Time Served

The yard between the dormitory blocks was the only place on Brack where the lights went fully off, and that was not a kindness; it was a budget. Velk had claimed the same corner of it, nine hundred-odd nights, whenever the roster and the weather let him: back against the water tank, boots on the painted line nobody repainted anymore, face to the sky.

The sky was the one thing on Brack worth the standing count.

Velk had begun the count on his first night, thirty-one years ago, because counting was how he settled. The whole yard sky was too many stars for one night, so he had cut it into twenty wedges off two gatepost stars, a wedge a night as the roster and the weather allowed, the full field turning over in a month and starting again, year over year, the way another man might have kept a calendar on a wall. The wardens’ bulletins, when they bothered, reported the sky “stable, within survey variance.” The bulletins were drawn from the survey feeds, and the survey feeds were drawn at the survey’s thresholds, and the survey did not see what Velk saw.

The count was down thirty-nine.

Not dramatic. Nothing you could point to at a window and make a warden believe. Thirty-nine faint stars in thirty-one years, gone so gradually that each one had spent seasons at the edge of being an argument with himself — low tonight, dust maybe, the yard lights bleeding — before it stopped being an argument. The bulletins had caught up with eleven of them. The other twenty-eight were his. He kept them in the same place he kept everything on Brack, which was in order, and told nobody, because there was nobody on Brack whose sky had thirty-nine fewer stars in it. Their sky had eleven fewer. It was the same sky. It depended what you came equipped to lose.

Tomorrow the lifter went up at second bell, and the carrier’s berth notice was under his mattress with his signature already on it, and the contract under that. Rigging work, the Cairn, the south apron gangs. Four rings going up and lines wanted men who could hold a count under load. The recruiter’s sheet had said growing station twice in one paragraph, which meant the writer was young. Things that were growing did not say so twice.

His children were not on the Cairn. His children were home, which was nine junctions from Brack as the routes now ran — had been six when he arrived; the schedule had been folding in on itself for years, call by call, the way the faint stars went, too slowly to argue about. From the Cairn, home was two junctions. That was the reasoning, all of it. He had explained it to Evesh in his last message in exactly that shape, two numbers, because Evesh trusted numbers, which she had from him, and Toln had not answered at all, which Toln had also, in a way, from him.

Velk did not think about whether he would see them again. He had a rule about that thought at night, and most nights the rule held.

Overhead the field stood in its thousands and did not care what it stood over — a works colony, a punishment, a man in a yard. Velk found the two stars he used as gateposts and started at the western one, counting inward, which was habit and settlement and, if he was honest, a kind of keeping company. He got to two hundred and eleven.

The lights-out bell went. The yard lamps came up to walking-level, and the sky thinned from a field to a scatter, and Velk stood a moment with the count unfinished before he went in.

There had been a thought forming under the count, one Velk had been circling for some nights now, about his granddaughters — he had none; Evesh’s messages mentioned nobody; it was a thought about the future, not a report — about what, exactly, would be over their heads by the time they were his age. He had not finished the arithmetic. The bell had a way of arriving at the same point in it.

Inside, the block ran its last-hour trade in whispers and lent tools, and Velk’s kit stood packed and strapped at the foot of his rack. On top of the kit, in a folder worn to the softness of cloth, were the messages — printed, the ones worth keeping, because terminal time was credit and reading was free.

Velk did not need the light to know them. The oldest was Evesh’s first, from her first school year, eleven lines, nine of them about a pond. The newest had come eight days ago and was four lines, and two of them were: Two junctions is better than nine. Send the sailing when you have it and I will do the arithmetic from this end. She signed as she had signed since she learned to sign, name and then the count of days since his last message, in brackets, like an invoice.

Toln’s messages stopped in the eleventh year. The last one said the weather had turned early, that the roof had held, that his mother was well, and that he had sat the second-cycle examinations. It did not say how they had gone. Velk had read it more times than he had read anything on Brack, including the notices, and had never worked out which line the stopping had been hidden in.

Their mother was well. The messages said so — Evesh’s, and before they stopped, Toln’s — in the same three words every time, for thirty-one years, which was an answer to a question he had stopped asking.

“Second bell,” Ames said from across the aisle, not a question. Eleven years across that aisle, and in eleven years Ames had never once asked him what he was in for, which made him the best company Brack had offered.

“Second bell.”

A pause the length of the block. “Who gets your corner?”

“The corner gets itself. It’s a corner.”

“No way to talk about an estate,” Ames said, and rolled over.

