The Abolition of the Middle

An assessment station in a brick workshop street: a brass scale with a coin on one pan and an elaborate unexplained device on the other. Beside it a dignified official in bone-white, badge on his chest, is mid-sneeze with streaming eyes and a crushed handkerchief. A long queue of people in rust and ochre working clothes waits, one wearing borrowed gloves. Two figures in ultramarine walk past unassessed.

He assessed eleven hundred people that day. There is no villain in it anywhere.

Kessareth found the middle class administratively inefficient, so it was discontinued.

Opening Scene

The problem was never wealth. The Tidy Throne wants this understood, and has said so in three separate proclamations, each shorter and more irritated than the last.

The problem was forms.

A survey of the Registry found that Kessareth maintained eleven distinct stations of life, and that nine of them lived in the middle, and that the middle generated ninety-one per cent of all paperwork in the empire — appeals, reclassifications, disputed thresholds, a man who had risen half a station by marriage and wished this reflected in his hat. The Registry employed four hundred clerks. Three hundred and sixty of them did nothing but adjudicate the middle.

So the middle was discontinued.

The Ordinance of Clear Station was not cruel and did not pretend to be generous. It observed that two stations require one boundary, and that one boundary requires almost no clerks at all, and that this saving would be passed to the public. There would henceforth be the Up and the Down. Every citizen would be assessed once, assigned once, and never troubled about it again.

They were true to their word about the last part.

Imperial Logic

An Assessor of Station earned a flat fee per soul assessed, which sounds fair and is the entire reason the great reassignment took nine days instead of nine years.

Senior Assessors advanced by throughput. The scholars of the Throne produced tables proving that a two-station empire was forty times more legible than an eleven-station one, and were cited, and promoted, and were of course assessed Up, since a scholar of the Throne is Up by definition, and a definition is much cheaper to administer than an assessment.

The great houses were not assessed at all. There was no need. The Ordinance defines the Up as those whose station has never been in question, which is the most efficient sentence the Registry has ever produced and does the work of an entire army.

The assessment itself was performed by the Balance of Station, a fine brass scale with a standard coin on one pan, and a device of some complexity which measured — the Registry never fully explained this — bearing. Citizens quickly worked out what it seemed to like. Coats were borrowed. Hands were softened with lard. A whole trade sprang up in a week teaching the Up manner of clearing one's throat, and the man who taught it was assessed Down, which his students found instructive.

And there was the Nose.

The Registry maintained one certified Assessor of Station by scent — a hereditary post, a genuinely gifted man, capable of placing a stranger within a station and a half at forty paces, and used chiefly in disputed cases. On the fourth day of the great reassignment he arrived at the Coopers' Quarter with a head cold so complete that he could not smell his own breakfast.

He assessed eleven hundred people that day. He assessed them all Down.

The finding stands. It has to; the Ordinance says every citizen is assessed once and never troubled again, and an appeal requires a fee that only the Up can raise, and so the entire Coopers' Quarter — four streets of skilled men and women who owned their tools and their roofs and their futures — went Down in an afternoon because a man had a cold. There is no villain in it anywhere. That is what people find hard about the story.

Citizen Consequence

Bimke made coats in the Coopers' Quarter, good ones, for people one station above her, which is the natural market for a good coat.

That market no longer exists. The Up buy from Up tailors. The Down cannot buy a coat like Bimke's, and Bimke, being Down, cannot buy the cloth to make one. She now repairs. There is a great deal of repairing.

But go up to the Coopers' Quarter on a Fifthday evening and you will see the thing the Registry cannot see, which is that the middle came back within a year, and it came back off the books.

They call themselves the Almosts. It is a joke that stopped being one. There is a way an Almost keeps a doorstep. There is a subscription, four coppers a month, that pays for a doctor to come to the four streets. There are rules about whose children may court whose, which are strict, and unwritten, and universally understood, and which nobody would dream of putting on a form. There is a hierarchy in there fully as intricate as the nine stations the Ordinance abolished, and it took eleven months to grow back, and it will outlive the Throne.

The Registry has never assessed an Almost. It cannot. There is no station on the form, and a thing without a station cannot be adjudicated, and a thing that cannot be adjudicated does not, in the language of Kessareth, obtain.

Bimke is a fairly senior Almost. It is not nothing. It is not a coat sold, either.

Four brick streets meet on a lamplit evening with washing lines overhead and the whole neighbourhood out on scrubbed doorsteps. Everyone wears something muted violet — a sash, a headwrap, a ribbon — in amounts that clearly differ from step to step. A doctor with a bag is walked from door to door, and two families hold a formal conversation while their children pretend not to listen.

It took eleven months to grow back, and it will outlive the Throne.

Ronin Monk Observation

They will tell you it is about efficiency, and it truly is — but ask what had to be made simple for the efficiency to appear.

A living city is inconvenient. It grows trades between trades, obligations between households, little ranks nobody appointed, doctors paid by four streets, rules nobody wrote, people who are neither one thing nor the other and insist on remaining difficult to sort. That is expensive to put on a form.

So watch for the day a throne simplifies you into a category broad enough to administer cheaply. And when four streets rebuild nine vanished stations out of doorsteps, subscriptions, marriages, reputation, skill and memory, do not mistake the complication for failure. The complication is the life coming back. They are refusing to let the state be the only thing that decides what they are.


ARCHIVE STATUS: Non-Canon Dispatch — Elements may be elevated into official Sky Khan canon only by Creator approval.

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