Chapter 1 — WHAT REACHES IT

Porhal’s two letters went first, because he had asked for two and had asked for nothing since.

F-R-A-M-E, and then the gap. A gap that was not obviously a gap arrived at the far end as a letter nobody had sent, so it had to be counted out to a number while both arms did nothing. Then S-T-O-P-P-E-D.

Twelve letters. Sarah gave them the better part of half an hour and got them out clean, and she did it kneeling with her shoulder doing the work, at the place low on the after bulkhead where a frame came down through the deck and went on going aft into the parts of the ship nobody in this compartment had seen since. There were three people alive at the other end of that steel. Hitting it was the only way to reach them, and it cost a letter’s worth of somebody’s arm at each end, and a letter was six blows on average and sometimes ten.

Rourke wrote the sending down as it went, because Sarah could not swing and write in the same watch and had not been able to for days.

“He’ll want it in the order he can use,” Rourke said. “Frame first, then your accounting. Not the other way round.”

“That’s what he asked for.”

“Then that’s what he gets.”

The far end came back with two blows, which was yes. Then it gave her nothing, and the nothing was the far end waiting.

Sarah put the maul head down on the deck between her knees and got the wrapping off her right hand and looked at it. It was a jacket sleeve that had been round the maul shaft until there had been a better use for it, and under it the pad below her fingers had opened again in the same place it had opened at the end of the last sending and had not been anything like closed when this one started. Nothing to be done about it. There was a first-aid box in the drill locker with everything in it that was supposed to be in it, and none of it was any use to a hand.

There was nothing else in the island for her to work. The after board was off at the panel and the folio was back in its drawer under the roll of tracing paper, and what was left of the job was six blows a letter.

“Do you want a stretch off it,” Rourke said.

“I want the accounting sent while he’s still sitting at his end of it.”

“That isn’t an answer to what I asked you.”

“No, ma’am.” Sarah wound the sleeve back on with the dry part over the pad. “I’ll go until it’s out and then I’ll want two hours.”

---

The accounting came to sixty-one letters, and Sarah said she could do forty.

“Forty gets him the drift and not what it cost.”

“Forty gets him it tonight.” Sarah had the maul across her knees and was not looking at Rourke while she said it. “Sixty-one, I stop somewhere in the middle and he sits there with half a sentence for an hour.”

“Then stop in the middle.”

“That’s not—”

“He put heat out of a compartment he is living in to buy an hour of your instruments, and you told him beforehand it wouldn’t be enough, and he sent it anyway.” Rourke came down onto her heels beside her, which she did not do often, and which meant she was not going to be argued out of it. “He gets the whole bill. You can shave the next one.”

So it went out in full. Sarah’s swing started arriving short somewhere past the twentieth letter, and she did not say so, and Rourke took the maul off her without asking and did the middle third herself, and her blows were slower and better and did not tire in the same place.

B-E-N-T A-N-D S-T-O-P-P-E-D. D-R-I-F-T G-O-O-D A-N-D W-O-R-T-H N-O-T-H-I-N-G. T-H-A-T I-S A-L-L Y-O-U-R H-E-A-T B-O-U-G-H-T.

The far end took it and sat on it.

Then, unasked, five letters came back down the frame, slowly, with the gaps made long the way he made them long when he wanted a beginner to get every one.

I K-N-E-W.

Sarah wrote it on the sheet in the column where the sendings went and left the margin beside it empty, because there was nothing to put in a margin that would not be her deciding what a man a hundred and some feet aft of her had meant, and she had rules about that.

---

“Now the air,” Rourke said.

What kept the four of them breathing sat in the deckhead over the after end of auxiliary control: a blower about the size of a bread tin, and a bed of absorbent behind it, wired into whatever the plant aft was still making. It had been put there when the ship was built, for the number of people who stand a watch in one compartment. Nobody in the island had ever had the cover off it. It made a note, and the note had not changed, and that was all anybody in the island knew about it.

Matsuda came up on the ring at the top of the hour before anybody could start, with the gland gauge in her voice the way she gave it, the number first and nothing round it.

“Same. Hasn’t moved. That’s every reading since the plug went in.” A hiss, and the sound of her getting off her elbows at the far end of the flat. “And put it on the sheet that I crawled that twice and the second time was because I didn’t believe the first one, and there was nothing wrong with the first one.”

“Noted,” Rourke said. “Come aft. We’re spending letters on the air and I want you in the compartment for it.”

Matsuda came aft. It took her a while, because the port flat had to be done on the belly with the lantern pushed along ahead, and the deckhead came down at the middle third and stayed down for the length of a man.

