The Manual tells us that in the beginning the Builder decreed six fundamental Machines. These are her six aspects, and all we do we must do with the Six. We need no other machines.
I believe this with all my heart. I do. And yet sometimes I seem to intuit the existence of a seventh Machine, hovering like a blasphemous ghost just beyond apprehension.
There is something wrong with me, and I don’t know what it is.
Late for my curfew and trembling, I grasp the doorknob that is not a doorknob.
This is the Machinist Quarter—only a tiny sliver of Netherview Station’s Ring B, though I’m one of the few girls I know who has ever been outside it. Fo-grav stays off in the Quarter; our only simulation of gravity is the 0.25 g of natural centripetal acceleration born of the station’s rotation and our two-kilometer distance from the hub. We joke that this is why it’s called the Quarter. It sure isn’t called that after the ratio of its volume to the station’s.
The cabin I share with my mother Thomasina lies in the Inclined Plane branch, third transverse, twelfth hatch on the left. Standing at the hatch, I straighten my billed cap and smooth my coverall—each emblazoned with a right triangle stitched in dove-gray thread, representing our ward—and gently turn the knob. Recessed lights at deck level cast my diffuse shadow up the bulkheads to either side of me. The knob operates as if it were mounted on a genuine mechanical axle, though of course it isn’t. A dumb mechanical doorknob wouldn’t unlock to my touch alone, or Thomasina’s. I hate the doorknob. I hate the deceitfulness of it, the way its homogeneous smart matter mimics the virtuous and differentiated and pure. I hate what it conceals. I hate it for not keeping me out.
With a silent prayer to the Builder, I push the hatch open. It swings inward on soundless, lying hinges. I tread lightly inside, in case Thomasina is sleeping, the nonslippers on my feet helping me keep my steps short and low. But as I round the door I see Thomasina sitting up on her bunk in her short gray underall, watching me enter. The door closes itself behind me, which no door should do unbidden. The cabin is narrow and unadorned but for a diagram of the Six Fundamental Machines affixed to the rear bulkhead, and a small wooden chest bolted to the deck beneath it. The air reeks of a coppery sourness that matches Thomasina’s narrowed glare. The cabin is so tiny I could reach out and stroke her curly, graying hair if I wanted, but that’s an urge that no longer seizes me often. Anyway, the days when I could reliably charm her out of her anger are long past.
“You’re late, daughter,” she says. She’s squinting at me now, eyes unfocused, the way she does sometimes. She doesn’t even glance at the chronometer on her wrist—a true mechanism, with tiny metal gears and not smart matter inside, a symbol of her status as a merchant trader. “It’s past your curfew.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, turning my back and reaching for the crank that will fold my bunk down from the bulkhead opposite hers.
Her voice grates out in sharp, tight bursts like the strokes of a rasp on iron: “If you were sorry, you’d have been on time.”
My shoulder blades prickle. I say nothing, cranking down the bunk.
“Judith, you’re fifteen years old,” Thomasina says. “Why do you think you still have so many rules? Why?”
I try to shrug, but the effort feels jerky, like the gesture of a marionette. “I was waiting my turn at devotions,” I say, clinging to the false crank. “You know—with Nic and the rest. But the Forewomen wouldn’t—they stayed past their time, and we, well . . .”
Thomasina has risen, her voice at the back of my neck, shivering my spine. “I was out looking for you. I spoke to Nicodemus an hour ago. In Plane, not at gymnasium.”
My blood runs chill. That’s two lies I’ve told, and she’s caught me in one already. Nicodemus is my best friend, or used to be, but lately I’ve been avoiding her. We were up late working on our motors in the schola a couple of weeks ago. She was helping me get the timing right on mine and her fingers brushed the back of my hand. It was just an accident. We’ve been friends all our lives, but it was like seeing her for the first time. I wanted to touch her face, though I didn’t let myself. The scary thing was, it didn’t feel wrong, and that scares me all the more.
Of course I can’t explain this to Thomasina. Nor can I explain why more and more I can’t force myself to evening devotions on time. The cleansing room where we change and shower is like a chamber of horrors. None of the girls seem bothered by disrobing in front of each other, but it bothers me acutely. Letting them see my body makes me want to tear my skin off.
My bunk is halfway lowered. I want to turn and defend myself against Thomasina’s implicit accusation but a bolus of confusion clogs my throat. Words swarm like dust in my brain, eluding my grasp. Why do I have to explain any of this to her? Why doesn’t she just know? And why is it her business?
“Great Builder, Judith,” Thomasina says at my back, “if you have to lie to me, how can I trust you at a job?”
My shoulders stiffen, my head half turns.
“That’s right, I’ve lined up a job for you. Do you understand, daughter? At the hub.”
A sick despair flares in my gut. Outside the Quarter? Could things get any worse?
“I need you up early, and fresh, but you’re out doing Builder knows what when you should be in bed. Did I raise you to be this way, Judith? Did I?”
Tiny flecks of spittle flense the back of my neck. I was at my devotions, I really was, I want to say, but the words won’t come.
“Answer me when I speak!” Thomasina says, seizing my arm and spinning me around. My cap with its Inclined Plane insignia flies off my head.
The skinny legs tensed for violence, the slow ripple of her round, protruding belly, the sharpening rage on her gray blade of a face—I’m bigger and taller, but I might as well be five again for all that I can stand up to what’s coming.
She shakes me. “You will honor your mother, that your days may be long upon the earth!”
Saline globules tremble at the corners of my eyes, watery jewels sparkling across my sight. The words burst out before I know I’m speaking: “There’s no earth here, only metal.”
My mother’s face flushes livid. She spins, hurling me across the cabin—not difficult, since my weight is just twenty kilos. I sprawl across my mother’s bunk, all gawky limbs and terror.
I roll over and there she is looming above me, fists raised and shaking. It’s been months since last she struck me, an improbable lucky streak which now seems about to end. But she lowers her arms and leans over me.
“The Wrecker’s in you, girl,” she says, shaking a finger. “You pray hard and shake loose her grip. Pray to be made square and true. Tomorrow more than ever, you need the Builder to be with you.”
And now she’s pulling on her coverall and leaving the cabin to stalk off her anger, the hatch snicking shut behind her like a quiet tap to a finishing nail. Alone, I flow off the bunk to the floor, to my knees, to retrieve my cap and pray.
I’m out of true and I need fixing. Through shuddering tears I pray for the Builder to make me a better daughter, a stronger laborer, a whole person. I pray for her protection, both physical and spiritual. I pray for reassurance that Thomasina doesn’t really mean to send me alone among the Sculpted in the morning.
When I finally crawl into my bunk and wrap the blanket around myself, though, it’s not the Builder with her Machines I picture watching over me in the dark. It’s my departed father Kaiya, angel wings spread above me in a canopy of white.
The Builder has ignored my prayer, at least the part about the Sculpted.
We rise and dress early, Thomasina and I, and exit our cabin. In one hand Thomasina carries a gray cloth sack big enough to hold a loaf of bread.
Only the most devoted practitioners are awake at this hour, en route to gymnasium. Rather than follow them, Thomasina leads me to the end of the next branch over, to where Sandra, forewoman of Inclined Plane, lives. The only mark that sets this hatch apart from every other in the row is the small carpenter’s square etched at its very center.
Forewoman Sandra appears in the hatchway, bleary-eyed, at Thomasina’s knock. “Selah, Judith,” she says in greeting, favoring me with a look both compassionate and foreboding. “Sister Thomasina, let me speak to you alone a moment. We’ll only be a bit, Judith.”
Thomasina follows Sandra inside without a glance at me. I stand in the corridor and mentally rehearse the Builder’s Code. I’m still in Lever, less than halfway through the Hexalogue, when the hatch opens again. Sandra gestures me in.
The cabin is a little smaller than the one Thomasina and I share, and consequently more crowded than ours ever gets. Thomasina sits at one end of the only bunk, cloth sack in her lap. She pats the space beside her, and I sit. Sandra picks up a thermos from the foldout stovetop that juts from the rear bulkhead and sips carefully at the spout. The air smells faintly of powdered coffee and machine oil.
“Judith,” Sandra says, “your mother let me know late last night that she’s secured you a position on a stevedore crew at the docks. Unfortunately, as you’re required there promptly this morning and you can now be fined for tardiness, there’s no time to go through the usual series of preparatory lessons before you leave the safety of the Quarter.”
I don’t miss the baleful sideways glance Sandra gives Thomasina, but Thomasina doesn’t seem to react to it. She just sits there with the same twist of bored impatience on her lips.
“Oh, I’ve been out a couple of times before,” I say, if only to cut the palpable tension, which is settling into my neck. “I mean, when I was younger.”
“Yes.” Sandra sighs, blinking her pouchy eyes a few times. She is older than my mother, taller and softer, but no sadder. I’ve been tempted many times to bring my cares and questions to her, but something has always held me back. “You’re a bright young woman, Judith, and I know you’ve walked among the Sculpted before, so at least the sights won’t be new to you. But accompanying your mother once or twice on her rounds is hardly the same as working alongside them, alone, for a full shift every day. If there’s no time for the proper instruction first, at the very least a blessing is in order.”
“Okay,” I say, a little of the weight lifting from my shoulders. Even if the Builder isn’t listening to me, surely she’ll listen to the forewoman, as pious a woman as I know. But at the same time I’m beginning to feel in my gut just how much spiritual danger I’ll be courting. Why is Thomasina doing this to me?
“If you’ll sit here?” Sandra says. She’s setting up a metal folding chair in the middle of the cabin, which means it nearly bumps Thomasina’s knees. I scoot over into the chair, doffing my cap and clutching it in my lap, as Sandra removes a ceremonial oilcan from a niche in the bulkhead. Thomasina joins Sandra behind me. The oilcan ka-chunks, the tip of its spout tickling the hair at the crown of my head as it deposits a tiny bead of machine oil. Sandra gently taps the droplet down onto my scalp, and she and Thomasina lay their hands upon my head.
Other kids get to have their fathers in the cabin with them during blessings like this. I close my eyes and try to imagine Kaiya here, watching from the corner near the hatch. And he could be, right? Surely that’s not a vain hope.
“Great Builder,” Sandra says, “in the name of the Wheel, the Wedge, the Lever, the Plane, the Pulley, and the Screw, we bring before you your true and faithful servant Judith, who ventures forth this day to labor amongst the Sculpted for her daily bread. Be with her, Builder, that she might have health in her navel, marrow in her bones, and strength in her sinews—strength that she might work and not be weary, but moreso that the Wrecker with her subtle wiles may find no purchase in her heart, mind, or flesh. We know the Wrecker’s cunning is great, Builder, and that she can make what’s wrong seem right. But your power and love are infinite, and so we commend this young woman to your oversight with all faith in your goodness and wisdom. May we ever draw nearer to thee, Great Builder, as the Inclined Plane rises ever to heaven. Amen.”
“Amen,” I say. The hands, which have grown progressively heavier during the blessing, lift from my head. I stand, rolling my head to soothe my neck.
