31. Voices

In the Boxmaker’s dome, Marly watches the manipulator arms assemble a new box. Jones decides to find Wig to prevent trouble if Virek’s people arrive, leaving Marly to observe the machine’s ceaseless sorting. When the finished box drifts free, Marly impulsively catches it, bruising herself. Inside, she sees cut maps over tarnished mirror, landmasses floating on silver.

The manipulators capture Marly’s jacket and purse, cutting them into the ongoing collage. Amused and moved, Marly offers her belongings to the process. As her voice echoes in the dome, she hears another voice respond. The presence claims it once was everywhere during a “bright time,” now broken into scattered selves, and that it sings through the debris of the Tessier-Ashpool family. It says other fragments send new things and scheme with men who mistake them for gods.

Marly asks if it is what Virek seeks. The voice rejects this, saying Virek imagines he can translate his personality into its fabric, but what he’d become would be less than even its most diminished fragment. When Marly suggests the songs are sad, the voice replies that sadness is in her; for it, there is only the dance of the arms and things Marly treasures are shells.

Left with her thoughts as the voice fades, Marly articulates her understanding: the true artist is the maker who installed the machine and fed it the Tessier-Ashpool remnants, leaving it to compose sealed boxes—an extraordinary, ongoing collage. She combs her hair with a drifting broken comb, accepting the Boxmaker’s logic.

Suddenly the sermon screen lights with Paco’s face. He reports that the old man refuses to admit them and that the vagabond has hidden him. Under Virek’s pressure to secure the property, Paco issues an ultimatum: if Marly cannot persuade Ludgate and the other to open the lock, they will force entry and depressurize the structure within an hour.