The Furrow

Two thousand one hundred metres. I paced it three days ago, when there was nothing left that needed doing and I could not make myself sit down.

It took most of a shift. Anna came out and paced it behind me and said nothing. Then Bo came out and paced it behind her. By the end there were four of us walking up our own furrow in a line, in the dark, in suits, like a procession for something, and nobody said what we were doing and nobody said stop.

Two thousand one hundred metres, near enough. Call it two kilometres. It is the only figure in the log I have not taken with any care, and I have not been back out to pace it again, and I am not going to.

One more thing about the furrow, and I have only this week worked out why it bothers me.

Every low place on this rock has ice in it. Every crack, every lee, the bottom of everything. Ours has none. We cut a two-kilometre hollow into a world that puts ice in its hollows, and it is bare, because we cut it six days ago.

The rock has not got round to us yet.

She came in flat.

That was Marek. He got the boat out ahead of us, put his lamps on her, and talked her down — talked at her, at a ship with no drives and nobody in the chair, the whole way down, saying flat, flat, keep her flat into a channel that could not do one thing about it. I have not asked him whether he knew that. I do not think I am going to.

She came in flat. If she had come in nose-down there is no fire after this, and no colony, and no log, and no me. There is a hole in a rock. She came in flat.

Rock does not do what you think it does.

I had a picture of a crash in my head, the way everyone does, and it is a picture of an impact. One event, one noise, done. That is not what a big ship does to a plain. What she did was plough. She went in shallow and stayed in, and the rock came up over the bow in a wave, a real wave, and it broke over her and came down her flanks and kept coming.

It went on a long time. Kosh says four minutes. That is the one figure of Kosh's I have never argued with, because I would have said six.

The whole time, the frame held. The frame held. I lay in the number-two housing with my arms round the strut and listened to her doing the one thing she was built to do, and she did it, and I started crying inside my suit somewhere in the middle of it and could not get at my own face to stop.

And then she stopped, and she did not stop the way a thing stops.

I have gone at this from every side I have, and the ground agrees with me, and that is the only reason I am putting it in the log.

She was not stopped by the rock.

Two kilometres of ploughing takes the run out of a thing, and she had run left. The furrow behind her is straight, and it is even, and it does not shallow out at the end. There is no slowing in it. I have paced the sides of it every hundred metres and it is the same trench the whole way to where she lies.

She was stopped by something in the ground.

It came up through her belly. Up through the decks, through the number-four bulkhead and the cargo spine, from underneath, and it took her in the middle and put her down, and it is holding her there now, and it is not going to stop holding her.

The furrow does not end. It ends at her, which is a different thing, and I do not like the difference.

Sera was first out. Not because she is brave. She will tell you that herself, at length, and does. She was nearest the hole.

Because there was a hole. That is the part I keep coming back to. We did not cut our way out of that ship. We did not blow a hatch or wind a lock or pick up one single tool.

We climbed out through the hole the ground had already opened in her. Downward, one after another, through the decks, through the mess, past the bare place on the wall where the manifest used to hang.

We came out of her from underneath.

Ilse went second, because Ilse goes second, that is her arrangement with the world. Then Kosh, and then Kosh's hands came back up through the hole for whoever wanted them, and a lot of us wanted them.

I was the ninth out. Everything I am about to put down had already been seen by eight people who came up ahead of me and said nothing about it, and now I know why they said nothing.

There is a crater under my ship.

She is lying across the top of it, holed, her belly open, hurt past anything I can fix, and she is — I know how this reads — she is still beautiful, the way she was always beautiful. I stood at the bottom of a two-kilometre trench on a dead rock in a suit that had gone grey and I looked up at the underside of her and could not make myself do anything else for a while.

Nobody hurried me. That is a small thing. I have thought about it more than I have thought about most of the large ones.

Down under her, under the ship and the wreck and all the years of her, there is something.

I did not see it. It is under her and it is dark and I was not going down there and nobody else was either. But I could see the edge of what it had done.

The rock around it is cracked, in a pattern, spreading out, and it is not the cracking of stone that has been hit. I build. I know what an impact does to rock, and I know what it looks like when rock has been pushed at from the inside, and the difference is not a small one, and I have not been able to make anybody care about it but me.

Something has been down there a long time.

And we came out of the dark at whatever speed a thing throws you, across a whole system with nothing left alive in it, and we came down on the one spot on it that already had something in it. Out of all the empty rock there was.

I said that out loud, the once. Rell said, "Or it is the only spot out here worth coming down on." And then she said, "Vela. Do not do that again." So I have not.

We were down, and we were alive, and we were standing on a rock with no air in a ring of our own lamps, and not one of us knew a single thing.

Kosh got nine people out of that hull with his own hands, and stood under the hole until the last of them was through, and he has never once said so, and if you say it for him he says something crude until you stop.

Twelve of us at the ship. Marek half a kilometre off, walking in with a lamp.

Thirteen.

I did the count at the lip of the crater with the ship over my head.

I did it once. I did it again. Then I keyed the channel and did it by name, in the order the names are cut into a plate that was, right then, somewhere in the decks under my boots.

Rell. Vela. Kosh. Oksa. Marek. Ilse. Teo. Nima. Bo. Sera. Ruben. Anna. Jun-ho.

Thirteen.

Then I said the fourteenth name.

The channel was open and it stayed open. Marek was still walking in and I could hear him breathing on it, and the breathing went on, and nobody said anything.

I said it again.

Ilse said, "Vela."

I know what she meant. I said it a third time anyway, because he was the youngest of us after Sera, and because he laughed at Kosh's jokes, which nobody does, and because a channel that is open is a channel somebody might still answer on.

Then Rell said, "That is enough now," in a voice I had not heard out of her before. And I stopped.

Hale Corrigan was on the boat deck with Marek when the stars went out. Marek went aft to the boat. Corrigan went forward. Marek does not know why, and has never once pretended to.

That is everything anybody knows. That is all of it. I have put it down in three sentences because three sentences is all there is, and I have watched people try to make it into more, and it does not go into more.

Nobody saw. Nobody saw him go, and nobody saw where, and there is no piece of him, and no last word, and no moment anybody can put a finger on and say: there, that is where we lost him.

He is just not on the channel.

Rell has not written his name on anything yet. We have no plate to write it on — the manifest is under the ship — but that is not the reason, and everybody knows it is not the reason.

I think, if we had lost him in front of us, if he had been ten metres off and we had all watched it happen, she would have cut his name and drawn the line through it that same night, and slept.

She did not get to see it.

So she has not drawn the line.

And it is already costing her something. I do not have the size of it yet. I am not sure I want the size of it. She has not once looked like she thinks the price is wrong.