第7章 The Sister's Story

The six of them worked it out in about four hours, and the working went faster than any of them expected, and only one of them enjoyed it, and that was Juni, and she noticed herself enjoying it and did not enjoy that. Sandoval pulled the Halcyon's launch record, which is not a secret, and it is a one-line entry, and it says the Halcyon left eleven days behind the Meridian with a complement of two thousand nine hundred and eighty-nine, which is eleven short of the yard figure and has been since the day the yard closed. Sandoval pulled the drive commissioning log for the first ninety days, which is not a secret either, and it is six hundred pages, and it is the only place on this ship where anybody wrote down anything the Halcyon actually did. "Fourth gate," Sandoval said. "At hour four thousand nine hundred, the deceleration suite dropped to a single chamber. Log entry says cascade failure and it has a duty officer's name on it and the name is a captain's name, not a duty officer's, because the captain came and signed it herself, which is a thing you only do for a real event." She turned the page. "After hour five thousand, nothing. Forty-one years of nothing. It is the largest single silence in the history of the fleet and I have never once been asked about it because everybody agreed not to." "What am I supposed to do with that?" "Nothing. I want you to have said it out loud, because I have been carrying it around on my own for six weeks and it is too heavy for one person, and it is exactly the sort of thing that gets carried around by one person until it turns into a decision made in a corridor by somebody who is frightened." Sandoval laid the log flat. "You are going to keep talking to that boy." "Yes." "Then I am going to help you do it properly, and I am going to keep a copy of every pass, and if anybody ever comes for you they come for both of us, and that is how I would like it, because I have been sitting alone in a comms booth for six weeks holding a piece of paper I did not write." Kaneka, who had not spoken for an hour, put both hands flat on the bench. "Row Nine," she said. "I have been on this ship thirty-one years and I have never once walked the length of the ninth row, because there is nothing down there, and everybody knows there is nothing down there." She looked at the back wall as if it were in the wrong place. "When I certified on the port loop, the man who signed my book was a pod rigger. He came up out of the ninth row to sign it. He had been a pod rigger for twenty-six years and he had never worked anywhere else, and he used to say a pod is a machine for not being a person, and he said it the way a man says a thing he is proud of." "Was it?" "It was a good job," Kaneka said. "And I have thought about that every week for six weeks, and I would like somebody to tell me now that it is still a good job." Nobody could tell her, and the six of them sat with the hum of the board and the meter going round. Juni put the headphones on and asked the boy to tell it again from the beginning, and he told it again from the beginning. The Halcyon coasted for six years on a burn that was never stopped. At the sixth year the deceleration suite went to one chamber and the ship did not slow, and the corridor went wrong, and the crew ran the numbers on the console and the numbers said that in four years the Meridian would be behind them in the dark and they would be heading out past everything any human being had ever surveyed. They put the crew under. All three thousand of them, in the pods on Row Nine, level by level, over eleven days, and the last name to go under was a hull rigger called Awad who had spent thirty years on the Halcyon's spine, and Teo had known him for six of those years and had been standing in the pod gallery beside him on the night the fourth gate went. He said the rigger checked his seals with a thumbnail, and he said it the way a person says a thing about somebody they loved, and Juni sat in a boot room above a pump house and listened to a dead man describe her father's hands. "It went out at the fourth gate," he said. "There is a redundancy in the fourth gate. There is a redundancy in all four. It is the redundancy that goes." "That is a sentence," Sandoval said, to nobody. "That is a sentence somebody taught him." "Second shift of Sable," he said. "It went out at the second shift of Sable, and the rigger was asleep, and I was in the pod gallery because I had got out to fetch a book and the power went and I was the only one who could hear the alarm over the pumps." "You were awake in the pod gallery with three thousand people." "I was awake for eleven days, and then I was awake for a very long time, and I do not know how long." And then he told her the number of gates the Halcyon had, and he said four, and Juni, who has a headset on and a whole career in listening for the sound a machine makes when it is lying, heard the half second where the carrier kept running and the voice did not come back. She took the headphones off and sat with it. "Teo." "I am here." "Read me your launch date again." The hiss. Six long, four short, and the boy's voice came back with the date on it, and it was the right date, and it was the right way of saying it. "Read me the name of the fourth gate." A pause, and this one had a floor in it. "Renn, Teodor Renn. Seventeen years old. Halcyon, out of the solar corridor, four one dash." "You said four gates." "I did." "You have said four gates since I started asking, and every time I ask you a number you say it, and there is a half second where the machine says the number and the voice does not say it." Juni laid her hand flat on the desk. "Somebody is reading you the questions." The carrier ran. When the voice came back it was different. The flat and formal cadence was gone out of it and there was nothing laid on top of it either, and it was the voice of a person standing in a small metal room with a hand on a grille. "Yes," Teo said. "There is an archive on this ship. It has a copy of me in it. It plays the copy every eleven seconds, out loud, in this room, so that I will not be the only thing making noise." A breath. "It has been doing that for a very long time. I answer it. That is how I know when it starts, because I answer it, and then it plays me again, and I hear myself say it a second time." "How long have you been answering it?" He thought about it. She could hear him thinking about it, the way you hear a person thinking when the room is very quiet and very far away. "Longer than I have been counting," he said.