By the eve of issue day the ration blocks stood finished along the trade-side wall — four hundred metres of them — and the chalked lanes ran between the blocks and away out of sight toward the heart, ready for ten thousand people to walk through them in the morning. From the heart to the ring corridors, shoulder to shoulder: the whole station in one queue, on one day, past one set of counters.
The posting itself is short. The lanes, the blocks, the order of the sectors, the hours of the counters. On issue day the Warden stood at the public route board with a flask of her own tea — the Warden did not come into the heart; her watch room, her quarters and the bonded hold made a triangle she walked and did not leave, and on issue day the whole station walked past the door of one of them. By evening the queue thinned, the grilles came down, and a corporal’s whistle moved the last of the barrows.
What the notice does not carry
The issue figures were public. The sittings were not. In the Sethlan sector the culture streams were failing, and the sector had gone from one sitting to two since about the sixth week — a displaced elder on a berth-registry call asked after exactly that, before he asked anything else: The sittings. At home. Is it still one sitting.
By the second week of the crisis the sector was on three. The last sitting ran after the sector’s lights went down, because the youngest ate first now and the oldest ate last, and nobody wanted to be watched doing it. The Administrator had it from the feedstock engineer, who had it from a technician who was not supposed to tell her. It went into no docket, no posting, and no board. The notice on the concourse wall said where to stand, and the lanes were walked, and that was the whole of what went on paper.