Opening the book…
Chapter 1 — THE CERTIFICATE
Eight seconds is what the Dunlin’s people got, and Sarah had listened to all eight of them five times that morning.
The set was on the bench at the end of the racking and the sound off it came out thin. Vardy on the all-ship, flat, twenty minutes off her slot — brace, brace, main coming in — and then the main came in and stayed in. After that the recording was furniture. The mess urn going the length of the deck ahead of everything else. A bench going into a bulkhead with a man in front of it. And down in the hold two pallets of pipe coming through the netting and finishing against the forward frame one length at a time, and it went on longer than anything else on the recording, and Sarah had not got used to it.
Eight seconds is not enough for six men round a table.
At the end of it somebody on the bridge said there was something off the bow, and then said it again with a bearing in it. Low, and not holding still. A place where the stars had gone wrong and come back. It stayed for the length of the entry, and the near edge of it worked in and out, and then there was nothing off the bow at all.
The certified track ran through the near edge of it.
Nobody in the building had put a line under that part. What a master saw out of a port under burn went in as an observation and sat where it was put.
Sarah had put a line under it in October and had spent since October failing to get anybody to read it.
What she had was one sentence long. A ship had run a track an authority had measured and stamped, and the track had not been where the stamp put it, and the further into the recording she read the wider the disagreement got. Down in that hold two pallets of pipe had come through the netting one length at a time into the forward frame. The Dunlin had been carrying fitters that trip as well as freight, and the fitters had been berthed forward of that frame.
“It’s contaminated,” Petrosyan said, behind her.
Sarah put the recording off.
“It’s been sealed at Halifax since September twentieth and nobody’s had a hand on it since. That’s the one thing in this that’s clean.”
“Not the platform.”
Petrosyan had his coat on, because the radiators went off at nine and it was the ninth of January. The fourth floor had been a records office until September and nobody had taken the shelving out, so the Dunlin investigation Kaplan had brought Sarah to Ottawa for worked down nine metres of steel racking meant for something else. Below the window a man had been clearing the same three metres of pavement since seven and losing.
“The page,” he said. “The mate’s fix off the Alder.”
“It’s what the mate wrote.”
“It’s what Kochi typed out of what the mate wrote.”
“He took it off his own ship’s reference and it went in his own ship’s book. Kochi doesn’t get anywhere near a ship’s book.”
“Kochi made the copy, and a clerk put the copy in a bag, and the bag came to you.” Petrosyan pulled the bench stool round and sat on it, which he did when he meant to still be there in ten minutes. “I’m not saying anybody touched it. I’m saying I can’t write never in the same building and put my name under it.”
“Nobody’s asked you to write anything.”
“Somebody will.”
Sarah went at the calendar instead, because the calendar was the part of it she could get her hands round — the yard had the Dunlin until the ninth of February and on the ninth the platform went back into service and stopped being evidence, and there was no version of the next four weeks that had a bench in it — and she was most of the way down that before she heard what she was doing and stopped doing it.
“How long have you known?”
“Since the bag came.”
“Three weeks.”
“I wanted to see whether you’d find it.”
“Three weeks,” Sarah said again.
“It was a stupid way to spend them.” He did not put anything round it and did not offer her anything after it. “Twenty-two years, and I’ve never once enjoyed being right about a bag.”
Four months, and the offices had not closed the file before she arrived. They had closed it around her, while she sat in the same building and read their working.
Sarah had the injuries off Vardy’s own form. A collarbone. A wrist between a bench and the frame. A man called Okpara who let go of a ladder and caught the rail with one arm on the way past. A fitter with four stitches’ worth of eyebrow and nobody aboard to put stitches in, so the cook taped it and gave him a towel.
Nobody had died, so nobody outside the building cared.
Kochi had it as a platform fault first, which was the obvious reading, because Vardy had thought so herself and had said so on the bridge before she called the abort: it’s the platform, cold-start the backup and run it again. A cold start took four minutes and came up clean and gave four hundred and twenty metres of disagreement instead of a hundred and forty. Kochi noted the cold start, noted that the disagreement had grown, and wrote that a second platform fault of the same class inside fifteen minutes was improbable and not impossible.
The issuing review took six weeks to prove it was not an issuing error, and the man who ran it was called Ihde, and he telephoned Sarah in December after she sent him a list of questions.
“You’ve got my working,” Ihde said.
“I have your working. I’ve read it four times.”
“Two people who’ve never met re-ran that arithmetic. It came out the same to eleven places.” A pause on the line, the long one that came off the switching. “Lieutenant, you’re going to write that I was wrong.”
“I’m going to write that you were right and it didn’t help.”
“That’s worse.”
“I know it is.”
“Six weeks,” Ihde said. “I had four people on it and a woman who missed her mother’s birthday. If you’re going to publish a thing that turns all of that into a footnote, put the six weeks in it.”
Sarah had a card in her breast pocket that said Wills. Collarbone. Wants to talk, and she took it out and wrote a new one that said six weeks — Ihde — four people, and put the new one in front of it.
“I’ll put it in.”
