Are You the Named?

I. The Cap

Arbitrator Dovin Sisk lay on the stair between the second and the third level, and the first thing Judge Almut Reuther noticed about him was that he had his cap on.

One wears the cap on duty. Sisk had no duty; the watch board listed him as relieved for the night, and a relieved Arbitrator walks bare-headed through his own house like anyone else.

She wrote it down before she did anything else. Headgear worn, off duty. She wrote it in the small book she had carried at her belt for nineteen years, and only then did she crouch down.

He had been dead about five hours. That could be read from the coldness of the hand, and the coldness of a hand is on Vhassel a better timekeeper than elsewhere, because in Precinct Fortress Seven it has been a constant eleven degrees for forty years and no one knows any more how to change it.

The wound sat at the back of the head, on the left, above the ear. A single one. It was not large.

Reuther looked up the stair and down the stair, and then she looked once more at the wound, and then she stood up and went back two steps and looked at where he lay.

A man who falls on a stair and strikes his head lies at the foot of the stair or on it, with his feet uppermost.

Sisk lay crosswise, his head to the rail, his feet to the wall, like someone who has been laid down because one did not want to leave him lying as he had fallen.

"Watchmaster."

Ottilie Kastner came down the stair. She had not drawn her weapon, and Reuther gave her credit for it.

"Judge."

"Who found him?"

"I did."

"When?"

"Eleven minutes ago. I came from the ration store." Kastner looked down at Sisk and then away, and then, because she was twenty-nine and because Reuther had not ordered it, back again. "He was already lying like that."

"Did you touch him?"

"No."

"Did anyone touch him?"

"I do not know, Judge."

Reuther nodded and went up the three steps and stopped on the landing from which one sees into the main corridor of the third level, and in that moment, about the fifth hour of the sixteenth day of the month, she thought for the first time the thought that did not leave her for an hour in the following sixteen days.

Precinct Fortress Seven had been sealed for fourteen days.

That was nothing unusual. Dorrhast had had two food riots in the spring, and when the hive is unquiet the precinct fortress closes — not out of fear, but because a court that stands open seems negotiable. Fourteen days of seal were a middling matter. They had had seals of ninety days.

A seal means: no one comes in. No one goes out. The outer bulkheads are barred, the barring is checked twice daily and signed off in the watch book, and the watch book was without a gap; Reuther had signed it off herself that morning, as every morning for nineteen years.

In Precinct Fortress Seven there were seven people.

One of them lay on the stair between the second and the third level, with the cap on his head and a wound behind the left ear.

The other six had given it to him.

II. Book Four, Title Nine, Paragraph Six

Almut Reuther did not fetch the codex because she did not know it by heart. She fetched it because one fetches it.

The Lex Imperialis lies in every precinct fortress of the Imperium in the same edition, in the same case, in the same place beside the judge's chair, and one opens it even when one has had the paragraph in one's head for nineteen years, because a judge who judges from memory judges from his own.

Book four, title nine, paragraph six.

If within a sealed precinct a servant of the Arbites comes to his death and the cause cannot within sixteen days be connected with a person, then all present within the seal are jointly liable. The liability is a liability of life.

Beneath it, set smaller, the editorial note that has been printed with it unchanged for two thousand years:

The period is not intended to make the truth possible. It is intended to end the absence of the truth.

Reuther read both twice.

She had learned the paragraph in her training and in nineteen years had never needed it, the way one learns paragraphs that exist so that they need not be used. She had always taken it for a paragraph against mutiny. If a garrison beats its judge to death and no one has seen anything, then Four-Nine-Six sees to it that silence is dearer than testimony.

As a paragraph against mutiny it is excellent.

The paragraph does not distinguish between a garrison that is silent and one that does not know.

She went into the courtroom, where the other five already stood, and Kastner came after, and then they were six, and the seventh place in the room was Dovin Sisk's and remained so.

"You all know it," said Reuther. She did not say it as a question.

They knew it. In a house with six people and one dead man it takes less than an hour.

"Then I shall tell you the rest now, and I shall say it exactly once, because in the next sixteen days I have no time to repeat it." She laid the codex on the table, open, with the writing towards them. "Book four, title nine, paragraph six. Sixteen days. If by then I have not connected the cause with a person, we are jointly liable. All six. Myself as well."

Proctor Nelke Brehl cleared his throat. Brehl cleared his throat before every sentence, for as long as she had known him, even when he was only saying a number.

"Yourself as well, Judge?"

"I was present within the seal."

"And who executes it?"

That was the right question, and it came from the man Reuther had held to be the slowest in the house.

"The Lex does not say," she said. "It says that liability is incurred. It does not say who collects. That at this point is no oversight." She shut the codex. "It means: on the seventeenth day I stand before the choice of executing the judgement or not executing it, and both are a breach, and the second is the one I do not survive."

No one said anything.

"You will all answer me," said Almut Reuther. "You will answer me quickly, and you will also answer me what you do not like telling me, for I have sixteen days and not one of them for decency."

III. Five Names and an Empty Column

Six people, and Almut Reuther had known them all longer than she had known anyone else.

Proctor Nelke Brehl, sixty-one, thirty-three years in Seven, responsible for the store, the rations, the keys and everything nobody else wanted. Cleared his throat before every sentence. Kept the watch book in a hand one could read from four metres away, because once, a very long time ago, he had been reprimanded for a hand one could not read.

