'Yes,' said Friedisch, meaning to say no. He never did: despite himself, he enjoyed Cawl's company.

'As the Machine-God wills it,' said Cawl, and off he went.

Cawl's workspace-quarters were as modest as his rank, located far down the levels of Septa, near where its vast trunk anchored the station to its host moon. Tech-adept accommodation was a warren of intersecting corridors laid out by machine-governed algorithms, but confusing to the unenhanced human mind. Narrow doors gave way into small rooms. In each one, and thus also in Cawl's, there was a single atmospheric vent, for those that needed air. A rotatable bed had a workbench on the underside, a tool locker nestled close to its head. Cawl's room was further cramped by Tez-Lar's revitalisation cradle. Cawl was tall, like a lot of Martians. The natives of the red planet had delicate bones lengthened over millennia of living under low gravity. But the beds of the processing station were made to fit a physiological average taken over hundreds of forge worlds, so it was too short for him. When he worked at his little bench on his folding stool he banged his left elbow on Tez-Lar's cradle. The Mechanicum prided itself on being the guardian of knowledge, but at the macro scale it was susceptible to the idiocy of brute generality. It was all so damnably inefficient. Cawl preferred to work around all that.

Friedisch was envious of Tez-Lar for all the wrong reasons. Cawl hadn't told him that he'd built the servitor himself from scavenged parts. Like the cradle he rested in. Like many of the idiosyncratic tools that cluttered his work desk. They were mainly of Cawl's own building. He had purchased none of them, been awarded but a few, and acquired most of the parts for the rest in dubious circumstances.

Fundamentally, the Mechanicum operated upon the principle of discovery - or finders keepers, to put it more crudely. Cawl put his acquisitiveness down to an individual expression of the principle that guided all forge world societies, and doggedly refused to acknowledge his acquisitions as theft.

Technically, Cawl shouldn't have filched the bionics for Tez-Lar from the recyc heaps of Gamma-Gamma-Gamma when he was stationed there. Technically, to lay claim to the corpse of the indigent who provided Tez-Lar's organic component, he should have filled in rather a lot of forms.

Finders keepers. They could call it stealing if they wanted to. He knew better.

He didn't have time for any social conventions like custom or law. They were so restrictive. The pursuit of knowledge was a pure calling that overrode any moral compass, not that the priesthood was in any way moral.

He sincerely believed what he had said to Friedisch. Too many of his colleagues were focused on their own advancement. Advancement in position was a corollary to advancement of human knowledge; to put it the other way round was counterproductive to the consolidated effort of the Mechanicum.