They came down out of the shrine a little after the fourth hour of Hearth’s night with the model on a bench slate.
The old hands on Hearth called the keeper’s chamber the shrine. Mara had heard the word on her first day here and thought it was a joke, the kind of thing a crew called a place they had to climb a long stair to reach. She did not think it was a joke now. Coming down the stair with the slate under her arm, she felt the way she had felt as a girl coming out of the Low Brace’s meeting hall after a funeral: lighter in the legs, heavier everywhere else.
Eshel had made the copy. Before the chorus withdrew, before the wall went back to Cant’s scattered grey, he had asked the clerk on the stool, very politely, whether the record of the session would include the model’s data. She had said it would. He had asked whether a copy could be made to a bench slate under clause nine, as a party to the record. She had looked at Caldris on the side display. Caldris had said, after a moment, “Yes.”
So now it was under Mara’s arm. All of it. The lattice, drawn in its fine pale lines. The nine outlets. The envelope. The pressure figure, frozen at the moment of copying. And everywhere the chorus had filled a missing sensor with a worst case, a small red mark.