Arbitrator Bosse Tanner, forty-four, the heaviest in the house, slow in speaking and not in thinking. Never ate at the table. He took his portion and went with it into the corridor and ate standing, and in seventeen years he had never explained it, and no one had asked.

Arbitrator Wibke Terlau, thirty-eight, Reuther's deputy and the only one in the house who knew the Lex better than Reuther herself. Said "understood" instead of "yes, Judge" to every order she held to be wrong. She had never admitted it and Reuther had never raised it, and both had known it for eleven years.

Arbitrator Marun Osk, thirty-three, marksman, armourer, a man who had nothing personal in his locker but a comb. He oiled the shotguns every third day, whether they had been used or not, and laid them back afterwards in the same order, stocks to the left.

Watchmaster Ottilie Kastner, twenty-nine, four years here, the youngest. Counted the doors she passed as she walked — not aloud, but one saw it in the hand at her thigh, one finger per door.

And the sixth had been Sisk.

About herself Almut Reuther wrote nothing, and that was the first mistake she made in this matter, and she made it good three days later.

Fifty-two years. Nineteen of them judge in Seven, before that seven years an Arbitrator in Dorrhast-East, before that the training on a world whose name she gave when asked and which she remembered only as a row of buildings.

She was the senior of the district of Vhassel. That sounded like more than it was: the district of Vhassel consisted of one world with four hives and one working precinct fortress, and the other three had stood empty since the garrisons were concentrated sixty years ago.

In nineteen years she had passed two hundred and nine judgements. She knew the number, because she kept the judgement book.

Of those two hundred and nine, forty-one had been death sentences, and she had executed every one of them herself, because in Seven there was no one else for it, and in nineteen years she had not slept badly for one night because of it, which she spoke of to no one, because she did not know whether that was information about the judgements or about herself.

Reuther wrote the five names one beneath another in the small book at her belt and beside them a column she left empty, and in the night of the first day she sat two hours before it and wrote nothing in it.

She knew none of them as someone who beats Dovin Sisk to death.

That was the point at which she forced herself to think through to the end a thought she had seen three hundred times in others in nineteen years of service and had never had about herself: that she hears it from every accused she has ever sentenced, out of the mouths of neighbours, superiors, mothers.

I do not know him as someone who does such a thing.

She had always held it to be an excuse. She established that night that it is none. It is an accurate statement about the speaker.

IV. The Tin Bowl

About Dovin Sisk she knew more after the second day than in the twelve years before.

Fifty-two. Twelve years in Seven, before that Precinct Fortress Two in the underhive, transferred after an incident about which three lines stood in his file and the truth presumably did not.

He had been the man for the fourth level. That is a responsibility that does not exist in large precinct fortresses and does in Seven, because Seven is too large for its garrison: a fortress for forty-one Arbitrators, built at a time when Dorrhast had ninety million, now inhabited by seven.

The upper three levels were used. The fourth, fifth and sixth stood empty, and the fourth was Sisk's.

He went down once a month, checked the barring, counted the holdings in the evidence store, came up again and signed off in the watch book. It was the dullest responsibility in the house, and he had had it for twelve years without ever complaining.

Terlau said one sentence about it that Reuther could not shake off for three days.

"He went down more often than once a month."

"How do you know that?"

"The lamps." Terlau stood with her back to the window, which was not one but a closed embrasure. "We keep the cell stock by lamp coal, because the Munitorum supplies us by coal and not by need. The fourth level consumed four times as much last year."

"Did you ask him?"

"No."

"Why not?"

Wibke Terlau actually considered, which Reuther valued in her and which that week disquieted her for the first time.

"Because a man who in an empty house consumes more lamp coal than is provided for is either doing something that is none of his business or something that is too much his business," she said. "And because in both cases I should have had to involve the Judge, and because I have known Sisk twelve years."

"Knew."

"Understood."

That evening Reuther went into Sisk's chamber.

It was as empty as an Arbitrator's chamber may be after twelve years. A locker, a bunk, a shelf with four volumes of service regulations and a fifth that was none: a collection of edifying reflections such as the Ecclesiarchy distributes by the ten thousand, thumbed, with a bookmark of a piece of card.

On the floor beside the bunk, half under the bed frame, stood a tin bowl.

Reuther drew it out. It was clean. It smelled faintly of gruel.

It was not from the ration store of the precinct fortress. The bowls in Seven were plasteel and all bore the double eagle on the rim. This one was tin, unstamped, with a dent, and someone had carefully washed it out and set it under a bed.

She wrote it down. Tin bowl, foreign, clean, under the bunk.

It was the second day, and it was the first sentence in her book that meant something, and she needed a further nine days to grasp what.

V. The First Round

The first round of interrogations lasted from the third to the fifth day and yielded nothing, and that was worse than if it had yielded something.

Reuther conducted them singly, in the courtroom, standing, because seated she became too friendly.

Brehl cleared his throat and said that he had worked in the store from the twenty-second to the fourth hour, alone, on the inventory list, and that no one could confirm it. He said it without any embarrassment. A man who works alone in a store for thirty-three years is not surprised that he was alone.

Tanner said that he had slept. From the twentieth to the sixth. He always slept so.

Terlau said that she had read until the second hour and slept after that. Asked what she had read, she said "the Lex", and Reuther asked for the book, and Terlau named book four, and Reuther asked for the title, and Terlau said: "Nine."

