"It’s probably an old pre-exchange model," he continued slowly. "With only one set of pistons and no recombination box. They were never any good." He stopped there for a while. Go on, he thought. She might say yes, and the lad’d like it. "If you fancy, I could take a look. Worked with engines all my life. I could… I could even…" He hesitated at a verb that sounded somehow obscene, discussing a person. "I could even refit you."

He wandered away from the table, ostensibly for more stew, to avoid listening to Shekel’s embarrassing monologue: gratitude to Tanner and cajoling of the unconvinced Angevine combined. Over the chorus of go on Ange best mate Tanner you’re my best mate, Tanner saw that Angevine was unsettled. She was not used to offers like this, unless they meant incurring debts.

It ain’t for you, Tanner thought fervently, wishing he could tell her. It’s for the boy.

He moved further away while she and Shekel whispered to each other. He turned his back on them politely, stripped to his longjohns, and slipped into a tin bath full of brine. It soothed him. He soaked with the same sense of luxury that he once would have had for a hot bath, and he hoped that Angevine would understand his motivations.

She was nobody’s fool. After a short time she said with dignity something like thanks then, Tanner, that might be good. She said yes, and Tanner found to his mild surprise that he was glad.

Shekel was still excited by the clamor of silent sounds reading had given him, but with familiarity came control. He no longer found himself stopping midway along a corridor and gasping as the word bulkhead or heads shouted itself to him from some ship’s sign.

For the first week or so, graffiti had been an intoxication. He had stood in front of walls and ships’ sides and let his eyes crawl across the morass of messages scratched or scrawled or painted on the city’s flanks. Such a diversity of styles: the same letters could be written tens of different ways but always say the same thing. Shekel never stopped enjoying that fact.

Most of what was written was rude or political or scatological. Dry Fall Fuck Off, he read. Names in scores. Somebody loves somebody, repeated again and again. Accusations, sexual and otherwise. Barsum or Peter or Oliver is a Cunt or a Whore or a Queer or whatever else it might be. The writing gave each declaration a different voice.

In the library, his ransacking of the shelves had become less furious, less drunken in its haste and exhilaration, but he still picked books out and laid them down in great numbers, and read them slowly and wrote down words he did not understand.