Chapter 553 - 552: The Shorter List

Chapter 553: Chapter 552: The Shorter List

Location:Seven Peaks — Medicine Hall, Lower Workshop; The Hall

Date/Time:TC1857.02.20 – TC1857.02.26

The hand weighed about what a hand weighs.

That was the first thing wrong with it, and Raven stood in the lower workshop with it lying across both her palms and could not stop turning it over. It should have weighed more. Steel that color and that thickness ought to have sat in her hands like a tool, and it did not; it sat there like something that had been asleep. Warm along the back of it, cooler at the fingertips. When she tipped it, the fingers moved, not loosely — they settled, the way a hand settles when its owner is thinking about something else.

She put a fingertip against the pad of the thumb and pressed.

It pressed back.

"It’ll do that until it’s fitted," Hester Varden said, from the bench. "After that it stops doing it to strangers."

Varden was sitting because she could not do anything else. She was perhaps fifty, with a stonecutter’s forearms and a face that had gone loose around the jaw in a way that had nothing to do with age, and there was a bowl of broth beside her that Mira had put there and that she had not touched in the time Raven had been in the room. Her hair had come out in the front. Not much. Enough to see.

"How long does it take you to come back?"

"Nine days for me. Six for Jessop, and he’s a liar about it, so call it eight." Varden looked at the bowl and did not reach for it. "The boy’s back on his feet in three."

"And that’s better."

"That’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud, so I’ll say it, and you can be the one to look sick about it." She picked the bowl up at last, both hands, and did not drink from it. "It costs him less, and he can do more of them, and if I’m honest with you about the arithmetic then the arithmetic says put the child on the bench and keep him there."

***

Rhys Jessop showed her the making that afternoon, because she asked, and because he held that if you were going to rule on a thing you had better watch it happen.

She did not follow most of it. It was not formation work, and it was not alchemy, and it was not any of the six disciplines she could have named, and when she said so, Jessop looked pleased in a tired way and said that was because it wasn’t any of them, and that Lin Yue had spent a month trying to file it under something and had given up and started a new page.

What she could follow was the part with the boy in it.

Idris Tull was small for whatever age he was, with the stillness children get when they have decided to be no trouble, and he sat on a stool at the end of the bench with his sleeves rolled and did as he was told. Varden shaped. Jessop held the pattern. The boy’s job was to keep the thing alive while the other two worked — that was the word they used, and neither of them offered a better one, and Raven noticed that neither of them liked using it.

It took the better part of five hours.

It had taken three weeks to get to those five hours. Jessop had been building the hand alone at a bench since the turn of the month, the way a man builds a clock, and that was the number that governed the year — not how fast any of them got back on their feet afterward.

At the end of it, Idris Tull got off the stool and stood there swaying with a completely ordinary expression on his face, and Jessop put a hand between his shoulders without looking at him, and the boy said, "I’m fine," in the voice of somebody who had said it before and been believed.

He was not fine. He weighed less than he had at midday. Raven could see it in his wrists.

***

The list was nine pages by the time Mira finished making it, which she had done in one night and clearly resented.

"Hands, arms, legs, feet. Ninety-one people at Seven Peaks and its holdings who would take one tomorrow." Mira put it on the table in the Hall and did not sit. "That’s the honest number, and it includes everybody, and if you want a shorter one I can give you a shorter one by getting stricter, and I’d like it noted that getting stricter is a way of making a decision while pretending you haven’t."

"Noted," Raven said. "How many of the ninety-one are Corps?"

"Sixty-two. And that’s the number that’s going to get worse."

Coop said it before Mira could. "Because the hardware’s failing."

"Because the hardware’s failing." Mira’s mouth flattened. "Every augment in that camp was built in the Federation to be serviced in the Federation, on a schedule, with parts. Nobody here has the parts, and nobody here has the schedule, and we are now two and a half years past the last service any of them had. I have people whose knees are seizing. I have a man whose spinal interface has started reporting sensation from a leg he does not have and cannot be talked out of it. It is not a queue that stays at sixty-two. It’s a queue that grows on its own, in the dark, at a rate I cannot give you because I don’t know how these things fail, and neither does anybody else on this continent."

Taron had been standing at the window with his arms folded.

"Then the criterion writes itself," Taron allowed. "You’re going to sink a bore in the Wild Confederacy and sit down with four governments this year. Put the limbs on the people the work needs. It’s ugly, and it’s correct."

"Say that with a name in it," Raven answered.

