第9章 The Closing Distance

They made the rendezvous at the fourth watch on a Tuesday, which was a Tuesday in June, which was a month that did not exist on the Halcyon. The Meridian has been slowing for one hundred and nineteen days. That is the shape of the whole ship right now, the whole of the life of everybody on it, a long gentle deceleration to meet a waystation four months out that has been dark for six of the years any of them can remember, and every kilojoule the drive does has to come off a radiator, and the port radiator loop has been weeping since Kaneka put her name on it, and the loop is the reason the burn is a conversation instead of an order. "I can hold us," Varga said, in the room with the blind off. "I can cut the burn to a crawl and give back the loop and we will coast for eleven days and come out of it four hundred thousand kilometers long of where the waystation is, and the waystation does not care, and we will not be at the waystation." She put her finger on the plot. "Or I can hold the burn and we will be at the waystation and the port loop will be a hole in the ship by the second month, and I will be running a generation ship on a radiator I have already lost, and I will be doing that for whatever the rest of it is." "You are asking me, Captain?" "I am telling you what I am going to do and then I am going to have you tell me what I got wrong." Varga turned around. "You have been in that room for five weeks and I have had you watched, which I am aware is a thing you are going to hold against me, and I have had the room watched because I have a drawer with a forty-one-year-old annex in it and I have not opened it in nine years. I am not going to open it until somebody tells me the number on a wall." The plot showed two marks. The Halcyon had come in off a return trajectory that no one aboard had programmed, and the drive that turned it around had been throttled to the bottom of its authority and then some, and the thing was coming down the corridor with a velocity error of forty-one meters a second, which was nothing, and with a light time of under two minutes, which was not nothing at all. Light time is the whole conversation. That is the thing nobody tells you about a generation ship. Everything you say to another ship, you say to a version of the past, and everything you hear, you hear after it has already happened, and when the light time gets short enough to be comfortable you have been talking to somebody who stopped being the person you thought they were a long time ago, and both of you have to decide whether to keep talking anyway. Juni had a rule for the conversation and it was the only thing in five weeks that had gone right. She never asked him about the past. She asked him about the present, every time, and she made herself ask two questions she already knew the answer to at the start of every pass, so that she could tell whether the copy was playing or he was. "Teo. What is the light time?" "Under two minutes now." "What did you have for dinner." "I did not eat today. I do not eat most days. I eat on the day I put a name up, and today is not that day, and I would rather not talk about it." And the second question, the one that never varied, the one she had made herself ask on the first night and had asked on every single pass since: "What is the light time?" "Under two minutes." Two answers, in the same voice, nine seconds apart, identical in the intake before the words and identical in the way the last two words lifted, and the same lift she had heard in the six long tones on the very first night in the boot room when the transmitter was being asked for more than it had. She took the headphones off and sat with the meter running. "You are breathing the same." "Yes." "Teo, the human being, is breathing the same as the recording, and the recording is a copy, and the copy does not get tired." She held the two facts in front of each other in the dark room. "Which of you am I talking to right now." "You are talking to me," he said. "And the copy is in the room with me. And we are very much alike, because I have had nothing to be unlike it with, and it has been a very long time, and the reason I answer it every eleven seconds is that if I stop, then the only voice in this ship is mine, and I do not know what I am after that." "Right." Juni stood up and turned the board over to the plot side, where the two marks were getting closer to each other, and the closer was a number, and the number was a thing that could be seen. "Teo, I have to go and tell my captain that the next thing that happens in this is going to happen in front of human eyes." "Wait." His voice came up half a tone and stayed there. "Before you go. Look at us. Not with the instrument, look at us, with your eyes, the way your father would have, and tell me what you see, because I have been alone with a number for a very long time and I would like somebody to say it out loud before the light time goes to nothing." She had not thought about that. In five weeks of the fastest work of her life she had not once thought about the fact that she had spent all of it on a number. She walked down to the forward gallery, and the forward gallery was full at second watch, because the whole third shift had come up to look at two marks on a plot that had been two specks on a plot for forty-one years, and she got them all to shut up. Then she looked. It was a smudge. It was a smudge that got a little less of a smudge every hour, and the shape in it had a straight edge on the left and a ragged one on the right, and the straight edge was the edge of a radiator, and the radiator was bigger than anything she had built or repaired or crawled inside of in her life. "A straight edge means a fin," she said, to a gallery full of people who had gone very quiet, and then she went to find the captain.