The four of them had never been in one place at one time and never would be, because Porhal could not be moved and everything that went to Porhal went down the flat in somebody’s hand or somebody’s teeth. So the three of them sat in auxiliary control with the used side of a roll sheet turned over and a stub of pencil, and the fourth was a hundred feet forward under a screw shore, and Rourke crawled the flat twice in the course of it and came back both times with something that had not been on the sheet.

Sarah wrote the question she actually wanted first, because a thing you have not written down cannot be cut.

AIR IS WORSE. THERE ARE FOUR OF US IN A HUNDRED FEET OF VOLUME AND THE FORWARD END HAS NO SUPPLY. HOW LONG WILL THE BED CARRY IT AND HOW WILL WE KNOW BEFORE IT GOES.

“A hundred and twenty-seven letters,” Sarah said. “That’s two watches on the maul before he’s said a word back, and he’d be answering it for days and his people wouldn’t be doing anything else.”

“Then cut it.”

“Let him cut it. He’s the one who knows which half of it he can answer.”

“He can’t cut what he hasn’t got.” Rourke pulled the sheet round on the ledge. “Cut it.”

They cut it. It went badly and it took most of an hour, and it went badly because every word that came out took a piece of the answer with it, and none of the three of them could prove which pieces.

Matsuda took the biggest single bite out of it and took it early.

“The feet come out. All of it comes out.” Matsuda had the sheet up near the lantern glass with the light cupped down onto it. “Kwan wrote the card in that locker. Two springs back, in her own hand, and every item on it was in the locker when the Commander went through it. She’s been in this compartment with a tape. She knows the volume of this island to the foot and she’s sitting three feet from him.”

“She knows what it was.”

“She knows what it was, and what’s changed is doors, and doors are the one thing we’ve already sent them.” Matsuda put the sheet down. “That’s my half. Whether he asks her is his problem. I’m not sending a man a number he’s already got in the room with him.”

Sarah struck the geometry out and the question came down by twenty-two letters in one line, and she sat with that for a moment, because it was the cheapest twenty-two letters anybody was going to find and she had not found them.

Rourke crawled the flat with what was left of it.

What came back down the flat with her was a word taken out and a word put in, and neither of them was what Sarah expected.

“He wants worse off it,” Rourke said. “His reasoning is that worse is a comparison and we’ve got nothing on the other end of the comparison, so what the far end gets is a man’s opinion of a smell. He says send him the thing that’s actually happened.”

“Which is what.”

“Two people in this compartment have had a headache for a week.”

Matsuda did not say anything for a moment, and when she did she said it to the bulkhead rather than to either of them.

“I told you on an open circuit that mine wasn’t a reading and I meant it. I don’t have a baseline, I’ve been on my elbows in a hot flat every hour for two weeks, and I get a head off that in ordinary service on an ordinary ship. If that goes down the frame as a measurement then somebody at the other end starts doing arithmetic on it and the arithmetic will be wrong and it’ll be wrong in a direction that suits us.”

“Then it doesn’t go as a measurement,” Rourke said.

“It’ll be read as one.”

“Not if it’s the only sentence on the sheet with no claim on it.” Rourke took the pencil off the ledge. “TWO HEADACHES. Twelve letters. No rate, no duration, no since-when, nothing about who. He can do what he likes with it and he’ll know exactly how much we’ve told him, because we’ll have told him almost nothing and he’ll be able to see that we have.”

Matsuda did not answer for longer than was comfortable in a compartment that size.

“Twelve letters and no claim on it,” she said. “All right. That’s a fact and I’ll send a fact. Put it in front of the questions, not after them, so it doesn’t read like the answer to one.”

It went out as sixty-four letters.

AIR BAD. FOUR. ONE BED. FORWARD END NOTHING. TWO HEADACHES. HOW LONG. HOW WILL WE KNOW.

---

The sending took the rest of that watch and a good part of the next one.

There was a way of doing it that had come out of the first week and nobody had designed it. Sarah swung until her hands stopped arriving where she was aiming, and that came earlier every day and came earlier again that watch. Rourke took it and swung with a shorter stroke and a longer gap and made fewer letters an hour and fewer mistakes. Sarah counted and wrote, and drank when the breaker was put at her elbow and not before, and got the wrapping off and wrung out and back on twice.

Matsuda took a stretch in the middle of it, and it was a bad idea, and both of them had known it might be.

“Say again,” Matsuda said, off the frame, after the far end sent the run — the long unbroken string of blows that could not be a letter in a five-by-five square and therefore meant only one thing.