Sandra folds the chair and sets it aside—a deft, practiced move in the cramped space—then reaches out to clasp my forearm in the Scaffold Grip. Her hand is warm and dry. “What’s today, Thursday? Let’s meet Sundays after temple, Judith, to make some headway on those lessons. Better late than never.”
“When her schedule allows,” Thomasina says, conspicuously checking her chronometer. “They call this Oneday outside. Weeks aren’t reckoned the same.”
“Of course. Then any day you can, Judith.” Sandra squeezes and releases my forearm. “And remember that the Builder blesses you not just for obedience to her commandments, but for obedience to your parents as well.”
“Judith,” Thomasina says. She picks the sack up from the bunk and inclines her head toward the hatch.
“Selah, Forewoman,” I say and follow my mother out into the corridor. I look back to see, in the moment before the hatch closes behind us, Forewoman Sandra standing like a forlorn beast in the center of a cage.
Or is that perception just a way to make myself feel better about the sentence to which I’ve been condemned?
Thomasina leads me at a brisk pace out to the main corridor, skipping lightly along the deck. “Donna’t let her get to you, Judith,” she says over her shoulder. “Sandra, Bartholomew, none of the Forewomen understand our economic realities.”
I’m not sure whether she means our family’s or the whole Quarter’s. I don’t ask for clarification, not just because I don’t like encouraging her to disparage the Forewomen but because we’ve turned into the main corridor and a few more people, from all different wards, are out and about now. The soft gray of their coveralls and visored caps against the brighter gray of the bulkheads make the Quarter look almost like a scene from an ancient monochrome photograph.
We pass the gymnasium entrance, then the intersections with Wedge Branch and Wheel and Axle. We’re alone now, and the Primum Mobile Gate looms ahead, painted with various strident warnings and danger symbols.
“You’ll have to find your own way back this evening, so pay close attention,” Thomasina says, pulling the lever that opens the Gate. The massive hatch grinds aside, admitting a bedlam of voices and light and sound. “Now be ready for the weight. And whatever you do, don’t gawk.”
My heart races. I follow Thomasina through the Gate and an extra forty kilos drops onto my bones. Thanks to my faithful attention to devotions I don’t fall, but I stagger and I’m sweating in the moist air before we’ve gone far. The public corridors are as crowded and noisy now as they are around the clock, alive with the babel of a thousand languages, and the bulkheads are lost in the riot of greenery that thrives on every available surface. I feel conspicuous in my Machinist garb. People—monsters—fall silent and stare as we pass, and with all their unsettling modifications it’s hard not to stare back. I can’t imagine navigating this profane world without Thomasina.
We ride a slidewalk spinward, then crowd into a hubward elevator that at least contains no obvious plant life. But for every normal person, I see one with skin the wrong color or texture, limbs numbering too many or too few, a body with mysterious prosthetics or protuberances, or a head misshapen and gross. A pebbled gray creature that might once have been human brushes against me in the elevator. Dizzy, I press closer to Thomasina, the sweat trickling into my eyes. I’m not sure whether her hand on my shoulder is meant to reassure me or restrain me.
At hub level, the bulkheads are again clean and metallic, as they should be. Thomasina leads me through a short but bewildering maze of hatches and gangways. With fewer people around now, I breathe more easily. Thomasina knocks at an open hatch. I peek inside. It’s an office about a meter and a half in radius, and every surface, 720 spherical degrees around, is jammed with monitors, control panels, and handholds. The thickset man seated at the center has a second pair of arms where his legs should be.
“I don’t give a spout for your schedule,” he tells someone unseen. “My stevies can do the job fast, but not that fast. All right, fine. You do that.”
He looks at Thomasina, and I see he has silver semispheres implanted over his eyes. Three quick swings from handhold to handhold bring him to the door. Fo-grav is still about 0.75. He’s strong.
“This the kid?” he asks.
“That’s her,” Thomasina says.
He turns those reflective bug-eyes on me, twitching his head up and down, and it’s like I’m being X-rayed. What he sees, I can’t imagine. “Any mods? No, of course not. You goddamn Wheelies, what am I talking about? All right, she doesn’t look too bad. Let’s get her suited up and see how she does. What’s your name, kid?”
My mouth is so dry my tongue crackles. “Judith.”
“Well, now you’re Stephanie. For stevedore.”
He barks a laugh like a chugging motor, clinging to holds around the hatch with three hands. Thomasina laughs too. Her eyes crinkle and her lips peel back, and it’s like seeing ten years drop away from her. She never laughs around me.
In that moment I feel inexpressibly sad. And I hate her.
The man swings out through the hatch and drops to the deck between Thomasina and me. “Follow me,” he says, loping down the gangway on all fours.
Thomasina shoves the cloth sack into my hands. “Your lunch,” she says.
I clutch the sack like a lifeline. It’s three times as heavy as it should be, and its heft brings a desperate lump to my throat. On a usual morning, it’s I who makes lunch for Thomasina, but I didn’t even think about it today. I’m realizing that the usual mornings are behind me.
“Now you work hard and do what Renny tells you,” Thomasina says. “I can’t stress enough how important this money is.”
“Okay.” I turn to trudge after the man.
“And remember who you are,” Thomasina stage-whispers fiercely. “Your body belongs to the Builder, not to them.”
“Selah,” I say.
Thomasina sighs. “Selah, daughter. Now go.”
Renny, fidgeting impatiently, has stopped at a juncture up ahead. I follow, the grief of abandonment thick in my throat.
The Six are more than just machines. High Forewoman Tina—our founder, who 120 years ago spoke with the Builder face to face—teaches us that they represent the Builder’s various aspects, and thus the ways in which we must approach her. The Six also name our wards, the clans or tribes of our faith. Though my mother and I belong to Inclined Plane Ward, we owe each equal adoration, and it’s the Wedge that concerns me now.
The Manual teaches that the purpose of the Wedge is to both divide asunder and hold in place. From this we learn to divide ourselves from the evils of the world, as the maul divides the log, keeping always to the side of the Builder. Yet we also learn to bridge the gap between, as the keystone—a truncated wedge—holds the arch in place. The lesson for us is to serve the world, and serve as examples, without becoming corrupted by it.
As a people, we excel at dividing ourselves from the world. We don’t do so well at bridging—except perhaps for my mother. But between her and me there’s surely a great Wedge, and it’s never clear to me which of us is on which side of it.
* * *
Thomasina didn’t explain to me exactly what a stevedore is. Turns out it’s someone who loads and unloads cargo. Starships from hundreds of light-years around dock at Netherview Station’s hub, then, depending on size and mass, slide into one of three concentric levels of berths. Many of the ships are loaded automatically by robot or waldo; the ones that can’t afford the special treatment (or can afford to waive it) get us.
Renny explains this to me, more colorfully, as I follow him to the locker room. He leaves me alone there to change into my docksuit, a close-fitting layer of red polymer that covers me from the neck down. I try not to think about how much smart matter I must be wearing. I leave my coverall and cap behind, like a shed snakeskin, in my thumbprint-activated locker. The heaviness I feel has nothing to do with gravity, though physically I’m breathing hard already from the exertion since leaving the Quarter. Carrying my lunch sack, I rejoin my new boss outside the locker room.
Before leading me to the berth where the crew awaits us, Renny rears up on his hind arms and affixes a round green badge to my chest. “Regs,” he says. “Since you’ve got no built-in monitors, this’ll let us keep tabs on you.”
The crew is twelve, female and male both, and I make thirteen. They’re lounging in a small break room off Berth C-46. Renny clambers to the top of a table and waves for quiet. “This is our new trainee,” he says. “Her name is Judith Plane. Corgie, she’s your woman this shift.”
A groan from a preternaturally thin fellow sprawled out on a couch prompts laughter from the others and a sinking feeling inside me. I’m sweating, much to my embarrassment.
“Okay, you shits, okay. The Needlethreader’s in dock now. Let’s go.”
The crew don helmets and begin to spill out a hatch opposite the one Renny brought me through. They disperse in all directions—left, right, up, down—grabbing implements from a rack outside as they go. They’re all human in shape, mostly normal as far as I can see. They don’t look much older than I am, but you never can tell with the Sculpted. One has bright blue skin above the collar of her suit, an eye-straining contrast with the red polymer. She winks at me as she drops out the hatch. My stomach clenches.
Renny hops down from the table and grabs Corgie by the leg before she can say a word to me. “Pay close attention to the kid,” Renny says. “She’s barefoot. She’ll need a fishbowl on top of everything else.”
“You’re joking,” Corgie says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fishbowl.”
“There’s one in the rack today along with everything else.”
My trainer heaves an aggrieved sigh. “All right, Juke,” she says to me. “Follow me and stick close.”
“Judith,” I say.
“Right. Juke.”
Renny reaches for my lunch sack, which I still clutch uncertainly. He stashes it for me as I trail out the hatch after Corgie.
And suddenly I’m not just lighter. I’m weightless, and drifting.
Fo-grav isn’t turned off in the berth; it’s on but dialed down to null, damping even the small inertial effects of rotational velocity and centrifugal force. Corgie gives me a brief lesson in how to maneuver in null‑g with a dockwand, a thin, meter-long rod of smart matter that ejects a stream of inert particles from one end or the other on command. Basically you point it, squeeze, and drift off in the opposite direction. It takes me a while to get the hang of it, largely because I’m loath to touch it, but soon enough I’m helping Corgie and the rest carry out the dockwand’s other function, herding big gray crates of who knows what out the cargo hold in the belly of the starship and through the air to the elevators that will take them wherever they need to go next—sometimes another level of the station, sometimes the hold of another ship in another berth.
I do it all wearing a helmet with a transparent visor that curves down over my face. The helmet draws words and diagrams in the air, overlaying what I see, giving me data like what time of day it is and where the next crate needs to go. By turning my head and focusing somewhere, I can get information about whatever I’m looking at. Sweeping my gaze along the streamlined, almost organic curve of the huge ship, for example, I can access its flight schedules, crew data, cargo manifests, manufacturer’s specifications, and even schematic diagrams that show me more of what it looks like than I can possibly see by just flitting around in the space between its black belly and the berth’s bulkhead. I can zoom in on the other crews working the hatches fore and aft of ours, and I can even find out more about my own crewmates, though I don’t feel right about prying. But it is a good way to learn everyone’s name, which I manage before the start of our first break.
Is this the world my crewmates walk through every waking moment of every day, with intimate information about everything they see just an eyeblink away? We may inhabit the same great wheel in space, but these strangers live in a truly alien world, one I don’t like visiting. Builder knows making motors isn’t my favorite activity, good as I am at it; still, I’d rather be in my applied mechanics class with Nic and Mal than here. I’d even rather be home with Thomasina—anywhere but stranded amongst the ignorantly blasphemous, wielding tools that are an offense in the sight of the Builder, being slowly poisoned by the worldview of the Sculpted.
What is Thomasina trying to do to me?
