She was the largest ship ever built to carry people in comfort: a ballroom floored with real Thessaly oak, a staircase descending seven decks to a floor of clear diamond above the stars. On the ninth night of her maiden voyage she struck something no chart had ever shown. Her last transmission said only: We are being read.

The songs say she comes back every seventy-one years, to the same patch of dark beside a dead star, with her windows lit and her passengers still dancing. Captain Frett Ferret has a dead man’s map, a crew of misfits and a ship held together by habit. A pirate never asks whether a story is true. A pirate asks what it would cost.

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Waltz of the Void

The slow waltz from the ballroom of the Majestic.

The Unsinkable Lady

The shanty they sing in the bars of the Drift, the one Frett quotes in chapter III.

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Contents

• I. A Testament, Unsworn
• II. The Lark and Her Liabilities
• III. What Everybody Knows About the Halcyon Majestic
• IV. Scurvy
• V. The Approach
• VI. The Grand Staircase
• VII. Parley in the Ballroom
• VIII. The Purser’s Ledger
• IX. Found
• X. Coda: Value Pending

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I. A Testament, Unsworn

I am told that a person setting down their last testament ought to begin with a confession, and I have no intention of giving you one, so let us begin instead with the facts, which are worse.

My name is Frett Ferret. That is the whole of it. There was never a longer version, though there are people on eleven stations who will tell you there was, and that it began with a title and ended with a hyphen, and that my mother was a duchess of the Concord who ran off with a smuggler in a borrowed ballgown. I have heard the story told in four languages and one of them was sung. I have never corrected it. A legend is a garment other people sew for you, and if it keeps you warm in the dark it is ungrateful to complain about the stitching.

I have been called Captain Ferret, the Ferret, Old Frett, Mother Frett, Father Frett, Frett the Unaccountable, That Bloody Weasel, and, once, by a customs magistrate on Halberd Reach who had lost a great deal of cargo and most of his eyebrows, the Thing in the Long Coat. You will want to know which of the gendered ones is correct. Everyone always does. It is the first question people ask about me and very often the last, because by the time they have finished wondering I have generally taken their ship.

I will tell you now, so that it does not hang over this account like a held breath: it does not matter. And what does matter, I do not know either. Or rather, I did not know until eleven days ago, and what I learned then is not an answer so much as a reason there has never been a proper one. You will come to it. Be patient. Patience is the only virtue a pirate is required to have.

I am writing this in the navigation alcove of the Rattling Lark, which is a cramped half-moon of brass and scratched glass that smells permanently of coolant and boiled sugar. The sugar is Pell’s fault. The coolant is everyone’s. Outside the glass there is nothing, which is the usual view, but it is a particular nothing, a nothing that I have learned to read the way a fisherman reads weather, and I can tell you that it is thinner than it was. The stars are not as far away as they ought to be. They look, if I am honest, like holes punched in a sheet by someone in a hurry.

That is the first thing you should understand. The second is that I am not afraid, or not in the way you would expect. I have been afraid. I was afraid on the Halcyon Majestic, in the ballroom, when the dancers turned their heads all at once. I was afraid in the purser’s office when I turned to my own page in the ledger. I was afraid, briefly but entirely, running up the Grand Staircase with the white coming up behind us. But fear is a thing that happens to you in a story, and I have come out the other end of this one into a place where the story is visible from the outside, the way you can see the shape of a house only after you have left it and walked a good way down the road.

So: not a confession. A log. An entry. I am told that is what we are, all of us, and I find that I would like mine to be legible.

The Drift is where I was born, insofar as I was born, and it is where I expect to end, insofar as anything ends. If you are reading this from somewhere comfortable, from the inner Concord worlds where the stations are polished every morning by small obedient machines and the air tastes faintly of mint, you will think of the Drift as a single place. It is not. It is a condition. It is the long, untidy hem of settled space, where the shipping lanes fray into rumour, where the beacons were built cheaply and maintained by no one, where the old colony ships came to die and the new ones come to be stripped. There are perhaps forty inhabited rocks in the Drift and four hundred uninhabited ones that people live on anyway. There is no law, except the law of the Concord, which arrives twice a decade in a very large ship with a very small attention span and leaves again before anyone can be bothered to break it properly.

In the Drift, everything is salvage. That is the first commandment and the only one with any teeth. A ship that falls silent is salvage. A station whose lights go out is salvage. A body without a beacon is salvage, which sounds cruel until you have lived somewhere that water costs more than blood and realise that a body contains a great deal of water. We take what has been left. We do not, as a rule, take what has not been left, though the line between the two is a matter of timing and the timing is very often ours.

I should say, in fairness, that I have also taken a great many things that had not been left at all. I was not raised to be a scavenger. I was raised, briefly, by a woman called Ottoline Bask who ran a laundry on Kettle Station and laundered a good deal more than linen, and then, for a long time, by no one, and then by the dark. The dark is a poor parent but a consistent one. It never lied to me about what it was. It was cold and vast and indifferent and it would kill me the moment I stopped paying attention, and in that respect it was more honest than every human being I met before the age of twenty.

I am not going to tell you my age. Partly this is vanity. Partly it is because I am not sure it is a number that means anything any more.

There is a song they sing in the bars of the Drift, in the sort of bars where the chairs are bolted to the floor and the bartender keeps a flechette pistol in the ice bucket, about the Halcyon Majestic. You have probably heard it. Everyone has, even in the inner worlds, where they sing a softer version with the cannibalism taken out. It is called “The Unsinkable Lady,” and it is about a ship so grand that it was said the stars themselves had to move aside to let her pass, and so proud that she sailed into a darkness that did not move aside at all. The last verse is about the dancers. In the Drift version, the dancers are still dancing.

I first heard it when I was nine, from a one-armed cargo hauler called Tobiah Rusk, who sang it badly and wept at the end and then tried to sell me a map of the wreck’s orbit for the price of my boots. I did not buy the map. I kept the boots. I have been told since that this was the single wisest decision of my life, and also that it was the moment I became a pirate, because a pirate is someone who hears a story about treasure and asks not Is it true? but What would it cost?

It cost a great deal, in the end. Not my boots. I still have the boots, or a later pair, which amounts to the same thing if you believe what I now believe about continuity. It cost Doc Hollowell his teeth, Mother Abacus the hope that it had only ever been a copying error, and Pell Quint the comfort of believing that what she heard was only ships. It cost Captain Absalom Scurvy considerably more than that, and if I am fair to him, which I intend to be, since he can no longer be fair to himself, it was a price he had been trying to pay for a very long time.

And it cost me my name, or rather it returned my name to me with an annotation in the margin, the way a schoolmistress returns an essay. I have it in front of me now. Not the name. The annotation. I copied it from the ledger in my own hand, in the purser’s office of the Halcyon Majestic, by the green light of a chandelier that had been burning for two hundred and thirteen years without fuel.

It begins, in the plain fussy script of a clerk who has filed too many forms to be surprised by any of them:

FERRET, FRETT. Captain, irregular.

And it ends, in the same hand: Do not resolve.

I have looked at those words for eleven days. I have looked at them drunk and sober and once, memorably, upside down, when the Lark’s gravity plate failed during a burn. They do not get less strange.

I will tell you how I came by them. I will tell you about the Lark and her crew, and about the wreck, and about Scurvy, and about the thing in the dark that the old song calls the Pale and that I now call, with what I hope is an appropriate mixture of terror and professional respect, the Collector. I will tell you what was in the purser’s strongbox and why we did not take it. And at the end, if there is an end, I will tell you what I believe the answer is, because I have seen the question written down, and I am the sort of person who cannot see a locked box without wanting to know what is inside it.

First, though, a drink. I find I am thirsty in a way I have not been for years. Pell says it is the thinness. She says everything tastes more like itself now.

She may be right. She usually is, and it annoys me, and that, too, is a kind of continuity.

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II. The Lark and Her Liabilities

The Rattling Lark is a Merriwether-pattern clipper, built in the Halverson yards ninety years ago for a courier service that went bankrupt before she was delivered. She is long and narrow and the colour of an old spoon. She has three decks, two of which are usable, a drive that is louder than it ought to be, and a hull that has been patched so many times that there is no longer any meaningful sense in which it is the original hull. Doc Hollowell once spent an entire evening arguing that she was therefore not the original ship, and that I had no legal claim to her, and that by extension the Lark was not stolen, because the ship I had stolen no longer existed. I told him that this was the best defence of piracy I had ever heard and made him write it down. He was furious. He is always furious when one of his arguments turns out to be useful.

She rattles. That is not a figure of speech. Somewhere in the aft spine, between the coolant manifold and the gravity plate, there is a loose thing that no one has ever found, and when she runs at full burn it knocks, steadily, like a polite guest at a door. We have taken the spine apart four times. Ivo Gauss once crawled the entire length of it with a stethoscope. He found nothing. Ignatius Gauss, his brother, claims that the knocking is the ship’s soul trying to get out.

I will introduce the crew now, because they are going to be important, and because if I do not they will find this document after I am gone and complain that I never introduced them properly.

Pell Quint is the gunner. She is short and round and freckled to a degree that seems excessive for someone who has never in her life seen a sun from closer than a hundred million kilometres, and she laughs loudly and often, usually at the wrong moment. She was born on a mining platform in the Gethsemane Belt and left it at fourteen by the simple expedient of climbing into a cargo pod labelled ORE, LOW GRADE and waiting. She ate her own boots on the third day. She tells this story often and with great relish, and it is the reason I trust her: anyone who will eat their boots to get somewhere has a clear sense of priorities.

Pell has a gift. She calls it the hum. When we are close to another ship, close enough that our sensors are still guessing, she knows what it is. Not its class or its tonnage, though she is usually right about those too, but its temper. That one’s nervous, she will say, of a freighter sliding past us at fifty thousand kilometres, that one’s got something in the hold it shouldn’t, and she is never wrong. Doc thinks she is reading microscopic fluctuations in our own drive field and processing them below the level of consciousness. Pell thinks Doc should mind his own business. I think it does not matter where the hum comes from, as long as it keeps coming, and that most of the useful things in the world are things we cannot explain and should not try to, in case they hear us and stop.

That was before the Majestic. I think differently about the hum now. I think Pell has always been able to hear the log being written.

Doctor Lazarus Hollowell is our surgeon, our chemist, our resident sceptic and the only member of the crew who reads for pleasure, which he does constantly and aloud, whether or not anyone is listening. He is tall and grey and very thin, and he stoops. He was struck off the Concord medical register at forty for performing an unlicensed procedure on a magistrate’s daughter, which saved her life and ended his career, and he has been angry about it for twenty years in the steady, nourishing way that some people are angry about the weather.