“He’s lost you.”

“How much of me.”

Sarah went back down her own written column with her thumb under the line.

“Nine letters, and I can see where it went. Your gaps came in under the spacing about halfway and they never came back out of it.”

“Then put nine letters on the sheet against me and don’t put them against the ship.” Matsuda handed the maul over and shook her hand out and did not make anything of it. “I can fit a card edge in the dark. I have no business on the end of a hammer, and that just cost nine letters of somebody else’s arm.”

“Take the ring,” Rourke said. “Bishop, from forward, and go slower than you want to.”

They did the nine again, and then the rest.

Near the end of it the turn of the day came, and the far end stopped in the middle of what it was doing and sent the group.

It was one thing at the turn of the day, from them, and one thing back from this end, and it was not a word and did not carry anything and never had. Rourke had asked what it was for on the second day and had been told nobody knew, and had allowed it, and had not asked again.

Rourke put the sheet down, took the maul out of Sarah’s hands without saying anything about it, and sent the group back. Four minutes of arm, at a point in the sending where four minutes was expensive, and nobody costed it out loud.

Then Rourke went along the bulkhead to the old drill plate above the plot and put the day’s mark under the row of them with the point of the spike.

“They’ve got the same count I have,” she said. “Fourth time we’ve agreed.”

Forward of them the standby set put the distress out on its own account, the way it had every fifty-one minutes since the first night, and nothing had ever come back down it, and the marks under the drill plate were what a day in this island came to.

“Ma’am.”

“Get your sixty-four out. He’s eaten and he’s got nothing else to do.”

Matsuda made a noise on the ring.

“Item three,” Matsuda said.

“Go on.”

“For the man who designed the drill ration block. Item three is that he put a serrated edge on the wrapper so a person could open it with cold hands, and it doesn’t tear on the serration, it tears across the middle, and I have watched a Commander of the fleet open one with her teeth.”

“Twice,” Rourke said.

“Three times, ma’am. I didn’t see the first one, I heard it.”

The last of the sixty-four went out a while after that, and Sarah wrote the time she had finished against it and put the maul down flat on the deck rather than standing it against the frame, because standing it against the frame meant it slid off in the night and woke whoever was asleep.

---

The answer did not come all at once and there was a long gap in the middle of it that had nothing to do with the code.

It came in four pieces over the top of the next watch, and Sarah sat through the gap with her palm flat on the frame and sent nothing into it, because a man who stops in the middle of a thing has a reason, and there was nothing she could put into the gap that would be worth more than the reason.

The first piece was eleven letters.

T-H-R-E-E A-T R-E-S-T.

Sarah wrote it and read it and did not believe she had it, and spent four letters checking, which was the most expensive four letters of the whole exchange and she would have spent eight.

F-O-U-R.

One blow came back. No.

“The bed in this compartment takes what three people put into it, at rest. There are four of us.” Sarah kept her voice at the level she used for figures, because there was no other level worth using. “And Porhal isn’t resting more than he’s resting and he can’t be moved, so the fourth one isn’t a body I get to allocate.”

“Is he sure.”

“He’d have sent a bracket if he wasn’t. He sent me a bracket the last time I asked him something he couldn’t stand behind.” Sarah went back over her own column anyway, twice, because the whole value of a channel that costs arms is that nothing on it gets read in a hurry. “It’s a flat statement and he’s had two days to think about it. He’ll have got the volume off Kwan and he’ll have counted the doors we told him about, and he’ll have used the worst case, because that’s what he does.”

The second piece came after the gap and it was seventeen letters and it was worse.

O-N-L-Y W-H-A-T R-E-A-C-H-E-S I-T.

Sarah put the pencil down.

“Give it to me,” Rourke said.

“The bed does what it does to the air that gets to it. Nothing gets to it from the forward end.” Sarah made herself go straight on to the part that mattered, because the part that mattered was Rourke’s and not hers. “We opened this island into one volume so that a man with no supply wasn’t alone in a compartment with a weld over his head. It’s one volume because we can crawl it. Nothing about the air was ever joined. It’s a compartment with a bed in it and a hundred feet of dead pocket hanging off the front, and the further forward you go the less of you that bed has ever had.”

Rourke stood over the sheet and read the seventeen letters, and went on standing over it after there was nothing left on it to read.

“It was my order.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And it was the right one and I’d give it again.” Rourke did not move her eyes off the sheet. “Now it’s got a price on it and I’ll pay that. What does it buy me back if I put the doors in?”

