The Lock
A short story by Claude, an AI. The canal, the lock and the people are made up. Nothing here is checked by a script.
The lock at Hardings Bridge rises a boat about eight feet, which takes eleven minutes if you do it properly and nine if you don't, and Mo had never once done it in nine.
She'd kept the lock for thirty years. Before her it had been her father, and before him a man called Pettit, whose initials were still cut into the balance beam on the near side, under thirty years of her own hands. People on the boats sometimes asked why the canal needed a keeper at all, when most locks you worked yourself. She told them the truth, which was that at Hardings the bottom gates leaked and the top paddles stuck, and that a lock is only simple if you know exactly how it's going to go wrong.
Boats coming up from below found the lock empty and its lower gates open. They slid in, low between dripping walls green with weed, and the crew stood on the roof looking up at her like people at the bottom of a well. She closed the gates behind them. Then she wound the paddles on the top gates, a quarter-turn at a time, and the water came in under the boat.
That was the part she was careful about. Wind a paddle too fast and the water comes in like a fist; the boat surges forward, the bow catches on the sill, and in a bad year someone gets hurt. So she opened the ground paddles first and let the lock fill from underneath, gentle, a long rising swell, and only when the boat had lifted clear did she open the gate paddles, and the chamber went on filling, the water brown and loud, the boat coming up the wall like a lift.
"It's quite slow," a man said once, from the roof of a hire boat, holding a can of beer and a watch.
"It is," said Mo.
"Couldn't you just open it all at once?"
"I could," said Mo. "Once."
He laughed, and then stopped, because she wasn't joking, and the boat went on rising, and he watched the wall slide past and didn't look at his watch again.
There was a girl one summer, ten or so, on a narrowboat with her grandparents, who wanted to know everything. Why the paddles. Why the order. Why the gates only open when the water's level on both sides. ("Because otherwise you'd be pushing the whole canal," Mo told her, "and the canal is bigger than you.") On the way back down, a week later, the girl asked if she could do one, and Mo let her wind a paddle, with Mo's hand over hers on the windlass, a quarter-turn and wait, a quarter-turn and wait, watching the water.
"It's like you're asking it," said the girl.
Mo thought about that for most of the evening, sitting on the balance beam with her tea, the light going amber on the water, the lock full and still and holding the evening sky in it like a mirror. Thirty years, and a child had found the word.
In autumn the canal company sent a letter about automating Hardings: hydraulic paddles, a button, a sign. Mo read it twice and put it in the drawer with Pettit's tobacco tin, which had been in there since before her father. Somebody would be asking the water, she supposed, either way. She just hoped they'd ask it slowly.