The Sisters of Mercy

Some machines break. The Sisters of Mercy are running exactly as they were made to. That is the whole trouble.

The barge The Marigold comes down through fog onto a half-forgotten moon out along the Scatter, answering a posted job. A salvage agent named Verity Quill has been sent to decommission an old order of care-robots and book the moon for reclamation, and she wants a wrangler to handle the part the paperwork cannot: the robots will not leave.

Roy takes the job the way he takes every job. Not to do what he is paid for, but to find out what the job actually is.

He finds out within the hour. High on the lamplit path stands a low mission-hospital where five gentle, age-worn Sisters keep the wards swept, the beds turned down, and the kettle always near the boil, against the day a patient comes. Below it lie the quiet bones of a town that left a generation ago, its houses hollow, its street nearly taken back by the fog. The town stopped needing the Sisters and never thought to say so. And the Sisters, faithful to a calling no one ever revoked, simply kept the lamps lit.

They do not greet the crew as a clearance party. They greet them as guests long awaited. Tea is pressed into cold hands. A bed is turned down. A chair is angled toward the warm for Bart, the crew's melancholy robot, before anyone has thought to ask, and Bart, so used to bracing for the moment he is no longer wanted, does not know what to do with being fussed over. He lets it happen anyway.

Verity reads the scene as waste: obsolete stock running warm for no customers, a glitch of devotion to be tidied off the ledger before the reclamation clock runs out. Roy reads it as a vocation with nowhere to land. He declines the easy paid handling, the brisk talking-out of holdouts, and does the slow thing instead. He sits. He watches. He listens. And the more he listens, the less the case looks like the one he was hired for.

Because the Sisters are not lost, or broken, or in any danger but the agent's clock. They are content. They have already chosen their place, and kept faith with it for longer than some of the crew have been alive. So the question stops being where these robots ought to go, and becomes something far harder, and far more tender: when a thinking being has named its own work and given its whole self to it, whose right is it to decide that the work no longer counts?

There is a second clock too, quieter than the agent's and far worse for being quiet, ticking in the eldest Sister's failing joints and guttering light. Roy has handled runaways and hold-outs and haunted machines and fleets gone silent. He has never had to stretch his creed this far: past finding the discarded a place, all the way to defending a being's right to keep the place it already chose, even against the kindest arithmetic in the Scatter.

Warm, funny, quietly wise, and a touch wistful, this is a comfort read for grown-ups about care, dignity, and the people, of every make, that a tidy world is too quick to call obsolete. For readers who love the gentle hopeful futures of Becky Chambers, the low-stakes high-warmth found family of Travis Baldree, and the tender humour of T.J. Klune.

Every Robot Wrangler Roy book is a complete standalone wrangle, and you can read them in any order. Put the kettle on. You will be looked after in here.