The Shoes Come Off

Three things were tried on the eighth day, in front of witnesses, and two of them failed, and the failures are in the book because they are the part people need.

The first was cutting. A technician from Maintenance, who had read nothing, got at Tilk’s left band with a pair of snips while everyone was arguing in the corridor. He meant well. He did it in eleven seconds and he was very pleased.

The lights went amber. The clack came.

In the morning Tilk had three.

“Nobody shout at him,” said Mirell, before anyone could. “He did what every decent person’s hands want to do. Write it in the report in big letters: the kind thing and the right thing were not the same thing, and only the file could tell you which was which.”

The second was cleaning it away. There is a woman on Nebula Station called Iren who works with spirits, which up here is not mysterious: spirits are visible, so working with them is mostly a matter of being polite and knowing the forms. Two spirits came down to Section Nine and looked at the Krallen and were extremely helpful, and by lunchtime every band in the Lower Vents was simply gone, and the mice ran about on their own feet, and Dobbel cried, and for four hours it was the best day of the whole case.

At eight that evening the lights went amber, and the clack came, and the bands came back, on the same forty-nine mice, in the same places.

Iren sat down on a crate and explained it to Kappa without any softening, which Kappa was grateful for all their life.

“We can take away the thing,” she said. “We cannot take away the reason. The register still says those mice are owed protection. So the protection is still owed. We cleaned the floor with the tap running. It will come back tonight and tomorrow and in a hundred years, and every time, somebody will feel clever for four hours.”

Kappa wrote that down. It is the most-quoted line in the whole report:

Do not clean it with magic. It will come back. The magic was never the problem and it is not the answer — the record is.

The third was the one that worked, and it was boring.

They did it in the office with no windows at eleven in the morning on day nine, with the door propped open, and the fire team outside, and Frau Vesper taking the minutes, and the whole of the Lower Vents listening at the vent grille above the desk, which was against four separate regulations and which nobody mentioned.

There were two flimsies on the desk.

On the first, Mirell had written, in her own hand, the thing nobody had written in seventy- one years:

ENTRY IN THE RESIDENT REGISTER — SECTION NINE (OLD) Population: Mus sapiens, resident, Section Nine, pre-duplication. Status: living residents of this station. Count: to be established by survey, with their consent. Note: These residents were omitted from Works Order 11/0440 by error, not by decision. This entry corrects an omission seventy-one years old.

On the second, the review.

SCHUTZPROGRAMM K — REVIEW Reconciliation: complete. Protective issue: no longer required. Withdraw all issue. Programme: closed. Reason for closure: the hazard was not a hazard. It was our neighbours, whom we had failed to write down.

And at the bottom of each, the box.

“I can’t sign it,” said Mirell Kawa.

The supervisor said, “What? You’re the Negotiator, you’re the most senior — ” “I’m not the officer present,” said Mirell. “I asked it four times and I got the same four words. The officer present means the officer on duty in Section Nine when the review is made. That is not me. I am a visitor with a stool.”

And everybody in the room turned and looked at the apprentice on the night shift of the Mäusewerk, with a steel band on one ankle and a scabbed knee, who was holding the log.

“No,” said the supervisor. “Absolutely not. Twelve years old — ” “It doesn’t say twelve or forty,” said Frau Vesper, from the minutes, without looking up. “I have read the instruction eleven times this week. It says present. The child is present. The child has been present since one o'clock on the first morning, which is rather more than can be said for the rest of us.”