Seventeen Percent

§1 The Weather in Vezna

The rain came down on Vezna the way a government comes down on a village: from a great height, indifferently, and pooling in the low places. It had been raining for three days or for forty years, depending on whom you asked. Everyone you might have asked was in the tavern called The Crooked Scale, waiting for the weather to change or the century to end, whichever came cheaper.

I sat at the corner table with my back to the wall, because a wall is the only colleague that has never disappointed me. I was drinking the house plum brandy, which tasted like a plum that had confessed under interrogation. My coat steamed. My left tusk is broken, and has been broken so long that I describe it as a feature, the way the district describes the flooding.

On the table in front of me lay my notebook, bound in oilcloth and string, swollen with rain and arithmetic.

§2 The Crime

That morning, somebody had stolen the Widow Marska's hen.

The hen's name was Ludmila. She was a Trans-Karpatian Buff, four years old, properly registered with the Bureau of Livestock (Non-Ideological) as egg-adjacent, non-strategic, Form 27-B, two stamps, one signature illegible in the manner required of signatures. She had survived two winters, one fox, and a governmental reclassification of the egg. Now she was gone, leaving behind three feathers and a paper trail.

Constable Dremmel examined the feathers and pronounced them “consistent with chicken.” He regretted that he could not open an investigation until the widow's complaint had been stamped, and the Stamp Office was closed for its annual inventory of stamps — an operation conducted using the office's own stamps and therefore, like the soul, never completed.

Theories formed along the bar the way mold forms on bread, naturally and without ambition. Ludmila had been sold to a railway cook. Ludmila had been taken uphill to the District Complex as evidence in a case that had not yet been invented. Ludmila had informed on someone and been relocated. Pavel the drunk, with his elbow in a puddle of beer, composed a ballad:

§3 Seventy-Eight

Tess Vale came in out of the rain with a loaf of bread under her arm and the weather in her hair. The bread was for the widow. This was typical of Tess and, in my opinion, inadmissible.

She sat down at my table without being invited, which made her the only person in the district who still did.

“They took her chicken,” she said. “Who does that to a widow?”

“Someone hungry,” I said. “Someone thrifty. Someone collecting on a debt the chicken didn't know it secured.”

“It's low.”

“It's Tuesday.”

“The village will help her. You'll see. People will come. Most people are good, Root.”

“Most people are adjacent to good,” I said. “They live near it. They wave to it over the fence. On holidays, they visit.”

“Seventy-eight percent of people,” said Tess, “are fundamentally decent.”

“Seventy-eight.” I handled the number the way you would handle someone else's handkerchief. “From what census? The almanac of wishes?”

“And your figure?”

“Seventeen percent. At best.” I tapped the notebook. “And I round up, because I'm an optimist.”

§4 The Notebook

I unwound the string with the tenderness other men reserve for love letters or fish.

Inside, in my cramped, rooting hand, humanity had been subdivided.

THE GOOD, CONFIRMED — 17%. With subcategories. Kind by Temperament (goodness as weather: pleasant, local, unearned). Good Under Pressure (the load-bearing good; extremely rare; test conditions difficult to arrange ethically). Good by Accident (kindness committed in the course of attempting something else; classification disputed).

THE WICKED, CONFIRMED — 4%. “Monsters are a stable market,” I said — with, I will admit, a certain professional respect. “It's the middle where the economy booms.”

PENDING — 79%. The expedient. Not villains — applicants. People who have never been offered the envelope and therefore believe, with perfect sincerity, that they would refuse it.

“You can't file people,” Tess said.

“The Complex files them,” I said. “I merely audit.”

“And what moves a person to Confirmed?”

“A cost. Goodness that costs nothing is a hobby.”

“And you? Where are you filed?”

“Pending,” I said. “I'm suspicious of my own motives, and I've known me for years.”

§5 Small Kindnesses, Footnoted

While I talked, the tavern went about its business.

