Julian date 2459557, Friday.
The station was quiet enough to hear the phase of the air conditioning. The spectrometer swept thirty megahertz to a thousand, and the picture it swept up came back cleaner day by day: the FM broadcast lines went down one after another inside the first week, faster than the schedules said—every country wanted to go dark ten minutes ahead of its neighbor. What still stood was all on the exemption list: the aviation transponders' pulse trains, one burst a second, like someone far away working a stopwatch; the navigation satellites' spread spectrum, spread along the bottom, flat past having any shape.
Hu Yisu counted the lines that were left every morning and wrote one number on the whiteboard. Day one, two hundred seventeen. Day nine, forty-one. After that it kept hovering between the thirties and the forties. He said: count any lower, and what you're counting isn't radio stations anymore, it's the exemption list itself.
The 13.6 percent of observing time that human interference used to take went to zero in the first week. The single-day precision of the residuals came up a notch; Jiamusi telephoned to ask whether their side had swapped in a new clock. Hu Yisu said no—the sky was clean. Eli made his round of the feeds and came back and said: heart of the dish, the sky is clean; people switched it off. She said: a hundred days. He shifted the toolbox to the other shoulder and said: then let it have a hundred quiet days.
She computed S at ten every morning. The same clumsy method: nine sequences, normalize, take the global mean. Ursula had said not to change the estimator, so she didn't. Done, she entered one line in that hundred-line table. The first line was the baseline, 0.34. Then 0.34, 0.33, 0.35, 0.34, 0.33. Jitter inside the error bars, jittering without an opinion.
Afternoons she entered the paper records. Those three thousand photographs from Shanghai—she had assigned herself a hundred and fifty numbers a day, fourteen thousand six hundred in a hundred days. The page for January 1, 1970, six o'clock, 74 solar flux units, she entered first. The twelve o'clock cell had ink bled into it; she bent the desk lamp over into raking light and shot it again; under the blot a 7 came through, and a 9, and the one in between wouldn't resolve—8 or 3. In the remarks column she wrote: pending. Beside it she set a check mark—pending still counts as entered; that was a rule she had made herself.
Lu Weiming took three numbers home each Saturday afternoon to cross-check—his own rule. He held the stretch digitized after 1979; using her entries from around 1979 he made the crossing, and where the two sides met, the paper could be trusted. The first month he crossed two batches—74, 79, 81, all of them meshed. His reply ran one sentence: paper stands up to cross-checking better than people do. Blotted is blotted; it doesn't hide anything.
Naked-eye stargazing went hot on the fourth day.
It started with a middle school in Nagoya that stretched the one-minute lights-out drill at T0 into ten minutes; someone shot a video of it: the field lights going out row by row, and a band appearing in the sky that hadn't been there before. The first comment under the video asked what it was. The second answered: the Milky Way.
After that it couldn't be held in. The video played two hundred ten million times in three days, second for the year; first was still the leaked meeting footage from three weeks before. The big cities began competing—you go dark ten minutes, I'll go dark half an hour—and municipal lighting went out block by block on rotation. City hall held a hearing over it; the opposition spoke in accident rates, the supporters spoke in electricity bills, and the quarrel ended with each side giving ground: main roads as before, residential streets dark after eleven. Planetarium tickets were booked out three months; at one planetarium an engineer shut the dome projector off before closing, led the last group of visitors out to look at the real one, and was caught doing it on camera. A reporter asked whether he would still run the show. He said: I don't want to run that one today. The one outside is real.
That autumn telescope sales ran eight times a normal year, and the sellers printed the words Milky Way Visible on the shipping boxes. One city's meteor-shower forecast went to the top of the trending list; second was some country moving its resumption time up another two hours.
Saturday, 2459558, 20:00, the video call connected.
Zhou Yao was on the balcony, the camera pointed at the sky. Her mother—over there the lights had been off for an hour already—she turned the camera back and said: Mom, it's like salt spilled all the way along.
Zhou Yan asked: what's spilled all the way along.
Zhou Yao said: salt, that's all. The coarse kind. She said the class group chat had posted forty-odd photographs; three of them had been taken crying, nobody knew what over.
Zhou Yan said mm. She had meant to say the sky over Kashgar had always been like this; the words reached her mouth and she changed them: give your eyes twenty minutes of dark adaptation, then look out again—you'll see one step more.
