Slow

Nothing happened for a long time.

That was the first thing about world one, and nobody had planned for it. They stood in a field and waited to be told what to do. Nothing came. The voice did not speak. The light did not change. There was a sun, a little too white, and it moved the way a sun moves.

After an hour Ellis sat down in the grass.

It was cool and slightly damp and it soaked through the knee of his good shirt. He noticed that and decided it did not matter, which was something he had never once managed at home. The grass was grass. It was coarser than the grass at Denise's and it grew in the same clumps, and there were small flat weeds in it with four leaves each. Something the size of a ladybug walked over the back of his hand. It had too many legs and he let it.

The field went farther than a field should. No fence anywhere, no road, no building.

And there were the trees.

They stood in a line four hundred yards off and they were too tall.

Ellis had stood under a redwood once, on a vacation he had not enjoyed, and had tipped his head back until his neck ached. These were taller. Not a little taller. He put them at twice that and then stopped, because he had no way to check and because the number was silly.

He kept looking anyway. He could not work out why he minded so much.

By the second hour the cohort had begun to organize, which is what capable people do when nobody gives them anything to do. Groups formed along the lines that had formed in the hall. Somebody paced out a perimeter and called the number. Somebody else was doing push-ups, which Ellis thought was probably the most honest response available.

Everybody had worked out the first thing inside a minute, which was that they were lighter.

It was not subtle and it was not pleasant at first. Standing up was too easy and overshot. Walking wanted to be something else. Ellis had knelt down for the grass and come back up faster than he meant to, and put a hand out at nothing, and felt briefly ridiculous. A man near him kept jumping. He was not celebrating. He was checking, the way you press a tooth.

By the second hour it had become the only topic, and the topic had become good news.

Ellis listened to it go around. He was hearing the same sentence in different mouths, and the sentence was some version of *we can do more here*. A woman with a shaved head was working out what her deadlift would be. Somebody had done the arithmetic on a standing vertical and got a number that made three people laugh.

Kai arrived at his shoulder without making any noise at all.

"I jumped," he said. He sounded further away than he was. "Standing. I've got a number for that, I've had a number for that since I was nineteen."

"And?"

"It's not close." He looked at his own hands for a second. "That should feel better than it does."

Vera came over a few minutes later, still in the suit. She stood and looked at the trees for a while and said nothing.

"Those are wrong," she said, and went to sit down.

The animals were there the whole time. Ellis kept coming back to that afterward.

They were on the far side of the field, past the place where the grass changed color, and they were so large that the eye refused to place them. Ellis had them at half a mile and the size of a barn. Then he had them at two miles and the size of a church. There was nothing standing near them to measure them against, so they sat in the distance being an unknown size, and after a while people stopped looking at them.

There were four. Low gray backs, long and flat. Legs like the piers under a bridge. Heads down in the grass and staying down.

For six hours they did nothing at all. They grazed.

Nobody was frightened of them, and Ellis understood why, because he was not frightened either. A thing that big is slow. Everyone in that field had known it their whole lives without being taught it. You watch an elephant walk and you can count the steps. You watch a whale and it is enormous and unhurried and the water carries it. Size costs you speed. It is one of the first true things a person learns about the world.

It is true because of the way bones work. Bones work that way because of what things weigh, and what a thing weighs depends on a number.

Every person in that field knew the number was different here. They had known it for six hours. Near the perimeter a group had spent most of those hours on arithmetic — what the difference bought a vertical, a stride, a throw. All of the arithmetic pointed inward.

A little after midday a group went out to look.

Forty of them, more or less, and they were the right people to send. A mountaineer. Two soldiers. A woman who had swum the English Channel both ways. They went slowly and spread out and did it properly, and from four hundred yards back it looked careful and sensible, like something being handled by professionals.

Ellis watched from where he was sitting. Kai stood beside him.

The nearest animal lifted its head.

Something went wrong in Ellis's chest before he had any words to put to it. He sat forward.

The head had come up fast.

That was all. It was not a large movement and nothing followed it. But the head was the size of a car, and it had come up in one snap, and the neck had not swung afterward. Nothing that heavy stops that cleanly. He had watched a crane operator set a beam once, on a claim in Lackawanna. The beam swayed for eleven seconds after it stopped moving.

He thought about a warehouse fire he had closed in March. The invoice said four hours. The parts list said ninety minutes. The whole file had been fine except that two numbers did not agree with each other.

"It's not slow," Ellis said.

Kai turned. "What?"

"Its head. It's not slow. Get them back."

Kai did not ask a second question. That was the thing about Kai.

Kai ran and shouted, and he was very fast, and it did not matter.

The animal came the way weather comes. There was no gathering and no warning stride. It was standing, and then it was at a gallop, and the sound arrived late and wrong — a heavy, fast drumming that did not match the size of the thing making it.

Somebody in the group turned to run and was already too late.

Most of them did the correct thing and went flat in the grass. It made no difference at all to some of them and all the difference to others, and there was no way to know in advance which one you were going to be.

Ellis went flat too.

He did it four hundred yards from anything that could have reached him, without deciding to. His cheek was in wet grass. Both hands were laced over the back of his neck, like a man in an old civil defense film. It was the first time in thirty-four years that his body had done anything about anything. He was not proud of it. He was not anything. He lay in the grass and felt the ground take the impacts one after another, and counted them without meaning to.

Then it stopped.

When Ellis lifted his head, the animal was turning, and a woman was walking toward it across the grass.

She had come from somewhere past the tree line. She was tall — taller than anybody in the cohort — and built like an ordinary person who happened to be that height, not like an athlete. She wore work clothes, brown and heavy, the sleeves pushed back off her forearms. She carried a tool in one hand, something with a long handle. She did not raise it or change her grip on it at any point.

She was not hurrying.

That was the part Ellis could not get past, then or later. She crossed sixty yards of open ground while the animal was still coming around, and she never once hurried, and she arrived before it finished the turn.

Ellis did not see what she did.

He was looking directly at her, from four hundred yards, in good light, with nothing in the way. He did not see it. There was a woman standing at the animal's shoulder, and then the animal went down on its front legs and over onto its side, and the grass jumped, and it did not get up.

She stood a moment with one hand flat on its flank, the way you would rest a hand on a car.

Then she looked around the field, at nine thousand people in office clothes and running gear and hospital scrubs, standing in her grass. She had a face that was almost exactly a human face. It did something polite that Ellis could not read at all.

She shifted the tool to her other hand and walked back toward the trees.

Nobody went after her.

The cohort stood in the field and watched a farmer walk back to her trees. Then it did what people do, and went to find out how bad it was.

It took most of an hour. There was nobody to report to and no list to work from, so the count was done by walking and asking and walking again. Kai did a great deal of it. He came back at the end with grass on his knees and did not say anything for a while, which was new.

The number was nine.

Vera was standing near Ellis when it came around to them. She had been quiet all afternoon.

"She was farming," Vera said.

Nobody answered. It was the accurate thing and it was the worst available thing, and she said it in exactly the voice she said everything in.

The light went orange and then gray. Nobody had said anything about night.

Ellis sat in the grass with his arms around his knees and looked at the tree line until he could not see it anymore.

He thought about the head coming up, and how cleanly it had stopped.

He did not put that together with the trees. Nothing in the field helped him. The sun went down at the speed a sun goes down. Nine thousand eight hundred and three people lay down in a field on another world, and the assessment did not tell any of them how they were doing.