第12章 The Balance

The slack ran out in the second week of the third month, and the night Mireille learned to spend it well was the night she learned what the spending cost. There were two names on the schedule that night and slack for one lift, and she stood in front of the wall and read them the way she had read monitors for eleven years, looking for the shape of the noise. The first was an old man in the fourth ward, seventy-three, a former water board engineer with a Standing of five hundred and six, scheduled for a fold of forty. The second was a woman in the third ward, thirty-four, a primary teacher, five hundred and ninety, scheduled for a fold of one hundred and ten. Both folds would take the person into the lapsed range. The engineer would fall from five hundred and six to four hundred and sixty-six. The teacher would fall from five hundred and ninety to four hundred and eighty. "Do both if we stretch," the woman at the ledger said, without looking up. "The pharmacy slack is thin but it holds." "It doesn't hold," Mireille said. "If we draw the pharmacy slack to nothing, the pharmacy flags and the Bureau audits the third ward, and we lose the channel for a year." She looked at the two names. "One." She chose the teacher. She said the words out loud, because Zorah had told her to always say them out loud, so that the choice would have a voice and she could not pretend it had been made by the arithmetic alone. "Her. She has thirty years of pupils in this city and a cohort that will eat her the moment she's weak. Fold the engineer, and he has no one to file a response for him, and he dies quiet, and the roll doesn't notice. Fold her, and the roll notices, and the Bureau has to spend a channel closing the noise. We buy a month with her. We buy nothing with him." Zorah did not argue. The woman at the ledger moved the weight, and the teacher's number held, and the engineer's fell. Mireille saw the engineer two days later, because she was buying rationed water at the fourth ward market and he was there, sitting on a crate by the fountain with a folded paper in his hand and the particular stillness of a person who had just come from the ward office. She did not know him. She had read his name on a page and chosen him to fall, and he would never know that, and that was the design, and the design was a mercy and a cowardice at the same time. He was trying to file a response. She could see the form in his hand, the same form she had filed a lifetime ago, and she watched him try to read it in the afternoon light and she knew, with the precision of a nurse, that he could not see it well enough, and that the form asked for a corroborating witness, and that he had none, and that the forty-point fold would stand. She walked home and did not sleep. The fourth ward had a different smell than the fifth. It smelled of wet stone and the river and the coal smoke that came off the north bank when the wind turned, and Mireille walked through it that evening because she could not sit in the Gray block with the count in her head. She passed the engineer's building, a narrow house pressed between a chandlery and a shuttered school, and she did not go in and she did not knock, and she stood across the street for the length of a tram passing and then walked on. There was no version of the knock that would help him. A citizen who learned that a stranger had chosen him to fall would not be saved by the knowledge; the knowledge would only be one more thing the roll could reach. The network's mercy and its cruelty were the same motion, and the motion was silence. She bought a newspaper the next morning, which she never did, because the ward office posted the useful notices on the board and the newspaper cost two credits. She bought it for the back page, where the city printed the weekly Standing averages by district, and she read the fifth ward's number and found it had not moved, and she understood that the teacher she had saved and the engineer she had spent had cancelled each other in the arithmetic and left the average exactly where it had been. The Bureau's target had not moved either. The city would need another fold to close the gap, and the next fold would land on someone whose name she had not yet read. The ledger woman wrote the engineer's name on the failure side that night, in the folded column, because a citizen reduced to four hundred and sixty-six was not yet lapsed but was spent, and the network counted the spent with the lost. Mireille watched her write it and did not argue. In the arithmetic of the wall, a person who had four hundred and sixty-six points and no one to file for him was already gone, and pretending otherwise would only make the next choice harder than it needed to be, and the next choice was always coming. Briony came to the Gray block the next morning, which she had never done, and stood in the corridor with her hands in her coat and looked at the unit and said nothing for a while. "You look worse than your number," Briony said at last. "I've been working nights." "At a laundry." Briony said the word the way a person says a diagnosis. "On Solvang Row. You think I don't know what that laundry is. I've known for six years. Half the day shift knows. The ones who don't know are the ones who pretend not to." "Then why haven't you filed a report?" "Because I am not a warden, and because a report is a tool, and I do not waste tools." Briony came in and sat on the one chair, and Mireille stood, because there was nowhere else, and the two of them looked at each other across the small room. "I came to tell you something. The Bureau is running a reconciliation sweep on the fifth ward clinics next week. They audit the coding, the discrepancies, the slack. If your friends in that laundry have been drawing weight from a fifth ward ledger, the sweep will find the hole, and the hole will lead to whoever left it, and a nurse who lost her license for public aid makes a very tidy answer to that question." "I don't file codes anymore. I don't have access." "You don't need access to be the answer." Briony stood. "Clean the hole. Or drop the laundry. Those are the two moves, and I am not going to tell you which one I'd make, because whichever one I'd make is the one I already made, years ago, and it didn't make me right. It just made me still here." She left. Mireille stood in the corridor and listened to the water pipes knock and understood that Briony had come to save her and had done it in the only language Briony had left, which was the language of mistakes already made. ---