Work Text:
My visit to the Repair Shop was in Septima of the eighteenth duration of the Beyond. The journey took nearly two standard weeks, but that was less because the Shop is remote – it isn’t, most of the time, regardless of where you start – and more because I was, as numerous ex-partners have informed me. But I’ll come to that in due course. I can be flippant about it now, but it was profoundly awkward, not to say painful, at the time, and not just because it put me in a professional quandary. I don’t bring myself into my work as a rule. True dispassion is a fallacy that is knocked out of one at the journeyman stage in my profession, but I make myself invisible in my histories as much as possible. Which isn’t to say I’m not aware of my personal biases and preconceptions, but I balance for them and record them in the sealed addenda where I feel it’s appropriate to do so. Suffice to say, in this case I felt I really could not report the bizarre series of travel mishaps – the shuttleport cat that ate my passport (actually ate, stared at me as she did it); the shuttle arriving at the same place we had left with no explanation, pilot as mystified as the passengers – without also recording the reason I was finally able to leave the tiny shuttleport at the base of the highest mountain on Karam 3 and, after a peaceful and uneventful journey of three hours with lovely views, land on Karam 3’s moon. Which isn’t where the Repair Shop is, for many people, but it’s where it was for me.
You know of course that the Repair Shop is a juncture. It’s the least studied of the junctures, for obvious reasons, and I wasn’t able to get much out of its denizens that shed any more light on its cryptogeography. Everyone was very forthcoming, you understand. They were just ordinary people of various stripes who were happy to have found a place they belonged, and preferred not to remember how they had got there, or why. It was rather frustrating. Sonnaz – a charming young person who appeared to be an unaugmented human – told me that she got on a ‘bus’ (which I take to be a public transit vehicle), not really caring where she ended up, and then it stopped raining and she thought she’d better get out and see where she was, and there she was. A visitor from a world she called Viridian told me he’d jumped into a local sacred pool with his item for repair under her arm, and resurfaced in the stream out back of the Shop. I believe it was an elderly family member’s drinking vessel, which may or may not have been relevant to his route of ingress, I wasn’t completely clear on that.
You asked for some sample excerpts from my observations, and I’ve realized I’ve waffled enough and I only have an hour before docking procedures start. This is going to give you an alarming insight into the state of my first drafts – yes, this is why I always build at least 40 hours of editing into my contracts. So, in no particular order:
I had been sitting for several hours that morning before the day’s first visitor entered. I had asked Mr Blades if business was always so slow. He grinned at me, crows feet creasing around his eyes, and handed me a cup of tea. He always seemed to have one to hand, but there was no magic to it. He liked to make tea, he said, his sure hands moving over the kettle, the leaves, the spoon, the strainer, the little jug of milk. All his tools in their place, steam rising gently from the pot. He rubbed the back of his head, under his flat cap, where I had seen the edges of some kind of socket a few times, although I never saw him recharging. “Sometimes we’re jam packed.”
As if in answer, there was a brisk tap on the door, and he strode forward to answer it. The woman was tall, striking, black hair tightly braided above a high brown forehead, one snapping black eye, a burgundy leather eyepatch, and a narrow mouth that looked as though it never smiled. She wore a lady’s suit of a style in vogue around two hundred of our years ago, fitted close to her figure and beautifully made, but well-worn and obviously hard wearing. She nodded at Mr Blades, but her gaze slid across me without appearing to see me. She held in her hand a wooden box, which she placed on the table with a hesitant look, as if unwilling to let go of it. It was beautiful, old, and had a huge crack across the side where the wood had warped.
“Jennpher Lewis,” she said.
“Well, well, what do we have here?” Blades murmured, as she opened the lid. “Oh my goodness. Steve, you’d better come and have a look at this.”
Steve appeared, one pair of glasses perched on his forehead and the other on his nose. He handed his tea to me, absently, as she lifted the clock out of its case. It was of a size to rest in the palm of one’s hand, weighty and pleasing to look at, but very tarnished and obviously not working.
“What a lovely thing.” I had seen Steve work on several chronometers at that point, and had never heard that soft note of reverence. “How did you come by it?”
“It belonged -” her voice caught, and she raised a gloved hand to her face for a moment, shielding her expression from my view. “It belonged to my teacher. She made it herself.” That drew a low whistle from Blades. “She travelled with it for years and years, before we lost her.”
