High on the upper balcony of the Ferry Museum, Pella Rook and Corvin Hest looked down at the foaming expanse of the turning basin. The broken leftovers of Sleeve Alpha were floating peacefully in the shallow mud flats at the far end of the water chute. It looked like nothing more than a bundle of torn rags discarded by a laundress. Yet that pile of wet cloth had saved three thousand homes from drowning.
“Sorell would call that an embarrassing defect,” Corvin said, adjusting his glasses as he watched Sleeve Beta carry the raging river. “In his academy memoirs, he wrote that any machine that suffers a broken part in public is a stone-built failure that disgraces the designer’s guild.”
“My father called that arrogant stupidity,” Pella answered, her hand resting on the wet granite low roof wall. “Hal used to say that the only machine that never breaks is a machine that never does any work. A cart axle wears down. An oar splits. A leather trace stretches. An honest engineer designs his machine so that when the break comes, it breaks where he can see it, where it hurts nobody, and where a man with a dry spare can fix it in ten minutes.”
