Chapter 9: The Temptation

Tomas stayed three days.

On the first day, Maren gave him a tour that was not a tour because she refused to call it that. She walked him through the settlement the way she walked through it every day, and he walked beside her, and she pointed at things when he asked about them and did not point at things when he didn't. The cranking station. The workshop district. The forge, which ran on clear days and smelled like hot metal and coal smoke and the clean sweat of the woman who operated it, a former shipyard welder named Anja who had joined in the sixth year and who treated the forge the way Petra treated bearings: as a problem of precision in hostile conditions. The terrace gardens. The records hall with its analytical engine, which was working again, the sorted cards clicking through the gates at a rate that Tomas watched with the expression of a man doing math he didn't want to share.

He asked good questions. They were the questions of someone who had read the papers and understood the claims and wanted to see the reality underneath. How many cranking hours per week, total? What was the gear train efficiency on the gravity battery? How did they handle bearing replacement now that the Ljubljana stock was long gone? What was the failure rate on the analytical engine's sorting gates?

Maren answered. Petra answered the mechanical questions with more detail and less patience. Lina trailed after them for part of the morning. At some point around the forge questions she wasn't there anymore.

Tomas did not mention the pills. He carried the case in his bag. Maren knew it was there the way you know something is in a room even when you're not looking at it.

On the second day, he asked to join the morning cranking shift.

Maren had expected this.

She set him up at station twelve, which was near the back and had a slightly shorter handle throw that was easier for people who weren't accustomed to the motion. She set the resistance to three. He looked at the dial.

"Three?"

"You haven't done this before."

"I'm in excellent cardiovascular condition."

"I know. Three."

He took the handles. Around him, the regular crankers were settling into their morning positions. The elderly woman at station three was already turning, her rotation slow and certain. Filip was at his station, not showing off today; he'd noticed the visitor and was pretending not to notice, which for a twenty-three-year-old was a form of intense scrutiny. The gear train hummed. The gravity battery groaned as the chain took the load.

Tomas pulled. The resistance engaged. He cranked with the efficient, measured strokes of a person who understood biomechanics and had never applied them to anything that fed back into a communal machine. His form was good. His breathing was controlled. His heart rate, Maren was sure, was optimal.

After fifteen minutes, he increased the resistance to four. After thirty, he went to five. Maren watched from her station (level six; it was a Tuesday, and the gravity battery needed an extra half-turn because the workshop had drawn more than usual yesterday) and said nothing. His technique was improving. The rhythm was settling. He was finding the pace, the sixty-RPM cadence that Petra had drilled into every new cranker since the first day, the speed at which the gears meshed most efficiently and the body found its easiest stroke.

At forty-five minutes, something changed.

Maren saw it because she'd been looking for it, which doesn't mean she understood it, because she had never fully understood it even in herself. Tomas's face shifted. The controlled efficiency softened into something else. His breathing, which had been managed, became simply breathing. His shoulders, which had been held in the correct ergonomic position, released into something looser. His jaw unclenched. His grip on the handles changed — less engineering, more contact.

She looked away. She cranked. The gravity battery rose. Around them, the station sounds settled into their loaded rhythm: the creak of handles, the hum of the gear train, the steady groan of the chain. Someone at station fourteen sneezed.

After ninety minutes, the shift ended. Tomas stepped back from his station. His hands, when he looked at them, were red from the handles, which were rougher than anything he'd gripped in eighteen years, and there was a blister forming on the pad of his left thumb where the callus would grow if he stayed.

He stood in the cranking station while the other crankers filed out toward breakfast. He did not move.

He looked at her.

"That's not in the data," he said.

"No."

"That feeling. The thing that happened around forty-five minutes. The shift."

"We call it the shift."

He laughed. The sound was strange in the cranking station, which was usually a place of effort and mechanics, not laughter. "Of course you do."

Davorka met Tomas on the terrace that afternoon.

Maren had not arranged this. Davorka arranged herself. She appeared on the terrace, sat down across from Tomas, and folded her hands on the table.

Tomas stood when she sat down, which was a reflex from the Institute, from a time when Davorka was his senior colleague and standing was what you did. She waved him back into his chair. He sat.

