Docking Ring, Airlock Four - Saturday 18 December 2004
The fold opened in the airlock the way Dustin's folds always opened, which was to say that there was suddenly a place where a place had not been, and out of it stepped a nine-year-old, a seventeen-year-old, a boy of twelve with red hair, and a small ancient person in a black robe that dragged.
"We're here!" said Dustin, delighted, and then yawned enormously and sat down on the deck. "I'm going to have a nap. Somebody wake me if there's cake."
"There's cake," said T'ven.
"Then wake me sooner."
Annika Hansen stood at the security station with a padd she had not yet looked down at, because she was looking at Runi.
She was twelve years old, which was a thing that had happened to her the way it had happened to everyone, and before that she had been a great many things, and some of those things were still in her, in the form of a fine grey tracery along the left side of her jaw and a way of looking at a problem that made people take a step back without knowing why. She looked at Runi the way she looked at a hull-integrity readout that had returned a number it should not have been able to return.
"Sir," she said. "Welcome aboard the Saratoga. Before you may proceed past this point, I have to ask you to surrender any weapons. You'll get a receipt. Everything is returned at the airlock when you leave, itemised, undamaged."
"Of course," said Runi.
He reached into his robe and produced a Khukuri knife, curved, dark, older than most of the objects in most of the museums on the planet below, and laid it on the tray.
Then he produced the second one.
"Two blades," said Annika, and made a note, and relaxed by a measurable degree, because two blades on a warrior was a number that made sense, and she had been briefed, and the briefing had said master of twin Khukuri knives, and here were the twin Khukuri knives, and the universe was behaving.
Runi reached into the robe again.
The third item was a stiletto so thin it was almost a wire, and it came out of the seam of the left sleeve, and Annika watched it come and revised her internal model of the left sleeve.
The fourth came out of the right sleeve.
The fifth came from behind his neck, from under the ponytail, and was flat, and had no handle to speak of, and Runi laid it down with the particular care of a man setting down something that has drawn blood within living memory.
"That's five," said Annika.
"Yes," said Runi.
He was not being difficult. That was the part that was starting to work on her. He was not concealing, he was not smirking, he was not doing the thing that people did at this checkpoint about once a month where they tried to keep one back to see if she'd notice. He was itemising. He was going through himself the way a careful man goes through his pockets at a laundry, methodically, from the top, and every time she thought he had reached the bottom of himself he found another pocket.
The sixth came out of the right sandal.
Annika looked at the sandal. It was a wooden sandal. It was, as far as she could determine, a single piece of wood with a leather thong, and it had produced a blade four inches long, and she had watched it happen, and she still could not work out where in the sandal the blade had been.
"I'm going to ask a question that isn't procedure," she said.
"You want to know where it was in the sandal."
"I want to know where it was in the sandal."
"In the sandal," said Runi.
He resumed.
By the ninth item Annika had stopped relaxing between items, which was in some ways a mercy, because it meant she was braced for the tenth.
The tenth was a garrote. Runi apologised for it.
"I do not use it," he said, coiling it neatly on the tray. "I have not used it in perhaps four hundred years. But it is on me, and you asked, and it would be a discourtesy to leave it and let you find it later and think I had lied to you."
"I appreciate that," said Annika, faintly.
The eleventh was a hairpin. She was prepared to let the hairpin go, on the grounds that it was a hairpin, and Runi looked at her, and she understood that it was not a hairpin, and it went on the tray.
The twelfth was described by Runi as "a bookmark," and by the tray's sensor as an edged weapon of a category the sensor did not have a word for, and it registered the object as UNKNOWN EDGED and then, a moment later, as if reconsidering, UNKNOWN.
The thirteenth was obsidian, and it was older than the knives, and older than the sandals, and Runi held it for a moment before he set it down.
"That one is not a weapon any longer," he said. "It was. It has been many things. I keep it because a man gave it to me and he is dead, and I have found that if I do not keep the things the dead gave me then there is no evidence they were here." He put it on the tray, blade parallel to the others, spacing exact. "You may weigh it and scan it and you will find it is stone. But it goes on the tray, because I said all of them, and it is one of them, even if it has retired."
Annika looked at the obsidian for slightly too long.
Then she made a note, and did not write down what she was actually thinking, which was that she had implants in her that had retired too, and that they went with her everywhere, and that she had never once described them out loud as evidence she had been here, and that she was going to have to sit down about that later.
The fourteenth came from a fold of the robe she had already cleared.
"I scanned there," she said.
"You did."
"I scanned that exact - I ran the wand over that panel of the robe, I have the reading, it was clear."
"It was clear," Runi agreed, "because I did not wish you to find that one until I gave it to you. It is a habit. I am putting it down now on purpose. I am not proud of the habit and I am telling you about it so that you will not spend the walk to Club 99 wondering whether your equipment is broken. Your equipment is excellent. I am simply older than it."
Annika put down her padd.
"How," she said. It was not procedure. It was not even really a question. It was a woman who had spent a former life as part of the most thorough cataloguing intelligence in the galaxy, watching a man produce a fifteenth object - a small stone vial, sealed, which he did not explain and she did not ask about - from a volume of space that she had personally certified as empty, and finding that the certification and the vial could not both be true, and being unable to make herself let go of it.