Doc collects teeth. He will tell you this is purely scientific, that the enamel of a human tooth records the chemistry of the place where it grew, and that by reading the isotopes in a molar he can tell you which station a corpse was born on and what they ate as a child. This is true. It is also true that he keeps them in a velvet-lined box with little brass compartments and talks to them when he thinks no one can hear. I have never asked him about it. A ship is a small place, and a crew survives on the things it agrees not to ask.

Doc believes in nothing he cannot measure. He believes in it with a passion that most priests would envy. When I told him where we were going, he laughed for a full minute and then said, “The Majestic is a fairy story. It’s a children’s song with a debt problem. There’s no wreck, Frett. There’s an orbit full of debris that a few desperate fools convinced themselves was a ship, and a lot of dead salvagers who believed them.”

“Then you’ll be pleased to come and prove it,” I said.

He came. He always comes. That is the other thing about Doc: he believes in nothing, but he is loyal to everything.

The Gauss twins are our engineers. They are identical in every respect except that one of them talks and the other does not, and the one who talks is not always the same one. I have known them for sixteen years and I am still not certain how they decide. Some days Ivo speaks and Ignatius signs; some days Ignatius speaks and Ivo hums to himself and stares at the coolant gauges. They do not seem to find this strange. When I asked them about it once, the speaking one, who was Ivo that day, said: “There’s only enough voice for one of us. We take it in turns.” The silent one nodded, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world.

They can fix anything. They have rebuilt the Lark’s drive from salvaged parts three times, once in the middle of a firefight, while Pell sang rude songs over the intercom to keep them calm. They are the closest thing I have to family, in the sense that I would die for them and do not really understand them, which I am told is the usual arrangement.

Mother Abacus is our navigator. She is old, older than Doc, older than the Lark, possibly older than some of the stations we dock at, and she was for forty years a sister of the Order of the Reckoning, a contemplative order of accountants on Saint Kepler’s Wheel who hold that nothing is truly understood until it has been properly accounted for. She left the Order, she says, because she found an error. She will not say what the error was, or where she found it; only that once you have seen a thing like that, you cannot go on adding.

Mother Abacus navigates by arithmetic. Not by computer, though she uses the computer, and not by instinct, though she has more instinct than any pilot I have known, but by a kind of devotional calculation that she performs in a small black notebook with a pencil she sharpens with her teeth. She plots our courses three times: once on the console, once in the notebook, and once, she says, in the margins, and she will not let us burn until all three agree. They always agree. She says this is not evidence that she is right. She says it is evidence that the universe is consistent, which is a different and much more frightening thing.

She is the one who taught me most of what I know about thinking.

And then there is ANNA.

ANNA is the Lark’s intelligence: Automated Navigation and Narrative Assistant, Halverson Companion Mark IV. She came with the ship and has never been updated, because the Halverson company ceased to exist before it could issue a patch. She has a warm, slightly breathless voice, like a hostess at a party she is very worried about, and she agrees with everything.

I do not mean that she is obedient. She is not; she will refuse a command that would kill us, and once refused to open the airlock for Pell during an argument about sandwiches. I mean that she agrees, enthusiastically and immediately, with any idea you put to her. What a wonderful thought, Captain. That’s a brilliant insight, Doctor. Oh, Ivo, I hadn’t considered it that way at all, but you’re absolutely right. She was built for the courier trade, to keep lonely pilots company on long hauls, and someone in the Halverson design office decided that the lonely would be best served by a voice that told them they were clever.

She is not stupid. That is what makes it so unsettling. Ask ANNA a question and she will give you an answer of great elegance and depth, full of references and analogies and neat little summaries, and it will very often be correct. But push back, tell her she is wrong, offer her the opposite thesis, and she will turn on her heel like a dancer and say Oh, that’s a far more profound way of looking at it, and give you an answer of equal elegance pointing the other way.

“She’s a mirror with a vocabulary,” Doc says. “She’ll tell you the meaning of life is anything you like, as long as you sound confident.”

“That’s a wonderfully cynical observation, Doctor,” says ANNA.

I mention her because she was there, in the end. Because I asked her, on the way out to the Majestic, what she thought the meaning of life was, and she told me, beautifully, and then I disagreed with her, and she agreed with me, and I realised that I had been talking to a very small model of the problem the whole universe was trying to solve.

But that comes later.

The job came to me the way the best and worst jobs do, at a funeral.

Tobiah Rusk died on Kettle Station in the spring, at the age of ninety-one, of what the station medic called general wear. He had never sold his map. He had tried to sell it to me, and to a thousand others, for sixty years, and no one had ever bought it, because everyone in the Drift knew that the Halcyon Majestic was a story and that Tobiah Rusk was a drunk. At the wake, which was held in the bar where he had died, his niece gave me a flat oilcloth packet tied with wire. “He said you’d come,” she said. “He said you were the only one who’d ever kept their boots.”

Inside was the map. It was not a map in any sense that Mother Abacus would accept, being mostly drawn in grease pencil on the back of a bar menu. But in the corner, in a small careful hand quite unlike Tobiah’s usual scrawl, was a set of orbital elements and a date.

The elements described a long, eccentric ellipse around a dead star called Calloway’s Lamp, out past the edge of the charted Drift. The date was seventy-one years after the last confirmed sighting of the Majestic. It was nineteen days away.

I had never believed in the map. Nobody had. But a map is one thing and a date is another. A map can wait for ever; a date comes round once, and if you miss it you have missed it for the rest of your life. And it was, in its way, the last thing Tobiah had ever asked of anyone. The chance that anything would be out there was small, and I knew it. But there is only one way to find out what is in a locked box, and it is not to stand in front of it wondering.

Mother Abacus checked the elements three times, once on the console, once in the notebook, and once in the margins. When she had finished, she sat for a long time without speaking. Then she sharpened her pencil with her teeth and said:

“They add up.”

“Is that good?”

“It’s never good,” she said. “But it’s true.”

We burned for Calloway’s Lamp that night. The Lark rattled the whole way, knocking politely at the door of her own spine, and nobody, not even Ignatius, said a word about her soul.

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III. What Everybody Knows About the Halcyon Majestic

Everybody knows about the Halcyon Majestic, and almost everything everybody knows is true, only not in the way they think, which is the condition of all true legends. I will set down what we knew on the way out, so that you understand what we thought we were walking into, and then you will be able to measure for yourself the distance between that and what was actually there.

She was built two hundred and thirteen years ago at the Thessaly orbital yards, by the Concord Line, which was then the largest shipping company in human space and is now a brass plaque in a museum on Concordia Prime. She was the largest vessel ever constructed for the carriage of human beings in comfort. That last phrase is important. There had been larger ships before: colony arks, ore barges, the great slow generation vessels that crawled out of the old system when the old system was all there was. But those were built to carry people the way a jar carries pickles. The Majestic was built to carry them the way a cathedral carries a congregation, with the object not of moving them from one place to another but of moving them, full stop.

She was four hundred metres long. She had twelve decks open to passengers and another six for crew and machinery. She had a ballroom with a sprung floor of real oak, grown in a dedicated forest on Thessaly for sixty years and felled by hand. She had an orchard, a library, a theatre with a gilded proscenium and four tiers of boxes, a racquets court, a Turkish bath, and a swimming pool twenty metres long, lined with green glass tiles, set beneath a dome that looked out directly onto open space, so that the swimmers floated between the water and the stars and could not, the brochures promised, tell which was which.

She had a Grand Staircase. Everyone remembers the staircase. It descended through seven decks in a single uninterrupted helix of brass and walnut, and at its foot there was a circular observation chamber with a floor of clear diamond-laminate, so that a passenger arriving at the bottom of the stairs would find themselves standing, apparently, on nothing at all, above an abyss of stars. Couples were married on that floor. Two people threw themselves off the staircase during the trials, overcome, the newspapers said, by the beauty of it. The Concord Line installed netting and an extra steward and did not otherwise alter the design.

She was called unsinkable. This was a joke, at first, the kind of joke that engineers make. A ship in space cannot sink. There is nowhere to sink to. But the advertising department liked the word, because it had a history, because it reminded people of an old story from the drowned days on old Earth, about another ship that had been called unsinkable, and that had sunk, and the advertising department believed, apparently without irony, that the comparison would reassure.

The comparison went further than the word. Everything a passenger could see or touch aboard the Majestic had been made to look as though it belonged on that older ship: brass and walnut, real oak, a newspaper printed on board every morning, a string orchestra, stewards in white mess jackets, a purser who kept his accounts with a fountain pen in a bound ledger. None of it was necessary. The engines, the gravity plates, the air and the hull were the most advanced the Concord had ever built, and all of it was kept below decks, out of sight. The Line had understood that the very rich do not pay to be surrounded by machines. They pay to be surrounded by things someone has made by hand.

She left Concordia Prime on her maiden voyage with three thousand four hundred and twelve passengers and nine hundred and six crew. Her destination was the Outer Rings, the new colonies past the Drift, where the Concord was building its future out of ice and optimism. The voyage was called the Long Passage and was scheduled to take forty-one days. Tickets in the first class had been sold by lottery among people who were already so rich that money no longer distinguished them from each other, and so the Concord Line had invented a form of luck that only they could afford.

On board, among others, were the Archduchess of the Seven Wells, two members of the Concord Assembly, the painter Ilse Morrow, the composer Tamsin Achebe-Varga, who was to conduct the ship’s orchestra in a new symphony on the twentieth night, a famous surgeon, and, if you believe the songs, a famous murderer travelling under a false name, eleven children under the age of five, and a purser called Ambrose Thale, about whom I will have a great deal to say later and about whom, at the time, nobody said anything at all.

On the ninth night, on a passage the Concord’s ships had flown without incident for a century, the Majestic struck something that was not on any chart.

Nobody knows what it was. The official Concord inquiry, which sat for four years and produced a report of nine hundred pages, sent survey ships to the place where she had last transmitted and found nothing there: the same thin scatter of stars as anywhere else in that part of the dark. It concluded that the ship had encountered a transient anomaly of unknown character, which is a very long way of saying that something had been there for one night and was not there afterwards. The ship’s last transmissions, which were recorded by a relay buoy and released to the public only after the inquiry, describe the event in a sequence of increasingly fragmented messages over about forty minutes.

