第14章 The Answering Together

They keyed off the Halcyon's own cycle for nine days, and on the ninth day Sandoval asked for a two-way link and Varga signed it, and that is the afternoon the two ships learned to speak at the same instant. The joint pulse was six long, four short, from the Meridian and the Halcyon in the same millisecond, off a common reference that Sandoval made out of the waystation's carrier and gave to both ships by hand. It is not a large thing to do. It took two techs four days and a great deal of argument about which clock was authoritative, and the argument was won by the Meridian by default, because the Meridian has a waystation to meet and the Halcyon has a hallway. "You understand what this means," Sandoval said, on the wire, with her hand over the key. "When we key together, there is exactly one pulse on the band with both ships' names in the header. Everything else that hears it knows we are one asset." "Everything else that hears it," Teo said. "What else is out here?" "Nothing. That is the answer and you already know it, and you asked anyway so that a woman in a booth could say it out loud for the record." Sandoval looked at Juni, who was standing in the doorway with a coil of coax in her arms. "Okonkwo. When it goes out, do not key anything from the post. I want a clean listen. Every log in this ship records the wideband burst with my name on it and I would like exactly one clean passage in the whole history of this affair." The pulse went out at 15:20. Six long, four short, one second, and it came back at fifteen twenty and one and a half seconds and the hiss in front of it was thinner than the hiss on the Halcyon's own beacon, because it had only had to cross ninety thousand kilometers twice. Then Teo read the header out of the loop and stopped in the middle of a word. "Halcyon. Four one dash. I am here. I am here and I am—" "Forty-one hours," Juni said, "and eight minutes." "Where did you get that." "From the board, and you were about to say it, so keep going." "Halcyon. Four one dash. It has come back late." A pause with the carrier running in the middle of it. "It has always come back late. Every pass I have run with you, the Meridian has answered a second and a half after I have keyed, and I put it in a book as travel time because I did not have anything better to put it in." "Light time is five seconds." "I have been out here eighty-nine thousand kilometers and I have counted my own light time in my head since I was nine years old, and it is five seconds, and it has been five seconds for every day of my life, and I put the one and a half in a book as travel time because I did not have anything better." He stopped. "I have been out by two days, and I never noticed, because the only clock I have is the one the wall is on." "Forty-one hours, eight minutes," Sandoval said over the booth speaker, "and it is a fixed number. I have run it four times. It does not grow and it does not shrink. One of the two clocks was set wrong once and nobody ever corrected it, because correcting a clock requires a second clock, and there is only ever one clock on a ship." "Do not say that in front of him," Juni said. "I am saying it in front of him, because he has been alone on one clock for four decades and the sentence will do him more good than the correction will." Sandoval put her hand flat on the board. "Yours is the slow one, Renn. The Halcyon lost forty-one hours at the fourth gate. Emergency power, no crystal keep, and a restart that came up on a backup oscillator that was never re-synchronised. I have found the maintenance note. I have been sitting on it for nine days because I did not want to hand a man two pieces of bad news on the same morning." "Read me the note." "The note is one line. It says, primary time standard lost at gate four, service oscillator held, drift unmeasured, re-sync on recovery." A pause. "There is no line under it. Forty-one years of no line under it. Nobody ever wrote down how wrong it was, and you have been making your life against a clock that is forty-one hours slow, and a man can be seventeen on that clock for a very long time." "So I am older than I said." "You are exactly as old as you have always been. Nobody on this ship can tell you what that is, and I am not going to stand here and do arithmetic on a person's life while he is standing in front of me." Sandoval's voice did not change at all, which was the thing Juni admired about her. "What I will tell you is that the pod gallery, the eleven days, the gate, and the number you have been keeping are all on the wrong clock, and every one of them is now two days earlier in absolute terms than the day you have been living on. Eleven days after the fourth gate, Meridian time, is nine days after the fourth gate, Halcyon time, and that is a difference in the pod bank and not a difference in you." The link held for another four minutes. Then Teo said something into the loop that was not part of any procedure, and Juni heard it arrive in the tender cabin eleven seconds after he said it, and the sentence was this. "Juni. Key the post." "No." "You have to hear the two of them at once. That is the whole of it. If the pulse you are hearing has never been the machine, and the pulse I have been hearing has never been the machine, then there are two pulses and we have only ever heard one at a time, and the one you have been hearing is the answer to the one I have been hearing." His voice came up half a tone. "Key it. Now. Both." She looked at the board. She looked at the fault code she already had four times in a maintenance drive, and at the burst ID with her name welded into it, and at the eleven seconds she had been logging in yellow for six weeks. She keyed it. Six long, four short, out of the post, with her own name in the header for the second time in her life. The answer came back at nineteen and a half seconds, and it came back wrong. "Four and four," Teo said. "It was four and four." "Four and four," she said, "and the gap was one and a half, and there is a third tone under the second pair that I have never logged in my life, and it is not noise." She put her hand flat on the desk. "Teo, there are three transmitters on that ship and only one of them is you."