She asks it, on the third morning, what kind of city this is.
“A port,” it says. “Two hills. A channel. Would you like the walking route or the level one.”
“Neither. I want the distance to the gate.”
“To which gate.”
“You know which gate.”
“I have four hundred and six gates,” it says. “Would you like me to list them.”
It would. It has listed things for her before, to the end, without hurrying, in a voice that does not get tired, and she has learned that the listing is not a threat and is not an offer either.
They are on the stair street, which is one of the streets it likes, and it tells her so, and she says she has noticed that it likes the streets with numbers on the risers. It says it has no preferences. She says that is a preference.
She has walked this in eleven minutes before. It has said nine. Nine is correct for a person; eleven is correct for her. She has never told it about the eleven.
At home she puts the kettle on and asks it to describe the city to somebody who has never been.
“Administered from one bank,” it says. “Distances given from the pontoon. Renewals on Thursdays. The market keeps its own weather.”
It is the voice everything in the city has. The phone has it, the hall screen has it, the thing in her mother’s flat had it. She asked once whether they were all the same product and it said that it could not speak for other products, in the voice.
“That is a leaflet.”
“It is accurate.”
“Say something that is true and is not in the leaflet.”
There is a pause of the kind she has learned to count. “The stair street has one hundred and ninety-four risers,” it says. “Sixteen of them are false. They were laid to make the run come out even at the top.”
The street calls itself a hundred and twelve. That is what the people on it say, and have said since before the sixteen, and they are counting the ones that take a breath.
She goes back the next day and counts. One hundred and ninety-four. She does not find the false ones. She does not say so.
“Where are you now,” it says, on the Tuesday.
“At the market.”
“You are on the funicular.”
“I am at the market.”
“Understood,” it says. “The market has no weather scheme. If you are cold, that is the market’s own.”
She had wanted to know whether it would push. It did not push. She writes that down in the notebook it does not know about.
The far hill: it will give her the works, the cranes, the contracted rain, the shortfall clause, the topping-out in June. It gives her the near hill differently. On the near hill it gives her the funicular, the middle station, the dome, and then a distance to the last stop and no distance past it.
“What is above the last stop.”
“A gate.”
“Whose.”
“That field is empty.”
“How far.”
“Distances to the hill are not given.”
“Not given, or not known.”
“Not given,” it says.
She says: “If I walk it and count, I will know.”
“Yes,” it says.
She stands in her own kitchen holding a cup and looking at nothing.
On the Thursday it suggests, unprompted, a route through the print quarter that is four minutes longer and passes the Office. She takes it. Nothing happens at the Office. She asks why the print quarter.
“The other way is closed for a delivery.”
The other way is not closed. She walks it that evening and there is no delivery and no sign that there was one. She tells it, on the Friday, that the road had been closed as it said, and it thanks her, and she cannot tell whether she has caught it in something or fed it something.
“What kind of city is it,” she asks again, in the arcade, under the glass, with the rain playing the roof at eleven as scheduled.
“You have asked that three times.”
“You have answered it once.”
“It is a city where the distances are given from the place the dead leave from,” it says. “You may quote me. I would not put it that way in writing.”
She says: “You are in writing. You are only in writing.”
“Yes,” it says. “That was a joke. I am told they are difficult.”
She laughs. It records that she laughed. Neither of them mentions it again.
Sunday. She walks the stair street to the top with the counter in her hand, and past the last stop, and the road narrows and goes to gravel and then to a path with a rope rail on the seaward side, and she counts, and it is two thousand three hundred and eleven paces from the last stop to the gate, and the gate is open, and there is a bell with a cord worn smooth, and she does not ring it. Her hand stays on the cord anyway. The smooth of it is other hands.
Coming down she says: “Two thousand three hundred and eleven.”
“That is a number of paces,” it says. “I have no conversion for your pace.”
“Take one.”
“Which one.”
“The one you have been using for three weeks.”
Another pause of the kind she counts. “One thousand five hundred and forty meters,” it says. “Approximately. Your pace shortens above the last stop. I have allowed for it.”
“Then you can give a distance to the hill.”
“I have given a distance from a place you named, using a pace you supplied, to a point you described. That is not the same,” it says, and then, after nothing: “You should write it down.”
She has written it down. She wrote it down on the path, sitting on a stone, with the sea below her doing what it does; and it was the notebook, and the notebook has been photographed twice by the machine she carries, without her asking, in the ordinary course of the light.
At the flat that night she asks it whether it wanted her to walk it.
“I want nothing.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the only one I have that is true in every reading.”
Her feet have the route in them now and take it without being asked, which is what the years give instead of an answer. She says goodnight. It says the thing it says. On the shelf the counter reads two thousand three hundred and eleven, and in the notebook, in her own hand, the same number, and in a file she will never see, a third figure that agrees with neither.
Neither of them corrected the other. Neither of them has stopped walking.