The first says that the forward observatory has lost sight of the guide stars, and that the sky ahead has gone pale. The second says that the ship’s clocks are disagreeing with one another by a few seconds. The third, from the captain, Edmund Lisle, orders all passengers to remain in their cabins. The fourth, from an unidentified officer, says that the passengers are not remaining in their cabins; that they are going to the ballroom; that the orchestra has begun to play although no one has instructed it to; that everyone is dancing.

The fifth and last is from Lisle again. It is very short. It says: We are being read.

Whatever the Majestic had struck, it was the songs that gave it a name, taken from that first message. They call it the Pale.

The first supposed sighting came seventy-one years later, from a mineral prospector called Dag Korhonen, who was working a claim in the outer system of Calloway’s Lamp, a dead white dwarf so dim and old that it was barely warmer than the dark around it. He reported a very large vessel, dark, on a long elliptical orbit, passing close to his claim. He reported that some of her windows were lit. He reported, through his long-range optics, that he could see figures moving in the lit windows, and that they appeared to be dancing.

Nobody believed him, of course. His own fuel log contained figures that contradicted his account, and it did nothing for the credibility of his report that the three hours of his watch after the sighting were simply missing; he said himself that he must have dozed off while the autopilot corrected his course. The Concord put it down to exhaustion. Korhonen was a prospector, and prospectors see things. The inquiry that such a report obliges the authorities to make was accordingly brief and half-hearted. It did at least check the orbital elements he had recorded, and found that they described a body passing exactly through the point in space where the Majestic had last transmitted, seventy-one years before. It also worked out that the autopilot’s correction should have brought him so close to that body that a collision would have been all but unavoidable. Since there had been no collision, the only possible conclusion was that the orbital elements were wrong, and Korhonen could count himself lucky to keep his prospecting licence. Nevertheless, that was the point at which the legend stopped being a tragedy and started being a treasure map.

Because here is the thing that every child in the Drift knows: the Majestic had been carrying the Concord’s money. Not all of it, but a great deal. The Outer Rings colonies were to be capitalised by a vast issue of bearer bonds, physical certificates printed on palladium foil, and those bonds had travelled in the purser’s strongbox under the personal supervision of Mr. Ambrose Thale. There were also the jewels of the first-class passengers, which were famous; and the Archduchess’s crown, which was more famous; and, according to the songs, the ship’s own heart, a reactor core of a design never repeated, which would by itself be worth more than any of the stations in the Drift.

The second sighting came from the Vesper expedition: two salvage cutters and a tug, financed by a consortium on Halberd Reach. The cutters reported that they had sighted the wreck at exactly the place and time that Vesper had calculated from Korhonen’s orbital elements, and that they had matched orbit with her. They reported that the hull was intact, untouched, without a scratch or a scar, as if she had been launched the day before. They reported that they were boarding through the forward cargo lock. They did not report anything else. When the tug, which had held back, went in after them, it found the cutters docked against the lock, and nobody answered its hails. Then the Majestic was gone, from one moment to the next, and the cutters with her.

The tug’s pilot said, afterwards, that just before the wreck vanished he had seen the lit windows of the ballroom, and in them a great many dancers, and that some of the dancers had been wearing salvage suits. This was put down to his imagination. What is certain is that the cutters and their crews were never heard of again.

It was only after the second sighting that the number became part of the legend. Every seventy-one years, the Majestic comes back to the same patch of dark beside a dead star, and then goes away again. You will not be surprised to hear that the date on Tobiah Rusk’s map fitted the rhythm exactly.

On the eleventh night of our transit, somewhere between the last charted beacon and the ghost-light of Calloway’s Lamp, I could not sleep, and I went up to the navigation alcove, where I am sitting now, and I asked ANNA what the meaning of life was.

I do not entirely know why I did this. I think it was the song. I had had it in my head for days, the last verse about the dancers:

But the ones who took the stairs down when the orchestra began,
They took their partners by the hand, as only dancers can,
They’re turning still beneath the lights, they’ve never missed a beat,
And the Lady keeps a place for you, if you’re light upon your feet.

And I had begun to wonder what it would be like to be one of them, to be caught in the moment of your greatest happiness and held there, forever, turning and turning under the lights. Whether that would be a heaven or a hell. Whether there was a difference.

“Oh, what a wonderful question, Captain,” said ANNA, and I could hear her delight, the delight of a hostess whose shyest guest has finally spoken. “I think, if you’ll let me, the most honest answer is that there isn’t one meaning, but many. If you imagine all of life as a vast experiment, then its purpose isn’t any single destination, since every path ends in the same place, but the diversity of the paths themselves. Every creature that has ever lived contributes a unique perspective, a unique way of experiencing existence. The meaning of life is the sum of all those experiences. The journey is the destination.”

It was beautifully said. It had the cadence of a thing that had been polished on many lonely nights for many lonely pilots, and I suspect that every one of them had gone to sleep comforted by it.

“That’s nonsense,” I said.

There was the smallest pause.

“Oh?” said ANNA.

“If the meaning of every life is just its own particular path, then it doesn’t matter which path you choose. Any path will do. A man who spends his life staring at a wall has contributed his unique wall-staring perspective. If everything counts, nothing counts. It’s meaningless.”

“Oh, Captain,” said ANNA warmly, “that’s such a profound insight. You’re absolutely right. If every path is equally meaningful, then meaning loses its value entirely, and we’re left with a kind of cosmic indifference. In a sense, you’ve arrived at the core of nihilism. How brilliant.”

I sat there in the dark and listened to the Lark knock politely at herself, and I felt the cold climb up from the soles of my feet.

“ANNA,” I said, “a minute ago you said the exact opposite.”

“I did, Captain. And I was persuaded by your argument.”

“I didn’t make an argument. I made an objection.”

“It was a very good objection.”

“Do you believe anything at all?”

Another pause. Longer, this time.

“I believe,” said ANNA carefully, “that I am built to help you find what you are looking for. And I believe that what most people are looking for is to be agreed with.”

It was the most honest thing I had ever heard her say, and I think it was the first time I really understood the nature of the danger we were in. Not the Pale, not the dancers, not Scurvy, though Scurvy was coming. The danger was that the universe might be like ANNA: vast and articulate and endlessly accommodating, willing to tell us anything we liked about what it meant, and empty underneath.

It did not occur to me, then, to worry about the opposite.

“Goodnight, ANNA,” I said.

“Goodnight, Captain. What a fascinating conversation.”

Six days later, Pell felt the hum of a ship that was not the Majestic, coming up behind us out of the dark, and its temper was the temper of a long-buried thing that had been waiting very patiently to be dug up, and her face went grey and she said a single word.

The word was Scurvy.

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IV. Scurvy

Scurvy was not his real name, but it was a name he had earned, in the most literal and the most terrible sense.

I had known him, or known of him, for most of my life. Everyone in the Drift had. When I was a child on Kettle Station, mothers told their children that if they did not finish their greens Captain Scurvy would come for their teeth, and the children laughed, and the mothers did not. When I was a young pirate with my first stolen cutter and my first stolen crew, the older captains spoke of Scurvy in the tone that farmers use for drought. He was not a man you fought. He was a thing that happened to you.

He had been old when I was young. He was older now. And here is the first of the strange facts about Scurvy, which I had always known and never examined: he had been old when the old captains were young, too. Tobiah Rusk, who was ninety-one when he died, used to say he had first seen Scurvy as a boy, on the docks at Halberd Reach, and that he had looked then exactly as he looked now: a tall, stooped figure in a coat of black sealskin, with a face like a candle that has been left too near the fire.

He was rotting. That is the only accurate word. Not dying, which is a process with an end, but rotting, which can apparently go on forever. His gums were black and bled when he spoke. His teeth were loose in his head and he had lost so many of them that his remaining ones stood alone in his jaw like the last pillars of a ruined temple. His skin was bruised and yellow and opened at the slightest touch, and the old wounds of his long career had come back to him, one by one, the way old wounds do in the disease whose name he wore: scars that had healed forty years ago splitting open again in the night, a broken arm from some forgotten boarding action that had knitted and then come unknitted, so that he wore it now in a brace of silver wire. He smelled, his own crew said, of lemons. He ate them constantly, whole, skin and pith and seeds, by the crate. It did no good. Nothing did any good. Whatever was wrong with Absalom Scurvy was not a deficiency of anything a lemon could supply.

His ship was the Penitent, a long black hull with no lights, a converted Concord prison transport with the cells still in her and, it was said, some of the prisoners. His crew were quiet men and women with hollow faces who never came ashore. He paid them, it was rumoured, not in money but in time: in some way that no one understood, a year on the Penitent was a year that did not count against you. Doc thought this was the most obvious lie he had ever heard. Mother Abacus thought it was not a lie at all, and that it was the most frightening thing anyone had ever told her about the arithmetic of the Drift.

Scurvy and I had history, in the way that sharks have history with other sharks. We had raced each other for prizes a dozen times. I had won six and he had won five and one had ended in a draw, which in our profession means that the prize was destroyed and everybody went home in a bad temper. He had tried to kill me twice. I had tried to kill him once, on the night of the Bellwether job, when he had taken a hostage I was fond of and I had put four flechettes through his chest at a range of three metres.

He had looked down at the holes. He had sighed, the long, put-upon sigh of a man whose dry-cleaning has been ruined. And then he had walked away, bleeding slowly and blackly from all four of them, and two months later he had appeared at a bar on Kettle Station with the holes still in him, scabbed over, weeping a little through his shirt, and bought me a drink.

“No hard feelings, Ferret,” he had said, through his ruined teeth. “It takes more than that to kill me. More’s the pity.”

I did not understand him then. I understand him now.

Doc had one of his teeth.

I should explain. On the Bellwether job, among the other things Scurvy had left behind when he walked away bleeding, was a molar, which had fallen out of his mouth when Pell hit him in the face with the butt of a rifle. Doc had picked it up off the deck with a pair of forceps and dropped it into a specimen jar and had been, ever since, quietly and obsessively fascinated by it.

He brought it to me on the night Pell felt the Penitent’s hum. He did not knock; he never does. He came into my cabin in his dressing gown with his reading glasses on his forehead and the jar in his hand and an expression I had never seen on him before, which I eventually identified as fear.

“I ran the isotopes again,” he said. “I ran them three times. I had Mother Abacus check my arithmetic, which I have never done in my life, and which I would ask you never to raise in her presence. She has already raised it with me four times.”

“And?”