There arose a pause in which two women looked at one another who had worked together for eleven years.

"You read title nine. On the night on which Sisk died."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I read title nine every time we are sealed," said Wibke Terlau. "For eleven years. It is the title that governs what applies in a sealed house, and I hold it negligent to read it only when one needs it." She held Reuther's gaze. "You can check that. Ask Brehl how often in the last eleven years I have taken the codex out of the case during a sealing. He keeps a record of it, because he keeps a record of everything."

Reuther asked Brehl. Brehl cleared his throat and said: "Nineteen times, Judge. In twenty sealings."

Osk said that he had oiled the shotguns, which was true, because it had been the third day and because the stocks lay to the left.

Kastner said that she had had the watch and had gone to the ration store about the third hour and back about the fourth, and that in between she had passed the lower end of the stair and nothing had been lying there.

Reuther wrote everything down.

What changed in those three days was not what was said but the house.

A precinct fortress with seven inhabitants is always empty. Reuther had never felt that as a burden; one gets used to distances. From the courtroom to the ration store is two hundred paces, and one walks them alone, and at some point one likes walking them alone.

From the third day on no one walked alone any more.

It was not discussed. It arose. Tanner no longer ate in the corridor but at the end of the corridor, from where one sees the table. Kastner took routes that were longer. Osk oiled the shotguns on the second day instead of the third, and again on the fourth, and Reuther saw it and said nothing, because an armourer who oils weapons breaks no regulation.

On the fifth day she established that she herself was leaving the door of her chamber open.

She shut it and sat down and stood up after eleven minutes and opened it again, and wrote both in the small book, because she wrote it down with the others and because a judge who leaves herself out is conducting her own interrogation.

On the evening of the fifth day she sat before her small book and established that she had six statements of which none was refutable and none confirmable, that five people in an empty house had been alone on the same night because in a house for forty-one people with seven inhabitants everyone is always alone, and that the Lex left her eleven days for it.

VI. Fourteen Bolts

On the sixth day she checked the seal.

She did it herself, alone, and it took her nine hours, because Precinct Fortress Seven has fourteen outer bulkheads and because she took each one separately.

It was the work she liked best, and she did it with a thoroughness she did not entirely believe of herself. A judge who checks bolts for nine hours checks bolts. A judge who checks bolts for nine hours while five people sit in her house whom she has to suspect is looking for something else.

She was looking for an eighth.

It would have been the simplest solution. An intruder, a break-in, a bolt someone worked on from outside — and Four-Nine-Six would be settled, for the cause could be connected with a person, even if that person is never found. The Lex does not require the culprit to be caught. It requires the cause to be connected with a person.

The bolts were intact.

All fourteen. The seal waxes bore the impression Brehl had set on the first day of the sealing, unbroken, with the crack in the lower third that Brehl's signet ring has had for eight years and that he does not have replaced, because a crack in a seal makes forgery harder.

Between the ninth and the tenth bulkhead, in the connecting corridor of the second level, she came past the plaque.

It has hung there since the building. It is a brass plaque with the establishment strengths of Precinct Fortress Seven, donated by a governor whose name has been struck out, because the names of governors are occasionally struck out.

Judges: 1. Arbitrators: 34. Proctors: 3. Watchmasters: 3. Cleaning service: 6. Clerks: 2. Cyber-mastiffs: 8.

Fifty-one posts. The fortress had been built for fifty-one people and eight animals, and it had had fifty-one people, at a time when Dorrhast had ninety million and the hive needed four precinct fortresses.

Reuther stopped and read the plaque, as she had read it perhaps three times in nineteen years.

There were no cyber-mastiffs any more. The last had died before her time, and none had ever been resupplied, and in the kennel chamber on the second level paper was now stored.

There were no clerks. Brehl wrote.

There was no cleaning service.

She read the line twice and went on and checked the tenth bulkhead, and in that moment she thought nothing further about it, because a person who reads a plaque of establishment strengths thinks of a shortage of staff and not of a person.

On the evening of the sixth day Reuther sat on the floor before the last bulkhead and looked at it.

No one had come in.

She wrote it in the small book, and because she was honest she wrote the second sentence with it:

No one has come in. That does not exclude that someone was in.

She read the sentence again and held it to be a quibble, of the kind one writes at night, and did not strike it out, because in a service book one strikes nothing out.

VII. The Ninth Request

On the eighth day she made the enquiry she knew was pointless.

There is for Four-Nine-Six an application for suspension. It stands in the same title, three paragraphs further on: the responsible judge may apply to the sector administration for an extension of the period if he sets out that the investigation requires more time through no fault of his own. The administration decides within thirty days.

Reuther dictated the enquiry to Brehl, because Brehl's hand was legible from four metres, and Brehl wrote it and cleared his throat and said:

"That is the ninth, Judge."

"The ninth what?"

"The ninth enquiry to the sector administration of Mordacis. Since I have been here." He blew on the ink. "Six of them I wrote myself. Two inventory reports, one requisition of replacement staff, twice a request for review of a judgement, once notice of a shortfall." He laid down the pen. "None has been answered."

"Since when?"

"For forty-one years, Judge. The last confirmation from Mordacis that stands in the watch book is from 930." Brehl cleared his throat. "I was eighteen at the time and not yet here. The entry is one line. It does not say what they answered."