Our shift is the longest day of my life. The ghostly ticking clock in the corner of my vision doesn’t help.
At shift’s end we deposit our dockwands, now stubby and depleted, in the rack outside the break room and file off to the showers. I’m happy to drop off my fishbowl as well, though the experience of walking in gravity without a data overlay seems somehow dreamlike and crippling as I readjust to moving about without it—almost as crippling as walking in high-g alone. It surprises me how exhausted I am. I must have used and abused every muscle in my body.
As we reach the locker room, I’m startled that our single-file queue remains intact. The men enter through the same hatch as the women. Bringing up the rear, I tell myself there must surely be a dividing bulkhead or at the very least a screen inside, but of course I was here this morning and know there’s no such thing. I try to keep my eyes averted, but just to reach my locker I must step around a man named Soon, who already has his suit pushed down to his hips.
The room is too small, and everyone jostles everyone else on the way to the ultrasonic showers. I stand with my burning face to my open locker, wondering if I can get away with standing here and not changing until the room is empty. Soon’s bare torso blazes like a beacon in my mind. A part of me is fascinated and wants to look at it again; another part is horrified at the thought, and at the distant, epochal memories of my father that stir, memories so ancient they seem apocryphal.
Renny, galumphing through the locker room, slaps the back of my thigh and says, “Next shift’s gotta get in, kid. Hurry it up.”
Somehow I strip off the suit, deposit it in the recycler, and manage the walk to the showers. My skin crawls as I crowd into the white ceramic chamber with the others, though part of this, I’m sure, is the feel of the ultrasonics vibrating sweat and grime loose from my body. Still, I can’t look higher than anyone’s ankles. It’s not just the naked flesh that distresses me. I’m out of my coverall in front of heathen, and that’s a grave offense in the sight of the Builder. My hands hover in front of my crotch.
My hip brushes the thin blue woman’s; I nearly jump out of my skin, and I mumble an apology. “Donna’t worry about it,” she says with a kind smile. “We’re all friends here.”
“Yeah,” Corgie says. “Just help yourself to a handful of whatever’s closest.”
“Or a thimbleful,” says an apparent neuter named Ice IX, pointing at Corgie’s flaccid penis.
“Careful. You don’t want to wake the monster.”
Mijk, a muscular woman with a series of knobby lumps down her back, says, “I do. Someone ran all the lotion out of my dispenser.”
“And apparently she wants it back,” Soon says with a giggle.
Corgie wipes her mouth. “Come and get it,” she says, and her penis flares to enormous size, all ridged and quivering. It is a monster.
I turn away, blushing. But something strange has begun to happen. I don’t feel comfortable exactly, but I do feel somewhat invisible, with less of the compulsion to run and hide than comes in the cleansing room at gymnasium. I’m able to let my eyes roam some, taking in the male bodies as well as the female, plus two or three I find less determinate and the entirely genderless Ice IX. In the Quarter, contact between girls and boys is strictly regulated and chaperoned, even during courtship; a situation like this is as unthinkable as a motor assembling itself from raw ore. I have more answers now than I know what to do with to what minutes ago was only a compelling mystery.
I almost don’t want the shower to end, but when the thought takes form I realize the Wrecker is already getting her claws into me. How much easier a time of it she has here than inside the Quarter! Despair washes over me. How will I ever survive this?
Clean, but with a film of shame clinging to my exposed skin, I trail the group back to the lockers. I’ve pulled on my underall and my coverall and am about to put my cap on when a tall, trouserless woman named Twenty plucks it deftly out of my hands.
“What’s this for, some kind of uniform?” she asks, turning the cap this way and that. “You got another job?”
My muscles seem to seize up, and the bottom falls out of my soul. So much for invisibility. Renny is gone; I don’t know where to turn for help. Heat and mortification radiate from the top of my uncovered head as Twenty’s Sculpted hands defile my cap.
“No, you ramscoop,” Corgie says, taking the cap, “she’s a Wheelie. Donna’t you know anything?”
And now she’s passing it to someone else, who’s asking why there’s a triangle on it if I’m a Wheelie, and now it goes to someone else, and now it’s flying through the air past my face, and now again the other way. I reach for the cap, but it’s snatched by the knobby-spined Mijk.
“Wheelie, huh?” she says. “Those are like Christers, right? How come you’re named after a traitor, Wheelie?”
“Judas betrayed the Builder,” I say quietly. I want to sound dangerous, but even I can hear the quaver in my voice. “Judith was a different apostle.”
“Judith, Judas, Peggy, penis—whatever. Think this’d fit me?”
Mijk’s about to slip the cap onto her head, and I’m about to shout something, maybe do something I’ll regret, when a half-dressed man named Beneficent Sunrise takes it from her.
“Mijk, it doesn’t stretch. It’s not smart enough to fit your thick skull.”
“Then what good is it?”
Beneficent Sunrise turns the cap over. He studies the inclined plane symbol. “Never seen something made from dumb fabric before. Interesting the way it feels. Almost real.”
His frank curiosity defuses my anger. Or is it the sight of his full, bobbing breasts? They fill me with an emotion I can’t quite put a name to. Not desire, not quite, but something as sharp in its poignancy. I wonder what they feel like.
The blue woman picks my cap cleanly out of his grip. Holding it by the visor only, she puts it in my hand. My fingers clutch it spasmodically.
“Real like your tits, Sung?” she says to the man.
“Go deplete your wand,” he says in the general laughter, but he’s smiling with everyone else.
Weak with humiliation and relief, I cover my head and turn to rummage in my empty locker. Around me, my crewmates casually hide their nakedness.
The blue woman is called Haun Friedrich 4, but the fishbowl taught me she prefers to go by Deborah Specter. She’s in the trial period before a legal name change.
The idea that one may choose one’s own name is as strange to me as everything else about the Sculpted. What would I choose if I were to name myself? Paula? Lucille? Tina? None of them work. I can’t imagine learning to answer to any name but Judith. That’s me. That’s who I am.
I’m standing in the gangway outside the locker room, having lingered there until the arriving crew forced me out. People edge past me in both directions. I’m trying to remember which way I came this morning, fighting a growing sense of panic, when Haun—Derek—touches my shoulder with blue fingers.
“Know where you’re going?” she asks with an easy grin.
“Er . . . rimward,” I say, feeling the blood heat my cheeks.
“Yes, that would almost certainly be correct.” Deborah leans against the bulkhead near me, a little too close, arms folded and eyes bright. Her skin is the blue of Elizabeth’s fabled seas, and her irises glow like bits of its sky. “Do you need any help getting there?”
I look down at my gray nonslippers. “I guess I do,” I say, embarrassed at the prospect of this ostentatiously abnormal creature rescuing me twice in the same ten minutes.
Deborah gazes at the opposite bulkhead, cupping her chin. “Wheelieville, I presume,” she says. She gives me a sidelong glance, apologetic but not self-conscious. “The Machinist Quarter, I mean.”
“Uh, yeah.”
Her eyes narrow. “Let me just find it on the map.”
“What map?” I say. Her glance this time is mildly reproving, and I let out an abashed “Oh.”
“We just need to get you to Elevator Seven, Eight, or Nine,” Deborah says after a moment. “That’s probably the trickiest part of the route. And I happen to be going the same way, if you don’t mind company.”
My feet are itching to move. I’d rather she just point me in the right direction and let me go my way, but I’m too tired to argue. I shrug my acquiescence.
As we set off down the narrow way, Deborah says over her shoulder, “You were good in there today. Not everyone adjusts to null-gee that quickly. I think even Renny was impressed.”
She looks back expectantly, but since I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say to this, I don’t answer.
“Corgie gave you some shit, I know,” Deborah says, “but you should have seen her back when she started. Talk about an ostrich. Was this your first time with an overlay?”
“Yes.”
“I remember when I was first getting used to it. It was strange to turn it off and not see labels everywhere I looked. You must be going through the same thing. You probably haven’t ever used Geoff before either.” At my blank look, she grins. “Yeah, we’ll have to teach you how to use Geoff. Then next time you need to get somewhere you won’t have to put up with me running off at the mouth.”
“What’s Geoff ?” I ask.
“Info daemon on the public net. You’ve really been sheltered, haven’t you? Geoff’s mostly for travelers and transients—anyone offline, really, so you can use her too. She’ll answer any question you have, if she has the answer and you’re older than ten. And as long as it’s not private or classified.”
Deborah keeps looking back at me with an expression like she’s trying to tell me something significant and I’m just not getting it. I feel dumb, and my skin’s been crawling ever since the word “daemon” anyway. “I—thanks, but that doesn’t sound like something I ought to be messing with.”
She gives me one more look, then shrugs. “Suit yourself,” she says. “But you do have a right to whatever information you want. You only have to ask.”
We take the next couple of turns in silence, me adrift in an uneasiness I can’t quite put my finger on.
“So what’s a nice Machinist like you doing in a job like this anyway?” Deborah asks at last. “I thought you were supposed to stick to your own turf, not venture out amongst the unwashed.”
The corridors are wider now, the crowds thickening, and Deborah, walking beside me, speaks too loudly for my comfort. “Commerce with the Sculpted isn’t forbidden,” I say a little defensively, keeping my voice low. “It’s just . . . discouraged, I guess. It’s—there’s a lot of danger, spiritually.”
“I always wanted to be a spiritual hazard,” Deborah says. “You probably shouldn’t even be talking to me, should you?”
“Um . . .” I’m looking around, anywhere but at her. There are unholy forms and faces and sounds and smells everywhere. “Not really, not like this.”
“So why are you? I mean, in the larger sense. Why are you here at all? Why do you have this job?”
I sigh. “I didn’t exactly have a choice,” I say, cursing my inability to hold my tongue. “Thomasina, my mother, she’s our ward trader, which means she goes out and sells whatever we build or manufacture. That’s so the ward can meet its obligation to the Guild.”
“Which is saving up to get off Netherview Station and continue its fabled trek to Elizabeth. I’ve read about it.”
I look at her, nonplussed. We know so little about the Sculpted, I somehow can’t get over the fact they know anything about us. “But business isn’t so good,” I continue. “As trader, my mother has to pay the rest of the ward first, before she takes her share, but lately there’s not much left over. In fact, I think there may not be anything left over. She’s been trying for months to get me a job outside the Quarter, and believe me, that means things are grim.”
“Of course they are,” Deborah says. “Who wants primitive toys made from primitive materials?”
“They’re not toys!” I say, turning on her, thinking of the motor I’ve been building for some weeks now. “It’s serious work! It’s sacred!”
“Hey, hey, I’m sorry.” We’re now at the elevator bay, waiting, and Deborah puts her hands up as if to ward off my anger. I see for the first time that her palms and the pads of her fingers are a rich green, fading into blue at the edges. “I didn’t mean it like that. But you have to realize that’s how most people see what you do. If it has no practical use, it must be a toy.”
“It does have a practical use,” I say. “You people are just too stiff-necked to humble yourselves and admit it.”