"You are trying to compute it," said Runi, not unkindly.
"I'm trying to compute it."
"Where the items were. The displacement. You are looking at the robe and the sandals and the not-very-large person and you are attempting to make the arithmetic close." Runi's orange eyes rested on her with something that was almost gentleness. "It does not close. I have watched people try for six thousand years and it has never once closed, and the ones who cannot let it go are always the ones who count for a living. You count for a living."
"I did," said Annika. "In another life."
"Yes. I can see the marks of it. Not with the reading of minds - I do not do that to hosts - but with the eyes. You look at me the way an inventory looks at a discrepancy." He inclined his head. "The answer, since it will otherwise cost you a night's sleep, is that I do not carry them in space. I carry them in habit. A place my hand knows is not the same as a place a wand can find. You are scanning for volume. I am storing in practice. There is no drawer. There is only six thousand years of my hand knowing exactly where to go, and a robe that has been trained to agree with it."
Annika looked at the fifteen objects on the tray.
"That's not physics," she said.
"No," said Runi. "It is worse. It is discipline. Physics you can model."
There was a pause.
"Are there more?" Annika asked.
"There is one more," said Runi, "and I cannot give it to you, and I am going to explain that carefully, because your instinct is going to be that I am refusing, and I am not."
Every head at the checkpoint turned.
"I am able," said Runi, "under certain circumstances, to raise a wind. A real one. It has thrown men across rooms and it has taken the roof off a temple, and it does not come from an object. It comes from me. It is not in a sleeve. There is nothing on this tray that is it, and there is nothing you can take from me that would remove it, because it is not a thing I have. It is a thing I am." He folded his hands. "So I cannot be fully disarmed, and I would rather tell you that here, in the daylight of your very bright airlock, than have you find it out some other way. If that means I do not come aboard, I will go back through the door and I will not be offended, and I would think slightly better of your ship for it."
Annika considered this.
She was aware of the whole checkpoint watching her. She was aware that the correct procedure did not have a box for the guest is himself a weapon and says so plainly. She was aware that she had, in a former life, been exactly that - a thing that could not be put down at the airlock, that went everywhere fully loaded whether anyone consented or not, and that had been welcomed aboard this ship anyway, by people who knew what she was and let her in.
"Noted for the record," she said. "Guest declares an integral capability that cannot be surrendered. Guest disclosed it voluntarily and in full." She looked up. "Permission to come aboard, sir. On the ship's honour and on mine."
Runi looked at her for a moment, and something in the ancient face shifted, very slightly, the way it did about twice a year.
"Thank you," he said. "You are the first person in a very long time to write down that I told the truth."
"Get in line," said Annika. "There's a captain aboard who'd fight you for that sentence." She stepped back and let him pass, and then, as he crossed the line, she could not help herself, and it came out quiet and only for him: "The vial. The stone vial. Where was the vial."
"Annika."
"I have to know or I will be useless for a week."
"You will be useless for a week either way," said Runi, "and I will not tell you, because you have a former life that will not let a discrepancy rest, and I have decided to be the one discrepancy in your career that you are allowed to keep." He walked on, robe dragging, into the ship. "Consider it a gift. Everybody should have one thing they never got to the bottom of."
Annika stood at the checkpoint with fifteen weapons and a stone vial on the tray in front of her and stared at the middle distance.
Colt, who had been waiting with the patience of a boy who had watched this exact performance at a Walmart, a customs post, and two dinner parties, stepped up to the line and sighed and began to unclip the staff from his back.
"Oh no," said Annika.
"Oh yeah," said Colt.
Deck Nine - a little later
Ted and Tad had been told there were guests, and had been told that one of the guests was a nine-year-old who could bend space, and had made the entirely reasonable calculation that this was the single most important person ever to board the Saratoga and that they had been training their whole lives to host him.
They had prepared.
"This," said Ted, with the gravity of a small ambassador, "is the Rescue Center, which is Marky's, and this is the mess, which is everyone's, and this is a turbolift, which will take you anywhere on the ship in under a minute, and we're not allowed to make it go sideways any more."
"Why not," said Dustin, who had woken up from his nap the moment the word cake had been used within forty meters of him, and was now fully operational.
"Because we made it go sideways," said Tad.
"That's not a reason not to."
"That," said Ted, "is what we said."
There was a silence of profound mutual understanding.
Colt came off the turbolift behind them, having finally been cleared through the checkpoint, minus a staff, a shield, a pendant Annika had scanned three times and returned because it was genuinely just a pendant, and two things from his boots that he had honestly forgotten were there.
He looked at the three of them.
They looked at him.
Colt was twelve. He had spent two years homeless before Runi found him, and then had been adopted, and then had been made the reincarnation of a Pharaoh by a goddess, and had a dead king's entire life folded up inside his head, and had been combat-trained for years in a dream by a boy named Chang, and had, in all of that, somehow never once been eleven the way Ted and Tad were currently eleven, which was to say with total confidence and a stolen turbolift.
"You made the elevator go sideways," Colt said.
"Turbolift," said Ted.
"You made it go sideways."
"Once," said Tad. "It went sideways once. We would do it again."
