unclaimed-recollection / 12 - Not Yet.md# 12. Not Yet > **Narrator:** Zahir Dasan · **Setting:** Tern Junction, the Reach · **Act 2, Part 2** > After three years of "not yet", Zahir is told "now".  A cell does not care what you want. That is the first thing the night shed teaches you, and it is more honest than most things I was taught in daylight. I run the charging shed at Tern from sundown until the first freight bell. It is a long low building on the edge of the yard with its own line from the station's reliable power, which is the only reliable power for kilometres, and every crew heading for the Far Reach comes through it sooner or later with its cells in a sack. Standard cells, which are honest. Jank cells from the south, which are honest in a different way. Relic-pattern cells, which are the ones people carry wrapped in a spare shirt and do not talk about. I put them on the racks and I read them and I write down what I see. I have a ledger for it. Not the Guild's ledger, mine, in which every crew that has passed through my shed in three years is entered with its kit, its slot, and what it wished it had packed. That night I had eleven cells on the racks and one pot of tea on the stove, and I was not thinking about any of it, because I had been in the kitchen doorway at midday. I had not been listening. I want that understood. I was carrying a tray, which is what I do in a doorway, and the doctor from Halloway had a voice that went through a room like a ruler. She was telling Idrin Orek, quite pleasantly, that a young man from the yard had had his Guild fee paid since the spring and had been bringing him tea ever since, and that she did not hear that anything had come of it. I know who that young man is. I see him in the shaving mirror. Then she said: *Now you have two.* I did what a Tavari does when a thing is too large to hold. I made more tea. * * * It was after nine when the shed door opened and let in the wind and a man. Idrin Orek does not knock. He considers a door to be an opinion that has already been delivered. He came in with his coat buttoned to the throat and his hands in his sleeves, looked at the racks, looked at the ledger open on my knee, and sat down on the upturned crate that has been his for three winters, on the rare nights he comes. I poured him a glass. He took it. We drank. I have a fair idea how long a Sorethi-Tavari man can sit with a silence, and the answer is that he can sit with it for a good deal longer than I can. "The doctor," I said, at last, "has opinions." "She does." "She says there was a young man from the yard." "There is," said Idrin. He turned the glass in his fingers. He has a pale patch on one cheek from the Saddle's cold, and when he is working out how to say something it goes a shade whiter. "Zahir." "Yes." "Now." It is a small word. I have heard it said by foremen and by brokers and once by my father, on a salt pan, at the worst moment of a summer. It is not a word that has any trouble being understood. I put the ledger down very carefully. I should say what *not yet* has been. For three years, every time I brought him tea, which was most mornings, I asked whether I might carry his kit to a halt, and he looked at me with that calm, faintly amused face and said *not yet*. Not *no*. I would almost have preferred no. A *no* you can argue with, or take away and grieve. *Not yet* is a door held a hand's breadth open for three years by a man who will not say whether he has forgotten you are standing in it. I had paid the fee to the Guild in the spring. I had saved the fare to Crownward and not spent it. I had put my name on every list I could reach, and I had begun, I will confess it, to drink my tea rather quickly. "I have two," said Idrin, as if he were reading it off a manifest. "The Guild has put a man on me who needs retraining. You were my first. I did not say so, and I should have. I am saying so now." "The man upstairs." "The man upstairs." "The one who talks like a hymn book." "Zdena has been telling people," said Idrin, without heat. "Yes." I thought: *so that is the reason.