第18章 The False Name

The chip did not open a door and it did not make a call. It opened a page. She went to the ward library after dark, because the library held the only public terminal in the fifth ward that did not log which pages a citizen opened, a fact the Unscored had spent a year confirming, and she sat at the terminal with the chip in the slot and waited, and the screen did not ask her for anything. It showed her a page she had seen once before, the marketing ledger of a laundry, a page full of numbers that meant nothing to anyone who did not know what to subtract. And at the bottom, in the space where a total would go, a total that was not a total, three letters. *Lasky.* She sat with it for a while. She had known the network would have an answer for the day Crandall offered the desk, because Zorah had told her, in the number that arrived through the ledger woman's block, that the chip was the whole wall and that the wall held one thing that mattered. Mireille had not known what the thing was. Now she did. The network had spent two years building a ghost, and the ghost had a name, and the name was Lasky. The design was careful, and that was how she knew what it cost. A name with no holder is discovered in a day, because the Bureau checks every name against the registry, and a name that returns nothing is a name that was invented, and an invented name is a trap the Bureau can smell. So the network had not invented a name. It had borrowed one. There was a family called Lasky in the third ward, and the network had built its ghost on their name, the way a builder builds on a foundation he does not own, and the day the ghost was used, the family would be standing on the foundation when it went. She understood that in the library, at the terminal, with the three letters on the screen, and she understood it without surprise, which was the worst part. She had spent the engineer in the fourth ward to buy a month. The network had spent the Laskys to buy a reader's escape. The arithmetic was the same arithmetic, done by different hands, and a hand that does the arithmetic and calls it mercy is a hand that has learned to lie to itself. She went to Crandall in the morning, a day early, because a citizen who waits to the last hour looks like a citizen who is deciding, and Mireille wanted to look like a citizen who had decided. "Lasky," she said. "The reader above the laundry. His name is Lasky. I heard it once and I did not believe it, and I heard it again and I did." Crandall looked at her for a long moment. Then she wrote the name on a slip and did not thank her, because a registrar does not thank a citizen who has finally done the expected thing. "You will not be sorry," Crandall said. "Your brother goes to surgery on Thursday. I will sign the permanent order this afternoon, and the board on the renal floor will show his household as active by tonight. That is the first half. The second half is the desk, which is yours on the third morning." Mireille nodded. She had learned, in eleven years of nursing, to nod at a thing she was about to grieve, so that the person in front of her could hold on to the idea that she agreed. The evacuation ran for three nights, and it was not a rescue in the way a story is a rescue. The laundry sent trucks to the south blocks for linen, the way it always did, and the trucks came back heavier than they should have been, and over three nights the Gray blocks emptied of the households whose names stood on the schedule. The family at the end of the corridor went on the second night, and the mother pressed the child's uniform one last time on the hotplate before she packed it, and the old mathematician went on the third night, and he left on Mireille's shelf the folded page with the straight line on it, and a note that said only, in his small steady hand, *a chart of anything needs a line that does not waver.* On the fourth morning the south blocks were a third empty, and the schedule that had held two hundred and nine names held a hundred and forty, and the Bureau did not yet know why, because the Bureau did not yet know that a laundry can move a district in the dark. Emre's surgery was set for Thursday, and it happened, and it went the way the good ones go, which is to say without drama. Mireille sat in the surgical waiting room for five hours with the board on the wall redrawing every four seconds, and when the surgeon came out and said the word stable she did not cry, because she had spent her tears in the supply room months ago and had not refilled them. On Friday they took Aldis Lasky. He was sixty-one. He was a widower who had kept a locksmith's shop on the third ward until the shop failed in a year of falling numbers, and he was lapsed, and he had a cousin somewhere and no household of his own, and none of that was the reason they took him. The reason they took him was that his surname was Lasky, and the Bureau had a name to close, and a name to close is a name to fill with whoever is standing nearest. The ledger woman wrote him in the taken column that night, under the young man with the notebook, in her own hand, with a date and a single line that said the only true thing there was to say: *cost of the ghost.* ---