Eleven weeks is long enough to learn a colony’s new manners, and Niðholm’s new manner, in the year of our freedom, was politeness.
That is the word, and I have spent most of those weeks trying to find a better one and failing. Nobody blames me for Dag. I checked, the way I check everything now that checking is most of what I’m for — I asked Sigge outright, on the second week, sitting on her bench with a mug I wasn’t drinking from, whether anyone had said anything. She told me the truth, which is the only thing she has ever told me. Nobody had said anything. Nobody was going to. A colony that spent two hundred years being audited down to the last kilogram of tailings does not, it turns out, know how to conduct a real accounting when the number involved is a man, and so it had settled instead on the only posture available to it: it thanked me for nothing in particular, at intervals, and let me alone the rest of the time, and called that mercy.
It is not mercy. I have done the arithmetic on it more times than the arithmetic deserves, mostly at three in the morning with a hand that won’t stop doing the thing it does now, and the arithmetic keeps coming out the same: they are not being cruel to me. Cruelty I could have used. Cruelty is a structure you can lean on. What I have instead is eighty-nine thousand people who freed themselves without me, entirely, correctly, on their own clock, with a woman and a mop and a ventilation board doing what I was three months late to understand any weapon of mine could never have done as well — and the story they tell about that morning is true. That’s the part I can’t get a purchase on. If it were a lie I could go looking for the seam. It isn’t a lie. I wasn’t there, and the day went better for it than any day I have ever personally attended, and every time somebody in the stacks tells it — the dry urns, the mopping woman, the ice that lied and remembered — I stand at the edge of the telling with the specific weightlessness of a man listening to an account of his own funeral in which he is, correctly, not mentioned.
I have started keeping a private ledger of the things I have not been asked to help with. It is longer than the one I keep of the things I have.
The story itself I have heard four separate ways by now, in four separate mouths, and it does not change in the tellings the way stories usually change, which is its own kind of evidence. Gerd tells it as a gearbox problem — rails and burst rates and a fire-control solution written by a girl who’d never fired anything. Olf tells it as an ice problem, fractures three generations deep, charges set on faces his own hands had mapped. Sigge tells it, when she tells it at all, as a scheduling problem: a woman with a mop, four dry urns, a chain of people who knew which other people to tell. Nobody tells it as my problem, because it wasn’t, and I have sat in rooms where all four versions got told inside the same hour and none of them once turned to me the way a story turns to the person it’s secretly about, and I have understood, slowly and without any single moment I could point to as the moment I understood it, that this is simply what it looks like when the true version of events does not require you. I spent three years assuming that if the colony ever won its freedom clean, I would have been load-bearing in the winning. It won clean. I was four hundred thousand kilometers away, doing arithmetic that mattered somewhere else entirely, and the two facts sit next to each other on the page without needing me to reconcile them, which may be the most honest sentence in this whole account.
The pump gallery on Level Five has not changed, which is either the last stable object in my life or a small cruelty of its own, and some mornings I can’t tell you which. Same bench, bolted low the way Djúpgraver furniture always is, built for people who spend half their working lives crouched. Same ventilation board, its board glass fogged permanent along the bottom third from thirty years of breath and grease and Sigge’s own hands. Same grease pencil, worn to a stub, tied to the board frame on a length of monofilament because somebody stole the first six and the seventh one Sigge tied down herself and dared the colony to try it again.
The names are still on the bench. Two hundred and twenty-two of them, some in her hand, most in others’, because after the flagship people had come and written their own dead onto the wood in whatever they had — grease pencil, a soldering iron for the ones who wanted it to last, a fingernail dragged through varnish for the ones who couldn’t wait for a tool. Nobody has cleaned it. I asked Sigge once, early on, whether the committee that runs Level Five maintenance had said anything about it, given that it is, technically, colony property and technically defaced. She looked at me the way she used to look at me when I was seventeen and had just said something that confirmed I hadn’t grown as much as my body had.
“They offered to have it refinished,” she said. “As a memorial plaque. Bronze, I think somebody said. Nice border.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them the bench already does the job and a bronze one would need dusting.” She didn’t look up from the board. “They took a vote on whether to insist. It was close. They didn’t insist.”
