In the fourth week of the translation class, the sheets began coming home — white paper, in duplicate, one copy for the iron cabinet of the branch bureau's Translation Affairs Section, one for the child to carry home for a guardian's signature and bring back the next morning, and the returned copy had to match the stub; where it didn't match, a re-signature was required, with a separate page of explanation attached, all of it printed on the back of the sheet under item five, the type one size smaller than the front and printed perfectly clearly. The re-signature clause actually got used once, in the second week: a classmate's sheet was blotted by a water cup, the date's half-cell gone soft, and when the child handed it in the next morning the branch bureau called by noon — the stub doesn't match, please bring your seal in the afternoon. When the mother got home she said the seal had been stamped all right; the written explanation ran a page and a half, and by the end she no longer knew who she was explaining to. The story moved through the parents for an afternoon and settled into one sentence: the sheet is more careful than the people. What Lin Wanzhao noticed first was the format: three columns, widths fixed to the millimeter, date and time band on the first line, entries from the second on, each entry followed by a magnitude, and after the magnitude one narrow cell left for the checker's signature. She had seen this format in the meteorological bureau's yearbooks; thirty years ago, when the translation sheet got its first official form, the bureau borrowed it wholesale from the weather system, column widths unchanged — borrowed, most likely, for no better reason than convenience, and the convenience had since hardened into a rut down a road that everyone after walked along in, nobody ever asking who had pressed the rut there.
Every day after school Zhou Shu set the sheet on the shoe cabinet without handing it over. The placement was fixed too: second cubby on the left, the one that also held her bus pass and a key. The first sheet carried seven entries, the second three, the third five. The fourth day's sheet was blank — date and time band only, and laid across the entry column one pencil line, heavy at the start, light at the finish, ruled straight. Not along a cell border but across the middle of the cells, its two ends stopping two millimeters short of the frame on either side. Whoever drew it had a sure hand.
She asked, nothing said today.
Zhou Shu said, I said it.
She asked, then why is this column empty.
Zhou Shu hitched her backpack strap up and said, I said it. They wouldn't take it.
She asked, who wouldn't.
Zhou Shu said, Translation Affairs.
She asked, what did they say.
Zhou Shu said, that this doesn't go in the ledger.
She asked, what doesn't.
Zhou Shu paused, and said, the ones that can't be counted.
That night she spread the four sheets on the dinner table in date order. The first, seven entries: five pressure, one migration, one luminosity. The second, three, all pressure. The third, five: four pressure, one migration. Ten days, fifteen entries, twelve of them pressure. Behind an occasional entry came a word, and behind the word no magnitude — the cell printed "to verify," and the to-verify cells stayed empty. She had counted the empty ones: together with the ruled line on the fourth day's sheet, nine in all. The numbers in the pressure column were walking down, a few tenths lower each day, lowering with such regularity it was like someone going down a staircase, one step at a time, in no hurry.
On the afternoon the translation class turned one month old, the branch bureau convened the parents, third floor of the district Window Period Administration. The meeting room's windows faced west and caught sun after three; the row by the windows had drawn the curtains. More than forty parents came, not enough chairs, so two rows of folding chairs went in at the back — iron-tube frames that clanked before you settled, so the people in those two rows all sat down half a beat behind everyone else. Section Chief Zhen of the Verification Section presided, getting through two and a half of his standard three sentences before ceding the third to the comrade from Translation Affairs. The comrade's surname was Tong, in his forties, carrying a green bound volume — one booklet a year, thirty years, a stack that would come to his elbow. He hadn't carried it in his arms; he'd brought it in a string net bag, the handles wrapped in adhesive tape. First the system, he said: sheets stapled into a volume every Friday, one volume a week, fifty-two a year, better than fifteen hundred in thirty years, all in the cabinets. Then the content, he said: the current sheet carries three categories — pressure, migration, luminosity. He turned the volume to the final year and read one entry — such a year, month, day; pressure 101.3 kilopascals; migration easterly, force three; luminosity, grade two. The fullest entry, he said, in thirty years.
Someone asked, what about the treaty.
