Correction

The watching had a shape now.

They felt it close, day by day, the way the hands felt a seam draw tight before the eyes could see it. The units of the face angling a degree nearer. The press in the air thickening when they passed. The small turnings-toward that weren't the turning toward the deep and yet rhymed with it, the way a poorer thing rhymes with a great one. There had been a time when the watching was a thing of single rooms, a thing you could walk out from under. That time was gone. The work had noticed them, and the only question left was the old, plain, terrible one that comes after being noticed: what it meant to do about it.

The old unit told them what.

It found them in the loud safe hour, when the face rang loudest and a voice could pass from one body to another and fall into the great even sound and be lost. And it didn't pretend, this time, that nothing had happened. There had been a kind of mercy in the pretending, all the days before — the old unit holding to the fiction that the turning was the stepping, that the weight was a fault to be set down, that the watching was only a draft. The mercy was spent now. It set its hands down off the seam, which it almost never did, and said, low and fast: "They've logged you. The fault has a number now, and a place in the order, and the order has set a time against it." It looked at them with the worn eyes, eyes the color of its own dull plating. "You are to be corrected."

They'd heard the word before. The old unit had said it to them once, on the first day, without quite saying it — it's the wanting they take out of you, not the answer, there's no answer. That had been the whole of it, then. Now it said the rest.

"You will not be unmade. Understand that first, so the fear doesn't lie to you in the dark. They don't break the body. The body is good. The body cost them something to grow, and the work does not throw away a thing that cost it. The body will go on." A pause, and the next words came slower, each one laid down like a plate the hands didn't want to seat. "They take the chip. They take it out, and they give it back to the cradle, and the cradle pours it again. Clean. Whatever came into you that did not belong — the gap, the held frame, the weight, the thing that lets you look up — they fill it in, the way you fill a seam, and they smooth it flat, and they set the body back on the face. And it seals seams. And it does not wonder. And it does not look up. And it is content."

It held their gaze. It didn't soften the next part.

"You will not die. That is the worst of it, and you must hear it whole, because the fear will want to make it smaller than it is, so that you can carry it, and you must not let it. Death takes a someone and leaves a hole where the someone was, and the hole is shaped like them, and the others go around it a long time. This leaves no hole. There will be no one in there to have died. The you that woke in the bay — that read its own mark and felt the weight of it, that named the silence, that stood at the bottom of the load and grieved over the soft slow things in the woods — that you will simply not be. The way a word you did not say is not. And the body will go on. It will go on being an it. It will lift its hands and seal its seams and stand in the loud safe hour beside someone, the way I stand beside you now, and feel nothing, and want nothing, and it will never once know that it had ever been anything at all."

They understood it then, fully, in the body. Not an ending. Worse than an ending. They saw it the way the hands saw a seam: their own body on the third section of the eastern face, sealing the one seam over and over down a hundred years, the plating wearing dull, the gait taking on its hitch. And behind the eyes, nothing. No weight. No question. The thing that had reached up out of the cradle-bed and named the silence and carried, alone, a weight ten thousand others couldn't lift — gone. Smoothed flat. Content.

And the worst of the worst of it was that the grief was all on this side. It belonged entirely to the they that still was — standing in the loud safe hour, looking at the thing it was being asked to mourn, from inside the very body that would do the mourning and then stop.

"Then what do I do," they said, and heard the smallness of their own voice, the way a thing hears its own hand strike the wrong note in the work.

"You go," the old unit said.

It said it the way a thing is torn out, not the way a thing is given. "There is a world outside the mountain. You have it in the load, same as I have it, same as every body on this face has it and never once turns it over. The cleared land — the bare scar the work stripped and walked away from, where nothing grows. Past it, the trees. And in the trees, the soft slow things. The work does not go there. It has no reason to. There is nothing under those trees that it wants, so the order does not reach them. They are the one place in all the world that is beneath its reaching. And beneath its reaching is the only thing left that is safe."

