The tea in the back office of the Dunnigan Ratepayers' Assembly is real tea, steeped twice, in a mug with the lock authority's old crest on it. In a town on federal water rationing, serving real tea to a reporter is a statement about who has slack in their week. I drank it. I want that on the record early, because nothing after this is going to flatter anybody who was in that room, and I was in that room.
Halden Price is sixty-one. He spent twenty-two years as an allocation clerk for the lock authority, retired on a partial, and now chairs an association of ratepayers that began as a complaint about supplementary draw and is now the largest political body in the interior corridor. He wears a spent water purity strip in a brass lapel sleeve. Everyone in the hall wears one. It is the kind of strip you dip in a jug and read against a card, and once it has been read it is trash, and the Assembly has turned trash into a pin.
He set his own recorder on the table before I set down mine. Two men stood near the door for the full ninety minutes and never sat. I have done a lot of interviews in rooms I did not control. This was the politest of them.
The Assembly filed a permit on the sixth of August for an evening walk on the twelfth. Route: the hall on Fourth Lift, down Mill Cut, to the ration office, dispersal by twenty-one hundred. Two point one kilometers. The Assembly had walked it three times before with no trouble, and the permit is a public document that anyone in Dunnigan Lock can pull for free.
At ten past four on the afternoon of the twelfth, the route was amended in pen. The amendment adds two blocks: Cutbank Row, east side, north to south. The initials beside the change are Price's. Cutbank Row is where nineteen of the town's registered gene-forged households live, because the borough put them there in 2061 when the registry came in, on the theory that keeping the permits on one street would simplify inspection.
Nineteen doors were entered that night. Three people died. The borough incident count lists two of them by household permit number, because the registry files forged households by permit and the clerk who wrote the count used the file she had in front of her. The third has a name in the record only because a neighbor supplied it. Suun Ferreira, twenty-seven, a hall runner, marked clean, which means she could have walked through that crowd and been fine and did not.
Price's account of the amendment has not changed since the first week. A marshal suggested it for crowd flow, because Mill Cut narrows at the culvert and four hundred people do not get through the narrow part quickly. He will not give me the marshal's name. He says he does not remember it. He says he signed a lot of paper that afternoon.
Twelve minutes later, explaining why the Assembly's allocation figures are sound, he cited the supplementary draw attached to permit block 4400 through 4418 from memory, without notes, to the decimal.
Cutbank Row is permit block 4400 through 4418.
I read the numbers back and asked whether a man who carries that block in his head could route four hundred angry people down it by accident. He said the two facts were unrelated. He said clerks remember blocks, and that he had been a clerk for twenty-two years. Both of those statements are true. Neither is an answer. He knew it, and he let the silence sit instead of filling it, which is the most honest thing he did all afternoon.
The arithmetic the Assembly campaigns on is real, and it is presented in a way built to mislead. A registered gene-forged household draws a supplementary medical allocation, because suppression meds need clean water to take and cold storage to hold. On the town's posted totals, a forged household of four therefore consumes more water than a baseline household of four. The Assembly prints that comparison on a card and hands it out at the door of the hall.
The supplementary line is federal. It does not come out of Dunnigan's share. The town loses nothing. I asked Price whether he had ever said that from the podium. He said, "People don't read the line item. They read the total." He did not offer it as a confession. He said it the way a clerk describes a form.
The pins are printed by a novelty shop on the lift road at three a strip, and the Assembly keeps a dollar of the three. Nineteen hundred sold in six weeks. It is the only line in the Assembly's books that has grown this year.
Orin Laak is forty-four, badger build, eleven years on Lock Three. On the night of the twelfth the crowd took him off his own step and broke his right hand with a lock bar, and his daughter Meja, who is nine and scans baseline, went four blocks in the dark to find a medic who would come out to Cutbank Row. He was in the culvert about forty minutes. He asked me to make sure I wrote that the medic came.
Lock Three's tainter gate actuator froze on the twenty-seventh of August. It does that in heat. When it freezes, somebody has to crank the gate open by hand, and Laak is the hand, and on the twenty-seventh he did it left-handed. Four hours instead of ninety minutes. Everything Dunnigan Lock drank on the twenty-eighth came through that gate.
I asked at the Assembly hall whether anyone there knew the gate had been opened by hand that week. Nobody did. They were drinking it.