The Founders' Round

The records of the previous accountants were not hidden. That was what unsettled Imogen most, in the grey morning, working with the office door locked for the first time in nineteen years. They were not hidden at all. They were exactly where they should be, in the personnel archive, nineteen tidy files, and she read them with a cup of cooling tea she kept forgetting to drink. Accountants of the Anselm did not, on the whole, come to dramatic ends. They retired. They were thanked. Three of them had moved, late in their careers, into other work — one to the air committee, one to the schools, one to a post she had to look up, an advisory seat that turned out, when she followed it, to sit within the budget line of the Founders' Round. Two had died in office, of ordinary ages, of ordinary things. The rest had simply grown old and been replaced, and the replacing was always smooth, always early, always with a long handover, and Imogen had been through one of those handovers herself, from a patient woman named Sefton who had trained her for a year and a half and had said, near the end, a thing Imogen had filed away as the sentimentality of the retiring. Sefton had said: The books will balance for you. They always balance. The trick of this job is to know which balance to trust. At the time Imogen had thought it was advice about rounding. Now she sat with it the way you sit with a hand on your shoulder you cannot see. She found Sefton's name in the directory. The old woman was eighty-eight and lived on the garden deck, in the assisted terraces, and Imogen had visited her twice in nineteen years, both times out of duty, both times briefly. She told herself a third visit would not be strange. She told herself this was the part of the lie that was simply true: an accountant visiting the accountant who trained her. Nothing on the Anselm was more ordinary. But she stood a long time at the office door with her hand on the lock, because she understood that going to see Sefton was a decision and not an errand. If Sefton knew nothing, then Imogen carried the thing alone and the carrying was hers to plan. And if Sefton knew everything — if Sefton had run the substitution forty years ago and watched the reserve run dry and then trained her successor for eighteen patient months and never once said the word — then Imogen was about to walk into the second oldest secret on the ship, and she would not be able to walk back out of it. The drive hummed. Through the office wall came the sound of the schools, the bright unbearable ordinary noise of children with a number on a wall. Imogen drank the cold tea, all of it, because her mother had raised her not to waste. Then she unlocked the door, and she went to find out which balance she was meant to trust.