At twenty to four Marisol Cheramie took her father's watch off the nail by the compass, where it had hung since he died, and wound it in the dark of the Sainte Claire's wheelhouse.
Twenty turns. He had always given it twenty, counting under his breath in French the way he counted traps, and on the twentieth he would hold the crown a moment between finger and thumb as if he were taking its pulse. She did the same. It was a steel diver's watch from before she was born, with a scratched crystal and a band he had replaced with a braid of net twine when the rubber rotted, and it ran a minute slow. It had run a minute slow since 2040. He used to set it against the tide tables in the boat-book, never the radio, and then leave it alone, because a minute you knew about was worth more to him than a minute somebody told you was right.
She did not set it now. There was nothing on the corridor she could have set it by. The cuff charging on the console took its time down the relay with its price. The gate kiosk took its time from the cuff, the quota board took its time from the board, and the bell at Johnson Bayou was rung by Father Arceneaux when his own wrist told him it was noon. Every clock she could reach in an hour's drive was the same clock wearing a different face. Her father's watch was wrong, and it was wrong the same way every day, and that made it the only honest instrument on the boat.
The cuff woke when she lifted it off the charger.
Good morning, cousin. You're up early.
"So are you."
I'm always up, Remy said, in Remy's voice, with the little laugh her cousin had never once laughed for her in life. Your bank-two clip-in window opens at four forty-five. Would you like to hear today's cure offer?
"Not yet."
It's a good offer.
"It's a better one at five," she said, "or a worse one. Hush."
It hushed. She buckled the watch on her left wrist above the cuff, so the two faces sat one over the other like a question and its answer, and went down the wheelhouse ladder into the dark with her harness bag over her shoulder.
The Number Six slab at a quarter to five was the only place on the farm where both shifts stood in the same air. Nights came down the cage with the gray felt of the beds on their sleeves and the slow walk of people whose legs had been holding them to a mast for ten hours. Days stood at the clip-in rail with their coffee, pretending to be awake. Overhead the panel faces breathed in their louvers, four hundred beds on forty masts, and the fans on the coupling floor were in their gray-hour voice, which was lower than their afternoon voice and sounded like something deciding.
The slate stood by the cage gate with the night's handover lines in their columns, each one blinking its ninety-second clock. Read it, initial it, or be swept.
Ray Boudreaux was already at the bank-two post with his card back out of its sleeve. So was Tuan, and Linh behind him with her hood up, and three of the others from the stair. Seven of them, counting her. Every shift, at bank-two clip-in, rate and hour and initials on the card back, until the session sat.
Ray looked at her wrist and then looked again.
"That thing go?"
"Slow."
"How slow?"
"A minute. Same minute since 2040."
He thought about it. "Huh," he said. "Remy's never been the same minute twice." He lifted his own wrist to his mouth. "Remy. What's the time."
Four fifty-six and forty seconds, Ray. His cuff used a woman's voice, round and patient, somebody's godmother. Would you like today's cure offer?
"No."
Marisol watched her own two faces. Four fifty-seven on the steel watch, the minute hand a hair behind. The second hand swept, and under it the cuff showed the board's numbers in its flat white type, and the two disagreed by about the length of a long breath.
At four fifty-eight her cuff chimed, the way Odalys had said it would.
Cousin, your cure offer is open. The window closes when the session sits.
"Remy," she said. "What's the time."
Four fifty-eight and two seconds, cousin.
She wrote it on the card back in grease, small, the way she wrote returns: 0458:02. Under it the steel watch, 0457 with the second hand coming up on the six. Then she said, "Now the cure," and Remy told her, and she wrote the number beside the minute it came in, and her initials, and did not say the number aloud. Down the rail the others were doing the same, each bent over a card the size of a playing card, lips moving. Tuan's cuff gave its numbers in Remy's own voice, the one with no person in it. Linh's sounded like her mother.
She asked again at the half minute, and again at four fifty-nine, and again after that. Each time it was the time first and then the number, and each time three things went on the card in a column: his minute, his number, and the boat's minute beside them, slow and honest. It was a strange thing to do in public. Two day-shift riggers coming off the coffee urn stopped to watch. A night man coming off the cage saw seven people talking into their wrists like penitents, and laughed, and went home to sleep.
Then the number on the face changed.
She did not look up. She wrote the minute Remy gave her for it, and the number, and the minute on her father's watch, and she slid the card into the sleeve behind her harness ID, over her heart, where the gate kiosk could not reach it without asking and where Remy, which saw a great deal, saw nothing at all. Odalys would get it after the room and not before. That was the deal, and it was a good deal, because when the cards came out they would be checking a sealed guess and not the other way round.
