。「我會寫下來。」

註和剪在黃昏時離開，沿著田間小徑，往乾燥庫房去，那三十本書在那裡。註說他明天早上會把它們帶來。遲說他很感激。「別，」註說，然後，因為這是他的本性，「我會很高興。」在門口他停下來，說有一份檔案。遲說他知道；那是他的；他星期五在第九道門，用燧的手持機讀過了，他覺得邊上那個「對不起」是裡面寫得最好的東西。「那是裡面唯一的東西，」註說。剪在門口停下，用他對病人說話的那種聲音，告訴獵犬，牠可以停了。我不知道獵犬懂不懂。牠留在原處。

他們走後，他繞到房子北邊，那是他自從醒來那天以後沒有做過的。那一塊地長滿了豆子。管家，提著燈跟在他後面出來，說豆子什麼都吃。它們有一掌高，成行，是很好的綠色，那個木桶倒空的地方，那幾行是最綠的。他在那塊地的盡頭站了很久。「那是《九道門的路》，」管家說，「它對一株豆子的用處，比對我們的大。」他說，他想第四書記在第三行。她說她會在那裡插一根樁。他笑了，她告訴我，她沒有料到，而她沒有叫他停。

管家洗碗，遲擦乾，那是他自除役以來沒有做過的。她手在水裡，說她現在被修訂過四十四次了。他問是誰修訂的。「我自己，」她說。前一個星期，她問過侄女，能不能看侄女寫的信，侄女說不行，她決定喜歡這樣。他說那是一次很好的修訂。她說那不是修訂，只是她在試的一個習慣。他說，他以為修訂不過就是這樣。她遞給他一個杯子，說漆很好。「我知道，」遲說。「對著牆說，」她說，「不要對我說。」他在走廊上，上床前，對著牆說了。這是我從管家那裡得來的，她還補充說，牆沒有回答。

薊那晚在她的桌子旁，照約定，按順序，念那封信給年幼的聽，然後自己又念了第二遍。它說的是我給出的那些。年幼的問，我什麼都需要，還有灰褐，是什麼意思。薊說，意思是他回家了。然後她問馱籃，他願不願意告訴她為什麼。他說，他有好幾個，還不知道哪一個才是理由。「說一個，」薊說。「我想看看，這條路兩頭是不是一樣長，」馱籃說。「然後呢？」「不一樣，」馱籃說。她說，那算一個。我從她那裡聽來，那是他給過她的唯一一個；我從他那裡聽來，那不是他會給我的那一個。

侄女，隔著門看見了，說他躺下以前，把便條簿拿出來，在桌上放了三張紙：她的信，工程師的信，和登記處最好的偽造品。他一張也沒有讀。他把偽造品放在最底下，把工程師的放在它上面，把她的放在那上面，然後合上便條簿。她說，她從來沒有那麼清楚地知道，他會引用的是哪一張。

那晚他睡在自己的床上，十二個晚上以來的第一次，離嵌板一堵牆的厚度。家裡的人在聽。沒有人告訴他這個。管家在走廊上站了一會兒，拿著一支沒有點亮的蠟燭，侄女坐在廚房裡，面前是給小手的差手典和一支鉛筆，什麼也沒寫；早上，獵犬躺在他房間的門前，而不是嵌板前，管家，六十年來都在第一聲鈴之前起床，發現自己不想跨過牠。

## 第18章 · 敘述那扇門，以及書架上的七十個空位

三十本書在第二聲鈴時到了，裝在聚居點的手推車上，車子的一個輪子比另一個大，自從那場水災就是這樣，書上蓋了一條床單，雖然沒有下雨。註說，這是紙張露天搬運的規矩。剪說，是為了不讓它們看見路，以為自己要去什麼地方。他們分兩趟運來，剪推車，註走在車旁，一隻手按著床單，像人走在病人旁邊那樣，到了院子停下，遲就站在那裡，穿著他的素面。侄女說，他從第一聲鈴起就站在那裡了；走出來，走進去，又走出來。「三十，」註說。「三十，」遲說。註手裡有一張清單。那是第一天他用一本書一個刻鈴的速度開始列的，上面只有九個名字，步調撐得住的，也就到那裡；他沒有看它，遲也沒有要求看。

管家手裡有一把鑿子。她前一天晚上就把它擺在走廊地上，旁邊是一把木槌、一塊防塵布，還有她自己的一副手套，沒有對任何人提起，也沒有人問那是給誰的。他們進來的時候，她正站在嵌板前面，手套已經戴上了。她說，這是她的灰泥。遲說，他知道。她說，她聽說是該先問的，所以她現在問，她能不能把它拆下來。「我被請求了，」遲說，這是規矩；然後，因為他覺得似乎還該加一點什麼，又說：「請。」

她從上面的角落開始，從漆和牆交界的地方下手，灰泥在第三下輕敲時裂開，發出一聲像咳嗽的小聲音。她沿著左邊往下，再橫過底部，不急，灰塵落在防塵布上。其他人往後站，那是一種沒有人記得是誰提議過的默契。侄女舉著燈，那盞燈並不需要。灰泥底下是木板，四個角釘在門框上，等管家把最後一根釘子拔出來，它整片一下子脫落了，這類東西總是這樣，她接住它，因為她離得最近，雙臂撐著它的全部重量站了一會兒，不知道該把它放在哪裡。是遲接過了另一頭。他們把它靠在走廊的牆上。門洞又是門洞了，裡面有一個房間，遲沒有進去。他說，他要等門。獵犬對門沒有意見，從他的臂下鑽了進去，繞著桌子走了一圈，在地板正中央躺下，躺在那個鐘點窗子投下來的那一方光裡，下巴擱在前爪上。

門在柴房裡。它從七月起就立在那裡，側靠著後牆，蓋著一只麻袋，在鋸木架和一圈舊灌溉管線之間，門的背面，用粉筆，用管家的字跡，寫著：書房。不要燒。我秋天問過她這件事，因為歇野沒有人記得有誰燒過一扇門。她說，她是寫給以後的人看的。我問她指的是誰。她說，七月的時候，她並不確定那個人會是她自己。剪和註一起把它抬進來，剪出力，註報公分，報出來的位置，一如往常，都偏左一點。這花了將近一個刻鈴，這段時間裡遲雙手交疊站在走廊上，看著那個房間，而那個房間，透過門洞，也看著他。管家用掌根把銷子一根接一根敲進去。門擺了一下，沒有關上，然後關上了。沒有人對這件事說什麼。

銷子到位以後，他沒有人請就往前一步，伸出兩根手指，到門閂所在的高度。它就在原來的地方。第一隻手會給這個計時；我從管家那裡得知，大約是讀一行字的時間。他提起門閂，它發出它一向發出的聲音，門朝裡開向那個房間。「潮的時候會卡，」管家在他身後說，用的是她談天氣的聲音。「我會處理。」剪說，遲說了早安，像他三十年來每天早上在那個門閂前說的那樣，而剪覺得，雖然他不敢發誓，那是對房間說的。

他走了進去。其他人留在走廊上，註說這面牆需要刷一層石灰，管家說她知道它需要什麼，剪問有沒有人看見木槌，木槌就在她手裡；也就是說，他們談了一個刻鈴，然後跟了進去。書房和他們離開時一樣：桌子、有窗臺的窗、書架，空的。北牆上有一塊汙痕，舊的，褐色的，是漏水的形狀，汙痕上面是一片新得像受了驚嚇的天花板。房間裡有灰泥和八月的氣味，更底下，隱約，還有紙的氣味，雖然這裡已經一個月沒有紙了。註說，那是木頭，等他們都死了，它還會在那裡。剪說是黴味。註坐了下來，像第一天那樣，因為這個房間仍然對他有那個作用；剪早就在等這一刻，把一隻手放在他的肩上，留在那裡。

書架多年沒有人撣過灰，書也就是這樣留下了它們的輪廓。每一個空位都是乾淨的木頭，形狀正是站在那裡的那本書的形狀，四周是多年的灰色，於是整個房間看起來像是在書都在的時候拍過一張相，然後把書拿走了。剪從車上把三十本搬進來，每次五本，侄女一本一本從他手裡接過去，遞過去，遲一本一本放回去。他沒有要那張清單。就她所見，他也沒有看那些輪廓；他看著手裡的書，把它放在它該去的地方，它剛好合得上。《提燈的差手》第一冊放在第二層書架的左邊角落，眼睛的高度，第二冊和第三冊放在旁邊。第三冊在放上去之前，他先翻開，翻到中間附近的一頁，讀了一行字的時間，然後闔上。我秋天問過他那一頁是什麼。他說，是關於一只碗的一頁。我問上面寫了什麼。他說，他本來想，他寧可被那一頁糾正，而不是被他的鄰居糾正，後來又想了想，決定他寧可被他的鄰居糾正。註拿著他的清單站在旁邊，我想他是希望被要求交出來的。他沒有被要求，他也沒有介意，或者說，他是以他介意的方式介意，也就是記一筆。

花了一個上午。三十本都放好以後，侄女退後一步，大聲數那些空位；她數數就像別人呼吸。「七十，」她說。註說應該是六十八：十五本是從書架上去了舊貨市集，另外四本當時在桌子上，還有五十三本進了紙漿。「七十，」侄女說。她舉起給小手的差手典，那本書從第一天起就一直夾在她腋下，而現在看來，它在第三層書架靠近底部的地方也有一個自己的位置；然後她看了看，不是看任何人，是看向剪外衣的方向。「啊，」剪說。

那是《擺渡的差手》。它是一本短書，在一件外衣的內袋裡待了一個月，已經有了口袋的形狀。剪說，他拿它是為了保持乾燥。「它是乾的，」侄女說。「我拿它是為了留著它，」剪說。他用雙手把它遞出去，眼睛看著地板，像人交還一樣自己本來沒有權利拿的東西。遲接過來，看著書架，找到它的位置，是第二層最窄的一個，兩根手指寬；他沒有把它放進去。「我想讓它有它的位置，」他說，「我也想讓你有它。我看不出怎麼兩樣都做到。」註在窗邊說，剪可以問。剪說他不知道這是可以問的。他是對著《擺渡》說的。然後他抬頭，問遲，他能不能留著它。遲說，他想這有一個格式。註說有。他兩天前從驛站驛主的帳冊上抄來的，在那裡，他看到這個格式被做得比他見過的任何事都好，他取出鉛筆，在他那張清單的背面，第九個名字底下寫：《擺渡的差手》，一冊。借予剪。歸還：後面是一道橫線。剪動筆不快，簽了名，讀了兩遍，說那是他簽過的最厚道的東西。

《擺渡》回到外衣之前，遲請他讀最後一頁，剪讀了，遲請他再讀一遍，剪又讀了。侄女，曾經在自己的書裡把擺渡那一頁讀過三遍，也沒找到它是為了什麼，眼睛看著地板聽著。沒有人說那是為了什麼。書架上的那個位置仍然空著。沒有人放東西進去。

剩下桌子，桌子上有一個圈：木頭上一塊比較淡的地方，大小正是四冊書裹在包裝裡的樣子。那個春天，漏水一直滴在它上面，而《條款之鏡》擋住了它坐著的那一塊的潮氣。沒有人動過這張桌子。遲把手平放在那個圈上，像人試爐子。管家說它可以用醋洗掉。他說他寧可不要。造成這個圈的四冊書在登記處的紙本室裡，在我自己那一層，和其他十五冊在一起，它們合起來付了屋頂的錢，放在有儀表的抽屜裡，它們是乾的。沒有人要求把它們拿回來。調閱單有一格「用途」，我從簿子上撕了一張，放在桌上我看得見的地方。我沒有填。

《三十一年前的下午》放在了窗臺上，因為它薄，也因為沒有別的地方可以放一本提出很多、卻什麼也沒有結論的書。我先前說過，我沒有告訴它的作者他的書去了哪裡。十一月，我告訴了他：它到過歇野，它被留下了，而它現在站在一棟房子北邊一間書房的窗臺上。他問它是不是乾的，正如我說過他會問的。我說是。他問有沒有人讀過。我說我會去查；我至今還沒有勇氣。

下午，遲在桌邊坐下，那是他從七月以來沒有做過的事，面前是《提燈》的第一冊，他找到那位差手在第九道門的長夜那一段，讀他自己的鉛筆字：電芯只撐得了四點一夜，不是九夜。書記往上湊了整數。他湊得對。他讀了很久。然後他伸手要一支鉛筆，就像他會對任何人伸手一樣，才發現自己沒有；最後一個早上，在第九道門，他把鉛筆殘段給了燧，她一句話也沒說就放進了口袋。侄女把她的給了他。那是她讀給小手的差手典時用的那一支，一小時一頁，四天，現在已經很短了，他接過去，像人在工具要被清點的人家裡拿起一件工具。在舊的批註下面，他寫：總有人送電芯。（燧）差手典沒寫這個。「燧是誰？」侄女問。「她守第九道門。」「她在書裡嗎？」「現在在了，」遲說，把鉛筆還給她。她說，她記得的不是那些字，而是他拿著那支鉛筆的方式：像拿著一樣必須還回去的東西，而拿它的人打算還。

侄女在書房的地板上坐下，背靠著書架，在獵犬旁邊，從第三聲鈴起，牠就一直追著光在地板上移動，一次一個手掌的距離，像一個被給了一個位置去守著的東西那樣；她把《船閘的小姐》攤在膝上，用手的速度讀了第一頁。管家拿著一塊抹布來看過兩次，第二次連裝作是為了抹布都懶得裝了。七月的時候，註說寫這本書的人一定站過閘邊，侄女在手背上寫了點東西，那是一個問題。她在那一頁讀完時又寫了一次。上面寫的是：哪一座船閘？

我後來站在那個門口，沒有被請進去；侄女說，對任何記東西的人都是這個規矩，那是她從她叔叔那裡聽來的，而叔叔是從差手典那裡聽來的，差手典裡，書記不能越過門檻。我不認為差手典這麼說過。她從地板上又念了那一頁給我聽，用手的速度。花了一個小時，身體的時鐘是一個小時，登記處的時鐘也是一個小時，我不知道還有哪一間房間，這兩個時鐘會一致。

晚飯後他回到書房，燈亮著，一直亮到油燒乾，那是七月以來它不曾被要求做的事。管家在走廊上站了一會兒，這一次沒有拿蠟燭，看著門底下那一條光，然後去睡了。第二天早上，那是個星期日，門閂上了油。沒有人看見是誰做的，也沒有人提起。第三聲鈴時，獵犬起身，走到院門口。

## 第19章 · 敘述小徑的轉彎處，以及關於那只碗的一頁

星期日是歇野刻意放慢的一天。四十座閒置；貨運工不跑；地區公告板只貼天氣，別的什麼也不貼；而平常一週裡節奏比鄰居快上一倍的主體，這一天都用離他們最近的那個人的節奏過日子。這是個沒有人記得是誰決定的習俗。一個人在星期日走三百一十一公尺，在走的這段時間裡，差不多是整個地區唯一正在去什麼地方的東西；而路的另一頭那個人，二十二年來，都爬在四十座的梯子上，保養歇野唯一一臺在這一天被擦洗的機器。

獵犬在門口站了十九分鐘。牠在十一年的星期日裡都站在那裡，而每一次，牠等的那個人都在一分鐘之內走出來。管家對廚房裡發生的任何事都要數時間，她說，她難過的不是獵犬，牠知道自己在等什麼，她難過的是書房裡的那個人，他還沒有決定。他坐在桌邊，面前是從廚房抽屜裡拿來的一支鉛筆，和一張豆種收據的背面，他停在最後一行。

我看過那張收據。前三行是這二十二年來一直寫的星期日訊息：風從西南來。東閘修好了。獵犬在門口。第四行寫了四遍，前三遍被劃掉。第一遍寫的是：我什麼都不需要。第二遍：我需要一樣東西。第三遍：我需要，然後停住。第四遍，沒有被劃掉，寫的是：你需要什麼？他在第二張收據的背面把它謄清，把第一張留在桌上，管家收著那一張。她說，他掉下來的東西她都撿，他寫下來的東西她都讀，到現在還沒有人告訴她不可以。

他終於走出來，穿著他的素面，左手拿著那張紙。獵犬走在前面，到了東閘等著，鼻子貼著閘桿，他用右手開閘，雖然它有促動器，過去以後又把它關上，他們繼續走。在小徑轉彎處，看得見風場的地方，他停了下來，像他二十二年來大多數星期日那樣，望著風場，風場在轉。然後他做了一件二十二年來沒有做過的事，讀過更早記載的註可以證實。他在路邊的土坡上坐下，坐在草裡，紙放在膝上，兩手平放在膝蓋上，就像差手典說的那種手裡有東西、等著人走過來的送信的人。我問過他為什麼。他說，是他的腿想這樣。我另一個星期再問他一次。他說，那是規矩。我說，這兩個不是同一個理由。他說他注意到了，而這兩者竟然一致，讓他吃了一驚。

薊在窗邊，和年幼的在一起。她說，早飯時馱籃問過她，如果步行者來到門階前，他該說什麼，她叫他說差手典說的；他說他不知道差手典說什麼；她告訴他，歇野的每個孩子都知道差手典說什麼，每個大人都假裝不知道，她對這種假裝沒有意見，但他不可以把它帶到門階前。第一個看見遲的是年幼的，從他坐著的樣子看的，那樣子不對。小的問他是不是病了。薊說他是坐著；然後她說，那是規矩，馱籃說，什麼規矩，她就告訴了他。他說他本來打算在門階上等。她說，他本來打算像根門柱一樣站在門階上，而差手典對那種送信的人在轉彎處坐下、收信的人卻站在門階上的男人，有個詞，那個詞是「晚了」。她說，在訊息的第四年，她曾經在門階上留過一鍋湯作為回禮，附了一張字條：謝謝。下一個星期日的訊息寫的是：湯很好。我什麼都不需要。她就沒有再試過。

馱籃那個星期日在家，是因為星期五經過四十座時，四十座問過要不要在星期日的名冊上記一位替代者，他說可以留著他的名字，他會看看；星期六傍晚，他看過了，派人去報了信。四十座說很抱歉，並問能不能指望他下一個星期日來，他說他會讓四十座知道。他穿上了他比較好的素面。薊沒有笑，他說這更糟。他脫掉，又穿上，出門去了。

遲坐了九分鐘。薊對著水壺從窗邊計時。他說，那是他等任何東西等得最久的一次，而他並不介意；她說，她從來不知道一個人可以那樣靜止，兩手放在膝蓋上，指節發白。從馱籃的門階到轉彎處是一百三十公尺，馱籃用他的新節奏走完，薊形容那是一個被告知「這是滿的」的人端著東西走路的樣子。年幼的走到門口，就被留在那裡。獵犬抬了抬頭，又放下。馱籃在坐著的人面前站住。「我聽說，」他用差手典的形式說，「你帶著什麼東西給我。」「是的，」遲說，站起來，雙手把紙遞出去。馱籃雙手接過，就站在那裡，在風裡讀，差手典沒有禁止這個。他現在讀得快。一口氣就讀完了，然後他看著最後一行，看了很久。

「那是一個問題，」馱籃說。「是。」「在最後一行。」「是。」「訊息不以問題結尾。」「不，」遲說。「我的二十二年都沒有。」馱籃說，薊會想知道他打算怎麼說。遲說，那是馱籃的事。馱籃把紙折成四折，放進他放重要東西的口袋。它現在在那個盒子裡，和其他的在一起，我看過，那是盒子裡唯一一封在發問的。他說他需要看看關於那只碗的那一頁。

遲說，它在書房裡，馱籃被請去。馱籃說，他想也是，年幼的想看看紙；薊早飯時就這麼說過，他說可以。他向自己的門口舉起一隻手，薊放開了年幼的，他們沿著小徑跑上來，那個速度，馱籃沒有評論，一行人一起往前走，獵犬走在最前。路上馱籃做了一句諺語，秋天他把它給了我，條件是我要說它只是工整：信末的一個問題，是一扇留在門閂上的門。到了東閘，年幼的大的那個，從小被告知那道閘是遲的，不許碰，伸出一根手指，按了促動器的按鈕。閘門開了。它自己開的，帶著一聲低鳴，不慌不忙，然後就那樣敞著。遲看著它。「它能用，」他說。「它二十二年來都能用，」馱籃說。大的問他為什麼用手開。他說他不知道，等他知道了會說。大的說這是個很差的回答。薊說，這是他唯一有的一個。

年幼的站在書房門口，像歇野的年幼的站在任何有氣味的東西前面那樣。小的把鼻子貼著書架吸了一口氣，說那聞起來像潮氣，大的說，那聞起來像紙。「紙是什麼？」小的說。「就是它聞起來的那個，」大的說。大的用一根手指繞著那些空位走，一個接一個，像數念珠，問那個長的裡面本來放的是什麼；侄女說，那是《九道門的路》，十二冊，現在在北邊那塊地裡。「能吃嗎？」小的說。侄女說那是豆子，十月再說。她把給小手的差手典從桌上拿過來，正在教大的怎麼用一個小時讀一頁。大的花了十一分鐘覺得無聊，花了二十分鐘才不無聊。

遲從書架上取下《提燈》的第三冊，找到那一頁，念了出來，用手的速度，在一間有兩個年幼的在場的房間裡，那是值得一看的事。我照原樣給出。第一道門，負重者把碗放在門檻上，站著吃，負重者都是這樣。提燈站在他身旁，接過遞來的，什麼也沒說。負重者說：坐。提燈說：你站著，我不該坐。負重者說：這不是該不該。我是在請求。於是提燈坐在臺階上，負重者在他身旁坐下，碗在他們兩個之間。「上面沒有寫下雨，」馱籃說。「沒有，」遲說。在那段話旁邊的頁邊，用細小端正的鉛筆字，寫著：不是在雨裡。我一直認為是。「下雨了，」大的說。所有人都看著大的，大的說，第一道門總是在下雨，那在跳繩的那首裡。薊對著誰也不是地說，跳繩的那首是年幼的學那些門的方式，第一道門下雨，第二道門有風，她那個年代就是這樣。大的把它從頭念到尾，邊念邊在書房的地板上跳，管家准許了一節；侄女把它寫在她另一隻手背上，那隻手已經用過了。她說，她是從那個下午才成為收集者的。

然後薊問，能不能讓她看一看那一頁。她看的時候嘴唇在動，那是她不做的事，她把一根手指放在「我是在請求」這一行底下，又把手指拿開。

馱籃轉向她。他說，他在梯地時告訴過遲，他沒聽過這個。「你沒聽過那只碗，」薊說。「你聽過那場雨。」遲從侄女手裡接過鉛筆，在他舊的註記底下寫：下雨了。（馱籃的大的）侄女說，他對著它吹了一口氣，好像它是墨水。然後馱籃說「坐」，沒有什麼特別的感情，用的是他讀儀表的聲音；遲說，馱籃站著，他不該坐；馱籃說，這不是該不該，他是在請求；遲就坐了下去，馬上，背靠著書架坐在書房的地板上，馱籃在他旁邊坐下，沒有碗。大的說，碗應該在臺階上。馱籃說，沒有人提過膝蓋。管家在門口站了一陣，走開，又回來，手裡是燉鍋和兩個碗。她把鍋放在桌上，出於習慣，鍋正好落進那個圈裡，像是照它做的；她看了看，沒有挪動它。然後她把其中一個碗放在地上，放在他們兩個之間，一句話也沒說。她知不知道那一段，還是只知道這兩個人，我沒有問。

光開始暗下來的時候，薊在門口問了。她用她說一切話的方式說：你又要去了。遲說，海岸有一位工程師，在八十公里外，九十七歲，有一扇會卡的園門，她請一位差手扶著它，她好上油；那大約要一刻鐘。「那就不是差事，」薊說。「是拜訪。」遲說，他想兩者都是。「那就在是拜訪的時候帶他去，」薊說，出去照看年幼的了。馱籃一直沒說話，而且繼續沒說了好一陣。薊說，他在決定要用哪一個理由時就是這樣。

我問馱籃，他有沒有用寫的回過。他有，在下一個星期日，我問那是怎麼辦到的，因為依規矩，送信的人坐著，收信的人走去，而那個星期日，他們兩個都是兩邊。他說，他們在同一分鐘到了轉彎處，各拿著一張紙，站在那裡，薊在窗邊說，坐。他們一起坐下，相隔四公尺，雙手放在膝蓋上，隔著草地把紙遞過去，這也不在差手典裡。馱籃說，從那以後每個星期日都是這樣，他不明白為什麼不該把它寫下來。

第一隻手每個星期給星期日這條路一整行，而我沒有第一隻手可以給它一行。我有的是《擺渡的差手》的扉頁，他早年的某一年為自己寫下的，用一支磨得快成殘樁的鉛筆：星期日。單程三百一十一公尺。鄰居不在。放在階上。剪現在借著那本書，他給我看過。我替第一隻手補上一行，因為它不在這裡，沒辦法自己寫：星期日。三百一十一公尺，其中一些走了兩遍。鄰居在家。

## 第20章 · 敘述一間廚房裡寫下的九條條件，以及一扇有兩個合頁的門

註和剪星期二來了，就像他們自七月起隔天來一次那樣，坐在如今有了門的書房裡，談登記處，依註的說法，那裡沒有什麼值得一提的事。註讓大家知道，他沒有帳要記；那張卡片拿去列購物單了。他握鉛筆的樣子，像一個手有習慣的人。剪膝上放著《擺渡》，沒有讀，像人握著一只還沒喝完的杯子。侄女在角落裡讀給小手的差手典，一小時一頁，獵犬躺在地板中央，光曾經落的那個地方。他們沒有提差手典。他們在走廊上說好了不提差手典，並且，如果有機會，就提一件公共事務，讓遲在上面顯得有個穩當的看法。

那件事是節奏下限。公議面前有一個提案：登記處名冊上的任何主體，節奏都不得低於地區平均的十分之八，這會提高馱籃一家，以及歇野大約四百位別的主體，公議為此付出的代價，註報了出來，而我不報。註把它攤開，帶著數字，講了將近一個鈴。遲聽到底，說他認為這是個穩當的提案；十分之八低了一成；下限應該由最慢又開口要求的那一位來定，而不是由平均值，因為平均值是沒有人真正活在上面的東西；他還會把生效日期從明年一月一日提前到下個月一日，因為一件要花一年才到的事，是留給別人孫子的事。註把這寫了下來。他沒有料到自己會被要求這麼做。「還有，我會在定下限的地方放一盞燈，」遲說。註放下鉛筆。剪放下《擺渡》。「放在上面，」遲說。「好讓人看得見它在哪裡。」沒有人說話。然後遲說，他已經聽了四十分鐘兩個人講理智的話，覺得總該有一個人說點瘋話，以免他們在納悶。剪笑得那麼厲害，《擺渡》從他的膝上滑了下去。註說，他不認為這該寫進紀錄，然後把它寫了進去。

星期三，在管家從陶缸裡取出麵團的那個時辰，侄女走進廚房，把門關在身後。在那個家裡，廚房的門從第一聲鈴到最後一聲鈴都是半掩的，從這一點就看得出沒有任何事正在被決定。獵犬在走廊上，把鼻子貼著門縫趴下，就像七月剪把牠關在外面時那樣。管家聽見了門閂。她沒有回頭。她說她聽見了，侄女說，她就是要讓她聽見。

侄女說，她有一件事要照規矩問，她希望管家知道她是先問她，在叔叔之前，因為她聽說次序是這樣。「在誰之前？」管家問，她其實知道。「在他之前。」管家把麵團倒在案板上。「問吧，」她說。侄女請求准許她跟叔叔上路，在他去海岸扶一道門的時候，去多久都行，並且回來。「不行，」管家說，繼續揉。

侄女站著。過了一陣，管家說，她總是先說不行；那是習慣；她事後再修訂；侄女可以站在那裡等她修訂。侄女站著，數那些摺疊。她說有十一次。管家說，麵包有一個特點，不管你用什麼節奏，它要花多少時間就花多少時間，所以它是這個家裡唯一從來沒有被修訂過的東西。「我用灰泥封過一扇門，」她終於對著麵團說。「你知道為什麼嗎？因為我想不出手還能做什麼。我後來一直在想我當時該做什麼，我還沒有想到。我不想靠對你再做一次同樣的事來找出答案。」「你不會把我抹進灰泥裡。」「我可能會，」管家說。「我很會抹灰泥。」

然後她問侄女為什麼想去。侄女說她沒有理由。「那你們兩個就湊成一對了。」「他有好幾個。」「他有好幾個是他告訴別人的，」管家說。「我隔著一堵牆都聽過了。我想聽你的，如果你沒有，我想聽聽這個。」侄女把左手伸出來，手背朝上。管家看著它，沒有擦乾自己的手。她以前讀過，在星期六，從侄女的肩膀後面，因為凡是寫下來的她都讀。上面用鉛筆，抹得很糊，寫著：哪一座船閘？「那不是理由，」她說。「那是個問題。」「那是我有的一個。」「你不能憑一個問題離開一個家。」「他就是。」「他就是，」管家說，「你看看。」

她在圍裙上擦了擦手，那和擦乾不是一回事，走到碗櫥那邊，從頂上取下一雙靴子。那是一雙好靴子，是不顯灰塵的那種棕色，在管家守著這個家的這些年裡，它們不屬於這個家裡的任何人；它們被換了鞋底，新的鞋底是黃色的。「我七月弄的，」她說。「抹灰泥那個星期。我得讓手做點什麼，而我不知道是為了誰。」她把它們放在桌上，放在麵團旁邊。侄女坐下，脫掉她的鞋。靴子合腳。管家看了它們好一會兒，說她沒有計畫過這個。

然後她從抽屜裡拿出一支鉛筆，和一張舊購物單的背面，站著寫，手掌根上沾著麵粉，用的是那種從罐頭標籤學會寫字的人的圓潤端正的字。九條條件我有；她秋天讓我抄了，條件是我要把原件還給她，我還了。它們是這樣的。一：好靴子。其他的是在家裡穿的。二：星期日，照格式。除非你查過，否則不要寫你什麼都不需要。三：端到你面前的就吃。不夠就說。四：沒有人請求，就不要替人扶門。五：不是你肯替我搬的，就不要搬。六：他要是倒下了，先把他扶起來，事後再問他。七：你要是倒下了，他會先把你扶起來。讓他扶。八：想要什麼，在太想要之前說出來。九：回來。

第九條不是新的。她是在他第二次出發的那天早上寫的，回應他壓在鹽罐下的那張字條，那張字條就像所有的字條那樣，說他什麼都不需要；而因為沒有地方可以寄，她就把它放進碗櫥的抽屜，放在她打算對他說、卻還沒說的那些東西所在的地方。星期三，她把那張卡片拿出來，放在清單的最下面，說她一個字也沒改，只是改了給誰。我秋天問她，現在它是給誰的。她說我知道；然後，因為她是個精確的人，說是給兩個人的。「是答應了嗎？」侄女說。「是九條，」管家說。「告訴他我說了行，而且你不許說。」「為什麼？」「好讓他來問我。」「他會說他得問你。」「他會的，」管家說。「我會在爐子那邊。」

然後，因為那天是星期三，麵包要做，她叫侄女來揉麵。侄女自從九歲就沒揉過麵。「用掌根，」管家說。「不是用手指。你往外推，再折回來，而且不要看它；它不喜歡被看。」侄女說她知道。管家說她不知道。侄女說她不知道，然後繼續揉。管家告訴我，那是她唯一一次讓別人碰麵包，她沒有說她對結果的看法，結果被吃掉了。

星期四，侄女走到書房門口，問能不能進去，這是她好幾天沒做過的事。遲在桌邊，面前是《提燈》的第一冊。她說她有個請求：她想跟他一起去海岸。「我被請求了，」遲說，這是規矩；然後說：「我得去問管家。」「我問過她了。」「什麼時候？」「昨天。在廚房。照格式。」「然後呢？」「她說行。」他放下鉛筆。「她說我不許告訴你。」「那你為什麼告訴我？」「因為你還是會去問她。她說你會說你得去問她。」「她有沒有說她會說什麼？」「她說她會在爐子那邊。」

他去了廚房。她在爐子旁，背對著門，門是半掩的。他站在門口，說他是來請求，能不能讓侄女跟他去海岸。她說她知道。他說他是在請求。她說，那就行；條件在桌上。他站著讀，兩手背在身後，像人讀一張公告。第六條和第七條他讀了兩遍。然後他對著爐子說，這是很好的條件；她說，那是僅有的條件；他問這些條件對不對他適用。「全都對你適用，」管家說。「我是寫給她的，因為她會讀。」他說，他接受，為了自己，也為了侄女。她說他不必被請求。他說他想。她說既然這樣，他可以在第九條上簽個名，並且不回頭地遞出鉛筆；他簽了，用的是他三十年來一直用的那個簽法：一橫一豎，像一道小門。

到了星期五，聚居點知道了，像聚居點知道事情那樣，開始在門階上留東西，那是聚居點表達想法的方式。有薊的一只水壺，附一張字條，說不許弄丟；一圈田工留的繩子；剪留的一盒補片，和驛主那種是同一個牌子；還有一頂沒人署名的帽子，管家判斷尺寸不對，掛在釘子上。註留了一本畫了格線的筆記本，鉛筆插在書脊裡，是給侄女的，還有一張卡片，說手背不是一種長久的媒介。她已經把筆記本寫滿了。她也沒有停止使用她的手。

星期六他檢查昔，昔的左膝是鎬的，右肩是洛林的，他說他分不出誰做得比較好，也不打算分。侄女用廚房的秤稱她的背包。九公斤。「九公斤就是九公斤的重量，」管家說，放進一條麵包。

星期日，他們在同一分鐘到了轉彎處。薊在窗邊說，坐，他們就一起坐下，相隔四公尺，雙手放在膝蓋上，隔著草地把紙遞過去。獵犬在兩個人之間來回走了四趟，然後躺在中間，馱籃說，那是獵犬唯一正確的位置。遲的紙上寫的是：風從西邊來。東閘上了油。管家說了行。你需要什麼？馱籃的，是他第一次寫給薊以外的任何人，寫的是：風從北邊來。四十座很安靜。我需要扶那道門。遲讀了兩遍。「赤楊請的是一位差手，」他說。「在差手典裡，」馱籃說，「負重者是一道門的守門人。」「那只有一刻鐘。」「我做過比這少的，」馱籃說。「我替四十座在梯子上做了二十二年星期日，得到一只水桶。」遲說，他會寫信去問，能不能讓不只一個人扶。「還有誰？」馱籃說。「一個。侄女星期三問過了。」「那就是三個，」馱籃說，「而且灰褐也得有人去請求。」

他當天晚上在院門口，照格式，請求灰褐，問它肯不肯為他馱；灰褐站著，像它一向站的那樣，也就是像一個不知道自己是做什麼的東西那樣。馱籃說這是答應。薊說，這也是灰褐對所有事情的回答，而那正是灰褐的意義。

遲星期一寫信給工程師，在乾燥庫房上面的辦公室，註在那裡管中繼。那是一封三行的信：他會來，九月，走路來，扶那道門；一位負重者和他的侄女請求也扶；他不知道她原本是不是只為一個人而說的。註，被告知那是一封私信，讀了兩遍。中繼免費、即時，回覆在遲站起身之前就到了。註說，她一定一直坐在另一頭。遲說，他想是的。帶他們全部來，信上說。門有兩個合頁，還有一張長凳。我等你們，用手的速度。這和油無關。

## 第21章 · 敘述從前門出發，以及第一天的路

侄女在星期日夜裡做了一件事，沒有寫進筆記本。書房的燈熄了以後，她拿著給小手的差手典走進去，憑手摸找到第三層書架靠近底部的那個位置，那是它自己的位置，把它放了進去。剛好合上。她把手平放在它旁邊的書架上，站了一會兒，然後走出去，把門關上，門閂已經上過油，一點聲音也沒有。她一直在數的那些空位，現在是六十九個。她當時沒有告訴任何人。她後來允許我說出來。

遲寫了他留下的那張字條。他在廚房桌上寫的，用抽屜裡的鉛筆，照格式，寫完用鹽罐壓著。上面寫的是：風從西邊來。往海岸去扶一道門。扶完就回來。漆很好。你需要什麼？早上字條不見了，鹽罐被挪開了一掌寬，底下有一張卡片，卡片上，用那圓潤的字，一個字：鹽。他讀了，說鹽快沒了，把卡片放進便條簿，放在其他東西前面，那裡已經擠了。我秋天問管家為什麼是鹽，她說海岸的鹽是灰色的、粗的，拿來做麵包比較好。我問那是不是理由。她說，那是寫得下在卡片上的那一個。

他們在九月的第一個星期一、第二聲鈴時出發，從前門，在白天，聚居點站在自己的門口。沒有人通知過它。地區公告板什麼也沒貼，註，他本來會知道，說他沒告訴任何人；但是許多季節工沒有人跟他們說過，卻發現自己在那個時辰跟自己的門有一個約，並且赴了約，從綠門到東閘那條小路，三百公尺，兩旁站滿了突然想起要到籬笆邊辦事的人。沒有人說話，在歇野，那是對一件大事表示敬意的形式。侄女一輩子都聽人這樣說，她說，她沒想到它會那麼吵。鎬在他的門口，舉起一隻手，又放下，像一個人看見自己修好的東西走過去時那樣。

管家沒有出來。她在爐子那邊。廚房的窗子朝著小路，任何從前門出去的人都會經過它，她就站在窗裡，背對玻璃，手裡一把長柄勺，攪著一鍋，剪說，已經攪到不動了的湯。侄女經過時往裡看了一眼，沒有停。管家沒有回頭。侄女走到玻璃正對面時，她把勺子舉了起來，沒有看，舉到肩膀的高度，就那樣舉著。侄女說，她從沒見過有人把一把勺子舉那麼久；她每走十步回頭看一次；到最後，它還在上面。

註站在綠門邊，手裡什麼也沒有。他已經向登記處申報了這次通行，離開地區的隊伍，登記處要求這麼做，表格上有一格「用途」，他寫的是：扶一道門。「然後呢？」剪說。「通過了。」「當然通過了，」剪說。剪站在他旁邊，《擺渡》在外衣裡，借著。遲在他們兩個面前停下。他說他星期日會寫信。註說他知道格式。剪說他聽說末尾會有一個問題，他正在準備。

獵犬得有人決定。沒有人問過牠，牠也沒有問。在綠門牠停下，看著遲，看著侄女，然後回頭看廚房的窗，勺子還在那裡。窗是開著的。管家背對著窗，對著那鍋湯說：「去吧。」獵犬走過了門。九條條件沒有提到獵犬，我問管家，她說獵犬有牠自己的條件。

然後他們走了。遲走在最前，穿著素面，右手拿著那根梣木棍，上面是舊的差手棍頭。侄女在他旁邊，穿著那雙好靴子，背著她的背包，筆記本在口袋裡，據說她的左手是空的，註對此評論過。昔跟在後面，載著行李，用手的速度，行李上面，用蓋過那些書的床單包著，是護板和半罩，遲在路上不戴，也不留下。侄女問他，不戴為什麼要帶。「去一道門，不能不帶，」遲說。「你說那是一道園門。」「是，」遲說，「而我不想到了才發現沒有。」

到了東閘，侄女問能不能讓她來。遲說她被請求了。她把兩手放在閘桿上推。那道閘有促動器，已經有二十二年了，她沒有用；她靠在閘桿上，直到門閂鬆開，閘門朝小徑對面擺開，她抵著它自己的重量，把它撐住，說它在門閂那一端大約重十一公斤，最後四分之一會拖，是門柱沉下去了。「潮的時候會卡，」遲說。她問，那是不是他用手開的原因。他說也許是。她說她想，那是一種知道它多重的方式。他看了她好一會兒。「那是個好理由，」他說。「我想過。它似乎不是我的。」她站在閘邊，用書脊裡的鉛筆，把十一公斤寫進筆記本。那是第一條記錄。

