Chapter 8 The Boy on the Halcyon

She went in on the off watch with her own watch log in her hand and a rule she had set for herself, which was that she would not ask him anything she could answer from the ship's own records, because the moment she started asking him for things he did not have, he would start answering her for things he did not have either. So she went and got the archive first. It took her two shifts and a lot of quiet lying. The Meridian's public record of the Halcyon runs to about nine hundred pages. Sandoval let her into the raw store on the condition that she did not touch the launch log, and between them they built a shape of forty-one years out of what a ship that is not there wrote down about itself, and at the end of the second shift Juni had four facts she trusted. The Halcyon's crew went under in eleven days. That is in the commissioning log, in a hand that is not a captain's. The pods are on Row Nine. The Meridian has a Row Nine and it is a machine gallery, and the two ships are sister hulls, and every row on the Meridian has a twin, and Row Nine on the Halcyon would have been the same gallery at the same place in the same ring. The archive, whatever it was, had been on the Halcyon from the beginning. Every ship carries one. The Meridian's is in the chapel deck and it is the size of a wardrobe and it holds forty-one years of every voice anybody ever recorded, and it is the reason the dead of this ship are still here in a sense that the chapel can put a name to. And the fourth gate. The Halcyon had a deceleration suite of four chambers and the Meridian's commissioning drawings say so in the same font, in the same annex, and the annex is a fleet document, and fleet documents do not lie about a number of gates. "I have something," she said, and waited out the light time with her hands flat on the desk. "You told Sandoval that the fourth gate went to a single chamber. You said it twice and you said it the same way both times. There is a redundancy in the deceleration suite, and the redundancy on your ship is on the second chamber, and the second chamber is the one they pull first, and it is the second chamber they log when it is over." "That is what I said." "That is what the log says. The log is not a boy's memory. The log is a document with a woman's name on it that you were not there to see." "Do you want to know what is on the wall or do you want to be right about a gate?" "I want both, and I cannot have both from you, and that is the part I do not like." He let the carrier run for a while. "The archive is a good archive," he said. "It is a Halcyon archive. Everything I said to it, it kept, and it is a very good copy of me. It is better than me. It does not get tired, and it does not lose count of things, and it is always seventeen." A pause. "I am not the copy. I know what I am. I have been the one who is not the copy for a very long time, and I would like you to be careful, because you are the only person in a long time who has asked me a question I could get wrong." That is the part she kept. Not the gates. That. She took the notebook up to the forward gallery and sat under the port with her knees up and read back everything she had, and the reading took two minutes. Then she pulled up the schematic of Row Nine on a maintenance terminal, because it is on a maintenance terminal, because Row Nine on the Halcyon is Row Nine on this ship, sister hulls, the same number in the same ring, and the drawing ran off the right-hand edge twice before somebody in the yard gave up and printed a second sheet. Cold sleep pods, two ranks, in a gallery that is a kilometre long, and the drawing did not say how many of them there were, and it did not need to, because there is no version of a kilometre-long gallery where three thousand people are not under foot. She sat and looked at it for a while. Then she went back down and rang him. "Teo. I am going to ask you when you woke up again, and this time I am going to ask it in a way that you cannot tidy." "You are doing the thing with the flat voice." "I am doing the thing with the flat voice." "Do it, then." "Teo. When did you go under?" "I did not go under." "Then when did you wake up?" "Second shift of Sable." He said it the way he had said it before, all the same notes in all the same places. "The power went at the fourth gate and I was in the pod gallery and I was the only one who could hear it over the pumps." "Sable is a Halcyon month." "It is a Halcyon month." "I know it is a Halcyon month," Juni said. "You have never once said it is a Meridian month. You have been telling me for five days that you are seventeen, and you will not say the name of the month you woke up in, because if you said the month you would have to say the year, and you do not have the year, because the year is the thing you spent." The carrier ran, and the board logged it, and eleven thousand kilometers of nothing went by. "Nineteen eighty-four people," he said at last. "Nine on Row Nine and the rest of it below. And then it was me, and then it was me, and I have added one name a year to a wall in an empty corridor, because that is what you do, and because somebody has to keep saying the number out loud, and because the number has to go up or it goes down and I could not stand for it going down." "How many names, Teo?" "Sixty-one." "Sixty-one years have not passed." "No," he said. "Sixty-one names. And I am the sixty-first, and I put it up myself, and I would like to know what you would like me to do about that, because you are the only one who has ever asked me a question I could not answer, and I have been alone with this for longer than I can put a number on, and I do not have a number for it, Juni. I have never had a number for it. That is what I have been trying to tell you."