Reuther took the sheet and read it through and signed it.

"Send it."

"It does not go out, Judge. We are sealed."

"Then put it in the outgoing folder and send it on the seventeenth day."

Brehl looked at her. He cleared his throat twice, which he otherwise never did.

"On the seventeenth day, Judge," he said, "I may possibly no longer be in a position to send anything."

"Then it lies in the folder and someone else sends it." Reuther stood up. "Put it in, Proctor. I want it to lie there."

She went out, and she went faster than necessary, and as she went she knew that Brehl had just grasped what she herself had known since the sixth day: that an enquiry to an administration that has not answered for forty-one years is no legal remedy but an act one performs so that it stands in the book.

Seven precinct fortresses the subsector had had. Reuther had learned in her training that there were seven.

In nineteen years she had spoken with not one of them.

VIII. Item Nine-Three

On the ninth day Almut Reuther went down to the fourth level, and she took Terlau and Osk with her, because she wanted to go as three and because in that moment she was not certain whether she did that out of caution or out of cowardice.

The fourth level of Precinct Fortress Seven is a corridor of two hundred and sixty metres with forty-four doors.

There is no light. There was once light; the fittings still hang there, all forty-four, and in none of them is anything. One goes with lamps, and lamps need coal, and coal is accounted for.

The corridor smelled of cold stone and of oil and of a third thing that Reuther could not place and that occurred to her only halfway along, because it was so everyday that in an empty storey she had not expected it.

It smelled of soap.

The evidence store lay at the end, behind the thirty-first door, and Sisk had opened it once a month for twelve years and counted the holdings.

Reuther opened it and held up the lamp, and Terlau took the inventory book from the hook beside the door.

They counted for three hours.

The evidence store of a precinct fortress that has been working for four hundred years is not a store but a geology. Right at the front lies what comes from the food riots of the spring: pipes, knives, a truncheon from a production line. Behind it the eighties, behind them the sixties.

Right at the back, against the rear wall, stood the items no one clears away any more.

Item nine-three was a case of plasteel two metres long, banded round with iron, with a wax seal that had already twice been renewed, because wax crumbles.

Terlau read out the entry.

"Item nine-three. Taken in in the year 671.M41 on the instruction of the sector administration. Ceramite armour, complete, pattern not determined. Without occupant. Weight two hundred and fourteen kilograms. Contents enclosed: dust, about forty kilograms, not removable. Custody for an indefinite period. Not to be opened." She paused. "And then one more sentence. Different hand, entered later: The dust has been counted. It is the quantity of a man."

Reuther stood a while before the case.

"Do we open it?"

"No," said Reuther.

"Why not?"

"Because it says there that one does not, and because whoever wrote that knew more than I do." She turned away. "And because I have one dead man in this house and not two."

"Judge," said Terlau. "There is something else with it."

She held the inventory book slantwise into the light.

"Beneath the entry there is a cross-reference. Case 671/4, sector administration Mordacis, annexe not attached." She looked up. "That means there was a case. Someone wrote a report on why an empty suit of armour with forty kilograms of dust in it is kept in a precinct fortress. And the annexe is not attached."

"Where is it?"

"In Mordacis, Judge. If it is anywhere."

Reuther held the lamp to the side of the case. The plasteel was rubbed bright at one place, at head height, over an area the size of a hand — by sleeves, over three hundred years, by people who had stroked it in passing, as people stroke things in passing.

She drew her hand back before she did it herself.

"Three hundred years," said Terlau. "Whoever took that in thought that someone would come and fetch it."

They finished counting the store. The holdings tallied to the item exactly, as Sisk had signed them off every month.

On the way back, at the twelfth door, Osk stopped and raised the lamp.

The door stood a finger's breadth open.

"That was shut," he said. "On the way in that was shut. I count them along."

Reuther did not look at Kastner, because Kastner was not there, and thought of her all the same, who counts the doors as she walks, and of the fact that in this house evidently more people counted doors than she had known.

"Open it," she said.

Behind it was an empty chamber with a bunk without a mattress, and on the floor beside the bunk stood nothing, but the dust on the floor slabs had at that place a circle the size of a tin bowl.

IX. The Fifth Level

On the tenth day they went down to the fifth.

Four of them this time. Reuther, Terlau, Osk, Tanner. Brehl stayed above, because someone stays above, and Kastner stayed with him, because Reuther did not want to take her along and did not tell her so.

The fifth level is no corridor. It is the foundation: pipes, girders, the coolant runs of the reactor wall, a space without a ground plan in which one reaches places for which there is no way.

It is warmer there. Eighteen degrees, sometimes twenty.

They went four abreast as far as it was possible, and then in file, and then they were four in four different places.

Reuther heard it first.

Something soft. To the right.

"Halt."

All four stood. Four lamps, four circles of light, nothing between them.

"Osk."

"I have it too."

Again. Nearer. No metal.

Reuther opened her mouth to say do not shoot.

Osk fired.

The report in a room of pipes is not loud. It is massive. It presses.

Reuther was on her knees without having knelt. The lamp rolled.

Then came the hissing.

He had hit a coolant run. She did not see it; she heard it and smelled it, sweetish, sharp, and the smell was everywhere in two seconds.

"Back!"

Tanner shouted something. Terlau shouted back.

Reuther got hold of a hand and did not know whose. She pulled. The hand came with her.

The mist was white and stood at chest height and was rising.

