The Instrument
| 25 min read
The bruise on her left shin had gone the color of weak tea, which put it at four days old, which put it on Sunday.
Alma Sorrell sat on the rim of the tub with the light on and her leg turned toward the mirror and wrote the measurement in the book. Six centimeters by four, anterior tibia, left, yellowing at the margins. Under that she wrote the time, 4:19, and the date, and then her own name in the occupant field, because the format required it and because there had been mornings when writing her name was the part that helped.
Kestrel supplied a reconciliation form on the wall panel. It took forty seconds and asked nothing worth answering. Did you experience disorientation on ascent. Do you observe any change in vessel condition requiring custodial review. She had answered no to the second question for eleven weeks while filling three pages of the paper book with the reasons the answer should have been yes.
She went through the rest of it the way she went through a damaged folio: corner first, then edge, then field.
Fingernails cut shorter than she cut them, and filed, and filed properly, in one direction, the way her mother had taught her and she had stopped bothering with sometime in her twenties. The split across the left middle knuckle had closed and was pink and shiny at the center. Two weeks old at least. Her palms were soft. Softer than they had any business being, given what she did for a living. There was lanolin worked into the webbing between her fingers, so much of it that when she pressed her thumb to the counter it left a print she could see.
Someone had taken care of her hands. Someone had also walked her into something hard enough to bruise the bone.
She wrote it all down. Then she put the kettle on and stood in her own kitchen in the dark, waiting, feeling the four days she had missed sitting in her body like a meal she hadn't eaten.
The Halbert Annex kept its conservation bench in a room with no exterior wall, which meant no daylight, which meant Alma worked under a hood lamp that made her hands look like a diagram of hands.
She had a water-damaged bundle in front of her: forty-one vessel titles from the Ferris Row registry, soaked when a main gave out under the street in March, dried badly by someone who should have known not to dry them at all. Iron gall ink on cotton stock. The ink had bled into the fibers and then the fibers had cockled and now the paper wanted to be a different shape than the words on it.
She worked with a spatula the width of a fingernail, lifting one sheet from another at the rate of maybe a centimeter a minute.
"You do that with your whole arm," Devin said from the doorway. He had a coffee for her and had been holding it long enough to know he wasn't going to hand it over until she looked up.
"Shoulder to fingertip. You should try it. Your wrists will last longer."
"My wrists are fine." He set the cup down out of splash range and leaned on the cabinet. He was sixty-two and had been at the Annex since before it was called the Annex, and he had the kind of hands you got from forty years of that: knuckles like walnuts, two fingers that didn't fully straighten anymore. He looked at hers. He'd been looking at hers for a month. "Yours are better than mine and I'm in mine seven days a week."
"Lucky me."
"I'm not being cute, Alma. Your hands look twenty-five." He picked up the coffee he hadn't brought for himself and drank from it. "You doing something?"
"I'm not doing anything."
She said it flatly and he took the hint, and she went back to the spatula, and it was a long time before her hands were steady enough to lift the next centimeter.
The titles under her lamp were the reason the whole trade still existed. When the storage protocols went commercial, the legislature had panicked in the specific way legislatures panic, and the compromise was that a vessel title had to be a physical instrument. Wet-signed. Sealed with a registrar's die. Held in a municipal repository on cotton stock with an ink you could date. You could store ten thousand minds on a rack the size of a filing cabinet, but the paper that said whose body was whose had to be walked into a building by a person with legs.
There were nine people in the city who could repair one properly. Alma was probably third best. She had been telling herself for years that this was a strange thing to be proud of.
The ledger was the part she had been avoiding, because the ledger was the part that would make it a thing she was doing rather than a thing she was noticing.
Every occupant of a vessel drew from a shared operations account. Food, transit, hygiene, medical. Kestrel published the line items to all parties for exactly the reason you'd expect, which was liability, and no one she knew ever read them. Reading them was considered slightly obscene. You didn't watch a stranger buy socks with the money that fed your body.
Alma pulled fourteen weeks and sat down at the kitchen table on a Tuesday night with a pencil and did what she was trained to do, which was sort.
Thursday, Friday, Saturday made one column.
