The Shadow Sire

Chapter 10: Sing More, Talk Less

The tap in the matron's room ran cold for a count of eight and then ran colder. Rook put his hands under it, then his face, and stood with the water running off his chin.

He had slept, and it hadn't helped. The loudspeaker out in the yard had been talking straight through the wall since before he sat up, because the loudspeaker did not care what anybody was doing.

"Good morning, Pen Fourteen."

A woman's voice. Warm, the ends of the words rounded off, the vowels opened out wide, the way a woman reads to children she does not have to look at. There was music behind it, bright, handclaps in it, and the music was held down low so the words came first.

"Lights-on was at six. Breakfast is served in the yard at six-fifteen. Rations are calculated by weight and condition. They are not negotiable. Berries will present themselves at the scale in single file. Berries will not crowd the scale. Berries will not touch the scale."

He dried his face on his sleeve. The voice went on with a small pause before each new part, the pause of somebody taking a breath at the top of a paragraph.

"The greatest good available to any berry is to eat and to sleep. These have been provided. The happiness index for Pen Fourteen stands at ninety-one and is reviewed quarterly. A berry who has reason to believe the index is incorrect should bring it to his matron."

Rook had both hands on the rim of the basin by then. The water kept going.

"Berries are reminded to stay alert to unusual thoughts. An unusual thought is a symptom of berry cancer of the brain. Berry cancer of the brain is fatal in the majority of recorded cases. A berry who notices unusual thoughts in himself, or in a neighbor, will report them to the matron. A berry will not report them to a neighbor."

"Sure it does," Rook told the basin. "Don't try that on the illiterate. Cancer of the brain makes you think."

He turned the water off with his elbow, put his coat on, and went out along the landing past the feed store, where the sacks were stacked to the ceiling and the air was thick with ground grain and something under it, and down the stairwell.

The stairwell door was steel with a brass lens set into it at neck height, scratched to hell from people leaning into it, and Rook leaned into it. Something inside the door clicked twice, argued with itself, and let go, and the cold came up over him smelling of wet concrete and bleach and, under both of those, of the pens.

Twelve steps to the landing, twelve more, and his knees did the thing they did now, which was not much.

The yard was neither day nor dark. The strips overhead had come up all the way and turned everything under them the color of a bathroom — the concrete, the women's forearms, the wet patch around the drain, the bowls. It was cold enough for your breath to show, and no breath showed; the light was too flat and too white to keep it.

Thirty-odd women were up and working. The children were in a line.

The line ran to the feeder, a square machine against the wall with a hopper on top, a chute at the bottom, and a bowl-shaped recess worn into the concrete under the chute. In front of it, set flush into the floor, stood the scale: a steel plate the size of a big man's two feet, a screen on a stalk, a strip of red light behind smoked glass. A cart waited at the end of the feeder with the morning's kibble heaped up in it.

The plumpers stood in the line with their bowls against their chests in both arms. They were round as bed pillows and not much taller, their hair cut the same way and their faces all the same face, the face of children who have been told a great many times that they are doing well. The yard called them plumpers. They were the ones kept on and fattened instead of sold, and the yard's word for them was not kind and was not wrong.

The line moved. A girl stepped up onto the plate.

"Stand still," said the machine. Not the broadcast voice. Flat, and a little bored. The red light swept her from the top of her head to her heels, stopped, swept her again.

"Grade two. Sixteen ounces."

She stepped off, went to the chute, held up her bowl, and the feeder dropped sixteen ounces into it, kibble, dark, in a heap that came up the sides, and she carried it away at a fast walk with her eyes on her own hands.

Then the music under the broadcast changed, and the warm voice came back.

"And now the morning rule."

The women straightened. The line straightened. It went through the yard the way a change of shift goes through a room, one breath and everybody standing differently, and nobody had to be told anything.

"Singing rests the mind. Talking spends the breath. Questions are dangerous, to the berry who asks and to the berries who hear. Berries will repeat."

And they repeated.

Forty voices, women's and children's, in a yard that had been full of talk a moment before: *Sing more, talk less, never ask.* They clapped once on the *ask* and dragged the last word out long, and the line bounced on the balls of its feet to keep time, and it came around again, *Sing more, talk less, never ask* —

Rook laughed.

It came up out of him with no say on his part, a snort, loud, in a yard of forty people singing, and the singing went on around it for one more round and then came apart in the middle of a word. Nobody finished it.