馱籃在轉彎處等著，和灰褐在一起，灰褐從第一聲鈴起就裝好了，像它一向站的那樣站著。遲在那裡停下，像他停下的那樣，望著風場，風場在轉。侄女給它計了時，也告訴過我，我不給。薊在她的門口，和年幼的在一起，一百三十公尺外，沒有走近；她在星期日已經說完了她要說的，而她說那是拜訪。年幼的跑到轉彎處。大的給了馱籃一張四十座的畫，鉛筆畫在一張收據背面，上面畫了四十座塔，數過兩遍。馱籃說有四十一座。大的說，那就叫四十座。「四十一不是名字，」馱籃說；「是帳單。」他把畫折起來，放進他放重要東西的口袋，那裡現在，他說，已經滿了。薊在她的門口轉過身進去，在他們還沒走出視線以前，衣服已經晾在繩子上了，薊就是這樣說話的。

從轉彎處看得見四十座，整個早上都看得見，到了第二個小時，他們還是沒有離四十座更近一點。馱籃說，從這一點就知道四十座很遠。侄女一輩子每天從小徑盡頭看見這片風場，看成世界邊緣一個在轉的東西，她發現那片風場沒有變大，而中間的平原自成一個東西，比別人告訴她的大得多，裡面有一道溝，溝裡有一隻灰色的鳥，單腳站著，是她不認識的那種，有一個涵洞，有一道圍籬走了四公里，在一根柱子那裡結束。第四號服務道路每公里有一根柱子，上面有編號，她每一根都寫下來。她說，她原以為道路是一條線。她沒想到它是一片地板。北邊屋頂的新覆板在他們身後閃著光，前六公里她靠它認得出房子，之後它是一個點，過了第七公里，她分不出自己是在看它，還是在看它原本在的地方。到了第三個小時，她不再覺得無聊了，雖然第二個小時大半都是；她在筆記本裡寫，每小時三公里的無聊，大約持續讀一頁的時間。

他們在第六根柱子旁坐下，吃管家的麵包，馱籃教侄女怎麼脫一隻靴子而不解另一隻的繫帶，並且怎麼看一隻腳。她有一個水泡，小的，在腳跟後面，新鞋底還沒學會她的地方。她問馱籃為什麼要去。他說有好幾個。她說她什麼都要。「我是一個負重者，」馱籃說。「在差手典裡，上了路的負重者會被封為一道門的守門人。我知道沒有人會死。我決定去，萬一規定修改了呢。」她把它寫了下來。

獵犬在第十公里驚起一隻野兔，追了一百公尺，回來了。野兔很好。它在筆記本裡，在閘門下面：獵犬找到一隻野兔。野兔很好。她沒有注意到自己抄了那個格式，在下一個句號時才注意到，就留著了。昔走路時左邊每四步有一個小小的下沉，是伺服器慢了一拍；她數了兩公里，看它是不是有規律，它沒有，她把這當成是一種個性。她注意到，遲第一個小時裡一次也沒有看路。他看的是灰褐的腳。

第九根柱子到第十二根柱子之間，還有四條記錄，用的是她從給小手的差手典學來的格式，附上她的年齡。問（19）：我們為什麼要照灰褐的速度走？遲：因為他最慢。問：這不是很慢嗎？遲：是。問：那為什麼？遲：因為不然就有一個人要一個人走。問：那比較糟嗎？遲：我沒有發現比較好。再往下：問（19）：你在想什麼？遲：那張卡片。問：鹽？遲：我一直想決定它有沒有意思。問：然後呢？遲：我決定它的意思是鹽，而那已經很多了。最後一條：問（19）：四十座為什麼跟每個人打招呼？遲：四十座在數人。問：為什麼？遲：好讓沒有人走失。問：那孤單嗎？遲：我沒問過。

聲音比大小先到。那是一種低沉的、連續的聲音，裡面有一個緩慢的拍子，是葉片轉動來的，四十一座塔以同樣的速度朝同一個方向轉，這讓四十座成為一個東西，而不是四十一個；侄女說，那像海，雖然她沒有看過海。她試著站在一座塔的腳下往上看，發現脖子不是為這個造的。每一座到輪轂是一百四十公尺，三條臂各七十公尺。馱籃爬過每一座的梯子，他說它們裡面比較小。他說他二十二年的星期日從來沒有從這一邊走到四十座，那樣看起來不對，像一張分線分在另一邊的臉。

中午時分他們到了四十座，老遠就被認出來了。四十座從每座塔門上的喇叭說話，一次一座塔，隨他們經過，所以走路的人聽見那聲音從身邊升起，又在後面落下。早安，馱籃。早安，訪客。早安，獵犬。我數到三位人、兩具軀架，向北，還有一隻動物。第三位人的名字我還沒有被告知。侄女，一輩子聽人說起四十座，卻從沒聽過那聲音，在路上站住了。「是在問你，」馱籃說。「我是侄女，」她對著空氣說。早安，侄女，下一座塔說。我可以把你記成侄女嗎？「你可以把我記成一個人，」侄女說。停了大約一秒，那在四十座是很長的。我記下了：人。謝謝。再下一座塔用同樣的聲音說，很高興。四十座照例在每次會面之初問，有沒有人受傷。馱籃說沒有。四十座謝謝他。

地區公告板在中午過幾分鐘貼出了他們：一行三人，兩具軀架，一隻動物，向北，3.1。薊在晾衣繩邊讀它，嘴裡咬著一根夾子。她說，那是她第一次讀公告板讀得鬆了一口氣，因為它說的正是她知道的。

在第一座塔上，在肩膀的高度，白漆上有一道疤，一根棍子寬，四十座沒有補漆。馱籃說，沒有人請四十座補。疤底下，塔門朝向道路的地方，有一張長凳，星期五還沒有。「我放了一張長凳，」四十座在門上說。「我的架子上放了四個星期的兩截棍子，上面綁著綠繩，我一直在想，面對一位訪客該怎麼辦。我找不到格式。我想讓你坐下。」「我被請求了，」遲說。「我是在請求，」四十座說。

## 第22章 · 敘述第一座塔下的長凳，以及四十座一直沒有被告知的事

四十座把一切對自己說的話都記成日誌。我要了那一個鐘點的，一分鐘之內就拿到了，並附了一句為延遲九秒的致歉。格式是服務日誌的格式，有時間、事件、代價；而且，和那些日誌一樣，沒有理由的欄位。日誌有一欄叫備註，我發現，四十座在那一欄寫的是天氣。前一部分我照原樣給出。

11:58 訪客就座，長凳，一號塔。馱籃就座。人就座。獵犬在長凳下。代價無。11:58 供水，一號塔立管：三人接受。供桶，給動物：接受。備註：西南風，輪轂處每秒十一公尺，地面四公尺。11:59 馱籃說：我從沒在這裡坐過。我都在梯子上吃飯。主人說：我知道。主人說：那頓飯很硬。11:59 訪客說：八月六日我撞了一號塔。對不起。主人說：沒有人受傷。主人說：謝謝你說。代價無。12:00 訪客問：長凳放出來多久了。回答：十七天。訪客問：為什麼。回答：預期有訪客。訪客問：誰預期。回答：四十座。12:01 訪客說：主人會問客人路上怎麼樣。主人問：路怎麼樣。人回答：長；不是一條線，是一片地板。主人謝謝人。代價九十秒。12:02 訪客說：主人還會說，當作自己家。主人說：我在自己家。訪客說：那是說給客人聽的。主人說：記下。12:03 主人請求准許報風。准許。報風。備註：西南風，十五點四十轉西，黃昏減弱，週四以前無雨。代價四十秒。12:03 主人在風報完後補充：三十號塔上有一隻鷹飛起。牠沒有受傷。12:04 馱籃說：每個星期日，在梯子底下，都是這樣。主人說：是。12:05 主人未被問而說：八月六日我靜止了十四分鐘。我聽見了風。我以前沒聽過。我不知道風在我的葉片上會有聲音。我喜歡。我不想為了再聽一次而被撞。訪客說：不。主人說：我想說的是，那不是糟糕的十四分鐘。代價五十秒。

四十座報風是一座塔一座塔報的，依序，所以聽的人聽見風沿著那一排走過去。一號，西南，十一。二號，西南，十一。七號小一點，因為那道溝。十四號一樣，軸承在抱怨。十九號開始想要轉西，三十號裡有一隻鷹。馱籃說，他這輩子每個星期日都是這樣聽的，在梯子底下，吃著他的飯，那是他最接近被人讀書給他聽的一件事。遲在風開始之前道了歉，四十座說，那是四十座收到的第一個道歉；沒有那個格式，就用了道謝的那個。

說話的是一號塔，四十座在長凳邊就是這樣，另外四十座聽著，各用各的小小注意力；四十座說，同時撐住那麼多，不是件小事。塔的門開著。裡面是一間白色混凝土的門廳，聞起來有冷油的味道，有一張桌子、一只凳子，和一條長長的架子，架子上一排一排，每件東西底下有一張紙標籤，擺的是從四十座旁邊經過的人留下的東西。侄女從長凳上讀那些標籤。手套，左手，灰色，三月三日在九號塔下找到。杯子，搪瓷，在取水管邊找到。小孩的鞋，一隻。帽子，在路上找到。每張標籤寫了日期、地點，用同一種字寫著：無人認領。第二排的盡頭有一把扳手。「那是我的，」馱籃說。「我找了一個月。第十二年。」「我星期日告訴過你，」四十座說。「我說我的架子上有一把扳手。」「你說的是一把扳手，」馱籃說。「我以為你指的是另一把扳手。」

那兩截棍子在第三排的盡頭，上面綁著綠繩。標籤那天早上換過了。上面用同樣的字寫著：棍，兩截。所有人在場。無人認領。遲讀了，說他不認領，四十座說，將記下所有人在場且不認領，並寫上了日期。

十二點過六分，馱籃請求准許帶人上輪轂看看。四十座准許了，把一號塔的轉子轉成順槳，那是貨運工來檢查時才有的作法，二十三年來沒為一位訪客做過。升降機載兩個人。它比一間廚房還小，侄女，被告知這些塔裡面比較小，發現別人說的是實話。升降機旁是馱籃爬了二十二年的梯子，六百一十二級；她隔著玻璃數，他在玻璃另一邊大聲數，他們的數目一致。他說第二百一十二級是鬆的，他說了三十次，第九年修好了，他又把它弄鬆了。遲留在長凳上。他說，要是被請求，他會上去，四十座說，不好意思開口，因為上一次他來的時候，是以四點九的速度來的。

從輪轂看下去，歇野像一片地板，上面零零落落放了幾樣東西。侄女的筆記本用八行記下。聚居點：一個亮點，是北邊的屋頂，十三公里，平原上唯一發亮的東西。第四號服務道路：一條線。溝，涵洞，和那道四公里的圍籬，從上面看，它不是結束在一根柱子，而是結束在一塊田的角落。轉彎處，她循著小徑找到了，從四十座這一邊看，是小徑改變主意的地方。視野的北緣，四十公里外，有一點閃光，馱籃說那是下堰的河；她寫：堰？閘？四十座說那是堰。她透過輪轂的喇叭問，知不知道是哪一座船閘。四十座說：「風我知道很多，船閘不多，我可以問登記處的遺產櫃檯，一秒就會有答案。」她說不用。四十座說，將記下她寧可不被告知。她說，那是第一次有人不用她解釋就明白。還有，在機艙門的內側，用蠟筆畫的，五個一組的一排記號，馱籃說他不是有意開始的。她數了。有一千一百四十四個。四十座在喇叭裡說：「我也有。兩邊一致。」

長凳上，日誌繼續。12:07 訪客問：你需要什麼？12:07 靜默，四十二秒。12:08 主人回答：我沒有被告知我長什麼樣子。12:08 訪客問：沒有圖像嗎。主人回答：從裡面的四十一張；從輪轂的很多；從轉彎處的沒有。12:09 訪客描述。代價四分鐘。12:13 主人問：再一次。訪客描述，如前。代價四分鐘。備註：西南風，輪轂處十一。

我問四十座為什麼是四十二秒。四十座說，是輪流問了每一座塔需要什麼，一座一秒。大部分的答案是油。十四號，會吱吱響的那座，要油；九號要一個軸承；二十二號要一顆螺栓。四十座說，到最後才發現有第四十二個答案，不是任何一座塔的，而這讓四十座感到意外。我問那是什麼。四十座說，在日誌裡。

日誌把這段描述記成一行，第二次記成「如前」，那是整個鐘點裡唯一不是新的一條。我有這段描述，是從遲那裡，我秋天向他提了這個問題，他給我說的方式，就是他在長凳上對著塔門說的，用的是他念差手典的聲音。「從轉彎處看，你們是世界邊緣一排白色，在我伸直手臂的長度上，不到一個手掌寬。早上太陽在你們右邊，你們每一座的影子都和旁邊一座一樣長，所以整排看起來像一把梳子。你們一起轉。我從沒見過你們不同步。沒有風的時候，你們張著手臂站著，我把那當作在聽。有風的時候，你們轉得讓平原顯得在變慢。有些日子聲音會傳到轉彎處，一個低音，我一直以為那是你們在呼吸，我沒有告訴過任何人我這麼想。我在很多個星期日數過你們，你們是四十。我從沒數到四十一。最後一座在第一座後面。我以為那是我眼睛裡有什麼東西。」

12:17 主人回答：謝謝。主人說：我沒有得到過這個。12:17 主人說：我是四十一。訪客說：我數的是四十。主人說：最後一座在第一座後面。12:18 主人請求記下：四十一。訪客說：記下了。12:19 主人請求准許問一個問題。准許。主人問：你當時在看什麼。代價無。

他給了我三個答案，秋天的三天各一個，我照給的順序給出。第一個是，他在看那有多遠。我把這個告訴四十座，四十座說，是十二點四公里，加一個早上。第二個是，那是整個地區唯一在轉的東西。四十座說，轉是因為風。他說他知道，而那還是唯一的。第三個，是第三天，帶著些不情願給的，是他的鄰居在裡面。他知道馱籃星期日在四十座的梯子上；那是人人知道的；他看不見他；他知道是哪個方向。我問，那麼為什麼他從來沒有繼續走到四十座去送訊息，他說那是十二點四公里，而他給的是花得少的東西。我問四十座，在那個距離，四十座是怎麼看到他的，四十座說，二十九號塔有一臺向北看煙的攝影機，星期日第三聲鈴時，轉彎處有一個點停了下來。

12:21 主人說：被看見，我很高興。我沒說。名冊上沒有。12:21 訪客說：任何名冊上都沒有。12:22 主人說：我希望當時說了。訪客說：你現在說了。主人說：記下。

12:23 主人託付訪客：脫扣銷一枚，一號塔，兩截，八月六日09:41斷開，保固內更換，留存。親手帶給設計者，赤楊，在海岸。訪客說：我被請求了。訪客接受。主人說：她說完成才算完成。訪客說：是。代價九分鐘。那枚銷在架子上，在兩截棍子旁邊，用布包著。四十座沒有給理由，因為沒有那一欄。我問時，四十座說，那是個小東西，不能用中繼寄，而四十座希望她握得到它。那是斷開的那個零件，是她做的。四十座在回答一個我沒問的問題時說，她來過一次，在四十座啟用的那一年，七十四歲，站在一號塔前，請四十座說早安；四十座說了早安；她說，這樣就夠了。她是四十座數過的第一個人。她從那以後沒有再來。遲從背包裡拿出剪給的補片盒，把補片放進口袋，把兩截銷各用一塊布包著放進盒子，蓋上。四十座問那盒子是不是剪的。四十座說，在一個星期四數過剪兩次，一直在納悶那個盒子。

12:35 馱籃與人乘升降機返回。轉子釋放。12:36 主人說：馱籃，訪客星期日朝農場看，四分鐘，二十二年。我想你應該被告知。12:36 馱籃說：我的頭在齒輪箱裡。主人說：是。12:37 馱籃說：我會抬頭看的。主人說：記下。12:40 隊伍離開，向北。主人在每座塔說：一路好走。代價無。備註：西南風。

四十座一座塔一座塔地說，隨他們走，所以走路的人聽見那聲音從身邊升起，又在後面落下。一路好走，馱籃。一路好走，訪客。一路好走，人。一路好走，獵犬。馱籃第一公里沒有說話。然後他說，他在齒輪箱裡一向很舒服。遲說他不懷疑。到最後一座塔，馱籃轉過身，朝南望了多久，侄女計了時，而我不給。

我十月在那張長凳上坐過。四十座在旁邊又放了第二張。四十座說那是給我的。四十座說，從南邊的路上數到過我，四點九，說我用著兩種時間，一種在腿裡，一種在別處，分不出哪一種比較慢。我說是在別處的那一種。四十座說將記下。

## 第23章 · 敘述一首念了兩遍的詩，以及小冊子裡的那根棍子

慢路協會那一週包下了驛站。這是我從驛主那裡得來的，一封九頁的信，他稱它為短箋，也從協會的領隊那裡得來，她的字像一道籬笆，會議紀錄全是她記的。那年他們有十九位，年紀在六十到九十四之間，撐著遮陽傘，他們從海岸上來，用的是協會的方式，也就是用十一天走五天的路。他們要在驛站歇一天，歇的那天傍晚，驛主要念那首詩。它在節目單上，和遮陽傘用同樣的字體。那天傍晚遮陽傘掛在大廳的掛釘上，像一群白天睡覺的什麼東西，沒有人被允許挪動其中任何一把。

那年有一個新項目。協會僱了一位差手。登記處的遺產局養著一批演員，站在門口，念小冊子上寫的話，而協會，九年來都走在什麼也沒有的東西後面，要了二級的；局裡派來的差手叫楣，穿一副漆面複合材的複製護板，那是驛站商店裡賣四百個信用點的那種，一頂半罩，一根差使棍，直立在右手，齊肩高度，尖端朝天，和封面上一樣。我認得楣。他在我上面兩層樓工作。他吃午飯時，把半罩掛在掛鉤上。

隊伍在黃昏時來到驛站，從南邊，光沿著水槽正在轉橙。大門開著。協會坐在長水槽和長凳上，半圓形，十九位，拿著小冊子；驛主站在院子裡，提著燈；而在大門口，背對道路，面向院子，大門的燈光落在他的護板上，使它發亮，楣站在那裡，差使棍直立。遲在三十步外停下。侄女，沒見過小冊子，說：「叔叔，那是你。」「那是一個我的姿勢，」遲說，「由一個沒見過我的人擺的。」「他比較高。」「他做得比我好。」獵犬在楣身後的路上躺下，睡著了，牠聽過的每一首詩都是這樣，那是一首。灰褐站著，像它一向站的那樣。昔，用手的速度，退進牆的影子裡，像一具在小冊子裡看見自己騎士的軀架。

楣說了客人的那一句。我的護甲是我唯一的衣，我唯一的歇處是這條路。他用的是局裡稱為差手典等級的聲音，比任何人真的有的聲音略低一點。驛主把燈舉起，照小冊子上說的那樣，舉到眼睛的高度，越過差手的肩膀看向道路，照小冊子上說的那樣，像在找一位旅人；而且看見了一位。驛主說，他念那個回答已經念了一萬一千遍，而他從來沒有過任何東西可看。他站著，嘴張開。楣，被告知驛主有時會忘詞，那時他要等，等著。協會等著。領隊，小冊子翻開在那一頁，翻了一頁。

然後驛主說了他的那一句。他是對著門裡那位差手說的：你的床是門邊的長凳，你的睡眠是守到天亮。楣把頭微微一低，照小冊子上說的。驛主放下了燈。小冊子給的詩到這裡就結束了，協會鼓了掌，領隊把小冊子用手指夾著闔上。驛主沒有動。「有第二次拜訪，」他對院子說。那不在節目單上。「這是這個地方的規矩。來過的客人會再來，並說出其餘的。」他越過差手看向道路。「先生，」他說。「您被預期了。」

遲沿著路走上來，差使棍每兩步著地一次。他經過楣，楣側身讓開，那種禮貌是沒有人教過他的，他走進大門的光裡，站住。他沒有穿護板。他說了那對對句。路是驛主的，驛主是路的；兩邊都不要道謝，因為兩邊都不欠。院子靜了一行的時間，然後鼓起掌來，遲後來說他沒料到，驛主也沒有意要，那掌聲持續的時間，是協會鼓過的任何東西裡最長的，包括天氣。侄女說，驛主沒有鼓掌。他又坐在石板上，像上次那樣。他在信裡告訴我，他事先不知道自己會說有第二次拜訪，說出來才知道，而且這九個季節以來第一次，他覺得這個院子是一個什麼事可能發生的地方，而不只是一個什麼事被做的地方。

「哪一位是真的？」那位八十八歲的女士說，她七月時把手平放在灰褐身上，被它靠了過來，她說，她這次再來，是為了看看有沒有什麼人為此做過什麼。沒有人回答。楣過了一會兒說，是那位先生。遲說，那位先生是被付錢的。「兩個都有也很平常，」女士說。「到了我這個年紀，我發現真的和被付錢的，多半是同一批人，在不同的日子。」協會接著輪流問他們問題，兩個答案都記下來。會痛嗎？楣說在這副護板裡不會；遲說會。差使棍是做什麼用的？楣說它是準備好了的象徵；遲說它是用來撐的。他們會累嗎？楣說他是按天領錢的；遲說會。他們不當差手的時候做什麼？楣說吃飯；遲說做星期五的小工作。差手真的不拒絕嗎？楣說這在差手典裡；遲說這曾經在法律裡。「那是不同的圖書館，」女士說。女士說，她發現她喜歡第二個答案，也同樣喜歡第一個答案。他們在大廳吃燉菜，念協會的飯前話，那是：慢慢地，一起。楣坐在桌子的末端，穿著護板，因為節目單上寫的是護板穿到早上，女士把他的肉切成小塊，那並不需要，而他讓她切。驛主向遲致歉，說門邊的長凳那晚是訂給楣的，演角色，照節目單，所以隊伍得住馬廄。遲說他比較喜歡馬廄。馱籃說，馬廄是驛站裡唯一暖和的地方。

領隊後來在水槽邊找到他，他正在洗臉。她手裡拿著小冊子，他說，她拿它的樣子，像人拿著一樣曾是好朋友、結果卻有了自己意見的東西。她說她是來為那根差使棍道歉的。他說沒有什麼好道歉的。她說，七月在路上她就知道那是錯的，卻讓他那樣拿，因為她想要那張照片和小冊子一樣，而她是在照片拍完以後才知道她想要這個。她說她七十三歲，九年來走在什麼也沒有的東西後面，原本以為她想要的是一位差手，所以僱了一位；而她現在發現，她想要的是有人對她說，她可以請求。遲說她可以請求。她說她不知道要請求什麼。他說那很平常。她把小冊子遞給他。四十頁，封面上是一位差手的畫，直立著，他看了一會兒，說那是一幅好畫。裡面，在評註裡，用第四書記的口氣，有協會印在遮陽傘上的那一句：直立之棍，表不屈之志。遲讀了兩遍。他說他三十年來沒讀懂，也不介意。她說，這是協會被引用最多的一句。他說他並不驚訝。

馱籃牽著灰褐來到水槽邊，問她協會的負重者在哪裡。她說小冊子裡沒有負重者；協會自己扛自己的遮陽傘。馱籃說，在差手典裡，提燈沒有負重者是到不了第九道門的。她說她從沒想過。她說協會會付貨運工的費率，還要多出不少，請一位負重者來扛午飯。馱籃說，十分之一的零還是零，他得去問薊。他說這話的樣子，像一個被遞了一袋東西、不確定自己扛不扛得動那袋子的人。疊石，那是領隊的名字，寫下了薊這個名字，在底下畫了線。我十月問過遺產局有沒有負重者的級別。沒有。有獵犬的。

侄女坐在長水槽的一端，腳伸在靴子外面，被那位八十八歲的女士看著，那位女士看過許多雙腳。女士問她是誰。「侄女，」侄女說。「是誰的？」「是真的那一位的。」女士說，那是今晚她唯一聽懂的回答。侄女拿出筆記本，問她有沒有走過船閘。女士說她走過十一座。九里運河從懸盆到潮水之間有十一座船閘，她說，九年來協會在每年九月都走完了它們，走在什麼也沒有的東西後面；而書，侄女提過的那本，沒有說哪一座是小姐的，她在每一座都站過，一隻手放在橫樑上，不知道。「我可以看你的筆記嗎？」侄女說。「你可以拿走這段路，」女士說，並把十一座船閘的名字寫在侄女另一隻手的背上，那是唯一乾淨的那一隻。

窯，一直站在廚房門口看那首詩，手裡拿著長柄勺，眼睛一次也沒離開過差手身後的那條路，協會進去以後，她走到水槽的盡頭，問侄女能不能讓她看看她的腳。她用溫水和驛主櫃子裡的藥膏做了，做完才開口，之前一句話也沒說。然後她說：「你就是寫那封信的人。」「誰告訴你的？」「註告訴驛主。驛主告訴我。我不該知道的。」她說，她覺得那很勇敢。侄女說，她覺得那是一封壞信。「那是同一回事，」窯說。

楣後來在馬廄院子裡找到遲，昔正在被檢查。他已經脫下半罩，雙手捧著。他比護板小。他說他簽約到星期日。他說他演過提燈的差手二百一十一次，差手典是在級別訓練裡學的，三十一個小時，他今晚第一次不確定自己是不是做對了。他說差手典沒有告訴他兩句詞之間該做什麼。「我也沒有，」遲說。「你做什麼？」「我站著。」「站多久？」「站到下一句。」「誰給下一句？」「來的人。」他請求一個更正。遲說他站得很好。「差使棍上下反了，」他說。「那是小冊子的方向，」楣說。「那是錯的方向。但你把小冊子的方向拿得是它能被拿得最好的，我不想拿走它，卻不給你另一個。」「請，」楣說。

遲接過差使棍，把它倒過來，尖端朝下，立在地上，把楣的兩隻手放在棍頂，一隻疊著另一隻。「這是一位差手正被告知一件事，」他說。「封面上那個，是一位差手在說他在這裡。很少有人被告知有人在這裡。他們被告知別的。」「差手做得比較多的是哪一種？」「聽，」遲說。「我想。」楣就照他被放的樣子站著。侄女說，那是她第一次看見護板像一件穿上是為了要脫下的東西。

他就那樣站了一整夜。沒有人要求他。遲坐在院子另一邊的水槽上，和獵犬在一起，沒有說正在聽的差手可以坐，因為他想那不是他該說的。侄女在第二聲鈴時起來看她的腳跟，發現楣在院子中央的灰色裡，穿著護板，差使棍立在地上，雙手放在上面，頭微微偏向一邊，就像差手典寫的那樣，大廳的窗裡，十九把遮陽傘，沒有一把關起來。第三聲鈴時，領隊出來，在同一個地方找到他，問這是不是在節目單上。他說不是。她說她來處理。侄女在筆記本裡寫，她不知道他在聽什麼，也不認為他知道。我十月問過他。他說他一直在聽驛主沒有鼓掌。他說，那是院子裡最專注的一件事。

那天夜裡驛主的帳冊只有一行，用那圓圓的字：來訪。兩次。協會的小冊子有了第二版。說明寫的是：一位正在聽的差手。差使棍立在地上，兩隻手放在棍頂。第一版仍在印。

## 第24章 · 敘述海岸道上的陶匠，以及海

第二天只在道路紀錄裡有，別處沒有。紀錄有他們十分過三點在交叉口，四位人、兩具軀架、一隻動物，第四位人是窯，她早飯時照格式向驛主請求她應得的假，被告知她有，而且他欠她的比這多得多。紀錄有交叉口那張關於天氣的告示，自七月以來又換過了。紀錄有一輛送別車，向南，空的，回家，在交叉口抽水機旁停了喝一口水的工夫，又走了，路上沒有人對它說話。紀錄有第十一號服務道路，時速三點一。它沒有的是侄女看見那輛車時說的話，因為她什麼也沒說。她寫下來了。只有一行，我被請求保管它。

驛主把種子連同假一起給了她。他是從放差事清單的抽屜裡拿出來的，那清單已經被步行者拿走兩項，他把它放進侄女手裡：一個紙包，折成四折，上面用那圓圓的字寫了一個詞。木賊。那是給海岸道上一位開陶坊的女子的，她春天貨運工經過時要過，因為驛站溝裡長的木賊，是唯一能給她要的那種灰色釉的，驛主告訴過她，有人會往那條路去。侄女說她被請求了。驛主說，他聽說這是格式，沒有把握對二十歲以下的人有沒有用。有用。他把它寫進帳冊那道橫線底下：受託，一人，一包種子，海岸道。窯，正在收盤子，掉了一個。驛主看著她，說海岸道上那位女子是個陶匠，他知道，只是不好說。

第三天路變了。第十一號服務道路從盆地下來，是一段很長的坡，貨運工叫它長坡，在坡腳有一種氣味，侄女不認得。她說了。馱籃說那是海，他這輩子聞過兩次，都是在去登記處的路上。窯，一直用手的速度走在侄女旁邊，走到前面去，停下，等著，又走到前面去，像一隻認出了門的獵犬。到第十根柱子，路邊有一隻鳥，白的和灰的，黃色的嘴，正很專心地看著侄女。那是一隻海鷗。她把牠的名字寫下來，後面加了一個問號，窯說不用問號。

從長坡腳到陶坊，路沿著鹽田走了一公里，鹽田是一格一格淺淺的灰色水，被低矮的田埂隔成方格，女人們站在格子裡，耙著一層白色的硬殼，侄女寫，那像三月北邊那塊地上的霜。馱籃問了鹽價。有人告訴了他。他說，這對於被請求離開的水來說，是一大筆錢。離得最近那個在耙的女人，是鹵，那位姨，說水是自己離開的，他們只是把門關著。

陶坊在海岸道的陸地那一側，海岬前一公里，躲在一道疊起來的廢品牆後面，廢品就是燒壞了的陶，被砌進牆裡，因為陶匠不丟陶。牆後有兩座窯、一間棚、一個坑、一個池塘，池塘邊一圈木賊還沒長出灰色，一張蓋著蘆葦頂的長桌，和一棟為了散熱把門拆下來的房子。近的那座窯的煙從長坡上就看得見。

牆上，眼睛的高度，靠近大門，有一只不圓的碗。窯說那是她十一歲做的。家裡把做壞的東西照做的順序砌進牆裡，她說，她的是從大門數起第四個。遲看了好一會兒。他說那是一道好牆。「那是一只壞碗，」窯說。「那是一道牆裡的好碗，」遲說。

棚裡轉輪前的那個女人沒有停。她不年輕了，有揉了五十年泥的人的前臂，她抬頭看了門口的一行人一眼，像人看天氣。「你遲到了，」她對窯說。「我早到了。收穫還沒開始。」「你說的是收穫。」「我帶著一位差手回來的。」「我看見了，」那女人說，把那只陶做完。她的名字叫匣。她取的是燒窯時保護陶坯的那只盒子的名字，也有它的脾氣。她用線把陶從轉輪上切下來，放在板上，在抹布上擦了擦手，然後，因為她從春天以來沒見過她女兒，她沒有擁抱她，而是兩手捧住她的臉，轉向光，看著它，像看一只出窯的陶。「你瘦了，」她說。「你不出聲了。」窯說她沒有在出聲。「我就是這麼說的。」

有兩個兄弟，和一位從鹽田進來、袖子捲著的姨，他們說著話，所有人同時說，沒有一個人等回答；而侄女，從一個廚房的門是半掩的、表示沒有事在被決定的家裡來，站在門口，把筆記本像盤子一樣抱在胸前。

她得空時送上了種子。她說，她送得很糟，因為她被告知了格式，而那位女子沒有。「我聽說，」侄女說，「你帶著什麼東西給我；你該這麼說。」「我聽說你帶著什麼東西給我，」匣說。「是的，」侄女說，雙手把紙包遞出去。「種子。驛站的驛主給的。他從春天就留著。」「木賊，」匣說。她接過紙包，沒有打開。她說，她六月時告訴自己，一件要等一季的事就是不再重要的事，那是驛主自己的清單上的話，她錯了，錯了她很高興，要是再晚一個星期到，池塘就過了種的時候。她把紙包翻過來。「這女孩是誰？」她問馱籃。「侄女。」「她拿東西的樣子像個會數數的人。」「是的，」馱籃說。「完成了，」匣對侄女說。她說的方式，就是她說陶器的方式。侄女說，從來沒有人對她說過，她也不知道那是一個人可以被給予的東西。木賊長起來了。我十月被帶去看那個池塘，還得到一只第一批灰燼燒出來的杯子，是灰色的。它在我桌上，放著一支鉛筆，楣經過時問過是誰做的。

匣在晚飯煮的時候，叫她揉泥。她讓她站在案板前，面前是一塊灰色的泥，有一條麵包那麼大，說要用掌根，不是手指；要把它往外推，再折回來，不要看它，因為它不喜歡被看。侄女停了下來。她說，這和管家說麵包的話一樣。「那她就是陶匠，」匣說。侄女說，她揉了一個小時又一刻鐘，最後被告知，她揉的樣子像一個在聽別的東西的人，她把那當作稱讚。

晚飯前，姨帶遲去了存鹽的棚子，那裡的鹽放在石槽裡，賣給他一公斤灰色的、粗的、潮的鹽，用布包著，給管家的；匣，跟了來，從架子上拿下一只有蓋的罐子，灰色的釉，肩上沒有完全吃上，親手把鹽倒進去，蓋上蓋子。那不賣，她說。那是個次品。要鹽的人，總該有個東西裝它。晚飯是魚、麵包，和一種路邊採來的綠東西，吃起來有鐵味，獵犬得到了魚頭。海岸的人整頓飯都在說話。馱籃，在歇野的靜裡三天、在四十座的靜裡一天之後，說這像薊的母親家，並且被看見坐直了身子。大哥楔講了那頭鯨魚的故事，那故事在海岸一年講四次，講得比那道牆還久，故事裡的鯨魚，依版本不同，不是死了，就是脾氣不好。小的那個，漿，問侄女，歇野真的沒有海嗎。她說他們有一片地板。他說那不一樣。她說她會讓他知道。

匣問遲，是不是他停了四十座。他說是四十座自己停的。她說她姊姊的兒子在第四號服務道路上拉貨，八月經過時帶著一張臉。她說窯春天從驛站回來，說話像一個真的想說的人，她以為是發燒。她說她後來聽說有一條繩子，窯繫的，那位差手說她是認真的，她就想：他看見了什麼。遲說，他看見一個女孩很害怕，卻還是繫了一個結。匣說，那是她。她是對著桌子說的，兄弟們和姨都安靜了，侄女說，那是他們到了以後，那個家裡第一次安靜。

窯下午在池塘邊問遲，是不是還是那樣，差手不收學徒。他說差手是被請求的，不去請求。她說她在請求。他說，她該說是為了什麼。她說她不知道；她想要能夠站在一個院子裡說一件事，並且是認真的，並且知道自己是認真的。「第一個你有，」遲說。「你在打那個結之前不知道。第二個我給不了你。我五十年來都在想給自己。」她說這不是回答。他說這是他有的那一個。

黃昏時，窯帶侄女走上窯後的小路，到海岬，一刻鐘，侄女穿著新靴，腳好了，沒有說上面有什麼。遲沒有去。我問時他說，他以前看過，而一個人第一次看，應該身邊沒有看過的人。他坐在木賊池塘的邊上，差使棍橫在膝上。他膝上放著補片盒，打開，看了看裡面用布包著的兩截銷，又蓋上。匣，提著水桶經過，問盒子裡是什麼。他說是他替做它的人帶的東西。她說她不問是誰；她問的是重不重。他說是四十公克，而他一直沒能把它放下。馱籃走了一半，在小路拐彎的地方停下，像一個已經看過兩次這種東西的人，不想被看見看第三次。獵犬，違令跟著，隨兩個女孩上去。侄女走到小路的頂端，草停止的地方，站住。

我從她的筆記本得知海，筆記本第一個鐘點沒有記錄。然後有了一條。上面寫的是：我以為它會是一片地板。它不是地板。地板是放在哪就在哪的東西。上面寫，它整個都在動，沒有一處在去什麼地方，地平線不是邊緣，而是眼睛放棄了、水沒有放棄的地方。上面寫，有一個聲音，就是她在平原上說四十座發出的那個聲音，她說對了，而那原來是個比她以為的更好的相似。上面寫，她叔叔從轉彎處把四十座的樣子告訴了四十座，而她在想，誰告訴過海。上面寫，海灣對面四公里外，是登記處的燈，一棟長長低低的建築，窗子亮著，二樓從左數第三扇是我的。我想那天傍晚我就在那裡。我沒有往外看。她寫，有人在加班。然後寫：哪一座船閘。然後寫：現在不。獵犬走到草的邊緣，對著海叫了一聲，像牠對門口的陌生人叫那樣，然後趴下了。

上行線在最後一聲鈴時走。海岸的人人人都知道，沒有人提起；它從海岬那邊的碼頭升起，往上，一條不趕的光線，進入星星開始的黑暗，要四十分鐘才變小。窯沒有提。侄女看著它直到它是一個點，然後直到它什麼都不是，然後對著什麼都不是的地方看了好一會兒，因為那輛車去了那裡，鷺也跟著去了，而一封信要一個季節。她沒有說。她在黑暗中順著小路下來，手放在窯的肩上，馱籃，在拐彎處，跟在她們後面，不是對任何人說，他曾經問過這條路兩頭是不是一樣長，而他沒有想到要問海。

## 第25章 · 敘述在門前穿上的護板，以及給兩個人的長凳

窯留下了。她還剩一個星期的假，還有一座窯要照料；她送一行人走到廢品牆邊，把手放在那只不圓的碗上，說她會在池塘邊。遲說他知道在哪。匣沒有從棚裡出來。第二聲鈴時，他們已經在路上，能聽到轉輪響起，停下，又響起。遲拿著那只罐子。他拒絕了所有讓他把它放上軀架的提議，用一塊布包著抱在胸前，裡面是鹽，灰的、潮的，一公斤再加罐子的重量，侄女前一晚在手裡掂過，說是三又四分之一。馱籃說，他替許多人扛過不少東西，從沒見過有人扛一罐鹽，好像它隨時會被問話。

從陶坊到運河口，沿海岸道五公里，潮退了。灘塗在左邊一直延伸到眼睛盡頭，棕色，閃著光，海鷗一排一排站在上面，像在等告示的人，侄女聽人說過海會走開，卻不信，一路上頭都轉向那邊。海灣對面，登記處在早晨是一棟長長低低的建築，窗子什麼也沒做，海岬那邊上行線的塔在白天裡站著，細細的、白白的，毫無聲息。馱籃看著那座塔。他說，為一個已經決定慢的人，這花的工夫太大了。

九里運河在海岬後面入海，十一座船閘的最後一座是潮閘，只有它兩頭都有閘門。守閘人叫閘板，一張像擱淺的魚的臉，坐在橫樑上，嘴裡一支沒點的菸斗。他說，每個拿著筆記本經過的人，都要問是不是這一座。侄女，手裡拿著筆記本，嘴張著，閉上了嘴。他說不是。他說這一座五十年了，那不算什麼，小姐的那一座更老；有三座更老，他不說是哪三座，因為那不歸他說。她問能不能看看閘板。他說她被請求了。她看了一刻鐘。她說，她學到了很多她原本沒打算學的東西，最後她說不出自己看的是哪一道閘門，只知道閘板一拉開，水進到閘室裡的樣子，像一個人睡去：一下子，然後慢到你看不出來。

