For the creation of the mechanicals was a seismic event, an earth-rending convulsion that left nothing untouched: palaces, thrones, and empires, yes, but also the way men and women thought about themselves and their relationship to the world, to God, even their own bodies.

Clakkers carried complex geasa by dint of alchemy; humans carried heavy obligations, too, but called them culture. Society.

Jesus’s bloody tears.

Jesus Christ on a six-day wine bender.

How did humans guide themselves? How did they know what to do and what not to do?

The clockwork men and women fated to maneuver the oars twenty-four hours per day until the ship reached its destination had turned their silent voices to song as they bent their backs to row. They sang not in any human language but in the secret language of the mechanicals. A shanty sung in the click-tick-click of clockwork bodies, the crash of tapped feet, the clatter of metal hands gripping banded wooden spars.

The prosperity achieved through slavery had a way of blinding men’s hearts to the evil of their own hands.

Oh, for crying out loud,” she said. “Were you fools any more chivalrous I’d surely swoon on the spot and damage my uterus.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph on a bad-tempered camel.

Free Will was a vacuum, a negative space. It was the absence of coercion, the absence of compulsion, the absence of agony.