Sleep came badly, which meant it was an ordinary night. Brack ran a flat twenty-four-hour day, corridor to corridor, bell to bell. His body ran its own day, an hour longer, and had never once in thirty-one years been argued out of it. The two came into agreement every few weeks, and on those nights he slept like the drowned; the rest of the time his body reached lights-out an hour after the colony did, and he lay in the dark of the block listening to eighty men breathe, awake at the wrong point of a day that was not his, the way he had been for thirty-one years, the way he would not be, after tomorrow, ever again.

---

The release office opened at first bell and processed in alphabetical order, which put Velk near the end and gave him three hours on the bench under the notices. He read the notices. He knew them by heart. WORK IS CREDIT. CREDIT IS TIME. A man ahead of him in the queue — Garrick, from the crusher line, out the same day — turned around twice to say things a younger Velk would have needed to answer and this Velk let land and slide.

“You believe it’s a station,” Garrick said, the second time, as if the Cairn were a rumour Velk had fallen for. “Man does his time and then goes and lives in a pipe.”

“The pipe is hiring,” Velk said.

Garrick had a laugh like the crusher line. He went to a farm placement on the southern continent, same world, same sky, and Velk did not say the thing he thought, which was that Garrick would die under the sky he was standing under and thought that this made him the free one. It was not a kind thought, and he kept it.

At the property counter, Officer Dray worked through the sealed bag without hurry, calling each item against the intake sheet from thirty-one years ago in a voice that had done this ten thousand times and did it properly anyway, as if doing it properly were the same effort as doing it badly.

“Coat,” Dray said. “Boots, civilian. Reader, obsolete — you’ll want that replaced before the Cairn, they won’t carry the format. Tag, metal, personal.”

The tag came across the counter last, laid flat, turned the right way up. Dray did that for everyone; Velk had heard so from men released ahead of him. It was a strip of pressed alloy the length of a finger, stamped by hand, his name in his daughter’s stamping, the letters crowding at the end where the room had run out. She had made it in her first school year. He carried it eleven years before Brack; Brack kept it in a bag for thirty-one; the bag did what he could not, which was keep it from wearing any further down.

The officer who had taken it off him at intake had turned it over twice and asked what the stamping said, and Velk had told him, and the officer had written PERSONAL — SENTIMENTAL — NO VALUE in the column, which was two-thirds accurate.

“Thank you,” Velk said.

“Sign at the line,” Dray said. “Read it first. Nobody reads it.”

Velk read it, because he read things before he signed them; it was the one habit Brack had never had to teach him. The form was the standard release instrument, one page, the fields filled in the office’s block hand.

NAME: VELK. SENTENCE: SERVED IN FULL. BASIS OF RELEASE: EXPIRY. SPECIES: VEKHOL. AGE AT RELEASE: 141 Y (EARTH STANDARD). DESTINATION DECLARED: THE CAIRN (TRANSIT VIA LIFTER, SECOND BELL).

The form did not ask whether the sentence had been deserved. There was no field for it. He had been tried where it happened and served where they sent him, and both of those facts were on the page, and the third fact was not, because forms are for what can be established. There had been no field for it at the trial either, in the sense that mattered, and Velk had stopped visiting that room in his head in the second year. The question was never settled; it just did not compound. Time compounded. Distance compounded. The question cost the same every year and bought nothing.

Velk signed at the line. The stylus sat in his grip, lower thumb and two fingers, and Dray watched the signature happen with the flat professional patience of a man who had watched every kind of hand there was sign that line, and slid the page away, and said the only unofficial thing he said all morning.

“Long time, thirty-one years.”

“It was a smaller share for me than it would have been for you,” Velk said. “That is not the same as small.”

Dray considered that with his jaw, the way humans did their considering out where you could watch it. “No,” he said. “I’d say it isn’t. Second bell. Don’t miss the lifter; the next one’s Thursday.”

---

The transit hall was the newest room on Brack and still twenty years old, human-cut, the ceiling low enough that Velk stood at the window end where the frame gave him his height back. Through the glass the lifter sat on the apron in the early light being loaded with the things Brack sold — alloy billet, acid salts, the crusher line’s output in numbered frames — and twelve released men, one of them Vekhol, in a while, when the ramp crew got to the afterthoughts.

There were two hours to fill, and his own reader was thirty-one years obsolete, so Velk stood at the window and finished the arithmetic instead, because the bell that always interrupted it had rung for him for the last time.

The survey maps gave the general dark three hundred years, middle of the band. The near edge of the band was inside two hundred. The far edge was four hundred, and nobody serious was resting anything on the far edge anymore, the recruiter’s sheet for a growing station notwithstanding.

