Chapter 1 — An Ordinary Morning

“It’s not a rule,” Cray said. “Nobody has a rule about shoes at breakfast.”

“This household has a rule about shoes at breakfast.”

“Since when?”

“Since there started being three of us and one of you kept putting a bare foot on my chair.”

Tehl, who was the third of them and had not put a foot on anything, kept her head down over the bowl and did not help either side. She had been doing that for four days and had got good at it.

Cray looked at her own feet with the expression of somebody meeting an old and disappointing acquaintance, and fastened the second shoe, and was not quick about it. Twelve years old and most of the way up her mother’s shoulder now, and the argument was won on points and both of them knew it, because there had been no rule at all before Tehl came and everybody at the table had eaten breakfast barefoot for years.

Next door the welder started his music at the usual place in the morning. The same songs in the same order, a woman singing on the recording in a language nobody on this corridor spoke, and by now every child on the stretch could carry the chorus of the third one and most of them did, at volume, in the wash queue, to the annoyance of nobody who admitted it.

Under the music came the ovens. The baker fired hers before anything else on Ring Six was awake and the vents did the rest, and the smell arrived at every door on the stretch for nothing, and was the only thing on the station that had never once been metered.

“Your father sent to the sector office and not to us,” Lote said to Tehl. “So it comes through the board. I’ll have it by the second bell and I’ll bring it up to the school myself rather than leave you sitting on it.”

“She said the eleventh.”

“Your aunt said the eleventh from inside the basin, and in there that’s a guess.”

Tehl moved the last of the bread round the bowl and went still. Four days in, Cray had learned to leave about six seconds of room after that.

“It’s a whole relay,” Tehl said. “It’s not her.”

“I know it isn’t her.”

“People keep saying it like it’s her.”

Selh had brought her down on the third morning of the blackout with a bag and an apology, then gone back to the throat side to sit at a desk and wait. There was nothing else to do about a relay two roads out. He had said four days. It had been four days. Grey hands on the door frame, and no fuss made, and the apology given twice because once had not been enough for him.

“Cans,” Lote said.

“There’s two of us.”

“There’s two cans.”

The door ran its whole track on the first pull. It had dragged once, in the bottom quarter, before the cold spell broke the year Cray was four, and a plant hand from up the corridor had come down after supper with a kit roll and a compound tube and put a new bead in the frame. He had held the frame steady and let her press her thumb into the soft compound at the tail of it, low on the hinge side, where it would show only with the door standing open.

There. Inspection mark.

The print was still in the cured bead. Cray put her thumb on it going out, which she had done every morning she could remember, and her thumb covered it now with room on all sides.

“It’s got smaller again,” she said.

“You’ve got bigger. It’s the same size it was.”

“I know how it works.”

“Then stop saying it.”

Outside, the corridor was about its morning. The twins from the far end were nineteen now and one of them still went past at a run. The baker’s boy had a bench of his own halfway down and a queue of his own, and sold repaired lamps off it at a rate the corridor considered barely honest and paid anyway. Somebody’s washing hung across the ring passage on a line rigged from the light brackets, against the fit-out rules, and had been up long enough to smell of bread itself.

Halfway along, the walkway narrowed by about the width of a person.

It narrowed because the line ran there — a hand’s span of pipe on brackets down the port side, lagged, taped at the joints, with a rubber mat across the section outside the third door where a woman had put one down years ago and nobody had ever taken it up. The plates along that stretch had come out of a different shop from the plates on the rest of the corridor. They sat a shade off, and the fixings stood proud, and the tread on them rang under a boot in a way that told a person with her eyes shut exactly where on Ring Six she was standing.

Cray had lived here since she was three. Corridors narrowed. Some of them ran warm at one end and cold at the other, and some of them rang, and a girl going up this one at speed with two cans learned to turn her shoulders at the third door without deciding to, and did.

“Don’t go fast at the bypass.”

“I’m not going fast.”

“You went fast at it.”

At the ring junction the tap queue had sorted itself out by a rule nobody had ever posted, and the seamer’s chair stood at the head of it with a coat over the back, which meant the seamer was in the queue somewhere and the chair was not to be taken.