Blades pointed to the great crack in the side of the box. It did not look to me as though it had been caused by anything but time, but the woman nodded, rigid-faced. “I had the box when it happened. That’s how I knew.”
“Have you tried to get it repaired?”
She shrugged. “Too dangerous. I haven’t dared try it myself. There’s a reason we stopped using the Folger mechanism.”
“You wouldn’t mind if he replaced it, then?” Blades said, assessing the clock with a professional eye. She hesitated, then shook her head. “What does it mean to you, to have it repaired?” Blades spoke softly.
“I would like.” She closed her eyes for a long moment, and when she spoke, her voice was thick with tears. “I would like to hear it chime again. Its motions. She was so – so dashing, the greatest chrononaut of her generation. She kept it in the inside pocket of her jacket so it was always against her heart. When I was very small, she would take it out and let me hold it. It was always warm, and I imagined that it was alive. She told me it had been the earth’s molten core once, and that in a way, it was still in its volcano, because it knew that all times were the same.” She laughed suddenly, her face transformed with memory. “I haven’t thought of that in years.” She reached out and traced the crack in the box with the tip of her finger. “I would like to see it as it once was, so I can remember her as she was.”
She pressed her lips together, looking faintly surprised. It was always like that. The room itself seemed to exhale as Mr Blades stepped back from the table, a look of deep satisfaction on his face. He clapped Steve on the shoulder. “I’ll leave it in your capable hands, then, eh, Steve? I’ll come by later and see how you’re getting on.”
“I’ll take good care of it for you,” Steve said, and took her outstretched hand to shake. “Thank you for bringing it, it’s a real honour.”
I trailed him to his bench, and watched him as he began the now-familiar movements of laying out his tools, but he did not immediately begin taking the clock apart, as I expected. Instead, he turned the box over in his hands for what felt like an age, frowning. I jumped when Will Kirk’s curious, handsome face bent over my shoulder.
“Oh, good,” Steve said. “I was just coming to get you. Have a look at this.”
“Wow.” Will picked up the box and turned it over in his hands, the mirror of Steve a moment before. “I’ve not seen one of these in years. What happened to the clock?”
“I’ll have to have a look inside. It’s a Folger mechanism; they were very temperamental.”
Will hissed through his teeth. “Should you be touching that?”
“I’m going to ask you for a favour. Actually,” he turned to me, and I nearly dropped my cup of tea. His cup of tea, I realized belatedly, although I had been drinking it. “Could you give us a hand too?”
I stammered something about having no experience with fine work, and he smiled and patted his own shoulder. “I just need grounding. A couple of hands should do it. You and Will, come on, one on each side.”
We each put our hand on his shoulder, mine just above where the metal of his articulated arm disappeared under his sleeve, and he began to open the clock with deft, precise movements. As he removed each plate, cog, and gear to reveal a multitude more, each tinier and more delicate, he laid them on the grimy white cloth on the bench before him, organized according to a system of his own that I knew would allow him to restore them in exactly the correct order. The inner workings were dark with grime. He tutted. “Looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in half a century.”
“Surely not,” I blurted out before I could stop myself. Will looked quizzically at me, but Steve only popped his second pair of glasses down over the first. Ms Lewis couldn’t have been over fifty herself, and it didn’t sound as though her mentor was the kind who would have neglected the tools of her trade.
“All kinds of things happen to these things if they’re not deactivated in controlled conditions,” Steve said absently, selecting a hair-thin screwdriver and plugging into his articulated hand attachment. “Different parts aging in different directions. You saw the box. I’ll be sending that off with you, Will. Do you think you can manage it?”
Without removing his hand from Steve’s shoulder, Will reached for the box.
“Don’t touch it yet!” Steve snapped. Will snatched his hand back, and Steve chuckled, looking wan. “Christ almighty, it might still have a charge. Just give me a moment. I’m nearly at the Folger.” He nodded at me. “Pass me that sieve there, would you?” He unscrewed the drill attachment from his wrist, added a rubber insulating cap before restoring his metal hand, and using tweezers, plucked out the golden heart of the clock. “Right, we’re going for a little walk,” he said. “Hands on my shoulders for a few more minutes, please, ladies and gents, if I may.”
