The Book of Continuity

Harold

"Everything it sees, we keep," Toshi said. "Every word it hears. The eyes are cameras. The ears are microphones. The unit logs all of it for Proxy's quality control, and Proxy isn't getting any of it anymore." He patted the laptop. "We are."

"So they're going to blackmail a robot," I said, "while the robot films them doing it."

"Pretty much."

I thought about that for a while. It was the first time in my life I'd understood why people enjoy chess.

* * *

The bank in Cincinnati had closed at five. The black sedan stopped at a side door at 9:40 p.m., in an alley that smelled like rain and old stone, and a man in a dark coat opened the door before Noah could knock.

It was Cyrus Vail.

"Mr. Fiatt," he said. "Welcome."

He led the way down. Three flights of stone stairs, each one older than the last, until the walls stopped being plaster and started being rock. At the bottom stood a vault door, round, steel, taller than a man, standing open. Beyond it, candlelight.

Before we went through, Cyrus stopped and turned. He looked at Noah for a moment with an expression I couldn't read, which I was beginning to understand was the only expression Cyrus Vail ever showed on purpose.

"A word of advice," he said. "Whatever they ask you for, give it."

"Anything?"

"Anything they can hold." He paused. "The things they can't hold, you'll find, they don't think to ask for."

Then he put on a green hood, and he was nobody.

* * *

I'd seen secret societies in movies. I was expecting skulls, maybe, or a pentagram on the floor, or a man in a goat mask. What I got was a library.

The room was round. The walls, floor to ceiling, were lined with books, thousands of them, bound in green leather with gold on the spines. Candles burned in iron holders. A curved stone bench ran all the way around the wall, and on it sat three dozen figures in green hoods, perfectly still, like a jury that had already made up its mind. In the middle of the floor was a wooden lectern, and on the lectern lay an enormous open book.

It smelled like a church and a bank had a baby. Old paper, candle wax, money.

"Harold," Toshi whispered in my head. "Recording. Everything's clean."

Noah walked to the center of the room and stood by the lectern, where the one who has to answer questions always stands. I knew that without being told. Some rooms tell you where to stand.

"Noah Fiatt," said a voice from the middle of the bench. It was dry and soft, like pages turning. "Do you know where you are?"

"I've been told it's an old club."

"It is the oldest club," said the voice. "We have no name that we say aloud. No leader. No officers. We are a circle." A hooded head tilted. "Do you know what a circle is, Mr. Fiatt?"

I thought of the art room. The first thing I taught every September: how to draw a circle freehand. Most kids can't. They start at the top and chase it around and meet themselves at the end, a little off, a little lumpy.

"A line," I said, in Noah's voice, "that keeps going until it gets back to where it started."

A pause.

"Good," said the voice. "That is exactly right. Everyone here holds something of someone else's. And someone else holds something of theirs. It goes all the way around. No one is on top, and no one can fall, because no one can let go." The hood turned toward the lectern. "Tonight, you become part of the line."

* * *

There were three parts to it. I'll tell them in order.

The first was the oath.

They had Noah put his hand on the open book, which was ruled in fine red lines and filled with neat handwriting in brown ink. The voice read the oath, a line at a time, and Noah repeated it. It was mostly about Continuity. I will preserve what came before. I will protect what holds. I will keep the order of things. It was dull, in the way that truly dangerous things are often dull. The way a mortgage is dull.

At the end, a hooded figure rose from the bench and came forward holding a small silver dish. On the dish was a thin golden lancet and a fountain pen with no ink in it.

"Your name," said the voice, "in your blood."

In Paperton, in a green camping chair, my heart stopped.

"Harold," Toshi said in my head, very fast. "Harold, it'll be blue, it'll be blue—"

Noah held out his hand. What else could I do? The figure took his wrist, turned his finger up to the candlelight, and raised the lancet.

"A moment."

It was a green hood at the end of the bench. It stood. It came forward, unhurried, and from somewhere inside its robe it produced a small glass vial, sealed and labeled, full of something dark red.

"The candidate's physical was this morning," said the hood, in Cyrus Vail's pleasant, bored, evaluated voice. "Our physician drew blood for the lab. I took the liberty of bringing some." A faint, dry note. "Saves the carpet."

A ripple went around the bench. Not quite a laugh. The voice in the middle was silent for a long moment.

"Irregular," it said. But it didn't sound surprised. All around the bench, hoods had leaned forward to watch the lancet. The voice in the middle was one of only a few that hadn't. As if it, at least, had known exactly what the needle would find.

"Efficient," said Cyrus.

Another pause. Then the voice said, "Proceed."

The figure with the dish lowered the lancet. Cyrus unsealed the vial and dipped the empty pen into it, and the nib drank up somebody's blood. Real blood. The blood Dr. Veritas had palmed so neatly that morning, blood from a stranger, from a bag, from God knows where. He handed the pen to Noah.

Noah signed. Noah Fiatt, in rusty brown, in the Book of Continuity, beneath a hundred years of other names. I made the signature look exactly like the one on the campaign posters. I've always been good at copying.

Cyrus took the pen back, capped it, and returned to the bench without a word. He didn't look at Noah once.

* * *

The second part was the favors.

They didn't call them that. They called it the giving. One by one, voices from the bench made requests, and Noah said yes, and a figure at a small side desk wrote down each yes in a smaller ledger.

