The Contentment Ratio

RESIDENT 41,552 — ARBOS, Y.

On the one day of the year when the light over Anodyne was not manufactured, Yelen Arbos walked up to the counting house intending to vote against the company that owned the sky.

The array had stood down at the fourth hour. One hundred and eleven mirrors, strung in a slow ring above the basins, had turned themselves edge-on and gone dark, and the real sun of Anodyne had come over the eastern salt pans at a crawl that nobody alive was used to. It would take thirty-five hours to cross. The shadows moved slowly enough to watch them move. In the market square children lay flat on the flagstones with their arms out, waiting to feel the edge of the shade come off their fingers, and their grandparents let them lie there, because it was the Long Noon and nothing was owed to anyone until the mirrors came back.

Yelen was a mirror technician, sector nine. She spent her working life on the trim motors that gave the colony its twenty-four-hour day, and she had come to the counting house because she had decided, sometime in the winter, that she wanted to know what it cost to say no to the people who paid her.

Nothing was wrong. That was the whole difficulty of it. The rations were good. The clinic had taken the cataract out of her mother's left eye in an afternoon and asked nothing for it. She had tried three times to write the reason down and each time it had come out sounding ungrateful, which is what it was. The nearest she had got was this: she wanted, once, to want something that the company had not already put into her hand and given a name.

She marked the ballot. The clerk thanked her, took it, and handed her a card — cream, stiff, her own name on it in real ink. The Deputy Custodian would be glad of a quarter of an hour, at her convenience, any time before the mirrors resumed.

She had expected, if she were ever noticed, to be afraid. Instead she was flattered. She understood at once that being flattered was the point, and she went anyway, and that was the point too.

DEPUTY CUSTODIAN — SOWE, E.

He was eighty-one, and he came round the desk to take her coat.

The room had a window, which was rare. There was a pot of tea gone cold on the desk, and an open ledger.

"You are the fourth today," he said. "I have nine more before the light goes. Do sit."

"Am I in trouble?"

"You are in the register," Sowe said, "which is not the same thing, and I would like you to see the register, because otherwise you will not believe me." He turned the ledger round. "Last year's return. No: six point one percent. The year before, five point eight. The year before that, six point four."

"You count them."

"We publish them. The auditors at Tessaly read that figure before they read a single line of the accounts. A freehold that returns ninety-nine percent assent is a freehold under investigation, and an investigation costs more than a bad harvest." He set the tea down untasted. "Our band is four to eight. We are inside it. You have been, this morning, extremely useful."

"Then my vote doesn't matter."

"Your vote matters enormously," he said. "It simply does not matter which way it goes."

She waited to find cruelty somewhere in it. There was none. He spoke the way a man reads out a tide table.

"May I tell you what we actually bought?" he said. "Meridian took this world in the Cassia default. All of it — the mass drivers, the half-built array, four million people and the descendants they had not had yet — for less than the yard price of a mid-sized freighter, because nobody else would take on the liability of the air. We did not buy your obedience. Obedience was never for sale, and it is ruinously expensive to keep: you have to garrison it, and a garrison must be paid and housed and rotated and, above all, feared, and fear is the most perishable stock in the catalogue. It goes off in a generation. Every freehold that relied on it is a crater with a flag in it now." He tapped the window frame. "We bought the daylight. Everything else follows from the daylight and costs us nothing."

"And the Long Noon?"

"Ah." For the first time he looked pleased. "The referendum could be held at the sixtieth hour, in the cold and the dark, with the pans frozen and everybody's joints aching. It would be administratively identical. We hold it at noon, in the middle of the only festival on the calendar, when you are warm and fed and standing next to everyone you have ever loved. It costs us the price of the bunting. It buys four points of assent." He shrugged, small and old. "There is nothing cheaper in the book. We are not cruel, Miss Arbos. Cruelty is a luxury good. We could not afford it even if the shareholders had the appetite, and they haven't; they have never been here."

"What if I wanted to leave?"

"You are entirely free to. The passage to Tessaly is two hundred and forty thousand. A mirror technician of your grade will earn, across a full working life, about nine." He said it without any relish at all. "That figure is not an accident. It is also not spite. It is simply the level at which nobody accrues an exit and everybody accrues a garden."

"And if we all voted no? All of us. Ninety-nine percent."

"Then the freehold would be reviewed, and Meridian would take the compensation and be glad of it, and Anodyne would be sold to Cassia Reclamation, who are standing ready and whose methods differ from ours." He closed the ledger. "I have read their ledgers, Miss Arbos. I would not recommend it."

She sat with that a while. Outside, the shadow of the window frame had moved perhaps the width of a thumb.

"Why did you send for me?"

He considered whether to lie. She watched him consider it, and watched him decline.

"Because a resident who has been heard stays," he said. "A resident who has not been heard writes to seven other residents. It is one of the most reliable numbers we have." He helped her into her coat. "I am telling you the mechanism because telling you is also part of the mechanism, and because at my age it has stopped being interesting to pretend otherwise. Vote no again next year. I mean that sincerely. We need you."

INDEX OFFICE, GRADE 3 — FERRAN, P.

The returns came in through the long afternoon, basin by basin, and Piet Ferran watched the ratio slide the wrong way.

Northern pans: 4.4. Cordage and the mill districts: 4.1. By the fifteenth hour the running figure stood at 3.9 and would not come up, and Ferran, who was twenty-six and had held Grade 3 for a year, did what the manual said and opened Schedule C.

Schedule C was headed RESTORATIVE FRICTIONS and ran to nine pages. He took three things from it. The milled-grain price would rise eleven percent in the third quarter, announced, with a stated reason. The Feast of Low Water would move back a week, announced, with a stated reason, and the reason would be a poor one. And sector nine's trim motors, which were due for service, would not get it, and the manufactured dawn over the eastern basins would come up nine minutes late all season.

The frictions were always small and always announced. That was the whole art of them. An unexplained hardship makes people frightened, and frightened people go quiet and then, in time, go strange. An explained hardship makes people argue, and people who argue in the market queue do not write letters to seven other residents.

He costed it at forty-one thousand and initialled the line. Somewhere in an appendix to the manual there was a note that the garrison on Threnody, in its final year, had cost nine hundred million and lost.

Then he cleared the day's flags. Most were routine. One was an interview log out of the Custodian's office: ARBOS, Y., resident 41,552, mirror technician, sector nine, twenty-two minutes, no incident.

Ferran typed RETAIN — PRODUCTIVE, added her to the standing list for next year's invitation, and went to the window to watch the last of the real light. It was, he thought, genuinely beautiful. Nobody had had to make it. That was probably why they only used it once a year.

RESIDENT 41,552 — ARBOS, Y.

She walked home in the long gold of it, and the shadows of the mirror pylons lay across the road like fallen ladders, and she felt — she turned it over the whole way and could not make it come out any other way — she felt considered.

At the fourth hour the array woke. One hundred and eleven mirrors turned their faces east in unison, the way they had every day of her life, and the manufactured morning came up over the basins nine minutes late.

She noticed. She had spent eleven years inside those motors; of course she noticed. And standing in her doorway in the crooked false dawn, with her tea going cold in her hand, Yelen Arbos felt the first clean flare of anger she had felt in a year — so bright, and so entirely her own, that it never once occurred to her to ask who had paid for it.