The Commons · June 24, 2230 · Afternoon, during Della's break
The bird on Della's workbench had been designed to waste energy.
Its wings beat against nothing. Its feet held a little wooden perch. When wound, it opened its beak and produced a shriek that would have justified several predators.
Della loved it immediately.
“It has a fault,” Trey said.
“It has a personality.”
He had found it in a box of damaged household goods while collecting a cart strap from a salvage seller. The seller would not separate it from the strap, having judged correctly that a man carrying a mechanical bird was unlikely to come back and demand his money.
Trey had brought it down with a delivery, keeping it away from the clean containers. Now he stood outside the dry tool cupboard, watching Della turn the perch over in her hands. The cupboard was nowhere near the working water line. No valve required the bird, and she had told the shift hand where to find her if a real problem arose.
“Can you make it useful?” Trey asked.
“I hope not.”
She undid the two little screws. They did not match. One had been shortened by somebody with strong feelings and a poor file. Inside, a spring turned a wheel, the wheel pulled a rod, and the rod did its best to flap two wings that had ceased agreeing about the length of a flap.
The bird's voice came from a thin tongue of metal above a tiny air chamber. Someone had packed the chamber with cloth. Della drew it out with tweezers.
“There. They muffled it.”
“Possibly a person who had heard it.”
The cloth was dark with old oil. She set it aside, cleaned the tongue and wound the key a quarter turn. The beak opened. A clear, short note entered the cupboard and died there.
Trey's face changed.
It was not enough of a change for anyone else to have remarked on it. His mouth remained prepared to smile. But the joke that should have followed did not arrive, and he looked at the bird as if it had called a name he had not expected to hear at work.
“You know that sound,” Della said.
“I've heard birds.”
“Not many with keys.”
He put a finger on the wing, then removed it. “There was one in a room I used to sleep in. Larger. Different paint.”
Della waited. He examined the shortened screw.
“Whose room?” she asked.
“A room I used to sleep in.”
She nodded and returned to the mechanism. The answer was a closed door, not an invitation to pick its lock. Trey knew more doors than was probably healthy. She did not need to become another person he had to get past.
The wing rod was bent. Straightening it perfectly would take tools she could fetch from the next room. Replacing the worn pivot would take a scrap of sound metal and some patient work. She had the scrap. The time belonged to the break she had intended to spend drinking tea.
Trey brought the tea without asking how she took it. He had delivered enough interrupted cups to know.
She watched him set it down.
“You don't have to stay.”
“I want to see whether it gets worse.”
“That's a generous audience.”
He sat on the threshold, leaving the passage clear. For a few minutes there were no customers in the little room. A cart rattled across the yard. Someone argued about which stack a lid belonged with. The pumps continued beneath all of it, an accustomed vibration in the boards.
Della shaped the new pivot slowly. On working equipment she would have checked the load and the reason for wear before putting in a new piece. Here the entire load was a badly painted wing. A mistake would cost a bird its dignity, assuming any remained.
“We could put it by the tap,” Trey said.
“No.”
“To tell people when—”
“No.”
“I haven't finished.”
“That's what I'm protecting.”
He grinned. She was grinning too. She had not realized how often a thing arriving at her bench brought with it the demand to become necessary. A good repair became an argument for adding more work. A reliable fitting became something everyone wanted installed before dark. Even her pauses had names that made them defensible to a clerk.
This bird could not defend itself. That seemed a virtue.
The new pivot fit. The left wing moved; the right scraped the painted body. Della adjusted the rod. Trey held the perch when she asked, pressing too hard at first and then easing off. Together they brought the wings into a motion that looked less like distress and more like a creature proposing to leave.
It did not leave. Its feet remained nailed to the perch.
“Very familiar,” Trey said.
She glanced at him. “What is?”
“The optimism.”
This time the joke came easily, but she did not laugh quite as quickly. He saw that and reached for his cap.
“I'm not asking you to mend me.”
“Good. I don't have the parts.”
He laughed then, properly. She wound the key one full turn. The wings beat six times, the beak opened, and the bird produced three notes followed by its original hideous shriek.
They stared at it.
“It remembered the ending,” Trey said.
Della took the cover off again. The air tongue was catching at the end of the cycle. She could alter the wheel. She could shorten the travel. She could spend the rest of the afternoon pursuing a sound that had existed briefly before the machine had become itself again.
Her tea was nearly cold.
“We could leave that,” she said.
Trey nodded so promptly that she knew he had been hoping she would.
She closed the cover and put the shortened screw back in its own hole. She would replace it another time, perhaps. The bird was no public hatch, and no one was going to lose water because its belly required a little care.
“How much for it?” she asked.
“Came with the strap.”
“That isn't a price.”
“It's a gift, Della.”
She looked up. Trey had said it without the layer of explanation that usually made his kindness difficult to accept. She let the sentence stand.
He rose, brushed his trousers and tested the bird once more. The three clear notes came first, the shriek after. He nodded to it as if the two of them had concluded a private piece of business.
Della put it on the dry cupboard shelf, behind her cup and well away from the parts bins. From there it could see nothing but tools and the opposite wall. It would announce no shifts, measure no quantity and receive no mention in the water account.
After Trey left, she drank the last of her tea. Before going back down to the gallery, she wound the bird again.
This time she waited for the bad note.