第4章 The Captain's Ear

The trouble with an emergency burst is that it is the one transmission on this ship that is written to a permanent log whether or not anyone down there is awake to care. Juni came off third watch at 08:00, slept four hours in her bunk, and woke up to a note slid under the door, and the note was her own fault code number, which meant the system had matched her maintenance drive entry against the burst record and told somebody, and the somebody had asked to see her. Varga's office is on the command tier, and it 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 stand in front of a desk and find out what the ship is going to do about something. Juni had been in the room four times in her life. She knew the bench. She also knew, standing in it now, that the captain had put the blind on the forward port, which Varga never did, because the forward port was the only place from which you could see the waystation clock. "Sit," Varga said. "No. Stand. I'd rather watch you not sit." Juni stood. "Tell me what you heard and then tell me why you keyed an emergency burst about it." So Juni told her. The eleven seconds. The six and the four. The header, the beacon family, the time stamp eleven days forward of the Meridian's own clock. She told it the way she would have written it in a fault report, because she had decided on the way up that if she was going to do this then she was not going to do it beautifully. "And the burst was mine," she finished. "I keyed it. I know that is a one." Varga did not move for a while. She was fifty-four and had been captain for nineteen years and had the look of a person who has learned to spend nothing on her face. "Who else knows?" "Nobody." "Kaneka knows you were in the room." Varga turned one hand palm up, a small flat gesture, like settling a scale. "A filter swap. She wrote that down in her own book and she will remember writing it. Somebody in comms heard a wideband carrier go out at 04:19 and they will have a copy, and the copy has your burst ID in it, and the ID has a name in it, and the name is yours. How long do you think that stays true?" Juni had not thought about the ID. That was the actual shape of the mistake and she heard herself discover it out loud. "There is a hearing requirement," Varga said. "Any wideband carrier on an unnumbered band gets a review, and a review gets a name attached, and a name gets a question. I am telling you this so that you understand I am not being kind to you, I am being accurate. I do not have a way to protect you from having used the hardware." "Then tell them I lost the housing gasket." Varga almost smiled. "I will tell them you lost the gasket." The blind came off the forward port with a flick of two fingers, and behind it was the waystation clock, and the clock was counting a burn, and the burn was the whole reason the radiators were running hot and the port loop was weeping and Kaneka had put her name on it. "Sit down," Varga said. "You asked the emergency band a question and a seventeen-year-old answered it. Before I decide what to do about that, I am going to ask you a question, and I want an answer that is not the one you have been rehearsing." She waited until Juni was looking at her. "Did you recognize the beacon family, or did the beacon family recognize you?" Juni thought about the manual in her father's toolbag and about the two nights she had spent with it as a child. "The family," she said. "I needed the manual." "Then you are a rigger's daughter with a good ear, and not something worse." Varga opened a drawer and took out a paper log, an actual paper one, bound at the spine, older than anything Juni had seen in a compartment. "You know what is in here?" "No." "The Halcyon had three thousand souls on her." Varga put a finger on the page and left it there. "Two thousand nine hundred and eighty-nine, and the ones that are on this page are the ones who are not in the number, because the number is the manifest and the manifest is what we tell the families." She turned the page. "Ask your boy how many. Do not tell him the number. Ask him and see what comes back, and then come upstairs and tell me what came back and do not stop in a corridor to think about it." The paper went back in the drawer. The drawer shut with a sound like a hatch on a small boat. "Captain." Juni stayed standing, because the bench was for people being told something and she had not been told anything yet. "The loss report. There is a loss report on the Halcyon, and it is forty-one years old, and somebody signed it." "Somebody did." "You were on this ship." "I was on this ship." Varga turned back to the forward port, and Juni understood that the conversation was over, and then understood that it was not, because the captain turned back again. "Captain, I need to ask you one thing, and I need you to answer it in this room and not in a drawer." "There is no time for it." "There is about a minute. Light time is eleven minutes, I have nine of them left, and if I do not ask it in the next minute then I will spend five weeks not asking it, and I already know I would rather not know the answer, which is how I know I have to ask it now." Varga looked at her for a long moment, and Juni thought she was going to refuse, and understood at the same time that a woman who had been captain for nineteen years did not refuse things on principle. She refused them on arithmetic, and the arithmetic had just come out wrong. "You have forty-one years of a ship's memory," Varga said, "and I have forty-one years of one signature. They are not the same thing. The difference between them is the whole of what I have to say to you, and I cannot say it here, and I will not write it down, so I am going to give you a sentence to carry instead of a document." "Yes." "I was nineteen. I was on the watch and I was the one who read it. The reading took four minutes, and in forty-one years I have never once been able to get to the end of it." Varga did not look up. "Go to your bunk, Okonkwo. Do not go near the backward-look post until I ring you. And when you do go, you will find that I have had somebody in there already."