Epilogue: The Second File

Three months later Kappa was still on the night shift, because the station had considered a promotion and Kappa had asked to stay, and because the night shift in the Mäusewerk is a good place to be bored.

It was quiet. It smelled of warm dust and grain. The pipes ticked as they cooled.

Tilk came up the ramp from Vent Nine walking perfectly normally, which Kappa was still not used to and hoped never to get used to, and sat down on the counter and had an opinion about the pipe inspections, and was given a grain husk.

Brummel was asleep under the counter. Dobbel was late with the tea.

And Mirell Kawa came down three decks at half past one in the morning with her folding stool and her thermos and a file, and set the stool up, and sat on it, and said nothing for a while, which Kappa now understood was not a trick.

“You’re not here socially,” Kappa said.

“No.”

“Is it bad?”

“I don’t know yet. That’s why I came to the person who writes things down.” She put the file on the counter and did not open it. “When we closed Schutzprogramm K, the Archive did what the Archive does, and went looking for every other temporary order in the system that is still in force and has never been reviewed.”

Kappa put the pen down.

“How many?”

“On this station?” said Mirell Kawa. “Fourteen.”

The kettle came to the boil and went off again.

“Fourteen,” Kappa said.

“Thirteen of them are nothing. A lighting rule in the docks. A ban on a kind of paint. One that says the laundry is closed on a holiday that no longer exists.” She drank some tea.

“The fourteenth is from year nine and it is two lines long and I have read it about forty times.”

“What does it say?”

Mirell opened the file and turned it round so Kappa could read it, and this is the last thing in the book, and it is the first thing in the next one.

TEMPORARY — ALL SECTIONS Until the water is accounted for: no enquiry. — awaiting countersignature Kappa read it twice.

“Which water?”

“That,” said Mirell Kawa, “is exactly the question, and it has been waiting sixty-two years for somebody to be present, and I have a stool and a thermos and a kettle is already on.”

And Dobbel came in at twenty to two with his coat on inside out, carrying three mugs because he had decided to be optimistic, and said, “What did I miss?”

End of Fall Eins.