The Thinning

The first hull gave them nothing.

Rin set her palm against the plating and counted five. The metal stayed quiet beneath her glove. No working warmth. No held movement. Nothing worth opening.

“No,” she said.

“Good,” Marek answered over the channel. “One less thing to cut.”

Across the wreck, the second hand placed two fingers against a seam.

Marek’s voice followed at once. “Flat. Not fingertips.”

The hand came down properly.

They worked both sides before moving on. A hull could keep something useful in one face and lose it from the other, and they had all day.

The second wreck gave the same answer. So did the third.

Rin brought Twelve around the broken edge of a larger hull and set down near its middle. The other pod crossed to the far side. Marek lifted one hand through the glass before his craft passed out of sight.

“Try not to take everything, girl.”

“You can have what I leave.”

“That is the spirit that has sustained this trade.”

Rin went out onto the plating with the other rigger behind her. The sun showed as one hard point beyond the wreck. It gave enough light to see the torn course ahead and none that she could feel.

She knelt, set her palm flat, and counted.

At four, a faint movement reached her through the plating. Not sound. A small, steady hum against the bones of her hand.

She counted again from another place. The same movement met her there.

“Pocket,” she said.

Marek answered from the far side. “How much?”

Rin worked along the seam until the hum ended. It did not take long.

“Small.”

“It’s small,” Marek said. “That saves us grading it.”

They opened the pocket and took the ice. The work occupied less time than setting down had. When they finished, the cut piece sat secured against Twelve, looking larger than what it held.

The next six hulls were cold. That was most hulls. Cold meant finished, and finished meant they could leave it where it was without wasting another cut.

They moved deeper into the field.

The wrecks lay farther apart there. Twelve crossed long reaches between them, then waited while Rin went out, put her palm down and counted five. Marek did the other face with the second hand. Sometimes one of them found a seam worth following. Most times they did not.

By the middle of the day they had crossed half the reach Rin had marked for the run. They had one ice cut fixed to Twelve and nothing on the other pod.

Marek asked, “Bread?”

Rin looked at the wrapped piece beside her seat. “Later.”

“You said that an hour ago.”

“It remained true.”

“That is Suda’s kind of answer.”

“You asked the wrong question.”

Marek made a thoughtful sound over the channel. “I have trained you too well.”

They kept going.

The next hull had enough ice for a second cut. Rin found it on the underside, where the broken frame kept turning slowly beneath her boots. She held to the plating and let the wreck bring the stars around her while she counted.

The hum reached her palm at five.

After that came fourteen more hulls and fourteen ordinary answers.

The final wreck lay near the edge of the marked reach. Rin did the near side. Marek took the far. Both hands reported cold plating throughout.

Rin returned to Twelve and entered the last mark.

Forty-one hulls worked. Two cuts taken.

The count fitted in one line.

She looked once at the two secured pieces outside the glass. They had spent the whole day finding them. There was nothing wrong with either cut. Both would go into the ship. Both would be used.

There were only two.

“Twelve to second craft,” Rin said. “We’ll look at the road.”

Marek answered without pause. “Cheap to look.”

The road lay beyond the field, where there was less dead metal to work around. All Rin had to do was hold Twelve clear and watch.

A chain used to show first as a string of slow lights on a road of its own. The guards crossed any stretch every fifty. You could arrive late, miss one, and wait for the next without having to think about it.

Rin took Twelve out to the near edge of it and held there, broadside to the run. The other pod settled a little above and behind. There was nothing for her hands to do, so she did the things she did when there was nothing for her hands to do: trimmed the drift out, brought the two cut pieces back into view, put them where she could see both without turning her head.

The first fifty passed.

Nothing crossed.

Rin ate the bread she had put off. It had flattened inside its wrapping, but Marek had made it that morning and it still tasted good. Behind her, the other rigger finished eating and folded the wrapping away, and then found something to do with the stowage that did not need doing.

Marek’s voice came over the channel. “Perhaps they heard we were coming.”

“They’ve met you before,” Rin said.

“That would explain caution. Not absence.”

The joke lay between the two craft and did not improve.

They waited through another crossing. Rin kept Twelve on the same easy course. There was no reason to spend more work on it than that. Partway through it she caught herself watching one place — the stretch up the road where the lights had always come out of — instead of sweeping the whole run, which was the lazy way to look and hard on the eyes besides. She went back to doing it properly.

Marek spent some of the wait saying what he intended to put in the pot when he got home. It took a while. Nobody asked him to stop, and the other rigger asked one question about the greens that started him again from the beginning.

The road remained a road because they knew where it ran. Nothing on it showed itself.

Two crossings was looking. Rin held them there for a third, and the third was longer than the other two, though it was the same fifty. By the end of it the other pod had drifted off the easy course and had to be brought back onto it.

“Anything?” Marek said.

“No.”

“Then we’ve looked.”

Rin opened the home channel.

“Twelve. Day count.”

Suda answered, “Ready.”

“Forty-one hulls worked. Two ice cuts. No other lift. Both craft whole.”

“Filed.”

Marek came in after her. “Suda, how long since anything crossed this sector?”

“Twenty-three days.”

Nobody answered the number.

Rin turned Twelve toward home. The second craft followed with no load fixed to it, and the road went on behind them without lights.

The unloading took almost no time.

The first cut came free of Twelve and went into the receiving line. An unloading hand watched it pass and called, “That’s the lights.” The second followed.

Then there was nothing else to move.

Someone at the bay mouth looked across the empty frame on the other pod. “The dark provides.”