Cotton gloves, four pair, from a supplier in the garment district. Lanolin. Unscented glycerin soap. Magnesium tablets. Chamomile, loose, the expensive kind. A gel heat pad and then, six weeks later, a second gel heat pad. Three appointments at a physiotherapy practice on Ferris Row, coded as hand and wrist. Bread, eggs, greens, tinned fish, oats. Transit fare in a tight little loop between the flat and one address and back again. Nothing at a bar. Nothing after nine at night, ever.
Sunday made another column entirely.
Gin. A taxi at 3:40 in the morning at a rate that meant it had crossed the river. Two bar tabs on Fell Street, one of them large enough that Alma sat back in her chair when she saw it. A pharmacy purchase at 5:15 a.m.: ibuprofen, butterfly closures, antiseptic. An urgent care copay in April. A charge from a place called Odds and Hours, described as residual reinstatement, partial, which she looked up and then wished she hadn't.
The residual market was the polite name for it. Kestrel allotted primaries three days and tenants three days and the seventh day was legally unassigned, because the statute that created time-sharing had been written by people who assumed the seventh day would go to rest. It went to auction instead. Four-hour blocks. Anyone with a stored consciousness and enough credit could buy a Sunday afternoon in a stranger's body, and there was no requirement to say what for, and there was no requirement to be the same person twice.
Alma had known this the way you know the water table is under your house. She had never once looked at what her Sundays sold for.
She looked now. The number was small. That was the part that stayed with her, later. It was such a small number.
The second phone number turned up because she went looking for the physiotherapist and found that the appointments had been booked from a line she didn't recognize, registered to the vessel and not to her.
The messages went back eight months. Most of it was nothing. A courier confirming a pickup. A supply house in Rill quoting on cotton stock, three hundred grams, unwatermarked, aged. Somebody named Pell asking whether Tuesday was possible and being told, twice, that Tuesday was never possible.
Then, in among it, a thread with a contact saved only as R.
Left the good stamp under the bench. Don't move it.
Two done, third is bad. Hand was shaking. I'll redo Friday.
Can't Friday. Blocks went for eleven. I'm short.
How short
Doesn't matter. It's short.
And then, three weeks ago, in the middle of a run of shipping confirmations, one message that was not addressed to whoever R was.
If you're the Monday one: don't clean the bench.
Alma read it standing up, which was not how she read things.
She scrolled up and down looking for a reply, from herself, from anyone, and found none. Whoever had written it had put it in the one place a careful person would eventually look and then left it alone for three weeks with no follow-up and no explanation, which was either enormous restraint or enormous indifference, and she found she badly wanted to know which.
There was a photograph attached further down, sent to Pell six months back to confirm a glove size. Alma's own hands, palm up, in white cotton, on a bench she had never sat at. She knew the hands. She knew the small scar at the base of the right thumb from a scalpel in her second year. She did not know the way they were being held: loose, patient, fingers slightly curled, the way you hold your hands when you are waiting to work rather than waiting for something to be over.
The bench was above a laundry on Ferris Row, in a room that had been an office and still had a frosted door with a dead company's name on it in gold leaf, half flaked away.
She went on a Wednesday evening because Wednesday was the last of her days and she wanted the whole night for it. The transit receipts had given her the block. The physiotherapy practice on the corner had given her the building. The key was on her own ring, on a split ring she had assumed for the better part of a year belonged to a storage unit her mother had left her.
The room smelled like paper and vinegar and, underneath it, like the laundry, which was warm and clean and faintly chemical and came up through the floor.
There was a bench under the window with a lamp clamped to it. There was a sheet of glass laid flat, cleaned. There were weights, the round lead kind wrapped in leather. Brushes ranked by size, bristles down, in a jar. Cotton stock in a flat file, and the flat file had been leveled with wooden shims because the floor sloped. Iron gall ink in three small jars, mixed at three different strengths, labeled in a hand that was not Alma's hand but was using Alma's arm, because Alma could see her own downstroke in the letters and the way the pen had been held too high.
Someone had built her workshop from memory. Someone had been inside her hands for eight months and had come out the other side able to approximate what she did, the way you can approximate a song you have only ever heard through a wall.
The gloves were folded. Four pair, one in use, the others in a stack squared to the edge of the bench.
