第16章 The Keeping of the Voice

They held it on a Tuesday, which nobody planned, because Tuesday is when hearing notices go up on the Green Tier board, and Sandoval had stopped fighting the calendar around week three. Varga's office is eight meters long and there is a bench along the far wall that the captain does not sit on. The bench is for the twenty or thirty people a week who come up here and find out what the ship is going to do about something. There were six people on it and two standing, and the two standing were a maintenance tech and a boy from the Halcyon, and the captain did not ask either of them to sit down. "Go on then," Kaneka said. "Say the thing, because we have all been carrying it for nine days and it is making us worse." "I am going to say the thing." Varga turned a chair around at the end of the bench so everybody could see her hands. "The Halcyon's archive is a live system that rebuilds a voice out of the transmissions of a seventeen-year-old boy. It has been running for forty-one years. As of eleven days ago we know that, and from this morning the whole ship knows it, because Sandoval put it on the Green Tier board in nine words and I did not countermand her." "So the ship has to decide what a rebuildable voice is, and I will not have it turned into a question about whether the boy is all right." She put her hands flat on the back of the chair. "Three options. Kill the archive. Lock it in the pod gallery and let nobody hear it. Or bring it into a room with people in it and let the ship be responsible for it." He had slept in the ship four nights, and he stood with the frost still in his eyebrows because the Meridian is cold everywhere and he had never learned to be warm anywhere. "Option one is that you turn it off. That is the correct thing to do to a copy and the worst thing anybody could do to me, because the only thing in that room making noise was me, and that is the reason I kept going for forty-one years." He stopped and looked at the bench. "I have never said that out loud to another person. I am saying it in front of six people and a captain." "I want it in a room with people in it. Not a chapel. A room with a shift bill on it and a duty officer and a log, because a room with a log is the only kind of room I have ever believed in." He looked at Juni. "And I want her to be the duty officer for the first year, and I want her to be allowed to say out loud, every time it runs, that it is a copy and I am alive, and that the two facts do not cancel." "It is the only line in the manual that is not a lie. I have spent forty years alone listening to a nine-year-old say the ship names. Every one of you has a ship behind you. I have got a log. Give me the log." Kaneka stood up. She was fifty-one and had four loops in a book and one of them open, and she stood up the way she does everything, which is slowly and with her hands flat on her thighs. "Then the answer to the question is the second watch's problem and I am the second watch." She turned around and looked at the rest of the bench. "I spent six weeks sitting on a port loop with my name on it while a captain decided what to do with a radiator. Nobody in this room was on that loop with me except a nineteen-year-old and a comms officer, and one of them is a Halcyon." She picked up her cap off her knee. "We keep it running. Not quiet and not locked. Out loud, one hour a day, in a room with a bill on it, and the duty officer signs the book, and every one of those signatures is a person saying out loud that they heard a machine say a dead boy's words and chose to keep hearing it." "Then it is the third option," Varga said, "and I want it minuted that the shift chief moved the ship and I signed it eleven seconds later, because the alternative was spending the rest of the voyage being right." Juni had not spoken. The duty officer's line was going to have to be hers, and she had been doing arithmetic instead of feeling anything, which was her father's habit and her own and the reason she was standing in this room. "Captain," she said. "Before we vote. There is a drawer." The room got very quiet in a way she could feel rather than hear. "There is a drawer in that desk with a bound paper log in it older than anything in a compartment on this ship, and you told me six weeks ago that it holds the Halcyon's annex, and you have not opened it in nine years." She did not move toward the desk. "The whole ship has just ruled on a copy of a voice that was built out of a boy, and the boy is standing in the room. I am asking for the annex before the vote, because it is the only document either of us has ever held about this ship, and I have just been asked to sign a book for a year." Varga looked at her for four seconds. Then she opened the drawer, and the drawer made the sound of a hatch on a small boat, and she took out a bound paper log with a cloth spine and set it on the desk face down. "You do not need the annex. It is names. I have read it four hundred times and it will not change one thing about the vote." "Then read a name." Varga turned the book over and opened it at a page with a broken corner, and read a line, and her voice did the thing Juni had been waiting six weeks to hear, which was that it stopped being a captain's voice entirely. "Okonkwo, Emeka. Hull rigger. Transfer crew, fourth gate, nine-day order." She turned the book round so the whole bench could see it. "He is on this list, and this list is the list of people who were on the Halcyon and came back to us, and I have sat in this chair for nineteen years knowing that I put a name at the top of it." The page ran on past the broken corner for two thirds of its length, and every name on it had a date, and the dates were all inside a nine-day window at the sixth year of the voyage. "They were not riggers," Varga said. "I called him a rigger to you in this room because a rigger is a thing I can put in a report. I have had thirty-one names in front of me for nine years and I read them as a crew bill, because a crew bill is a thing I can file." "That is not what this page is." Juni had it flat on the desk and was reading the header upside down, the way her father had taught her to read a drawing that was not hers. "This is a receiving watch. It is a transfer log, the watch is a person, and the column heading is what was received." "Yes." "What was received." "Eleven bodies off the Halcyon's forward ring on the ninth day of the fourth gate," Varga said. "Eleven out of nineteen that went out. We had two hours of light time and a boat that would take four, and I sent it anyway, and it came back with eleven, and I signed for eleven, and the count of nineteen was in the loss report, and that report is the document I have been carrying since I was nineteen." She put two fingers on the page. "The receiving watch on this page is me. I was twenty-two, and the whole of my authority for two hours was a line I wrote myself." Teo had gone the color of the corridor light. "Eleven," he said. "There is a name on my wall that is not in my hand. I have been counting past it for four decades. It is the fourth from the bottom of the sixty-one." "Read it," Juni said. "Not on a bench with six people on it and a captain's finger on a page." He looked at Varga and then at Juni, and his voice went flat the way it did when the beacon was on. "I want it in the corridor, under the lamp, with a light on it, and I want you in the room when I read it, and I want the witness to be somebody who has to write it down."