Page 74 of Deep Alien Obsession

It is learning. That, as it turns out, is the entire architecture.

CHAPTER 39

CLAIRE

Ninety days after landing here to advise which districts should be let go, I find myself in a chamber eighty meters across, watching a map of Paragon turn in the air while four hundred people argue about drains.

This is the Assembly. No legal status. It meets in the map hall and it started because eleven district engineers and nine volunteer crew leaders tired of walking up to Tier Three to be told no.

Rhyss came to the third meeting to observe and has not missed one since.

"It isn't a government," I tell Helena, who is watching from the doorway with a cup of tea and a face I can't read.

"It's a hundred and forty people deciding how a city shares its air."

"It's advisory."

"Architect." She sips her tea. "That is what every government on record has called itself in its first year."

The Custodian proposed it, which is the part the Council is still digesting.

It made the proposal the way it makes everything, once a queue was clear on an ordinary Thursday: a standing recommendation that reallocation affecting more than four districts be reviewed by a body holding both species and at least one person without an engineering qualification. Asked about the last part, it said a city is not only a machine, and that it had been told so once, in a work order, by a crew member on day nineteen.

That's mine. It read one of my narrative entries and kept the argument.

So the long restoration gets a shape. Ten years at least. Four hundred kilometers of capillary to survey. The Founders' sublevels rebuilt honestly instead of patched. Nine hundred archive plates translated properly rather than in a panic. Two engineering schools going into the under-city — one at the Cistern, because Darius would hear of nowhere else, and one down among the alcoves where the crews raised their children, because I wouldn't.

And an apprenticeship scheme with eleven hundred names on the waiting list, which is the single thing I am proudest of and had almost nothing to do with.

I sign my permanent residency on day eighty-eight.

Four minutes, and a clerk more excited about it than I am. No ceremony. I hand over a Coalition contract that expired forty-six days back and receive a card, and outside the trams are running and somebody is arguing about a timetable and the air sits at twenty-one percent across the whole city, which has not been true in six hundred years.

Darius asks me that evening, and he does it in the most Darius way imaginable.

We are up on my balcony on Fifteen, which has a rail now, a fight I lost — and he has brought a slate.

"I want to ask you something, and I'd rather do it in my language, and my language requires witnesses and a filed record." His eyes stay on the cavern. "Eleven days I've spent trying to find a way to do this that isn't ridiculous, and I have concluded that it is going to be ridiculous."

"Darius."

"Among my people, two people who intend a life together say so once, aloud, before others, and lodge it. There is no ceremony to it. It is a registration." He turns the slate around. "I have prepared the registration. There are two signature fields."

I look at what he has written.

It's a work order. He has drafted the thing as a maintenance task — class, duration, crew names — and where the duration field should read a number of hours, he has entered the archive's code for work that does not end.

"You filed for me."

"I have not filed anything. I would not file that without you." There is no steadiness in his voice and he makes no attempt to find any. "Claire. I have never wanted anything the way I want the ordinary version of this. I want to argue with you about drains for forty years. Will you sign?"

Behind him the Lung turns the whole cavern gold, and then blue, and then gold.

"Where are the witnesses?" I ask.

He looks over my shoulder. I turn around.

Tomas is standing eleven meters back along the gallery with his hands in his pockets, entirely failing to look casual. Ovel beside him. Helena. Rhyss with a folding chair, because her arm still aches and standing is not on her agenda. Nineteen people from the units. Ottoline Reske, who has brought food, because of course she has.