85: Year's End

The week between the third charter scout and the year-end ran at its own pace.

That is the most accurate thing I can say about it. It was not a slow week or a fast one. Tuesday seminar ran; I sat in the third row and listened to Doctor Mu describe gas chromatography calibration procedures in the way he described all procedures — methodically, without drama, as if the world would benefit from more people who understood calibration. He set us an optional applied-coursework module for the winter-recess break. I worked through it Wednesday morning at the desk in A-7, the dorm quiet around me, the building's heating system making its periodic knock every forty minutes like a polite reminder that the world had not ended overnight.

I found these empty recess mornings useful. There was no seminar, no lab, no shift. The desk existed as a surface and I sat at it and worked and the hours passed without needing to be managed. The applied module was straightforward — calibration tolerance bands for low-concentration environmental samples, a subject that Doctor Mu had been circling for two sessions and which I had, by the second session, already understood well enough to answer most of the questions before I reached them. I answered them anyway, correctly, and wrote out the reasoning fully. The work of showing your reasoning is different from the work of having it. I was better at the first than most people my apparent age. I had had more practice.

The Friday morning shift was the empty pod-12 again. Manager Fang gave me the small envelope at 11:30 and then, before I could pocket it, cleared his throat.

"Three things on the side ledger," he said. "One: the Beijing-pipeline handler-rotation calendar's winter-recess week — Sister Lin's lateral-promotion window is at its quiet point. Two: the Pingjiang-Road suit-gentleman is, by the Hu-Xiaodu-internal rotation, at winter-recess leave to the Suzhou-eastern-county field office. Three: your father called the shop telephone Thursday at 4:42 PM IRL. He asked me to confirm to you that Doctor Yan's December thirtieth weekly check-in confirmed the blood markers held at the four-month-flat. The winter-recess weekly will be at January seventh."

I said: "Thank you, Manager Fang."

He said: "Thank your father."

I wrote the entry in the Suzhou-cotton-paper notebook before I left the cafe — standing at the counter because that was where I was when I remembered I needed to write it, and there was no sense walking six blocks to sit down for something that took fifteen seconds: *December 30, 2014 — 4:42 PM IRL — Manager Fang (relay from Father) — three minutes — Doctor Yan, four-month-flat held.* Eighth entry.

Four-month-flat. Four months of blood markers that matched what they needed to match. My father didn't comment on the results when he called — he relayed them through Manager Fang to me precisely because commenting on them was not the kind of thing the 1992-Pingjiang-Road-kitchen-table-education's holding protocol asked of a father who was still at the western chair with the Suzhou paper. He held. The markers held. We held.

***

The Wednesday December thirty-first ran.

I worked through the morning at the dorm. Ate the small lunch — rice, the last of the week's garlic, hot water from the kettle. Slept from one to three the way I'd trained myself to sleep in the first life, when the schedule demanded it: flat on my back, alarm set, no pillow under my head to trap heat. Made the small early dinner.

At 7:00 PM IRL I called the Pingjiang Road family flat from the slab phone.

My mother picked up on the second ring.

She said: "Cangtian."

I said: "Mother. Happy end of 2014."

She said: "Happy end of 2014. Your father is at the kitchen window. He has been there since 6:30." She paused. "He is, by his own judgment, at the father's-watching-window seat the 1992-Pingjiang-Road-kitchen-table-education's holding-protocol asks the father to take on year-end-day at the seven-PM call. He will not, by his own judgment, come to the phone this evening. He has, by his own Saturday-morning-acknowledgment from the western window on November twenty-ninth, given his year-end signal."

I thought about my father standing at the kitchen window in the grey sweater, watching the Pingjiang Road lane in the cold December dark, doing the thing the protocol asked of him: being present in the right place at the right time so that the absence of disaster could be witnessed.

"All right," I said.

She said: "Xiaoyu is at the end-of-fall-term-exam-set debriefing at the Pingjiang-Road auntie-network's Tuesday-night Number-Eight-Lane teacher's flat. She — by my own Wednesday-meeting-third-row-table relay — earned the 89th-percentile in the mathematics-and-language-and-civics composite."

"Mother," I said. "Tell her I am proud."

"I will."

She was quiet for a moment. In the background I could hear what I thought was the kitchen clock, though it might have been the building's heating. Then she said: "Cangtian. The year — by the Pingjiang-Road auntie-network's Wednesday-meeting third-row-table's December thirty-first count — is the year the 1962-Pingjiang-Road-cadence-line came home. Walk safely into 2015."

I said: "I will. Walk safely into 2015, Mother."

She said: "Goodbye, Cangtian."

I said: "Goodbye, Mother."

The line went silent. I set the slab phone on the desk and sat with it for a long minute. The dorm room was very quiet. The desk lamp made a pale circle on the notebook I hadn't opened yet. Outside the window the city was assembling itself toward the turn — not loudly, not yet, but with the specific restlessness of a city that knows midnight is coming. The heating system delivered its periodic knock, right on schedule.

Through the thin window I could hear the distant sound of someone setting off small fireworks early, which people did in Hangzhou starting in mid-December regardless of what the city ordinances said.

Then I picked up the phone and called Mrs. Su.

She picked up at the second ring.

"Cangtian. Walk safely into 2015."