Velk was a hundred and forty-one. With luck, and rigging work was not luck’s favourite trade, he had another hundred and seventy in him.

Set a hundred and seventy against a near edge inside two hundred and the difference was thirty years of maybe. An argument, not a margin, and nobody serious would promise him the difference.

That was the fact he had been circling in the yard for some nights, and it sat differently in the morning, in a warm hall, a free man. There was no version of the count where the dark was somebody’s distant descendants’ problem, some strangers three lifetimes down who would have his name in a register and nothing else of him. If the pessimists had drawn the better map, the sky would go out while he was still in it — old, but in it, on a station or a world somewhere, with whatever was left of his eyes still equipped to lose stars the survey had not conceded yet. His whole species did their sentences in full.

And Toln. Toln was young. On the middle of the band his son would be old inside the deep of it, the sky down to embers and the survey pages thinning with every revision. On the near edge Toln would be there for the end of the count — alive when the answer to everything was: it went out. His son. Not a descendant, not a name in a register. The boy who had not answered his last message.

Evesh’s children, if Evesh had children, would take the stars the way Velk took the trial — as a thing that had happened, that older people carried strangely, that it was rude to press on.

Velk stood with that at the window for a while, at the count’s end, where the count had been trying to arrive for some nights, and the hall filled slowly behind him with men saying loud goodbyes to a place they hated.

And the arithmetic had not changed the morning. That was worth knowing. The lifter still went at second bell. The contract in his coat still said the south apron, gang rates, bunk included. Home was still two junctions from the Cairn and nine from Brack, and a message still went faster from a junction city than from anywhere on this world, and Evesh still answered inside a week, and Toln still might. A man could stand in the full knowledge of the end of the sky and find that it did not reach the front of the queue. The queue was: reader, bunk, gang, message, sailing. The dark could have him in a hundred and seventy years. The lifter went at second bell.

The Cairn had no sky. The recruiter’s sheet had not hidden it — rings, aprons, floodlight, a station. A man who had spent thirty-one years memorising a sky had signed for a place without one, and had thought about that longer than about the wage. But the reasoning was already done, and it had two numbers in it, and the count was closed regardless — at two hundred and eleven, one wedge short, which was how counts ended on Brack.

The farm placements were called to the ground transports first. Garrick came past with his bag over his shoulder, stopped, and put his hand out, and Velk took it — the first hand offered him in thirty-one years, the grip careful on both sides — and Garrick said, “Mind the pipe,” and was gone through the doors.

At the counter by the gate he bought tea with the first money he had spent in thirty-one years. The counterman took the coin, looked one beat too long at the hand that offered it, and made the tea neither well nor badly. Velk drank it at the window. It was the first thing in thirty-one years that nobody had issued him, and it was terrible, and he finished it slowly.

---

They called the lifter at second bell, cargo first, then the placements, then the transfers, and last, off the addendum sheet, the throughbound: “Velk. For the Cairn, by the Merridew Deep, seventeen days. Board.”

The ramp officer checked the name against the manifest without looking up, and then did look up, and found nothing on Velk’s face worth a remark, because Velk had spent thirty-one years making sure there was never anything on his face worth a remark, and stood aside to let him climb.

The berth deck had no windows. It had racks, human-cut, and a Vekhol notice riveted below the human one — his own people’s writing, block civil script, the first he had seen in thirty-one years that was not his own hand — stating the transit posture and the tie points, as if any Vekhol old enough to travel needed telling. Somebody at some line office had ordered that plate stamped, for the comfort of passengers the line might carry twice a year. Velk read every word of it. Then he took the end rack, and folded for transit the way his people folded, joint over joint, down into the shape that fit the racks of other species’ vessels — not the long diagonal almost-fit of a Brack bunk, heels through the end rail, that he had slept in for thirty-one years, but the true fold, the one his body had been waiting all that time to be asked for — and made fast at the tie points, and lay in the dark hold while the frames of alloy billet rang under the loaders’ binding, a sound with a count in it if you wanted one.

Seventeen days to the Cairn. Then the apron, and the gang, and a bunk, and a reader that worked, and a message home that said — he had it drafted already, three words, one of them a number — two junctions now.

The sky over Brack would lose its next star to the survey in its own time, and the survey would concede it in the survey’s time, and the wardens would post a bulletin, and no one in that yard would be equipped to argue. His count was closed at thirty-nine. Overhead, above the hold, above the lifter’s ceiling and the weather and the whole of Brack’s ration of sky, the field stood in its thousands minus what it had paid, and Velk lay folded in the dark below it, timing his breathing to the loaders’ rhythm, a free man on his own long day, and let the last bell of Brack ring for somebody else.