Chapter 1 — The Useful Jobs

The run above the second landing had been dry for eleven years and had a bend in it that nobody had drawn, and Cray had her shoulders inside the void and both arms up past the elbow before Renko had finished telling her not to.

“Come out of it.”

“I’m at the union.”

“You’re at the union with your face in a live stretch and my name on the sheet.”

“It isn’t live. You bled it at the sixth bell and I watched you do it.” Her thumb found the collar and went round it, and the collar moved, which it had not done for the two hands who had been at it before her, and she came out backwards with her hair full of the grey dust that lives above a ceiling and nowhere else. “It’s a quarter turn out of true. Whoever put it up put it up short and heated the bend to make the difference.”

Renko took the collar off her without looking at it and turned it in the light.

“That’s a good read.”

“So sign it off.”

“No.”

The gang worked four hands on the Ring Six stretches and had done since before Cray was born, and three of the four were signed and one was not, and the one who was not could do the union above the second landing in less time than the two who could. Everybody in the passage understood the arithmetic of that. Nobody had ever seen it change anything.

“Bring the ladder round,” Renko said. “We’ve the door furniture on Six-B and the notice says the hour.”

They brought the ladder round.

The stretch ran the whole inboard length of the ring walk and had been narrowed by about the width of a person twelve years ago and had never got it back, and the plating along the narrow part was different plating, four courses of it, laid the year everything got laid. Cray had walked it every day of her life. She knew where the courses changed by her feet and had never once looked down to check.

At the second landing the light was on. Somebody had got a counter to say whose it was, eventually, and the counter had said it and then the plant side had come and done it in an afternoon, and the whole stretch had been unbearable about it for a month.

“Cray.”

“Ganger.”

“What’s the reason.” Renko had the collar still, and turned it once more, and put it in his coat. “Not the arithmetic. You’ve got the arithmetic. The reason.”

“Because you don’t want to write my name against a live stretch.”

“That’s the arithmetic said backwards.” He went up the ladder. “A sign-off says somebody looked. Not that somebody could have. If your name’s on that sheet and nobody looked, she gets what she gets and my name’s on the paper.”

“I did put my eyes on it.”

“You did.” He had the plate off the door head and his hand inside it. “And I didn’t see you do it.”

“You were four feet away.”

“I was four feet away with my back to you doing the other one.” The plate came down and he passed it to her without turning. “Hold that. When I’ve watched you do nine of them I’ll sign you, and it won’t be because you got better. You’re not going to get better. You’re already better than Tuazon and Tuazon’s been signed six years.”

“Then—”

“Then nothing. Hold the plate.”

Cray held the plate.

Down the walk somebody’s door was propped with a folded mat and there was a child in the gap of it with a dish, watching them the way children watch a ladder. Two women came past with the week’s dry stores between them on a pole and went round the ladder without being asked and without breaking whatever it was they were saying to each other. The narrow part took them single file and they did that without breaking it either.

A woman came out of the door under the ladder with a basin and stopped because the ladder was in it.

“Is it the closer?”

“It’s the closer,” Renko said. “It’s been dragging on you.”

“It’s been dragging on me since the winter and I’ve stopped saying so.”

“You should have gone on saying so.”

“I said so four times.” She put the basin down on the deck rather than carry it round. “Then I worked out the ones who say so get seen last.”

Renko did not argue with that, which Cray had not expected.

“It’ll shut tonight,” he said.

The closer was an old pattern and had been fitted the wrong way up, which the whole stretch had, because the whole stretch had gone in during the year everything went in. Cray had the arm off and the spring out on the deck in the time it took Renko to get the second ladder foot to sit, and she had the wear on the pin under her thumb before he was up.

“Pin’s gone oval.”

“Show me.”

Cray showed him. Renko put his thumb where hers had been and left it there a moment longer than was needed, and then took a pin out of the roll in his coat, because he carried four of them and had carried four of them for as long as anybody on the gang could remember.

“You’d have got a year out of that,” Cray said.

“I’d have got a year out of it.” He seated the new one. “And then it goes in the middle of a night, and she’s got a door standing open on a passage in her nightclothes at the third bell.”

The door shut. It shut properly, with the small dead sound a door makes when the closer is doing the work instead of the frame, and the woman picked up her basin and went off down the walk without saying anything about it, which on this stretch was the thanks.

Renko came down and stood looking at the door the way he looked at everything, which was for slightly too long.

