Chapter 1 — First Call

“—one word,” Corrigan said. “Spare. Read the schedule’s own meaning of it into the record, and I’ll sit down and be no further trouble to anybody’s afternoon.”

“It’s in the annexe.” The clerk in Concession grey had the annexe open across her knee and had had it open since he started. “Which the desk holds, and which was published with the instrument in 2319.”

“Then it’s a short read.”

The claims officer looked along the bench at the back of the bay, where the afternoon’s applicants sat with their folders and their queue numbers and had not moved in an hour except to change which knee the folder rode on. “Read it.”

The Ring Six claims desk had a counter, a rail, four chairs and a door that stood open onto the ring’s inboard passage, because the bay had been drawn as a store and drew no air of its own. Everything said in it went out into the corridor and got walked through. A barrow of printed panel went past behind Corrigan’s shoulder. Further along, two men were conducting a delivery dispute in two languages, amiably, the same argument going round twice.

The clerk read.

“Spare capacity: in respect of each ring, the environmental capacity of the ring as designed, less the aggregate allocation entered against the residential schedule of that ring at the date of the instrument.”

“The last part again.”

“At the date of the instrument.”

“Thank you. That’s read very well, by the way — I’ve had senior people mumble that clause at me and hope I wouldn’t ask.” Corrigan turned a quarter, so the officer had the front of him and the bench had the side. “Ring Six was a drawing in 2319. Nobody was entered against its residential schedule, because there wasn’t one — there were frames, a hoist and a crew. So the annexe took the ring as designed, subtracted nothing, and wrote every metre of it down as spare. Three thousand six hundred people are living inside that figure this afternoon. Every one of them is spare.”

“They’re tenants,” the clerk said. “They’re on the housing roll.”

“They are. The housing roll doesn’t reach the annexe, and you’ve just read me why. The only allocation your instrument can see is the allocation of a ring nobody had plated yet. So when the houses enter a draw against Ring Six’s spare capacity, the capacity in question is a ring with people asleep in it, and there is no line anywhere in that annexe where they appear.”

A woman on the bench said something under her breath to the man beside her, and the man made a noise, and the officer looked down the bay until the two of them were finished.

“Advocate.”

“Nearly done.” To the clerk: “Who can amend the annexe?”

The clerk turned two pages before she answered, which he liked her for. “The houses. On their own instruction, entered with this desk.”

“Only the houses.”

“It’s their instrument.”

“It is.” Corrigan let a breath go by. “Then read me the clause that lets anybody ask them to.”

The pages went back the other way, unhurried, and then again with a finger down the margin. A burst of children ran past the open door and away up the ring.

“There isn’t one,” the clerk said.

“There isn’t. Sir — I’d like that in the note. Not as a submission. As a fact of the paper, entered on the day it was read out.”

The officer wrote it, which cost him nothing, and Corrigan let the silence afterwards run, and it did not run long.

Then the clerk did a thing nobody had asked her to do.

“The draw isn’t discretionary in any case,” she said. “The tenant is the glassworks on the Six frontage. A furnace can’t be cold-started — if the draw’s held up, the run’s lost, and the tenant carries a loss they’ve done nothing to earn, and the houses have obligations to their tenants the same as anybody else has.”

“That’s an interesting point,” Corrigan said, and made none of the four replies available to him, and sat down.

The officer granted the draw on the build-lease instrument, in one sentence, without reference to any furnace. First call on berth priority and environmental allocation, running with the term; the term forty years; the instrument of 2319 for Rings Five and Six. Entered, dated, effective on the quarter.

“You’ve had this answer before, Advocate.”

“Four times.”

“Five, now.” Not unkindly. “The renewals list.”

The list went the way lists go. Ring Six’s residential renewals were granted against what stood in the pool once first call had been entered against it, and the pool was worked in the order the applications had been lodged. The officer read the numbers off, and the folders came up off the bench one at a time, and the early ones went through on the nod, and somewhere past the middle of the afternoon the pool ran out.

After that the officer said the same four words to each remaining queue number. No allocation this quarter. Then: You may re-lodge.

Corrigan stood for the first refusal and for every one after it, and argued hardship on three of them, and got nothing, because hardship had nowhere on the form to go.

“Lodging order,” he said. “That’s the whole of the ground. These households are refused because somebody else reached the counter before them.”

“On the ground that there’s no allocation,” the officer said. “Which there isn’t. Advocate, I’ve got the trade side tomorrow and a list like this one waiting on me.”

“Then one thing and I’ll go. Read the refusals into the record. Names, queue numbers, the order they were lodged in, and the ground under each.”

The clerk in Concession grey looked up at that, briefly, the way people look up at a request whose price they cannot see.

“It’s already the ground,” the officer said.

