Chương 62: The Price List

It took him two more days to find, and he was not hurrying. In the end it was a directory board under a covered way. White letters slotted into black felt, the kind where somebody stands on a stool with a box of letters to change a line. The sixth line down had the word on it that had been on his kitchen wall since he was fourteen. Abe stood in front of that board in a stopped street for a while. Then he went and found the street it named, and stood at the end of that one too.

The building was long and low and clean, four floors, with the top two set back. There was a ramp up to the doors, and a woman halfway down it with her coat over her arm. Her face was doing something Abe could not read at all. Behind her one of the doors was propped back against the wall with a rubber wedge. He went in. The lobby had a desk with two people behind it and eight people waiting on blue chairs. There was a laminated sheet in a frame on the wall by the elevators. It was a price list.

Abe stood in front of it in a stopped room and read the whole thing, top to bottom, twice. Assessment. Two days. A figure beside it that was about a month of Peg. Stabilization. A figure four times that one. Under it, a line saying the course cannot begin until this holds for ninety days. Course of six. The big one. Then the footnotes, in type half the size, and the footnotes were where it stopped being a list and started being a wall. Residency required for the duration. Twenty two weeks. The patient lives here.

Transport not included. Two words, and a note underneath about approved carriers and a schedule available on request. A course stopped partway does not part-refund and does not part-treat. Abe went back up to the top of the sheet and read the first line again. Assessment. Two days, and a figure that was about a month of Peg. He had that in his coat more than ten times over, in notes, standing there in a stopped lobby at four in the afternoon. He could buy it today.

He could walk up to that desk with the world running and put it on the counter and buy the first line on the sheet outright. Then he went and read what was on the desk. There was a folder open on it, and a book of dates. Clipped inside the cover was a printed schedule with the approved carriers on it, and two departures a week. The patient attends. It said that in three separate places in three different sets of words, because it was the sort of thing people tried to get around.

Abe stood there with the money in his coat and worked out the shape of it. He could pay for it. He could not get his sister into this building. He had thought about the other way of having money. He had stood in a warehouse in December with nine days of food in his arms and thought about it all the way through. There is no pile of two million marks anywhere for him to walk into. Every mark of it goes across a desk in this building, in June's name.

Somebody writes her onto a list, and she stays on that list for twenty two weeks. Openshaw had stopped him at six cores because six a week went through that hall and nobody asked. Forty meant paperwork with his name in it. This was a desk that would want all of it, and it would want to know where every mark had come from, with June's name at the top of the form. Forty one miles, on a carrier, twice a week, for a girl who had bad days and worse ones. Peg would have to know all of it, and be asked to say yes to it.

Peg's job started at seven. The cheapest line on that whole sheet cost four hundred marks and a conversation he had been avoiding since October. The number at the bottom of the sheet was the number off the wall in his kitchen. He had thought about that number every day for four years. June had written it on the list in green pen, at the top, above the doses and the electric and the shoes. She had drawn a face next to it with its tongue out. Two million marks.

He had said it to himself on a marsh and on a road and on a hummock in the dark. It had always been one number, sitting on its own at the top of a list. It was on a wall in Manchester with a footnote, and the footnote said the number had never been all of it. Twenty two weeks of somebody living forty one miles from home. A carrier off a schedule, twice a week, in winter. Peg's job was in Calder and so was the rent.

Abe stood in that lobby and it came out bigger than the number he had spent four years being frightened of. Then he did one more sum and it stopped him where he stood. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Somebody has to be here. Twenty two weeks of somebody in this city, in a chair beside a bed, on the days that go well and the ones that do not. Peg could not.

Peg had nine hours a day standing up in a school kitchen forty one miles south of that ramp, and a rent that did not care what was wrong with June. He went through who that left. It left him. Then he added up what it would actually take, and the number was so small he did it twice to be sure. Nine hours of his own legs each way. Four minutes of anybody else's afternoon. He could sit in that chair every day for twenty two weeks and be home for dinner every night of it.

Nobody in Calder would know he had left the room. Abe stood in a lobby with a price list on the wall. Every line on it had a figure beside it except sitting in the chair, and sitting in the chair was the only part of the whole thing he could actually do. Everything else on that sheet had a number, and every number had just gone up. Money was not going to be enough on its own. It was still the only line on that sheet he had ever managed to move. He went up.

The ward was on the second floor and the doors were propped open with a wedge. Six beds. Four of them had people in them. One of the four was a girl about June's age, sitting up, halfway through saying something to the woman in the next bed. She had a book face down open on the blanket to keep her place. On the wall by the ward door there was a rack of charts, clipped in with the top sheet of each one facing out. Abe read down the whole rack. Most of it was in a shorthand he could not read at all.

What he could read was the same thing on every single sheet, in the same box, with a date beside it. How many weeks in. Two of the four people in that ward were past week fifteen. At the far end there was a room with a window in the door, and Abe looked through it. There was a table, and a woman on the table, awake, with her head turned to one side. Five people stood around her under a machine on an arm. One of them had a hand on the woman's shoulder and was in the middle of saying something to her.

