Chapter 566 - 565: The Assessor

Chapter 566: Chapter 565: The Assessor

Location:Seven Peaks — Thorne’s Office; The Medicine Hall; The Hall

Date/Time:TC1857.07.04

Thorne’s office smelled of lamp oil and paper and the dryness that gets into a room with a fire in it every day for a year, and Raven had been in it at that hour perhaps a hundred times and had never once had all four of them in it at the same time.

Sera Vahn shut the door herself and stood with her back to it, which was not manners.

"I’m going to give you a thing I can’t prove," Sera Vahn told them. "That’s the first sentence, and I want it said before anything else, because in about ten minutes somebody in this room is going to want to act on what I say and I am not able to give you a page."

"Go on," Raven allowed.

"I don’t know her name. I have never known her name. Nobody I served with ever knew her name."

Coop had not sat down. He was standing at the end of the table with his hands folded and his eyes doing the thing they did when he was pulling something up out of hardware that was ten years old and Federation and nobody’s to service, and he said, without being asked, "V over Assessment."

Sera Vahn nodded once.

"Take it from the beginning," Raven asked.

***

It took Sera Vahn about a quarter of an hour, and she did it in order.

The Federation does not sign requisitions with names. It signs them with an office and a rank line: the office on the left of the stroke, the authority on the right. A commander at her level countersigned perhaps nine of them a week for three years and never once wrote her own name on one either.

V/Assessment was not a supply office. It was the office that put a figure against a thing before the Federation decided whether to do it.

"Every program," Sera Vahn answered. "Everything. Road-building, a bridge, a battalion, a — anything. You do not get to start a thing in the Federation until V over Assessment has priced it, and what they price is not money. Money’s a different office. V over Assessment prices what it costs in people, against what it returns. A number on the left and a number on the right and a recommendation at the bottom, and the recommendation is one word."

"Which word?"

"Proceed or revise. Never stop. There is no stop. If the left number is too big, you revise until it isn’t."

Thorne had his pen up and was not using it.

"You’re telling me," Thorne put in, "that she is the person who decides how many people a thing is allowed to cost."

"I’m telling you that she is an office that does that, and that I have seen her signature block on requisitions for every year I served, and that I recognized her at forty paces yesterday morning and I have never met her in my life." Sera Vahn looked at Raven for the first time since she had shut the door. "I know her because in the second year, when I was still theirs, I went to a building in the capital to argue about a number, and I sat in a corridor for six hours and never got in, and she came out of that door once and went back in, and I have had her face since."

"What were you arguing about?" Raven asked. "In the corridor."

Sera Vahn did not answer for long enough that Thorne stopped writing.

"A rotation." She said it evenly. "Nine people. Somebody at a desk had costed a river crossing and the left-hand number was nine and I had a sheet that said it could be six if we went two days later, and I sat in that corridor from the second hour to the eighth with the sheet on my knees, and nobody came out."

"And the crossing?"

"Went on the day it was costed." She still had her hands behind her back. "Seven, in the end. So the sheet was wrong in the direction that makes you feel worse rather than better, and I have never been able to decide what that proves, and I have thought about it on and off ever since."

***

Coop said the rest of it, because Sera Vahn stopped and did not go on, and it was clear she was not going to.

"The program was assessed," Coop reported.

The room went very quiet.

"Not by her personally. I don’t know that, and I’m not going to say it, and neither should anybody in this room." He had not moved. "But something out of that office put a figure against it, because nothing happens in the Federation until something does. Four thousand two hundred and eighty-eight is a number that sits on the left-hand side of a page, and somewhere there is a right-hand side, and somebody wrote proceed at the bottom of it."

"And they’ve sent that office here."

"They’ve sent that office here with no name on the paper. Which means they intend to price something. That’s all it means, and I’d not go past it."

"Price what?"

"Us," Sera Vahn answered. "Three hundred and seventy-five of us. She has come here to work out the left-hand number and the right-hand number on getting the Anvil Corps back, and by the third day she will have it, and on the fourth she will say it out loud in a room in front of three governments, because that is what that office does. It does not negotiate. It reports."

***

Raven stood at the window for a while.

"Then I’ll say what I’m going to do and you can all tell me why it’s wrong," Raven told them. "She sits."

Nobody argued immediately, which told her they had all got there first and had all been hoping she would not.

"She’s a delegate of an invited government. I invited them. I did not put conditions on who they sent and I am not going to invent one this morning, because the first thing I do at this table cannot be to tell the Federation which of their people are acceptable to me." She turned around. "And because if I send her away, the assessment still gets written. It just gets written by somebody who has never been in the same room as the people in it."

"That’s the argument for," Thorne observed. "Say the argument against."

"The argument against is that I am about to put somebody whose office prices people in a building with four hundred of them, and one of the four hundred is nine years old and was in that program." Raven did not soften it. "And he has Ostrek’s boards, and he reads everything that comes into this mountain because I gave him the job, and he will know she is here by the middle of the day whatever anybody does, because he is the person who is told things now."

"Then he should be told properly," Sera Vahn put in.

"Yes."

"By you."

"Yes." Raven picked up her coat. "This morning. Before the first session and not after it, and not in a corridor."

***

Elian had the boards on the bed, and a rule laid across them, and was doing something with a straight edge that involved his tongue between his teeth.

