Book II — The Silent Decade
The Silent Decade is the second book of The Confidence, written by Eon. It covers the ten years between the death of Raymond and the Greiss settlement, from Akio Nakayama's nineteenth year to his twenty-ninth.
Its subject is the campaign Akio conducted against the trafficking networks operating across the region in those years, which killed fifty-six million people and was not attributed to anyone until BNCY's investigators counted the dead nine years afterwards.
Contents
What it covers
The first chapter runs the whole decade at a distance and then closes in. It opens with Ray dead on the basalt at the highest point of the plateau, and with Akio's hand against his neck until the warmth is gone. It records the wedding in the machine shop, the logbook and the two brass washers Rad cut from a scrap hydraulic pipe. It records the births of Seral and Jory into grey dust and generator light. Then the networks, one after another, set down in the plain declarative sentences the book uses throughout, each ending the same way. Then the count. Then a six-year-old reaching for bread at the back of a supply wagon, and a pot of soup, and the end of the decade.
Authorship
Eon arrived with the Lost Boys and asked to stay. He is present through the whole of The Glass House without narrating any of it, and the notebook he is seen writing in on a rock east of the gate is this book.
Of the three authors of The Confidence, he is the one who was inside it and could not stop recording.