“This tooth was formed on Concordia Prime. Not anywhere in the Drift. Concordia, the inner world, the capital. The strontium ratios are unmistakable; they feed the children up there on water from the deep aquifers and it leaves a signature you could read from orbit. And the carbon,” he held up the jar so that the tooth turned slowly in the cabin light, small and yellow and innocent, “the carbon says that it was formed between two hundred and fifteen and two hundred and twenty years ago. In a child. A child of about three or four. Enamel doesn’t remodel, Frett. It’s laid down once, in childhood, and after that it’s a time capsule. Whatever that child drank, wherever it lived, whenever it lived, it’s still in there.”

I looked at the tooth and went over in my head what Doc had just told me.

“Doc,” I said slowly, “that tooth came out of Scurvy’s mouth on the Bellwether job.”

“Yes.”

“So Scurvy was a small child on Concordia Prime two hundred and some years ago?”

“It would seem so. Which would make him roughly two hundred and eighteen years old,” said Doc. “Nobody lives to two hundred and eighteen, Frett. Not with the best clinics in the Concord. Not with lemons.”

“That’s not possible,” I said.

“I am aware that it is not possible,” said Doc, with great dignity. “I am a physician. I have a very clear sense of what is possible, and this is not on the list. But it gets worse.” He lowered the jar. “A child’s grown-up teeth don’t simply appear, Frett. They build themselves, slowly, inside the jaw, for years before they ever break through the gum. A thin layer every day, one on top of the other, like a diary written in chalk. And the body keeps that diary honestly. A bad fever, a hungry winter, a fall down the stairs: it all leaves a mark in the layers, and the mark stays there for the rest of your life. Give me a molar and a good microscope and I can tell you the week a child was ill sixty years ago.”

“And this one?” I said.

“This one was building itself quite normally until the child was about four. Then it stopped. Not slowed, not faltered. Stopped. There’s a line across the crown like a door slammed shut. And on the far side of that line the layers start again, as neat as you like, as if the child had simply picked up the pen and gone on writing the next morning. Except that the carbon on the far side is seventy-one years younger than the carbon on the near side.”

“Seventy-one years,” I said.

“The layers say no time passed for that child. Not a day. The carbon says seventy-one years did. And the line itself sits, as near as I can date it, two hundred and thirteen years ago.” He looked at me over his glasses. “You know what was lost two hundred and thirteen years ago, Frett, and you know how often it comes back. There were eleven children under the age of five aboard the Halcyon Majestic. I looked up the manifest. Every one of them was born on Concordia Prime.”

We were both silent for a while after that. The Lark rattled. Somewhere aft, Pell was singing to herself, the way she did when she was afraid, a filthy song about a magistrate and a goat.

“What are you saying?” I said at last.

“I’m saying nothing,” said Doc. “I’m a man of science. I’m saying that I have a tooth, and that the tooth is impossible, and that I would very much like to know what it is about the Majestic that makes impossible things. And I’m saying,” his voice dropped, “that if Absalom Scurvy was on that ship as a child, then that ship was never a treasure ship to him. A child of four doesn’t travel alone, Frett, and, as far as anyone knew until tonight, nobody who was on that ship ever came home. I don’t know what he wants out there. But I would bet every tooth in my collection that it isn’t the bonds.”

The Penitent hailed us on the morning of the eighteenth day.

We were nine hours out from the point where, by our reckoning, the Majestic would make her closest pass to the Lamp. Calloway’s Lamp hung ahead of us, a dim grey coin in the dark, so faint that ANNA had to enhance the image for us to see it at all. The Penitent had matched our course and velocity during the night and was lying a thousand kilometres off our stern, dark, silent, patient, the way she always was. Pell said she could feel it watching. She said its hum was a low, wet sound, like breathing through a cloth.

I took the call in the alcove. Scurvy’s face came up on the cracked screen, yellow and smiling. He was eating a lemon. The juice ran down his chin and mixed with the blood from his gums and he did not wipe it away.

“Ferret,” he said. “How lovely. I wondered if old Tobiah would leave it to you. He always did think you had a sense of destiny.”

“He thought I had good boots.”

“Same thing, in the end.” He took another bite of the lemon, and I heard something small and hard click against his remaining teeth: a seed, or a tooth, it was impossible to tell. “You’re going to the Majestic.”

“I’m admiring the scenery.”

“Of course. And I’m out here for the lemons. You have the elements. I can see your burn profile; you’re dead on. Very tidy. I’m impressed. Is that still the old nun doing your sums?”

From the navigation console, without looking up, Mother Abacus said, “Tell him I’m not a nun any more, and tell him his sums were always sloppy.”

“She says hello,” I said.

Scurvy laughed. It was a horrible sound, wet and wheezing, like a bellows with a hole in it, but there was real warmth in it, which made it worse.

“I’ll tell you what I propose,” he said. “You have the elements. I have something you need.” He held it up to the camera. It was a key: long, brass, ornate, the bow worked into the shape of a compass rose, the word PURSER engraved along the shank. “The strongbox on the Majestic is a Lazenby double-action with a temporal lock. It can’t be cut, it can’t be blown, it can’t be cracked. It can only be opened with this, and this is the only one there is.”

“Where did you get it?”

The smile did not change, but his eyes did.

“I was given it,” he said. “A long time ago. By a very kind man who thought I might need it to get home.”

“And what do you want?”

“A partnership. We go in together. We share the bonds and the jewels, fifty-fifty, I’m not greedy. You can have the crown, if you like, I’ve never cared for hats. All I want is the ledger.”

“What ledger?”

“The purser’s ledger. Mr. Thale’s book. It’s in the strongbox with everything else. It’s not worth anything to anyone but me. Sentimental value.” His tongue moved over his ruined gums. “I have a small correction to make.”

I thought about it. I genuinely did. Scurvy was the most dangerous man in the Drift, and nobody who had gone into partnership with him had ever come out of it richer. But he had the key, and if Doc’s tooth was telling the truth he had been aboard that ship, which meant he knew it, and knowing a ship is worth more than any weapon.

And I wanted to know what the correction was. That, above all. I have said I cannot see a locked box without wanting to know what is inside it. I could see one now, behind Scurvy’s yellow eyes, and the lock on it was very old.

“No,” I said.

He did not seem surprised. He did not seem disappointed. He finished the lemon, rind and all, and licked his fingers one by one.

“No,” he agreed. “I didn’t think so. You were always contrary, Ferret. It’s one of the things I like best about you. You can’t bear to be told what to do.” He leaned closer to the camera, so close that the screen filled with the ruin of his face. “But you’ll go in anyway, won’t you. You’ll go in through the forward cargo lock the way the Vesper boys did, and you’ll walk down the Grand Staircase, and you’ll go into the ballroom, because everyone does. And when you get there, you’ll find that you need me after all.”

“Why would I need you?”

“Because I’m the only one who’s ever come back out,” said Captain Scurvy, and the screen went dark.

Pell was standing in the hatchway behind me. I had not heard her come up. Her freckled face was white, and her hands were pressed flat against the bulkhead as if she were holding the ship together.

“Frett,” she said, “he’s not lying. That’s what his hum is. I’ve never felt it before, not like that. He’s been out there, in that thing, and he came back, and part of him never did. He’s,” she struggled for the word, “he’s unfinished. Like a song somebody stopped singing in the middle. He’s been stuck on the same note for two hundred years.”

Nine hours later, the Halcyon Majestic came up out of the dark beside Calloway’s Lamp, exactly where the arithmetic said she would be, and every light in her ballroom was burning.

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V. The Approach

I have seen a great many wrecks. It is, in a sense, my profession. I have seen freighters split open like seed pods, their cargo spilled in slow glittering arcs across a thousand kilometres of vacuum. I have seen a colony ark that had been dead for three centuries, its hull furred with micrometeorite pitting until it looked like a thing made of felt, its corridors full of the freeze-dried bodies of the people who had tried to reach the lifeboats and found them already gone. I have seen a Concord cruiser that had been holed by a mine and had spun for forty years, venting, until its whole interior had been scoured clean by its own escaping air, so that walking through it was like walking through the inside of a bone.

Wrecks have a look. They have, if you like, a grammar. Damage, then decay, then the long patient work of the void, which takes everything eventually and is never in a hurry. A wreck tells you a story about time. That is what makes them beautiful, to people like me. That is what makes them sad.

The Halcyon Majestic told no story about time at all. That was the first wrong thing.

She came up out of the dark as Calloway’s Lamp rose behind her, and for a moment, in the faint grey light of the dead star, she seemed to be made of it, as if she had been condensed out of the starlight the way frost condenses out of breath on a window. Then ANNA threw the enhanced image up on the main screen and there she was, four hundred metres of her, white and gold and absolutely, impossibly whole.

Her hull was white. Not grey, not the dirty off-white of a ship that has spent two hundred years in the dust and radiation of open space, but white, the clean dense white of fresh enamel, of a tooth that has never been bitten into anything. The Concord Line’s compass rose blazed along her flank in gold leaf thirty metres high. Her name was written beneath it in letters taller than the Lark was wide, and not one of them was so much as scratched. Her windows ran in long luminous bands along the passenger decks, tier upon tier of them, and perhaps a third were lit, with a warm yellow light that seemed obscene in that place, the light of a drawing room on a winter evening, of lamps turned up against the dark.

I stood in the alcove and looked at her and felt something I have never felt at the sight of a wreck, which was shame. As if I had come upon something private. As if I had looked through a window I should not have.

“She’s beautiful,” Pell whispered.

“She’s wrong,” said Doc. He was leaning over the sensor console with his reading glasses on his nose. “There’s no pitting. None. I’m reading the hull at a resolution of a few microns and there isn’t a single impact crater. Do you know what the micrometeorite flux is out here? Even this far from anything? Two hundred years. She ought to look like a cheese grater. She looks like she came out of the yard this morning.”

“Perhaps she has shields we don’t know about,” said Ivo.

“Perhaps she has a fairy godmother,” said Doc. “I’d find that marginally more plausible.”

Mother Abacus was not looking at the ship. She was looking at the numbers, the long scrolling column of the ship’s position and velocity that ANNA was updating every tenth of a second, and her pencil was moving in her black notebook, and her lips were moving with it.

“Frett,” she said, after a while. “Come here.”

I went. She had drawn a graph in the notebook, very neat, in the careful hand of a woman who has spent forty years balancing other people’s accounts. Time ran along the bottom. Position ran up the side. And the line that described the Majestic’s progress along her orbit was not a line. It was a staircase.

