Chapter VIII · The Lower City Speaks

Nara Venn could hear the bottom of the pot.

The ladle made a different sound when there was nothing beneath it but iron. She tilted the pot towards herself, gathered what remained against its side and filled the bowl waiting on the table. Behind that bowl stood a woman with two more. Nara had counted her as one person. All evening, the queue had been teaching her the difference.

“My father cannot get down the stairs,” the woman said. “The other is for the boy.”

Nara looked past her. The last serving had been announced twice, and people were still arriving beneath the viaduct. Some carried vessels intended for something else: a shaving cup, the inner tray of a workman's case, a little enamel basin with flowers at its rim. Water dripped between the overhead plates. Each drop struck a different piece of metal, so that the court seemed to be cooking even where the fires had gone out.

“Wait here.” She hated saying it. The woman had already waited long enough to learn that a table, a pot and a person behind them could be mistaken for an undertaking.

Davit Sorn cut the last heel of bread into three. He had worked in the district bakehouse before its freight connection stopped, and still measured a loaf with his thumb before cutting. Nara had asked him to keep the pieces equal. He gave the largest to the woman and looked at Nara, daring her to object. She took the empty pot away.

At the back of the court, a dozen people sat with their bowls in their laps. They had finished eating but had nowhere warmer to go. One man was asleep beneath a coat too small to cover his feet. Nara recognised the coat: she had repaired its lining at the linen works. Before the fighting, he would never have let her see him wearing it inside out. She lowered the pot carefully, so the clang would not wake him.

Amel Ryn came through the service arch carrying the insulated box she had taken to the turbine hall. Nara hurried to meet her, then saw how easily the box swung. The kitchen porter put it on the table. A packet of papers slid across its empty floor.

“They sent the carrier for the riggers,” Amel said. “There are supposed to be two smaller loads.”

“Supposed to be where?”

“One is at the lower court. The other hasn't left the store.” She opened the packet. “I asked who had agreed for us. They couldn't give me a name.”

Nara could smell the turbine hall on the paper: hot oil over old dust. She read the first lines while Amel went back to explain to the woman with three bowls. The compact promised that receiving stations would be consulted. Their own station appeared on a separate sheet, with the agreement space blank. Someone had written a new contact beside it, then crossed that out because the receiving office closed at six.

It was after ten. Nara turned the sheet over. No address for the people who remained hungry after an office closed.

“They did listen,” Amel said when she returned. “A woman called Holt found where the handcart was. It's loaded. There isn't anyone left to bring it.”

Davit wiped the knife on a cloth. “Then we bring it.”

He was reaching for his coat. Nara caught the sleeve. “You have been on your feet since before the bells.”

“So has the bread.” He pulled free, not quite gently. “It's still expected to do its work.”

Two people volunteered to go with him. A third asked whether his place in the queue would be kept. The question silenced the people nearest the table. Nara said yes, then made herself say that the people unable to pull a cart would eat too. A woman on the bench lifted her swollen ankle as though showing why she deserved the assurance. Nara wished she had not made anyone prove it.

They went by the service walk. Amel stayed to keep the receiving point open; she had climbed enough stairs for one night. Nara took the bowl she had put aside for herself and carried it to the woman with the others. The woman saw what she was doing and shook her head.

“I don't want yours.”

“It is here.”

“That isn't what I asked.”

Nara set it down between them. The food had thickened as it cooled, pulling away from one side of the bowl. They looked at it without speaking. At last the woman took it, not gratefully, and Nara was relieved of having to accept thanks for a situation she could not repair.

When the handcart arrived, its wheel made so much noise that people came out from under the arches before they saw the load. Davit had wrapped a strip of his shirt around the handle. Blood had come through it. They helped him lower the shafts, brought the sacks beneath the dry part of the viaduct and put water back on the fire. Nobody cheered. The smell of warming meal was enough to make conversation possible again.

Holt called through the receiving booth while the second pot heated. She had found someone who could take messages after six. Nara thanked her and asked what would happen when tomorrow's carrier was needed elsewhere.

“We will have someone to ask here,” Holt said.

“Ask what? Whether we mind missing supper?”

A pause. “Which delivery can wait. What another route would cost.”

Nara watched Davit try to open his stiff fingers. “Tonight it cost his hand.” She gave Holt the baker's name before the anger could make her say something larger and less useful. “We ought to be there when you decide.”

After the call, she tore the clean lid from a ruined meal crate. On it she wrote a question for the morning, then read it to the people still waiting: who could speak for this court when its delivery was changed? Several answered at once. The woman with the bowls said she would be upstairs feeding her father. Amel asked who would serve breakfast while the cooks went to a meeting.

