The requisition went out on the ninth of Pyrelon and Ilma Serreth was offered a district on the eleventh, and neither of those things had anything to do with the other, and that was the whole of the problem.
The letter came from Denning Ovarr, who had been district officer at Marrow Hill for nineteen years and had known her for eleven of them, and who wrote the way he talked. Badly, at length, and with no side to it at all.
*Ardenby wants a district officer in Frostmere. I have put your name in and it will be accepted, because I have never put a name in that wasn't and I am not going to start at my age.*
*You will be nearer your mother. Four rooms. The district is small and the work is dull and you would be extremely good at it.*
*There is one piece of tidying. A district officer may not hold a review on own motion in his own name — you know why, it's the obvious reason — so CR-335-Marrow-4 would need to be withdrawn before the appointment takes effect.*
*Say yes. I would like to hand this district to somebody who reads.*
***
She read it four times at the window on the Sarrow stair. It was a better window than Rethe's, and it had been the largest thing in her life for two years, and she had been proud of it, and she could feel that going while she stood there.
Nobody had threatened her. That was the thing she kept coming back to, and it kept getting worse.
Denning Ovarr did not know about Mataon Gaael. He had taken her review across a counter at twenty past nine on the twenty-second of Sylphenia and said *you have done that properly* and had not looked at her. He had not looked at her because he was embarrassed. He was embarrassed because he had known then that this letter was coming, and had decided to write it anyway.
The rule was real. She went and read it that afternoon to be sure. A district officer may not hold a review on own motion in his own name, and the reason for it is entirely sound: a man who reviews and a man who decides cannot be the same man.
Nobody had done anything wrong.
Ardenby was four rooms and her mother was eighty-one.
She did not answer for six days. That was five more than she needed and four more than was polite. On the fourth she went and found Rethe.
They had never done this. In nine years they had exchanged perhaps three hundred sentences, all of them about instruments, and Serreth had always assumed the older woman thought her ambitious in the way that gets noticed.
Rethe read the letter standing up, in the corridor, and gave it back.
"He's right about the rule."
"I know."
"And he means every word of the rest of it, which makes it worse."
"I know that too." Serreth folded it. "Say the thing you're not saying."
Rethe put her glasses up into her hair.
"Nineteen years I've read instruments in that room. Nine hundred examinations. And in all of it there's never once been a moment where somebody stood in front of me and said *do the wrong thing.* Not once, Serreth. Not one. Every day of it was made of correct rules applied by decent people, and here we are."
"That's not advice."
"No. It's the only true thing I've got and I thought you should have it before you decided." She took her glasses back down. "There's no version of this where anybody's bad. That's what you're up against and it's why it wins."
Serreth started to say something and stopped.
"Go on."
"My mother has a chair by a window in Ardenby and she can't get out of it on her own any more. I've seen her twice in four years." She heard her own voice do something and did not much care for it. "And I want to be told that's the important thing. I've come up here to be told that."
"I know."
"You're not going to."
"No," said Rethe. "I've been doing this trade a long time and I've never once seen a person made happier by being told what they'd already decided. You'll do it and then you'll live in it, and I'll still be down that corridor either way, and I'd have you know that's not nothing."
On the sixth day she wrote out both futures in two columns. She had learned that from a subject in a quarry and it had annoyed her at the time.
**If she takes it.** The review lapses. Four hundred and eleven matters ahead of it and now none, because it will not be there. The requisition she sent on the ninth is spent, in the sense that nothing hangs on the answer any more. Mataon is a subject with a schedule he cannot use. Hesper Marn is a copyist nobody has asked about. And Ilma Serreth is a district officer at Ardenby, four rooms, near her mother, doing dull work extremely well for twenty years.
**If she refuses.** She stays a supervisor at Sarrow. She will stay one. Denning Ovarr will not put her name in again, not out of spite but because a man does not offer the same thing twice. Her mother is eighty-one. And a review sits in a queue for six to ten years and is answered in the end by somebody who has never heard of any of them.
She looked at the two columns for about an hour. Then she wrote a third line under both, and it was the only new thing on the page.
*In one of these the paper still exists.*
The refusal went on the twelfth. It was four lines and she did not explain herself, because a refusal that explains itself invites an answer about the explanation, and she had learned that from the same subject in the same quarry.