Another was watching a screen and not the woman at all. A third had both hands up and still, waiting, the way Riddell waited with a blade over a stone. He stood at that window a long time. There was plenty in that room to take, and none of it was worth carrying out. He had stolen nine days of food out of a warehouse. He had taken a crate of dying tins out from under a table, and a whole book out of a library in his head. He was better at it now than he had ever been at anything in his life.

He could put that entire building in a bag and it would not do June one bit of good. What was in that room was five people, awake, doing something to a woman who was awake, over weeks, with her lying still and letting them. All of it needed the clock running. All of it needed somebody to say yes. The one thing he actually wanted was the only thing on Earth that could not be done to a person who was not there. He watched them a while longer and then went back along the ward.

On his way out he stopped at the girl's bed. She was halfway through a word. Whatever she was telling the woman in the next bed, she had been telling it a while. The woman had her head propped on one hand to listen. There was a photograph taped to the bed frame up at the top, where she could see it lying down. A dog, and somebody's legs, and a bit of a gate. Week fifteen, on the chart at the end of the bed. Abe stood in a ward in Manchester and looked at a girl he had never met. She lived here.

She had lived here fifteen weeks, and she was in the middle of telling somebody something. He was not going to remember her face. He had stopped arguing with himself about that in December. Her face would go where Ray Garbutt's name went, and Mrs. Ellery's, and there was nothing to be done about that one either. So he stood there and looked at her for a while longer than he needed to, which was all he had. Then he went down the stairs and out through the open one and did not look at the price list on the way past.

The woman was still on the ramp with her coat over her arm. Abe stopped in front of her this time and looked at her properly, and her face was not doing anything complicated at all. She had been in that lobby. She had read the same sheet. He had walked up this ramp forty minutes ago and could not have read her face. He could read it now, though, and that was the only thing about him that had changed all afternoon. He worked for eleven more days after that and did not go back to the building.

Realm 1 · KINDLED · Mind 5 Foundation: 1, 900 / 2, 500 (Mind 6) Seven hundred and sixty more points off the last of the reading, and he read the number on the floor of the locked hall with a lot burned down to nothing beside him. He had gone home once out of the middle of all of it. Ten minutes in his own kitchen, because Peg had asked him to be in for Sunday dinner. Forty one miles each way cost him a night and most of a day of walking, and nothing at all off the clock in that kitchen.

"You look tired," Peg said, and put more on his plate.

"You haven't had anything green since Christmas," June said.

"I have."

"Name it." He sat at that table with two people who thought he had been out since breakfast. He did not say one word about a laminated sheet in a lobby forty one miles north. He did not go home for the Monday. The fifth of January was the first morning of term. Every senior in Calder walks past the pad in the cultivation corridor that morning and it reads them, and Nita has the whole year up on the board in green marker by lunchtime. Three days before, on a bank outside Prescot, Abe had counted the days to it.

He spent it forty one miles north on the floor of a locked hall with a tin open beside him. He could have gone. Nine hours of his own legs, and he would have been in that corridor before the bell and back before the lot finished burning. Then he thought about the number itself, and what it would actually do when it landed. It would go on a wall. Two hundred people would look at it. Danforth would look at it a long time. It would not get him past a tired man on a chair on a ninth floor.

It would not put one mark on the sheet downstairs in this building. It would not get June onto a carrier. So he stayed where he was and opened the next lot. He came out of the market hall on the last night with his bag packed. He stood on the bridge over the river and looked back at the towers. Seven weeks of his own days in that city, and six days of the world's. He had a book in his head and a Mind bar that had moved for the first time since autumn.

He had coming up on six thousand marks, a certificate he could not get, and a stall holder's name on a piece of paper. He had seen the outside of the thing he wanted, and a laminated sheet with a footnote on it. None of it was going to arrive any faster than it was arriving. Gault pays six hundred a month now and a school board pays nothing at all. Six hundred a month gets you to two million in two hundred and seventy seven years. Four gray cores had gotten him twelve hundred and forty marks in three days.

Six more had gotten him eighteen hundred and sixty across a counter in one morning. One green one had gotten him four thousand in a morning, and a woman in a cardigan had asked him twice where it came from. Abe turned that over on the bridge and did not like himself much for how fast the answer came. The reeds were the shallow ground outside a small city. They were the bit the crews worked on a Sunday with a school kid on the boards. Out past the reeds the water got deeper.

The things in it got worse and the cores got bigger, and everybody knew that too. Cottle talked about the deep channel like people talk about weather in another country. Abe stood on a bridge in Manchester with the whole stopped world under him. Forty one miles south was a girl who would ask him on Monday whether he had eaten anything green. Then he worked out how far out he could go. Openshaw had said bring me more, and had not asked how. Somebody else had been asking, though.

Somebody had gone to that stall before Abe ever walked into the hall and wanted to know whether a boy had brought in a green core. Openshaw had said no, and had not said who was doing the asking. Abe had asked him three things standing at that stall, and not one of them was that.