The Price of a Question
The first person the narrator meets in the Province is a shepherd, and the shepherd flinches when he is asked the way to town. Then he sees the stranger's pack and boots, relaxes, and gives him the country's free advice. Ask what a thing costs. Ask where a road goes. Those are workman's tools and need no license. The deep ones, the who-are-you and what-is-it-for kind, a sensible traveler leaves unspoken.
The Province of Licensed Questions is the fourth country in the first book of A Map of Other Laws, and its founding promise is that no one should be destroyed by doubt. There was an age, the placards say, when nothing was left unasked. Doubt was the highest virtue, and the best minds of the country asked of everything why, and of every why, why again. The Province holds that things stay together because a little unexamined trust sits in their joints like mortar, and that if you ask past the mortar the joint opens. A bridge that had stood four hundred years was questioned in public for a summer about what truly held it up, until one August morning it no longer knew. Southern wells were asked how deep they went, and gave up their water. Late at night, and never on a placard, people tell of a scholar who asked his wife every evening whether she truly loved him, until neither of them could remember what the word had been attached to.
The narrator cannot say whether any of it happened, and even the placards leave room to doubt it. What he can say is that things asked too hard in the Province visibly wear. So the country licenses inquiry, and rations it.
Practical questions cost two coppers. Deep ones are handled at the Office of Inquiry, a hushed building with felt on its floors. The license ledgers are open to the public, because a question, in the Province's view, affects everyone who lives near it. And the fee is fixed by doctrine.
"The price of a deep question is a certainty, one of the asker's own."
The certainty does not come back.
The woolwoman
The narrator watches it happen once, from the public benches. A woman of sixty wants to ask whether her son, who went over the border twenty years ago, is still alive. The clerks do not haggle over the question. They audit her. An assayer sits with her for two days and catalogues what she is certain of, the working certainties her life stands on: that her hands know wool, that her house will hold the winter, that the sun's return is reliable, that her husband, six years dead, was faithful. There are forty-one of them. She is honest about her house (she won't swear to the west gable since the wet spring) and gets a better price for it. She answers the one about her husband before the assayer has finished the sentence.
That one is what her question costs. She takes an hour to decide, turning a loose thread from her cuff between finger and thumb, and then she signs. The answer she receives is hers alone and goes into no ledger. A week later the narrator sees her at the bread stalls, buying a dark loaf and talking to the baker's boy about nothing at all.
What asking costs, in ordinary buildings
No real office employs an assayer. But most people who have worked inside an organization know that some questions are free and some are not, and that the expensive ones are rarely priced out loud.
The free ones are the Province's workman's tools: where is the invoice, and when is it due. The expensive ones sound much the same but carry a charge. Are these numbers real? Did the person we promoted earn it? An investigation into a colleague, or an audit of a programme everyone is proud of: each of these is a deep question in the Province's sense, and each one tends to cost somebody a certainty they were leaning on. Sometimes that is the point. Sometimes the certainty was false and deserved to go. The Province would only add that it is still a price, and that someone pays it.
Survey researchers have long known that asking a question can change the answer. Families have learned the same thing more painfully from consumer DNA tests, which have turned up unexpected parents and siblings for people who were only curious about their ancestry. Engineers doing a root-cause review sometimes use the "five whys": keep asking why until you reach the real cause. It is a good technique. The Province would recognize it immediately, and would want to know who had licensed the fifth why, and what it had been priced at.
The part of the Province I find hardest to argue with is how its people behave toward one another. Because nobody may ask a stranger anything that matters, they talk in statements, left out like saucers of milk that the other person may fill or ignore. Someone remarks, to nobody in particular, that there is dry hay behind the smithy. The narrator arrives in a village at dusk, sits on the well step, and is fed and housed without anyone asking his name or his business. The answers are laid where he can reach them, and people look away so that reaching won't shame him. A country that rations questions has become extraordinarily good at leaving doors open.
That leaves two uncomfortable questions. In your organization, which questions are free and which are licensed, even if nobody calls it that? And when a deep question does get asked, who pays for it: the person who asked, or someone downstream who never heard it asked?
There is a gate on the top terrace above Ferre, good chestnut on sound hinges, that the narrator passes every morning for a month before he notices he dislikes it. There is nothing wrong with it that would go in a report. It only has a flat, lightless look, like timber that has been left out through weather it never needed to face. The woman it belongs to comes by with a hoe, looks at it for a while, and tells him, without looking at him, that her son asked it what it was for when he was twelve years old and meant no harm.
What in your building has been asked what it is for, and how did it look afterward?