“That’ll do till the quarter,” he said. “Write it up.”

“It’ll do past the quarter.”

“Write up that it’ll do till the quarter.”

Cray wrote up that it would do till the quarter.

---

The apprentice bay was two rooms off the works passage with a bench down the middle of each and a wall of shallow drawers that had come out of something else, and at the end of a shift it filled with people who were sixteen and had nowhere in particular to be for an hour.

Tehl had the far end of the bench with a lamp pulled over on its arm and a spool of solder wire and somebody’s bad joint in a clamp.

“Whose is that?”

“Bel’s.”

“Bel doesn’t do joints.”

“Bel did that one.” Tehl had the iron in her right hand and the wire in her left and did not look up. “He did it on a feed for the fish tank in the school bay and it’s held four months and it’s about to stop holding, and he wanted me to tell him it was fine.”

“Is it fine?”

“It’s the worst joint I have ever seen and I have seen my father’s.”

Cray got her coat off and got up on the bench with her boots on the rail.

The thing Tehl did with the wire took four seconds. It had taken four seconds when they were twelve, in the school bay, with Cray watching the thumbnail and getting about half of what the thumb was doing and none of what the other hand was doing. Cray had spent a year working out the thumb. She had got the thumb, in the end, and then she had spent two more years on the other hand, and now she could do it in five.

Five was not four. There was no way of getting from five to four that anybody had ever been able to describe, and Cray had asked, and Tehl had tried to say, and what Tehl said was you just stop waiting, which was not a thing a person could do on purpose.

The joint came apart and went back together and Tehl put the iron in the stand and turned the clamp round.

“There. Now it’s a joint.”

“Four.”

“Was it four?”

“It’s always four.”

“It’s sometimes five,” Tehl said. “You’ve never been here for a five.”

Somebody at the other bench had a tray of instrument heads out and was going through them against a list, and had been at it since before Cray came in, and would be there after she left. That was Sarraf’s boy, seventeen, put on stores because he was quick, and since discovering that quick was the wrong thing to be about stores.

“How many’s wrong?”

“Nine,” he said, without turning round. “Nine out of a hundred and four, all wrong the same way, and the list’s been signed off twice.”

“Tell your ganger.”

“I told my ganger. My ganger told the plant side. The plant side sent back a note saying the list was signed.” He put another head in the tray. “So I do the hundred and four, I find the nine, I put them right. Nobody writes anything down. Next quarter it’ll be nine again.”

Bel came in for the joint and looked at it, and said it looked the same, and Tehl said that was because it looked like a joint now and had looked like a joint before, and the difference was the four months. Bel took that away with him to think about and would be back with it in a fortnight, worse.

Vesh came through with her sleeves still rolled and a tally of something in her hand and sat down on the drawers, which everybody did and nobody was supposed to.

“They’ve had us on the second growth hall all week,” she said. “It’s the same three trays. Somebody up the line writes down that the trays are turned and nobody turns the trays, and then it’s us at the far end telling the schedule the yield’s off, and the schedule says it can’t be off because the trays are turned.”

“So turn the trays.”

“We do turn the trays. That’s the whole—” Vesh stopped, and looked at Cray, and started again more slowly, which was how she got when the system was the point. “We turn the trays now. Because we’re the ones who found out. So the yield comes right, and the sheet upstream says the trays were turned all along, and when we stop being the ones who do it the sheet will still say it.”

“Write it down.”

“Where.”

Nobody had an answer for where. Bel said the sector office, and Vesh said the sector office would put it on the plant side, and Bel said then the plant side, and Vesh said the plant side was the ones writing it down wrong, and then it was a quarter past and the argument stopped being interesting.

“My aunt’s on tonight,” Tehl said, at the point where it had stopped. She was winding the wire back onto the spool with her thumb inside the coil. “She’s got the relay from the second bell. She’s going to want to know whether I’m signed.”

“You’re signed.”

“I’m signed for bench work. She won’t know that’s different. She’ll say signed and mean the whole thing and I’ll say yes.”

“Tell her about the joint,” Cray said.

“I’m not telling her about Bel’s joint. She’ll want to know who Bel is and then I’ve spent the relay on Bel.” Tehl got the spool in her pocket and pulled the lamp arm back where it lived. “I’ll ask her about the delivery. She’s been on about a delivery for a month, and there’s about four minutes of it, and then she gets to the part where she’s cross and that’s the good bit.”

