The Praea Euq Reaches

The fourth of February, 3305. I started the day meaning to be sensible, and I have never once in my life managed to stay that way past the second jump.

It began as a short errand. There was a man on Mainani who paid in clean money for charts of the near systems, the ones close enough that you could still see the Bubble's haze behind you if you killed the cabin lights and pressed your face to the canopy. LFT 1834 first, then a loop back through Pachamama and one of the Col 285 catalogue stars and home by LHS 3744. Four jumps. A morning's work. I had told the Akiko we would be back before the recyclers needed their cartridge changed, and I half believed it, the way you half believe a thing you are saying to a ship.

I painted her name fresh before I lifted. I always do, before a long going-out — a thin coat over the old coat, white over the ghost of white, just under the canopy seam on the port side where I can see it from the seat without turning my head. The paint smells of nothing in the suit, but I take the helmet off for it. That is the rule I keep with myself. Bare-faced for the name. The fumes catch in the back of the throat and the eyes water a little from the solvent, and that is the only time my eyes water, so I have decided it is the solvent.

The empty seat to my right had her restraints folded the way I fold them. I do not buckle them. I do not leave them loose either. Folded, like a made bed in a room nobody sleeps in. I put my coffee in the cup-ring on her side because the heater on my side is dead and I have never bothered to fix it. The coffee was bad. Station coffee always is — they grow the beans in a tank somewhere and it tastes of the tank. I drank it anyway and we fell out of dock into the long fall.

Four jumps went the way four jumps go. You line the bright disc of the next sun in the ring of the sight, you let the drive take hold, and the stars smear forward into a white throat and the hull moans low, that note in the deck plates you stop hearing within a week of your first flight and only hear again when you are frightened. I was not frightened. I was bored, which out here is the same as safe. LFT 1834 was a red dwarf with nothing around it but rock and patience. I marked what there was to mark. First eyes — that small foolish pride, that no living person had put a name to this dim coal of a star before me, and now it carried mine in the great ledger that Cartographics keeps, the one nobody reads. I file these the way another man might leave stones on a cairn. Somebody passed here. Somebody saw.

I sold the near charts at LHS 3744 to a buyer's clerk who did not look up from his screen, and the money came across — half a million, a fat clean transfer, enough to keep the Akiko fed and bonded for a season. Sensible. I should have docked and slept.

Instead I sat in the pilot's seat with the drive cooling and listened to the station make its station noises, the clack and sigh of a hundred ships being serviced, and I felt the thing I always feel at the lip of a decision I have already made. There was a season on the wind that year. You could feel it in every bar from Mainani to the rim worlds — thousands of them going out, all at once, a whole tide of Commanders pointed at the far black edge of the galaxy, tens of thousands of light-years of nothing, going to a point on the rim that a man had once walked to and named after his dog. They had a fleet, those ones. Formations and call-rosters and a doctor among them and songs. I did not want the songs. But I wanted the direction. The fever was in the recycled air and I breathed it like everyone else.

So I did not dock and sleep. I ran a longer loop — twenty jumps, out and back, far as a place called Manissyet, threading the dwarf stars: Wolf 1373, the LHS catalogue numbers, an Uluri that turned out to be worth the detour. Twenty jumps is a real day's flying, and I sold the haul of it for another half-million and felt, for about the length of time it takes a scoop to top a tank, that I had done a good honest day and could rest.

I could not rest. That is the whole of it. I have tried to write this chapter as if there were a reason, and there is no reason, there is only the shape of the man.

I changed ships for the deep run. I have worn out more hulls than I can keep straight — bought and sold and burned and rebuilt them, a dozen keels and more across the years — and painted her name on every one, some form of it, because a ship ought to carry something and mine carry that. The name outlives the hulls; it steps off the dead one onto the next while the solvent is still wet. Just that season I kept two. The Akiko then was a courier's hull, fast and thin-skinned, made for the inhabited reach where help is one jump away. For the going-out I kept a heavier explorer — a Lakon Asp, all tank and scanner and long legs — and that one I had named Akochan: the small-name, the soft-name, the name you'd say to someone half-asleep. I do not explain the names to anyone. The dock crew at Mainani learned long ago not to ask why a grown man calls a four-hundred-ton starship by a child's pet-name and paints it on the hull in letters you could read from the next berth. They just top the tank and wave me off.

I topped the tank myself, in fact, on the way out — first star past the frontier, a white dwarf with a corona like a struck match. The scoop drinks from the edge of a sun. You drop in close, closer than feels right, and the heat comes up through the deck and through the soles of the boots until the soles go soft and your back is wet against the seat and the hull's cooling fins scream a thin scream you feel in the teeth. Then the tank reads full and you peel away into the cold and the sweat goes to ice on the spine in about four seconds and your body does not know whether it has been burned or frozen and decides, sensibly, on both.