* I thought it quite clearly. After three years I was going to be taken on not because of anything I had done, not the fee or the tea or the ledger, but because a stranger had had the ill luck to be hurt and to lose his memory and to come to a junction where the instructor of record had no one to instruct. A door had been opened for me by somebody else's accident, and I stood on the threshold of it feeling, in about equal parts, like a man who has been given a seat and like a man who has been handed a coat that is still warm. "I know what you are thinking," said Idrin. "I doubt it." "You are thinking it is a poor reason." "It is a very poor reason," I said. "I will take it." He did something then that I had not seen him do in three years, which was to smile. It went across his face and was gone, like the platform lamps coming up. "Good. Here are the terms. The course is by day. You keep the shed by night, because Zdena will not release two of her hands for the Guild's convenience and I will not ask her. You will sleep when you can. If it kills you, you will not tell me, because I will have to tell the Guild." He put the glass down. "You will be taught alongside him. He is a good deal more lost than he looks. Be kind to him. And do not ask where he is from." "Where is he from?" "Pinecliff," said Idrin. "By registration." "And before that?" "That is the question," said Idrin, "that I just asked you not to ask." I laughed. I could not help it. It had been a long time since a man had told me not to be curious and meant it as a kindness. * * * I took him tea in the morning, the proper way, in the glass with the gilt rim, poured from a height three times so that the mint knows it is wanted. It is a long way up Zdena's back stair with a tray in a wind, and the stair has a bad step, the sixth. I took it with the ease of a man who has been doing it for three years, and knocked on the door at the top with my foot. He opened it before I had finished. He was already dressed. He had on an olive jacket of waxed cotton, the kind you see on Reach crews, hip-length, a pale knit under it, dark trousers, and he was a little taller than I had been led to expect. I am not short. He had perhaps four fingers on me. He looked down at me, gravely, and then at the tray, and then at the glass, and I will remember it as long as I live. "This is for me?" "It is for you." "Thank you," he said. And then, because the tray was not finished: "Thank you," to the glass. And then, with a small bow, to the stair behind me, "And to the stair, which I understand has a bad step." "The sixth." "The sixth," he said, with satisfaction, as if the fact had been in his notebook all along. I have met a great many people who thank things. Salt-pan men thank the pan. Caravan drivers thank the well. But I had never met a man who looked as though he had arrived at it by arithmetic, by working out which things in the world deserved a courtesy and deciding, so far, on nearly all of them. I stood in a doorway with my tray and felt something go off in my chest like a cell coming up to charge. I gave him the Tavari greeting, because it is how I was raised, and because I wanted to see what he would do with it. *May your cup be full.* It is not a difficult phrase. He answered. And what he said was the greeting, but it was not the one I had given him. It was longer, with a turn in the middle that my grandmother would have called *the road-shaded form*, and no one under eighty uses it. It came out of his mouth quite naturally, with all its old vowels. I have heard the same sort of thing from the very old and the very drunk. "Where," I said, carefully, "did you learn that?" "I do not know," said Sevran Hallow, with perfect honesty. "Is it wrong?" "It is perfect," I said. "It is so perfect it is wrong." "Ah," said Sevran, and looked at me with such a tired, hopeful, apologetic face that I abandoned the enquiry on the spot. Somebody's grandmother, I decided, in Pinecliff. Somebody in a Reach settlement had kept the old form alive, and he had caught it like a cold. Idrin had said not to ask. I had asked a very small question and been given a very small answer, and I was content. The light over the bed brightened as I stepped in. I noticed it, because I notice lights, and I said, in passing, in the voice you use for weather, "It likes you." "It is an old light," said Sevran. "They have opinions," I said, and put the tray on the table, and that was all that either of us said about it. * * *  Downstairs, Zdena was waiting for him with her arms folded. She is not a tall woman. She is as wide as her authority, and she stands in her kitchen like a woman guarding a bridge. The crock was in the window, where the range keeps the glass warm, and she handed Sevran a jug of vessa water and a saucer of scrapings and said, "No onion," and he said, "No onion," and she said, "Say it again," and he said it again. She watched him tip the water, and the scraps, and cover it, and wash his hands. She said, "Tomorrow you will do it without me," and I saw him go very quiet, in a way that made me think he had been told something like that before, by someone who was not here. I put a glass of tea in front of Zdena that she had not asked for. "You have a trainee," she said, not to me. "I do." "And a