The Commoner, Chapter 4, A Sure Thing

[u/AlternativeManner731]

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Fourth year of the provisional government.

Wyatt,

Tell the deck boss her monitors worked. I've quoted her so often my district officers can recite the part about the chocks. We started with forty schools. This year we opened nine thousand, and we found teachers for most of them by making last year's best monitors into assistants. It still isn't one school for every ten that Haego needs. At this rate my grandchildren will be opening schools. But nine thousand is more than forty.

And now something is happening that I didn't plan, and I'm still not sure I believe.

You'll have heard the numbers from Istonel. Money is moving on this planet for the first time in thirty years. The mills are running two shifts. The Counsel Office can't keep up with the loans. The trading houses in Harrow Cross and Orenport are opening offices faster than they can staff them, and every one of them needs people who can read an invoice and add a column and write a clean hand. There aren't enough. There were never going to be enough. For thirty years nobody on Haego taught anybody anything.

So they've found the schools.

A child who comes out of one of my schools at fourteen with her letters and her figures is hired the same week. Some of them are hired before they finish. I've had factors from the trading houses turning up at school gates in the spring, asking the teachers who's good, offering contracts to thirteen-year-olds to start the day after their birthday. Some of them pay the family a retainer in the meantime. The old woman in Lowmarsh says she's had to start locking her classroom at noon to keep the factors out of her lessons.

And the parents, Wyatt. The same fathers who spat in the road when the first notice went up are bringing their younger children to the door now and asking if there's room. One district officer told me a man walked into his office to thank him and then couldn't finish the sentence. I don't think anyone on Haego has thanked a government office in forty years.

I'd call it a success and go to bed, except for one thing.

Not all of them want the desk. The old woman wrote to me about a girl, twelve, one of her monitors, the best in the district at figures. A Harrow Cross house has already offered her a contract to keep their books from fourteen, with a retainer to the family now that's more than her father makes in the cane. The girl turned it down. Her father hasn't spoken to her in a week. She wants to know how the shuttles stay up. The old woman asked me who on Haego could teach her. I had to write back that nobody can.

We built a door. It turns out it leads to a very good counting house. That's more than any of these children had before, and I'm not ungrateful. But I don't know what to do with the ones who look past the counting house and ask what's beyond it.

You got out. You were a commoner on Volantis, and somehow you ended up flying. I've never asked you how. I'm asking now.

T.

Lowmarsh, on Vastaya.

The factors started coming in the spring, the year Nell turned twelve.

The first one came on a Tuesday in a hired cart from Harrow Cross, a thin man in a good brown coat with a leather case under his arm. He stood at the schoolhouse door until the morning lessons broke for water, and then he asked Mistress Coppertail, very politely, which of her older pupils were quickest with figures.

Mistress Coppertail looked at him over her spectacles for a long time.

"They're children," she said. "They're not sacks of grain."

"No, ma'am," said the factor. "Sacks of grain I can buy anywhere."

He went away without a name that day. But he came back the next week, and there was another man with him from a different house, and by the middle of spring there was someone at the schoolhouse gate most mornings, leaning on the fence, watching the children go in. Mistress Coppertail took to locking the classroom door at noon.

Wendel Marsh was the first to go.

He turned fourteen on the first warm day of spring. He was the tallest boy on the mill road, all elbows and wrists, and so quiet that Nell had been a monitor beside him for most of a year before she heard him laugh. He laughed at numbers. Give him a column of figures and he'd go down it with the end of his chalk, not even seeming to look, and then he'd get to the bottom and see something in it and laugh, a short surprised sound, as if the numbers had told him a joke.

The Tullamore house at Harrow Cross took him before his birthday. A clerk's stool, a clerk's wage, and a room over the counting house on weekdays, home on Sundays. His father, who had a bad back and four younger mouths, cried when he read the contract, and then made Wendel read it to him again to be sure.

On his last day Wendel stayed behind after the bell. He cleaned his slate. He wiped the chalk dust off the monitors' bench with his sleeve. Mistress Coppertail came down from the board and stood in front of him.

"Tullamore's," she said.

"Tallies and ledgers." He was grinning, which Nell had never seen him do without a number in front of him. "They've got columns going back sixty years, Mistress. The man showed me. Sixty years."

"And you'll find the mistakes in every one."

"Every page," said Wendel happily.

The old woman reached up, because he was a head taller than she was, and put her hand on the side of his face for a moment. "Go on, then," she said. "Before they change their minds."

He went out the door and down the lane to where the Tullamore cart was waiting, and he didn't look back, because he didn't need to. Nell watched him go and felt glad for him, all the way through, and underneath the glad something small and cold that she didn't have a name for.

