The municipal records hall opened at the eighth bell, and Mara was on its steps at the seventh, with frost in her hair and the notebook in her coat.
She had not slept. After the gauge and the relay she had sat at the bench until the sky over the towers went from black to grey, turning the eight seconds over in her head, and somewhere in that grey hour a different thought had come to her, a colder one, out of the director’s outer office. Item nine is below its required output. A lamp below its required output for three quarters will be decided. And Halvek, light and exact: Closure is a word for an accident. Lamps do not close. They fail.
If lamps failed, someone recorded it. Everything on Cinder was recorded. The tithe was recorded down to the household, down to the clipped red corner on a ration card. If a lamp somewhere in the nine systems had failed, it would be in a register.
So she was on the steps when the doors opened.
The records hall was a long high room lined with shelves, with reading tables down the middle under green-shaded lamps, and a counter at the far end where a clerk took requests. This clerk was a heavy man of about forty with ink on his cuffs and a pencil behind each ear. He looked at her yard coat and her scarred hands without much interest.
“Tithe register,” she said. “And any log of lamp failures.”
“The tithe register records household heat cuts.” He said it as though he had said it many times. “Not lamps. Lamps are the Compact’s business.”
“Then I’ll start with the tithe register.”
He brought it to a table: three heavy volumes bound in grey cloth, each holding four years of tithes, district by district. She sat under the green lamp and opened the first.
It was what he had said. Pages of districts. Under each district, columns: households on full quota, households reduced, households cut, households appealing. The figures were in a clerk’s small neat hand, and they went on and on, tithe after tithe, the reduced column creeping up a little each time, a slow rising tide.
She turned the pages for most of an hour before she noticed the margin.
It was narrow, along the outer edge of each left-hand page, and most of the time it was empty. But every so often, perhaps one page in thirty, someone had written something there in a different ink and a different hand, smaller, tighter, a clerk’s private print. A date, and beside it a word or two. She bent close to the first one and read it under the lamp.
Output rise, Sable. 4%.
She knew of no lamp called Sable. She turned the pages. Three tithes later, in the same small hand, in the same margin: Sable, dawn late (2). Then, five tithes after that: Sable, dawn late (6). Unstable. Then, a full year on: Sable. Collapse. Cause: age.
She sat back.
She found the next one in the second volume. Output rise, Sorrel. 3%. Then the late dawns. Then the instability. Then, in less than a year, Sorrel. Collapse. Cause: age.
She took out the notebook and began to copy the margins, leaving the households and the names where they were. Each date, each lamp, each word. She laid them out in a column, in order, and as she wrote she saw the pattern before she had finished writing it: every failure began the same way. First a brief rise in the lamp’s output, a few percent, the kind of thing a tithe office would record as good news. Then the dawns came late, a few times, then more often. Then they were unstable. Then the collapse, and the word age.
A rise. Unstable dawns. A collapse called age.
Her wrist buzzed.
She had forgotten the clip. It was the yard’s call clip, a cheap brass band with a speaking stone set in it, the kind the district handed out to businesses so they could be reached about jobs. Tavin had given it to her the year she turned seventeen, and it lived on her left wrist and was mostly silent. She turned her wrist up and pressed the stone, and Pell’s voice came out of it, small and tinny, from the household line at the yard table.
“Mara.”
“I’m in the records hall. Keep your voice down.”
“I am keeping it down.” He lowered it further, which made it harder to hear. “The dawn came late twice on the yard board. This week. Tavin writes the dawn on the board every morning, the bell time. Twice it was late. Four minutes once and six minutes the other time.” A pause. “Is that the lamp or the clock? I haven’t checked which.”
She held her wrist close to her ear. Around her, the records hall was quiet. A woman at the next table turned a page. The clerk at the counter scratched something with one of his pencils.
“Write it down,” she said. “Both times. The day and the minutes.”
“I did. That’s how I know it was twice.” Another pause. “Is it the lamp?”