That’s Sigge’s whole political career now, condensed: she has an office, on Level Three, with a door that shuts and a chair that isn’t bolted to anything, and she hates it in a specific, itemized way she will describe to you if you make the mistake of asking. The desk is the wrong height for a Djúpgraver spine. The chair swivels, which she says is a design decision made by someone who has never had to stand up fast. There is a window — an actual window, ice-glass six centimetres thick, looking out on nothing but more colony — and she has told me twice that a window in an office is how you know the person who built the office has never worked anywhere that mattered. She has no title. Three separate committees have offered her one. The Reconstruction Council wanted to make her Director of Essential Systems, capital letters and all, with a staff and a budget line, and she turned it down in a single sentence that the committee minutes record, with what I choose to read as some embarrassment, verbatim: I already do the job; I don’t need the door to say so. The Allting-Adjacent Claims Board, in a fit of something I can only call institutional guilt, offered her a seat as Colonial Liaison for Ventilation and Life Support, a title so long it required two lines of the appointment slate, and she sent back a note that said she would take the seat the day the board could tell her, without looking it up, what the reserve margin currently stood at. Nobody on the board could. She still has no seat.
The third offer she has never told me the details of, which means it was either genuinely tempting or genuinely insulting, and with Sigge those two categories overlap more than most people would find comfortable.
I was on the bench that morning, doing nothing useful, which had become the largest single category of thing I do, when she came in from the office she hates and set the kettle going and looked at me for a while in the particular silence she keeps for when she’s decided something and is deciding whether I’ve earned being told.
“You’ve been home eleven weeks,” she said.
“I’ve been counting.”
“So have I.” She didn’t sit. She stood over the ventilation board with her hip taking the weight it takes badly now, and she looked at the two hundred and twenty-two names the way she looks at a pressure reading she already understands and is checking anyway, out of a discipline older than the reason for it. “The Allting hasn’t moved a hull past the picket line in six weeks. Ragnar’s gone quiet in a way that means he’s building something, not that he’s given up — I don’t need your crystal to tell me that, I’ve outlived enough quiet men to know the shape of it from across a room. A quiet Allting is a counting Allting. It’s doing arithmetic somewhere I can’t see, on a slate I don’t have.”
“And?”
“And you are the loudest thing in this system whether you open your mouth or not.” She said it without any particular weight, the way she’d tell you a rail was hot. “Every crystal for four hundred thousand kilometers knows where you are the way a compass knows where down is. You’ve spent three years being the one fact nobody can argue with, and I am telling you, as the person who has watched what that costs at every distance from arm’s length to a whole ocean of ice, that there is a version of the next year where the safest thing you can be to this colony is quiet.”
I didn’t say anything, because there wasn’t a version of that sentence I could improve on by arguing with it, and because some part of me — the part that keeps the ledger of what I haven’t been asked to help with — already knew what she was going to say before she said it, the way you know the second half of a sentence Sigge has been building since before you walked in.
“Go and be less special for a while,” she said.
I have turned that sentence over more times in the weeks since than I turned over any structure Jolnir has ever handed me, which is a comparison I make with the specific discomfort of a man noticing that the two things now live in the same drawer. She meant it kindly. It would be easy, and cheap, to render that as a wound and leave the kindness out. Sigge has never once in her life said a kind thing to me that wasn’t also, load-bearingly, true. She meant it operationally — a beacon that stops transmitting is a beacon nobody can triangulate, and an Allting doing quiet arithmetic on a system it has not finished threatening does not need a fresh data point walking around Niðholm’s upper stacks reminding everyone, including itself, what that data point is capable of.
She also meant it as a diagnosis, and both readings are correct at once in the way only Sigge’s sentences ever manage, and I have decided, provisionally, that I resent the second reading more than the first, which tells you something about which one landed.
I tested the theory the same week, because I have never in my life been able to leave an untested theory alone longer than it takes to find the equipment.