“Then it costs you the time it takes to say it out loud, and I’ll take a clerk’s copy at my own expense, and you’ll not see me again this quarter.” Corrigan gave him the whole of the grin. “That last part’s the offer, sir. Consider it carefully.”

The officer read the refusals into the record. It took no time at all, and Corrigan wrote every one of them down on the back of the notice he had come in with, in a hand he had developed for exactly this and could read at a run.

The clerk in Concession grey packed the annexe into a soft case and stopped at the rail on her way out.

“The sublet market on Six is very active,” she said. “That’s not a small thing. My cousin found a share off the market stair inside a tenday and she’s happier where she is now. Nobody refused this afternoon is going to be sleeping in a corridor.”

“No. Nobody is.”

“So it isn’t as hard as it sounds when it’s said out the way you say it.”

“You read that annexe better than anyone they’ve sent yet. Tell them I said so — they’ll hate it and it’ll still be true.” Corrigan held the door for her, and she went out into the passage with the case under her arm, and the barrow traffic took her.

---

Milek was waiting past the bay door with her slip folded once and her shift bag already on her shoulder.

They had been children on the same corridor in the old rings, four doors apart, and she had never once been impressed by him talking his way out of anything.

“Well,” she said.

“I’ll take it up.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m going anyway, so you’re getting it whether you want it or not.” Corrigan put his hand out for the slip. “Give.”

Milek gave him the slip. “There’s a share going on Six, off the void stair. Two rooms, three of us, and it’s ten minutes to my shift instead of forty. I’d have been an idiot not to look at it.”

“Six.”

“Six is fine. I work under it.” She shifted the bag. “You’ve got your face on. Don’t come down to the voids and be sorry at me, I haven’t the time to be polite about it.”

“I wasn’t going to be sorry at you.”

“You were going to be warm at me. It’s worse.” Milek was already moving. “Thursday, if you’re not busy being the ring’s conscience. Bring something that isn’t printed.”

Corrigan put the slip in his inside pocket with the notice and the names, and went down the ring.

The inboard passage on Six ran straight from the claims bay to the section stair, and at the change of the day watch a man got down it at the crowd’s speed or not at all. Corrigan took it at the crowd’s speed. A wash queue at the junction had turned into a discussion about somebody’s wedding and had acquired a stool. A woman with two full cans went by at the shoulder of a man carrying nothing, and let him carry nothing, and told him about it the whole way to the stair.

Twenty-four thousand people held quarters on the Cairn, and another few thousand were passing through in any given week, depending on how the routes had run. Thirteen thousand of them slept in rings that had been lines on a drawing back when Corrigan was still taking appeals off a folding table. He came down the section stair into the relay heart at the hour when the day watch changed over and all that arithmetic tried to buy its supper at once.

The heart’s floor had been floor. Four years ago there had been a drift-board, a noodle counter and a great deal of deck. Now the deck was let in pitches to the wall on three sides and in barrows down the fourth, and the pitches ran to their own order: how long you had stood there, written nowhere. The oldest frontages had the south stair and the light. A man who had come in last year had the corner by the recycling gate and would keep it until somebody died or got rich.

Across the middle of it ran the freight lane, painted on the deck in yellow, wide enough for the hoist and repainted by the traders out of their own pockets, because the heart had been a junction before anybody sold anything on it. As Corrigan crossed, a newcomer with a folding counter of pressed fruit had set up with one leg of it inside the yellow. Two women off the pitch behind him lifted the near end, walked it clear, set it down, and went back to their trade without breaking off the conversation they were having about a third woman’s brother.

The fruit-seller looked at his counter in its new position, and at the line, and moved himself round to the clear side, and went on selling.

Corrigan bought nothing and stopped four times crossing. The Vekhol drift was chalked up on the board — the outboard market running its own hours again, later against tomorrow than it had been against today — and a knot of hauliers were doing the sum out loud and disagreeing about it. A grill under the south stair had a queue folded back on itself twice and a boy working the fold, taking orders backwards down the line so the front of it never stopped.

On the east side, where the frontages were deepest, Ollery had the two doors either side of his chandlery counters and had knocked through, and what came out of the middle door was the sound of a room full of people spending. He stood outside it with his sleeves down, watching a man chalk a measurement on the deck for a serving hatch.

“Advocate.”

“Ollery. You’ve eaten your own neighbours.”

“The counters pay the rent and the drink pays for the counters, and four years ago I’d have told you neither of them would,” Ollery said, and went back in.

Past the seal cabinet the crowd folded.

It folded fast, for something worth looking at. Four men were bringing a bath up the ring passage at head height — a real bath, Earth iron, white inside and green outside with the enamel gone at one lip, carried upside down on four shoulders with a maker’s name cast into the underside in letters a hand long. The freight on it had cost more than the bath had ever cost anybody, and every soul in the passage knew that without being told, and not one of them thought less of the man who had paid it.