They did not find the stair. They found a wall, went along it, found a girder, went back.

Osk coughed. Then he stopped coughing.

Tanner carried him. Reuther noticed it only when they were already on the stair, because Tanner had said nothing about it.

On the fourth level they halted. Terlau slammed the bulkhead shut and threw the bolt and leaned against it.

Reuther counted.

Four.

Osk was breathing. Shallowly, but he was breathing.

"What was that," said Tanner.

"A coolant run."

"Not that." He set Osk down. "The other thing."

Reuther turned the lamp on the floor before the bulkhead, where the white precipitate from the run already lay as a thin layer.

In it stood a footprint.

It was small. It was barefoot. It was narrow, with one toe shorter than the others, and it did not point away from them.

It pointed at the stair.

Osk came to after barely an hour and was on his feet two hours later and reported to Reuther in her chamber that evening.

He stopped in the doorway and laid the shotgun on the floor, which is no regulation and which Reuther had never in thirty-three years of service seen anyone do.

"I fired before you ordered it."

"Yes."

"I fired before you forbade it." Marun Osk looked past her. "You opened your mouth. I saw it. I fired all the same."

Reuther looked at the weapon on the floor.

"What would you have hit if the run had not been there?"

"Something that moved."

"And what was it?"

"I do not know, Judge." He raised his head. "I know only that in fourteen years of service I have fired twice, both times in Dorrhast, both times at people with pipes in their hands, and that today in an empty storey of my own house I fired at something I did not see."

He picked the weapon up again.

"I ask that it go into your book."

"It goes into my book."

"Thank you, Judge."

He went, and Reuther wrote it down, and she also wrote down the sentence she had not said to him: that she had opened her mouth to say do not shoot, and that she had not said it in time, and that a judge who is two tenths of a second late has nothing to fall back on.

X. The Room Behind the Registry

They found her on the eleventh day, on the third level, behind the old registry, in a room that appears on no ground plan of Precinct Fortress Seven, because it came into being when a partition wall was put in two hundred years ago.

Reuther went in alone. Terlau stayed at the door and was against it and did not say so.

The room was four paces long.

It was clean.

That was what Reuther could not place in the first seconds and what closed her throat when she did place it: she had been standing for eleven days in a house in which seven people keep places for forty-one, and in which the dust on the fourth level lies a finger thick.

Here there was none.

The floor had been wiped. The bunk was made, with a blanket that had been patched three times and turned once. On a nail hung an apron, grey, washed, with a strip sewn on at the hem on which half the imprint of the precinct's cleaning service could still be made out.

On a board stood seven tin bowls, stacked one inside another, and beside them a piece of soap.

The woman sat on the bunk with her hands in her lap and looked at the door.

She was old. Very old. Small, bent, with a face in which everything had gone downward, and with hands that looked as the hands of people look who have lifted things for eighty years.

"Judge," she said.

Reuther stopped.

"You know who I am."

"I have known it since you came here, Judge. You came in the ninth year of the Second District, and in the first week you objected to the lighting of the second level, and then it was repaired." The old woman said it without pride. She was reporting. "Before you it was Judge Ambrost. Before him Judge Kell. Before her Judge Ossek, and he was long."

"What is your name?"

"Hanne."

"And what else?"

The woman looked at her hands.

"No one has asked me for a long time," she said. "I do not want to say it wrongly."

Reuther sat down. There was no chair; she sat down on the floor, with her back to the wall, and knew that Terlau saw that from the door, and did it all the same.

"How long have you been here?"

"In this room fifty-one years. In the house sixty-two."

"Sixty-two years."

"I was taken on at fourteen," said Hanne. "Cleaning service, third and fourth level, with the tag. I had a tag, Judge. It fell down the shaft in my third year, and I reported it, and they said a new one would come."

"And then?"

"And then it did not come." Hanne smoothed the blanket, though it was smooth. "It was no malice. Simply nobody sent one. And in the year after that they struck the cleaning service for the fourth level, because the fourth level is not used any more, and then I was no longer on the list, because on the list I stood only by the tag."

"You said nothing."

"I said something for eleven years, Judge." For the first time the old woman looked up. "I told the Proctor who was before Proctor Brehl, and the one before him. I gave it twice in writing. Once one of them answered that he was passing it on." She laid her hands back in her lap. "And then I turned fifty-one and stopped."

Reuther sat on the floor of a room that did not exist, opposite a woman who did not exist.

"And what have you done in those fifty-one years?"

Hanne looked at her as though she had not understood the question.

"The third and the fourth level," she said. "Every day. The fourth every other, because nobody goes there."

XI. What Hanne Said

She said it of her own accord, and she said it before Reuther could ask.

"I killed Mister Sisk, Judge."

There arose a silence in which Reuther heard Terlau breathing at the door.

"Tell me how."

"At the top of the stair. He came, and he had the cap on, and then I knew that it was something official." Hanne spoke in the same reporting manner as about the judges. "He otherwise never had it on when he came to me."

"How often did he come to you?"

"For a year and two months. About every eight days."

"Why?"

"He found me," said Hanne. "While counting in the store. I was just then wiping, and he came in, and I was not quick enough." She drew up her shoulders. "I thought, now it is time. And then he sat down and asked me whether I had enough to eat."

Reuther thought of a tin bowl under a bunk, carefully washed out.

"He brought you food."

