The Bureau of Something To Do

In a vast foundry hall lit orange by furnaces, ranks of brass automaton labourers work the whole depth of the room. In front, a man in a deep teal work-coat sits alone on a small wooden stool with his hands on his knees beside a delicate brass air-sensor with a trembling needle. A small brass medal hangs on a ribbon behind him.

It is skilled work, in its way. There is a diet. There is a schedule.

In Wend-Kabo the machines did all the work, so the Throne made idleness illegal.

Opening Scene

The Diligences came off the barges in crates, forty to a crate, and within two years there was nothing in Wend-Kabo they could not do better, faster, and without lunch. They ploughed. They tallied. They set bones. One of them wrote a poem about the harvest that made three separate grandmothers cry, which was considered a great triumph until people thought about it for a while.

The Throne studied the situation with enormous care and arrived at the only possible conclusion: the people had gone wrong.

Idleness, the Proclamation of Diligence explained, is a disease of the spirit. A citizen without occupation decays. He becomes sour, then talkative, then organised. Therefore, in its mercy, the Throne would provide. Every citizen of Wend-Kabo would hold a Certificate of Usefulness, renewable yearly, and would perform the occupation named upon it, and would be well.

The occupations were assigned by the Bureau of Meaningful Occupation, which was staffed by nine hundred people, none of whom the Diligences had replaced, because the Diligences had proven completely incapable of inventing a job that did not need doing.

Imperial Logic

The Certificate cost eleven coppers, which the Bureau pointed out was less than a goat.

An Occupation Clerk earned a portion of every Certificate issued, so occupations were issued liberally. Senior clerks advanced by the inventiveness of their assignments — there is a plaque in the Bureau's hall honouring the woman who devised Assistant to the Assistant Inspector of Buckets (Provisional), an office that has now been filled continuously for thirty years by people who have never met a bucket.

The scholars of the Throne produced tables proving that the Bureau now employed four times as many citizens as the Diligences had displaced, and presented this as evidence that the crisis had been solved rather than eaten.

The exemptions were, as ever, where the real craft lay. The great houses hold hereditary Sinecures, which are Certificates that name no duty at all, on the reasoning that a man of station is useful merely by continuing to exist in the correct part of town. And the Diligences themselves are exempt from the Proclamation entirely, being — the clerks explain, patiently, to anyone slow enough to ask — already useful.

Some of the assigned occupations, it must be said, are worse than others. There is an Official Sigher attached to every ministry, to sigh on behalf of officials too busy to sigh. There is a Second Opinion, whose licensed duty is to agree. There is a Rain Encourager, whose performance is assessed annually against the rainfall, and who has twice been formally commended.

And in the machine halls there is the Calibration Officer (Atmospheric) — one per hall — whose entire certified occupation is to sit among the Diligences and break wind at intervals, so that the air-sensors have something to measure themselves against. It is skilled work, in its way. There is a diet. There is a schedule. There is a small brass medal for twenty years' service, and eleven men have earned one.

The one clerk who ever wrote the obvious thing down — that the Diligences produced more than the city could eat, and that the people might simply be allowed to rest — did not lose his post. He was appointed to the Standing Committee on Long Reflection, which is a genuine honour, and which meets every fourth year, and which has now met twice.

Citizen Consequence

Fadu is the Calibration Officer (Atmospheric) of the Third Foundry Hall, and he is good at it, and he would like it noted that it is harder than it sounds.

He is forty-six. He was a joiner before the crates came, and a fine one — there are doors in the old quarter still hanging true that he hung at nineteen. Now he sits on a stool in a warm room full of brass and does what the Certificate says, and collects his stipend, and goes home, and does not talk about it much.

What he does after he goes home is the part the Bureau has never got its hands on.

Because in the evenings, in the lower quarter, the certified useless of Wend-Kabo do the actual work of the city. Fadu hangs doors.

The Official Sigher from the Ministry of Rivers is a very good midwife. The infirmary owns a Diligence that can measure a labouring woman's pulse, calculate the interval between contractions, predict blood loss, and tie a cleaner knot than she can. Women still send for the Sigher when they are frightened. She sits where they can see her. The machine has never understood why this matters, and the Bureau has never thought to ask.

In a lamplit room a woman in labour grips the bed frame while an older woman in everyday clothes sits on a stool pulled into her line of sight, holding her hand and her gaze and doing nothing technical. In the corner a brass automaton extends a fine instrument and takes a precise reading. The labouring woman is looking at the woman, not the machine.

The machine has never understood why this matters, and the Bureau has never thought to ask.

Two Bucket Inspectors run a school out of a boat shed. The Rain Encourager, who is eighty, sets more bones in a month than the infirmary does in a season, and has never been paid a copper for any of it, and would be deeply insulted by the suggestion.

None of it is certified. None of it appears in any tally. The Bureau of Meaningful Occupation has no line on its form for a man who is useful without permission, and so, administratively, none of this is happening — and half of what still works in that city is happening in exactly that column.

Ronin Monk Observation

The harvest comes in. The doors still need hanging. A frightened woman still reaches for a hand. And none of these facts seem to have taught the Bureau what usefulness is.

So watch the stool, the schedule, and the little brass medal. A throne that has solved the problem of necessary labour and immediately invents unnecessary labour is telling you what it fears. Not hunger. Not scarcity. The moment after both, when a person looks up with time enough to wonder who exactly all this is for.


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

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