I waited for shock to arrive; it never did. I said, faintly, “I see.”
The Chancellor of Dominion crossed her arms on the desk and leaned toward me. Her expression became almost comically severe, like the queen of hearts in a deck of cards. “You have served your country well, Owen Mallory.” Even her voice changed, the accent turning oddly archaic. “Are you the man who will save it?”
This was the moment, I thought, for a show of emotion. I made myself swallow, as if overcome. I nodded.
Vivian’s face relaxed again. There was something unsettling about the way her expressions shifted, a fractional delay. “Excellent! Let’s go ahead then—no time like the present, is there?” She clapped her hands twice, very loudly. The door opened, and the unmemorable person said, “Chancellor?”
Vivian issued a series of instructions, but I barely heard them. I was reaching for the book, sliding it across the desktop. My left hand was hurting so badly now it was difficult to make my fingers close around the cover.
I opened the book. For the first time since it had arrived in the post—for perhaps the first time in my life—I experienced true surprise. “The pages,” I said. “The pages are—” I swallowed, this time in genuine and wholly inexplicable distress. “Not blank.”
Vivian gave me a quizzical smile. “Well, I should certainly hope not! Did you think I gave you a fake?”
I swayed a little. I could smell the clean, wild scent of frost, the green bite of pine.
Behind me, the door opened again, this time admitting a pair of men who both looked like they knew the difference between stocks and bonds. “Ah, Mr. Satford, Mr. Gills. Make yourselves comfortable. This is Corporal Mallory, the young man we discussed.”
The men introduced themselves and expressed their extreme joy to be working with me on a project of such national import. They produced glossy leather folios and began to turn the pages, describing the terms oftheir offer in a language that seemed to bear very little resemblance to modern Mothertongue. What, I wondered, was anadvance against royalties? My hand was screaming now, the pain traveling in hot waves from my wrist to my jaw.
Vivian cut in sometimes with questions and clarifications. The men nodded and made tiny amendments to their papers. I sat in dazed silence, thinking, over and over, for no logical reason:This isn’t how it goes.
But apparently it was. Someone handed me a pen. I signed my name twice and shook three hands. Mr. Satford assured me that a check would be delivered by special courier the following morning. Then everyone stood, so I stood, too.
I reached for the book, but Vivian pinned it to the desk with one finger. “Property of the state, I’m afraid. We’ll get you an office here, and a couple of assistants.”
I nodded because I didn’t know what else to do. Turning away from the book felt like missing a step on the stairs, a sick swoop.
Vivian gave me a bracing slap on the shoulder at the door. Her eyes flicked to my forehead, slicked with sweat, and she shook her head, fondly. “Poor thing. You must be absolutely stifling in that coat. You’d think you were expecting snow.”
Everyone laughed, and so I laughed, too.
I finished the translation well before winter.
It wasn’t hard. The Chancellor gave me a very nice office in the capitol building, two security guards, and crisp, glossy photographs of each page ofThe Death of Una Everlasting.(The original text was packed carefully away; the college archivist would have approved.)
I was also provided with a pair of painfully deferential graduate students who insisted on addressing me as Professor Mallory. When I corrected them—I was only a lecturer—they said, instantly and simultaneously, “Yes, Professor Mallory.”
One of them, an anxious young woman named something like Daphne or Shelly, scrambled to explain. “It’s just, that’s what the Chancellor called you. And Professor Sawbridge talked about you so much when we took her Material Cultures of Middle Dominion course. She said you were—”
“A feckless sycophant?”
“—worth ten of us.”
I was shocked to feel a sudden surge of affection; I hadn’t felt much of anything since I walked out of Vivian’s office. “Oh.”
The other one, a rowing-clubbish boy named Georgie or Frankie, said, glumly, “And twenty of me.”
I sent Professor Sawbridge another telegram that evening but received no reply. The term had started the previous week, but her office on campus remained locked, and her usual courses had been assigned to harassed-looking junior faculty.
I made an effort to be nicer to the graduate students after that. Partly because anyone who had survived Material Cultures of Middle Dominion deserved reparations, and partly because I needed them rather badly. Their Middle Mothertongue was quite poor—why did everyone struggle so much with strong and weak noun classes—but I kept forgetting to eat or drink, and my hand often hurt too badly to type.
I would translate aloud, instead, while they took turns transcribing. Once I caught Georgie (Frankie?) staring glazedly at me rather than typing. “What?” I asked him.
“Sorry, Professor! It’s just”—some revelatory throat-clearing and blushing here—“you have a lovely voice.”
I did. I always had. There was no reason it should startle me so. “Thank you, Frankie. Did you put that second comma in the last sentence?” He nodded, still blushing. “Well, strike it out. Whoever wrote this had a very loose grasp of punctuation.”
The day we finished the first draft, the Chancellor herself arrived with a bottle of expensive-looking brandy, the color of which reminded me of someone’s eyes, though I couldn’t recall whose. We raised our glasses to Dominion, and to the First Queen, and to you. My voice caught and snapped on your name, like a loose thread around a nail.