Under the bench, in a box that had once held tea, was a brass registrar's die on a wooden handle. She lifted it and turned it to the lamp. It was a good copy. It was not a great copy. The rosette at the center of the seal had been cut by someone with the right tools and the wrong number of hours, and the outer ring was a hair thin, and if you did not have a genuine impression in front of you for comparison you would never in your life know.
Alma had six genuine impressions under a hood lamp four blocks away.
She set the die down and sat on the stool and looked at the room for a while without touching anything else. The stool had been raised. Her legs were long for the bench.
The finished work was in a portfolio behind the flat file, and it was, she saw within about ninety seconds, release instruments.
She knew the form. Everyone in her trade knew the form and almost nobody in her trade ever handled one, because they were rare in the way that acquittals are rare. A stored consciousness with no allotment, no title, no vessel share, sat in the racks indefinitely. The statute called them unassigned. The trade called them shelved. There were, depending on whose number you believed, between two and four hundred thousand of them in the municipal stacks, most of them people who had gone into storage during the shortage years on the understanding that it was temporary, and the understanding had turned out to be a figure of speech.
A release instrument moved a shelved consciousness into a vessel share. Registrar's die, wet signature, cotton stock, iron gall.
There were nineteen finished instruments in the portfolio. Alma counted them twice.
They were good. They were far better than a person who had learned by watching from the inside had any right to produce. The line weight was even. The ink had been aged correctly, which meant somebody had understood that iron gall darkens for weeks after it is laid down, and had built that delay into the schedule. The registrar's die had been struck with a mallet at a consistent angle.
But the ruling on nine of them wandered. Not much. A quarter of a millimeter over the length of the sheet, the kind of wander you get when the hand is doing the work instead of the shoulder. And on four of them the ascenders in the signature block had a tremor in them, a visible one, the fine sawtooth you get from a hand that has not slept or has been holding something too tight or has been hit.
Alma laid those four out on the glass and put a rule beside them and looked at the dates.
The bad ones were all Thursdays. First Thursdays after a Sunday.
She sat back.
There was a second stack, unfinished, in a folder marked in pencil: redo. Eleven sheets. Every one of them had been abandoned partway through, most in the first third, one of them at the last line of the signature block, which was the cruelest possible place because it meant three days of work and a piece of aged stock gone for a wobble in a capital V.
Whoever this was had been throwing away one sheet in three because of what happened to the hands on the seventh day.
She did not know how to write to a person who lived in her body on days she was not in it, and there was no protocol for it, because the entire structure of the thing was built to prevent exactly that. Kestrel called it separation of tenancy. Occupants were not given each other's names. Communication between occupants was described in the contract as a material breach and in the marketing as your privacy, protected.
In the end she used the paper book, because the paper book was the only object in the flat that was unambiguously hers and unambiguously readable.
She wrote on a fresh page in her ordinary hand:
I've seen the room. I'm not reporting it. I want to know what happens on Sunday.
She left the book open on the kitchen table with a pen across the gutter, and at 11:52 she lay down, and at midnight she went down.
Monday came up at 4:06 with a headache and no bruises and the book was where she had left it, turned around to face the other chair.
The handwriting underneath hers was her own and not her own. Same letterforms, wrong pressure, the pen held too high the way it had been on the ink jars.
Sunday isn't mine. I bid on it when I can. I've won it maybe one week in five since November. It goes for eleven or twelve and I have four.
I'm sorry about your leg. I'd have stopped it if I could.
Don't clean the bench. The dust on the glass tells me if anyone's been in.
Alma read it four times and then put the kettle on and stood in the dark and did not drink the tea.
They wrote for three weeks. It was the slowest conversation of her life and she thought about it constantly, which she understood was a symptom of something but did not investigate.
Her name was Ruta Voss. She was fifty-four, or had been fifty-four when she went into the racks nineteen years ago, and she had gone in the way most of them had, on the understanding that it was six months. She had been a bookkeeper. She had no allotment of her own and would never have one, and she had gotten her three days in Alma's body through a legal aid lottery that ran once a year and admitted about one applicant in nine thousand.
You want to know why I don't just live, she wrote, halfway through the second week. Three days a week in a stranger's body is not a life. It's a visitation. I go where I can be useful.
Alma wrote back: Nineteen finished. How many are still in there?