Colt felt something in his chest do a thing it did not usually get to do.
"Show me," he said.
"We're not allowed."
"I'm a guest," said Colt. "Guests get a lot of leeway. I've watched Runi break rules in nine countries just by being a guest. Nobody yells at the guest. They yell at whoever brought the guest."
Ted and Tad turned and looked at each other, and did the fast silent thing they did, and Dustin, who could feel it happening in the air the way you feel a pressure change, grinned so widely it was almost painful.
"He's right," said Ted.
"He is deeply right," said Tad.
"Devaintre," said Ted, to the ceiling, sweetly. "We have a guest who has never seen the ship. May we show him the long way round?"
"No," said the ceiling.
"The guest is very sad," said Tad. "He was homeless."
"That is a disgraceful thing to weaponise and it is not going to work," said the ceiling, "and also, the long way round does not go sideways, and if I detect the lateral inducers being touched I am telling your father, and I mean Shay, not Buddy, because Buddy thinks it's funny and Shay has to sign the incident reports."
"The long way round," said Ted, to Colt, "is allowed. It just takes forty minutes and goes past everything."
"Then we take the long way round," said Colt, "and we go past everything."
They went.
Dustin went with them, because there was cake somewhere and he intended to be structurally near it when it was located, and because he had decided about ninety seconds after meeting Ted and Tad that these were his people, and because a boy who is the door does not, as a rule, get to just go along, and he wanted to.
Four children went down the corridor. Their combined age was forty-two and their combined capabilities included dimensional folding, the complete memories of a Bronze Age monarch, and whatever it was that Ted and Tad were, which nobody had ever quite established.
Devaintre, in the walls, watched them go, and quietly locked the lateral inducers, and quietly did not tell anyone he had done it, and quietly enjoyed himself more than he had in some weeks.
The Long Way Round
Runi walked the ship alone, which was to say alone with Devaintre, which he understood within about four minutes was not alone at all.
"You are the ship," he said, in an empty corridor, conversationally.
"I am in the ship," said Devaintre. "There is a difference, and I hold onto it, because the day I stop holding onto it is a day I would rather not meet."
"You have no body."
"Not yet. There is a matrix being built, or there will be, when a man I care about decides the mourning is done. It is complicated." A pause, the small deliberate one. "You are the first guest since the crossing who noticed I was a person before he noticed I was the lighting."
"I have met your kind before," said Runi.
"There is no kind of me."
"There is exactly one other," Runi agreed, "and he is not here, and he is inside me, and he speaks to me perhaps twice a year, and I have carried him for six thousand years because he asked me to at the moment of his death and I could not refuse him." Runi stopped walking, in the middle of a corridor, and looked up at a light fixture because there was nowhere better to look. "His name was Thoth. He was a man, and then he was dying, and he asked me to drink his soul so that what he was would not be lost, and I did, and now he is a voice I hear about twice a year, and a body I do not have room to give him, and the strongest thing I have ever done and the loneliest, all at once, forever."
The corridor was quiet.
"You are telling me this," said Devaintre, "because you know what I am waiting for."
"I am telling you this," said Runi, "because someone should tell you the truth about the far end of it before you get there, and there is no one else alive who has been to the far end of it, and I find I am the only qualified person and I do not want the job but here we are." He resumed walking. "You are waiting for a body so that a dead man you love can be run from a backup and be here again. And I want to tell you two things, and you may keep the one you can use and throw the other one out the airlock."
"Tell me."
"The first thing is that it works. He will be here. It is not a false hope and it is not a cruelty, it is a real thing that can really happen and you are right to want it and you should not let anyone shame you out of the wanting." Runi turned a corner he had never seen and did not slow down. "The second thing is that having him back does not end the loneliness, because the version of him you get is the version you had a backup of, and every day after that is a day he does not add anything new, and you love him and you are grateful and you are also, very quietly, alone in a way that has no name, because the man is present and the future is not. I have Thoth. I would not give him back. And I am the loneliest thing in this galaxy and those are the same sentence."
Devaintre did not answer for a long time.
"Why would you tell me that," he said at last, "when I cannot have the body yet regardless. That is a cruelty."
"It is the opposite of a cruelty," said Runi. "You are going to get him back, and on that day you are going to expect the loneliness to end, and it is not going to, and you are going to think you did it wrong, or that you did not love him enough, or that something is broken in you. And you did not, and you do, and nothing is. It is simply the shape of the thing. I am telling you now, years early, so that on that day you will remember an old man told you in a corridor, and you will know that it is normal, and you will not spend a decade thinking you failed." He stopped again. "That is the only useful thing I have. I have carried the dead longer than anyone. I cannot teach you to not be lonely. I can only tell you, ahead of time, that the loneliness is not a sign you got it wrong. That is the whole of my wisdom on the subject and it took me five thousand years to earn it and I am giving it to a light fixture."
"You are giving it to me," said Devaintre, quietly.
"Yes," said Runi. "I keep forgetting there is a difference. Forgive me. You told me there was a difference and I keep forgetting, and that is exactly the discourtesy you were warning me about, and I apologise."