"He said he had too much. That was not true. I had seen his portion." For the first time something changed in the old face, very little. "He said it every eight days, for a year and two months, and every time I acted as though I believed it, because otherwise it would have stopped."

"And that night?"

"That night he had the cap on." Hanne folded her hands. "He said he had found me. Not me — my name. He had been on the fourth level, in the old cases where the countings lie, and he had searched eleven months, and he had found a counting from nine hundred and twenty in which I stand. With the name. With the tag. With the number."

She said it very tidily, in the right order, like someone who has said it over to herself often.

"And he said that now he can do it. He can register me. He puts his name under it and sends it up and then I am there again." Hanne looked at her hands. "And I asked what happens to him then. Because I have been sixty-two years in this house, Judge, and because I know what stands in the books. I have wiped the books. I can read."

"What did you ask him?"

"I asked him what stands in the Lex when an Arbitrator has a person in the house for fifty-one years and does not report it." She raised her head. "He told me. He told me exactly, book and title and paragraph, the way he said everything exactly, and then he said that that was not the point now."

Reuther said nothing.

"I asked him to leave it. Twice. He took the sheet out of his pocket and showed it to me, and it was already written and already signed, and he wanted to put it in the outgoing folder in the morning." Hanne's voice did not grow louder. "And then I took it, Judge. The bolt from the twelfth door. It lay there because I had unscrewed it the day before, because it jammed."

"You struck him once."

"Once."

"And then?"

"And then he went down the stair, and then I went after him, and then I laid him down." The old woman looked at Almut Reuther directly for the second time that day. "One does not leave a person lying as he falls."

"How did he find the name?"

"With his hands," said Hanne. "There are twenty-eight cases down there. Countings, district lists, duty rosters, everything that came here from the other three precinct fortresses when they were closed. Nothing is ordered. It was tipped in."

"And he went through them."

"Eleven months. Every eight days one evening, and sometimes two." The old woman looked at her hands. "He sat on the floor with a lamp burning and went sheet by sheet. I sat beside him and took the sheets he had already had and put them in order so that he would not take them twice."

"You helped him."

"Yes."

"You helped him for eleven months to find something you knew would cost him."

Hanne was silent for a while.

"I thought he would find nothing," she said. "After the third month I thought that, and after the sixth I hoped it, and by then I already knew that I was hoping it." She stroked the blanket. "He came every time. Every eight days, a year and two months, with a bowl and a lamp. In fifty-one years before that nobody did it."

"And the sheet?"

"Burned."

"Why?"

Hanne was silent a long time.

"Because his name was on it," she said.

XII. A Person Within the Meaning of This Law

On the twelfth day Wibke Terlau stood in the Judge's chamber and explained to her why a confession was worth nothing.

She did it well. Reuther had known for eleven years that Terlau knew the Lex better than she did, and she had always regarded that knowledge as a tool at her disposal. On that day it was no tool.

"Four-Nine-Six requires that the cause be connected with a person," said Terlau. "Not with a human being. With a person."

"I know what you are driving at."

"Then say it, Judge, for I have to know that you really know it."

Reuther said it.

"Book one, title two. A person within the meaning of this law is one who is carried in a roll of the Imperium."

"Paragraph three. And paragraph four says that the carrying in a roll is effected by the responsible administration." Terlau laid her transcript on the table; she had one of her own, handwritten, since her training. "The woman in the registry is no person without papers, Judge. That would be easy. A person without papers is carried as soon as one carries them. This woman was struck from the roll when her post was struck, and a striking is lifted by re-entry, and the re-entry is a matter for the sector administration."

"There is a counting from nine hundred and twenty. Sisk found it. It lies below."

"I fetched it. Last night." Terlau pushed a sheet across the table, brittle, with a line that someone had struck through fifty-one years ago. "It proves that the woman was carried. For Four-Nine-Six we need her to be carried."

Reuther looked at the struck-through line.

"And the application to Mordacis runs thirty days," she said.

"The application to Mordacis has been running for forty-one years, Judge." Terlau said it without bitterness, which made it worse. "We have four days."

They stood a while.

"There is a possibility that you know," said Terlau at last, "and I am saying it out now so that it has been spoken and we need not think it afterwards. You can connect the cause with Arbitrator Sisk. A fall. An accident, caused by the man who suffered it. That is a connection with a person, and Sisk is carried, and Four-Nine-Six would be satisfied, and no one could ever check it."

Reuther noticed that she thought the proposal through to the end before she refused it, and she noticed too how easily that went.

It was the twelfth day. She had four days. She had one dead man, a confession that was legally nothing, five people whom she knew, and a paragraph that did not distinguish between silence and not knowing.

And she had a sheet she could have written, in eleven minutes, alone, without witnesses, and that would have withstood any examination, because there was no examination.

She thought it through to the end, because in nineteen years she had learned that one does not get rid of a thought one wards off. One must look at it. One must look at it entirely, with everything it costs and everything it brings in, and afterwards one decides, and then it stays away.

That evening it did not stay away, and the next it did not stay away either, and Almut Reuther did not write that in her book.

"And Sisk would stand as the man who killed himself."

"Yes."

"And in the roll there would stand beside his name a note that his sister on Vhassel-South gets to read when she requests the death certificate."

Terlau nodded slowly.

"I did not know that," she said. "That he has a sister."

"Nor did I. I read it yesterday." Reuther pushed the brittle sheet back. "It stands in his file. Line four."

