Iona Draskovic

The Sitting

She was fifty-six, twenty-two years an engineer of record, and the sheet on the table named a load case from 2170: four pages, six combinations, a shoreline span, the ordinary work of an ordinary Tuesday fourteen years earlier.

She got through the first question. She got through most of the second. The third asked her to derive the governing combination without the tables, and she said she could not.

That is the whole of what happened. She has never described it any other way, and she gets short with people who describe it for her.

Guessing would have worked. She knows this and says so. A confident, wrong derivation delivered in the right register has carried holders through third questions before, because a mediator with forty minutes and no instrument in the room is listening for a person who is thinking, and a person who is thinking wrongly still sounds like a person who is thinking. She had twenty-two years of not stating a number she had not checked. She did not have another way of being in a room.

So the thing that made her worth having on a drawing is the thing that took the drawing off her.

The Strike

Her licence lapsed at the sitting. Then the strike ran downstream, because every later certification she had filed named the 2170 entry as its qualifying basis, which is what a qualifying basis is for.

Twenty-two years, in an afternoon.

The span is two sectors away on the Ironclad shoreline. An inspection crew load-tests it every spring with a frame and a set of gauges, files the results under the reference number of a certification that no longer exists, and has never recorded a failure. Ironclad did not appear at the sitting and has never commented. Its human-authorisation doctrine is why her name was on the drawing in ink in the first place, which is what made the entry drawable.

Nobody is safer. That is not an argument she makes. It is a thing she will confirm if asked directly, once, and then change the subject.

What is left on her standing summary is a citation from 2176 for a late filing. Four credits. She paid it the same week and it had no consequence then and has had none since, and under the clause it cannot be recalled, reviewed, or removed. She told a builder in the Cathodics that it was the only thing left on the page that was still true. He has repeated it to three other people and has not understood it the same way twice.

Eleven Days

She went home and learned it.

Over eleven days she reconstructed the six load combinations by hand, from first principles, on butcher paper, and got them right on the ninth attempt. She carries the sheet folded in her coat pocket. It has no legal effect of any kind. There is no procedure by which it can be submitted, no office that would accept it, and no version of her record it could be attached to.

She has never explained why she keeps it and has never been seen showing it to anybody.

The layer that used to carry that derivation sat inside her thought for the whole of her licensed career, lawfully, the way it sat inside everybody's, and she will not call it a crutch. She corrects people who do. Her position is exact and she has not moved off it: the division of labour was correct, it is still correct, and she was audited for the half she was not doing. The published number — ninety-nine point two per cent with the layer, eleven without — does not offend her. What offends her is the inference that the twenty-two years were therefore theatre, and she has fourteen years of annual load tests to put against it.

The Bench

She checks work now from a back bench in the Cathodics, the Dregs' only middle class, where the technicians out-diagnose Helix at a fifteenth of the price and nobody asks what anyone used to be.

Builders bring her drawings. She reads foundations, spans, load paths, and the improvised column work that holds up half the bay floor, and she tells them what she finds, and they pay her in parts and favours and hot food. Two of the shop's technicians route foundation questions straight to her bench without going through the front counter, which is how most of the work arrives.

None of it can be filed. There is no signature she can put on anything that any office in the licensed districts would read, which means her opinion is now worth exactly what the person hearing it thinks it is worth. Below the Rim that turns out to be quite a lot.

The recitation houses have offered her a reader's stool three times, at roughly four times what the bench pays, because nobody explains a load case like somebody who lost twenty-two years to one. She declined three times and has never given the houses a reason. She gave one to a builder, once: I will not be paid to be the warning.

Field Observations

She wears the same dark blue work coat she wore licensed. The licence tab was unpicked rather than cut, so there is a clean rectangle of unfaded cloth on the chest where it used to sit, and she has never had it patched or re-dyed. Asked about it she says the coat is fine.

She keeps a steel rule worn bright at one end and reading glasses pushed up into grey hair she has stopped cutting short. Chalk dust on the left cuff only.

The thing that reliably annoys her is sympathy phrased as injustice. Tell her the sitting was unfair and she will take it apart: the instrument does what it says, the questions were fair, ninety-one holders in a hundred pass, and she was not one of them. She has an exactness about her own case that people find hard to sit with, and it is the same exactness that would not guess.

She has never said what the second question was.

Open Questions

Old Jin could account for every route on the Grid and holds no certificate, so he will never be summoned. She held the certificate and could not account for the entry. Neither of them has ever been in the room the instrument was built for, and they have never met — a Lamplighter apprentice brought her a Grid drawing once, assuming she would know what to do with it, and she sent it back with a note saying she was not qualified to read it. That was true in the only sense that has ever mattered to her, and it was not true in any other.