The control room was a long low chamber with one wall of dark glass and a row of chairs bolted to the floor facing it, as though the people who had worked here once had sat in a line and watched the forge the way an audience watches a stage. There was a window at the room’s far end, thick and round, looking down into the drum. Through it Mara could see the heart from above, a small grey shape in its turning rings, and the split, a black hair.
Caldris went to the glass wall and touched it, and it lit.
Green script. Orison’s script. But Caldris did not need Orison to translate it; she read it herself, moving her stylus down the lines on her slate in parallel, and after a moment she brought up a single block of text and enlarged it until it filled the wall’s center.
“The retirement notice,” she said. “For this lamp. Read the date aloud.”
Mara studied it. She could not read the script. But at the bottom of the block there was a line of figures in the Compact’s standard numerals, the same numerals as on her gauge, and she could read those.