*Thank you. I am not able to withdraw CR-335-Marrow-4 and I would rather not set out why in a letter that goes on a file.*
*I know what you are offering and I know what it costs you to offer it, and I would like it recorded somewhere that I understood both.*
*I am sorry. That is not a form of words.*
*Ilma Serreth, Supervisor, Sarrow.*
Denning Ovarr's answer came back in nine days and was two lines.
*Understood. I will not ask again, and you know I would if I could.*
*Ardenby goes to Merrick, who is adequate.*
She read that on the step at the end of the day, with the counters shut and the barley woman packing up in the square, and the part she could not get past was the word *adequate*.
He had carried that district nineteen years looking for somebody to hand it to who read. He had found one. He was going to give it to a man he had just described in a letter as adequate, and then do another eleven years, and then retire.
She sat with that until it got cold.
Then she did the other thing. She wrote to her mother and didn't send it. Four attempts. In the first she explained the review and it ran to two pages and read like a defence. In the second she left the review out altogether and it read like a lie. The third was six lines and she burned it in the grate for reasons she could not have set out.
The fourth said that the post at Ardenby had gone to a man called Merrick, and that she was well. Both of those were true. She put it in her coat and carried it about for eleven days before she sent it.
Then she went back in and wrote to Ardenmoor, and it took her a long time to find a way to say it that did not ask him for anything.
*The second requisition went out on the ninth, named exactly as you gave it, with nothing added.*
*I was offered a district on the eleventh and I have refused it, and I want to be extremely clear that this is not a debt and you do not owe me a sentence about it. I have watched you carry two of those for a year and I am not adding a third.*
*I refused because in one version of the future the paper still exists and in the other it does not. That was the whole of my reasoning and it took me six days.*
*Do not write back about it. Write back about the requisition.*
[Sarrow — 9-21 Pyrelon, 336 A.Z. — Days 387-399]
[SECOND REQUISITION SENT 9 Pyrelon 336, naming: *the sixth column of the schedule maintained under this office, being the record of the state of the person at the last date the office had information.* Nothing added, no explanation.]
[DISTRICT OFFERED 11 Pyrelon — Ardenby, from Denning Ovarr, district officer at Marrow Hill, nineteen years. Four rooms. Near her mother, aged eighty-one.]
[THE CONDITION IS A GENUINE RULE: a district officer may not hold a review on own motion in his own name. CR-335-Marrow-4 would have to be withdrawn.]
[Nobody threatened her. Nobody did anything wrong. The rule is sound and the reason for it is sound.]
[RETHE — first real conversation in nine years. Nine hundred examinations, nineteen years, and not once has anybody said *do the wrong thing.*]
[REFUSED 12 Pyrelon, in four lines, without explanation.]
[Ardenby goes to Merrick, who is adequate.]
[Ilma Serreth remains Supervisor at Sarrow, and will.]
***
The letter reached Ardenmoor on the eighth of Ravenmark. Mataon read it twice, and then went out, and did not come back for about an hour.
Barni found him up on the road above the village. It was Barni's road and not his, and Barni did not say anything about that.
"She told you not to."
"She told me not to write back about it." Mataon was sitting on the bank with his arms round his knees. "She didn't say anything about not saying it out loud on a hill."
"Then say it."
"Eleven months ago I told her the difference between a woman who was asked and a woman who knows, and I was extremely pleased with the distinction, and I've thought about it about forty times since and been quietly satisfied every time." He looked out at the flats. "And she's turned down four rooms and a dying mother. And she made sure to tell me it wasn't a debt before I could work out what to feel, so she'd thought about that too, for six days, at the same time as all the rest of it."
"So what's the sentence?"
"That I've never once, in two years, been the person in the room who paid the most." Mataon put his head back. "And I've walked about this country for a year thinking I was."
Barni sat down against his leg.
"Write back about the requisition."
"Yes."
"And then in about four years, when it's finished one way or the other, write the other letter."
"She said not to."
"She said not to *now*." Barni put his chin on his paws. "She's a Deunan. She'll have meant exactly what she wrote and not a word past it, and she wrote *do not write back*. She didn't write *ever*."
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