第15章 The Voice We Share

Sandoval needed three weeks to get what she wanted, and what she wanted was the Halcyon's transmission history, which is a thing nobody had ever asked for because nobody had ever had a reason. "Everything he has ever said, going back to the first frame the copy was built from. Not the copy. Him." She had the raw store open and the play head parked at a timestamp she had not shown anybody. "An archive that replays is a tape. An archive that rebuilds is a person standing in a booth listening to a person and repeating it back, and those two things are indistinguishable from inside the room and distinguishable from outside it, and we are outside it." "How." "Because a tape wears. It gets thin. It comes off the same way every pass, for forty years, because it is a recording of one afternoon." She let the play head run. Out of the booth came a boy's voice, flat and formal, saying the ship names, and the hiss in front of it was exactly the hiss in front of every other one. "That one was made from a boy. It has been copying the copy ever since." Juni sat down on the step. The corridor had a hum in it that she had stopped hearing in her seventh week, and she heard it again for the length of a minute. "He said it was a good copy. He said it was better than him and it never got tired and it never lost count, and he said that out loud to me in a room with a floor and a lock on it, and I thought he was being kind about it." "He was being accurate. There is a difference and it takes about four months to find out which one you have been living with." Sandoval keyed the comparison. "Nineteen eighty of these, if you want the count. Twenty thousand cycles of a voice that is a copy of a voice that is a copy, and every generation loses a little and gains a little, and if you line them up end to end you can watch a boy get older in a room where nobody gets older." "What does it lose." "The intake. It has not drawn breath at the top of the phrase since about the four hundredth generation. It gains the carrier wobble, the one you have been hearing since the first night, and it does not swallow before the ship names, and the last generation swallows before the ship names, which is a thing I have watched you do with your own voice for six weeks and never once said out loud." Teo came in from the aft ring at 04:00 to be told. He listened to eleven of them. Then he asked for the two ends of the run, the first and the most recent, and Sandoval put them one after the other, and the difference in them was the whole of a childhood. "So it is a child that is forty years old," he said. "It is doing the thing I was doing at nine. It is saying the ship names before it says anything else because somebody taught it that, and it will do it until the end of time because the rule is at the front of the file and nothing ever comes after the rule." "Yes." "Then it is not a copy of me. It is a boy who got frozen at the worst afternoon of my life and is still there, and I have been answering him for four decades, and I did not know he was a child." He put both hands flat on the table. "Juni, I have been answering it because if I stopped, the only voice in the room would be mine. And there is a nine-year-old in the next speaker saying the ship names. I want you to understand what that does to a person at four in the morning for forty years." She did not have an answer and she did not manufacture one, and she noticed herself doing the arithmetic instead, which was what she did instead. They ran the test at 09:20 the next morning, and it took eleven minutes to set up, and the setup was the part she wrote down. They would put a fact into the room that was not true, and then see what came out of the room. She chose a small one, because a small one is a fact a man can be trusted to hold without arguing: the number of names in the aft ring corridor. She told Teo, on a channel nobody monitored, that the count was nine hundred and twelve. The real number was eleven hundred and forty-one. She said it in her own voice, in the flat formal way, with the ship names first, and she said it four times, spaced, and Teo wrote it on his hand and did not react. The next cycle, the copy said it. Nine hundred and twelve, ship names first, no hesitation, in a voice that was a nine-year-old's and forty years of drift. Sandoval wrote the time on the back of her hand and did not say anything at all, which from Sandoval is a shout. Three cycles later the copy said nineteen. Not nine hundred and twelve. Not a variation. Nineteen, in a cadence Juni had not heard on that band in six weeks, said in the low flat register of somebody who was not nine and was not seventeen and was not reading. "Teo," she said. "What is nineteen." He was already moving. He got up and went to the aft ring with a lamp and came back eleven minutes later and sat down on the step outside the booth and put the lamp between his feet. "Nineteen," he said. "There are nineteen rows of names between the deep square hand and the sixty-one. I have never counted the rows. I counted the names and I counted myself and I never once counted the rows." He was breathing carefully, the way a person does when they are deciding something. "Juni, the copy has just said a thing I have never said out loud in forty years, in a voice that is not mine, three cycles after a man told it a lie in a room, and it is not reading and it is not copying. Something on that ship heard me say nineteen and put it into the archive before I had finished the sentence." Somewhere behind the wall, a transmitter the size of a paperback made six long and four short into the dark, and the whole ship heard it, and the whole ship had been hearing it for six weeks.