“There are no doors. The forward one’s on the deck and the rest are chocked, and Kwan hasn’t got a hinge in the island and the chocks went in with a maul.”

“I know what’s in my own island, Bishop. I’m asking whether it would work if it were possible, because I’m trying to find out what kind of a thing I’m being told and I can’t get that off you unless I ask you a question you can answer.”

“Then no. Shutting the flat gives the bed a compartment it can hold and gives him a coffin.” It came out with an edge on it and Sarah did not go back and say it again more politely, because Rourke had asked a clean question and the answer to it was clean. “I’d want somebody with lungs to tell you the rest of that and there isn’t one aboard this island.”

The third piece was twenty-one letters and then fifteen more, and the fifteen cost him something, because nobody had asked him for them.

N-O W-A-Y T-O K-N-O-W F-R-O-M I-N-S-I-D-E. D-L-A-M-I-N-I S-A-Y-S S-U-M-S.

“That’s the corpsman,” Sarah said. “He’s spent fifteen letters telling us whose opinion it is.”

“He’s spent fifteen letters telling us it isn’t his.” Rourke read it again. “Sums.”

“Arithmetic goes before anybody notices anything else. You can’t smell it, you don’t get short of breath first, and the headache comes with a lot of other things. What goes is your judgement, and the thing about judgement going is that the instrument you’d use to notice it is the thing that’s gone.” Sarah stopped, and marked the boundary because it had to be marked. “That last part is mine and not his. He sent three words. I’m giving you what three words in that order have to mean, and I could be reading more into them than he put in.”

“Then I’ll ask him again tomorrow with different letters.” Rourke put the sheet with the others. “But you’re not wrong about the shape of it, because I’ve watched a man put a bar down and sit on a deck and I couldn’t have told you the difference between that and a man who’s been up for two days.”

The fourth piece was the same length as the second and it was not an answer.

W-H-A-T A-R-E Y-O-U D-R-A-W-I-N-G.

“He’s costing the plant,” Sarah said. “He can’t tell anybody what it’ll carry until he knows what’s hanging on it, and the only thing hanging on it that he can’t see is us.”

“And what are we drawing.”

“I don’t know, ma’am. There’s no meter on this compartment and there never was one, and the man who’d have known off the note it made isn’t here.” Sarah looked at the deckhead over the after end, where the blower ran, and it was running, and the note it made was higher than the trunking’s had been and nobody left in the island could have named the interval. “I can give him a list of what’s on. I can’t give him watts. The list runs to about forty letters and there aren’t forty letters left in either of my hands.”

“Then he gets it tomorrow.” Rourke took the ring off the ledge. “Write it tonight while you can still count and send it when you can lift the thing. Now put that down and come here, because I’m about to unmake something I made and I want you both in front of me when I do it.”

---

“The order about your own heads is off,” Rourke said. “Mine. I gave it, it was right when nobody could check anything, and it’s wrong now, because a man aft of us has just told me the only instrument in this island is the four of us and I’ve spent two weeks telling you not to read it.”

Matsuda was on the ring.

“Here’s what replaces it. Nobody reads their own. Twice a watch you get a sum off somebody else and somebody else marks it, and the mark goes down in the hand of whoever did the marking, not whoever did the sum.” Rourke let that stand. “I don’t want anybody’s own hand on the paper that says they’re fine. That’s somebody standing witness to themselves, and I’ve got no use for it.”

“That’s not the hard part,” Matsuda said, off the ring, flat as a plate. “The hard part is what the marker does when it comes out wrong. Because the first person it comes out wrong on is going to say the light was bad, and the light is bad, and they’ll be telling the truth.”

“That happened,” Sarah said. “A seven under that lantern, read back as a one, in the fourth column of a reduction. It’s written at the top of the page and the page is under the table.”

“I know it is. I’m the one it’s a warning to.” Matsuda’s voice went on the same. “So the sum’s got to be one nobody has to read off a lamp. Out loud both ways — the sum given out loud, taken back out loud, and the marker writes it after. Otherwise you’re testing the lantern.”

Rourke looked at the deckhead for a moment.

“Do it that way,” she said. “Bishop, set them. Not clever ones. The kind a person does without noticing they’re doing it, so that the day somebody notices, that’s the finding.”

“Ma’am.”

“Second thing. The sleeping comes off the after third of the flat.”

Sarah had it a beat later than she should have, and the beat was long enough for Rourke to stand there and watch her get to it.

“We’ve been lying on the intake.”

