Who Gets to Answer
by R. S. Breed
A family comes home having lived years no one else shared — and the Cairn discovers it never built the office that could say who they are.
Eight years on, the Cairn is thirty-seven thousand people, twenty-three seated sectors and a representation panel that was invented as an expedient and never replaced. Then a survey hull puts a dock checker and his daughter ashore. They have lived years the station did not, and the records have moved on without them: an estate distributed, a status lapsed, a treatment the girl needs that the next scheduled sailing cannot wait for, and a death certified by an ordinary administrative process that nobody performed in bad faith.
The Warden's office can authenticate what happened and nothing else. The civil administration can confer status, and whichever way it rules it takes something irreversible from somebody with a good claim. The losing side appeals — and there is no body to appeal to, because the founders costed a review board and cut it. What fills the vacuum is politics: an advisory panel with no authority to determine a person, an election nobody planned to hold, and a twelve-year-old born in transit whose own provisional status will be settled by whatever standard the case produces. Nobody is arguing the other side out of malice. There is only a family with a good claim, and a station working out what granting it would oblige it to grant to everyone who comes after.
Era
2330
Series
Book Three of The Cairn
Price
$2.99
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Who you’ll meet
Artefacts from this book
The archive →In-universe records, blueprints, and documents drawn from Who Gets to Answer — the institutional paper trail behind the story.
The Act of Day 109 — As Promulgated
K. Anand
The Cairn's first statute, made in one sitting by an Assembly that had never certified anything. An Act to provide for the determination of prospective identity continuity and guardianship where the civil record is absent or defective — four clauses: what it reaches, the five-limbed standard no one part of which governs alone, the office that decides, and what a determination revives. It carries a fee amendment from the member for the voids, and it vests its authority in whoever happens to hold a counter, by virtue of the office and not by appointment, because the chamber understood that choosing the person would have been deciding the case.
The Sector Roster — Twenty-Three Volumes, 2330
The roster the Cairn's first election was fought on. Twenty-three sectors, each one an independently sealable volume, each one a constituency: you vote with the people you would be sealed in with. The voids have a seat because they have a seal. The two newest rings are the emptiest. Every over-crowded sector was built before the Ring Six disaster taught the station what a single-path corridor costs. Nobody designed any of it — which is the roster's whole argument, made in figures.
Objection at the Return — Nine-A
The malapportionment, put on the record on polling day by the member it favoured least. There are two thousand and eighty people in Nine-A. There are four hundred and sixty in the voids. That is one member each — more than four and a half votes' weight to one, produced by nobody, because the Cairn drew its constituencies along pressure boundaries and pressure does not apportion. The returning officer confirmed the figures, minuted the objection, and called the next hall. It was argued in the chamber and not resolved, and it is still standing.
Certified Copy — the Entry for Cray
Cray
A twelve-year-old's own civil entry, pulled at the counter by the twelve-year-old — the form has a reason field, and the reason is a dash. Born aboard MV Tallow, under way. Two dated columns with a rule down between them: the left one a number on its own, off a ship's log; the right one a day and a year, off a berth date. STATUS — resident, provisional. There is no line saying when provisional stops, and nowhere on the form for one to go. The clerk has been at the counter nine years and does not guess at her.