Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

”They’ve burned a man’s workshop in Two Willows,” Bai Qing said.

I put the pen down. ”Burned.”

”Nobody hurt. They did it at night with the place empty, which tells you they wanted him gone and not dead.” She was already unrolling a map, because that is what her hands do while her mouth is working. ”He’s sixty-one. His name is Hong. He was a copy-clerk in a district office for nineteen years, a long time ago.”

”Empire.”

”Empire,” said Bai Qing.

— • —

Here is the thing we did, thirteen years ago, and were right to do, and which I would do again, and which has just set a man’s workshop on fire.

When we opened the Archive, we published it. All of it. That was the whole principle — you do not protect a record by hiding it, you protect it by copying it into ten thousand hands. We gave the world every route, every order, every ledger. It is the reason eight million people came home. It is the best thing we ever did.

The Empire’s employment records were in there.

Nobody thought about it. I want to be honest about that rather than pretend we weighed it. Thirteen years ago we were looking for names of the erased, and there were eight million of those, and nobody in that vault stopped and said and also, here is every person who ever drew a wage from this building.

So it sat there. For thirteen years, in ten thousand copies, in every town hall in the world. Not hidden. Just not looked at.

And about eight months ago somebody looked.

— • —

His name is Yuan, and he is a returned soul, and I want to be extremely careful about how I write him down, because the easy version of this story has a villain in it and there isn’t one.

Yuan came up in the fifth year. Farmer, taken over a grain dispute, nine hundred and forty years gone. He got a chair and some water and somebody asked him what he did, and he settled in a valley town and grew things, and by all accounts he was fine for about four years.

Then one winter he went to the town hall and looked up his own order.

He found it. It is four lines long and it has three signatures on it: the authorising officer, the district supervisor, and the clerk who copied it out.

”I sat with that paper for two days,” he told me later. ”And what I could not get past — it wasn’t the big name. The big name I’d expected. It was the little one at the bottom. Because somebody wrote it out by hand. Somebody dipped a pen and formed the letters of my name knowing what the form was for, and then went home and had their dinner.”

So he started looking up other people’s orders. And then he started writing down the names at the bottom.

And then — because he is a methodical man and because the records are complete — he compiled every name in the personnel book, with post, district and years of service, and he sent it down every thread the Rememberers ever built, and he called it The Other List.

It went everywhere in eleven days.

— • —

”Eleven thousand four hundred names,” Xue Ningzhi said, when I got to her. She had a copy on the table. Of course she had a copy. ”Accurate. I have checked two hundred of them at random and found one error, which is a woman entered under her married name, and I have written to him about it.”

”You wrote to him.”

”He’s compiling a record. It should be right.” She said it flatly. ”Lin Bo, before you say anything else: there is nothing false on that sheet. Not one line. It is the single most accurate document produced in this world in thirteen years, it was assembled by a man who was owed it, and it is doing exactly what you think it is doing.”

”How bad?”

”Forty-one incidents that I know about. Hong’s workshop is the fourth fire.” She turned the page. ”Two hundred and some households have quietly moved. Four councils have stopped giving work to anybody on it. There’s a village in the terraces that put a copy on the wall of the hall and underlined nine of its own people, which I am told was done politely, by vote.”

”And you’re on it.”

”Page nine,” said Xue Ningzhi. ”Third from the top of my district. Twelve years of service, three promotions, final post Directorate of Public Belief. It is the most accurate line about me that has ever been written down anywhere and it does not include a single thing I actually did, because what I actually did was worse than the post.”

She folded her hands.

”And nobody has touched me,” she said. ”Nobody has so much as looked at me sideways in thirteen years. I have been to sixty towns since that list came out and not one person has said a word, because I am the famous one who came over, and the girl and her whole movement stand behind me.” Her voice did not change at all. ”Meanwhile they have burned down a copy-clerk’s workshop. He transcribed. I designed. If that list is justice then it is pointing the wrong way, and if it is not justice then nobody should be losing their roof to it, and I have not been able to get past those two sentences for eight months.”

— • —

I went to see the village in the terraces, the one that had put the list on the hall wall.

It was on the wall. Nine names underlined in a ruled pen line, which is the detail I have not been able to shake — somebody used a ruler.

The woman who had chaired the meeting was called Ip. She was about forty and perfectly friendly and gave me tea.

”We voted,” she said. ”Twenty-two to nine, with four abstaining. It’s minuted. Do you want to see the minute?”

”Yes, please.”

She got the book out. It was minuted. It was minuted well — proposal, discussion, amendment, vote, action. Somebody in that village keeps a very tidy book.

”What was the amendment?”

”Somebody moved that we not include Auntie Pau, because she’s eighty-six.” Ip turned the page round for me. ”It failed. Eleven to twenty. The feeling was that if we start making exceptions for the ones we like, it isn’t a principle, it’s a grudge.”

”What does being underlined mean?”

”Nothing official.” She said it without a flicker. ”It means it’s on the wall. People can read it. We’re not doing anything to anybody.”

”Nine people in this village can’t get work.”

”That’s not the underlining, that’s people deciding who they hire.” Ip refilled the pot. ”I can’t make anybody hire anybody. That’d be telling people what to think, wouldn’t it.”

And there it is. I sat in that clean little hall with the tidy minute book and the ruled line and the tea, and I understood that nobody in that room had done one single thing you could point at. They had held a meeting. They had read out a true document. They had declined to make exceptions for people they liked, which is the exact shape of fairness, and they had carefully not instructed anybody to do anything.

”Auntie Pau,” I said. ”What did she do?”

Ip looked at the wall.

”Filing,” she said. ”Thirty years ago. In Hunsang.” A pause, the first one. ”I don’t actually know what that means. Nobody’s asked her. It didn’t come up.”

”Would you ask her?”

”She’s eighty-six,” said Ip. ”It’d upset her.”

— • —

I went to see Hong.

He was staying in his daughter’s back room, which had one window and a stack of what he had got out of the workshop, which was not much: a plane, a box of chisels, a kettle.

”I’ve not got anything to say that helps,” he said, before I sat down. ”I know what you’re here for and I’ve thought about it and I haven’t got it.”

”I’m not here for a statement.”

”Everybody’s here for a statement.” He sat on the bed. ”I copied orders. That’s what I did. Nineteen years, three hundred days a year, a desk by a window. I wrote out what was put in front of me in a good clear hand, because that was the job and I was good at it.”

”Did you know what they were?”

Hong was quiet a long time.

”I knew what the form was,” he said. ”Form eleven. We all knew what form eleven was for. Nobody ever said it out loud in that office, not once, in nineteen years.” He looked at his hands. ”So yes. I knew. I have known I knew since about the fourth year and I have not had a night off from it since the Archive opened.”

”Did you ever not write one?”

”Twice,” said Hong. ”Twice in nineteen years. Once because the name was a boy I’d played with, and once because I was ill.” He said it without any defence in it at all. ”Two, out of thousands. I’d like to tell you I’ve worked out a number that makes it all right and I haven’t, and I’m sixty-one, and my workshop’s gone, and my daughter’s neighbours have stopped talking to her.” He shrugged. ”That man Yuan’s not wrong about me. That’s the bit nobody expects me to say. He’s not wrong. He’s just not finished.”

That last word sat in my chest all the way home.