A man from Eight sat in it.

The man from Eight had been on the station eleven weeks and had the look of somebody who had worked out that the queue was a queue and was pleased with himself for it. Four people told him at once and none of them agreed on the reason.

“That’s the seamer’s.”

“She’s not in it.”

“That’s why it’s got a coat on it.”

“Where I’m from, if nobody’s sitting in it, it’s free.”

“Not here it isn’t. Up,” said the woman behind him, who had two draw-chits and a shift to trade and no patience at all before the second bell, and the man got up, and nobody held it against him for more than a minute, because the seamer herself came back down the line and made him sit in it again, which was worse.

Lote filled the big can and did not join in. At the head of the tap, on the wall, the ring’s access plate carried the reserve in figures the height of a thumbnail — nine hours, the same as it had said since the works finished, the same as it had said when the ring went up, with the post-programme certification date under it and a tag on a wire beneath that. She read it. Then she read the flow off the tap head, and got her book out of her coat, and wrote the one against the other in a hand that had been doing it long enough not to need to look.

“You’re the only one who does that,” Cray said.

“Mm.”

“Nobody else on the corridor even looks at it.”

“They look at it.”

“They don’t read it.”

“Then somebody ought to,” Lote said, and put the book away, and that was that conversation done, as it had been every time Cray had ever started it.

They went up the ring walk with the cans between them, past the niches in the wall on the inboard side where people left things — dock chits, a card deck with a band round it, a printed cup with a name scratched into the base, a pair of gloves laid flat with the fingers straight. A woman was crouched at the second one putting a cloth over the shelf and lifting each thing to wipe under it. Cray went past at the pace she always went past, and got her shoulder through the narrow part without slowing, and was talking about the wire before she was clear of it.

Because Tehl could do a thing with solder wire that Cray could not.

It took about four seconds and it was maddening. A length of stripped wire off a lamp bench, a thumbnail, one pass, and it came off the thumb as a closed ring with the join invisible, and it would not pull apart. Cray had watched it eleven times. She had produced, so far, four rings that came apart, one that had never closed at all, and one very good one that turned out to have been made by Tehl.

“You’re going round it,” Tehl said. “Go through it.”

“I am going through it.”

“You’re going round it and then pressing it.”

“That’s the same—”

“It isn’t the same at all,” said Tehl, who had not said a full sentence to anybody outside the household for four days, and laughed at her, and Cray called her something unrepeatable, and they went up the last of the ring stair arguing about it.

---

Second period was arithmetic. Third period was supposed to be the reach, but the reach teacher had a bad chest and the sector had not sent a relief, so third period had become an argument about weather.

“It’s air,” said Bel, who had held this position for a year. “It’s just air doing something.”

“Air doesn’t do anything.”

“Air does loads. It goes round.”

“It goes round because a fan is on.”

“Not down there it doesn’t.”

Nine of them in the bay and seven born on the Cairn. Bel had a cousin on Earth who sent pictures, which made him the authority in the room and also the least trusted person in it, because the pictures never showed the thing anybody actually wanted to see.

“Rain, then,” said Vesh. “Explain rain.”

“Rain’s water coming down.”

“From where.”

“From the air.”

“Why is there water in the air. Who put it there. Nobody’s running a line.”

“It gets into the air off the sea and then it comes back down.”

There was a pause while the bay worked on this.

“That’s a loop,” Vesh said, with the flat contempt of a girl whose mother worked the cultured lines on Twelve. “That’s a loop with no cover on it. Anybody could fall in it.”

“You can’t fall in the sea.”

“You could absolutely fall in the sea.”

“It’s very big, Vesh, you don’t just—”

“So it’s a loop, it’s open, and it’s very big,” Vesh said. “Right. And they let children live there.”

“There’s a rail,” Cray said.

Every head came round.

“Round the sea?”

“Round the — ” Cray had not thought this through and was now committed. “Round the parts of it people go near. Obviously not round all of it. You’d never finish it.”

