I do eleven holds on this rotation and Vane is the one I look forward to, which is not a thing I would put in a packet.
They feed you. That is most of it. But they also have a bay that works, and after four holds where the mass officer is a man on rotation from somewhere else who last touched a plate two terms ago, a bay that works is a kind of holiday. I had the determination on Bes and I had two ordinary compliance items and I had a window that was tight the way they are always tight, and I told my own people I would be four shifts and I meant it.
The provision on remains of contracted personnel is short and I have it by heart. Remains are returned for determination on the first available window. There is a deferral clause underneath it, for over-allowance, and in nine terms I have never once had cause to use it, because a body is not large and an allowance is not that tight.
I gave my designation at the lock and the woman there, Doiv, heard the back half of it and called me Seventeen all week. I let it go the first time out of politeness and after that it was too late to take it up without making an occasion of it, and she said it so warmly that I stopped minding. Everything in Vane sounds like a mass figure. Their names, their sections, the way they say the time. Seventeen-and-four. Seventy-one and four. You get an ear for it by the second shift and then you cannot hear anything else.
Sesk had the figure ready before I asked. Half the places I go I wait two days and then it comes in wrong and has to be taken again, so I said what I always say, that it was good to have it ready, and I meant it, and she looked at me as though I had said something about the weather.
I put my hand out for the crate that was on the plate, to shift it, because it was in the way.
Somebody took my arm. Not hard. A hand on the forearm and then gone, and nobody looked at me, and I understood that I had done something and did not understand what, and I put my hand back down.
Nobody said anything. The number came up. Sesk said it aloud and everyone started moving again.
The trouble started because I am thorough, and I want that on the page, because it was not their doing.
The compliance packet was revised last window. There was a business two rotations back at a hold I will not name, where a bay had been applying a standing correction to its readings for years — a good correction, an honest one, computed by a competent man — and when he was carried the correction went with him and nobody could reconstruct it, and there was a settlement. So the form now asks for an uncorrected figure. It says so in the field: reading as taken, uncorrected. That is all it says. There is no field for the correction. There is no line where you would put it.
I read Sesk’s preliminary and it was a corrected figure. She had the correction written beside it in her own hand, which not one bay in six would bother with.
I told her it was fine work and that my form had nowhere to put it.
She stood there a moment.
Then she said, in front of Reso and in front of two of her own rotation who were doing something with a hopper and had no reason to be listening, that Vane had not been stopping.
She said it the way you would report a valve. That the fans had not been cycled down for a manifest reading in — she gave a number of windows, and it was a large one — and that the run does not really stop, it slows, and that she had been carrying the difference herself, and that the figures were good but they were figures she had made good and not figures the bay had made good.
One of the hopper people said, “We stop.”
“We stand still,” Sesk said. “It isn’t the same thing.”
I said, and I want to be exact, that this was a formality and that I did not want to put anybody to trouble. I said the deviation was inside anything my packet would flag. I said it twice.
Doiv had come in by then and she costed it out for me on her fingers, pleasantly, the way you would tell a guest what is in a dish: fans down means the recovery line stands, and the line standing means the growing sections take it on the chin, and the sections taking it means somebody’s shift gets longer at the far end. It was a real cost. She told me the size of it without a flicker.
Then she said they would do it.
I said again that they needn’t.
“No,” Doiv said. “You’ve asked for a reading at rest.”
I said I had asked for a form to be filled in.
“That’s the form,” she said, and went to find whoever runs the loop.
I have been doing this a long time and I know the shape of a place that is proud of a practice and will not be talked out of it, and the only thing you can do is get out of the way and be gracious. So I got out of the way. I did note, privately, that a hold this careful about a metrology custom might usefully apply the same care to its recovery line, which drips, audibly, in the outer bay, continuously, and has evidently dripped for years.
I mentioned the drip to Doiv.
She laughed for a long time and did not tell me why, and every time I saw her after that she said something about the drip and the people around her laughed too, all of them, every time, and it was clearly a good joke and I never got it and by the third day I laughed anyway because it seemed rude not to.
They gave me a strawberry on the second day.
I have had strawberries. I did not say so. Doiv put it in my hand and then eight people stood around me and watched my face while I ate it, openly, not pretending to be doing anything else, and when I said it was very good they looked at each other with enormous satisfaction and somebody clapped somebody on the back.
Then they gave me a jar of them, put up in something, for the transit.
I said it was too much. Doiv said it was nothing. I said I was on an allowance. She said it was nothing again, in a way that closed the subject, and Sesk — who had been standing there the whole time with her hands behind her back — took the jar and put it on the plate and everyone in the run stopped where they were.
Hands off. The bay went over to quiet. Two decks up somebody’s boots going away. The drip.
“Point four,” Sesk said.
I said that was nothing.
“It’s a number,” she said, and wrote it in my column, because that is where it goes, and gave me back my jar.
I was four days at Vane and it was six by the time I left and I could not tell you where the two went except that they went into stopping.
The fabricator’s stock had to come off the outbound, which I expected, and which I told her about myself rather than letting it arrive on a sheet. She took it well. She then explained, correctly and with real regret, that it was a bonded consignment moving on somebody else’s paper and that she could not release it without a word from a consignor who was eleven days out, and that she was very sorry, and that this was her fault for not flagging it, which it was not. She was right about the bond. I read it and she was right about all of it.
She gave me a thing she had made. It was a small thing, a trim block, beautifully finished, and she said it was an apology, and I said an apology was not owed and she said it was not for me, it was for the pallet, and pressed it on me, and I have it still.
Sesk weighed it. Everyone stopped.
