PROFESSOR PRYCE REMEMBERS

Day 62 of 100

She went to him at night, by the back stair, in Ruth Pellam's second-best cloak, with the hood drawn over her ears and a lantern shuttered to a thread.

It was a cold clear night with a hard bright moon. The Academy slept. She crossed the East Court by the shadow of the wall, and under the lime trees, and up the worn stone stair of Cloister House to a low oak door at the top, where a brass plate said, in letters worn nearly smooth: A. PRYCE. There was a light under it. There was always a light under it. The students said the old man never slept.

She knocked. Three slow, one fast.

It was the knock she had used at fifteen, to bring him an essay she was ashamed of. She had not thought she would remember.

There was no answer. Then the creak of a chair, and a shuffle, and a long silence on the other side of the oak, in which she knew he was looking at the door.

"Who is it?" said Pryce.

"Mara."

A pause.

"Which?"

It was said so quietly and with such terrible simplicity that she almost laughed. She leaned her forehead against the wood.

"The one who owes you an essay on Aristotle," she said.

The bolt shot back.

…

He had not changed his rooms in twenty years.

It was a long low chamber under the roof, crammed from floor to ceiling with books: books on shelves, books on chairs, books in leaning towers on the floor, books open face-down on the sill with their spines cracked. A fire burned in a small grate. A green-shaded lamp stood on a desk heaped with papers. On the mantel, between a brass microscope and a china shepherdess, sat the skull, Dr. Hobbes, with a pair of spectacles balanced on the bridge of its nose.

The smell struck her like a hand. Pipe-smoke. Leather. Tea gone cold. It was the smell of every Tuesday afternoon of her girlhood.

"Come in," said the Professor. "Come in, child. Close the door."

He had aged ten years since the dinner.

She saw it at once, in the lamplight. He had been gaunt before; he was a skeleton now, in a rusty black dressing-gown with a rug round his knees, and his white hair stood up from his skull in tufts. His hands shook on the head of his stick. His eyes, behind the half-moon spectacles, were red-rimmed and enormous and bright with something that was either fever or relief.

He looked at her for a long time.

"You've cut your hair," he said.

"Dyed it."

"It doesn't suit you."

"No."

"Sit down." He gestured with the stick, helplessly, at a chair piled with periodicals. "No. Not there. Wait. I'll—" He seized the papers in both arms and dumped them on the floor, and the whole stack went over in a slow slide. "Damn. I'm sorry. I haven't had company in a—"

"Aurelian."

He stopped.

It was a name she had never used. She did not know why she'd used it. It had come out of her mouth, simple and plain, and she saw it go into him. He sat down heavily on the corner of the desk, with the stick across his knees, and looked at her like a man who has been struck.

"Yes," he said. "I suppose that's right."

…

He made tea.

It took a quarter of an hour. His hands would not do what he told them. She watched him measure the leaves into the pot, and spill them, and measure again, and she did not offer to help, because she understood that it was the only thing in the room he could still do for her. When it was drawn he poured two cups. He set one before her. It was black as tar and stewed to bitterness, and she drank it slowly, to the last drop, because it was the best she had ever had.

"I have thought," said Pryce, "of what I would say to you, for ten years."

"Have you?"

"Every night. In the dark, you understand, when one cannot sleep. I have made speeches." His mouth twitched. "They were eloquent. I recall a particularly fine passage on the contingency of moral knowledge. I am afraid I have forgotten every word."

"Then say what comes."

"It will not be fine."

"I don't need it fine."

He nodded. He turned the cup in its saucer. The lamplight lay along the deep lines of his face.

"I was on the committee," he said.

"I know. I saw the list."

"In 'eighty-six. The Advisory Committee on the Doubled Soul. I was fifty-two, and tired, and rather pleased with myself. Washington asked for my opinion on a question of theory, and I gave it." His voice was dry as paper. "We spent eleven months on it. Nine of us in a room in the Treasury, with the windows shut. We drew up Section Six. The hundred days. The Vault. I was proud of the work. I thought we were being humane."

"Humane?"

