The Inner Voice

Kappa did not sign straight away, and the reason is the best thing in the whole case, and it was Queen Perrin’s doing.

From the vent grille above the desk came a cough. Mice cough on purpose when they want a room.

“Before the child signs,” said Queen Perrin, “I have a question, and I would like it in the minutes.”

Frau Vesper’s pen was already moving.

“The paper says withdraw all issue,” said the Queen. “Good. And then what protects the young ones at the gates?”

The room went quiet in a new way.

“They are not a danger,” said Kappa. “We just proved that.”

“They are not. The gates are. A gate is a hole in the world, child, and I have fifty-one young ones in the Lower Vents who are going to hear by tomorrow night that the grey ones are family and that nobody is watching the pipes any more. Some of them are stupid. I was stupid. Do you want a book where we take the chains off the children and then nobody tells them about the hole?”

Mirell Kawa sat back and said, “Ah,” and then, “I nearly got this wrong, and she caught it, and that is going in the report too.”

So they wrote a third flimsy, and it took until four in the afternoon, and it was argued about by a mouse, a twelve-year-old, an archivist, a negotiator and a supervisor, which is the correct number of people to argue about something like this.

What they wrote was this.

IN PLACE OF PROTECTIVE ISSUE — SECTION NINE No fitting shall be attached to any resident. At each gate: a marker that can be seen, smelled and felt, maintained by the station, in all three languages used in Section Nine. Any resident approaching a gate shall be told what a gate is, once, plainly, in words they can understand — and then they may decide. Record of each gate opening to be kept by the Lower Vents and by the Mäusewerk jointly. A warning may be ignored. That is what makes it a warning and not a Kralle.

Tilk, who had been sitting on the desk the whole time with three bands on, said: “So instead of the claw — somebody tells me.”

“Somebody tells you,” said Mirell.

“And then it is my foot.”

“And then it is your foot.”

Tilk thought about it in the tiresomely honest way of mice.

“I will probably still go,” he said.

“Yes,” said Mirell Kawa. “That is the cost. I would rather have a station where you go and you knew, than a station where you stayed because of steel.”

And Queen Perrin said, from the grille: “Put it in the words the young ones use. Not this.”

So Kappa wrote the mouse version at the bottom, and it is the version that got painted at every gate in Section Nine, and the version that children on Nebula Station can recite before they can read:

This is a gate. It is a hole where the world was copied badly. On the other side are our family who got left out. We are working on the door. Until the door works, if you go close, the station will notice and be stupid about it. Nobody will stop you. Now you know, and knowing is yours.

“That is an inner voice,” said Queen Perrin, satisfied. “That is what should have been on our feet all along. Something that tells us, that we carry, and that we can choose to ignore.”

Then she said: “Sign it, child. Some of us are nine months old and we have had steel on since we were two.”