7: Above the Sky

3 Pluvo 712, 7:13 a.m. (V)

Jon leapt out of bed and crossed the room at a bound. He threw open the wardrobe and grabbed the first weapon that came to hand, a double-barreled pistol, then he jerked the bedroom door open and ran down the stairs.

He reached Anna’s office and slammed its door open. Anna was standing in the middle of the room with her back to him, but she wheeled around at the crash of his entry. He advanced on her, the barrels of the gun thrust at her wide eyes, and she stumbled backwards until her back hit a wall. He pressed forward until his body was touching hers, leaving just enough space between them for the gun, now held vertically. He pressed its barrels up under her chin, forcing her to look up at him, forcing her to see his anger.

Anna tried to summon her mask of indifferent professionalism — he could see her trying — but it cracked even as she put it on. Her lips trembled as tears welled in her eyes, then trickled down her cheeks.

Jon waited for her to scream. He wanted her to scream.

“Scream!” he commanded.

“I can’t breathe,” she rasped. Jon looked down and saw that she was standing on her toes. He was pressing the gun into her neck so hard that he was lifting her off her feet.

Jon felt suddenly foolish. Choking her and then demanding that she scream — how stupid! What a stupid thing to do, and what a stupid person he was for doing it. He pretended to be the world’s smartest man, but he was not competent to perform a simple act of domestic violence.

He let her go. She collapsed, gasping.

He sat down in the chair and watched her, waiting. Waiting to do what? To take revenge? No. He was incapable of taking revenge. He just wanted to purge his anger. He would make Anna suffer, and her pain would be the channel by which his anger would leave him, and then he would feel… Peace? No. Just the absence of anger.

After a minute Anna stood up shakily, bracing herself against a bookshelf. “I think I could scream for you now, sir,” she said.

She met his eye, and he recognized the expression. It was how she had looked in Cynd’s museum, when he had forced her to perform a charade she did not understand, death the penalty for failure. She was terrified, but she must be composed, because to lose control was to die.

Jon stood up and left the room without saying anything. Bitali was loitering uncertainly in the parlor. Jon did not say anything to him either. He went upstairs and lay back in bed.

A few minutes later he realized that he was still holding the gun. “Maybe it’ll work this time,” he mumbled to himself. He put the barrels under his chin and pulled both triggers.

3 Pluvo 712, 7:13 a.m. (VI)

But of course it did not work. Jon’s position in the bed changed slightly. The sheets were over his body instead of under it. The gun vanished from his hand. Otherwise, it was as though nothing had happened. 

I can’t get out, he thought, but I didn’t mean to trap you with me, Anna.

The abyss of introspection opened beneath him, and he could not escape it, because Anna was his escape route, and Anna had become a way down.

* * *

Jon’s life had been ordinary until he had died. Born in the year 677, his earliest memories were of a world already transformed by the Technological Revolution. He knew as historical fact that the Revolution had begun quite suddenly in 668 with the invention of the steam turbine, and had been codified with the Prohibition in 670. But these dates were as obscure to him as the Abbotts’ Compact in 299, or the ascension of Empress Liira in 368. To Jon’s generation, the Revolution was not a change in the world; it was simply the world.

His parents had been farmers, as had their parents, and theirs, planting legumes and herding sheep on the cold High Plains in the South of the Continent. Like most rural people, they lived near a village that was dominated (if not ruled outright) by a family of magicians. Dams were rare and expensive, and any family that had one could leverage magic into wealth and social influence. Since time immemorial, families that possessed dams had served as a sort of rustic aristocracy.

Skilled magicians could assure that a village had sufficient rain, dry silos, sharp blades, short plagues, and safe births. A village would increase in population until the power of its magicians was no longer sufficient to ease its burdens, and then the village’s children would start leaving to found new villages elsewhere.

Under this system, the Plains had quietly prospered for hundreds of years.

