Eleven

Nove stood under the tree with both hands on her hips.

“It’s leaning.”

“It was leaning yesterday,” Rin said.

“That doesn’t make it better.”

“It makes it the same tree.”

Jun set his basket down beside the roots and looked up through the leaves. “Which way is it leaning?”

Nove pointed. “That way.”

“That’s toward the light.”

“It’s still leaning.”

The gardens were opening around them for the evening. Covers had been drawn back from the planting beds, and the paths still held the damp smell of watering. People came through with baskets and small tools, stopping where the work wanted them. Nobody had much left to do. That was why the argument had room to grow.

Rin sat on the low edge of the bed with the splice across her knees.

She had finished it ten minutes ago.

Since then she had taken it apart, checked the ends, and put it back together exactly as it had been. The join was clean. It would hold.

She turned it over once more.

Jun looked from the tree to her. “Could ask the shipmind.”

Nove lowered her hands. “Ask it what?”

“If the tree’s leaning.”

“We can see it’s leaning.”

“You can see it’s growing toward the light.”

“That’s leaning with a reason.”

“All leaning has a reason.”

Nove considered him. “How do you know?”

Jun opened his mouth.

Then he looked at Rin.

Rin kept working.

“How do you ask the shipmind about a tree?” he said.

“You say, ‘Shipmind, is the tree leaning?’”

“But how does it know which tree?”

“There’s one tree here.”

“There are more trees farther along.”

“Then tell it this tree.”

“What’s this tree called?”

“It’s called the leaning one.”

Jun looked offended by the whole answer. “It wasn’t called that before.”

“It is now.”

A little girl crouched on the far side of the bed, digging with both hands. Her sleeves were wet to the elbows and there was soil on one cheek.

“What are you doing?” Rin asked.

The girl covered something quickly. “Nothing.”

Nove leaned across the bed. “What did you bury?”

“Nothing.”

Jun peered over. “It looked like a spoon.”

“It wasn’t.”

“It had a handle.”

The girl pressed both palms down over the place. “It’s planted.”

Nove looked at the tree.

Then at the girl.

“That explains a great deal.”

The girl frowned. “About what?”

“The tree.”

Jun picked up the argument again. “If we ask the shipmind, does it answer from here?”

“It answers wherever you ask it,” Nove said.

“So we could ask.”

“We could.”

Nobody did.

Rin pressed the splice flat between her thumbs. The join did not move. She tucked it into the basket beside Jun’s and stood.

The tree went on leaning.

Pell came along the path at a fast walk.

She did not look at the tree. She looked at faces, one after another, as though she had been sent to find anybody at all.

“They want hands at the Ninth.”

Nove straightened.

Rin still had one hand on the basket.

“What for?” Jun asked.

Pell stopped long enough to answer.

“It’s woken. All of it.”

For a moment Rin thought she had heard her wrong.

The gardens carried on around them. Water ran somewhere behind the beds. A basket touched the path. Somebody farther down laughed at something that had nothing to do with Pell.

“All of it?” Nove said.

“Nobody’s hurt. They’re just out.”

Rin’s fingers had tightened around the basket handle. She let go.

Pell was already moving again. She went to the next people on the path and looked at their faces.

“They want hands at the Ninth.”

Jun left his basket under the tree.

They went along the town street with everybody else, toward the spoke.

The corridors had not changed, but the direction of them had. Every crossing brought more people into the same flow. Some carried folded blankets against their chests. Some had two or three tucked under an arm. Everyone walked briskly. Nobody ran.

Rin kept looking ahead for someone coming the other way.

Nobody did.

A serving hatch stood propped open at an hour when it was never open. Cups passed out through it into raised hands. The people holding them did not stop walking. Empty hands reached up. Full ones came down.

Someone offered Rin a cup.

She missed it.

The hand went on to Jun without pause.

Nove looked at the backs of the people ahead of them.

“How many is it?”

“They’ll be counting,” Rin said.

