Opening the book…
Chapter 1 — The Resident Figure
The last of the after run went back on in the middle of the second morning, and Denn stood at the panel line with the board under his arm and would not let the fourth panel up.
“Fourteen pieces off,” Denn said. “Thirteen on.”
“Thirteen and a burnt block.” Halloway’s arm came out from under the frames with the block in it, tagged in his own hand, the char down one side of it gone soft with handling. “It’s not going back in. It was never going back in. You’ve had it on the cloth a fortnight watching you count it.”
“Then it comes off the column as a loss and the column reads fourteen and thirteen and one, and the fourteenth has a word against it.” Denn wrote it left-handed, the crooked finger riding high off the pen. “Panels stand at one off.”
“Panel goes on when the run’s read out.”
“Read it out, then.”
Rahimi came down the passage in the middle of that and stopped where the cloth had been, which was floor again, and stayed out of the way of both of them. The run got read out at the after board, circuit by circuit, Halloway calling and Tavish answering off the far end of the passage with a lamp, and every figure came back where Halloway said it would come back except the third one, which came back low twice and fair the third time and was written down all three ways.
“Lagging’s sitting on the frame at the second penetration,” Halloway said. “It’ll do that until I go back in there, and I’m not going back in there today.”
“Is the run closed or isn’t it?”
“The run’s closed. The frame’s a separate item and it goes on the list.”
“The list,” Tavish said, coming up the passage with the lamp still lit, “is where things go to be safe.”
“Say the rest of it,” Halloway said.
“There’s no rest of it.”
“There’s the rest of it and I’ve had it twice this quarter.”
“Then you’ve had it,” Tavish said, and went aft with the lamp.
The fourth panel went up, and Denn ruled the column, and the after passage was walkable again for the first time since they had come back onto the camp’s book.
Aft, past the water card and the crooked shelving, the stack space stayed shut with a light under the door.
Rahimi went ashore on the boat’s second run of the day, with the household’s quarter money in an envelope and nothing else to do with the morning.
The plate lamp was on because the giant was up, and the camp’s own light ran the ordinary way it ran on a giant-lit day: the lamp posts down the boat ground, the scale’s gantry black against the arch, barrows on the rows, and the melt cut throwing its slow white feather off the scarp face and putting the one piece of weather on the moon down over everything downwind of it. Veski had the boat’s cover on before he was ten paces off the ramp.
“Cask dust and man-made snow,” Veski said to his back, “and a good pad, and I love it here.”
The queue at the counter ran out the door of the household’s galley and along the covered way, six deep. Rahimi took the end of it and had all six pieces of business inside two moves of the line, because the counter did its work out loud and the covered way had no doors in it. A hose-cart man went in with a complaint about a cask man and came out having been heard and told that being heard was not the same as being agreed with. Two gang men took an age over a galley line and a piece of paper with a name spelled two ways on it, and the water-master fixed the spelling and charged nothing for it and read the corrected line back twice.
The boy came down the way with the pans and read the helmet row through the galley door on his way past, and counted the meals off the helmets and not the plates, and put the strokes up in five-bar chalk with his tongue in the corner of his mouth. Behind him the cook had the proving cloths off and both arms in a trough, and asked the queue in general whether anybody in it was staying for the meal, and got four yes and one maybe, and put the maybe in the count.
Rahimi let the woman off the water hull go up ahead of him because she was carrying a drum on her hip and had a lighter to catch.
“Which hull,” the water-master said, when the way was finally clear.
“You know which hull.”
“I know which hull. Say it anyway, because the book doesn’t know until somebody’s said it.”
“Kestrel.”
The old leaf came back one turn under a wide-knuckled hand, and the finger went down the resident hulls’ column to the line that had gone in above the foot of the page at the quarter’s turn.
“Resident figure. Share ruled against the run, household shape. Watering by turns, third day, drawn level since entry, fees squared as they fall.” The finger stopped. “This is the first share off the new column and it’s the one people get wrong. It’s not the quarter rate with a different name on it. You’re carried against the run now, and what the run costs the households in a quarter, you carry your ruled part of. Melt-house hours are in it. The scale hand’s time is in it. The pump that went on the second ring last quarter is in it and will be in it for four more.”
It was the arrangement the camp’s households had with each other, ruled onto a hull — a share of what the run cost, and a line to draw against it.
“And the carry line.”
“The carry line prices you like anybody if you draw ahead of your share. You haven’t.” Both columns went across the counter and were read at each other, and agreed. The envelope came open on the counter and the money went out of it onto the wood in front of him, coin by coin, where he could watch it being counted. “To when?”
“Open.”
“Open gets read again when the quarter turns.”
“Open,” Rahimi said again, and the water-master wrote open where the date to close on would have gone, and turned the book round for the name, and asked after the splinted hand while he signed, and got a longer answer than the entry had taken.
Past the counter, at the head of the melt cut, the cut’s travelling block ran fair, and the two feet of new whipping on the ends of the cut’s lines had gone grey with use and stayed whole.