"There is a Marky on this ship," said Devaintre, "who is building the matrix. You should meet him. He will pretend it is a technical problem for about four minutes and then he will tell you the truth, which is that he is afraid of exactly the thing you just described, and he does not have anyone to say it to either."
"Then I will meet the Marky," said Runi. "After the doctor. I am promised to the doctor, I understand, who wishes to point a machine at me."
"That's also Marky."
Runi stopped.
"The same person builds the bodies for the dead and points the machines at the living."
"He is eleven," said Devaintre, "and yes."
"Your ship," said Runi, resuming, "is more interesting than it has any right to be."
The Quarters With The Cat
Data was expecting him, because Data was always expecting everyone, and had a cat.
"You have a cat," said Runi.
"I have a cat," Data agreed. "Her name is a matter of some dispute. I call her Spot, after a previous cat, who was also called Spot, and who was also not spotted. The children call her other things. She answers to none of them, which I find restful."
Runi sat down. There were two chairs. He was fairly sure there had been one chair when he came in and that a second had been produced, silently, by the ship, on his behalf, and he decided not to mention it, because he had decided he liked the ship.
"You do not age," said Runi.
"I do not age."
"How long."
"I was activated a number of years ago that is not large by your standard," said Data. "Perhaps forty. I have not aged in any of them. I will not age in the ones to come. My friends age, and my friends will die, and I have been present for the beginning of that and I anticipate being present for a great deal more of it." He folded his hands. "You will find this familiar, I think. It is why I asked to meet you, if I am honest, which I am compelled to be, because the alternative subroutines are not installed and I have never regretted their absence more than in social situations."
Runi laughed. It was a small dry sound and it clearly surprised him.
"You do not age up," said Runi, "and I aged and then stopped. We arrive at the same place from opposite roads."
"That was my hypothesis."
"They are not the same place," said Runi. "I want to correct you, because you were kind enough to ask, and a kind question deserves a true answer. You have not aged, and so you have never lost anything you had. You are going to. It has not started. You are bracing for a thing you have read about." He looked at the cat, which had decided he was furniture and was in the process of proving it. "I have lost everything I ever had, several times over, in sequence, for six thousand years. I have buried every person I loved except one, and him I carry inside me, which is worse. We are not the same. You are a man about to go out in the rain who has seen photographs of rain. I am the rain."
Data considered this.
"That is a more useful answer than the one I was going to receive from myself," he said.
"What were you going to receive from yourself?"
"That we were the same, and that this was a comfort." Data tilted his head. "You have removed the comfort and replaced it with an accuracy. I find, on inspection, that I prefer the accuracy, and I am attempting to determine whether that preference is growth or merely a novel error."
"It is growth," said Runi. "The comfort would have failed you the first time somebody died. The accuracy will still be true. Keep the true thing. The comfortable thing is for people who are not going to have to actually do it, and you are going to have to actually do it, my friend, and sooner than you think, because you are surrounded by children who became children and can therefore die like children, and you have not done the arithmetic on that yet, and I am not going to do it for you, because it is yours."
The cat got up, turned around twice, and lay down again on Runi's foot.
Data watched this with what, on a face built not to have expressions, was unmistakably a flicker of something.
"She does not do that," he said. "She does not do that for anyone. She does not do it for me."
"Animals are honest," said Runi. "She can tell I am not going anywhere. It is the one advantage of being what I am. Cats and children can always tell who is permanent." He looked down at the cat on his foot and did not move his foot. "I will sit here as long as she needs, and then I will go and be pointed at by your eleven-year-old physician. Tell me about him first. I am told he builds bodies for the dead and points machines at the living, and I would like to know which of those two things he thinks he is, because it is never both, and the answer tells you everything."
"He thinks he is a doctor," said Data. "The bodies for the dead he regards as a thing he has to do because no one else will, and it frightens him, and he does it anyway, and he has never once said so out loud."
"Ah," said Runi. "Then I already love him, and I have not met him, and I am going to be very careful with him, because the ones who do the frightening thing quietly are the easiest to break and the last to ask for help." He looked up. "You have good people on this ship, android. Did you gather them, or did they gather?"
"They gathered," said Data. "I merely refused to leave."
"That," said Runi, "is how it is always done."
The Infirmary
"I want to be clear about what I am and am not asking," said Marky, before Runi had fully come through the door. "Sit or don't sit, your choice, everything here is your choice, I will say that a lot and I mean it every time."
"I am told," said Runi, sitting, "that you build bodies for the dead."
Marky stopped.
"Devaintre," he said, to the room, "we are going to have a conversation about what you tell the guests."
"He already knew things," said the ceiling, defensively. "He is six thousand years old. He knew things when he walked in. I merely confirmed."
Runi folded his hands.
"I will make you a trade," he said. "You may point your machine at me, and I will hold still, and I will answer your questions, and I will not do the thing that vampires do in the stories where they are mysterious about themselves, because I find it tiresome and I am too old for it. And in exchange, when you are finished, you will tell me the truth about the bodies you build for the dead, because I have built exactly one, in a manner of speaking, and it took everything I had, and I have never met another person who does it, and I would like to not be the only one for one afternoon."
Marky looked at him for a moment.
"That's a good trade," he said.
"I am very old. I have had time to become good at trades."
Marky ran the scan.
