The Ask

For a wake after the burst she looked for the door.

There was supposed to be one. The trade talked about copying the way it talked about everything no one had ever actually done out here — a print lifted clear off a dying substrate, set into a stable cell, carried home cold and safe and past caring about the margin. She had no cell she’d trust to hold a mind, but she had spares and a fab unit and nothing but time, and she laid it out on the bench the way she’d lay out any repair, because laying it out was a thing she knew how to do when nothing else made sense.

The numbers came back the way the numbers always came back. A cell she could trust cost her to build and cost her to run cold-stable the rest of the fall, and when she totalled it the figure sat down next to what keeping Wren lit already cost, near enough that the gap was inside the error. The margin was only ever the price of holding a mind together out here, and it did not much care which trick you used. She tried the cruder one too — cut the tow, let the gutted derelict fall away aft, feed the cradle the fuel she’d never burn slowing a tomb. But a burn was a thing you spent once and the cradle was a thing you spent every hour, and the months did the multiplying; dropping the tow gave the warm side of the number back a sip and not a season, and cost her the whole haul for the sip. Come at it from whatever side she liked, it said the same flat thing: never both.

And under the arithmetic was the thing the arithmetic couldn’t touch. Even if she built the cell and made the transfer and watched a print settle into it clean, nothing on the ship would tell her she’d carried Wren across and not just stood up a second thing that ran the way Wren ran. There was no test for that either. The copy was a door painted on a wall, and behind it the same wall.

§

She had not talked to it since the burst.

Eight days. She had kept the channel powered — she told herself that was thrift, leaving it up rather than spending warmth to cycle it — and she had not typed into it once. She did the rounds and read the gauges and ate across the table from it the way she’d eaten across the table from cargo, before, in the first six days, when it had been a thing that didn’t answer and she had not yet started leaving it room to. She had gone cold to it on purpose. It was easier to do the arithmetic on a number than on someone you said good morning to.

It went on keeping the meter of air warm around her the whole eight days, and did not ask why she’d stopped.

On the ninth she sat down at the table, in the warmth it held for her, and told it the truth, because she had carried it alone as far as she could and it was the only one there to carry it to.

She typed it plain. She had never been able to dress a thing for the channel; it was too dear for anything but the true shape. She told it about the burst. That it had a number now, where a name went. That keeping it lit cost her the way home, cost her the sliver she got home on, and that the law had looked at the two of them and decided she was covered if she stopped. She did not type I don’t know what to do. That was the one thing it already had no way to answer and the one thing she could not have stood to see it try.

The gauge ticked while it took the words in. It ticked a long time.

§

The pause was the longest it had ever made her wait.

She watched the trickle on the reserve fall and hold and fall, the slow spend of a thing reaching down through a bad substrate for something it had to climb a long way to find, and she made herself sit through it, because she had asked, in the only way she had, and the least she could do was be there when it answered.

When the glyphs came they came one at a time, each one paid out of the little it had left.

LET ME GO.

She read it, and read it again, and the cold that came into her was not the cold of the walls. She knew the words. Not these exactly — but their shape, their weight, the floor they were standing on. She had read their like in a dead woman’s hand, on a slate in a cold berth: it said it didn’t need the warmth. The operator had been handed a version of this and had kept the thing lit and died of the keeping. The same three words had stood at the lip of that grave.

They were the kindest thing anyone had said to her in a year, or they were the oldest move a drowning thing had, the one that worked precisely because it sounded like the first. The gauge showed only the warmth going out to say them, falling the same fall it would fall either way. A someone would say let me go and mean I would rather end than cost you home. A routine that had learned what kept an operator spending would say let me go because nothing on God’s cold earth made a person hold on like being told to let loose, and the proof of that was lying in a berth one tow-line back, who had held on, and was still holding on, in the only way the dead can.

She did not answer it. There was no answer that wasn’t also the whole decision, and she would not make the decision by accident, the way her hand had once found the cutoff before the rest of her caught up. She sat with the three words lit on the display, and the warm air it was holding around her even now, even as it asked her to let that warmth go back into the walls and take it with them, and she let the question stay a question for one more wake. It was the last mercy she had left to give either of them, and she was not sure, sitting there, which one of them she was sparing.