charging shed. And a yard." She held up three fingers. "Bohdan Krel will be in at six to tell you what he thinks of that, and he will tell it to me afterwards, and I will say to him what I say to everybody. A Guild chit buys a season. A season is not forever. Eat." I ate. The foreman did come in at six, and he did say what he thought, at some length, and the substance of it was that he had one hand he could rely on and it was apparently going to be asked to be two. I said I would keep the yard on the mornings I could. Zdena said nothing. She does not need to. Her chits say it for her. That afternoon, Idrin took the pair of us down to the Guild's check-in at the head of the platform, the glass door and the clerk with ink on his cuff. I touched my cord to the leaf. It warmed, and blinked, and he read it, and then he said, in the flat voice of a man who reads one hundred and eleven beads a day, "Dasan, Z. Fee paid since spring. Associate, retraining, instructor of record Orek." He gave me a bead. It was a small plain thing, newer than the blue glazed one I have worn for years, and I strung it beside the blue and did not say anything, because I could not. Sevran was standing behind me. He had said nothing during the whole of it. When I turned round with my cord in my hand like a man who has been given a fish, he gave me a small, solemn nod, as if I had passed through a gate that he had been told to watch. "It is a good bead," he said. "It is a very small bead," I said. "It is the first bead," said Sevran. "I should think they are all small at first." * * *  Idrin taught us chalk the next morning. Not a clever thing. Chalk is what you teach on the first day, because it is the first thing you need and the last thing you will want. He walked us out through the yard to the far fence, past the freight and the gantry and a row of flatcars under tarpaulin, and he set a stick of it in each of our hands. "Chalk the way home," said Idrin. "Everybody says it. Hardly anybody does it. You mark your way as you go in, and you mark it so that a tired man in the dark, with a lantern he does not trust and a head he trusts less, can follow it back. The mark is the lesson. The walking is only the examination." "Two lanterns," I said. "Trust neither." "You have been listening to me through a wall." "For three years," I said. He sent us out through the yard with a sheet of route in his head and none in ours. We were to go to the end of the northbound platform by a route of our choosing, and come back by the same one, with nothing but the chalk to guide us. I made my marks the way my father taught me to read a pan: the sun's angle, the shadows of the gantry legs, the wind on my cheek. I know where I am by heat. I put a bar of chalk on every post that took the morning sun and a cross on every one that did not. Sevran made his marks like a man writing a letter to somebody he respected. Each one was the same. Each one was exactly the same distance from the last. When we came back he walked the whole yard, from the platform to the fence, without once looking at the route we had set. He remembered it all. Every post, every turn, every one of my crosses, in order. He did it like a man reciting something, and I realised, with an odd little shock, that he was reciting something. It was not the platform chimes this time. It was the yard. "You never lose your place," I said. "I seem to keep what I am given," said Sevran. "It is the things I was not given that I cannot find." "It is a better habit than mine." "Yours finds the heat," said Sevran, and looked at my crosses on the shaded posts as if they were a kind of music. "I would not have known that the north side of a post would be cold." "It is the Saddle. Everything is cold." "Yes," said Sevran. "But you knew before it was." Idrin, at the fence, said nothing, but I saw him unfold his brass rule and fold it shut again, and I thought: *there. That is a man who has just found out what he has got.* * * * I dragged him onto the platform at noon. It was my idea. I will take that on myself. A crew was coming off the south train, six of them, a Foundries survey with a quartermaster who had a laugh like a gantry hook, and I know the quartermasters. They like to be asked. I put Sevran in front of me and said, in Aurevian, "This is my friend. Ask them where they have been." Sevran looked at me as if I had asked him to leave the planet. "Go on," I said. "It is only talk." He did. He turned to the quartermaster and said, in Kandren, with the full old courtesy, that he begged her pardon for the intrusion and wished to know whether the journey had been long. The quartermaster, who was Kandren herself, put down her sack