"You look well," she said.

"You look eighty."

Maren, standing in the records hall doorway with a cup of tea she had no intention of drinking, nearly choked. Davorka's eyebrow went up. Then she laughed. It was a real laugh, the kind she produced about twice a year.

"I do look eighty," Davorka said. "I am eighty. My knees work and my mind works and I walked the hillside this morning at a pace that would have embarrassed me at sixty. Not a bad return on the investment."

"Your data is remarkable," Tomas said.

"I know. Have you read all of it?"

"I've read everything you've published. I've been reading it for years."

"Then you know what I'm going to say."

"You're going to say the pills can't do what the cranking does."

She folded her hands. Her fingers were thicker than they used to be, knuckled with age, and they moved more slowly, but they were steady. "You felt it this morning."

"I felt a change in my subjective experience of the exercise. That's not the same as demonstrating a biological mechanism."

"No. It isn't." She looked at him. "You could have sent the data by mail. You could have sent a colleague. You came yourself. On a rail cart."

Tomas said nothing for a while. A child ran across the far end of the terrace. A gearwright's apprentice carried a box of parts toward the workshop, the metal pieces clicking inside with each step. The sea was blue. A cloud was doing something complicated near the horizon.

"I also came because I have a sixty-three-year-old woman in my trial who can read again," he said. "And a forty-year-old man whose depression lifted in eight weeks. And a teenager whose inflammatory markers were destroying her joints, and they're not anymore. These are real people, Davorka. Not cohorts. People. And they will never come to a hillside."

Davorka nodded. She was quiet for a moment.

"And you came for Maren," she said.

Tomas looked at the sea. "Yes."

"But you stayed for the cranking." Davorka folded her hands again. "That is why I'm sitting here."

On the third evening, Maren found Tomas on the terrace at dusk. The phosphorescent panels were still out, glowing faintly as the last light faded. The settlement was settling into its evening rhythm: the cranking station silent, the gravity battery descending, the ticking of the escapement measuring the hours. Below, the bay was going dark from east to west as the sun set behind them.

He was sitting on the wall, looking at the sea, holding the pill case.

She sat next to him. Not touching. Close enough.

"I can feel it wearing off," he said. He turned the pill case over in his hands. "That doesn't happen with these. You take them and you feel fine. Consistently. No peak, no trough."

"And?"

"And I spent ninety minutes on a crank handle and felt better than I've felt in years, and I can't scale it." He was quiet for a moment. The stone wall was cold under Maren's thighs. She could feel the damp seeping through her trousers. "The teacher I told Davorka about. She's never going to move to a hillside. These pills are all she's going to get."

Maren watched the panels glow. They were beginning to fade now, the zinc-sulfide phosphorescence declining on its exponential curve. By midnight they'd be dark.

"You could stay," she said.

"No."

"You could."

"I can't. The trial is at a critical phase. The two-hundred-subject cohort needs another eighteen months of monitoring. Kassar is depending on the longitudinal analysis." He paused. "And I'm not an Integrator, Maren. I wasn't then and I'm not now. I believe in what we're doing. The pills work. They help people. That's real."

"I know it's real."

"But you think it's not enough."

"I think there are things your pills can't reach. I don't know if those things matter enough to justify"—she gestured at the settlement, the terrace, the ticking, the sea—"all of this. I don't know. I've been here for eighteen years and I still don't know."

"That's the most honest thing you've said to me in three days."

"It's the most honest thing I've said to anyone in eighteen years."

They sat. The panels dimmed. The first stars appeared over the bay, and then more, and then the sky was full of them in the way that skies are full of stars when there are no electric lights for a hundred kilometers. The ticking was the only sound that wasn't the sea or the wind.

"Leave the pills," she said.

He looked at her.

"Leave the case. I'll look at the data again. I'll run it through the engine. I'll compare it properly against our longitudinal records. Not today. Not this week. When I'm ready." She paused. "If the data holds, I'll write to you."

"And if it doesn't hold?"

"Then the pills will be on my shelf and I'll know where to find them."

He turned the case over one more time. Then he set it on the wall between them.

The panels went dark. It got cold. They went inside.