The first voice wanted a port contract in Louisiana to go to a certain company.

"Yes," I said.

The second wanted a certain judge appointed, when the time came.

"Yes."

The third wanted a certain bank left alone, and a certain senator not left alone, and a certain word removed from a certain bill.

"Yes. Yes. Yes."

In my head, Toshi was quietly narrating names as fast as he could run them against the voices and the context: a shipping conglomerate, a federal circuit, a regional bank. Got it. Got it. Got that one. I said yes to everything, pleasantly, the way you'd say yes to a waiter reading the specials, and every yes went into the robot's memory next to the voice that asked for it.

It went on for twenty minutes. By the end, the next President of the United States had promised away a small nation's worth of favors. And the Continuum had written it all down, in its careful little ledger, as proof that they owned him.

They never seemed to wonder what else was writing it down.

* * *

The voice in the middle spoke last.

"One more," it said. "The Youngstown remark."

The room went still in a new way.

"My prompter here says that's temporary," the voice quoted, flatly, like reading a stain off a tablecloth. "Forty million views. Songs. A tattoo. It has been noted."

"It was a slip," I said.

"Slips are corrected." The hood leaned forward, and a sliver of candlelight caught a thin, dry mouth. "In nine days you will sit for an interview on national television. You will be asked about prices. You will say that the current pressures are transitory. You will say it clearly, and you will say it with confidence, and you will say it in those words."

I thought of Dolores. I thought of her coat, too thin for March, and her glitter sign, and the way she'd stood up at the end, leaning on her cane.

I thought of the man in the quarter-zip at the Rusty Nickel. Transitory. The same rhythm as the man on the TV. Two radios tuned to one station.

So that's where the station was.

"Mr. Fiatt?"

They couldn't hold what I felt. That was what Cyrus had meant. They could hold Noah's yes. They could write it in their ledger. But they couldn't reach the old man in the camping chair, two hundred and fifty miles north, with a blanket over his knees and his fists clenched so hard his nails cut his palms.

Give them anything they can hold.

"Yes," said Noah Fiatt. "Transitory."

* * *

The third part was the circle.

The figure at the side desk rose and came forward carrying a flat wooden box. Inside the box, on green velvet, lay a single sealed envelope. No name on it. Just a small red number, written in the same brown ink as the Book.

"Every member holds another," said the voice. "This is yours to keep. You will not open it. You will not lose it. And if ever this circle is threatened, you will know what to do with it."

Noah took the envelope. It was thick. It was heavier than paper had any right to be.

"And someone," I said, "holds mine."

"Of course," said the voice. "Someone always does."

I understood it later, in pieces, the way you understand a painting after you've stared at it long enough. Every member of the circle held one envelope, one secret belonging to one other member. Nobody knew who was holding theirs. Nobody held more than one. And the Book, where every confession was written down, stayed in the vault, opened only by a vote of the inner circle, because every one of them had a page in it too.

It was a web where every strand was a nervous person holding a match next to a stranger's house, knowing that some other stranger was holding a match next to his. You couldn't burn anyone without burning yourself, because you never knew which pocket your own secret was sleeping in. And the favors made it tighter. Every yes the new man gave was a crime he now shared with the person who asked for it. Each side held the other.

A hundred years of presidents and judges and bankers, and not one of them had ever pulled a thread. It didn't need a lock. Fear was the lock. Every single link had something to lose.

Nobody had ever handed an envelope to something that didn't.

Then the candles were put out one by one, from the edges inward, until only the one on the lectern was left. In its light, the green hoods stood and walked out through a door I hadn't seen, in silence, in a line, until only one remained.

It pulled back its hood. It was Cyrus.

"Congratulations, Mr. Fiatt," he said. "You're one of us now."

He walked Noah back up the three flights of stone stairs, into the alley, into the rain. At the car door he paused, the way he always seemed to pause, as if doors were where he did his real talking.

"That envelope," he said. "They tell every new member not to open it."

"They did."

"Mm." Cyrus looked up at the rain. "Funny thing. In twenty-two years, I've never once met anyone who didn't."

Then he closed the car door, and was gone.

* * *

It was after two in the morning when Noah came back to Unit 114 and sat in his chair and closed his eyes. I let go. My hands were cramped from clenching, and there were four little red half-moons in each of my palms.

Toshi hadn't said anything for a long time. He was just staring at the laptop, scrolling, his face lit blue.

"Harold," he said finally. "Do you understand what we have?"

"Tell me."

"Every voice. Every favor. The judge, the port, the bank, the bill. The oath. The Book, with a hundred years of names in it, the ones Noah's eyes could read in the candlelight." He turned the screen toward me. There, frozen on the display, was a page of the Book of Continuity, in brown ink, perfectly clear. "They spent twenty minutes building a file on us, Harold. And the whole time, we were building one on them."

I nodded. I was too tired to feel anything like triumph. I just felt dirty, the way you feel after lying to somebody who trusted you, except the person I'd lied to was Dolores, and she hadn't been in the room.

"And the TV interview," Toshi said, more quietly. "Nine days."

"I know."

"You said yes."

"I said yes to what they can hold."

He looked at me. I looked at Noah. Noah sat with his eyes closed and his hands folded, and in his breast pocket, over the place where his heart would have been, the envelope with the red number sat unopened.

For now.