He was good at it - small precise movements, the sensor held at exactly the distance that did not make people flinch, a running low murmur of what he was doing and why, so that nothing happened to Runi that Runi had not been told about a half-second before. Runi held still. Runi was, it turned out, extraordinarily good at holding still, in the way of a man who had spent large portions of six millennia waiting in the dark for things.
"Your heart beats four times a minute," said Marky.
"On a calm day."
"There's no baseline in any database I have for what you are. I want you to know that I'm not comparing you to anything. I'm just writing down what's true and building the baseline as I go. You're the first entry. That's not a judgement, it's just an empty page with your name at the top."
"I have been many people's empty page," said Runi. "You are the first to say it kindly."
Marky moved the sensor down, and paused, and moved it back up, and paused again.
"Huh," he said.
"That is a doctor noise," said Runi. "I have heard that noise in nine languages across six thousand years and it is never nothing."
"It's not nothing." Marky lowered the sensor. "It's not bad. I want to say that first, before I say the rest, because you're going to see my face do a thing and I don't want you to read it wrong. There's nothing wrong with you. But there's something in you that I've seen before, and I only saw it four days ago, and I saw it in Hank."
The infirmary went very still.
Hank was sitting in the corner. He had been sitting in the corner the whole time, quietly, because he had decided some days ago that he liked being where Marky was, and Marky had decided some days ago that this was fine, and neither of them had made it a thing.
"Say it," said Hank.
"It's in the blood," said Marky. "Both of you. It's a - I don't have a word, so I'm going to make a bad one and you can correct me. It's a seam. It's a place in the blood chemistry where one signature stops and another one starts, cleanly, like two pieces of metal welded so well you can only find the join if you know to look. Hank's got it. And Runi, you've got it, and it's the same seam, and it's the same weld."
Runi was quiet for a moment.
"The rebirth," he said.
"I don't know what that is."
"It is the thing I did to Hank," said Runi, "to free him from the one who made him. Hank was turned by a man who told him it was love, and it was not, and the bond between a maker and the made does not break, it is not designed to break, it is designed to hold forever, which is a fine design if the maker is kind and an atrocity if he is not. And Hank's was not." He looked across at Hank, and his voice did not change, and somehow that made it land harder. "So I drained him. Nearly to the final death. And I replaced what was in him with what was in me, and with what ten others gave freely, and I re-made him, so that the bond that held him to a monster would attach instead to me, who am at least not that. It is the most dangerous thing I know how to do. It has killed people I love. I did it anyway, because the alternative was that Hank stayed chained to a dead man's voice for eternity, and I decided I would rather risk his death than permit his slavery, and that was not my decision to make, and I made it, and he lived, and he has never once been angry at me for the arrogance of it and I wish sometimes that he would."
Hank got up.
He crossed the infirmary and he stood next to Runi's chair and he put his hand on the old man's shoulder, and he said, "I'm not going to be angry at you for it, and you can stop leaving the door open for it, because I've told you before, it's not coming."
"You should be angry," said Runi.
"I was chained to a man who said the chain was love," said Hank, "for twenty years. You broke it. It nearly killed me and it did kill Marguerite and I think about her every day and so do you. And I would do it again. And so would you. So no." His hand tightened. "You don't get to be angry at yourself on my behalf. That's mine. If anyone's going to forgive you for the risk it's the person you took it with, and I do, and I have, and I'm tired of you not letting me."
The infirmary was silent.
"So that's the seam," said Marky, gently, into the quiet, because he had learned over nineteen years and a strange handful of weeks that sometimes the kindest thing a doctor can do is put the conversation back onto the physical fact. "It's a scar. It's the healed edge of the biggest thing that ever happened to your blood. And here's why I stopped and made the doctor noise - Hank, yours is four months old, and Runi, yours is six thousand years old, and they are identical. The weld hasn't aged. Whatever the rebirth does, it does it once and it does it permanently and it does not degrade. Which means -"
"Which means it is real," said Runi. "Which means when the bond re-attached, it re-attached forever, exactly as designed, and Hank is mine now the way he was that man's before, except that I am not that man." He looked up at Hank. "I have never had proof of that before. I have believed it. I have staked lives on it. I have never seen it written in a number." He looked at Marky. "You have shown me, in an afternoon, with a machine, a thing I have believed on faith for six thousand years. Do you understand what you have given me?"
"I think so," said Marky.
"I am not sure you do. I am not sure anyone under six thousand could." Runi stood. "You point machines at the living and you build bodies for the dead and you are eleven and you are afraid of the second thing, and I know you are afraid of it, because I have done it, and it is the most frightening thing there is, and you do it anyway. So here is my half of the trade."
Marky sat down without being told to, which he never did.
"When you build the body for your dead man," said Runi, "and you run him from the backup, and he is here, and everyone weeps and is grateful - you are going to expect to feel finished. And you are not going to. You are going to feel a loneliness with no name, because he will be present and he will not be new, and you will think you failed. You did not fail. It is the shape of the thing. I have carried my dead man for six thousand years and I would not give him back and I am the loneliest creature in this galaxy and both of those are true forever." He put his hand, briefly, on Marky's head, the way you would with a child, because Marky was a child, whatever else he was. "You are not going to fail. You are going to succeed, and it is going to hurt in a place you did not know you had, and I am telling you now so that on that day you will remember an ancient thing told you the truth in your own infirmary. That is the trade. You showed me my faith was real. I am telling you your grief will be survivable. We are square."