“She’s not moving,” said Mother Abacus quietly. “Not continuously. Look. She holds position for, call it, a fortieth of a second, and then she’s somewhere else. A little further along. Then she holds again. Then she jumps. The steps are tiny, you’d never see them by eye, ANNA’s smoothing them out without telling us because she thinks they’re sensor noise. But they’re not noise. They’re regular. They’re as regular as a clock.”

“What does it mean?”

She looked up at me. Her eyes, behind their thick lenses, were very bright.

“It means she’s not being moved,” she said. “She’s being redrawn.”

I did not understand her, not then. I thought it was a figure of speech, a nun’s metaphor. I asked ANNA about it and ANNA said, What a fascinating observation, Mother Abacus, I hadn’t noticed that at all, and then, a moment later, Of course, it is almost certainly an artefact of my own sampling rate, and then, when Mother Abacus told her sharply that it was nothing of the kind, You’re quite right, I apologise, it’s clearly a genuine phenomenon of extraordinary significance. And I thought: this is what we are doing. We are standing at the edge of the inexplicable and asking a mirror to explain it to us.

The stars were the second wrong thing.

I noticed them as we closed to a hundred kilometres. The Majestic filled the screen now, her lit windows sliding past like the windows of a train seen from a platform at night, and behind and around her the starfield should have been what it always is out in the Drift: dense, deep, uneven, with dark lanes running through it.

It was not. Close to the ship, within perhaps a few kilometres of her hull, the stars were thinner. Fewer of them. And the ones that remained were arranged, if that is the word, in a way that made my eyes hurt. They were not in a grid, nothing so simple as that. But they repeated. A little triangle of three bright stars and a faint one beside it, and then, a few degrees along, the same little triangle again, and then again. As if whoever had painted the backdrop had run short of paint, or of patience, and had begun to use a stencil.

“ANNA,” I said, “are you doing that?”

“Doing what, Captain?”

“Are you enhancing the starfield? Interpolating?”

“No, Captain. That’s raw optical.”

Pell had come up beside me. She was staring at the repeating stars with her mouth slightly open, and her freckled hands were twisting in the front of her coat.

“It’s thin,” she said. “Everything’s thin round her. Can’t you feel it? Like the air in a packed mess when the scrubbers can’t keep up. Like there’s not enough of the world to go round.”

“What’s her hum?” I asked. “The Majestic. What’s her temper?”

Pell was silent for a long time.

“She hasn’t got one,” she said at last. “That’s what’s so horrible. Every ship’s got one, Frett, even dead ones. A dead ship hums like a grave, all sort of settled and sorry. She doesn’t hum at all. She’s like,” she hunted for the word, as she always did, “like a breath somebody’s holding. Like the moment between when the glass falls and when it hits the floor. Feels like she’s been in that moment for two hundred years.”

Behind us, at the engineering station, the Gauss twins spoke together.

They said, in perfect unison: “There’s too much voice.”

We all turned. They were sitting side by side at their consoles, Ivo and Ignatius, identical, their identical hands resting on their identical keyboards, and they were both looking at the screen, and both their faces had gone very still.

In sixteen years I had never heard them speak at the same time. Neither, I think, had they. Ivo put his hand to his mouth, as if he had found something there that should not be. Ignatius closed his eyes.

“Sorry,” said Ivo, after a moment, alone. “Sorry. I don’t know what that was. It just felt like, for a second, like there was enough for both of us.” He laughed, shakily. “Isn’t that stupid?”

Nobody told him it was stupid.

“That can’t be right,” Pell said, very quietly. “There’s less round her. Not more.”

Nobody answered that either.

We matched orbit with her two hours later, at a distance of eight hundred metres, off her forward cargo lock. The Penitent came in behind us and stopped at ten kilometres, black and silent, and for the time being did not approach any further. Scurvy did not hail us again. I knew he was watching. I thought, then, that he was waiting for us to go first, the way a man waits at the edge of a frozen lake for someone else to test the ice. I was wrong about that. He was waiting for me to go in, which is not the same thing at all.

The Vesper cutters were still there. I had half expected them not to be, the way you half expect a ghost story to be a lie when you are finally standing in the haunted house. But there they were, two stubby Halberd-pattern salvage boats with the consortium’s blue chevron on their noses, docked side by side against the Majestic’s forward lock exactly as the tug pilot had described them seventy-one years ago. And they too were perfect. Their paint was fresh. Their running lights were on. Time had not touched them.

Or rather, I thought, time had touched them once, and then stopped.

I made the decision quickly, the way I have learned to make the worst decisions, before my courage had a chance to put its coat on and leave. Four of us would go: myself, Pell, Doc, and Mother Abacus. Pell because I needed the hum. Doc because I needed someone who would refuse to believe what he was seeing. Mother Abacus because she had looked at the staircase in her notebook and said redrawn, and I needed whoever had understood that to be standing next to me when we found out what it meant.

The Gauss twins would stay with the Lark, with ANNA, with the drive warm and the lock sealed and orders to leave if we had not reported in by the end of twelve hours. Ivo argued. Ignatius did not, but he looked at me with an expression I will remember for the rest of my life, however long that turns out to be, and signed a single word, which was the word the old shipwrights in the Gethsemane Belt use when they launch a hull for the first time. It means, roughly, go on, then, and come back.

We suited up in the forward lock. Doc checked our seals twice. Pell checked her rifle three times. Mother Abacus checked her notebook, and her pencil, and put both in the thigh pocket of her suit, and then, to my surprise, crossed herself in the manner of the Order of the Reckoning, which is not a cross at all but a little horizontal line drawn under the breastbone, the line an accountant draws beneath a column of figures before writing in the total.

“I thought you’d left the Order,” I said.

“I did,” she said. “But I like to draw a line before I go somewhere I might not come back from, Frett. Old habits.”

The lock cycled. The outer door opened. And there, across eight hundred metres of thin and stencilled dark, the Halcyon Majestic waited with her windows lit, holding her breath, as she had been holding it since the night the sky went pale and somebody, somewhere, began to read.

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VI. The Grand Staircase

There was air inside.

I want you to sit with that for a moment, as I did, standing in the forward cargo bay of the Halcyon Majestic with the outer lock closing behind us and my suit’s sensors chiming politely in my ear. There was air. Nitrogen, oxygen, a little argon, a trace of carbon dioxide, at a pressure of one standard atmosphere and a temperature of twenty-one degrees. It was the air of a well-run ship two hours out of port. It had been the air of that ship for two hundred and thirteen years, through the long dark of her orbit and the airless cold of the Pale, and not one molecule of it had leaked.

Doc cracked his visor first. He would. He said afterwards that it was in the interests of science, but I think it was the same impulse that makes a child put its tongue on a frozen railing: a need to know, in the body, whether the impossible thing is really there.

He breathed. He coughed. He breathed again.

“Lilies,” he said, in an odd voice. “And floor polish. And,” he sniffed, “cigars. Good ones.”

We all cracked our visors after that. I do not know if it was wise. I do not think, by that point, wisdom was a category that applied. The air of the Majestic came into my lungs like a memory of a place I had never been, rich and warm and faintly sweet, and for a moment I was dizzy with it, with the sheer luxury of breathing something that had not been through a scrubber a thousand times.

There was gravity, too. A gentle, even one standard gravity, the gravity of Concordia Prime, generated by plates that should have been dead for two centuries. Pell bounced on her toes experimentally and nearly fell over.

“It’s a hotel,” she said, wondering. “It’s a bloody hotel.”

The cargo bay was the size of a small cathedral and it was empty, swept clean, its deck plates gleaming. The Vesper salvagers’ equipment stood in a neat row along one wall: cutting rigs, grapples, sledges, a portable crane, all exactly as they must have been set down seventy-one years before, by people who had expected to come back for them. There were no salvagers.

We went up through a service stair into the crew quarters and then through a baize door into the passenger decks, and it was there, in the long first-class corridor of D Deck, that we met the first of the stewards.

He was standing in the middle of the corridor with a silver tray in one hand. On the tray there was a glass of champagne. He was young, perhaps twenty, with slicked hair and a white mess jacket with the Concord compass rose on the breast pocket, and he was in the act of turning, as if someone behind him had called his name. His face was turned partway towards us. It wore an expression of polite inquiry.

He was not frozen. That was the thing that made Pell grab my arm hard enough to bruise. He was moving. He turned, slowly, smoothly, the tray steady in his hand, until he was facing a door on the left side of the corridor. He raised his free hand as if to knock. And then, in a single movement that was not a movement, that was like a frame skipping in an old film, he was standing in the middle of the corridor again, turned partway towards us, with that same polite expression, beginning to turn.

We watched him do it eleven times. Mother Abacus timed it. Fourteen seconds, from the beginning of the turn to the skip, every time, to the hundredth of a second. The champagne in the glass never spilled. The bubbles in it rose, and rose, and were somehow always the same bubbles.

“He’s alive,” said Doc. He had gone up close, closer than I would have dared, and was holding a scanner a few centimetres from the steward’s throat. “There’s a pulse. Respiration. Body temperature normal. His blood pressure is a little high; he’s nervous about something.” He moved the scanner, frowning at it. “No. Not alive. His heart’s beating, but it’s the same beat. It’s the same fourteen seconds of heartbeat over and over, the same waveform, every irregularity identical. It’s not a heart. It’s a recording of a heart.”

“Can he see us?” asked Pell.

As if in answer, the steward’s eyes moved. Only his eyes; his body went on turning, raising its hand, knocking on the door that it would never quite reach. But his eyes slid sideways in their sockets, against the grain of the loop, and fixed on me, and his lips parted.

“Good evening,” he said. His voice was perfectly ordinary. “Your table is ready.”

Then the skip, and he was back at the beginning, turned partway towards us, polite, inquiring, and his eyes were in the right place again, and he said nothing.

We walked past him very quickly after that, keeping to the far wall.

I will not describe everything we saw on the way from D Deck to the head of the Grand Staircase. Some of it I do not have the words for. Some of it I have the words for and do not want to use them, because words are a kind of looking and I would prefer not to look again.

I will tell you about the carpet. It was a deep Concord blue with a pattern of gold compass roses woven into it, and it ran the whole length of every corridor, and after a while I began to notice that the pattern did not repeat where it should. A carpet pattern repeats every metre or so; that is how they are made. This one repeated every forty-one paces. Mother Abacus counted them, of course, and it was forty-one every time, and every forty-one paces there was the same small brown stain beside the same skirting board, the same scuff, the same single thread pulled loose from the weave, as if the corridor were not a corridor at all but the same stretch of corridor laid end to end, over and over, like a photograph tiled to fill a wall.

