Rule 3377 - Land It, Don't Release It - Part 1 of 3

The handbill had been pasted to the Apron gate at the height of a child’s eyes, and Rolf had bent a little at the knee to read it, which Bjorn had never before seen him do for anything printed. The Rule Book was in his other hand, shut on one finger.

It was a very good handbill. Somebody had paid for two colours, and for a border of little printed snowflakes all the way round, every one exactly like its neighbour, which is the single thing snow is famous for not doing. Inside the border, in capitals of four sizes, it said that THE HARBOUR MERCHANTS’ ASSOCIATION, IN GRATITUDE FOR A PROSPEROUS YEAR, PRESENTED TO THE HARBOUR ONE HOUR OF SNOW, TO FALL OVER THE WHOLE TOWN AT DUSK ON THE EVE OF FESTIVAL WEEK, FROM FIVE O’CLOCK. Along the bottom, in the smallest size, where a reader who had come that far would be feeling generous, it said BY KIND PERMISSION OF THE HARBOUR.

Rolf read the bottom line twice, and straightened.

“Kind,” he said.

Above them, on four wet lines, the Fair Measure went on dripping.

Bjorn had been told she was a barge and had come down the hill expecting a hull. There was a cloud instead, an ordinary grey winter cloud with a darker belly, about the size of a chapel, held in a net of fine brown cord the way a pudding is held in its cloth, hauled down hard at the sides so that the grey bulged out between the meshes in soft, heavy cushions. Under it, on eight ropes, hung the gondola, a long shallow boat of woven cane varnished nearly black, with a row of wooden rollers down one side like a laundry mangle’s and a rope ladder dropping forty feet to the slate. It smelled of older rain than the Harbour’s, with moss in it, and wet stone, and cut rushes. On the gondola’s bow somebody had painted FAIR MEASURE, and under that, smaller, BRUME.

The Rain Apron lay at the bottom of the Sky Dock under the Tether Field wall, a long floor of grey slate sloping gently in from both sides to a line of iron grates down the middle, with a waist-high wall round it and one gate. Under the grates lay the cistern.

Bjorn had come down from the Office with the day book under one arm and PROCLAIMATRON 304 on the other shoulder, and had arrived late, with most of the afternoon gone.

He had also arrived, which mattered more to him, without promising anybody anything. He had told a carter on the Office steps that he would see what he could do, and a woman with a gutter that he would mention it, and somewhere along the Tether Field wall he had decided, with some force, that the next sentence out of his mouth beginning with I’ll would be the last one until he was back through the Office door that evening. He had practised sentences that did not begin with it all the way down the hill. Most of them had come out as questions.

The unit rode his shoulder, strapped to his coat by its own buckle: a squat brass body no bigger than a ship’s lantern, in chipped harbour-green enamel, on three short jointed legs. Its face was a signal lamp, and it spoke through a small brass horn. On its back, on a plate held by four new rivets over the ghost of an older plate somebody had filed away, it said PROCLAIMATRON 304 (NOW WITH WELFARE).

It had been issued to him at the Stores hatch at eight that morning, with a docket and an oil can tied to one leg. The docket said that it was issued to the apprentice on the instruction of the underwriters, following an injury. Bjorn had read that in the corridor and looked at his hands, which were perfectly well, and which he had not mentioned to anybody. Somebody had. He had gone straight back to return it, and the clerk had got out the book they keep for gear that has failed and asked him, pencil ready, what was wrong with it, and Bjorn had been obliged to admit that nothing was, and the clerk had put the book away and waited, very pleasantly, for him to leave. The unit had forgiven him at once, glowing gold, which was worse.

Rolf had not looked at it in the Office courtyard that morning, and he did not look at it now.

“Harbour Master!”

The woman at the rail came along the inside of the wall with her skirts held clear of the wet: broad, handsome and beautifully upholstered, in a fur tippet and a hat chosen to be seen from a distance, with a chain of office round her neck on a purple ribbon and a silver medallion on it the size of a saucer. Bjorn saw Rolf’s hand start towards his own chain, and stop. Two men came after her, a thin grey one with a satchel of papers and the face of a man walking behind a coffin he had voted against, and the boy with the paste pot.

“Modesty Loveridge,” she said. “Chairwoman. And Mr Tidey, our secretary. You’ve seen it.” She beamed at the handbill. “We are so pleased. The Association felt that after the year the Harbour has had, it deserved something from its merchants that wasn’t a letter about a berth fee. And we asked ourselves, what does a harbour never get? And the answer was obvious, once somebody had said it. Weather it chose.”

On Bjorn’s shoulder the signal lamp went from amber to a hard official white.

Then PROCLAIMATRON 304 stood up like a man rising for a toast, played a few bars of something stately that had plainly been an anthem once, before somebody in Stores took a file to it, and spoke, directly into Bjorn’s ear, at a volume he had not known a thing that size could reach.