Then came the great famine in 667. A blight that the magicians had never seen before swept across the Continent, killing crops of all kinds. Millions of people starved. But then, as if in answer to prayers, the Emperor sent the machines, and with them new crop varieties and new farming methods. Crop yields increased tenfold in 669. Then in 670 Prohibition was declared, and the Bureau began confiscating dams. Without magic, the structure of village life collapsed.

Many villagers across the Empire attempted to resist these changes, some even staging small, uncoordinated rebellions. Jon’s parents had bowed to the inevitable. When Jon’s father found himself replaced by an autoreaper, he and his wife moved to Argintarbo, the Imperial capital, and the center of suddenly exploding industry. His father and mother both found jobs at Jaboro Steelworks, and they were both miserable. Jon was born in the tiny apartment which their combined incomes were just able to afford.

Jon’s parents both died when he was nine years old. He remembered little about them, except that they were always working, and usually in a state of bitter confusion over why so much work was necessary. He knew they missed the High Plains, but Jon had never seen the High Planes, so their dissatisfaction meant little to him. They had practiced some folk religion in their old home, but they did not teach it to Jon.

When they died, Jon went to live in Jaboro’s corporate orphanage, where he received food, shelter, basic education, and debt to the company. When orphans came of age at fifteen, they became Jaboro employees. Nearly all of their earnings went to pay their debt. Having no money, they were compelled to live in corporate housing, which incurred more debt. Most orphans worked for the corporation well into their thirties before they paid off their debt and started earning silver.

Jon followed this path, and he was happy enough on it. An unambitious boy with no particular ideals, he was comfortable in an environment dominated by clocks and bells. Adequate intelligence, sufficient strength, and moderate charm enabled him to be good enough at everything he needed to do without really trying. He labored in the steelworks during the day and whiled away the evenings playing games with other young men in the corporate dorms. And life was good enough.

When he was nineteen, he met Katerine. Like himself, she had aged into the Jaboro workforce at fifteen. Jon had grown bored with his male friends, and he felt that he would like to have a woman. When he saw Katerine, he decided that she was good enough.

When orphans graduated, they were assigned jobs according to aptitude tests, and this resulted in the Jaboro facilities being loosely segregated by gender. Men tended to work “downstairs,” where metal was cast and beaten, and strength was required to move masses about. Women tended to work “upstairs,” where tasks were primarily magical, and strength was less relevant. Katerine was taught to use magic to magnetize iron and put to work on a line making hair-fine magnetic rods that would become components of… No one on the line knew what the rods were components of…

The first real ambition of Jon’s life was to be near Katerine. With both of them living in corporate dorms, and working on different floors, there was little opportunity for them to be alone together. Getting a job where he could see her during the day seemed the only option for courtship.

Jaboro had no system of transfer or promotion, but if an employee could demonstrate aptitude for a certain job, they might be transferred by appeal to the relevant manager. Jon resolved to learn some magic so that he could get an upstairs job and be able to see Katerine — or some other woman if Katerine proved either uninteresting or unattainable. Jon used his moderate charm to convince a manager to let him practice with a dam at night, and he found that he had a talent for magic. He discovered for himself the principles of indirection and least cause. In six weeks he taught himself to sharpen a knife by sitting it on top of a whetstone and willing it to be sharp.

He sought and was granted a transfer onto the line that manufactured fine springs, which was on the same floor as Katerine’s line. Like Jon, Katerine was bored; she felt that she would like to have a man. When she met Jon, she decided that he was good enough. They were married four months after his transfer.

Like all citizens of the Empire, Jon worshiped the Divine Emperor out of legal obligation. Like most citizens of the Empire, he had few religious ideas beyond what the law required. He was vaguely aware that there were several competing sects within the Imperial cult, and several competing interpretations of how Pliigism should harmonize with it. Such speculations seemed pointless to Jon: everyone agreed that the Emperor ruled the living and the dead, and that punishment in either realm could be avoided by obeying his laws. Why worry about details?

