Night Shift in the Mäusewerk

To understand what was wrong, you have to understand how the Mäusewerk works when nothing is wrong.

The station needs small hands. Nebula Station is sixty years old in its newest parts and much older in the parts nobody talks about, and it is laced through with pipes the width of your arm. People cannot get into those. Robots can, and did, for about eleven years, until it turned out that a robot in a pipe will report that a pipe is fine right up until the moment it is standing in water.

Mice notice things. That is the whole of it. A mouse in a pipe is not inspecting the pipe. A mouse in a pipe is a creature in a place it knows, and it will tell you that Vent Nine smells different this week, and it will be right, and it will not know why, and that is still worth more than eleven years of reports.

So there is an arrangement. It took nine years to write and it is four pages long and it is pinned up in the Mäusewerk in both languages — station print, and the bitten-dot script the mice use.

The arrangement says, in short:

Mice take work by the shift, not by the lifetime.

Mice are paid in grain credit, heat and repairs to their own tunnels.

Mice may refuse a job. Twice in a row, and someone has to come down and ask why.

No mouse works a job a person would not do.

Nothing is fitted to a mouse without the mouse agreeing to it.

That last line is rule five. Kappa had copied it out forty times in training, because the night archivist believed in copying things out, and because rule five was the one that had taken four of the nine years.

Kappa was looking at rule five on the wall, and at Tilk on the counter, and the two things were refusing to be in the same room.

The night shift in the Mäusewerk is two apprentices and a dog. The dog was asleep. The second apprentice came in at ten past two with a mug in each hand and his coat on inside out, which was not a statement, just Dobbel.

“I brought you tea,” said Dobbel, “and I have had an idea.”

“Put the tea down and look at Tilk’s feet.”

Dobbel put the tea down. Dobbel looked at Tilk’s feet. Kappa watched the whole thing happen on his face, which was the fastest and least reliable face on the station: the interest, then the confusion, then the wrong conclusion arriving at speed like a tram with no brakes.

“Somebody is making mouse armour,” Dobbel said. “For the war.”

“There isn’t a war.”

“There’s always a war somewhere, Kappa, that’s just —” “Dobbel. Look at which way the points go.”

Dobbel got down to the level of the counter, so that his eye was where a mouse’s eye would be. It was the one thing he did better than anybody: he would get down on the floor without being asked. He looked along the line of Tilk’s foot and the hooks and the deck plate.

“Oh,” he said. “That’s not for fighting anything in front of him.”

“No.”

“That’s for stopping him going somewhere.” Dobbel sat back on his heels. For about four seconds he was the cleverest person in the room. “That’s a brake.”

Kappa wrote it in the log, and under it wrote the question that the rest of the case hung from, although nobody knew that yet:

02:20. If it is a brake — which direction is it stopping them going, and who decided they should not go there?

“Anyway,” said Dobbel, “it’s the ghost mice. Obviously.”

And went to put his coat on the right way round, pleased with himself, having said the only true thing anyone would say for three days without having the first idea why it was true.