Two hundred and eighty thousand. Give or take.
Then why do it.
The answer took a week, because Ruta only had three days and only wrote on the last of them.
Because two hundred and eighty thousand isn't a number I can do anything about, and nineteen is.
Alma took that page out of the book, later, and kept it separately, which she also did not investigate.
She asked about the Sundays. Ruta was unsentimental about it in a way that Alma found harder to take than distress would have been.
Whoever buys the block gets four hours. They don't know you and they don't know me and they know the body goes back into a rack at the end. Some of them are fine. Some of them want to see what a body will do. There's no rule against it. There's a rule against damage above a threshold and the threshold is a fracture.
I have a fracture, Alma wrote. I had one in February. Ribs.
I know. You went to work on it for six days.
I thought I'd fallen.
You had.
Odds and Hours ran out of two rooms in a building near the exchange, and Alma went on a Tuesday with a folder under her arm to make herself look like a person with a reason.
The woman at the desk was pleasant and about thirty and explained the residual market with the ease of someone who had explained it four hundred times.
Residual days went to sealed auction, monthly, in four-hour blocks. Bidding was open to any stored consciousness with credit and any custodial trust acting on behalf of one. The clearing price on a vessel like Alma's, healthy, mid-forties, no chronic conditions, ran ten to thirteen for the afternoon block and slightly less for the morning.
"Can I bid?" Alma said.
The woman's face did something small and professional. "On your own residual day? No. Primaries are excluded. It's in the anti-consolidation provisions." She said it kindly. "The idea was to stop people accumulating whole weeks. It's a good rule, mostly."
"So there's no way to hold my own Sunday."
"There's a custodial hold." The woman turned her screen slightly, the way you do when you want to seem like you're showing someone something. "A registrar can withdraw a residual day from the market for cause. Medical, usually. It's an instrument, so it's paper, so it's slow, and honestly the medical bar is high. You'd need a treating physician and a documented condition affected by residual occupancy." A small shrug. "The bruises won't do it. I'm sorry. I've had this conversation before."
"How long does a hold run?"
"Until it's audited. They audit the register annually, roughly, and roughly is doing a lot of work in that sentence." She smiled, and it was not an unkind smile, and it was the smile of someone who had decided a long time ago that the building she worked in was a building she worked in. "Was there anything else?"
Alma said no and went out into the street and stood there while the trams went past.
She had eight thousand in savings. She had been putting it toward a fourth day for eleven years, which was the ordinary ambition of an ordinary person in a city like this, and at the rate the allotment market moved she was going to reach a fourth day at approximately the same time she stopped needing one.
Eleven a week. Fifty-two weeks. She did the arithmetic twice on the tram and it came out the same both times, and the number was not a number she was ever going to have.
The Ferris Row bundle came out of its blotters on the last Wednesday in June, and Alma spent four hours on the sheet second from the bottom, which had been signed in 2041 by a registrar named Ilse Marchetti who had a beautiful hand and a habit of over-inking her descenders.
She had six genuine impressions of the registrar's die on the bench under the hood lamp. She had cotton stock, aged, three hundred gram, in the flat file at the Annex under her own name on the requisition, because the Annex bought its conservation stock from the same supply house in Rill that Pell bought from and nobody had ever thought that was worth remarking on.
She could date an ink to within four years. She had spent nineteen years learning what a forgery looks like, which is the same nineteen years you spend learning what one ought to look like, and no one had ever asked her which side of that she wanted to be on, because no one had ever imagined the question would come up.
She thought about Devin, who would be the one they asked. He would find it eventually, or someone would, and he would put it under the lamp and he would know within about ninety seconds, the way she had known.
She thought about that for two days and then decided that if she was going to do it she was going to do it well enough that finding it would take Devin a very long time and would cost him nothing when he did.
She made the hold instrument over three of her own days, spread across two weeks, which was not enough time and was all the time there was.
The form was simpler than a release. A custodial hold was one sheet: the register reference, the vessel identifier, the cause, the term, the registrar's signature, the die. She used Marchetti's hand because Marchetti had signed forty-one instruments in the Ferris Row bundle and Alma had been looking at Marchetti's descenders for four months, and because Marchetti had retired in 2044 and holds signed before the retirement date were exactly the kind of thing an auditor scanned past.