Ihde rang off, and Sarah sat with the receiver in her hand for a moment.
The trouble was that the Dunlin was in dock and dock was on a schedule.
The yard had her until the ninth of February. On the ninth she went back on the twelve-day rotation with fitters and freight on her, the way she had been on the twentieth of September, and her inertial platform came out of the sealed bay and into service and stopped being evidence.
The crew were worse. Vardy had taken a relief master’s berth on another hull in November, because a master ashore gets talked about. The second officer was on leave and had not answered two letters. Wills was still off with the collarbone and was, so far, the only one of them who wanted to talk about any of it, which Sarah had written down in October and had not acted on.
And the solution had been superseded on schedule six weeks after the event, the way every solution on that junction was, so the thing they were arguing about existed nowhere except in a drawer.
Sarah wrote it out for Kaplan on the Thursday, short enough to read standing up.
Kaplan read it standing with her coat on.
“You want the platform on a bench before the ninth, you want it read by somebody outside this building, and you want it done in four weeks.” She turned it over and found the back empty. “What’s it worth?”
“Nothing, if Petrosyan’s right about Kochi.”
“Is he?”
“Yes.”
Kaplan turned a hand over: go on, then.
“The platform’s not his.” Sarah kept her hands out of her pockets for this. “Sealed at Halifax since September twentieth. The yard’s kept the two-metre access log since, whether we asked for it or not.”
“A physical object that’s never been near Kochi.”
“It’s never been near anything.”
“That’s two chains, not three.”
“It’s two, and it’s honest.”
Kaplan put it down on the corner of the desk.
“Then no,” she said.
“Ellen—”
“Four people have asked me for that bay.” Kaplan did up one button of the coat she had not taken off. “And on Monday your case was a third bigger than it is now. I have to go back to a man who counts bays. It isn’t going to be with this.”
Sarah had the next argument ready and did not make it, because it was the same argument in different words and Kaplan had already heard it in the first set.
“All right.”
“Take the platform’s log off the yard,” Kaplan said. “That’s free.”
The parcel was on her desk when she came back down and she knew what it was from the shape of it.
Her father sent the score on the ground, in four days, from Albuquerque, and there was a network path that would have put it in front of her in under a second and he had never once used it. Paper gets there or it doesn’t, he had told her at some kitchen table. Nothing in between.
ISOTOPES 11 — 4. Down the margin in his handwriting: I was up behind third. The box says E-6. Scorer changed it the next morning after somebody had a word with him.
Sarah put it in the drawer with the rest of them and got on with the afternoon, and at about four she stopped in the middle of writing a sentence.
The Alder’s mate had written a number in a book on a Tuesday morning, and the book was aboard the Alder, and nobody had ever asked him for the book. Kochi had asked him for a copy. Kochi had made the copy. The copy had come to her in a bag.
Sarah wrote to him that evening and put it in the post. Four days to Bergen. She asked for the original, cut out or photographed or carried by somebody he trusted, and she asked him to write on the back of it who had had it since the twentieth of September, and she said she would pay the carriage herself if the company would not.
Then she wrote to the Alder’s master, because a mate who sends a page out of a ship’s book without his master knowing is a mate with a problem.
Sarah left the second officer alone after that. Two was where the line was. Micah had taught her that without meaning to — he had answered every request anybody ever put to him, right up to the last one.
Kaplan came down to the fourth floor in the morning, which she had not done since September, and stood in the door of a records office with her coat on.
“Ihde telephoned me last night,” she said. “Wanted to know whether the woman asking him questions was a serious person. I said yes. Then he told me he can’t account for the Alder’s eleven hundred metres either and it’s been bothering him since October, and he’d like six weeks of his people’s work not to end up as a footnote.”
“You said no yesterday.”
“I did say no. I’d have gone on saying it.” Kaplan put a docket on the bench. “The seventh and the eighth. The bay goes back at four on the eighth and you don’t get a third day. Don’t ask me for one.”
The bag from Kochi had come across on Hart’s line, because expediting had wanted an authority and the only one with Sarah’s name on it was entry nine-oh-six of the standing requirement register.
Nine-oh-six was Hart. A colony twelve days’ running out past the Cairn, under a sun that had gone out in the spring, on the far side of a Seam traversal that had not opened since March, so that there was no longer any way to go there and no way for anything to come back. A hundred and thirty-four people standing on the ground over there who did not know whether Earth was still there either.
Sarah signed for it on the Friday in a cold room with the shelving still in it, and later she sat with her hand flat on it.
Deakin had wanted her in the room for the October review, and she had gone up on a Tuesday, and it had taken forty minutes. Next date, October 2350. Seventeen names on their own line.
The seventeen had not moved. Nothing had come the other way since March to move them with — no letter, no list, no name struck through.
Petra Nowak’s last letter was in the drawer under the scores, three lines as usual, and one of them was about a fitter’s hands. Tandy had gone to the yards. Okonjo had told her in September, plainly, that the evidence lane was hers now and Sarah was to keep off it, and Sarah had kept off it.
Sarah went back to the frame.