"We thought the Doppel would fade. That is what the theory said. I wrote the theory." His eyes met hers. "That the copy, having no root, would flicker and fail within a fortnight; and that the Vault was merely a precaution for the exceptions. We believed it, Mara. We believed we were sparing the Original a protracted ordeal."

"The Doppel doesn't fade."

"No." The word was very quiet. "The original does."

She said nothing.

"I knew in 'eighty-nine," said Pryce. "I had a letter from a young Warden at Burlington. Hollis. He had counted. He had found that in the three cases where one party weakened, the weak one was always the Original. He asked me what it meant." He shut his eyes. "I wrote back that he was mistaken. I said the data were insufficient. I advised him to be silent."

"And he died."

"Of pneumonia."

"Did you believe that?"

"I wished to." The eyes opened. They were wet. "That is the whole of my sin, child. I have a small gift for wishing to believe what is convenient. I wished to believe the Doppel faded. I wished to believe Hollis had died of the lungs. I wished to believe that the Director of Special Dispositions was a mild and sorrowful man who wished only to preserve the peace." He laughed shortly. "I am a philosopher, you see. We are the worst. We can make an argument for anything."

…

"Tell me about 1884," said Mara.

He winced.

"Tell me what you did. I want it all."

"I know." He set the cup down. "I knew you would."

"You found him on the dock."

"I was walking. I walked every evening in those days, by the north shore, because it was quiet and nobody spoke. It was nearly dusk. I heard a noise. A high thin sound, like a kettle. I thought it was a bird." He passed his hand over his eyes. "I came out of the trees and I saw a boy on his knees at the end of the dock, with a girl in his arms. And the sky above them was—"

He stopped.

"I do not know how to say it. The air was full of light. It was shredded. It hung in tatters over the water, blue and silver, like a torn veil, and it was drifting away. And the boy was screaming. Not words. Only the sound. And the girl lay across his knees like a dead thing, and her light was not there."

"And you knew."

"I knew what it was. I'd seen the drawings. I had a Bureau pass for the restricted shelves. A Division." He swallowed. "It was the first I'd ever seen, and I stood on the shore and I looked at it, and I was so frightened I could not move. And I thought: they will take her."

"Who?"

"The Bureau. They would have come in a day. They would have taken a fourteen-year-old orphan with a divided soul to a laboratory in Washington and studied her till she died." He turned his face aside. "I knew that, because I'd read the reports. I'd written some of them. So I did the only thing I could think of. I took her, and the boy, and I carried them up to the infirmary, and I told the nurse that she had had a fit on the dock. That she had been found unconscious. I wrote the entry in the register myself."

"And the boy."

"I put him in my spare bed. I sat with him. And when he woke, I lied to him." His voice dropped to a whisper. "I told him the tear had closed over. That you were healed. That you remembered nothing, and would be happier if he held his tongue. He asked if he could see you. I said no. He asked if he might make amends. I said the best amends was silence." He looked at her at last. "I thought I was saving two children. I thought it was a mercy."

"Was it?"

"I do not know."

She turned her cup in its saucer.

"You didn't tell me either," she said.

"No."

"I woke up in a bed. I'd been ill three weeks. I'd a fever and a blank, and you came and sat by me and read me the Nicomachean Ethics. And you never said. Not for ten years. Not when I wrote you from Concord, or the Athenaeum, or when I stood in your office last month and asked about the Doppel and you said Sit down, child. You knew."

"I knew."

"Why?"

"Because it was too late," said Pryce. "Because there was nothing in the world I could do. Because you were happy, in your way, and he had taken a post, and I had promised, and every year the silence grew heavier until I could no longer lift it." He looked at the fire. "I told myself that there would be time. And then there was the Ascension. And I saw you come up the aisle with the book against your breast, and I thought: I am an old man, and I have made a terrible mistake."

…

The fire shifted. A coal fell. Dr. Hobbes grinned on the mantel with his spectacles awry.

"I need to know something," said Mara.

"Anything."

"The book. On the Lifting of Griefs."

He went rigid.

"The Captain read it, at nineteen, in the cadets' library. A black manuscript. Unsigned. Two initials on the flyleaf." She kept her voice level. "M.A."

For a long moment he did not move. Then something went out of him, as air goes out of a bellows, and he put his face in his hands.