Nove said nothing to that, which was not like her.

“Nobody’s hurt,” Jun said.

He had heard Pell. He was only saying it again.

Rin put two fingers against the inside of her wrist, though she had no reason to. The beat there was too quick for the pace they were keeping.

The blocks held.

A door might stick. A light might go. A rail might work loose and be set right before supper. The blocks held.

Pell had said the Ninth had woken.

All of it.

They rode the spoke up with everybody else, across, and down into the berth ring. Nobody spoke in the lift.

Rin counted the crossings without meaning to. At the foot of the lift the street ran two ways. Left toward the Ninth.

Right toward the Fourth.

Her foot set wrong for half a step.

Then Nove brushed her shoulder, and Rin went left with everyone else.

She heard the Ninth before she reached its doors.

At first she took it for the people in the passage. There were enough of them. Cups, blankets, feet, low voices.

Then the doors came into sight.

They stood open.

Both of them.

Beyond was the long hall of the Ninth, longer than the gallery and built in three courses from deck to ceiling. Rin had been down to the blocks a dozen times. She had stood in halls like this one while Holl checked a name or while a door was opened for somebody’s waking.

Every berth door was the same plain grey, a little taller than a man. Every one carried a plate at chest height, and every plate had a name on it in somebody’s careful hand.

A block had one sound.

The low working hum behind its walls.

Nothing else.

Rin stopped before the threshold.

The sound continued.

Not shouting. She had expected shouting without knowing she had expected it. There was none.

Voices.

Hundreds of them, kept low and overlapping. Cups touched the floor. Blankets moved. Somebody coughed, and then somebody else.

She looked back into the passage.

The people there were quiet.

The sound came from inside.

Nove went through ahead of her. Rin followed.

The lower course stood open along the full length of the hall.

Every door.

People sat in rows against the wall, wrapped in blankets, holding cups in both hands. Some looked straight ahead. Some watched the people passing. A grey-haired woman had one hand on the rail and walked a slow circuit of the hall, reaching the doors, turning, and going back again.

Rin looked up.

The middle course was open in places. The top course was still being emptied.

Three helpers stood on the top walkway with a section of plating open. Their arms were in to the joint. One drew back as a bench came beneath it and waited until the bench had passed before reaching in again.

Nobody looked at them.

Nove disappeared into the blanket chain almost at once. A woman turned and put a stack into Rin’s arms.

“Along there, the ones sitting down first.”

The blankets were warm from being carried. Rin held them too tightly and had to shift the stack before she dropped it.

She started along the wall.

Hands came up. She passed the blankets down one by one. The people taking them moved slowly, as though their arms belonged to someone else.

A man accepted one and stared at it before opening it across his knees.

“What happened to it?” someone asked.

The answer came from farther down the row.

“It’s old.”

That was all.

It was said the way someone might speak of a door that caught at the bottom in wet weather. The people nearest heard it and went back to their cups.

Nobody added anything to it, then or for the rest of the night.

Rin reached the end of the row with two blankets left.

Holl sat behind a table under the middle course. His ledger lay open before him. Delo stood beside him with a board, calling names into the hall.

“Aden.”

“Here.”

A hand rose from the second row.

“Ferris.”

A man near the wall tried to stand.

“Sit down, Ferris.”

“I’m all right.”

“Sit down.”

Ferris sat.

Holl looked up as Rin came near.

“You’re salvage.”

“Rin. Twelve.”

“Holl.”

He closed one finger into the ledger to hold his place and pointed to the far end of the hall.

“Stand where you can see the top course. Tell me when it’s empty.”

“How many?”

“Six left in.”

Rin put the last two blankets into waiting hands and went.

The top course ran close beneath the ceiling. A ladder had been set against the rail. One person came down, then another, each taking the rungs with care. People waited below without calling up.

Rin counted.

Four.

Five.

The sixth man filled the ladder. He came down backward, one foot searching longer than it should before finding each rung.

When he reached the deck, he stayed with both hands on the sides.

