What They Want From Her

She walked home the long way, because the long way had, since Tuesday, become the way she did her thinking; and by the time she let herself into the flat and put the kettle on she had arrived at the question she had not, in the long room, quite let herself ask out loud. Not whether Saroya had been telling her the truth — that was the question to hold. The smaller and meaner one sat behind it: if the Society had spent a hundred and fifty years building a vocabulary and a building and a green door and an envelope with no surname on it, all to find people like Iyla, what specifically did they get when they found one. Not the company. Not the colleagueship. Those were the things one said over the first cup of tea. The question was what was got over the second.

She set the coin on the kitchen table while she waited for the kettle — on the bare wood, not a saucer, because she wanted to see the fact of it again: that it was a coin, an actual coin, with a milled edge and a small wear at the rim where a thousand thumbs in a city that did not exist had rubbed it, and that the man on its face was named Aren the Second, and that nobody — nobody, anywhere, in any registry of any thing — owned him.

She thought about the apple. It had come out of a children's book she had read at nine, imagined first by a woman named — she got the book down, because she was being rigorous — Margery Whitlock, in 1962, in a small house in Dorset, with an editor. The apple was, in some sense she could not quite untangle, Whitlock's apple. If a person could be said to own a fictional apple — and lawyers had argued about less interesting fruit for centuries — then Whitlock, or her estate, or her publisher, owned it. The apple had a provenance. It belonged to the road that had been walked to it.

The coin did not. The coin had no Margery Whitlock, no estate, no 1962. It had Iyla, and a notebook, and four pages, and an afternoon. The coin was — she watched the word arrive and settle and refuse to leave — unowned.

This was what the Society wanted. Not her company. Not her ethics. Not her Sunday afternoons. They wanted the coin, and what the coin was an example of: a category of object that no one, in any human institution, had a prior claim on, that could be carried out a door and sold or studied or given as a gift without any of the questions that attended ordinary objects ever being asked. They wanted the eight because the eight were the only people in the world who could produce, on demand, things no human being had ever made and no institution had ever claimed.

She made the tea badly — her hands went clumsy when her mind outran them — and sat back down. The coin had not, while she was at the kettle, become any less the thing it was.

She thought about Lentar. The baker who had given her bread for a story about her grandmother. The scrivener with his book of kept stories. Aren the Second on the coin, and the man who had named him, who was not her, who lived somewhere in Lentar she had not yet walked to, and who was — and here the small clean cold arrived, colder than Saroya's table had been — a person. Someone Iyla had a relationship with the way one has a relationship with anyone: incomplete and biased and partial and real. Someone who, in Saroya's careful phrasing, had not asked to exist. Someone who, if she understood what she now understood, was — along with the bread and the coin and the bakers' alley and the dust-gold light at three in the afternoon — an unowned artifact.

She put her hand over her mouth. She sat a long minute like that, the tea cooling and the coin on the table, and thought, with a clarity she would have refused if she had seen it coming, that Saroya had not, today, told her the worst part. Saroya had said, with the lightness of a woman delivering a fact she wanted absorbed rather than heard, that the worlds were not, on the whole, considered by the Society to be the Author's property. She had said it the way you say the thing you need to say before the next sentence — the sentence Iyla was now saying for her, here, in her kitchen: that if the worlds were not the Author's property, then the people in the worlds were not the Author's people; and if they were no one's people, then they were available; and if they were available, then the question was not whether someone would eventually go and get them, but who, and on what terms, and with what story told about it afterward.

To be specific about the baker was to admit she had made him. To admit she had made him was to admit she was responsible for him. To admit that was to admit that whatever decision she made — on Sunday, or not on Sunday, about a green door on a street she had walked past six hundred times — was not, in fact, a decision about her own life. It was a decision about his.

She picked up the coin. It was warm, which it should not have been — it had been on the wood for an hour — and she did not, for the moment, try to explain that to herself. She set it down, got out her notebook, turned to a fresh page, and wrote, at the top, in the small upright hand she was beginning, against her will, to write in: What they want is the coin. What they want is the baker. What they want is everyone in Lentar who does not, in the world's registry, exist, because what does not exist cannot be stolen, and what cannot be stolen can be taken.

She underlined taken. She closed the notebook and drank the badly made tea in three sips, then sat at the table with the coin and the letter and the brass key, and let herself feel the specific shape of the thing she had not, until tonight, understood she had been recruited into. The Society did not want to harm her. The Society wanted to be standing next to her, in a friendly and well-lit room, on the afternoon she decided what Lentar was for. It wanted to be the voice in her ear when she answered the third question. It wanted, in the most literal and most patient sense, to be the conscience of an Author — because an Author with no conscience was a thing the Society could not afford, and an Author with her own conscience was a thing the Society could not, in the end, control.

She did not yet know which kind of Author she was going to be. She knew, sitting at the table at half past nine on a Friday in October, that the question was no longer whether she would walk through the green door. The question was what she would be carrying when she did, and what she would refuse, on the threshold, to put down.