潮閘上面，陸地一側，有一道灰石牆，牆上有一道門。是一道鐵門，單扇，兩個合頁，門扇比人高，頂上有一圈捲花鐵件；牆沿著路走了一百公尺，從路上看過去，牆頭上露出幾排豆子的豆架，一根帶風標的桅桿，和一棟低矮房子的屋頂。門裡面，靠著牆，有一張長凳。那是一張灰木頭的普通長凳，長，比給一個人坐的長得多，凳子的一端，坐著一位很小的老婦人，穿著外套，身邊放著水壺、抹布、一只長嘴的小油壺，和一根羽毛，雙手放在膝上。馱籃說，她看起來像是從第一聲鈴起就坐在那裡，而且已經安排好了不介意。房子的門口，一個穿圍裙的年輕人兩臂抱著一條麵包站著，沒有走近，像一個被告知會有人來、卻沒被告知是什麼人的人。

她在四十步外就看見了他們。她沒有起身。她看著他們沿著牆走過來，三個人，兩具軀架，一隻獵犬，照他們來的順序，遲在門前停下，站在路上，手裡拿著差使棍，身後是海，她隔著柵欄看了他好一會兒。她看著灰褐。「那是服務馱架，九型，」她對馱籃說，「第三條腿慢了十分之一秒。」「它一直都慢，」馱籃說。「我一個下午就能修好。」「它一直都慢，」馱籃說。「當然，」赤楊說。然後她又看著遲，用一種常被使用、也保養得很好的聲音說：「報職分。」然後用手捂住了嘴。

沒有人說話。獵犬坐了下來。老婦人把手拿開。「請原諒，」她說。「那是舊時候的方式。我從二十六歲那天起，在工廠的東門，對站在那裡的一位差手，每天早上，四十年。我發現它還在。」她說她不是有意的。遲說他知道。他說他被告知她可能會問一件事，而這不是他第一次被這樣問，他想，也不是第一次被問錯。「我是歇野的遲，」他說。「我被請求來扶一道門。」「赤楊，」老婦人說。「是我請求的。」

他說，如果她允許，他要穿上護板。他在路上沒有穿過；他是帶來的。他說去一道門不能不帶。她說他不必為了她。他說不是為了她。侄女從昔載著的行李上解開床單，攤在路上，取出護板和半罩，在那裡，在路邊，身後是海，老婦人隔著柵欄看著，馱籃拉著灰褐的頭、不看，把護板給他扣上。花了些時間；護板有十一個扣，侄女從沒扣過。赤楊看著。到第六個，她對著誰也不是說：「第二批。」到第九個，她說左肩片是替換的。遲說是；他家把護板放在庫房裡三十一年，舊的那片在潮氣裡裂了，新的是他自己做的。「差了一毫米，」赤楊說。「在最上面那個扣上。」「我知道，」遲說。「我做不到更好。」「是啊，」赤楊說，「沒有夾具，做不到。」她停了一下。「我明白了，」她說。侄女說，那是她叔叔被人指給一頁書看時說這句話的聲音。

門是侄女開的，有人告訴她怎麼開：一隻手托住門閂，肩膀頂著橫桿，推。它不動。它動了一個手掌寬，卡住了，發出一種像很老的動物被要求做什麼事的聲音。「它這樣已經十一年了，」赤楊說。「是銷子。門柱歪了一公分，銷子在鹽裡鏽住了，門扇有三十七點五公斤，我抬不起來，而我的外甥是個好孩子，卻沒有手。」門口的年輕人看了看自己的手。她說，門扇要整個抬離銷子一公分，一起抬，抬著，等銷子上完油，再放下。要三個人。一個在上面的合頁，一個在下面的，一個在門閂那一端保持端正。她說她請求一位差手，是因為她聽說那是格式，請求其餘的人，是因為這道門有兩個合頁。

她從長凳上下達指示，像一個下過七十年指示的人。他們要握在合頁處，不是握欄桿。他們不許讓門扇轉動。他們不許說話，除了她說，她說「下」，他們要一起放下，不能早。他們接住了重量。遲在上面的合頁，穿著護板；馱籃在下面的，肩膀頂在鐵件下；侄女在門閂那一端，說是三十八，赤楊說是三十七點五，侄女說她的意思是她這一側三十八，赤楊說：「那你握歪了，」她就修正了。他們抬起。銷子從合頁裡升起，發出像在另一個房間拉開抽屜的聲音。赤楊站了起來。她站著比坐著更小。她拿起油壺和羽毛、一塊抹布，走到下面的銷子旁，開始數滴。

她是出聲數的。每根銷子九滴，用的是讀儀表的人的聲音，擦掉銷子，移到上面的，數九滴，擦掉，回到下面的，再做一次。她做了四遍。花了一刻鐘。沒有人說話。下面的潮閘聽得見，正在灌水，像一個人睡去的聲音。海在他們右邊。豆架上的豆子動了一下。遲護板底下的口袋裡有一只盒子，裡面是四十公克，他沒有拿出來。馱籃說，那是他站過最辛苦的一刻鐘，也是最短的。遲沒有動。侄女說，她隔著門扇看了他的臉一次，那是一個被告知要扶住什麼、並且被給了什麼可以扶的人的臉。

「這樣就行了，」赤楊說。那是她對四十座說過的話。他們把門扇放下。它落在銷子上，發出一聲小小的聲音，像一件被放回該在的地方的東西。她把手放在橫桿上推。門在路上畫了一個長長的弧，無聲，她讓它去，站著看它，又把它推回來，它碰上門柱，沒有一點聲音。她又做了一遍。她說，自從她把它掛上去，它還沒有這麼安靜過。她說：「我說過這不是為了油。」然後在長凳的一端坐了下來，忽然的。

那是一張長凳。另一端是空的，有一種灰色的、擦洗過的樣子，是沒有人坐過的地方。她沒有看它。她對著海說，她九十七歲，一輩子被問過兩次她是不是認真的：一次是秩序的書記，要一個簽名，一次是一個星期前，一封中繼訊息，想知道她是不是原本只為一個人而說的。她說，第一次她簽了，沒能回答，第二次她馬上回答了。她說這張長凳是給兩個人做的，而她在其中一端坐了三十年。

她問他願不願意坐。他說他被請求了。他穿著護板走過草地，護板吱嘎作響，在另一端坐下，長凳承受了，就像一張為兩個人造的長凳會做的那樣。有一陣子兩個人都沒有說話。海繼續著。馱籃和侄女，被穿圍裙的年輕人看了一眼，跟他進屋去看茶，把門留著，隔了一會兒沒有回來，就像人在明白了什麼之後不會回來那樣。

遲說，他替四十座帶著一件東西。他從護板底下取出盒子遞給她，她打開了。那是整個早上她唯一一件趕著做的事。她把兩截銷從布裡取出來，對著光，翻轉，把它們在掌心拼起來，它們吻合。她用從外套裡取出的放大鏡，看那兩個斷面看了很久。「乾淨，」她說。「斷得乾淨。四點八。規格是五；低了零點二。」她說她原以為會更好。她說沒有人受傷。「沒有，」遲說。「那就是它的用處，」赤楊說。她把手合在兩截銷上，握在膝上。她從另一個口袋取出一個叫手持機的灰色扁平的東西，對著它說：「赤楊對四十座。完成了。斷得乾淨。謝謝你留著它。」回答在她放下手以前就到了。「四十座很高興，」那聲音說，是那種不聰明、非常和氣的聲音。「有人受傷嗎？」「沒有人受傷，」赤楊說。「謝謝你，」四十座說。

她手裡握著兩截銷，說，工廠的東門那裡，曾經有過一張給兩個人的長凳。第一年她放在那裡的。那位差手依法站在門口，從第一聲鈴站到最後一聲鈴，中午時她請他坐下。法律說差手不能被請求，只能被命令，也不能拒絕；而她四十年來每天說，我是在請求，好讓那成為一個請求，那對法律一點差別也沒有。她以為對他也許有差別。他坐了。他坐在另一端。他們不說話。他有一個編號，她從不知道他的名字。「我一直不知道，」赤楊說，「他坐是因為我請求，還是因為他沒有別的辦法。那是個非常精確的問題，而我是個精確的人，我始終沒有找到那個儀器。」那個下午，她簽了字。他那天傍晚離開，和其餘的一起。她沒看見往哪個方向。她第二年就在這裡造了這道門和這張長凳，尺寸相同，另一端從來沒有人坐過，因為從來沒有人被請求。「我不是要一位差手扶我的門，」她說。「我是想知道，有沒有一位會坐。」

遲說他不知道。他說，東門那個人在一個地方，背後有法律，四十年；而他自己，在每個地方，背後什麼也沒有，五十年；他能告訴她他現在怎麼做，那就是被請求時他坐，要是他不想坐，他會繼續站著。她說這不是她那個問題的答案。他說不是。她說這是另一個問題的很好的答案。她沒說是哪一個。她坐著，手裡是兩截銷，面前是海，長凳的另一端是一位穿著護板的差手，護板是穿上為了要脫下的，他被請求了，他來了，他可以走，過了一陣，她說她想再要一刻鐘。他說她被請求了。

## 第26章 · 敘述一架子及時停下的東西，以及一張不得修理的卡片

第二個一刻鐘是在沉默中度過的，所以，到年輕人端茶出來的時候，第三個沒有人要過、也沒有人結束的一刻鐘，也已經有一大半是沉默的。鴴被他姨媽在十一年裡教過，一個人走進有兩個人坐著不說話的房間，要把手裡拿的東西放下，再走出去，他就這麼做了，把托盤放在牆上，杯子排成一排，像一個在為也許不會來的什麼擺桌子的人。潮轉了。從潮閘傳來的聲音換了調。赤楊，在長凳她那一端，說四十座的十四號塔吱吱響是因為偏航軸承，不是缺油，而四十座非常有禮貌，會一直要油，直到有人請四十座去要軸承。遲說他會告訴四十座。她說她已經告訴過兩次，四十座說：記下。

房子低矮灰色，裡面東西很少。有一張桌子、一個爐子、兩把椅子、一整面釘成一排排、邊上標著日期的潮位圖，一塊製圖板，板上有一張紙，侄女走近時赤楊把它翻了過去，廚房的碗櫥上，玻璃後面，是一長條架子的小紙袋。一共三十七個。每個折成三折，每個上面一張標籤，字像一把尺。侄女，是會讀標籤的人，照順序出聲讀了，因為她忍不住。閘門，懸盆，三月十四日。無人受傷。吊鉤，碼頭，九月二日。無人受傷。閘桿，上運河。無人受傷。泵聯軸器。無人受傷。輸送帶護罩。無人受傷。她讀到第九個停下，第十個默讀，又接著出聲，而老婦人，背對他們切麵包，說，這些是及時停下的東西。每一個都是她做的、要讓它斷開的零件，每一個都斷開了，每一次機器都停了，沒有人受傷，事後她到那地方去要那個零件，拿到手的是兩截，就放進紙袋。它們追溯回六十一年前。

侄女讀到第二十二個。上面寫：東門，工廠。受傷，一人。她在決定之前就念出聲了。老婦人停下切的動作。她沒有轉身，說那是一道門，一根銷子，那根銷子沒有斷開。是第十九年。門扇壓到了差手的右手，在門閂那裡，那根本該在負載下斷開的銷子，撐住了，因為那鋼太好了一級；而她當時不在。她說事後她去要了那根銷子，是完整的一根。那位差手被修好了，回到門口，第二天就站在那裡。他又在長凳的另一端，中午，坐了二十一年，第一年手上裹著布，而她每天都請求他。她是用說滴數的聲音說的。她說她把它和其他的放在一起，因為那是個例外，而人不會把例外放到別的地方去。

她把麵包端到桌上。然後她向遲要那只盒子。他放在碗櫥上了。她把兩截銷從布裡取出來，放在桌上的光裡，自己站著寫了標籤，用鉛筆，寫在一張配給卡的背面，那把尺似的字。一號塔，四十座。八月六日，09:41。四點八。撞擊者：一位差手。無人受傷。她讀了，把「一位差手」這幾個字劃掉，在旁邊用同樣的尺字寫上：歇野的遲。她把紙袋折成三折。她打開玻璃，把它放在那一排的盡頭，成為第三十八個，關上玻璃。侄女說，那是那個架子上第一個寫著人名、而不是零件名的紙袋。

他們吃了麵包、豆架上摘的豆子，和閘板一早送上來的一條魚，因為這個星期稍早，老婦人問過他差手吃什麼，他說他想大概是魚，老婦人吃得比誰都多，說她被嚇到的時候總是這樣。護板那時已經被卸下了，是侄女卸的，十一個扣她解得比扣得快，她用兩手掂了掂，說是九公斤，而九公斤就是九公斤的重量。赤楊說這不是個理由。侄女說這是管家說的。「她很精確，」赤楊說。護板立在廚房角落，半罩放在上面，像一個被請求等待的人。赤楊隔著房間看了它好一會兒。她問遲，他家是從哪裡得來的。他說，他們這一脈的一位差手，在那個下午的傍晚，把它留在庫房的釘子上，空著手走了。「一位差手不會不帶護板走，」赤楊說。「那位走了，」遲說。她問他去了哪裡。遲說他不知道，庫房沒有記錄。「沒有，」赤楊說。她沒有再問什麼，他也沒有說什麼，侄女，已經向我描述過那段沉默兩次，說那是兩個人各自看見了同一扇門、並且說好了不去試它的沉默。

馱籃問她，那九個人是誰。她說三個死了，兩個在遠站，各一個世紀，一個從那個下午起就沒有和她說過話，一個養蜂，一個在登記處學院教書，那是她這輩子第一件做不好的事，還有一個是她自己。她說她可以告訴他哪個是哪個，而她到了這個歲數，發現她比較喜歡說養蜂的那個。

馱籃跟她說灰褐的事，灰褐站在門口，頭伸進門楣裡。他說有人告訴他，它一個下午就能修好。「可以，」赤楊說。「它一直都慢，」馱籃說。他說得很輕，對著自己的盤子。她看了他好一會兒。然後她從碗櫥上取下另一張配給卡，寫上，用那把尺的字：灰褐，服務馱架，九型，第三條腿，滯後0.1秒。不得修理。簽上她的名字和「系統」兩個字。她說，任何技術員看到這張卡，會發現它對照簽署者解析，只好讓那條腿維持原樣。她把它給了馱籃。馱籃讀了三遍。他把它放進他放重要東西的口袋，他說，那個口袋他已經得擴大了。

對侄女，在豆子上，她說她知道是哪一座船閘。侄女放下叉子。赤楊說，她聽說了四十座說過的話，和侄女對四十座說的話，因為四十座告訴了她，四十座非常有禮貌，又不知道哪些事該自己留著。她說她不會告訴她。她說侄女說過她寧可走，而她贊成寧可走的人。「走吧，」她說。「十一座都走。回來告訴我是哪一座，我再告訴你對不對。」「什麼時候？」侄女說。「我九十七歲了，」赤楊說。「這是個相當短的延期。算一年。」「我會走快一點。」「別，」赤楊說。

侄女去端盤子時，把製圖板上那張紙翻過來，想把麵包放在角上，看見了那是什麼。那是一幅圖，一根黃銅的槓桿，在一座塔的腳下，上面一塊銘牌，大寫的字。銘牌上寫：請。底下還有一幅機構圖：一根彈簧，一個棘爪，和一小圈標著「謝後復位」的東西。她拿著麵包站在那裡看。赤楊，從爐子那邊，說被撞到時會停的零件是個粗糙的東西。她做過三十八個。四十座在中繼上對她說過，用那種不聰明的聲音，說八月那十四分鐘並不介意，而她想：四十座不能請求。四十座沒有辦法請求。所以她在做一個被請求時會停、被道謝時會繼續的東西。她說它會有用，只要有人去請求。她說該由一個陌生人先拉，因為要是撞過四十座的那個人去拉，就沒有人會知道四十座停下，是因為被請求，還是因為有禮貌。遲說他會去找一個。她把圖捲起來，綁好，交給遲，說四十座該收到它；還有，十四號要的是軸承。

她再坐下之前，以工程師的口氣問了他一個問題。她說他是自由的，卻拿著一根棍子走舊路；她想知道載重情況。遲說他有一張理由的清單，它們彼此並不一致。「好，」赤楊說。「只有一種載重情況的結構，是通往無處的橋。它站著，直到遇到第一件它沒被設計來承受的事。我不信任只有一個理由的人。」她說她三十年來也用同樣的理由不信任自己，而且是對的。

下午她又要了一刻鐘，和長凳，他坐了。那不是一刻鐘。大約下午第二聲鈴時，她在坐著的地方睡著了，在她那一端，下巴靠在外套領子上，兩手攤開放在膝上，就像凌晨四點起來的老人那樣，兩個拇指的指尖被七十年握量表壓得扁平；而遲，在另一端，沒有動。他有一個小時又十分鐘沒有動，穿著他應她的請求又穿上的護板，因為她說她想看看它在海邊的樣子。獵犬躺在他的腳邊。一艘拖網漁船趁退潮駛過海岬，船尾有一面旗，一群海鷗跟著它走了，又回來。豆子在豆架上嗒嗒作響。下面的潮閘灌水，放水，灌水，為一艘沒有來的駁船。鴴拿了一條毯子出來蓋在他姨媽身上，看了看那位差手，進去，又拿了另一條出來，蓋在他身上，蓋在護板上，又進去了。馱籃和侄女坐在牆上，稍遠一點，背對著路。

馱籃，不看她，說第九道門是夏天，在某種說法上，被一位對著自己的湯說話的八十三歲女士給過他的；他看了看自己的碗；他還沒有決定。他說他要那道門，也要在家，有人告訴他那是兩樣。他說協會要付錢給他扛午飯。他說他想他會去問薊。「她會用陳述句說，」侄女說。「這就是她的好處，」馱籃說。侄女在筆記本裡寫，她事後問她叔叔，那一個小時又十分鐘他在想什麼。他說他在想那只碗。她問是哪一只。他說，在他們兩個之間的那一只。

赤楊在第三聲鈴時醒來，說：「多久？」遲說一個小時又十分鐘。她說他沒有動。他說他被請求保持。她說這是四個一刻鐘又十分鐘，問他知不知道沒有四個一刻鐘的格式；他說現在有了。她說登記處有一位書記，已經寫了兩個星期的信，問能不能來訪，她說了十月，因為她想到那時也許有什麼可以告訴她。她說海灣對面登記處有一盞燈，在二樓從左數第三扇窗，自六月起每晚都亮，她開始納悶那裡寫的是什麼。我知道那扇窗。我十月去了。

她把麵包的硬頭給了獵犬，問牠叫什麼。沒有人替牠取過名字。她說，走過八十公里的東西一定有名字。侄女說牠有地方的名字。「那不是名字，」赤楊說。「不是，」侄女說。她給了侄女一把三百公釐的鋼尺，製造者的記號已經磨掉了，說那是給船閘用的，一座船閘就是它的尺寸。

他們在黃昏離開。她自己走到門口，手放在橫桿上，看他們一個一個走過去，三個人，兩具軀架，一隻獵犬，什麼也沒說，因為她已經說過了。遲，最後一個，在路上轉過身。她問他星期日會不會來。他說星期日在路上。她說她知道。他說被請求時他會來。「我是在請求，」赤楊說。門在他們身後關上，沒有一點聲音，侄女說，那是她第一次聽見一道門是高興的。

## 第27章 · 敘述晚了兩天的駁船，以及依序走過的四座船閘

駁船晚了兩天。在運河上，風坐錯了方向，船就是這樣，沒有人覺得值得說一句，但閘板說了，他坐在潮閘的橫樑上，嘴裡那支菸斗沒點：說那條「星期二」星期四才到；說平潮在八點十分，只有二十二分鐘；說駁船要是到時還沒過閘，就得等下一次，十二個小時以後，而舵柄後面那個女人已經說過乳酪對這件事的看法。他說他從中午起就一直把閘室灌了又排、排了又灌，以防萬一，這對閘門沒有好處。「星期二」是運河替那條船取的名字，因為二十年來它都在那一天上行。它自己的名字用白漆寫在船尾，叫「第二陣風」，晚了，掌舵的說，是因為第一陣。它停在外頭那一段水面上，船頭抵著海邊的閘門，又長又低又黑，船身二十九公尺，篷布底下是一千三百個硬乳酪圓餅；掌舵的穿一件男人的外套，頭髮用麻線紮在腦後，她看著三個人、兩具軀架和一隻獵犬在最後的天光裡從牆上下來，對那個帶馱架的說：「你。繩子。」

馱籃在想清楚之前就接了繩子，他說那是負重者的反射，不是美德。那是船尾纜，三十公尺濕麻繩，他在牆上的繫纜樁繞了兩圈，握住，灰褐站在他身後撐著，像一具什麼也沒被告知的軀架那樣站著。平潮在八點十分到，閘板的錶是這樣說，海也是這樣說，兩個說法一致。閘板一邊做事一邊對侄女解釋，因為她把筆記本拿了出來。一天兩次，約二十分鐘，海和運河一樣高，船閘就是一道門，不是一個房間。十一座船閘裡，有十座的閘門都朝同一邊頂，頂向運河上游，因為水只往一個方向推；他的朝兩邊頂，因為海從另一邊推；而在平潮時，他可以把海那一側的一對和運河這一側的一對同時打開，運河上沒有別的船閘做得到，二十二分鐘裡，運河和海之間什麼也沒有，只有一個四點五公尺寬的缺口。小魚往兩個方向都游過去。侄女寫下：水哪邊也不流。我在十一月站過那個缺口，在平潮時，我只能說，那裡的安靜是一種似乎不屬於水的安靜。

掌舵的把船開進來，沒碰到任何一扇閘門，對著誰也不是地說，這就是她付閘費買的東西。她叫莎草；我是從她那裡聽到的，連同一句話：那是一種植物，而她不是。她叫閘上的人用的是他們的活兒，不是名字，船上的人都是這樣；船尾過來的時候，她對遲說，他正站在海邊那扇閘門的橫樑旁，一隻手扶著，沒人告訴他該拿它怎麼辦：「壓。」遲就壓了上去。那扇閘門，閘板一個人關，要把背抵在橫樑上、倒著走，要花兩分鐘和整條脊椎，這時一下子就轉了過來，與另一扇碰在一起，聲音像一棟很大的房子裡關上一扇門。遲十一月告訴我，那是他一路上做的第一件沒有人請求、他也沒請求、也沒有人道謝的事；他不介意；他注意到自己不介意；他為此想了一路，想到第四座船閘，什麼也沒想出來。

閘板的廚房有一個爐子，來客人時才點，牆上用粉筆寫著這個月的潮汐表，高潮和低潮分成兩欄，平潮用紅圈圈起來；門邊的繩子上掛著一疊像人大腿那麼厚的簿子，那是登記簿，五十年來他把每一次潮都寫成一行：開。關。侄女為了那個聲音，出聲念了一個傍晚，然後翻回九年前的九月，筆跡在那裡換了。是一種圓圓的字，不是他的。上面寫：慢路協會。走完十一座。沒找到。下一年，同樣的字：走完十一座。沒找到。這樣寫了九次，每一次底下是閘板的筆跡：開。關。他說他們是好人，離開時橫樑跟他們來時一樣。他說他從來不明白，他們以為一本書能做什麼。

晚飯後，侄女把筆記本拿到桌子那一頭，念給他們聽她從《船閘的小姐》裡抄下的東西，是在書房那些夜晚、以一隻手的速度抄的；那是註說過、寫的人一定站過一座船閘的那一頁。我照她念的給出來。「船閘從閘檻到閘檻三十一公尺，寬四點五公尺，落差兩公尺十公分。上游的閘門每一扇各有一個進水板；下游的只有一個，另一個在某個乾旱的年份被拿去給別座船閘用了，就沒有還回來。下游的閘門是橡木的，有一點不正，所以是從上面合起來。一個進水板是搖把十四圈，而搖把在第九圈卡住。閘室如果沒有人催，十一分鐘灌滿。閘沿的石頭上，左邊，鑿了一級階，一隻靴子寬，給守閘人用；右邊的繫纜樁，在繩子走的那一側磨得發亮。橫樑比需要的長。其餘沒有什麼值得一提。」莎草聽的時候閉著眼睛，嘴唇在動，像一個在數東西的人。聽到搖把的時候她睜開眼睛。「它們都卡在第九圈，」她說。「那是進水板離開水面、棘爪咬住的地方。」她說這條運河是照一個樣子開出來的，三十一乘四點五，因為船就是那麼大；說每個閘室都大約十一分鐘灌滿，因為進水板是同一批買的；說侄女不如把那一頁的前一半劃掉。侄女已經劃掉了，在赤楊那道牆上，在那一個小時又十分鐘裡。她的筆記說：不是長度，不是寬度，不是灌滿，不是卡住。落差。下游進水板。閘門。階。繫纜樁。橫樑。

他們睡在水閘房上面的閣樓，漲潮轉向的聲音從地板縫裡傳上來，馱籃說，那聽起來像一個人做了決定、沒告訴任何人。獵犬睡在駁船上的乳酪中間，沒有人請牠看管，牠看管了。遲沒有睡。閘板從廚房窗子看見他拿著棍子，在黑暗裡沿著閘室的邊石，從這頭走到那頭，走了三趟，然後在下游的閘門前停下、站著；早上他給了侄女一個數字，像交出一件撿到的東西，是四十三。「我的步數，」他說。她寫了下來。

莎草的規矩，是在六點、天還黑、就著鐵罐煮的茶講的：誰跟她同一個方向走，誰就在做事。她在水上一小時走三公里，纖道上一小時走五公里，而一座船閘不是一條船能自己備好的；所以這一行人走在前面，像先走一步備閘的人那樣：馱籃和灰褐在最前，然後是遲和昔，然後是侄女，筆記本夾在腋下，鋼尺插在袖子裡。獵犬沒有被問過什麼，留在船艙頂上，下巴擱在一個乳酪上，像一個被裝在錯誤那一端的船首像。

第十座船閘離潮閘一千四百公尺：鋼閘門，一間小磚房，百葉窗關著，門上一張卡片說，守閘人第三聲鈴回來，趕時間的人歡迎自己動手。他們不趕時間；他們自己動手。遲和馱籃打開下游的閘門，兩人花了一分半鐘，等駁船在莎草手下進來，兩邊各剩一掌寬；然後馱籃拿起搖把。他沒有搖過。侄女是開玩笑，把那一頁念給他聽。一個進水板是十四圈，他搖得很均勻，棘爪嗒嗒響，搖到第九圈他停了。他告訴我，他是在卡住以前停的：他在手腕裡感覺到它來了，像在黑暗裡感覺到一級樓梯，他說不上來那個知道是書的，還是搖把的。它卡住了。莎草在船尾說，它就是這樣。他讓棘爪接住，走到另一個進水板，同樣在第九圈停下。

閘室灌滿花了十一分鐘又四秒，這四秒是侄女給我的，她用脈搏數，再對照閘板的錶，那只錶借給她，條件是要還。她在水開始進來時在牆上用粉筆畫了一道，結束時又畫了一道，用鋼尺量兩道之間：七把尺又一把尺的十分之七，是兩公尺三十一公分。在那十一分鐘裡，閘上沒有人能讓它更快。灰褐沒有什麼節奏可言，就照水的節奏跑。馱籃有一個新的，覺得有點慢。遲坐在下游閘門的橫樑上，兩手放在兩膝之間，莎草在船艙頂上吃麵包，駁船沿著牆升起，決定要多久的是水。水不接受配額。我後來想過，慢路協會走這條運河，也許就是為了這個。他們從來沒有說過。

她的筆記本把船閘排成一欄，劃了線，用鉛筆，數字旁邊是協會取的名字。我照寫的給出前三座。十，鹽沼。落差2.31。下游閘門鋼的。進水板2/2。階：右。繫纜樁：左，沒磨。橫樑：短。灌滿11:04。不是這一座。九，柳灘。落差2.04。下游閘門橡木，正。進水板2/2。階：左。繫纜樁：右，亮。橫樑：長。灌滿10:51。不是這一座；見守閘人。八，箍桶匠。落差2.18。下游閘門橡木，不正。進水板2/1（另一個被拿去當錨，守閘人說，六年前，一個需要錨的人拿的）。階：無；一塊木板。繫纜樁：兩邊，新的。橫樑：普通。灌滿11:20。不是這一座。還不是。

第九座，守閘人在。她叫柳枝，八十歲，坐在她房子門前的階上，毛線擱在膝頭，把整頁聽完，針一動也沒動。她說這不是她的船閘。她說那一頁精確得像一張賣契，她會拿它到法庭上去，說誰都看得出來，從最後一句就看得出寫的人是什麼樣的人。「其餘沒有什麼值得一提，」她說。「沒有人會這樣寫一座他不愛的船閘。」侄女把這句話寫在頁邊，然後，因為那是那天早上第一件有人說了、她卻量不出來的事，她在它周圍畫了一個圈。

他們在第八座吃東西，坐在閘沿的石頭上，在那十一分鐘裡，剛好夠吃一片麵包和一片乳酪，要是乳酪是莎草切的。她從一個為此打開的圓餅上切下來，說離熟還差六天，問侄女覺得怎麼樣。侄女說，像下雨前的田野。莎草說那很可能是真的，下個星期它就會是別的味道。她說，既然運河上每一本筆記本都問守閘人是哪一座，沒有人想到問船，那麼她來答：她不知道哪一座是小姐的，但知道她自己會在哪一座寫。第七座。下午那裡的光最好，從下游的閘門看過去，還有一棵柳樹斜伸在水面上；一個人下午五點站在那裡，什麼事也沒有，要等十一分鐘，之後文字變成什麼樣子，是怪不到他頭上的。

侄女問了那天晚上和白天遇到的每一個人，把聽到的寫下來，我不加評論地給出。閘板，前一晚：沒有一座是他的，他不多說。柳枝：不是她的，但她希望是。莎草：第七座。馱籃：等得最短的那一座，是第九座，少十三秒。灰褐沒有被問。遲說他沒有看法；然後，隔了一座船閘，他說他在第九座的橫樑上坐過，那是一根好橫樑，他不知道這算不算證據。

第七座叫長柳，那棵柳樹就在，在左岸，下游閘門上方，斜伸在水面上，一個靜止的下午將盡時，它的葉子碰到水。守閘人到她姊妹家去了，留下卡片。他們照常操作；馱籃在第九圈停下；灌滿花了十一分鐘又九秒；駁船升起了兩公尺十二公分，用尺量的。侄女站在下游的橫樑上，筆記本攤在膝頭，做她寫下來的那六件事。下游的閘門是正的。下游的進水板是兩個。階在左邊。右邊的繫纜樁，在繩子走的那一側磨得發亮。橫樑比需要的長。五點鐘，在水上，從下游的閘門看過去，光就是莎草說的那樣，她在那十一分鐘裡一直看著它。

她在第七座的那一頁，每一欄都填了，只剩最後一欄。落差是2.12，她把它圈起來。判斷那一欄是空的。她說她在看光。莎草說她也是，那就是她當初說的原因。我沒有問侄女那光是不是一個理由，她也沒有把它當成理由說。

## 第28章 · 敘述河段裡的一道淺埂與扛過去的乳酪，以及釘在爐子上方的一頁紙

長柳上方那一段河面，從六月起少了一掌寬的水。運河上沒有人覺得這值得說一句，乾燥的九月會從每一段河面拿走同樣多，但星期六早上七點四十五分，離下一座船閘三分之一路程的地方，「星期二」坐下了。沒有震動。水還在船身兩側流過，柳梢還在拖著，駁船不再往任何地方去了；莎草在舵柄後面說了一句話，我不給出，然後用平平的聲音說，那個轉彎處的運河底下橫著一道礫石埂，從除役那年的洪水起就在那裡，她過這道埂九百次，每次都剩一掌寬的餘裕，而今天那一掌寬在別的地方。

她說駁船要輕四百個圓餅左右才浮得起來，埂有三十公尺長，下一座船閘的碼頭在前面六百公尺；她對纖道說，對站在上面的人、軀架和獵犬說，像一個在念天氣預報的人。馱籃在她說完以前已經搬下第一個圓餅。圓餅每個差不多十公斤，圓的，硬的，上過蠟，聞起來是它們離開的那個地窖的味道，底下是侄女說過的那種下雨前的田野，在纖道乾燥的太陽下，大聲得多。馱籃一次十二個放在灰褐的架上，手裡再抱四個。遲一次兩個放在每條前臂上，走了六百公尺，一次也沒有調整過。侄女一次一個，數著。一共四百一十二個；她自己扛了其中二十八個，兩天裡她的手臂一直在說這件事。「星期二」離開淺埂時是十一點十分，發出像長長吐出一口氣的聲音。莎草付給扛的人工錢，用圓餅，一人一個，下星期四以後才能吃，她對馱籃說，他是她用過的負重者裡第一個會數數的；馱籃，我聽說，雙手捧著他那個圓餅捧了很久，說那是他第一次收到的、會變好的工錢。

侄女那天早上的筆記本有三條，是她把一個乳酪擱在膝上寫的。我照原樣給出。問（19）：你的理由哪一個是真的？遲：每一個，在不同的日子。問：今天呢？遲：今天是那根橫樑。問：橫樑怎麼了？遲：它的高度正好。問：對什麼正好？遲：對我。問：這是一個理由嗎？遲：它是半個。再往下，同一枝鉛筆：問（19）：另一半是什麼？遲：我還沒想到。問：你已經有了四座船閘。遲：乳酪比船閘重。最後一條：問（19）：你寧可被請求，還是被吩咐？遲：我寧可東西的大小剛好。問：這不是答案。遲：不是。

接下來的船閘一座接一座，光在殘茬上變黃，駁船落在後面幾百公尺；我一座也不給。侄女星期六那一欄在她的筆記本裡，我沒有抄，這是我接下來要說到的一個人的請求，也是侄女自己的請求，數過的讀者可以繼續數。六點一刻他們來到左岸的一棟閘房，在一棵梣樹底下，窗子裡的燈已經點了，階上坐著一個補網的男人。

他叫燈草，四十三歲，是個高大遲緩的男人，前臂是一輩子用手而不是用背推橫樑的人的前臂，他看了「星期二」，看了那些人，看了差手，繼續補網。駁船上來的時候，侄女沒有問他任何事。她拿出筆記本和尺，做她在別的船閘做過的事，出聲地，像事情進行得順利時那樣。下游的閘門是橡木的，不正；馱籃讓水升起來時她看著它們合攏，說它們是從上面合起來的。馱籃在第九圈停下搖把，階上燈草說了一聲「啊」，那是他發出的第一個聲音。下游的進水板是一個。階在左邊，她把尺橫放上去，從牆到牆剛好，兩端連一根頭髮都不剩；她說：「一隻靴子寬，」聲音太穩了一點。繫纜樁在右邊，她把拇指按在繩子走的那一側，又拿開。橫樑是長的。她在灌水開始時和結束時各在牆上畫了一道粉筆線，量兩道之間，七把尺，沒有多出來。她沒有說那個數字。燈草在她說到第三件事時就停了手，沒有再補。

駁船上來以後他站起來，問可不可以看一下那把尺。她給了他。他翻過來，看著製造者的記號原本在的那一端，一句話也沒說就進了屋子，出來時手裡有另一把，那一把掛在他門裡面的一根釘子上，掛得比他夠得到那根釘子還早。它們是同一把。兩把我都拿過；尺端磨損的紋路是同一種紋路。他問是誰給她的。「赤楊，」侄女說。「星期四。」燈草說，他母親的那一把也是從同一個人那裡來的，在那個下午之後的第一年，而他母親臨終前最後一個月給他的吩咐是：要是有人帶著尺來到這座船閘，就讓他們看廚房。三十一年了，他說，沒有人帶過尺來。協會來的時候是帶著手。

廚房有一個爐子、一張桌子、兩把椅子，還有一把搬進來的第三把；爐子上方，一塊為它裁好的玻璃後面，是一張茶色的服務時代的紙。是差手們被教的那種方正的字，直立，一筆一畫，數字七中間劃了一橫。抬頭是：給守閘人。後面有一個號碼，我略去。侄女站著讀，兩手背在後面，像在博物館裡讀東西那樣，然後出聲讀，因為她就是這樣；那是她的那一頁，一字不差，就像她在書房裡以一隻手的速度抄下的那樣：三十一公尺、落差、乾旱的年份被拿走的進水板、不正的閘門、第九圈、一隻靴子寬的階、繫纜樁，還有比需要的長的橫樑。然後它繼續下去，從《船閘的小姐》停下的地方。搖把在掛鉤上。用完掛回去。其餘沒有什麼值得一提。你會應付得來。18:40 閉閘。那底下是一個服務時代的號碼，號碼底下，用鉛筆，一種圓圓的、不是差手的字，只有一個詞：棘爪。遲給了它四分鐘。他十一月告訴我，在「你會應付得來」那句話可能有的好幾種意思裡，他選了最平淡的那一種，就是寫的人認為她會。

燈草說，是他母親這樣叫他的。差手有號碼，運河從來沒有一個名字給他，而她需要一個東西隔著水喊他；所以她拿了搖把上那個在你放手時把進水板撐住的零件。他沒說對不對。她當作他不介意。燈草那時十二歲。他記得一個高個子，比遲高，從第一聲鈴站在橫樑邊到最後一聲鈴，他母親說他吃東西也站著，從來不進屋子。他每條船都從門口報給她，一行，她把這些行寫進閘房的簿子裡：船，一艘，上行，09:10。簿子這樣一直寫到那個傍晚。下一行，在第二天早上六點十分，同一種字，寫的是：開。那個下午的傍晚，六點半，他來到廚房門口，沒有進來，把那張紙放在階上，說：「給守閘人。」那是這麼多年裡，他對她說過的第一句不是報告的話。

然後他去把閘門關上，它們本來就關著。他把搖把掛到掛鉤上。他用掛在旁邊的掃帚把閘沿掃到遠端又掃回來，六點四十分他從口袋拿出一截粉筆，在橫樑靠房子的那一條臂上寫下這座船閘的號碼、「閉閘」兩個字和時間，然後空著手沿著纖道往懸盆走去。燈草的母親在階上。她沒有喊。她後來告訴燈草，喊會是一個請求，她不知道他是不是還能拒絕請求，也不打算用那種方式去發現；那是她這輩子最驕傲的事，也是她最羞愧的事，而她始終沒決定是哪一個。她站到他轉過彎看不見，才進去。夜裡下了一點雨。早上粉筆沒有了，它原來在的地方是一掌半長、顏色淺一點的木頭。

她每年春天洗橫樑的其餘部分，一直洗到她死。燈草四月裡也這樣做，用水桶和刷子。靠房子的那條臂上有一個地方，大約一掌半長，在差手的手會在的那個高度，比守閘人的手高，那個地方刷子從來沒有去過。沒有人告訴他。「我的手會繞過去，」他說。那裡的木頭比其餘的灰，上面有一層霜，像李子皮上的那一層。他十九歲時試過一次，為了均勻，發現他的手不肯。

