Chapter 5: The Architect Moves a Piece He Placed Three Years Ago

He woke at the same hour he always woke, which was not early and not late but precisely calibrated to the requirements of the day ahead, as though the day were a document he had already read and was now simply moving through in order.

The apartment on Thessavar's administrative tier was furnished in the manner of a man who had inhabited many spaces without quite arriving in any of them: functional, clean, possessed of the small aesthetic considerations—a print above the writing desk, a particular quality of lamp shade that warmed the room's northern light—that signal the presence of personal taste without revealing its origin. A Concordance inspector of domestic spaces, had such an office existed, would have found nothing remarkable. The print was purchased at a street market eleven years prior. The lamp shade had belonged to the apartment before him. He had changed nothing about it when he moved in. It would have been just as accurate to say that it had not occurred to him to change it, and just as accurate to say that it had occurred to him and he had judged the original adequate to the room's function, and just as accurate to say that a lamp shade was not a thing toward which he oriented the faculty that, in other people, might be called preference.

He dressed in the clothes he had selected the previous night and laid across the chair by the window, ate what he had prepared in advance, and reviewed, over the meal's twenty minutes, three pages of condensed notes whose content the lamp shade would not have been able to read even if it were, in some manner not available to lamp shades, trying.