“By order of Stores, and with effect from this hour,” it proclaimed, “the apprentice has not eaten.”

The Apron took this in. The paste boy dropped his brush. Mrs Loveridge shut her mouth on whatever came next and looked at Bjorn’s shoulder with the face of a hostess whose guest has arrived with a dog.

“It’s from Stores,” said Bjorn. “Sorry. It does that.”

“On the hour?” said Mr Tidey, with real interest.

“So far.” He turned his head. “Three-Oh-Four. Sit down.”

“Three Hundred and Four,” said the unit, and sat, its lamp an offended pink.

Rolf had not turned his head. He let the quiet go on until the drip off the mooring lines was the loudest thing on the Apron, and then a little longer.

“Bjorn,” he said. “Have you eaten?”

“No.”

“You’ll want to,” said Rolf, and gave the chairwoman his attention again. “Weather it chose.”

“Weather it chose,” said Mrs Loveridge, recovering the thread with a small tug, like a glove. “Mr Hone has sold us an hour of it. It’s all snow up there, every bit. It’s going three worlds along for a festival of their own, and they won’t miss an hour, he says, because he feeds it as he goes. And at five o’clock this evening he lets it fall.”

“Releases it,” said Rolf.

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“I’m sorry?”

“The word you want is release. It’s the one in the Book, so it’s the one I’ll be using.”

“Releases it, then. Over the whole town, for an hour.” She smiled at him with enormous kindness.

“Who gave the permission?” said Rolf.

“The Harbour.”

“Which part of it?”

For a moment she looked like somebody who has been asked which hand they keep their pulse in. “It was resolved,” she said. “At the meeting on the eleventh. The Association resolved that the Harbour would be delighted. It was carried.”

“With one against,” said Mr Tidey. “I’d like the Harbour Master to know that I voted against, and that it’s minuted that I did.”

“Mr Tidey thought it extravagant.”

“Mr Tidey thought,” said Mr Tidey, “that we should ask.”

“And it was resolved that we needn’t, since nobody in the world refuses a present.” Mrs Loveridge turned the whole of her warmth back onto Rolf. “A thing resolved is minuted, Harbour Master, and a thing minuted is printed, and there are four hundred of those up between here and the fish quay. I really don’t see what more anybody could require.”

“Asking,” said Rolf.

He set the Book open on the gatepost beside the paste pot, turned a dozen leaves without seeming to look at any of them, and stopped.

Rule 3,377. Weather brought in as cargo is landed, not released.

Bjorn read it over his arm, and his first thought was that it was the shortest Rule he had ever been shown and could not possibly be about this. Weather was not cargo. It arrived in its own time and nobody signed for it.

Then he looked up at the Fair Measure, dripping patiently into her own shadow with a buyer three worlds along and a price agreed on an hour of her, and the Rule could not have been about anything else on earth. Somebody had sold that. Somebody was carrying it. It had papers. Landed: brought down, here, into the Harbour’s hands, over the Harbour’s tank. Not released: not let go over the whole town at five o’clock with a border of snowflakes round it.

“Then there’s no snow,” said Bjorn.

He said it the moment he had it, out loud, to everybody: the chairwoman, her secretary, the paste boy and the wringer at the gondola rail.

The old reflex arrived a moment later, as it always did now, when it was no use to anybody. Rolf had not said so. Rolf had read out a Rule, and had not yet said one word about what the Harbour meant to do with it.

“Run down to Pargeter’s,” said Mrs Loveridge to the paste boy, without taking her eyes off Bjorn, “and tell him the Harbour’s apprentice has spoken.”

Rolf watched the boy up the steps and out of sight, and rested his palm across the open Book.

“I invoke Rule 3,377,” he said, “on the cloud aboard the Fair Measure, of Brume, now holding over the Rain Apron.”

Somewhere behind the Tether Field and the Masts, the Lighthouse tolled once. On the Apron the note arrived muffled, as if it had been carried there wrapped in wet wool.

“Your hour will be landed, Mrs Loveridge,” said Rolf. “Over this Apron, into that cistern. It does not fall on the town at five o’clock, or at any other time.”

“It has been announced.”

“It has.”

“The children have been told.”

“Not by me,” said Rolf.

Mrs Loveridge took this with perfect composure. Bjorn, watching her, saw her decide something.

“Then the Harbour had better tell them,” she said, “since it has been the Harbour’s idea.”

* * *

Rolf wrote a line across the foot of the Fair Measure’s Arrival Notice, under the printed wringing line, and gave it to Bjorn with a tip of his head at the ladder.

It was forty feet of wet rope. At the foot of it PROCLAIMATRON 304 got down to climb by itself. Its legs were for a flat quay. On the third rung they gave out, and it hung there, lamp an affronted orange, pedalling at the fourth like a beetle in a basin, until Bjorn came back down for it. By the twentieth rung, with it under one arm and the Notice between his teeth, the wringer at the rail had been joined by two more, and all three were watching him come up as though he were a procession.

