The Balance

TH E BA LA NC E B O O K O N E The Long Sleep · The Count A Novel 2 THE BALANCE Book One of The Balance This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons is coincidental. First edition. 3 P A R T O N E The Long Sleep 4 PROLOGUE He did not remember agreeing to die, and that, in the end, was the cruelty that outlasted all the others. There had been a room. He was almost sure of the room. It was the first thing the cold gave back to him, two hundred years later, and it came back the way a bruise comes back, tender and out of order: a low ceiling, a light that hummed, a docket number read aloud in a voice too bored to be cruel. Sedation to term. Whatever he had done to earn those three words, and he must have done something, the paperwork would have said what, he could not find it now. There was only the sentence, and the room, and the man reading it who did not look up, and the sense, even then, even at the very end of a life he could no longer name, that he was already less than a person in that room. That he was a thing being processed. That the worst part of dying was not the dying. It was being bored to death by the people who did it, filed and stamped and moved along, one more form in a stack of forms, so ordinary that no one in the room could be bothered to feel anything about it at all. Then the needle. The width of a thought, and then a cold that was not weather. It came from the inside out, as though his blood were being asked, very politely, to stop, and his blood, being tired, being finished, being a coward the way all bodies are cowards at the end, agreed. He remembered wanting to fight it and finding he had nothing left to fight it with. That was the 5 loneliest moment of his first life, and he would carry it, unhealed, into his second: the discovery that when the cold came for him at last there was no one there to hold his hand, and nothing in him strong enough to hold his own. He remembered the taste. That was the strange thing, the thing that should have been the smallest and became, across two centuries, the largest. Not the crime. Not the sentence. Not the faces of whoever had loved him once or wanted him gone. Just the taste that rose in the back of his throat as the machines pulled the last of the fuel out of him and left his body burning the only thing a body burns when there is nothing left to burn. A taste like pennies and overripe fruit, sweet and metal at once, the flavor of a thing consuming itself because nothing else was left to consume. Later, much later, in another century, on another world, a stranger in a pale coat would give him the word for it. Ketosis. For now it was only the flavor of the end, and it filled his mouth, and he thought, with the last clear thought he would have for two hundred years: so this is what it tastes like to be used up. They were supposed to let the cold finish him. That was the sentence. That was the whole of the law of a world he could no longer name, and the law, at least, was clean. The cold would come, and it would deepen, and it would carry him down past the last taste and into the dark, and it would be over, and he would be nothing, and there is a mercy in nothing that the living never quite believe until they are close enough to want it. 6 But the mercy did not come, because somewhere between the reading of the docket and the finishing of the cold, a form went missing. That was all. That was the whole of it. A single sheet of paper that should have been stamped was not stamped, because the person whose job it was to stamp it had gone home early that day, and then gone home for good not long after, the way people did in a dying world, and the form sat on a desk waiting for a signature from a hand that would never sign anything again, and then it was tidied into a box, and the box was shelved, and the man it belonged to lay in his engineered winter, unfinished, unfiled, forgotten, alive in the technical and legal and deniable sense of the word and in no other sense at all. Two hundred years is a long time to be a clerical error. He would try, later, when he could try things again, to make people understand what those years had been, and he would fail every time, because there were no words for it, because language is a thing the living made for the living and it had no room in it for what he had been. He had not been dead. That was the horror the dead are spared. And he had not been alive, not in any way that counted, not in any way that could hope or grieve or pass the time. He had been kept. Barely lit. A pilot flame in a house no one lived in anymore, flickering in a dark that had no bottom and no morning, for two hundred turns of a world he could not see, could not feel, could not leave. He did not dream, and that was the cruelty of it, because a dream would have been company. What he had instead were smears. Every long while, 7 when the cold loosened half a degree for reasons no one had ever bothered to correct, a smear of something would move behind his eyes, and it was always the same, and he came to wait for it the way a prisoner in solitary waits for the one square of light that crosses his cell each afternoon.