Washington, D.C. · June 22, 2230
On the day the ward bought less smoke, nobody carried money out of the hall.
That was why the argument took so long.
The ward had agreed to charge Tavi's workshop a smaller license fee for each new courtyard stove that burned less charcoal than the old iron boxes. Tavi would build them. A ward tester would measure each one before it was sold. If a stove missed the mark, it would keep its full fee and its place on the workshop floor.
At the public demonstration, Tavi set two identical pots on two nearly identical stoves. One had been patched with a round door and a narrow throat. The other belonged to the ward and coughed whenever the wind changed its mind.
“The license office gives up twelve brass per good stove,” said Pell, who kept the ward accounts. “Where does that go on your poster?”
Tavi looked at the sign above her pots. It read LESS FUEL, MORE SUPPER.
“There isn't room,” she said.
“I brought another sheet.”
Pell pinned one beneath it: TWELVE BRASS NOT COLLECTED FOR EACH STOVE THAT PASSES.
Several people stepped closer. A smaller fee was still a fee, but a fee that might have paid for something else. It had paid for the tester's wages last winter. It had bought the brush that cleaned the public flues. Nothing in the agreement said either job would become cheaper.
Tavi did not ask Pell to take the sheet down. Her own books were scarcely comfortable. The narrow throat took longer to make, and she had lost a week's charcoal trying to find its shape. Without the reduced fee, she said, she could build one such stove as a curiosity. With it, she could sell a row of them at a price people could approach without mortgaging next week's charcoal.
“Some of us would still have to borrow,” called a woman near the back.
“I know,” Tavi said. “I didn't say cheap. I said approach.”
The woman came forward. She was called Sef. She ran a soup pot in a courtyard where three households shared charcoal and argued over whose turn it was to scrape the soot. The old stove ate fuel even when the soup did not thicken. A better one would help her. So would twelve brass in the flue fund, if the old chimney caught.
“Which of those pots is ours?” she asked.
“Neither yet,” Pell said.
“Then how will you know?”
The tester, a thin man named Rue, lifted the lid of a battered measure box. Inside were weighed charcoal, a clockwork timer, two thermometers, and a notebook with the corners burned round. He had tested grain dryers, bath fires, and once a baker's oven whose owner insisted the smoke was part of the bread.
“I run the same load through each stove,” Rue said. “I write what it eats. Yours gets its own test when it's built.”
“Every one?”
“Every one.”
Tavi winced. “We negotiated that part for a while.”
“I can tell,” said Sef.
The new stove heated its pot first. A little cheer escaped the crowd, followed by the silence of people trying not to be sold something. Rue marked the time and weighed what remained in the fuel tray. Then he crouched to examine the door.
Smoke escaped at its lower hinge.
Tavi knelt beside him. The latch had pulled the door tight at the top and left a slit below. It was a small fault. Through the slit, a small amount of the claimed saving went away.
“Can you fix it?” Sef asked.
“Yes,” Tavi said.
“Before or after I pay?”
Tavi found a file in her apron. “Before Rue signs.”
Pell held up his pencil. “And before I reduce the fee.”
For once, nobody complained that the clerk had interrupted a pleasant moment. Tavi took the door off in front of them. Rue set the unpassed result on the table, where it remained visible while she worked.
By dusk the hinge sat square. The second test used another weighed bag of charcoal. The new stove reached the mark. Rue signed one page for one stove. Pell entered twelve brass in the column headed NOT COLLECTED, and Sef put her name beside the stove, though she still had to find the purchase price.
Tavi reached for the poster. Pell thought she meant to remove his sheet. Instead she borrowed his pencil and added a line of her own:
FIRST STOVE PASSED ON SECOND TEST.
“Leave room below it,” Sef said. “There'll be others.”
Across the hall, the old ward stove finished its pot of soup. Rue weighed what it had eaten and left both pages open. They ate that soup too.