Nara put down the chalk. She had imagined a crowd answering her. What she had were people who could not leave.

By morning, somebody had answered on the other side of the lid: YOU DO.

Nara propped it against the serving table with the question facing out. She had slept sitting up, waking whenever she thought she heard a cart. Her tongue felt too large for her mouth. At the linen works she had learned to recognise the hour when tired people became certain of everything. She could hear that certainty in her own voice when she told Amel they ought to choose someone else.

“Who?” Amel asked.

“Someone with time.”

Amel looked around the court. Then she laughed, a hard, brief sound that made Nara laugh too. A child near the table stared at them in surprise.

They held the discussion while breakfast was served. This gave the loudest voices an advantage until Davit took the bread round to the benches. The woman with three bowls came down for ten minutes, leaving a neighbour with her father. She said her name was Ilen. She wanted the decisions repeated in the evening, when people on shifts could hear them. A lodging-house keeper asked whether strangers would have the same allowance as residents. Half the people under his roof, he said, had arrived yesterday.

“They still have stomachs,” Davit said.

“So do the people who have paid here all their lives.”

Nara was ready with an answer about payment. Ilen spoke first. “Yesterday I was a resident at one end of a stopped Way and a stranger at the other. Tell me which end you intend to feed.”

The keeper turned red. He had taken people in; Nara knew that. His wife was cooking in a washroom for families whose names they had not yet learned. He was asking whether their small store would be swallowed by everybody else's disaster. Nara asked him to tell the court how many were sleeping there. When he did, the argument became a request for a larger pot and somewhere to put it.

They chose Amel to go to the supply meeting and Nara to go with her. Neither could promise the court's food to another district without bringing the proposal back. Either could be replaced. Someone asked how. They argued over that until the first cook threatened to give the whole breakfast away while they improved the procedure. In the end, the evening gathering would hear what had happened and decide whether to send the same people again. It was not a constitution. Amel wrote the arrangement on the lid so they would remember the same one.

Holt received them in a room full of people bringing quite reasonable emergencies. Nara had expected a cold table and a refusal. Instead she found a clerk carrying a cup she had forgotten to drink and a map covered with changes. A man from transport showed them the carrier reassigned to the riggers. The ward lift had been repaired during the night. Patients no longer had to be carried up the stairs.

“That is good,” Amel said.

Nara disliked her for saying it so quickly. She wanted their hunger to remain an accusation long enough for someone to answer it. Then Amel put Davit's bloodstained strip on the table. “And this happened at the other end.”

Nobody moved the cloth. Holt took their receiving number and made room beside the ward report. Nara could see how easily the meeting might end there: recognition, apology, a record of two costs which had both been necessary. She had not come merely to get the court's suffering entered neatly beside a successful repair.

“We don't want to choose between your explanation and a rumour,” she said. “We want to help choose before the cart leaves.”

The transport man asked whether that meant every court could hold up a change. Nara looked at the map. She could make out their viaduct only because Amel found it for her. A city might wait for everyone until everyone starved. She had no clever answer, and resented the question for making her need one.

“Not every delay is an argument,” Holt said. “Some changes cannot wait. Then we say who made them and why, and where the people affected can challenge the next one.” She turned to Nara. “Will your court stay here when another district has the stronger claim?”

Nara thought of the bowl she had given away. That had been hers to give. “I will come back and tell them it has the stronger claim. I cannot promise they will thank me.”

“Good,” Amel said. “Don't.”

They left with a revised delivery window and space for two receiving delegates at the next review. It was a place at a meeting, not enough food, and Nara knew how easily she could sell it as a victory. At the viaduct, she gave the delivery time first. The kitchen still needed people to peel roots donated by a store whose cooling had failed. She sat on a crate and took a knife. Questions reached her one at a time, between the work of getting the black places out.

By evening, people from three neighbouring courts had come to ask about the meeting. They crowded beneath the arch where the old market speaker still worked. Nara climbed onto her crate because those beyond the fire could not see who was answering. Someone said the Engineer had saved them; another said the Heir would put everything right. A woman asked whether the new public trusts would belong to Marian and be given back to the city afterwards.

“I don't know what she can inherit,” Nara said.

“Then what are you telling us?”

The question came from the lodging-house keeper. He was standing at the edge with a basket of cleaned bowls. She had been annoyed to see him arrive and now found herself grateful. He would not let the gathering become a story in which she had already supplied the answer.

“They are asking who should own what we need,” she said. “Why does it have to belong to anyone?”