Katerine worried about details. She found the idea of a disembodied existence disturbing, and she held to the most conservative interpretation of Pliigism, in which souls were reborn as new generations of the same bloodline, reward and punishment for one life being simply to bear consequences in the next. This doctrine teetered on the edge of heresy because it provided no clear role for the Emperor, but it fell under the umbrella of Pliigist tradition and so it was not illegal.

At Katerine’s insistence, they were married by a monk at the Temple of Arraton. They had gotten passes to leave the Jaboro campus for the day, and they walked for two hours to reach the Temple. There they bought a pair of the wedding rings that Katerine claimed were traditional. Jon had never heard of wedding rings — his mother had worn a pendant inscribed with his father’s name — but he had acquiesced, because he had not cared enough to argue.

This set the pattern for their marriage. Katerine had her way when Jon did not care enough to argue. He had his way when he did. He usually did not. They agreed on little, but their disagreements were not consequential. It was good enough.

Both of them were still deeply in debt to Jaboro, so they were obliged to move into a two-room apartment in the same building as Jon’s former bunk. Jon was content. His work was monotonous, but it was not stressful, and the workday passed quickly as he daydreamed about going home to Katerine in the evenings. Like him, she had an adequate intelligence, and she was interesting enough to talk to. But much more interesting, she had a strong sexual appetite. The first year of their marriage had consisted mostly of work, sex, and sleep. It was good enough.

They had their first real fight when Katerine became pregnant. Jon did not want the baby. He wanted to abort it — a procedure done for free at the corporate infirmary — or send it to the orphanage. Katerine needed to keep working full time, he reasoned: if she stopped working to care for a baby, they would never pay off their debt.

Katerine was adamant that she would keep the baby, and that she would raise it herself. When Jon would not agree, she became despondent. For a week, she alternated between rage and weeping. She did not work, and her manager threatened to fire her. Their apartment, which had been to Jon a place of relaxation and pleasure, became a pit of misery.

The second ambition of Jon’s life was to pacify Katerine. He did not want her to be happy. He did not understand her well enough to conceive of her happiness as a discreet goal. He wanted her to stop crying so that he could be happy. The obvious way to pacify her was to promise that she could keep the baby, but that required the corollary promise that he would earn enough that she would not have to work. To that end, Jon began to study metallurgy, and the evenings that had been spent in lazy enjoyment were consumed by dull reading.

Katerine was thrilled when the baby began to squirm and kick. Jon felt only anxiety. The birth was the first opportunity of his life for a truly consequential failure. Katerine’s growing belly was a looming deadline, and he was not sure that he would have the skill or the luck to meet it. His greatest obstacle was the lack of opportunity to actually practice metallurgy. Jaboro had engineering internships, but they were for scholars graduated from universities, not laborers graduated from orphanages. Jon grew bitter at the unfairness of it.

He did not share his dark feelings with Katerine. He told her white lies about the skills he was learning, and the managers he was making friends with.

But his anxieties proved unnecessary. About the time the baby was to be born, Jaboro began construction of a new factory building. More foremen were needed to supervise new furnaces, and Jon was offered a position based on his history free of accidents and citations. Foremen earned less than engineers, but they earned enough to maintain a corporate apartment without a second income, and that was all Jon really wanted.

Liira de Alder was born in their bedroom, with the help of two of Katerine’s friends. Jon did not know these women, and he was not sure how Katerine did, but he was glad to yield the apartment to them and loiter in the hall while Katerine labored. His only role in the birth would be to carry her to the infirmary if something went wrong. But nothing went wrong, and their daughter was born in the evening on the fourth of Semoj, 697. Katerine named her Liira, after the Empire’s one Empress. Jon thought the name was good enough and offered no alternatives.

Jon remembered the next few years as an evolution of emotions more than a series of events.

