Chapter 11 The Meeting

Bram Kessler aimed the tender at the white point and then took his hands off the yoke, which is not permitted in either direction, and which she let him have for eleven seconds. "Hands," Juni said. "Hands are optional out here. Rule nine. Read it back to me." "That is not a rule." "It is in a binder with my name on the spine, and I wrote the binder." He put them back where they belonged. "Ninety-one minutes of transit and I am going to talk about coolant the entire way, and you have already decided not to stop me." The tender came off the Meridian's forward airlock at 03:40 carrying one maintenance tech, one pilot, six kilos of line, a hand jack, a chest of tape and a thermos nobody had thought to take back off. On the roof eyepiece the Halcyon was a smear of white that came on for four seconds and went out for eleven, four on, eleven off, and the smear did not brighten or shift as they closed on it, which told her the man behind it was not watching the plot. He was watching something else, or he had stopped watching. She laid her palm flat on the deck and felt the double knock come up through the plate. Six long, four short. The tender answered, because the tender answered everything, and its answer went off into the dark and did not come back again. "Nine minutes of light time are behind us," Kessler said. "Say whatever you want to say on the way in now. Once we are inside his sky, he hears you before you hear yourself." She had three sentences prepared and lost two of them somewhere around minute thirty. "Do not tell me I am all right," Teo said, at the hatch, before she had her gloves off. "A great many people have told me I am all right. Tell me the number." "Which number." "All of them." Frost had already gathered in his eyebrows. He was seventeen in the face and about sixty in the hands. "How many live on your ship. How many of yours were born after we left the pad. How many go under a year on your watch bill. I have been asking a room for a very long time and the room does not answer, and now there is a room that answers, and I want the numbers inside it." She gave them to him in the order she trusted them, which was the order she had learned them in. "Nineteen hundred and eleven born in the ship since we left Earth. Two thousand nine hundred and eighty-nine came off the Halcyon. That is our whole count of you, and it is a manifest, and a manifest is what you tell the families." "And your wall?" "Your wall is your wall. I have not been in the corridor it is in." "You are the first person who has admitted that." He turned his head very slightly, the way a man does when he is listening to a second room. "That is her. Say the ship names first, because the first two words are the only two anybody writes down." Dr. Ilona Brecht had the receiver gain up before the sentence finished. Out of the tender's cabin speaker came a boy's voice, flat and formal, with a hiss in front of it. "Halcyon, out of the solar corridor, four one dash. This is Renn, seventeen, I am alive, are you alive, over." "Six and four," Kessler said. "Eleven seconds. Same cycle, no drift." "Same cycle exactly," Juni said. "It is not coming off a clock in there. It is a duty cycle. Eleven seconds is how long that machine takes to spool, and it starts over the instant the transmitter will take power again." Teo put two fingers on the wall of the tender and left them there. "Halcyon, out of the solar corridor, four one dash," he said, over his own voice, from inside the airlock. "This is Renn. I have somebody here. I want that in the record." Brecht worked him for eleven minutes in a space nine meters long, and Juni stood out of the way and watched instead of helping, because a doctor with a job does not want a maintenance tech in the light. "Teeth are good. Gums are not. Weight is eleven below what a rigger's manual gives for his frame." Brecht wiped her hands. "This is cold cycling. Not starvation. He has been under and coming up and under again for a long time." "How many times," Teo said. "I cannot count them from the outside." She put the scope away. "I can tell you his heart has done it more than three times, and I can tell you the myocardium has been cold more than it should survive, and I can tell you that he is not going back into a pod this week." "Then that is the answer and I do not have to have it twice." He looked at Juni. "How many?" "Eighteen hundred and forty-one names on the wall, and sixty-one people on it that are not on any manifest, and one of the sixty-one is you." "Read the sixty-one." "Read the sixty-one," he said. "I have never heard them. I put them up." "You put them up and you never heard them." "A wall is not for hearing. A wall is for counting." He waited for the light time and said the next part slowly. "Somebody reads them or they are only scratches. I have wanted somebody to read them for a very long time and I have wanted it in the worst possible way, and you should know that about me before we go any further." They had the hatch open and the tender's atmosphere equalized with the Halcyon's forward collar, which took four minutes a cycle because the collar ran on emergency power and the motor in the panel had been gone for a long time. The outer door was sealed with a strip of rigger's tape laid over the flange in four layers. Juni put her thumbnail into the edge of the top layer and it parted along a seam that somebody had cut and re-laid so many times it had become a feature. "That is Awad's trick," she said. "Everyone learns it from Awad. Awad taught me by shouting at me about it." He looked at the tape. "He sealed the gate house at the second shift of Sable and checked the seal with a thumbnail, and he was asleep in it nineteen minutes later, and I have checked his seal every day since with his thumbnail logic and my own hands, and that is the whole of what I have done for four decades, and I would like somebody to change the subject now." "No," she said. "I would like you to say the other one." "The other one is the last name on the wall, and it is not mine to read." He turned around, all of it, and the frost in his eyebrows had not melted. "It was on the wall when I came up out of the pod the first time. It is in a hand that is not mine and it is not any hand in this ship that I know, and it is the fourth name from the bottom, and I have counted past it a great many times, and I am not going to read it to you on a channel that logs."