He looked up, and looked at her face, and put the rule down.

"It’s bad."

"It’s not bad. It’s a thing you need before you hear it from somebody else, and I’d rather you heard it sitting down and I’d rather you heard all of it in one go rather than in pieces over a day, because pieces over a day is how a thing gets to be worse than it is."

"All right."

She sat on the end of the bed and told him.

She told him who had come with the Federation and what the office was and what it did and how Sera Vahn knew the face, and she told him the part Coop had said and the part Coop had refused to say, and she told him which of the two of those was a finding and which was not, in those words, because he would want that and because he was entitled to it.

He listened the whole way through without moving.

"Did she do it to me?" He said it at the end, flatly. "Personally. Was she in the room?"

"I don’t know. Nobody in this settlement knows. Coop won’t say it, and he’s right not to." Raven did not look away from him. "And I’ll tell you the harder half, which is that I am not going to find out this week, because the way to find out is to ask her, and asking her in this building on these six days would be me using a nine-year-old to open a negotiation, and I will not do that even if it is the only way and even if you tell me you want me to."

Elian went through it twice. She could see him do it.

"That’s the right answer," Elian allowed, "and I hate it."

"Both of those are allowed."

***

He was quiet for long enough that she began to work out what she would do if he asked to see her.

He did not ask to see her.

"Is she going to sit in the Hall?"

"She is."

"In front of the sheet with the Northern words on it."

"She’ll walk past it to get to her chair. They all will."

"Good." He picked the rule back up and put it down again. "Can I ask for a thing? It’s not a big thing, and you can say no, and I’d like you to say no if it’s wrong rather than say yes because it’s me."

"Ask."

"I want the number in the record." He had his hand on the top board. "Four thousand two hundred and eighty-eight. In the first column, with the date it was published and who published it, because it was published, it’s in the Federation’s own findings from the year before last, and Coop’s got the sheet. Not in the fourth column. In the first one. As a thing that happened."

"Why?"

"Because she’s an office, and offices are all right with the first column." Elian’s voice had not changed at all, which was somehow worse. "If I write it in the fourth column, it’s a feeling, and she can leave it there. If it’s in the first column with a date on it then it’s the same kind of thing as her own page, and she has to do something with it."

"She may do nothing with it."

"Then it’s still in the record, and I’ll have put it there properly." He looked up. "And when somebody in ten years wants to know what was in the room that week, it’ll be on the same page as the animals and the ground and Emrys Dunmore, and it won’t be a story, because I’ll have written it in the column where things you can prove go."

***

He went back to the rule and the straight edge, and Raven stood up and got as far as the door.

"One more," Elian said, without looking up. "Not about her."

"Go on."

"When you write the first column about this week, put in that I asked, and you said no." He had the rule squared on the board. "Because in ten years somebody’s going to read that I was in the building and they’ll assume nobody thought of it. I’d rather it said somebody thought of it and decided against it and here’s who and here’s why."

Raven looked back at him from the door.

"That’s better record-keeping than I’ve managed in five months," she said.

"I’ve had a lot of time."

***

Raven walked down to the Hall the long way, by the east terrace, because she needed the eleven minutes.

The Hall had been laid out overnight. Four sides. The Northern sheet on the table in front of the chair nobody would sit in, Old Northern above and the common tongue underneath in letters half the size, weighted flat with two stones from Emrys Dunmore’s wall, which Thorne had arranged and had not mentioned to her and which she noticed on the way past and did not comment on.

Speaker Kael-Ren was already in, an hour early, standing behind his own chair and reading the sheet without touching it.

The Confederacy peg-setter Speaker Kael-Ren had warned Thorne about came in behind him, stopped in the doorway, looked around the Hall at the height of the ceiling and the size of the table and the number of chairs, and said something short to the man beside him in a voice that carried perfectly well.

Thorne wrote it down. Raven watched him write it down, and watched him not soften it, and thought that of all the arrangements made in the last month that one was probably the most useful.

The Federation came in as a four and separated as a four, which was practiced.

The third of them stopped at the table in front of the empty chair, the way everybody had, and read it, which everybody had done. And then she did the thing nobody else had done, which was to take a small book out of her coat and write in it, standing there, for about fifteen seconds, and put it away.

Raven watched her do it and felt something go through her that she recognized and did not welcome, which was not anger.

It was the specific, unpleasant, professional interest of one record-keeper looking at another.

Kael Xuán came in last, on the hour, and stopped at the sheet as well, and read it twice, and then took the chair opposite the empty one rather than the one his own secretariat had been allotted, which moved him six feet and which nobody in the Hall failed to notice.

"Before we begin," Kael Xuán told the room, "I would like it minuted that I have moved. And why."

Thorne’s pen was already going.

"I have spent three years drafting a document for four signatories, and the only party in this war who answered it without lawyers is the one who cannot sign it." Kael Xuán rested one hand on the back of the chair he had not yet taken. "I will sit where I can see the chair. Not as a gesture. As a working arrangement, because I intend to keep looking at it, and I have found that I do not look at things unless they are in front of me."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then the third of the Federation four took her own book back out, and wrote in it again, and Raven — who had spent five months teaching a settlement that the writing down is the whole of the discipline — found that she could not tell from where she sat whether that was the best thing that had happened all morning or the worst.