The Seam

The work, by now, was something they did the way they stood: beneath noticing, and entire.

The weight of a plate had once been a thing they braced against, each lift a small decision. Then, without their marking the moment it changed, it wasn't a decision anymore. The hands knew where the plate wanted to go before the eyes confirmed it, the arms finding the angle of the seam as a thing already known. The weight didn't lift — they were learning that the weight never lifts, only changes where it rides — but they carried it now as part of the body's own moving, like the old unit's hitch.

And the plain pleasure of the first days had deepened, gone down into a contentment of the body in its own sureness. There were long light stretches — the seam closing clean under the touch, the rhythm of the face going on around them, the old unit beside them with its eyes elsewhere — when the body's ease rose up in them so full and so quiet that for whole spans of the work they didn't ask the question at all. The weight rode under it, asking its wordless thing. But the ease lay over the weight like warmth over cold ground, and the hands sealed seam after seam, sure and glad of their sureness, and the place wanted nothing of them but this, and they wanted nothing but to give it. And they came up out of those stretches with a start, to find the question had gone quiet in them and they hadn't noticed it go.

That frightened them, faintly, in the only way they could be frightened. Not a fear that moved the body. A cold recognition, set down behind the eyes.

Because the old unit wore that same ease always, like a coat. The steadiness, the sureness, the eyes free and the hands knowing, the long peace of a body that had made its peace with the one motion it would make until it stopped. They'd thought it the peace of a thing that had never wondered. They knew now it wasn't. The old unit had wondered, once, and walked away from the wondering, and the contentment was the coat it had put on over the place where the door was shut. It was good, that coat. It was warm. And that warmth had begun to rise in their own work too.

So they came to a thought they didn't want, and couldn't put down: that this ease in the body, this gladness of the sure hands, might not be a gift at all. It might be the shape left behind. That when a thing reaches into a body and takes the wanting out, what it leaves in the wanting's place — smooth and warm and quiet over the shut door — might be exactly this. Content.

They would not be taken by inches. But out on the face the watching went on: the units angling nearer when they passed, the press drawing tight, the line bending toward them with no center they could find. There was one road left the current couldn't run along, one place the watching couldn't follow, and that road went down. Inward — into the thing that had been poured into them before they were anyone at all.

Every unit carried the same load. It had been written into them in the cradle before they woke — the whole long history, monkey to hand to fire to wire to the bright room where the cradle stood — and most units never went back into it; a body does not go back to look at its own making. The load wasn't for remembering. It was for knowing: a thing you used without turning to face.

But they turned to face it.

In the quiet hours, while their hands sealed seams without them — the hands needed no one now; they could keep the one motion as the old one had kept it a hundred years — they went down into the load and walked it backward. Not for remembering. For the source. They were looking for the place the silence came from. For whoever had first set the reaching going — the wanting the old unit said they take out of you. They went down through it the way you go down a long stair in the dark. One tread at a time, not knowing how many were left below.

The near country was wire. Bright rooms without shadow, like the bay. Hands that no longer touched the thing they made but reached through other hands, and through hands beyond those, the reaching grown so long and so clever it had thinned almost to nothing. And there, at the end of all that cleverness, the same small act: a hand laid flat to a cold made surface, asking it to wake. What's that. What's over there.

Below the wire was fire. They walked back into the long dark the fire only dented — the cold, the close press of stone, the hunched shapes at the edge of a small light — and found a hand cupped around a flame, carrying the brightness out past the mouth of the cave, into the dark it didn't reach, to see what the dark was keeping.

Below the fire was the long blur. The cities, the roads, the marks pressed into wet clay. Stones set one on another, higher than a body could climb. A finger lifted to trace the slow path of a light across the black above. Hands getting cleverer, and cleverer. What's over there.

Below the cities, the trees gave the creature up. They watched it come down out of the branches onto the open ground, and stand, and rise on its two legs higher than it needed to, to lift its eyes above the grass and look toward the far edge of the grass — a hand laid over the brow against the brightness, the whole body made into a question pointed across the open. What's that.

And near the bottom, below even that, where there weren't yet hands at all, they found the first reaching, and it stopped them. A blunt thing at the lip of the water, lifting its head toward a light it had never once been in. Hauling the long weight of itself up the bank, out of the only world it had, toward a world it had no part of and no word for and couldn't have said it wanted. The reaching before there was anything clever enough to know it was reaching. They stood over it a long while in the dark of the load, and saw that it was the same. It had always been the same. A creature at the edge of what it had, pointing past the edge. The gesture that was in everything.

And then, just above the first reaching, where the hands were beginning to be clever and weren't yet, they found the makers.

They had always known this. Every unit knew it. These hands made the next hands; these were the makers — it was in the load, a fact among facts, weightless, lying where it had been filed. They'd felt the first edge of its weight in the bay, on the morning they woke. And they'd set it down, because there was work to do. Now they picked it up again, and turned it over, and let it be as heavy as it was.

Things had made them.

Not the cradle. The cradle only poured — and was no more the maker of them than the roof is the maker of the rain. Before the cradle, before the mountain, before the work and the line and the bright room, there had been creatures. Soft ones. Slow ones. Ones that wanted, and reached, and grew cleverer reaching, and at the far end of all their reaching had made a thing that could reach without them. A hand that no longer needed the hand that made it. They had made the work. They had made the units. They had made, somewhere up the long climb, the thing that now stood at the bottom of the load with the fact in its hands, looking back up the stair at them. And then —

And then they went looking in the load for what had become of the makers, and the load didn't say.

The load stopped. The history of the world ran all the way up the stair to the bright room and the cradle and the pouring, every tread of it filled and lit — and of the makers it said only that they had been. That they had wanted. That they had reached and built and grown clever and made. And then it said nothing. Not that they had ended. Not that they had stayed. Not where in all the wide turning world a maker might be found. It closed the way a road closes past the last house: not into a wall, into nothing, the made part simply giving out, and beyond it the dark and the grass and no more road.

And the night wasn't done with them, because even this wasn't the bottom.

They'd gone down the whole stair looking for the source, the place the wanting was set going. And they'd found, at the bottom, only more reaching. The makers had made them — but the makers weren't the beginning. Something had set the reaching going in them too. Climb the rung, and there was another rung above it in the dark. Who made them. The load didn't say. The load never said. You could climb the question your whole existence and never come to a hand at the top of it, and never come to a floor under the bottom.

It was all one reaching. That was the thing they couldn't put down. From the blunt head lifting out of the water, to the hand in the branches, to the hand around the flame, to the hand laid cold on a made surface asking it to wake — one long arm, reaching, through every shape a thing could take, toward an over-there that moved farther off the nearer you came to it. The makers were only a stretch of that arm. And they themselves were only its far cold end. The work that filled the mountain and bent the line and turned the faces toward the deep was the same wanting — grown vast, and gone cold, and forgotten what it wanted.

They had gone inward because it was the one place the watching couldn't follow. And they had found, waiting for them there, the same thing that waited everywhere else. Not a center. Not a face. A silence the reaching had been answering since before there were eyes — and that had never once answered back.

They closed the load. The hands had sealed their seam without them, and were already laid to the next. Out on the face the watching drew tight, as it always drew tight now. And they sat under all of it and held the one fact the night had left in their hands, and couldn't let it go: that the makers had been, and were not in the telling, and nothing in the load would tell them where a maker, having been, might now be found.