"Oh, my dear," said Pryce. "Oh, my dear girl."

"It was hers."

"Yes."

"It was my mother's."

"Margaret Ashgrove." The words came muffled. "The finest mind I ever knew. Bar none. She sat on the Committee with me, in 'eighty-six, and she was the only one who said it was wrong."

"What?"

"The Act. The Vault. The whole structure." He raised his head. His eyes were red. "She said a Division was not an abomination. It was an injury. She said it could be mended. That a divided soul was like a broken bone, which, if set correctly, will knit. She'd worked for years on the theory. She had a method." He drew a breath. "She called it Reintegration."

"Reintegration."

"She was never able to demonstrate it. She had no subject. Divisions are rare, and the Bureau did not allow experiment. But she was sure. She had written it all down, in a hundred pages of the most beautiful, exact, passionate prose I ever read. And she brought it to the Committee. And they laughed."

"They—"

"The Director led it. He was most courteous. He thanked her for the contribution." Pryce's voice shook. "And the next week the manuscript was gone. Withdrawn from the Treasury archive. Lost."

"But a copy—"

"She made one. For you." He looked at her very steadily. "She kept it. A fair copy, in her own hand, the only one. And she had another, the draft, which she put in the cadets' library at Burlington, in a locked case, under the heading Theoretical, as an act of defiance. She said, If the Bureau won't read it, perhaps a child will."

A thing turned over in Mara's chest.

A child will.

A boy of nineteen, with a key to clean the shelves.

"She gave it to him," she whispered. "To the boy. My mother gave Cal the book that tore me in two."

"She gave it to nobody," said Pryce, gently. "She left it on a shelf. She could not have known. She was a scholar leaving a message in a bottle. And, Mara, listen, the method was sound. The lifting itself, the drawing off of grief. It is a true technique. It works. It has worked, I think, in a hundred small ways that none of us has recorded." He shook his head. "What it lacks is the second part."

"The second part."

"The part that comes after." His voice fell. "Your mother always said that one must never lift a grief without preparing to restore it. That a soul stripped of its darkness is a soul with a hole in it. That the pain you remove must have somewhere to go, and someone to hold it, and a way home. It was the second half of the book. The Reintegration. The page the boy never read, because the case was cracked, and the last leaves were missing."

…

She sat quite still.

She had thought she would weep. She had thought she would be angry. But what she felt was a sort of vast, silent, tender pity, like the feeling of a woman standing before a very large and very old tree that has been cut down. She thought of her mother's hands, bent over the embroidery. She thought of the middle button.

If ever you need me, and I'm not there.

"She drowned," said Mara.

"Yes."

"On the sixth of September, in the lake. They said it was an accident."

"They did."

"Did you believe that?"

He was silent a long moment.

"No," said Pryce.

It was almost inaudible.

"I never could prove it. The boat was found upturned. The body had been in the water two days. There was nothing to say it was not a fall. But she was the finest swimmer I ever knew. She'd swum the lake at sixteen. And two days before, she told me she had written a letter to Washington, to the Secretary, asking for an inquiry." He looked at his hands. "The letter never arrived."

The fire hissed. Outside the window, very far away, the clock on the tower struck one.

"He killed her," said Mara.

"I do not know."

"You do."

"I think it likely," said Pryce. "And I did nothing. I have done nothing, my dear, for ten years. I've sat in this room with a skull, and I have made tea, and I've told myself that there was nothing to be done." He lifted his eyes to hers. They were brimming. "I have not deserved your coming. I know it. I will not ask you to forgive me. But I will tell you what I can."

"Tell me about Reintegration."

…

He told her.

It took half an hour. He did it as he had once taught her Aristotle, slowly, in order, with his long cold fingers laid against one another, and his eyes on the fire. His voice grew steadier as he spoke. She saw the old teacher come up in him, the dry, exact, passionate intellect, like a ship rising on a flood.

"There are three conditions," he said.

"Go on."

"The first is place. It must be done at the Soul Sanctum, beneath the chapel. It is the oldest consecrated ground in the Academy, a chamber cut in the living rock in the year the Founders came. It sits upon a node, a point where the veil between the soul and the world is thin. You'll have seen the Stone. The Stone is only its tip."