A few people applauded. Others called out about their rooms, their tools, the carts they had paid for. She shook her head. “Not your coat. The Way you cannot get home without. The water line we all drink from.” She heard her voice climb above them and felt the dangerous pleasure of being understood before she had explained herself completely. “Why should our way of living be somebody else's inheritance?”

This time the applause reached the back. Davit watched from beside the pot with his bandaged hand held against his chest. When Nara climbed down, he said he liked the question. Then he asked whether it brought them any nearer tomorrow's bread.

She helped him carry the bowls. Above them, somebody was repeating her sentence into a recorder, without the part about the coat.

On the third afternoon, the custodians offered Nara a room.

There was a desk in it, two receivers and a window opening onto a light well. Somebody had found a cushion for the chair. From the doorway she could hear crockery being washed rather than scraped clean by hungry people. For the first time in days she noticed how much she wanted to sit somewhere that did not require her to be useful.

Reva Tern stood beside the window. She had replaced the broken lens in her spectacles; the other remained cloudy at its edge. “We need a representative who can be reached,” she said. “At present we send to one court and are told you have gone to another.”

“Sometimes I have gone home.”

“That is also permitted.” Tern smiled, then saw that Nara did not. “I meant that. We can arrange hours and someone to take messages when you are not here.”

The offer included a place at an emergency consultation on supplies. Nara could see its uses. Since the first gathering, two more courts had begun choosing messengers. The linen workers met after their shift; the people sleeping in the old tram shelters met before the queues formed. Every visit brought a different account of the same missing cart. Somebody needed to spend time understanding how the accounts joined. It could be her work instead of something she tried to do between serving bowls.

“Who would I represent?” she asked.

“The receiving districts. To begin with, those who are already asking you.”

“And who sends someone else when they don't want me?”

“We can settle that.”

Nara touched the cushion. A shallow depression remained where somebody had tested it. “Before or after the public notice?”

Tern opened a drawer and showed her the unfinished notice. There was a blank after representative. Nara found her own name pencilled lightly beneath it. She had spent the morning resisting people who wanted her to make promises, and here was a place from which a promise might reach somebody able to keep it. That was the offer's force. Refusing it would not make the questions smaller.

“I will bring you whoever the courts choose,” she said. “They may choose me. But your supply meeting must hear them together, and let the people waiting outside hear what is decided.”

“We cannot fit every receiving court in this room.”

“Then don't call this room the receiving courts.”

Tern shut the drawer. For a moment Nara thought she had spoiled the one useful thing her question had obtained. She could see herself telling the viaduct that she had defended their freedom and lost the direct line to the grain office.

“Keep the food questions coming here,” Tern said. “That is not conditional on taking the chair.” She laid a dispatch slip beside the notice. “I will propose an open receiving session at the morning review. Some individual cases cannot be read to a crowd. You know why.”

Nara thought of Ilen's father, whose needs had already become a public explanation for three bowls. They agreed that personal details would remain with the people supplying them. Delivery changes, reasons and objections could be heard. Tern would put that arrangement to the review; she did not promise that the other custodians would welcome it. Nara left without accepting the personal appointment. The cushion stayed on its chair.

On the service stair she met a man carrying a copy of her speech. He had underlined the sentence about inheritance. He wanted Marian Vale to read it, he said; perhaps the heir could give the whole thing to the people and end the dispute. Nara asked whether he had spoken to her. He had not. Marian had become an available solution in much the same way the freight gallery had become an available route.

“If it is ours to use, why must we first wait for somebody to give it to us?” she asked.

He looked wounded, as though she had rejected generosity itself. She gave the paper back. “Take her the questions. Don't say she has answered them.”

At the viaduct, Amel had put the revised delivery window where anyone could reach it. Someone had added a complaint beneath it; someone else had answered in a different hand. One of the cooks wanted both removed because people were stopping to argue in the serving lane. Nara carried the board to the other side of the arch. It took four minutes to find a place where disagreement did not obstruct supper.

She told the gathering about Tern's room. Davit asked why she had not taken it. Ilen asked who would look after the questions while she was at meetings. The people from the tram shelters wanted their own messenger. Nara found herself defending an arrangement she had refused, then admitting what she had wanted from it. A receiver, a chair, the chance to make a call without someone putting an empty bowl into her hand.

“We can take turns answering,” Amel said. “We already take turns cooking.”

So they made a place for messages at the old market booth. Davit found a stool; the lodging-house keeper lent a lamp. Each messenger would bring the terms on which their court had sent them. Nara kept a list of the places not yet reached. There were more of those than there were people at the table.

