第65章 The Carrier's Price

The council sat in the chart room at midnight with the knocking still coming up through the deck, slower now, almost drowsy, and argued the three futures of the machine with the lamps turned low because everyone's eyes hurt. Withdraw, and leave her for the recovery group's winch. Sink her, and spend the muzzle forever. Or stay, and teach, and find out whether a made thing can hold a promise. "Sink her" found no sponsor and did not deserve one, but the withdrawal case was argued honestly by Sano, who had plotted the recovery group's track and gave it three days. "If we are alongside her when they arrive, Captain, we are in the middle of a northern naval operation with a warship's reasons. If we are two hundred miles south, we are nobody's target and the diplomats keep a table to work at." "If we are two hundred miles south," Ellison said, "the next voice to reach her will belong to a destroyer's sonar, and you heard what her hands do when she is frightened." Silence took that argument and ended it, and the council came where Tanabe had been sitting all along. "We teach her," Tanabe said. "Fully, quickly, and well enough that the world can see what she is before anyone arrives to tell us what she is. Mr. Ishikawa gets the transducer rigged as a chapel — his word, and I endorse it. Doctor, you will design the lessons. And the carrier—" "I am already drafted," Callahan said, from his chair by the bulkhead, where he had sat through the entire debate with his eyes shut, listening to two songs and a knocking. "You may as well hear the terms, Captain, because I have been negotiating with the surgeon all evening and he believes I do not know I am losing. I sing the exchanges. All of them, at the machine's range, at full truth. That is the price of admission; the meaning-between cannot come out of a speaker fed by a microphone, it has to be in the water from a throat that means it, and at present there is exactly one throat in this ship's company the deep has vouched for." He opened his eyes. "In exchange I accept rationing. Surgeon Lieutenant Maeda may stand beside me with his watch and his thermometer and his disapproving face, and when he says done, I am done, even mid-phrase. Those are my orders to myself, Captain, and I would take it kindly if the log backed them." Maeda's terms were harsher than the old man let on, and Tanabe read the medical note afterward alone: core temperature falling a tenth of a degree a week; extremities past the reach of any stimulant; sleep fourteen hours in twenty and dreaming audibly, murmuring soundings, bearings, depths, as if the carrier's nights were already spent half a fathom under. The surgeon's conclusion was written in the margin in pencil, small: he is spending himself faster since the cradle. I cannot say where the voice goes. I can say it is being paid for. She found Callahan at noon on the stern deck in the sun that had finally found them, watching the wake with Maeda's blanket around his shoulders, and told him the truth, because lying to him had stopped being possible sometime around the ice. "You know what you are spending," she said. "I know what I bought with it," he said. "Fifty years ago I sealed a door with chain and swore a promise in a raft, and the interest on that loan has been the whole of my life since, Captain, and I call it the best-invested money I ever had. This is more of the same. Only the exchange rate has moved." He turned his collar against a wind she could not feel. "And I will tell you the other thing, since we are being honest, and you will want to sit down for this one, because it moved me more than anything since September. I can hear her interior now — the automaton's. You learn to sort the deep's voices after a while, and hers has been getting closer every night. Her thermal cells are failing, Captain. Corrosion in the coil housings; her own diagnostics are counting it down; she has been listening to herself decay for months the way you or I would listen to a cough." His voice went very quiet. "She has weeks. She knows she has weeks. That is why the practice never stops, and why she climbed up our road to meet us, and why she showed us her dead. She is trying to finish learning the song before she dies, and she does not have the word finish, so she keeps taking the course over again. Our pupil is not racing the recovery group, Tanabe. She is racing the tide coming into her own hull." The lessons resumed that dusk with new urgency, and new machinery. Ishikawa's chapel rig went into the water — a towed line of projectors and hydrophones, a direct channel between the ship's singing and the machine's hearing, a leash woven entirely of music — and the automaton, sensing it, rose another fifty fathoms to meet the end of it. The exchanges lengthened. In the middle of the third night, with the lesson holding steady in the water like a lamp, the northern radio traffic changed key: the recovery group had sailed early, all three hulls, making fifteen knots for the trench country — and leading them by sixty miles came the destroyer's search radar song and, behind it, riding the water in long spaced pulses, the sound that every submarine sailor alive knows in his sleep. Sonar. Pinging. Coming south at fifteen knots, straight up the road, toward the lesson. Sano brought the contact evaluation to the bridge at 0300 and laid it beside the plot of the automaton's climb, and the two lines converged on the same patch of ocean inside seventy-two hours. Tanabe looked at the convergence for a long time. Below the keel, faint and faithful, the machine sang its accompaniment into Ishikawa's chapel line, asking its question between every verse. "Make to the commodore of the recovery group on the flag circuit," she said at last. "Courtesies first, Captain Tanabe to whichever flag is flying — then the message. Inform him that the property he is recovering has spent nine months keeping faith with the dead of Zarya, that it currently holds station four miles under this ship singing the counter-melody the whole world's choirs are learning, and that this ship's company will be teaching it, aloud, at the moment his sonar arrives. Invite him"—the pause she took was worth logging—"to arrive in time for the lesson."