Katerine stayed home with Liira, and then with their son, Erik, who came three years later. Katerine, still indebted to Jaboro, was technically not allowed to leave the corporate campus without a pass, but this rule was not enforced for people who did not actually have jobs to do. As long as Jon made payments on her debt, and she was in the apartment at curfew, Katerine was free to go where she liked. Jon knew that she and the children were rarely home when he was not, but he had only a vague idea of where they went. Liira and Erik learned to read and write somehow, so he assumed that Katerine must teach them. They were polite, so he assumed that Katerine must discipline them. They knew that the Hunting Moon carried souls to the Judgement Table, so he assumed that she must take them to Temple.

Jon worked at the furnace seventy hours each week, but he did not feel busy. He felt passive, like silt dragged along a stream bottom. The foreman job was not difficult, and its expectations were precisely defined by the company. He had no prospect of further promotion, and no interest in it. He liked his children, but it did not occur to him that he should have any practical involvement in their lives beyond providing food and beds. He had no wisdom to give them, and he imagined no future for them beyond working for Jaboro, or one of the other corporations. All of the family’s sustenance came directly from the company, so providing for them was merely a matter of keeping his job, and that was merely a matter of following procedures. He liked Katerine, but by the time Erik was born, he found that they had little to say to each other. The playful banter that had characterized their early days became first awkward silence, and then apathetic silence. Katerine’s loss of interest in conversation was quickly followed by a loss of interest in sex, and, to his own surprise, Jon found that he had little desire to persuade her. He felt that his relationship with Katerine had been completed. He had done everything with her that he could imagine to do.

At twenty-six years old, Jon had no challenges, and no goals. He could not leave Jaboro — would likely never leave Jaboro — because of their debt. And if he stayed at Jaboro, then every other aspect of his life was determined automatically. He had no choices to make, no risks to weigh, no ambitions to achieve, no future to anticipate. The rhythm of his days was like a stasis: there was only today, which was indistinguishable from yesterday, which was indistinguishable from tomorrow. And today was spent following procedures that he had no hand in making, whose purposes he did not understand.

The modest, ambiguous optimism with which Jon had begun adult life slowly faded, and was replaced by… nothing. He felt nothing.

He had learned in the orphanage school that above the sky, up where the Moons circled, there was no air. If a man went that high, then the nothingness would suck his eyes out, and boil the blood in his veins. As the days drew out in monotonous succession, Jon’s nothingness intensified. It sucked at his heart. He felt that it must eventually reach a limit where it could not be endured. He did not know what would happen then. His ignorance frightened him.

“Do you love me?” he asked Katerine one evening, lying in bed.

“Of course I love you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She had no answer. She told him he was being stupid, then went into the other room to tell a story to the children. Jon stared at the ceiling until she came back to bed, an hour later, to lie with her back to him. He listened to her breathe and wondered why that sound had once made him happy.

Jon died the next day.

Accidents were frequent in Jaboro facilities. There were many reasons for this. Chief among them was that everything was new. Equipment and methods were updated constantly, as were the products being produced. Jon took the newness of things for granted: he had never in his life seen any manmade object that was more than fifteen years old.

When Jon had started, the factory’s furnaces had burned coal, but they had soon transitioned to gas. Then a month ago, crews had begun installing electric furnaces, and Jon had been put in charge of one. He had little idea how the furnace worked, but he didn’t need to understand. He only needed to make sure that his men followed the procedures, and these were detailed in colorful illustrated manuals.

The furnace Jon supervised had been brought online just a few days earlier. An installation crew with levers and cranes had assembled it, then a calibration crew had powered it up and melted the first batch of titanium sponge. Jon’s production crew was responsible to keep the furnace running, clean, and fed with sponge. The output of liquid titanium was poured into white ceramic molds, which were shuttled down a conveyor to cool in another room. Jon had no idea what the titanium ingots were used for; he had asked his manager, but the manager didn’t know either. This was typical. Jon never knew what he was ultimately making, and he rarely knew much about the production steps before or after his own. He knew that the sponge was made using toxic chemicals in a reaction stabilized by magic, and he knew that the ingots would be melted again in much smaller furnaces to be made into… whatever they were made into…

The only magician on Jon’s crew was a man in his fifties named Loomis. His job was to ensure that none of the ceramic molds cracked under thermal stress. Before Prohibition, Loomis had been a village magician. He rarely spoke, and when he did it was to complain about how degrading his work was, or to boast about how respected he had been in the old days. Jon paid little attention to this; old people were always angry; it was just how old people were.