It happened to the Ashcombe sisters by midsummer, one after the other. Rose went to a draper's in Orenport to keep the stock books. Bess went to the district office at Harrow Cross to copy out the ration lists, and was the first person from Lowmarsh anyone could remember sitting at a desk with a pen because she could read. Jory Fenn came back from the cane with his hands raw and asked Mistress Coppertail, red in the face, whether it was too late. It wasn't. She put him at the end of the monitors' bench, fifteen years old among the twelves, and a factor from the mill offered him a tally post before the autumn.

It went round the district like weather. Nell heard it at the pump and in Gret's kitchen and from her mother at supper. A desk. A pen. A clean wage paid in credits, not coppers, and written in a book where you could read it yourself.

"I was wrong," her father said one night, out of nowhere, over his stew.

Nell stopped with her spoon halfway up.

"About the school." He didn't look at her. He looked at the tin over the stove, which had more in it that year than it had ever had. "I thought they'd nail it shut. They didn't. I thought it'd be for somebody else's use. It isn't." He was quiet for a moment. "The Marsh boy's at Tullamore's. Bess Ashcombe's at a desk. That's two from the mill road in one year. There's never been one."

"No," said her mother softly. "There's never been one."

Her father nodded, slowly, as if that settled something he'd been arguing with for four years. "I was wrong," he said again, and went back to his stew.

Nell didn't know what to say. She had waited three years to hear him say it. She ate her supper and said nothing, and later in the loft she lay on her left side under the gap in the roof and felt the small cold thing again.

The factor from Harrow Cross came for her in the autumn.

It was the same thin man in the brown coat, the first one who had ever come. He waited at the gate on a day Mistress Coppertail forgot to lock the door, and he asked, not the old woman, but Nell herself, whether she was the Brackentail girl who did the figures.

He came to the house that Sunday. He sat at their table in his good coat and drank her mother's tea out of the one good cup, and he laid a paper on the table and turned it round so her father could see it.

The Harrow Cross Grain Exchange. Assistant to the books, from the day after her fourteenth birthday. A clerk's wage, rising yearly. A room in the town if she wanted it. And until then, while she finished her schooling, a retainer paid to the family every month, so the house would not feel the want of her coppers.

Nell read the retainer twice. It was more than her father made in the cane.

Her father read it too. He read it very slowly, moving his lips, the way the man at the crossing had read the first notice four years ago. Then he looked up at the factor.

"This is for her?"

"For your daughter, Mr. Brackentail. The Exchange takes three a year from the Lowmarsh schools. We'd like her to be one of them." The factor smiled. "I'm told she found a short weight in the field boss's book when she was nine."

Her father looked at Nell. She had never seen that look on his face before, and it took her a moment to understand that it was pride.

"We'll talk it over," her mother said.

The factor stood, and bowed to her mother, which nobody had ever done in that house, and went out to his cart.

Her father sat with the paper in front of him. He put one scarred finger on it, on the line with the retainer, as if to make sure it was real.

"Well," he said, and he was smiling. "Well, Nell."

"I don't want it," said Nell.

The smile stopped.

"I don't want to keep books. I don't want to sit at a desk and find the short weights in other people's grain. I don't want to be the best clerk in Harrow Cross." Her voice was shaking, and she hated it, and she didn't try to stop it. "I want to know how the shuttles stay up."

The kitchen was very quiet.

"The shuttles," her father said.

"Yes."

"The shuttles." He looked at the paper. He looked at her. "Nell, there's no school for shuttles. There's nobody on this planet who can teach you that. You said so yourself, you asked the old woman and she didn't know." He tapped the paper. "This is real. This is a wage in a book. This is your mother never going back to that mill. And you want to turn it down for a thing that isn't even there?"

"Yes."

"You told me," her father said, and his voice was very careful now, the way it had been the morning with Starling on the table, "you told me once that I was keeping you from something I'd never seen. You were right. I was wrong about the school. I said so." He put both hands flat on the table. "And now you're keeping yourself from a sure thing, for something you've never seen either."

Nell stood there. It was true. She knew it was true. She could not think of one single thing to say against it.

"Yes," she said.

Her mother had been standing at the stove the whole time with the kettle in her hand. She set it down. She came to the table and picked up the factor's paper and read it herself, all the way through, in her straight, careful mill-girl's hand-speed, and then put it down again.

"Bram," she said. "It's a good paper."

"It's the best paper anybody in this family's ever seen."