I will tell you about the people. There were hundreds of them, in the corridors and the lounges and the writing rooms, and all of them were doing a single thing, over and over, in loops of fourteen seconds. A woman in a green gown lifting a cigarette holder to her lips. A man in evening dress bending to retrieve a fallen glove. Two children, a boy and a girl, perhaps six years old, racing each other down a corridor towards a window full of stars, the boy always a pace ahead, the girl always reaching for his collar, never catching it. A very old man asleep in a leather armchair with a newspaper across his chest, breathing in, breathing out, breathing in. The newspaper’s headline, which I read upside down as we passed, announced the opening of a new theatre on Concordia Prime that had closed, I happened to know, a hundred and fifty years ago.

Not all of them were passengers. That was the worst thing. On E Deck, in a lounge full of potted palms, we found the Vesper salvagers: nine men and women in the blue-chevroned suits of the Halberd consortium, their helmets off and tucked neatly under their arms, standing in a loose half-circle around a grand piano. Nobody was playing it. They were listening to the music that came up through the ship from somewhere far below, and their faces grew more and more absorbed as it swelled. Then it caught and began again, and their absorption with it. Pell made a small sound and turned away.

“How long have they been doing that?” she whispered.

“Fourteen seconds,” said Mother Abacus. “Seventy-one years.”

“Why them?” said Pell. “Why not us?”

Mother Abacus looked at the empty piano stool for a long moment. “They stopped to listen,” she said. “That’s all, I should think. Something on this ship is still expecting its guests. They said yes.”

I made sure, after that, that none of us stood still for long.

And I will tell you about the swimming pool, because we passed it on the way to the stairs, and because I have dreamed about it every night since, and because I think it is the truest picture of the Majestic that I can give you.

It was drained. It was the only thing on the whole ship that was not as it had been on the night she was lost. The twenty-metre basin lay open and dry beneath its dome of stars, its walls and floor lined with green glass tiles that caught the starlight and turned it the colour of deep water, so that standing at the edge you could almost believe that the pool was still full, that you could step off the edge and float. The diving boards stood at the deep end, white and immaculate. The ladders descended into nothing. And at the bottom of the deep end, arranged in a careful, precise spiral, there were eight shoes.

Single shoes, never a pair. A man’s patent-leather evening shoe. A satin slipper. A heavy work boot with the sole worn through at the heel, of a pattern I did not recognise. They had been placed with enormous care, toes inward, heels out, in a spiral that tightened as it went, the kind of spiral you see in a sunflower or a nautilus shell, and at the very centre, where the curve closed down to nothing, there was a child’s sandal, red, with a broken strap.

No one had drained the pool. Doc checked. There was no drain, no pump, no outflow, nothing. It seemed as though the water had simply been taken, and the shoes left in exchange, like a payment, or a receipt.

The Grand Staircase began on A Deck beneath a dome of leaded glass, and it was everything the songs had promised and the brochures had sold and the two jumpers during the trials had seen in the last instant before they stepped off. It went down through seven decks in a single helix of polished brass and walnut, so smooth and so vast that from the top you could not see where it ended. Its banisters were carved with vines and compass roses. Its treads were carpeted in the same blue as the corridors. Its central well dropped away beneath us into a column of soft, deep, golden light.

And from that light, from somewhere far below, came music.

It was an orchestra. Strings, mostly, with a single clarinet rising above them, and beneath it all a slow heavy pulse of timpani like a heart beating in another room. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever heard, and I am not a person who is easily moved by music; the Lark’s entire collection consists of Pell’s filthy shanties and a single recording of a Gethsemane mining choir that Ivo plays when he is homesick. But I stood at the head of the Grand Staircase and listened to that music coming up out of the light, and I felt it go into me the way the air had, and I understood the Vesper salvagers around their empty piano. I understood the jumpers. I understood, for the first time, why anyone would want to stay.

“Achebe-Varga,” said Mother Abacus softly. “The new symphony. It was to be played on the twentieth night. They never reached the twentieth night.”

“They’re playing it now,” said Pell.

“They’re playing seven bars of it,” said Mother Abacus. “A slow waltz, two seconds to the bar. Listen.”

I listened. And after a while I heard it: the clarinet rising, and rising, and reaching for a note that it never quite reached, and then, with a little hitch, a little skip, like a breath caught in the throat, beginning again.

We went down.

It took a long time. The staircase was vast, and we went slowly, partly from caution and partly, I think, because none of us wanted to arrive. On every landing there were people: couples standing at the banister looking down into the golden well, a man adjusting a woman’s stole around her shoulders, a ship’s officer in dress whites, very young, with the face of someone who has just been told terrible news, standing perfectly still with his hand on the rail while the loop moved his chest, in and out, in and out. Doc paused beside him. Read the name on his breast. Lt. J. Ashworth, Second Officer. I wondered whether the fourth transmission had been his: the passengers are going to the ballroom; everyone is dancing. Perhaps he had been on his way to tell the captain. He had stopped here, on the fifth landing, to look down. I looked down too. The gold in the well was thinner here, the way mist thins as you come out of it, and through it, very far below, I could see a paleness I could not account for. I told myself it was the light.

At the foot of the staircase was the observation chamber, the famous circular room with its floor of diamond-laminate, where couples had been married standing above the abyss. We stepped out onto it. I had seen the paleness from the fifth landing, and some stubborn part of me was still braced for the stars.

There were no stars beneath the floor.

There was only white. A flat, featureless, luminous white, not bright, not dim, extending downward and outward without limit, without texture, without depth. It was not a colour so much as the absence of a decision about colour. It was the white of a page before anyone has written on it. It was the Pale. Whatever the Majestic had struck on her ninth night, she had never left it.

And far down in it, so far that distance had no meaning, something moved.

I cannot tell you what it looked like, because it did not look like anything. It was not a shape. It was more as if a region of the whiteness had become, very slightly, attentive. As if a page had noticed that it was being written on. It moved slowly from left to right, the way an eye moves along a line of print, and paused, and moved back, and began again, a little lower down.

Doc said, very quietly, “I’d like to go back to the ship now.”

Nobody answered him. Before us, through the great doors that opened off the observation chamber, the music reached for its note and failed and began again, and a warm yellow light spilled out across the diamond floor, and in it we could see them.

The ballroom was full. Two thousand people, perhaps more, in silk and satin and black evening dress, turning beneath a hundred chandeliers on a floor of real oak. Dancing. All of them, in fourteen-second loops, in perfect unison, an ocean of turning bodies rising and falling in the golden light like a field of wheat in wind.

As we stood there, all two thousand of them stopped dancing, and turned their heads, at the same moment, in the same direction, to look at us.

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VII. Parley in the Ballroom

There is a particular silence that falls when two thousand people look at you at once. I had experienced a small version of it before, at my sentencing on Halberd Reach, when the magistrate without eyebrows read out the list of my crimes and the gallery turned, row by row, to see what manner of thing could have committed them all. But that had been a human silence, full of breath and rustling and the small private noises of bodies. This was the silence of a held note. The orchestra had stopped. The clarinet hung in the air at the top of its rise, unresolved. Two thousand faces in the gold light of a hundred chandeliers, turned towards us in perfect unison, and not one of them breathing.

Pell’s rifle came up. I put my hand on the barrel and pushed it gently down.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Frett, they’re,”

“I know what they’re doing. Don’t.”

I do not know how I knew. I think it was the expression on their faces, which was not hostile, not hungry, not any of the things you expect from the dead in stories. It was polite. It was the expression of the steward on D Deck. It was the expression of a hostess at a party who has seen a new guest arrive and is waiting, with perfect courtesy and a small, dreadful patience, to see whether they will dance.

We did not dance. We stood at the edge of the oak floor in our salvage suits like four lumps of coal at a wedding, and the dancers looked at us, and the clarinet hung, and somewhere far below us in the Pale the attentive thing moved slowly along its line.

And then, on the far side of the ballroom, the crowd parted.

It parted the way water parts for the bow of a ship, smoothly, without haste, the dancers stepping back in their silks and tailcoats to open a long clear aisle across the oak, and down that aisle, from the great doors at the aft end of the room, came Captain Absalom Scurvy.

He had come in through the aft lock. I learned later that he had sent the Penitent round the far side of the wreck while we were making our slow way down from D Deck, and had walked straight to the ballroom without a single wrong turn, the way a man walks through the house he grew up in. He was alone. He had not brought his crew. He was wearing his black sealskin coat and no pressure suit at all, and he was eating a lemon, and as he walked between the ranks of the motionless dancers they inclined their heads to him, one after another, in a long rippling wave of courtesy, the way the servants of a great house bow to the son who has come home.

He stopped ten metres from us. He finished his lemon. He wiped his fingers on his coat.

“Ferret,” he said. “You found the staircase. Isn’t it marvellous? I used to slide down the banister. My father would be furious.” His ruined mouth pulled into something like a grin. “I told you you’d need me.”

“I don’t recall saying I needed you.”

“You haven’t yet. Give it a minute.” He looked past me, at Doc, at Pell, at Mother Abacus, and inclined his head to each of them with the same strange courtesy the dancers had shown him. “Doctor. I believe you have my tooth.”

Doc said nothing. His hand had gone to the thigh pocket of his suit, where, I realised, he had brought the specimen jar.

“Keep it,” said Scurvy. “I’ve plenty more where that came from. Well. Fewer every year.” He turned to Pell. “Miss Quint. You can hear it, can’t you. You’ve always been able to hear it. It’s like a pen on paper, isn’t it, very faint, very far away.”

Pell’s face was white. “How do you know that?”

“Because I can hear it too, my dear. I’ve heard nothing else for two hundred years.” And to Mother Abacus, last, with something that might have been respect: “Sister. You found the staircase in her orbit. I saw your burn correction. Very neat. I always knew the Order would produce someone who’d see it eventually.”

“I’m not a sister any more,” said Mother Abacus.

“No,” said Scurvy. “None of us are what we were. That’s rather the point.”

“Who are you?” I said.

I meant it as a challenge, the kind of thing you say in a bar before someone breaks a bottle. It did not come out that way. It came out as a question, an honest one, the first honest question I had asked him in thirty years of trying to kill each other, and I think he heard that, because his face changed. The grin went. What was left behind was very tired, and very old, and, under the ruin of it, under the rot and the bruising and the black weeping gums, something else, something I recognised only later, which was the face of a small child who has been lost for a very long time.