Rahimi walked the covered way twice on his way back to the boat ground, once for the way and once for no reason he gave anybody, and stood a while at the head of the rows where the account’s crates went back behind the second bunk line in rows he had not counted, under lag and frost, with a barrow track worn in between them.
Kajola gave the board at the seventh bell, flat, the way the board got given twice a watch.
“Camp’s lighters on the camp’s business. Water hull at the far rings, working. One hull on the camp’s window that isn’t either.” Kajola went back up the line with a finger before giving the rest of it. “Giving herself properly. MV Kedge, master Rusnak, booking a watering turn and standing off the second ring for the pattern. She’s asked for us by name on the camp’s channel and the camp gave her the answer, so half this roadstead heard it. I’m writing.”
Sena’s count came down the floor behind it without anybody asking for it. “Off-hull stands at three. Boat’s on her ground, Tavish and Wells at the counter. Nobody’s due back before the meal.”
“Off-hull stands at three,” Denn said from his board, back turned, and entered it.
Kedge came down the pattern at the ninth bell and took the holding the camp gave her, which was the far side of the old pair, further out than she needed to be. Her master came across in her own boat an hour later and did not send ahead.
Abrezh had the flap, one-handed, standing a half-step further back off the sill than he had ever stood.
“Rail, then the sill. Rail. If you come off that boat holding a case you’ll come off it holding the case in both hands, which is one more than I’ve got, and I’ll still be the one who tells you how.” The strike-bar went twice under the working hand. “Master aboard.”
“Master aboard,” Denn said, and made the mark. “Name for the sheet.”
“Rusnak. Josip.” A big man in a good coat that had been a good coat some years ago, who read the flap on his way through it the way a master reads another master’s flap, and gave the strike-bar a look, and said nothing about it. “Rusnak with a k.”
“They all are,” Denn said, and wrote it.
They took the galley end, because there was nowhere on the ship better and because the third pot was on.
Wells came in off the counter run with frost still across the front of her and put her board down at the table’s other end and stayed there. She was Kestrel’s surveyor: she ranged roads and wrote down whether they carried, and when a counter said the ship’s authority it meant her name on a finding. Halloway came up from aft and stood, and did not sit, and was not asked to.
“I’ll say the one thing first and then it’s said,” Rusnak said, before the mug had got to him. “I won’t take a job with your authority’s paper on it. Not the same ground, not the same hour. That’s not an opening price and I’m not going to say it twice.”
“Noted,” Rahimi said.
“I’ve come anyway, because this is where the work is.”
“That’s noted too.”
Wells took the frost off her sleeves with the flat of her hand and said nothing at all, and reached across for the pot, and poured for the man who had said it, because he was nearest the pot and she was nearest the handle.
Rusnak took the mug.
“Ledden,” he said.
“That’s a place.”
“That’s a place. Ice moon off a cold giant, four legs out from here, and everything anybody has there is under twelve kilometres of ice. They melt chambers at the roof of the ocean and they live in them, and they go down holes in small pressure boats—”
“Twelve kilometres of what pressure,” Halloway said, from the passage head.
“I don’t know. Ask them. I’ve been in twice and I never went under the roof, and the men who do go under wouldn’t tell a hull master the figure because a hull master would only put it in a book.” Rusnak turned the mug round once on the table and picked the thread back up where he had dropped it. “They harvest a floor that comes up at the far end of the year. Up, and their beds can be worked; down, and that season’s finished, and nobody out there argues with it. It’s a short one. The whole year’s living is landed inside it. Four years ago their road had marks on it. It hasn’t now. Somebody lifted the set.”
“Who?”
“I’ve stopped asking that question because I’ve stopped getting anywhere with it. It’s lifted. That’s the fact I can do something about. No road means no gear in, no boats in, no market out. They’re not starving. They’re working the near beds because the far beds need hulls they can’t replace, and they’ll be finished in a decade, and every one of them can do that sum and does it out loud.”
“How did you get in?”
“Slowly, twice, small, and blind. There’s nothing to range on and I went in on my own arithmetic and my own nerve, and I wouldn’t recommend either of them to a friend.” Rusnak turned his hand over on the table. “I can put myself in there. I can put a crate of gear in and four people out on a good run. The numbers there are households and shafts and boats, and I can’t carry households, and I can’t carry the mass, and I can’t do it enough times before the season, and if I could I’d have done it and not come here.”
“So you want a road.”
“I want a road, and a road wants marks, and marks want a hull that can carry them there and hands that can set them. That’s three things and I’ve got none of them.” The mug went down. “You’ve got the hull, you’ve got the hands, and you’ve got the one surveyor on this reach whose column a counter will take without a fight.”
“How long since anybody ranged it?” Wells said.
It was the first thing she had said, and Rusnak answered it the way he would have answered it from anybody.
“Four years for the road. Longer for the approach — nobody’s put an honest figure on that plain since before the marks went up, because nobody needed to.”
