Chương 36: Their People

They called him for the reading at half past twelve, and Priya Sandhu caught him in the corridor on the way.

"A sheet of paper and two hours and nobody talks to you," she said.

"My first year I cried in there. I've told about four people that and you're the fourth, so." The last room had a table in it, a chair, and one sheet of paper turned face down.

"Reading and working," said Prentice.

"Two hours."

"You've already read my Mind. It took four seconds."

"It did, and it told me what you are at half past ten this morning." Prentice squared the sheet up on the table.

"Nobody on this circuit is buying what you are at half past ten this morning. So I give you somebody else's mess, and I shut the door, and I find out what you do when a thing beats you."

"And if it doesn't beat me?"

"Then I've given you the wrong sheet." He was already at the door.

"Do not sit there being brave about the last page." Then the door shut, and Abe turned the paper over. A salvage report from a crew he had never heard of. Four drawings of a winch frame, two sets of load figures that did not agree, and a question at the bottom asking which drawing was wrong and why. He knew the first one, because he had worked two Sundays under one. By the third he was going back over the same four lines and getting nowhere. Abe sat back and looked at the door.

It was not a rule about rooms and it never had been. His heart would not slow down while somebody could see him, and a door that might open was nearly the same thing. This door was not going to open, and Prentice had told him the exact minute that it would. He counted himself down, and it took about fifty seconds, and the room went out like a switch. The dust that had been coming down through the high window stopped where it was and hung there.

There was a fly on the inside of the glass with its wings flat and one leg up, not going anywhere at all. Abe got up and walked around his own table in a stopped room. The sheet lay where it was with every word showing, and he could not have shifted one corner of it for a hundred marks. So he got down on his elbows with his face six inches off the fourth drawing. He had all the time there was. And the fourth drawing went on being wrong, and he went on not knowing why.

He worked it until the working stopped going anywhere. Then he let go, and the fly moved, and the dust came down. Abe sat back down older than he had stood up, holding a pencil, with nothing written on the page. That was new. Up to today, everything that had ever stopped him had stopped him because he did not have enough hours. He had just spent hours on one sheet of paper and the paper had not cared at all. So he did it the ordinary way, badly, one line at a time, with both hands in his hair.

He got it at about the ninety minute mark. He wrote something wrong about the third drawing and sat looking at what he had written, and the fourth one came apart while he was looking somewhere else. The load figures were not for that frame. Somebody had copied a page out of a different job. He said a word out loud in an empty room and did not notice he had said it. Then the bar filled. He got his own screens up to watch it happen.

The Mind bar had been sitting twelve points short since ten o'clock that morning, and it stopped being a bar with something missing out of it and started being a bar that was finished, and it did not make any noise at all doing it. Abe laughed at the ceiling of a stranger's exam room with a pencil still in his hand. Prentice came in on the two hours and found him on the floor, sitting cross-legged against the wall with his eyes shut and the paper finished on the table behind him.

"Ah," said Prentice. Abe heard the door and kept his eyes shut. Getting up now would throw the whole thing away. He had been settling since he was eleven, though this was only the seventh time it had ever mattered. He heard the door go again, and Prentice saying something in the corridor in a voice he had not used all day. Then he stopped hearing anything, because it started. It came down through him the way it always does.

It was warm, and much heavier than warm ought to be, and it started up behind the ribs and went down slow. It took twenty minutes. Mind Layer 3 → 4 Mind 3 → 4 When he opened his eyes the doorway was full and the corridor behind it was fuller. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! The whole floor had come. The woman with the clipboard, the boy from up the coast with his thumb strapped, the man in the tracksuit.

Priya Sandhu was on the radiator at the back with her shoes off, and her coach was standing behind her, in out of the car. Gault was at the far end with her pen capped, which Abe had worked out by now meant she was pleased. And Piers Danforth was in the corridor with his coat already on. He had placed ninth that morning off three years of coaching and two evaluations before this one, and he stood there and watched a boy from his own school go up a whole layer in an afternoon, and then he went.

"Stand on the pad," said Prentice. So Abe walked out through the middle of them with his legs still full of it and stood on the pad. It took four seconds. Nobody cheered. The coaches all did the same thing instead, which was look at the screen and then look at Abe.

"I have been coming here for two years," said Priya Sandhu, loudly, from the back. The man in the tracksuit laughed at her, and then the whole corridor went. Abe stood on a rubber pad in a converted swimming pool an hour from home and let himself be exactly as pleased as he was. The girl with the marker changed one line on the long board while about thirty people watched her do it. 5 DOLAN, A. · Calder · Realm 1 · Layer 8 · Body 7 · Mind 4 Still fifth.

He had gone up a whole rung in a stranger's exam room in front of four coaches, but he was in exactly the same place on that wall. The four above him had gone through a door and he had not, and nothing he did today was going to move that. Down the other end Priya Sandhu was in front of the board again with her coat on, reading a wall she had already read twice that day. Abe read his own row twice and found he did not mind as much as he had expected to. Eight.

