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

Reyne went down into the cistern at seven, and took Bjorn with her, because somebody had to hold the lamp and he was the only person on the Apron not already holding something.

The hatch was a square iron plate at the landward end, sunk flush in the slate, and she unlocked it with a long key off her own ring while Corrin watched the key and said nothing about it in a way that could be heard across the Apron. Under the plate an iron ladder went down a brick shaft into the dark, and cold came up it. It came up the way warmth comes out of an oven when the door is opened, except the other way round, a solid, patient, climbing cold that got into Bjorn’s cuffs and up his sleeves before he was three rungs down.

At the bottom was a vault of old brick, long and low, with a groined roof and a walkway along one wall a foot above the water. The water was black, and it was going. A skin of ice had come across it from the walls and was thickening while they watched. Overhead, through the grates, the Fair Measure’s cold came down in long white streams and fell hissing onto the skin and heaped there in drifts, and the drifts did not melt.

Reyne walked the length of it with her lamp held out over the water. She looked at the ice, and the drifts, and the walls, and then she stopped at the far end, where an iron pipe as thick as a man’s leg came down the brickwork from the roof, open at the bottom, and she held the back of her glove to its mouth.

“What’s that?” she said.

Bjorn put his own hand up beside hers. Air was going up the pipe, steadily, the way air goes up a chimney.

“Air.”

“Whose?”

He thought about it. “Ours. It came in through the grates. It’s going out through the vents.”

“Colder than it came in.” Reyne took her glove away. “I can cask water. I can cask ice, if it comes to that, and it will. I can’t cask cold. I’ve never been asked to, and there’s nothing in my book that says I ought to try.”

She went back up the ladder and wrote in the cistern book on the wall under her lamp that the cloud was landed, the cistern sealed, and nothing released, and signed it, and then stood looking at the word nothing for somewhat longer than it needed.

* * *

Rolf gave Bjorn the day book back at eight and told him to write the ruling down, and dictated it standing at the gate with his back to the ice.

“Rule 3,377, invoked at ten past three on the cloud aboard the Fair Measure, of Brume, holding over the Rain Apron. The cloud is landed into the cistern, every part of it sold at this Harbour. How the wringers bring it down is their trade and not the Harbour’s. Nothing is released.” He waited until the pencil stopped. “Read it back.”

Bjorn read it back.

“And the cold?” he said.

“The cold’s not in it.”

“In the ruling?”

“In the Rule.” Rolf looked up at the Fair Measure, who was a good deal smaller than she had been at three, and hung lower, with her net gone slack at the shoulders like a coat on a man who has been ill. “It says weather. Somebody wrote that who knew perfectly well what weather was, and didn’t write down which part of it they meant, and they’ve been dead longer than this Apron has been slate. I’ll not guess for them.”

Corrin had climbed to the road to see about his Thursday, and come back down again. He did not need to say anything. The ice under the grates would be there till the thaw, and would want testing when it went, and pumping after that, and the wool barge would have to hold at the outer roads and wring her ballast out over the sea, if she could be persuaded to, and pay nobody an Apron fee for the privilege.

“Thursday’s gone,” he said anyway, and crossed it off his board with a single line, the way a man crosses off a name.

On his way to the steps he stopped beside Bjorn, took a pie in a paper out of his coat pocket, and put it in Bjorn’s hand.

“That was for the Thursday lot,” he said. “There isn’t a Thursday lot.”

Rolf was the last to leave. He buttoned his coat on the top step.

“Go home, Bjorn.”

“I told them they could come and see.”

“Told who?”

“The yard.”

Rolf finished the last button.

“In whose name?”

“Mine.”

“Good,” said Rolf. “The Harbour’s is spoken for. It’s on four hundred doors.” And he went up into the dark, and Bjorn heard his boots go away along the Tether Field wall at exactly the pace they always went.

* * *

He ate the pie standing up, because the slate was too cold to sit on and he could not see why a pie should be any different.

Hone wrung all night. His wringers slept in a heap under a tarpaulin at the bow, and he stood alone at the stern with his arms going round and round on the Comfort’s crank, and every so often he took a hand away and flexed it and studied it and returned it to the handle. The ice came down out of the cloud in its straight white rope, hour after hour, rattling into the grates, and the cloud got smaller. Bjorn found he did not like watching that. He could not have said why. It was a cloud; it did not mind; it had no more opinion of what was happening to it than a sack of flour has of the scoop. It was only that somebody had paid for it by the hour, and here was the hour, being handed over a turn at a time, in the dark, to a tank.

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PROCLAIMATRON 304 sat across his knees with its legs folded under it. It had not said a word since the yard. The cobbles had put a hitch in its third leg, and the cold off the grates had got into all three, and some time after the pie it had stopped trying to walk on them.

Nobody was going to see to that but him.

Some time after midnight the grates began to breathe.

He saw it first at the far end, where the vents came up through the wall: a thin white smoke rising off the iron, as though somebody under the slate had lit a very cold fire. Then it came up through all the grates at once, low and slow, and lay on the Apron in a white skin a foot deep, and thickened, and rose, and found the wall, and went over it. It did not blow; there was no wind. It spread, the way milk spreads across a tilted plate, out over the Sky Dock and up into the streets, rising as it went, and wherever it touched a rope or a rail or a stone it left it grey, and then pale, and then white.

It was the Harbour’s own damp night air, the ordinary breath of a town by the sea, going in at the grates over a tank of somebody else’s cold and coming out at the vents changed, and nobody had sold a breath of it to anybody.

At some time after two, with the fog up to his shoulders and the cloud a pale smudge above it, Bjorn untied the oil can from its leg and oiled its joints.