He was a big man. Grey ran through his hair, but his face had the soft, unsettled look of somebody only just brought up. He opened one hand and studied it.

“Well, that’s not right.”

Rin stepped closer. “What isn’t?”

“The hand.”

He flexed his fingers. Three moved. The smallest two did not.

“Sit down.”

“If I sit down now I’ll be an hour getting up again.”

A blanket came along the line. Someone put it around his shoulders. He did not seem to notice.

He worked the fingers again.

The fourth moved.

He watched the thumb.

“Come on.”

The thumb bent.

“There. You go by the fingers.”

He opened and closed the hand four times. Each time the thumb came last.

“Brix,” he said.

“Rin.”

Then he looked around the hall for the first time.

“Who’s got it?”

“Holl.”

“Who’s Holl?”

“The Warden.”

Brix found him at the table. “Who’s Speaker?”

“Vera.”

He looked across the hall again. Vera had her sleeves pushed up and one end of a bench in her hands.

“Shop-master?”

Rin told him.

He knew none of the names.

“How far behind am I?”

“Don’t know.”

He took that in, then put one hand on the rail.

His fingers closed round it. He looked down its length.

“This is out.”

Rin looked.

“Finger and a half,” he said.

“Maybe.”

He gave her a hard look. “Maybe?”

Rin set her hand against the rail and sighted along it. He was right.

“Finger and a half.”

“It’s held so far,” she said.

“Everything’s held so far. That’s not a standard.”

He put his weight on the rail. It gave the amount a rail gives.

“That’s not a tolerance. That’s an opinion.”

The words carried farther than he meant them to. The nearest people looked over.

He looked at them, then at the open doors.

“Sorry.”

Nobody answered. The hall moved on.

Rin lifted a hand toward Holl. The top course was empty.

Holl marked the ledger.

The questions began once people had cups and blankets and enough feeling in their mouths to make words.

“Are there spaces in another block?”

Holl stood behind the table to answer. He did not shorten the question by pretending it was smaller than it was.

“Every other block is full.”

A woman near the front raised her cup and forgot to drink from it.

“Not one?”

“Not one empty berth in the ship.”

Someone behind Rin asked how long that had been true.

“My whole tenure,” Holl said. “And my predecessor’s. She held it a long while.”

He said the next part to the rows rather than to the voice that had asked it.

“If there were one, I’d have put you in it. You’d have been gone before I finished writing your name, and none of us would be standing here.”

“What happens tonight?”

“Tonight you sleep in the town.”

“Where in the town?”

“In the gallery. On the floor, like everybody did when they were children.”

That brought a few tired sounds from the rows. Not laughter. Nearly.

A man at the wall held his blanket shut under his chin.

“Do we keep our place?”

Holl looked down at the open ledger.

The hall waited.

“The ledger records turns,” he said. “It records wakings. It has never had to record this. I will not invent an answer, and I’d ask you not to take one from anybody who offers you one tonight.”

The man’s hands stopped moving on the blanket.

“That isn’t much of an answer.”

“I’d rather you had that than something comfortable.”

Holl’s voice stayed even. He kept one hand beside the ledger, not on it.

“When I know, you’ll have it from me. And you’ll have how I got there.”

The man looked away.

After a while Holl said, “It’s the true shape of one.”

Marek arrived with the pot wedged into a crate and a sack hanging from his good shoulder. He rolled the crate across the threshold on the other side, taking the weight badly.

He had greeted three people before he was properly through the doors, and none of them had been given time to answer.

Before he had gone four steps, someone lifted the sack away.

“Careful,” Marek said.

“I am.”

“I meant with the bread.”

The crate stopped near the wall. Marek opened it, checked the pot, took out the ladle, and began filling bowls one at a time.

A queue formed without deciding where it meant to be. It bent around a bench, divided for the grey-haired woman on her circuit, and joined itself again farther on. Nobody corrected it.

Marek watched a man’s fingers close badly round the bowl he had just handed over.

