Mayor Imogen Petrakis (Human)

Petrakis read the paragraph twice, once as a Mayor and once as a resident, and the two readings did not agree, which was the usual condition of the job and the reason she had wanted it.

The Mayor's reading was that Eden had been handed nothing and owed nothing: a crossing had ended on her habitat's dock, the Compact's own task force had looked at it with everything it had, and had written down that it could not say. Clean. Wayland's paragraphs were always clean; it was the thing Petrakis liked least about them and relied on most.

The resident's reading was that a sealed cradle had arrived on Eden heavier than it had left Halcyon, by an amount two certified instruments could not carry, and nobody could say why, and the sentence that said so had gone up to the Governor with no word beside it, while the people on Deck 9 were not going to be told a thing.

She had been elected on a platform that amounted to someone who reads the forms before they get filed. She had read this one. What she had not expected was that it would hand her, in the Compact's own flat prose, the best sentence she had ever had for the one argument she kept losing.

She had asked the Compact three times to fund an independent review of Eden's monitoring capacity — of what the habitat could see for itself, beside the Passage, separate from whatever the Corps and the Defence Command ran for the fold route and did not share. Three times the budget committee had declined, courteously, on the ground that the Passage was monitored by the people chartered to monitor it. She had never had a fact to put against that. She had the Patience First, which was more than a century old, and a compliance framework of thirteen requirements and counting, and a conviction, which is not a fact. Now she had a cradle. A sealed consignment arrived on Eden heavier than it left, and no instrument the habitat holds can say why. Every word of it true. It would move the committee. She knew it would, in the way she knew a quorum by looking at a room.

Wayland came up, and Petrakis did not offer her a chair, because Wayland never took one, and asked the question the paragraph had been built not to answer.

"Is it one of ours."

"Nobody is entitled to say so." Wayland had the file under her arm and did not open it. "The Commander declined to, in writing, and gave the reason: the crossing ran dock to dock, the instruments are the Compact's, nothing in it touched the Passage. He had the standing to write that sentence and chose not to. We have less standing than he has."

"I'm not asking what anyone is entitled to. I'm asking what you'd say to a fabricator on Deck 9 who wants to know why his feedstock was opened in front of two bureaus and a notary before he was allowed to have it."

"The same paragraph I sent you. I sent it to the Chief Commissioner as well." Wayland's voice did not change. "I don't have a third one, Mayor. I looked."

That was, Petrakis thought, the whole of it. She had the sentence. She also had a private rule, never stated in session, that a Mayor who asks every question she is entitled to ask stops being able to trust the answers she gets to the ones that matter, and she had found that it held for facts as it held for questions. A fact she was entitled to use was not a fact she was obliged to spend. Put the cradle in front of the committee and the review would be funded on a number nobody could explain, and the first thing an independent reviewer would ask, on the first morning, was what the number had to do with the monitoring they had been paid to review. The answer was nothing. The cradle had not come from beside Eden. It had come from Halcyon, in bond, through the Compact's own hall, on the Compact's own instruments, and the Compact had looked at it and said so. Attach that to the Passage and she would be doing with a Mayor's sentence what the task force had refused to do with a Commander's.

"The fabricator," she said. "Has he been told what the notary saw."

"He has the notary's statement. He also has a complaint in with the bureau, about five weeks of presses standing idle. That one is the Superintendent's."

Petrakis let the sentence go. She did not file it anywhere; a thing she decided not to say in session she did not keep for a later one. What stayed with her, after Wayland had gone back down, was smaller and worse. She had wanted an independent review because she did not trust the Compact to see what was beside Eden. It had just looked, as hard as it could, at the one object nobody had asked it to look at, and written down that it could not say — which was a finding, and an honest one, and exactly the finding she had been afraid a review would come back with.