PROFESSOR CLANK'S REGISTER OF CORRIGIBLE ERRORS

Being a Full Accounting of Everything in This Castle That Would Function Correctly If Only It Were Made of Brass.

Compiled, wound, and re-wound by Professor Clank, of the Clock Tower and the Forge (House Clank). The ticking in the margins is structural, not decorative. If you cannot hear it, that is a fault in you, and I can fix it.

A Foreword, Delivered at Speed

The sage Woooozniak sees creatures; the banker Pennyworth sees prices; Magister Fizzle — my rival, my burden, my near neighbour in the tower — sees magic, which is his word for a mess he has not yet apologised for. I see none of these things. I see defects. Every ghost is a scheduling error. Every curdled love in the larder is a thermal-regulation failure. Every haunting, famine, feud, and falling footman in this castle is, correctly understood, a problem of gears — insufficient, ill-fitted, or absent — and every one of them could be corrected by a man of method with enough brass and a free afternoon.

I have had six hundred free afternoons. The following is what I have learned, which is chiefly this: the castle does not want correcting, and has a great many ways of saying so. I record my improvements here not because they worked, but because a failure that is properly written up is merely research, whereas a failure that is not is only a Tuesday.

Each entry: The Defect · The Improvement · The New Defect.

1 · The Reaper's Moped

The Defect. The realm is served by a single Reaper, whose moped is forever sputtering on some distant hill, and so the dead are never collected on time and the crypts overflow with tenants who ought, by any decent schedule, to have moved on. The Improvement. I built a Clockwork Collector: brass, tireless, punctual to the second, and constitutionally incapable of breaking down on a gradient. The New Defect. It works. It collects precisely on schedule, without pity, delay, or the possibility of appeal — and the ghosts, who had only been attending Thursday dinner out of habit and had rather come to enjoy the wait, were appalled to meet a Death that arrives on time. Three have lodged formal complaints. One has emigrated. The moped has never been more beloved. The dry moral: A service everyone complains about is mourned the very instant it becomes reliable.

2 · The Aggressive Bacon

The Defect. The larder's alchemically-cured breakfast meat has, through no fault of any process I would sign my name to, become opinionated, ambulatory, and territorial. The Improvement. A mechanical rasher — brass, biddable, and wholly without ambition — to take its place and end the negotiation. The New Defect. Within a fortnight my mechanical rasher had organised the living bacon into a bargaining body, appointed itself shop steward, and now presents me each Tuesday with a schedule of demands formatted, I note with professional envy, rather better than my own. The dry moral: Optimise a thing far enough and it develops opinions — first about its work, and shortly afterward about you.

3 · The Armour That Remembers

The Defect. A suit of animated armour stands in the west corridor carrying a memory it did not ask for and will not discuss, and flinches — audibly, a small unlovely clatter — whenever a hand reaches past it. The Improvement. I fitted a dampening escapement to still the flinch: a modest governor to regulate feeling down to a manageable, silent tick. The New Defect. It no longer flinches. It no longer does anything at all. It stands in perfect brass composure with a stillness that empties the corridor by noon, and I understood at last that I had not mended the memory but merely taught it to hold very, very still. I have removed the escapement. The flinch has returned. I have reclassified the flinch as not a fault. The dry moral: You cannot mainspring your way out of a memory. The most you can do is give it somewhere kinder to keep its time.

4 · The Clock of Honest Time

The Defect. In this castle a Tuesday may last a fortnight, and a fortnight may prove, on inspection, to have been Tuesday all along; no two clocks agree, and most have stopped out of sheer discouragement. The Improvement. I built one clock that keeps true, incorruptible, mathematical time, and hung it in the Great Hall as a standing rebuke to the others. The New Defect. It is always right, and therefore always alone. The castle simply flows around it. The staff learned to distrust the one honest face on the wall, for a clock insisting it is half past three in a room that has firmly decided it is Michaelmas is not helpful — it is merely correct, which in this house is a different and lonelier thing. The dry moral: A right answer in a wrong world is not a light in the dark. It is one more thing nobody consults.

5 · The Efficient Corridor

The Defect. The corridors will not hold their measurements. The geometry drifts; a stair is nine steps on Monday and eleven on Thursday; the whole magnificent pile is, reduced to its essence, badly kept time made of stone. The Improvement. My life's work. A great self-winding governor, sunk into the western foundation, that would bring the castle to heel at last — every corridor true, every stair the same length twice, every drifting Tuesday marched back into line, the entire dreaming edifice made, finally, to run on time. The New Defect. I have not finished it. I tell the apprentices it wants a part I cannot source; this is a lie, and I am too precise a man to enjoy telling it. The truth is that on the one night I set the governor ticking, the castle went quiet in a manner I did not care for — a held-breath quiet, the quiet of a very large thing that has been sleeping and is beginning, slowly, to consider waking — and the scullery door, which drops three inches every Thursday morning like a sigh, that week did not drop. I switched the governor off. The following Thursday, the door sighed. I have not switched it on since, and I do not intend to. The dry moral: The one machine that would fix everything is the one machine that must never be allowed to work. Some things a careful man builds only to be certain, ever after, that he can leave them switched off.

6 · The Needleless Compass

The Defect. Brought to me — or rather, brought to the yard outside my forge, the owner declining, with a courtesy that permitted no discussion, to stand beneath my lintel — a brass pocket-compass of sound manufacture, its needle snapped off clean at the root. The owner is an ex-Delve-man known about the roads as No-Bell Jack, who sleeps at the old toll house, goes under no roof and over no cellar, and offers no reasons, and I did not ask for any, because I am a man of instruments and the instrument was the patient. The Improvement. My finest small work of the decade: a new needle, jewelled at the bearing, damped against tremor, indifferent to pocket-iron, weather, and opinion. It found north through the forge wall. I balanced it in the rain, in the yard, and it was beautiful, and he thanked me very quietly and went away with it. The New Defect. The compass was on my step the next morning. The needle had been removed — neatly, mind; respectfully; by someone who understood the work — and laid beside it, wrapped in a dock leaf. No note. He was at the gate, waiting to see that I had it back safe, and he touched his hat to me, and said nothing, which I have come to understand is the whole of what he says. I have watched him since, on the Bogmoor road, in the rain, holding the empty case open on his palm — level, patient, exact — and catching the water in it, and drinking. It has taken me longer than I like to record the finding, which is this: a compass with no needle cannot point at anything. I had assumed that was the fault. It is the feature. The instrument is functioning precisely as its owner requires. Error reclassified as intentional. The dry moral: Before you mend an instrument, establish what it is for. Some instruments are for pointing. Some are for holding steady, out of doors, under open sky — and a careful man learns to tell the two apart before he reaches for his tools.

(Appended to this entry in a later hand, upon the fair copy lodged at Murkminster, in the autumn of 1958:)

Entry irregular. An instrument recorded as functioning while lacking its needle cannot be so recorded. The finding is reclassified: defective, pending repair. The owner to be issued a replacement in due course.

No further entry is required or invited. The matter is regular.

(And beneath it, in Professor Clank's:)

I have written four times. The register is not mine.

I am informed that the matter is regular, and I am obliged to concede that by the office's own definition it is. The form provides for a compass. A compass has a needle. There is no box on it for a man who wants the rain.

I set down here, where it may stand, that the instrument was not defective. It was finished. I have spent sixty years in this house trying to complete things, and I have met precisely one object that was already complete when it reached me, and the office has scheduled it for repair.

The dry moral, revised: A form is a machine for turning a working thing into a broken one, and it does not, at any point in the process, have to understand what it is doing.