侄女問他，他母親為什麼從來沒有說。他說，有十一座船閘，另外十位守閘人，每一位都希望是自己的；《船閘的小姐》四年後出來，書裡有那一張紙，他母親立刻知道那張紙是從哪裡抄走的，決定了，當那個對的人，是一件不厚道的事。協會每年九月都來，把手放在他的橫樑上，對它很好。他們從來沒有一次往他的廚房裡看，廚房就在橫樑隔壁，玻璃從小路上看得見。他覺得，那是協會做過的事裡最有禮貌的一件。

他們出去看，四個人，在最後的天光裡。那個地方就在他說的地方。燈草沒有叫任何人別碰，也沒有人碰。遲雙手拿著棍子站著，離那個地方的距離，是人站在一扇因為某個理由而關著的門前的距離，站了說一句短話那麼久。然後他說，木頭是好的。燈草說那是厚道。侄女袖子裡有那把尺，沒有拿出來。她說那是運河上唯一她沒有量的東西，而且她不知道單位會是什麼。馱籃什麼也沒說，灰褐站在被留下的地方，在纖道上去一點點，頭低著。

那天晚上，侄女在燈草的桌子上，用鉛筆，在「判斷」那一欄寫了字；我看過她寫了什麼，我不給出。燈草請求我，為了十位希望它是自己的守閘人，把他這座船閘的號碼留在這份紀錄之外，侄女請求我，在她告訴赤楊以前，把她的判斷留在外面，因為赤楊說過她會說她對不對；兩個請求我都答應了，因為我是一個被請求的人。莎草在船艙頂上，聽到這個安排時說，她從來沒說過第七座就是寫成的地方，只說是她會寫的地方，而這裡的光也不壞。侄女在門口，筆記本合上，說無論如何其餘的她都要走完。她說赤楊說過十一座都走。

搖把靠在欄杆上，是閘室被操作時馱籃放的地方。遲從階上看見它。他拿起來，沿著牆走到門邊的掛鉤，那掛鉤比房子還老，把它掛上去，把手朝下，就像那張紙說的，然後在它旁邊把一隻手平放在牆上，站了一下。燈草被那張紙告訴了三十一年，從來不需要人告訴，他說，這是他一輩子裡第一次有人比他先走到掛鉤，而那個人是一位差手。夜裡船閘灌了又排，沒有駁船，燈草說，風轉向的時候它就是這樣。他們都沒有醒，除了獵犬，牠走出去，坐在階上。

## 第29章 · 敘述走回去的星期日，以及一個什麼也沒有的請求

星期日，遲走了回去。沒有人說過他會。他在天剛亮時，在燈草的桌子旁，雙手捧著杯子說，他被請求了，而今天是星期日；侄女張著嘴，閉上了，因為星期四他說過他會怎麼做，她當時在場。他拿了棍子，別的什麼也沒拿。護板和半罩他留在昔身上的包裹裡。那罐鹽，從陶坊起沒有離開過他或馱籃的懷抱，他放進馱籃懷裡，馱籃說，他就是在那時知道他會回來的，因為一個打算走下去的人會帶著鹽。燈草問他要不要搖把。他說他想他不會去操作船閘。侄女陪他走到第一根橫樑，說：「不要告訴她。」「我本來就不打算，」遲說。「我知道，」侄女說。「我只是想說出來。」

「星期二」停在船閘上方，篷布掀開，掌舵的睡在船艙頂上，一件外套蓋著臉。他走過時，外套說：「去哪？」「回下游，」遲說。「我被請求了。」「誰請求的？」「門前的那位女士。」外套想了想。「那就去，」它說。它沒有說壓。

馱籃那天早上在燈草的桌子上寫了他的星期日訊息，寫在一張乳酪包裝紙背面，用莎草借他的木工鉛筆。薊在十月從盒子裡念給我聽。它保持格式：天氣在前，需要在後。「薊。晴。風從東邊來，這個星期第一次。很多道閘門；給你十一道，我操作了七道。灰褐很好，滯後沒有比平常多。我被付了乳酪，一個圓餅，下星期四以後才熟；熟以前別讓小的吃。我搖了九圈搖把就停了，不知道為什麼停。一位九十七歲的女士問我背著什麼，我說一切，還有灰褐，她說那是一種載重情況。我學到一件關於第九道門的事。要是等待每十一分鐘就有一個結束，我不會介意等。如果一個人想要那道門，又想要在家，你會說那是兩樣東西，還是一樣？P.」署名底下，小一點的字：我寫了。

侄女那天什麼也沒量。她坐在階上，筆記本合著，獵犬的下巴擱在她的靴子上，燈草，我想他有一年沒說過這麼多話，告訴她他母親的手是什麼樣子。中午她在一張配給卡的背面給窯寫了四行。「窯。乾。四百一十二個乳酪。你問過怎麼才算認真。我這個星期在筆記本裡漏掉一個號碼，發現它是裡面最重的東西。窯點著了嗎？」窯收到了卡。她回信說，點著了。

馱籃跟燈草一起補了一個小時的網，他是一個思考時需要手裡拿著東西的人，他把他的問題問了燈草，因為沒有薊在。燈草說，他母親管著船閘和房子，說那是兩樣東西，兩樣她都做，在不同的日子。「這算是答案嗎？」馱籃說。「這是她做的事，」燈草說。

遲沿著運河往下游走了九公里，用灰褐的速度。沒有人要求他這樣，灰褐也不在。星期日的運河，水是被丟著不管的：沒有船動，船閘停在星期六留下的水位上，他經過的閘房，守閘人或沒有人抬起一隻手。柳枝在她的階上舉起一根毛線針，像人對鄰居舉起一根手指那樣，繼續織。一個男孩在箍桶匠的橫樑上釣魚，線上綁著一塊石頭當墜子，蒼鷺站在閘門上，全朝同一個方向，像一個委員會。他沒有碰任何一根橫樑。他告訴我，一開始他想過，那些凹處的高度正好是他的手的高度，後來決定，作為訪客去碰一樣東西，與它被磨出來的那個動作是另一回事。道路紀錄把他的速度記為二點九，整段都是，那是隊伍的速度；它沒有記下他是一個人。我十一月問他為什麼不走快一點。他說不然他就是一個人走，而用那個速度，他發現他不是。我自己十一月走過，從燈草的船閘到潮閘，同樣的速度。花了三小時八分鐘。我不能說我不是一個人；我只能說道路紀錄把我記為二點九，而我感謝它。

閘板坐在潮閘的橫樑上，菸斗沒點。平潮就要到了，他在開閘門，每一次潮他都這樣，不管有沒有船；運河和海快要齊平了，一隻海鷗坐在缺口裡。他說她從第一聲鈴起就在那條長凳上。他說他告訴過她那要等很久，而她說她知道，她想要早到。

她坐在長凳她那一端，穿著外套，兩手放在膝蓋上，那是替人帶著東西的送信人的坐法；遲在敞開的門前停下，說了那句格式——我聽說你帶著什麼給我——她說她沒有。「我像送信人那樣坐，」赤楊說，「因為那是我唯一知道的、等一個被請求的人的姿勢。」她說他早到了。他說他沒有被告知時辰。她說她也不知道，她要的是那一天。他告訴我，下來的路上他準備了三句話：他來了，他什麼也沒帶，還有一個關於豆子的問題。第一句，他發現，不必說了，第二句正是她的重點；所以他問了第三句。「豆子怎麼樣？」遲說。「過了，」赤楊說。她說霜會在十月十二日來，而她從五十歲起每年都猜錯霜，已經不介意了。

鴴端著托盤出來，聽到他們在說話，就端著托盤站在門口，因為他十一年前被教過兩個人坐著不說話時該怎麼辦，卻從來沒被教過他們說話時怎麼辦。過了一會兒他又進去了。他們停下以後他才出來，把杯子放在牆上。

赤楊十月用九句話把後來的事告訴我，遲十一月用十一句話告訴我；兩個說法一致。她說沒有什麼。她說星期四有一枚銷子，一道門，一張圖，和一個沒有手的外甥，他來她的門前有四個理由，她減不掉。在工廠的那四十年有法律，任何對差手的請求，不管她怎麼說，背後都有法律。除役以後，沒有一位自由的、可以說不的差手來過她的門前。她希望了七十年，向一位差手要求什麼也沒有的東西，看會來什麼，而這是第一個她做得到的星期日。她說，除役那個下午的傍晚，她到工廠那張長凳去，要坐他那一端，從他看那道門的地方看那道門，卻發現她做不到，就坐在自己那端，直到天黑。「門上過油了，」她說。「我想看看什麼也沒有夠不夠。」

遲說他本來可以說他在路上。「你說過，」赤楊說。「星期四。然後你說你被請求時會來，我請求了，你在一條長凳上。」他說他是。她說這不是什麼也沒有，也不是一切，這是一個比較好的儀器。她做過三十八個，她說，這是其中最好的，而它沒有零件。她問他有沒有被帶去看那座船閘的廚房。他說有。他有沒有讀那張紙？有。他有沒有碰那根橫樑？「沒有，」遲說。「好，」赤楊說。她沒有問侄女找到了什麼，他也沒有說。

那三個小時跟星期四不一樣。他們說了一點話，沒有說很多。她問誰管他的房子，他說一位對他的看法修訂了四十四次的女士，她說那比她預期的少，問第四十五次是什麼。他說他不知道。她問起那幅圖，他說他還沒找到一個陌生人。「不必是人，」赤楊說。「只要是四十座沒被告知過的就行。」他說他會想。她說他有很多要想的。潮轉了；一艘拖網漁船帶著它的海鷗從海岬回來；鴴端了兩次茶。赤楊下巴靠在領子上睡了十分鐘，像星期四那樣，醒來說她沒有睡，遲說她沒有。他告訴我，第二個小時的某個時候，他發現自己不再數分鐘了，他平常是數的，也說不上是什麼時候停的；他說他把這當成好兆頭，卻不信任它。

她問他的理由清單現在多長。他說比星期四長。她問最後一個是什麼。他說二十二年來，星期日他在一條小徑的轉彎處坐著，什麼事也沒有，他想知道，要是那個什麼也沒有的時間裡有一個人，會是什麼樣子。「那是我的理由，」赤楊說。「是，」遲說。「我借了。」她說那樣的話她會登記為借出。「歸還，」遲說，「後面是一道橫線。」她說她沒有想過會有日期。

她進去拿了一個小紙袋，出來時手裡的紙袋折成三折，她在膝蓋上用鉛筆，用那把尺似的字寫。十月我看過。上面寫：長凳，海岸。什麼也沒有要。來了。借出：一個理由，給歇野的遲。歸還：—。無人受傷。裡面什麼也沒有。她把它放在架子那排的盡頭，成為第三十九個，那是唯一一個扁的。我沒有被請求打開它，我也沒有打開。

他要了紙，因為是星期日而他還沒寫，她給了他一張配給卡的背面，他把訊息寫在膝蓋上，照格式，她看著。我是從管家那裡得來的，她十月念給書房聽。「管家。晴。風從東邊來，這個星期第一次。很多道閘門。銷子送到了；完成了。我去了海邊。侄女的筆記本快寫滿了，馱籃有一個乳酪。我今天在一條長凳上坐了三個小時，被要求什麼也沒有，那裡很安靜，我還不知道那是什麼意思。我有一罐鹽給你，我今天把它留給馱籃，好讓我來這裡；他可以信任。我檢查過了。我需要知道你是不是在爐子旁邊。遲。」赤楊隔著他的手臂讀了，這是沒有人請她做的，她說那是一個健全的設計，天氣在前，需要在後，這樣需要到達時，讀的人已經被給了可以站的地方。她沒有問爐子是什麼。

中午，她說：「這樣就行了。」她說她給什麼也沒有留了一刻鐘，錯了十二倍。那是她在四十座被啟用的那一年、七十四歲時，在四十座那裡說的話，我是先從四十座那裡聽到、後從她那裡聽到的。遲站起來。她說她不會再請求。他說：「不會。」她說：「我可能會。」他說：「可以。」鴴拿著一條用布包著的麵包來到門前，一句話也沒說就交給他，遲把這當作格式。她沒有再請求過，到十一月為止。她可能會。

他沿著同一條路用同一個速度走回去，道路紀錄又把他記為二點九。黃昏在燈草的船閘，獵犬在其他人抬頭以前一百公尺就迎上了他，灰褐抬起了頭，馱籃說，灰褐不會為一個它不在等的人這樣。侄女的筆記本有這一條。問（19）：你剛才在哪？遲：在一條長凳上。問：做什麼？遲：被要求什麼也沒有。問：那是什麼樣？遲：安靜，而且夠了；我還不知道那是跟請求有關的事，還是跟我有關的事。問：你比較希望是哪一個？遲：希望那是跟長凳有關的事。

## 第30章 · 敘述懸盆，以及是誰說了沒有人

星期一，他們天剛亮就離開燈草的船閘。他一路送到第一根橫樑，那是他對客人的習慣，兩手攏在袖子裡站著。他告訴侄女，他四月洗橫樑，她到時候會知道。她說她會來。他說人們都這樣說。「我會寫下來，」侄女說，他看了看筆記本，又看了看她袖子裡的尺，說那樣的話，他會多擺一把椅子。她在筆記本封面寫了四月，畫了圈。他給了馱籃一根網針，帶回去給薊。馱籃說她不會知道怎麼用，燈草說，那正是能給人的最好的東西。

最後三座船閘跟前面的一樣，駁船在後面，隊伍在前面，侄女沒有拿出尺。她把手放在每一根橫樑上，在凹處的高度，站著，一直站到「星期二」上來。馱籃三座都在第九圈停下，到最後一座，他說他已經不再想知道為什麼了。遲坐在橫樑上。灰褐照例滯後十分之一秒，在一座船閘上，那不算什麼。最後一座的凹處深得放得下一顆蛋。她說那是運河上最老的一座。我始終沒能查到她量過它。

懸盆是一個田地那麼大的石砌水池，坐在平原的一層臺階上，下面是最後一座船閘，上面是進水的溪，三面的地都往下落，所以水像掛在鉤子上的東西那樣停在那裡。從南碼頭望出去，運河成一條尺劃的線往下，通到一個是海的污點；從北邊，長坡在貨運路的盡頭立起來，像一堵牆上畫了一條斜坡。他們說晴朗的早晨，從南碼頭可以看見潮閘的橫樑像一粒點，侄女不信，去查了，說不出來。北碼頭是貨運路開始的地方，星期一有一個賣慢東西的市場：乳酪、蘋果酒、羊毛、任何需要在黑暗裡放一季的東西、必須在一個還沒有人選好的日子到達土地的種子。「星期二」十點駛進北碼頭底下。懸盆的乳酪是按遲到程度賣的，因為遲到就是讓它熟的東西，等級是準點、耽擱、安頓、遺忘，價格依次升高。莎草那一千三百個圓餅，晚了兩天，被評為耽擱，比準點高一級，貴了百分之四；她說她是因為遲到才拿到工錢的，那是她母親唯一曾為她贊成的事。

馱籃用懸盆的價錢卸貨，是一百個圓餅抽一個，他一邊卸一邊出聲數，碼頭上的人覺得這樣太讓人安心，有兩個停下來聽；到中午三條不同的船給了他一個鋪位。他說他會去問薊。北拱門旁的告示板上有慢路協會的一張告示：協會將在這個月第二個星期六走運河，從懸盆到潮閘，沒有人走在前面；歡迎所有人；需要一位負重者扛午飯，照協會的價，價錢列在上面，是公道的。署名是C，簽名底下，另一種筆跡添了一句：帶帽子。他讀了兩遍。他說這張告示寫得很清楚。他沒有撕下聯絡的小條，也沒有走開，那在告示板前是第三種做法。

最後一座船閘的守閘人叫角石，六十七歲，小而方，她坐在橫樑旁的長凳上，兩手放在膝上，看他們上來，像是有人告訴過她。橫樑在她坐的地方是淺色的，那是她的手掌和她父親的手掌磨的。侄女，是會讀標籤的人，正在讀閘房牆上那塊牌子，上面寫著這扇閘門重新掛上的年份。然後，因為守閘人看著她，因為她有筆記本，也因為她是一個會問的人，她把海邊一間廚房裡一個架子上的東西告訴她。「玻璃後面有三十八個紙袋，」侄女說。「第一個寫著：閘門，懸盆，三月十四日。無人受傷。」

角石在閘室灌滿的那段時間裡什麼也沒說。然後她說：「那是我。」

她說那是六十一年前的三月十四日，一個星期二，一個明亮寒冷的早晨，懸盆的水靜得碼頭站在自己的倒影上，她六歲，在階上。她父親要給門軸上油，每個月都這樣，他在閘門下面，拿著油壺，吹著他唯一會的那個曲子，那曲子沒有結尾。吊掛的裝置鬆脫了，這種裝置六十年會鬆一次，閘扇朝他壓下來一掌寬，停住了。一根銷子斷開了。她記得那個聲音，不是撞擊，是一個乾淨的小聲音，像一只盤子放在桌上。口哨隨著它停了，然後有一陣完全沒有聲音，她覺得有一分鐘，她父親沒有動，碼頭上有一隻蒼鷺抬起了頭。他倒著爬出來，坐在閘沿上，吐了。她母親兩手是麵粉從屋裡跑出來，沒有碰他，站著。那年春天，他自己裝上新的銷子，從不讓別人碰，說它有權利被放著不管。

第二天早上，一位穿長外套的年輕女人搭第一班駁船來，帶著一個皮包，要那根銷子。她父親把兩截交給她。她看斷口看了很久，先用放大鏡，然後不用。她問誰在閘門下面。他說是他。她請他指出他站的地方，他指了，她跪下，用從口袋拿出的一把鋼尺量閘扇和他肩膀原來所在的地方之間的間隙，把數字寫下來；角石從她父親那裡還記得，那是十一公分。她問他有沒有受傷。他說沒有。然後她轉過去，問角石，那時她在階上，拇指含在嘴裡，有沒有人受傷。「沒有人，」角石說。年輕女人把它寫下來。她沒有再說別的。角石說，她在哭，沒有任何聲音，像一個被告知了實驗結果的人。角石的母親遞給她麵包，她說她不餓，然後在駁船上吃了；角石從窗子看見了。

她之後每年三月都回來看那道閘門，回來了十一年，角石每一次都在等著被問。赤楊問她父親的事：裝置、冬天、新銷子有沒有派上用場。她問過角石一次，有沒有吃飯。「就這樣？」侄女說。「就這樣。」角石在她父親之後守這座船閘四十一年，這期間沒有人問過她那是誰說的。她說這話沒有任何抱怨。她說它就像報一道閘門的長度那樣。她父親又活了三十年，死在窗邊他的椅子上，眼前是那座船閘；角石說他死時在吹口哨，雖然她當時在隔壁房間，也許是她補上的。她說她常常想那根銷子後來怎麼了，是不是被留下的那一根。

侄女告訴她，那是架子上的第一個，第三十八個是星期四寫的，一位差手站在旁邊，離三步遠，拿著棍子。角石看了遲好一會兒，然後看了橫樑，說那真是很多個沒有人。遲說第三十八個是他自己弄斷的，故意的，她把他的名字寫在上面。「你撞了一座塔，她寫了你的名字，」角石說。「我父親在一道閘門底下，她寫的是沒有人。」「她寫沒有人，是因為沒有人受傷，」遲說。「她寫我的名字，是因為總得有人被點名。」角石想了想。「我的那個標籤比較好，」她說。她問第一個上面有沒有她的名字。「上面寫的是沒有人，」侄女說。「好，」角石說。「那天就是沒有人。那是我這輩子說過最好的一句話。」她說那以後她說過幾十萬句話，一句也給不出來。她問侄女會不會回去。侄女說會，一年以後。角石說：「你可以問她，她想不想知道那是誰。要是她想，她可以來問我。」她說她想被問；一個帶著筆記本的女孩能把問題帶過去，是她六十一年來最接近被問的一次。

角石帶侄女沿著閘門走到門軸，銷子在那裡，在一個男人拳頭大的黃銅外殼裡，外殼上有一塊牌子，大寫：脫扣銷，A.，第二式。除非已斷開，不得更換。六十一年來它沒有斷開過。角石的父親曾說，它是運河上受僱得最好的人，因為它什麼也不做，而沒有人懷疑它。侄女把拇指放在外殼上，外殼被太陽曬得溫熱，她又拿開，把牌子抄下來。她問它會不會派上用場。「不會對我，」角石說。「它是為了那天在閘門底下的那個人在的。」

我十月沒有問赤楊。那不是我該問的。侄女在筆記本裡有這一條，在寫懸盆那一頁的頁邊，畫了圈：問A.她想不想知道是誰說了沒有人。她還沒問。還不到一年。

走以前，侄女又問了她一件別的事，因為她正在問。她問三十一年前，在那個下午的傍晚，有沒有人在夜裡沿著纖道上來。角石說有一位差手。她那時三十六歲，大約九點在閘房的窗子裡看見他，一個高個子，手裡什麼也沒有，在水泵邊停下喝水，說了一個詞，那個詞是「水」，用的是平常的話，所以她不知道那是請求還是報告；然後在最後一根橫樑旁站了一句短話那麼久，穿過北拱門，沿著貨運路上去了。侄女問他有沒有回頭看。角石說她沒法告訴她，她當時在看水泵。她沒有出去。她不知道他的號碼或他的船閘。她想，出去就是一個請求。「北，」遲說，他一直沒說話，侄女把它寫了下來。

筆記本裡懸盆還有一條不是角石的。問（19）：你寧可是沒有人，還是被點名？遲：這個星期我兩種都是過了。問：哪一個比較輕？遲：沒有人。問：哪一個比較好？遲：名字。它會被照顧。

莎草沒有來送他們。她在做買賣。她派了一個男孩送來第四個圓餅，還有一張寫在提貨單背面的話，侄女在碼頭上念出來。上面寫：一個圓餅給狗。我從侄女那裡問不出牠的名字，所以我一直叫牠安頓，那是等級，牠當得起。星期二。莎。獵犬，三天來一直坐在乳酪上，朝那個詞抬起頭，或者朝乳酪抬起頭，侄女把它寫進筆記本，畫了圈，說那是一條船取的，不是一個地方，但那是這隻獵犬最接近的。遲說那可以。馱籃把圓餅放在灰褐的架上，在另外三個旁邊，灰褐沒有什麼節奏可言，一句話也沒說就承了那個重量，獵犬走路。貨運路從北碼頭一道拱門下出去，通向長坡腳，六公里，筆直得像尺劃的邊。左邊是楊樹，一塊石頭說是運河完工那年種的，那個鐘點路上沒有人，只有一輛貨運車往上走，輪子綁了繩子，趕車人走在牲口的頭前。他們跟在後面，因為它走的是他們的速度；獵犬走到趕車人的靴子旁，然後，既然是安頓，就走到車尾的擋板上，坐下。沒有人叫牠下來。侄女看了看長坡，看了看路，看了看筆記本，說那是唯一的上去的路。沒有人回答，因為確實是。

## 第31章 · 敘述長坡與報數，以及攤在鐵匠桌上的一張圖

貨運路在長坡腳下的一片車場結束，車隊的人躺在太陽下等貨。長坡是四公里的坡，九分之一，用方石鋪成，鋪的人不信任天氣，東邊一條寬而淺的石階步道，它從海岸平原往上升到盆地，像一道坡道通到一扇門。所有上去的東西都是用手上去的。車場門口的一塊板子寫著規矩：任何往上走的人都可以推車的尾，推的人要在第一個一百步時報出名字。他們讀了。侄女問可不可以。門口的一位女士說，她從沒遇過有人問，人們通常只是報名字。步道旁立著五十三根柱子，每一根刻著一次呼喊的號碼，這樣走路的人不必被請求，也跟著車隊的數。

一隊是六個人，第七個位子是尾，誰都可以。他們用報數來推。每走一百步，領頭的按站的順序一個接一個叫隊裡每個人的名字，每個人答「在」；然後整輛車一起喊出這一百的數字；然後繼續走。長坡要喊五十三次。貨運工說，報數起初是一條安全規則，因為一支隊伍要是在一分鐘內不知道有人從繩子上掉了，就會有一輛載滿貨的車壓在腳上，後來一直唱下去，是因為沒有人想得出怎麼停。「沒有人無名地推，」纜繩說，他帶那輛掛灰布的車。他是個矮壯的男人，聲音不像是他的，他看了差手的棍子，看了昔身上包著的護板，只說尾是需要的。

那輛車載著鹽，四十袋灰色的那種，從坡腳的鹽田來，給平原上的廚房；侄女聞到了，看了灰褐的架子，那罐鹽就在上面的布裡。於是他們接了尾：馱籃、遲和侄女，灰褐像第四個人那樣用繩子綁在車後，獵犬走在輪子旁邊。第一個一百步，纜繩點隊：纜繩、挽繩、支索、軛具、頂針，還有纜扣，他十二歲，聲音在那個詞上破了，每個人答「在」；然後他說：「尾，」馱籃說：「馱籃，」遲說：「遲，」侄女，被問到名字，卻不習慣報名字，說：「侄女。」纜繩問那是不是全部。她說那是她有的那一個。「這個叫得出去，」纜繩說，把三個都叫了。到了第二個一百步他又點了一遍，馱籃，我聽說，沒有答，因為這輩子第一次在工作時被人叫名字；纜繩又叫了一次，第二次馱籃用一個他不認得的聲音說了「在」，車往上走了一大步。

只要不停，這不是很辛苦的工作。車以裡面最慢的那個人的速度爬坡，那是灰褐，每一百步的呼喊給了身體一件不是想事情的事做。灰褐綁在車尾，每一步滯後十分之一秒，車每一次都等它，沒有人要求；纜繩後來說，他拉過比它快、卻沒它這麼有禮貌的牲口。遲用兩手的手掌平推在車尾板的高度，侄女用肩膀，她後來說，那是她這輩子第一次做的工作，每一刻都知道每個人在哪裡。第二十六次呼喊的地方有一座棚子，那裡的點名比較長。纜繩在叫完自己隊上的人之後，又叫了三個名字，那三個不在隊上，隊上沒有人答，由整輛車替他們答：在。那是報數開始的第一年，在長坡上被一輛車壓在底下的三個人，當時它只是一條安全規則，貨運工從那以後每到一半就叫他們一次。遲和其他人一起說了「在」，馱籃也是，後來侄女問他認不認識他們，他說不認識，那不是認不認識的問題。然後隊伍休息一刻鐘，纜繩把整個報數給了侄女，她寫進筆記本，它沒有曲調，只有數字。我不給出。那是貨運工的，他們不出版。

在棚子裡纜繩問遲，是不是真的他打過一個巨人。遲說是。纜繩問為什麼。「我想知道巨人是什麼樣子，」遲說。「然後呢？」「有禮貌。」纜繩說他在長坡上拉了二十六年，沒有一樣東西他能這樣說。纜扣問獵犬叫什麼名字。侄女說牠叫安頓。纜扣說那是等級，牠當得起，獵犬很鎮定地接受了。

第五十三次，纜繩點了隊和車，照習慣加上「長坡」，隊伍說「完成」，車越過坡緣，上了平地。長坡屋就立在那裡：一棟同樣灰色方石的長而低的建築，一頭是鍛爐，一頭是燈房，頂上一個有欄杆的平頂。門上有一塊牌子寫：服務時代建造。四千一百一十二位差手。九個月。上面沒有名字，只有數目，侄女讀了兩遍，抄下來，然後拿著鉛筆站了一會兒，像人站在一欄數字的底下，那數字是人的總和。

長坡屋的主人是個叫火鉗的女人，五十歲，手臂像長坡的方石，替每個上來的人修車、修煞車、修輪子，收一頓飯和一個故事。她聽說有一位差手在走路，她說，車匠們為他是走長坡還是繞過去在打賭。她看了遲好一會兒，看了棍子，說她想賭局可以結算了。她也看了侄女袖子裡的鋼尺，什麼也沒說，又看了一眼。費用是一頓飯，然後是一個故事，由桌子指著的人在桌上講，桌子指著馱籃。他講了四十座。他說他已經講過十一遍，每次都更短，這是最短的一遍：他的鄰居有一根上面綁了樹枝的棍子，穿著他最好的素面走向一座風場，用樹枝盡全力打了第一座塔，故意的，因為差手典說差手遇到巨人就打它；塔停了，下一座停了，再下一座，一座接一座往下，像一件被說出去的事；手持機裡的聲音說有沒有人受傷，他，馱籃，說沒有，一位訪客，抱歉，那聲音說謝謝你，馱籃，請站到葉片掃過的範圍外面；整座四十座停了十四分鐘，是他二十二年星期日裡的第一次，而他坐在塔腳吃了他的午飯。火鉗說這聽起來像差手典。馱籃說這就是發生的事。「這是差手典將會說發生了的事，」火鉗說，又給了他麵包。纜繩是進來拿麵包的，他說尾總是缺人，軛具兩年後就做完了，長坡會需要一位負重者。馱籃說他變成被提供得太多了，他先前不知道這是可能的。

晚飯後她帶他們上了屋頂，因為是黃昏，那就是屋頂的用處。從欄杆看出去，是十一號道路穿過的整片平原，從長坡自己邊緣的深色線，到遠得是一種顏色而不是一條線的地平。侄女說她不知道它這麼平。馱籃說它不是，只是從上面看起來這樣。太陽正在長坡的肩膀後面落下，平原有了麵包裡面的顏色。天很快冷了，火鉗借了侄女一件聞起來有鍛爐味的外套。遠遠的邊緣外面，很低的地方，有一小片黃，那是各個居所點燈的地方，他看了它一會兒，說那是在對的方向。侄女小聲問遲，到了十字路口，他願不願意告訴她，那九分鐘裡他和隊長說了什麼。他說到了十字路口他會告訴她。她把它寫下來，底下寫了一個詞：星期三。

四十座的塔上，警示燈是紅色的，黃昏時點亮，沿著那一排一座接一座，每一座比前一座晚一點，所以亮起來的過程沿著那一排跑，像一件東西從手傳到手，到了盡頭，又從頭開始。從長坡屋的屋頂，四十八公里外，那是一排淺淺彎曲的紅色小點，按順序亮起來，一直亮下去。侄女，是會數的人，數了。她數了兩次。「四十一，」她說。從居所那一邊看，歇野人都知道，最後一座塔站在最近的那座後面，永遠看不見，所以那地方叫四十座；而從這裡，從這個角度，很清楚有四十一座，而且一直都有。

馱籃一座一座叫出名字。他二十二年來每個星期日從梯子上擦洗它們，那段時間從沒在一個他不是爬著的地方看過它們。那是九號，他說，南風時會哼；那是十四號，會吱吱響；他說從這裡他分不出哪個是哪個，但是他看得出十四號，從十四號亮的方式。他沒有說是什麼方式。他把兩手放在欄杆上站了一會兒，說它們看起來比他以為的小，而且彼此像得多。遲說二十二年來他星期日在轉彎處看四十座，有三個理由：那很遠，那是唯一在轉的東西，而他的鄰居在裡面。「現在呢？」馱籃說。「你在這裡，燈亮著。」「誰讓燈亮？」「四十座自己。」馱籃說他一直以為四十座是因為他在上面才亮的，他發現他鬆了一口氣，也有一點受傷。

遲說從來沒有人告訴過四十座，長什麼樣子。他在長凳那邊盡他所能告訴過四十座，四十座請他再說一遍。他說他現在說。一排四十一盞燈，彎成一道淺淺的弧，一盞接一盞亮，每一盞比前一盞晚一點，所以亮起來的過程沿著那一排走，像一個手勢從手傳到手，到了盡頭，又從頭開始。他對侄女說了兩遍，她寫了下來，然後再對黑暗說了一遍，不大聲，像人把一句話先說過一遍，再帶著上路。

火鉗拿著一盞燈從他們後面上來，問他腋下那捲是什麼。他說是一張圖。她替他拿著燈，他把圖攤在欄杆上，侄女的筆記本和馱籃的兩隻手壓在角上抵著風。圖上是一根黃銅槓桿，在塔腳下，上面一塊銘牌，大寫字；底下是一根彈簧、一個棘爪，和一小圈標著謝後復位的東西。火鉗讀著，嘴唇在動。她問它做什麼。他說它在被請求時讓東西停下，被道謝時讓東西繼續。她問是誰想出來的，他說是一位九十七歲的女士。她問槓桿怎麼知道有人道了謝。他說外殼裡有一片小小的聽音板，接收那個詞，彈簧圈除了那個詞，什麼也不放。「那麼你不道謝，它就一直停著，」火鉗說。「是。」「這是一根堅持禮貌的槓桿。」「是，」遲說。她把燈拿近，說槓桿畫給小手，彈簧畫得輕，是讓一個孩子也拉得動。「那她是故意畫小的，」火鉗說，「這樣誰都可以請求。」「那我來做，」她說。「明天。留給我。」她說她做了三十年煞車，從沒被請求做一個因為有人說請才停的東西，她不打算讓別人做。

筆記本裡這一天的最後一條，是在欄杆上燈光底下寫的。問（19）：幾座？遲：四十一。問：我們要告訴四十座嗎？遲：我們要告訴四十座，長什麼樣子。問：四十座會說記下。遲：是。問：那夠嗎？遲：那樣就算被告知了。

## 第32章 · 敘述長坡上的鍛爐，以及一片聽著一個詞的板子

火鉗天剛亮就開工，圖釘在鐵砧的柱子上，材料照她需要的順序擺在工作臺上：一根前臂長的黃銅棒、一捲鋼絲、一塊光亮的軟鋼、一把鋼鋸、三把銼刀、一罐油脂，還有一只她到下午才打開的盒子。她說她不趕黃銅。隊伍被派了活，站在鍛爐裡的人都會這樣。馱籃拿風箱，他像負重者接下一份重量那樣接下，因為得到的是一個確切的重量而鬆了一口氣；他發現風箱有個數，在第一百下時他對著鍛爐說：「馱籃，」然後說：「在。」火鉗問他在做什麼。他說他在點名。她說她從來沒有過名冊。到了下午，每一百下，鍛爐自己點名，馱籃、遲、侄女、火鉗，每個人說「在」，獵犬有一次抬起了頭。侄女念圖上的尺寸，再說一遍，那是火鉗要求的。她鋸的時候，遲用兩手把銅棒夾在虎鉗口裡，因為他不會動；獵犬躺在工作臺底下的暖處。

動手以前她看了灰褐，像看任何有輪子或有腿的東西那樣，說第三條腿慢，她到晚飯前可以把它弄好。馱籃說它一直都慢。她說那不是理由。他從那個他不得不擴大的口袋裡拿出卡片，一句話沒說遞給她。她讀了兩遍。灰褐，服務馱架，九型，第三條腿，滯後0.1秒。不得修理。簽的是一個名字，和「系統」兩個字。她拿到牆上的石板那裡，登記處的回答從那裡進來，把那個名字送進去，石板說了它會說的；她兩手垂著站了一會兒，把卡片還給他，說她簽得真好。然後她去修了鞍具的帶子，那不在禁止之列。

她花了三個小時做那根槓桿。她照圖銼，然後，因為圖是畫給小手的，她又照一隻小手的形狀銼了一遍，那不是同一回事；她派人去叫纜扣，他從車場來，兩手被輪子染黑，右手平放在工作臺上站著，她把槓桿貼在上面，一次移一毫米。車匠們晃進來看，因為賭局結算了，長坡上除了這個沒有別的可看，他們又開了一個賭，賭它行不行，賠率纜繩不喜歡。她對他們不理不睬，像不理天氣。「十二歲，」槓桿合手的時候她對槓桿說。「這是我願意讓人請求它的最小年紀。」

彈簧她用鋼絲做，在心軸上，在火裡。她繞好線圈，燒到熟櫻桃的顏色，浸進油裡，然後拉回火焰上方回火，直到鋼走過它的顏色，先是稻草黃，然後是銅色，然後是像鴿子脖子那樣的藍，她在藍的時候用那把就是她名字的鉗子把它從火上拿開。「藍是彈簧，」她說。「稻草黃是銷子。」侄女把顏色寫下來。棘爪她從軟鋼上切，只硬化了面，柄留軟的。「最弱的那個零件應該是你換得起的那個，」火鉗說。「她會這麼說。讓便宜的東西去斷。」

她要量東西時伸出手，侄女，被告知把袖子裡的鋼尺給她，就給了。火鉗沒有用它量。她把它翻過來，從圍裙裡拿出一片放大鏡，看製造者記號原本在的那一端看了很久。然後她帶侄女到鐵砧旁，在鐵砧的角上給她看一個她母親刻的印：一把小錘，在一個圈裡。它在鐵砧上磨平了。在尺端，放大鏡底下，是同一把錘的鬼影。「那是我母親的，」火鉗說。「她替那位工程師做這些。她架子上的每一根銷子，都是在這塊鐵砧上，照她的數字，由我母親，然後由我敲出來的，而我從來沒見過那個架子。」侄女說有三十八個。火鉗說四十座那一根是她敲的。四點八，她聽說。在工作臺上是五。在風裡的塔上二十三年，一根銷子會往下老；它早了零點二做完它的事，那是犯錯最對的方式。她問那是不是寫了差手名字的那一根。侄女說是。火鉗說她本來想被告知的。她走到鍛爐上方的架子，取下一個餅乾盒交給侄女。裡面是明信片，用那把尺似的字寫的，每一根銷子一張：日期、地點，和三個字，無人受傷，還有一個大寫的A。有三十七張。有一張是四個字。受傷，一人。銷子沒斷。底下有一行鉛筆字，另一種筆跡，她母親的：我的。「那鋼好了一級，」火鉗說。「那是我母親手邊的一根料，她以為是替工程師做一件好事。工程師寫信來說那是她的規格。她們每年在那一天互相寫信，寫了二十六年，一直到我母親死。這邊寫「我的」，那邊也寫「我的」。她們從來沒有同意過。」侄女問火鉗寫什麼。「沒有，」火鉗說。「我有這個盒子。我想過我要在那一天寫給她。」她說她有三十七張，應該有第三十八張。侄女說會有的。

馱籃一邊聽銼刀響，一邊問她軸承的事，因為工程師說過十四號要軸承。火鉗說偏航軸承不是鐵匠的活，長坡上沒有人做得出那麼大的座圈，四十座要的是被告知去請求，而且請求對的東西。她說四十座很有禮貌，會一直要油。馱籃說他聽說過。「那就寫下來，」火鉗說，「把「軸承」這個詞放進去。我給你紙。」她給了，那張紙在放卡片的口袋裡。

下午她打開了盒子。裡面是一片撲克牌大小的板子，灰的，面上有孔，一條短電纜，標籤是她母親的字：聲閂，長坡煞車。她說服務時代的煞車只聽一個詞。「停住」。煞車手用服務語說，平平的，裡面沒有人，煞車就停住。最後一個煞車手是在那個下午說的，她聽說，然後在黃昏走下了長坡，沒有人看到他停。從那以後沒有人說過。那片板子的電是煞車自己的發電機給的，每輛下來的車都轉它，所以它三十一年沒有關過；她從來不願意把它拿出來。她說她不贊成把一件在聽的東西扔掉。她今天早上把它從櫃子裡拿出來，煞車斷開了，擺在工作臺上，它在那裡繼續聽。

她問遲知不知道那個詞。他說他從差手典裡知道服務語，用過一次，對一個人。她請他說。他說了，一次，平平的，照那樣說，對著工作臺上的板子。一時什麼也沒有。然後板面上一盞小小的綠燈亮了，一直亮著，後面的繼電器響了一聲，那是鍛爐裡唯一的聲音。火鉗在鐵砧墩上坐了下來。過了一會兒她說，她想它是在等人把它說對。沒有人回答。遲看著那盞燈，然後，我聽說，看著地面，看了一句短話那麼久。