Loomis’s station was just beside the barrel-sized crucible that lowered from the bottom of the furnace, and so he was the first to die when the cables supporting the crucible snapped. It happened without any sign or warning. One moment the heavy vessel was slowly descending, as it did several times per shift, and the next it was swinging sideways, its shining contents splashing and then pouring out onto the floor.

Loomis was covered. His body burned to ash before it could fall. The two polemen who had been standing ready to tilt the crucible lived a moment longer. The spreading wave of molten metal consumed their feet first, so they had time to scream before they withered and collapsed, jets of pink-tinged steam erupting from their bodies.

Jon was standing a few feet further back, far enough to have time to realize what was happening, far enough to leap backwards and then pivot on his heel to run. But he tripped. Instead of solid floor, his foot landed on something round and mobile. It moved. He slipped. He fell.

Jon had ample time to scream. He pulled himself forward with his hands as the metal took him an inch at a time. He felt little pain: the heat killed his nerves almost before they could detect it. But he knew what was happening, and he screamed with horror. Then steam was coming out of his mouth instead of air.

10 Semoj 703, 1:06 a.m. (II)

He was in his bed.

He jumped up, screaming, and Katerine jumped up and started screaming too. Then Liira and Erik woke up and started screaming, and it was several minutes before it was quiet enough for Jon to explain that he had had a nightmare, that everything was fine, and they should all go back to sleep. There were no electric lights in the apartment, and after a few minutes the children did go back to sleep. Katerine sat up while Jon explained the nightmare to her, and she patted his arm sympathetically. Then she went back to sleep. Jon lay awake an hour, then he went back to sleep too.

When Jon awoke, he saw Katerine by the daylight seeping in through the room’s small window.

“What happened to your hair?” he asked her.

“What do you mean?” She ran her fingers through her long black hair, checking it for damage.

“You cut it,” he said, perplexed. “Is that a wig?”

She stared at him with a look of confusion that morphed into concern.

“No…”

Jon let the question drop and got ready for work while Katerine woke the children. She would take them to the cafeteria for breakfast, and then they would go… wherever they would go that day… Jon would have pastries at the morning foremen’s meeting. He typically saw the children for only a moment as they all left the apartment together, took the stairs to the street, and then went their separate ways. As they parted that morning, he gave a half-hearted squeeze to Katerine’s hand, and a half-hearted wave to his children.

Liira smiled at him, and something seemed wrong with her smile. Several minutes later, as he was entering the factory building, he realized that Liira had had all of her teeth. But she had lost her first tooth three days ago; there was a conspicuous gap in her smile. There was no gap this morning…

And then the foremen’s meeting started, and the manager announced that Jaboro would begin installing electric furnaces in the factory next week.

* * *

Jon tried to believe that it really had been a nightmare. He talked to Katerine about it that evening — the longest talk he had had with her in months — and she reasoned that he must have heard about electric furnaces somewhere before. He must have overheard a manager talking about them days or weeks ago, and developed a subconscious anxiety about the impending change.

Manuals for the electric furnaces had been passed out at the meeting. Jon showed his manual to Katerine. He recognized it, he said: it was the manual from his dream. He remembered specific images from it, specific text. He was sure it was the same book.

Katerine said that memories of dreams were unreliable. Probably, the book had been indistinct in the dream, and when he saw the new manual, he reimagined it with that detail. As to her hair, and other things he misremembered, that must be because the nightmare had been so vivid. It had been so realistic that his memory was confused.