She looked out of the window, which was not one.

"Dovin Sisk rummaged in cases in an unlit storey for eleven months in order to find a name so that a human being would stand in a book again," said Almut Reuther. "I shall not put my name under a sheet that says he threw himself down the stair."

XIII. Book One, Title Two, Paragraph Eleven

Wibke Terlau came on the thirteenth day about the second hour and did not knock.

She had the transcript under her arm and the codex in her hand, both open, and she had been awake for thirty-one hours, which showed and which Reuther had never seen in her in eleven years.

"Book one," she said. "Title two. Paragraph eleven."

Reuther knew book one. Book one is the part of the Lex one reads in training and never again, because there are no offences there but definitions: what a person is, what a district is, what a judge is. It is the part in which the law explains itself.

Terlau read out.

"If the responsible administration is permanently and not merely temporarily unable to exercise its powers, then the senior judge of the district concerned exercises those powers to the extent necessary, until the administration exercises them again."

She let the codex sink.

"You can enter her, Judge. You yourself. It is lawful. It has been lawful for forty-one years."

Almut Reuther sat very still.

"Say that again."

"It has been lawful for forty-one years."

It took a while to settle, and when it had settled it was not relief.

Forty-one years.

For forty-one years Precinct Fortress Seven had sent enquiries to Mordacis and received no answer. Requisitions of replacement staff. Requests for review of a judgement. Inventory reports. Nine sheets, six of them in Brehl's hand, and Brehl was sixty-one and had for thirty-three years laid every one of them in the outgoing folder and signed it off.

And the whole time it had stood in book one, title two, paragraph eleven, that they were permitted to do it themselves.

"Why has no one read it?" said Reuther.

"Everyone has read it." Terlau sat down without asking, which she had never done. "In training, in the first year, in the second week. I could say it by heart if you had asked me two days ago, without knowing that I could."

"And why does no one use it?"

"Because for that one first has to establish something." Terlau looked at the codex in her lap. "Permanently and not merely temporarily unable. That is no description, Judge. That is a finding someone has to make. And whoever makes it says thereby: no one is coming any more."

She said it quite calmly.

"I am thirty-eight. I was born in this subsector. In my whole life I have not met one person who came from outside." Terlau raised her head. "And until two o'clock this morning I believed that we are waiting. I believe we have all believed that, and I believe we have believed it because the other possibility means that for forty-one years we have been the highest instance on this world and did not know that we are."

Reuther stood up and went to the case beside the judge's chair and took out the codex, her own, the official one, and opened book one, title two, and looked for paragraph eleven, and there it stood.

It stood there as it had stood there for two thousand years, with the same column width and the same type area as everything else, and nothing on the page indicated that this paragraph was anything other than the forty around it.

She read it three times.

Then she shut the book and said: "Fetch Brehl. He is to bring the roll."

XIV. Three Times

On the fourteenth day Almut Reuther went into the room behind the registry for the third time, and this time she took no one with her.

Hanne sat on the bunk. She always sat on the bunk, and Reuther had by now grasped that this was no submissiveness: there was no second place in the room, and the old woman was of the opinion that one does not take the only one from a judge.

"I have to explain something to you, and afterwards I have to ask you something," said Reuther. "The explaining takes a long time. I ask you not to interrupt me, because otherwise I shall not say it in the right order."

"Yes, Judge."

Reuther explained Four-Nine-Six to her.

She explained the sixteen days and the joint liability and that the period ran out on the seventeenth day. She explained that a confession ends the period only if it comes from a person, and that a person under book one is someone who is carried in a roll, and that Hanne had for fifty-one years been carried in none.

She explained book one, title two, paragraph eleven.

She explained that she, Almut Reuther, had for forty-one years had the power to enter people on Vhassel into the roll, and that she had not known it, and that there was no one she could reproach for that.

And then she explained the rest.

"If I enter you, you are a person. Then your confession is effective. Then Four-Nine-Six is satisfied, and the six who are in this house are not liable." She held her gaze. "And then I sentence you. For the killing of a servant of the Arbites on duty there is one judgement, and there is only one, and I cannot mitigate it, because book four provides for no mitigation."

She had finished. It had taken eleven minutes.

Hanne sat with her hands in her lap.

"And if you do not do it?"

"Then the period runs out. On the seventeenth day I stand before the choice of killing six people or not doing it." Reuther heard her own voice very clearly. "And you stay where you are. In this room. Then no one knows of you any more except those who are still there, and that can be none."

"And then I stand in no book."

"No."

The old woman looked at her hands a long time.

"Judge," she said. "May I ask something that has nothing to do with the matter?"

"Yes."

"If you enter me — where does my name stand then?"

Reuther had prepared an answer to a great deal and not to that question.

She needed a moment.

"In the district roll of Vhassel," she said. "The volume of current entries, with date and number. Then in the judgement book of Precinct Fortress Seven, with the case and the judgement. And then in the report to the sector administration of Mordacis, which goes into the outgoing folder when the seal falls."

"Three times."

"Three times."

Hanne nodded, very slowly, like someone checking a reckoning that comes out.

"And in the report to Mordacis," she said, "does the name stand there even if no one answers?"

"Yes. It goes out, and what happens to it afterwards is no longer my affair." Reuther heard herself and hated the sentence. "I do not know whether it will ever be read."

