Full Disclosure

[MINISTRY OF PUBLIC CONFIDENCE — COMPLIANCE INTERVIEW 4471-M]
[The subject's remarks are recorded verbatim, as the Candor Statutes require. The interviewer's remarks are reconstructed from the stenographer's summary.]

You want me to start at the beginning, but there wasn't one, and I can't give you what there wasn't. That's the first thing your reports never manage to say. It didn't arrive like weather. There was no morning when the loudspeakers announced, From today you will not be able to lie. It came the way a tide comes into a mudflat — you never catch it moving, and then your shoes are full of water.

For me it was a Tuesday. My daughter held up a drawing and asked if I liked it. A horse, she said, though it had the patient sadness of a sofa. I opened my mouth to say I loved it — I'd said it four hundred times, it cost me nothing — and what came out was, "No. But I love that your hands made it." She stared at me. I stared at me. Across the city, though I only learned this later, a man was telling his wife the truth about the money, and a surgeon was telling a family the true odds instead of the kind ones, and a priest stood in his own church with his mouth open and nothing coming out at all.

You call it the Candor. We called it the affliction, back when we still thought it was one. Then the Ministry decided a disease ought to sound like a civic virtue, and you renamed it. I notice you can still do that. Rename things. Interesting.

No, I won't skip ahead. You asked how it works, and unlike you I have no choice but to answer. Your own people worked it out in the second year — it's in the sealed annex you're pretending you haven't read. A retrovirus, airborne, patient. It crosses into the brain and quietly unbuilds one small machine: the one we'd used, since we came down from the trees, to say a thing we knew was untrue. I can still stay silent. I can refuse you. I can say I don't know when I don't. What I cannot do is look at your horse and call it lovely. The lie simply won't form. It's like reaching in the dark for a step that isn't there.

You'd think the courts would have thrived. They didn't. Perjury vanished, yes — and with it the whole architecture that had assumed everyone was lying and corrected for it. Every contract ever signed had been priced for deceit. When the deceit drained out, the prices made no sense. Advertising died in a single quarter. Then the divorces — oh, the divorces. Not from cruelty. From accuracy. Thirty years of small, load-bearing kindnesses pulled out of a marriage in a single week, and the whole structure sitting down into the mud like a barn with its posts kicked away. My husband asked me, that first month, whether I had ever loved him. I liked the answer as little as he did. We are still married. I want you to write that down. We are still married, and I stayed for the true reasons, which are smaller and more stubborn than the ones I used to recite.

You want to know why I'm here. I'm here because I said, in a ration queue, that the figures the Ministry publishes are false. And they are. I know it the way I know my own hand: I can no longer believe a false thing on purpose, so when I read your numbers my whole body reports the mismatch, the way a struck bell reports the hammer. Everyone in that queue knew it too. That's the part your annex doesn't linger on. You didn't just take our lying. You took our ability to be lied to. We read your bulletins now the way a physician reads a chart. The symptom is always visible. The diagnosis is always the same.

Which brings us, at last, to you.

You've been very careful in this room. You've asked questions and written summaries and let the machine record only my side. You wear the filter mask that the notices insist is there to protect us from the residue of contagion on your breath. But there is no residue. Your own annex says the vector burned out in the fourth year; there is nothing left to catch. The mask is not to keep my affliction out. It is to keep your health in.

Because you can still do it. That is the whole shape of the new world, and no one has said it to your face, so I will, since I am the only one in the building who is structurally incapable of flattering you out of it. Somewhere in the second year, when the Ministry understood what was coming, a small number of people were sealed away and kept clean. Kept able. You are one of them. You sit across from a population that can neither lie nor be lied to, and you can do both, and that — not the rations, not the guns — is the actual government now. Truth became universal, and so it stopped being worth anything, and the only wealth left is the ancient, ordinary power to say a thing that is not so and be believed.

I can see you deciding what to write. Take your time. Whatever you put in the summary, the people who read it can no longer be fooled by it, only ruled by it, which I'm told is more efficient anyway.

One more thing, for the record, because it's true and because you will never say it and someone should. You envy us. I have watched it cross your face for an hour. We lost the whole delicate craft of getting through a day on soft untruths, and it nearly killed us, and then it didn't, and what's left on this side of it is quiet. My daughter shows me a drawing now and I tell her exactly what I see, and she has stopped needing me to lie, because she was only ever asking whether I would stay in the room and keep looking. I do. That is the answer underneath all the other answers. I stay in the room. I keep looking.

You can't, quite. You have to leave and file this. Go on. The door is the true one. It's the only thing in here that is.

[Recording ends. Subject released pending review. Interviewer's summary sealed.]