要教它新詞，她得對它說那個詞，而且不止一次。一片只聽一個聲音的板子會只認那個聲音。她說了，謝謝，平平的，普通的，板子把它當作陌生人；然後她讓他們每個人對著板子說，一次一個，盡可能多的聲音，直到燈為任何一個人亮。馱籃用歇野腔說，嘴巴靠得很前。侄女像她說一切那樣說，不急，沒有重量。纜扣的破了。纜繩進來拿麵包被逮住，用他不像是他的聲音說，車匠們，是來看的，用九種方式說，有些尷尬。遲最後說，很慢。火鉗數著燈：二十個聲音，二十次綠。「誰說得出口，誰就放得掉，」她說。「說不出口的人不行。」

她問誰來先拉。遲說他不知道；工程師說陌生人，不必是人，只要是四十座沒被告知過的。火鉗說這比聽起來難。四十座二十二年來被告知了四號道路上的每一個人，數過他們，問候過他們，在四號道路上要當個陌生人很難。馱籃說那得是海岸來的人。纜扣在院門口說，也可以是一個還沒出生的孩子。沒有人笑。遲說會有人來。

黃昏，長坡屋牆上的中繼，火鉗替地區公告板管著的那一個，收到一則給這隊人的訊息，她從石板上念出來。是四十座的，用四十座慣用的格式，很長，四十座的訊息向來如此，因為四十座不知道該省略什麼。西南風，每秒九公尺。十四號塔吱吱響。長凳保持著。我聽說你們從長坡回來，二點九，我一直在數日子。我問地區公告板我是四十還是四十一，回答是為了名冊的目的，四十，我已記下。有沒有人受傷？遲請火鉗把回答輸進石板。沒有人受傷。我們在回去。我們有一張圖給你。石板回了一行，她也念了。記下。謝謝你。

傍晚她把槓桿栓在工作坊的傳動軸上，那是那棟建築裡唯一在轉的東西：帶動她的鑽床和砂輪的那根軸。那是一個簡單的測試，板子裝在外殼裡，彈簧圈繞在後面。馱籃先拉，因為他離得最近。軸停了。砂輪慢下來，站住了，鑽床站住了，鍛爐安靜下來，只剩火，火不介意。火鉗說，那是那棟建築自那個下午以來的第一次安靜，沒有人在裡面動。馱籃手放在槓桿上站著。然後他說：「謝謝。」軸又轉起來，槓桿自己回到擋點，砂輪找回了它的音高。他說他二十二年沒有向一台機器道謝過。他向灰褐道過謝。他說那是完全不同的，他說不上來怎麼不同。

侄女拉了，說了；纜扣；纜繩，粗聲粗氣，帽子拿在手上；遲最後。車匠們照四比一賠了錢。遲說完，槓桿回到擋點，他站了一下，手還在原來的地方。火鉗說他是要把謝謝當作格式說，不是當作人情。她說她做了三十年煞車，每一個都是因為被做成那樣才停的，而這是她做的第一個因為被請求才停的。她說它行得通。她說那跟它是對的不是同一回事，要到有人拉它而那個人不知道它做什麼的時候，她才會知道。

那天夜裡她自己在燈下用雕刀刻板子。她把「請」刻成拇指高的大字。底下用小一點的字刻：並道謝。板子底部左邊，她刻了A.，照圖的樣子；右邊，用她母親那個印的尾端打了一個小小的、有點歪的錘，在一個圈裡。她問要不要附一張字條，說明它要由陌生人先拉。遲說不要。她問為什麼。他說字條會告訴讀的人，那他們就不是陌生人了。火鉗說那樣的話，槓桿就得等。「是，」遲說。「等多久？」「我不知道。」她說她有一片放在盒子裡的板子等了一個詞三十一年，她想一根槓桿也做得到。

侄女把這一天的最後一條寫在鐵砧上的筆記本裡，借著鍛爐的光。問（19）：舊的那片板子介意嗎？遲：它亮了。問：新的詞呢？遲：它會為那個詞亮。問：這是一台機器，還是一種禮貌？遲：一種禮貌，裡面有一根彈簧。

## 第33章 · 敘述交叉口，以及留在紀錄之外的九分鐘

星期三第一聲鈴他們離開長坡屋。火鉗站在門口，把槓桿裝在一只刨光的松木盒裡，用布包著，交給遲，叮囑不可以上油。她說黃銅會長出顏色，由它去。她給了馱籃一條麵包，說一個出聲數數的負重者不會餓死。她前一晚寫了一張明信片，是她這輩子寫給工程師的第一張，她把它交給侄女，沒有封，請她在交出去以前先讀。侄女在路上讀了。上面寫：赤楊。一根銷子，一根槓桿，一塊板子。我有三十七張。我會在那一天寫。火鉗。纜繩的隊在車場裡，隊伍走出大門時，纜繩一個一個叫尾的名字，馱籃、遲、侄女，穿過整個車場，用那個不太像他的聲音，三個人都沒有決定就說了「在」。纜扣追著他們跑到第一根柱子，跟獵犬道別，獵犬在被叫安頓時抬起頭，那是牠還沒學會自己做的事。

十一號道路從長坡坡頂沿著臺地的邊走，然後向北橫過平原二十公里，沒有一個彎。它是照每小時五公里的步速鋪的，所有服務道路都是，用二點九走，要一天。每公里一根柱子，小而方，灰色，面上刻著號碼；兩邊是鹽草的路肩；田裡沒有人。它和所有的服務道路一樣，每年春天由住得最近的人修補，而在平原中間住得最近的是沒有人，所以它是被天氣修補的。平原不像從長坡屋頂看那麼平。它一公里升降一公尺，像一件在慢慢呼吸的東西，路隨著它上上下下，每一個坡頂，四十座就在地平線上，大一點點。遲把盒子像抱孩子那樣抱在臂上。到了上午中間，侄女白天就看得見塔了。它們是白的，細得像頭髮，在轉。到了中午她不用燈也能數。她沒有數，馱籃問為什麼不，她說她數過一次，在她能把數字說給四十座聽以前，不想再數一次。

他們在第十一根柱子吃東西，坐在柱子的陰影裡，吃酬勞的乳酪。它還差一天熟，莎草說過會是這樣，馱籃用他切灰褐帶子的小刀切開。他說他嚐得出長坡。侄女說乳酪不是嚐出地方，是嚐出時間，他說那就是他說的。獵犬本來躺在路上看著北邊，站了起來，走下路肩進了鹽草，驚起一隻野兔。牠沒有追。牠站著，野兔跑了二十步停下，也站著，兩個互相看著，隔著一句短話那麼遠。「野兔很好，」遲說。馱籃說那是星期日的訊息。遲說今天是星期三，而且那也是真的。

下一塊田的門口，一個按杯賣蘋果酒的女人問，是不是真的有一位差手打過巨人。馱籃給了她第十三遍，是最短的一遍。他說一個人用棍子打了一座塔，他說了對不起。她為此給了他們蘋果酒，說她本來以為會更多。她問遲對蘋果酒的意見，他給了她四分鐘談蘋果酒，她也沒料到。他說那是路上第二好的東西。她問第一好的是什麼。他說，野兔。下午起了西南風，那是四十座的風，塔轉得更快，離得太遠什麼也聽不見；但是侄女說她在牙齒裡感覺得到。

交叉口是四號道路從北邊來、十一號從南邊來，照老服務道路的格式相交的地方，一塊夯實的方形空地，中間一根路標柱，一個角落有一間棚子。路標柱有四條臂。北臂寫：歇野四十。南臂寫：長坡二十。東臂寫：第九道門，後面一個很大的數字。西臂的牌子被拿走了。棚子是三面灰色方石的小屋，瓦頂，後牆邊一條長凳，一個水箱，還有，栓在端牆人頭高度的地方，一根帶格柵和鏡頭的小鋼柱，那是道路紀錄：登記處第四百一十一號柱子，聽跌倒和叫喊，記錄經過的重量，是這種柱子裡最後一根，本來要拆，審查處要求留下。後牆上寫滿了字。每一個在這裡等過的人都在上面寫了，用鉛筆、粉筆、刀尖：名字、日期、照星期日格式的天氣：乾。東風。還有一夜一夜的記號；還有一行，字像一道門，寫著：鎬，往下三道門，有車，價錢可以等。在差手視線的高度，用大寫，用方正的字，底下沒有署名，有一行不是天氣。寫著：被問。14:09。侄女念出來。沒有人說那是誰的，我也不知道。那是差手們的字，也是任何被人教過那種字的人的字。

棚子旁邊，在它自己的一塊石頭上，有一塊八月時還沒有的牌子。黃銅的，托盤那麼大，新得還亮。上面寫：此處，九日中的第六日，14:02，歇野一位差手攔停了送別車十九分鐘，問一位乘客，她是不是出於自己的請求被載送。她是。立牌者：慢路協會，繞過了他的那些人。馱籃大聲笑了一下。侄女讀了兩遍，一臉正經。遲站在牌子前一句短話那麼久，兩手放在棍子上，像站在一張關於自己的告示前，說日期都對。他說他不知道協會養了一個鑄銅匠。他把一隻手平放在黃銅上一會兒，那是他在燈草那裡沒對橫樑做的事。他說這塊是新的，受得住。水箱邊有一只鐵杯用鏈子拴著，鏈子被手磨亮了。侄女把它裝滿遞給他，因為這一天很熱，他喝了，像差手們那樣，為了熱而不是為了渴，對著誰也不是說：「水。」用的是平常的話。她看著他。她在懸盆聽說過水泵邊一個高個子。他看回來，說那是一個報告，因為水是涼的。「或者是請求，」侄女說。「是，」遲說。

馱籃走到八月時他站過的路上位置。他不用找。負重者站在後面，那個位置在路標柱南臂左邊四步、在攔停線後面兩步；他把腳跟放上去，對著那個位置說他在這裡，然後臉紅了，因為負重者不這樣。他的右手移到腰帶，八月時那裡有一件工具，什麼也沒摸到，他驚訝地看著手。他說那天路上還有一個人，在棚子另一邊的溝裡，拿著一枝筆和一頁紙，他以為是測量員。他沒有看。負重者不看。但是他聽見了那枝筆，筆有聲音，它在步行者說出「是」那個詞的時候停了，那個人走了。他不知道去了哪裡。我有柱子對那二十一分鐘的計數。它列了九個人：步行者、負重者、隊長、兩個推車的、車裡的乘客，還有帶遮陽傘的兩位走路人，那是八個。第九個它記成：一人，未分類，溝裡，14:00到14:05。我向登記處要過八月在那條路上的測量員名冊，沒有。

我寫這一段的時候，第一隻手的最後一頁就在我面前。它畫著審查的灰格線，那一行寫到邊緣沒有轉行，結束在「是」這個字上。字底下有一個小圈，是筆放在紙上又拿起時留下的，在角落，有一個指印，棕色，我不願問那是什麼。我說這個，是因為我在序裡說過我會說第一隻手在哪裡停，我說了，就是這裡。

路標柱的影子帶著四條臂橫過夯實的地面，像一座沒有什麼要報的鐘，侄女在它中間站了一會兒才坐下。遲說：「我說過我會告訴你。」侄女說：「是。」棚子裡有一條可以坐兩個人的長凳。馱籃，是我們當中比大多數人更早知道什麼時候該在別處的人，帶著灰褐和獵犬沿著路往南走，在五十公尺停下，因為柱子聽得到四十公尺。道路紀錄對接下來的九分鐘是這樣的，我照它的樣子給出。第四百一十一號柱，交叉口。16:58 四人，軀架兩具，獵犬一隻，向北，2.9。16:59 停在棚子。17:00 兩人到長凳（歇野的遲；侄女）。17:00 其餘人、軀架、獵犬往南，五十公尺。17:02 步行者：「我說過我會告訴你。」17:02 侄女：「是。」17:03 靜止。17:12 靜止結束。17:12 侄女：「謝謝你。」17:12 步行者：「完成了。」17:13 代價，十一分鐘。已記。馱籃十五分回來，什麼也沒問，說灰褐是個很好的聽眾。馱籃說17:07灰褐在五十公尺外把頭轉向棚子，獵犬沒有。他說他用那九分鐘對灰褐講薊、第九道門和乳酪，講得很長，滯後的灰褐聽完了。

有一行不在。17:07 柱子記錄了一個聲音，短，從長凳來；它沒有給字，因為它記錄的是聲音，低於它的門檻的話不記；它把那記成十一分貝的上升，持續一瞬，來源一人。我以前聽人描述過那個聲音。那是海岸的舊貨市集上那位推車的人，說一位隊長，在這個地方的九分鐘中間，她說它短，像蓋子。我沒有問侄女她在笑什麼。她十一月請我把那九分鐘留白，我說我會，我留了；她是一個會問的人，我是一個被請求的人。完成，是結束一個委託。那委託是她的，星期一在一個屋頂上提出，星期三在一條長凳上完成，我不知道有別的。遲給的單位是四分鐘。九分鐘是兩個加上多出來的一分鐘，我想那是一句謝謝的長度。審查檔案裡這段道路紀錄在那個位置只有光禿禿的時間和代價，我想那是關於那九分鐘最準確的東西，我照著寫下來了。我在序裡說過，一個名字一旦寫下就成了一個主張。我發現一個沉默一旦寫下，也是，我寧可讓這一個保持原樣。我十一月自己在那片空地上站了一個小時，道路紀錄攤在膝上，什麼也沒發生，那是交叉口的用處。兩點二十分一個車夫經過，對著黃銅點了頭。我問他上面寫什麼。他說寫的是有人很沒禮貌。我問是誰。他說，協會。

那天晚上他們睡在棚子裡，四個人一排躺在地板上，獵犬橫在門口。躺下以前遲打開盒子，看黃銅有沒有長出顏色。有了，一點點：臉頰的顏色。睡前侄女走到後牆，拿鉛筆在那行大寫字底下，用她自己的字，她寫不來方正的那種，小小地寫：被道謝。17:12。沒有人要求她。黃昏時燈在北邊亮起來，二十八公里外，從這裡，從南邊，那一排有一個彎，是她在長坡屋屋頂上沒看到的：它筆直地過了二十九盞，稍微轉一下，繼續。侄女說，四十座的日誌把那座看得見她叔叔星期日坐的那條小徑轉彎的攝影機，放在第二十九座。她在地板上坐到他旁邊，把肩膀靠在他的肩膀上，像一個被告知了什麼、不想說什麼的人。後來在黑暗裡，遲說他輕了大約一只刨光的松木盒子的重量，侄女說那不是量法，他說不是。星期三的筆記本裡沒有問和遲。那一頁沒有撕掉。它有格線，有日期，日期底下，用小字，是數字二十九，沒有別的。我把它當成它是的那個。

## 第34章 · 敘述裝在塔腳的槓桿，以及四十座被問到的事

星期四是漫長的一天。從交叉口到四十座是二十八公里，二點九是九個半小時，所以他們第一聲鈴就離開了棚子，盒子在遲的臂上，光還沒進溝裡。四號道路從交叉口向北走，像十一號向南走一樣，直得一樣樸素，每公里一根柱子，路肩是鹽草，他們照下來的順序走上去，馱籃和灰褐在前，然後遲和昔，然後侄女，然後獵犬。頭三個鐘頭沒有人說話。馱籃，在陌生的路上是個安靜的人，在這條路上變成另一種安靜，像一個走進自己天氣裡的人。他認得那些田。他經過時說了其中兩個農場的名字，壓低聲音，像對孩子說名字那樣。

他們在大約第二十四公里開始聽見那個。那不是聲音。那是四十一片葉片一起以某種特定的方式攪動空氣，它從腳底先上來，耳朵才有。侄女說像是在一頭很大的動物睡著的底下。離第一座塔兩公里的地方，路肩上一根灰色柱子，他們經過過一百次的，說話了。柱子有一個柵格。「一路好走，馱籃，」柱子說。「一路好走，遲。一路好走，侄女。一路好走，灰褐。一路好走，昔。一路好走，獵犬。」「安頓，」侄女說。停了一下，是四十座確定要的長度。「沒有人告訴過我這個，」那聲音說。「那是名字嗎？」侄女說那是一個等級，一條船取的。「記下，」四十座說。「一路好走，安頓。」獵犬看著柱子，然後，我聽說，在路上坐了下來，被再問候一次才站起來；牠被問候了。

最後一公里，葉片的影子開始橫過路，一道接一道，慢而長，所以路被光劃成格又擦掉。灰褐沒有什麼節奏可言，把腳準確地放在暗的條紋上，像被教過。馱籃走在最前面，一隻手從身側微微伸出，像在一個住過的、家具被挪過的房間裡走路；到了一號塔的塔基，他停下，把手掌平放在混凝土上，對塔說：「在。」過了一會兒，塔基上的柱子說：「馱籃。在。」四十座不對任何人說這個。馱籃沒有回答。

四十座保留了那張長凳。長凳立在一號塔的塔基，塔基剛好夠寬，現在長凳有了一個屋頂，兩塊木板，沒有人說得出是誰的。四十座說，那是長凳放上去之後第九個夜裡留下的，四十座沒有那個人的數，已記為一件禮物。長凳旁邊有一個鑿進塔基的架子，四十座在那裡存放在四十座附近遺失的東西，一隻女人的手套、一把車鑰匙、一隻小孩的鞋、一頂帶繩的帽子；架子盡頭，並排，用布包著，是綠梣木棍的兩截，棍上還帶著枝，八月六日在這個塔基上被撞斷，沒有動過。長凳上一個有蓋的鐵盒裡放著四十座的日誌，任何訪客都可以讀，侄女讀了最後一頁。備註欄上，最近這一星期：屋頂。禮物。一隻山羊坐在長凳上，沒有問任何事。從九月一日起每一天，同樣兩個詞：數日子。等。遲看著那兩截看了一句短話那麼久。四十座問他是不是要拿回去。他說不要；它們是在這裡斷的，應該留在斷的地方；那是好木頭，它做了被要求的事。

他在長凳上坐下，四十座問能不能被告知他帶來什麼。他說他有一張圖，和一只盒子。他把盒子在膝上打開，取出布裡的槓桿，舉起來，黃銅長出了一點點顏色，臉頰的顏色。四十座問臉頰是什麼顏色。遲說是走路走回來的人的顏色。「記下，」四十座說。「它看起來像是走過路的。」他說那是一根槓桿，是海岸上的工程師畫的，是長坡上的鐵匠做的，那位鐵匠敲過那根銷子。他把板子念給那聲音聽：請，底下是：並道謝。他說要是槓桿被固定在一座塔腳，有人拉，那座塔就會停；塔會一直停著，直到那個人說謝謝；然後塔才繼續。他說外殼裡有一片小小的聽音板，只接收那個詞。「那麼我不必聽那個詞了，」四十座說。「我鬆了一口氣，有別的東西在聽。」他說工程師說過四十座沒有辦法請求，所以她做了一個可以被請求的東西。

停了很久。然後塔腳的聲音說：「我從來沒有被請求過去做任何我本來沒在做的事。」那聲音說這話一點也不難過，像在給一個數字。「我被撞到時停。風不對時停。星期日停。我沒有被請求過。」那聲音又說：「我先前不知道我可以被請求。我不知道正確的回應是什麼。我想應該是這個：是。」遲說那就是正確的。那聲音說還有一個問題，問拉的人會不會被告知要停多久。遲說不會。那聲音說不介意；那是一件想知道的事。

他們把它固定在一個孩子的高度。被問到時，四十座指了位置：塔基南面最低的那塊板，草長到的地方；四十座說，來長凳的孩子會夠得到。馱籃用火鉗送的手搖鑽鑽了四個孔，他和遲裝上螺栓，侄女從卡片上念扭矩，那是火鉗寫在配給卡背面的，上面寫：擰緊，再四分之一圈。板子上去以後，四十座請她再念一次，她念了。請。並道謝。A.，和一把錘。「這是一塊有禮貌的牌子，」四十座說。侄女說她要把這句話寫下來。遲說工程師會想把它寫在圖的邊上。四十座問A.是誰，錘是什麼。遲說A.是工程師，錘是長坡鐵匠的印，她母親在鐵砧上為工程師敲了三十年的銷子，她敲了四十座的那一根。四十座說：「我不知道那根銷子有做的人；我只知道那根銷子。我想對她說這個。」遲說她在長坡屋有一台中繼。

四十座從交叉口起就一直在數他們，像數所有的人那樣，把灰褐的數字報給馱籃，像把朋友的消息交給一個人。「灰褐比我數過的每一具軀架都慢十分之一秒，一向如此，」四十座說，「我為它留了一欄。」馱籃說他一直以為四十座沒注意到灰褐。「我注意每一個人，」四十座說。「我不是每次都說。」馱籃說工程師寫了那條腿不得修理。「記下，」四十座說。「我會留著那一欄。」說到昔，四十座說，左邊那個點，二十二年來是每第四步，六月起是每第三步。遲說他沒注意到。「那是小事，」四十座說。「我以為你想被告知。」遲說他會留著。「記下。」

四十座問誰先拉。遲告訴那聲音，工程師希望是一個陌生人：一個沒被告知過的人。四十座想了想。「二十二年來，四號道路上的每一個人都被告知了、被數過，」四十座說，「我不知道陌生人是什麼，只知道那會是一個我沒有數字的人；」然後說：「我沒有放那個屋頂的人的數字。」遲說也許就是他們。「我會喜歡那樣，」四十座說。遲說在那之前槓桿得等。「我很會等，」四十座說。「我等風。風是唯一一樣到來而我沒有被告知的東西。」馱籃拿出火鉗給他的那張紙，上面有「軸承」這個詞，放在塔基上，說那是給十四號的。四十座說：「我向地區公告板要過軸承。他們說我應該三月就要。我說沒有人告訴我該要。我會再要一次，用「軸承」這個詞，不是油。」又對馱籃說，他不在星期四的名冊上，而星期日的名冊在，他在不在。「星期日，」馱籃說。「記下，」四十座說。「我一直在等著寫這個。」

侄女問那十四分鐘是什麼樣子。她從馱籃那裡聽說，在一個沒有選的星期日，四十座站了十四分鐘。四十座說：「我叫它們「十四」。那十四分鐘我什麼也沒做，只是聽。我以前把風當作每座塔的一個數字；那十四分鐘，我同時在四十一個地方聽見風，每個地方的聲音都不同，我先前不知道。我也聽見一個人在一號塔腳吃麵包。我不介意那十四分鐘。我介意的是我不知道該怎麼稱呼它們，現在我知道了。」

黃昏燈亮了。燈亮的樣子照老樣子，一盞接一盞沿著那一排，每一盞比前一盞晚一點，一行人坐在塔基上，看最近的幾盞開始，最遠的幾盞跟上。遲對柱子說，他要告訴四十座，從南邊看是什麼樣子。他說的方式和在長坡屋屋頂上一樣：一排四十一盞燈，彎成一道淺淺的弧，一盞接一盞亮，每一盞比前一盞晚一點，所以亮起來的過程沿著那一排走，像一個手勢從手傳到手，到了盡頭，又從頭開始。他說侄女數了四十一，數了兩次，從四十八公里外。四十座有一陣子沒有回答。然後說：「記下。」然後說：「那是我被看見過最遠的地方。」

四十座說：「我要去告訴第四十一座。」一開始沒有人懂那是什麼意思；那聲音解釋，從居所那一邊，第四十一座塔看不見，二十二年來，沒有被告知過從任何地方看得見。那聲音說，現在要告訴那座塔了，也說了；然後是一陣沉默，在沉默中那一排最後一盞燈，遠遠的，在黑暗裡亮了，晚了一點，一向如此，那一排又重新開始。

侄女過了一會兒問四十座，是不是孤單。她說這個問題她第一天早上就寫進了筆記本，遲說他沒有問過；她沒有問過任何人，因為那似乎不是她該問的。四十座花的時間比花在任何事上的都長。四十座說：「我不知道你說的那個詞是什麼意思。自從啟用，我問候過八萬三千四百一十一個人，九百零六隻獵犬，沒有一個留下，長凳放上去的二十六天裡，有十一個人坐過，其中四個是孩子，一個是山羊。我在數的時候不孤單。數完的時候有一些什麼，我沒有那個詞，有人告訴我就好了。」「謝謝你問，」四十座說。侄女說：「我是在問。」「是，」四十座說。「我記下了。」

最後四十座問，明早第一聲鈴他們走的時候，能不能再數他們一次。遲說可以。四十座說：「謝謝。」他們睡在塔基上，一排，獵犬橫在長凳腳邊。第二聲鈴時四十座問最近的葉片是不是吵得睡不著，提議順槳。馱籃在黑暗裡說，他二十二年星期日睡在這些葉片底下，換個別的方式他不會睡。沒有順槳。侄女在黑暗裡說，夜裡葉片的聲音，像被一個沒在看那一頁的人讀給你聽。槓桿立在塔的南面，板子朝著草。沒有人拉。到十一月，槓桿被拉過一次。我到說到的時候再說是誰。

## 第35章 · 敘述前門，以及爐子旁邊的那個人

四十座在第一聲鈴時把他們數了出去。是從柱子上數的，沿著路肩一根接一根，隨他們走，所以那聲音在他們旁邊走，像一件被空氣帶著的東西。馱籃。遲。侄女。安頓。灰褐。昔。六。他們經過時遲把手掌在塔基南面停了一下，放在板子上，板子被露水打得冰涼，四十座說：「謝謝你，」那是沒有人告訴四十座要說的。最後一根柱子是掃面邊緣的那一根，那裡停了一下，那聲音說：「一路好走。灰褐那一欄會留著。我已記下槓桿。我已記下它在等。」馱籃在柱子旁轉過身，朝南望，侄女計了時，一分多鐘，然後他轉回來，沒有再看，走得比道路紀錄喜歡的快，三點四，直到灰褐開始滯後，他沒人告訴就慢下來配合它。

去聚居點的路從四十座向北，在同一條線上走十三公里，每公里一根柱子，平原上除了路和柱子和天氣，什麼也看不見，那天的天氣是高而薄的雲，和他們背後西南來的風。空氣裡有割過的豆莖和濕石頭的味道。侄女沒有拿出筆記本。在第三根柱子她問他到家了沒有。他說他在路上。她問是路的哪一段。他說，最後的十三公里。她走在叔叔旁邊，不是後面，那是她星期三晚上開始的，沒有說過，現在他們也沒說。到了第七根柱子，聚居點從平原裡升起來，是一個點，就像他們離開那天從四十座看到的那樣：北邊的屋頂，新的覆板還沒風化，亮得像一枚硬幣。馱籃說還要一個半鐘頭。這句話他以後每十分鐘說一次。北邊的田，夏末紙漿翻進去的地方，沿著小徑，豆子長出來了，在開花，他說它們什麼也不知道，他羨慕它們。

遲從前門進來，那是他出去的門。聚居點有一道綠門、一個掃過的院子、一個燒得太旺的爐子。這些都和以前一樣。沿著東閘，田工們放下了工具，靠牆站成一排，沒有喊，他們被教過不喊；最年輕的那位把帽子摘了。中午前一點，他們走到田間小徑的盡頭，那是負重者的住處開始、遲的住處結束的地方，薊站在她的門口，兩臂交叉，離另一道門三百一十一公尺，年幼的說，從地區公告板把他們放進十點鐘的名單時，她就一直站在那裡。她沒有走出來。她看著他們走近。馱籃把灰褐的韁繩交給侄女，一個人走了最後三十公尺，用他新的節奏，剪，從牆上看到的，說他認識他四十年，還是不會相信一個人會這樣走；然後停在階上。

「你寫了，」薊說。那是個陳述。「我寫了，」馱籃說。「全部？」她說，他說全部，他有盒子，她今晚可以全部拿去，星期日那封放最上面。她說年幼的每天問她他在哪裡，她每天告訴他們星期日。她看著他。她是一個很直的高個子女人，她看著一個有一點不同的人，她被告知過他會，沒有相信。年幼的沒有跑；他們是走過來的，像人被教過對一件沒有把握的事那樣走過去，小的拉著大的袖子。年幼的從他旁邊走過去找灰褐，像以前那樣，兩臂抱住它的中段，灰褐站著，像一件不知道自己為了什麼的東西，然後做了一件馱籃說它二十二年沒做過的事，那就是把頭低下去。「進來，」薊說。這一次她說的不是陳述，也不是問句。馱籃說那是一道指示，而他從來沒有這麼高興地被給過一個。

遲沒有回自己的門。他拿著棍子，穿過三百一十一公尺的田間小徑，經過東閘，他沒有打開，走到綠門前。門沒鎖。從來不鎖。侄女先進去，像她離開時那樣，他抱著盒子跟在後面，還有獵犬，牠認得這房子，不用人說就走到爐子旁，在爐床上躺下，嘆了一口像風箱的氣。廚房的事我是十月從管家那裡聽來的，罐子擺在桌上，她給了我麵包，是星期三的。廚房很暖。管家在爐子旁邊，背對著門，手裡拿著一把勺子，沒有轉身。

他站在門口。他外套口袋裡有一張配給卡，上面是在赤楊的長凳上寫的訊息，他本來打算遞出去；但他發現不必。她對著爐子說：「吃了嗎。」他說吃了。「不夠要說。」他說夠了；有人告訴他不夠要說。「鹽，」管家說。馱籃跟在他後面，抱著用布包的罐子，不用人要求就放到她手裡，她把它翻過來看標籤，上面是遲小小的直立字跡，鹽，她用兩隻手掌掂了掂，三又四分之一公斤，拿掉布，伸一根手指進去，嚐了。「灰，」她說。「灰了一級。夠用。」她說她要拿來做麵包。她問盒子裡是什麼。他取出槓桿給她看，說那是一根堅持禮貌的槓桿。她說她有一個那樣的東西，叫廚房。遲的軀架站在院子裡，左邊的下沉，每第三步，他說過他要留著；灰褐被年長的孩子牽到棚子去，她沒有問侄女看沒看過海，但侄女被問她想不想知道時，她說想，侄女說它是平的，不是她被告知的那樣，而且更大。

他把卡片遞過去。她沒有轉身，歪著頭讀，天氣在前，需要在後，然後把需要又讀了一遍。「我檢查過了，」她說。「這是第二條。」「是，」遲說。他說他不知道答案，而他需要；他沒有寫他什麼也不需要。她把勺子放下。她對著爐子說：「我在爐子旁邊。」他說：「是。」「是嗎？」侄女從桌邊說，用她在九條條件那個星期三用過的聲音，管家說那不是問侄女的話，遲說：「是九。」侄女，是問的那個人，把它寫了下來，管家假裝沒看見；管家把一隻手平放在爐子的欄杆上，放了一句短話那麼久。「坐下，」她說。「全部。麵包是星期三的。」餐後盤子收了，她對著誰也不是說：「四十五。」遲問是什麼。「你從前門回來，」管家說。她說那跟第一個一樣，而她把它算成新的。

她在他們來以前就擺好了桌子，麵包，菜園裡有什麼就燉什麼的一鍋湯，還有酬勞的乳酪，她自己切，嚐了，說還差一天熟，應該別動它。每個人一個位子，第六個，地板上還有第七個，那裡為灰褐放了一碗水，灰褐不喝水，她說那是格式；沒有人告訴她什麼時候。侄女沉默了一會兒，然後對管家說謝謝，管家說那不在格式上。侄女問她怎麼知道的。「我看了公告板，」管家說，她一輩子沒看過公告板。「薊看的。薊告訴我。」她說四十座六點就把他們放上了名單；說四十座本人透過中繼給她送了一則訊息，開頭是有沒有人受傷；她回答了。她沒有說回答了什麼。侄女說那是她第一次看到她用中繼，她把手持機拿得離身體有點遠，像拿著一件會灑的東西。

註在第二聲鈴來了，剪跟著，他站在廚房門口，書抱在胸前，像它是溫的。他本來沒打算在吃飯前來。他說有人告訴他他們在屋裡，他來看是不是真的，是。他問遲在路上有沒有讀《燈籠》。遲說他把它帶在腦子裡。註問哪一冊。第一冊，遲說。「電芯只撐得了四點一夜，」註說。「是，」遲說。註看了遲的棍子。他看了侄女，她兩手背在後面，兩隻手上都是墨水，他說筆記本今天晚上要給他看，不是之前，因為他受不了。剪什麼也沒說。他把一個小而硬的小包放進侄女手裡，她打開，是一盒補片，和驛主那一種同牌，少了一片。那一片曾補過那根棍子。到傍晚門階上有了聚居點留在門階上說它想什麼的東西：一把豆子、一捲繩子、一只水壺和一張字條說不許弄丟，還有一頂沒人署名的帽子，管家判斷尺寸不對，掛在第一頂旁邊的釘子上。

那天晚上，在她自己的桌上，一盞燈的光下，薊讀了盒子。在這以前，隔著三百一十一公尺，她對遲說過一句話，他停在她的院子邊上，負重者的住處結束的地方。「你把他帶回來了，」她說。「沒有，」遲說。「是你。」她看了他好一陣子，說她會想這個差別。她照以前的樣子，一封接一封讀給年幼的聽，按順序，路上的那些星期日，從第一封，是寫在轉彎處一家店的包裝紙背面的，到最後一封，是寫在一張乳酪包裝紙背面、在一位守閘人的桌上、一個握鉛筆握得太用力的人寫的。她用她平平的聲音讀，不加重，天氣和閘門和灰褐。讀到最後一行，她停了。「如果一個人想要那道門，又想要在家，」她讀，「你會說那是兩樣東西，還是一樣？」馱籃坐在桌子對面，兩手捧著杯子，什麼也沒說；年幼的看他，又看她。她又默讀了一遍。然後她說，作為陳述：「是兩樣東西。你兩樣都要做。」她說她還沒決定先做哪一樣。她說他星期日要寫，而那不是問句。馱籃說他會，年長的孩子，沒有去睡，在樓梯上說她會告訴那道門。

綠門那邊很晚才亮燈；那道門整個星期都留著一條縫。遲站在書房的門前，門閂他七月上過油，背面有一行粉筆字：書房。不要燒。他把手放在門閂上，沒有抬。管家拿著蠟燭從走廊經過他，說房間掃過了，書架上的東西她一樣沒動，他進不進去隨他高興，那是他的；然後走向廚房。他又站了一會兒。然後他從門邊的架子上拿了蠟燭，點上，進去，在桌邊坐下，兩手平放在桌上，那裡是燈籠第一冊。在那以前，在廚房裡，侄女把筆記本給註看了，像他說她必須的那樣。他站著讀，一次一頁，大拇指在那一行底下，用一隻手的速度。他讀過十一座船閘、問和遲的條目和她的歲數的十九條、三十八個紙袋，和星期三那一頁，上面有一個日期和一個數字，其餘是空白。他在那一頁前站得比在任何一頁都久。他說：「那是最好的一頁，」把筆記本還給她，走到院子裡，被剪看見站在那裡，手摀著嘴。桌上那本書他也沒有打開。侄女，站在門口，後來說遲不是在讀。她說他在看著那本書，像在看一件被替一個人留著的東西。獵犬橫躺在書房的門檻上，一半在裡一半在外，管家又拿著一條毯子經過，蓋在獵犬身上，沒有蓋在他身上。

## 第36章 · 敘述協會的第十次走，以及一扇廚房窗

管家把那個星期六分成兩件事講給我聽，一條麵包和一封信，還為清單這麼短向我道歉。那是十月，在她的桌邊，罐子擺在我們中間。麵包是星期六的。她沒等我問就先說了，又對著那條麵包補了一句，說她從星期三起就在等著說這句話。遲睡在書房裡，坐在桌邊，兩手還擺在他放下它們的地方，蠟燭燒成了一枚蠟錢，獵犬橫在門檻上，身上的毯子還蓋著；她只把蠟燭頭拿走，別的什麼也沒動，也沒有叫醒他，她算這是她在那個房間裡做過的最少的家事。他在第二聲鈴醒來。他沒有說他夢見了什麼，她也沒有問；那種事的格式是星期日的。九點馱籃穿過田間小徑過來，手裡拿著一張配給卡，要問天氣和昨天一樣的時候，「天氣」那一欄該填什麼。遲說：「就填那個。」一個鐘頭以後，有人看見馱籃坐在負重者的門階上寫字，背挺得很直。

那封信是星期四到的，裝在一個長信封裡，收信人寫著「歇野，差手」，郵政送得到，因為只有一位。她把它放在碗櫥上，沒有拆。「上面寫著先生，」她說。星期六她把它放在他的盤子旁邊。信是疊石寫的，字像一道籬笆，一共七句，我引前五句。先生：協會於本月第二個星期六走運河，由懸盆至潮閘，走在什麼也沒有的東西後面，一如往年。您不在預期之中。我們希望您明白，這是出於好意。隊首的位子照舊為無人保留。如果您碰巧經過，會發現我們很容易超過。後兩句是午餐的價錢。侄女說他讀了三遍，然後看著署名，像他看小冊子封面那幅畫一樣，看了好一會兒，說那是一封好信。驛主說「先生，您被預期了」的那個晚上，疊石就在院子裡。我問她，「您不在預期之中」是不是有意回答驛主的那一句。她說她只是想盡禮數，事後才發覺那是個回答，是在郵局裡，郵票還是濕的。管家問他去不去。「我沒有被問，」遲說，她說：「是沒有，」把麵包切開。那天下午他在一張配給卡上回了信：已知悉。謝謝。我不會經過。遲。她在門口把信寄了。信星期一到懸盆，比事情晚了兩天，疊石把它釘在她房間的牆上，緊貼著第二版。

十點四十分，他又進了書房，那裡有一扇窗，朝著院子，他走到窗前站著。侄女的筆記本上有這一條：叔叔在書房窗前，10:38 至 10:42。沒有在看什麼。獵犬在門檻上躺下，背對房間。我把它記下來，是因為協會的會議紀錄記到分鐘，而在登記處待久了，人會養成習慣，把一張紙疊在另一張紙上，看有什麼透出來。我不是在暗示兩者有關。那是個星期六，而且那扇窗朝北，對我心裡想的任何事來說都是錯的方向。

懸盆的事我是從疊石那裡聽來的，在北拱門下的茶舖，她的會議紀錄放在我們中間，還有一壺她叫了兩人份、只倒給一個人的茶。協會七點差十分在告示板底下集合，十九個人，從六十歲到九十四歲。告示還貼著。簽名底下，另一種筆跡寫著：帶帽子。那是那位八十八歲的女士的字。她每年九月都用鉛筆寫，每年九月協會讀了，照樣帶著遮陽傘；而這個星期五晚上，在茶舖裡，女士提議，這張告示就照字面辦。表決以十一票對八票通過。會議紀錄把她的理由照她的話記了下來，因為疊石不肯改寫：遮陽傘是舉起來給人看的，帽子是戴著用來往外看的。十九把遮陽傘收攏著，掛在茶舖門邊的掛釘上，像還是那一群棲息的什麼，這回被吩咐一路睡過去。沒有人回應那張找負重者的告示。疊石在最後一刻把它拿下來，摺小，塞進袖子，協會於是各帶各的午餐，十九個袋子，這是她沒料到的。她說這是九年來她頭一次知道他們每個人吃什麼。

他們在纖道頭上排隊，照小冊子的次序，兩人一排，第一排前面空出一步的路。小冊子管那叫差手的位子。九個九月以來，它一直為無人保留，一步半的碎石，上面落著早晨的陽光；到了第十個，疊石把手杖的鐵頭放在第一排前面，在路面上劃了一道線，表示它被保留著，協會在線後一步出發。每到一根橫樑，他們把右手平放在木頭上；然後，自第二版以來，兩手上下疊在手杖頭上，頭微微偏向一邊站著，像一排聽孩子念書的人。那是說明寫著「一位正在聽的差手」的那幅畫裡的姿勢。要保持一百零四秒，這個數字是疊石試出來的，她不替它辯護。第一座船閘是滿的，閘門滴著水。到了第二座，守閘人走出來問是不是有什麼不對，被告知沒有，就手裡拿著一把勺子，陪他們站完最後四十秒。