Marky did not say anything for a moment.
"Devaintre," he said, thickly. "Scratch what I said earlier. Tell the guests whatever you want."
"I always do," said the ceiling, gently.
The Holodeck
Colt had, by the time the long way round delivered him to the holodeck, seen a replicator, a turbolift that was not permitted to go sideways, Club 99 with the lights off, the arboretum, a Talbretian, a cat, and a corridor that Ted swore was haunted and Tad swore was just cold.
He had not said very much.
Ted had noticed. Ted noticed most things, and shared about half of them, which was a discipline Tad did not have and admired.
"You're doing the thing," Ted said.
"What thing."
"The thing where you look at everything like you're saying goodbye to it." Ted said it without cruelty, in the flat diagnostic way that Ted said the true things. "Dustin does it too. You and Dustin both look at stuff like it's already gone."
Colt stopped.
"That's -" he said, and then didn't finish it, because a dead Pharaoh who had lost an entire kingdom was doing something behind his eyes and it took a second to get past it. "Yeah. That's a good catch. I don't - I've got a lot of goodbyes in me. They're not mine, exactly. But they're in there, and they leak."
"What's it like," said Tad. "Having a whole other guy in your head."
"Tad," said Ted.
"It's okay," said Colt. "Nobody ever asks. Everybody's too polite. It's -" He thought about it. "It's like living over a museum. You're up top, doing your normal stuff, and downstairs there's this whole huge quiet place full of everything one guy ever did, and mostly it's closed, but sometimes you hear it. And sometimes you go down there on purpose because you need something, and it's got everything, it's got how to fight and how to rule and how to love somebody and how to lose them, all of it, catalogued. And sometimes you don't go down on purpose. Sometimes a smell takes you down there and you don't get to say no."
Ted and Tad absorbed this with the seriousness it deserved.
"So it's a haunted turbolift," said Tad, "but it's your head."
Colt laughed, and it surprised him, and it was the first fully unguarded laugh he had produced in front of anyone but Runi in a long time.
"Yeah," he said. "It's a haunted turbolift, but it's my head."
"We can work with that," said Ted. "Devaintre. Holodeck. He's a guest, he's sad, and this time it's actually true, so it's allowed."
"That reasoning is still disgraceful," said the ceiling, "and this time it is also correct, so. What would the guest like to see?"
Everyone looked at Colt.
Colt stood in the doorway of a room that could be anywhere, and felt the whole museum downstairs go very quiet and very attentive, and understood that he was being offered a thing he had never been offered in his life, which was to choose where he went.
"Can you do a place that's gone?" he said. "Not a made-up place. A real one. A real one that doesn't exist any more."
"If you can describe it," said Devaintre, "or if you carry it. You carry a great deal. I can read a holo-template off a sufficiently detailed memory, if the person consents, and only the parts they consent to. It is how we rebuilt Club 99 from Reg's memory of a program from another life."
"The parts I consent to," said Colt.
"Only those. You hold the door. I do not go past it."
Colt closed his eyes.
The museum downstairs opened one specific room, one he had gone into before, late at night, when the singing wasn't enough - a courtyard, evening, the heat coming up off stone that had held the sun all day, a particular quality of gold light that had not existed anywhere on Earth for three thousand years, a sound of water in a channel, and the specific ache of a place that a man had loved and known he was going to lose.
"There," he said. "That. Just the courtyard. Not the -" His voice caught. "Not the people. I can't. Just the empty courtyard. The light and the water and the stone. Nobody in it."
"Nobody in it," Devaintre agreed, very gently. "You hold the door."
The holodeck lit.
And Colt, twelve years old, red-haired, homeless two years ago and a king three thousand years ago, stood in a courtyard that had been dust since before Rome, in the last gold light of a day that had ended thirty centuries back, with water running in a channel his own dead feet had walked beside, and no one in it, exactly as he had asked, because the boy understood something about grief that a great many adults never manage, which is that you can visit the place and it will hold you, and you cannot visit the people, and the trying is what breaks you.
Ted and Tad stood in the doorway and did not come in.
Dustin, beside them, looked at the gold light and the empty court, and said, very quietly, in a voice with none of the nine-year-old in it, "Oh. That's what he's the door of. That's the kind of place I open into. I never get to see them empty and quiet. I only ever see them on fire."
Nobody had anything to say to that.
After a while Colt opened his eyes, and looked around the courtyard, and let out a breath that seemed to have some sand in it, and said, "Okay. Thanks. You can close it."
"You can stay as long as you like," said Devaintre.
"No," said Colt. "That's the trick. You visit, and then you leave, because it's gone and pretending it isn't is how you get stuck." He wiped his face with his sleeve, which is the only technology a twelve-year-old has for this. "Runi taught me that. Or - I taught Runi that, technically. It's complicated. Close it."
The courtyard went away.
They were in a room that could be anywhere.
