The line at the municipal tithe gate began at the iron rail by the clock tower and ran back along the square, past the shuttered grain office, past the fountain that had not run since Pell was nine, and around the corner into Pump Street, where he could not see the end of it.
Pell Venn stood about two-thirds of the way along, between a grandmother with a ration card held in both hands and a woman with a small child on her hip. He had his hands in his coat pockets. In the right pocket, under his fingers, was the lamp ship he had finished the night before: a hull of bent wire, spoon-handle fins, a cabin made from the cap of a fuel cell. He kept turning it over. It helped him think.
He was counting families.
The cards made it possible. Every household that came to the gate carried one card, grey for full quota and yellow for reduced, and a household with a sick member had a red corner clipped. If he watched the hands instead of the faces, he could count the cards, and the cards were the households. He had been counting since he joined the line. Ninety-four in front of him, as far as he could see. Of those, sixty-one yellow. Nine with red corners.
He had no paper. Paper was a coin a sheet at the stationer’s, and the dormitory gave him one notebook a term, which he was saving. So he kept the count in his head, in groups of ten, with a trick his mother had shown him once, when he was small: you put each ten in a room of a house you know, and walk through the house to add them. He used the flat over the pump house, from before. Ten yellow cards in the kitchen. Ten in the corner where the blanket was. Ten by the window where she used to hang her work coat to dry.
He disliked using that house for numbers. It was the only house he could see clearly enough.
The line moved. The grandmother in front of him shuffled forward a step. He shuffled with her.
At the gate the tithe clerk sat in a glass booth with a speaking grille. He was a thin man in a Directorate collar, and every so often, when the line had moved enough to make a new crowd near the grille, he lifted a printed sheet and read it aloud in a voice that never changed.
“Households below quota receive reduced heat and water pressure until the next tithe.”
He read it. He put the sheet down. The line moved.
Pell heard it twice before he got close enough to see the clerk’s mouth. The second time he took the pencil stub out of his left pocket, licked the end, and wrote the household figure on the back of his hand: the quota threshold the clerk had read before the notice, the number of credits a household needed to clear to stay on grey. He wrote it small, along the side of his thumb, where it would not smear when he put his hand back in his pocket.
The woman with the child shifted her weight. The child, a girl about three, was asleep with her mouth open against her mother’s shoulder. Her mother’s card was yellow.
When Pell reached the rail at last, the grandmother was ahead of him at the booth. He leaned around her to see the grille.
“How many households fell below quota this week?” he asked.
The clerk looked at him through the glass. It was a look Pell knew from the dormitory: the look adults gave a question that was not on their sheet. The clerk did not answer. He lifted one hand, palm forward, a small tired gesture, and the grandmother shuffled up to the grille with her card.
Pell stood back. His face was hot. He had asked politely. He had asked a question with a number for an answer, and numbers were what the clerk had in his booth, on his sheet, in the ledger at his elbow. He had seen the ledger. It was open.
“You’re Mara Venn’s brother,” said the woman behind him.
He turned. She had shifted the child to her other hip. Up close, he saw that her coat was a man’s coat, too big in the shoulders, and that her hands were red with cold.
“Yes.”
“My heat was cut at the last tithe. Third floor, east block, Cutter Row. They cut us to half. My boy’s chest is bad.” She looked at the gate and back at him. “People say your sister fixes things. People say she hears what she’s not supposed to.”
He thought about the question. It was the kind of thing people said about Mara in the Low Brace, quietly, in the market line, not quite as a compliment: that the Venn girl at Rusk’s yard could tell a good valve from a bad one without opening it. That she had been strange since the fall when she was small. That her mother had been strange too, and look what came of that.
“I haven’t checked whether she does,” Pell said.
The woman frowned. “You don’t know?”
“I know what she says. I haven’t checked it.” It was the only way he could think to put it. Mara never talked about the graft except to tell him to stop asking. He had once watched her stand frozen beside a pump in the yard and then tell Tavin which bolt would shear, and the bolt had sheared, a week later. That was one time. One time was not a count.