“So where’s the rail stop?”

“Wherever they got to.”

“And then what?”

“And then you’re just careful,” Cray said, “the same as anywhere,” and Bel said yes, thank you, and Vesh said that was the worst answer anybody had given all year, and everybody started at once, and the arithmetic teacher put her head round the partition and looked at them until it stopped.

Cray had a picture of it in her head that she had built out of two of Bel’s pictures and a description of a hill in a book, and in it the sky was a ceiling painted a long time ago and coming away in places. She knew it was wrong. It was the only one she had, and she was not going to put it in front of Vesh.

Lote came up at the second bell with the sector office’s slip in her hand and stood in the passage, and Tehl went out to her and was gone a good deal longer than Cray expected.

Tehl came back and sat down and put both hands flat on the bench.

“It’s the relay,” she said, to nobody. “The whole basin’s off. It could be another fortnight.”

“A fortnight—”

“I said it could be.” Tehl said it too fast and too loud, and the bay went quiet, and she heard herself do it. She turned the slip over twice and did not look up. “Sorry. It could be a fortnight.”

Nobody had anything for that. After a moment Vesh moved her bag off the bench without being asked, so that Tehl could sit properly instead of on the corner, and said, “Have you still got that wire?”

“It’s at hers.”

“Bring it to mine after. My mother’s on lates.”

The arithmetic teacher came back and made them do arithmetic, and the reach went untaught for another day.

---

The lease office sat off the junction between a printer’s stall and a man who sold cable by the metre, and had a counter and a queue that moved.

Lote had the folder. Cray had been brought because the renewal took the household’s dependants afresh every fourth year and the clerk had to see the dependant, which was a rule somebody had written without ever having stood in a queue with a twelve-year-old.

“You could have brought the card.”

“They want the person.”

“They never ask me anything.”

“Then it’ll be short and we’ll both be out.”

The queue moved. A man ahead of them was arguing a maintenance right on a stretch of walkway that had been redrawn when the works went through, and had been arguing it, by the sound of it, for some years; the clerk gave him the same three sentences she had plainly given him before, without heat, and marked the file each time. Behind them a woman was explaining that she had put in for Ten-B and been told nineteen months, and her friend said nineteen months was optimistic, and both of them laughed in the way people laugh at a number they have already lost an argument to.

At the counter Lote put the folder down and turned it round.

The clerk went through it with a stylus, page by page, at the pace of a woman who has done nine of these before the interval. Occupancy. Metering. The dependant’s line.

“Full name.”

“Cray.”

“Just the one?”

“Just the one,” Lote said.

“That’s fine, we’ve got that.” The stylus went down the page. “Age?”

“Twelve,” Cray said.

The clerk did not look up. “It’ll take the date of record. That’s what it’s got.”

The clerk keyed it, and the field came back, and her stylus went straight past it to the next line without any change in her face at all, because there was nothing in it to stop for.

PROVISIONAL.

“Guardianship unchanged?”

“Unchanged.”

“Then that’s the four years.” The clerk squared the folder off and pushed it back. “Metering’s up in the spring, don’t let it run past the notice. And if anybody comes to your door about the boundary on your stretch—” she tipped her head at the man, who had reached the doorway and was still going “—don’t sign it there. Bring it here.”

“I don’t sign anything at the door.”

“You’d be the one, then.”

Out in the junction the printer’s stall had a queue four deep and somebody two levels up was frying real onions and the smell was coming down the well and making enemies. Lote put the folder under her arm.

“Right. That’s you done till you’re sixteen.”

“Can I go to Vesh’s?”

“Is Tehl going to Vesh’s?”

“Tehl’s the whole reason, Vesh has got the good iron and Tehl can do the thing with the wire and I can’t do it yet—”

“Back for the shift-change. Both of you.” Lote was already turning for the ring stair. “And don’t go fast at the bypass.”

Cray went sideways through the gap between the stall and the cable man, working out whether there was any way at all, before Vesh’s mother came off Twelve and put a stop to the three of them, to make Vesh admit she had been wrong about the sea.