I was so much shorter than him that I had to practically jog behind him, reaching up to keep my hand on his shoulderblade. We passed Kirsten’s bench as we went, and she looked up curiously from a ceramic tiger with a missing ear. Mr Blades materialized as we walked out of the building. “Is this a parade?”
“We’re just disposing of the Folger,” Steve said.
“Right you are,” said Blades, and he wordlessly slid his hand under mine, taking my place and allowing me to drop my uncomfortable pose. Our strange procession reached the stream behind the large barn that housed the Shop. I hadn’t been back here since the quick tour Mr Blades had given me when I arrived. The tiny golden mechanism, inert and unremarkable except for the care with which Steve handled it, was lowered into the running water, the sieve slotted into a small cage apparently built for the purpose. We all contemplated it. It was an oddly solemn moment. Then Blades clapped Steve and Will on the shoulder. “It’ll need a few hours for the spell to wash out, eh? Come on, lads, no more dawdling. I’ll put the kettle on.”
I gravitated towards Kirsten’s bench on the way back in, my attention caught by the tiger. I had been at Lucia’s bench when it came in, watching her painstakingly use a cotton bud to remove two decades’ worth of cauldron fumes and cooking grease from a painting of a woman with a toad on her shoulder. Early on, I was just curious about the process, and I looked up long enough to see the burly, huge person, a dagger at their waist and small child at their knee, who brought in the tiger with the broken ear. But I became engrossed in the hypnotic pattern as Lucia licked and dabbed, licked and dabbed, slowly revealing the creature’s lurid, almost violent colouring, until I was breathing in the damp smell of pondweed and soil. I only resurfaced after Mr Blades came to rescue me. Lucia smiled gently as he took me by the shoulders and led me away, and I could have sworn I saw nictating lids flicker across her pupils.
“Got to be careful about paintings like that,” was all he said. After a cup of tea, the spots of colour stopped dancing before my eyes, and I was able to go back to work, but I stayed far away from Lucia’s bench.
“Isn’t he beautiful?” said Kirsten. He was beautiful. The tiger was large, as long as my arm from shoulder to wrist, and would have stood just above my knee. Its colours were faded, the paint scuffed and chipped, but it was still impressive in its orange and black. Its face was heavily stylized, whiskers and sharp teeth sketched in curlicues and flourishes. As a young child, I would have wanted to befriend it. “Look, you’re just in time.” She pointed to the fractured edge of the ceramic, where the orange and brown paint broke off into white. “Someone tried to glue that, a long time ago. I’ve been using this solvent to take off the glue without damaging the paint, do you see? Here’s the last bit.” She indicated a yellowed section which was less sharp, more blockish. She swiped her cloth over it, removing the ancient glue, and suddenly it looked as though it had been broken only moments before. “Now then, my boy, it’s time for you to get your ear back.”
“Do you have the broken piece?”
“Unfortunately not.” She looked professionally chagrined, but also had a light in her eye. She liked a challenge. “I’m going to have to make him a new one. I can’t sculpt it directly on, as it might crack; I’m going to make a replica ear, fire it, break it to give it an edge to match this one, glue it on, and then paint over the cracks. Then I’ll have to weave it into the existing animacy charm, so the tiger knows it’s his ear. It’s old work, twenty-seventh century Second Mughal, but it’s taken several patches already, so hopefully he won’t take much convincing.”
I watched for some time as she worked on moulding the tiger’s ear, coaxing the form out of a lump of clay with wet fingers. I glanced occasionally at the tiger’s blank, empty eyes, until I was distracted by the sound of applause. I wandered back towards the display table, where an elderly man with pierced ears was wiping tears from his eyes, smiling, turning this way and that to display a jewelled belt. I had seen it earlier, a sad, twisted thing with several missing gems. Now it shone on his hips, and for a second, we saw him as he had been, young and graceful, stepping onto a dance floor at his wedding.
“Do you ever get tired?” I asked Will later, as he sandpapered the damaged side of the box, now neatly sawed off its undamaged siblings and nothing more than scrap. He was wearing thick gloves and grinding at the wood with searing strokes, as if he’d wear it down to nothing.
