March 2043, and spring opened at the station. In the days the poplar budded, the S table passed line 7,700—one line a day, the young man doing the checking, she sitting beside him, without a pen. The first winter without a pen she was a little unused to it: every morning at the machine room her hand went into her pocket first, and what it found was only the key. Then she was used to it. Used to it, she discovered one thing—without the pen, her ears got sharper. Before, checking numbers, the machine's sound was background; now she sat and listened, and in the hum she could sort out three layers: one the fans, one the current, and a bottommost one she couldn't name, like a very distant tide. The graduate student said it was the lowest pump. She said: No. A pump I can hear. No one else could say what it was, and she didn't insist; she took it as her own private affair. On the old blackboard by the canteen door appeared the first new notice in many years: Office of the Former Secretary-General gives notice: on March 14 at twelve noon, the undersigned will broadcast and read aloud a certain document. Global transmission. No questions. No replay.
The notice was only three lines; it ran at the tail of the wire services and had gone round the world by day's end. Twenty years and nine months earlier, the day the document was made public, she had been absent; the secretariat said she was "writing something; no deadline set." That sentence raised a flock of believers and a flock of gamblers: the believers said she was still writing; the gamblers said she had long since stopped; and some bet on a third thing—written, locked away, waiting for an age older than herself. In twenty years she left office, left the stage, attended nothing, gave no interviews, never lit her avatar. Now the three lines drove the game to settlement. The mirror page put up a countdown the same day, in the countdown page's old format—years, months, weeks, days. The Sleepkeepers had long dispersed; the few old hands who couldn't disperse issued a joint statement of one sentence: Listen. The Wake faction's young were louder: they made a long timeline image, every script title she had ever read set out by year, a blank line left at the end, captioned: What does she read this time. An old committee member from those years said a fair word in an interview: You all took her for a machine that reads scripts. Machines have no patience. Twenty years—that is a human patience.
At the station, fewer stood around the old blackboard than around the terminal. Someone said what was there to watch, a retired old woman reading a document; someone countered at once, saying this old woman had chaired fourteen minutes from the script without one wrong character, twenty years off script without a single slip—never in her life had she let a character fall off a script. The argument ran to night without a result, and in the end Engineer Ma said one thing: None of that. What she reads doesn't matter. What matters is that she finally thinks it's finished. Only finished would she read it. That quieted everyone. Breaking up, the graduate student asked: What will that document say. No one answered. A few days later he answered himself: Probably the words she never said, written down. Her position, forty years—every character out of it was somebody else's.
Broadcast day was clear. The station cleared out the canteen, wiped the long table in the middle twice, set the radio straight—an old valve machine from the storeroom, salvaged out of the station's written-off equipment; Engineer Ma had cleaned the tubes and swapped the capacitors the month before, saying that for a human voice, this one's sound was still the truest. While he was at it someone asked why bother—play it on a terminal and be done. Engineer Ma said: She waited twenty years for this day. When we listen to her, we don't listen over a plastic speaker. At five to twelve the canteen was full, people standing along the walls too. Half the families' quarter came; three of the retired old comrades arrived, the farthest of them having moved into the guesthouse the night before. She sat midway down the long table. The server, breaking his precedent, hadn't shut the serving window; he stood inside it, ear turned. The young man brought his duty book and set it on the corner of the table—not to write; habit: at an important moment he had to be next to the book.
At twelve exactly, the voice came out. Aged. The characters were still one by one, each standing bolt upright, like a review. What she read was that document. The scripted part ran thirteen minutes: no defense, no verdict, no thanks. She gave the timeline and owned it—which year decided, which year executed, which year wound down, year upon year, like reading another S table. Halfway through she put in one remark, the only one in the thirteen minutes: This document can be cited by both sides. The left cites it leftward, the right cites it rightward. I won't stand in the way—and I couldn't.
