第19章 The Shared Sky

They read the wall in shifts for six days, and the rule they set was that whoever read a line out loud also had to say whether the person was on a manifest, and that stopped being a rule about reading very quickly and turned into a rule about grief. Sandoval read the first three rows and wrote them on the tally board in block capitals, because her hand was the only one in the aft ring that had not been trained to let a number go. Juni read the fourth through the ninth and did not write, because after the first day she could not hold a number and a name in the same head at the same time. Teo read the tenth through the fifteenth and read badly and got faster. Kaneka read the rest. The nineteenth row is the one everybody went back to. Nineteen rows, and the rows were not years. Sandal had been the first person to say it out loud, on the second afternoon, and then she had sat down on an upturned crate and said it again to be sure. "These are not annual lists. There is no year on any of them and I have been waiting for a year on every one since eleven o'clock this morning." "Then what is a row?" "Look at the length." She had the tape out. "The rows get shorter going down. The first one is two hundred and six names. The last one is nine." Teo counted the last one with her and it was nine, and the nine were the oldest chiseling on the wall, the deepest-cut and the most weathered, and the first name on it was cut in a hand he knew. He knew it because he had watched the hand. He was nine. He had been in the aft ring of a ship that was being written off around him, and a man had put him on a crate so he could see and had cut a name while he watched, and the man had run his thumb along the line after it and said, to nobody, that there was a right way and a wrong way to do it and that the difference was mostly in the stopping. He had not asked whose name it was. He had not asked whose hand it was. He had been nine, and then he had been told there was a forward ring and a reallocation, and then he had gone into a pod at nineteen and come out at nineteen, and the name on the wall had stayed a shape he could see with his eyes closed. "Teo." Varga had come up the gallery at some point in the second hour and had not interrupted once, which was the single most frightening thing the captain had done in four months. "You have stopped reading." "I know that hand." "Then say whose it is." "It's my father's." Teo put his fingers on the stone. "He told me there was a right way to cut a name and a wrong way, and I have been trying for ten years to remember whether he was talking about the chisel or about something else." "Reichen, Dorothea," said Kaneka, from the sixteenth row. They all stopped. "Kaneka." "That is the name at the end of the twelfth row and it is in my hand for the date and it is not in my hand at all for the shape." She came over and stood beside him and did not touch the wall. "I signed her out of my shift in the sixth year. I wrote *temporary assignment* because that is the line you write when a detail has not come back. I have written it four hundred times in thirty-one years. It is the most expensive four words I know how to write." "And the year?" "Nine years before you were born," Teo said. Juni looked up from the board. She had been writing the dates off the eighteenth row and she had a date in her hand and she read it out. "There is nothing here after this." She put the chalk down. "The last name on the wall is cut nine days before the fleet was written off. Nineteen rows and then the stone." "Then that is a memorial." Varga said it flatly, the way he said the things he did not want to be argued with. "Nineteen hundred people who died on that ship, cut into her by somebody, in a hand a boy watched. It is obscene and it is a hundred years too late and it is a memorial. Which is more than most of us will manage." "No, Captain." Teo did not take his hand off the wall. "It is not a memorial, and I can prove it, and the proof is the twelfth row, and her." He said it fast, because he could feel it going the way a thing goes when a person has not had the argument yet. "Varga. Look at what is on this wall. Every one of these names is on a manifest. Every single one. We have spent four months counting the dead of two ships, and I have the counts for both, and I guarantee you that not one name on this stone is a name that is in either book." He put his other hand flat beside his first. "This is not a list of who died. This is a list of who is *accounted for*. They cut up the ones who were going to be lost so that whatever was counting could find them. It is a manifest. Somebody built a manifest out of a wall." The lamp under the deck of the Halcyon had been dark for four months. It came on at nineteen hundred and twelve, without a hand on any switch, and every lamp in that ring came on with it, and Teo felt it in his back teeth the way he had felt the count go up on the day they opened the corridor. "It is a queue," Kaneka said. "Somebody is writing the queue. And the last name on it was cut nine days before we gave up on this ship, so whoever was writing it left, or was taken, or ran out of stone." She turned around. "Captain, how many names are on this wall?" "Six hundred and eleven." "Six hundred and eleven people who were not lost," Varga said. He did not sound like a man who believed it. "The books say we lost two thousand nine hundred." "Then the books are the thing that is wrong," Teo said. "Or the books are the thing that was *written for* us, and this is the thing that was true, and it took us four months and a dead woman cut into a wall to find out which." They read the nineteenth row again at the end, all of them, standing in the cold with the lamps up, and the nine were old enough to have lost their edges and the ninth of the nine was a name that Juni wrote on the board in a hand that shook, because it was a name that Teo's father had cut when he was nine years old and had not cut the way he said was the right way. There was a space in the last line with the stone already dressed flat and waiting. Somebody had cut the space and had not cut the name. "Teo," Juni said, in the dark. "Who is it?" He looked at the dressed stone for a long time, and the lamps hummed, and out past the lock the Halcyon's forward ring went four hundred meters into a cold that had been waiting forty-one years for somebody to be in it.