“Both hands. And sit down before you start on it. It isn’t going anywhere and neither are you.”

Rin stayed at the far end.

The hall kept making sounds that did not belong there.

She tried not to listen to all of them. A spoon against a bowl. The low call of another name. Brix working his fingers for the third time since she had stopped counting. Holl’s stylus moving.

Vera crossed the hall carrying another bench with two other people. Later she sat beside a man who had moved away from the rows. He did not speak. She stayed there for a quarter of an hour and did not speak either.

Twice in the night Rin heard somebody put a question to her. Both times the answer came late.

Late enough that a stranger would have filled the gap with talking.

In the middle of the night, Suda came through the open doors with a board under one arm.

She went straight to Holl.

“Three hundred and forty-one.”

The number passed only as far as the people nearest the table. Rin saw their faces turn.

Holl looked up. “Out and standing?”

“Yes.”

“Nobody hurt?”

“Nobody hurt.”

“Nobody missing?”

“Nobody missing.”

“You’re certain.”

“I’ve done it twice.”

Holl rested both hands on the table.

Then he looked along the hall, from the open lower course to the dark top one.

He stepped away from the ledger and stood where the people in the rows could see him.

“Shipmind.”

A chime answered.

“The Ninth berth block. Can it be returned to service?”

“The Ninth berth block cannot be returned to service. Replacement requires new-build.”

The chime closed.

The closest conversation stopped first.

Then the one beside it.

The quiet moved down the hall unevenly. A bowl was passed before the hands holding it understood that the room had changed. Someone finished a sentence at the far end and received no answer.

Rin heard the working hum behind the open wall.

Holl went back to the table.

He sat. He opened the ledger to the place his finger had kept and wrote in it.

Nobody hurried him.

The stylus crossed the board. Holl finished the line, checked it once, and closed the ledger.

“Then we build one.”

Brix stood three paces from Rin.

He said it as though he had noticed they needed the other ladder.

The hall did not turn toward him. A cup changed hands. Someone asked for another blanket. The moment closed over the words and went on.

Rin looked at him.

He had one empty bowl in his hands. His thumb was moving now with the others.

“You heard it,” she said.

“I heard it.”

“It needs new-build.”

“It’s a block. It’s not weather. Somebody built the thing in the first place.”

He looked at the open doors as if the work were waiting behind them and only needed somebody sensible to begin.

He had come out into a ship that had moved on without him, and he did not yet know the way it moved.

Rin took the bowl from his hands.

“Have another one. He’ll keep filling it, it’s what he’s here for.”

Marek filled it.

Brix ate standing.

The low point of the night came without a bell.

The work at the Ninth had settled into repetition. Blankets. Bowls. Names. Benches going up to the gallery. People going with them in small groups.

Rin left the hall.

She did not decide where she was going until she reached the crossing and took the other way.

The Fourth was dark, cold, and silent.

Its doors were shut on all three courses.

A woman sat at the entrance with a lamp turned low beside her. She looked up when Rin came through.

“Fourth’s whole. Everyone’s asking.”

Rin nodded.

The woman did not ask who.

Rin went along the lower course, counting bays out of habit. The hum sat where it should, low behind the walls. No voices. No cups. No doors standing open.

She stopped at the plate marked ESSA.

The name had been written by her mother. Rin knew every stroke of it. The first letter leaned too far. The last ended in a flat line because her mother had never lifted a pen cleanly in her life.

Rin put her palm against the door.

Cold.

Properly cold.

The right cold.

She left her hand there.

The block held its low hum. Nothing changed beneath her palm.

She moved her hand to the frame and checked again.

Cold there too.

Only when she took her hand away did she notice that she had done it twice.

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

She had said it here. Everyone said it. Nobody put a morning to the words.

She thought about saying something else, and didn’t.

Essa had never had any patience for people who talked at doors.

Rin stood a little longer.

Then she went back along the course.

The woman at the entrance raised the lamp enough to see her face.

