Opening the book…
Chapter 1 — HALF A REPAIR
Kwan scribed the section of plate in three places before anybody put a bar under it, because the only thing anybody can trust about a hold is the order things came out of it. It came out of the deck in one piece and it went onto the stack at the top of the second row.
That had been on the first morning. It was now the third, and the forward hold was open from the coaming to the after bulkhead, with the plates stacked in two rows along the starboard side in the order they would go back, and the frames bare, and a rig of lamps hung off the overhead on wire that Szymanski had made because the ship’s own lighting did not go where a person working needs light to go. Where the lamps did not reach it the frame was cold to the hand and stayed cold all day, because outside the hull at that place there was no more ship.
Sarah had the topology lane set up on a bench at the after end because it was the only bench aboard that nobody wanted for four days.
“You’re in the way,” Kwan said, going past.
“I’m not in the way. I’m at the end.”
“You’re at the end of where I’ll be on Thursday.” Kwan kept going. “Don’t move. I’ll tell you when.”
“When did you last go up?”
“The port row goes back in the order it came out and I want it dry.”
The lane was three instruments and a book and a pencil on a string, and it did not need a compartment, and Sarah had stopped pretending otherwise about a month after they came aboard. What it needed was somewhere flat that stayed at one temperature, and the forward hold with its plates up was the worst place on the ship for that, and she had taken it anyway because the alternative was the galley flat, and in the galley flat somebody talked to her every six minutes.
Sarah had counted that, and a good deal else that year. The paces from her rack to the bench were ninety-six and had been ninety-six since the winter. The ribs over the galley flat were thirty-one if you counted the half one at the door and thirty if you did not, and she counted the half one. And the plant made a noise at the top of every hour that was not exactly a noise, more a change in what the ship had been doing all along, and about nine seconds after it something in the after part of the hull answered it, and she had never once been able to make anybody else hear the second one, and she had stopped asking.
Nine months. That was the other thing she had counted, and it was the only one that mattered, and she had stopped counting it in about February because the number kept coming out well.
Nine months of nothing going wrong.
“Bishop.” Senanayake was at the top of the ladder with a light in his teeth, which he took out. “Is your bench earthed?”
“To what?”
“That’s the answer I wanted.” He went down two rungs. “Don’t put your hand on the frame between now and the middle of the afternoon. Either frame. I’ll tell you when.”
“Everybody’s telling me when today.”
“Nine people in a hold and two of them cutting. Ask Dlamini.” Senanayake went the rest of the way down, and did not add anything to it. At the bottom he stood and looked along the string of lamps. “Who’s had the second one off its wire?”
Nobody answered, and Senanayake left it where it was.
Dlamini was on the deck plates in the middle of the hold with a tray of fasteners in front of her, sorting them into three heaps by hand at waist height, which was the only work in the hold she was allowed and which she did about twice as fast as anybody else could have. Her shoulder had not come back. It had been going to come back in the spring, and then in the summer, and nobody said the word permanent aloud and everybody had stopped using the word yet.
“Four times,” Dlamini said, without looking up. “And Vukovic’s got a drill at the change and he’s short.”
“He’s always short.”
“He’s short by one today and I’m not going, because I’d be standing at the back holding a door open, and I did that on Tuesday.” She put a fastener on the middle heap. “Go if you want. It’s twenty minutes and there’d be three of you and he’d be happy.”
“Three.”
“Three’s a good week,” Dlamini said.
In the middle of the morning the deck moved under all of them.
It was slow and everything stayed where it had been put. It was a long change of what down meant, four or five degrees of it over about a minute and a half, and everybody in the hold stopped what they were doing and put a hand on something and waited, and the loose fasteners in Dlamini’s middle heap slid a finger’s width and stopped, and then the deck came back to where it had been and the noise the plant made underneath everything went up a note and stayed there.
The hold stayed like that for a moment. Then Szymanski, from the far end, with the cutting head still in his hand:
“That’s a heading.”
“That’s a heading,” Kwan agreed.
“That’s a big one.”
“That’s a very big one,” Kwan said, and put her bar down on the plate she had been about to lift, and stood in her open hold, and did not go anywhere for about the length of time it takes to decide not to shout.
The galley flat ran along one side of the ship’s middle third and had a bench down the length of it, and it was warm, and it was warm because Neshar ran the environmental exchanger through it, which he had done for nine years and which was not how anybody had drawn the ship. Everybody ate there. After the first month everybody sat there when they were not eating, and by now some of them slept there, and Neshar complained about all of it constantly and would have been insulted by anybody moving.