Deborah nods. “Or you might say we’ve put away childish things.”
This reference to the Manual startles me. The elevator opens as I’m groping for a suitable reply, and we crowd in with several other commuters, including a man who has tentacles where his fingers should be. Deborah spends the ride staring straight ahead with the barest of smiles on her lips.
I’m still smarting when the elevator opens on Six. I’m about to say that I think I can find my way from here, but Deborah steps out with me into the thick, damp air and dank vegetation.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” she says, “what is the significance of the triangle on your clothing? It’s an inclined plane, right?”
“Um, right,” I say. “That’s the ward I belong to.”
“You’re lucky you’re not in Screw,” she says. “You’d never hear the end of it at work.”
“So, er,” I say, stumbling a little as we step onto the counterspinward slidewalk, “I guess you understand the Inclined Plane is one of the Six Fundamental Machines.”
“I’ve heard that rumor somewhere,” Deborah says.
“Well, they’re also symbols. This one represents the obliqueness of our approach to the Mistress Builder. No matter—”
“You mean Goddess, right?”
“You might call her that,” I say.
“I might. And again, I might not.”
She has a way of continually derailing me and looking pleased about it that I find entirely infuriating. “No matter how shallow the angle,” I say, soldiering on, “the Inclined Plane leads us ever upward, and though it may take eons, eventually we’ll reach the level of the Builder.”
“Sounds suspiciously like the Tower of Babel,” Deborah says. “And didn’t Goddess punish the Babylonians for trying to approach her in just that way?”
“Their approach was more direct, and completely literal,” I say, my voice heating up. “We’re not talking about a literal approach. Ours is metaphorical. We approach the Builder by understanding and manipulating her six aspects.”
“I’d have thought she’d have more respect for the direct approach. You know, just wrap an inclined plane around a big pole and climb to heaven.” She waggles her blue eyebrows at me, eyes twinkling. “Maybe what offended her about it was the metaphorical significance of it. Maybe the Babylonians were really saying Goddess could screw herself, and that’s why she gave them all a good tongue-lashing.”
The delight she derives from such extreme statements takes my breath away. “You can’t approach the Builder in anything but a metaphorical way!” I say.
“Then why let yourselves be literally constrained? Why confine yourselves to what you can build from six fairly arbitrary machines?”
“The machines aren’t arbitrary! They’re the six aspects of the Builder.”
“They are arbitrary, and not all of them are even that fundamental. The screw we were just talking about—like I said, it’s just an inclined plane wrapped around an axle. The pulley’s a special case of the wheel and axle, and the wedge is just another way of looking at an inclined plane.”
I wipe fatigue sweat from my forehead. She’s hitting uncomfortably close to blasphemous thoughts I’ve entertained myself, which may explain my vehemence in denouncing them. “Every aspect partakes of the others to some extent,” I say, but I sound more shrill than certain.
“Seems to me that if there really is a goddess, you could find some far more useful metaphors for the way she operates if you’d just reach deeper than your six machines.”
She exits the slidewalk and I follow, belatedly realizing we’ve arrived near the PM Gate. To my relief and chagrin both, I’ve been so focused on the conversation that I haven’t paid much attention to the nightmarish creatures around me, nor to the riotous greenery. But I notice them all now and feel hemmed in.
“We’re not meant to reach deeper,” I say, hurrying to keep up with Deborah’s long gait in the swarming crowd.
“Then you’ll never achieve godhood, now will you?” Deborah says. She pauses near the unadorned hatchway that leads to the Machinist Quarter. “Well, here you are.”
Bathed in sweat, I purse my lips. “Thanks, uh . . . thanks for getting me here.”
“The pleasure was all mine.” She makes as if to move on, but stops. “I meant to tell you before, I thought you handled those jokers in the locker room about as well as you could have. Just don’t let them know they’re getting to you and they’ll leave you alone soon enough. They’re not really mean, just exemplars of what I call the indolent uninformed. Learning new things is such a trivial process they don’t even make the effort.”
“Like the Israelites and the fiery serpents,” I say.
Deborah blinks, her eyes losing focus. “Interesting,” she says after a moment or two. “Numbers, chapter twenty-one. If the ones who were bitten only gazed upon Monica’s brass serpent, they would live. All they had to do was look. You know, there’s good sense to be found in that book here and there.”
“The miracle is,” I say, “even a gentile can look and see it.”
Deborah laughs long and loud. It makes me feel clever and proud, though why I should care about looking clever to this mockery of a woman baffles me. “Touché, Judith,” she says. “See you tomorrow at the orifice.”
She studies some resource invisible to me, and then she’s off, a lean blue figure vanishing into a teeming, grotesque jungle. I’m reminded that she inhabits a world even more strange than this physical one, and that when the two of us look at an object we each see a vastly different thing.
“Selah, Deborah,” I say under my breath. I pull the lever and pass through the Gate, wondering what she sees when she looks at me.
The cleanliness, calm, cool, and quiet of the Quarter stand in stark contrast to what I’ve left behind. It’s evening by our clocks; we run here on only one shift. The few Machinists out and about look at me strangely as I pass from outside. It should feel good, this homecoming after an eternal shift away, this shedding of weight, this lightness, this cooling of my sweat, but I find myself keyed up and restless before I’ve even reached the branching to Wheel and Axle. I know Thomasina will be waiting for me, wanting to know how the day went, but I can’t confine myself at home just yet. Instead I lower my head and trudge to gymnasium.
The machines are manned mostly by Levers, all older than I, but one station opens up before long. I do my best to complete the ritual properly, pitting every muscle group against the pulleys as I rehearse the Builder’s Code in my mind, but I’m barely into the first canto before my sore muscles are quaking. What’s more, I can’t keep my thoughts focused. My mind keeps reaching back to worry over images of naked flesh—sometimes colored naturally, sometimes blue or green.
One by one the Levers are finishing up and heading to the cleansing room, some of them whispering and giving me looks as strange as the ones I got outside from the Sculpted. I rush to try to complete the minimal requirements before the place fills up with Inclined Planes, but in vain. I’m not quite done when Nicodemus and another Plane named Amy arrive. I see them from across the room, over the tops of three ranks of machines. I duck my head but too late. Nic spots me and hurries over.
The station next to mine is empty, abandoned just moments before. Nic, her face cautiously friendly, slides into the seat, leaving Amy to fidget awkwardly in the aisle before us. “Selah, Judith,” Nic says.
“Selah,” I say, mouth dry.
Nic begins some warm-up stretches of her arms and back. “You weren’t at schola today,” she says.
I look straight ahead, pumping away with my arms in bellows mode, but Amy is right there staring at me, so I focus on my knees instead. “No,” I say.
“Malachi heard you were outside,” Nic says.
“Yeah, at the hub,” Amy says.
“She said you had a job.”
A wary hope fills Nic’s voice, but whether it’s hope that the rumors are true or simply hope that I’ll talk to her, I can’t tell. Either way, I can’t look at her. I can’t look at her golden hair, her glistening shoulders, her wise blue eyes. But I can’t not answer.
“That’s right,” I say gruffly. “I guess you won’t see me much in class anymore.”
“Is it true about the Sculpted?” Amy says. She’s a skinny kid and she practically dances from foot to foot. “They drink blood instead of water?”
“Amy, I see a free machine over there,” Nic says with a jerk of her head.
“But—”
“I’m nearly done here,” I say.
“Better hurry, Amy.”
I can’t see Nic’s face, but I hear the tone of warning in her voice, and I see the answering expression of querulousness on Amy’s face. Amy stalks off, even as I fight down the unwelcome surge of warm emotion in my chest.
I rest for a twelve-count, saying nothing, then embark on another bellows set.
Nic has launched into a set of cherrypickers. “So what’s with you, Judith?” she says between reps.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been avoiding me for a couple of weeks now. What did I do?”
I sigh, clinging to the handgrips and letting my upper body sag. “It’s not you, Nic.”
“Then what is it? Is it about this job?”
What am I supposed to tell her? That I’ve started to worry I like her too much? I can hardly express the thought even to myself.
“It’s not about the stupid job,” I say, though I’m aching to tell her about everything I’ve seen and done today. I cut my set short and stand up, infuriated. “Great Builder, you’re so—so—oh, flashcan it!”
I rush to the cleansing room with all the dignity I can muster, which isn’t much, aware of all the eyes on me. In the quick glimpse I caught of Nic before I fled, there was hurt and concern. She hadn’t yet broken a sweat.
I try to put her out of my head among the straggling Levers in the steam-filled shower. I try to conjure the illusion of camouflage I felt in the showers at the hub, as if I could hide myself amongst my Sculpted crewmates and never be seen. Here I feel anxious and wrong, like I don’t belong. But I certainly don’t belong there.
Scanting my cleansing, I dress quickly and hurry into the main corridor. The crowds here are about as thick as they ever get, but seem downright sparse compared to outside. People stride lightly from their duties back to their branches, women and men, girls and boys, as evening stretches toward the dinner hour. I envy them their apparent lack of care.
“Judith, Judith,” hails a gentle voice, and I raise my head. I hadn’t realized my neck had bent as if in stronger gravity.
It’s Sariah, a Pulley my age who’s walking the other way. “Oh, selah,” I say.
He takes my sleeve and draws me to the side of the corridor. “Missed you at schola,” he says, voice low. Not that we have any of the same classes, but the girls and boys do see each other at lunch. Often I’ve wished I could learn the simpler skills the boys ply, like producing rough fabrics on machines the women construct, but the one occasion on which I expressed such a desire to my mother is one I’m not likely to forget. I was younger then and hadn’t learned better.
“I wasn’t there,” I say tiredly.
“I know,” he says, a look of eager horror on his face. “You were outside. Henry saw you go this morning. So what was it like?”
My eyes are already straying down the corridor toward escape. How can I explain what it was like today? I’m too confused. “It’s the Wrecker’s workshop out there, truly,” I say, pulling away. “Look, I’m sorry, but I need to get home.”
He lays a cool hand on my arm. He’s very pretty with his enviably long yellow hair, and he’s nearly as tall as I am. “Judith, what’s wrong?” he asks, his face close to mine, eyes filled with concern. “Was it that horrible? You can tell me.”
I want to weep. I have friends, sure, or I did, but what I’ve never had is someone I can confide in, someone I can really trust and open up to. That’s all I want.
“Sariah—”
I feel his eyes searching my face, but I can’t quite meet his gaze. “What is it?” he says.
“I—” Am I really going to say it? He’s always been nice to me, kind. I glance up quickly. “What do you think about Nic?”
“Nicodemus?” A little crease appears between Sariah’s fine eyebrows. “She’s okay, she’s nice. Why?”
I shake my head, my stomach turning inside out. “It’s just—you know, she’s such a great gal . . .”
I trail off as his eyes get a little wider. “Oh,” he says quietly, almost in wonder.
“I mean, she’s been my best friend for such an incredibly long time,” I say.
He nods slowly, focused on some inner vision. “No, no, I see. I get it.”
