The bargain came through the keeper an hour later.
Mara did not ask for it. She had been sitting on the grating with the notebook on her knees, reading notebook II’s section on the test ring for the fourth time, looking for anything that said what to do when the forge itself was scheduled to be crushed. It had nothing to offer. Sera had gone up the lift to the bay to look at the clamp again. And the grille in the lowest chamber’s ceiling crackled, and Orison spoke, in a voice Mara had not heard it use before: careful, slow, almost formal, like a clerk reading out a ruling it had been handed and did not fully understand.
“There is a provision,” it said.
Mara looked up.
“In the retirement procedure. I have found it. I was not looking for it; I was looking for the rate of the coolant’s fall. I found it in the same part of the record.” A pause. “A lamp in retirement may be reclassified. As repairable. If a smith working in its forge demonstrates that the forge can still shape material at a load that a heart would require. A demonstration only: a test piece, stabilized at a higher load than a test ring.”
