Fourteen Parts, By Volume

Greetings again, my dear readers. Posted on the approach to Mixing House Six, outside the visitors' rail, on a panel that already has a good deal of other people's opinions under it.

I have spent the last two ticks going down. Not down as in a descent with a view of anything, because there is no view and there is nowhere in this district you could stand and get one. Down as in a service lift with a rated load painted inside it, then a landing, then another lift that only runs when the first one has finished, then a corridor that is warm along one wall and cold along the other and has a stencil every twenty paces telling you which wall is which, in case you had somehow failed to notice with your entire body. The Lower Plenum is not a place you arrive at. It is a place you keep getting further into, and then a door opens and the sound changes, and that is how you know.

The sound is the thing I want to give you first, because I do not think I will be able to give it to you later. It is a low, wide, absolutely even note, and it does not waver, and it is coming out of a room roughly the size of a freight hall with a walkway hung down the middle of it at about the height of a third floor. Under the walkway: fourteen columns, ranked, dressed in grey lagging with the lagging tags still on, going down further than the light goes. That is a mixing house. There are nine of them on this tier, and this one serves about a third of the city, and I am going to be honest with you and say that when I walked out onto that gantry I stopped, and I did not have a professional reason for stopping.

Here is the wrong thing, and it is not hidden, and nobody down here would even accept the word wrong for it.

Every public interior in this jurisdiction is on one blend. Not one standard with local variation. One blend, mixed to one specification, certified against one set of reference bottles, and pumped into every concourse, hall, stairwell, waiting room, plenum, refectory and licensed premises in the merged city and in eleven thousand jurisdictions that adopted the standard because adopting it was free and writing your own was not.

It is fourteen parts by volume. One part per founding accession, weighted.

I asked what weighted meant and I will get to that, because it is the entry, but first I want the plain fact on the page. Nobody in this city is comfortable in the air. Everybody in this city is survivable in it. Those are not my words, those are the two lines of the published service objective, in that order, and the second one is the one that is met. There is a tolerance on the first one and the tolerance is described, in the standard, as aspirational, which is a lovely piece of writing and I mean that with no edge at all.

You can feel it, incidentally, once somebody tells you. There is a flat note under everything, a slight dryness at the back of the throat that everyone here has had since they were born and therefore does not have a word for, and residents who spend a quarter out at an unserved address come back and say the outside air smells like a room. Not fresh. Like a room. They are quite firm about it.

[Also posted- at the top of every tick the blend re-datums against the reference set, which takes about forty seconds, and during those forty seconds everybody's voice drops fractionally. Nobody stops talking. Nobody waits it out. A whole gantry crew simply goes down half a tone together and comes back up and carries on with the same sentence, and I stood there with my mouth open like a tourist, which, in fairness.]

Her name is Ilvath and she has run Mixing House Six for a long time and she is the reason this notice exists.

I want to describe the plant before I describe her, because she would prefer it that way and because it is true: that room is the best run thing I have stood in since I came to this city, and I include some very expensive rooms in that. Every valve is labelled. Every label is current. The floor is dry. The log at the head of the gantry is written up in one hand, in ink, to the minute, and when I asked whether the ink was a requirement she said no, the requirement is legible, and ink is legible in a hundred clicks and the other thing is not. There is a fault board and there are two faults on it and both of them have a name and a date next to them and the dates are recent.

Ilvath does not stop moving while she talks, and she checks things with the flat of her hand rather than looking at them, running it down a lagging seam the way you would run a hand along a wall in the dark, and about every third seam she stops for half a beat and then carries on. I asked, eventually, what she was feeling for. She said she was not feeling for anything. She said if you take your hand off the plant for a shift you come back a stranger to it, and she would rather not be a stranger to something that is doing that much work in the dark under a third of a city.

At the end of a shift she goes to her locker and takes out the calibration kit, and inside the calibration kit are the certified reference bottles, one per founding accession, in a foam bed, each with a seal and a certificate number and an expiry, and she opens one for whoever has come down to ask.