She looked at the column in her notebook. Dawn late (2). Dawn late (6). Unstable.
“I’ll tell you when I know,” she said.
The clip went quiet.
She sat and looked at the notebook, then turned to the top of the page and wrote, in her plain hand, above everything else: Pell: dawn late twice this week (4 min, 6 min). Lamp or clock? She underlined it. She thought about the answer for a while before she wrote anything else, and the answer she thought of frightened her, and she did not write it. She did not know. She had two numbers from a boy and a yard board and a column of margins from a clerk’s private hand. That was not knowing.
She went back to copying.
Halfway down the third volume the clerk came and stood beside her table. He looked at her notebook, at the column of dates, at the register open to its margin.
“Copying the register is not allowed,” he said.
“I’m not copying the register. I’m copying dates. No names, no households.”
“The dates are names,” the clerk said, “in a different order.”
She looked up at him. His face was not unkind. It was tired, and a little wary, and he was looking not at her but at the margin of the open page, at the small tight handwriting there, as though he knew whose hand it was.
He left the book where it was. He turned his back and went off down the long room toward the far shelves, saying over his shoulder that he had another box to fetch. He walked slowly. He never looked back.
She copied faster.
There were three collapses in the three volumes, three lamps she had never heard of: Sable, Sorrel, and a third, Whitlow, late in the third volume. Each one ended in age. She laid them in her column with their dates, and with the days between them, and as she did the arithmetic she found that the days between them were growing shorter.
Then she noticed the gap.
Between Sorrel’s collapse and the first mention of Whitlow there was a long stretch with nothing in the margins. Almost two years of empty margin where the pattern said there should be entries. And when she checked the sequence of words, she saw that Whitlow’s entries began with unstable, not with a rise. The rise was missing. So were the late dawns. Somebody had started Whitlow in the middle.
Two entries missing, at least. The rise and the first late dawns. Perhaps more.
She drew a short line in the notebook where the gap was, and beside it wrote check.
The last entry in the third volume was the newest, from little more than a year ago. Output rise, Lorn. 3%. Then nothing more. She sat with her finger on it. She knew Lorn. Sera’s sister lived under Lorn.
But below it, at the very end of the register, there was one more line, in the same small hand, in the same margin, written after all the others, and it was neither a rise nor a collapse. It was the first lamp’s name again, years after its collapse, with a recent date and one word.
Sable. Unlisted.
She looked for it in the register’s front matter, where the nine lamp systems were listed by name and number. It was not there. She went to the shelf of maps at the end of the reading tables and pulled out the Compact’s chart of the nine systems, a big folded sheet with the lamps marked as gold circles and their worlds as smaller dots, and spread it on the table, and looked. Hearth, Lorn, Tal, Meridian, and the others. Sorrel and Whitlow were there, each drawn as a hollow ring that the key called retired. She counted the circles twice. Eight. The front matter said nine systems. Where the spiral should have carried a ninth circle on its outer turn, the chart showed open paper.
The clerk came back down the long room with a box under his arm. He set it on the counter. Mara folded the map and carried it back and stood at the counter with her notebook open.
“Which lamp is this?” She showed him the last line. “Sable. It’s not on the chart. The others that failed are on it, marked retired. This one isn’t there at all.”
He looked at the line for a moment. He never asked where she had copied it from. He did not tell her again that copying was not allowed.
“One the Compact has stopped listing,” he said.
“Stopped listing. Not failed?”
He lifted the box’s lid and began sorting the papers inside, not looking at her.
“The register says what the register says,” he said. “Good morning, miss.”
She went out into the cold. The sun was well up over the towers now, round and bright, a few minutes late or not, she could not tell from the street. She stood on the steps of the records hall with the notebook in her hand and read the last line again.
Unlisted.
A lamp the Compact had stopped writing down, still failing in a clerk’s private margin, after everyone else had decided it was gone.