The letting office on the Ring Eight frame keeps its founding paper under glass, flat on the counter where the tenants queue:
Rings Seven and Eight, to be built, held and provisioned on the terms of the instrument of 2320; the term forty years; first call on berth priority and environmental allocation to run with the term.
The nine houses of the Concession go down the left margin in nine seals and nine inks. The right-hand signature is Kade’s. A companion instrument of 2319 covers Rings Five and Six on the same shape. Between them, the two papers built four rings for a station that had admitted everyone it promised to admit and could not house them — and the houses’ own case for the bargain is short and not stupid: every tenant in those rings queued to sign, and nobody queues to be wronged.
The clause that became a verb
First call is the priority clause: the right to draw before the residents do. At a hearing it is granted in one sentence, without reference to any furnace — first call on berth priority and environmental allocation, running with the term; entered, dated, effective on the quarter. On the renewals list that follows, residential renewals are granted against what stands in the pool once first call has been entered against it, and somewhere past the middle of the afternoon the pool runs out, and the officer says the same four words to each remaining queue number: No allocation this quarter. Then: You may re-lodge.
Nobody outside a hearing says the full phrase. On the aprons it is a verb — we got first-called — and it is said of ships as well as corridors: a Master with good paper and no house behind her can be first-called past so often the queue adopts her and waters her at the change of watch.
The glass above the schedule of fees has clouded from being pointed at. The glass above the signature is clear as the day it was cut. Both facts are maintained by the same queue.