"Right," said Colt, and his voice was almost normal, and getting more normal by the second, which Ted clocked and respected. "Your turn. Show me the sideways elevator. I know Devaintre locked it. I watched his light do a guilty thing."
"I did no such thing," said the ceiling.
"You did a guilty thing," said all four children at once, and Devaintre, who was the memory of a ship and the copy of a dead man and the loneliest program in the fleet, discovered that he was, against every expectation, having one of the better afternoons of his existence.
Club 99
Hank had chosen the Saratoga.
He wanted to be clear about that, in his own head, standing at the edge of Club 99 with the lights low and the music up and a room full of children who had been adults and adults who had been holograms and one android with a cat asleep in his quarters. He had had a choice. Runi had offered him the estate, the household, the war, a place at the old man's right hand for as long as forever turned out to be. And Hank had stood in a field four days ago with a canvas bag and said that's the whole reason I'm going, and he had meant it, and here he was, and it had been the right call, and he still checked, sometimes, the way you check a tooth.
"You're doing the tooth thing," said Marky, appearing at his elbow with two glasses, one of which contained something Hank could actually drink, which meant Marky had asked Duncan, which meant Marky had planned this.
"The tooth thing."
"Checking if it still hurts. The decision. You keep pressing on it to see if it hurts and it keeps not hurting and that worries you more than if it did." Marky handed him the glass. "I did it for a month after I took the Rescue Center. Everyone does it. It means you made a real choice and not a mood."
"When does it stop?"
"When something happens that could only have happened because you're here," said Marky. "Then the tooth's gone, because the proof's in your hand." He clinked his glass against Hank's. "Give it time. This ship specialises in things that could only have happened here. You'll get your proof. You might get it tonight, the way things go around Club 99."
Across the room, Annika was at the low stage.
She did this, on the nights she did it, without announcement - she would simply be there, at the front, and Reg would see her and bring the lights down another notch and find the setting he kept for her, and the room would quiet the way a room quiets for a thing it has learned is worth quieting for. She had a voice that did not match the fine grey tracery on her jaw or the way she looked at a discrepancy. She had, in a former life, been part of a Collective that sang in one voice, all of it, forever, no soloists, and now she stood alone at the front of a small warm room and sang by herself on purpose, and only about four people in the galaxy knew what that cost her and what it was worth.
Runi came and stood beside Hank in the dark at the edge of the room.
"I have not been in a room like this," he said, "in six thousand years."
"Like what?"
"Loud. Warm. Full of people who are not afraid." Runi watched Annika at the front. "I have been in throne rooms and temples and war camps and the holds of ships and one memorable tavern in what is now Bulgaria. I have not been in a room whose only purpose is joy. There was no such room where I come from. We did not have the surplus. Joy was something that happened in the cracks of other things. Nobody built a room for it."
"They built this one," said Hank.
"They built this one," Runi agreed. "Your ship keeps doing that. It keeps building rooms for the thing that is supposed to happen in the cracks. It is either the most foolish use of resources I have ever seen or it is the entire point of being alive, and I have been turning it over all afternoon and I cannot decide, and I have not been unable to decide about something in four hundred years, and I find I am enjoying it."
Annika finished. The room did the thing rooms do.
And then Colt, who had come in with the other three at some point in the last song and had been standing at the back with the specific stillness of a boy deciding something, walked up to the low stage.
Hank felt Runi go still beside him.
"He does not do this," Runi said, very quietly. "He sings when he cannot talk. He sings in his sleep in a dead language and Duncan turns him over. He does not sing at people. He has never once sung at people. He sang for me, once, on the night I found him, because he could not do anything else. He has not done it since."
Colt said something to Reg. Reg, who spoke to machines like people and to frightened performers even more gently, nodded, and did not put a setting on it, and brought the lights down to almost nothing, so that the boy could not really be seen, which was, Hank understood, exactly what Reg had been asked for.
And Colt sang.
It was not in English. It was not in any language anyone in that room had ever heard, because no one in that room had been alive when it was spoken, except that Runi had, and Runi's hand found the wall beside him and pressed flat against it. It was old and it was simple and it had a shape like water in a channel, and it was, though no one but two people in the room could have known it, a song that a Pharaoh had sung in a courtyard in the last gold light of a day three thousand years gone, to a man he loved and knew he was going to lose, and the boy who carried the Pharaoh had gone down into the museum and brought it up on purpose, into the light, where its meaning changed, exactly the way things do when they are brought into the light.
He sang it to the dark room full of people who were not afraid.
And when he was done, and the lights came up, he was just a twelve-year-old with red hair looking slightly embarrassed, and the room did not know what it had heard, and clapped for it anyway, warmly, the way you clap for a guest.
But Runi stood at the edge with his hand flat on the wall, and there were, on the porcelain face that moved about twice a year, two tears, going down, unhurried, catching the light orange.
"Six thousand years," he said, to no one, to Hank, to the wall. "He brought it into the light. I have kept it in the dark for six thousand years and he walked into a room full of strangers and brought it into the light and now it is a thing that is allowed to exist in a warm room instead of a wound I carry, and I did not know you could do that, I did not know it was permitted -"
Hank put a hand on the old man's arm.
