What the Makers Forgot

Teo read it to them that night, in Ruth Anand's study, by the light of the dim yellow lamp in the ceiling, with the stars coming out one by one in the small window above her bed.

It took a long time. He read slowly. He did not want to get any of it wrong.

It was not what he had expected.

He had expected a story. One great terrible thing — a war, a plague, a fire falling from the sky — the kind of thing the Canon talked about, the Flame burning the proud Makers' world to glass in a single night. But Ruth Anand had not written a story. She had written something much more like the reckoning of mercy. A long, careful, unhappy list.

The world had grown hot, she wrote. Slowly, over a hundred years and more, because of the way the Makers burned things to make their machines go. They had known it was happening. They had measured it. They had argued about it for decades, and done a little, and not nearly enough, and the seas had risen and the rains had moved, and whole countries had dried up and blown away, which was why the Ashlands were the Ashlands. Then, in the hungry years that followed, there had been a sickness. Not the worst sickness the Makers had ever seen — they had fought worse and won — but it came at the wrong time, when everything was already strained, and it spread along the very roads and ships and flying machines that held their world together. Then there had been wars over water and food. Then the great web of wires that carried the Makers' power from city to city had failed, in one place and then another, and then everywhere.

And when the power failed, the world stopped.

That is the part I still don't really understand, Ruth had written, and the part I most want you to understand.

It wasn't that we didn't know how to fix things. Somewhere, someone knew how to fix almost everything. The problem was that the knowing was in the wrong places. We had built a world so complicated that no single person understood how it worked. I knew about stars. My neighbour knew about medicine. Neither of us knew how to make bread, or soap, or clean water, or a pair of shoes. We had machines for that. Other people, far away, ran the machines. When the machines stopped and the roads closed, billions of the most educated people who had ever lived found out that they did not know how to stay alive.

And the people who did know — the farmers, the old ones, the people with practical skills — were scattered and few. We had stopped listening to them a long time before.

Teo stopped reading for a moment. He thought of Ama Tull, sorting rye on a cloth across her knees. Black grain makes the fire. Everyone in the Fens knows that.

He went on.

But even that isn't the real reason, Ruth wrote. I've thought about this for twenty years, alone up here, and I keep coming back to the same thing.

We stopped trusting each other.

It happened slowly, over a long time, and I can't tell you exactly why. There were too many voices, and too many of them were lying, and after a while, people couldn't tell the liars from the honest ones, so they stopped believing anyone who didn't already agree with them. Scientists said the world was warming, and half the world called them liars. Doctors said a medicine was safe, and half the world refused it. Every fact became a side in an argument. And once that happens, knowledge stops being something you share. It becomes a weapon. Something you use against the people on the other side.

And then there were people who decided they could fix it by controlling who was allowed to know things. Who decided that ordinary people couldn't handle the truth, and needed to be told what to think by those who knew better. Some of them were even right about the facts.

But it didn't help. It never helps. People who are told what to think, and not shown how, can't tell a true thing from a false one when it matters. And the people doing the telling start to believe they're the only ones who can be trusted. And nobody checks them, because checking them is forbidden.

Knowledge that isn't shared isn't knowledge. It's just power.

If you're reading this, I'm begging you. Share it. All of it. Teach people how to check things for themselves. Even if they use it badly. Even if they argue with you. Especially then.

The notebook went on for many more pages, but Teo stopped there.

He closed it very gently and sat with it in his lap for a long time, looking at the stars in the little window.

He was thinking of Valdris Kahl.

Truth is a fire. The Chantry is the hearth. Every man among them could learn how to make a fire... and not one of them could learn what not to burn.

The Archdeacon had read the Leaves. He had read them for forty years, in the vault beneath the Crown. And he had looked at the fall of the Makers and drawn exactly the lesson that Ruth Anand, who had lived through it, begged her readers not to draw.

'He thinks he's saving the world from the Makers' mistake,' Teo thought slowly. 'And he's making it all over again.'