Olf’s crews were shoring a lateral off Deep Nine that had been showing bad numbers on the standard instruments for a decad — nothing dramatic, a stress reading that wandered further from baseline every shift than the shift before, the kind of drift that either means the sensor’s failing or the ice is telling you something it hasn’t finished saying yet. A parlor trick, by the standard I used to hold myself to. Nine minutes of work, if that: put a hand flat on a cold face, let the structure come up the way it always has since I was fourteen, read where the load actually wants to go instead of where the gauges say it’s going, tell Olf which side of the lateral to brace and which side he can leave alone for another season. I have done versions of this a thousand times without thinking about it as an event. It used to be the cheapest thing I owned.
It took nine minutes. The number is the whole point and it is easy to lose in what came after: nine minutes with a palm against Deep Nine’s western face, reading a stress pattern that resolved, in the end, into something almost embarrassingly simple — a joint the original cutters had shimmed wrong two hundred years ago and nobody since had thought to recheck, because nobody since had a reason to think the ice could be wrong about something that long.
It cost me four hours flat on the bench in Sigge’s gallery with a rag held to my nose, and a headache that sat behind my left eye — the good one, which I noted with the specific bitterness of a man auditing his own remaining assets — like a weight nobody had bothered to balance, and an afternoon in which the signature I have carried since I was a child, the thing that used to feel like a held note, felt instead loose. That’s the only word I’ve found for it and I have looked. Not gone. Not diminished in any way I could point a gauge at. Loose, the way a hand feels when you’ve been gripping something for longer than the hand wanted to and it starts, of its own accord, to shake.
I told nobody the number was wrong. I told Olf the joint was bad and which side to brace, because that part of the transaction still worked exactly as it always had, and I sat on the bench afterward doing the arithmetic my head does when it can’t do anything else, and the arithmetic did not resolve into a sentence I was ready to say out loud to anyone, including the ledger. Nine minutes. Four hours. A nosebleed I have not had since I was nineteen and pushing something I had no business pushing. A hand that felt like it was tiring, on a day I had done almost nothing with it.
I filed it. The warehouse is not getting any smaller.
My mother has said eleven sentences to me in eleven weeks. I have counted every one, the way you count things when counting them is safer than feeling whatever it is you’d feel if you stopped.
The first was in the corridor outside the infirmary rotation, the day I came home, and it was: You’re thinner. The fourth was about a ration chit she thought I’d need and didn’t, which meant it wasn’t really about the chit. The seventh was the longest, six words, delivered while she was looking at the wall past my shoulder rather than at me, and concerned whether I was sleeping, and I said yes, which was a lie neither of us had the energy to examine.
The eleventh came on a Tuesday, in the stairwell outside the pump gallery, and it was about a door.
“The Level Two access is jamming again,” she said. “Somebody should tell maintenance.”
That was the whole sentence. I have replayed it more times than its content could possibly justify, looking for the thing underneath it the way I’d look for a load path under a stress reading, and I have concluded, provisionally, that there is nothing underneath it. It is exactly what it says. A door is jamming, and my mother, passing me in a stairwell, mentioned it the way she would have mentioned it to any Djúpgraver in the corridor, because at some level she has come to file me under any Djúpgraver in the corridor, which is either the single kindest thing eleven weeks of silence has produced or the cruelest, and I have not been able to decide, and I have stopped trying to decide, because deciding requires a kind of energy I have started rationing like everything else.
I told maintenance about the door. It was, as far as I know, fixed within the week. I have not mentioned to her that I did.
Jolnir has been distracted for six weeks, and Careful is the only instrument I have and it is getting more expensive to use every month.
It doesn’t talk. I have said this before, in another account, and I will keep saying it as long as I keep an account at all, because the temptation to render it otherwise never fully goes away and giving in to it even once would be a lie about the single most important fact of my life. What I have instead of words is tone, and pressure, and one thing set beside another thing, and for three years the tone underneath everything it has ever shown me has had the particular quality of a presence that is, however patiently, with me — attention that arrives and stays, the way a hand stays on a shoulder after the thing it was steadying you against has passed.