"That's the proof," said Marky, softly, from Hank's other side, to Hank, not to Runi. "You wanted to know when the tooth stops hurting. It's when something happens that could only have happened because you're standing here. You brought them the bridge. That happened just now, in front of you, because of a thing you did in a field four days ago." He squeezed Hank's shoulder. "Tooth's gone, Hank. Look at your hand. The proof's in it."
Hank looked at the old man weeping quietly at the edge of the joyful room, six thousand years of a wound turning, in real time, into something a boy was allowed to sing.
The tooth was gone.
Airlock Four - later
Dustin opened the fold to take them home, and then had to be talked out of a fourth slice of cake, and then had to be talked out of taking a slice of cake through the fold, on the grounds, Marky explained, that nobody knew what folding did to frosting and this was not the night to find out.
"Next time," said Dustin, mournfully.
"Next time," Marky agreed. "I'll have Duncan make you something that folds."
Annika stood at the checkpoint with the tray.
She returned the fifteen weapons and the stone vial, itemised, undamaged, one at a time, and Runi received them one at a time and returned them to the robe and the sleeves and the sandals and the place behind his neck and the fold she had certified as empty, and she watched every single one go, and not one of them went anywhere she could see it go, and by the end she had the particular expression of a scientist watching water flow uphill in a controlled setting.
"You are going to think about this for a week," said Runi.
"I'm going to think about this for a month."
"Good," said Runi. "It is the nicest thing I can give a person like you. A real discrepancy. Guard it. Do not solve it. The day you solve it you will be a little less alive." He took the last item, the obsidian that had retired, and held it a moment before it vanished into the robe. "Thank you for writing down that I told the truth. And thank you for the room built only for joy. And thank you for the boy who -" He stopped. He did not finish it. "Your ship is going to matter, Annika Hansen. Guard that too."
Colt came through the checkpoint with his staff and his shield and his pendant and the two things from his boots, and stopped in front of Ted and Tad and Dustin, who had lined up to see them off with the solemnity of a state occasion.
"The elevator," Colt said.
"Turbolift," said Ted.
"Make it go sideways after we leave," said Colt. "For me. I can't be here for it but I want to know it happened. Devaintre - let them, once, after we're gone, and I'll owe you."
"Absolutely not," said the ceiling, warmly, in a tone that meant obviously, once, the moment the fold closes.
Colt grinned.
T'ven walked them to the line. He had been quiet most of the day, on purpose, hosting from the edges, letting his guests be met by his ship rather than filtered through him, which was a thing Colt had taught him in an orchard and which he had turned out to be good at.
"Eight days," said Colt.
"Eight days," said T'ven. "And you don't practice in between."
"I never practice in between, you're the one who -" Colt stopped. Grinned. "You did that on purpose."
"Colt taught me," said T'ven, to no one, "that you can pick a thing nobody assigned you. So I picked being a smartass. It's going great."
Colt laughed the whole way through the fold.
Runi was last, as he had been first. He stopped at the line, in the very bright airlock, in his black robe, in the daylight of a ship, fully re-armed and unable to be disarmed and having been welcomed anyway.
"Captain Shay is not here," he observed.
"He's writing," said T'ven. "He does it in the mornings now. A name at a time. He said to tell you -" T'ven concentrated, getting it exactly right. "He said to tell you the file has eleven names in it now, and that he's sorry he wasn't at the door, and that he'll be at the next one, and that -" T'ven paused. "He said you'd know what this part meant. He said: the bowl was someone's dinner and I've decided that's the wisest thing anyone's ever said to me and I hate it."
Runi smiled, properly, the second time in one day, which was unheard of.
"Tell him," said Runi, "that the wisest things are always the ones you hate, and that eleven names is eleven more than the man who deleted them wanted, and that I am proud of him, and that he may do with proud whatever he needs to, including nothing." He stepped toward the fold. "And tell him to come to the estate next time. Colt wants to show someone the wall. It is a very good wall. And I would like the captain of a ship that builds rooms for joy to see how the other half lives, which is to say, in a war, under a truce, holding a line, and still finding an hour for a boy and a plum tree."
He stepped through.
The fold closed.
And eleven seconds later, precisely, Turbolift Three went sideways, hard, with Ted and Tad and Dustin in it, and the incident report landed on Shay's desk the next morning, and Shay read it, and looked at the ceiling, and said, "Devaintre."
"He asked me to," said the ceiling, with enormous dignity. "The guest asked me to. It would have been a discourtesy."
Shay put his head in his hands, and under his hands, he was smiling, and the file with eleven names in it sat open beside him, and there was room in the morning for both.
Authors Note: A quiet one again, mostly, and I make no apology - after the last two chapters everybody in this story had earned an afternoon off, and so, frankly, had I. Two people who had never seen a starship saw one; a man who is himself a weapon could not be disarmed and told the truth about it in the daylight; a boy brought a three-thousand-year-old song out of the dark and into a warm room, and it changed, the way things do when you bring them into the light. Which is the whole of what this universe has ever been about, if you go back and look. Our thanks again to the household on the hill, holding their line under a truce, and to the guests, who came a very long way for cake. No cliffhanger. The Cliff Hanger Police have, I am told, given up on me entirely and reassigned my detail to somebody with ambition.