Mehta had the far end of the bench with his boots up on the rail and did not take them down.
“You’ve heard, then.”
“I’ve felt it,” Sarah said. “Nobody’s heard anything.”
“That’s about right.” Mehta was the coalition’s man aboard, on corridor logistics, and had been for five months, and had never once pretended to be crew. “There’s a retained settlement about nine days’ running from here with a utility grid coming apart, and it has people on it, and there is nobody else in the volume, and Havren’s the nearest thing to a hull anybody’s got.”
Sarah stood with her hand on the back of the bench.
“Go back a bit.”
“There’s nobody else in the volume.”
“Not that part.”
Mehta took his boots down.
“Havren,” he said. “That’s the ship. That’s what’s on my corridor list and that’s what my people call her and that’s what she’s called.”
“How long have you known that?”
“Since the day I came aboard. It’s printed on the sheet.” He looked at her for a second longer than the question needed. “Nobody aboard says it. I worked that out in about a fortnight and I stopped saying it too, and I’ve just said it, because you asked me, and I did notice which of us asked.”
Rourke came in at the forward end with Teshan behind her and stayed on her feet.
“Eleven hours,” Rourke said.
It took the room a second and a half.
“For the hold,” Kwan said.
“For the hold. You’ve got them from the top of the afternoon and then the plates go down, wherever we are with it. It comes out of your eleven days.”
“Eleven hours doesn’t close it.”
“I know it doesn’t close it.”
“It closes it wrong.”
“I know that too,” Rourke said.
Kwan stood there with a scriber in her hand. She had been asking for the forward hold since the winter, in the same words, at the same point of the same meal, until it had stopped being a request and become a thing people said to her to make her laugh. The job was eleven days. She had costed it at eleven days, twice, and had been given it, and had been three days into it since the day before yesterday.
“Who decided?”
“I did.”
“When?”
“About forty minutes ago, and I didn’t consult anybody, including the person who owns your lane and including the person who owns mine.” Rourke put both hands on the back of the nearest chair. “Teshan gave me the running time and I gave her the heading before I came down here. That’s the sequence, and it doesn’t get dressed up.”
Sarah had a question in her mouth and got as far as opening it.
“Bishop,” Rourke said, “the answer’s yes, and you’d have said go, and you’d have been right. Asking you costs me forty minutes I’ve already spent. Don’t make me spend the afternoon as well.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you that.”
“Then ask me the other one.”
“There isn’t another one,” Sarah said, and meant it, and was surprised by how flat it came out, and by the fact that nine months earlier she would have had four.
Kwan turned the scriber over twice.
“Close it,” she said.
The plates came down in the order they had come up, which was right, and the fastenings went in dry, which was wrong and unavoidable, and the two of Senanayake’s people who should have been on the stores volume were on the plates instead, because Kwan’s own hands were on the patch and there was nobody else. One of the two was the rating who had put in for leave in the spring and had been told the autumn, and who worked all of it and did not mention it, and everybody in the hold knew about the leave.
The patch was in three sections. Two of them went in.
The third was the one that had come out in one piece with three scribe marks on it, and in the eighth hour it became clear to Kwan, and then about four minutes later to everybody else, that it was not going to go back in the order the rest of it had gone, because the middle section was now in and the middle section had been the thing you fed the third one past.
“Take the middle out.”
“That’s three hours.”
“Then it’s three hours.”
“It’s three hours and you haven’t got three hours,” Senanayake said, “you’ve got two and a bit, and if you take the middle out and the third one still doesn’t go you’ll have a hold with nothing in it at all when the plates come down.”
Kwan stood under her own lamps with her hands on her hips and went completely quiet, and stayed that way for longer than anybody was comfortable with, and nobody filled it, because they had all been living with her for two years and knew better.
“Leave it,” she said.
“Mira—”
“Leave it. It’s a third of a patch and the two thirds that are in are the two thirds that were carrying.” Kwan had her back to all of them by then. “Get the plates down and get them down flat and I’ll have somebody’s hand off if they cross-thread one to save four minutes.”
They got the plates down.
The stores volume went at the tenth hour and nobody had time to do anything about it. It was the one dry volume aboard that held a temperature — Al-Khatib had spent three weeks in the winter finding out which one it was and had moved the dry stores into it, all of it, in an afternoon and had been unbearable about it for a fortnight — and it shared a bulkhead with the forward hold, and the bulkhead had been open for three days, and closing it in a hurry with the plates going down meant the trunk that fed it got blanked and stayed blanked.