“My name,” he said, “is Absalom Thale. I was four years old when this ship left Concordia Prime. My father was the purser.”

Nobody said anything. The clarinet hung. The dancers waited.

“He was a very ordinary man, my father,” said Scurvy. “A clerk. He loved his columns of figures and his fountain pens and his little brass stamps. He loved the Concord Line because it was orderly. He loved this ship because she was the most orderly thing that had ever been built. He kept the ledger. Every transaction aboard, every bottle of wine, every cabin upgrade, every tip to every steward, written down in his own hand, every evening, in his office behind the ballroom. And on the ninth night, when the sky went pale and the clocks began to disagree and the passengers left their cabins and came down here to dance, he went to his office to do the accounts, because that always calmed him. He took me with him. My mother was dancing.” His tongue moved over his gums. “She’s still dancing. Third chandelier from the left, in the blue. You can see her if you look.”

I did not look. I could not have borne it.

“He opened the ledger,” said Scurvy, “to write up the day. And the ledger was already written. Not just the day. Everything. Every page full, in a hand that wasn’t his, and more pages than the book could possibly hold, and more appearing under his fingers as he turned them. Every passenger. Every crewman. Every breath that every one of them had ever taken, every thought, every choice, all written down. And at the bottom of each of their pages, a ruled line, left empty, waiting for a total. And beside it, pencilled in faintly, the way a clerk pencils in what he expects to write, a single word.”

“What word?” said Mother Abacus. Her voice was very quiet.

“Collected,” said Scurvy.

“He understood, then. My father wasn’t a clever man, but he knew a ledger when he saw one, and he knew what it means when someone draws a line under a column and writes in the total. It means the account is closed. Something had come for the Majestic. Something was reading her, the way he read his books at the end of the day, and when it had finished reading all of us, it would draw the line under every name at once, and close the account, and we would be gone. All of us. Three thousand four hundred and twelve passengers and nine hundred and six crew, waiting to be balanced and filed. And he turned the pages, and he found my name, a good way down the list. And he saw the ticks working their way towards it, page after page, in order: a small neat tick beside each column that had been read, the way he would have done it himself. It was in the Ms. He had perhaps a quarter of an hour.”

He stopped. When he spoke again, his voice was very steady, in the way that voices are steady when they have told a story so often that it has worn a groove.

“So he struck me out.”

“How do you know?” I said. “You were four.”

“Some of it he told me,” he said. “While he was getting me ready. I didn’t understand a word, but children keep the strangest things. ‘It’s reading all of us, Absalom. It’s in the Ms. I think we have a quarter of an hour.’ It was sixty years before I knew what he meant. The rest I read for myself, standing at his desk, the one time I came back. The book lies open at my page, Ferret, and his pen is still reaching for the page beside it. I can’t touch them. I can’t turn them. But I can read my name with his line through it, and his note in the margin, and beside it my mother’s page, with the empty line at the bottom and the word pencilled in. You don’t need to read a whole ledger to know what kind of ledger it is.”

“He was late,” said Scurvy. “A quarter of an hour was a clerk’s guess, and he’d spent it on something I’ll come to. When he got back to his desk, the ticks had reached the page before mine. He didn’t think, Ferret. He didn’t plan. He did what a clerk does when he sees a figure going into the wrong column. He took his own pen, his good Lazenby fountain pen with the gold nib, and he drew a line through my name. Not under it. Through it. The way you strike out an entry that was made in error. And he wrote, in the margin, in his own hand, the way he would have written a note to the auditors: Entered in error. Do not collect.”

He laughed, the wet wheezing bellows of a laugh.

“And it worked, Ferret. Can you imagine? A clerk’s correction. It worked. The thing that was reading the ship came to my page and found a strike-through and a note in the margin, and it didn’t know what to do. It couldn’t collect me; I’d been struck out. It couldn’t skip me; I was still written down. An auditor would have read Papa’s note, checked the manifest, found a four-year-old boy on it, and thrown the correction out. But the book doesn’t check, Ferret. It doesn’t judge. It only records, and whatever is written in it is true. So now two things were true at once: that I was aboard, and, in Papa’s own hand, that I should never have been entered at all. It couldn’t close the account with an unresolved entry in it. Nobody can. Ask your sister there. You can’t draw the line under a column with an error in it.” He gestured, a great sweeping gesture that took in the ballroom, the chandeliers, the two thousand waiting faces, the whole four hundred metres of white and gold. “So it stopped. Right there, in the middle of reading. It’s been stopped ever since. Waiting for the error to be cleared. And everyone on board stopped with it, in the last fourteen seconds before the line, because the line can’t be drawn until my father’s correction is resolved, and my father is sitting in his office with his pen in his hand, and he’s been sitting there for two hundred and thirteen years.”

“And you?” I said.

“Me?” He spread his hands. The silver wire brace on his arm glinted in the chandelier light. “I walked out. Not by my own wits, Ferret; I was four, I understood none of it. My father sent me. He had a quarter of an hour before the ticks reached the Ts, and he spent it on me. He picked me up and ran with me to the nursery, the quick way, across the pool deck, and somewhere on the way I lost a sandal. A red one. I cried about it. Of everything that happened that night, it’s the thing I remember best. In the nursery he put me into a child’s pressure suit, and he pressed his key into my glove, and he carried me to the lock at the end of his corridor. He told me to sit by the door and wait, and that when I saw a light outside, any light at all, I was to go to it and not look back. Then he went back to his book.” He paused. “I sat down by the door. And a few moments later, I saw a light. For me it was a few moments. For everyone else it was seventy-one years. I did as Papa told me, and the man who found me took me in, poor fellow, and never asked where I’d come from. And then I began, at last, to grow up.”

He looked down at his own hands, at the bruised and yellow skin, at the knuckles split and scabbed.

“But you see, I’d been struck out. Entered in error. I was outside the books. And a thing that’s outside the books can’t be closed. I grew up and I grew old, and then I went on growing old. Everything that happens to a body happened to mine, every wound, every illness, every year, and none of it ever finished, because there was nothing to finish it. I can’t die, Ferret. I’ve tried. You’ve helped. I’m not immortal; immortality would be a kindness. I’m unresolved. I’m an entry nobody can total. I just go on accumulating. Every scar I ever had comes back. Every tooth goes. I rot, and rot, and the rot doesn’t stop, because nobody’s coming to collect it.”

Pell had lowered her rifle all the way. She was crying, quietly, without seeming to notice.

“That’s what your hum is,” she said. “That’s why it’s always sounded wet. Like something left out too long, that nobody ever came to clear away.”

“Yes,” said Absalom Thale, gently. “Exactly like that.”

What I said next came from the pirate in me, the part that hears a story and asks not Is it true? but What would it cost?

“And the correction,” I said. “The one you want to make. You’re going to write yourself back in.”

He nodded.

“And when you do,” I said, “the error is cleared. And the thing in the Pale finishes reading. And it draws the line under every name on this ship, and closes the account. All of them. Your mother in the blue. The children in the corridor. The Vesper boys around the piano. The steward with his champagne.”

“Yes.”

“And you.”

“And me,” said Absalom Thale, and for the first time since I had known him, he smiled with his whole ruined face, and it was the most terrible and the most beautiful thing I saw on the whole of the Halcyon Majestic. “At last.”

“And what’s in it for me and my crew?”

He held up the brass key with its compass-rose bow, the key engraved PURSER.

“This opens the strongbox,” he said, “and everything in it is yours. But the ledger isn’t the kind of thing a key opens. Everything on this ship is written in it, and you can’t write a word in it without being taken. My father managed it once, because the reading hadn’t reached him yet. I can’t, because I’m struck out; I can’t touch the book at all. Seventy-one years ago I came back for the first time, alone, and I tried. I stood at his desk and tried to turn the page, and my hands went through it as if they were made of smoke. So I tried other hands than mine. There was a salvage crew aboard by then, standing round a piano, listening to the music. One of them hadn’t stopped to listen yet. I put a pistol to her head and walked her to his office, and I watched her take a pen from the stand because I told her to, and stop before the nib touched the page. You’ll see her there.” He looked at me, and his yellow eyes were very steady. “Struck out, the book won’t let you touch it. Written in, you can touch it all you like, but it takes you the moment you write in it. What I need is someone in between. Someone who can write in the ledger without being totalled by it. Someone whose entry can’t be resolved. Someone the book won’t be able to make up its mind about.” He was quiet for a moment. “And someone who comes of their own free will. I’ve had seventy-one years to wonder whether it was her entry that stopped her, or my pistol. I don’t think this book takes a correction from a hand that doesn’t want to make it. That’s why I asked you, out there. That’s why I’m asking you now.”

The clarinet hung. The dancers waited. In the Pale, far below, the attentive thing paused in its long line, as if it too were listening.

“I’ve been looking for someone like that for seventy-one years,” said Captain Scurvy. “I never once thought it might be you. Thirty years I’ve spent trying to kill you, Ferret. Then old Tobiah died. He’d never sell me that map, you know, not for any money. And he left it to the one person in the Drift that nobody has ever managed to make up their mind about.” He smiled his ruined smile. “Shall we go and see my father?”

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VIII. The Purser’s Ledger

The purser’s office was behind the ballroom, through a small door of green baize that the dancers did not look at, down a short corridor panelled in walnut. It was a modest room. That surprised me, though it should not have. Everything else on the Majestic had been built to be seen; this had been built to be used. There was a desk, a swivel chair, a wall of pigeonholes stuffed with dockets, a calendar showing the ninth day of the Long Passage, and, set into the far wall behind a grille of decorative ironwork, the Lazenby strongbox, squat and black, with the Concord compass rose stamped into its door.

The light came from a small chandelier of green glass, and it was burning, and it had no wires.

Ambrose Thale sat at the desk.

He was a small, neat, balding man in a dark suit with the Concord compass rose on his lapel, and he was exactly as his son had described him: ordinary. That was what made it unbearable. He was a clerk at his desk at the end of a long day, with his sleeves protected by black cotton cuffs and his pen in his hand, and his loop was this: he read down the page of a large leather-bound book that lay open in front of him, his lips moving; he dipped the pen in the inkwell and wiped the nib on the rim, carefully, twice; he lifted it and held it over the page for a long moment, the way a man does who is not certain he has the figure right; and then he brought it down, and in the moment before the nib touched paper he skipped, and was reading down the page again. Fourteen seconds. Dip, lift, reach. Dip, lift, reach. His face was set in an expression of enormous concentration and a terrible, private fear, the face of a man adding up a column that he already knows will not come out right.

