Chapter 6 The Listening Post Fills

She went and found the tally wall in the morning, and it took her until second watch to find it, because there are three of them and the one that matters is the one you do not expect. You add your name to a tally wall when you leave. That is the whole rule and it has never been any other rule, and it holds on the Meridian the way it holds on every ship ever built, and the wall lives on the Green Tier behind the water plant where the light is worst and the plants grow slowest and nobody goes. Names going out, going home, going anywhere. A wall with your name on it is a wall with one fewer person on the ship. Juni stood in front of it for a while with her hands in her pockets and worked out what to do with the question a boy had asked her from a dead orbit. The Halcyon had one. He had told her so, and he had said that he kept the number, and he had said the number he kept was the one he stood in front of. She wanted to know what a person does on a wall when the ship has been alone for forty-one years and the crew is underfoot on their way to the pods and nobody will be walking out of that airlock for a long time. She could not ask him. Not that. If she asked him how many names he had written, he would hear the shape of the question, and he had been awake a long time, and a question with a shape like that is a door he would learn to shut. So she went to the reading clerk instead. The reading clerk was a booth the size of a phone box two decks up from the chapel, and behind it sat a woman named Perla Sandoval who ran the comms watch and who had been in the Meridian longer than Juni had been alive, and who had the specific unhurried way of listening that is the reason anybody trusts a comms officer at all. "Okonkwo." She did not look up from the board. "You are the one who put a wideband carrier out at four in the morning." "Yes." "Understood." Sandoval's fingers kept moving. "Do you know how many people on this ship have wanted to do that in the last four days? Eleven. The captain has told nine of them no in a voice I would not have used on my own mother. I do not know what the other two did, and I do not intend to find out, because that is how the ship stays a ship." She looked up. "I am not going to report you for the gasket. I am going to report the carrier. That is my whole opinion and I have said it out loud so that later nobody can say I was polite about it." "I did not come about the carrier." "Then come about what." "The Halcyon kept a tally wall. I want to know what a crew of three thousand would have written on one, and whether there is any list of them that came back with the loss report, because the loss report gave me two thousand nine hundred and eighty-nine and I would like to know if the wall has a different number on it than the wall does." Sandoval went quiet in a way that was different from the way she had been quiet. "The loss report has an annex," she said. "The annex is names, and the annex is in the captain's drawer, and the annex is not on this ship anywhere else, and I have never been in the room where it is kept." She turned a board key over in her fingers. "Why do you want the wall number?" "Because a boy asked me if we have one, and then he asked me to read him the names on it, and I do not think he has read them in a long time." The reading clerk was very small and had a plant in it that was dying for want of light, and the two of them sat in it for a while without saying anything, and then Sandoval said, "Get out of my booth. You are making me complicit in something and I would like to do that on my own shift." She was at the mouth of the corridor by the water plant when the trouble came, and it came the way trouble always comes on a ship this size, which is that it is a person who is worried rather than a person who is angry. Kaneka caught her at the stair head with both hands, which Kaneka does not do. "Juni. Loop three has gone." The shift chief's face was gray under the corridor light. "I have been sitting on that loop for six weeks and it has gone, and it went while I was in my bunk, and there is nothing I can put in a report that means anything when the captain already knows, because the captain has had the number since before I had it." "What do you want me to do." "I want you to tell me what is in the post." Kaneka did not lower her voice, because lowering it is worse in a corridor. "You have been up there four nights running and you have a drive full of something and you have not put one line of it in the fault book where the rest of us can see it, and I have put my name on loop three so I know exactly what it is to be the person who saw it first and could not make anybody come." That was the moment the post stopped being hers. She went up and opened the door and there were already four people in it, and they had all come for the same reason and none of them had said so out loud, and there was a woman from water treatment standing with her back to the wall and a man from hull who had brought a chair up from the pump house on his own initiative, and a boy of fourteen who had the whole wrong look on his face and did not have a business being there at all, and they were all looking at the meter, and the meter was moving. "Sit down," Juni said. "Somebody tell me what you heard, and I will tell you what I know, and then somebody decide what we do, because I have been deciding alone for four days and I am not doing it any more."