Al-Khatib came down at the end of the eleventh hour and stood at the coaming and looked at it and did not say one word to anybody.
Kwan did the last of the closing herself.
There were two of Senanayake’s people standing there with the tools in their hands and she took the bar off one of them without asking, and did the last nine fastenings on the after run on her own, badly, slower than either of them would have done it, with her knuckles going into the frame twice; and when it was finished she put the bar back into the man’s hand and went up the ladder and did not come down again that night.
Porhal left an hour after that.
Porhal had been sitting in the hold for most of two days on a folding stool, out of the way, doing something with a bank of his own that nobody had asked about, and he went up to the transfer bay with his coat over his arm and Voren took him off, and the last Sarah had of him was the back of him at the coaming and Voren saying something to him in the language and Porhal not answering it.
“He’s going home,” Marwick said. He was at the rail of the transfer bay with his hands in his pockets; he came to every departure now and went on none of them. “First time in — what is it.”
“Ask him.”
“I did ask him. He said a length of time in the way he says things and I still don’t know if it was a year or nine.” Marwick watched the craft go. “Voren’s got me down for the run back. Right-hand seat.”
“That’s good.”
“That’s the checks,” Marwick said. “The checks are good.”
The craft was out of the bay window before Marwick had his hands out of his pockets, and after it there was nothing lit in that window, and the two of them stood at the rail looking at nothing lit until Marwick put the pin back in the rail and they went in.
Matsuda came off the reference watch in the middle of the night and put her head into the galley flat because the light was on.
“Is Teshan up?”
“She’s aft.”
“Then it’ll wait.” Matsuda sat down anyway. She had a slate under her arm and did not put it down. “I had it as a fault for the first forty minutes and I was wrong about that, and the forty minutes are gone. Something in the ship’s own set walked in the second half of the watch. Not the outside ones. The ones that only look at this hull. They went out by a bit and sat there for about an hour and came back, and I’ve written down what they read and I’ve written down when, and that’s all I’ve done.”
“How much of a bit?”
“Enough that I wrote it down.” Matsuda rubbed her eyes with the back of her wrist. “Teshan’ll say it’s the hull working. She said it in the winter and she was right in the winter.”
“Was she?”
“She was right that it was the hull working. She wasn’t right about anything else because nobody asked her anything else.” Matsuda got up. “I’m not going to interpret it. I’ve been asked to interpret things before.”
Two days later the flour came up at supper.
Vukovic had run his drill at the change of the watch, the boarding drill nobody needed on a ship nobody was going to board, and four people had come, which was one more than usual, and he was in the galley flat in a very good mood about it and telling Petrescu at some length why the fourth person had come. The fourth person had lost an argument.
Al-Khatib put a dish down in the middle of the table.
“There’s no more of that,” she said.
“There’s a lot of that.”
“There’s that. There’s what’s in that dish and there’s about as much again and then there’s no more of it, because the dry volume’s been at whatever the hold’s at for two days and the flour’s gone, and I’ve been in there twice and it’s gone, and I’m not doing the third look.” Al-Khatib sat down. “So it’s that dish twice more. Then it’s rice, and it’s rice for as long as the rice lasts. Then it’s whatever Neshar has standing. Then I come back to this table and tell you a fourth thing. I’d have said it on the day. I’ve had two days of deciding when to say it and I’ve decided it’s now.”
The people at that table went on eating, or did the thing that looks like it.
“How much,” Senanayake said.
“Don’t.”
“Samira—”
“Don’t ask me for a figure, because you’ll take it away and put it in something, and then in six weeks somebody will hold me to it, and I count low and everybody at this table knows I count low.” Al-Khatib had her hands flat either side of her plate. “It’s gone. That’s the figure.”
Petrescu, who had been on her feet since before light, put her fork down.
“Whose is that?”
“It isn’t anybody’s,” Al-Khatib said. “It’s a bulkhead.”
Kwan came in at the end of it, having heard about a third of it from the flat outside, and stood in the doorway with her hands at her sides.
Kwan turned round in the doorway and went aft, down to the forward hold, and got the third section of her patch out of the store where they had put it after the plates went down, and carried it up the ladder on her own with it catching on everything, and stood it against the bulkhead in the galley flat at the end of the bench where the light was, in among the people, where anybody coming in for a meal would have to walk round it.
Then she sat down on the end of the bench with her back against it and her hands on her knees.
“That’s staying there,” she said, to the room, to nobody in particular.