"All right. Alek Voss’s eyes are Federation, and they’re ten years old, and if they go, the bore stops. Put him first."

"And the man with the seizing knee who shovels."

"Goes second."

"And Elspeth Nyland."

Taron did not know the name. She watched him not know it, and did not enjoy it as much as she had expected to.

***

Elspeth Nyland ran the drying sheds on the east terrace and had done so for nine years, and had lost the hand before any of it — before the Federation, before the Corps, before the golden rain — to a winch drum on a boat in a country she did not talk about.

Raven went and found her rather than sending for her.

She was flipping racks when Raven came in, and she flipped them the way people do who have solved the problem years ago: forearm under, wrist as a hook, hip against the frame, done. Rack after rack in the time it took Raven to cross the shed. She did not stop when she saw who it was, which Raven liked.

"You’re on a list," Raven said.

"I know. Mira asked me a lot of questions about a wrist I stopped thinking about in the reign before this one." Flip. "I told her the truth, and then I went home and didn’t sleep, which I resented, because I’ve slept fine for nine years."

"Do you want one?"

Elspeth Nyland set the rack down.

"That’s not a fair question, and you know it isn’t." She wiped her palm down her apron. "Ask a person who’s managed for nine years whether they want the thing back, and you’re asking them to say out loud that all the years behind them were a worse life. Some of us have gone to a great deal of trouble not to think that."

"Then I’ll ask a different one. If it were sitting on the table in front of you and nobody was watching, would you put it on?"

"Yes." No pause at all. "Yes, in a heartbeat, and I’d cry about it, and I’d be furious with myself for crying."

***

The Hall sat on the fourth day, and Raven let it run for two hours before she said anything, because she wanted the arguments in the room and on the record and not in corridors afterward.

Taron held his line: function to the work.

Sera Vahn held hers, and held it harder than Raven expected. "Sixty-two of the ninety-one are mine. They didn’t get that way farming. Every one of them was cut open by their own government to make them useful and then walked out of it, and if service means anything at all then the queue starts in my camp." She put a hand flat. "I’ll say the ugly half too. If the first hand off that bench goes to a woman from the drying sheds while my people wait, I will hold the camp together, and it will cost me something I don’t currently have."

Mira wanted triage and said so in a sentence: worst function, first.

Lin Yue said the thing nobody else had.

"You are all arguing about the order of a list and none of you have said the word twelve." She had her hands inside her sleeves. "Twelve a year. Ninety-one people. That is a seven-and-a-half-year list, and Varden is fifty and losing hair, and Jessop is lying about his recovery, and the third maker is a child who bounces back in three days because children bounce back until they suddenly do not." She looked around the table. "I have watched a great many people spend a resource because it was in front of them. The resource here is three human bodies. I would like somebody to say out loud that we are discussing the order in which we use them up."

***

Raven ruled on the fifth morning, standing, with everybody in the room who had argued.

"Two rulings and I’m signing both of them, which means the name at the bottom is mine, and anybody who wants to be angry knows exactly where to put it.

"First. The queue is ordered by how much use can be given back, soonest, and by nothing else. Not rank. Not service. Not what the settlement needs the person to do. Not where they were born and not which army cut them." She let that land. "I know what that costs. Taron’s version is more efficient, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise — his version gets the bore sunk faster and gets me a better summit. And the moment usefulness to me is the criterion, the queue becomes a reward for being valuable to Seven Peaks, and I stood in the mud eight nights ago and told four hundred people I would not price them. I meant it there. It doesn’t get to stop being true in a warmer room."

"That puts a drying-shed hand near the top," Sera Vahn put in.

"It does. Clean joint, old amputation, nothing else wrong with her, best result the soonest. She goes near the top, and sixty-two of your people who were cut about worse go under her, and every one of them is going to know why, because the criterion is going up on the wall with the list."

"They’ll hate you for it."

"Yes." Raven did not soften it. "They’ll hate me for it, and they’ll be able to read the reason in my handwriting, and I’d rather that than have them hate each other for it, which is what happened the last time I left a blank."

She turned before anybody could take the next line.

"Second ruling. Idris Tull does not make limbs."

The room came apart for about ten seconds.

Varden got there first and was the loudest, which Raven had expected and which did not make it easier. "He recovers in three days. Three. I take nine, and Jessop takes eight, and he takes three, and you’ve just cut the year’s output by a third to make yourself feel —"

"By more than a third," Raven said. "Varden, say the number. What is it without him?"

