[Narrative] The Wound in the World
It was a poetic name for a volcano. The Wound in the World . An inexplicable rift in a planetary crust, nowhere near any cause understood by common or esoteric geology. It made the name of the way-station, informal though it was, into an even more gratuitous act of bathos. Why the station was called Dead Leg , nobody was entirely sure. This did not stop its brace of lay-mechanics from speculating, of course: anything to fill the time. The junior, round-faced and twenty-something and probably going to be there forever, opined that it was to do with the distance : that they were so far away from anywhere else that there was nowhere to go when you arrived but back. The senior, taller and leaner and a little older, early thirties if he was a day, took the tack that it was an implied sentence: a posting here suggested exactly what the priesthood thought of you, your prospects, and your chance of ever becoming an enginseer. "You know," the junior lay-mechanic said as they went thro...