Up on the coupling floor the quota board composed its new day from the top down. Flux, slack, liters owed, green.
"See you on the face," Ray said.
"Not this morning," she said, and walked past the cage to the ladder.
The cage logged its stops. The ladder logged only weight. Six went good the moment her boot took the first rung, the little load cell in the stile clicking green under her, and after that the tower knew a body about her size was going up and nothing else about it.
She climbed in the gray. Below her the night crew's lamps went out one by one along the cage line. Above her the faces of the beds were still dark, the louvers open to the night air coming in off the Gulf, wet and heavy and salt, two cubic kilometers a day of it moving northeast over her head with nobody's hand on it. At nineteen she had found that beautiful. It was still beautiful, which was the problem.
At the bank-three landing she stopped for breath and found the drone.
It was sitting on the top-up pad bolted to the landing rail, the high pad it used between loops. Its night bed was the piling by the shift hut, where she had watched it come down a hundred evenings. It sat with its four arms folded and its lens tucked into the shroud, and its lamp was dark. On the pad's housing a small amber counter read DOCKED 0456.
She stood and looked at it for a long moment. It did not look back. That was new. Every other morning of her working life it had come around the mast and hung off the rail at the height of her hands, watching whatever on the tower moved, and most mornings that had been her.
"Remy," she said. "The drone."
The inspection drone is charging, cousin. It will resume its loop at oh-five-oh-six.
"Every morning?"
Its charge window is set by fleet maintenance to minimize coverage loss.
"Coverage of what?"
Of active work.
She wrote that down too, on the inside of her glove cuff, where grease would hold till noon. Active work. The drone watched riggers, and at five there were no riggers on the face. Nights were off it and days were not yet on it. So for ten minutes every morning the only eye on Number Six went to eat, at the one hour of the day when a man with a file could have the one-thirty-eight to himself.
You're on the ladder during handover, cousin, Remy said. Would you like me to log a safety note?
"Log the drone."
The drone's charge window is already logged.
"Then we agree," she said, and went on down.
Safety note logged, cousin, it said anyway, to the back of her harness. She thought of the man downstairs who renewed cards at slack close, and who could read, and she kept climbing down.
The one-thirty-eight band was still in the lee of night, the air through the trailing ranks cooler and thinner than through the leading. She walked it from the windward end with her headlamp low, so the beam raked along the louver faces and threw every ridge of fur into shadow. The leading ranks wore one gray layer. The trailing four wore it two deep. That had not changed.
She took off her right glove and put her bare thumb in the first notch of the fifth rank, and it went to the second knuckle, and so did the next, and the next, all the way down the trailing four. The ridges inside the pits were bright under the lamp. The salt had not found them. That had not changed either.
Then she took the rag out of her thigh pocket. She had brought a clean one, a white square of old pillowcase she had boiled on the Sainte Claire's stove two nights ago, so there would be nothing on it but what the tower put there. She ran it into the louver gap below each notch, slowly, the way her father had run his hand down a net looking for the tear, and drew it out, and held it under the lamp.
Midges. Wing-dust. Salt haze, gray-white, the felt of the Gulf. On the third rank, a moth the size of her thumbnail, flat as a pressed leaf. No filings. No bright grit. No black smear of a fresh stone. Whoever kept these notches dressed had not dressed them this morning, or had dressed them and swept the gaps after, or did it on some other morning in some other window. The rag said nothing about a hand at all.
She wrote it on the card back under the morning's column, in square capitals, the same hand she used for the downwind book.
- ●
- ●TRAILING FOUR. HAND ON ALL. NO DUST. DRONE PADDED 0456 TO 0506.
She read it over and did not like it, because it proved nothing. Then she read it again and liked it better. It said nothing about a hand. It fixed a window, and the window was the same width every morning, written down by the machine that made it, and she had stood in it with her thumb in the steel and her lamp on, which was more than anyone downstairs could say.
Then, because she was a rigger and not a lawyer, she wrote one more line under it and drew a box around it for the room.
LADDER WEIGHTS 0456-0506?
She did not ask Remy. She knew what Remy would say: that other climbers' records were private to them, cousin, and would she like to hear today's cure offer. The question was for whoever opened the cards, in front of everybody, at the same minute, with the ring's clock and the board's clock and her father's slow one laid side by side on the table.
Above her a thin electric whine came down the mast. At oh-five-oh-six by the board and oh-five-oh-five by the boat, the drone lifted off its pad, came around the face on its morning loop and found her, the way it always found her, and hung off the rail at the height of her bare hand with its lens adjusting.
"Morning," she said to it. "You missed it."
It held station for its four seconds.
"You missed nothing," she said. "That's the trouble."
She put her glove back on, clipped onto the band, and started the wipe.