What the Mice Decide

Kappa signed at seventeen minutes past four in the afternoon on day nine.

It was not dramatic. The pen had dried out, so Dobbel ran up three decks for a working one and came back with two in case. The box was small and Kappa’s handwriting was worse than usual. Frau Vesper noted the time. The stamp came down, once, with its soft deep clack, and the lights in the corridor outside went from amber to white and stayed white.

And all over Section Nine, fifty-three bands came off and fell on the deck with a sound like rain on a tin roof, and did not come back, and have not come back since.

Kappa’s came off too, and Kappa kept it, and it is in the Archive now in a box labelled in Frau Vesper’s handwriting: Protective issue, one, as worn by the officer present.

The survey of the old section took five weeks, because it was done with consent, which is slow.

There were four hundred and nine of them.

They were not ghosts and they were not thin because they were spirits; they were thin because four hundred and nine mice had been living for seventy-one years in a copied- over section with no grain store, eating the Kleinen Abweichungen — the small wrong bits that duplication leaves behind, the half-things in the seams of a copied world. It turns out you can live on those. It turns out you cannot live well on those.

The doors were the engineers’ problem and took eight months, and the first gate to open properly was Gate Four, and Brummel was there, and Brummel was very pleased and nobody could make him stop barking, and the official photograph of the most important day in Section Nine’s history is a blurred dog.

The grey mouse with the notch in her ear came through first, because the others made her, because she had been the one putting her paw out for forty years.

Queen Perrin met her at the grain scale. They looked at each other for a long moment.

They had the same notch in the same ear. Nobody in the room had been expecting that, and nobody wrote down what was said, because Frau Vesper put her pen down on purpose, and in thirty-one years of minutes it is the only time she ever did.

Afterwards there was a meeting, because there is always a meeting, and the station asked the Lower Vents and the old section what they wanted now.

Queen Perrin answered for both, and this is in the minutes, and it is on the wall of the Mäusewerk next to rule five.

1. “We want the work. Do not take the work away to be kind. We are good at the pipes and we like being good at something.”

2. “We want to be asked. Not protected — asked. Protection that was not asked for is just a nicer word for a hand on your neck.”

3. “We want to be written down. All four hundred and nine. If being in the book is what makes you real to your machines, then put us in the book, and read it out once a year so nobody forgets how easy it was to lose us.”

4. “Dogs should sleep in the house.”

5. “And no more meetings this month. I am very old. The last one ended with somebody saying that was good, let’s do it again tomorrow and compare, and I would like it on the record that this is how seventy-one years happen.”

The station agreed to all five.

The fourth one was already true, and was written down anyway, because Queen Perrin had learned in the hardest possible way what happens to things that everybody knows and nobody writes down.