“Whose?” somebody shouted.

“Ring Five,” said the man at the back left, which was answer enough and got a roar out of everyone near enough to hear it.

A woman by the recycling gate wanted to know where the water was supposed to come from. The man at the back left said the gentleman had that in hand. Somebody else asked whether the gentleman had a spare afternoon and a spare wife. The bath went on up the passage at head height and turned at the section stair with a great deal of instruction from people who were not carrying it, and the crowd closed behind it and got back to buying things.

In the noodle queue two people were making an appalling job of getting somewhere.

“—no, but the head’s the easy part,” the young man was saying. He had a metering rig over one shoulder and had angled himself so that it showed. “It’s the run behind the head. You’d be amazed what’s behind the head.”

“I wouldn’t,” the woman said. “I fit them.”

“You fit heads.”

“I fit the run behind the head.”

“Right. Right, so you’d know, then, about the—”

“I’d know.”

“—about the seating.” He had gone red and was going on anyway. “Because there’s a way of doing the seating that people don’t.”

“There is,” she agreed, and let him stand in it.

The man ahead of them in the queue had turned round to watch and was making no attempt to hide it.

“Two,” the woman said to the counter, and to the young man, in exactly the same voice, “You’re paying.”

Corrigan came out of the far side of the heart with his coat over his arm and the whole floor’s noise at his back, and the paper in his inside pocket had not changed since the bay door. The clerk had been right. The annexe said what she had read out and meant what it said, and it had said it on a day when Ring Six was a hoist and a crew, and it would go on saying it for forty years, and he had run at it five times now like a man shouldering a door that opened the other way.

At the foot of the administration stair he put the coat on properly, shot his cuffs, and went up.

---

Two levels above the heart the noise fell off to nothing, which was what the old core paid for and got. The Administrator’s outer office had a bench, a counter, a rack of forms and a clerk who had plainly been doing this since before there were rings to do it about.

“Advocate Corrigan. Ring Six claims, this afternoon.”

“You’re quick.”

“The desk copies its dailies up.” The clerk had the sheet already. “Refusals for want of allocation, the back of the list. Was there something the office can do for you?”

“There is. The quarter’s about to post renewal figures on Six against a pool that had a first-call draw taken out of it this afternoon, and the households at the bottom of today’s list are refused on nothing except the order they lodged. If the Administrator holds those over to the new quarter — just held over, not granted — the desk can hear them against a pool that’s been recomputed, and nobody loses a lease to a queue number.”

“The office doesn’t sit over the claims desk.”

“It doesn’t. It talks to it.”

“It does.” The clerk wrote nothing down. “Representations to the Administrator go on this form. I’ll docket it today and you’ll have a return date.”

“What return date?”

“New quarter.”

“That’s the thing I’m trying to get in front of.”

“It’s the return date there is,” the clerk said, and put the form on the counter, turned so he could read it, with a stylus beside it.

Corrigan filled it in. It had a box for the instrument, a box for the ring, a box for the relief sought and ruled lines for the grounds, and he wrote the grounds small so that all of it fitted, because a continuation sheet went into a different pile and he had learned that the year the rings opened.

While he wrote, a woman came in off the gallery with a crate of vat greens on her hip, said something to the clerk that had Thursday in it, and went straight through the inner door without a docket, a number or a form. The clerk did not look up. A while after that a Master off one of the trade-side hulls put a card on the counter, and the clerk read it and said, “Sixth bell, and she’ll want the tonnage with her,” and the Master thanked her and left with his afternoon solved.

Corrigan finished the grounds and turned the form round.

“Are you appearing for any of them in particular?” the clerk said, reading down it. “If there’s a household with a certifiable hardship, that goes on the front, and the front moves. Medical, dependent, a rig on the quarter.”

The slip with Milek’s queue number on it sat in his inside pocket against his chest, folded once.

“For the list,” Corrigan said.

The clerk stamped it, tore the docket, and put the counterfoil in his hand. “New quarter.”

“Can I put you a question that isn’t on the form?”

“You can put it.”

“How does a person get through that door with a crate of greens?”

The clerk looked at him then, without any unkindness at all.

“By carrying them up here every Thursday for four years,” she said. “Was there anything else, Advocate?”

Out on the landing the gallery ran the length of the office level, and below it the heart was still going — the pitches lit, the grill queue folded on itself, the drift-board’s chalk gone smeary under somebody’s sleeve.

Corrigan took the notice out of his inside pocket and read the names down the back of it, and the queue numbers, and the order they had been lodged in.

Under them, with the stylus he had not given back, he started a second column: the trade-side desk, which sat on Thursdays; the metering rounds falling due on Seven; the berth board, and the hands who read it every morning without getting on it. He left the column long. There was going to be more.

Corrigan buttoned the coat and took the gallery stair down the fast way, toward the trade side, writing as he went.