The innkeeper, unasked, began watering Pavel's beer after the third glass, thinning his sorrow to a survivable proof, and charging him for half of what he poured. (“Inventory management,” I said.)

A carter chased a stranger into the rain to return a dropped glove. (“Reputation. In a village, a glove has witnesses.”)

The potboy slipped a heel of bread into his own pocket, stood there a moment with the look of a boy listening to two lawyers argue inside him, took it out again, and gave it to the Widow Marska with the sideways speed of a theft committed in reverse.

I watched that one and wrote nothing.

The boy, emboldened by his own goodness, drifted over to the corner table and considered its largest customer, who was me.

“Are you a pig?”

“Hog.”

“What's the difference?”

“Education.”

The boy nodded, satisfied, and withdrew to tell the kitchen.

“You have just witnessed three kindnesses,” Tess said. “You issued two footnotes and a silence.”

“The silence is under review.”

§6 The Burden of Proof

“By your method,” Tess said, “no one counts until they've bled. You've defined goodness as heroism, and now you act surprised by the shortage.”

“And you've defined it as intention,” I said. “Which is why your number floats. Everyone intends. Intending is free. The district itself intends — read the plaques. The plaques intend enormously.”

“Kindness is not nothing.”

“Fair-weather kindness is a rehearsal, Tess. The performance is announced without notice.” I was not clever about the next part. I heard the varnish come off my own voice. “When the wagons came through the border villages — within living memory, some of it my living memory — the percentage of this district that hid a neighbor was not seventy-eight. It was not seventeen. I went and looked. There are, in the entire archive, more forms concerning the licensing of dogs.”

The tavern had gotten quieter around us, the way a room does when it recognizes itself in a story.

“And there were people who hid them anyway,” Tess said. “No forms. No witnesses. No thanks.”

“Yes,” I said. “I count them twice.”

She blinked. “You what?”

“Double weighting. It's in the methodology.” I turned the notebook away from her, the way you shield a hand of cards, or a wound.

§7 The Notice

The door opened and a man in a damp uniform came in carrying a hammer, which in Vezna is how news travels. He nailed a decree to the post beside the stove, touched his cap to no one in particular, and left without drinking, which frightened people more than the decree.

Pursuant to Incident 114 (Poultry), all birds within the district were to be re-registered within ten days at Room 14 of the District Complex. Unregistered birds would be subject to fines. The schedule of fines was available for consultation in Room 14. Deadlines, the decree noted, would be measured by the public clock.

The public clock stood in the square, and every citizen of Vezna knew it was wrong by eleven minutes. What no one had ever established was the direction — whether the clock lived in the recent past or the near future. It was the only institution in the district that was simultaneously binding and disbelieved, like the weather report, or absolution.

“There it is,” I said, with the calm of a man watching his own hypothesis metastasize. “One chicken is stolen, and by nightfall every honest bird in Vezna owes the state a fee. That isn't corruption, Tess. That's metabolism.”

“A little corruption,” Tess said bitterly, “would at least be human.”

I looked at her for a long moment, the way you look at someone who has just recited the first line of a poem you know all of.

“Yes,” I said. “That's how they get you.”

§8 The Man Who Helped

My father — and I will say this part as plainly as I can, because it deserves better than cleverness — was a clerk. A village clerk of the old kind, who read what he signed and signed only what he had read. He kept his pencils sharpened at both ends, in case of emergencies. He taught me that a man's word should cost him something, the way a coat costs something, or it will not keep anyone warm.

Then came the permit.

It was nothing. A repair to a roof beam, the kind of permission the office had granted a thousand times. But this one stopped moving. It sat in Room 14 like a stone in a field. My father went uphill to ask about it and was sent to Annex C. Annex C required a certificate from Rural Affairs. Rural Affairs had been consolidated into Annex C the previous spring, but its certificates had not, and the clock by which his appeal was measured ran eleven minutes wrong in an unspecified direction. Each office was courteous. Each door was correct. The whole circuit was shaped like a noose that never tightens — it only lengthens.

