-I will go soon, Judah tells him. Red-eyes nods, another learned gesture.

There are no children left in the township to challenge with little golems. There are only adults whose grace is now martial, who count kills and set traps. The grinding of stone and gears is unending as the works approach.

One day Judah rises and gathers all he has-notes, specimens, heliotypes and drawings-and walks out of the village, through water maze to the new industrial zone. He is unstuck. The moment has passed him.

There is a foreman at the edge of a new clearing, shouting at his crews. Judah stares. They are crude and small and hubristic, but they are reshaping the land.

The foreman nods at Judah as he passes, and tells him, -This ain’t no fuckin’ godsdamned fuckin’ lake this piece of shit is a devil. He gobs into the black water. -Eats and eats every godspitting ton of shite we put in it. It don’t have no bottom.

Axemen and flagmen, chainmen, hunters, engineers cutting trenches; cactus-people, vodyanoi, men and Remade. They work with spades and saws, picks, barrows. The swamp is thinning.

Man after man, Remade, cactus, comes with cart full of gypsum and gravelled earth and tips it from the new quay. A steam shovel spastically drops its loads. Ballast is swallowed. Waterweed and the pelage of leaves and dust is gone, the muskeg’s camouflage is defeated, its water uncovered in a spreading ring. Barrow after barrow is sucked down with a throat noise.

-See? See? the foreman says. -This godsdamned thing’s deeper than a whore’s cunt.

This was quagmire once, where mud would wrestle you in as vigorous as the constrictors. Stone hauled from the foothills rises in blocks, lapped by the thick water. They are bulwarks that hold in gravel and earth. Dry land is cut out. A road of matter has been excised, a swath of tamaracks, mangroves, runt grasses and the de-bris of spatterdock. It is a ribbon of flattened earth a score of yards wide and endlessly long, sweeping backward through wet thickets, purged of trees, tended by haulers and hewers as far as Judah can see.

There is a stretched-out tent-town. Carts are carried by mules Remade to swamp things, amphibian. Judah walks the raised road. Stumps stubble the ground, and beyond them the fingers of the swamp move. Pumps howl and drain the waterways, make them mudflats, and then these mudflats become beds for new stones. There are gangs of cactus-people, their muscles moving hugely beneath spined skins.

And there are many Remade. They do not look at the whole men, free workers, the aristocracy of this labour.