“Not really,” he said, pausing to flex his wrist and shake out his hand. “It’s nice, this, isn’t it.” His gesture seemed to encompass the whole, warm workshop, the craftspeople at their stations, the beams of the roof and the cups of tea, the smells of wood shavings, glue, and leather. “First time I walked in here, I knew I never wanted to leave.” He resumed turning the small, warped plank into a pile of sawdust. “Things like this box, they’re not just objects, they have all this love and memory seeped into them. When I’m repairing them, it’s like I’m… releasing some of that, giving people something back that they want to remember. Pieces I work on go back to their homes to last for another fifty or a hundred or even a thousand years, and I’m part of their stories forever.”
“Do you need to destroy that side?” I asked eventually. Barely anything was left of the damaged side; warped around a crack, it had looked as though it had been dunked in water and split along a seam then aged for a century in bad conditions. It had looked totally incongruous with the rest of the box, but with that side removed and its lining taken out, it was a sad, naked thing.
He smiled. “I need the sawdust. This is treated locustwood – it’s used for clocks and chronometers because it’s so resistant to time, it hardly degrades at all. Normally I’d try to match the age of the wood, but actually, in theory, I could use much newer wood for this, as long as I match the polish. Like this.” In the back, he had shelves on which he kept stores of commonly used wood from a hundred different worlds; he had on his work table an irregularly-shaped, flat piece of wood, which he now held up against one of the undamaged sides. They looked almost identical, aside from the slight sheen of polish on the box. It was a pale wood with an odd, oil-slick effect to it when you tilted it to the light.
“The problem is, the box has absorbed a lot of temporal energy, and this new plank hasn’t. Just plonking new wood in there is going to warp the existing sides. So I’m making a sort of insulating layer of the old wood which will touch both of the original sides.”
“Won’t it look messy?” I was troubled at the thought.
“Sonnaz is knocking up a new lining for the inside, it’ll be hidden under that.” He jumped suddenly, then laughed, and leaned down. “Oh, hello there. Kirsten, I think you’re missing something.”
The ceramic tiger rubbed its forehead against his work trousers, and permitted him to scratch behind its new ear. It regarded me with contempt before it stalked away under the bench towards Suzie Fletcher, who put down the leather strips she was braiding and crooned at it. “Aren’t you gorgeous.”
Mr Blades appeared at my elbow with a plate of biscuits and a smile that was too gentle for me, it put my teeth on edge.
“Want to see how your little lady is coming along?”
I didn’t, really. But I followed him.
The Repair Shop isn’t hard to find. But you can’t reach it unless you have an old and broken thing that needs the attention of masters of rare and forgotten crafts, as I found out after two weeks of trying to get there, despite being given perfectly clear directions. It doesn’t have to be valuable. But it does have to be something you value, something with a story.
I asked Mr Blades once why they didn’t take payment for their labour, at the Shop, and he smiled at me. “Course we do,” he said. “What do you get paid in?”
“Money, of course,” I snapped, and he laughed.
“That’s not why you do what you do though, is it? Are you telling me you don’t care about the stories?”
I snorted. “Rich people hire me to make their banks and space freighter companies venerable by writing a history that looks impressive and doesn’t turn up anything embarrassing.” (I do, of course, include the embarrassing details – that’s what sealed appendices are for, and often enough the newer CEOs are very glad to know what their predecessors swept under the carpet.)
“And that’s why you came here, was it?” He was twinkling.
“Well, no,” I had to admit. “I’m writing a study of places that occupy junctures.”
“Big money maker, you think?”
“The three specialists who read it will be very interested,” I said stiffly.
“So you like old stuff, yeah?”
“I mostly deal in digital records and interviews.” I had no patience for my colleagues in graduate school who gravitated towards the nostalgia for pre-Beyond artifacts, the carvings, paper, ruined domes, and I knew they found my mercenary attitude distasteful. I had no interest in teaching snotty children my craft. I liked being left alone with a mass of documents, creating lovely file trees and timelines, and tidying them up into a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The interviews were an unpleasant necessity for filling in gaps when people had made irresponsible decisions about record-keeping. If I’m honest, I was a little embarrassed about my pet project. I liked to pretend that it was all craft, for me. But I have always been fascinated by places where worlds rub up against each other, where you can catch a glimpse into other histories, other pasts.
When I first stepped through the big double doors of the Repair Shop, it was with a cold knot of reluctance in my stomach. I dropped my duffel bag on the table in front of Mr Blades with a complete lack of grace, but he opened it as carefully as if he expected it to have a glass vase in it. “And who’s this?”
“It’s a doll,” I snapped. “Its name is Doll. You don’t have to pretend it’s alive.”
