He wanted to tell him how much he loved him, but, try as he might, couldn’t seem to find the means of doing so. Each time their paths crossed – in the corridor, on a shift – each time their eyes met across the mess table or they found themselves next to each other in the queue for scrip – there was a flash of something that might, if nurtured, have bloomed into an opening. Each time he grasped for that moment and each time it was gone before he could close his hands around it. Then he would turn his head away, jam his hands in the pocket of his apron and shuffled away to the counter without saying a word, leaving the man with the long braids and the thick eyelashes standing alone, silent.
It was an equation quite unfathomable.
The problems to which he was accustomed could be broken down into their component parts, analysed, processed. If it could be solved, one would solve it; if it was impossible, one could prove it so and discard it. This was something else; an extra-ordinary entity, an exception. This was so huge and impenetrable he could not comprehend its extent; it was so small he could hardly see it with the naked eye. Most frustratingly, he could not shake the feeling – less an intuition, more a superstition – that the problem was not impossible after all, but quite within his reach. He had only to take it. And that was what he simply could not do.
At any rate, he had left it so long now that what might have once been spontaneous had turned bad, stagnated, turned from an affirmation into a confession. And as any citizen knew, confessions were not something you give willingly. They were something that’s extracted from you, surgically, by professionals.
Which is where the Coordinator came in.
“And your sister? How is she?”
He sat on the chair that had been provided for him, made from something which looked like Bakelite but wasn’t. It creaked when he fidgeted, as though it was about to crack right down the middle. He tried not to fidget.
“She works in the Telecommunications District. She keeps fish.”
The Coordinator looked at him from behind the terminal. She did not appear to be typing or tapping or interacting with the computer in any way; he suspected it was a prop, that the people who cared what he was saying in this interview had other ways of finding that out. “How unusual. Are they edible?”
“No, they’re cosmetic.” Hastily he added: “Not to sell. It’s just a pastime of hers.”
“But of course they are not to sell. She has no permit.” The Coordinator blinked once, twice, and he wondered if she was being told something he was unable to hear. “But I didn’t want to know about fish. Do you see her often? Is she well?”
“No. I don’t know.” He fidgeted, and the chair creaked. He sat on his hands. “I saw her at the Day of Gratitude, last. And she writes.”
“And you do not write back.” It wasn’t a question.
“I don’t like writing.”
“No.” Another pause; this one was longer, the instructions, maybe, more elaborate. “You like living here, in the Stairwell.”
“Yes.”
“And you like your little maths problems.”
“Calculatrix.”
The Coordinator looked up. “Pardon?”
“Calculatrix. It’s not maths, technically. It’s applied topomancy.”
“Of course.”
“They’re quite different, you see.”
“My apologies. You like your calculations, and you are – as you say here – quite content with your accommodation, your duties, and your allowance, which have remained unchanged for almost three years.”
“Yes.”
Quite suddenly there was a key change; a shift up by a major third. He knew himself not to be attuned to such things but he recognised something had changed in the mood of the room. The Coordinator pushed the terminal to one side and steepled her hands, looking directly at him.
“I have good news. Your calculatrices are renowned. The Arch has decided you should be rewarded with something which will allow you to accelerate your work, for the benefit of all citizens.”
He stared.
“You are to ascend the Staircase and begin working at the Apex.”
There was a pause. He heard himself say, “But I don’t want to.”
The Coordinator looked at him. “Don’t want to what?”
He had a moment of vertigo at the magnitude of this moment. He understood, rationally, that his time in the Stairwell was of a chapter of his life that was now over. Now the unknown loomed before him in dizzying complexity, as though he had opened a door expecting to see a room but instead finding an endless chamber filled with blinding light.
Already a part of his mind was enumerating it and measuring the phase space. At the Apex he would be exempt from shift; he could concentrate all his energies on calculatrix.
But a still larger part of him stood dumbstruck at the threshold.
The walls stared at him.
“Your ascension will take place in three shifts’ time,” said the Coordinator. “Department staff will help you prepare your things.” She refolded the computer and nodded to him. “Close the door behind you.”
As he stood that part of his brain that was plunging into his new, alien future said, you will never see the man with the long eyelashes again if you leave for the Apex without knowing his name.