The woman looked at him for a moment as if he were simple, then shrugged and turned her attention to the child, who had woken and begun to fuss.
He gave her no number. He had none he trusted.
At the booth the grandmother had her card stamped. Yellow, again. She walked away slowly, holding it in both hands. Pell stepped up and slid his own card under the glass: a dormitory card, blue, which put him on the municipal books as a ward of the city rather than a household, and drew a ration for one boy and no heat at all, because the dormitory’s heat was paid for by the city and the city paid what it chose.
The clerk stamped it without looking at him.
Pell took the card back and moved off to the side of the square, out of the line, and sat on the cold lip of the dry fountain. He took out his notebook. He opened it to a clean page at the back, where the pages were his own, and wrote a numbered list.
1. Families at the gate today. Counted 94 ahead of me before the turn. 61 yellow. 9 red corner. 2. Dormitory beds, my corridor. 48. 3. Cold stairs in the east block. ?
He looked at the third line for a while. He had heard about the east block stairs from a boy in his room, whose cousin lived there: that the heat to the stairwells had been cut first, before the flats, so that old people stopped going out because the stairs were too cold to climb. He had not been to look. He had no idea how many stairs, or how many people, or whether it was true.
He did not write a total. He wrote count not checked beside the space where it would go, and underlined it, and closed the book.
The dormitory was a long brick block behind the municipal offices, four floors, with the windows on the north side painted over to keep the heat in. Pell went in by the side door and climbed to the second floor, where the warden’s board hung by the stairwell. It held the bed list, a long printed sheet with every boy’s name and number, renewed each tithe. Most weeks nobody looked at it. Pell looked every week, because his name was on it, and his name was one of the few things in the building that was his.
This week, beside his bed number, someone had drawn a circle in red ink.
He stood and looked at it. There were four other circles on the sheet, scattered among the names. He hardly knew any of those boys.
The warden came out of her office at the end of the corridor with a cup of something steaming. She was a large, tired woman who ran the second floor and the third, and who had once given Pell a pair of socks out of a box in her office without asking him to explain why he needed them.
“What does the circle mean?” Pell asked.
She glanced at the board. “Bed’s under review.”
“Review for what?”
“For the list.” She blew on her cup. “City’s cutting the dormitory allotment. Some beds go back to the pool.” She looked at him, not unkindly. “You’ve got family, don’t you? A sister at a yard.”
“Yes.”
“Well, then.” She went on down the corridor, and at the stairwell she stopped and said over her shoulder, “Nothing’s decided. It’s a review.”
Pell stood in front of the board for a long time after she had gone. Then he went to his room, which held six beds and six boys and one window that had been painted shut, and lay on his bed with his boots on, and took the wire ship out of his pocket and held it up against the grey light.
It was a good ship. He had made the hull from a single length of wire, bent around a candle to get the curve, and the fins from spoon handles he had traded for, and in the cabin, if you looked closely, there was a tiny chair made from the clasp of a broken pen. He had built it to the proportions in an old picture of a Founder lamp ship, one of the long ones that had carried people between the lamps when the Founders still flew. The picture said they had flown to places nobody had mapped since. Pell believed that. Somebody had built the lamps. Somebody had decided where to put them. It seemed impossible to him that the people who did that had not also left somewhere else, somewhere worth finding.
Mara said all great machines became junk. She said it as though she had looked into every one of them and checked.
He turned the ship over. The circle on the board was red, and the warden had said nothing was decided, and the clerk had lifted his hand instead of answering, and the woman with the child had wanted a number from him that he could not give.
He thought he would ask Mara the question tomorrow. He had been saving it. Not about the bed, which she would try to fix, because she fixed things. About the count. About the families at the gate, and the stairs he had not seen, and the clerk’s open ledger behind the glass.
Who checks a count that nobody writes down?
Outside, the dormitory bell rang for supper. Pell put the ship back in his pocket, wrote the bed number and under review on the inside of his wrist beside the quota figure, and went down to stand in another line.