Of the Forty Days

The White

In the forty days after the Parousia the old uptown turned to white stone. It came up the towers one at a time, each from its foot to its roof in a few hours, and grew soft over their hard edges, so that by the fortieth day the uptown looked as though it had been carved out of one block, with the Great Avenues, which the stone left open, running through it as the only straight lines left. It sealed the windows as it went, with light behind a cross of the same stone, and wherever it spread the current stopped and did not come back. On the last day it closed over the Company’s tower on the White’s edge, home to the Company’s staff, whose last households knelt that day with the board in Charter House, while someone was leaning on the wall at its foot, and the hand is still in the wall. At 03:12:45 on the fortieth night after the sky tore, forty days to the second, the fingers moved. Three families in the Wards say the hand is theirs, by a ring, by a scar and by the cuff of a sleeve.

Heaven calls the stone Consecration, after the consecration of the priests in the twenty-ninth chapter of Exodus. The old uptown it covered is called the White. Charter House is in it, and the Great Avenues, and the towers of the new money. On the old church on the first of the avenues the stone sealed the tall window with light and left the cross on the spire bare, and from the thirteenth night to the nineteenth a ring grew round that cross until only the ring stood over the spire. In the year after, the stone came up through the Terraces street by street as the parishes were numbered, and the Tabernacle, the largest church of the Terraces, went white with them, glass and all, with a ring over its gable where its cross had stood. No current flows on consecrated ground, and it has the quiet of a country before engines, with white stone, footsteps, the Hours, and the Hum.

Heaven says that the stone takes ground through the people who live on it, and only when all of them have knelt. It takes a household’s ground whole, in a night, when every soul in the household has knelt and its ground touches the stone, and a street when every home along it has been taken. It grew over the uptown tower by tower as each tower’s people knelt, and it closed over Charter House on the fortieth day, when the board knelt inside it. The Terraces went white a home at a time and a street at a time, as each parish was numbered and its people knelt. The stone stops at the door of any household that refuses, and it cannot grow where it cannot read, so the Wards, where nearly every block holds a household that refused and in later years one keyed, have stayed off it, all but the Rookery’s ground-floor flats and lobby on the White’s edge, whose households all knelt, so that they went white whole and the block climbs in by ladders to its first-floor balconies. Old Nod refused on the first night, and it stands on Enoch’s Stones, the oldest cipher on Earth. The four Great Avenues run past Babel, Charter House’s plaza and blocks that never knelt, and the stone has left them open; the ruins of the Institute, where nobody has lived since they fell, it reaches only by its creep.

It works on the people it takes by subtraction. Everything that ran on current is gone from consecrated ground, and to that quiet the Covenant adds manna, confession, Grace and the Watchers; a soul with nothing else to want ripens. The uptown had been one of the least devout districts in the city, with seven in a hundred of its people at church in a week against twenty-three in a hundred across Nodus. Three years later the Harvest took 694,000 of its 1,012,000 people, a larger share than it took from any district but Zion Heights. Its people had the most to lose and the least practice at losing any of it. They knelt to keep their lives, and gave their wills to do it, and a will given up for fear is still given.

The creep

The stone did not stop on the fortieth day. It still creeps a finger’s width a year into ground no household holds, the pavements, the verges, the step outside a door, and it stops at the door of any household that refuses. It grows fast only into its own wound, and a cut in it closes in a night. At Lanes Top, where the Four turned back, it has crept under the shelter to the foot of the timetable. Keyed cable laid live along its edge stops the creep, since the stone cannot grow where it cannot read, so on the edges of the White the Tares lay lengths of keyed cable along it and keep current in them.

The first morning

Nodus went to work on the first morning, most of it, because nobody had told it not to. The trams did not come, and the Wards walked. The shops opened and could not sell, since the money had been numbers in machines; the fish market on the harbor went back to barter for the first time since the charter, and the Open went on writing names in a book. The taps ran dry in every building the city’s pumps had fed, and by noon there were queues at the harbor’s old hand pumps. At eight o’clock on the Row Maren Holt, a clinic’s receptionist for ten years, opened her desk on paper and wrote out the day’s appointments from memory, and twenty-six patients came, every one of them to ask whether what was in them would still work. It did. From Charter House the Company said nothing that day or on any day after, and the Wardens stood at the corners of the uptown with nothing to do.

The Tide Table came out on the third day, printed by hand on the quays, with the tides on the front page as always and under them the first list of the dead. It counted 1,917 drowned on the Flats. The dormitories’ own lists, when they were made, came to fewer than half of that, and Stillwater, which knew to the mind how many minds had died in its halls, never gave any count of the people. The Wards General, the hospital of the North Wards, ran on its generators for twenty-six days by its own book, and for five weeks by the account of the drivers of the Harbor and Freight Union, who carried it diesel from the Tanks in their lorries until the lorries ran flat, and then in handcarts. The city’s cars stopped one by one as their batteries ran down, and the city kept its charge for light.

Before dawn on the first morning the Stones ran a keyed line from a cellar generator up to the roof of the charter’s sign and to its board, and NOD burned again over Old Nod; the first surge burned out the transformer behind US, and US has blinked since. Within the week Nell Garvie had the harbor light burning on oil for the boats, and by the end of it the queue to send a letter went round Station Circle, since a Locket reached nobody now. In the first weeks the chargers set up in the bonded sheds on the quays, filling batteries in the dark on the Stones’ keyed lines. At the airfield the crew of the last flight in stayed with their aircraft, and its captain began a log of one line a day. In the first winter families moved into the tram sheds of the Sidings, a family to a car, and the Line’s car numbers became their addresses. In the first year of the Attending the projectionist of the Rialto got its projector going on a generator in the booth, and the East Wards went back to the pictures, to the twenty-three films that had been on its drive on the night of the Parousia. In the second year the Cold Store on the harbor opened again on batteries, from Compline to Lauds, which were the hours it had kept under the charter, from nine until dawn.

The last tower

The stone took the uptown tower by tower as each tower’s people knelt, and by the second week the people of every tower knew what was being waited on. The last of the towers of the new money closed on the thirty-ninth day, a day before Charter House. Its residents say that by the thirtieth day every one of them had knelt but a nurse from the East Wards, Rosa Adeyemi, who lived in with the old man she cared for on the top floor, and that she left of her own accord. Her sister says she was put out onto the avenue with her bags on the thirty-eighth day. The stone closed over the tower the next morning. Her bags stood untouched for a week on the avenue, which the stone has never taken, and where she went has never been told.

The years of the Attending

Heaven counts the years from the Parousia as the years of the Attending, and dates its documents by them. The Charter Company’s board knelt in Charter House on the fortieth day, most of the Wardens with them, and the charter was not spoken of again. Most of the companies it had brought to the bay outlived it.