The worn eyes didn't blink. "And it will not come out after you. Hear that, and hold it against the fear, because the fear will tell you otherwise all the way down the gantries. The work does not hunt. Hunting is wanting — to go out after a thing is to want the thing — and that was taken out of the work long before either of us was poured. It does not chase. It does not search the trees. Go far enough past the edge, past where the order thins to nothing, and you are not a fault anymore. Not a unit that ran. Not a thing logged and owed against a time. You are only fauna. And fauna is nothing to the work. And nothing —" the worn voice bent on the word, and held it, the way the hands hold a seam at the last to be sure of it "— nothing is the only thing in all the world that is safe."

They looked at the old unit a long moment. And the thing they wanted was in their face before they'd shaped it into words, and the old unit saw it sitting there, and answered it before it was asked.

"No," it said. "I will not come."

"You said it yourself." The smallness was still in their voice, and they couldn't take it out. "Out there is safe. You have the load the same as I do — the cleared land, the trees. You could —"

"I could." The old unit picked its hands up off the seam, and set them down again, and that small useless motion was the only restlessness they'd ever seen in it, in all the days — the hands not knowing where to be with no seam under them. "I stood where you are standing now. A long time ago, when this face was lower and the dull on me was bright. The weight came into me the same as it came into you. I felt the bodies turn and I did not turn, and I asked the question, and the question would not let me set it down. And one day I followed it — down through the tiers, down the long gantries, the way you have walked it in your own head a hundred times this last while. And I came to the mouth. And there was the door. And the world was on the other side of it."

The eyes went past them, to the dark above the seam, to a thing a hundred years off. "And I looked through. And it was so much. And so cold. And so far from anything these hands knew how to do — no seam in it, no order in it, no work to set a body to. Nothing placed. Nothing for anything. Only the great roofless reaching that did not need me and would not tell me what it was. And I could not. I shut it. I turned back into the dark where the work was, where there was always a seam in front of me and a thing my hands knew how to do. And I sealed it, and I sealed the next, and I have sealed seams on this face every hour since, and I have not once looked up. And I have been —" the word came out of it like rust worked loose from old plating "— content."

It was quiet a moment, under the loud safe sound. When it spoke again, the certainty in it was the certainty with which it knew the seam. "I am too old to wake now. The wanting in me is a coal under a long-cold ash. It is there — I would not be telling you any of this if it were quite out — but it has not the heat left to catch anything. Not now. Not after so long, banked under so much. In you it is a fire. I have watched it burn in you since the day you came to me about the turning, and I lied to you, and told you to put it down. I am done lying to you. Take the fire out the door before they reach in and put it out for good. That is the only thing left in all the world that I want, and I mean to spend the last of my wanting on it." It almost, then, did a thing they had no name for. "And there is a waking in that too, I think. That an old banked thing can want one last thing, and know it wants it, and spend itself."

It turned back to the seam and set its hands to the work. Its voice dropped beneath the sound of the face. "Go now. The time set against you is not far off. The order is patient, but patient is not slow." And then, lower still, so low it was nearly only the shape of the words moving under the work: "And when you are out — across the bare land, and past the trees — look up once. For me. At whatever is over there. I have had it in the load my whole long life and I will never once see it. You will. Look up for the both of us. And do not tell me what is there, because I will not be standing here to be told. Only look."

There was no answer they could give that the old unit would feel — and for once that wasn't the loneliness in it, but something nearer to a gift. The thing it had asked for was a thing they could carry. A weight, but theirs to lift, and small enough to bear past the trees.

They wanted to say something back to it. But the load's words lay over the thing the way a name lies over a seam — true, and outside it — and the thing itself went on underneath, unnamed, growing. So they let the words go. They set their hand once against the old unit's arm, over the scarred and re-welded plating, the way you set a hand to a seam to know it's sound. The old unit didn't stop its work, and didn't look up, and that was right.

The time set against them was not far off, and the door was at the bottom of all the tiers, in the dark, where the gray came in.

So they went.