This seemed like a contradiction to Jon: how could the memory of the dream be so vague that real memories overrode it, but also so vivid that it overrode real memories? But he did not argue. He did not argue because he wanted her explanation to be true.

Then she asked him if she should cut her hair, and he said no, because her hair was beautiful. She smiled, and he kissed her, and for the next hour he did not think about his dream.

But as the days passed he became convinced that his memories must, in some way, be real. Every day — every hour — contained some detail that he remembered. Trivial details like the dinner menu in the cafeteria on Moonday, complex details like the arrangement of wires in the control panel of the electric furnace, personal details like Erik catching a cold on the day after the furnace was installed. His “dream” was somehow real, and this imbued the “real” world with a disturbing unreality. Jon could think of no explanation for how or why this was happening. Perhaps he was insane? But surely an insane man does not know that he is? If a madman can articulate the nature of his madness, then surely he is not mad?

Jon did not discuss his thoughts with Katerine. He knew that she would try to explain his experiences, and he was afraid to hear her fail.

Lying awake in bed, four days after his nightmare, he resolved what he would do. He calculated that, if “reality” continued to conform to his “dream,” then the accident that killed him would occur in twenty-one days, on the fourth day of Konstraligno, 703. So he would wait. He would behave as usual, ignoring his foreknowledge as much as possible. And on that Day he would see if the accident happened. He would see if the crucible spilled. And then he would know.

For the next three weeks, Jon pretended that his nightmare had been merely that. He did not speak of it, and he tried not to think of it. This proved easy, for two reasons. First, because his foreknowledge was not comprehensive. He found that, while many events happened just as he remembered, many others were subtly different. He did not ponder this, but he inuited that it was because his own behavior was subtly different, and his actions were reflected in his world. Whatever the reason, there were enough unexpected events in his days that rotely reenacting his memories was not possible, and this made it easier to pretend that he did not have them.

The second reason was that his days were so routine that foreknowledge of them was almost redundant.

As the Day drew near, he began to feel an anxiety that he could not conceal. Liira asked him what was wrong, and he shouted to be left alone.

On the Day, Jon was careful to behave normally. He said nothing usual to his crew. He paid no special attention to the cables supporting the crucible. He did not warn Loomis. But he did examine the floor where he would be standing, and he noticed a small pebble of slag sitting there, the exact same color as the floor, nearly invisible. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.

Jon followed procedure precisely for the next hour. The furnace was turned on, the first batch of titanium sponge was melted, and ceramic molds filled with glowing metal glided down the conveyor.

And then the Moment came. The crucible, filled with the second batch of molten titanium, began to lower from the furnace, and one of the cables snapped, followed immediately by two more.

Jon saw Loomis covered in the hot metal, burned so quickly that it was more like evaporating. He saw the spreading pool consume the two polemen. He leapt backward and pivoted on his heel to run. And he did not slip. His footing was firm, and he sprinted away from the deadly wave, up some nearby stairs.

When he looked back, the metal had already stopped spreading. The yellow glow quickly faded to a dull red, and then the metal became reflective, the charred bones of the three workers mirrored in its smooth surface.

Jon stared, speechless, motionless. He continued to stare as alarm bells rang, as an emergency crew swarmed with fire extinguishers and asbestos blankets.

“I could have saved them,” he told Katerine that night.

“No!” she said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

But it was his fault.

* * *

Jon had expected the passing of the Day to bring him closure. He had not asked himself why he expected this; in hindsight, he saw that he had simply made the most convenient assumption. He had assumed that the accident would not happen because that would prove that his dream had been only a dream, his foreknowledge some sort of hallucination. He had wanted this to be true, so he had acted as if it was.

And because of that choice, three men had died.

But had they really died? He had seen them die once, and it had been reversed. Could it be reversed again? Could he still save them? This question tormented him for the next three days.

