What Lucy Crocombe Took

The thirteenth of the ninth, by the count I still keep though out here the numbers mean nothing — there is no morning, no ninth of anything, only the cabin clock I never reset and the slow drift of my own bad habits. I woke in the seat. I had not meant to. I had meant to sleep in the rack like a person, but somewhere in the long fall the night before I had stopped trusting the rack, stopped trusting that I'd wake in time if the alarm came, and so I had folded myself into the pilot's chair with the harness loose across my chest and let the hull rock me like a bad cradle. My neck had paid for it. I worked a knot out of it with two fingers and tasted the air, which tasted of nothing, which is how you know you have been out too long. The scrubbers were doing their work and the work smelled of absence. Recycled, re-breathed, mine. When a station's galley hits you after a month of that it can put you on the floor. There was no station for two hundred light-years in any direction.

TETSUO sat quiet around me, ticking. She always ticks after a hard run, the hull shedding the heat it drank at the last star, the metal remembering its shape. I have flown her long enough to read her by sound the way you read a person's breathing in the dark. She was fine. She was tired the way I was tired, which is a way that does not show on any gauge.

I drank the morning's ration of water that was yesterday's water and the day before's, and I looked out at where I was. Synuefe. The name is just a surveyor's grunt, a syllable some machine assigned to a patch of the deep black nobody had reason to love. Out here the suns come in pairs and triples, leaning on each other, and between them the dust runs thin and cold and the Bubble is a rumour you tell yourself to stay sane. I had come for the same reason I always come. There are worlds out here that no human eye has ever crossed. I wanted to be the eye. First eyes. There is a hunger in that I have never been able to name to anyone and have long since stopped trying — to be the first, the only, the one whose looking makes a dead rock briefly mean something. To put my mark on it. To leave the little permanent flag that says a person was here, a person saw this, it is on the charts now and will be after the person is gone.

I leaned over to the empty seat beside me and brushed the dust off the armrest with the side of my hand, the way you'd straighten a collar. Old habit. There was no dust, of course; the scrubbers see to that. But the hand goes anyway. "Seven today," I told the dark, because there was no one else to tell and because the dark, in my experience, is the only thing out here that listens without wanting something. "Maybe a water world if the leaning suns are kind."

The first fall took me out to a place the machine called by a string of letters I won't pretend to remember. The fall itself is the thing I have never gotten used to and hope I never do — the moment the drive winds up and the whole sky pulls toward a point ahead of you and then bends, the stars smearing into a tunnel of cold light, your own heartbeat suddenly very loud against the hum, and then the snap, and a new sun standing in front of you where a heartbeat before there had been a thousand. You fall toward a star and you live or you don't. I have made near six thousand of those falls. The number used to frighten me. Now it is just the weather of my days.

I skimmed the first star for fuel and felt the heat of it come up through the deck and into the soles of my feet, that good ugly warmth, the corona's breath through the plating. You ride the edge of a thing that could end you for the fuel that lets you run from it. There's the whole life, right there, if you want it tidy. I scooped till the tanks were heavy and pulled out before the temperature gauges started their soft complaint, and I worked the system the way you work a system — slow, patient, reading the worlds as they came around. Two of them were dead rock, the kind of dead that has been dead since before anything anywhere was alive. One was a frozen marble of methane and ammonia that I logged for the cartographers because the cartographers pay for it and I have learned to take the money where it sits, even when the money is the least of why you came.

Nothing with my name on it yet. I moved on.

The second fall, the third. The work has a rhythm and the rhythm is a mercy. Wind the drive, fall, snap, scoop, look, log, move. There were stretches in there — and I will be honest because there is no one to lie to — when I did it all without a single thought passing through me at all, my hands doing the thing my hands have done ten thousand times while the rest of me went somewhere quiet and grey. That grey is the thing I have to watch. It feels like peace and it is not peace. It is the wearing-down, the slow sanding of a man, and the trouble with it is that it doesn't hurt. The hurt would at least be a sign I was still all there.

Somewhere around the fourth fall I caught myself talking to her. Not aloud — or not much aloud. Just narrating, the way I do, the way I've done so long I no longer notice starting. Look at this one, I said, of a ringed giant the colour of an old bruise, the rings throwing a thin shadow across its own clouds. You'd have liked the rings on this one. And then the rest of me caught up to the talking part and there was the small familiar lurch, the one in the chest, low down, that I do not name and will not name, and I let it pass through the way you let a wave of nausea pass, breathing slow, eyes on the gauges, and then I winked the survey-mark into the charts — first found, mine, ours — and moved on. I file them as if for her. I have never said why and I am not going to start.

The fifth and the sixth fall gave me nothing but more rock and a fat blue-white sun that ran my hull hot enough that I sat sweating in the scoop for a minute longer than was wise, just to feel something on my skin that wasn't the cabin's dead-level chill. Small pleasures. You learn to take them. A too-hot star, a knot worked out of your neck, the particular way TETSUO's drive settles into its hum a half-second after the snap, like a dog turning twice before it lies down. That's the wealth out here. The money is just the excuse.

The seventh fall is the one I have gone over since, and over, the way your tongue goes to the gap where a tooth was.

