The Manual tells us that in the beginning the Builder decreed six fundamental Machines. These are his 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 boys 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 father Thomas 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 Thomas’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 Thomas is sleeping, the nonslippers on my feet helping me keep my steps short and low. But as I round the door I see Thomas sitting up on his bunk in his 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 Thomas’s narrowed glare. The cabin is so tiny I could reach out and stroke his 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 him out of his anger are long past.
“You’re late, son,” he says. He’s squinting at me now, eyes unfocused, the way he does sometimes. He doesn’t even glance at the chronometer on his wrist—a true mechanism, with tiny metal gears and not smart matter inside, a symbol of his 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 his.
His 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.
“Jude, you’re fifteen years old,” Thomas 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 Foremen wouldn’t—they stayed past their time, and we, well . . .”
Thomas has risen, his 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 he’s caught me in one already. Nicodemus is my best friend, or used to be, but lately I’ve been avoiding him. We were up late working on our motors in the schola a couple of weeks ago. He was helping me get the timing right on mine and his fingers brushed the back of my hand. It was just an accident. We’ve been friends all our lives, but it was like seeing him for the first time. I wanted to touch his 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 Thomas. 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 boys 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 Thomas’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 him? Why doesn’t he just know? And why is it his business?
“Great Builder, Jude,” Thomas 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, son? 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, Jude? 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!” Thomas 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 his round, protruding belly, the sharpening rage on his 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.
He shakes me. “You will honor your father, 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 father’s face flushes livid. He spins, hurling me across the cabin—not difficult, since my weight is just twenty kilos. I sprawl across my father’s bunk, all gawky limbs and terror.
I roll over and there he is looming above me, fists raised and shaking. It’s been months since last he struck me, an improbable lucky streak which now seems about to end. But he lowers his arms and leans over me.
“The Wrecker’s in you, boy,” he says, shaking a finger. “You pray hard and shake loose his grip. Pray to be made square and true. Tomorrow more than ever, you need the Builder to be with you.”
And now he’s pulling on his coverall and leaving the cabin to stalk off his anger, the hatch snicking shut behind him 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 son, a stronger laborer, a whole person. I pray for his protection, both physical and spiritual. I pray for reassurance that Thomas 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 his Machines I picture watching over me in the dark. It’s my departed mother 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, Thomas and I, and exit our cabin. In one hand Thomas 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, Thomas leads me to the end of the next branch over, to where Saul, foreman 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.
Foreman Saul appears in the hatchway, bleary-eyed, at Thomas’s knock. “Selah, Jude,” he says in greeting, favoring me with a look both compassionate and foreboding. “Brother Thomas, let me speak to you alone a moment. We’ll only be a bit, Jude.”
Thomas follows Saul 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. Saul gestures me in.
The cabin is a little smaller than the one Thomas and I share, and consequently more crowded than ours ever gets. Thomas sits at one end of the only bunk, cloth sack in his lap. He pats the space beside him, and I sit. Saul 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.
“Jude,” Saul says, “your father let me know late last night that he’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 Saul gives Thomas, but Thomas doesn’t seem to react to it. He just sits there with the same twist of bored impatience on his 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.” Saul sighs, blinking his pouchy eyes a few times. He is older than my father, taller and softer, but no sadder. I’ve been tempted many times to bring my cares and questions to him, but something has always held me back. “You’re a bright young man, Jude, and I know you’ve walked among the Sculpted before, so at least the sights won’t be new to you. But accompanying your father once or twice on his 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 he’ll listen to the foreman, as pious a man 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 Thomas doing this to me?
“If you’ll sit here?” Saul says. He’s setting up a metal folding chair in the middle of the cabin, which means it nearly bumps Thomas’s knees. I scoot over into the chair, doffing my cap and clutching it in my lap, as Saul removes a ceremonial oilcan from a niche in the bulkhead. Thomas joins Saul 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. Saul gently taps the droplet down onto my scalp, and he and Thomas lay their hands upon my head.
Other kids get to have their mothers 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 she could be, right? Surely that’s not a vain hope.