The gondola was colder than the slate, and wetter, because the bottom of the cloud hung a few feet above it and let down a fine grey drizzle onto everything, the way a cellar ceiling sweats. Six pairs of rollers ran along the port side, each worked by a crank, with cords going up from them into the underside of the net. At the stern a tarpaulin was lashed down over something square, with one brass corner showing.

There were four wringers in oiled wool, every one with both hands wrapped to the wrist in strips of cloth, and there was the wringer-chief.

Abel Hone was short and wide and bald, with forearms like two lengths of hawser and a grey beard cut square across the bottom, and he had the Notice out of Bjorn’s teeth before Bjorn had his second foot over the rail. He read it standing, and the ink of Rolf’s line began very slightly to run.

“Landed,” he said. “Aye. I land at every port I’ve ever been to. I’m not the one wanted the other.”

“They said the Harbour knew.”

“They paid in advance, which is the part I listen to.” He folded the Notice into his coat. “You can’t buy an hour of a cloud, lad. You can buy a weight of it, and I’ll wring that weight at whatever speed you like, and if you want it to take an hour it’ll take an hour. People who buy an hour of anything have never once had to deliver one.”

“Will they want their money back?”

“You tell me. You’re the Harbour.”

“I’ll—” said Bjorn, and stopped.

It was half out, with I’ll on the front and see what I can find out coming along close behind, and he got hold of the back of it in time and turned it round.

“Is that likely?” he said.

Hone looked at him as though the cloud had asked him something. “I’ll wring what I was paid for, at five, over your tank,” he said. “They can argue with the sky about the rest.”

Bjorn looked at the rollers, and the cords going up into the grey, and the four pairs of wrapped hands. Down on the slate the chairwoman had begun on Rolf again. He could not hear the words, but he could guess them: how much of the stuff there was, and where it ought to go. Everybody on the Apron wanted to know that. Nobody down there had asked the men holding it anything at all.

“Mr Hone,” he said. “What can you actually do to it? On the way down. As a trade.”

Hone turned right round.

“Now that,” he said, “is a question nobody’s asked me since my father.” He put a wrapped hand on the nearest roller. “Wring it slow and you get drizzle. Wring it hard, rain. Twist the cords as it comes through and you get drops the size of your thumbnail. Put it through the sieve-rollers and it comes down as snow, which is what your merchants bought, and which I’ve never liked, because snow’s a thing you can’t land. Snow goes where the wind wants.” He jerked his head at the stern. “And cold. If you’ve the gear for it.”

He went aft, unlaced two ties and pulled the tarpaulin back far enough to show a squat black iron mangle with a brass drum between its rollers. The drum was furred all over with fine white frost, though nothing near it was cold, and a maker’s plate on its side said WRINGER’S COMFORT 7 (NOW WRINGS COLDER).

“Bought her at a fair, the year my hands were bad,” said Hone. “It said Comfort on the plate. She does comfort them, in a manner of speaking. You stop being able to feel them.” He did not look along the rail at his wringers, who were all looking somewhere else. “What she puts through comes down hard and straight and cold. You could land it in a thimble. And you don’t ever wring cold over a sealed tank. Not on a still night. Not near the sea.”

“Why not?”

“Because they wrote to me about it,” said Hone, and pulled the last tie tight.

Bjorn wrote all of it down against the gondola rail, the drizzle spotting the page, down to the Comfort Seven and a letter somebody had once written to Mr Hone, because a harbour ought surely to know that much about a trade that came to it, and because nobody else on the Apron appeared to.

* * *

Hone brought her down the lawful way before the light went.

Two wringers took a roller each and began to turn, slowly, and the cords went taut up into the net, and the cloud gave, the way a wet sheet gives in a mangle, and let down its rain. It came straight down in a soft grey curtain, ran in along the courses to the grates and went through them with a steady, satisfied sound, and not a drop of it went over the wall. The whole barge came down with it a foot at a time, until the gondola hung about level with an upstairs sill.

It worked. It was the first thing that afternoon that had.

Mrs Loveridge stood at the rail with her gloved hands folded on the wall and watched her rain go into a drain, and said nothing at all, and Mr Tidey, beside her, said nothing in a noticeably different manner.

At twenty to four the paste boy came back with a sheaf of new handbills and pasted one over the first.

They had printed it in two colours as well. It said, in capitals of three sizes, THE HARBOUR HAS FORBIDDEN THE SNOW. They had printed it on the backs of the first lot to save paper, and the paste had soaked straight through, so that all round the edge of it, faint and grey and back to front, the little snowflakes showed.

Rolf read it.

“That one’s accurate,” he said, and went to find somewhere to stand out of the drip.

End of Part 1