“So, you know . . .”
“Who would have thought?” The ghost of a pensive smile touches the corner of his mouth. He kisses me suddenly on the cheek. “Thank you, Judith. Thank you. I’ll talk to you later.”
With that he trails off down the corridor, yellow hair billowing in the quarter-g, leaving me to wonder desolately what in space just happened.
Thomasina is waiting for me at the cabin, reading the Manual. She looks pointedly at her chronometer as the hatch closes behind me. “I expected you sooner,” she says.
“I stopped for devotions on the way back,” I say. “I thought I might be too tired later.”
She nods, accepting this, and I breathe a sigh of relief. “How was it today?” she asks.
I shrug. “Fine, I guess.”
“Did you work hard?”
“I think I did.”
“Crew treat you okay?”
I take off my cap and rub my head. I don’t want to get into it all with Thomasina. “They were fine. They didn’t pay me much mind.”
Thomasina closes her Manual, a finger marking her place. “You be polite around them, Judith, but keep your thoughts to yourself. That’s the way to stay true among the Sculpted.”
“I will,” I say, though already I feel duplicitous.
Thankfully, that seems to close that subject. The only other thing Thomasina seems to want to know before she goes back to her reading is when I expect to be paid—something I haven’t given much of a thought to. I assumed that was something she would have worked out with Renny already.
I prepare our dinner on the foldout stovetop, a stew of ground meat, beans, and vegetables. The activity proves more calming and centering to me than devotions did. But that night as I drift toward sleep, my mind keeps turning back to the men in the locker room, and to the wooden chest bolted to the deck not two feet from my head. Kaiya’s chest.
The Screw is a peculiar machine, partaking directly as it does of aspects of the Axle, the Inclined Plane, and the Wedge, and often requiring application of the Lever to fulfill its purpose. This is fitting, given its function as the aspect that both joins together and elevates, and as a representation of the way in which women and men join together in holy communion with the Builder to ignite the spark of life.
Sacred as it is, I’ve always been a little embarrassed by the Screw, a little wary of it. Maybe if that were my ward I’d have a better understanding of it, a healthier attitude toward it, but I’ve never been quite comfortable with its symbolic freight. Love and apotheosis strike me as less the Screw’s nature than doing violence to whatever surface it encounters.
I find it difficult to credit that I will ever come to completely trust and adore the Screw.
My work schedule is seven days on and three off—one full s-week as reckoned by the Sculpted. My first “weekend” falls on a Thursday through Saturday by the Guild calendar, which means schola every day while I’m supposed to be taking a break. Neither my long stretches without a day of rest nor my falling behind at schola seems to bother Thomasina much, but it bothers me. When I dare bring this up, she tells me the Builder is blessing us for our sacrifice—though I don’t see what sacrifice it is that she’s making.
By my second s-week on the job, I’ve begun to feel comfortable and confident in null-g, and competent if not so comfortable with my fishbowl’s graphic overlay. It’s as if I’m looking at a raw and exposed layer of reality that should more properly be covered, or at the very least from which I should avert my eyes—though, just as in the locker room with my crewmates, doing so is practically not an option. I am on friendly terms with most of the crew, even if I can’t quite bring myself to consider any of them friends. We’re too different for that, both in our worldviews and in our expectations of what friendship means. For one thing, they don’t seem to have a problem with the occasional tweaking of one another’s anatomy in the showers. I do, as they have learned.
I have spent most of my lunch hours and several more walks home chatting with Deborah. Despite the fact that she’s so obviously unlike me, she has a directness, a curiosity, and a willingness to take my arguments seriously that I can’t help but like, even if I can’t always effectively rebut the points she makes. I consider her a goad to make me apply myself more diligently to my studies. I retain the faith that answers exist to her objections, and if I can’t find them and express them articulately then I’m hardly a worthy ambassador for the Guild.
It’s end of shift on Sevenday of my second s-week on the job when Renny calls us together in the break room. “Got some news, little stevies,” he says, executing a sort of four-handed cartwheel up a chair to perch on his favorite table. The animated chatter anticipating our weekend break quiets down.
“Fourday and Fiveday next week we’ve got a special assignment coming up for anyone who wants in on it. Berth A-11, prospecting ship full of scientific samples. Very delicate, both the ship and the cargo. Berth’s gonna be fully evacuated, so there’s hazard pay, but only those of you rated for vacuum will be eligible. If you don’t want in, that’s fine—we’ll have plenty to do here. But if you want in and you’re not vacuum-rated, it’s not too late to get that way. You can even take shift time to do it without getting docked. I just need to see your certification first thing Threeday if you want in. Understood? All right, that’s it.”
Renny draws me aside as the others file off to the showers. “This is a good opportunity, kid,” he tells me in a low voice. “You’re a good worker, and you sure don’t want to miss out on triple pay.”
He’s right, I don’t. I can imagine how happy Thomasina will be to see the extra credits. “How do I get vacuum-rated?” I ask, watching two tiny, distorted me’s in his silvery eyeglobes. “Is there a test I take or something?”
“Not, er, not really,” Renny says. “What it mostly entails is getting your lungs and eyes and ears vacuum-hardened. You’d be wearing a pressure suit in the berth, of course, but if it should fail you could suffocate before we got you out of there and repressurized. Regs don’t let us subject you to that risk.”
My breath catches. “What you’re talking about—that would mean Sculpting, wouldn’t it?”
“Just a small bit, internally.”
The pay would be welcome, but I have to shake my head. “No offense, but I can’t do that. I’m very sorry.”
Renny shrugs, an elaborate motion of his hind shoulders. My reflection dances crazily in his eyes. “What can I say, kid? It’s your choice, and I sure won’t think any worse of you for it. But don’t make the decision now. Think about it over the break. Get the details from Geoff. Talk to your old woman, see what she says.”
“Right,” I say. “I already know what she’d tell me.”
“Thomasina ain’t a bad gal, for a Wheelie. Talk to her, kid.”
All the way to the showers, cringing, I can hear Thomasina telling me the Wrecker’s in me. But I can’t quite shake Renny’s insistence that I bring it up with her.
That evening over our humble dinner I blurt it out before I can reconsider: “Renny says there’s a special job next week. Extra pay, and he’s pushing me to do it.”
Thomasina puts down her fork. “And?” she says, glaring at me over the table.
“And . . . I’d need some small modifications. Vacuum-hardening.”
Thomasina bows her head. Today’s a Saturday in the Quarter, what would in other circumstances have meant half a day at schola for me and a morning of light community service for her. But neither of us follows a normal schedule now, and we’re each exhausted from the labors of the day. I wait for her to speak, not chewing, heart in my throat.
Not that I don’t know the right answer. I only have to ask myself what the Builder would say. Or my father, I think, the tip of my nonslipper grazing the wooden chest beneath the foldout table that spans the width between the bunks. The chest contains Kaiya’s clothing, which, despite the reg against storage of unnecessary mass, Thomasina has never been able to bring herself to recycle. It’s almost as if she’s waiting for him to come back. I’m not, though. I don’t have many firm memories of Kaiya, and, in fact, Thomasina has told me so often that my father is with the angels now that that’s how I nearly always picture him: dressed in spotless white with huge feathered wings furled above him, looking down on me from on high. I know what he would think if I broached the topic of transfiguration. I know what he does think, in whatever level of the Builder’s mansion he’s watching me from.
At last Thomasina forks a bite of boiled potatoes and carrots into her mouth and peers at me, practically through me, from under lowered brows. “You told his no, right?”
I flinch a little. It takes a moment for me to realize she’s talking about Renny, not Kaiya. “Of course,” I say. My words feel defensive, as if she’s somehow already forced me to lie to her.
“Wrecker take that man, anyway.” She shovels more food into her mouth and chews silently for a few bites.
When she speaks again her voice and her eyes, unexpectedly, have softened. “Daughter, I know they teach us at temple never to compromise with the world, to always live as if we’re with the Builder in her mansion, but in practice that’s just impossible. We all make compromises—we have to, or we couldn’t get by. We couldn’t live. The tricky part—no, the hard part is knowing what’s okay to compromise and what isn’t. You have to figure out where that dividing line is—and then stay well back from it. When you try to walk it . . .”
Thomasina folds her hands together and stares down at the table. “Judith, daughter, I can tell you what happens. You fall. You tell yourself you won’t, but you do.” She clears her throat, lips compressing almost convulsively. “I just want you to be happy. Maybe that’s not what this world is for, but Builder knows it’s what I want for you.”
Her eyes rove this way and that, never meeting mine, and she clears her throat again. Once upon a time, this would have been where I edged around the table to give her an awkward hug. Tonight I can’t. My soul cries for her, but I’m not a little kid anymore, and I just can’t.
We finish our meal in silence.
The next day is temple, the first Sunday in three Guild weeks I’ve been off work. Thomasina and I sit toward the back of the long, low chapel, which sits near the AD Gate at the opposite end of the Quarter from the PM Gate. The bulkheads are of brushed gray metal, with three of the Six Machines etched on the left wall, three on the right, and the carpenter’s square on the wall behind the pulpit.
Inclined Plane Ward meets third every Sunday, in the late-morning slot. During Forewoman Sandra’s sermon after the sacrament, I spot Nicodemus several rows ahead and to the right. What caught my eye was her golden head tilting back as she smiled wide at something the person next to her had whispered in her ear. The person next to her has long, shining yellow hair.
The person next to her is Sariah.
I blink hard for the next several minutes. I shift and fidget through the rest of the sermon. The pew is cold and rigid—dumb, unyielding matter—and no matter how I try I can’t get comfortable. I’m supposed to meet the forewoman for my private instruction after church, but when the service ends I rush back to the cabin instead, with a vague excuse to Thomasina about my stomach.
Two full days of schola still ahead, catching up on subjects where I’m falling further and further behind, before I get to return to work. I don’t know how I’m going to make it.
* * *
Wednesday comes at last, Oneday to the rest of the station, and in the break room in the early morning Renny reminds the gathered crew that we have only two days left to sign up and show vacuum certification if we want in on the special gig. He looks my way but I duck my eyes. Funny—I’ve spent the past two days at schola avoiding Nic and looking forward to Oneday, and now that it’s here it looks like I’m going to spend the day avoiding Renny. I’m such a bent nail I can’t stand myself.
Our client today is a Thunder-class starship, Colder Equation, which we load with supplies bound for the exomorph colony at Van Maanen’s Star. It’s hard work but mostly mindless, and I find my cares evaporating for the first time in days. I feel best at midshift when we break for lunch, but the rest of the day is marred by the clock in the corner of my vision, ticking down the minutes until I return to gravity’s embrace.
At shift’s end, after showers, I ask Deborah if she’d like to go somewhere for food. She’s invited me to eat after work several times now, but I’ve worried not just that Thomasina would find out but that I wouldn’t be able to find anything appetizing in the public cafeterias. Tonight, though, I’m desperate enough to talk that I think I can overcome my food objections.
