第18章 The Answer in Numbers

They got the manual out of the chapel archive on the second day, because a beacon family does not decode itself and the Halcyon's copy had gone into a fire with the gate house nine days into the sixth year. Juni had a copy of it in her own notebook that she had copied out of her father's toolbag at the age of eleven, in pencil, on the back of a reclamation requisition, and she had read it about four hundred times in eight years and never once understood page eleven. "That is dots," Teo said, at 02:00 on the second night, with the book flat between them. "Six long, four short is the timing. It is not the message. The message is in the header and the header is dots, and the dots are a rigger's tally, and a rigger's tally is a number of items held by hand." "Held by hand." "A redundancy is a hand." He turned the page over and put his finger on the diagram, which is a box with two circles in it and a third circle drawn in outside the box, and the third circle is the one her father had cut into the second chamber of the fourth gate. "Everything on this page is a hand. Two hands in the box, one hand outside the box. Outside is not spare. Outside is the hand somebody is holding in case the other two go, and the man outside the box is a man with a meter, and his job is to be the last one to find out." "Who is outside the box in this picture?" "No name. That is the point of it. The drawing does not have room for a name." He sat back. "The payload is the count of hands outside the box. Six long, four short says I am here. The dots say how many of us are here that are not on the manifest yet." Juni laid the manual flat and read the dot field off the header of a captured frame at nine times slow, with a grease pencil on the back of her hand, the way she had read her own name off the pod stencil five hours earlier without knowing she was doing it. "One, one, one, three, seven," she said. "That is a tally, and a tally goes up in columns of five, and the column is the hundreds, so it is one thousand one hundred and thirty-seven." Neither of them said anything for about a minute. "That is the wall," Teo said. "That is the manifest. That is the pods. That is the number you got in two days out of a dead ship with a cart and a tally board." He put both hands flat on the book. "Juni, that number has been going out on the emergency band every eleven seconds for forty-one years, underneath the part I was answering." "And the count is rising." "The count rose by one the day we opened the corridor. I felt it go and I did not trust the feeling." He stood up and started to pace the length of the four hundred and ten meters, and came back. "I am going to say the hard thing. The copy in the archive is built out of me, and the archive is a machine that has been listening to me for four decades, and I have been in a room with it, and it is better at me than I am. If a machine that has only ever heard me can put a number on the wall that I never counted, then it has been counting something I do not have, and it has been counting it with the same arithmetic I would use, and it has been counting it correctly." "Somebody built it out of you with an instruction in it." "Somebody built it with an instruction in it," he said, "or the instruction is in the ship, or the instruction is in the part of me that has been in a pod for four decades, and I would like to know which, and I would like to know before I find out the other way." They went to Row Nine at 06:00. It is a kilometre of gallery with cold sleep in two ranks the entire way, and every pod has a status plate on the foot of it with a lamp on it, and a white lamp means somebody is in it. "It takes eleven hours to walk," Teo 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 down, 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 counted the board in a corridor, and it came to one thousand one hundred and forty-eight. "Eleven plates are stamped transferred," Teo said. "Those are the eleven that came back to us in Varga's boat, and those pods are empty, and I have checked every one of them, because an empty pod is the only good object I have ever seen in this ship." "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 took two days and it matched, and I do not know what to do with that." "Then we find the one that is not like the others." They found it at 03:40, near the far end of the gallery, at the inside corner where the row turns, in a housing that has a lamp on it and no plate and no manifold and no cold wall behind it. "There is no plate," Teo said. "Every pod on this row has a plate and I have read every one of them. This has a lamp and a stencil. 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." "Say the obvious one first, because I have been wrong in front of you before and you have had to do the work of proving it. Can a person be on a ship and in a pod?" "No." "That is what I thought." He was looking down the gallery, a kilometre of it, two ranks of white lamps, a great many of them. "Then there are two people in this gallery who are not here. The bank has been counting occupied since before I came up out of the first time, and it has never once been wrong in my hearing, and it says one thousand one hundred and forty-eight, and I have walked that gallery on foot a hundred and forty times and it has always said that." He put his hand on the housing. "Somebody has been getting up." The intercom took the rest. It was Sandoval, and she was not calling from her booth. She was calling from the aft ring, with her hand on a wall. "Okonkwo. Come to the aft ring and bring a light. Do not bring anybody. I want one person and I want it to be you." A pause with something in it, and then a completely different voice, the voice of a person who has stopped managing a sentence. "There is a mark on the wall that was not there in January. It is a row of names, and it is nineteen rows deep, and I have been standing in front of it for four minutes and I have not called Teo, because he is in a pod gallery four hundred meters away with a lamp and I would rather tell him myself, in a room, the way a person ought to be told." Juni was already walking. "Read it to me." "No. You read it. That is the reason I am not going to say it a third time." Juni was already walking. The aft ring is four hundred and ten meters and she did most of it at a run, and she ran the whole way with the lamp off because she did not want to arrive holding a light like somebody going down into a hold. Sandoval was standing in front of the wall with her own lamp set on the deck, pointing up, and when Juni came round the corner she moved out of the way without being asked, the way you move out of the way for somebody who has been walking toward a thing for four months. Juni put her hand flat on the stone under the first line of names. The chisel work was old. It was not Halcyon work either, and that was the first thing she registered, because she had spent eight years learning to tell one crew's chisel from another's and this was a third hand. "There are nineteen rows," Sandoval said. "I counted them twice and then I stopped counting, because the number stopped being the interesting part." Juni read the first line. Then the second. Then, because her eyes had gone the way eyes go in a pod gallery, all the way down, and the names went on being names, and the last line of the nineteenth row was cut deeper than the rest and had a space left in front of it where a name should have started. There was no name in the space. Somebody had cut the space and then had not cut the name. "Captain," Juni said. "There is a place at the end where somebody did not finish."