"And the second?"

"Time. The eclipse." He nodded slowly. "At the moment of totality, when the sun is hidden, the veil is thinnest of all. For ninety seconds, perhaps, a divided soul may be drawn together without the violence of the flesh. At any other hour it would be like trying to rejoin the halves of an egg."

"Ninety seconds."

"If it is done correctly."

"And the third?"

He was silent for so long that she thought he had not heard.

"The third," said Pryce, "is consent."

She waited.

"Both halves," he said. "Both. Freely, wholly, and without reservation. The Original must be willing to take back what she cast away. And the other, the part that was lifted out, must be willing to return." He drew a long breath. "It cannot be forced. It cannot be tricked. The soul will know. If either party holds back, if a single thread of the self resists, the rite will not merely fail. It will tear. And the tear will be—"

"Total?"

"It will kill them both," said Pryce. "Instantly. And completely."

…

"I don't understand," said Mara slowly.

"What?"

"Why she would not be willing. The Doppel." She frowned. "Why would any part of me not want to come home?"

"Is that what you think it is?"

"What else?"

"Mara." He leaned forward, and the lamplight caught in his spectacles. "You must understand this before anything. The one you call the Doppel is not a copy. I have read a great many Bureau papers, and I tell you now that the word is a lie. A copy implies a thing made from outside. A forgery. A shadow." He shook his head. "She is not that. She is you. She is the portion of you that you set down, ten years ago, when you could not carry it. The sorrow. The fury. The hunger. The love you were too frightened to feel. All the things a fourteen-year-old orphan puts away when she must go on."

"I know," said Mara. "I understood in the water."

"Then you understand that she is not your enemy."

"Yes."

"She is the part you abandoned," said Pryce. "The part that suffered, in your place."

Mara looked at her hands.

"She has had ten years in the dark," he said. "Alone. Without a body. Without a name. She has lived in the Stone like a child in a cellar. And on the twenty-first of March she came out into the light and found that the person she had been born to protect was a stranger, who did not want her."

"I never—"

"No. But she thinks so."

The words fell into the silence like a stone into a well.

She thinks I never wanted her.

She thought of a woman in a red dress, in a clock tower, weeping. I have never been held. Not once. No one has ever looked at me and seen me. She thought of the pale shape in the cracked mirror, pressing its hand to the glass.

"What happens to her?" she said. "If it works?"

"She returns. She is no longer separate." He spoke gently. "She is a part of you again. Her feelings. Her memories. Her will. Not erased, you understand. Not absorbed. Joined. As a river joins the sea."

"And there is no—"

"No."

"She doesn't die."

"No more than the river dies."

"But she stops." Mara looked up. "She stops being Vesper. She stops being herself."

"Yes," said Pryce, after a pause. "In that sense. She does."

…

It was very quiet in the room.

The fire had sunk to a bed of embers, and the lamp was low, and the books stood round them in the gloom like a congregation. Dr. Hobbes looked down from the mantel with an expression of benign inquiry. And Mara sat in her cloak, with her cold hands in her lap, and felt the thing come up in her slowly, from a very long way down, like a bubble rising through deep water.

"Pryce."

"Yes, my dear."

"She wants to live."

"I know."

"She's said so. In the tower. She said, I want to be." Her voice cracked. "She has a name. She chose it. She likes wine and red silk and the sound of her own voice. She's a person. She has her own heart. And you are telling me that the price of my life is that she should agree to stop."

"I'm telling you the conditions."

"And if she won't?"

He did not answer.

"If she refuses," said Mara. "If, when it comes to it, in the Sanctum, in the dark, with the sun going out, she says no. She says I don't want to be you. She says I want to go on being me. What then?"

Pryce said nothing.

He looked at the fire. He looked at the skull. He looked at his own two shaking hands, as if they might have an answer. And when at last he raised his eyes to hers, she saw in them the whole of what he could not say, the pity and the terror and the old, dry, scholarly shame.

"Pryce," she whispered. "What if Vesper doesn't want to?"

The clock on the tower struck the quarter. The embers settled. And the old man sat there, with his stick across his knees, and did not speak.