Chapter 13 The Shared Watch

Kessler brought the tender back at 04:00, put a bowl of soup on the deck of the corridor, and called it a meal. Teo came through the lock and stood in the middle of a ship with a thousand people asleep on it and found nothing at all to say. They let him stand there for four minutes. That was Sandoval's doing, though nobody would ever admit to it: she had cleared the whole of that corridor and posted herself at the far end with her back to the wall and her eyes shut. Then Teo walked the length of it, all four hundred and ten meters, with his hand on the new handrail, and at the far end he put his palm against the wall and took it away and looked at the print. "You put your hand on a wall," he said. "I want you to understand that I have watched a person do that every year of my life and never once had a reason to copy it." "That was my grandfather's. Or my father's. It is a family thing." "I know exactly what it is a family thing." He was still looking at the print. "It is a thing a person does because the wall is cold and the hand is warm and it is the cheapest proof anybody has ever invented. Do it every year and it turns into something else. Nobody tells you that part." Sandoval set the watch bill two days later and made it a real one, written on the real form, with a line in the crew complement for a seat that did not exist: HAL 1, backward-look post, third watch. She put her own name as relief and Juni's as primary. "You are putting a Halcyon on my bill." "I am putting a body on a seat. The body happens to be from the Halcyon." Sandoval turned the board key over. "It is a legal document and the only kind of invitation anybody in this fleet can send. If it is in the bill, the ship knows, and the ship does not gossip about its own care list." "What does the bill buy me." "Authority. You are going to walk into rooms where you are nineteen and a maintenance tech, and a bill with a captain's countersign on it is a receipt. People stop arguing with the form and start arguing with you, and that is a change of life." The aft ring took four hours to get into. It is a service corridor that runs the inside of the ring at the two o'clock position, four meters wide, unheated for as long as the ship has been cold, with conduit on both sides and a wall of bare hull at the back that somebody had painted on. She had known about the wall. He had told her about it in the way he tells her things, which is by not telling her. Eleven hundred and forty-one names were cut into it, in rows, in the deep square hand of somebody who had a chisel and time and no other task. Below the break in the rows there were sixty-one more, in a smaller hand, and the hand ran downhill as if the person doing it had been very tired or very cold. "Read the sixty-one," Teo said. "You have a light. I have read them in the dark and I have read the ones I know by the shape, and I have never heard the sound of somebody else saying them." She read all sixty-one. It took a long time. Some of them had been awake for a while. The fourth one up from the bottom of the sixty-one was cut in a completely different hand, in a shallow line, and it said OKONKWO, EMEKA, and under it, in the same shallow cut, HULL RIGGER, MERIDIAN, TRANSFERRED. "He was on this ship," Juni said, and then stopped, because her ears had gone hot and the corridor was four degrees above freezing. "He was on this ship," Teo agreed. "Nine days, in the sixth year. He put a redundancy of his own into the second chamber of the fourth gate, by hand, because the yard said it was not required." He sat down on the deck with his back against the hull. "I was nine. I carried his toolbox down the spine and he told me that a beacon is a question only a machine can answer, and that you can tell who is asking by the shape of the asking, and then he asked me about the weather on a ship, which is a strange thing to do, and I answered him." "He told me that when I was eight. On a bay deck. I do not remember his face." "That is the ordinary way. I have his face and I do not have his voice, and I do not think a person should have to choose." "Teo, the fourth name up from the bottom. You told me yesterday the last name on the wall was the one you would not read, in a hand that was not yours." "I said the fourth from the bottom and I was on a channel that logs, and it is not mine to read, and it is now yours to decide about." He looked at her. "The man who cut it was on a transfer crew with a nine-day order, and I carried his toolbox, and I know the shape of the hand, because I watched it happen." "Say the name." "No." He stood up and put his palm back on the print he had left on the wall, over his own. "Because the ninth day is the day the fourth gate went out, and the log says a cascade, and a cascade is what a yard calls a thing that happened by itself, and he was the man who went in there with a meter to look at the redundancy he had built by hand." He wiped the frost off the wall with his sleeve and made a clean stripe through somebody's name. "I will say it when I can say it without wanting to be wrong, and I would like a person to have taught me the difference between those two." The duty cycle came out of the shared watch six days later, and it came out by accident, which is how the useful things come out. Teo had been keying six and four by hand for forty-one years. Eleven seconds, four long tones, a second, four short ones, a pause he chose. When the second shift took over the watch, he gave the two halves of it to two Meridian techs and went to sleep in the corridor, because he did not trust anybody with a stopwatch and had not slept in front of another person since he was nine. At 11:41 the six and four went out and came back on its own, at the same eleven-second spacing, in the middle of the corridor, and the receiver board answered it, and the two events made a beat in the room like a heart with a second chamber. "What just did that," Teo said, from the corridor, in a voice that had been asleep and was not any more. "You keyed it." "I have not touched a key in nine hours." He came and stood over the board. "Juni. It is still going out at eleven-second spacing and it has been going out at that spacing since the second shift of Sable, and I have spent forty-one years believing that I was the reason." He put a finger under the carriage of the meter and read the duty cycle off the needle without looking at the panel, because he had read that needle four million times. "Eleven seconds is spool time. The Halcyon's primary bus will not hold a load. It takes nine seconds to come up to the point where the transmitter will take current, and it drops back in two, and the difference is the gap, and the gap is the part you have been counting as a decision." He pulled his hand back. "I have been answering a machine because the machine is what wakes me up. Nobody has been talking to me. I have been sitting in a room with the door open and a lamp on the wall, and I have called that company for four decades because I wanted it to be company." "Then who keyed it?" The carrier came round again. Six long, four short, one second, and the second this time was not one second. It was one and a half, and it came out of the hiss with a scrape on the second short tone that Juni had heard on the very first night and had written in a fault log as an artifact. "Teo," she said. "It was eleven seconds. It is not eleven seconds." "Count with me."