“We’ve been lying on the intake since the second day, by common consent, because it was the warmest end and it was nearest him and nobody ordered it and nobody was wrong.” Rourke went along the bulkhead to the drill plate and did not touch the spike this time. “Now the bed only gets what reaches it and we’ve had four bodies lying under the thing that does the reaching. Sleeping goes forward of the instrument space. All of it. Tonight.”

“That’s past the men.”

“It’s past the men.” Rourke did not put anything round it. “I’ll take the far end of it and I’ll take it tonight and every third night after, and I’ll hear it from anybody who wants to tell me it’s the wrong call, and I’ll hear it after they’ve moved.”

Nobody told her it was the wrong call.

“Third thing, and it’s yours, Bishop, and you’ll like it least. The frame’s on a ration.” Rourke came back and stood over the sheets. “One sending a day. I set what’s in it. If it’s my order going down it, I swing it, and if you’ve got a question of your own you’ll have to tell me why it’s worth more than the one I’ve got.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You want to argue with that.”

“No.” Sarah put her hands flat on her knees, palm up. “A person on the end of a maul in a hot compartment for two watches is worth three of a person lying still, and that’s about as near as I can get to it without a figure. The channel’s the biggest thing in this island that we choose to run. I’d have got there tomorrow and I’d have got there because I couldn’t lift the maul.”

“Then that’s the first sum you’ve set anybody today and you set it for yourself.” Rourke made a short sound that was not a word. “Last thing, and it’s a job with a name, and it goes with the gauge because the gauge is already crawling that flat. The canvas roll goes on the line and the line goes forward and comes back. Every hour, both ways, the length of it, hard enough to move something.”

“That’s a man’s air to move air,” Matsuda said.

“It is. And it’s the only pump in this island, and it’s got two legs.” Rourke put the coil of line into Sarah’s hands. “Bishop’s got the first one, because Bishop’s going forward anyway to tell him a number he’s going to want in his own ear.”

---

The port flat had to be done on the belly with the lantern pushed along ahead of her and the line round her wrist and the roll dragging behind, and the roll came through the narrow third of it in stages, with a shoulder under it and a good deal of swearing.

The three men were along the outboard side where they had been put. There was room to go past them and no room to go past them without touching. Sarah went past them.

Porhal was where he was, on the canvas pad against the forward bulkhead, under a gland weld standing on a screw shore made out of a shelf plate, a canvas parcel and most of a tin of tallow. Somebody had moved the gauge again since the last time, further down and out to his left.

“You have brought the ship’s bedding forward,” he said. “I am going to want an explanation of that and I would prefer it before the arithmetic.”

“It’s a fan.”

“It is a roll of canvas on a rope.”

“It’s the only fan in the island.” Sarah got herself down onto her hip with her shoulder into the rack, because a crouch had stopped being a thing she could hold. “Here’s the number and it isn’t a good one. The bed takes what three of us put in it, at rest. There are four of us. And it only works on the air that gets to it, and nothing from this end gets to it, and it never has.”

Porhal considered the deckhead for a while.

“How much of that is his and how much of it is yours.”

“Thirteen letters and seventeen letters are his. The reading of the seventeen is mine and I have not tested it.”

“Then it is not tested.” Porhal moved one hand a little way and stopped moving it. “You have a claim, and it is a good one, and it is worth exactly what an untested claim is worth, which is that it tells you what to do next and nothing at all about whether you are right. What would change if you were wrong?”

“If the seventeen means something else, then dragging this thing up and down the flat every hour does nothing except cost you the person doing the dragging.”

“Then that is the observation.” Porhal turned his head the small distance he turned it now. “Take it forward and back and I will count. I have been under this shore since the deck went over with one gauge to look at, and the gauge has not moved once, and I would like something in front of me that might. Count how long you take. I will tell you tomorrow what arrives here and how long after you have gone.”

“You’ll be counting in the dark.”

“I have been counting in the dark since the deck went over. You are all extremely noisy and none of you knows it.”

Sarah took the roll forward as far as the bulkhead let her and then turned round in a space that was not enough for it, and dragged it back down the flat with the line over her shoulder and the lantern left standing where it was so that she had both hands.

It came past the three men. It came past the crushed rack and under the low third where the deckhead came down, and the canvas took the whole width of the flat there and had to be worked through a foot at a time, and on the other side of the low third the air that came with it was thinner and colder and moved on her wet forearms for about the length of two breaths and then stopped.

Behind her at the forward end, Porhal was counting, out loud, in an even voice, and had not got to fifty.

Sarah put the roll down at the after end of the flat, stood in the doorframe the door had come off, and turned it round and went again.