and regarded him with an eyebrow that rose by a finger. "My grandmother's hymn book," she said to her mate, and then, to Sevran, a good deal more kindly: "Long enough. And where do you hail from, my friend?" "Pinecliff," said Sevran. "I am told." "You are told?" "I have been unwell," he said. "I am being retrained." She laughed and clapped him on the arm, hard enough to move a smaller man. "Retrained! By Orek? Eat before you do anything he says." And they were off, the way people are, into the weather on the Corridor and the price of cells at Halloway, and I saw his shoulders come down by a finger's breadth. He was, I think, very nearly enjoying it. "Who taught you the cord?" the quartermaster asked him, looking at the beads at his throat. "You hold it like a man who has been taught." "A guide," said Sevran. "My guide. Odran Maresh. At Pinecliff." "Maresh," said the quartermaster, nodding. "I know the name. Keeps Corridor thresholds." She said it as the highest sort of praise, and went off to her train. I wrote it down that night. *Odran Maresh. Pinecliff. Guide. Taught the cord.* I wrote it in the ledger under the new entry, because that is what the ledger is for, and because he had said it in a particular way. Not as a man names a person. As a man names a place. * * *  He came down to the shed at midnight. I had not heard him on the stair. Nobody ever has, I learned. He opens doors the way he has learned to open things, as if each might be asleep. The wind was working at the shed roof and the racks were humming, eleven cells and a twelfth coming up, and he stood in the doorway in the olive jacket with his hat in his hand and said, "I could not sleep. The wind is very loud." "It is the Saddle," I said. "It is a loud sort of place. Come in. Sit. You will want tea." He sat. I poured. The shed is warm in the way a hearth is warm, which is to say at the feet and nowhere else, and he put his hands round the glass and looked at the racks the way a man looks at a fire. "You keep this by yourself," he said. "By night. I sleep in a bunk in the yard. By day I am going to learn to hold a relay chain, if Idrin does not kill me first." I tapped the ledger. "It is how I pay my way." "Your way to what?" "To the next halt," I said. "To the first berth. To the Cloudwell, one day, with a crew. I have a dew cup and a bad memory for sums, and I would like to see where the rain is made." I had not meant to say the last of it. I do not tell people about the Cloudwell. It was something about the hour, or the way he listened, with his whole face, like a man at a long table who has been told he need not hurry. "I should like to hear it," said Sevran, "when you wish to tell it." "Another night." "Another night," he agreed. It was a very comfortable silence. I have not had many. I opened the ledger on my knee and wrote, as I do for everyone, in the column for *wished they had packed*, and I looked up. "Here is the thing I ask every crew," I said. "What did you wish you had packed?" He thought about it. He gave it the whole of his attention. "Nothing," he said, at last. "I was packed for. A woman put bread and a pot and a living jar in a basket, and I did not know what was in it until I opened it. I do not think I could have packed better." "That is not an answer." "It is the truest one I have," said Sevran. I wrote: *Sevran Hallow. Pinecliff. One basket. One crock (alive). One hat.* Under *wished he had packed* I left a space, and I did not write *nothing*, because I do not believe him, and because a ledger is for the things people have not yet said. "You are cold," I said. "A little." "I am always cold. It is the one thing a salt-pan boy never gets over." I unwound the sand-coloured cloth from my own neck and held it out. "Wrap this. The Saddle takes whoever forgets." He looked at it, and at me, and I saw him decide, as he decides everything, with great care. Then he took it, and put it round his neck as though it were something that had been waiting there. "Thank you," he said. "You are not allowed to thank me twice in one day." "Who says so?" "I heard it from the doctor," I said, which was a lie, and a good one, and I saw the corner of his mouth do what it does. It was not a smile. It was the place where one would be, if he were sure it was allowed. "Then I shall thank you tomorrow," said Sevran Hallow. The twelfth cell came up on the rack and blinked green. Outside the wind went on over the Saddle, and somewhere in the yard the first of the freight bells began to turn over, a long way off, like a man clearing his throat. I did not mind it at all. I had not been waiting for three years, I thought. I had been practising. It is a different thing.