The Pacing of Forty-One Steps

Letter 33 of the Book of Forgetting

The old well stood grey at the south edge, the fog flat and low. Zipporah Gefen came up the path at a little before nine, her rangefinder in her hand, her notebook tucked under her arm. Garrin Zohar was already there, sitting on the well's stone lip, his tablet closed on his knee.

"Garrin," she said, "I couldn't finish counting the north wall blocks—the guard stopped me. You've been timing Gilead's patrol at the south well. Could you tell me exactly how far from the well the fog line is by your paces, and whether the guard ever lets you near the wall? I want to compare that with my rangefinder readings."

Garrin stood up, brushed dust from his trousers. "I paced it this morning. From the well's lip to where the fog starts, it's forty-one of my steps, and my step is about three feet. The guard Gilead came by at nine-fourteen and left at nine-twenty-two, but he never let me set foot past the well. He just stood there, watching me."

Zipporah opened her notebook, ran her finger down a column of figures. "Forty-one steps—that's about a hundred twenty-three feet. My rangefinder read two-ten meters going out and one-ninety-six coming back, and the survey says the wall is six blocks. I counted seven before the guard turned me back. The numbers don't line up."

"The rangefinder reading different going out and coming back—that's not a wall problem, that's an instrument problem," Garrin said. "But the patrol timing, eight minutes exactly, that I can trust. I've timed it four days straight, and it's always eight minutes."

Zipporah closed her notebook. "Eight minutes, same every day. And the fog line at forty-one paces. If the fog moved, the patrol would have to adjust, but Gilead walks the same line every time. He's pacing off something fixed."

"Or he's pacing off the well," Garrin said. "He starts at the well, walks toward the fog, stops where it starts. If the fog line moved, he'd stop at a different place, but he never does. He stops at the same spot, forty-one paces out."

"So the fog line is fixed, but my rangefinder says the distance changes." Zipporah looked out at the white wall. "I trust my hands more than that device. Tomorrow I'll pace it myself, from the well to the fog, and count my own steps."

"I'll come with you," Garrin said. "I want to see if your forty-one matches mine, or if we get different numbers. If we don't agree, then it's not the fog—it's how we measure."

"And if we do agree, then the fog is exactly where it's always been, and the survey's six blocks is just a mistake. I can live with that."

"I can't." Garrin's voice was flat. "If the survey is wrong, then the record is wrong, and I've spent forty years keeping that record. I need to know which one of us is off—me, or the wall."

Zipporah looked at him a long moment. "Then we measure together. Same pace, same tape, same stopwatch. No instruments, no survey. Just our feet and our hands."

She held out her hand. Garrin took it.

The fog held its grey light. Somewhere beyond it, Eli Segal was setting up his camera at the east edge, waiting for the line to move again. Somewhere beyond it, a bird carried another seed that matched nothing in the reference list.

Garrin picked up his tablet. "Nine o'clock tomorrow. Here."

"I'll be here," Zipporah said.

She walked off toward the plaza. Garrin stood at the well's edge, counting something on his fingers, then stopped.

The patrol would come by at nine-fourteen. He already knew that. He stood there waiting for it, the way he had for four days.