He took Doll carefully out of the bag and laid her on the counter. Her poor caved in face and flattened-out leg made her look like she had run over by a shuttle loading wagon. Possibly she had. “So what’s Doll’s story?”
“As you can see, I didn’t take sufficient care of it and it’s been badly damaged,” I said sullenly, then I tried to pull myself together. I may have resented the situation I was in, but it was hardly this person’s fault, and he was being perfectly courteous to me. “I don’t deceive myself that it’s possible to restore it, but I would be grateful if you could make the damage a little less obvious.”
“Can I touch her?”
“Of course,” I bit out, although I wanted to snatch her back from him, but he only pressed his fingertip to the undamaged part of her face that showed the smile she used to have, the most delicate, analytical touch, and I couldn’t be angry.
“Where did she come from?” I closed my eyes. This was the part I had been dreading. I felt exposed, my face was hot, my eyes prickled, and I nearly scooped Doll up and ran, research opportunities be damned, but then Mr Blades said, “You don’t have to tell me. She needs some TLC, that’s all I need to know. I’ll get Amanda and Julie on the case. You all right with that?” He didn’t touch Doll until I nodded, and I was pathetically grateful when he turned away to let me collect myself.
Now we were walking over towards the toy bench together, which I had studiously avoided in my time in the Shop. I had been braced for this, dreading that I would see Doll made into something strange and no longer mine – or worse, that she would somehow be miraculously restored and that I would embarrass myself and never be able to look at her again. Neither of those things happened. Julia was bent over Doll, Amanda hovering beside her holding the loose wires trailing from her hand laser so they would not get caught. A sharp, clean smell of burning filled the air. “Jules? Got a sec to show us how you’re getting on?”
She sat back with a fierce, satisfied look on her face. “Absolutely.”
I realized that I was gripping Mr Blades’ arm far too hard, but when I tried to make myself let go, he simply took my hand in his. Then Julia stepped back, and I saw Doll.
“We didn’t think you’d like her to look new,” she said. “She’s lived an eventful life.”
She didn’t look new. She didn’t look broken. She looked like she had been mended, like someone cared enough for her to re-weld her broken joints and re-inflate her poor crumpled face. She looked like Doll, a little older and more battered. My breath caught in my chest, my tongue froze. “Oh-”
“We’d like to make her a new outfit, but only if you want it,” Amanda said, looking hesitant. “Her old dress isn’t recoverable, I’m afraid, but we could make one exactly like it.”
I swallowed a few times until I was able to speak. “Something – something new would be lovely.”
“What’s her style?” Amanda said briskly.
I blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“Lady of leisure? Socialite? Working woman? Spacefarer?”
I hesitated, but not for long. “Travel companion. Practical. But she’s…” I swallowed, and forced myself to continue. If there had been even a trace of condescension on any of their faces, I couldn’t have. “She’s always liked to look pretty.”
“What do you think, Mandy?” Julia said, considering my poor old Doll as sharply as if she were styling a politician for a public address. “How about that, you know, the blue –”
“And a belt, yes,” Amanda said, finishing her thought. I wondered, suddenly, if they had some kind of symbiotic consciousness. It seemed rude to ask.
“And what about that eye? We could replace it. Or – an eyepatch?”
I would have balked at such a suggestion before seeing Ms Lewis, but – “That sounds perfect.”
“Thank you, ladies, we’ll leave you to it,” said Mr Blades. I found myself steered to a chair and installed with a plate of biscuits by my right hand and a cup of tea in my left. I had inhaled two before I realized I needed them.
“I should tell you about her,” I sighed, after I didn’t feel I could put it off anymore.
He patted my arm. “Not to worry, love,” he said. “It’s on the house.”
“That doesn’t seem very fair. You’ve allowed me to observe you, given me access to your workshop and time. I knew what the price was, and I’m prepared to pay it.”
“Your face, when you saw her all fixed up and mended,” he said. “Now, then, none of that.”
I wiped my eyes, sniffed, and pulled myself together. “No. Quite.”
“Sonnaz is finishing off the lining for that box, if you want to go and have a look before they put it back together," he said, and I hopped gratefully off my chair. “Take her cuppa with you?”
The deep blue velvet Sonnaz was pulling taut over a little square of foam looked rumpled and confused. She took her tea with a grateful smile. “Velvet is so finicky, but it’s so glorious.”