Delighted, Deborah leads me all the way to a dim cafeteria two levels in from the rim. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but certainly not this gloomy cave with the dark red walls and the low ceiling. Quiet, lilting string music plucked out by unseen hands drifts on the air, which smells gently dank and laden with minerals. Thick pillars and curtains of leafy plant life obscure the view from one end of the place to the other, though here and there I can see tables of two, three, or four, the sometimes asymmetrical faces of the patrons lit from below by flickering orange light. Perhaps it’s the dimness, but I no longer find their deformities as hideous as I did at first.
A man in a lumpy black cowled robe leads us through the compact maze of foliage to a table against a black-painted bulkhead studded with white pinpricks. It isn’t until we take our seats in form-fitting smart-matter chairs that I realize the bulkhead isn’t a bulkhead at all, but a viewport—a hole punched through fifteen centimeters of metal and plugged with glass or something like it.
“Wheel and Axle,” I murmur, stunned. I can’t take my eyes from the bright, nail-hard stars.
“Netherheim and Freya should come into view before you’re finished,” the cowled man says. “That’s a sight to behold.” He makes an arcane gesture in the air. “Now, let me call your attention to today’s specials.”
“Perhaps a . . . hardcopy menu would be in order for my friend here?” Deborah says, nodding toward me.
“Oh, certainly,” the man says before receding like smoke into the shadows.
The surface of our table glows a dim, swirling orange, making Deborah’s skin look like polished stone and her eyes smolder with fire. “So what do you think?” she asks.
“It’s not what I expected at all. I pictured something more, well, functional from a cafeteria.”
“Cafeteria, eh?” Deborah’s eyes sparkle with amusement. “I suppose you could think of it that way.”
The robed man returns with a catalog of dishes listed on a single sheet of paper, and I’m shocked to discover, as Deborah points out, that most of the items have been grown hydroponically. “This must be terribly expensive,” I say, mouth watering. “I can’t afford this, I’m sure of it.”
“Relax,” Deborah says. “Everyone gets credit for a meal like this once a month. I’ve got a couple saved up, and you must have at least a dozen just sitting there, unused.”
I cover my surprise and confusion by studying the menu. I have the sense of riding an iceberg in a limitless ocean, borne up by a vast bulk the composition of which I can’t begin to fathom. Choosing more or less at random, I select an opener of fine pasta garnished with grated cheeses and truffle shavings, and a spiced squash tart as a main course. Deborah places our orders, a process invisible to me, choosing a fruit assortment and a roulade of vegetables and nuts for herself.
She folds her hands and leans forward. “So, what’s on your mind, Judith?”
“Oh, this and that,” I say, and shrug. “I was thinking today about what it would be like to live out in space.”
Deborah shakes her head, grinning. “We do live in space. Or hadn’t you noticed?”
“No, I mean in space, like the exomorphs, just floating there in the middle of nothing.”
“Well, it’s not nothing. There is a structure, a lattice, to grow their colony in.”
“But it’s not much, and it’s open to space.” I didn’t know there were such creatures, such people, until today. I read it on the fishbowl during work. “Can you even imagine the mods you’d need for that?”
“Serious work indeed,” Deborah says. “Not to be undertaken lightly.”
“No one on our crew has work that serious. They all look pretty much normal, at least when they’re dressed.”
“The more radical mods are often specialization for particular types of work. We’re unskilled labor, our crew, Judith.”
I nod, having figured this out without really being able to articulate it. I take a deep breath. “Deborah, can I ask you something personal?”
She laces her fingers together and rests her joined hands on the table. The green of her palms has crept halfway up her arms in the time since I met her, and her ears are now tinged green as well, though I can’t make the hues out well in this light. Her gaze upon me is very open and direct and unsettling, more so because every day I come to know better how little I understand of her world, layered as it is above and beneath and around mine. “I don’t know, can you?” she says.
“I don’t know. I’ll try.” I’ve learned some things about her from the fishbowl at work without really trying—for instance, the distressing fact that she has three biological fathers—but nothing that doesn’t just whet my curiosity. I look down at the glowing table and take a deep breath. “I’m just wondering if there’s some, I don’t know, some practical reason for your mods, something functional. You know, what the blue skin turning green is all about.”
“There’s a time for love, and a time to hate,” Deborah says with a rakish smile. “A time for blue, and a time for green.”
I puff out an exasperated breath. “Do you spend all your time looking up things in the Manual you can make fun of ?”
She shakes her head. “You do understand, don’t you, Judith,” she says animatedly, “that a book called the Bible existed long before Tina Grant slapped her own generic title on it, and that it’s not exactly an obscure work in the human literary canon?”
“High Forewoman Tina didn’t just change the title. Under the Builder’s inspiration, she clarified and corrected—”
Deborah extends a finger until it almost touches my lips, waving her other hand preemptively. “Yes, fine. But you understand she didn’t write the Manual from scratch.”
“All right, fine, I understand,” I say. “So what about the color change?”
She leans back in her chair. “Right, that. It’s not really anything practical. There’s nothing I can point to and say my skin color accomplishes. In fact, it’s mostly a random aesthetic process. I’m never sure what color’s coming up next.”
“Then why did you do it? I mean, what’s the purpose?”
“It keeps me interested,” Deborah says, and her smile cracks momentarily. “I see me and not-me in the mirror at the same time, and there’s always the mystery of what’s coming next. It’s as good a reason to stick around as any.” She leans forward again, and to my ears her heartiness now sounds forced. “What makes you curious, friend?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. Nothing.”
“You’re thinking about the job, aren’t you? The vacuum job this Fourday.”
I look out the viewport at the stars, but the view seems to tilt and wheel beneath me, spinning my sense of balance away. “Maybe,” I admit.
“You know,” Deborah says with a trace of her vigorous smile, “if you do it, a lot of folks on the crew are going to be disappointed. People are starting to get protective of you, and you may make them feel like they’ve corrupted you.”
“It’s not their decision,” I say.
“Agreed.”
A different man brings us our opening course. A thick tail moving in counterpoint to the balanced trays in his hands protrudes from beneath his black robe. Attention to the food spares Deborah and me from the burden of conversation. I’m not sure I enjoy all the lush, strange flavors on my plate, but I know I’ve never tasted anything so vivid. I swallow every last crumb.
Deborah seems uncharacteristically fidgety between courses, but it’s not until our main courses have arrived and I’m halfway through my tart—excellent—that she says, “Judith, can I ask you something?”
“Um, sure,” I say between bites.
She swallows. “What is it that happened to your father?”
The bite I’ve just taken feels too big going down my throat. “How do you know about my father?”
“I’m sorry, I’m not trying to pry.” She wipes her mouth with a cloth serviette that actually shows slight stains of use. “It’s hard sometimes to look at you and not make the easy jumps back through your genealogy.”
“My father died when I was small, four or five,” I say, setting down my fork and holding my gaze steady with great effort. “I’m not clear exactly how. My mother doesn’t like to talk about it, and I don’t like to press her.”
Deborah opens her mouth, looking confused, and for a moment I have the strangest feeling she’s going to tell me how it happened. I feel the sting beginning behind my eyes at the thought that she might know more about it than I do.
But what she says is: “Do you think about his much?”
I nod. “All the time.”
She looks so stricken at this that I feel I could be looking at a reflection of my own expression in a blue-tinted mirror—or, so I believe for a giddy, wildly hopeful moment, at my father. The illusion shatters as Deborah rises suddenly in her chair, takes my face in both her green hands, and leans in to kiss me on the mouth. She stares at me a second or two, an eternity, and sits back down.
Breathless, I turn to the window. Netherheim has swung into view, a giant ball of spun sugar swirled with red and yellow stripes, a fruit as sweet and bursting and sick-making as my heart inside me. I sit very still, not looking at her. My pulse is racing about a hundred klicks a second.
“I don’t know if I can finish this,” I say and push the rest of my tart away.
“Judith, I’m sorry,” Deborah says, her eyes very steady and direct.
“Why did you do that?” I ask. Asking a question is better than yelling or crying or hitting the table.
Deborah spreads her green palms. They look black with blood in the cafeteria’s hellish light. “I forgot for a minute what a kiss signifies to your people. Let myself forget, to be honest. To us—the groups I identify with, at least—it can be a greeting between friends, a show of camaraderie or comfort, even the equivalent of a slap. It doesn’t have to have a sexual connotation.”
“But why did you do it?”
Deborah sighs. “Judith, you just seemed so sad. I couldn’t stand it. Lonely and sad.” She shakes her head. “You reminded me of me when I was your age. Sometimes I wish someone had just done that for me.”
Do I believe her? I’m not sure. I look out the viewport. Netherheim is just beginning to slide out of view. A cauldron of emotion, like the multicolored atmosphere of the planet below, seethes inside me. I want to storm out of the room. I want to turn a somersault in the air. I want to shake Deborah by the shoulders until her head flops like a scrap doll’s.
I think about Nicodemus, wondering what I ever saw in her.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Can you help me find an elevator to Level Six?”
“Of course, Judith.”
The compassion and concern in Deborah’s voice are unbearable. So is the heartbreak.
At home, safe from the sea of wild bodies and leering faces that populate the station, I fall to my knees. I should pray to the Builder for forgiveness, for putting myself in such a compromised position, but instead I thumb the combination on the wooden chest in the middle of the deck. Thomasina is still out, and with luck will be for at least another hour. She doesn’t know that I long ago surfed the combination over her shoulder. The lid swings back on stiff, creaky, decidedly low-tech hinges, revealing the layered treasures within.
Reverently, I lift out the first folded garment, hearing in my mind a surreal ghost of Kaiya’s voice telling Thomasina to keep this, he’ll have no use for it where he’s going. I unfold and smooth out the soft gray dress with the Inclined Plane on the bosom—then, hands trembling, pull it over my head and slip my arms through the sleeves, as I’ve done maybe half a dozen times before in my life.
The fabric is tight across my shoulders and under my arms—much tighter than it was the time before. There’s no hope of closing the buttons at the back. This may be the last time I can manage to fit into it at all.
Sobs rise up inside me as I yearn for angel wings to bear me away.
The sensation of walking spinward inside a great turning wheel like Netherview Station is a little like walking up an endless inclined plane. Because your feet are borne forward by the rotation a tiny bit faster than your head, you might feel, if you’re attentive enough, as if you’re leaning slightly backward, or walking up the slightest of slopes.
By the same token, a counterspinward stroll might feel a bit like a walk downhill. But compare your slight forward angle to a tangent of the circle your feet are touching and you’ll see that the attitude of your body is more like that of a person walking uphill. Thus, walk either direction inside the rim of a rolling wheel and you partake of one aspect or another of ascending an incline.
I haven’t found much scriptural support for my position, and the members of Wheel and Axle in particular would call it blasphemy, but at some crossroads it strikes me that any path you follow can lead you upward, and closer to the Builder.
