The Negotiator

Mirell Kawa arrived at four in the afternoon with no equipment at all.

That was the first surprise. Kappa had expected tools, or guards, or at the very least a case. Station Negotiators were the people you sent when two sides of a thing had stopped being able to hear each other, and in Kappa’s imagination they came with something impressive.

Mirell came with a folding stool and a thermos.

She was somewhere between thirty and sixty. She wore the plain grey of the Negotiation Office, with the single green band on the sleeve, and she moved like someone who had decided a long time ago never to be in a hurry in front of other people. She shook hands with the supervisor. She shook hands with Dobbel, who went red. She shook hands with Kappa and said, “You wrote the log?”

“Yes.”

“The line about protected from what or protecting whom.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t let anyone take that line out of the record,” Mirell said. “People will want to. It’s the only useful sentence in the file.”

Then she set up her stool in the middle of the Mäusewerk floor, three decks down, in the warm dust, and she sat on it, and she did nothing at all for eleven minutes.

Kappa found this unbearable.

“Shouldn’t we — look at the vents? Or get the claws off?”

“We will take them off,” said Mirell, “when we know what takes them off. If you cut that band with a pair of snips you will have a mouse with no band and no idea whether it comes back tomorrow with two.” She unscrewed the thermos. “Also, nobody has asked them yet.”

“Asked who?”

“The mice. You asked Tilk who fitted it. Good. Nobody has asked the Lower Vents what they want done.” She drank some tea. “Everybody on this station has spent today talking about mice. Did you notice? Nine hours of talking about mice and not one minute of talking to mice. That is usually where the whole answer is sitting, being bored, waiting.”

Kappa thought about that for a while.

“Is that your job? Asking?”

“My job is that I am not allowed to win,” said Mirell. “If I win, I’ve done it wrong. I can only finish when both sides can live with it, and the trick — ” she held up one finger — “the trick is that the moment you plan to make someone lose, you stop being able to hear them, and then you miss the thing they are telling you, and the thing they are telling you is almost always the answer.”

“Dobbel says it’s the ghost mice.”

“Dobbel may be right. What does Dobbel say the ghost mice want?”

“He hasn’t got that far.”

“No,” said Mirell, “and neither has anybody in forty years, which is interesting, isn’t it.

Forty years of a thing nobody can measure, and nobody has ever once written down what it might want.”

She put the cap back on the thermos.

“Right. One question before we start, and it is the only clever thing I am going to do today.”

She looked up at the supervisor. “You said Schutzprogramm K is not yours. I believe you.

So fetch me the file, and I will ask the file the question.”

“Which question?” said the supervisor.

“Not who fitted them,” said Mirell Kawa. “Everybody has been asking that since one in the morning and it has got them nowhere, because the answer is going to be a machine or a standing order and then everyone will shrug and go home.”

She stood up and folded her stool.

“When were they fitted?” she said. “Not last night. The first time. When did Schutzprogramm K start?”

And the supervisor went to get the file, and that was the question that cracked it, although it would take four more days and one very frightening afternoon before anybody understood why.