That night, Teo could not sleep.

He went out through the great door onto the summit of the mountain, and sat with his back against the cool white wall of the dome, and looked out over the Ashlands under the stars. The plain stretched away below him into the darkness, endless and silent and empty. Somewhere out there, three hundred miles to the west, was a grey wall holding back a sea, and a city clinging to it, and a little girl and a blind man hiding in a boathouse.

After a while, he heard footsteps. Mira sat down beside him without a word.

They sat there together for a long time.

"I've been thinking about something," Teo said at last. "Ever since the bread."

"Tell me."

He was quiet for a moment, gathering it. It was not easy to say.

"When I took the handle off the pump," he said slowly, "I told myself I was doing it to save people. And I was. But when the count fell, and the Chantry had the procession, and called it a miracle... I wasn't happy that people were alive. I was angry that nobody knew it was me." He stared out at the darkness. "And at the Burning Square, when the Archdeacon took what you said and turned it into the Flame's mercy... part of me wanted to stand up and shout that it was a lie. Even if it got Maud burned. Even if it got you burned. Just so that everyone would know he was wrong and I was right."

Mira did not say anything.

"I've been angry at him since the night in his study," Teo went on. "Because he was so sure. Because he'd decided he was the only one who could be trusted with the truth." He laughed shortly. "And I think... I think I wanted to be that, too. Just on the other side."

The stars wheeled slowly overhead.

"Ruth said knowledge isn't knowledge unless it's shared," Teo said quietly. "I don't think I ever really wanted to share it. I wanted to win."

Mira was silent for a long while. Then she leaned her head back against the white wall of the dome, and looked up at the sky.

"I've been thinking about something too," she said. "In the temple. In the city of glass."

Teo turned his head.

"The Canon says the Makers fell because they tried to measure the Flame," Mira said. "That knowledge was their sin. And for my whole life, I believed that. And then I met you, and Hesk, and saw the small lives in the water, and the black spurs in the rye... and I thought, perhaps the Canon is wrong. Perhaps knowledge isn't a sin. Perhaps faith is the mistake." She was quiet for a moment. "And then I stood in that temple, and I saw that they had faith and knowledge, and they fell anyway. And tonight Ruth says it wasn't either of those things. It was fear. Fear of each other. Fear of the truth. Fear of not being in control."

She turned and looked at him, and her dark eyes were very steady.

"I don't think the Flame is the enemy, Teo. I don't think knowledge is the enemy. I think the Chantry's sin was never faith. It was fear." She smiled faintly. "If the Flame made the world, then it made the small lives too. And the black spurs. And the stars, and the stick, and the shadow at noon. I don't see why it would mind us looking at them."

Teo looked at her for a long time.

"...You'd make a terrible Archdeacon," he said at last.

Mira laughed.

"I'd make a wonderful one," she said. "That's why they'd never let me."

The next morning, they found the crates.

Bram found them, in the end, in a long low room at the back of the hall that none of them had noticed before. There were dozens of them, stacked to the ceiling, made of the same smooth grey material as the shelves and sealed with strips of dark tape. Each one was stencilled with the same words. PRIMER. DISTRIBUTION COPIES. 50 PER CRATE.

Teo pried one open with the steel bar.

Inside, packed in neat rows, wrapped in clear, thin sheets that crackled under his fingers, were fifty red books. Each one exactly the same as the one on the table by the second door.

START HERE.

A Primer for People Who Have to Begin Again.

He stood there for a long time, looking down at them.

Then he counted the crates. Forty-four of them. Two thousand two hundred red books.

"Give it away," he murmured. "Please, whatever you do, give it away."

Bram, standing beside him, looked at the crates. Then at the door. Then back up the long corridor, toward the summit, where Turnip the mule was standing in the sun, chewing on a pine branch, carrying nothing but their bedrolls.

"...We'll need a bigger mule," he said.