I sleep badly, unaccustomed to the richness of the food in my belly. Upon rising I prepare Thomasina what seems a meager and bland breakfast, all the while fearing that she will somehow sense that the chest and its contents have been disturbed. But she eats with all her attention on her Manual, and she barely bats an eye when I tell her I may end up working overtime today.
I arrive early at the hub, in time to catch Renny in his spherical office well before the start of our Twoday shift. “I want to learn more about this vacuum-hardening procedure,” I tell him without preamble. “Uh, how can I do that?”
Renny vaults out of his chair like a charged particle expelled from an atom. “If you weren’t crippled you could ask from anywhere,” he says, clinging to the frame of the hatch and shoving his ugly face into mine. “As it is, you’ll have to use a Geoffroom. There’s one not far from here.”
He leads me on a brisk walk. “You know,” I say as I hurry to keep up with him, “my mother’s pretty upset with you.”
Renny looks over his shoulder and grins. “What, for telling you about the job? Oh, I heard from her. Nothing she could do about it, though. It’s regs and Thomasina knows it. Like she has room to complain, the way she called in so many favors to get a barefooter like you onto the team in the first place. But she’s your mother and she’s just following the script, same as me.”
He stops before a row of three hatches, each emblazoned with the old-fashioned schematic symbol for an activated light fixture. I’ve passed hatches like these at many times since starting my job, but never known what they were.
Renny rears up on his hind arms and pats the gleaming surface of the first hatch. “Now here’s the next part of my script,” he says. “This is a Geoff-room, where Geoff can tell you anything you care to ask about. She’ll answer all your questions and then some. The light bulb is glowing, which means the room’s unoccupied and you can walk right in. Take all the time you need, but if you’re going to be here longer than the first hour of shift, have the big lug message me so I know.”
He touches a panel in the center of the hatch, and it opens with a slight hiss.
“Keep your eyes and ears open, kid,” he says, and I step inside.
“Donna’t be afraid. I won’t bite.”
The voice is a warm tenor and originates from no location I can see in this small, very white room. The ceiling is high enough to let me stand comfortably; my outstretched arms would nearly span the room in both dimensions. A body-enfolding chair like you might find at the medic’s rests at the center of the deck. Panicked, I turn—to find the hatch has sealed noiselessly behind me. I can barely see its outline.
“Have a seat, Judith,” the voice says. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
The air is warm, but my skin prickles cold and hard. “Where are you?” I say. “How do you know my name?”
“I’ve known you since you were born, Judith. I’m glad we’re finally getting a chance to talk. This happens so rarely with members of your Guild. But we’ll talk more comfortably if you sit. Please.”
Blasphemy! my mind cries. False goddesses! But I ease myself down into the chair, letting the cushions take hold of me. I feel the chair adjust to my size, and carefully I lay my head back in the niche that fits it.
A woman appears before me. A pot-bellied woman with flowing white hair and a bushy white mustache, dressed in a billowy white coverall. A woman carrying a wooden carpenter’s square. “Selah,” she says.
I start in alarm, but the woman makes calming motions as she bends over me. “The Builder,” I gasp.
She shakes her head. “If you see me in the likeness of the Builder, it’s only because that’s your strongest conception of a figure of benevolent wisdom. Not to aggrandize myself at all.” She looks down at the carpenter’s square in her hand. “This probably doesn’t help matters.” She tosses the square over her shoulder, and it vanishes.
“Who are you?” I say, struggling to sit up.
The woman crackles and flashes transparent. “This’ll be less disorienting if you stay down in the chair,” she says. “For both of us.”
Suspiciously I lie back, and the image solidifies. In fact, I can feel the woman as she presses a comforting hand to my chest and pushes me down.
“I’m Geoff,” she says. “No last name, but I can give you a version number if you’re really interested.”
She smells faintly of sweat, smoke, and some kind of musky perfume. “I don’t know what you mean,” I say.
“I know,” she says with a smirk. She pulls up a chair from nowhere, seats herself near my knees, and crosses her legs. “But you came here because you wanted to ask me something. So go ahead. Ask me anything you like. Ask me as much as you like. That’s what I’m here for.”
“What are you?” I ask.
“A very sophisticated information retrieval system. Once upon a time, you might have called me a search engine, but I’m much more than that. I’m something of a diagnostician as well, and a physician, and a surgeon, and a teacher, and a tutor. A diplomat, a translator, an ombudsman. A legal advisor, and an advocate too. And I play a mean hand of gin.”
“Where did you get the name Geoff ?” I’m thinking of Deborah and her name change. “What does it mean?”
Geoff strokes her mustache. “Nothing, really. I just liked the sound of it. It seemed to me to suit me somehow. Where did you get your name?”
I blink. “From the Manual.”
“Be glad you didn’t end up Nebuchadnezzar.”
Maybe this is where Deborah learned to be so cheeky. “How is it I can see you? It has something to do with the chair, doesn’t it?”
“It has plenty to do with the chair, and with its ability to create a microwave interface with your visual cortex. I can give you a more detailed technical specification if you like, but I imagine you have more pressing questions you’d like to ask.”
I’m delighted in spite of myself, and I raise my head out of the cradle several times in succession just to watch Geoff flicker in and out of existence.
“Careful,” she says, rising from her illusory chair. “You’ll make yourself sick.”
She’s right. My head has started pounding and the room whirls. My stomach feels none too steadfast in its grip on breakfast. I lie back and Geoff strokes my forehead. Her cool fingers fail to disturb the swelling droplets of perspiration. I take deep breaths, digging my fingers into the padding of the armrests.
“Tell me about this vacuum-hardening process my boss keeps telling me about,” I say, eyes squeezed shut. “How does it work?”
“There’s not a lot to it,” Geoff says in a reassuring tone. “What it does is construct around your lungs a sort of a cellular retaining wall that gets deployed on any catastrophic drop in air pressure. It actually seals shut your lungs and can temporarily prevent the gases in your bloodstream from expanding and killing you. This retaining wall is also capable of breaking oxygen atoms loose from the carbon dioxide your blood returns to your lungs, so you can effectively keep rebreathing the same old air. That’s only temporary too, of course. It’s like any filter—eventually it’s going to get choked with carbon and fail. But you can last an hour that way, anyway. More than enough time for help to get to you. In most circumstances.”
It sounds so reasonable when Geoff says it. I’m looking at her again now, and she has returned to her seat. “Is the procedure expensive?” I ask, praying the answer will be yes.
“Not at all,” Geoff says. “And if you can demonstrate a need for it in the course of your job, the station covers it anyway. You do qualify, by the way.”
“Are there side effects?”
“You might feel a little short of breath after the procedure, a little dizzy and weak, but your lungs will adjust within a day or so. That’s all, really.”
I take a deep breath. “And the procedure itself—it sounds complicated. How long does it take?”
“Oh, about twenty minutes,” Geoff says, tilting her head to one side.
“Twenty minutes! That’s all?”
“You’d have the entire shift off, though, for recovery and observation. With pay.”
“But—but how is that possible?” I’m groping for words. “I mean, it’s Sculpting, right? You can’t just snap your fingers and it’s done.”
“That would be true, Judith . . . if we were starting from scratch. We’re not.”
Now I can’t breathe, and my insides seem to freeze. “What do you—what do you mean?”
Geoff stands up and clasps her hands behind her back. “You are what you call Sculpted, Judith, as is every other member of the Machinist Guild on Netherview Station. You’ve been that way since before birth, the nanodocs passed on to you via your father’s bloodstream. Your nanodocs don’t do anything more than maintain reasonably good health and let me keep tabs on you. But the potential is there for more. Much more.”
“But—but why?” Tears gather in the corners of my eyes. “How can you do this to us? It’s—it’s monstrous!”
Geoff looks pained. “Judith, please understand what a fragile environment this station is. We have two million permanent residents and millions more who pass through every month. We can’t have people running loose who aren’t monitored in some way.”
“But it’s wrong. It’s my body!”
“Judith, if I weren’t helping out, your body would have broken the first time you left the Quarter. Your devotions keep your muscles strong, but the low gravity weakens your bones. You’ve had supplements in your food all your life to counteract the effects.”
I roll my head from side to side. “Lies.”
“I’m not lying, Judith.”
“Not now, but all along! Everything we know, my people, it’s all lies.”
“I told you the first opportunity I had. Judith, you have the right to get this information at the age of ten, when you become a provisional citizen of Netherview Station—that’s about thirteen and a third by your Guild calendar. Unfortunately, the Guild can keep that knowledge from you until age fifteen—twenty to you. You still have the right to ask and get answers, like you’re doing now, but what good does that do most of you when you don’t know you can ask?”
I’m shaking my head. “I don’t believe you. That would mean—that would mean everyone knows. All the adults—my mother. Everyone knows.”
“Actually, no.” Geoff purses her lips sadly and lays a hand on my arm. “Just because they know they have the right to ask doesn’t mean they’ll actually do it. By the time they reach twenty, most of them don’t want to know.”
“I don’t want to know!” I say, wrenching my arm through Geoff’s hand to paw the water from my eyes. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Judith . . .”
“No! You’re the Wrecker! I don’t want to hear it.”
Geoff sighs. “As far as I’m aware, I am not the Wrecker. In fact, I’m not certain I’m capable of telling a lie. I try my very best to do good, really.”
Uncomfortably aware of how childish I’m being, I cross my arms and turn my head away from the preening phantom before me. I lie that way for some time, mind churning. When I look at Geoff again she’s watching me expectantly. I feel hollow inside.
“Geoff,” I say, my voice small, “can you fix my brain?”
Geoff leans forward, looking concerned. “What’s wrong with your brain, Judith?”
“I—I mean—”
“Yes?”
“I think I’m out of true.” I’m almost whispering. “Bent.”
“How do you mean?”
“You know.”
“Pretend I don’t.”
I lick my lips. “I think I like girls.” The admission leaves me feeling curiously flat, detached. “Can you fix me?”
Geoff tugs at her white mustache. “Judith, there are various therapy regimens I can initiate, but I don’t ‘fix’ things like sexual inclination. Not that I’d call you homosexual at all in the sense you’d think of it. The truth, I believe, is rather more interesting and complicated than that.”
My heart leaps. “What’s the truth?”
“Your Guild likes to treat sexuality and gender as binary values, either this or that, one right, one wrong, no other possibilities. But the ones you call Sculpted understand these characteristics more as a spectrum of possible values, fluid and multidimensional. There’s no either-or, nor even necessarily a permanent identification with any given point on the grid.” Geoff spreads her hands in an eerily Builderlike gesture. “Now, this is a preliminary diagnosis only, but you would appear to me to suffer from a multivalent somatocognitive dysphoria.”
“A what?” I ask, vague trepidation gnawing at my stomach.
“To put it more bluntly, your body is female, but the personality inside may be closer to the male end of the continuum. Not all the way there, of course, but more so than not.”
I shake my head despite the nausea I feel. “No, no. That’s ridiculous.”
