Chapter 9: The Conductor

Conductor Anselm prayed before he ruled, always, because a ruling on the Pilgrim was not a decision but a disclosure, and a man who disclosed the will of the Mercy had no business doing it out of his own tired head.

He prayed in the forward sanctuary, which was the nearest carriage to the Fore that any soul was permitted, and which was therefore the warmest place on the train and the most quiet. The warmth came through the forward bulkhead steady as breath. Beyond the bulkhead was the Fore, and beyond the Fore — but there was no beyond the Fore, that was the discipline of the place, you came to the warm bulkhead and you knelt and you did not go on, you did not ask what carried you, you let the warmth be warmth, and in thirty-one years of kneeling at that bulkhead Anselm had built his whole soul on the not-going-on, the way a house is built on the ground precisely by not digging through it.

He was an old man now and he had been Conductor a long time, and he carried it the way the bulkhead carried the warmth, without strain, because the office had been invested in him and not seized — that was the strength of the Pilgrim and its mercy both. On the other trains, he understood, succession was a wound; the chair was taken by the strong or the surviving or the quietly murderous, and a Conductor sat in it always half-listening for the step behind him. Anselm had never listened for a step. He had been raised through the orders, examined, fasted, found sound in his faith, and invested with oil and the bell before the whole train, and his authority was not his own and never had been; it was the Mercy’s, lent to him, and a man does not fear losing a thing he never owned. It made him, he knew, the most settled Conductor on the network, and it made the Pilgrim the most stable train, and he thanked the Mercy for it every morning at the warm bulkhead, and he was not wrong to. He was a good man. It is important to understand that he was a good man, because everything that follows is worse if you let yourself believe he was not.

The matter of the soul Halia had come to him, as all hard matters did, already shaped into the two readings, because the Pilgrim was a machine for shaping hard matters into the two readings and Anselm sat where the two readings were meant to be reconciled.

Thane had brought the true reading, grave and certain: a wound in the floor, a soul in whom the gift had not held, to be corrected — re-delivered — closed, gently, for her own rest and the train’s safety, before the wound widened. Avis had brought the kind reading, warm and rising: a wonder, a soul the Mercy in its wisdom had kept partly whole, to be raised up, enshrined, made a pillar and a sign. Both were sincere. Both were, in their way, faithful. And both of them, Anselm saw — kneeling at the warm bulkhead with the matter laid out in him like a body on a table — both of them wanted the same thing underneath, which was for the question to stop.

Because there was a question under the soul Halia, and it was the question, and Anselm felt it the way you feel a draught off a door you have spent your whole life keeping shut.

If a soul could be found in whom the gift had not held — then the gift could not hold. And if the gift could not hold, then the gift was a thing that could do otherwise. And a thing that can do otherwise is a thing that is done — chosen, administered, by a will, by a hand — and a hand that gives can withhold, and a mercy that can be withheld is not a mercy at all but a decision, made about you, without you, before you could speak — and what, then, was the Fore; and what was carried; and what was taken, to make the emptiness the Pilgrim called a gift; and by whom; and to where —

Anselm stopped.

He stopped the way he had stopped ten thousand times, at the lip of the question, and he turned from it, and — this is the thing to understand about him, the thing that made him what he was — he did not turn from it with effort, the way a tempted man turns from a sin, gritting against the pull. He turned from it with relief, with love, the way you turn from a cold dark stair to the warm lit room you would always rather be in. The not-asking was not a discipline he imposed on himself. It was the warmest and most natural motion of his soul. To stand at the lip of what is taken, and by whom and to turn back to the warmth of the bulkhead and say it is the Mercy, and the Mercy is good, and I will not pick at it — that was, to Anselm, the very feeling of faith, the home feeling, the rest. He had built his whole holiness out of the most comfortable refusal a man can make, and he had never once felt it as a refusal, and that was why he was the safest Conductor on the network, and the most useful, though to whom he was useful he would have been the last soul aboard to ask, the asking being precisely the door he had spent thirty-one years not opening.

So he did not see — he was constitutionally unable to see — that the two readings before him were not really a choice about Halia at all. They were a choice about the question. And he weighed them, kneeling, the only way he could weigh them, which was by which one would let the door stay shut.

The true reading — blasphemy, the wound, correction — would shut it, but roughly. To name a soul a wound in the floor was to admit, out loud, before the train, that the floor could be wounded, that the Mercy could fail; you closed the wound but you left the idea of wounding standing in the open where the faithful could see it. A correction announced that correction was necessary, and a train that knew its Mercy sometimes needed correcting was a train in which the question had been let through the door even as the soul was carried out of it. Thane did not see this — Thane was a true man and true men think the truth costs nothing — but Anselm saw it, because Anselm’s whole genius was the door.

The kind reading shut the door softly, and shut it all the way.

Because a wonder asked no questions. A soul kept partly whole on purpose, by the Mercy’s wisdom, for the train’s blessing — that was not a failure of the gift, that was the gift being greater than anyone had known, more personal, more wise. It did not crack the floor; it gilded it. The faithful would not learn that the Mercy could fail; they would learn that the Mercy could choose, which was the same fact wearing a crown, and they would love it, and they would kneel, and the question — what is taken, and by whom — would be buried so deep under incense and gladness that not one soul in a thousand would ever feel the draught off it again. Halia would be raised up. And raised up meant enshrined, and enshrined meant brought forward, toward the sanctuary, toward the warm bulkhead, set apart from the ordinary life of the train, kept — for her protection, he thought, for her blessing — in the holy quiet near the Fore, where a wonder belonged, and where a soul, once translated, was not seen walking the open carriages again, because a soul that holy did not belong to the open carriages any more, it belonged to the Mercy, which had kept it.

Anselm knelt at the warm bulkhead and felt himself being drawn, gently and with his whole loving heart, toward the kind reading, and he experienced the drawing as compassion. That was the last mercy he did himself, and the cruellest. He did not think the wonder is safer for the floor. He thought the poor woman; how much kinder to raise her than to close her; how much more like the Mercy to honour a soul than to wound it; surely the gentlest reading is the most faithful one. He thought it sincerely, and it warmed him, and he did not see — could not see, would have wept to be shown — that the gentlest reading was the most total erasure of the two, that to crown her was to take her away as surely as to correct her, only with the train weeping for gladness instead of grave, and that he had been steered to it not by compassion but by the oldest reflex in him, the home reflex, the turning-from-the-stair, the thing in him that served the shut door before it served the soul.

For one moment — a single moment, kneeling, before he rose — something in him went very still and very cold, the way the bulkhead would have gone cold if the Fore had ever, for an instant, stopped. He had reached, in the weighing, almost without noticing, the centre of why the door must stay shut — had come nearer the lip than he had been in years, pulled there by the very effort of ruling on a soul who lived at the lip — and at the centre, for half a breath, there was a thing, and it had no name, and his mind arrived at the place where the name should be and found that he could not say it, not would not, could not, the way you cannot say a word in a dream, and a Conductor of thirty-one years felt, at the warm bulkhead in the holiest quiet on the train, the brush of something he served and had never once looked at, and flinched — flinched in his soul, a single clean flinch — and called the flinch reverence, and rose, his knees aching, an old good man, and gave the order that the soul Halia be brought to him to be examined, so that he might disclose, as gently as the Mercy allowed, what she was.

He intended to be just. He intended it with his whole heart. That was the horror, and he would carry it to the warm bulkhead every morning for the rest of his life and never once see it, because seeing it was the one door he had built his entire holiness to keep shut.