I came out of the tunnel into a system the machine called Synuefe XW-O b53-5 — I do remember that one, I will remember it now till I die the real way — and the new sun snapped into place ahead of me and the drive settled into its hum, and I had maybe four seconds of the ordinary world before the ordinary world ended. There is a thing that happens out here that should not be able to happen out here. There are no roads in the deep black. There is no reason for two ships to ever find each other across that much nothing; the odds against it are the odds against anything. And yet I came out of the fall and the gauges screamed and something reached into my drive from the outside and dragged me down, hauled me bodily out of the safe high lane of the fall and dumped me into open space with my hull groaning and my heart going off like an alarm and the cold sweat coming up all over me at once, that full-body drench of the animal that knows.

A voice came onto my board. Out here, where no voice can reach, a voice. That alone told me everything. Only a hunter carries the gear to pull you down by name and speak to you while she does it.

"Commander Rakasa," she said. Pleasant. Almost kind. "Lucy Crocombe. Hold still now. This won't take but a moment."

I did not hold still. I am not a gun. I have flown a gun — one season, one ugly little ship I will not glorify here — and I know the difference between a man who fights and a man who runs, and I am the second kind and have made my peace with it. I threw TETSUO over and ran for the dark and wound the drive up to fall again, and she let me get the drive most of the way to ready before she opened up, and that is when I understood she had done this before, many times, and enjoyed the part where you hope.

The first hits walked across my hull like someone running a stick down a fence. I felt each one in the deck, in the seat, in the fillings of my teeth. The lights browned and came back. Something behind the bulkhead let go with a sound like a struck bell. The drive's whine sagged, fought, sagged again — she'd cooked it, she knew exactly where to put the fire to cook it — and the fall died in the wires and would not come, would not come, would not come, and I sat there hauling on a thing that wasn't there anymore while she took her time.

There is a moment in it — and I have had it more than once now, the black has nearly kept me before — where the fear burns all the way down to its bottom and goes out, and what's under the fear is the thing I never have words for in the moment and only find afterward. It is not bravery. It is a kind of terrible attention. The cabin very bright. The smell of the air gone sharp and electric. My own hands, very far away, still trying. And one thought, clear as a bell in cold water, surfacing whole: not yet, not out here, I have not found her yet.

Then the hull came apart around me and there was a great white nothing.

I want to be careful how I say what comes after, because the easy way to say it is a lie. The conceit of our trade is that a dead hull is not a dead man. The Pilots Federation that licenses us keeps a thread on every Commander, a remote conceit, an insurance against the dark, and so when the white nothing cleared I was alive, I was breathing, I was sitting in a chair in a station bay a long way from the rock where Lucy Crocombe had peeled my ship like fruit, and the account that holds my life's earnings was lighter by the cost of a new hull. I was alive. They will tell you that means it does not count.

It counts.

I have died this death before and the first times it was clean terror, the body's plain animal no, and then later it was nothing much at all, a cost of doing business, a number off the account, a shrug — that grey again, the wearing-down wearing me smooth. I had thought I'd reached the bottom of how little it could mean. I sat in that bay with the new hull's paint still curing somewhere below me and I waited for the shrug to come and it did not come. What came instead was something I had not felt before and have not stopped feeling since, and the only honest word I have for it is tired. Not sleepy. Not the good ache of a long day's work. A tiredness that lives under the breastbone, that was there when I woke and is there now, the tiredness of a man who has understood a thing he would rather not have understood: that he can be ended out there, in the one place that was supposed to be his, by a stranger who knows his name and finds it amusing, and that he will get up and go back, because the alternative is to stop, and to stop is to admit there is nothing one system ahead worth being killed for.

Lucy Crocombe. I rolled the name around. I did not know her. She knew me — she'd said it like a thing she'd read, Commander Rakasa, the way you'd greet a man whose obituary you'd written in advance. That a person can hunt the deep black, can wait in all that nothing for the one fool to fall into it, and can hold the gear and the patience and the appetite to drag a stranger down for the lightening of his account — there are men like that in the lanes near the Bubble, I knew that, everyone knows that. I had not known they came this far out. I had thought the dark was at least clean. I had thought the worst it would do was let me die of my own bad math, the fuel run dry, a star misjudged, the honest deaths. Now there was a face on it. Now there was a name that knew mine.

When the new hull was mine I had them paint her before I'd take her out. The name where the name always goes, along the line of the nose where the first eyes that ever see her will see it, where I will see it every time I climb the ladder, where the dark will read it if the dark can read. I watched the painter lay it down and I felt the tiredness settle in for good, like a tenant who's decided to stay, and I thought: she'll know it too, the next one who pulls me down. She'll say it pleasant, like Crocombe, like a thing she read. Let her. It is still going up. It is going up on every hull I will ever fly until the day the black keeps me for real, and on that day it will be the last thing painted on the last thing I owned, pointed out at the nothing I spent my life falling through, looking.

I did not go home to Mainani. I thought about it — there is a berth there that is mine, a station-keeper who nods, a gravity that is real and not bought from a long burn, a place a person could stop. I get as far as thinking about it most times and then I do not go, and I did not go this time either. I pointed the new hull back out the way I'd come, toward Synuefe, toward the leaning suns and the worlds with no eyes on them yet, and I brushed the dust that wasn't there off the empty seat beside me, and I told the dark we'd try the seventh fall again.

This time I'd come out of it ready. That's a lie too, the kind you need.