Chapter 168: Finish the List

"We can't suppress it," I said, at the fire, to everybody.

"Obviously not," said Ji Lan.

"I want to hear somebody argue for it anyway, so it's been argued."

"Fine." Ji Lan put her hands flat. "Here's the case: it's causing real harm to real people, some of whom are barely culpable, and we have the reach to bury it in a fortnight." She let it sit. "And here's why it's rubbish. It's true. Every line. The one thing this movement has ever been is the people who say the true thing in the light, and the second we start deciding which true things the world isn't grown up enough for, we're the Directorate of Public Belief with nicer manners." She shrugged. "That's the whole argument and it takes nine seconds and everybody in this fire already knew it."

"Then what?" said Tao Tao. "Because Hong's sixty-one and he's sleeping in a back room."

Nobody had it. We sat with that for about two days, and then Mu Chen said the thing, and he said it while washing a bowl, which is where he says everything.

"It's not a list," he said. "That's the trouble with it. It's a register."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning it's got a name and a category and nothing else." He set the bowl down. "Think about every list this movement has ever made. Ping's manifest — name, trade, town, the levy, the dog. Yun Shu's shapes. The First Author's eleven thousand. Every single one of them had the person in it, because a name on its own isn't a person, it's a label, and you cannot do anything with a label except sort people into piles." He dried his hands. "Yuan's list has eleven thousand four hundred labels on it. And a label is the only tool that has ever been any good for driving somebody out of a town."

"So what do we do with it?"

"Finish it," said Mu Chen.

— • —

That's what we did, and it has taken four years and it is not done and it will not be done for another six.

The idea is simple and the work is enormous. Every name on the Other List gets its entry completed. Post and district and years, yes — all of that stays, nothing is removed, that was the first rule and Yuan wrote it himself. And then underneath: what they actually did. What they signed. What they refused. What they knew and when. In their own words where they will give them, from the records where they won't, and from the people they wronged wherever those people can be found and are willing.

Not a defence. Not a trial. An entry.

"It won't help most of them," Xue Ningzhi said, when we put it to her.

"No."

"I want that understood before anybody gets excited. A full entry will make about a third of them look better than the register does, because they were clerks who copied. It will make about half look the same. And it will make a significant number look very much worse, because the register says supervisor, eleven years and the entry is going to say what the supervisor did in those eleven years." She took her pen out. "I am in favour. I want to be clear I am in favour. I am simply noting that we are about to hand a lot of people a fairer hearing and that a fair hearing is not a kind one."

She was right on all counts.

— • —

She went first. Nobody asked her to.

Her entry is the longest on the list and she wrote every word of it herself and would not let Ji Lan near it, which Ji Lan says was correct and also physically painful to watch.

It has the post in it. It has the three promotions. It has the campaigns she designed, by name, with dates and provinces and the number of people each one reached, and it has the four she is proudest of and why they were the worst ones. It has the night she nearly used erasure on herself. It has the sentence that she knew what she was doing from the second year and kept doing it for ten more because she believed it, and the sentence after it, which is that believing it made her better at it, not worse.

There is no part of it that asks for anything.

The last line is: I was not turned by an argument. I was turned by watching a man fill an empty chair, and I have never been able to decide whether that makes me a person who can be reached or a person who needed a miracle, and I do not think I get to decide.

It went out with the first two hundred entries, in among the others, not first and not featured, at her insistence and over Ji Lan's professional objection.

Four councils that had stopped giving work to people on the list read it and did not reverse their policy. One of them wrote to her to say so. She has that letter pinned above her desk and has told me twice that it is the only piece of correspondence in her life she has never wanted to answer.

— • —

Hong's entry came out in the second year.

It says he was a copy-clerk for nineteen years in the Fenmarch district office. It says he transcribed four thousand one hundred and six orders under form eleven, which is a number he did not know and which he asked to have included the moment he learned it. It says he refused twice, and it names both, and it says that one of them was a boy he had played with and the other was because he had a fever, and Hong insisted on the fever being in there.

And it has nine lines at the end from people who came up off orders he copied out.

Six of them are what you would expect. Two of them are worse than you would expect.

The ninth is from a woman who says that the copy of her order is in a different hand from the rest of that month's, a bad shaky hand, and that the district office's log shows it was re-copied eleven days late, and she has always wondered whether somebody sat on it for eleven days. She does not say it helped. She was taken anyway. She just wanted it written down that somebody might have hesitated.

Hong did not remember doing it. He says he doesn't remember and won't claim it.

He has a workshop again. The town did not give it back to him and the town did not apologise; some of it still will not deal with him. His daughter's neighbours talk to her now, which he says is the only part he cares about.

— • —

Yuan came to the fire, once, in the third year. Tao Tao gave him soup before she let him speak, which is the house rule.

"I thought you'd try to stop me," he said.

"We thought about it," I said. "For about two days. Ji Lan talked us out of it in nine seconds and then we sat there feeling clever and useless for a day and a half."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because your list is true, and because you were owed it, and because the last people who decided what the world was grown up enough to know had a Directorate for it." I passed him the bread. "Also because you were right and we were embarrassed. We published that Archive and never once looked at who else was in it. You did our filing for us."

Yuan turned that over.

"I didn't want them burned out," he said. "I want that said, because it's mine now whether I wanted it or not. I wanted somebody to have to look at the bottom of the page." He put his bowl down. "The entries are better. I hate about a fifth of them. There's a supervisor in the western district whose entry made me so angry I had to walk to the coast." He almost smiled. "But I read the clerk's. The one who did mine. He died forty years before I came up and there's eleven lines about him and one of them is that he asked to be moved to the roads office twice and was refused. I have not decided what to do with that and I would not have had it at all."

"What are you going to do with it?"

"Nothing, probably," said Yuan. "I'm sixty. I grow things." He ate. "But it's in me now instead of the other thing, and the other thing was all teeth, and Old Wen's right about what that does to your mornings."

"You've met Old Wen?"

"Everybody's met Old Wen," said Yuan.

— • —

The warm — late.

I made the soup.

"Six more years," said Xue Ningzhi, to nobody, with her sheet.

"That's the estimate?"

"That's the estimate. Nine thousand entries to go and the easy ones are done." She made a note. "The hard ones are the dead. Four thousand of them are dead and cannot answer, and we are writing entries about men who cannot say a word in their own defence, and I have written the methodology three times and I still do not like it."

"Is there a better way?"

"No," she said. "There is only a more honest way, which is to put at the top of every one of those four thousand entries that the subject is dead and did not contribute, and let the reader weigh it. Which is what we are doing." She put the pen down. "Thirteen years ago I would have solved this in a fortnight with a campaign and it would have been elegant and it would have been a lie. I now spend four years on something that will annoy everybody. This is what I meant when I said I had changed and nobody believed me."

"I believed you."

"You believe everybody," said Xue Ningzhi. "It is your least useful quality and I have built a career on it."

Yun Shu tasted the soup and said, "There's a bone in it."

"Min brought a bone."

"Min brought a bone." She ate some more, thoughtfully. "It's better. Don't tell her."

"She'll know."

"She'll know," Yun Shu agreed, "because she's been standing behind you in the dark for the last minute and a half."

"I have," said Min.