For six weeks that attention has been elsewhere. Not gone — I would know gone, I have priced gone in advance more than once and it terrifies me in a way nothing else on this account does — but tilted. The comparison Jolnir itself would offer, if it offered comparisons about itself, which it doesn’t, is one I have had to build myself out of the pieces it leaves me: a person half-listening to you while watching a road. Not rude. Not withdrawn. Just facing, by some fraction of a degree, a direction that is not you, the way you’d stand in a doorway with your body angled toward a conversation and your eyes angled toward whatever’s coming up the street.
I read it, on the days I have the energy to read anything at all, as waiting for something. The reading might be entirely mine and not its — I have made that mistake before, with smaller stakes, and I am not eager to make it again with this one — and I have filed the observation the way I file everything I can’t yet afford to think about properly: dated, itemized, set aside. It sits now next to the loose feeling in my hand and the nine minutes that cost four hours, three entries in a column I have started keeping without quite deciding to keep it, and I notice, the way I notice most things about myself these days — late, and with a certain professional embarrassment — that the column has a shape already, even though I haven’t given it a name.
Tófi Bergsson has decided I am his responsibility, which is either the funniest thing that has happened to me in eleven weeks or the thing I am least equipped to carry, and some days it is both before lunch.
He is nine. I knew him before I knew his name — he is the boy from the trunk stair the night the colony took itself back, the one in the borrowed rebreather two sizes too large, mask strap wound twice around to make it fit, standing in a stairwell full of adults doing something dangerous and refusing, with the specific stubbornness of a child who has decided a fact about himself, to be sent back up. Somebody must have told him afterward who I was, or he worked it out on his own the way children work things out — by watching which adults go quiet when a name comes up — because he has attached himself to me with the total, unembarrassed persistence of somebody who has not yet learned that persistence is supposed to be rationed.
He finds me on the bench. He finds me in the stacks. He found me once in Sigge’s office, which I hadn’t known was possible to do without a pass, and Sigge, rather than being annoyed, gave him a biscuit and told him where I’d gone, which I have chosen to interpret as an act of quiet sabotage against my one remaining sanctuary.
He asks about the flagship. Always the flagship, never the flood, and I have wondered more than once whether that is a mercy he’s extending without knowing it or simply the version of the story that reached him first and stuck, the way stories do with children — the big true one, the one with a shape you can hold: a man went aboard the largest ship the Allting ever built and came back and the ship didn’t. He wants the details the way boys his age want details, hungrily and without any sense that some of them might cost something to give.
“Was it loud,” he asked me, on the stairs, on a day I didn’t have the energy to redirect him.
“No,” I said. “Most of the worst things I’ve done have been almost completely silent. That surprises people.”
“Did it hurt.”
“Yes.”
“Did you know it was going to hurt before you did it.”
“Yes.”
He considered that for a while, with the specific gravity children bring to a fact they’ve just been handed and haven’t decided yet whether to be afraid of. I could have lied to him. It would have cost me nothing and it is, by any reasonable measure, what a decent adult does for a nine-year-old asking about the worst afternoon of a man’s life. I answered him honestly instead, every time, because I have found — and this is not a virtue, and it reads more like a deficiency the longer I sit with it — that I no longer have the energy left over to build him a kinder version and hold it separately from the true one. The honest answer is cheaper. That is not a fact I am proud of.
He does the two-finger gesture wrong. I noticed it the third or fourth time he did it — two fingers pressed to the sternum, the way Sigge did it in the staging gallery the night the colony counted its dead, the way Niðholm has done it since before I was born for anyone worth the pressing — except Tófi presses with three fingers, and low, closer to the ribs than the heart, the way a child copies a gesture he has seen from across a room and never once from close enough to get the geometry right.
I have had a dozen chances to correct him. I have watched myself not take any of them, and I have done the arithmetic on why, sitting on the bench with the names under my hand, and the arithmetic keeps coming back the same unfinished shape: that the gesture is his now, three fingers and all, made in a place low on his own chest that nobody taught him and everybody will recognize anyway, and that fixing it would cost him something I don’t have the standing left in this colony to be sure I could give back.
So I let it stand. Wrong, and his, and the closest thing to a job I have had in eleven weeks.