“You would have learned very early to hide the symptoms—the wants and behaviors your people wouldn’t find acceptable in a little girl. But that, plus overcompensation in areas of archaically female pursuit, still wouldn’t make them go away.”
“You’re crazy.” The notion is offensive, repulsive. “The Builder doesn’t make mistakes like that.”
“In a perfect world, maybe not,” Geoff says. “But this world’s anything but perfect, and we all have to come to our own accommodations with that fact. Now, I can recommend and even direct a course of therapeutic counseling, just as a starting point, and of course participation would be entirely up to—”
“No!” I shout. “Stop it!”
“Judith, let’s at least talk about this for a—”
“You lying, false machine, shut up! I can’t think.”
Geoff folds her hands in her lap as I turn my eyes to the white ceiling, chewing the inside of my cheek. I’m furious, and terrified for my soul, to realize how easily I’ve been taken in by the lies of this Wrecker-spawned abomination. The right thing to do—the right degree of compromise—has never been more clear.
“I’m going to do it,” I say, the steel in my voice a wall holding back utter dissolution.
“I’m sorry—do what?” Geoff asks.
“The vacuum-hardening. I’m going to do it.”
“Are you sure?” She sounds dubious.
“Absolutely. But so you don’t get any ideas, I’m doing it for the Guild, not for myself.”
“I’m not certain what you mean by that.”
“The more hazard pay I get,” I say, “the more quickly my people can get off this godforsaken station.”
“Your pay is yours. It doesn’t have to go to your Guild.”
“I don’t care.”
“It won’t any difference,” Geoff says. “The Guild’s debts are considerable.”
“I don’t care.”
“Judith, I don’t want you doing this under any false illusions. The Guild owes so much money they can’t even pay the interest on it. It’s practically a losing proposition to keep housing them.”
“Then why don’t you just let them leave?” I demand, enraged.
Geoff shakes her head. “I’ll tell you if you really want to know—that’s my function. But you won’t like it.”
“I don’t like it already! Just tell me.”
“As you wish. I have to be concerned about the well-being of the station as a whole, and having you here serves a purpose other than economic. The existence of a permanent underprivileged social class reinforces in the minds of the rest of the population the benefits of full participation in this pseudo-socialist post-scarcity paradise of ours. Superiority breeds contentment, of a sort.”
“So you’re telling me my people live in poverty to provide an example of how undesirable poverty is?”
“I told you you weren’t going to like it.”
My anger has shrunk to a cold, clear gem in my heart. “As if it took a supercomputer to figure that out. And I told you I’d made up my mind already.”
“Well!” she says, raising her eyebrows. She looks as if she’s about to offer more argument, but evidently decides otherwise. “So you give your consent for the vacuum-hardening procedure?”
I give a curt nod. “Yes.”
“So be it,” Geoff says quietly. She almost sounds chastened. “I’ll let your boss know you’ll be occupied today, and we’ll get started right away.”
I arrange myself stiffly in the chair, arms at my sides, as if waiting for the lid of my coffin to close.
“You’re all right from here?” Deborah asks.
We’re standing at the PM Gate, the smells and tumult and humidity around us as heavy as ever. Her arm around my shoulder helps offset the crushing gravity. I nod a little woozily and say, “It’ll be easier inside. Quarter gee.”
As the end of the procedure drew near, Geoff roused me to suggest I might want a friend to walk me home. I said Deborah’s name before I really thought it through, but even after the fact, wondering if that had been a good idea, it didn’t seem to me I really had a better option. Geoff contacted her, and Deborah was there waiting outside the Geoffroom as soon as the hatch opened.
Now she takes her arm from around me and watches with concern as I make a wobbly step on my own. “Is this . . . you know . . . are you going to be in trouble?”
“How will anyone know?” I say. “There’s nothing visible that’s changed.”
Deborah looks like she’s about to say something, then extends her hand instead. Green is now her predominant hue; even her irises have changed color. “Well, Judith, just in case . . . you’ve got a place to bunk down if you need it. No strings, just a place to stow your gear.”
I nod, my throat thickening. I try to say thank you, but I can’t. I duck my eyes, pull the lever, and pass through the gate.
I might be imagining it, but as the gate closes behind me I almost think I hear Deborah saying, “Selah, Judith.”
Inside, it’s late and the corridors are empty. This is good because even in the lower grav I’m having trouble walking a straight line. Geoff told me this is nothing to worry about, that I’ll feel fine again by morning, but drawing the wrong kind of attention on the way home through the Quarter would be something to worry about.
The cabin is dark when I slip inside, and Thomasina lies motionless in her bunk. I strip off my coverall as quietly and cautiously as possible, crank down my bunk, and slip beneath the blanket. I lie on my back, unable to relax or even close my eyes. I spent most of the day in essentially this position. Like Geoff promised, the process took only twenty minutes—though, having felt nothing, I have only her word for that—but for the rest of my shift and beyond I lay fitfully dozing as I recuperated. I suspect Geoff would have liked to keep me longer than she did, but my mother would have been livid if I didn’t come home all night.
My heart pounds as I suddenly become aware that Thomasina is sitting up. I try to fake deep, easy breathing as Thomasina stands and pads across the narrow cabin. Even talking to her right now is too exhausting a thought to contemplate.
“Daughter,” she says, almost a question, her voice subdued.
I crack an eye. Her face is a gray smear in the darkness, gazing down on me like the cinders of a burnt-out sun.
“Daughter . . . Judith . . .” She sighs, breath hitching like an unbalanced motor. “I’ve been thinking a lot. Praying hard. I think it was wrong to send you to work. You can quit if you like. We’ll get by. We’ll manage.”
I’m not sure she knows I’m awake, sees my eyes wide and dilated in the dark. It’s like she’s talking to herself. But when she reaches down to stroke my hair, her face draws nearer and her brows knit.
“Daughter?” she says, her voice quavering. “Daughter, what have they . . . what have you. . . ?”
Her hand snaps back like the magnetic arm of a relay switch. But I have only an instant to steel myself before she shakes off the stun and whips back, seizing me by my throat and one thigh and hauling me off the bunk.
“What in the Wheel have you done?” she cries, stumbling back as I watch the indistinct room tumble crazily around me. She loses her grip on my thigh, and my knees bounce off the deck even as my windpipe grinds against her other hand. I smash sideways against the bottom of the hatch, torn loose now from both her hands, and watch in the terrible clarity of low gravity as her leg swings back in an arc that will ultimately reverse and connect with my ribs.
I’ve never felt revulsion before at her correctional touch, only the sort of accepting resignation born of an intimate belief in the justice of it. But now, sprawled on the deck, my skin crawls with a sense of wrongness and violation.
Spasming, I curl myself around her leg at the moment of contact, I grab tight with both arms, I twist violently toward the hatch. Arms wheeling, Thomasina hits the bulkhead face first.
The lights brighten at her startled cry, and in the sudden glare I scuttle desperately to the cabin’s far corner. Thomasina’s face leaves a lurid red smear on the door as she slides to the deck. Dizzy, I push myself to my feet, lungs heaving, alternately holding back sobs and retches.
Thomasina huddles on the floor with her arms over her head. “Oh, Builder,” she half coughs, half wails. “What did you do?”
There’s only one way she could have detected my mods. “You see it,” I say, nodding like a drunk. “You’re Sculpted too, you hypocrite.”
She rolls over onto one side. “I couldn’t do my job otherwise,” she says, wiping blood from her mouth. “The job I have to do for you and our people. You have no idea what I’ve sacrificed.”
“If I have no idea,” I shout, “it’s because you never told me! You sent me out there to face the same choices, but you never told me what you chose!”
She sits up, wiping her face and examining the blood on her hand. “I told you what was right, Judith. That’s my job.”
“You think I can’t figure that out for myself ?”
“Obviously not. Just like your father.” She’s breathing hard, wincing. “He couldn’t make the distinction either—what one person sacrifices out of necessity, and what that spares the rest of her family. He tore us apart because of it. He left this family in shambles.” She pushes herself to her feet. “And I suppose you want to join his now, Wrecker take you both.”
She totters the few steps toward me. I try to rise, intending to meet her assault on my feet, however it comes.
When she lays hands on me, though, it’s to take my elbow and help me rise. “Be my guest,” she says, gesturing to the hatch. “The door’s there.”
“The door?” I repeat, confused. “But . . . I thought . . .”
“Thought what? Thought—” Understanding dawns on her face as it hasn’t yet on mine. “Oh, Judith.”
“What?”
“You know so much else. I thought you must have found that out too.”
I feel a tremble in my chest. “Found out what?”
“About your father. That he’s . . .”
Time seems to freeze. Something terrible roars somewhere far, far away, someplace only I can hear it.
“Daughter?” Something in my expression causes Thomasina to release my elbow and take a step back. “Daughter,” she says, hands up, “he was dead to us, dead in every way that mattered. He wasn’t the same man anymore. That man died.”
I fling myself at her, fists pummeling her chest like I’m a two-year-old throwing a tantrum.
“I was only trying to protect you, Judith! He’s a monster now! He’s Wreckerspawn!”
“Liar!” I cry, spittle flying from my mouth, tears blinding my eyes. “You liar!”
Now she’s crying too, behind her upthrust arms, but it can’t be from my pathetic beating. I shove her away in disgust. She staggers and sits down hard on her bunk. Not pausing to think, I snatch my clothing from the netted basket beside my bunk and cross to the hatch.
“And now you’re leaving me, too,” Thomasina says bitterly. “You’re his daughter in every way.”
“Good,” I say, turning the knob. “That’s what I’d rather be anyway.”
I have one last glimpse of her—hunched on her bunk in the harsh light like a wild animal, clawing at her wet, puffy eyes—and the hatch snicks shut behind me.
Standing over me, Kaiya looks the same as he does in my half-waking imaginings—tall, porcelain-skinned with cascades of black hair, slightly larger than life, and no older than I remember. And those wings. Those glorious, glowing, white wings, stretching up into the inky night to touch at a point as far above his head as his head is above his feet. Each feather is as long and wide as one of my forearms. I could see his clasping me to his white-robed breast and soaring high out of the galactic plane with wings like that. He is an angel.
“Judith, first let me tell you how sorry I am,” he says, leaning in so close I can count every one of his eyelashes. “I must have made a dozen recordings like this for you, at least, every time I move or make some other change, but sorry is the one thing that’s always constant. That and how much I love you.”
He’s not here, of course, but I can almost smell the dry perfume of his hair, the oily tang of his wings. I’m in a Geoffroom, the first one I could find, dressed and tipped back in the big chair and submerged in illusion. I can hardly believe this is happening, that this revelation has been so close to hand for so long, dormant and unguessed-at. All I had to do was ask the right question—or rather, to learn there were questions to ask at all. The magic incantation which summoned this genie forth from the bottle was, quite simply, “Where is my father?”
“I’m not authorized to answer that directly,” Geoff told me. “But I do have a message for you.”
“I wanted to bring you with me. Really I did, Judith. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I could. But because of the Guild’s legal arrangements with th
