2Deck Nought

I did not sleep. I have never been good at carrying a thing unfinished, and an unopened door is the most unfinished thing there is. I lay in my bunk through the sleep-watch listening to the ship do what the ship always does — the coolant ticking, the air moving, eleven thousand people breathing in the dark on the far side of the bulkheads — and I thought about a rectangle of cold under my palm, and at the turn of the watch I got up, drew a hand-lamp and a pry-bar and a laser from the survey locker against the log, which is a small dishonesty and the first I had ever committed, and went back down to Fourteen-aft alone.

The wall was exactly where I had left it, which I record because part of me had expected it to be gone, or to have been never there, the way a fright looks foolish by daylight. It was not foolish. It was a bulkhead built across a corridor, and now that I was looking with the doubt already in me I could see the lie in the workmanship — the plating was ship’s plating, but the welds were not on the ship’s schedule, and the paint that should have been forty coats deep like everything we live inside was thin, a single skin, meant to be looked at and not touched. Behind the maintenance plate at knee height, where on any true bulkhead there would be coolant runs, there was instead a manual latch. A latch. On the inside face of a wall that the map said was the outer hull of the world.

Someone had wanted to be able to open it.

The latch was stiff with the disuse of a very long time and then it was not stiff, and it turned, and the hatch let go of its frame with a sigh of equalising air — colder air, older air, air that had been shut away from the rest of us and had forgotten how to smell like people — and I put my lamp through the gap ahead of my body, the way you are trained to enter any dead space, and I went into a deck that four hundred years of my Office swore was solid hull.

It was a long room, and it was cold with a cold that had no coolant behind it, only distance — the cold of the outer skin of the ship, the true skin, the one the corridor had been walled short of. My lamp found a low ceiling, a floor of plain deckplate worn smooth down the centre by feet, consoles ranked along one side under their dust like furniture in a shut house. And it found, along the whole far wall, a window.

I want to be careful here, because I have read back what I first wrote and it was not exact, and this deck deserves exactness if nothing else in my life does. We do not have windows. I had lived thirty-one years inside the Ark Meridian and never once seen the outside of it, because there is no reason to build a hole in a hull that must hold for ten thousand years, and every child learns that the outside is not a place but an absence, the Long Quiet, the dark we sail and do not look at. And here was a window twenty metres long, and beyond it was the dark, and the dark was full of stars, and the stars did not move.

That is the thing I had come for, though I did not know it until I saw it. The stars did not move.

I stood at that founders’ window a long time and I watched them not move. A ship under drive — a ship still climbing toward the morning we are all promised, still adding speed against the long dark the way the Purpose says we have added it every day since the founders lit the engines — such a ship is falling forward through the star-field, and near stars slide against far ones, slowly, but they slide, and the sliding is the proof of the promise. Every schoolroom has the diagram. I had drawn it myself for children, the near lights drifting past the far, this is how we know we are going somewhere. I put my eye to that cold glass and I looked for the drift with a cartographer’s patience, which is a great deal of patience, and there was none. The field hung dead and perfect and eternal. We were not falling forward. We were not climbing. We were coasting, the way a thrown stone coasts at the top of its arc in the long moment before it remembers the ground — and I did not yet know how long we had been at the top of the arc, but the dust on the consoles was very deep, and the stars were very still.

The consoles told me the rest, once I had wiped a plate clear and coaxed the residual cells to wake them. I am a cartographer and not an engineer, but a velocity log is only a corridor drawn in numbers, and I can read a length whatever the units. The engines had gone dark ninety-one years ago. I found the date they stopped and I found the coast-speed they left us at and I found, worst of all, an honest projection in a founders-era hand — the same hand, I realised, going cold, that had drawn the master chart I had trusted my whole life, the same clean confident stroke — carrying our arc forward to the destination the Purpose sings about every founding-day. The number under it was not a number a person is built to hold. Ten thousand years, it said, and beside the ten thousand a small mark that in the old notation means lower bound; assumes recovery of drive, and there had been no recovery of drive in ninety-one years, and the mark meant, if you read it the way it was written, if ever.

We were not going to arrive. Not I, not my children if I had them, not their children down two hundred generations. The morning we carry each other toward, the morning the whole world turns its work and its grief and its patience against — the founders had run the true numbers on it, at this window, in this cold, and then they had walled the deck out of the map and gone back up the corridor to tell everyone the morning was coming.

I sat down in the one chair. It was worn smooth, the arms of it, the seat of it, worn the way a thing is worn by use and not by years — and that was when the cold that had nothing to do with the hull went all the way into me, because dust does not settle on a chair that is sat in, and this chair was clean. In the deep dust of that erased and forgotten deck, one console plate was wiped, one chair was worn bright, and across the smooth floor to the hatch I had just opened ran a single track of clean deckplate the width of two feet, walked and re-walked and walked again, recent, patient, ongoing.

I was not the first person to distrust the map. I was only the first in a long time to do it by accident.

Someone came here still. Someone from my Office, in my own generation, came down to this window on a quiet watch and looked at the stars that do not move and read the number that means if ever, and then climbed back up the honest corridor and confirmed it at one hundred and sixty-one metres, the way we all do, the way I had always done — and told the children that the world was known.

I put out my lamp so the dead stars could have the room. Then I lit it again, because I am a cartographer, and I took out my stylus, and by its small light I began, with a very steady hand this time, to draw the deck that is not on any chart, so that at least one true map of the world would exist somewhere, even if I was the only soul who ever read it.