第5章 The First Conversation

She had thought about what that would mean, and she had not thought it through, and the post was in the corridor with a light on in it. Nobody was inside. The dish was where it should be. The board was on its standby panel with the port cover off and set down on the bench in the careful way that a person who has never taken it off sets it down, at a slight angle to the edge of the bench, in a way no technician would have done. The log book was open on the seat. It was a paper book, four years old, the kind the post still used because the board does not like paper. Someone had ruled a line and written on it in a small square hand that was not Kaneka's, in a hand that was not any of the six signatures she could remember from the shift boards, and the entry said this. *0417. Carrier-type repeating, 11.00 s, no traffic ID. Source bench-ward. Logged reviewed. Do not log further.* *0417. Same. Do not log further.* *0417. Same.* Four lines, four days apart, ending three weeks ago. She read it four times. The hand was not careless. The hand was somebody who knew exactly what a maintenance drive entry was and what an entry in this book was, and who had put the same instruction in the two books that a technician would look at, three weeks before she found a pattern of her own, in a room that has one chair. She did not photograph it. There is no camera on a maintenance deck and she could not have taken one off the shelf without a signature. She copied it into her own notebook, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, and then she copied it four more times and compared the five against each other, because a hand is not a hand until you have watched somebody write their name with it, and then she stopped doing that, because the copies were all identical and she had begun to be frightened of the copies. Then she went down to the water bay and put her hands in the reclamation sump until they went numb. And then, because the Meridian is one animal and because nobody aboard has ever kept a thing to themselves for a whole week without somebody noticing, the captain came down the corridor speaker two decks above her head, flat and unhurried, the way she always was. "Okonkwo. You are on the list for an eleven-oh-one in the morning. Bring the log you have been keeping, or bring nothing, and come anyway." "Captain, the log is a maintenance drive. It has a fault code on it. That is all it has ever had on it." "That is what I will read." A pause exactly one second long. "I have been doing this nineteen years. I have watched three hundred people come into that office and lie to me, and every one of them did it beautifully, and every one of them did it because they thought they were shielding somebody. Bring it. Come anyway." The speaker clicked off. Juni stood in the dark under the pump house with the reclaimed water still running off her hands onto the deck plates, and worked out that she had just been handed something no one on this ship was ever handed, which was a second chance to walk into a room and put a piece of paper on the desk. The captain had also, in the same breath and without any authority on earth to do it, released her from the post. She noted that. She did not mention it. She went back up and sat down in front of the transmitter and waited out the light time, because a boy was going to come back around every eleven seconds and she had work to do. The thing she had to do was to stop being the only person who knew. She had a name to give and no authority to give it with, and she was nineteen, and there is a particular kind of door in every ship for people who have found something and are not the kind of person who finds things. "Renn." "I am here. I am always here at the start, that is how the watch works." A rustle, and then a flat, close sound, like a hand laid flat on a grille. "You have gone quiet for four cycles. Something is happening." "When you key, say the ship names first." "That is what they taught. Say who you are before you say anything, because the first two words are the only two anybody writes down." "Then say them first." "I do say them first." A pause with something tired sitting in the middle of it. "It is the part after them I have stopped being able to start." "Teo. I am going to ask you things and I am going to write the answers down, and I am going to check them, and if you do not like the checking that is not a reason to stop answering." "That is fair. Somebody checked me once." A pause. "How many of us are on the Halcyon?" "Give me a number." He gave it to her without a breath in between, the way you give a number you have said a great many times. "Three thousand." She had the manifest in her head. Varga had not given her the manifest, but the number was in every corridor of this ship, it was on the wall outside the chapel, it was the number you said when somebody asked how many had gone. Twenty-nine eighty-nine, and forty-one years of people who were born here. "Nineteen hundred and eleven," she said. "People born on the Meridian since we left. That is not the number. I am not asking you to make it the number. I am asking you whether you know the number." "I know the number I am standing in front of." The hiss moved. "I know how many names are on the wall. That is a different number and it is the one I keep." "Teo, I am going to tell you something and I want you to sit down." "I am sitting down. I have been sitting down for most of a year." The voice went flat and formal again, the beacon voice, and then it came back. "Tell me." "I am nineteen years old. I was born eight years after we left Earth. There has been no year out here where a seventeen-year-old was seventeen years ago, because there has not been a you, because you left before I was born, and you have been saying seventeen to me for four days and you have no idea that it is a problem." The silence on the far end ran to the length of the carrier and past it. When he came back his voice was not steady and it was not pretending to be steady either. "Say the year again." "I cannot. We stopped at the corridor." "Then say how old I would have to be to make it work. Say it to me slowly." A sound like a chair being pushed back, and then nothing at all, and then, from very far down the hall of a ship that was not this one: "I would like that to not be the case."