In the canteen people matched the years under their breath. At the year of the decision, several of the station's old hands traded a look—what they had been doing that year, all of them remembered. At the year of execution the graduate student worked out his own age: still in primary school. At the year of winding down, at the far end of the table, someone laid a pair of chopsticks quietly flat. The timeline read off, she paused and said: The table is that much. What follows is words. And took up the script again. Her scripted voice and the one in the news twenty years before were a couple of eras apart, but the rhythm hadn't changed: one sentence was one sentence, the gaps between sentences cut to the same measure. An old comrade, listening along, said under his breath: Still that pace. The man beside him asked what pace. He said: The pace you read so a stenographer's pen could keep up.
Thirteen minutes in, the sound of page-turning stopped. Half a second of quiet. Then she said: These next passages—twenty years in the writing—today I don't read them. What can't be read out, reading it would be for nothing.—From that sentence she was off the script.
What followed, less than five minutes, was her own words. She spoke slowly, slower than with the script, because the script didn't have it; she had to think it out character by character, new. She said the scripts she had read in her life, stacked up, would stand taller than she did; the scripts were all correct; what was wrong was never the script. She said the decision coming out as it did didn't answer to the script; it answered to whoever signed—and she had signed, and she owned it. She said her generation was best at polishing a sentence until nobody could fault it, polished until, in the end, nobody remembered it. She said these five minutes were to go out as no transcript; slips of transcription would not be acknowledged: the sound wave is authoritative.
She said one short passage more. It was about the lamp in her office in the hundred days of the silence verdict. She said what hour that lamp went out each night, the secretariat had on record; the records were correct; she didn't question the records. What she questioned was the person under the lamp—the person under the lamp took a burning lamp for responsibility. She said: Whether it was responsibility, you have to look at what came after the lamp went out. The account of after the lamp went out is written in this document; the passages I can't read out are that account. When this passage was done she stopped three seconds—one second more than her two. No one knew what the extra second was.
The last passage was about the star. She said they had called it it, called it that for forty years, never given it another name. She said what was carved on it, they wanted to know more than anyone—but knowing wouldn't let them do anything about it; knowing was never for the sake of doing anything. She said what was written in the passages of this document that can't be read out was exactly that: that nothing could be done. With that sentence done she closed the script. Closed it lightly, as if afraid of waking someone.
Then came that sentence. The original's wording could be looked up online afterward; the grammar was correct. In the broadcast she dropped one character—one character, the not. That one character dropped, and the whole sentence turned over. The script had said this side; what came out of her mouth was the other. The way she dropped it had its own craft. The first half she read as flat as the script; at that character the tongue went over and the character didn't keep up—not stuck; slid past, like a stair with one step missing, the foot coming down half an inch into air, and the person still walking on down. People who knew the trade said afterward: a slide like that fools a transcript, not an ear. She finished and stopped. Two seconds. Everyone who knew her knew what those two seconds were—twenty years, whenever a character dropped, she stopped two seconds and said: I'm sorry. I will read that sentence again. In the canteen someone's breath stopped without their meaning to, waiting for the sentence twenty years by heart.
She didn't say it. The two seconds passed; she opened her mouth, and what she said was: That sentence ends here.—Then the close: four sentences, three people thanked, one goodbye. At 12:17:41 the broadcast was over.
Nobody in the canteen moved. At the very end the radio had a little static; the server came out of the window, reached over, and switched it off—then, as if remembering something, switched it back on and twisted the volume down to nothing. In that shrinking static, her fingers knocked twice on the tabletop. The graduate student sat nearest and watched her. She said: Nothing. I heard it.
The room broke up slowly. No one spoke; no one hurried out—everyone still waiting on something: for her to say one more sentence, or for themselves to think one through. Going, the old comrades shook her hand one by one at the door; at the third, that one said: Read well. She said: She didn't finish reading. That one said: Better unfinished. She thought, and nodded. The last to leave was the one from the guesthouse. He stopped at the door, turned, and asked: Coming again tomorrow?—he meant the station people. The station people said: Yes. Every day. He said: Then I'll lodge one more day. The next day he did come; he didn't go into the machine room; he sat a morning in the courtyard, in the sun. Leaving, he said: This courtyard is good. Quiet—but not empty. The families' children passed the window once, didn't know what was going on inside, pressed to the glass for one look, and were led off by their teacher. That afternoon the machine room ran as usual; the young man went to check the table—S line 7,714, 0.37. He read aloud all afternoon, louder than usual. Nobody corrected him.