That is the first body-memory of the deep black. The fire and then the cold, over and over, every few jumps, a tide your own flesh runs to. After a while you stop noticing you are doing it. After a longer while it is the only clock you have.

I counted seventy-nine jumps that day on the Akochan. I have flown days of more. But that was the day the counting stopped being a count and became a walking. I went out through LHS 1065 and BD+75 58, through a star somebody had bothered to call Rex, through the long catalogue dark of the Tascheter sector, through OU Geminorum where the light was the colour of a bruise, and I kept going, past Quikil, past the last star I could have justified to the man on Mainani, past the last star anyone had ever stood in, and out into the Praea Euq reaches where the chart goes blank and the names run out and the great map of human knowing simply ends and the black takes over the page.

Praea Euq. The names out there are not names, they are coordinates wearing a costume — TA-A c38, that sort of thing, a label a machine made because no mouth ever had cause to. And that is exactly the country I was looking for, though I did not let myself know it until I was in it. The place where the names run out. The place past the paid work.

I will tell the truth about why I stayed, as near to it as I can come.

There is a kind of silence after a jump that no human noise has ever reached. In the Bubble there is always a hum under the hum — other ships, the chatter of a station forty light-seconds off, the sense of people somewhere being people. You don't hear it but you lean on it. Out in Praea Euq there is no it to lean on. You come down out of the white throat into a system no eye has ever held, and the drive ticks as it cools, that small irregular ticking like a clock that has given up keeping time, and under the ticking there is nothing. Not quiet. Nothing. A nothing with a floor to it. You can feel how far away every other living thing is, all at once, the way you can feel a high ledge in your stomach.

Most men hate it. I have flown with men who could not take three days of it before they started talking to keep the dark off. I understood them. I do the same thing. I just don't pretend I'm talking to keep the dark off.

I talk to the dark.

I tell it where I am. I read the day's marks aloud as I file them, the way you would read a list to someone in the next room who can't see the screen. Gas giant, three moons, the inner one tidal-locked and bald. A ring, ice mostly, a little rock. First eyes. Filing it now. I file the discovery-marks on every world worth marking — the permanent kind, the name in the ledger that does not come off, that will be there in a thousand years when the ledger is the only thing left of any of us. I file them the way you leave sign for someone who went into country ahead of you that neither of you had maps for. Somewhere out there, one system on, two systems on, is the last place she reached — a world with her own mark on it, if the dark has kept it — and every mark I leave is me saying I am still on the trail. Still coming. Not turned back.

I am not a fool. I know what the silence is. I know what the empty seat to my right is, with its restraints folded neat over nobody. I know the numbers — the range past which no signal carries, the range past which a ship that does not report is a ship that has not reported and nothing more and nothing less. I have done that arithmetic in the dark more times than I have done any other sum, and it always comes out the same, and I have always set it aside, because there is another arithmetic that says: the galaxy is four hundred billion stars and I have stood in perhaps six thousand of them and I do not know. I do not know is the whole of my faith. The not-knowing is the only room left in the house, and I have made it the room I live in, and out here in Praea Euq, where the names run out and the silence has a floor, it is the one place the not-knowing does not press on my chest. It just is. Her absence is the size of the sky here, and a thing the size of the sky stops being a weight. It becomes the weather. It becomes the thing you fly through.

That is why I stayed. There were rings out there — a planet with a band of ice around it so wide and so still that I cut the drive and the lights and just hung in the dark under it for an hour, turning slow, watching the distant sun come through the ice in a thin grey line, and I did not file a single mark for that hour. I just looked. I was the first eyes that had ever looked, and I let it be only looking, for once, not work. The coffee on her side of the cabin had gone cold hours before and I drank it cold and it was terrible and I laughed, alone, in the absolute middle of nowhere, a short ugly bark of a laugh, because the coffee was so bad and the ring was so beautiful and both of those were true at the same time and nobody would ever believe me about either.

I came back, of course. I always come back. I sold the charts of the Praea Euq run for a little over five million — the largest single haul I had filed to that point, enough that the buyer's clerk did look up that time — and the Empire moved my name up some quiet ladder it keeps, a notch of its favour, a title I did not feel and would not have refused. The Federation, too, had marked me up a step for some old errand finally cleared. The powers measure us in steps. They have no measure for the hour under the ring.

I docked at Mainani in the small dead hours with the Akochan's name still bright on her flank and the Akiko waiting in her berth with hers, two hulls, two letters of the same word, and I sat in the cooling cockpit a while before I went in, the way I always do. The station made its noises. People somewhere being people. I leaned on it.

Then I did the thing I do, the foolish thing, the thing I will not stop doing. Before I powered her down for good I keyed open the cabin once more and read the day's last mark into the dark, low, so the dock mics wouldn't catch it.

Praea Euq, I said. I went as far as the names go. I'll go further tomorrow.

The drive ticked. The dark did not answer. It never does. I have decided that is not the same as no.