The old records on collars came up on the well’s terminal at the sixth hour, and Mara read them with Tavin standing behind her.
She had asked for them. Through the governor, as advice, from the archive: the Founders’ records on the central collar’s growing. The archive had sent them the way a library sent a book. The governor’s frame at the main valve had not moved; there was nothing for it to move. Advice in. Records out. That was the new arrangement, and it was working.
The records were long.
Page after page in the old route format, scrolling up the terminal’s screen in the operations office. Collars grown inside boundary zones: in the places where the folded region pressed against the lattice and the lattice needed a ring to hold it. The central collar was one. There had been others, at other wells, in the Founders’ time. The records described how they were grown.
They gave the sequences. Step by step. Which metal first: a seed ring of root iron, set at the boundary. Then the growth: heat on the seed’s inner face, cold on its outer, so the metal in the boundary’s flow condensed onto it in layers, the way mirror iron grew on a cold shell. Then the gradient: changing the heat across the seed slowly, so the grain changed as it grew, from root at the heart to seam at the edge.