The station had recorded the broadcast; before filing it, the young man looked a long while at the waveform. Those two seconds were a shallow groove on the wave—visible, inaudible. He cut them out and saved them alone, one file; its name was two characters: Two Seconds. Asked what he was saving it for, he said: Nothing. The account has to have it. Later everyone at the station copied the file, and nobody opened it again—all of them had it by heart. Engineer Ma was the exception. He opened it once and played it to the room at a handover meeting. Two seconds of quiet, out of the speaker, was still quiet; nothing at all. When it had played, he asked them what they'd heard. Someone said: Nothing. He said: Right. That is its entire content.
The wrong sentence circled everywhere in three days. Both sides cited it: one side said, you see, she has finally admitted it herself; the other said, you see, a slip—the script is correct. Someone dug out the old ledger. The characters she had misread in her life came to, on the record, zero—and that zero had once been kept by a group of stenographers founded for the purpose, three turnings of the membership, one cabinet of files. The day after the broadcast, the group's last head posted a farewell on his personal page: This group dissolves as of today. The dissolution statement was one sentence; posted, the page was locked. In the comments someone said: You kept watch for twenty years; what you kept watch for was this one character. That comment stayed pinned for years. The archive, on request, published the original in full; the sentence sat on page seven; the grammar did pass; the only wrong instance was the one in the broadcast. Her life, zero slips; the only one, on this sentence. Overnight someone made the comparison audio—the scripted sentence and the broadcast sentence, played front to back, two seconds between. That audio was used countless times after: in lectures, in debates, in mourning too. Later someone posted the two sentences side by side; the poster said nothing; the readers read for themselves. Nobody deleted that post, nobody annotated it; it hung there for years.
At the station nobody reposted and nobody took sides. Engineer Ma said: When the one who read the scripts no longer believes in scripts, what side is there left for us to take. The words reached the families' quarter the next day, and the quarter boiled them down to: She's stopped counting herself. It came back; the station laughed, and after the laugh thought it right too—the wrong part being that nobody could say just where it was wrong. The graduate student asked: The wrong sentence—does it count as her words? Nobody picked that up. Two days later the primary-school teacher from the quarter brought her pupils through the station; after the visit, the little girl with the twin pigtails asked: That grandma said a word wrong—why didn't she say sorry. The teacher thought, and said: Some things, you find out they were right only after they're said wrong. The girl said: Then what about exams? The whole room laughed. She stood at the back; she didn't laugh; she nodded once.
The archive wrote in twice. Once, whether to issue an erratum; once, what year the date on the last page was. Both replies were the same: The script is correct. The archive printed the correspondence as it stood; no erratum went out. The full text, punctuation included, was 10,400 characters; the last page held one line, a date.
Saturday's video. Zhou Yao asked: Did you hear the broadcast. She said: I did. In the canteen. Zhou Yao asked: Standing or sitting. She said: Sitting. A canteen full. Zhou Yao turned the camera to the wall. The One Taking Over was carved and hung at the center of the studio; what the hands were taking couldn't be made out; the knuckles were all there. Zhou Yao said: That day I carved all day. She asked: Why that day. Zhou Yao said: Don't know. The hands wanted to move themselves. Mother and daughter looked at the print a while across the screen. Before it went up, Zhou Yao said: Mom, the wrong sentence—I remembered it too. She said: Mm. Zhou Yao said: And you. She said: What I remember is the two seconds she stopped. Zhou Yao said: What's in the two seconds. She said: One character. She didn't pick it back up.
At night she sat alone a while in the machine room. The recording had been copied over; she put on the bone-conduction headset and listened from the top. At that sentence she set her fingers on the edge of the table and waited out the two seconds. In the two seconds she didn't knock. At the third second she stopped the recording, took off the headset, turned off the lights, locked the door. Two steps out, she looked back once at the clock in the machine room.