Space Commissioner Zara Wayland (Human)

The bureau's closure came up through her office the way everything from the bureau did, and she appended it, identically, to the paragraph already on both desks.

Calloway's office acknowledged it without comment, which was how Calloway's office acknowledged a thing that needed nothing. The Mayor's office acknowledged it with one word, noted, which from Petrakis after a conversation in which she had plainly wanted something was close to a kindness, and Wayland took it as one and did not say so.

She looked at the two lines of her own file before she closed it. Both ends of the post now held the same two paragraphs in the same words, and she had not once had to choose a word for one reader over the other, because there had been nothing in either paragraph that either office could have wanted more of. The rule had cost nothing. It had never cost nothing before, and she understood, without needing to write it anywhere, that this was not because the rule had got easier.

Eden's own record said closed, and was about two presses on Deck 9, and was true. The rest stood on a record that was not hers, under a name that was not hers, and both her offices held it in the same words. She had never, in the post, had so little to say to either of them, and been so certain of every word.