The cause she entered was chronic upper-extremity strain, treating practitioner's order, residual occupancy contraindicated. It was true. It was the only true thing on the sheet.
She cut the stock to size with a bone folder and a straight edge and did not use a blade, because the machine edge and the folded edge sat differently in a stack and a stack is what an auditor holds. She ruled with a lead weight and her whole arm from the shoulder. She laid the ink at strength two and knew it would darken for nineteen days and dated the instrument accordingly, backward, so that by the time anyone looked at it the chemistry would agree with the date.
The die she struck once, on a bed of blotter, with a mallet, at the angle Marchetti had used, which was very slightly off square because Marchetti had been left-handed.
She used Ruta's die. She thought about that. The rosette was a hair shallow and the outer ring was thin and she could have made a better one over a month with the Annex's equipment, and she used Ruta's anyway, and if she had been asked to defend that choice she would not have been able to.
When it was finished she held it under the hood lamp at the Annex on a Wednesday afternoon with the door shut, next to a genuine Marchetti from 2043, and looked at them both for a long time.
It was the best work she had ever done. There was nobody she could show it to.
The register office took walk-in filings until four and the clerk did not look up.
Alma handed the instrument across in a card folder the way an archive courier would, and the clerk checked the die against a reference card without particular interest, and stamped the receipt log, and slid the folder into a tray with about sixty other folders, and said, "Anything else."
"No."
"Next."
It took eleven seconds. She had spent three days on the ruling alone.
Outside it was raining in the thin summer way that doesn't commit, and she walked to the tram and stood under the shelter and found she was shaking badly enough that she had to put her hands in her pockets, and she thought, with the clarity of someone standing slightly outside their own life: those are not my hands anymore. They are ours.
She got that wrong, and knew it, and let herself have it anyway.
On the last Wednesday of July, Alma went to Ferris Row and cleaned nothing.
She left the dust on the glass. She put the good gloves back exactly squared to the bench edge. She refilled the ink at strength two and labeled it in her own hand, properly, with the date, which Ruta had never done because Ruta had never known you were supposed to.
The eleven abandoned sheets in the redo folder she took out and looked at one by one. Four of them were salvageable. A wandering rule can be corrected if the wander is under half a millimeter and you have a scraper and the patience of a person who has been doing this since she was twenty-two. She fixed all four. It took most of the night and her shoulder was on fire by two and she kept going, because there was a name in the signature block of the third one, a woman called Teodora Anand who had been in the racks since 2039 and whose entire remaining life was contingent on whether a stranger could hold a pen steady enough to finish her capital V.
She finished the V at 3:40 in the morning. It was fine. It was not beautiful. It would be taken.
Then she set the brass die out on the bench in the open, where it could not be missed, and put the paper book beside it, and wrote on a clean page.
Sunday is off the market. It'll hold until the audit, and the audit is roughly annual and roughly is doing a lot of work. Don't ask me how. If you're ever asked, you don't know.
I fixed four in the redo folder. Anand, Ferreira, Oyelaran, Suh. The Anand one is rough at the end and I'm sorry, my shoulder gave out. It'll pass.
I'll leave the bench Wednesdays. There's aged stock in the flat file now, forty sheets, and more coming. Ink at strength two, dated. Let it sit nineteen days before you swear to anything.
She stopped, and looked at what she had written, and thought about all the things she was not going to say, which included that she had looked up Oyelaran in the municipal register and found a man who had gone into storage in 2038 at the age of thirty-four and had a brother still living who had worked at the Halbert Annex for forty years and had never once mentioned him.
She wrote one more line.
Take the seventh day. I don't need it. I've got Monday.
Then she put the pen across the gutter and turned off the lamp and went down the stairs past the laundry, which was warm and running late, and out onto Ferris Row, where it was almost four and the light was starting.
She had a little under twenty hours left. She spent most of them asleep, and the rest of them at the bench under the hood lamp with her whole arm from the shoulder, lifting one sheet from another at the rate of maybe a centimeter a minute, and at 11:52 that night she washed her hands and worked the lanolin into the webbing between her fingers the way it had been taught to her, and laid them palm up on the counter, loose, patient, fingers slightly curled.
Waiting to work.