第17章 The Counting of the Ships

They took a lamp, a tape, and two witnesses into the aft ring at 22:00, and the witnesses were Sandoval and Kaneka, because Sandoval could write a number down and Kaneka had been in the book for six weeks and had earned the right to be in a room where a number was going to change. Teo read all one thousand eight hundred and forty-one out loud. It took from 22:14 to 01:40. Juni sat with the tape running and did not write anything down, because a person cannot listen to one thousand eight hundred and forty-one names and also keep a record, and so she was the one who listened and Sandoval was the one who wrote, which is how it had to be, and it was the last time in four months that the two of them were useful to each other in a way that did not need a form. At the end of it he turned around to the sixty-one. "Forty-one names in the square hand went with a crew out of the forward ring," he said. "Nineteen went. Eleven came back." He looked at Varga's page, which Sandoval had brought and laid on an upturned crate. "That is a different nineteen. I did not know that when I cut those forty-one." "You did not have anybody to tell you," Varga said. "I had a nine-year-old copy of me and a wall. That is everybody I had." He put two fingers on the sixty-one, on the fourth from the bottom. "This is the one." He said the name twice, once for the record and once because the first time he had got it wrong on purpose, to hear the shape of it. "Reichen, Dorothea. Cutter, second shift, forward ring transfer detail. Meridian crew, borrowed." Sandoval's pen stopped. "That is not a Halcyon name," she said. "It is cut into a Halcyon wall by a Halcyon hand, four decades before I ever came up out of a pod, in a row of forty-one that are all Halcyon, and it is written in the same chisel and at the same depth as the forty beside it." Teo took his hand off the wall. "I watched a man cut it. I was nine and I did not understand what I was looking at and I have understood it every day since." "Reichen," Kaneka said. "Dorothea Reichen. She was on my shift." The corridor was four degrees above freezing and it got about two degrees colder. "She was on my shift for nine months, in the sixth year," Kaneka said, "and then she went on a transfer detail to the Halcyon to cut seals, and I signed her out, and the whole shift came back eleven weeks later and she was not one of them, and I put that in the book as a temporary assignment because a temporary assignment is what you write when the detail has not come back yet." She took the page off the crate and looked at it. "Thirty-one years I have carried a temporary assignment." "She did not come back." "Captain." Kaneka turned around. "Your page says eleven came back. My book says eleven came back. Between the two documents there is a woman who was on my shift for nine months, and she is cut into a wall on a ship that nobody has been on, and she was written there by somebody who knew she was going." Varga did not answer. She stood in a cold corridor with a paper in her hand and she did not answer, and that was the answer. Teo went back to the wall and started at the top of the sixty-one. They got the total in the small hours with a strip of tape and a marker, and it took two attempts because the first time somebody counted a row twice, and Juni made them do it a third time, and the third time the strip went on at 05:12 and came off at 05:19. "Two thousand nine hundred and eighty-nine off the Halcyon," she said, reading off her own arithmetic, which was the only arithmetic in the room anybody trusted. "One thousand eight hundred and forty-one on the wall in the square hand. Sixty-one below the break, one of which is a person from the Meridian and forty-one of which are a crew that went out of a transfer boat and came back in one." She put the strip down. "One thousand one hundred and thirty-seven." Sandoval looked up from the book. "Say that again slowly." "One thousand one hundred and thirty-seven of the two thousand nine hundred and eighty-nine who came off that ship have never been on that wall, are not in the eleven that came back to us, and are not the sixty-one." Juni had been doing this since she was eight years old and it had never once taken her this long. "It is more than a third of the ship. We have a manifest with two thousand nine hundred and eighty-nine on it and a wall with one thousand nine hundred and two names on it, and if you want to know what we are actually arguing about on this ship, that is the argument. It is not the archive. It is the difference between those two numbers." "Then we count the pods," Teo said. They went to Row Nine in the morning. It is a kilometre of gallery with cold sleep in two ranks the entire way, and the pods have a status plate on the foot of each one with a lamp on it, and a lamp that is white means somebody is in it. "It takes eleven hours to walk," he said. "I know because I have done it a hundred and forty times." They did it in a cart with two techs from reclamation and a tally board, and Teo marked the plates as they went and Juni read the numbers off the foot of each pod out loud so the cart crew could write them, and it is a thing she will hear for the rest of her life, reading numbers off the foot of a stranger's bed in a dead ship. They came out at 22:00 on the second day and stood in the corridor and counted the tally board, and it was one thousand one hundred and forty-eight. "Eleven are stamped transferred," Teo said. "Eleven pods have a Meridian transfer stamp on the plate, and those are the eleven that came back to us, and they are empty." "One thousand one hundred and forty-eight, less eleven, is one thousand one hundred and thirty-seven." Juni sat down on the deck. "It is the same number. It is exactly the same number, and it took two days and it matched, and I do not know what to do with that." "You are going to tell the captain," Teo said, "and I am going to be in the room when you do, because a number that agrees with itself in two independent places is the most frightening kind of number there is. A number that disagrees with itself is a mistake." He crouched down in front of her and held out his hand for the tally board. "And then we are going to go back and find the one that is not like the others." They found it at 03:40, near the far end of Row Nine, at the inside corner where the gallery turns, in a pod that has a lamp on it and no plate. "There is no plate," Teo said. "Every pod on this row has a plate. I have read every one of them. This one has a lamp and a stencil and a stencil is a name." Juni put the lamp on an angle and read it upside down, the way her father had taught her to read a drawing that was not hers. "It says Okonkwo, Juni," she said. The lamp on that pod was white, which means somebody is in it, and the ship it belonged to was thirty meters away down a corridor with a warm light on, and the two of them sat on the deck of a dead ship's cold gallery and listened to a transmitter on the far end of the ship make six long and four short into the dark, in a room where the only living thing that could be making it was her.