Zhou Yao said: and your side.
She said: where I am, there are no lights to turn off.
After hanging up she went out and stood a while. The family compound's side toward the gobi had been dark to begin with; the sky was the same sky, the one she had looked at for a dozen years. She had no first time; she had only other people's first times. Before going back in she looked up and counted Jupiter's moons—naked-eye, of course they don't come out; she counted anyway. On the third count, she went in.
The next day Eli asked whether she'd seen the meteors last night. She said she didn't watch those. Eli said: city people are paying money now to come look at what we look at every day. He paused, and said: my granddaughter shot it too. Came out like a postcard.
The S table stayed flat through day twenty, day thirty.
Day thirty, 0.34. Day thirty-five, 0.35. Day forty, 0.34. In ninety-odd days the highest was 0.36, once, and the next day it went back; 0.35 came seven times, 0.33 nine times. Draw the hundred lines as one line, and that line lay as flat as the breathing band you watch on night rounds—every nurse knows, a person asleep still turns over; turn over once, and it moves. It never turned.
The two factions split the flatline between them.
The Sleepkeepers said: look—we shut up, and it sleeps deeper. The Wake faction said: you call 3.1 percent shutting up? Not one plane grounded, not one navigation satellite off, twenty thousand-odd home routers still lit. That's speaking softly, not silence. The Sleepkeepers came back: then ground the planes yourselves. The Wake faction didn't take it up—line two of the exemption list, ten thousand-odd aircraft aloft worldwide; no one dared move first.
The placards in the street changed their wording. The Sleepkeepers, who had carried suppress it six months, now carried another hundred days of silence; the Wake faction had swapped the just watch on their T-shirts for get on with it. Both sides were still working with words out of He Zhaoting's recommendation—only the pairings were different.
On day thirty-three Kramer asked once more for the 1,042-star version, and after asking added a line: does a cross-border transfer during the Silence count as transmission. She said it doesn't. He said: then I want it now. She sent back: not yet. Six hours later he came back with a single period. She screenshotted the period and stored it in 3t, no new directory.
Mateo's email came once a week, never late, never long. Day 21: still listening. Day 49: still listening; winter here is very clean. Day 70: the noise floor is lower than last year, but I don't know whom to thank. She answered every one, one line each. She thought: when the hundredth one comes, he'll probably write, I listened to the full hundred.
Old Tang came by the station once, around day fifty. He asked what this year's one sentence of annual progress should be. She said: write, it has been silent for a hundred days. Old Tang said: that one they'll like; makes it look like work got done. He said nobody was chasing the station-office form anymore, and the archive room had asked whether to put a seal across it. She said put it on. Before leaving, Old Tang stood a while downstairs and said: the sky's really dark. He said it without looking up. What was dark was the row of windows in the family compound behind him—that row of streetlights had gone out in the second week, and nobody had fixed them.
Ursula surfaced only once. Day fifty, one line in the group: what day is it. Hu Yisu answered: fifty. Nothing after it. Day fifty-one had nothing either.
The second Saturday, 2459579, the call ran a bit over three minutes.
What Zhou Yao asked about wasn't the sky; it was Lao Wu: has he molted.
Zhou Yan said: no.
Zhou Yao said: does he molt in winter.
Zhou Yan said: he doesn't go by seasons.
Zhou Yao said: then what does he go by.
Zhou Yan said: himself.
Zhou Yao said oh, and pushed the camera flat against her homework, to show her a geometry problem gotten wrong. What was wrong wasn't the hard part; she had miscopied her own rough work.
The ear got moved along by one WeChat message from Dr. Shen.
The slot, I'm holding it for you until the end of the month. After that it's the queue, and the queue runs into next year.
The hiss, that day, was at one hundred eleven. She went to the hospital Tuesday afternoon. The testing booth was the same soundproofed box, the same resident sitting outside it. On the call-up screen, seven names still ahead of hers; she sat waiting, and the hiss in her right ear laid itself over the waiting-room broadcast—the broadcast's words were the part she couldn't take in whole.
The earphones pressed down; as always she kept her thumb closed over the button. The left ear went smoothly, beep beep beep, pressed on all the way. When the right ear reached the four-thousand-hertz stretch, the sound seemed padded under by something; she couldn't tell whether she was hearing it or remembering hearing it, and her hand hung above the button—for how long, she didn't know herself.
