Liv

Chapter One: The Register

The vault held four thousand one hundred and six lives that had never begun, and it was Oskar Torheim's job to count them once a year.

He worked in a cold that made his knuckles ache through two pairs of gloves. Vault Three lay eleven metres under the Ministry of Continuation, in what had been the parking garage of a bank, and the dewars stood in rows like squat white drums, each one breathing a slow white fog when he cracked the seal. Inside were canes, and on the canes were straws, and inside the straws, suspended at minus one hundred and ninety-six degrees, were embryos harvested in the last good years, when people still believed the problem was technical.

"Rack forty-one, positions one through twelve," he said into his collar recorder. "Straw integrity intact. Frost accumulation nominal. Label legibility—" he leaned closer, squinting at the faded ink, "—degraded. Flagging for re-transcription."

He had flagged two hundred and six straws for re-transcription over the past three years. Nobody had ever re-transcribed one. The forms went up to Records, and Records sent back a receipt, and the receipt went into a file, and the file went into a cabinet, and the cabinet stood in a corridor where the ceiling had begun to sag from a roof leak nobody had been assigned to fix.

The embryos would never be implanted. Oskar knew this the way a physician knows a diagnosis he is not permitted to speak aloud. Between 2033 and 2041 the Federation had attempted eleven hundred transfers from this vault. Nine hundred and forty had failed to implant. One hundred and sixty had implanted and been lost before the eighth week. Not one had reached viability, because the sterilization vector did not only silence the making of eggs and sperm; it left a mark in every cell it touched, a small chemical scar on a stretch of DNA that a developing embryo needed at exactly the wrong moment. The embryos in Vault Three had been made from gametes already carrying the mark. They were photographs of a country that no longer existed.

He closed the dewar. The seal engaged with a sound like a held breath released.

"Torheim." The intercom crackled, and Halvard Sund's voice came down with the flatness of a man reading from a screen. "You're wanted upstairs at four. All-staff."

"For what?"

"The Minister's making an announcement. Attendance is logged."

"Then I'll be there," Oskar said, "and I'll be logged."

He took the stairs because the lift was slow and because his physician had told him, without much conviction, that men of fifty-eight should climb stairs. On the ground floor the Ministry opened out into what had once been the bank's atrium: forty metres of pale stone, a fountain that no longer ran, and along the far wall the great illuminated panel that gave the building its nickname. THE REGISTER OF LIVE BIRTHS. Beneath the words, in numerals a metre high, glowing a patient amber:

0

And beneath that, smaller: DAYS SINCE LAST VERIFIED BIRTH: 6,574.

Eighteen years. The counter had been installed in 2035 by a communications director who believed that shame would motivate the research staff. The research staff had all been reassigned or retired. The counter remained, ticking up one digit at midnight, the most reliable machine in the building.

Oskar stood in front of it for a moment, as he did most days, the way one touches a bruise to check whether it still hurts.

The all-staff meeting lasted eleven minutes and contained no information. Minister Søren Halberg appeared by video from the upper floors, a lean man of seventy-one with a face like good furniture, well-maintained and expensive, and told them that the Federation's commitment to continuation had never been stronger, that certain announcements would be forthcoming within the month, that patience was itself a form of courage. The staff applauded. Halberg's image blinked out. Somebody in the back row said, quietly, that the coffee ration had been cut again, and that was the only remark anyone remembered afterward.

Oskar walked home.

The city had been Stockholm once and was now the Administrative Seat of the Nordic Federation, which meant the same buildings with different signs and a third of the windows dark. He crossed the water on a bridge where the bike lanes had gone to moss. The tram came by, lit up, immaculate, empty except for a driver who did not need to be there; the trams ran because stopping them would have felt like an admission. Gulls stood on the railings in the cold blue light. Beyond them the district of Kvarnhamn rose in tiers of apartment blocks, and in the whole eastern face of the nearest block Oskar counted four lit windows.

There had been eight billion people. There were fewer than five now. Not from war, not from famine, though both had come and gone in the middle years. Simply from arithmetic. When you stop adding and never stop subtracting, the answer takes care of itself.

His own building had thirty-one apartments and six residents. The lobby smelled of the lime trees somebody had planted in tubs in 2039 and nobody had watered since. He climbed to the fourth floor, past the doors of the departed, and let himself in.

Margit's coat still hung in the hall. He had stopped noticing that he had not moved it, which was itself a kind of noticing.

He ate standing up: rye bread, hard cheese, two herring from a tin, the pickled kind that had become the Federation's unofficial currency of comfort. Then he took the aquavit from the freezer and a glass from the shelf and went up the service stair to the roof.

The garden was the only thing he had kept alive.

Margit had started it in 2036, in the year everyone was starting things—rooftop plots, community kitchens, choirs—the strange manic summer when people had still believed the emptiness could be filled by effort. Eleven raised beds of scavenged planks and builder's sacks of soil hauled up four flights on her back. Kale, chard, potatoes, beans on strings. Hyacinths along the parapet because she said food without flowers was rations.

She had died in 2042, of a cancer that a hospital would have caught in 2029, in a year when the oncology wing at Sankt Görans had been converted to a geriatric ward because that was where the patients were. He had held her hand in a corridor for nine hours waiting for a bed. He had been, at the time, Director of the Sterility Reversal Programme, and he had not been able to get his wife a bed.

He drank the first glass fast and the second slowly and pulled a few weeds in the dark out of habit. The beans were finished for the year. The kale would stand through the frost; kale was stubborn, Margit used to say, the vegetable most like a Swede.

Below, the water moved black between the quays. Somewhere across the channel a single voice was singing, badly, the way people sang when they were alone and drunk and did not expect to be overheard.

His handheld buzzed against his hip.

Not his Ministry device—that one chimed. This was the old grey unit in his jacket pocket, the one Margit had set up years ago on a mesh channel that ran through a chain of amateur relays, because in her line of work you sometimes needed to talk to people the licensing board disapproved of. Margit had been a nurse-practitioner and, in her last decade, an increasingly impatient one. Oskar had kept the device charged out of the same instinct that kept her coat on the hook.

It had not buzzed in four years.

He took it out. One message, no sender name, only a relay hash.

THE HYACINTHS CAME UP EARLY THIS YEAR.

He stood very still. The cold came through his sleeves.

It was a phrase from a night in 2038, when the Ministry's inspectorate had been rounding up unlicensed practitioners, and Margit had hidden a midwife in this apartment for nine days, and the midwife had gone up to the roof each morning at five because she couldn't sleep, and had said, on the last morning, that the hyacinths had come up early that year and that she took it as permission to hope.

Oskar looked at the parapet, at the dead brown stalks in their trough.

He typed with one thumb, slowly. WHO IS THIS.

The reply came in under a minute.

TUVA. I NEED A GENETICIST. I NEED ONE I CAN TRUST AND THERE ARE NOT MANY LEFT AND THERE IS NO TIME TO BE POLITE ABOUT IT.

He should have deleted it. He had been employed for seven years by an organisation that would consider this exchange, at minimum, an offence requiring disclosure. He was a man who catalogued frozen straws and drank on a roof and had made a religion out of not being asked for anything.

WHAT FOR, he typed.

The grey screen glowed at him for a long time. Then:

I HAVE A PATIENT. FOURTEEN WEEKS. THERE IS A HEARTBEAT.

Oskar Torheim read it four times. His glass was in his other hand. He did not remember putting it down, but later, when he came back up to look for it in daylight, he found it standing on the parapet, upright and empty, exactly where a steadier man would have left it.