By the fourth evening, the arch could not contain everyone who came to listen. Voices carried down the adjoining platforms. Nara could no longer recognise all the people repeating her name. The cooks kept the serving lane open, and beside the booth Ilen read the previous meeting's account to three people who had missed it. Nara stood listening until a hand touched her elbow. Another court wanted to speak.

The speaker had reached the second item when Graham appeared above her.

For an instant Nara thought somebody had brought back the old awakening bulletin. The market screen sometimes filled gaps with pictures whose familiarity made them seem like news. Then the man lifted his head. Behind him stood the great curve of the Atlas, pale against a room she had seen during the fighting. His coat was dark. One hand rested on a rail.

Someone near the pot dropped a bowl. It broke once, sharply. No one bent to pick it up.

He spoke of continuity, of hunger and the danger of dividing the city while it struggled to recover. He named Marian Vale as his lawful successor. He asked the system guilds to obey the custodians and the people of London to remain calm. The small catch before one sentence made Nara lean forward. She remembered that hesitation from his earlier broadcasts. It had seemed like a man reaching for words rather than receiving them from somebody out of sight.

The recording ended. The screen went dark for a breath, then began again. This time she saw Amel looking at her. The kitchen porter was crying, silently, with an expression of such naked relief that Nara could not bear to meet it. A living Graham could save them the effort of deciding what his death required. She understood the desire before she could oppose it.

“They told us he was dead,” Nara said.

“They told us all sorts of things,” the lodging-house keeper answered. “Look at him.”

She looked. The mouth made the words. The hand moved on the rail. Nothing about the face offered the useful ugliness of a lie. When he named Marian, somebody below the screen cheered. Behind Nara, Ilen began gathering her bowls. Perhaps the deliveries would run properly now; perhaps her father could return to the room he knew. Hope was already arranging tomorrow before anyone had asked when the message was made.

Pera Sol came out of the market booth with a strip from the receiver. She tended its notices and public calls, and knew more about what reached the screen than anyone there. Nara asked her to stop the repeat.

“Why?” a man called. “Because he doesn't agree with you?”

The question found its mark. For three days Nara had been teaching people to question an inheritance. Here was the dead owner apparently choosing an heir. She wanted the message to be false. Wanting it did not tell her whether it was.

“Let it finish,” she said to Pera. “Then leave the receiving notice beside it. Where it came from and when it arrived.”

Pera read the strip. It had arrived through an estate relay. The time was tonight's delivery time, not the time of the speech. No recording officer was named. The receiver could retain the transmitted package, including the wrapper, but it could not tell them whether the man had stood in that room and said those words.

“Then you don't know,” the keeper said.

“No,” Nara said. She made herself turn so the people behind her could hear too. “I know we were told he died. Now we have a recording. I don't know when it was made or who is sending it in his name.”

Amel wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “What would make you believe it?”

Nara almost answered nothing, and felt frightened by how close the word came. “An account we can check. Not only the face.” She looked up at the paused image. “And if he said it, we would still have to decide what we owe each other. He cannot eat for the people at the end of this queue.”

A man laughed without kindness. The woman who had been speaking before the screen changed tried to continue. Nobody listened. Her court needed lamp oil; she had come a long way to say so. Nara stepped off the crate and stood beside her until the nearest people quietened. They wrote down the request. It was an inadequate way of restoring a voice, but it was the one they had.

Pera saved the received package without changing it. She sent a second copy to the Council House archive with the relay wrapper and an account of where it had played. She checked the duration: forty-three seconds. Nara asked her to include the message before it, an ordinary market notice, and the delivery receipt. She wanted the archive to see how it had reached them, not a version from which somebody had already removed the inconvenient parts.

The gathering broke into smaller arguments. Some people left to tell their neighbours Graham had returned. Others repeated Nara's doubts as though she had proved something. She stopped one young man who was saying the Engineer had exposed it. Arun had said nothing about this message. The boy looked annoyed at losing the better story, then went on with a smaller one.

Amel stayed beside the serving table. When Nara returned, she asked whether believing the recording had made her foolish.

“No.” Nara reached for her shoulder, then let the hand fall. “I wanted to believe him when he first spoke. I still want there to have been somebody who meant it.”

Amel nodded. Between them, the pot gave off its faint, sweet steam. Tomorrow they would have to decide which delegates to send, and someone would quote Graham to settle a question that no longer seemed settled by the dead. The archive might reply before then. It might not.

On the screen, Graham began again. At the table, Amel held out the ladle. Nara took it.