She stretched and shook out her fingers, then resumed her work, pulling and tugging and stitching with swift dexterity. Like a magic trick, suddenly the piece of fabric and the foam became an elegant cushion, six square inches of plush magnificence.
“Seems a shame it’s just for a clock,” I remarked.
She laughed. “It does look like it should be for a little mouse emperor, doesn’t it?” I had no idea what a mouse was, but I got the general idea. “Honestly though, it never feels like a waste of time to make settings for really beautiful pieces,” she said.
A squeal of delight drew both of our attention. By the doors, a little child sat on a ceramic tiger, their slim, small hands gripping the braided leather harness I had seen Suzie plaiting. The tiger preened with the attention, head turning this way and that, feeling out the strength of his new rider. The child’s guardian stood like a wall of muscle and bulk, curved bow strapped to their back, their weathered face beaming.
“How you doing, Sonnaz?” Blades said, suddenly appearing at her shoulder. “Ms Lewis is back, you nearly ready?”
She hissed. “Nearly. Okay, leave me alone you two, let me finish this up.”
I wandered, strangely at a loss. There was a lull in the Shop; Will, Steve, and Sonnaz all had their heads down finishing up the repaired timepiece and box for presentation; Mr Blades had disappeared again; Suzie and Kirsten had gone for a celebratory drink in the back; I did not want to go back to Julie and Amanda’s bench. I found myself sitting next to Ms Lewis, who was waiting, staring into the middle distance.
“It’s been broken for so many years,” she said suddenly. “I grieved her for so long. I am ready to see it whole again. Do you understand what I mean?” She looked straight at me, and I was so startled that I jumped.
"I didn't think you could see me," I managed after a moment. Her lips quirked, and I felt my cheeks heat with embarrassment.
"I didn't think you wanted to be seen."
Somewhat to my relief, at that point Steve, Will, and Sonnaz approached with the box concealed under a silk cloth, with Mr Blades following close behind. When they were all set up, Mr Blades said, “Ready?”
Ms Lewis set her jaw, and nodded. But when she saw the box, her whole face softened, transformed. She smiled, and she looked twenty years younger, a burden of pain and grief lifted. “You’ve done something amazing,” she said. She reached out and touched it, opened it, and gasped again. The timeclock was ticking, a steady, reassuring sound, and its brass fittings shone like a star in the night sky against Sonnaz’s velvet setting.
“I’ve replaced the Folger with an ordinary working,” Steve said. “You should still be careful about putting it close to anything sensitive to temporal distortion, but it’s just a clock, now. It’ll keep time in the regular way.”
Her fingers brushed it, silently, her eyes full of tears. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
After Ms Lewis had left, Mr Blades tapped me on the shoulder. Amanda and Julie were just behind him, holding my old duffel bag. “Do you want to check her first, or just be off?”
I was unaccountably moved by their kindness, which I felt I had done nothing to deserve. It made me say, “I’d like to see her, please.”
Doll was dressed in a smart travelling outfit not unlike Jennpher Lewis’s, but more frivolous, less practical. She had a dashing eyepatch sewn in pink leather with tiny, tiny stitches. It suited her. “Oh,” I said, inadequately. Amanda beamed, and Julie put an arm around her shoulder.
“She’s ready for the first class lounges.”
“She’ll have to go without me, sadly,” I said. “My budget doesn't stretch to first class. But I’ll have to get a nicer bag for her. I’ll,” I swallowed. “I’ll take better care of her.”
“She deserves it,” Julie said seriously. “She has nothing to be embarrassed about.” I gave her a sharp look, and she met my eyes with utmost sincerity. She was, I realized, genuinely talking about Doll, and my irritation at her presumption melted away, along with something else that I hadn’t realized was there.
“No,” I said. “She has every right to expect good treatment, and she’ll get it. Thank you for your work.” Amanda nodded her approval.
Mr Blades walked me back to the doors, and pointed the way down the path, at the end of which, he assured me, I would find the stop for the transit link to the shuttle dock.
“Come back anytime,” he grinned. “You and herself.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Perhaps we will.”
I walked down the path, feeling lighter, somehow, than I had for a long time. At the end of the path that leads from the Repair Shop there is indeed a transit link to the nearest shuttle dock. It isn’t there for everyone. But it was for me.