Jon and the other survivors from his crew were put on paid leave while the accident was investigated. For the first time in many years, Jon had no schedule. Katerine made an effort to comfort him by suggesting pleasant activities to fill his time, but Jon was not interested in anything other than the question, and he could not talk to her about the question. He tried once, and he could not make her understand.

“You think you saw the future in your dream?”

“No. I don’t think it was a dream. I think it really happened.”

“If it really happened, then why don’t I remember it?”

“Because it happened… differently…”

Katerine invited him to go to a park and a library with herself and the children, but Jon was not interested. Instead he wandered aimlessly around the Jaboro grounds, brooding, his thoughts heavy in his head. But when she asked him to go to Temple, his eyes brightened. He went.

Jon waited impatiently while the monks performed a tedious ritual with bells and candles, and then suffered through the abbot’s sermon (something about the evil of loving money; as if Jon even had the option of loving money!) so that he could question a monk afterwards.

“What are sages?” Jon asked.

“What are sages?” the monk repeated, annoyed by a stupid question. “In general?”

“Yes. What is a sage?”

“A sage is a soul who has achieved enlightenment and may enter the peace of non-being, but chooses instead to be reincarnated so that he may help other souls achieve enlightenment also.”

“How do you become a sage?”

“By… achieving enlightenment… and then choosing to be reincarnated…”

“So anyone can be a sage?”

“Anyone who has achieved enlightenment!”

“When a sage reincarnates, is it always in a new body? Could a sage die, and then go back into his own body?”

“Go back into his own body? That doesn’t even make sense!”

Nonetheless the idea stuck in Jon’s mind. It was a theory. It explained. Sages were reincarnated because they had missions to carry out. What if Jon had a mission? What if, when he died without completing the mission, his soul was returned to his body so that he could continue trying? That was essentially what sages did, and anyone could be a sage…

But what was Jon’s mission? To stop the accident, of course! What else could it be? He had to go back and save those men!

For the next three days, Jon thought of nothing except this idea. If it were true, then he had a purpose; he had a choice to make, a risk to weigh, an ambition to achieve, a future to anticipate. More important, he had a means to correct his mistake.

He did not analyze this idea. He did not test it for flaws. He rolled it about in his mind like a man rubbing a talisman. He wanted it to be true. In three days he was certain that it was.

The morning that he killed himself, Katerine commented on how happy he seemed. “I am happy,” he said. “I think I figured some stuff out.” He hugged Liira and Erik, then went to the factory, opened one of the enormous fuse boxes that fed the electric furnaces, pulled out a fuse, and put his hands onto the two contacts where it had connected.

10 Semoj 703, 1:06 a.m. (III)

He was in his bed, in his dark room, Katerine asleep by his side. He woke her up, and he told her that he was a sage.

“Don’t say that!” she hissed. “That’s blasphemy!”

“No it’s not,” Jon replied, jovially. “It’s only blasphemy if you say you’re the First Sage. Anybody can be a sage.”

“I guess, but… You aren’t.”

Katerine rolled over and was soon snoring again. Jon stayed awake the rest of the night, too happy to sleep. He felt happier than he had ever felt in this life.

That happiness buoyed him for the twenty-five days. Katerine noticed. The children noticed. They were all shocked when he came to breakfast with them on the second day, and he was shocked that he enjoyed it. The days were the same, but their emptiness seemed filled. His Purpose refracted purpose onto everything, and it gave everything substance.

When the Day came, he was brimming with excitement. There was a bounce in his step that he could not suppress, and he grinned unknowingly. He had rehearsed in his mind one hundred times what he would do at the Moment, and he waited for it like a dog waiting for a morsel to fall. When the crucible began to lower, just before the cable snapped, he suddenly shouted “Loomis! Look out!”

With instincts trained by daily peril, Loomis and two polemen leapt backwards, away from the obvious source of danger. When the cable snapped, the splash missed the old magician, and the spreading wave did not catch the feet scrambling away from it. One minute later, every member of the crew stood staring at the congealed metal as it cooled from orange to red. All of them wore expressions of shock. All except Jon. He beamed with satisfaction.