Comrade Tong said, the treaty sits at the negotiation level. Outside today's scope.
Someone else asked, and the things the children say.
He said, the everyday level goes into the ledger. Only the ledger.
A third asked, in thirty years, not one whole sentence.
He said, scattered words, yes. Whole sentences, no. Then he added: thirty years, two thousand one hundred and seven registered acquirers, an authorized staff of forty-one translation officers.
The room went quiet a moment. A man in the back rows stood up, said, my girl has translated two years and filed pressure for a year and a half, and sat down again on his own; nobody picked it up. After a while a woman with glasses in the front raised her hand on the staffing question: forty-one people, for two thousand one hundred and seven files? Comrade Tong said, not managing them. Holding them. The woman asked, held against what. Comrade Tong set the green volume down on the table and said, against the day holding is needed. After that exchange, no more hands went up. A woman by the window asked one thing: then what is it we're cooperating with. Section Chief Zhen said, cooperating. The meeting broke up at four thirty, nobody in the corridor speaking, soles on the terrazzo, one footfall pressing down on another.
Before the meeting ended, Lin Wanzhao submitted a records-access request. Cross-system files required a stated purpose; she wrote: long-sequence comparison of the underhum, research use. The purpose statement had to come from her employer, so she went back to the array station for the director's signature. He signed fast, and after signing said one thing: this thing is on their side of the fence. Don't put yourself in with it. She said, I'm only comparing. The director capped his pen and said, comparing is being in with it too.
The archive room lay under the array station: sign in at the door, no photographs, nothing leaves, paper copied only by hand. The register had five columns, the last one "reason for copying," and the old master on duty filled in four characters for her — "sequence check" — after asking her one question first. She answered comparison, and he said, then it's a check. Between one stated reason and another, the conversions were understood on this underground level. She copied for three afternoons and filled two soft-cover notebooks, in pencil. The bound volumes' paper had gone brittle; pages had to be turned with a fingertip pushing a corner — press harder and crumbs dropped. Some years printed dark, some light, and in the light years the figures took a slant against the lamp to be read at all. For the third notebook she switched pens, to one with adhesive tape around the barrel, issued by the station, its registration number written into the ledger when it was drawn — a number she never looked at. By the fourth afternoon a dent had been pressed into the side of her right index finger. The dent was still there the next day.
Upstairs she did the reasonable things. Thirty years of entry counts, summed by week and laid over the curve of the Watching Day's uplift; the two lines walked their separate walks, a correlation in the hundredths, which is to say none. She tried monthly sums, tried luminosity alone, tried migration folded into angles; three tries, three separate walks. She filed those three pages together, and in the filing her hand paused. Where it paused she couldn't have said, nor why she pulled the first year's soft-cover notebook out from the bottom of the stack. In order it should have been read last. She read it first.
What she did then was a simpleton's trick: align by calendar day. First year, January ninth: three entries. This year, January ninth: three entries. First year, January tenth: empty. This year, January tenth: empty. Through February the entry counts rose and fell, and rose and fell in the very places this year's February did. She matched her way into March, June, September, faster the farther she went, because past a certain point she no longer needed to check — she already knew what the next line held. Empty behind empty, three behind three, dip behind dip, thirty rows without one row off, like two people walking the opposite banks of a river with their steps landing even. She finished mid-October, stopped, laid the two notebooks side by side, and pressed the desk lamp lower, down to where the light held just the desktop. She printed the two sequences side by side and took their difference in a third column. The difference, in entries.
Copied through October thirty-first, three hundred and four rows in all. Two hundred ninety-seven rows where the difference was zero. Seven rows weren't: five annotated "not reported," two off by one.
She pulled out the magnitude column too. This year's numbers sat below the first year's, below with regularity — every row lower by four parts in a thousand. Pressure, first year: 101.6. This year: 101.2. Lower by 0.4. Four parts in a thousand. She ran it three times. Three times the same.