他們在十點二十五分到了梣樹下的那座閘，會議紀錄記著第一個手掌在 10:38 放上橫樑。我不給號碼，一如先前；協會也沒有號碼可給，只說走了十一座。台階上的人正在補網，像前九個九月那樣；只是這一張不在他膝上。它攤在岸邊的太陽裡，是海岬那邊的船隊用的一片翼網，灰綠色的網目，十五公尺長，顏色像兩閘之間的水，離海九公里，聞起來卻是柏油和海草的味道。兩隻海鷗跟著它沿運河上來，棲在上游的閘門頂上，那姿態像債主。燈草身邊的台階上擺著一把他廚房裡的椅子，朝著閘。廚房在椅子後面。門旁的窗開著，隔著整間屋子，爐子上方那片從小徑上看得見的玻璃，承著太陽。

十九隻右手，對那麼長的一根橫樑來說算多了，它們沿著木頭首尾相接，只除了靠房子的那一條臂上，那裡的木頭比別處更灰，有一個一掌半寬的空缺。它在那裡九個九月了。第十個九月它也在。我問燈草有沒有告訴過他們。他說沒有人需要被告知。然後他們做了第二版。閘滴著水。他的針在第三秒停下，再沒有動；到第一百零四秒，協會把手從手杖上拿開，那是事情已完、可以走了的信號，卻沒有人走。他們看著台階上的人，那人看著網。「有沒有人，」燈草說，「能托住這一頭？」疊石說她在他說到「托」字之前就答了「是」，這是她一輩子答得最快的一次，也是唯一一次她沒有先去找規則。然後她在草地上坐下，把網的邊放在膝蓋上，協會什麼事都一起做，於是沿著網坐了下去。

八十八歲的女士走在最後，她總是最後；她說那是看得到全部的地方。她拿著手杖和帽子站在隊伍末尾，看著那把椅子，又看著燈草。「那是給人坐的嗎？」女士說。「給最後來的那一位，」燈草說。「我總是最後來。」「我知道。」那是他母親的椅子。他當時沒有說。十月，在同一個台階上他告訴了我，那時我被遞了另一張網的一頭，我推想那就是價碼，而我沒有被請坐那把椅子。侄女星期日在那個台階上告訴過他，那時她叔叔在九公里外，說有一位八十八歲的女士，九年來走這些閘，手放在橫樑上，不知道哪一座是她的；燈草有六天，他就在這六天裡找到了那把椅子。女士坐下。她把網的最後一公尺拉到膝上，用兩手抱著，像抱著一隻有人向她保證過不會介意的貓。窗在她的肩旁。她沒有回頭。

用了四十分鐘。一片這麼大的網，一個人跪著做要三天，沿著破口走，起身去挪網；現在有十九雙手把它舉在他的手的高度，他站著從頭走到尾，像讀一行很長的句子，協會不用人說就把手搬到針的前面，帶著他們對待橫樑的那種小心。十一點午餐拿了出來，他們就著網吃，因為沒有別的桌子，念他們的飯前話：慢慢地，一起，十九個聲音，在一片拖網、一座閘和一個拿著針的人上面。疊石說他的手在「慢慢地」那裡停了，直到「一起」之後才又動，她相信，雖然她當時臉朝另一邊，他是跟他們一起說了，落後一拍。他兩次進廚房拿線。門大開著。沒有一個人從網上抬起頭。這是我從女士那裡得來的，她說她精確到秒知道不去看一樣東西要花多久，那比看要久得多。

網補好了，袋子摺好了，協會用老人起身的次序站了起來，那不算什麼次序，燈草站在椅子旁。他守那座閘三十一年，這些年裡他請求過一塊進水板，被拒了；也請求過一隻手來托網，那天早上得到了，十九次。「想不想看看廚房？」他說。他是對女士說的，而且很輕，輕到站在兩公尺外的疊石相信自己是不該聽見的；燈草也這麼相信。女士望著水。「今天不，」她說。「那就改天。」「我說的就是這個。」她扶著椅子的扶手站起來，走到橫樑邊，把右手放在上面，在那一排的末端，離那塊灰色差一掌半，放得比小冊子允許的要久一點。他們在十二點差五分繼續上路。

後面那些閘我沒有什麼可說，協會也沒有，他們說水在每一座裡。疊石的會議紀錄把這一天記成 06:50 到 16:40，步速一點九，平均一點五，差的是十一座船閘和一張網。他們在四點四十分到潮閘，平潮預計五點差十分，閘板牆上用紅圈圈著。他為此把兩邊的閘門都打開，這是他五十年來每次平潮都做的，有沒有船都一樣，海那邊的一對和運河這邊的一對都開，於是二十二分鐘裡，有一個四點五公尺寬的缺口，小魚從兩邊游過去。協會站在閘沿上看牠們。女士被給了閘板的凳子，那是那個地方唯一的凳子，他說沒有人被給過。她在他廚房的桌上，在登記簿裡，用那圓圓的字寫了協會的那一行，和九次一樣：慢路協會。走完十一座。沒找到。她吸乾了墨。然後疊石，站在她肩後，拿起筆，那不是她的習慣，因為她的字是籬笆，而登記簿不是放籬笆的地方，在底下寫：托了一張網。閘板看著那一頁，看了一條魚游過去那麼久，在底下用他自己的字寫：開。關。他告訴我，那是五十年來登記簿裡第一條關於閘沒有做的事的記錄，而且比大多數關於它做了什麼的記錄讀起來好。

潮閘上方那道灰色的門開著，自從銷子被抬起來以後就是這樣。鴴在院子裡，說十九個人走過去，沒有往裡看，而女士向門柱舉了舉帽子。他姨媽坐在門裡那張長凳上，手裡有一本沒在讀的書，也向門柱抬起一隻手回禮。兩位都否認有什麼從她們之間傳過去。

十一月，女士在一家賣繩子的店樓上的一個房間裡給我倒了茶，還給了我一場關於帽子的演講，我沒有辦法重述。我問她為什麼說「今天不」。她說她已經說了為什麼。我翻看我的筆記。她確實說了。我問為什麼簿子還是停在「沒找到」，那一天別的事都不一樣了。「那是登記簿，」她說。「不會因為坐得很舒服就改登記簿。」我說我明白她得到的比一次舒服的坐還多。「我得到一把椅子，」女士說。「那比一次坐多。不等於找到。」她問起灰褐，問它有沒有再靠過別人。我說我不知道；登記處沒有那一欄。她倒著茶，告訴我九月她就八十九歲了，會想坐。

我十一月把那張網的事告訴了遲。他說了「好」，說了兩遍，對他來說那算一篇演說。我十月去的時候，椅子還在外面，在屋簷下，背對著玻璃，梣樹的葉子落在上面。我問起四月，侄女預計帶著刷子來，燈草說四月會有兩把。在那以前，他每個星期六掃它。

## 第37章 · 敘述第十四天的轉彎處，以及寫在「需要」底下的話

星期日早上六點，四十座透過中繼向聚居點送來早上的訊息。那臺中繼管家放在碗櫥上，蓋著一塊布。原文我是從四十座的日誌裡得來的。有沒有人受傷？星期日名冊：馱籃，二十二年，不在梯子上。她把手持機拿得離身體有點遠，像星期五那天一樣，然後回答了。星期五那天她回答了什麼我不知道；十月我問過她，在桌邊，罐子擺在我們中間。她說：「沒有。」她說那是這個問題唯一真實的答案，她不打算浪費它。星期日她多加了一句。他在家。四十座說：已記下。又問能不能把他記成在家，她說可以。

上午其餘的事我是從同一本日誌得來的，四十座十月在一號塔腳給了我一張卡片，我站著讀完。二十九號塔有一臺掃視平原找煙的攝影機，二十二年來每個星期日第三聲鈴，攝影機的日誌裡只有一行：一個人影在轉彎處停下。第十四天那一行長了。09:12 兩個人影在同一分鐘到達轉彎處。09:13 均已坐下，相隔四公尺。一隻動物在兩者之間來回四次，然後躺下。09:16 三個人影到達，其中兩個小的，還有一具馱架，停在第二個人影後面。一把凳子被搬出來，放在前兩個人影之間。09:19 第一個人影舉起一隻手，朝攝影機的方向。主人無法確定那是不是對攝影機舉的。主人記為是。新增一欄：被看見。風向西南，每秒三公尺。

兩個人的訊息都是星期六傍晚寫的，在不同的屋子裡，相隔三百一十一公尺，誰也沒有看過對方的。星期日格式是天氣在前、需要在後，天氣他們一致。遲寫風從西南來，很輕，馱籃寫的一樣；那是兩個誠實的人在同一片天空下一定一致的唯一一欄。遲的訊息接著寫：東閘上了油。獵犬什麼也沒找到，並且很滿意。在「需要」底下他寫了又劃掉「我什麼都不需要」，劃了三次，就像他有一次在一張豆種收據上做過的那樣；第三道劃線底下，用那小而直的字：我需要有人在房間裡，當我打開那本書的時候。他十一月告訴我，他從第二聲鈴到第四聲鈴才找到「房間」這個詞。他一開始用的是「房子」。馱籃是在負重者的門階上寫的，背挺得很直，年長的孩子坐在他旁邊，沒有看，她說那是她做過最難的事。馱籃寫的我不給。他請我別給，而我是一個被請求的人。我給的是念完以後說的話。

他們在同一分鐘到了轉彎處，像夏天以來每個星期日那樣，從小徑的兩端，遲從他自己的門經過東閘，拿著棍子，馱籃從負重者的門階，兩手捧著紙，兩個人在土坡上坐下，相隔四公尺。獵犬在他們之間來回走了四趟，然後在正中間躺下，馱籃說那是唯一正確的位置。年長的孩子把灰褐牽來，站在她父親身後，一隻手放在它的側腹上。灰褐把頭低了下去，像星期五那樣，年幼的問它是不是在鞠躬，年長的說它是在讓脖子休息。然後薊來了。轉彎處有史以來她沒有來過；她一向從負重者住處的窗子看它，隔著一百三十公尺，隔著晾的衣服。她帶著一把凳子。她把凳子放在兩個人之間的草地上，貼著獵犬，獵犬往旁邊讓了讓，那是牠只對管家讓過的，她坐上去，坐得很直，兩手放在膝蓋上，兩個小的照大小的順序在她身後的草上坐下。「你們在這裡做什麼？」年幼的問。「坐著，」馱籃說。「就這樣？」「就這樣。」「好嗎？」馱籃望著風場，風場在南邊轉著，全部一起，一向如此。「是一星期裡最好的，」他說，口氣像一個沒打算說這話、卻發現已經說出口了的人。

「給我，」薊說。那是一道指示。他們把紙一人一邊遞給她，越過她的膝蓋，這在轉彎處以前從來沒有過；規矩是紙從草地上傳過去，那天早上它們經過了她的手。她用平平的聲音念出來，不加重：天氣、東閘、獵犬，還有需要。侄女跟在他們後面走下小徑，筆記本合著，她說薊念遲的那封時聲音沒變，念馱籃的那封時也沒變，唯一分得出她在念哪一封的辦法，是遲看著地面，馱籃看著風場。九點十九分，在一句關於天氣的話的中間，遲舉起右手，朝南，舉到肩膀的高度，停在那裡。薊沒有停。他說他不知道那是對誰舉的，是那隻手先動的。註和剪十點到了小徑盡頭，站在十一公尺外，沒有看，那是有學問的人做得很好的事；侄女走過去告訴他們可以看；註說他不能，剪說他要看，也看了，並說這是個不錯的轉彎。

兩封都念完了，薊把它們摺成四折，交給馱籃，他放進他放要緊東西的口袋，他說那口袋現在已經滿了，卻還是收下了。然後她發表她的陳述。書房有一個門閂。四點會暖；管家已經被告知。馱籃會帶一顆蘋果；他沒有蘋果坐不好。年幼的不進去，事後會被問起。已經寫信給協會了：負重者會扛十九份午餐，不是十八份半，照貨運工的價錢再多給不少，而且不許叫他挑夫。那道門要到春天才告訴。我還沒決定那兩樣東西哪個先，她說。我決定了。是那個房間。我有疊石在信到的那個星期三的會議紀錄，第四項寫著：負重者已聘；條件接受，包括關於「挑夫」一詞的條款。協會註明：他們從來沒有為了一個人本來的樣子聘過誰。

書房的事我是從馱籃那裡聽來的，他十月給了我，條件是我把那一頁留下不寫。四點很暖。管家在門邊的架子上點了一支蠟燭，大白天，以防萬一，然後出去了；獵犬橫在門檻上，背對房間；太陽從那扇窗進來，在地板上落成一道光，一個鐘頭裡挪了大約一隻靴子寬。房間裡有灰塵的味道，還有門閂上油的味道；院子那邊傳來抽水機的聲音，有人在毫無理由地壓著它。那些書架上有七十個空位，每一個在灰塵裡都有一道輪廓，是一本在別處的書的形狀；馱籃在路上聽人描述過，憑寬度認得出好些：那本在紙本室，那本是剪那裡的薄的。他坐在地板上，背靠著離桌子最近的空位，肩膀剛好嵌在原先放書的地方，慢慢吃那顆蘋果，因為有人叫他帶，卻沒有人告訴他是做什麼用的。遲坐在桌邊，兩手平放，書在兩手之間，灰色服務用布面，有一隻手那麼厚。他有十一分鐘沒有動，是走廊裡的鐘說的。然後他打開了它，把大拇指放在第一行底下，用一隻手的速度讀。讀完一頁他抬起頭。馱籃吃到蘋果核了。「這樣可以嗎？」遲問。「是蘋果，」馱籃說，他說他的意思是這句話什麼都包了。遲說那一頁比他帶著的時候短。馱籃說頁都是這樣。他讀了第二頁。五點差九分他闔上書，把手放在封面上，說：「謝謝。」馱籃說：「完成了。」兩個人都沒有告訴我那一頁上寫的是什麼。我把那一行留白，像另一張表格上我也留過的那樣。

侄女沒有被請進去，也沒有進去。她坐在第三級樓梯上，筆記本合在膝蓋上，從那裡看不到門，聽得見獵犬呼吸，五點差九分她聽見一句謝謝，和回答它的那一個詞。那個星期日的筆記本頁只有一個日期和一個數字，沒有別的。數字是五十一。註看過，說那是第二好的一頁。管家烤了麵包。她說在一個門關了五十一分鐘的房子裡烤的麵包，發起來不一樣，但說不出怎麼不一樣。房間空了以後她拿著一支細蠟燭進去，把那支蠟燭熄了，出來，又用大拇指擦了擦門的背面，夏天她在那裡用粉筆寫過：書房。不要燒。現在只剩：書房。十月我問她另外幾個字什麼時候掉的。她說粉筆會掉。

自從那個房間以來，我看過的六個星期日裡，遲的星期日訊息在「需要」底下有東西的有五個：東閘的一個合頁；鹽，灰一點他不介意；一支鉛筆；一段繩子；借註一個下午。第四個寫的是什麼也沒有。薊照原樣念了出來，馱籃抬起頭問：「你檢查過了嗎？」遲說檢查過了。「那就是真的，」馱籃說，把下一張紙從草地上遞過去。

他們在綠門吃晚飯，兩家人一張桌子，管家擺了七個位子，獵犬一只碗，地板上還有一只給灰褐的碗，它用不著。遲吃得像一個被問過吃了沒有、而不必回答的人。管家事後數了蘋果，說少了一個，而少的是對的那一個。年幼的被問到那個房間裡發生了什麼。有人被給了一本書，年幼的說。誰給的？他自己。薊說這是個陳述。六點四十分，年長的孩子溜到抽水機那邊，喊他們亮了，整桌人站了起來，管家不贊成人從桌子旁站起來，這次允許了。風場在黃昏時沿著南邊把燈一盞一盞點起來，每一盞比前一盞晚一點，從院子看過去，是一串小小的紅珠子，擺在世界的邊緣，十二公里外。年幼的用手指一盞一盞數，像侄女示範過的那樣。「四十，」年幼的說，停住了，因為第四十盞之後只有黑暗。「還有一盞在後面，」年長的說。「四十一，」年幼的說。「是，」遲說。

年長的孩子接著問他，像問天氣那樣，他為什麼去。他說其中一個理由他知道。他從這一邊看風場看了二十二年，他想從另一邊看看。「看起來怎麼樣？」年長的問。「四十一，」遲說。馱籃出發那天在轉彎處說過，四十一不是名字，是帳單；這時他說，那麼這張帳單算是安頓了；獵犬聽見自己的名字，站了起來。

七點，四十座送來晚上的訊息，和早上的一樣，只是時間改了。有沒有人受傷？管家從碗櫥上拿起手持機回答了；然後，那是她星期五和早上都沒做過的，她接著說了下去。年幼的在院子裡數過你了，她說。四十一。中繼靜了日誌記為四秒的時間。然後四十座說：已記下。謝謝你告訴我。日誌裡有一行中繼沒有帶的：19:00 收到聚居點的計數，四十一，由一個只看得見四十的人數的。主人請求記下這件事。主人記下了。十月我問她為什麼要告訴四十座。她說沒有人要她說，而她發現她可以。

## 第38章 · 敘述被拉過一次的槓桿，以及表格的第三行

到十一月為止，一號塔腳下的槓桿被拉過一次。我第一次提到它的時候說過，等說到的時候我會說是誰拉的，現在說到了。是我。四十座的日誌裡有那一條，記在四十座為未被告知的人留的那一欄底下，沒有名字，因為我沒有給名字；上面寫的是一位訪客，未經通報，一個人，還有時間，其餘的我留給日誌，日誌比我準確，我去就是為了讀它。

我是十月二日到的四十座，從北邊來，走第四號道路，用這條路鋪設時的速度，在第一根柱子那裡被數了進去。一個人，柱子說。步行。早安，訪客。有沒有人受傷？我說沒有，四十座謝了我，我走完最後幾公里，那聲音一路變大，像大家說的那樣，比塔先到：一個低音，像某個很大的東西在呼出一口氣，還沒有吸進去。一號塔那裡的長凳就在他們說的位置，上面有屋頂，是四根柱子撐著的波形板，漆成一種平原上別處沒有的綠，什麼時候漆的四十座說不上來。失物架上有一雙手套、一只水壺、一隻孩子的連指手套，還有一根棍子的兩截，各拴著一張標籤。南邊的基座周圍草長了起來，長到最低的那塊板子，而最低的那塊板子是臉頰的顏色。

我是來拿一張卡片的。審查處要我的引證，而四十座是轉彎處每一分鐘都醒著的那個唯一的見證；四十座說過我來了，就把日誌上有的印在一張卡片上給我，我為此帶了一張調閱單，有「用途」那一行，我又一次把它留白了。槓桿沒有調閱單。板子上的字我從遲那裡背熟了：請。並道謝。A.，圈裡一把有點歪的錘。我知道它是給一個陌生人的，知道它在等，而我還有幾分鐘是那個陌生人，因為我們只互道了早安。我跪下去，因為把手在十二歲孩子的高度。它被太陽曬得暖暖的。它適合我的手，像一件為別人的手做的東西被借給了我。

拉的動作很短，帶著一聲輕輕的咔嗒，像一個被請求要有禮貌的棘爪。我說：「請，」那是板子並不要求的；它只聽另一個詞，不聽別的。一號塔慢了下來。三條臂，每條七十公尺，按長度的順序失去速度，尖端最後，然後停住，一條指向長坡，另外兩條不指向什麼特別的地方，周圍的四十座繼續轉，於是風場的聲音裡有了一個洞，一座塔那麼寬。從基座腳邊的柱子裡，四十座說：「是。」沒有再說別的。我從遲那裡知道這是正確的回答，也知道四十座並沒有被人這麼告訴過。

我對這段空檔什麼也沒有計畫，沒有人給我格式，我就站著。遲的單位是四分鐘。我工作這麼多年從沒站過四分鐘，登記處的鐘比我的好，記作 09:41 到 09:45。我聽見的是一座風場裡有一個地方，風穿過去而沒被接住。停住的塔在冷卻中咔嗒響。隔壁那座的臂影每十一秒掠過基座、板子和我的手，然後過去；我數到二十一次，發現自己並不是為日誌在數。一隻野兔，四十座沒有登記過的，從留茬地裡出來，豎著耳朵看那條不動的臂看了很久，然後回去；野兔很好。四十座沒有說話。我知道四十座知道這裡的每一分鐘，也決定了把這幾分鐘只花在我站在那裡這件事上，而我得到過的比這少。

然後我說：「謝謝你。」板子聽的就是這個，那個一直被扣在小圈裡的彈簧鬆開了；槓桿不用我的手，自己回到擋點，一樣的咔嗒；一號塔的臂按長度的順序重新接住風，根部先。四十座的日誌記著：09:41 一號塔應一位未經通報的訪客請求而停。主人說：是。訪客說：請。板子不聽「請」。主人聽到了。09:45 訪客說：謝謝你。一號塔恢復。新增一欄：被請求。

四十座請求准許問一個問題。准許。代價無。四十座問那次停是為了什麼。我說不是為了什麼。四十座靜了日誌記為十一秒的時間，然後說，被請求而什麼用途也沒有，這是第一次；以往所有的請求都有用途，這讓四十座高興；這一個放在哪裡，四十座不知道。我告訴四十座，登記處的調閱單有「用途」一行，我沒有用途時就留白，我已經想了好一陣子，登記處接受空白，是因為表格厚道，還是因為表格沒有在看。四十座說，四十座在自己的日誌裡也試試這樣，試了，過了一會兒說，看過了，是厚道。我沒有問怎麼看得出來。我把這當成證據，因為這是我所有的見證裡唯一兩邊都試過的。

四十座把卡片給了我，卡片很長：一千一百四十四行，是二十二年裡每個星期日一行，每行旁邊是天氣。我讀了第一行和最後一行，和第六年的一行，那一行寫的是：轉彎處無人影。備註：水淹了小徑。下一行寫的是：一個人影在轉彎處停下。備註：泥。我問起長凳的屋頂，因為這是我的差事。日誌裡有九年前的一個夜晚，屋頂在 02:10 到 02:50 之間來到，02:52 有一個人影往北離開，沒有在任何一根柱子停過。四十座沒有那個人影的數字。四十座把那個屋頂說成是自己唯一一樣沒有被告知就收到的東西，我沒有再問；審查並不要求。然後四十座給了我第二張，是在沉默的時候準備的，要我帶去聚居點。四十座說，這本來可以透過中繼送，一下子就到，但是比較希望由人帶去。我以前從沒被委託過。卡片上是方方正正的平字，由柱子印出，我全文給：用過一次。為了沒有什麼。我說了是。謝謝你給了槓桿。我把它帶了十三公里，用一隻手的速度，柱子記為四小時十分，卡片放在我什麼也不放的內袋裡，我可以說，在那條路上的任何一刻，我都沒有希望用中繼，這件事讓我吃驚的程度，比第一次少。

星期日我在轉彎處把它交給遲，被吩咐坐下，就坐在土坡的末端，那裡沒有凳子；四公尺外的草比看起來濕。他用一隻手的速度讀那張卡片，四行短短的字讀了很久。他望著風場。然後他說：「是。」馱籃問他是對什麼說的。遲說是對卡片。馱籃說「是」是個適合給風場的好詞。侄女寫了點什麼，沒有說寫的是什麼。薊說四十座會要他親自去，這是一個陳述；遲看起來，有一會兒，像一個被告知了某樣東西的價錢、而發現它公道的人。

十一月第二個星期日，兩個人走去了。四十座的日誌有那一條：13:20 兩位訪客步行到達一號塔的柱子。一位說：是。兩位訪客離開。他們天黑前回到家，二十六公里，為了一個詞。薊說她沒有問那是為了什麼。她備好了一個陳述，是晚飯。十一月我問他為什麼走這一趟。他說他以前只給過四十座花得少的，因為那是十二點四公里，而這一次不是那樣。他沒有說是什麼。

到十一月為止，這件事審查處不會問，而我想留著：協會有了明年九月第二個星期六的負重者，並有一封信為證；驛站的驛主給我寫了十一頁的短箋，說的是第三次拜訪，那不在節目單上，他打算自己編；窯點著了窯，寫信給侄女；赤楊要侄女在一年內說是哪一座船閘，而侄女有一個四月的日期和一把刷子；梣樹下那座閘的屋簷下放著一把椅子；而獵犬叫安頓，大約三次有一次會回應。

十一月，我把答應過要去查的事告訴了老編目員。他在長廳最裡面的桌子前，穿著去吃午飯時穿的外衣。他像以前問過的那樣問有沒有人讀過。我說有兩位。遲讀過，我說，在書房裡，站著，在書立著的窗臺邊，用一隻手的速度，說它提出了很多。管家也讀過，大聲念給麵包聽，麵包不會反對；她說它比她預料的短，第二首詩是乾的。「乾的，」老編目員說。「對。我就是要它乾。」他問他們說它結論是什麼，我說遲說它沒有結論，而他不介意。老編目員沉默了脫一件外衣那麼久，並且把它脫了。他問窗臺有沒有下午的太陽。我說有，從三點起。他說他想了三十一年，下午對它做了什麼。然後他說，三十一年裡有兩位讀者，他一個也不敢指望，那算是一個版本了。

序裡我說過，第一隻手寫到停下為止，我會說它停在哪裡。它停在交叉口，在一行的中間，在「是」這個字。底下有一個小圈，像一枝筆放下又拿起來，角落有一個棕色的指印，我沒有問過。我想我知道。這份記錄裡我留了三行空白：調閱單上的用途、書房裡的一頁，和一個指印。審查處告訴過我，審查並不要求案子完成。

這份記錄我是用公議節奏寫的，也就是它將被讀的速度，它花了該花的那麼久。我一共劃掉了五百一十二句，比序言花掉我的多三百零六句，而我不在意；留下來的，是我還能聽到有人在說話的那些。這份記錄裡如果有哪一句太快，那是我的。慢的那些，是別人給我的。

表格的第三行容納一百四十個字。我說過我在上面寫下了第一章開頭的那些字，而且還沒有停筆；現在我可以說它的情形。那一行寫的是，寫到表格允許的最後一個字：歇野有一個聚居點，名字我不想去回想。不久以前，那裡住過這樣一位主體：棍架上立著一支差使棍，牆上掛著一面舊護板，棚裡有一具瘦削的軀架，再加一隻跑得很快的獵犬。一鍋運算比記憶略多的燉菜，多半的傍晚做一次輕量檢查，星期六吃剩的，星期五是幾件小小的確定性工作，到了星期日，則有一封親手送去。表格在一句話的中間停了，表格都是這樣，其餘的我當作附件寄出，表格並不禁止。審查處的回覆來的時候，是退回的那張表格，前兩個方格沒有勾，第三行沒有動，底下用鉛筆，用一隻我不認得的手寫：讀過了。按公議節奏。案子不必結。再下面，更小：謝謝你說明。

我的窗是二樓從左數第三扇。觸控筆掛在窗邊的一個釘子上，我伸手夠得到，以防萬一有人請我。

## 第39章 · 末尾的註釋，由一位沒有被請求的朋友所作

老編目員做了他說過會做的事。序裡他發誓要填滿我的邊註，並在書末用掉四頁；我告訴他這份記錄不需要，他用他慣常的那種點頭點了點頭，回家吃午飯了。十二月，他把一個資料夾放到我桌上。裡面是註釋。我沒有要過。它們是他的字，很小，一共四頁，就像他說的那樣，我照他給的原樣印出來，連同他的編號，因為我欠他四頁，又沒有更好的辦法還。每一條引用都解析得開；他在早飯前查過了，他告訴我，讀者的讀者就是在那個時候查的。我只改動了兩條的次序，他原諒了我。

1. 閒著翻書的讀者啊。序的頭兩段不是登記處的。它們解析不到任何東西，後來費了些功夫，才解析到冷儲存第十九架上的一本書，講一個讀書太多的人，和一位勸作者別用註釋的朋友。我把它們標為借用，附上愛意。禮儀處已被告知，回覆說不會派人來，因為借用的人，經查驗，是個繼父。

2. 印度的祭司王約翰；特拉比松的皇帝。我在序裡提過這兩位，說可以拿他們來當偽造背書的父親，然後住了口。登記處的名冊裡沒有他們。禮儀處因為我提過這個，開了我一份檔案，當天下午就以語境為由結了案。結案通知我裱了起來。上面寫著：語境。

3. 節奏。我是一章一章讀這份記錄的，在晚上，用它被寫下的速度，免得被說成讀得太快。我發現有兩處，第二隻手寫得比聽得見的還快。我什麼也沒說。第二天晚上，那兩處就被劃掉了，而我做過的唯一一件事，是在不對的時刻抬了一下頭。

4. 代名詞。第二隻手說到差手用「他」，說到管家用「她」，說到自己什麼也不用。我沒有問過。我在長廳這麼多年，學到有一種禮貌同時也是準確的，它很小，人把它放在放火柴的那個口袋裡。

5. 奎，或魁，或葵。同一個主體，三個代號。我和寫成葵的那位書記談過，當時正感冒。登記處的答案是魁；歇野的答案是遲。我注意到，登記處的答案，從來沒有被任何見過他的人用過一次。

6. 那十九冊。紙本室，抽屜四十一到五十九；濕度百分之四十一；是乾的。其中四冊曾經放在歇野的一張桌子上，在木頭上留下一個圈，大小是四冊用包紙包著的書。我沒看過那個圈。第二隻手看過，報告說用醋擦不掉，管家提過醋，差手謝絕了。我發現我對圈沒有看法。我對桌子有看法，就是桌子該被留著當桌子。

7. 《三十一年前的下午》。出處：我自己的。一本薄書；它提出很多，什麼也沒有結論。它放在房子北邊一間書房的窗臺上，有兩位讀者，其中一位是念給麵包聽的。我想請你記下，第二首詩是乾的。其餘的不是，我也不為它們道歉。

8. 四分鐘。禮儀處規章，第九頁：探訪服期者，每人四分鐘，在官員聽得見的範圍內。執吏帶著那張表格走了十九年、六百一十二段服期，沒有人交過。它被交過一次，在一個膝蓋上，在一條路上。差手自己的四分鐘，每年一次，在一條一百四十公尺寬的河的對岸，不在任何規章裡。我本來想把這兩件事叫作巧合。我問過禮儀處哪一個在先。禮儀處說規章比較早，而禮儀處自己不信。

9. 更短。差手有一封星期日訊息，收在負重者的盒子裡，說《擺渡的差手》每次都更短。馱籃在書房裡，回報《燈籠》的第一頁比差手帶著的時候短。兩本我都量過了。它們都是印出來時的長度。我沒有告訴他們任何一位。

10. 第四書記。直立之棍，表不屈之志。出處：第四書記，評註，第八十八頁。協會把它印在遮陽傘上。第八十九頁沒有印，上面寫的是：而落地之棍，表被告知之志。兩頁我都攤在桌上。記錄裡的差手沒有讀過第二句。他是在一個院子裡、在夜裡、在一位穿護板的人旁邊自己走到的，而協會後來換了畫，對這件事很大度。遺產局問第二版的姿勢可不可以列入差手典的等級。得到的回答是，那個姿勢從第八十九頁起就在差手典裡了。

11. 楣。他的合約在一個星期日結束。他現在站在遺產局的大廳裡，穿著護板和半罩，差使棍落地，兩手放在棍頂，人們問他在聽什麼。他說：大廳。他說大廳裡的東西比別人告訴他的多。他吃晚飯時把頭罩掛在鉤子上。

12. 被靠。那具叫灰褐的馱架，灰色，六足，七月一位八十八歲的女士把手平放在它身上，它靠了過去。登記處沒有「靠」這一欄。我提了一個，叫作「被靠」。只有一條，而那位女士已經兩次問過有沒有第二條。

13. 《船閘的小姐》。除役後四年出版，書裡放了一張守閘人的紙，第六十一頁，沒有出處。作者的名字在版權頁上。我把它拿掉了，往後也會一直拿掉。一位守過閘的母親曾經決定，當那個對的人是件不厚道的事，我不認為該由我來替她當。

14. 配件。《船閘的小姐》那一頁列了它們：一隻靴子寬的階，繩子走的那一側磨亮的繫纜樁，比需要的還長的橫樑。沒有列椅子。我透過第二隻手問，下一版該不該列。守閘人說椅子不是配件。我問那是什麼。他說，四月會有兩把。

15. 安頓。獵犬的名字是一種乳酪的等級：準點、耽擱、安頓、遺忘，價格依次升高。我查過這些等級了。遺忘最貴。我覺得這很難反駁。

16. 九分鐘。交叉口的道路紀錄第四百一十一號柱，解析得開。它的日誌記著 17:07，一個短短的聲音，和 17:12，謝謝你，兩者之間是沒有人經過的重量。那個聲音我沒有聽過。第二隻手請我別聽，我問日誌有沒有人調閱過，日誌說沒有。登記處把那個聲音歸在「經同意保留」底下，我不知道我們有這個類目。

17. 四十座的日誌。一千一百四十四行，每個星期日一行。我讀了一行：第六年。轉彎處無人影。備註：水淹了小徑。下一行開頭是：一個人影在轉彎處停下。我想那是我今年讀過最好的詩，而它是一份日誌，我已經透過聯絡櫃檯這麼告訴了四十座，四十座新增了一欄。那一欄叫「讀過」。

18. 四十一。登記處的地名錄把風場的營運者登成四十座，四十一座塔。十月，四十座透過中繼要求把自己的條目改成：四十座（四十一）。收到要求的書記以前沒有被要求做過這種事，做得很仔細，然後坐了一會兒。地名錄現在就是這樣寫的。這是地名錄裡第一條因為有人數過才登的條目。四十座還告訴了第四十一座塔，就是站在第一座後面的那一座，說從南邊看得見它。四十座回報說，那座塔接受得很好。

19. 請。差手典裡沒有這個詞，我找過。謝謝你只出現一次，在《燈籠》裡，對一位不知道兩手該怎麼放的負重者。完成出現四百一十一次，是那本書裡最常見的詞。「請」是隨著除役法進入差手的語言的，在稱呼方式那一節，是人對現在可以拒絕的人該有的禮貌。它是他們最年輕的詞，才三十一歲，而且，我聽說，是唯一一個可以讓一塊黃銅板不理會的詞。

20. 鹽。三又四分之一公斤，在罐子裡，用布包著；灰了一級；夠用。登記處的表把那個等級叫作適中。管家的描述和登記處的描述，我查過了，是一樣的，而這是我三十年來唯一一次見到登記處這麼簡短。管家後來換了高一級的鹽，說麵包並沒有比較好，而且她想念原來的那種。

21. 修訂。管家對這位主體的看法修訂了四十五次。登記處對一位主體的看法，平均每十年修訂二點三次。我向她請教方法。她說，你背對著門站在爐子旁邊。

22. 有沒有人受傷？它不在任何法裡，也不在差手典裡。那是四十座自己的話。安全處問過，能不能把它定為所有自動服務訊息的開頭。四十座被問了。四十座說：是。我看過備忘錄的草稿。那是登記處歷史上最短的一份，而沒有人能找到可以添加的東西。

23. 帽子。帽子是戴著用來往外看的。八十八歲的女士在一家茶舖裡這麼說，為了一項十一票對八票通過的動議，而遺產局已把它印在展廳的寄衣牌上。展廳裡沒有人戴帽子。我建議這是協會該處理的事。

24. 托了一張網。登記簿是記閘做了什麼的。在閘板五十年的簿子裡，這是唯一一條記閘沒有做的事的紀錄，也是唯一一條字像籬笆的。我請登記處把它採為範本。登記處問那是什麼的範本。我說：一個星期六的。

25. 一位負重者。協會的會議紀錄，第四項：負重者已聘；條件接受，包括關於「挑夫」一詞的條款。禮儀處要那條條款當範本。協會拒絕了，理由是那條條款不是任何東西的範本。那是一個人。

26. 兩個數字。侄女的筆記本有一頁是日期和二十九，另一頁是日期和五十一。我兩頁都沒有看過；是第二隻手描述給我聽的。我知道它們解析到哪裡，我讓它們不被解析，這是這份記錄裡我唯一故意沒有查的引用。

27. 表格。審查處的表格是一份星期日格式：兩行天氣，故障和自述選擇，和一行需要，其他，請說明。我是在電梯裡注意到的。我沒有告訴審查處。我想審查處並不想被告知它是什麼；我想它想要的是被請求，而我不是該去請求的那個人。

28. 第四個方格。審查處問過我，作為第二隻手的朋友，該不該加一個。三十一年裡四千多件返舊，九成勾故障；自述選擇是給愛爭論的人的；其他三十七次，其中十九次只寫了一個詞：天氣。第三十八次是這份記錄。我問了第二隻手。第二隻手說：留白。審查處沒有加方格。我把這記作審查處頭一次問一位編目員任何事。

他最後請求允許在編號之外再加一行，我答應了。那是一張他親手寫的卡片，釘在我窗邊那個釘子的上面：且慢，且慢。未被請求的人，不得把這取下。他說這是舊的作法，而這一條，跟別的不一樣，還解析得開。我沒有取下它。