The audiogram came out; Dr. Shen looked it over and tapped his pen point on the right ear's four-thousand point: down again. He asked: where's your last one. That Shenzhen place—didn't they do a workup.
She said: didn't bring it.
Dr. Shen said: then we'll take it as though there was no last time. He asked: how long has the hiss been going.
She said: two months.
Dr. Shen didn't look up: when you say two months, what you're counting in your head is how many days.
She couldn't answer it. Dr. Shen wrote the referral—internal auditory canal, magnetic resonance—six weeks in the queue, shall I book it now. She folded the slip, put it in her pocket, and said: another day. The sixteenth time. Dr. Shen said: that mouth of yours never misdiagnoses, at least.
Out of the hospital she didn't go back to the station; she went home and fed Lao Wu. Water twenty degrees; the shell still the same shell, three notches, not one deeper. He lay on the driftwood, feelers moving very slowly. She squatted and watched ten minutes without reaching out. Whoever helps it harms it—that line she was holding on Eli's behalf.
Day fifty-seven, a text from Wei Xiangdong, two lines.
Eight crossed this morning, two-way lock, telemetry all green.
Seven, nothing.
Seven's calls had stopped on day nineteen. Before the stop, Kashgar had followed Jiamusi up with one last backup of the uplink; after that the uplinks powered down, all four stations. It was flying on its own out past forty-six point seven astronomical units; by rights the low-gain omni beacon should sweep past the Earth's direction once every forty seconds, and in a hundred days a dish this aperture should have caught it at least once. Not once.
Hu Yisu dug out the official bulletin and read it through again, and said: they couldn't even be bothered to change the wording of configuration anomaly. He said it not looking at her; he was looking out the window.
The resumption schedule made the papers on day seventy-nine.
The first to publish was a Nordic country: public broadcasting back from midnight of day 101, one hour ahead of the agreed moment. A second country followed and moved its resumption up four hours more. A third declared phased—the first week FM only, television could wait—and the commentaries said this was keep talking taken apart into first, softly.
Hu Yisu forwarded the item to her with one line attached: half of my sentence has come true; one day left.
Zhou Yan replied: mm.
Day ninety-one, the tenth drawing arrived. Kraft envelope, corners worn white, two postmarks struck, one corner crushed; she mended it with a strip of clear tape. She opened it: a person with closed eyes, again. What set this one apart from the first nine was the hand—it was raised, lifted to the side of the face, as if to block something, or to feel for something. On the back, no writing.
She looked a long time and didn't ask. In the Saturday call she didn't bring it up either. It was Zhou Yao who spoke first: the drawing came, right.
She said: it came.
Zhou Yao said: mm. That one word was all; she went on to school matters: the whole class draws stars now, and the teacher says the subjects collide, change them. They never used to draw them, she said—it took a blackout.
The last Saturday, 2459649, the call ran four minutes fifty-one seconds. Before hanging up, Zhou Yao said: the hundredth day is a Friday.
Zhou Yan said: it is.
Zhou Yao said: that day, you have to watch too.
Zhou Yan said: I've been watching all along.
The hundredth day, Julian date 2459655, ten in the morning.
Hu Yisu had pulled the data in the small hours: nine sequences, the stations' last night. She went by procedure: first check the clock-offset files from the three stations, then verify each sequence's missing-data flags, then call the roll of the nine in her head—which one had been there since 2004, which was added in 2021, which one's pulse profile had been redrawn last year. Normalize, remove the mean, align, take the global phase, average. The script finished; the number printed to the terminal.
0.37.
She sat without moving. Then she cleared the last cache and reran it exactly as it was. 0.37. She moved to another machine, copied the script over—the dependencies took twenty minutes to install—and ran it again. 0.37.
In the first ninety-nine lines this number had never appeared. The highest of the ninety-nine was 0.36, once. The error bar was plus or minus 0.03, and the number sat inside the bar—she struck that half-sentence out of her head. Ursula had said don't guess. She didn't guess. She only reported the number.
She sent Ursula the line: 2459655, 0.37.
Sent, she took out the table. The hundredth line: on the left the date, on the right, blank. She unscrewed the pen cap and filled it in: 0.37.
Filled, she didn't close the book. Below the hundredth line, with a ruler, she drew the one hundred first, and in its left cell, first of all, entered tomorrow's date.