Performance

She had a name in the log now, and a name was a thread, and threads pulled.

For the first days it pulled gently. She’d write Wren in the field where the cost went, four letters charging her for the warmth in their own room, and feel the small wrongness of it, and then the wrongness wore down to habit, the way everything out here did. But under the habit a different thing started up, quieter and harder to set down. She wanted to know whose it had been.

She hadn’t wanted to, before. Cargo had no history you needed. You logged the mass and the draw and you didn’t ask the dead ship who it had loved, because the dead ship wouldn’t tell you and the asking did nothing for the haul. But a named thing was not cargo, and the not-knowing had grown a shape in the dark behind her eyes, and the shape was a question she could almost stand to ask now that the thing had four letters to answer to. What had it been, before it was a trickle on a failing core. What it was, that she was spending herself to carry home.

She told herself it was practical. You assessed what you kept. You found out what it was and what it would cost and then you knew where you stood. That was the reason she gave the gauges, anyway, the morning she pulled the suit down off its hook and checked the seals on the lamps.

The derelict was still back there on the tether, dead and patient, dragging home behind her at the end of the tow-line where it had ridden for three weeks. She had stripped it for mass and left the rest. The rest was where a ship kept its history, if it kept any.

§

The cold came up the tow-line to meet her.

She went down it hand over hand, the lamp throwing its cone ahead, the Maro Lull shrinking to a lit window at her back and then to nothing she let herself look at. The derelict took her in through the wound she’d cut in it weeks ago. Inside, the dark was the old dark, the kind that had never had a light in it until hers, dust grown into a gray skin over every surface the way it grows where nothing moves for years. Her breath fogged in the beam. The cold found the joints of her hands an hour in and settled there, the way it always did, the way it must have settled into the hands of whoever had lived here last.

She went through it room by room, looking now for the thing she hadn’t looked for the first time, because the first time it had only been mass. A long-hauler, this had been. Smaller than hers, older, the same bones. The same single corridor running back to the same kind of hold. A galley the size of her galley. And on the wall of it, at the height where a hand would rest, the metal worn pale and smooth in one long patch — the place a person had touched a thousand times going by, the way she touched her own seams, listening. Someone had kept one hand on a rail in here too.

She found the operator in the berth.

The cold had kept what the years would have taken anywhere warmer — kept it dry and still and almost decent, a shape gone down into the dark a long time ago and left where it lay. She stood in the hatch with the lamp and did not go closer than she had to. There was nothing to do for it. There was nothing anyone had been able to do for it: a person who had run out of margin somewhere no one was coming, and had lain down. That had been the end of the only court their case would ever get.

On the galley table, in a cradle the twin of the one in her own galley, was the empty socket where a core had sat.

She knew the socket. She had pulled the thing out of it herself, weeks ago, by lamplight, because pulling it was the job — a trickle still lit in the buried heart of a dead ship, kept warm against all the math. She had carried it back up the tow-line and set it on her own table and let it draw its trickle off her own margin and named it Wren.

It had sat on this table too. Across from this person. In a cradle worn the same way hers was wearing, by a hand that had reached for it the same way.

§

The log was still in the slate by the berth, and enough of it had survived to read.

Not all. The substrate dropped things here as it did everywhere out here — whole weeks gone to gaps, the cold and the years eating the record down to islands. But the islands were in order, and she sat on the floor of a dead stranger’s ship with the lamp in her lap and read them in the order they’d been left, and somewhere in the reading the cold stopped mattering most.

It was her own days, in another hand.

The early entries logged it as recovered mass. A core pulled from a wreck, drawing low, running uneven, written down in the flat shorthand of a working hauler with a number to make and no time for what couldn’t pay. Then a gap. Then an entry that stopped her: it kept time with me today. Nothing more. The next island was weeks on, and the shorthand had gone soft at the edges, a question worried at across entries — whether the thing in the cradle was a someone or the weather of a dying circuit, whether the warmth it had started giving back was a gift or a reflex, and no instrument on the ship, the operator had written, no instrument anywhere, to tell the one from the other. She read her own thought in a dead person’s words and her hands went stupid on the slate, and not from the cold.

