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somebody
decided to make fancy.
    At least, that's what the chair maker
thought.
    The chair maker didn't want to make fancy
things, he wanted to make useful things. He wanted to make beds for
resting in and tables for eating off of and stools for sitting on.
He wanted to forget about chairs and just be Sam the carpenter.
    But he wasn't.
    The customers with the big wallets and the
big asses did not want stools. And they didn't want beds. And they
didn't want tables. Not from the carpenters anyway. Their expansive
mattresses, deep and plush and heavy, would require an amount of
wood that could see a carpenter, and his customer, thrown behind
bars for Consumption. Same for the tables which had to hold the
lavish platters of delicacies for the charity dinners – almost a
nightly occurrence in some parts of the city (the charities' food
supplies were exempt from the Consumption laws.) Tables and beds
made a living for the city's metalworkers, but not for its
carpenters.
    And the carpenters' customers wanted
chairs .
    Stools did well for sitting, but not for
putting food on the table.
    So Sam the chair maker made chairs.
    One chair could fetch a hundred thousand
Suns, enough to buy ten years of kale and half a ton of the best
fertilizer to grow it. Not that the chair maker bought much kale or
fertilizer. Every extra penny went back into the wood. The
scavengers drove a hard bargain, and the long-healed scar on the
chair maker's arm, running from wrist to elbow, was a constant
reminder that arguing was dangerous. Compassion, too, kept his
arguments silent, compassion for the most desperate Skyland had to
offer, those who would travel hundreds of miles just to get an
armful of twigs.
    And in ten years' time, he hoped, there
would be something more worth buying than kale, and fertilizer
would be cheap. Everybody hoped.
    And maybe then there would be no more
chairs.
    In ten years time, when some quick-growth
trees had grown back, and wood for chairs wasn't so hard to come
by, then the useless things wouldn't be the symbol of wealth and
extravagance. The price would fall, of course. But the chair maker
didn't think he would mind. It would be a fair trade for a living
planet. And for the possibility that he could return to being Sam
the carpenter, making stools and tables and beds, as he had learned
to do since he was a child when trees still ringed the city nearly
a century before.
    The reddish chair with the thick varnish and
deep seat was empty.
    This bothered the chair maker.
    Not so much that it was empty, but that it
would remain empty. It might be a useless item but nobody was ever
even going to try to make a use out of it.
    Pity . Such a pity.
    He walked in front of it and turned around
to set himself down on it – to make it useful, just this one, just
for a moment. But as he put a hand on one arm, his fingers brushed
a divot in the wood, a tiny nick.
    The chair maker sighed.
    He straightened up, turned around again and
sat instead on the little three-legged stool beside it. He ran a
hand over the arm of the chair, finger pressing into the one divot,
then running along the length of the arm looking for others.
    It was a pretty thing, the chair.
Plain, unpainted. It was the wood the owner'd want to show off. It
had been well kept over the years, nicks sanded away, varnish
replenished periodically to preserve it. The cherry grain would
have glowed ruby in the afternoon light if there had been any.
    But there wasn't any afternoon light.
    The ship blocked it all out.
    The varnish on the chair only reflected the
dim sheen from the one candle in the shop – a luxury, but also a
necessity for the detailed work of the chair maker. Half a mile
away, the closest ship still cast gloom on the stool maker's
workshop. He squinted at the surface, sanding lightly here and
there smoothing out imperfections – scratches and divots and one or
two splinters that stuck up through the top coating. It would get
another coat of gloss that night to