“Anybody in Nine belong to you?”

“No.”

“Nor me.”

The woman turned the lamp down again.

“Everyone’s somebody’s, though.”

When Rin returned, the Ninth was quieter.

Not silent. It could not be silent now.

Vera was still there. She had been there through the whole night, sleeves up, lifting what needed lifting and sitting where somebody needed another person not to speak.

Near the doors, she climbed onto a bench.

She did not call for quiet.

She waited.

The hall came round one conversation at a time. Marek lowered his ladle. Nove stopped with a folded blanket against her chest. Holl stood beside the closed ledger.

Vera looked over the rows.

“Everybody’s alive,” she said. “Three hundred and forty-one. Counted twice by somebody who doesn’t guess.”

Suda held the board under her arm.

“Nobody hurt. Nobody missing.”

Vera let that stay in the room before she went on.

“The block is finished. It would have to be built new.”

Her voice carried cleanly to the far end.

“There is no berth in the others. Nothing was taken off anybody tonight.”

Then she stopped.

Her hands hung empty at her sides.

Rin watched them.

Vera had moved benches, carried blankets, held cups while people climbed to their feet. She had kept her hands working all night.

Now they did nothing.

The wait gathered in Rin’s throat. She swallowed and it stayed there.

Vera looked once toward the open lower course.

“We had twelve. We’ve got eleven.”

Nobody moved.

Rin knew the number before Vera said it. The whole hall had known it since the chime.

It had not been real until it was spoken.

A voice came from the rows.

“What happens now?”

Vera looked toward it.

“Tomorrow.”

She stepped down from the bench.

Two people were waiting to move it. Vera took one end, and the three of them carried it away.

At the grey end of the night, the Ninth’s people lay across the gallery floor.

From the corridor mouth it looked exactly like a telling. Blankets spread from wall to wall. Cups stood beside sleeping hands. People had made narrow paths where they could and stepped over feet where they had not.

They had settled into family shapes without being families. Three and four to a blanket. A head down on somebody else’s folded coat.

Three hundred and forty-one people, and the gallery was not full.

Rin kept coming back to that.

The ship had opened a whole dead wall and poured its people into the room, and there was still space along the columns. Still room near the back. Still bare floor where the blankets ended.

Out in the corridor, a few steps back from where it opened into the gallery, the serving hatch stood open at the wrong hour.

Marek was working through the last of the pot. His bad shoulder had dropped lower, but the ladle still went down and came up full.

Nove sat on the counter with her boots swinging.

Tam slept against the wall with a blanket folded over his lap. He had been meant to deliver it to somebody. His hands were still holding two corners.

Nove looked back down the corridor into the gallery.

“Eleven. It’s a good number, eleven.”

Nobody answered.

“It’s got a look about it.”

Nobody answered that either.

“You’re all just tired.”

Marek had his back to her.

Rin saw him stop with the ladle in the pot.

His shoulders lifted with one slow breath. Not much. Just enough to see him take hold of something.

Then he laughed.

It sounded exactly like every laugh Rin had ever heard from him.

Nove looked at him.

Someone on the floor laughed too. Then someone near the hatch. The sound crossed the gallery in small, tired pieces until it reached people who had not heard the beginning and joined anyway.

Rin did not.

She watched Marek fill the next bowl.

Nove’s boots began swinging again.

“Four?” she asked.

Marek handed the bowl across the counter. “Four’s fine.”

Rin went up alone.

A man came the other way carrying a chair against his chest.

“Good morning.”

“Morning.”

He said it as though it were one.

Outside the repair shops, two women stood close together. One had her arms folded. The other was looking at the floor.

“Eleven,” the first woman said.

Flatly.

The way someone might say the time.

The second woman nodded.

Neither explained. Neither needed to.

By tomorrow, she thought, nobody aboard would.

Rin walked on.

Her hand went to the plain rail beside the shop doors.

She leaned on it as if it were out of true.

It held.