Silence. Then, flatly: "One every six weeks. Seven, some months."

"So call it eight or nine a year instead of twelve. Say that out loud too, because it’s going on the wall next to the list, and so is the reason, and so is the name of every person who moves down the order because of it." She waited for that to be understood. "You’re not going to be able to accuse me of hiding it. You’re going to be able to accuse me of doing it, which is different and which I’ll take."

It was Sera Vahn, in the end, who said the thing that actually cut.

"You took your own son off the screening rotation," she said. "Both grounds. On the record. And now you take a boy nobody here is related to off a bench, and the difference in both cases is a list of people who wait longer."

"That’s correct."

"That’s all you’re going to say about it?"

"It’s the same rule, and I’m applying it the same way, and I’d rather be accused of consistency than of the alternative." Raven put her hands on the back of the chair. "I’ll say the rest of it if you want it. I don’t know what it does to him. Nobody does. He’s back on his feet in three days, and he weighs less, and he says he’s fine, and he has learned to say it in a voice that gets believed, and that’s every child I have ever met who was useful to adults. In a decade we’ll know, and if I’m wrong then I’ll have cost ninety-one people four years of waiting for nothing, and I’ll have to live next to that. I’d still rather find out that way round."

Varden sat down.

"He’ll want to know why he’s been sent away."

"Then tell him the truth, which is that he isn’t. He can be in the room. He can hold the pattern, he can carry, he can learn every part of it that doesn’t take it out of him, and when he’s grown he can decide for himself, and I won’t have a vote." Raven picked up the pen. "But he doesn’t pay for it. Not while he’s small and not while the person deciding is somebody who benefits from him saying yes."

***

Elspeth Nyland came to find her that evening, which nobody had asked her to do, and she had clearly worked out what she wanted to say and then discarded it on the way.

"They’ve put me third."

"They have."

"There’s a man in that camp whose spine is telling him about a leg he hasn’t got." She was standing very straight. "I’ve had a long time to get good at this, and I am extremely good at it. Put me down the list. Twentieth. Fortieth. I’ll wait, and I’ll be fine, and it costs nobody anything."

"No."

Elspeth Nyland blinked.

"I’d like to explain why, because you’re owed it." Raven leaned back against the rail. "If the people at the top of that list can move themselves down out of decency, then within a month the list is ordered by who feels the guiltiest, and the ones who stay put are the ones who are best at not feeling it, and I promise you that is not a coincidence with who those people turn out to be. The queue only works if nobody in it can negotiate. Including you. Especially you, because you’d be the first and everybody would follow."

"So I take it, and they watch me take it."

"You take it, and they watch you take it, and the criterion’s on the wall in my handwriting so they know it isn’t your doing." Raven straightened. "And if you want to make it easier on yourself, which I’d understand — don’t. Take it and use it and let them see you use it well. The worst thing you could do to that camp is be sorry about it in front of them."

Elspeth Nyland stood there for a while with her wrist held in her other hand, the way she probably had for nine years without noticing.

"What does it cost the ones who make it?"

"Nine days for Varden. Eight for Jessop, whatever he says." Raven met her eye. "And nothing for the boy, because the boy isn’t making it. That’s the other thing on the wall."

***

Ilva Merrit went north on the seventh morning with fourteen of the Millford road people, and she did not want to go, and said so, and went.

"I’m a farmer with a notch in my ear," she objected, at the gate, in the cold. "You’ve got soldiers."

"I’ve got soldiers who’ve never fought on that ground and eight people who wrote the correction that everybody on this continent is using." Raven handed her the amended sheet, the one with the planking on it and the second line about how they had found out. "The crew that’s up there has nine engineers, a formation master, and one woman with three crates of crystal she stole. Not one of them has ever seen one of these things. You’ve killed them in a barn."

"We’ve killed them in a barn because there was a barn."

"That’s exactly why you’re going." Raven stepped back. "Teach them to fight off boards. And Ilva — if it comes to it, you’re not there to hold ground. There isn’t any. You’re there to get engineers onto wood."

Ilva Merrit read the sheet once, folded it, and put it inside her coat, and went up the north road after the others without saying goodbye, which was the most she had ever conceded to a formal occasion.

The list went up on the Hall wall the same day. Ninety-one names, in order, with the criterion at the top in Raven’s writing and the second ruling underneath it in the same size, and by evening there were forty people standing in front of it, and nobody was talking.