"That is something else," said Hanne.

"What is something else?"

"Whether something is read, and whether it stands there." The old woman smoothed the blanket, which was smooth. "I wiped the fourth level for fifty-one years, Judge. Nobody goes there. Nobody saw it."

She looked up.

"It was clean all the same."

XV. Current Entry 971/1

The district roll of Vhassel is a volume the size of a table top, in calfskin, with fittings, and it is kept in Precinct Fortress Seven, because Seven is the only precinct fortress on this world in which anyone still sits.

Brehl carried it in and laid it on the judge's table and cleared his throat.

"The last entry is from 968, Judge. An addition to the district service." He opened it. "After that four empty lines."

"Why four?"

"Because I begin the page once a year," said Brehl. "Little comes. But when something comes, the page should be ready."

Reuther looked at him. Sixty-one years old, thirty-three of them in this house, a man who opens a book for events that do not occur.

"Thank you, Proctor."

She assembled the other five in the courtroom and told them everything.

It took longer than with Hanne, because she was interrupted.

Osk asked first, in a voice still coated by the coolant, whether it would not suffice simply not to mention the woman. Terlau explained to him why not. Tanner said nothing, but ate standing at the wall and stayed in the room while doing it, which he otherwise did not.

Kastner asked whether one could not simply let the old woman out when the seal falls.

"Then the period runs out all the same," said Reuther.

"But she lives."

"Yes."

"And we do not."

"That is so."

Kastner looked at the table. She was twenty-nine and counted the doors as she walked, and Reuther saw how her hand lay at her thigh and did not move.

"Then it has to be done," said Kastner.

"I want you to say it out, Watchmaster."

"One has to write a seventy-six-year-old woman into a book so that one can execute her." Kastner raised her head. "I have said it. It stays in your book."

"It stays in my book."

Nelke Brehl cleared his throat.

"Judge. I want to put something on record."

"Yes."

"I have been thirty-three years in this house. I keep the rations." He had his hands behind his back. "The consumption of the precinct fortress has for thirty-three years been about one portion above the head count. I have never reported it, because it lies within the tolerance the Munitorum provides for, and because a report would have triggered an inspection." He looked straight ahead. "I did not know that someone was down there. I knew that something was not right, and I did not want to know it, and that is not the same as knowing nothing."

Almut Reuther took the pen and entered it, because he had asked for it.

Then she entered the other thing.

District roll Vhassel, current entry 971/1.

She wrote the date. She wrote the number. She wrote the legal basis, book one, title two, paragraph eleven, and beside it, because the roll requires it, the ground of the entry, and there was no fitting formula for it, and she wrote: Re-entry after striking, striking without fault of the person entered.

And then the name.

She wrote it slowly. She wrote it in the hand she uses for rolls and which is different from the one for the judgement book and the one for her small book at her belt, and she needed about as long for thirteen letters as for the four lines before them.

Brehl stood beside her and watched and did not clear his throat.

When she had finished he strewed sand, as one does, and blew it off, and then he took the volume and carried it back, and Reuther heard him the whole length of the corridor, because he walked slowly and because the fittings strike once against the leather at every step.

She had it from the counting of 920, the brittle sheet with the struck-through line, and she had checked it twice, because in that line the ink had run at one place.

XVI. Are You the Named?

The hearing took place on the sixteenth day, about the third hour, in the courtroom of Precinct Fortress Seven.

It was according to regulation. Reuther insisted on it, and she insisted on it against Terlau, who had proposed making it short.

The hall is built for two hundred listeners. Five were there.

Hanne stood, because the accused stands. She had washed the apron and put it on, the grey smock with the half imprint of the cleaning service at the hem, and Reuther grasped only when she saw her standing that the old woman had dressed for the occasion and that for it she had only this one thing.

The procedure is laid down. It does not begin with the charge.

It begins with the establishment of the person.

"I call the accused," said Almut Reuther and looked into the judgement book, in which the name had stood since the previous day, in her own hand, with the number 971/1.

And then she read it out.

She read it loudly and clearly, as the order requires, so that a hall with two hundred places hears it, and the hall was empty but for five people, and she read it all the same as one reads it.

The old woman stood with her hands at the seams of her trousers.

When Reuther had finished, Hanne said nothing.

There arose a silence in which Terlau raised her head and Brehl cleared his throat and then after all did not clear it.

"Pardon, Judge," said Hanne.

"Yes."

"The a is long."

Almut Reuther sat behind the judge's table of Precinct Fortress Seven, in a hall for two hundred listeners, on the sixteenth day of a period that ran out the next morning, and looked down into the book in which she had the day before entered a human being in her own hand.

She had checked the name twice. She had checked the run ink. She had not thought that a name also has a length, because a name on a sheet has none.

In fifty-one years no one had spoken it.

Reuther thought in that moment of something that did not belong there and that she could not switch off: of Dovin Sisk, fifty-two years old, on the floor of an unlit storey, for eleven months, every eight days one evening, sheet by sheet.

He had found the name. He had had it in his hand, written, signed, ready for the outgoing folder.

He had never heard it.

"Pardon," said Reuther.

She said it again. From the beginning, the whole name, with the long a.

Then she read the formula that comes after it, which is read in every precinct fortress of the Imperium before every hearing and which had not been read in Seven for four years, because for four years there had been no hearing:

"Are you the named?"

"Yes," said Hanne.