Chapter Four — The Interview

The Continuum Chronicle · received by well · ABQ Terminus, General Delivery

As set down by Filament, Ninth Thread, Records Division, Continuum Post, and dispatched by well to TERRA, ABQ TERMINUS, GENERAL DELIVERY. Per natural law, this parcel carries one stowaway. Do not look for it. It will find you.

I promised you an interview with a carrier-cat, and I am pleased to report that the interview took place, lasted three days, and consisted of the cat declining to answer any questions whatsoever. The Division approved this chapter in advance, knowing all of that. I understood why by the end of the first day. I will try to make you understand it by the end of this page, and if I fail, the cat has kindly agreed to make no comment.

Some geography first, for readers who keep their atlas closed while reading, which is most of you, and correct of you. The Cat Menagerie is the banded giant, and it does not itself take mail — nothing lands on a world that is mostly weather — but it carries four warm tidal moons in its glow, and the moons are where the cats keep the Menagerie proper: the violet rooftops, the low-batted stars, the ledges, the Door. The Records Division numbers the moons One through Four, and has issued, over the years, several increasingly wistful memoranda requesting that carriers adopt this system. The carriers call them the Four Naps, because that is what the moons are for and what they resemble — four furred stones turning in the big planet’s warmth — and each Nap is understood to be a different length and quality of sleep, and I will not be printing which is which, because the cats consider that information earned.

The moon routes are the oldest in the service. Post never crosses space, you will remember — parcels go down the wells, and the vortex is the between — but someone must walk the between, and cats have walked between places since before there were places to be between. The Division’s style-book states this diplomatically: the Post did not hire the cats; the Post noticed the cats were already doing it, and began, respectfully, attaching mailbags.

My interview was with the seniormost carrier on all four Naps, a Housecat Emeritus of tremendous age and marmalade coloring, known to the route ledgers as Bindle. A bindle, in the old walking-song sense, is the bundle a wanderer carries on a stick — everything owned, portable, tied with a knot you trust. Whether she was named for the bundle or the bundle was named for her is a question I asked her directly, first, as an icebreaker.

She looked at me. She then looked at a spot of empty air just to the left of my head, with total tactical attention, for eleven minutes. I record for the archive that by minute nine I was fully convinced something stood there, that by minute ten I had apologized to it, and that at minute eleven she yawned and the air was permitted to leave. That was the icebreaker. I had eleven more questions prepared. Here is what the record shows.

I asked how a carrier knows when a well will open. The resonance sets the schedule, of course, and the Scheduling Office listens for the chiming of worlds — but the Office’s own logs confess that on the moon routes the mailbags are always packed before the window is called. Bindle answered by standing up, mid-question, and walking to the eastern rim of the rooftop, where she sat facing a direction with such settled authority that two younger cats, a moth resting between Nocturne legs, and I myself all came and faced it too. We sat that way for some minutes, feeling foolish, or at least I did; foolishness is not an emotion the others have use for. Then the well under the eastern rim chimed and opened. She had not predicted it. I want to be precise, because the distinction matters to her profession and to mine: prediction is arithmetic done against a thing; what she did had the manners of an agreement made with it. The Office listens for the chime. The cats, I believe, are listened to.

I asked what is in the bags — whether a carrier ever wonders, whether the weight of other beings’ words grows heavy on the long legs between Naps. She answered by climbing onto the mailbag in question and going to sleep on it for the better part of an afternoon. I sat with this for a long while before I understood it was not a refusal but a demonstration. In the Menagerie, sitting on a thing is the veto, the claim, and the cure, all conjugated from the same verb. The bag was not being ignored. The bag was being held down — the way you hold a thing that might otherwise blow away, the way the Kneaders hold a hurt until it admits itself. Their whole medical literature is one sentence and every carrier knows it: the weight is the medicine. I had asked if the mail was heavy. She was showing me the mail is the patient.