No one threatened him. His life simply became harder to conduct.

And then there was Varga.

Varga, who paid for funerals. Varga, who remembered name days, who knew which window at the Complex was staffed by a human being and at what hour that being was fed. Varga did not demand. Varga assisted. The permit moved the week after my father shook the man's hand, moved like ice going out of a river, all at once, with a sound like applause.

Then came gratitude. Then a favor. Then the favor's cousin. Then an envelope that was never called an envelope. It was called for your trouble.

“He stayed gentle,” I told her. “He was honest in all the small denominations. He never became a bad man. He became—” and I chose the word the way my father had once chosen words, as if each one had to be paid for, “—implicated.”

The rain went on filing its endless report against the windows.

“Was he in your seventeen percent?” Tess asked, softly.

“He was the reason I believed the category existed.” I turned my glass a quarter turn; the hands keep their own small bureaucracy. “Then he was the reason I started counting.”

“And now? Which is he now?”

I looked out at the square, where the wrong clock stood guarding the wrong hour.

“Pending,” I said.

Tess had the decency, which I noted, to say nothing.

“People judge themselves by the moment they resisted temptation,” I said. “I judge them by the moment they stopped. My father resisted for eleven months. I have it in writing. What I do not have — what nobody will sell me, uphill or down — is the form that states how long a man must resist before the resistance counts.”

§9 The Puddle and the Sea

Tess was quiet for a while. When she finally attacked, she did it the way good people do, gently, and at the foundations.

“Seventeen percent of what, Root?”

“Of people.”

“Of which people? You've counted one village. One wet village with a clock that lies and a castle on the hill that eats permits. You've spent your whole life auditing a puddle and you've mistaken it for the sea.”

I opened my mouth. I closed it. I consulted the notebook, as though it might rise and object on my behalf. It lay there on the table, suddenly light — a census of a keyhole.

“You've only ever counted the people it was safe to be disappointed by,” Tess said.

“You're saying my sample is biased.”

“I'm saying you're hiding in a small dark number the way other men hide in drink—”

“You're right,” I said.

“—and furthermore… what?”

“You're right. The sample is insufficient.” I was already standing, already counting coins onto the table — the exact amount, and then, after an internal proceeding I am told was audible, one coin more. I took my hat from its nail. “I'll need a larger one.”

“That is not what I—”

“The world,” I said, in the tone of a man reading an itinerary. “Other villages. Other clocks, wrong in other directions. Cities, ports, republics, at least one functioning monarchy for the control group. Definitions to be standardized. Kindness to be observed under field conditions. I'll need the second notebook.”

“You cannot determine the exact percentage of good people in the world.”

I settled my hat between my ears.

“Exact?”

§10 Departure

The resolution of the case of Ludmila arrived three days later, in an envelope with two stamps.

The Widow Marska's complaint had been upheld. Enclosed was an invoice for the upholding. Enclosed also was a fine for her failure to re-register, within the statutory window, a hen she no longer possessed, together with a certificate — suitable for framing — confirming that Ludmila's existence had been administratively transferred. The hen herself was never seen again, although feathers consistent with chicken were found along the fence of the District Complex, making Ludmila, as far as anyone in Vezna could remember, the first thing ever to get out.

I left on the morning the fine came due. I maintain that this was a coincidence. The clock, being wrong, could not confirm it.

Tess walked me to the edge of the village, where the cobbles gave up and the mud began its long jurisdiction. She had brought bread. She held it out.

“For the road.”

“Reciprocity,” I diagnosed. But she kept holding it out, in the rain, with the weather in her hair, and after a moment I took it, and put it in the satchel next to the notebook, and said, quietly, in the plain voice, “Thank you.” The warmth in my chest I attributed to the brandy. In writing. Further down the page:

Day One. Sample: one village, biased. Percentage: seventeen, provisional. Weather: continuing.