Opening the book…
Chapter 1 — The Shed Calf
The calf was the better part of a kilometre end to end, dirty ice and black grain, shed off the out-quarter’s head at the harvest run when the head split on a live jet. It had gone away from the run’s line turning and was turning yet, venting from the head and from a dozen lesser places that made a haze of frost about it. It had a harvest gang stranded on it, clipped to the drum frames at the two low beds, and the quarter’s screens wound and pinned beside them, and all of that had been true since the run’s yesterday.
It went over its own short day in six minutes and a little, and each time the broken scarp at its head came round into the sun a jet lit off it — bright at the root, white where the light caught the grain in it, running straight out into the dark until it was too thin to see. It had done that every turn since the second bell, to the quarter-turn, and it was the last thing about the calf the season book still had right.
“Rate’s one in six, that’s one in six,” Kajola said, at the ranging board. “Head jet lights on the sun, dies by the quarter-turn. I’m writing.”
The run’s tug stood two lengths off the calf’s dark side with the stump of its line wound home. It had put the line on in the book’s first window, and the calf had taken the line round with it and parted it at the fairlead the first time the head jet fired, and the tug had nothing heavier to put on. It was a drum tug, built for walking calves onto the run’s line half a turn at a time, and the tug’s master had said as much on the counter channel without being pressed to.
“Kestrel, run’s counter.” Gorrie, the season-warden, flat as a board entry. “Book gives you the long quiet from the half-bell. Head jet spent by then, flank faces spent since the morning, nothing due to light again before the head takes the next sun. That’s your window and it’s the only one in the book today.”
“Counter, Kestrel. The boat will be on the pole inside it,” Rahimi said. “Where’s your gang?”
“Low beds, all of mine clipped to the frames and riding it. They know the count out there better than the book does. Get your pins in and get lines on, and then we’ll talk about what comes off.”
“We’ll talk about it now, if you like.”
“You came in off the long dark asking whose bookings watered here these two years past,” Gorrie said, “and the season broke before anybody could get a book open for you. Do this and you’ll get it. Every taking, two years of it.”
“There’s plant going in on that booking, at the far end of a road nobody’s walked, and the hulls that carried it drank at this run. We’d have done it anyway.”
“You’d have done it anyway. Do it, then.”
Wells had the counter’s day sheets spread against her own at the chart table, going down the jet columns with a pen, hour against hour, and saying nothing. Ranging roads and saying whether they would carry was her work aboard, and past the far end of this run lay one nobody had ranged at all. The folded sheet in the inside pocket of Rahimi’s coat crackled when he leaned past her to the board.
“How many days does that sheet give us,” Wells said, without looking up from the columns.
“Same as it gave us at the boundary. It’s a clerk’s paper. It doesn’t know there’s a season broken here.”
“Then it’s the only thing at this run that doesn’t.” She marked a jet hour and went on to the next. “I’d want the last of those lifts still standing when we get there. Somebody’s gear on that ground and not a swept pad.”
Down at the boat flap Denn had the tally board on his hip and the plate light on. “Pin case, one. Drivers, two. Coil, three — rated, ours, it comes back. Coil, four, the same. Long bag, five, that’s Tavish’s. Bottles, six, and I’ll have the empties back to write off against the fulls, because bottles walk.”
“Bottles walk,” Abrezh said, swinging the sixth piece through the flap. “On a harvest ground they sprint. Pin your second coil high, Tavish. A harvest hand will stand on anything that lies flat — they’re drum country out there, gear that winds in slow and gives a man all day to get off it. Nothing on this boat gives anybody all day.”
Tavish took the coil, pinned it high, and went on checking the drivers.
Two of the Mireth party stood on the gallery above the flap, out of the way, coats on, watching the coils go through the way tradespeople watch other people’s rigging. Neither asked for anything.
Nwosu came down with his sheet and said his piece to the flap in general and the channel pickup in particular. “When that gang comes off, they’ve been suited on those frames since their own morning. They come past me here, every one, longest out first, before anybody puts one of them back on a line of ours. I’ll want that order off the counter before the first lift.”
“You’ll have it with the book,” Gorrie said.
Veski came through from the boat side with her gloves in one hand. “Load’s mine when the plate’s shut. Rahimi — the pole scarp has maybe a boat’s width of honest ice on it, and I’ll be putting the skids on the middle of that width. If the width isn’t there when I’m looking at it, I’m coming home and we all think again.”
“Take the width you find,” Rahimi said.
Abrezh pulled the flap to and gave the strike-bar its two knocks against the frame, and the note came back flat, and Veski took the boat off the hooks on the half-bell exactly. Denn called the hour up the ladderway.
From the after port on the way back up, the run went down-sky for as far as there was sky to put it in. A dozen heads stood at work at once, jets off their sunward faces in long slow feathers, hard-lit where the sun took them and gone where it did not, and under the near heads the harvest screens were out across the jets, square after square of them, catching the light the way frost catches a window. Boat lights moved between two of the near heads. Every head down that street had a bell, a gallery, a season book and somebody like Gorrie keeping it.
Kajola’s board carried the heads by name as far as the run’s own book named them, and there the board stopped. Past the far end of the run the run’s book had nothing, and the road out ran on where no figure of anybody’s had ever been taken — grounds on the route side’s paper, thin as paper, and between here and them nothing watered, nothing named, nothing walked. The run was the last lit thing on the road they were on. Nothing had gone off the hull since the second boundary and nothing was expected to; the day’s work went into the hull’s own books.
The boat’s hour stood squared in the bound book at Sena’s elbow, and her board carried people the way Kajola’s carried ice. “Boat: Veski, Tavish, Abrezh, gear to Denn’s count, away on the half-bell. Tug: standing off, two lengths, dark side. Gang: low beds, on Gorrie’s say — Gorrie’s say, not mine, nobody of ours has eyes on them yet.” The hour went against each line as she said it.