Two months ago he had been a boy on ones at the bottom of a corridor board with a dead man's paperback in his bag. The mats were at the far end where the shallow water used to be. They had started at two o'clock on the sixth of December, which Abe had known about since half past ten, and they were still going when he got down there. There was a woman at the side of them with a folding chair and a flask. She had not moved all day, and Abe knew what she was for now.

They gave him a boy from Millbeck first, who had watched him take a layer an hour earlier and came on being polite about it. It took four seconds. Abe's back foot set itself, and the boy's guard was in the wrong place before he had finished deciding where to put it, and then the blade was flat across his forearm and Prentice said stop.

"Again," said the boy from Millbeck, which Abe liked him for. It took four seconds again, off a slightly different line. This time somebody on the benches said something out loud and somebody else laughed at it. Then a girl from Ketton, who was quicker than him everywhere except the one place he had drilled. Her Talent was that she knew which way a person's weight was going before they had finished putting it there. It had won her nine bouts that year and it was a horrible thing to come up against.

It did not do one thing for her. She read his weight perfectly both times, and both times her feet were still in the wrong place when the blade arrived.

"I could see it," she said, sitting on the mat.

"I could see it and I couldn't get there." Then she laughed at herself, and Abe liked her enormously. By the third one there were people standing at the back. Abe had spent five years being the boy nobody watched, and here he was on a mat in a city that was not his with forty strangers turned around on their benches. He was not frightened of it at all. He wanted the next one. Then Prentice looked at his card for a while.

"You're wasted on these," he said, to the card and not to Abe, and went down the list past three names to Sturrock. Sturrock was eleventh on the board and three inches shorter than Abe, and his family have been doing this since before the wall went up. Abe knew inside the first exchange. The opening went exactly as it always goes. His back foot set without being asked. His weight was off it before Sturrock's front hand had finished moving, and the blade got to where Sturrock was going to be and arrived there first.

It landed. It landed properly, flat and hard across the ribs, on the line he had cut in the dark until his shoulders quit. Sturrock took it, and stepped in, and did not stop. What happened after that was that Abe never got another one. He went to set his feet again and there was already a blade where his feet were going, so he did not put them there. He backed off to take the middle and the middle was gone, because Sturrock had walked into it while Abe was still deciding to.

He tried the thing Croft did with his hips and got it about half right. Sturrock came around the outside of it without appearing to hurry. He went for the disarm, the one Croft had shown him in November, and got it clean, and the blade did not come out of Sturrock's hand. It did not even shift. Sturrock's Talent was that a blade did not leave his hand, ever, and Abe worked that out inside one exchange and stopped spending anything on it.

So he went for the wrist instead, and Sturrock let him have the wrist and took his elbow, which Abe had not known was a thing a person could do to somebody. It was not fast. That was the part he could not get over afterward. Everything Sturrock did was slower than what Abe was doing, and all of it arrived first. The room had gone quiet in a way Abe could hear from inside it. He put Abe down twice. The second time Abe stayed on the mat and looked up at the ceiling of a converted swimming pool and started laughing.

"You all right?" said Sturrock, from a long way up.

"Yeah." Abe took the hand and got up.

"Do it again." So they did it again, and it went the same way, and Abe lost about as badly as a person can lose to somebody polite. He found him afterward by the water jug.

"How do you do the elbow." Sturrock thought about it while he drank. He had a scar on his chin and he was in no hurry at all, and there was nothing in his face that was pleased with itself.

"You put your weight on the wrist he's given you," he said.

"And then it isn't really about the elbow."

"Show me." So Sturrock showed him, twice, slowly, with the cup still in his other hand. Abe did it back and got it wrong in a way he could not have put a name to.

"Yeah," said Sturrock, and he said it kindly.

"It isn't one thing, it's about nine. The first four take a year, and you need somebody standing there telling you which bit you've got wrong. My uncle did mine. His dad did his."

"Right," said Abe.

"Where do you train?"

"A yard." Sturrock waited for the rest of it, and then understood that there was not any more of it. Abe watched a boy who had never once had to think about it try to find something to say.

"Well," said Sturrock.

"You've got a horrible first four seconds." Then somebody called his name from the mats and he put the cup down and went. Abe found Prentice by the door with the card still in his hand.

"Where do people get the rest of it? The nine things."

"Somebody's uncle, mostly." Prentice did not look up.

"Or you pay a man to stand there two afternoons a week for four years. There are about seven in this region who teach it properly."

"How much?" Prentice told him. It was more than Gault paid him in a month, and it was two afternoons a week, and Abe stood there and did the sum twice because he did not believe it the first time.

"That's about the size of it," said Prentice.

"You asked." Abe went and got his bag out from under the bench, with a bruise coming up along his forearm and the whole afternoon going around in him. He had beaten two people that day and he had learned one thing. There were nine of them, and he now knew exactly where a person goes to get the other eight, and exactly what it costs.