He did not know why he did it. It held each leg out to him in turn, very gravely, like a horse being shod, and he gave each one a single drop, which he told himself was all it had earned. At three its lamp came up white in the white, and it played its filed-down anthem very softly, since the fog gave nothing back, and addressed the fog.

“By order of Stores, and with effect from this hour. Report of the apprentice’s welfare unit, to Stores, for the day.” It paused, as though turning a page. “The apprentice did not eat until night, and then ate a pie, standing up, which Stores does not recommend. The apprentice’s socks have not been dry. The apprentice has not been home. The apprentice has made no promises. The apprentice went up a ladder into a cloud and came down it again, and was spoken to by a great many people. And this unit, his friend, has the honour to report to Stores that it has never been issued to anybody better.”

It stopped, having nothing more to say, and its lamp went down to amber.

It had been issued to one person, that morning. It had been wrong about the promise twice. Bjorn sat on the cold step with it across his knees and the fog round his ears and found that he did not mind either of those things as much as he would have expected.

“Thank you, Three-Oh-Four,” he told it.

“Three Hundred and Four,” it said, quite gently.

He was glad of the fog.

From the stern of the gondola, without stopping the crank, Hone said, “Mine never had one of those,” and went on turning.

Somebody had told Stores. Bjorn had been trying, on and off all day, to work out who. It was not a long list. Sitting on the step at three in the morning, with a welfare unit in his lap that had just told the fog he was splendid, he found he would rather leave it unfinished.

* * *

The Harbour was white by first light.

It was white from the Apron to the fish quay. Every rope on the Sky Dock was furred thick as a finger. The Masts stood up out of the thinning fog like iced cakes, and the Kite Station’s rail had grown a white fringe along its whole length, and all up the hill the roofs had gone pale, and the gutters, and the window ledges, and the lamp brackets, and the lamps. The railings along the Tether Field road had become a row of white spears. The Fair Measure hung low over the Apron, a lean grey rag of a cloud in a net far too big for her, with frost in every mesh, an hour lighter than she had come in, and her wringers were stirring under their tarpaulin, and Hone was asleep on his feet at the Comfort with both arms still on the crank.

Every handbill in the Harbour was white. Both kinds were, and you could no longer tell them apart without scratching.

Mrs Loveridge came down the Apron steps at half past seven in the same fur tippet, pink to the ears. She had walked down through the town, and on her way, Mr Tidey said afterwards, she had been congratulated by a baker, two lamplighters, the woman who kept the Tether Field gate, a man she had once taken to law about a party wall, and the whole of the early shift at the fish quay, one after another, all of whom had seen the handbill at some point in the last day and not troubled to read the second one.

She looked round the white Apron, and up at the white Masts, and at Rolf, who had come down the steps a minute before her exactly as though he had never left.

“Harbour Master,” she said. “I understand the Association has the Harbour to thank for its cooperation.”

“The Harbour was glad to have it,” said Rolf.

“It was nothing,” said Mrs Loveridge, and meant it, Bjorn thought, rather more exactly than she knew.

Mr Tidey stood at the Apron wall and ran one bare finger along the frost on the rail and looked at the white line it left.

“It’s better than snow,” he said, to nobody.

“The committee will wish to make it a custom,” said Mrs Loveridge. “I shall move it at the next meeting. With the Harbour’s kind permission, naturally.”

“Minute it,” said Rolf.

She went back up the steps with Mr Tidey behind her, to be congratulated again.

Bjorn waited until they were out of earshot. It took some doing.

“We can’t do it next year,” he said. “There might not be a barge. There might not be a Comfort. Mr Hone might never come back here as long as he lives.”

“No.”

“Then why let her—”

“Whose is it?” said Rolf.

Bjorn opened his mouth, and shut it. It was the cloud’s cold, which had been sold to somebody three worlds along. It was the Harbour’s water, which nobody had sold to anybody. It had been paid for by the Association and wrung by Hone and signed for by Reyne, and it had come out of a ruling of Rolf’s and a question of his own, and it was lying on every roof in the town, and he could not find anywhere in the whole of it to put a name.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Nor do I,” said Rolf. “When one of us does, we can go and tell her.” He settled his chain, which was white along one edge. “Next year she’ll have a handbill printed before she’s asked anybody, and I’ll say no, and the whole town will remember this morning while I’m saying it. That’s what it cost. Go home.”

“I’ve somewhere to be first.”

* * *

The Hall yard did not open until eight.

He walked up to it through a Harbour he had never seen, with his breath going ahead of him and his boots leaving black prints in the white, past doors where people stood in their shirtsleeves looking at their own railings. PROCLAIMATRON 304 had walked all along the Tether Field road beside him on its oiled legs, quite smoothly, and at the first flight of steps had stopped and waited, and he had picked it up. It rode his shoulder now with frost along its enamel and its lamp turned down low, saying nothing at all, which he did not intend to get used to.

At the Hall gate there were two children already, before anybody else in the world: the girl in the green muffler, and the small boy with the jam jar.

The boy was scraping frost off the iron bars of the gate into his jar with the edge of the lid, one bar at a time, with enormous care, and the girl was supervising.

She looked round when Bjorn came up. She looked at the white street behind him, and the white roofs, and the white handbill on the gate, and then at him, for rather a long time.

“It says on the gate,” she said, “it was the Association.”

Bjorn did not say anything.

The boy finished the last bar he could reach, and screwed the lid down, and held the jar up to the grey light to see what he had got. There was not much in it. It was already beginning to go to water at the bottom.

He looked at it as though it were the most valuable thing in the Harbour, and Bjorn stood beside him at the locked gate and let him.

End of Part 3