But his satisfaction faded by evening. As before, Jon had expected the Day to bring closure, but as before it did not. The first time he had felt guilt and shame for which he sought absolution. The second time he felt… nothing. He received no special recognition for his actions. No one even realized that he had done anything unusual. As far as anyone knew, he had simply seen the crucible begin to tip and called out a warning, as anyone would. The men he had saved thanked him, but no one thought he was a hero. The crew got two days’ leave while the incident was investigated, and then they were all assigned to help repair the furnace. And that was that. The monotonous grind of life resumed.

Jon’s nothingness returned, more intense for its absence.

Katerine was very emotional about his brush with death. She was affectionate toward him, interested in him, almost as she had been at the start of their marriage. But then he told her the truth: that he had only warned the others — had only survived himself — because he had already lived that moment twice and knew what would happen. She remembered what he had said that night about being a sage, and he affirmed that he had meant it. She became very quiet then. A few minutes later she took the children and left without saying where they were going.

Sitting alone at the tiny table in the appartement’s combined bath and living room, the idea that he could have a sacred mission seemed stupid. What gods or fates would care if a few near-slaves in the Jaboro Steelworks died in an accident? What were they going to go on to accomplish? What was he going to go on to accomplish? He wasn’t enlightened. He wasn’t even smart. Katerine had been right: with the Day behind him now, the idea that he was a sage seemed ridiculous.

But there must be some reason why he did not die when he died. There must be a purpose. It occurred to him that discovering the purpose could be a purpose. His immortality was a mystery: perhaps he was meant to solve it?

He had been certain that he was destined to stop the accident, but this new idea seemed dubious to him. He wished for someone to talk to about it, someone to give him advice. But there was no one to talk to. There was no one in the world who would take his predicament seriously. Even the monk at the Temple had scoffed at the suggestion that a man could die and somehow return to his own life.

Jon was a shallow man. He had never had a close friend. He had never had much to say, nor much patience to listen. Now he felt an urgent need to communicate, but there was no one who could understand him. Absence of companionship compounded with absence of purpose, and the void became total. His blood would boil.

What finally drove him to fall back (he was already thinking of it as falling back) was that he did not want to face Katerine. She thought he was crazy, and he dreaded the awkwardness of their next interaction. So he went back to the factory, and he opened the fuse box again. He was fairly sure that if he died, he would just wake up in his bed, twenty-five days ago. And if he did not… He had already killed himself once, so it was too late to avoid whatever punishment might await him in the Hollow Moon.

He touched the contacts.

10 Semoj 703, 1:06 a.m. (IV)

This time he did not wake Katerine. He crept quietly out of bed, feeling his way in the darkness, past Liira and Erik where they slept on mats. He picked up yesterday’s clothes from the floor, picked up his boots, left the apartment, and pulled the clothes on in the hallway. He left the building and started walking, without any destination in mind.

He soon came to the edge of the Jaboro campus. Indebted workers were not allowed to leave the campus without a pass. This rule was lightly enforced, but Jon had never broken it. Now it occurred to him that he could break it without any fear of consequence, because whatever happened, he could just fall back.

With a surge of excitement, Jon scrambled over the low fence that bordered Jaboro’s property. He stood in the road on the other side, and he pondered the significance of what he had just done. The company could not punish him. The Emperor could not punish him. He would not go to the Hollow Moon. He would not be reincarnated as his own wretched grandchild. He could do whatever he wanted. 

He had been wrong to fear nothing. Nothing was his ally. Nothing was his power.

He was overcome with a feeling of unfolding possibility. He swayed and stumbled, and for several minutes he knelt on the cobblestones. Then he stood up and wandered into the city. He had no idea where he was going, but Argintarbo was vast, and he could do anything there was to do in it. He would find something.