Weather Permitting

Mara Iversen had spent nine years reading the difference between what the city did and what the city had been told it would do, and in all that time the difference had never amounted to much. Her floor of the Municipal Forecast Authority called it the remainder. Every morning the Almanac published its bulletins, tier by tier, and every evening Mara's section collected what had actually happened and subtracted one from the other. The remainder was her whole profession. It was usually about the size of a rounding error, and she had come to love it the way some people love a dry creek bed, for the shape of what used to run through it. The Almanac itself lived four floors down, behind glass and cooled air, though calling it a machine understated things. It was a model of Merrow so dense that people had stopped distinguishing between the model and the town. It ingested the tram network and the sewer flow and the pharmacy registers and the ambulance dispatch logs and forty years of weather,…