Chapter 3 The Voice Answers Back

The emergency burst is a piece of hardware the size of a paperback, bolted inside the port of the backward-look post, and it is the oldest thing in the room. It predates the dish, the board, and the chair. When you key it, it takes everything the transmitter has and puts all of it into eleven hundred milliseconds of wideband carrier, unasked, unencrypted, and unnumbered, and the whole ship can hear it if anybody happens to be listening on that band. That last part is what she had spent five days thinking about. The emergency band is not private in the way people believe it is private. It is unmonitored, which turns out to be a different thing entirely. Anybody within a deck of the comms gallery can hear a wideband carrier go out, and comms does not sleep, and she had looked for five days for a way to key a burst that would land in a receiver nobody watches. There was no such way. Being found out was a smaller problem than the one she had, and on the fourth night she stopped looking and went to bed and slept three hours, which was the decision that got her here. She builds it at 04:02. It takes forty minutes to build, because the housing has to come off the wall and the contacts have to be cleaned and there is a gasket she has to seat with her thumbnail, and she does all of that with the lights off and the door shut and the rhythm going in the wall beside her. She has a speech prepared. It is four sentences long and she throws it out of her head in the hallway first and hates it, and then she comes back in and simplifies it to two. She keys the burst at 04:19. Nothing answers, because nothing can, for a while. Light does the talking between here and there, and light is slow, and eleven light-minutes each way means she has sat in this boot for twenty-two minutes staring at a meter that will not move before anything anybody says can reach her ear. She spends the time stripping the coolant hose on the outside of the wall, which is a thing she should not be doing in the dark, and which takes her hands eleven seconds at a time so that she does not watch the meter. Twenty-two minutes is not a long time, unless you are nineteen and alone and holding a wrench you have no use for. Then it is the longest silence in the history of the fleet taking itself out in front of you, one second at a time, and there is nothing at the end of it but a needle that may or may not move. She puts the wrench down twice and picks it up twice and does not look at the meter, and she is very proud of that afterward in a way she would not be able to explain to anybody. At 04:41 the meter twitches. The signal comes back up out of the noise with a hiss in front of it, the way a voice comes through a wall, and under the hiss there is a carrier with something sitting on it, and then the carrier drops out and what is left is a boy. He sounds about fifteen. He also sounds like somebody who has been talking to himself for a long time, because he starts in the middle. "I have been awake. I have been awake and I did not have anybody to tell, so I am telling the water." Juni does not move. The room is very cold. "Hello. I know you are there because you answered. Nobody answers the emergency band. It is a stupid band." A breath. "Halcyon. My name is Renn, Teodor Renn. I am seventeen years old." The board is logging. She can see the level meter climbing and she cannot make her hands care. "Wait," the boy says. "Wait, I have to do the other thing. I have to do the thing where I say who I am first, because that is what they taught. Halcyon, out of the solar corridor, four one dash, this is Renn, seventeen, I am alive, are you alive, over." The hiss took the middle of it. The long tones were there, six of them, and then something in the voice, and then the four short ones, and the four short ones had come out of a mouth. Juni put her palm flat on the cold plate of the wall and felt, faintly and certainly, the whole shape of a transmission on eleven decibels. She said, "Halcyon. This is Meridian, out of the solar corridor. I hear you." She had to wait twenty-two minutes for that to be true. "It came back," she said, when it did. "I heard you. Say again your name and your age." "Renn, Teodor Renn. Seventeen." He said it easily, the way a person says their own name in a doorway. "How old are you?" "Does it matter?" "Yes. It is the only thing I get to ask. There is a list. I do the list." The hiss moved. Behind it, something like a laugh that had not been used in a long time. "I am seventeen. I have been on this ship since before I could reach the rail, so I have had a lot of practice at being asked that." "Are you on your own?" "I have told you the number." "That is not what I asked. I asked whether you are on your own tonight, with nobody to hand the headset to." She heard the carrier breathe. "Because if you are, you have been putting a fire out every eleven seconds for forty-one years, and I want to know whether you have thought about that." "You are the one who is awake," he said. "That is not an answer." "It is the only answer I have that is true." The flatness came back over him the way water closes over a stone. "There is an archive on this ship. It plays me. It has played me since before you were born, and it is a very good copy, and it does not get tired and it does not lose count, and I answer it, because if I stopped answering it then the only thing in this room making noise would be me." She wrote it on the grease pencil next to the number on her wrist, and the two numbers did not agree. Eleven light-minutes away, a boy was seventeen. On her wrist, in grease pencil that would still be there in the morning, was the distance. Somewhere in the gap between the two numbers was a fact about the universe that she had no name for yet, and she had a rule about facts she could not name, which was to go and get the tools. "Teo. Do you know what year it is on this ship?" He was quiet for eleven seconds. She counted. When he came back the voice had changed register, and the change was small, and it was the most frightening thing that had happened to her in nineteen years. "We stopped keeping the year," he said. "It was an expensive thing. A year costs a lot of paper."