---

The quarters were four doors up from the narrow part, and Lote had the door propped with the mat because the mat had been propping the door since 2322 and had outlived two ring refits and the entire question of whether it was allowed.

The lease was still forty-one. It said so on the sheet in the press with the rest of the paper, and it had said so on the sheet in Ring Three before that, and Lote had never once in her life referred to it by number.

“You’re grey.”

“It’s above the second landing.”

“There’s dust above the second landing,” Lote said, “and there is dust in this room, and one of them is going to be the same dust in about a minute.”

Cray got her coat off outside the door and shook it in the passage and came back in, and Lote let that stand as having been dealt with, which was the arrangement.

They had come to the arrangement over about a year without saying any part of it out loud. There had been a bad stretch when Cray was twelve and thirteen, and the bad stretch had gone on long enough to become a shape rather than a fight, and then somewhere in the middle of Cray being fourteen it had stopped being a shape too. Neither of them had said anything then either. Lote had started leaving the second cup out, and Cray had started coming back for it, and that had turned out to be all of it.

Lote worked the long side of the week and cooked on the short side and the two days she did not cook Cray did, badly, and they both preferred the badly to the alternative, which had been three years of Cray not being asked.

“Renko wouldn’t sign me.”

“No.”

“He said I’m better than Tuazon.”

“He’d be right.” Lote put the pot down on the board and sat. “Tuazon’s on the doors. Tuazon’s been on the doors since the doors went in and Tuazon could do them in the dark, and could not tell you what any of them are for.”

“Do you know Tuazon?”

“Everybody on this stretch knows Tuazon. Tuazon holds the bloc door on the Seven-C side and has done for six years and knows every household from the landing down to the plant face by which side they come home on.” Lote pulled the dish over. “And has never once put a hand on anything I’d want a hand on.”

“Renko said the sign-off means somebody looked.”

“That’s right.”

“He was four feet away when I looked.”

“Then he’d tell you he had his back to you.” Lote ate. “And he’d be telling the truth, and you’d think he was being awkward.”

Cray ate the length of a mouthful on that. It was not an answer and she did not say so.

“Tehl’s on the relay tonight.”

“Is she.” Lote said it in the way she said things about Tehl, which was slightly warmer than she said things about anybody else, and had been since the fortnight. It was four years since the fortnight. Nobody in the household referred to it as the fortnight except in the household.

“Her aunt’s got it from the second bell.”

“Then she’ll be an hour and come out of it cross,” Lote said, “because it’s four minutes of her aunt and fifty of the basin dropping out, and it has been like that since the winter, and Selh’s been telling that relay office the same thing about the same equipment for two years and they write it down.”

“Vesh says the plant side writes everything down.”

“They do,” Lote agreed.

Lote got the press open and took the paper out and put the lease sheet on the board, which she did about twice a year and had never explained.

“Read me the top of it.”

“You know the top of it.”

“Read me the top of it.”

Cray read her the top of it. The reference, the ring, the term, the date, the two names and the hand that had written them, and the number, which she said without stopping on it, because the number was only a number and had been a number her whole life.

“Right,” Lote said, and put it back.

“Why do you do that?”

“Because the way a thing gets taken off you is you stop being able to say what’s on it.” Lote pushed the press door with her hip until the catch went. “There was a year when I couldn’t have told you what was on that sheet. I could have told you it was in the press. That’s not the same and it took me a while to work out it wasn’t.”

Cray put the dish in the wash and stood with her hands in it.

“Renko said in eleven years I’ll be somebody’s ganger and I’ll say no to them.”

“He’s out. It’ll be six or seven.” Lote came and took the dish off her and did it properly, which was the other half of the arrangement. “You’ve got his hands and you haven’t got his patience. And you’ll be given the gang before you’ve got it, because there’s more stretch than there are hands. That’s how I got the room I got.”

“You never say about that.”

“I never say about a lot of things. You’d be no better off.” Lote put the dish up. “Ask me when you’ve got the gang and I’ll tell you the useful half.”

Lote got up and put the second cup out and did not make anything of it, and Cray came and got it, and did not make anything of it either, and they stood at the board for a while with the door propped and the passage going past outside, two women, one dish, an ordinary evening on the ring, and the light on the second landing was on and would still be on in the morning.

Down the walk somebody was moving something heavy in short stages and stopping between them, and stopping for longer each time, and after the fourth stop two other people went out and did it with them, and after that it went in one go.