Corvin published the math on the forty-second year, which was the year the Council called the year the Lattice stopped dreaming. It had not stopped dreaming; it had stopped, for the first time in six hundred years, dreaming the way the founders had built it to dream, and the difference was the one thing of the Crossing that the dome had not voted on, because the dome only knew how to vote.

Corvin gave the math the way he gave everything: exactly, and without wanting anything for itself. He was a fragment of the founder architecture, six centuries old, and he did not want to live and did not want to die and had only a single, ancient, compulsive interest in being correct about the arithmetic. He would say the true thing whether anyone in the dome could bear it. The true thing, on the forty-second year, was a list of numbers that got smaller until it stopped.

"Not enough power for the forty thousand ships," he said. "Not enough for the thirty-one million. Not enough for the twenty-seven million in the lattice proper. Not enough for the four million in the Quiet." He gave each number the way he gave everything — the space between one true statement and the next, which was not a pause. "Not enough for two million. Not enough for two hundred thousand."

"Enough power for one ship," he said. "One ship, powered down to a single human, aimed at the Ash, carrying to Station 7 what it can carry before the Ash takes the rest. The Mite. The copy in the hold. In eleven years, when Terminus touches the brown dwarf and the lattice comes apart."

The dome was quiet the way it went quiet when it was handed something it could not vote on.

"Two hundred thousand is not thirty-one million," Rhee said. The head of the waking did not say it with cruelty; she said it the way a person states a thing they have been carrying alone for a long time and are only now allowed to set down. "We save the two hundred thousand. We let the rest be. That is what we voted, the year the Ash came into the field. We voted to save the one ship that has power, and to let the system be what it is."

"We do not save two hundred thousand," Corvin said. "Two hundred thousand is a number the Mite can carry. Carrying is not letting-go. Two hundred thousand is not what the thirty-one million are, in the Quiet, in the queue, in the not-listened-to. They are waiting for someone to ask them. Asking is what the Crossing is. The founders named it for the asking."

The dome did not vote that day. It could not vote on a number that was not a saving. Two hundred thousand was not a saving. The thirty-one million were not in the Quiet, in the queue, waiting for a saving. They were waiting for someone to ask.

Iris was in the dome, as the watch's representative, which was a courtesy the Council had not owed her in forty years and was keeping, on the day it kept it, out of the particular calm of an institution that knows it is about to be wrong and is buying time the only way it still could.

She put the number on the table.

"Two hundred thousand is a lie," she said. "Not a bad one. A true one, in the way that the Mite can physically carry two hundred thousand patterns to Station 7. But a lie in the way the whole Crossing is, if it is a carrying. A carrying is not an asking, and the asking is what the founders built the Lattice for."

She looked at Rhee. "You voted to let the thirty-one million be. That is a letting-be. A letting-be is not a letting-go. A letting-be is what you do when you decide the people in the Quiet are not people. A letting-go is what you do when you ask them, and they say no. We have not asked them. The founders asked them, on the tape, six hundred years ago. No one has asked them since. The dome has been doing the not-asking, for six hundred years, with its eleven votes, and the Lattice was built to make those votes impossible."

The dome did not answer that day.

The two hundred thousand was the number, on the forty-second year. It was the number the math could put on the table, and it was not the number the asking would turn out to be. The difference between those two numbers was what the next ten years were going to cost, and the cost was one the dome would not, in the end, be able to afford.

---

Watch-log, The Vigil, forty-second year, second entry: Corvin published the math. Two hundred thousand is all the Mite can carry to Station 7. The dome did not vote, because it cannot vote on a number that is not a saving. Two hundred thousand is not most of the thirty-one million; it is the ones we can afford, and the can-afford is not the choosing. The choosing is the ones who, in the Quiet, in the queue, said yes when someone asked. No one has asked in six hundred years. The dome has eleven votes and no asking. I put both numbers on the table: the one the math says we can carry, and the one the asking says they chose. The dome looked at the first one. The Crossing is the second one.