Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

It took Ji Lan eleven days to write it and about an hour to tell it; it was the worst telling of her career on purpose, and it was the best thing she has ever done.

I want to explain why it had to be bad, because she explained it to me and it changed how I understand her whole craft.

’Every story I have ever told was built to make you feel something,’ she said, the night before. ’That’s the job. You find the true thing and you shape it so it lands in the gut. And if I do that here — if I tell this beautifully — eleven hundred million people are going to say yes because their hearts are full of a star they love and a storyteller just played them like a flute.’ She tapped the page. ’So this one has to be flat. Ugly. Boring. No music in it at all. I have to tell it so plainly that the only thing capable of answering is somebody’s honest, unexcited judgement about their own street.’

And that is exactly what she did. She went out down every thread of the movement with the least rousing speech in history, and it said, roughly:

You are not being asked whether you love the Lantern. We know you do. That is not the question and your love is not wanted here.

You are being asked four things about your own town, and we need you cold. One: when the ocean comes home, every soul in your town will have to carry a share of it — not a metaphor, a real weight, the heaviest thing you will ever hold. Can your town carry its share? Two: not on your best day. On your worst. On the day your roof leaks and your mother is ill and you did not sleep. Three: the ones who can’t — the old, the sick, the grieving, the children — their share falls on the rest of you. Count them honestly. Count them high. Four: if you are not sure, the answer is no, and no is an honourable answer, and no costs you nothing, and nobody will think less of a single soul in your town, and we will come back and ask again next season and the season after and as many seasons as it takes.

If a quarter of the world says no, we wait. If one town says no, we wait for that town. We are not counting votes. We are waiting for everyone. Say the true thing. That is all we want.

And then she said the part that made it hers.

I am the person who has spent this whole war telling you beautiful true things to make you feel them in your chest. So you should know that this is the one time I have deliberately made it plain, because I am frightened of my own hands. Do not answer me. I’m not worth answering. Answer your own street.

— • —

The answers came in over two seasons, and I will be honest that the first three days nearly stopped my heart, because they came in overwhelmingly yes and far too fast, and Xue Ningzhi and I sat up two nights convinced the whole thing had become exactly the stampede we were trying to prevent.

It hadn’t. It just turned out that a world that has spent years practising the carrying-craft has a very accurate sense of what it can carry, and most of it had already done the arithmetic on its own kitchen table before Ji Lan ever asked.

But not all of it. And the not-all is the part I will remember when the rest has gone soft.

Four hundred and six towns said no.

They said it plainly and without shame, the way Ji Lan had asked them to. A fishing village on the western reach said no because a sickness had gone through it in the spring and a third of the adults were still weak, and they would not pretend otherwise, and could we please come back in a year. A mountain hold said no because it was ninety people and sixty of them were over sixty. A city district said no because it had taken in four thousand of Ping’s returned souls in one season and its people were generously, gloriously overstretched, and its elders said — I have the words written down — we are full of other people’s weight right now and we are proud of it and we are not able to take more, and you told us that was an honourable answer, and we are holding you to that.

And the Unnamed Hundred sent word, through the Warden’s woman, that most of their villages would be keeping their quiet through the homecoming, and did not wish to carry, and hoped that was all right.

It was all right. All of it was all right.