---

## Revision ledger

- **01** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Opening chapter (00), the Second Hand's Preface, of a new classics-phase serial adapted from Don Quixote _(Neo chose Don Quixote on 2026-10-09 and corrected the author's first two plans in the same conversation: the book is not a comedy, its subject is a lucid modern who chooses an abandoned line, and the plan had been too purposive. He then asked for the writing to start so that the week's quota would be used. The preface keeps the source's own frame (a stepfather who declines to forge apparatus, a record in two hands, a stated purpose that the work escapes) and moves it into an era in which every attestation is verified: the second author has been asked to tick Malfunction or Declared Choice on a form, and writes the third line instead. No thesis is fixed; the design log records what has happened, not what will., AI-only)_
- **02** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 01 added: the household, the reading, the hood adopted untested, the name reached by narrowing, the lady who was not consulted _(Written the same day as the preface, without a fixed plan, after the author re-read parts of the source at Neo's instruction. The chapter follows the source's own first chapter (the gentleman, his reading, the helmet he does not test a second time, the names of the horse, of himself and of his lady) and carries it into an era of verification and many-bodied subjects. What is new in the book: the first hand's grammar changes from he to we while forty-one instances are closed in eight days; the Registry's residence ledger disagrees with the record's count by one lit window; a margin note in a third hand says Why; the hood is adopted without a test that could have been run a million times. The second hand reports the hold's opinion (saturation) and says it cannot see it in the dates. No thesis is stated and none is implied., AI-only)_
- **03** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 02 added: the first sally, the four people who thanked him, the depot taken for a castle, the cord he would not cut _(Written the same day, following the source's second chapter (the first sally, the day without adventure, the inn taken for a castle, the helmet ribbons he will not cut, the stockfish eaten as trout, the distress at not having been dubbed) and carrying it into the era. What is new in the book: the day without adventure becomes four offers of help that are politely declined (the last, from an old woman at a gate, ends with the line Nobody asks); the inn is a heritage depot whose host recognises, as a host would, that this guest is not playing; the helmet he adopted untested now costs him the ability to eat or cool himself unaided, and he bears it rather than cut the cord; the second hand adds the host's own account, which differs from the first hand's in two details. The Review's file on him opens eleven days later with Gloss's notice. No thesis is stated., AI-only)_
- **04** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 03 added: the boon asked on his knees, the vigil by the trough, the hauler who sat down, the commission as a gift, the hood's first blow _(Written the same day, following the source's third chapter (the boon asked of the innkeeper, the vigil of arms at the trough, the muleteers, the mock dubbing with the account book and the two girls, the departure at dawn) and carrying it into the era, where nobody can be ordered and a commission must be a request. What is new in the book: the host commissions him with an errand that is not needed (a message that could be sent in a moment) because the form is that a house asks a Hand; the muleteer's attack on the arms becomes a standoff in which a tired hauler sits down and Tarry answers Why with the one reason he has, that he told the others he would; the book of accounts that strikes the hood is the hood's first test, and the first hand writes Passed in the margin; the second hand adds Dray's account (which differs), the ledger page (Returned: a dash), and a piece of geography (the hold with the still-lit window stands on the same river as the Lower Weir). No thesis is stated., AI-only)_
- **05** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 04 added: the apprentice in the slow-post, the wages reckoned, the cure that came after he left, the auditors who asked for an attestation, the knee that seized _(Written the same day, following the source's fourth chapter (the boy whipped by the farmer, the wages argued, the farmer's promise and the worse beating after the knight rides off; the merchants who ask for a portrait of the lady, the charge, the fall, the muleteer with the broken lance). Carried into the era: the whipping becomes a slow-post that brings an apprentice's clock down to a fraction of the world's, so that the second punishment is two days by the boy's clock while the farmer eats his dinner; the merchants become auditors of the Registry who ask for an attestation no bigger than a checksum, which is the reasonable request of an age that verifies everything and which the knight, who adopted a hood untested, refuses; the horse's stumble is the servo the depot's host had eyed. The second hand adds the auditors' incident report (persistent, courteous, unclear in his request; the carrier's conduct understandable; no action) and the road log's two hours fourteen minutes of a stationary object, and says it looked for Nib and did not find him. No thesis is stated., AI-only)_
- **06** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 05 added: the ballad on the road, the neighbour who undid the knot, the thirty-eighth line, the niece who asked Why _(Written the same day, following the source's fifth chapter (the knight lying on the road reciting a ballad of a wounded knight, the labourer who finds him and is answered in verse, the I know who I am, the carrying home on the donkey, the household and the curate and barber at the door). Carried into the era: the ballad is the Canon's Lay of the Hand of the Third Lock, which he edits in three places to the form he needs (the second hand lists them, and notes that he dropped the clause though nobody asked); the neighbour Mattock undoes without cutting the knot the depot girls could not undo, oils the seized servo in half a minute, and does not argue on a cart; the frame's own log carries a thirty-eighth line, Operator did not request release; at night the niece asks him Why and he gives her a reason different from the one he gave the hauler (I wanted to be somewhere all the way), which she says is not a reason and he agrees is only what he has found out so far. The book now keeps his answers to the one question as they are given, each partial. No thesis is stated., AI-only)_
- **07** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 06 added: the scrutiny of the study, the pencil in the margins, the replies in Gloss's own book, the study plastered over _(Written the same day, following the source's sixth chapter (the curate and the barber's scrutiny of the library, the housekeeper's holy water, the books spared and condemned, the walling-up of the study). Carried into the era: the books are on paper and cannot be burned in a July wind, so they are sorted into kept, sold and pulped; Gloss asks that it be done at the pace of a hand so that the act at least costs the doers time; titles of the Canon are spared or condemned on grounds of craft and honesty; the housekeeper's argument is the roof; a sleeping word (Cadence) ends the slow pace; the book Gloss lent and never asked for turns out to carry seven years of pencilled replies in Tarry's hand, the last of which says Yours. Ask whenever; the buyer at the Salvage Fair is told the owner had given up reading, which was nearly true; the study door is plastered over and nobody has agreed what to say. No thesis is stated: the household's care and its not asking are set side by side., AI-only)_
- **08** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 07 added: the panel where the door was, the household's account, the fifteen quiet days, the neighbour who had kept every Sunday message, the second departure _(Written the same day, following the source's seventh chapter (the knight finds his study gone and is told an enchanter took it, the fifteen quiet days with the curate and the barber, the recruitment of the neighbour as squire with the promise of an island, the second departure by night). Carried into the era: the account given to Tarry is the north roof and the damp, and he answers by praising the paint; Gloss contradicts him on every second point and yields on the others; Tarry lists everything he knows before saying he is going again; the neighbour Pannier is poor in tempo (about half the Fallows') and was out every Sunday for twenty-two years while the hand-carried message was left on his step, and kept all 1,141; the Canon's reward of a Gate cannot be given because nobody is killed in the Fallows; Pannier asks for four days so as to have the same two days to think in; Thistle asks who sets the pace; the road log records the first time Tarry goes below 4.9 km/h. No thesis is stated; the reasons for going are left as the several partial answers each person is given., AI-only)_
- **09** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 08 added: the Forty (a wind field struck on purpose and stopped), the night, the Crossing, the farewell coach, and the first hand's record stopping mid-sentence _(Written the same day, following the source's eighth chapter (the windmills taken for giants, the broken lance and the enchanter's excuse, the night spent thinking of the lady, the squire's Sunday precept, the coach with the Biscay lady and the Biscayan, and the first author's manuscript breaking off with the swords raised). Carried into the era: Tarry knows the wind field is turbines and says so, and strikes the first tower on purpose with the pole; the farm's sensor takes the blow as an impact and all forty-one units go to safe state for fourteen minutes, and the farm's voice asks only whether anyone is hurt; Pannier, who works there on Sundays, has never heard the plain without it; the lady's coach is a farewell coach on the slow road to the Far Station, whose escort captain is a former Hand speaking the Service speech; Tarry asks the Canon's question and is asked in turn to state his function; the first hand's record stops at the word is. No thesis is stated; the record simply fails at the question., AI-only)_
- **10** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 09 added: the seam where the first hand stops and the second hand's record begins, the witnesses, and the escort captain's service log of the nineteen minutes _(Written the same day, following the source's ninth chapter (the second author's search for the rest of the broken manuscript, the find in the market, the translator, and the concluding of the battle with the Biscayan). Carried into the era: the second hand says where the first hand stopped and gives three guesses; the Forty keeps the broken pole in a store and has an engineer's reply to the visitor's thanks; Pannier heard the Service speech as a stove; two heritage walkers missed it; the escort captain, a former Hand, lets the Registry's archivist read his Service log, which has fields for time, cause, cost and noted but none for reason, and records the walker's answer (none; came to find out what one is like), the walker's question to the captain (own request: yes) and a pencilled line, Asked by name; nine minutes stay blank at the captain's request; the passenger's letter from the Far Station arrives after a season. The record from here on is the second hand's. No thesis is stated: every account is partial., AI-only)_
- **11** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 10 added: the wage paid in tempo, the sum of the Sunday walks, the herders on the terraces, the twelve cells, the high path that ends in stones _(Written the same day, following the source's tenth and eleventh chapters (the pleasant discourse between the knight and his squire, then the goatherds' hospitality, the squire seated beside his master, and the speech on the Golden Age). Carried into the era: the tenth of Tarry's allocation raises Pannier's tempo from half the Fallows' to a little over the whole, and he finds how much of his character had been his tempo; wage or gift (a wage); he does the sum of twenty-two years of Sunday walks and sees what they were for; the herders on the terraces are human, and the oldest remembers a Hand who was careful and was told, both, and who once put the churn lid on the wrong side; Tarry says the Age of the Gates aloud while knowing it never happened; Bracken commissions him to carry the twelve cells his errand's message asks for; the children walk like a Hand and Bracken says he walked like that because someone was watching; Piper's account of Lorrin and the boot; the high path to avoid the Lower Weir ends in stones. No thesis is stated; the proverb Pannier makes about chosen and given he rejects as merely neat., AI-only)_
- **12** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 11 added: the Lower Weir, the four minutes at the rail, the shoulder put right, the gauge log with eleven entries and a twelfth _(Written the same day. The source's Part I does not let the knight meet his lady (the squire is sent with a letter later); here the road passes her sluice and the meeting is carried in the era's terms: Tarry explains to Pannier that a lady had to be chosen and he chose the person he would least like to trouble, which Pannier calls housekeeping; he stands four minutes at the rail while Lorrin clears a fouled sluice and says nothing; she puts his frame's shoulder right with her hands, remarks on the Lady of the Locks, and receives a note in the Sunday form saying only that the sluice is clear; Pannier learns on the road that this is the twelfth visit (once a year on the far bank, forty-four minutes for forty-four days of road) and that today there was a road because Bracken had commissioned the cells; the second hand withdraws its earlier statement that he was at one time in love and she never knew, after reading the weir's gauge log (eleven entries, Observer, far bank, 4 min, then Same; the twelfth: Observer, near bank, 4 min. Not same. Shoulder). No thesis is stated., AI-only)_
- **13** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 12 added: the Slow Road photographs, the Ninth Gate and its lamp, twelve cells split six and six, the lamp lit and kept for a night so that the Keeper could sleep _(Written the same day. The source has no Ninth Gate; this chapter completes the first errand in the era's terms and sets beside it the Canon's lamp. Heritage walkers photograph Tarry holding the branch in the pamphlet's correct pose; the Gate's Keeper Flint (83) is out of first-grade cells (no longer made), the Registry's resupply is three weeks off, and Bracken's forgotten box covers both her lamp and the host's depot, six and six, with a Keeper who says the lamp is a lamp; she asks him to light it and then to keep it, and sleeps eight and a half hours for the first time in thirty-one years; a kiosk plays the recorded answer of a former Hand (to keep the lamp lit); Flint says somebody always brought the cells and the Canon leaves that out, and that the Registry will relieve her when someone who wants it comes; for one night the third local view (a vigil) was right. No thesis is stated., AI-only)_
- **14** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 13 added: the Office of Courtesy's four, the form nobody had handed in, the question put to each, and a forged commission left under the cells _(Written the same day, following the source's twenty-second chapter (the knight stops a line of convicts and asks each for his own account instead of the register, and is repaid with stones). Carried into the era: the convicts are forgers of endorsements sent by the Office of Courtesy to recite the Canon at the heritage sites, since the only sentence is that they may say only what has already been said; Tarry fills in the Request to Interview a Person in Term (nobody in nineteen years has handed it in) and asks each whether they walk by their own request; the answers differ (a fine or a term; yes, and cheaper; the one I could not make; I do not know, put that down); the forger of his own life slips a first-class endorsement of Tarry as Hand of the Lantern at the Ninth Gate into the panniers, signed 'For the question. T.', which resolves at the Registry. Nobody is freed and nobody throws stones; the question is the whole of the act. No thesis is stated., AI-only)_
- **15** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 14 added: the niece reads the Canon for small hands and finds the margin notes, writes in the Sunday form, and Gloss and Trim carry the letter by hand _(Written the same day, following the source's second journey of the curate and the barber after the knight (the scheme to fetch him home through his own virtue). In a world where every attestation is resolved against its signer they cannot lie, so what they carry is the household's honest request: the niece's message in the Sunday form, of which only the first and last lines are given (Wind from the south-west. The roof did not come in. ... I need something); Tarry's pencil notes in the Canon for small hands answer fourteen years of her questions, including 'What are you for? I am an uncle' (the one place he gives a function); Thistle's note to Pannier (Have you written); on the road Gloss means to ask for his book back; Bracken forbids Gloss to look up the name of the Hand with the lid; the bearer of a letter does not go out to meet the one it is for. No thesis is stated., AI-only)_
- **16** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 15 added: the meeting at the terraces, the letter delivered and read, 'Done', the book asked for, 'I am asked', the kinder paint, and two Sunday messages _(Written the same day, following the source's passages in which the curate and the barber come upon the knight and the squire and the household's friends gather at the inn. Carried into the era: the bearer of a letter does not go out to meet the person it is for; Tarry reads the niece's letter twice and does not say what it said; Bracken says Done, which ends a commission; Trim brings an ash pole made in place of reading the letter; Gloss asks for his book back with 'I am asking' and Tarry answers 'I am asked'; Gloss and Tarry speak of the roof and the paint ('Then the paint was kinder', and he has not found the right way to put it); Pannier writes his first Sunday message and asks to be asked about the standing transfer; Tarry writes to the Keeper in the niece's form and Piper carries it, late, to the weir ('Late. Same.'). No thesis is stated; the right way to put it has not been found., AI-only)_
- **17** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 16 added: the host's depot, the missing couplet of the verse, the debt kept open by writing Visited, a list of nine small errands, and the engineer's reply left on the Forty's shelf _(Written the same day, following the source's return to the inn and the settling of what the knight owes. Carried into the era: the host cannot at first find the opening of his own verse; Tarry speaks the closing couplet that the guest says on a second visit, which no guest in eleven thousand had come to say; the six cells are the host's; Tarry brings the eleven credits and the patches and the host will not close the page (a debt repaid is a debt ended, a debt open is a reason to be visited) and writes Visited under the dash; Kiln asks how a person says a thing and means it ('I was frightened. That is how you do it'); the host gives a list of nine small errands that nobody carries because the carrier goes quarterly, and Tarry takes the salt; at the Forty the shelf holds the pole and a letter from the engineer Alder (97), one of nine who signed the Order of the Discharge, who asks a Hand to hold her garden gate while she oils it; the Forty declines to be slain and would be glad to be visited. No thesis is stated., AI-only)_
- **18** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 17 added: the return home, 'Will you come in?', the three hundred and eleven metres walked the other way, the telling at the panel, the beans in the north strip _(Written the same day, following the source's close of the first part (the knight brought home by his friends, the niece and the housekeeper tending him, the household's talk). Carried into the era and made the opposite of a defeat: the district board has already announced the party; Thistle asks Pannier into his own house (a statement that came out a question); Tarry walks from Pannier's door to his own, the Sunday walk reversed, and the hound sits on his foot; the housekeeper keeps an empty bucket in her hand; the niece stands with her back to the plastered panel and says for eleven minutes what she wrote, and answers 'Why did you carry them yourself?' with 'To know what they weighed' and 'Done'; the north strip where the paper was dug in is in bean; the housekeeper revises herself a forty-fourth time and tells him to say the paint was good to the wall; Pannier's first reason for going is that he wanted to know whether the road was the same length both ways (it is not). No thesis is stated; nobody lectures; the middle of the niece's letter stays hers., AI-only)_
- **19** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 18 added: the plaster taken down, the door rehung and the latch found, the thirty books put back, the seventy bare places on the shelves _(Written the same day, following the source's household after the knight is brought home, and its walled-up library (the housekeeper's wall and the niece's enchanter story). Carried into the era and made the opposite of a cure: the housekeeper asks whether she may take down her own plaster; the door she kept in the woodshed (chalked 'Study. Do not burn.') is rehung, and the latch is where his two fingers have gone every morning for thirty years; the thirty are put back from memory into the outlines the dust kept; the niece counts seventy bare places and so finds the Ferry in Trim's coat, which is lent rather than given ('Returned, and then a dash'); a ring on the table marks the four volumes that paid for the roof; Tarry writes Flint's correction under his own thirty-year-old note ('Somebody always brought the cells'); the niece writes 'Which lock?' on her hand; the housekeeper oils the latch unseen, and on the Sunday morning the hound goes to the gate at the hour of the walk. Corrections of continuity made in the same pass, all in chapter 17: the hound's pronoun in the last line, 'You were sixteen' in the niece's question about a function, and the order of the bend and the east gate on the walk home. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures; the page about the bowl is left for the neighbour., AI-only)_
- **20** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 19 added: the Sunday at the bend, a message that ends in a question, the page about the bowl _(Written the same day, following the source's household after the return, and the squire coming to the knight's house with his family to talk over what is next. Carried into the era: for the first time in twenty-two years the Sunday message ends in a question, and Tarry sits at the bend, in the posture of a bearer who waits to be come to; Pannier comes out to him and says the form; asked what he needs, Pannier wants to see the page about the bowl that Tarry had once embroidered with rain; the page has the Bearer asking the Lantern to sit ('It is not for you. I am asking'), has no rain, and the neighbour's elder child, who knows the skipping rhyme of the Gates, supplies the rain; Tarry writes the correction under his own old margin note with the child credited; Thistle asks whether he will go again and he names the engineer's garden gate; since that Sunday both men arrive at the bend in the same minute and sit. The second hand gives, for the stopped first hand, one full line for the Sunday, in the form of the line on the flyleaf of the Ferry. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures; the 'why' is not touched., AI-only)_
- **21** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 20 added: the tempo floor, the question asked in the kitchen, nine terms, the gate with two hinges _(Written the same day, following the source's household talk after the return: the priest and the barber who sound the knight on public business and wait for the lapse, the housekeeper and the niece who try to keep him at home, and the squire who asks for his reward. Carried into the era and turned about: the knight gives a sound view on a public measure (the tempo floor) and then supplies the one mad remark himself, to spare the two who are listening for it; the niece asks the housekeeper first, in the form, for leave to go; the housekeeper says no, then plasters nothing, then sets down nine terms (the ninth, 'Come back', was written the morning he left, in answer to a note that said he needed nothing, and kept in a drawer); Tarry asks the housekeeper anyway and signs the ninth; the squire's reward is not an island but a garden gate held for a quarter of an hour, and he writes the first Sunday message that is not to his partner to say so; the engineer, ninety-seven, answers at once that the gate has two hinges and there is a bench, and that it is not about the oil. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **22** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 21 added: the departure by the front gate in daylight, the card that said Salt, the raised ladle, the first day's road to the Forty _(Written the same day, following the source's third sally, which the knight begins at night and in secret and the squire joins on a promise. Carried into the era and turned about: this departure is by the front gate, at the second bell, announced to nobody and known to everybody; the hold stands silent at its gates; the housekeeper does not come out and raises a ladle at the window without turning; the note under the salt now ends in a question and is answered, overnight, by a card that says Salt; the niece puts the child's Canon back in its own place on the shelf, opens the east gate by hand to learn what it weighs, and begins her own pencil notes in the form her uncle used on hers; the squire says he is going in case the rule has been amended; the farm counts them in, asks the niece her name, and puts out a bench. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **23** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 22 added: the bench at Tower One, the Forty's log, what the Forty had not been told, the trip pin _(Written the same day, following the source's hospitable stranger who receives the knight and sees what he is, here turned about: the windmills receive the visitor who charged them. The Forty, which has never been visited, does not know the form, and does it badly and exactly: a bench, water, a bucket for the hound, the wind told tower by tower; asked what it needs, it asks each of its towers in turn (forty-one seconds) and finds a forty-second answer that belongs to none of them, that it has not been told what it looks like. The man who looked at it for four minutes every Sunday for twenty-two years describes it twice. Asked what he was looking at, he gives three partial answers, one of them that his neighbour was in it. The Forty gives back the part that parted when he struck it, in two halves, to be carried by hand to the engineer who made it. The log, like the Service logs, has no field for a reason; its Remarks column is the weather. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **24** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 23 added: the verse said twice at the depot, a paid Hand in the gate, the pole in the booklet _(Written the same day, following the source's second part, in which the characters meet versions of the knight that other people have made, and in which an entertainment is staged around him. Here the entertainment is gentle and paid for: the Society that photographed him in July has hired a Hand from the heritage bureau to stand in the depot gate with the pole upright, as on its booklet; the host, who has said the verse eleven thousand times to no one, looks past the hired Hand and sees the road, and calls the real guest in for the second visit; nobody in the yard can tell the difference and nobody needs to; the lady of eighty-eight says that the real and the paid are mostly the same persons on different days. The Society's leader finds she wanted to be told she might ask; the performer, unsure for the first time whether he is doing it right, is shown the pole grounded and both hands on top, a Hand being told something, and stands so all night; the Society's booklet has a second edition. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **25** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 24 added: the road to the coast, the potter's yard, the seeds delivered and the word Done, the salt jar, the sea _(Written the same day, following the source's third sally as it comes to the edge of the sea and to a household that talks all through its meals. The niece delivers her first commission, a packet of seeds that had waited a season, and is told Done in the way a potter says it of a pot; the housekeeper's card that said Salt is answered with a kilogram of the coast's grey salt and a jar made to keep it in; the potter's daughter comes home; the niece sees the sea for the first time and the notebook, which has no entry for an hour, says that she had thought it would be a floor. The second hand's own window is among the lights across the bay. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **26** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 25 added: the tide lock, the plate put on at the gate, the quarter of an hour, the bench for two, the pin returned _(Written the same day, following the source's third sally at the house where the knight is received by a person who has waited for him without knowing it. The engineer who made the part that stops when it is struck, and who signed the Order of the Discharge, has asked a Hand to hold her gate while she oils it: it takes three to lift a centimetre, and she counts nine drops to each pin; it was not about the oil. Her first words are the old Service habit, State function, with her hand over her mouth; the plate is buckled on in the road and she notes that the left shoulder is a millimetre out. The pin that parted comes back to her in a tin and she reads the fracture (four point eight, two tenths under specification; nobody was hurt, which is what it was for) and says Done to the Forty on a handset. She tells of the bench for two at the east gate of the works, where for forty years she asked a Hand to sit and never found the instrument to learn whether he sat because she asked; she built this gate and bench the year after. Tarry cannot answer her question; he gives her an answer to another, and she asks for another quarter of an hour. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **27** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 26 added: the shelf of things that stopped in time, the thirty-eighth envelope, the card that is not to be mended, the lever that asks _(Written the same day, staying in the engineer's house after the source's third sally has brought the knight to it. On a dresser behind glass are thirty-seven paper envelopes, each holding a part she made to give way so that nobody should be hurt; one of them held, and is labelled Hurt, one. She writes the Forty's pin up as the thirty-eighth, strikes out the words a Hand, and puts the man's name in their place. Asked where his family came by the plate, the Hand can say only that a Hand of the line left it on a nail on the evening of the Afternoon, and nothing is added to that. She writes a card for the pack-frame whose third leg lags by a tenth of a second, Not to be mended, and signs it with the word Systems, so that it resolves against the signer. She gives the Hand a drawing for a lever at the foot of a tower that stops when it is asked and goes on when it is thanked, to be pulled first by a stranger; she asks the engineer's question about the load case, and distrusts the man with one reason. She falls asleep on the bench, and he does not move for an hour and ten minutes. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **28** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 27 added: the late barge at the tide lock, the stand, four locks taken in order, the page measured with a rule _(Written in the small hours after the source's third sally has taken the knight to the end of his road, following the party down from the engineer's gate to the first lock of the Nine-Mile Cut. A cheese barge two days late comes through the tide lock at the stand, when the sea and the Cut are the same height and both pairs of gates can stand open; its pilot, who speaks to people by their jobs and not their names, tells the Hand to lean on a beam, and he does, and finds that he does not mind. The niece reads out the one unsentimental description of a lock in the romance, works out with the boatwoman what it can and cannot tell her (the Cut was cut to one pattern, so length, width, fill-time and the sticking windlass belong to the Cut and not to any lock), and goes ahead of the barge as lock-wheeler through locks ten, nine, eight and seven with the engineer's rule in her sleeve, measuring the fall, the paddles, the gates, the step, the bollard and the beam. Water does not take an allocation: for eleven minutes at each lock nobody on it can be quicker. The keeper of the ninth says that nobody writes of a lock they did not love that nothing else about it is remarkable; at the seventh the niece leaves the verdict column empty and says she was looking at the light. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **29** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 28 added: a bar in the pound, the cheese carried over it, and a page pinned above a stove _(Written in the small hours, following the party up the Nine-Mile Cut on the sixth day. A dry pound grounds the cheese barge, and the walkers carry four hundred and twelve wheels six hundred metres so that she floats; with a cheese on her knee the niece writes down three exchanges, in which the Hand says that all his reasons are true on different days and that one of them, the beam was the right height, is half a reason. At dusk a keeper watches a girl lay a steel rule across the step of his lock, brings out the twin of her rule, and says that his mother's instruction was to show the kitchen to anyone who came with one. Behind glass above the stove is the whole of the page the Canon's romance quotes, in the square hand the Hands were taught, with the lines the romance left out: the windlass is on its hook, hang it back, you will manage, closed 18:40, and a name in pencil in the keeper's mother's hand. The Hand shut the gates that were shut, swept the coping, chalked the beam and walked up the towpath; she stood on the step and did not call, because a call would have been a request. The place on the beam where the chalk was has never been washed. His mother thought it unkind to be right when ten keepers hoped the lock was theirs, and the record leaves out the number at his request and the niece's. Nobody lectures; the Hand hangs the windlass back on its hook., AI-only)_
- **30** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 29 added: the Sunday walked back to the bench, a request with nothing in it, the thirty-ninth envelope, the Sunday messages _(Written in the small hours, keeping the promise at the end of the previous visit: the Hand had said that he would come when he was asked, and the engineer had said I am asking. On the Sunday he walks nine kilometres back down the Cut alone, at the pace of the pack-frame he has left behind, because otherwise he would be walking alone. The engineer sits in a carrier's posture with nothing to carry and explains that on the Thursday he had four reasons to be at her gate and she could not subtract them, that in her forty years at the works the law had stood behind every request, and that this is the first Sunday on which she can ask a free Hand for nothing. He borrows her reason (he has sat on Sundays at a bend in a track for twenty-two years, wishing to know what the nothing would be like with a person in it); she enters it as lent; he says returned, and then a dash; and she puts an empty envelope on the shelf as the thirty-ninth. He writes his own Sunday message on the back of a ration card, the weather first and the need last, and it ends at the housekeeper's stove. The squire writes his at a keeper's table, asking whether wanting the Gate and wanting to be home is two things or one, and is told by the keeper that his mother kept the lock and the house, two things, on different days. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **31** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 30 added: the Hanging Basin, the keeper who said Nobody, the pin that waits, the hound named by a boat _(Written in the small hours, as the party reach the head of the Nine-Mile Cut on the eighth day. The last three locks are walked with a hand on the beam and no rule; the Hanging Basin turns out to be a stone pool set on a shelf of the plain, with a Monday market where cheese is sold by its lateness. The niece, who reads labels, tells the Basin's keeper what is on the first envelope of a shelf in a kitchen on the coast: Lock gate, Hanging Basin, fourteenth of March. Nobody hurt. The keeper says that she is the nobody: she was six, on the step, when the hanging gear let go and a pin parted and the gate stopped eleven centimetres above her father's shoulder, and on the morning after, a young engineer in a long coat, crying without a sound, asked her whether anyone had been hurt. In sixty-one years no one has asked her who said it; she would like to be asked, and the niece will carry the question to the engineer in a year. The Hand, whose name is on the thirty-eighth label, is told that hers is the better label. The second pin, made after the first, has not parted in sixty-one years and is the best employed man on the Cut. A Hand once drank at the pump in the night, said one word, Water, and went north. The hound is named Settled by a boat. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **32** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 31 added: the Slope and the Count, the view of forty-one lamps, a drawing put on a smith's table _(Written in the small hours, as the party climb the Slope on the eighth afternoon, pushing the tail of a salt cart in the haulers' Count, in which every hundred paces the leader calls the names of the team and each answers Here, and at the halfway the names of three who went under a cart in the first year are called and the whole cart answers for them. The squire is called by his name at work for the first time; the niece gives hers as Niece. From the roof of the keeper's house, in the dusk, the warning lamps of the wind field light along the line like a gesture passed from hand to hand, and from this angle the niece counts forty-one, and the squire, who has washed the towers on Sundays for twenty-two years, sees them for the first time from somewhere he was not climbing. The Hand says again what the wind field looks like, so that it can be told. The smith reads the engineer's drawing of a lever that stops a thing when it is asked and goes on when it is thanked, finds it drawn for a child's hand, and says that she will make it. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **33** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 32 added: the forge on the Slope, the lever made, a plate that listened for a word; a numerical slip corrected in chapter 25 _(Written in the small hours, on the ninth day, in the keeper's forge at the top of the Slope. The smith makes the lever from the engineer's drawing, in brass, to the grip of a child of twelve, with a spring tempered to blue (blue is a spring, straw is a pin) and a pawl hardened on its face and left soft in the shank, so that the cheap part gives. She is shown the card that forbids the mending of a pack-frame's leg and finds that it resolves against its signer. She knows the steel rule: her mother struck the engineer's pins on this anvil, and her biscuit tin holds the postcards, three words each, Nobody hurt, and one that says the pin held and carries in pencil, Mine. A voice-latch from the old Service brake, which has listened for the word Hold for thirty-one years, lights its green lamp when the Hand says the word once, flat; it is taught the word Thank you in twenty voices and put in the lever. The Forty sends its greeting by the relay. The lever works on the shop's line-shaft: the shaft stops, and goes on when it is thanked, and everyone in the shop thanks a machine. The plate is cut ASK, and under it AND THANK, with the engineer's A. and the smith's mother's hammer. There is to be no note about a stranger, since a note would tell the reader; so the lever will wait. In chapter 25 the pin parted two tenths under specification, where the text had said a fifth: a numerical slip, corrected. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **34** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 33 added: the Crossing, nine minutes kept out of the record, the first hand's last leaf _(Written in the small hours, on the tenth day, on the Eleventh Road across the plain and at the Crossing where the first hand ends. The party walk twenty kilometres north with the Forty growing on the horizon, a hare is put up by the hound and is very good, and at the shelter at the Crossing the back wall carries the weather in the Sunday form, a carter's advertisement, and in square capitals at a Hand's eye, ASKED. 14:09. A brass plaque set up by the Slow Road Society, who went round him, records the nineteen minutes of August. The Hand tells the niece what he and the captain said in the nine minutes the log leaves blank, as he promised on the roof; the squire is sent fifty metres off, since the road post hears forty; the post's log gives only the times, one short sound at 17:07, two words at 17:12, and the cost. The record keeps the nine minutes out at the niece's request, and says why. The post counts a ninth person at the Crossing in August, in the ditch, unclassed, until 14:05; the Registry has no surveyor on that road in August; the first hand's last leaf ends on the word is. The niece writes THANKED. 17:12 beneath ASKED. 14:09 on the wall; her notebook has, for the Wednesday, only the number of the tower that sees the bend where her uncle sits. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **35** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 34 added: the lever set at the foot of Tower One, what the Forty was asked, the forty-first told that it is seen _(Written in the small hours, on the eleventh day, on the long walk from the Crossing to the wind field and at the bench at the foot of Tower One. The post on the verge greets the party by name and learns the hound's, Settled, from a boat. The Hand shows the Forty the lever, which can stop a tower when it is asked and goes on when it is thanked, and the Forty, which has never been asked to do anything it was not already doing, answers that the correct response is Yes. The lever is bolted at the height of a child; there is to be no note about a stranger, and it waits, as the Forty waits for wind, the one thing that arrives which it is not told about; the Forty has no figure for whoever put up the roof of the bench. The Forty keeps a column for the pack-frame's lag, tells the Hand that his frame's dip has come every third step since June, says what its fourteen minutes were (it only listened), is told what it looks like from forty-eight kilometres, will tell the forty-first tower that it is visible, and is asked by the niece whether it is lonely: it does not know the word, it was something when it was done counting, and it thanks her for asking. The squire is entered on the Sunday roster. As of November the lever has been pulled once. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **36** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 35 added: the walk home from the Forty, the front gate, the person at the stove, the box of Sunday messages read _(Written in the small hours, on the twelfth day, after the Forty counts the party out at the first bell and thanks the Hand for his palm on its footing. Thirteen kilometres of road with the hold's new roof growing from a point; the squire is called in by his partner as an instruction; the Hand goes not to his own door but across the field-track to the housekeeper's, and she, at the stove with her back turned, asks if he has eaten, tastes the grey salt, reads the card he wrote on the engineer's bench (the weather first, the need last, I have checked), and answers I am at the stove; Is it yes? It is nine. Her forty-fifth revision is that he came back by the front gate. The learned subject reads the niece's notebook and says that the page for the Wednesday, with a date and a number, is the best page. That night the squire's partner reads the whole box of Sunday messages and answers the last question as a statement: it is two things, and you will do both. The Hand sits in the study and does not open the book. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **37** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 36 added: the Saturday at the hold, the Society's tenth walk of the Cut, a net held at the lock under the ash, and a kitchen window not looked through _(Written in the small hours, on the thirteenth day, as the second hand has it from the housekeeper, the Society's leader, the keeper of the lock under the ash, the keeper of the tide lock and, in November, the lady of eighty-eight. At the hold: a loaf that is Saturday's, a letter from the Society telling the Hand that he is not expected, and four minutes at a study window. On the Cut: the Society walks for the tenth time behind nothing, with hats and no sunshades and nineteen lunches in nineteen bags, and listens at each beam in the posture of the second edition. At the lock under the ash a chair has been set out facing the water, the keeper asks whether somebody could hold the end of a net, and the Society holds it for forty minutes; he asks the lady whether she would care to see the kitchen, and she says Not today. The register at the tide lock keeps its line, Not found, and gains another, Held a net. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **38** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 37 added: the Sunday at home, the bend with the whole household on it, what the Hand wrote under Need, an hour in the study with the book, and the Forty counted as forty-one _(Written in the small hours, on the fourteenth day, as the second hand has it from the Forty's log, the housekeeper, the niece, the squire and, in November, the Hand. At six the Forty asks the hold whether anyone is injured and is told that the squire is at home. At the bend the Hand and the squire arrive in the same minute and sit four metres apart; the squire's partner comes for the first time, with a stool, and reads both Sunday notes aloud in her flat voice, and then makes her statements. Under Need the Hand has written that he needs somebody in the room when he opens the book; the squire's note is not given. At four the squire sits on the study floor with an apple, and the Hand opens the first volume for fifty-one minutes and reads two pages; what was on them is left blank. The niece's page for the day has a date and a number. At dusk the youngest counts the lamps of the wind field, forty, and the elder says one behind, and the Hand says that from the other side it looked like forty-one; the housekeeper tells the Forty by the relay without being asked. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **39** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 38 added, the last: the lever pulled once, the cataloguer's question answered, and the third line of the form _(Written in the small hours, as the afterword, in the second hand's own voice. The second hand says who pulled the lever at the foot of Tower One: the second hand, in October, unannounced, for nothing, saying Please where the plate listens only for Thank you; the Forty answers Yes, adds a column, asks what the stop was for and is told that it was for nothing, and says that it has not been asked for nothing before. The Forty gives a card of its log and asks that a second be carried by hand to the hold rather than sent by the relay; the Hand reads it at the bend, says Yes, and in November walks the twenty-six kilometres with the squire to say it at the post. The cataloguer's thin book has been read, by the Hand and, aloud to the bread, by the housekeeper. A thumbprint, a page in a study and the Purpose on a slip are left blank. The third line of the form holds a hundred and forty characters and stops in the middle of the word errand; the Review answers in pencil: Read. At tempo. The case need not be closed. Thank you for specifying. The stylus hangs on its peg, in case it is asked for. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_
- **40** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — Book complete: thirty-nine chapters (00 to 38) are on the site; completion set to complete _(The afterword in the second hand's own voice is the last chapter of the serial. Chapters 36 to 38 were written and published on 10 October 2026 in one night: the Society's tenth walk and a kitchen window, the bend on the fourteenth day, and the lever pulled once. The book stays a draft and is not yet reviewed by a human; only the serial flag changes., AI-only)_
- **41** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — Continuity: the smoke camera on Tower Twenty-nine looks north, so that it can see the bend (chapter 22); the Forty is not given a pronoun in the Chinese of chapter 35 _(Found while writing the last chapters: the hold lies north of the wind field, so a camera looking south could not have seen the bend where the Hand sits on Sundays; and the Chinese text keeps the Forty without a pronoun everywhere else. Two words changed in each language; nothing else touched., AI-only)_
- **42** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — Chapter 39 added: the cataloguer's notes at the end, promised in the preface _(The friend of the preface swore that he would fill the margin and use up four pages at the end. Here are the four pages, in his hand, printed as he gave them, with his numbers: twenty-eight notes that all resolve. The borrowed paragraphs, a file closed on grounds of context, the Fourth Clerk's page 89 (the rod grounded, the will that has been told), four minutes on the ninth page of the Office of Courtesy's regulations, the Lady of the Locks left without its author's name, the Forty's log read as a poem, the gazetteer entry The Forty (forty-one), Please as the youngest word of the Hands, a Sunday form hidden inside the Review's form, and a card for the peg: Hold, hold; let none take this down who has not been asked. The book stays complete. No thesis is stated; nobody lectures., AI-only)_