“Then somebody’s going to have to.” Wells wrote something on her own board, two lines, and ruled under them. “The plain’s the harder half. Roads are gear. Plains are weather and a beam and somebody standing still long enough.”
“That’s my reading too.”
“Mm.”
Rahimi left it where it lay.
“Terms,” Rusnak said. “Say what you want and I’ll say whether I’ve got it.”
“That’s not the difficulty.”
“Then say what is, because I’ve been in this room ten minutes and there’s no window on your board, and a ship with no window on her board has either just finished something or can’t start anything.”
“She doesn’t traverse,” Rahimi said. “The coupling’s gone, in one taking, sixteen days back. She holds a roadstead, she moves on jets and the bank inside figures my engineer has posted at the board, and she’ll do that for as long as this camp will have her. There’s no crossing in her. This reach or any other. As she stands.”
Nothing moved in Rusnak’s face for a moment.
“As she stands,” he said.
“As she stands.”
“And you’re on the camp’s book.”
“Resident figure. Share against the run, watering third day. I stood the queue for it this morning behind a man with a complaint about casks.”
Rusnak sat back and laughed once, short, without any pleasure in it at all, and rubbed his face with one hand.
“I came four legs to a hull that can’t move.”
“You did.”
“I’d say something about that but there’s a checker at the door writing everything down.”
“Denn writes what’s entered,” Rahimi said. “The rest of it he just remembers.”
Rusnak took that better than the coat suggested he would. He drank half the mug, and put it down, and looked at the man standing by the passage head who had not sat and had not spoken.
“You the engineer?”
“I am.”
“Can it be mended?”
“It can be replaced.” Halloway did not move off the frame. “It can’t be mended. There’s not enough of it left to mend.”
“That’s a different word.”
“It’s a different job.”
Rusnak went back to his own hull before the meal, on his own boat, with his own hours in his own book, and got off the ground without saying anything about the last time any of them had been in a room together.
Rahimi found Halloway at the after board an hour later with the hull log open and the straight-edge across it and nothing written.
“Name it,” Rahimi said.
“Name what.”
“What it would take. All of it. I want the list and not the ending.”
Halloway turned the log round so that the leaf faced the passage, and put the straight-edge down, and named it in items, with no adjectives on any of them.
“A coupling head. Not mended — a head, whole, made on somebody’s bench with a schedule behind it, because I can’t make one and neither can anybody within four legs of this rock. That’s the one piece. Everything under it I can make or find. Cradles to sit it in, and they have to be its own cradles or cradles I can cut to it. Keeps and pins. The back half of the run out of it and into the frames — that’s mine, that’s hand work, and it’s weeks of it. Furnace hours, because I’m not making the back half of anything with a hand lamp, and the melt house is somebody’s business and charges by the hour. Line, lag, and about four hundred small pieces I’ll write down as I want them.” Halloway put a finger on the blank leaf. “And the head. I’ll say it twice. Without the head the rest is a shed full of work nobody can use.”
“Time?”
“I’ll price time when I’ve seen a head. Ask me then and I’ll give you a figure you can hold me to.”
Tavish had come up the passage somewhere in the middle of it and stood with a coil over his shoulder and let it run out.
“Half the rows behind the second bunk line is the account’s,” Tavish said. “Crates. It came down off the lighters and it never got up the hill, and it’s been sitting under lag since the windows went down. Cradles chocked on the camp’s own hardstand against a fee that stopped being paid. There’s a laid-up lighter on the far ramps with her hold full.”
“You’ve walked it?”
“I’ve walked past it. Everybody’s walked past it. There’s a barrow track through the middle of it, and the track didn’t get there by itself.”
Halloway looked at the coil on Tavish’s shoulder rather than at Tavish.
“Then somebody had better go and read what’s in the crates,” Halloway said, “instead of standing in my passage telling me about rope.”
The water-master came down the covered way at the third bell of the day after with a crate of empty tins on her hip and did not slow for anybody in it, and Rahimi got alongside and stayed there.
“The account’s crates behind the second bunk line. The cradles in your third bay. The lighter on the far ramps with her hold full.”
“What about them.”
“Whose are they?”
“On paper they’re the account’s.” The crate went onto the other hip without her breaking step. “The bookings are on my board unclaimed with the deposits against them. The stewards paid their fees whole and went home on other people’s hulls. Nobody’s come. Nobody’s written. There’s no line off this moon to write to, and I’ve stopped composing letters in my head about it.”
“And off paper.”
“Off paper they’re on my hardstand eating a fee nobody is paying, and I’ve a camp to run.” The crate went down on the step at the galley door, and she straightened up and looked at him for the first time since he had started walking beside her. “I’ve been selling it since the week the windows went down and I’ll go on selling it. It goes over that counter. Priced, entered, receipted. It goes to whoever’s standing there.”
“That’s not an answer about whose it is.”
“It’s the only one anybody out here has ever been given.” The crate came up under her arm again. “And bring the boy’s pans back, because half this roadstead thinks pans grow.”