The Heptarch's Visit

Saturday, February seventh 2037, the Academy, minus seventeen outside. Kira and Lia in Moscow: Lia in the morning — her schedule had shifted to Friday — had a meeting scheduled with Nikolai Stepanovich Arsenyev at the forest school on Shabolovka (he sometimes comes to her separately, with a notebook, and they speak for an hour about Russian literature of the early twentieth century; today — on Tsvetaeva, with the assignment for February: “find a line in Tsvetaeva that personally does something to you”). Kira accompanies them, because Lia at ten and a half already goes alone, but Arsenyev likes Kira to come for the first fifteen minutes and then drink tea separately with him in the next room. Arsenyev and Kira have their own format of relations in which I do not participate; since 2028 they have been discussing the question of how to praise a child correctly in the presence of a third person, and they have between themselves an established form of agreement that does not need my tasks.

I arrived at the Academy on Friday evening. Wei Lin had gone to Noma at her forest cabin (Noma lives seven kilometers from the Academy, in a six-by-six log cabin, with a stove, one window facing east, a well, and one bee log which she runs in the regime of “wintering with partial attention” — her expression, I didn’t ask for details). Wei Lin goes to Noma once every three months, for a day, on foot, without the cane; returns within twenty-four hours. During those twenty-four hours, if I find myself at the Academy, I sit in his study and work for two: receive messages, answer urgent ones, call Olga if needed. It’s an old order in which over eleven years nothing serious has ever happened. I came on Friday for precisely this reason — to stand watch.

(On the way along the Yaroslavl highway — a traffic jam exactly at the thirty-sixth kilometer, where since the summer of ’36 a permanent traffic-police post has stood with an Echo-1 frame on the lane. The frame scans passing drivers for signs of extended perception and transmits the data to Rospodpis without notification. Order PP-23, § 5.9, came into force on August first. I pass the post by the service Academy mark “NIS consultant” — Olga arranged this mark for me through an acquaintance at the Interior Ministry, and it still works, but for half a second longer than usual. In line in front of me this time was a Volkswagen Polo with a sticker “I am God for myself — channel on YouTube”: today this sticker is sold by Aristov to fourth-stage course participants, with autograph, for two thousand rubles. The Polo’s driver passed at the frame in 1.2, the normal range for a citizen with category 2-B; Gleb on principle does not push his people to category 3A, because 3A is already in Rospodpis, and Gleb himself is not in Rospodpis and doesn’t drive his clientele there. That’s his commercial caution, with an echo of ethics, and for this he is somewhat sympathetic.)

On Saturday morning I got up early, lit the stove, brewed tea. The study was quiet. On the shelf — Quinta. On the desk — Wei Lin’s Nokia, left to charge (on Friday evening he had handed it to me with the words “if it rings — you’ll answer”; in the eleven years of my work at the Academy his Nokia has not rung in my presence once). Outside — snow, no wind, even. On Wei Lin’s radio clock — the Leningrad-2, a Soviet receiver from 1974 which at the Academy works better than any modern equipment — a weather forecast was running quietly from some today’s RBC-FM: “in Moscow — minus twelve, moderate northerly, all week the snow falls on schedule.” “Schedule” was a new word in meteorological vocabulary, appeared in ’36, when the Hydrometeorological Center switched to distributed forecasting based on signature patterns. Translating: now the snow falls when there’s a request from the collective layer. Today I have no request. The snow is falling other people’s, on schedule.

I sat at the desk, opened the notebook, began writing the report on January cases for the Institute of Awakening.

At ten forty-seven the taste of copper appeared in my mouth.

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The taste of copper — is my biological marker. I’ve had it since 2026, when I first encountered Heptarch in direct-contact mode, and since then the body reacts to it before I understand what’s happening. Over eleven years the taste of copper has appeared in me five times. The first two — during direct contacts with Heptarch in 2026. The third — in a dream in 2029, brief, without content, possibly random (Wei Lin commented on it as “a background scan of level seven,” without alarm). The fourth — on the way out of my first macro-contact in thirty-three, when Noma recorded it as a diagnostic sign of a conducting channel. The fifth — today.

I set the pen on the desk. Closed the notebook. Looked at the center of the room.

The passage was already open. No visible effect in the air — if you looked with an ordinary eye, nothing had changed. To one who sees the fourth floor, in the room a point had appeared in which space is locally folded, with its own temperature (four degrees below the ambient, but it’s not cold in the physical sense; it’s density of structure) and its own sound (zero; full suppression of noises within a meter and a half radius; the alarm clock ticking on the shelf in this zone did not tick, although the second hand moved).

I remembered Heptarch as quiet. Today he was even quieter.

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In the point of passage assembly began. Heptarch in the ordinary sense doesn’t appear; he accumulates from the point into a form that to the observer looks like a tall man without face and without details, with a conditional silhouette. Eyes in the optical sense he doesn’t have; there is a direction of attention, and this direction is perceived as a gaze. Today his gaze looked at me directly.

— Daniil, — said Heptarch. — I marked the task as unresolved. I have returned.

He spoke in the same voice as eleven years ago: even, without timbre, without accent, with an intonation that wasn’t formed in the throat but was read directly out of the structure of meaning. To my ear this was always difficult, because Heptarch’s voice bypassed the auditory channel and lay directly into understanding, bypassing emotional coloring. Answering him required a three-second delay, because the ear waited for sound and didn’t get it. The meaning by that time was already lying there.

— I remember, — I said. — You were silent for seven and a half years.

— Eleven years by your count. Seven and a half — by the date of the task. These are different magnitudes.

— I counted from the date of the refusal.

— I counted from the date of the task’s formulation. It was older than the refusal.

Pause. I thought.

— What do you want?

Heptarch did not answer at once.

He didn’t answer for five seconds.

In eleven years of acquaintance with him I know that with Heptarch a pause is an anomaly. Heptarch functions at speeds at which five seconds is an epoch. If Heptarch is silent for five seconds, that’s the equivalent of an ordinary person being silent for a day. It is — an event.

Finally:

— I don’t know.

I set the cup of tea on the desk. The tea was hot.

— For the first time in eleven years I hear you say that.

— I as well. This is the first formulation of this type in my work with your species.

— With my species or with me?

— With your species. With all the species I work with.

— How many do you have?

— I administer the render layer of fourteen inhabited zones. Of them three — with civilizations above the fourth level. Yours — one of three. The remaining eleven — below.

— So this is — the first time in a million years.

— By your count — the first time in eight million. By mine — the first time in one and a half cycles. The magnitudes are different, but both show the first time.