The member returned for Nine-A came up to the counters’ rail with her own hall’s sheet, and did not go home afterwards, and said it in the open so that nobody could tell her later she only said it when it suited her:
There are two thousand and eighty people in my sector. There are four hundred and sixty in the voids. That is one member each.
The returning officer’s reply is the whole of the office’s power in one line: That is one member each. The objection went into the minute, was read out at the return exactly as promised, and the member went and stood with her counters afterwards.
The direction of the accident
The figures are worth reading the way the roster reads them. A reclamation hand’s vote weighs more than four and a half times a Nine-A resident’s — and nobody designed that. It is what happens when pressure boundaries are used as electoral boundaries. The largest constituency is the newest, best-specified, least crowded ring on the station, built two-path from the drawing after Ring Six taught the Cairn what a single path costs. The smallest is reclamation, in the service levels, where the poorest people on the station work. The accident favours the disadvantaged — which is why the people who complain about it are the well-housed, and why it is genuinely hard to argue against fixing it.
The member for the voids was at the same rail, waiting on her own hall with the empty counterfoil bag folded on her knee, and answered the objection without heat: You can have the four hundred and sixty. And the road out of them. It’s one road, and it’s the one you’d all be coming up if the doors went.
The Nine-A member said she had not meant it personally. The voids’ member said she knew. The officer called the next hall, and nothing was settled at that rail by anybody — which is what the minute records, and why the objection is still standing.