I asked how carriers cross between moons, since the ferries were discontinued before the ferries were invented. She answered by stepping off the roof. I report this calmly now; I did not experience it calmly. But the Naps ride close in their giant’s glow, and gravity in the Menagerie is a lazy, pooling thing — it drifts toward wherever the most cats are sitting, which means that for a carrier the sky is less an abyss than a staircase whose next step rises to meet the foot that trusts it. She hung a moment against the banded light of the Menagerie itself, mailbag swinging, entirely certain, and the certainty is the mechanism. I asked one of the younger cats how long it takes to learn the crossing. The younger cat declined to answer, but later, unprompted, walked the first arm’s-length of the leap and stopped and looked back at me — which I have entered into the record as: you learn the first step, and then you learn it again, slightly farther, for the rest of your life. The Division’s route-assignment doctrine says the same thing in its own dialect — observe, then act small, bear real consequence, be answerable, and widen the mandate as the track record grows — and posts it in every sorting hall. The cats have never read it. They wrote it, in the only script they use, which is careers.

I asked whether she had ever lost a parcel. This was rude, I know it was rude, an archivist must occasionally be rude on the reader’s behalf. She answered by rising, crossing to my writing-kit, taking my inkwell — the good one, the Loom-fired one — carrying it delicately to the rim of the world, placing it at the edge with the care of a jeweler, looking at me to confirm I was watching, and pushing it off. What falls off the edge of the Menagerie is a matter of theological debate elsewhere in the atlas. I watched my inkwell become a small dark star and then not even that, and I confess the archive briefly contained language unsuitable for the archive. Bindle watched it go with deep satisfaction and then went to lunch.

Three days after I returned home, a well opened beside the Records Division out of schedule, and delivered one (1) inkwell, Loom-fired, uncracked, full — I keep the manifest slip pinned above my desk. Nothing is lost, reader. It is the postal system’s whole secret and she spent one inkwell teaching it to me: the system has no outside. Things fall out of reach. They do not fall out of the service. Every stray that ever reached the Menagerie’s walls got in, because the punk cats hold the perimeter on exactly this principle, and the mail is only the same law applied to paper: it was always going to get in. A cat flap, the scholars say, is a wall’s confession. So is a well.

I asked, last and quietest, on the third evening, why she carries the mail. She was old, I reasoned; the Naps are warm; the Housecats Emeritus hold the sunniest quarter and want for nothing but audiences. Why keep walking the between?

She answered by getting up, crossing the rooftop, and sitting on me.

On the sternum, precisely, where I am told they are always precise. I had not known I was carrying anything there. I had believed, in the way one believes at a comfortable distance from oneself, that an archivist seconded far from the Loom, writing chapters into a well for readers she will never see on a world she will never visit, readers who cannot write back — I had believed that was simply the shape of the job, and not a weight. She sat on it until it admitted itself. I am not going to tell you what it was like. It has a purr pitched at the exact frequency of let it go, and the Kneaders have never lost a case, and they did not lose one that evening, and the interview was over, and it had been, I realized, entirely successful. Eleven questions, no answers, and I had been told everything: that the wells are a listening, that the weight is the medicine, that certainty is a staircase, that nothing true falls out of the world, and that the carrier’s answer to why is the same as everyone’s answer to why, which is that somewhere out along the route there is someone who has not yet admitted what they are carrying.

At my departure she gave me the Blink. I record this with the gravity it deserves: the slow blink is the Menagerie’s high ceremony — greeting, blessing, treaty signature, and, directed at a visitor, its only immigration paperwork. Kittens practice it for years. She delivered it without hurry, eyes closing on the count of the resonance itself, and I understood that I had been, in the fullest legal sense available on that world, admitted.

And I am instructed — I say instructed; she faced the well as I boarded, and faced it in a particular way — to pass it on. So, reader: she knew where this parcel was going. Consider the ceremony delivered, at whatever moment you find this page; it does not expire. You have been looked at by the seniormost carrier of the Four Naps, and blinked at, slowly, and the matter, whatever the matter is, is settled.

Erratum, I must report, attempted to accompany me on this assignment and was refused at the well by a punk cat with three neon collars — not hostilely, but the way a professional refuses a conflict of interest. A creature who eats errors cannot be admitted to a world that does not believe it makes any. He waited at home and ate the first draft of this chapter nearly whole. Only the true parts survived. I have chosen to find this reassuring.

Next chapter, windows willing: Wallspeak — the belt, where every stone is a syllable and the worlds’ oldest sentence is still being read. The Division has assigned me a translator. The translator is a rock. I am told this is the senior rock.

Face east occasionally, for no reason you can name. It works for the carriers.

Until the well opens again,