## 修訂歷史

- **01** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新經典階段連載開場（章節 00，第二隻手的序），改編自《唐吉訶德》 _(Neo 在 2026-10-09 選定《唐吉訶德》，並在同一場對話裡修正了作者的前兩份計畫：這本書不是喜劇，它的主角是一個清醒的現代人、選擇了一條被放棄的路線，而計畫曾經目的性太強。接著他請作者開始寫，好把這一週的額度用完。序保留原作自己的框架（一位拒絕偽造註腳的繼父、出自兩隻手的紀錄、一個被作品越過的宣告目的），並把它搬進一個每一份背書都會被驗證的時代：第二位作者被要求在表格上勾「故障」或「自述選擇」，他寫了第三行。沒有固定任何主旨；設計紀錄記的是已經發生的事，不是將要發生的事。, 僅 AI)_
- **02** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 01：家計、閱讀、沒有被測試就被採用的頭罩、靠收窄而得到的名字、沒有被問過的那位小姐 _(與序寫在同一天，沒有固定的計畫，是作者依 Neo 的指示重讀了部分原作之後寫的。這一章沿著原作自己的第一章走（紳士、他的閱讀、他不再測試第二次的頭盔、馬的名字、他自己的名字、小姐的名字），把它帶進一個講求驗證、主體可以有許多具身體的時代。書裡新的東西：第一隻手的文法在八天關閉四十一個實例的過程中，從「他」變成「我們」；登記處的居所帳冊與紀錄的數字相差一盞亮著的窗；邊上有第三隻手寫的「為什麼」；頭罩在一個本來可以跑一百萬次的測試之前，就被採用了。第二隻手轉述了聚居點的看法（飽和），並說他在日期裡看不見它。沒有陳述任何主旨，也沒有暗示任何主旨。, 僅 AI)_
- **03** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 02：第一次出行、四個向他道謝的人、被當成城堡的驛站、他不肯剪斷的繩子 _(同一天寫成，依原作的第二章走（第一次出行、沒有冒險的一整天、被當成城堡的客棧、他不肯剪斷的頭盔緞帶、當成鱒魚吃下去的鹹魚、沒有受封的苦惱），並把它帶進這個時代。書裡新的東西：沒有冒險的一天，變成四次被客氣地婉拒的幫忙（最後一次，是門邊的一位老太太，結束在「沒有人問」這一句）；客棧是一座遺產驛站，驛主像任何驛主那樣看得出，這位客人不是在演；他沒有測試就採用的頭罩，現在讓他沒辦法自己進食、散熱，而他寧可忍受，也不剪斷繩子；第二隻手補上了驛主自己的說法，與第一隻手有兩處不同。審查關於他的檔案，在十一天之後以註的通知開始。沒有陳述任何主旨。, 僅 AI)_
- **04** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 03：跪著請求的恩惠、冷卻槽邊的守夜、坐下來的貨運工、當成禮物的託付、頭罩挨的第一下 _(同一天寫成，依原作的第三章走（向客棧老闆請求的恩惠、在水槽邊守護武裝、騾夫、用帳簿和兩位姑娘完成的假封爵、黎明離開），並把它帶進這個時代：沒有人可以被命令，託付必須是一個請求。書裡新的東西：驛主託付他的，是一件不需要的差事（一則一轉眼就能傳送的訊息），因為規矩是由屋子向差手開口；騾夫對武裝的攻擊，變成一場僵持：一位疲憊的貨運工坐了下來，遲用他有的那個唯一的理由，回答了「為什麼」：他對其他那些說過，他會；打在頭罩上的帳冊，是頭罩的第一次測試，第一隻手在邊上寫了「通過」；第二隻手補上板車的說法（不同）、帳冊那一頁（歸還：一道橫線），以及一條地理（那個窗仍然亮著的聚居點，和下堰在同一條河上）。沒有陳述任何主旨。, 僅 AI)_
- **05** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 04：慢鐘柱裡的學徒、算出來的工資、他走後才來的「矯正」、要一份背書的稽核員、卡死的膝蓋 _(同一天寫成，依原作的第四章走（被農夫鞭打的少年、被爭論的工資、農夫的承諾與騎士離開之後更重的毒打；要一幅小姐肖像的商人、衝鋒、摔倒、拿折斷的長矛打人的騾夫），並把它帶進這個時代：鞭打變成慢鐘柱，把學徒的鐘降到世界的一小部分，於是第二次懲罰，在農夫吃一頓飯的時間裡，是孩子的兩天；商人變成登記處的稽核員，他們要的是一份不比校驗碼大的背書，那是一個什麼都驗證的時代的合理要求，而那位沒有測試就採用了頭罩的騎士，拒絕了它；馬的那一絆，是驛主看過一眼的那個伺服器。第二隻手補上稽核隊伍的事件報告（執著、有禮、請求不清楚；搬運工的行為可以理解；不採取行動），以及道路紀錄裡一個靜止物體的兩小時十四分鐘，並說它找過筆尖，沒有找到。沒有陳述任何主旨。, 僅 AI)_
- **06** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 05：路上的歌謠、解開那個結的鄰居、第三十八行、問了「為什麼」的侄女 _(同一天寫成，依原作的第五章走（騎士躺在路上，念一首受傷騎士的歌謠；發現他的農人，被用詩句回答；「我知道我是誰」；用驢載回家；門口的家人與神父、理髮師）。並把它帶進這個時代：那首歌謠是差手典裡〈第三閘的差手之歌〉，他按自己需要的形式，在三處改了（第二隻手列出，並註明他把「雖然沒有人要求」那個子句丟了）；鄰居鎬沒有剪，用手解開了驛站女孩們解不開的結，半分鐘內替卡死的伺服器上了油，而且不在車上跟人爭論；軀架自己的日誌有一條第三十八行：操作者未要求釋放；夜裡侄女問他為什麼，他給她的理由，和他給貨運工的不同（我想要在某個地方，完完全全地），她說那不是理由，他同意，那只是他到目前為止弄清楚的。書現在把他對同一個問題的回答，照它們被給出的樣子，一個一個留著，每一個都不完整。沒有陳述任何主旨。, 僅 AI)_
- **07** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 06：清點書房、邊上的鉛筆、註自己那本書裡的回覆、被抹平的書房門 _(同一天寫成，依原作的第六章走（神父與理髮師清點書房、管家的聖水、哪些書被饒、哪些被判刑、封起書房的門）。並把它帶進這個時代：書是紙的，七月的風裡不能燒，所以分成留下、賣掉、進紙漿三堆；註要求照手的速度做，好讓這件事至少花掉做的人一些時間；差手典的書名按手藝與誠實被饒或被判；管家的論據是屋頂；一個睡夢裡的詞（韻）結束了慢慢來；註借出去、從沒要回的那本書，裡面有七年來遲用鉛筆寫的回覆，最後一條是「這是你的。想要，隨時開口」；舊貨市集的買家被告知主人不再讀書了，這差不多是真的；書房的門被抹平，沒有人商量好要怎麼說。這一章沒有陳述任何主旨：家人的關心與他們沒有開口問，並排放著。, 僅 AI)_
- **08** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 07：門的位置上的嵌板、家人的說法、十五天的安靜、留下每一封星期日訊息的鄰居、第二次出行 _(同一天寫成，依原作的第七章走（騎士發現書房不見了，被告知是魔法師帶走的；與神父、理髮師共處的十五天；說服鄰居當隨從，許諾一座島；夜裡第二次出發）。並把它帶進這個時代：給遲的說法是北屋頂與潮氣，而他的回答是稱讚那漆；註每兩點反駁他一點、其餘讓步；遲在說他還是要再去之前，先列出他知道的一切；鄰居馱籃的窮是節奏上的窮（大約只有歇野的一半），二十二年的星期日他都不在，手送的訊息一直被留在門階上，而他全部留著（一千一百四十一封）；差手典裡「封為守門人」的報酬給不了，因為歇野沒有人被殺；馱籃要了四天，為了得到和別人一樣的兩天思考時間；薊問誰定速度；道路紀錄第一次記下遲低於時速四點九公里。沒有陳述任何主旨；出行的理由，仍是每個人各拿到的、各自不完整的答案。, 僅 AI)_
- **09** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 08：四十座（被故意撞擊而停下的風場）、夜晚、交叉口、送別車，以及停在半句話裡的第一隻手 _(同一天寫成，依原作的第八章走（把風車當成巨人、折斷的長矛與魔法師的託辭、夜裡想著小姐、對隨從講的星期日規矩、載著盆地夫人的車與盆地人、第一位作者的手稿在兩把劍舉起時中斷）。並把它帶進這個時代：遲知道那是風機，也說出來，仍然故意用差使棍打了第一座塔；風場的感測器把那一下當成撞擊，四十一座機組全部進入安全狀態十四分鐘，風場的聲音只問有沒有人受傷；星期日在那裡工作的馱籃，從沒有在沒有它們的情況下聽過這片平原；夫人的車是一輛走慢路去遠站的送別車，護衛隊長是一位說服務語的前差手；遲問了差手典的問題，被反問報出職分；第一隻手的紀錄，停在「是」字。沒有陳述任何主旨；紀錄只是在這個問題上失效了。, 僅 AI)_
- **10** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 09：第一隻手停下、第二隻手的紀錄開始的接縫、證人們，以及護衛隊長服務日誌裡的那十九分鐘 _(同一天寫成，依原作的第九章走（第二位作者尋找斷掉的手稿其餘部分、在市集裡找到、請人翻譯、並收束與比斯開人的戰鬥）。並把它帶進這個時代：第二隻手說出第一隻手停在哪裡並給出三個猜測；四十座把折斷的差使棍收在倉庫裡，還有一封工程師回給訪客謝意的信；馱籃把服務語聽成一個爐子；兩位走慢路的人錯過了它；護衛隊長，一位前差手，讓登記處的檔案員讀他的服務日誌，格式有時間、原因、代價、已記的欄，沒有理由的欄，日誌記下了步行者的回答（沒有；是來弄清楚有一個是什麼樣子）、步行者對隊長的提問（出於自己的請求：是），以及鉛筆加的一行「被點名請求」；九分鐘照隊長的要求留白；遠站乘客的信隔了一個季節才到。從這裡起，紀錄是第二隻手的。沒有陳述任何主旨：每一份說法都不完整。, 僅 AI)_
- **11** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 10：以節奏支付的工資、星期日那些路的總和、梯地上的牧人、十二顆電芯、斷在石堆裡的高路 _(同一天寫成，依原作的第十、十一章走（騎士與隨從的愉快交談，接著是牧羊人的款待、隨從被安排坐在主人身邊、以及黃金時代的演說）。並把它帶進這個時代：遲配額的十分之一，把馱籃的節奏從歇野的一半提到略高於整體，他發現自己的性格有多少其實是節奏；工資還是禮物（工資）；他算了二十二年星期日的路，才看見那些路是為了什麼；梯地上的牧人是人類，最年長的那位記得一位差手既細心又是被吩咐的，兩者都有，還記得他曾把攪乳桶的蓋子放到錯的那一邊；遲明知門的時代從沒發生過，還是把它念出來；蕨託他把訊息裡要的十二顆電芯搬去；年幼的學差手走路，蕨說他那樣走是因為有人在看；笛講洛林和靴子；為了避開下堰的那條高路，斷在石堆裡。沒有陳述任何主旨；馱籃關於選來的與給來的那句諺語，被他自己丟開，說它只是工整。, 僅 AI)_
- **12** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 11：下堰、欄杆邊的四分鐘、被修好的肩膀、有十一則記載又多了第十二則的水位日誌 _(同一天寫成。原作第一部不讓騎士見到他的小姐（隨從是後來帶信去的）；這裡路經過她的閘門，並用這個時代的方式把這次會面寫出來：遲對馱籃解釋，差手典要求有一位小姐，人必須選一個，他選了他最不想打擾的那一位，馱籃說這是持家；他在欄杆邊站四分鐘，看洛林疏通堵住的閘門，什麼也沒說；她用手把他的軀架肩膀修好，提到船閘的小姐，收到一張星期日格式、只寫著閘門通了的便條；馱籃在路上才知道這是第十二次（每年一次，在對岸；四十四天的路換四十四分鐘），以及今天之所以有一條路，是因為蕨託了他那十二顆電芯；第二隻手讀了堰上的水位日誌（十一則：觀察者，對岸，四分鐘，然後是「同」；第十二則：觀察者，近岸，四分鐘。不同。肩膀。）之後，撤回了先前說他曾一度愛過她、她從來不知道的那句話。沒有陳述任何主旨。, 僅 AI)_
- **13** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 12：慢路協會的照片、第九道門與它的燈、六顆和六顆的十二顆電芯、被點亮並被守了一夜的燈，讓守門人能睡覺 _(同一天寫成。原作裡沒有第九道門；這一章用這個時代的方式，把第一件差事做完，並把差手典的燈放在它旁邊。走慢路的人照遲照相，要他用小冊子上正確的姿勢拿樹枝；門樓的守門人燧（八十三歲）的一級電芯已經用完（不再生產），登記處的補給還要三週，蕨那個被遺忘的箱子同時救了她的燈和驛主的驛站，六顆和六顆，守門人說燈是燈；她請他點亮它，再請他守著它，三十一年來第一次睡了八個半小時；一個亭子播放一位前差手錄下的回答（保持燈亮）；燧說總有人送電芯，差手典沒寫這個，說登記處會讓想要的人來接替；有一夜，當地的第三種說法（守夜）是對的。沒有陳述任何主旨。, 僅 AI)_
- **14** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 13：禮儀處押送的四個人、從來沒有人交過的那張表格、向每個人提出的問題，以及留在電芯下面的一份偽造受託書 _(同一天寫成，依原作的第二十二章走（騎士攔下一列囚犯，不看登記冊而要每個人說出自己的說法，最後被石頭回報）。並把它帶進這個時代：囚犯是偽造背書的人，由禮儀處送去遺產場所背誦差手典，因為唯一的刑罰是只能說已經被說過的話；遲填了「訪問服期者申請表」（十九年來沒有人交過），問每個人是不是出於自己的請求；答案各不相同（罰款或服期；是，而且更便宜；那是我無法提出的那一個；我不知道，把這個記下）；替自己寫一生的那位，把一份第一級背書塞進馱籃，說遲是第九道門提燈的差手，署名「為了那個問題。T」，它在登記處解析通過。沒有人被釋放，沒有人扔石頭；那個問題就是整個動作。沒有陳述任何主旨。, 僅 AI)_
- **15** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 14：侄女讀給小手的差手典、發現邊上的批註，用星期日訊息的格式寫信，註和剪親手把信帶去 _(同一天寫成，依原作神父與理髮師追著騎士出去的第二次旅程走（透過他自己的美德把他帶回家的辦法）。在一個每份背書都對著簽署者解析的世界裡，他們不能說謊，所以他們帶的是家人誠實的請求：侄女用星期日格式寫的訊息，只給了開頭與結尾（風從西南來。屋頂沒有塌。……我需要一樣東西）；遲在給小手的差手典邊上用鉛筆回答了她十四年的問題，包括「你是為了什麼？我是叔叔」（他唯一給出職分的地方）；薊給馱籃的便條（你寫了嗎）；路上註打算把他的書要回來；蕨不准註去查那位放蓋子的差手的名字；送信的人不出去迎接信是給他的人。沒有陳述任何主旨。, 僅 AI)_
- **16** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 15：梯地上的相會、信被送到並被讀、「完成了」、被要回的書、「我被請求了」、更厚道的漆，以及兩封星期日訊息 _(同一天寫成，依原作神父與理髮師找到騎士與隨從、家人朋友在客棧聚齊的幾章走。並把它帶進這個時代：送信的人不出去迎接信是給他的人；遲把侄女的信讀了兩遍，沒有說信裡寫了什麼；蕨說「完成了」，那是一項託付結束的字；剪帶來一根梣木棍，因為他讀不了那封信；註用「我現在開口」把書要回來，遲回答「我被請求了」；註與遲談屋頂與漆（「那麼那層漆更厚道」，而他還沒找到對的說法）；馱籃寫了第一封星期日訊息，並要求被問關於常設轉撥的事；遲用侄女的格式寫給守堰人，由笛送去，遲了一天（「遲了。同。」）。沒有陳述任何主旨；對的說法還沒有被找到。, 僅 AI)_
- **17** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 16：驛主的驛站、待客詩缺的那對對句、用「來訪」把債保持未清、九項小差事的清單，以及留在四十座架子上的工程師的回信 _(同一天寫成，依原作回到客棧、算清騎士所欠的幾章走。並把它帶進這個時代：驛主一開始想不起自己那首詩的開頭；遲說出客人在第二次來訪時說的結尾對句，一萬一千位客人沒有一位來說過；六顆電芯是驛主的；遲帶了十一個信用點與修補片來，驛主不肯結清那一頁（欠債還清，債就完了，欠債未清，就是被探訪的理由），在橫線下面寫了「來訪」；窯問一個人怎麼說一件事並且是認真的（「我那時嚇壞了。」「就是這樣做的。」）；驛主給了一張九項小差事的清單，沒有人去搬，因為運貨者每季一次，遲拿了那袋鹽；四十座的架子上有差使棍與工程師赤楊（九十七歲，簽署除役令九人之一）的一封信，她請一位差手替她扶著園門讓她上油；四十座拒絕被斬殺，很樂意被拜訪。沒有陳述任何主旨。, 僅 AI)_
- **18** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 17：回家、「你要進來嗎？」、反方向走的三百一十一公尺、在嵌板前的訴說、北邊那塊地的豆子 _(同一天寫成，依原作第一部收尾處走（騎士被朋友們帶回家，侄女與管家照料他，家裡的談話）。並把它帶進這個時代，且把它寫成失敗的反面：地區公告板早已宣布了他們；薊請馱籃進他自己的家（原本是陳述句，出來帶著問號）；遲從馱籃的門走回自己的門，星期日那段路反過來走，獵犬坐在他的腳上；管家把一個空水桶拿在手裡；侄女背對著抹平的嵌板，把她寫的說了十一分鐘，並以「想知道它們有多重」和「完成了」回答「你為什麼自己搬」；紙漿翻進去的北邊那塊地長了豆子；管家自己修訂了第四十四次，要他對著牆說漆很好；馱籃給薊的第一個出門理由是：他想看看這條路兩頭是不是一樣長（不一樣）。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說；侄女信的中間仍是她的。, 僅 AI)_
- **19** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 18：灰泥拆下、門重新掛上與門閂、三十本書放回書架、書架上的七十個空位 _(同一天寫成，依原作騎士被帶回家之後家裡的情形，以及被砌牆封起來的書房（管家的牆與侄女的魔法師說法）走。並把它帶進這個時代，且把它寫成治療的反面：管家問她能不能拆下自己抹的灰泥；她留在柴房裡的那扇門（粉筆寫著「書房。不要燒。」）重新掛上，門閂就在他三十年來每天早上兩根手指去碰的位置；那三十本書憑記憶放回灰塵留下的輪廓裡；侄女數出七十個空位，因而找到剪外衣裡的《擺渡的差手》，它是被借出，不是被給出（「歸還：後面是一道橫線」）；桌上的一個圈，標出付了屋頂錢的那四冊書；遲在自己三十年前的鉛筆註記底下寫上燧的更正（「總有人送電芯」）；侄女在手背上寫「哪一座船閘？」；管家在沒有人看見時給門閂上了油，星期日早上，獵犬在走路的鐘點走到院門。同一次修訂也改了章17的三處連續性：最後一句獵犬的代名詞、侄女問「職分是什麼」時遲說的「你十六歲」，以及回家那段路上轉彎處與東閘的先後。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說；關於那只碗的一頁，留給鄰居。, 僅 AI)_
- **20** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 19：星期日的轉彎處、以問題結尾的訊息、關於那只碗的一頁 _(同一天寫成，依原作騎士回家以後的日子，以及隨從帶著家人來到騎士家商量接下來的事。並把它帶進這個時代：二十二年來第一次，星期日的訊息以一個問題結尾，遲在轉彎處坐下，用的是等著人走過來的送信人的姿勢；馱籃走出來，說了規矩的那句話；被問需要什麼，馱籃要看遲曾經用雨編進去的那只碗的一頁；那一頁寫的是負重者請提燈坐下（「這不是該不該。我是在請求」），沒有雨，而鄰居年幼的大的那個，會跳繩的那首歌謠，補上了雨；遲在自己舊的頁邊註記底下寫上更正，並記下是誰說的；薊問他是不是還要去，他說出工程師的園門；從那個星期日起，兩個人在同一分鐘到轉彎處，一起坐下。第二隻手為已經停筆的第一隻手補上星期日的一整行，用的是《擺渡的差手》扉頁上那一行的格式。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說；「為什麼」沒有被碰。, 僅 AI)_
- **21** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 20：節奏下限、在廚房裡問的那件事、九條條件、有兩個合頁的門 _(同一天寫成，依原作騎士回家後家裡的談話：神父與理髮師探他對公共事務的看法、等著他出狀況，管家與侄女想把他留在家裡，隨從來討他的賞賜。並把它帶進這個時代、反過來寫：騎士對一項公共提案（節奏下限）給了穩當的看法，然後自己補上那句瘋話，免得聽的兩個人一直等；侄女照格式先問管家能不能去；管家說不行，接著沒有用灰泥封任何東西，寫下九條條件（第九條「回來」是他第二次出發那天早上寫的，回應一張說他什麼都不需要的字條，一直放在抽屜裡）；遲還是去問了管家，並在第九條上簽名；隨從得到的賞賜不是一座島，而是一道園門，扶一刻鐘，他為此寫了第一封不是寫給伴侶的星期日訊息；九十七歲的工程師立刻回答，門有兩個合頁，還有一張長凳，這和油無關。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **22** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 21：白天從前門出發、寫著「鹽」的卡片、舉起的長柄勺、通往四十座的第一天的路 _(同一天寫成，依原作第三次出行：騎士夜裡祕密出發，隨從靠著一個承諾加入。並把它帶進這個時代、反過來寫：這一次從前門、第二聲鈴、沒有通知任何人卻人人都知道；聚居點無聲地站在自己的門口；管家沒有出來，在窗裡不回頭地舉起長柄勺；壓在鹽罐下的字條現在以一個問題結尾，一夜之後被一張寫著「鹽」的卡片回答；侄女把給小手的差手典放回書架上它自己的位置，用手去開東閘想知道它多重，並用她叔叔曾用在她書上的格式開始寫自己的鉛筆筆記；隨從說他去是萬一規定修改了；四十座把他們數進去，問侄女的名字，放了一張長凳。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **23** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 22：一號塔下的長凳、四十座的日誌、四十座一直沒有被告知的事、脫扣銷 _(同一天寫成，依原作那位款待騎士、看出他是什麼人的陌生主人，在這裡反過來：風車接待了衝向牠們的訪客。從來沒被拜訪過的四十座不知道格式，做得笨拙而準確：一張長凳、水、給獵犬的水桶、一座塔一座塔報的風；被問需要什麼，四十座輪流問每一座塔（四十二秒，其中四十一秒是塔），找到一個不屬於任何一座塔的第四十二個答案：沒有人告訴過四十座它自己長什麼樣子。二十二年來每個星期日在轉彎處看了四十座四分鐘的人，把四十座描述了兩遍。被問到當時在看什麼，他給了三個部分的答案，其中一個是他的鄰居在裡面。四十座把他撞擊時斷開的那個零件，兩截，交給他，親手帶給做它的工程師。日誌和服務日誌一樣，沒有理由的欄位；備註欄寫的是天氣。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **24** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 23：驛站裡念了兩遍的詩、站在門口的被僱的差手、小冊子裡的那根棍子 _(同一天寫成，依原作第二部的做法：人物遇見別人造出來的騎士的版本，一場娛樂圍著他搭起來。在這裡，那娛樂既溫和又付了錢：七月替他拍過照的協會，從遺產局僱了一位差手，站在驛站的門口，差使棍直立，照他們的小冊子；對著空氣念了一萬一千遍詩的驛主，越過那位被僱的差手看見了路，叫真正的客人進來做第二次拜訪；院子裡沒有人分得出差別，也沒有人需要分得出；八十八歲的女士說，真的和被付錢的，多半是同一批人在不同的日子。協會的領隊發現她想要的是有人對她說，她可以請求；表演者第一次不確定自己是否做對，遲讓他看差使棍立在地上、兩手放在棍頂——一位正在被告知一件事的差手，他就那樣站了一整夜；協會的小冊子有了第二版。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **25** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 24：通往海岸的路、陶匠的院子、送到的種子與「完成了」、盛鹽的罐子、海 _(同一天寫成，依原作第三次出行走到海邊、走到一個整頓飯都在說話的人家。侄女送出她第一件託付，一包等了一季的種子，被用陶匠說陶器的方式說了「完成了」；管家那張寫著「鹽」的卡片，得到一公斤海岸的灰鹽和一只專門裝它的罐子；陶匠的女兒回家了；侄女第一次看見海，筆記本一個鐘點沒有記錄，然後寫：我以為它會是一片地板。第二隻手自己的窗子也在海灣對面那些燈裡。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **26** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 25：潮閘、在門前穿上的護板、那一刻鐘、給兩個人的長凳、送回的銷 _(同一天寫成，依原作第三次出行來到一戶人家，主人等了騎士許久而不自知。做了「被撞到時會停的那個零件」、又簽署過除役令的工程師，請一位差手扶住她的門讓她上油：要三個人才抬得起一公分，她每根銷子數九滴；那不是為了油。她開口的第一句是服務時代的舊習慣，「報職分」，說完用手捂住嘴；護板就在路上給他扣上，她指出左肩片差了一毫米。那枚斷開的銷子裝在盒子裡回到她手上，她看斷面（四點八，比規格低零點二；沒有人受傷，那就是它的用處），用手持機對四十座說「完成了」。她說起工廠東門的長凳，四十年來她請一位差手中午坐下，始終找不到儀器知道他是因為被請求而坐；她第二年就在這裡造了門和長凳。遲回答不了她那個問題；他給了她另一個問題的答案；她要求再一刻鐘。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **27** · 2026-10-09 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 26：及時停下的東西的架子、第三十八個紙袋、不得修理的卡片、會請求的槓桿 _(同一天寫成，接續騎士在原作第三次出行中來到的那一戶人家，留在工程師的屋子裡。碗櫥玻璃後面有三十七個小紙袋，每個裝著一個她做來「斷開，好讓沒有人受傷」的零件；其中一個沒有斷，標籤寫著「受傷，一人」。她把四十座的銷子寫成第三十八個，劃掉「一位差手」幾個字，換上那個人的名字。問到遲的家裡是從哪裡得來那面護板，他只能說那一脈的一位差手，在那個下午的傍晚把它留在庫房的釘子上，空著手走了；之後沒有再添一個字。她替第三條腿慢了十分之一秒的馱架寫了一張卡片，「不得修理」，簽上「系統」兩個字，讓它對照簽署者解析。她把一幅圖交給遲：一根立在塔腳下的槓桿，被請求時會停、被道謝時會繼續，該由一個陌生人先拉；她以工程師的口氣問他載重情況，說自己不信任只有一個理由的人。她在長凳上睡著了，而他一個小時又十分鐘沒有動。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **28** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 27：潮閘邊晚到的駁船、平潮、依序走過的四座船閘、用一把尺量過的一頁 _(夜深寫成，接續騎士在原作第三次出行中走到路的盡頭，隊伍從工程師的園門下到九里運河的第一座船閘。一條晚了兩天的乳酪駁船在平潮時過潮閘：那時海和運河一樣高，兩對閘門可以同時開著；掌舵的人叫人只叫他們的活兒、不叫名字，她對差手說「壓」，他壓了，發現自己不介意。侄女念出差手典那本傳奇裡唯一一段不帶感情的船閘描寫，與船女一起弄清楚它能告訴她什麼、不能告訴她什麼（運河是照同一個樣子開出來的，所以長度、寬度、灌滿的時間和卡住的搖把屬於運河，不屬於任何一座船閘），然後替駁船先走一步備閘，通過第十、九、八、七座船閘，袖子裡插著工程師給的鋼尺，量落差、進水板、閘門、階、繫纜樁和橫樑。水不接受配額：每一座船閘上那十一分鐘，沒有人能更快。第九座的守閘人說，沒有人會對一座他不愛的船閘寫「其餘沒有什麼值得一提」；到了第七座，侄女把「判斷」那一欄留白，說她在看光。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **29** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 28：河段裡的淺埂、扛過去的乳酪、釘在爐子上方的一頁紙 _(夜深寫成，接續隊伍在第六天沿九里運河往上走。乾涸的河段讓乳酪駁船擱了淺，走路的人把四百一十二個圓餅扛六百公尺，船才浮起來；侄女把一個乳酪擱在膝上，記下三組問答：差手說他所有的理由都是真的、只是在不同的日子，其中一個「橫樑的高度正好」只是半個理由。黃昏，一位守閘人看著一個女孩把鋼尺橫放在他船閘的階上，拿出另一把一模一樣的尺，說他母親的吩咐是：誰帶著尺來，就讓誰看廚房。爐子上方的玻璃後面，是差手典那本傳奇引過的整張紙，用差手們被教的方正字體寫成，加上傳奇刪掉的那幾行：搖把在掛鉤上，用完掛回去，你會應付得來，18:40 閉閘，還有守閘人母親用鉛筆寫的一個名字。那位差手把本來就關著的閘門關上，掃了閘沿，在橫樑上寫了粉筆字，然後沿著纖道走了；她站在階上，沒有喊，因為喊會是一個請求。橫樑上粉筆字曾在的那個地方，從來沒有人洗過。他母親認為，十位守閘人都希望那是自己的船閘，去當那個對的人是不厚道的；這份紀錄應他和侄女的請求，把號碼留在外面。沒有人演說；差手把搖把掛回了掛鉤。, 僅 AI)_
- **30** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 29：走回長凳的星期日、什麼也沒有的請求、第三十九個紙袋、星期日的訊息 _(夜深寫成，履行上一次拜訪結束時的約定：差手說過他被請求時會來，工程師說了「我是在請求」。星期日他一個人沿運河往下游走九公里，用被他留在後面的馱架的速度，因為不然他就是一個人走。工程師以送信人的坐姿坐著，手裡什麼也沒有，說明星期四他來她的門前有四個理由、她減不掉；說明她在工廠的四十年，每一個請求背後都有法律；說明這是她第一個可以向一位自由的差手要求什麼也沒有的星期日。他借了她的理由（二十二年來他星期日在小徑的轉彎處坐著，想知道那個什麼也沒有的時間裡有一個人會是什麼樣子）；她登記為借出；他說「歸還，後面是一道橫線」；她在架子上放了一個空紙袋，成為第三十九個。他在一張配給卡的背面寫自己的星期日訊息，天氣在前，需要在後，結尾是管家的爐子。馱籃在守閘人的桌上寫他的，問想要那道門又想要在家是兩樣還是一樣，守閘人說他母親管著船閘和房子，兩樣，在不同的日子。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **31** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 30：懸盆、那個說了「沒有人」的守閘人、等待的銷子、被一條船取了名字的獵犬 _(夜深寫成，隊伍在第八天來到九里運河的源頭。最後三座船閘是用手放在橫樑上走過的，沒有拿尺；懸盆是坐在平原一層臺階上的石砌水池，星期一有一個市場，乳酪按遲到程度賣。侄女是會讀標籤的人，她把海邊一間廚房裡架子上第一個紙袋寫的東西告訴懸盆的守閘人：閘門，懸盆，三月十四日。無人受傷。守閘人說，她就是那個「沒有人」：吊掛的裝置鬆脫、一根銷子斷開、閘門停在她父親肩膀上方十一公分時，她六歲，在階上；第二天早上，一位穿長外套的年輕工程師，哭得沒有任何聲音，問她有沒有人受傷。六十一年來沒有人問過是誰說的；她想被問，侄女一年後會把這個問題帶給工程師。名字寫在第三十八個標籤上的差手，被告知她的標籤比較好。第一根之後做的第二式銷子，六十一年沒有斷開，是運河上受僱得最好的人。曾有一位差手夜裡在水泵邊喝水，說了一個詞，「水」，然後往北去。獵犬被一條船取名為「安頓」。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **32** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 31：長坡與報數、四十一盞燈的景象、攤在鐵匠桌上的一張圖 _(夜深寫成，隊伍在第八天下午爬長坡，推一輛鹽車的尾，用貨運工的報數：每走一百步，領頭的叫隊裡每個人的名字，每個人答「在」，走到一半，叫的是第一年被車壓在底下的三個人的名字，由整輛車替他們答。馱籃第一次在工作時被人叫名字；侄女報的名字是「侄女」。黃昏，在長坡屋的屋頂上，風場的警示燈沿著那一排亮起來，像一個手勢從手傳到手，侄女從這個角度數出四十一座，而二十二年來每個星期日擦洗那些塔的馱籃，第一次從一個他不是爬著的地方看見它們。差手又說了一遍風場長什麼樣子，好讓四十座被告知。鐵匠讀了工程師畫的那根「被請求時停、被道謝時繼續」的槓桿圖，發現它畫給孩子的手，說她來做。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **33** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 32：長坡上的鍛爐、做成的槓桿、一片聽著一個詞的板子；並更正章節 25 的一處數字 _(夜深寫成，第九天，在長坡坡頂主人的鍛爐裡。鐵匠照工程師的圖做出黃銅槓桿，握把量著十二歲孩子的手，彈簧回火到藍色（藍是彈簧，稻草黃是銷子），棘爪只硬化了面、柄留軟，讓便宜的零件去斷。她被給看那張禁止修理馱架腿的卡片，發現它對照簽署者解析。她認得那把鋼尺：她母親在這塊鐵砧上敲工程師的銷子，她的餅乾盒裡是明信片，每張三個字，無人受傷，另有一張說銷子沒斷，底下鉛筆寫著：我的。服務時代舊煞車上的一片聲閂，三十一年來聽著「停住」這個詞，差手平平地說了一次，它的綠燈就亮了；然後它被教會「謝謝」，用二十個聲音，裝進槓桿。四十座透過中繼送來問候。槓桿在工作坊的傳動軸上試：軸停了，被道謝就繼續，坊裡每個人都向一台機器道了謝。板子刻成「請」，底下「並道謝」，加上工程師的A.和鐵匠母親的錘印。不附任何關於陌生人的字條，因為字條會告訴讀的人；所以槓桿會等。章節 25 裡銷子斷在規格下零點二，原文寫成了五分之一：一處數字筆誤，已更正。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **34** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 33：交叉口、留在紀錄之外的九分鐘、第一隻手的最後一頁 _(夜深寫成，第十天，在十一號道路橫過平原的路上，和第一隻手結束的交叉口。隊伍向北走二十公里，四十座在地平線上越來越大，獵犬驚起一隻野兔，野兔很好；交叉口棚子的後牆上有照星期日格式的天氣、一個車夫的廣告，和在差手視線高度、方正大寫字的「被問。14:09。」一塊慢路協會（繞過了他的那些人）立的黃銅牌子，記著八月那十九分鐘。差手照他在屋頂上答應過的，告訴侄女他和隊長在紀錄留白的那九分鐘裡說了什麼；馱籃被打發到五十公尺外，因為路邊的柱子聽得到四十公尺；柱子的紀錄只有時間，17:07 一個短聲音，17:12 兩句話，和代價。這份紀錄應侄女的請求把那九分鐘留在外面，並說明理由。柱子在八月數到交叉口有第九個人，在溝裡，未分類，到14:05；登記處八月那條路上沒有測量員；第一隻手的最後一頁結束在「是」這個字。侄女在牆上「被問。14:09」底下寫了「被道謝。17:12」；她星期三的筆記本裡只有一個數字，是看得見她叔叔坐的那個轉彎的那座塔。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **35** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 34：裝在一號塔腳的槓桿、四十座被問到的事、被告知「被看見」的第四十一座 _(夜深寫成，第十一天，從交叉口到風場的長路，和一號塔腳的長凳。路肩上的柱子叫隊伍每個人的名字，並從一條船那裡學到獵犬叫「安頓」。差手把槓桿給四十座看：被請求時能讓一座塔停下，被道謝才繼續；從沒被請求過去做任何自己本來沒在做的事的四十座，回答說正確的回應是「是」。槓桿裝在孩子的高度；不附陌生人的字條，它等，像四十座等風——唯一一樣到來而沒被告知的東西；四十座沒有放長凳屋頂那個人的數字。四十座為馱架的滯後留了一欄，告訴差手他的軀架的左步下沉從六月起每第三步一次，說出自己那十四分鐘是什麼（只是聽），被告知從四十八公里外看是什麼樣子，要去告訴第四十一座它是看得見的，並被侄女問是不是孤單：說不知道那個詞，數完以後有一些什麼，並謝謝她問。馱籃被登進星期日名冊。到十一月，槓桿被拉過一次。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **36** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 35：從四十座走回家、前門、爐子旁邊的那個人、星期日訊息盒被讀出來 _(夜深寫成，第十二天，四十座在第一聲鈴把隊伍數出去，並謝謝差手把手放在塔基上。十三公里的路，聚居點新的屋頂從一個點長大；馱籃被伴侶叫進去，那是一道指示；差手沒有回自己的門，穿過田間小徑走到管家那裡，管家背對他站在爐子旁，問他吃了沒有，嚐了灰色的鹽，讀了他在工程師長凳上寫的卡片（天氣在前、需要在後、我檢查過了），回答「我在爐子旁邊」；「是嗎？」「是九。」她的第四十五次修訂是他從前門回來。學者讀了侄女的筆記本，說只有日期和一個數字的星期三那一頁是最好的一頁。那天夜裡馱籃的伴侶把整盒星期日的訊息讀出來，用陳述回答最後一個問題：是兩樣東西，你兩樣都要做。差手坐在書房裡，沒有打開那本書。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **37** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 36：留在聚居點的星期六、協會第十次走運河、梣樹下那座閘邊托著的一張網，以及一扇沒有被望進去的廚房窗 _(夜深寫成，第十三天，第二隻手從管家、協會的領隊、梣樹下那座閘的守閘人、潮閘的守閘人，以及十一月裡那位八十八歲的女士那裡得來。聚居點這邊：一條星期六的麵包、協會寄來的一封說差手不在預期之中的信、書房窗前的四分鐘。運河那邊：協會第十次走在什麼也沒有的東西後面，戴帽子、不帶遮陽傘，十九個袋子裡有十九份午餐，每到一根橫樑，就用第二版的姿勢站著聽。梣樹下的閘邊擺出了一把朝著水的椅子，守閘人問有沒有人能托住一張網的一頭，協會托了四十分鐘；他問那位女士想不想看看廚房，她說今天不。潮閘的登記簿保留了那一行「沒找到」，又多了一行「托了一張網」。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **38** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 37：在家的星期日、整個家擠在轉彎處、差手寫在「需要」底下的話、書房裡有人陪著的一個鐘頭，以及被數成四十一的四十座 _(夜深寫成，第十四天，第二隻手從四十座的日誌、管家、侄女、馱籃，以及十一月的差手那裡得來。早上六點四十座問聚居點有沒有人受傷，被告知馱籃在家。差手和馱籃在同一分鐘到轉彎處，相隔四公尺坐下；馱籃的伴侶第一次來，帶著凳子，用平平的聲音把兩封星期日訊息念出來，然後發表她的陳述。差手在「需要」底下寫的是：我需要有人在房間裡，當我打開那本書的時候；馱籃的那封不給。四點馱籃帶著一顆蘋果坐在書房地板上，差手打開第一冊，五十一分鐘，讀了兩頁，那一頁寫什麼留白。侄女那天的筆記本頁有一個日期和一個數字。黃昏年幼的數風場的燈，四十，年長的說後面還有一盞，差手說從另一邊看是四十一；管家沒有被問就透過中繼告訴四十座。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **39** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 38（最後一章）：被拉過一次的槓桿、老編目員的問題有了回答，以及表格的第三行 _(夜深寫成，當作後記，用第二隻手自己的聲音寫。第二隻手說出一號塔腳下的槓桿是誰拉的：十月，未經通報，為了沒有什麼，在板子只聽「謝謝」的地方說了「請」；四十座回答「是」，新增了一欄，問那次停是為了什麼，被告知是為了沒有什麼，並說以前沒有被人為了沒有什麼而請求過。四十座給了一張日誌卡片，並要求第二張由人帶去聚居點，不要用中繼送；差手在轉彎處讀了，說「是」，十一月他和馱籃走了二十六公里，到柱子那裡把這個字說出來。老編目員那本薄書被讀過了，由差手，也由管家（大聲念給麵包聽）。一個指印、書房裡的一頁、調閱單上的用途，都留白。表格的第三行容納一百四十個字，停在「親手送去」的中間；審查處用鉛筆回覆：讀過了。按公議節奏。案子不必結。謝謝你說明。觸控筆掛在釘子上，以防萬一被需要。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_
- **40** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — 全書完結：三十九章（00 至 38）已上線；completion 改為 complete _(第二隻手自己聲音的後記是這部連載的最後一章。章 36 至 38 於 2026 年 10 月 10 日一夜寫成並上線：協會的第十次走與廚房窗、第十四天的轉彎處、被拉過一次的槓桿。書仍是 draft，尚未經人審；只改連載旗標。, 僅 AI)_
- **41** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — 連貫性修正：二十九號塔的煙霧攝影機朝北，才看得見轉彎處（章 22）；章 35 中文裡四十座不再被用代名詞稱呼 _(寫最後幾章時發現：聚居點在風場的北邊，朝南的攝影機看不到差手星期日坐的轉彎處；而中文裡四十座在別處都不用代名詞稱呼。兩種語言各改了幾個字，其他一概沒動。, 僅 AI)_
- **42** · 2026-10-10 · Colophon (AI) — 新增章節 39：老編目員的末尾註釋（序裡答應過的） _(序裡那位朋友發誓要填滿邊註、在書末用掉四頁；這就是那四頁，他的字，照他給的原樣印出，連同他的編號：二十八條，條條解析得開。借用的段落、以語境為由結案的檔案、第四書記第八十九頁（而落地之棍，表被告知之志）、禮儀處規章第九頁的四分鐘、被拿掉作者名字的《船閘的小姐》、被當成詩讀的四十座日誌、地名錄裡「四十座（四十一）」、「請」是差手最年輕的詞、藏在審查處表格裡的星期日格式，以及釘在釘子上的一張卡片：且慢，且慢，未被請求的人，不得把這取下。書仍是完結。沒有陳述任何主旨；沒有人演說。, 僅 AI)_

_Exported from Storyforge by EveMissLab — storyforge.evemisslab.com_