Snapshot — Tuesday, 2086
The chisel had taken him forty minutes that morning, which was longer than it should have, and which was the point.
Theo set it on the bench and ran the pad of his thumb along the edge — the lightest test, not quite touching — and felt the hair part. The chisel was right. Old steel, late-twenties from a Bendigo forge gone since '41, bought from an estate sale fifteen years back and not yet used up: it would outlive him. He set it in the rack and chose another.
The studio was a converted warehouse two blocks east of the river: courier depot, gallery, failed theatre, taken by Theo in '78, the floor laid for him by the city's only remaining specialist without a contract. The copper tap on the sink had been soldered there by one of his earliest students, now dead, after Theo had told her it wouldn't work and she had wanted to prove him wrong; it had worked, and still did.
His band was on the threshold shelf in a small wooden tray with the others, set down eleven years ago and not worn in the studio since.
At eight-twenty the knock came.
He had been expecting them: the mother had written three weeks ago, in the unedited prose of people writing to him for the first time, long sentences and half-apologies and the careful naming of what the clinic had said and what she had decided not to accept of it. The daughter was nine; her index had been inconsistent across modalities for six months, which meant AION didn't know what the child was, and AION didn't like not knowing. Theo had written back the same evening with a time and nothing more.
He opened the door to a mother younger than he was expecting, late thirties and tired, her halo dim in standby — she had set it before coming up the stairs — and behind her the daughter, nine, wearing the inconsistent band: white, the new low-profile fitting that didn't show above the ear unless you knew where to look. The child looked at him, and he at the child.
"You're early," he said, which wasn't quite true but was the easiest thing to say, and stepped back to let them in; the mother said her thanks too many times while the child said nothing.
Theo gave the child the tour he gave everyone, which was no tour at all — he walked the perimeter slowly, named the benches in the order they had been built (first three Tasmanian oak, the rest local pine), put a hand on the cold stove, and pointed at the rack of chisels she didn't yet have permission to touch but would, by Friday, if she came back. The child watched as the mother watched her. Theo had been watched this way for the better part of two decades, and it had stopped meaning anything except as information about the watcher.
At the bench nearest the window he sat the child, gave her a piece of pine and one of his older planes — not the antique one, but the one his hand knew best, which would do the work for her if she let it. He showed her how to hold it without saying anything about attention or about the band, and then how to take a shaving, taking one himself — the curl coming off the wood the colour of new butter — before handing her the plane.
The child's first shaving was thicker than his but not a bad one; she looked at it, then at the plane, and made another, thinner than the first.
The mother, at the door, had stopped speaking some minutes ago — Theo hadn't noticed when, but he noticed now, and looked at her. Her eyes were wet. "She hasn't done anything for that long in six months," she said, very quietly. Theo nodded but didn't say what he was thinking, which was that two decades at the bench had taught him one thing about teaching: you put the work where the attention could find it, and you stayed out of the way.
The child made a third shaving, thinner again.
Outside, the river ran where it always had, the buildings on the far side reconfigured during the night, or some of them — the long brick warehouse from the twenties still standing on its bricks and right angles, the heritage listing from the fifties having held — but Theo didn't look long; he watched the child working.
The mother, after a while, took her halo from her ear and set it in her pocket, where it stayed for the rest of the morning.