"Walk safely into 2015, Auntie Su. Tell Mr. Su I am thinking of him at the western chair this evening."

"He is at the western chair," she said. "He has, by his own Sunday-the-fourteenth elder-of-the-table-acknowledgment-protocol's Wednesday-watching-window judgment, been at the chair since 6 PM. He has the Suzhou paper at the seventh-page weekend section. He is at the end-of-2014 reading. The watching-window is the 28-IRL-year watching-corner the protocol asks. He is at it."

She let a beat pass, and then she said: "Wanqing is at the HZUT central library through the new-year transition tonight. She told me, by the Wednesday-morning auntie-network message, that she would work the applied-mathematics-and-civic-historical-context cross-reference set through the midnight transition at the library reading-room." Another beat. "She will, by my own auntie-network read, be at the library reading-room with her own folded copy of the Hangzhou-Six 1968-founding-formation Charter at the inside pocket of her dark coat. She will, at midnight, lift the coat-pocket charter to the library reading-room's dim light for the one-second civic-historical-context-acknowledgment the 1968-Hangzhou-Six convention's year-end-charter-acknowledgment-protocol asks."

I held that.

I knew, in a specific and functional sense, that the Hangzhou-Six charter had been folded to fit in a coat pocket forty-six years ago by a mathematics professor who was twenty-seven years old at the time and who had, by her own account, spent the previous three months establishing whether the regulatory pace of the continental civic-historical context could be read — really read, accurately read — from the inside of a university seminar room in 1968. She had concluded that it could. The protocol she built around that conclusion included, among other things, a requirement that the charter be lifted once a year to the nearest available light and acknowledged.

I found this, as I sat in the dorm room on December thirty-first, genuinely moving. Not in the performed sense — not the way you perform being moved because the story asks for it. The actual thing: a pressure behind the sternum, quiet and specific. I was nineteen years old and carrying five years I hadn't lived yet, and I still found it moving. Some things survive the weight of foreknowledge. This was one of them.

"Auntie Su," I said. "Thank you for telling me."

She said: "Don't thank me. Carry the line into 2015. Goodbye."

"Goodbye, Auntie Su."

The line went silent.

I set the slab phone on the desk. I went to the pod at 10:30 PM IRL.

***

In-game, the Greenleaf Inn private second-floor room at 11 PM was lit by Wenqing's year-end candle-array — twenty candles in a four-by-five geometry, arranged to cover the 25-place-setting table without shadowing the western wall mural, which depicted a generic fantasy mountain range with the kind of confident mediocrity that characterized the game's environmental art in the low-level zones. The candles rendered at full flame-physics fidelity. This was a small luxury the engine reserved for interior lighting events.

Twenty-five at the table: eleven *Severing Light*, twelve *Yellow Plum*, Old Wolf at the corner closest to the door, Mother Plum at the head, Iron Plum at her right.

Mother Plum stood at 11:42 PM IRL with the porcelain wine cup.

She said: "Bladeless. Wanqing — at the HZUT central library reading-room with her own folded coat-pocket Hangzhou-Six 1968-founding-formation Charter — Old Wolf, Iron Plum, *Severing Light*, *Yellow Plum*. The 1962-Pingjiang-Road-cadence-line is, by the long-table dinner of November seventeenth and the kitchen-table sitting-transfer of November twenty-ninth and the elder-of-the-table acknowledgments of December fourteenth and the Mrs. Pan naming-event of December seventeenth and the Mei Yulan permanent civic-affiliate arrangement's first operational-test-scout of December twenty-eighth, at the four-civic-line intersection at *Severing Light*. The 2014 closes the intersection at this long oak table. The 2015 will, by my own 1962-Pingjiang-Road-cadence-line second-pair-carrier judgment, open at the Continental Qualification Round One registration on Sunday January eighteenth."

She paused.

"Drink."

She drank. The 25 drank.

The bonded-thread visualization on the in-game-pod-display widget brightened — the 11:42 PM signal from the HZUT central library reading-room, Wanqing lifting the folded coat-pocket Charter to the dim overhead light for the one-second acknowledgment the convention asked. The same moment, across the in-game and out of it, across the distance between the library and the Greenleaf Inn's private room.

I watched the visualization settle back to its resting state and did not say anything.

The midnight transition rendered at 12:00 AM IRL Thursday January first.

Yu Tieshou said, in his tank-officer register: "We are ready, Bladeless."

I said: "We are ready."

Old Wolf at the corner: "Thirty-six IRL months. The Continental Three opens in 2017. The intersection holds."

I said: "It holds."

The 25 began to leave at 12:14 AM IRL. They went quietly, the way people leave a room where something real has been said — no lingering, no performed sentiment, just the steady movement toward the door.

I logged out at 12:14.

In the dorm room A-7 the new-year cool came in through the small window. The slab phone on the desk had no new messages. Outside, the distant fireworks were closer now — the city permitting itself what it had technically prohibited.

In my chest the second voice — *four-month-flat* — was quiet. The first voice — the old counter — said:

*The year is closed. The 1962-Pingjiang-Road-cadence-line is at the four-civic-line intersection. The Mei Yulan operational-test-window's first scout passed. Mrs. Pan named herself. The 1962 line came home. 2015 opens at the Continental Qualification Round One registration on Sun Jan 18. The intersection holds.*

I closed my eyes.

I slept into 2015.