“Today it provided an early wash,” Marek said.

“That isn’t nothing.”

“Tell my sleeves.”

The hand caught one of Marek’s cuffs and turned it back before he could object. Rin left them deciding whether the other cuff had been folded badly on purpose.

Beyond the bay, the ordinals sat where they had been left. Nothing had called them out in days. Their work boards were closed, and the passage around them remained clear for the people going home.

Rin washed and reached the gallery while the bowls were still hot.

The kitchens had filled them well. Greens and thick vat food sat beneath a sharp sauce, and one basket of bread travelled the table more slowly than the bowls did.

Nove took a piece, looked at it, and held it up toward Marek.

“I can see through this.”

Marek leaned closer. “Then it is useful twice.”

“As bread and as a window?”

“As bread and as a lesson in gratitude.”

“You made it.”

“I am grateful you noticed.”

Nove tore the piece in half and passed one part to Rin. Rin took it before Nove could reconsider.

Across the table, Brix was mending the loose end of a bowl strap while its owner continued eating from the bowl.

“You could wait,” the owner told him.

“I could,” Brix said. “Then you would carry this another week and pretend the knot was meant to be there.”

“It holds.”

“It offends me.”

“That sounds private.”

“It stopped being private when you put it on the table.”

The strap owner kept eating. Brix finished the mend, tugged it once, and slid the bowl back into place without spilling anything.

At the next table, someone who had not been on the run was telling the end of the Great Quiet to two people who had missed the first telling of it.

“It decided we were debris.”

The listener passed her the sauce.

The words did not stop the room. Cups moved. Bowls emptied. Someone began another argument over whether Marek’s folded sleeve was better or worse than the first one.

Rin finished what Nove had given her.

When the drum sounded, conversations came apart by habit. People carried their bowls to the hatch or set them beneath the benches to be taken later. Nobody hurried, but the centre of the gallery cleared.

Vera waited beside the drum until the last people had found places.

Marek sat near the front with his sleeves now equally folded. Rin stayed along the side, close enough to see him without looking past anyone.

Vera rested one hand on the drum.

“Marek. Read the near fields.”

Marek looked down at his hands for a moment. When he raised his head, his face had the same settled look it wore before a difficult cut.

“At the first floor, I told you where the good fields were,” he said. “You are asking me now where they are not.”

Vera waited.

“The shelf here has been picked at for three thousand years. It is not thin anymore.”

Marek looked across the people before him.

“They are dead.”

No one challenged the reading. Marek had spent his life telling other people what the dark held and what it did not. The room took this answer as it had taken all the others.

Vera turned to Holl. “The line.”

Holl sat straight-backed beside the aisle, his hands together over one knee.

“Three hundred and forty-seven berths have been certified,” he said. “They are berths. They answer the years immediately before us.”

He paused, not for effect, but to keep each fact separate.

“They do not alter what follows. Blocks fail. Repair cannot restore a dead block. It requires new-build, and the ship cannot provide it. The windfall bought years. It did not buy a future.”

His hands remained still.

Brix spoke from the bench behind him. “We could build them.”

Every face near Rin turned toward him.

Brix put the repaired strap into its owner’s hand and looked at Vera.

“I have the whole method. Every stage, every measure, every tolerance. Ship gave it to me the first time I asked. Our manifest has none of the making it requires.”

He rubbed one thumb across the end of the strap, flattening a fibre that had lifted.

“The chains never ran out of Wasps. Not in all the years we stripped the fields. Things were made somewhere, and everything the chains carried went sunward.”

Brix returned the strap.

“Wherever the cargo goes, the making is.”

Nobody answered him. There was nothing in the statement that needed correcting, and nothing in it that told them what to do.

The drum ended without an argument.

Rin left the gallery with the others. She went as far as the lift before turning down toward the Fourth.

The lower course held its proper hum. Doors stood closed in long rows, each marked for the person sleeping behind it.

Essa’s was cold beneath Rin’s palm.

Properly cold. The right cold.

For a few weeks, better had been something the runs could bring home. The takes had been watts, and watts could put another living body beneath the lights. The berths had answered the bodies already awake.

The fields had answered nothing after them.

“We’ll wake you when things are better.”

Rin remembered the promise in her own voice. She left her hand on the door until the cold had gone through the glove, then took it away.

When she returned to the gallery, Vera stood beside the drum again. People who had been leaving stopped where the corridors met the floor. Holl and Brix remained where they had been. Marek had kept Rin’s place along the side, and she took it.

Vera looked around once.

“The floor is called.”

She gave the room a moment with it, then went on in the voice she used over a work board. “Not tonight. There’s work behind it that won’t fit in an evening — counts to close, readings to set down — and I want those in hand and not carried about in people’s mouths. Everybody who can be there, be there. Six days.”

She took her hand off the drum.

That was the end of it. The gallery went back to being a gallery. Bowls went to the hatch, benches went to where benches lived, and somebody near the front worked out aloud which shift six days fell across and got three answers, none of them agreeing. The pair at the corridor mouth went out still arguing about the sleeve.

Marek stayed on the bench a while after the aisle had cleared. Then he took a wrapped piece out of his coat and put it into Rin’s hand.

“For the morning,” he said.

“I have the morning.”

“You had this morning as well. You carried it about until the middle of the day.” He stood and collected her bowl along with his own, without being asked for it. “Eat it earlier.”

Rin stayed where she was until he had gone out. The piece had flattened again inside its wrapping. She put it in her pocket for the morning.