“Coming up her dark side,” Veski said, on the boat channel, to nobody who had asked. “There’s the pole — no. That’s the pole gone by. Round again. Calf’s quicker at the skirt than the board says. Kajola?”
“One in six at the frames,” Kajola said. “One in six.”
“Then it’s my eye and my eye’s a liar. Round again. Next time the head’s dark I’m putting the skids on the scarp, and Tavish is off before the head takes the sun.”
The head came round and took the sun and the jet fired, on the book, to the quarter-turn, frost going off the scarp in a sheet the shape of the light. Veski lay the boat off in the dark while it burned.
The next time the head went dark the skids touched the pole scarp and Tavish went out the flap on his own pin with a driver on his chest. What came up the channel after that was low and continuous and addressed to nobody.
“Sit down. That’s grain, that’s honest. Take the pin — no. That’s a hand out. Come back a hand. There. Now you’re honest.” A driver ran. “One home. One.”
“Writing one,” Kajola said.
Between the first pin and the second, with the driver still running its anchor down, Tavish stood with his left glove shut under his right arm, and then took the line again.
By the head’s next sun there were two pins in the pole scarp and a rated line on them, its tail back aboard the boat with two feet of whipping on the end where Tavish had made it up. The jet fired over the top of all of it, and the gang showed down the calf’s flank when the sun went across the low beds — suit lights in a row along the drum frames, the two wound arrays pinned down beside them, square bales of screen the size of the boat apiece, and the gang’s running lines rigged frame to frame between the two beds. Nobody down there was moving except with the turning of the calf itself.
“Counter, Kestrel,” Rahimi said. “Inside this window the boat can start lifting your people off the pole — suits and hand gear and nothing else. The screens stay pinned where they sit, and the run comes back for its own when the season gives the calf back.”
“No,” Gorrie said.
“Say again, counter.”
“The screens ride with the gang. Wound and pinned the way they sit, off the beds on their own lines once you’ve killed the spin, and my people ride with their screens. That’s how it’s done on this run and that’s how it’s being done.”
“It doubles the time on the calf.”
“Then it doubles.”
The counter channel clicked off at the run’s end and stayed off.
“There it is,” Abrezh said, on the boat channel, not far enough under his breath. “You can tell harvest country by the order things ride in. Load first, then the book, then the people. I moved passengers for a living and not once did I ask one of them to sit on the cargo while—”
“Abrezh,” Rahimi said.
“Master.”
The boat channel went back to line calls.
The flank lit three faces short of the head.
Nothing was due. The season book had every face on the calf spent until the head took its next sun, and Wells had been down the columns twice with her own pen and had them the same way the book had them. What lit was low on the mid scarp, under the gang’s horizon, dirty at the root, grain through the white of it — and it stayed on. The head came round on its schedule and fired over the top of it, and between the two of them the pole scarp drew a small circle against the stars where it had drawn none.
“Rate’s one in five,” Kajola said. “One in five. Axis walking — call it a degree a turn, a degree a turn. I’m writing.”
“It’s more than a degree at the pole,” Veski said. “I’m off the scarp and standing by, and somebody can tell me what the book gives for a jet that isn’t in the book.”
“Book’s done,” Gorrie said, back on the counter channel. “Fly it on your eyes, Kestrel.”
“Then there’s no window,” Veski said. “There’s my bottles and there’s the lines, and that’s the day.”
Rahimi stood away from the port. “Halloway. Holding station a length and a half off that thing, working the drums — what does the stack give me?”
“Three hours at holding rate,” Halloway said, off the machinery channel. “You asked what it gives you.”
“I did. Kajola — rates to the boat as they change, don’t wait to be asked. Denn — plate head; whatever comes aboard today comes past your board.”
Wells came up from the chart table with her pen still in her hand.
“Well,” Rahimi said.
“Go,” Wells said.
Her pen was moving before she reached the table’s end, and her copy was at his elbow before his own line was ruled.
“Kestrel, counter,” Gorrie said. “It’s your recovery. It goes in the season book at this bell — the tug stands off, and the gang works to your boat’s word until your Master says otherwise. Send your hours after.”
Ravn was at the bridge rail with the satchel strapped across her, already writing, and read the entry back to the counter channel word for word with the bell on it. Gorrie said, “As said,” and the counter channel went quiet.
Kestrel came in to a length and a half with the flank jet still burning. The boat carried the heavy line’s tail across, and Tavish made it fast on the pole pins, and Halloway’s drums came up on it soft — a touch, and off, and a touch, nothing held on for longer than a breath — and the rate came back through one in six and kept coming.
“One in seven, that’s one in seven,” Kajola said. “I’m writing.”
Down the flank the gang came up off the frames and began to rig for the off-lift, small and slow along the beds, in an order somebody down there was calling.
The flank jet burned through all of it, on the sun and off it, which was not a thing the season book had a column for. The ice under the outboard bed rode through the root of that jet once every turn.
On the turn after the rate touched one in seven, it let go.
The bed came off the calf whole — drum, frame, and the wound array pinned across it — slow, the way everything out there went, up off the flank on the spin with frost coming away around it in a ring. Two of the gang’s running lines were rove through that frame, and the lines came up off the drums taut, one and then the other, and the two hands on the ends of them came up off the inboard bed where they had been working and went away from the calf after their gear, feet first, not fast, out into the dark on the run’s side of the sky.
“I have them,” Veski said. “I’m turning.”
“Two off the calf, on the shed bed, lines fast through the frame,” Sena said, and put the hour against it. “My eyes.”