Queen Perrin of the Lower Vents

They went down to ask the mice, which should have happened on the first morning and had not.

The Lower Vents are not a nest. People say nest and then arrive expecting shredded paper, and what they find is a town. Nine levels of pipe, swept, with grain stores and a water point and a run of little chalk marks along the walls that the mice use for dates. It is warm and it smells of dust and cardboard and, faintly, of soap, because the mice of Nebula Station have opinions about cleanliness that they got from watching people and then overdid.

You do not go down there without being invited. That is in the arrangement too.

They were invited at eight in the evening, and they went in the proper way: Mirell first, then the supervisor, then Kappa with the log, then Dobbel, who had been told four times not to pick anything up.

Queen Perrin was waiting on the grain scale, which is where she always sits, because it is at the height of a person’s chest and she had worked out forty years ago that this changes a conversation.

She is called Queen because of a translation accident in year three of the arrangement and she has never let anybody correct it. What she actually is, is the mouse the other mice send to do the talking, which she will tell you is the worst job in the vents.

She was very old and very grey and she had a notch out of one ear. She was not wearing Krallen.

“Twenty-nine of us now,” she said. “It was nine last night. It is twenty-nine now.”

Kappa wrote that down with a cold feeling.

“I am going to ask you four questions,” said Mirell, “and then you are going to ask me as many as you like, and I will answer the ones I can and say I don’t know for the rest. I will not say probably to make you feel better. Is that acceptable?”

“It is unusual,” said Queen Perrin.

“It is standard. It is just unusual down here, and that is a thing I will be putting in my report.”

Mirell sat down on the deck plate, which put her eye lower than the grain scale. Kappa noticed. Kappa would remember that for years.

“One. Were any of you asked?”

“No.”

“Two. Has anyone refused?”

“You cannot refuse a thing that happens while you sleep,” said Queen Perrin. “Two of ours tried to stay awake for it. They stayed awake four nights. On the fifth they slept, and in the morning they were protected.”

“Three. Where were they sleeping?”

The old mouse was quiet for a moment, and the quiet had something in it.

“Near the Tore,” she said. “The old gates. Everyone who is protected was sleeping within forty of my body-lengths of a gate.”

Mirell did not react. Kappa, watching her, realised that not reacting was most of the job.

“Four,” said Mirell. “And this is the one I actually came for. In forty years of the Nebelmäuse — the grey ones, the silent ones — has any of you ever been hurt by one?”

The pipes ticked. Somewhere below, a water point dripped.

“No,” said Queen Perrin.

“Not bitten. Not chased.”

“No.”

“Then why is everybody frightened of them?”

And Queen Perrin said the sentence that Kappa wrote down in capital letters and underlined, and that the whole case turned on, and that Dobbel later claimed to have thought of first:

“We are not frightened of them. We are frightened for them. They are trying to get somewhere and they cannot, and they have been trying for forty years, and you cannot watch that every night and sleep well.”

Mirell Kawa closed her eyes for a second.

“Ah,” she said. “There it is. Nobody wrote that down in forty years because nobody asked a mouse.”

Then she opened them and said: “Queen Perrin, my fourth question has turned into a fifth, and it is not a nice one. The protection is fitted to the mice who sleep near the gates, and the claws point backwards, which stops you walking toward something.”

“Yes,” said Queen Perrin, who had worked this out some time around the second night and had been waiting, with enormous patience, for a person to catch up.

“It is not protecting you from the Nebelmäuse.”

“No,” said the Queen of the Lower Vents. “It is stopping us going to them.”