“Great Builder,” Saul 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 Jude, who ventures forth this day to labor amongst the Sculpted for his daily bread. Be with him, Builder, that he might have health in his navel, marrow in his bones, and strength in his sinews—strength that he might work and not be weary, but moreso that the Wrecker with his subtle wiles may find no purchase in his heart, mind, or flesh. We know the Wrecker’s cunning is great, Builder, and that he can make what’s wrong seem right. But your power and love are infinite, and so we commend this young man 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.
Saul 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. His hand is warm and dry. “What’s today, Thursday? Let’s meet Sundays after temple, Jude, to make some headway on those lessons. Better late than never.”
“When his schedule allows,” Thomas says, conspicuously checking his chronometer. “They call this Oneday outside. Weeks aren’t reckoned the same.”
“Of course. Then any day you can, Jude.” Saul squeezes and releases my forearm. “And remember that the Builder blesses you not just for obedience to his commandments, but for obedience to your parents as well.”
“Jude,” Thomas says. He picks the sack up from the bunk and inclines his head toward the hatch.
“Selah, Foreman,” I say and follow my father out into the corridor. I look back to see, in the moment before the hatch closes behind us, Foreman Saul 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?
Thomas leads me at a brisk pace out to the main corridor, skipping lightly along the deck. “Don’t let him get to you, Jude,” he says over his shoulder. “Saul, Bartholomew, none of the Foremen understand our economic realities.”
I’m not sure whether he means our family’s or the whole Quarter’s. I don’t ask for clarification, not just because I don’t like encouraging him to disparage the Foremen 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,” Thomas 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 Thomas 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 Thomas.
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 Thomas, the sweat trickling into my eyes. I’m not sure whether his 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. Thomas leads me through a short but bewildering maze of hatches and gangways. With fewer people around now, I breathe more easily. Thomas 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 woman seated at the center has a second pair of arms where her legs should be.
“I don’t give a spout for your schedule,” she tells someone unseen. “My stevies can do the job fast, but not that fast. All right, fine. You do that.”
She looks at Thomas, and I see she has silver semispheres implanted over her eyes. Three quick swings from handhold to handhold bring her to the door. Fo-grav is still about 0.75. She’s strong.
“This the kid?” she asks.
“That’s him,” Thomas says.
She turns those reflective bug-eyes on me, twitching her head up and down, and it’s like I’m being X-rayed. What she sees, I can’t imagine. “Any mods? No, of course not. You goddamn Wheelies, what am I talking about? All right, he doesn’t look too bad. Let’s get him suited up and see how he does. What’s your name, kid?”
My mouth is so dry my tongue crackles. “Jude.”
“Well, now you’re Stevie. For stevedore.”
She barks a laugh like a chugging motor, clinging to holds around the hatch with three hands. Thomas laughs too. His eyes crinkle and his lips peel back, and it’s like seeing ten years drop away from him. He never laughs around me.
In that moment I feel inexpressibly sad. And I hate him.
The woman swings out through the hatch and drops to the deck between Thomas and me. “Follow me,” she says, loping down the gangway on all fours.
Thomas shoves the cloth sack into my hands. “Your lunch,” he 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 Thomas, 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,” Thomas says. “I can’t stress enough how important this money is.”
“Okay.” I turn to trudge after the woman.
“And remember who you are,” Thomas stage-whispers fiercely. “Your body belongs to the Builder, not to them.”
“Selah,” I say.
Thomas sighs. “Selah, son. 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 Foreman Titus—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 him. The Six also name our wards, the clans or tribes of our faith. Though my father 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 father. But between him and me there’s surely a great Wedge, and it’s never clear to me which of us is on which side of it.
* * *
Thomas 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 her to the locker room. She 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 her hind arms and affixes a round green badge to my chest. “Regs,” she says. “Since you’ve got no built-in monitors, this’ll let us keep tabs on you.”
The crew is twelve, male and female 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,” she says. “His name is Jude Plane. Corgie, he’s your man 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 his suit, an eye-straining contrast with the red polymer. He winks at me as he drops out the hatch. My stomach clenches.
Renny hops down from the table and grabs Corgie by the leg before he can say a word to me. “Pay close attention to the kid,” Renny says. “He’s barefoot. He’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,” he says to me. “Follow me and stick close.”
“Jude,” I say.
“Right. Juke.”
Renny reaches for my lunch sack, which I still clutch uncertainly. She 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 Thomas—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 Thomas 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…