The Countess came around the end of the feeder with the whip hanging off her wrist. The limp made her slow and slow made her worse. She hit him twice, once across the back of the arm and once across the shoulders, and she wasn't swinging to drop him, and he didn't drop.

Somebody in the line made a sound and stopped making it.

"Finish," the Countess said, to the yard.

They finished. In the new silence the whole line went over the plate one at a time and stood still and got a grade and held up a bowl, and the feeder put breakfast in it, and they carried it off, and not one of them said a word to the machine or to each other. A boy who came out two grades lower than the girl ahead of him carried his bowl away staring straight in front of him, both arms wrapped around it, and a child behind him in the line watched him go and did not say anything either.

Rook sat on the concrete where she had left him with his arm going hot and watched four of them pass over the plate, and four was enough. They were measured, and the machine gave a grade, and the grade was breakfast, and it was not the same grade for everybody.

Then the first line took their bowls out into the middle of the yard and sat down in rings on the concrete, facing in, and ate where everybody could see them. Nobody told them to sit like that. An unemptied bowl went to the matron, and the matron did not have to do the watching, because they did it for her, forty heads coming up and down, up and down, checking the bowl on either side.

Rook got up and walked between the rings with his hands in his pockets and looked at what they had. It was the same kibble he had been eating out of a can and a bowl since the fever let go of him, and it had made these children round as pillows.

He stopped at a ring and crouched and pinched one piece out of the bowl of the girl nearest him.

The piece never got to his mouth. The girl didn't grab for it and she didn't shout, she just looked at the bowl and then at him, and the boy across from her said, flat, without hurrying, "He's taking."

"He's taking," the boy said again, louder, to the yard.

Rook was still crouched there with the piece between two fingers when the Countess crossed the concrete. She caught him across the back of the head with the flat of her hand and then across the shoulder with the whip, and the boy who had called it sat with his spoon halfway to his mouth and watched her do it, and the girl whose bowl it was started to cry, and a woman in the next ring said the girl's number, only the number, and the girl stopped.

Nobody said anything else at that ring. Rook moved off a little way and sat on the concrete with his ears ringing and ate nothing and watched them finish.

The Countess called the first line back up the outside stair and brought the next one down, and the second line formed at the feeder, and Rook got up off the ground and walked along the wall and hunkered down and shuffled sideways into the gap between two plumpers, knees bent, head down at their height, a big one among the little ones.

He counted the plates ahead of him. Six. Four. Two.

At the plate he stood up.

He stood up the way a man stands up at the end of a trick, arms out to the sides, chin lifted, waiting to be clapped for.

"Hey," he said.

The scale made a sound it had not made before. The red light went steady instead of sweeping, and a lamp on the stalk above the screen turned orange and began to turn.

"Warning," the scale said. "Target height exceeds standard upper limit. Please process promptly. Please process promptly."

Every head in the yard came around at once, the Countess's with them, and the yard made a noise that was not a word.

"Smart machine," Rook said, and ran.

The problem wasn't his legs. He had eleven good strides in him and he used them, and the men's dorm door came up on his left, and somewhere in the twelfth stride the white came in at the corners of his eyes and his mouth filled up with the taste of a coin. His lungs were two wet bags somebody had wrung out and handed back to him. He got one hand on the iron and stood with his head down, hauling air, and that was where she took him by the ear.

She had a grip like a bench clamp. She turned his face up. The scar on the back of her right hand at the base of the knuckle, where a piece of her was gone, sat level with his cheek, the skin over it shiny and old.

"You've been off all morning," she said. Low. Not for the yard.

He didn't answer.

He gave her his whole face: eyes wide, mouth a little open, nothing running behind it. It took work to hold it that empty. He held it, and it worked, or it worked as well as it had the other times, and something crossed her face, quick and not pleasant, and got put away.

She let go of his ear. She took a bowl off the cart and pushed it into his chest, and he had to get both hands up to keep it from going over. Kibble, still warm through the plastic.

She pointed across the yard at the small side pen and the man standing in it, big through the shoulders, hair gone in patches, a gray shift hanging off him, his back to everything.

"Give it to him," she said. "Get out of here."

She went back to the feeder.

Rook carried the bowl to the men's dorm and leaned into the lens with his throat. The lock clicked, argued with itself, and gave, and the bolt pulled back.

The door came open and the air of the room came out at him, warmer than the yard, close, air that had been shut up in there a while, and it smelled of something the yard didn't, and he stood in the open with the bowl in both hands.