They do come down to ask. There is no queue for it, because there is no procedure for it, because it is not a thing that exists. A resident comes to the gantry door at the end of the shift, and Ilvath gets the kit, and asks which one, and they tell her, and she warms the bottle against the inside of her wrist for a slow count before she cracks the seal, because a reference mix reads wrong cold and she is not going to hand anybody a wrong reading of their own world. Then she holds it up and they have a breath of it.

It is close and it is not right. Every single one of them says so. Ilvath agrees with them, every time, without any softening, because she has read the certificate and she knows exactly how close it is and exactly which way it is off, and she will tell you the figure if you ask.

And then they come back next month.

While I was there it was a woman called Hrolvi, off shift, still in her tabard, who came to the door and did not knock. Ilvath said which one, and Hrolvi said the second listed, and Ilvath went into the foam bed and came out with a bottle and warmed it on her wrist and cracked it, and Hrolvi took the breath with both hands around the neck of the bottle and gave it straight back, and said, it is not right, and Ilvath said, no, and that was the whole transaction. Hrolvi went off to the lift. She will be back next month. There are three bottles in that kit filed under her people, under three different descriptions, and she asked for the second one by name, and neither of them found that a remarkable way to place an order, and I did not ask, because it was the end of a shift and it was not my business.

Nobody has ever given Ilvath permission to do any of this. Nobody has ever stopped her either, and she has been doing it long enough that if anyone were going to, they would have.

Now the mechanism, and she gave it to me straight through without stopping once, which by now is the thing I expect from everyone in this city and it still gets me every time.

Weighted means weighted by population share. The share for each founding accession was taken at the merge, from the only headcount anybody had. The only headcount anybody had was the survey record: how many people of each kind were written down as being there, by whoever was doing the writing down, at the time the writing down happened. Those shares went into the blend calculation once, at the founding, and they have been the shares ever since.

Nobody has hidden this. It is printed on the plate at the head of the gantry.

Ilvath's view, and she is right, is that the shares are now a description of a galaxy that has not existed for a very long time, and that this does not matter as much as I want it to. Rebalancing the blend is not a calculation, it is a recertification: every plant on the tier, every reference set, every licensed premises that certifies against the standard, every jurisdiction that adopted it. She has costed it. She showed me the costing. It has been prepared four times, and it is correct, and it is filed.

So the standard holds. Correctly. It will go on holding, and the plant will go on being run beautifully, and the air will go on being close and not right, and everybody will go on being survivable in it, and Ilvath will go on being able to tell you the exact figure by which it is off.

I read the plate on the way out because I read everything now.

BLEND SCHEDULE. AIR TO STANDARD BLEND, FOURTEEN PARTS BY VOLUME. LICENCE CLASS 47/C. CERTIFY AGAINST REFERENCE SET ONLY. RE DATUM 0000 EACH TICK. Then the schedule itself, in two columns, accession number and share, and there are more lines in it than there are accessions, because three of the lines carry the same number under three different descriptions and somebody has ruled them together with a bracket and a hand written sum. Then, at the foot, in the same size as everything else: THIS PLANT SERVES 1/3. COVERAGE UNDER REVIEW.

[Also posted- the re datum runs at midnight, and midnight down here is not midnight anywhere in this city. It is midnight on a clock belonging to the body that wrote the standard, and that body's day is not this day, so the whole tier resets at a time that lines up with absolutely nothing. Ilvath's crew call it plant midnight and change shift around it without complaining, and I asked whose day it is, and she said she has never needed to know.]

I have written the notice up and it is on the wall and it is accurate. It says what the blend is, what weighted means, where the shares came from, and what the recertification would cost, and it says that the plant on this tier is run to a standard the specification does not deserve. All of that is true and none of it is news to a single person who works down here, and the panel gets a roller in forty eight ticks.

I pressed the bottom corner flat with my thumb until the paste took, because that is the corner that lifts.