Then she saw the two places. First year, April sixth through the fourteenth: nine days running, the entry column empty, the reason column reading "not reported." She went through the station's duty logs for those nine days — no power cut, no class suspended, the translation class ran as usual. In the bound volume those nine days were stapled as square as anywhere else; no loose pages, no inserted pages. The emptiness was emptiness as it had happened. This year, the same stretch, also nine days, the reason column also "not reported." The handwriting on the two "not reported"s was not the same person's — the first year's nine characters printed upright, this year's slightly slanted, slanted all one way, as if one person had written them nine days straight. And first year, November nineteenth: a single entry that day, its magnitude luminosity seven. In thirty years of bound volumes, luminosity had only ever reached two — two, four times in all. Seven had happened once. On scratch paper she listed every high value luminosity had put up in thirty years, and the list came out short: two, two, two, two, seven. The first four scattered years apart; the last one standing alone at the end of the line, touching nobody. She copied the two dates onto a sticky note, and when she finished, her hand stopped on the corner of the note and stayed about two seconds.
Xiao Jiang from her section came past with an enamel mug and bent over her screen. The two lines lay side by side, matching in length and thickness.
Xiao Jiang said, how come your two lines look the same.
Lin Wanzhao said, not the same. The same one.
Xiao Jiang said, how many years apart.
She said, twenty-nine. Within two days.
Xiao Jiang straightened up, drank, and said, then this thing is like this forever.
Lin Wanzhao didn't pick it up. She looked once more at the two lines lying side by side on the screen. Xiao Jiang had said the word lightly and gone off to fill his mug; she let the word stand where he had left it, took up her pen, and wrote another line in her notebook. Twenty-nine years, one cycle. Each cycle down by four parts in a thousand. Underneath that, a second line: What comes back is not data. She looked at the line for a while and did not strike it out.
The approval request was one page, four lines:
One. The translation-sheet sequence is periodic, period twenty-nine years (checked by calendar day, error within two days).
Two. Each entry's magnitude runs lower than the same entry of the previous cycle by four parts in a thousand, the direction of decay consistent.
Three. The sequence is forecastable. Forecast point: November nineteenth of this year, one entry, luminosity seven.
Four. Classification pending.
The page went from her office to the research section, from the research section to the bureau, and after three days a receipt came back. She hadn't chased it; the third afternoon it arrived with the internal mail — kraft envelope, the glue on the flap overdone, a corner of the number tearing off as she opened it. The receipt was machine-typed, a long string for a number, and in the classification field, four printed characters: translation-sheet data. She looked at the four characters and did not apply for correction. Correction meant another form, with a field for "basis of original classification error," and the field gave two blank lines. Two lines, room for some twenty characters — to hold a twenty-nine-year cycle, plus a decay of four parts in a thousand. She picked up the pen and put it down. Classification was classification; numbers were numbers. A number has never changed from being sorted into a column.
She photocopied the receipt twice. One copy went into the kraft envelope, the one holding Zhou Shu's medical booklets from birth to now, one a year, a pencil tucked at the ninth page. The other she slipped into the last page of the soft-cover notebook, first writing three numbers in the blank of that page: twenty-nine, 0.4, November nineteenth.
Then she closed the notebook. Before closing it she looked at the date again — a second look. The desk calendar sat beside the phone; she reached over and turned to the page. Printed on it, nothing but a number. She shut the calendar and weighted it under the phone.
Seventeen days.
That night she made her usual round of the router and the doorbell intercom and switched off everything that could be switched off. Then she stood in the living room a while without turning on the light. A streetlight below laid one stripe through the window, landing on the shoe cabinet, where tomorrow's sheet waited to go back, the entry column empty, Zhou Shu's signature already in place — in the cell under the guardian's, one size smaller than her own name. A smaller name signed beneath a bigger one: who ordered that order wasn't written on the sheet, and Zhou Shu had never asked; when the girl signed, she didn't hesitate. In the dark Lin Wanzhao looked at the two names a long time and did not go turn on the light. The names signed into those same cells across thirty years, stacked up, should run thicker than fifteen hundred bound volumes; one thin sheet, a signature at each end, and between them those columns of cells fixed to the millimeter — the empty cells queue too, and the cell at the tail of the line belongs to the checker.
She went and turned off the living room light.