Reso was in the bay for most of it, standing where the light is bad. He had worked beside Bes nine years, which Doiv told me the first night in the tone you use for something that ought to be obvious from looking. He did not talk. He carried things I had not asked him to carry and put them where I would want them and was gone before I could say anything about it, and twice he brought me tea I had not asked for, which is a courtesy, and once he stood beside me for a while and looked at the plate and then went away.
I have seen a great deal of this. A man loses a workmate and there is no provision anywhere in his life that gives him anything to do about it, so he does small unnecessary jobs for a stranger. I have written it up before, more than once. There ought to be something. It costs nothing to build a form.
I was kind to him. I made a point of it. I thanked him each time and I asked after his rotation and I told him, at one point, that I had read the file and that Bes had a good record and that the determination would be handled properly and quickly.
He said, “Thank you.”
That is the only thing he said to me all week until the last of it, and he said it looking at the plate.
By the fourth day I had a jar of strawberries, a trim block, a length of harness webbing from a man in the outer run whose name I never got, something in a cloth that Doiv would not identify and that I still have not opened, and a good knife.
The knife was the difficulty. A knife is not nothing. I tried to give it back and got about four words in before I saw what I was doing and stopped, and took it, and thanked him, and he was so plainly pleased that I went away and sat down for a minute.
Every one of them went on the plate. Every one of them stopped the run. And here is the thing I noticed and did not act on, because there was nothing to act on: the stops got better. The first ones were a slowing. By the fourth day, when Sesk called a reading, the corridor emptied of movement like a held breath, and the fans came off their cycle without anyone appearing to have told them to, and people who could not see the bay from where they were standing stopped anyway.
I stopped too. I did not decide to. Somewhere in there I had stopped deciding to, the way you pick up a limp from walking beside one.
The great one was on the fifth day and I have not got a way to write it down that does it justice.
They took the fans off. Not down — off, the whole run, and the recovery line stood, and the growing sections two decks up went over to whatever they do when the loop is held, and the lamps came down early because of it.
And the hold changed smell.
I did not know that a place has a smell it is not allowed to have. The fans had been mixing Vane for however long Vane has been Vane, and with them off the hold came apart into its parts and each part arrived on its own: the wet green out of the sections, undiluted, pouring down the stairwell like something spilled; oil off the run; the sharp scoured nothing of the outer bay; and under it people, a great many people, in a small volume, for a long time.
Nobody moved. I looked at a girl of about six windows standing at the rail with her mouth open and I thought, she has never smelled this hold. And then I thought, none of them under about twenty windows has, and then I stopped thinking about it because Sesk was at the plate.
There was one sound in Vane and it was the drip.
The plate settled and Sesk read it and said it aloud, because that is the job.
“Seventy-one and four.”
I wrote it in the field and I closed the packet and I said — because it was true and because somebody had to say something — that it was the finest reading I had taken in nine terms and that I would note the ventilation, which could clearly use a service, and that I would recommend they look at it before the next cycle.
Doiv said they would look at it.
Then the fans came back and Vane smelled of nothing again, and everybody went to their rotation, and I went and did my arithmetic.
I did it three times. That is not a figure of speech and it is not modesty; I did it three times, standing up, with the packet on a crate, because I did not believe it.
The gifts came to more than a man.
Not much more. But the outbound was tight the way it is always tight, and I had the fabricator’s pallet off already, and there is nothing else on a Vane manifest that is not either bonded, or a consumable somebody eats, or the hold’s own margin, and I could not take a hold’s margin for a determination. There was no version of the sheet where it fitted.
I could have given the gifts back.
I want to be exact about this too, because I have gone over it since. I did consider it. I considered it for about as long as it takes to picture Doiv’s face, and the man with the knife, and the eight people standing round watching me eat, and then I stopped considering it, because handing a hold its own hospitality back at the lock is not a thing a person does. There is no procedure for it. There is no form for it. If there were a form for it I would still not have done it.
So I read the provision again and the deferral clause is the deferral clause. Where the window is over allowance, determination may stand to the next available. It is one sentence and it does what it says and it was written by somebody sensible who knew that a window is a window.
I filed it. It took four minutes. I put the reason in the reason field, which was over allowance, and that was accurate, and I put my name under it.
Then I went and found Doiv and Sesk and Reso, because it was their hold and it was their dead and they had a right to hear it from me, and I told them that Bes would stand to the next window and that I was sorry.
I want to say that they took it well. What they did was something else and I have not got the word. Doiv put her hand flat on the crate beside her. Sesk said, “Next window,” and wrote something. Reso did not do anything at all, and then went out, and came back after a while.
I apologised again. I told them it was a scheduling matter and nothing to do with Bes and that it reflected on nobody.
Doiv gave me a jar.
I was at the lock with my kit and about eleven kilos of Vane and my window opening, and I felt what I always feel at the end of a good one, which is that I have taken more than I brought.
There is not a lot a man in my position can leave behind. I cannot leave a ruling. I have no standing to grant anything. What I have is a packet with a notes field in it, and I had been composing something in that field for two days, about the practice, about the stopping — because I have been in a great many bays and I have never seen a hold stop like that, and other holds ought to see it, and I could put it where people read things.
I said, “Before I go. I want to say something about the way you—”
Sesk called a reading.
Everything stopped. Doiv stopped with her hand up. The two at the far end of the run stopped. I stopped, with the sentence half out of me, because by then I stopped when the bay stopped and I could not have told you when that started.
The plate settled. The drip. Somewhere overhead the fans went through their cycle and came back.
“Two and one,” Sesk said.
Everything started again, and the sentence was gone. I stood there for a second trying to find where I had put it.
“Sorry,” I said. “What was I—”
“You’d finished,” Reso said.
I said, “Right.” I said it again. And I got my kit up and Doiv called me Seventeen and I went up on the window and left them to it.
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