The outbound roll came first, because the oldest debt in a book is settled before new business. The MV Tallow had cleared the Cairn with ten names on it. Nine signed back in. The tenth line went down in the same hand as the rest:
Cray, Master. Did not return. See the Warden’s finding.
Nothing else belonged in the space, so nothing else was written, and the roll was closed.
The ruled column
Then the arrivals register. A line for each soul: name, ship, date berthed, status, disposition. For crew, the disposition had always been a ship or the word transient. There was no column for what these people had gone and become, so Sesk ruled one, to the right of status, and printed the head plainly: Household.
The first entries. The Tallow’s engineer: provisional; her own, second ring. The two outbound hands: ship and date, closed. The Sethlan family off the Tallow: four names, four lines, and in the new column one entry serving all four — one household, the Sethlan sector — because that was how they had asked to be recorded, and it was not the register’s business to improve on them. Status, every line: provisional. The law behind the word did not exist yet. The leases had not waited for it.
Asked whether the column was now done for every ship, the loadmaster answered: for everyone who stays.
The child’s line
The last entry on the page took a strike-through. At the birth column the loadmaster’s hand went, out of long habit, to the station date; three figures in, he stopped, struck the line, and initialled the strike. Then he wrote it fair: Born aboard MV Tallow, under way, with the day-count out of the ship’s own log; and in the arrival column, the berth date from the station’s. Two dates, the width of a column apart, the Warden’s finding standing behind both, neither marked for correction. Status: provisional. Household: third ring, lease forty-one, with Lote.
The name at the head of the line, spelled as the lost Master had spelled it: Cray.
Her mother read the line twice, and put one finger briefly above the child’s name — over the ink, not touching it. She’ll want to see that someday. Where she starts.