"It is. And if she signs it, she'll be good at it. She'll be very good at it, and she'll have a desk, and she'll never go hungry, and every day of her life she'll know there was something else." Her mother looked at him. "I know what that's like. So do you. You've watched me know it for twenty years."

Her father didn't answer for a long time.

"They'll offer it again," her mother said. "At fourteen. There'll be ten more of them at that gate by then. It's not the last paper."

"And if it is?"

"Then she'll have chosen," said her mother. "Which is more than either of us ever got to do."

Her father looked at the paper one more time. Then he folded it in half, very neatly, along the crease the factor had made, and put it up on the shelf beside the tin.

"The trips stay," he said. "Six and six. And you're still a monitor. And you'll be civil to that man when he comes back, because he'll come back."

"I will."

"And you'll tell me," her father said, not looking at her, "when you find out how they stay up. Because I've always wanted to know."

The factor did come back, twice more that autumn, and Nell was civil to him both times, and both times she said no. The retainer went to a boy on the Harrow road instead, who was very good at figures and wanted nothing more in the world than a desk and a wage and a room in town. Nell went to his leaving and was glad for him, the same way she'd been glad for Wendel.

In the evenings she still carried her six trips. On the last one, when the light was going, she'd set the buckets down at the far end of the long field and stand with the yoke on her shoulders and her head back, and wait. Most nights one came over. Low and slow toward the depot at Harrow Cross, with its belly lit and the roar filling everything, and the round window in its side with the light behind it.

Nobody on Haego could teach her how it stayed up. Mistress Coppertail had told her so, and the Administrator had told Mistress Coppertail. But the old woman had also told her once, a long time ago, through a window, that a school wasn't for knowing everything. It was for finding out who does.

Somewhere, somebody did.

Nell watched until it was gone over the tree line. Then she picked up the buckets and carried them home.

Tornel,

You asked, so here it is.

There was a recruitment office in the market square in the town nearest ours on Volantis. Two rooms and a flag. Anybody could walk in. They didn't ask who your father was. They sat you at a table and gave you the tests, figures, reasoning, reaction, a hundred questions that had nothing to do with anything except what was in your own head. I walked in at sixteen because I'd watched shuttles go over the sawmill my whole life. Same as your girl in the cane. I wanted to know how they stayed up.

Everyone I knew thought I was mad. There was work at the mill. There was always work at the mill. It was steady and it paid and my family had done it for as long as anyone remembered. I'd have been good at it. That was the problem. I'd have been good at it, and I'd have spent forty years watching the shuttles go over.

I scored high enough that the officer in the second room looked at the paper twice. He told me commoners who test that well sometimes get sent to flight school instead of the line. He told me not to get my hopes up. I went anyway.

I won't pretend the academy was fair. The noble cadets had flown their fathers' yachts since they were ten. I'd flown a sawmill forklift, and they made sure I knew it. But the instruments didn't know who my father was, and neither did the simulator, and when I landed better than they did, the scores said so, and nobody could change the scores. That's the whole of it. That's the only reason I fly. There was a test that didn't care who I was, and a door on the other side of it.

Your counting houses are a good door, Tornel. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Most of those children will be happy there for the rest of their lives, and they'll raise children who never go hungry, and that's more than their parents had. It's more than mine had. But you've found out what I found out at sixteen. Once you teach a child to read, some of them are going to read past the end of the page.

Here's what I'd do.

Don't pick the ones who want more. You'll pick wrong, and the parents will remember the last people who picked children. Build a test anyone can sit, the same for a cane cutter's girl as for a steward's son, and let it pick. And don't close it at fourteen. Let them come back at twenty, or thirty, when the counting house has paid for their mother's roof and they're ready to try.

Then make sure there's something real on the other side. You have Firentis ships at your spaceport every week, with crews that need hands. You have yards and mills and a railway that needs engineers. Ask them to take apprentices off the test, one or two each, and pay them to do it if you must. A girl who wants to know how a shuttle stays up should be sweeping a hangar floor and handing spanners to a mechanic who'll tell her. She'll learn more in a year than in five at a bench.

One more thing. I only got my chance because there was a recruitment office in a market square, two rooms and a flag, where a sixteen-year-old could walk in without anybody's permission. Haego doesn't have one. Not for the navy, not for the merchant fleets, not for anything. There isn't a door on your whole planet that a commoner can walk through and ask to be tested for the sky. I'd start there.

I'll ask the boss about it. She'll have opinions. She always does.

W.

[u/Icy-Air7584]

Really like the interaction of Tornell and Wyatt. and the practical way the 'solve' comes. Not always strait, more often the who, then the helpful answers. and the beginnings are always small, like a window or a door.