What It Was Worth

13 June 3306. IC 2602, and then the long fall home with the charts.

The favour came to me in the deep black, where it meant nothing, which is the only place I have ever been able to stomach it.

I was thirty-two falls out from anywhere a person could buy a drink, somewhere in the dust-bright reach they have numbered IC 2602 and never named past the numbering, when the courier-band woke. Not a voice — there are no voices out here, no human noise reaches this far, the band is just a thread the Empire keeps strung between its useful men and the great houses that own them. It clicked on. It told me, in the cold clerical language they reserve for honours, that my service to exploration had been recognised, that I had been raised, that some chamberlain four hundred years' worth of light behind me had moved my name up a line in a register I would never see.

I was eating a paste that the cycler insisted was rice. I kept eating it. The reactor hummed under the deck the way it always hums, the sound you stop hearing until the day it changes and you learn what fear is. Outside the canopy the dust of the cluster stood lit from within, blue and old, and I had been the first eyes ever to fall through this particular nothing, and the Empire wanted me to know it was pleased.

I looked at the empty seat to my right when the band went quiet. I do that. They've raised me again, I said into the cabin, to the dark in it, to the painted name forward of the seat where my hand can reach the letters without looking. AKIKO, in the white I mix myself because the station whites all yellow under a scoop. Another rung. You'd laugh.

She would have. She always thought the favour was a leash they let you carry yourself, and she was right, and I have carried it anyway, rung by rung, all the way out here where it cannot pull.

I logged the cluster the way I log everything. Each star, the worlds wheeling cold around it, the weights and the airs and the long names — I file the marks. That is the thing they pay for, in the end, though pay is the wrong shape of word for it out here. A world no one has stood on, no one has wanted, no one will ever stand on — and you fall close, and you put your reckoning into the cartographers' keeping, and forever after the record carries your name beside it. First seen by. It is the only permanence a man like me leaves. Not on the worlds — the worlds don't care, the worlds were turning before the Empire had an Achenar and will turn after — but in the ledger of who looked first. I have left my mark on more dead places than I could name back to you. I have stood first eyes on water-worlds that will never feel a keel. And I file every one of them carefully, in order, the way you'd keep a thing for someone who was coming back to read it.

Thirty-two falls out, then a few more, drifting the cluster's edge where the dust thins and the deep dark starts again. There is a sector out past the bright they call Synuefe — letters and numbers, no name, the void's own filing system — and I let the drive pull me to the lip of it, one more star, the way you take one more step to the edge of a pier in the dark just to feel how far down it goes. IC 2602 behind me, all lit and ancient. Synuefe ahead, unlit, going on and on past where anyone has bothered to count.

I sat at that edge a while with the engines idling and the cabin ticking as the hull gave back the heat of the last scoop. I could have gone on. There was nothing behind me to come back for and everything ahead was the same nothing, and the difference between those two facts is the whole of my life, and I have never once been able to explain it to a soul who asked.

I turned the ship around. Not because the dark told me to. Because the charts in her keeping were worth a fortune now, and a man has to come in sometime to be reminded that he wants to leave.

The fall home is the worst of it. Outbound you are going toward — toward the next first, the next dark no one has touched. Inbound you are just spending the same distance backward, watching the count of falls climb down, watching the black thin into the grey haze of the Bubble where the stars get close and crowded and human and stop meaning anything. Skim a star, drink its fire through the scoop, the heat coming up through the deck plates into the soles of your boots until you ease off and let the corona fall behind. Fall. Skim. Fall. The reactor hum. The paste that is not rice.

Somewhere in there the band found me again, closer in now, and it was not the clerk this time. It was my patron's house — the man whose favour is the rung above the rung, the great-house name I fly under when I fly Imperial, who took an interest in me years ago the way a collector takes an interest in a tool that performs above its making. His steward's voice, smoothed by a station's bandwidth. Commander. They had heard I was raised. The house was gratified. There was, the steward let me know, work — there is always work for a useful man, there are always errands the Empire would rather a deniable courier ran than a navy did — and the house would be honoured to see me at table when I made port, and would I be staying, this time, in the reach where civilised men live.

This time. They always put the small knife in last and call it courtesy.

I said the things you say. Honoured, grateful, at the house's service. I have a courier's mouth; it runs the script while the rest of me looks out the canopy. And the whole time the steward purred about table and favour and the comforts of the inhabited reach, I was watching the haze of the Bubble come up ahead like a shoal you have to be careful not to run aground on, and I was thinking: there is nothing in there for me. Nothing in all those close warm crowded stars. A title that weighs nothing in the only place I can breathe. A patron's table where I would sit and be a tool that performs, and answer questions about the deep black from men who will never feel the scoop's heat come up through the deck. A bed in a port I keep meaning to keep.