They got the bay at Halifax on the seventh of February, with a metrologist called Nnamdi who had been told the hull number and nothing else.
Sarah was not allowed inside the tape and did not try. Six hours of the first day went by at the rail, watching a woman she had never met take a cover off a machine with a seal on it and photograph the seal before breaking it.
Late in that first day a yard hand came along the rail with a hand ranging set to put the bay’s own marks back for the cover work, and shot the far wall, and shot the hull standing across the basin, and shot the open end of the bay where there was nothing but weather for a long way. Three shots, three distances, the same figure. The man turned the set over and blew on the window of it and did all three again and got the same figure again, and swore at it without any heat, and put it in its case and went off to the store for another one.
Sarah watched him go, and went back to the tape.
Petrosyan came and stood beside her in the afternoon.
“She’s slow,” Sarah said.
“She’s expensive because she’s slow.”
“I know. I’m not complaining.” Sarah had both hands on the rail. “I’m just watching somebody do in one afternoon what I’ve been arguing about since October.”
On the second morning Nnamdi came out to the rail with her tablet against her chest and asked whether either of them had told her the truth about what the machine had been doing on the twentieth of September, and Petrosyan said no, and she said good, and went back in.
At two the yard sent a man round to say the bay was wanted at four. Petrosyan asked him for six and got four, and then went and stood where Nnamdi could see him through the tape and left it at that.
Nnamdi came out at ten past four with the cover back on.
“Your platform’s fine,” she said. “Two references. Inside its own class on both. It isn’t drifting, it didn’t drift, and if somebody’s written down that it drifted, somebody’s wrong.”
“You asked for a third.”
“A third stops a lawyer saying my two came off the same bench. You bought two.” Nnamdi turned the tablet round. “It doesn’t change this part.”
Sarah leaned in over the rail to read it.
“Four hundred and twenty metres on the twentieth, against the certificate. Still opening where the recording stops.”
“And the platform’s sound.”
“The platform’s sound.” Nnamdi let her have it. “The certificate was wrong at six, or it wasn’t describing the same relationship at eleven-forty that it described at six. The issuing review spent six weeks killing the first one.”
Nobody said anything.
“I’m not writing the second one,” Nnamdi said. “I’ll write that the platform’s sound, that the disagreement’s real, that I ran two and not three because of the bay, and that I can’t account for any of it. What you do with the arithmetic is your business. Keep my name off that part.”
“You’ll get that,” Petrosyan said.
Nnamdi went back inside the tape to write it standing up, with a fitter crew coming in around her.
Sarah stood at the rail with the cold coming up off the bay floor and did the arithmetic she had been refusing to do since the second week, and it came out the way it had come out then.
“Two chains,” Petrosyan said.
“Two chains and nobody who’ll account for four hundred and twenty metres.”
“That’s the number to have.” He was looking at the bay and not at her. “You were going to publish three. You’d have been humiliated inside a year.”
“I know,” Sarah said. “You were right about Kochi and I should have found it in the first week. There. Once.”
Bergen came back on the tenth, four days after she had stopped expecting it.
The page was inside, cut out of the book. It had been folded twice and it smelled faintly of the ship. Four names on the back in a second hand, with the dates each of them had held it.
At the bottom, from the master: he had read her letter, the page was going with his blessing, and would Lieutenant Bishop kindly not lose it.
Sarah put it on the bench beside Nnamdi’s report.
It had never been in Kochi.
“Three,” Petrosyan said, from the door, still in his coat.
“And Hart’s eleven.”
Petrosyan waited.
“Eleven mappings that went bad. Every one dated.” Sarah had the page in both hands and was not looking at him. “On its own that’s an anecdote. It’s been an anecdote for a year.”
“And with a measured displacement beside it.”
“Then it’s a window.”
Petrosyan came in and looked at it without touching it.
“Who asks for the hulls?”
“Kaplan.”
“Kaplan.” He straightened up off the bench. “Who bought you a day and a half off a telephone call from a man she’s never met. If you’re wrong you’re a Lieutenant who was wrong.”
Sarah put the page down flat.
“Write it so she doesn’t have to believe you,” Petrosyan said, and went.
Sarah worked the window out again, by hand, and put the answer at the bottom where anybody could read it.
It was shorter than the four weeks it had taken to get two days of a bay.
Sarah checked it, and it stayed short.
The Dunlin had gone back on rotation on the ninth. There were hulls on that queue every hour of every day, coming in ninth and tenth with the slot clock over the door counting down, and every one of them was flying on something an authority had stamped at six in the morning. Every one of them went out with people asleep in it.
Then she went up the stairs with all three of them under her arm. Two floors up somebody’s radio was on and a woman was laughing at whatever was on it, and the building smelled of wet coats and the soup they did on Fridays.
Sarah knocked on Kaplan’s door. Inside, a chair came back off a desk, and Kaplan said come in, and Sarah went in and put the three of them down in front of her in the order they had come.
“That’s three,” Kaplan said.
“That’s three, and there’s a window on the back of the last one.” Sarah stayed on her feet. “I can’t tell you where. I can tell you it won’t wait for October.”