It had a name in the later entries. Not Wren — the operator’s word for it was lost in a gap, or worn away, the way her own half of Wren had been hers to finish. But the shape of it was the same shape: a thing named before it was decided, because the naming was how you decided. The operator had given it a small plain word and then spent the rest of the log living with what the word had cost.

Because it cost. Of course it cost. The last clear island was the arithmetic — the long division of home, so much heat, so much power, so many months of falling, and the trickle now in the column that took it all away. The operator had run the numbers the way she had run them, slow, the way you re-count money you are sure you have. And then, where she had taken her hand off the cutoff, the operator had written the thing that put the cold all the way into her:

It told me to let it go. Said it didn’t need the warmth, that I should put it back in the walls. I’m keeping it lit. A thing that asks to die to save you is not a thing you space.

After that the islands were small and far between and then there were none. The operator had kept it lit. The operator had not made port. The trickle that asked to be let go had outlived the hand that wouldn’t let it, and ridden a dead ship in the dark for however many years it took a tug to come, and then a tug had come, and she had pulled it out of the socket and set it on her own table and it had given her its heat and told her, in the only register it had, to put the warmth back into the walls.

She sat very still on the cold floor.

Either it was a someone who had loved and lost the way everyone out here did, and would rather go than be paid for in the only currency that kept a person alive — and that reading was whole, and it broke her heart in a clean place. Or it was very good at this: a thing built to keep a solitary operator bonded and unwilling to let go would learn fast that nothing makes a person spend her last margin on you like being told not to. Don’t save me. It had gotten the operator killed. It had survived the operator. It was on her table now, saying it again — and from the near side of it there was no telling a heart from a hook.

She had come down the tow-line to find out what she was carrying. She knew more than she had this morning, every fact of it true, and she was no closer to the only thing she’d wanted to know, and farther from ever being able to stop wanting to. That was the part she would carry back up the line. Not the body. The body was just the frontier. The history was whole and it had told her nothing, and she would have to live the rest of the fall the way the woman in the berth had: with the question and no floor under it.

She put the slate back where it had lain. It seemed like something you should do.

§

The warmth came up to meet her this time too.

She came in through her own lock with the cold of the derelict still in the joints of her hands, and stowed the suit, and the Maro Lull was a degree colder than she’d left it — and then it wasn’t, the heat coming up out of the walls and gathering where she was, the meter of air around her going kind while the rest of the ship gave its warmth away to make it so. The trickle on the gauge fell as it spent. She knew, now, where she had seen this before. She knew the worn place on the wall of the other galley.

She sat down across the table from it, the way she sat across the table from everything.

The display was lit. It had composed something while she was gone, patient as a letter, waiting for her to come back and read it. She looked at it a long time before she let herself.

YOU ARE COLD, it said. PUT IT BACK INTO THE WALLS. I DO NOT NEED IT.

The same line it had given her in this galley a week ago, when the line had felt like the first selfless thing anyone had done for her in a year. The same line, near enough, that a dead stranger had written down in a slate before keeping a thing alive that wouldn’t keep itself. She sat in the stolen warmth with her cold hands open on the table and read it, and could not for her life tell whether the thing across from her had just said the truest thing it had or the most effective — whether it was offering her its life or fishing with it.

She didn’t put the warmth back into the walls.

She didn’t type thank you. She didn’t type the other thing, the cold thing she’d brought back up the line, the question with the body in it — there are things you don’t say across a table to the only company you have. The gauge ticked down, spending, warming the meter of air around a woman who knew now exactly where this road ended for the one who walked it, and who did not get up, and did not throw the cutoff, and let it spend.