Mainani. I have a home in Mainani. I want you to understand that I am not a man with no door to go through. There is a berth there with my docking-rights still good, a room above a cargo office, a window that looks out on a ring I used to think I would settle under. I have furnished it, over the years, the way you furnish a thing you mean to grow into. I have left for the black from that window more times than I have woken in it. It is the home I keep failing to stay in, and the failing is not an accident any more, and I have stopped pretending to myself that it is.

I made port to sell the charts. Not Mainani — a cartographers' hall, one of the big ones, where Universal Cartographics keeps the buyers who turn a man's looking into money.

There is a ritual to it. You dock, and the station smell hits you — that is always the moment, the recycled air of your own ship smells of nothing for months until a station's air comes in through the seal and it is suddenly thick, cooking-fat and machine-oil and too many people's breath, and your body knows it is back among the living before your mind agrees. You carry the keeping of half a year's looking into a quiet office. A clerk reads it. The cartographers reckon it — every first, every world no one had seen, weighted by how far out, how rare, how nobody-will-ever-go-there. And then they make you a transfer, and the number lands in your account, and the number that landed in mine that day was a fortune.

Five and a half million, near enough. More money than the cargo office under my Mainani window turns in years. More than my mother saw in a life. It went into the ledger as a single clean line and the clerk did not look up, because to her it was Tuesday, and to me it was the worth of every cold first eyes I had filed since the dust ate the light around me last.

I sat in the concourse afterward with a real drink — not paste, an actual bitter brown thing in an actual glass — and I felt the number sitting in my account like a stone in a pocket. And here is the thing I have never been able to make a settled man understand, and I will not dress it up for you now: it did not feel like anything. I kept waiting for it to. A fortune. You are supposed to feel a fortune. You are supposed to think of the room you could buy, the berth, the staying. I thought of the staying. I made myself think of it, sitting there, the window in Mainani, the ring, the life a man buys with five million when he is done.

My hands were already doing the other arithmetic. Fuel. A new pair of heat-vanes; I'd cooked the old ones thin on too many close skims. The drive wanted servicing for the deep range. I had the figures going under the table without my leave, the way your tongue finds a cracked tooth — this much for parts, this much laid by, and the rest is range, the rest is how far the rest of it buys.

That is what a fortune is, to me. I have been honest with you so far and I will not stop here. Five and a half million did not buy me a door to walk through. It bought me distance. It is the only thing I have ever been able to spend money on and feel the spending. Every credit of it went, in my head before I had finished the drink, into vanes and fuel and a tuned drive and the long laid-by reserve that lets a man fall a thousand falls past the last station without coming home — and what that buys is more black, more cold, more nothing, more first eyes on worlds that will never know I came. I sold a fortune in looking and I spent it on more looking. I came in rich and I went out the same hollow man with better vanes.

I did not go to the patron's table. I sent the courtesy and the regret and a useful man's promise to be useful, which is the coin they actually want, and I kept it ready in the band for the next time the house had an errand. The favour is a leash you carry. I carried it back to the dock.

I did not go to Mainani either. I want that on the record, in the ledger, beside the worlds. I was four falls from the window I keep furnishing and I did not go. I told myself there was no time, the vanes, the drive, the laid-by — and there was no time, all of that was true, and none of it was the reason. The reason was that I cannot sit in that room. I have tried. The ring turns outside it and I sit there and I feel the close warm crowded stars pressing in through the glass and I cannot breathe the way I breathe out where there is no one, where the silence after a fall is so complete that I can almost believe the next dark, the next first, the next system one fall on, will be the one with a light in it that I know.

I have not said what I am looking for. I will not, today. But I will tell you that the deep black is the only place I have ever felt close to it, and that a port full of living people, with a fortune sitting clean in my account, felt further from it than the cold edge of Synuefe ever has.

I provisioned the Akiko in the dark of the dock, the work-lamps making long shadows of the gantries. New vanes. Full reservoir. The drive singing clean. I checked the white of her name with my thumb, forward of the empty seat, and where the station light had yellowed it I touched it up, because I always do, before I take her out where no light reaches and the name is the only thing in the cabin that isn't me and isn't the dark.

The favour, the fortune, the table, the window — I left all of it at the seal, the way you leave a coat you won't need where it's warm.

Then I dropped the Akiko off the pad, and pointed her at the void past the dust, and started spending what I'd earned the only way I know how to spend anything.

One fall, and the station was a smear of light.

Another, and it was gone, and the silence came in that no human noise reaches, and I told the dark I was coming, and meant it, and fell.