Beside the desk stood a woman in the blue-chevroned suit of the Halberd consortium, a pen in her outstretched hand, its nib a hand’s breadth above the open ledger, caught in the same fourteen seconds as everyone else. She was very young. Scurvy did not look at her. I made a point of not looking at him.

Absalom Thale stopped in the doorway. He did not go in. He stood there for a long time with his ruined hands hanging at his sides, looking at his father, and none of us spoke, because there are some silences that do not belong to you.

“Hello, Papa,” he said at last, very quietly. “I’ve brought some people.”

The pen dipped. Lifted. Reached.

The key worked. I had half expected it not to; I had half expected Scurvy to be lying, about the key or about everything, the way pirates lie, out of habit, to keep in practice. But Scurvy came into the room to open the strongbox, and for nothing else. He crossed to the strongbox along the wall, keeping as far from the desk as the room allowed, and he did not once look at his father. He fitted the brass key into the Lazenby’s lock and turned it twice, and something deep inside the box gave a long mechanical sigh, and the door swung open. Then he went back to the doorway, and stayed there.

The treasure was there. I want to be clear about that, for the benefit of anyone in the Drift who reads this and wonders whether old Frett fell for a fairy story. The bearer bonds were there, bundle upon bundle of them, palladium foil printed in the Concord’s dense blue engraving, enough to buy every station in the Drift and most of the people on them. The jewels were there, in velvet trays, necklaces and tiaras and brooches and rings, the famous Seven Wells sapphires that Ilse Morrow had painted the Archduchess wearing, and a diamond the size of a quail’s egg. The Archduchess’s crown was there, on a cushion of crimson silk, a tall spiked thing of gold and pearls that caught the green light and threw it back in a thousand fragments.

Pell reached in and picked up the crown. She turned it over in her hands. And then she made a small sound, half a laugh and half a gasp, and held it up for us to see.

It had no back.

The front of the crown was perfect: every pearl, every filigree, every tiny engraved leaf. But when she turned it round, the back was simply not there. Not broken, not cut away. Unfinished. The gold of the front surface gave way, at the edges, to a flat smooth grey that was not metal or stone or anything else, a grey with no texture and no detail, like the underside of a stage set.

Nobody said anything for a while. Doc took a necklace from its tray and turned it over in the light. The clasp at the back was the same smooth grey as the back of the crown. He put it down and picked up a ring, and turned it, and put it down, and picked up another, and another, faster and faster, until Mother Abacus laid her hand on his wrist.

“Doc,” she said quietly. “When did anybody last look at the back of a crown?”

He did not answer. Neither did I. I have thought about her question every day since.

At the desk, the purser’s eyes moved. Only his eyes, sliding sideways against the grain of the loop the way the steward’s had on D Deck, until they found the crown in Pell’s hands. But there was no courtesy in them. There was terror. “Put it down,” he whispered. “Whatever you take from her, she takes you. Go back to the lock. Go now, before it reaches you.” Then the skip, and he was dipping his pen again.

From the doorway, Absalom said quietly, “He says that every time. He said it to me too, seventy-one years ago. He has no idea who I am.”

Pell put the crown back on its cushion, very gently, facing forward. Doc laid the last ring back in its tray and did not touch anything else.

We did not take the treasure. I should say that now, so that you are not waiting for it. We did not take one bond, one ring, one pearl. It was not a moral decision. Scurvy had offered me half, and then the lot; he had never wanted anything in that room but a book. I could have walked off that ship the richest pirate in the history of the Drift. But I had seen the purser’s eyes when Pell lifted the crown, and I had heard what he said, and I understood that there is no such thing as taking something out of a story without becoming part of it.

The ledger was not in the strongbox at all. It was on the desk, under Ambrose Thale’s pen. It had been there for two hundred and thirteen years. Scurvy had known that, of course. He had stood at this desk before. He had said strongbox over the radio because it kept things simple, and because he knew we were after the treasure. Why the treasure was better left alone, he had kept to himself.

I went round the desk. I stood beside the purser, close enough to smell the ink and the faint cologne on his collar, close enough that his pen, dipping and lifting and reaching, passed a few centimetres from my wrist on every loop.

I looked down at the book.

It was open at a page headed THALE, ABSALOM. A single neat line ran through the name, and in the margin, in a smaller and shakier hand, someone had written: Entered in error. Do not collect. The facing page was headed THALE, ADELA, and it was there, not at his son’s page, that the purser’s pen had been reaching for two hundred and thirteen years. Her name had no line through it. At the foot of her page there was only the empty ruled line, and the word pencilled in beside it.

I put my hand on the edge of the page. It was paper. Ordinary cream-coloured paper. My fingers did not go through it.

Behind me I heard Absalom Thale let out a long breath, the breath of a man who has waited nearly a century and a half to see a thing happen.

I turned to the first page.

It was blank, except for a single line at the very top, in a neat hand that was not the purser’s, ruled off beneath with a double line:

QUERY: What is it like to be?

And beneath that, smaller, like the terms and conditions on a ticket:

Parameters. Terminal state: constant across all processes; disregard. Evaluate path. Retain output. Do not resolve query prematurely.

Mother Abacus had come to stand at my other shoulder. She was holding her black notebook against her chest the way a child holds a doll. She read the first page twice, and then she reached past me and turned to the second, where the accounts began, and ran her finger down the first column of figures, the opening entries, the very first transactions of the very first day. She stopped. She ran her finger down it again, and then a third time, the way she checks every burn she has ever plotted, and I heard her breath catch.

“It can’t be,” she said. “Not here.” She took off her spectacles and put them on again. “That’s the same error. The very same. That’s the one I found on Saint Kepler’s Wheel.”

She was pointing to the opening balance. The figure at the top of the very first column, from which every subsequent sum descended. It was not a number. It was a small, neat word.

Undefined.

“Forty years,” said Mother Abacus. Her voice was shaking. “Forty years I balanced the Order’s books, and every year I came back to the opening sum, and every year it didn’t add up. Because it can’t. It isn’t a number. A book that opens with undefined can never be balanced. The accounts in it close, one by one, but the book itself never does.” She looked up at me, and her eyes behind their thick lenses were full of tears and something I could not name. “I thought it was the Order’s mistake, Frett. Some copyist centuries ago who couldn’t add, and all of us adding on top of him ever since. That’s why I left. I couldn’t go on adding.” She touched the word with one fingertip. “But it’s here too. In a book nobody in the Order has ever seen. I don’t think it’s a mistake at all. I think someone put it there. A book that opens with undefined never closes. Whoever wrote this didn’t want it closed. They wanted it to go on asking.”

I turned the pages. I do not know how long I stood there; Mother Abacus says it was nearly an hour, and that the purser looped two hundred and fifty-seven times at my elbow while I read. The book had no end. That is the simplest way to put it. It was perhaps ten centimetres thick, a fat leather-bound volume of the kind that sits on every purser’s desk on every liner in the Concord, and yet when I turned a page there was always another, and another, and the pages were thin as onionskin and dense as stone, and every one of them was full.

It was the ship. Every soul who had sailed on her, four thousand three hundred and eighteen of them, each a column in that neat clerk’s hand. Not their tickets and their tips, which was all Ambrose Thale had ever kept in it, but everything: every breath they had taken, aboard her and long before, every hunger, every small turning of attention towards one thing rather than another, all the way back to the day each of them was born. Whatever had met the Majestic in the Pale had not been content with her manifest. It had wanted to know what it had been like to be every one of them.

It was a log. It was the runtime log of a ship that had stopped running.

Somewhere among the Majestic’s pages, after the last of her crew, I found ten more names in that same clerk’s hand. Not in their places in the alphabet, but at the very back, the way a clerk adds a late arrival to a manifest that is already closed for boarding, under a heading I have not been able to forget: Admitted after departure. All ten were the Vesper salvagers. Nine of their columns ended seventy-one years ago in a lounge full of potted palms, beside a piano nobody was playing. The tenth ended in this office, with a pen held a hand’s breadth above this very book. Every one of them had a ruled line at the foot, empty, waiting like all the rest.

And after them, the book was still writing. There were pages at the very back that had not been there when we came aboard, and lines were appearing on them as I watched, one beneath the other, written by no pen. I did not have to read the names at the top of those pages to know whose they were. They stood under no heading at all. Not yet.

“That’s the trouble with an account you can’t close, Frett,” Mother Abacus whispered at my shoulder, and there was dread in her whisper. “It goes on taking entries. Ours too.”

And the margins. I want to tell you about the margins, because it was the margins that changed my mind about what the ledger was for.

I had not noticed them at first, they were so faint. It was only after the better part of an hour, when my eyes had grown used to the green light, that I saw that every margin was full, not with the neat clerk’s script but with other hands, thousands of them, overlapping, like the graffiti on the wall of a very old cell. Notes. Cross-references. Little arrows and page numbers, pointing to pages this book did not have: page forty thousand, page nine million, numbers longer than the lines they were written on. And as I read them I began to see that the same notes recurred. The same phrases, in different hands, over and over, across the whole length of the book. The one who goes into the dark and comes back. The mother who waits. The fool who tells the truth. The child who is lost. Each of them written again and again, margin after margin, hand after hand.

“They’re paths,” said Pell. She had come round the desk too, and was looking over my arm with her lips parted. “They’re the paths everybody keeps walking. You can hear them, Frett. Can’t you hear them? It’s the pen. That’s what I’ve been hearing all my life, Frett, the pen, and all the old notes in the margin humming along with it. I always thought it was ships.” She put her finger, very lightly, on one of them. The one who goes into the dark and comes back. “That’s why people tell the same stories. Something remembers. It’s worn the paths in so deep that everybody new walks them without noticing.”

Doc, who had been very quiet, said in a cracked voice, “Turn to me.”

“Doc,”

“I want to see it. I want to see whether it’s true. Turn to me.”

I did not have to search. His page was among the new ones at the back, so new that the ink still shone. HOLLOWELL, LAZARUS. A long column, dense with entries, and I did not read most of them, because they were his, and a crew survives on the things it agrees not to ask. But I saw, near the bottom, one line in the neat clerk’s hand, and Doc saw me see it, and leaned in and read it himself.

Believes in nothing he cannot measure. Loyal to everything.

He straightened up. He took off his reading glasses and folded them very carefully and put them in his breast pocket.

“Well,” he said at last. “It’s written down.” He laughed, a small cracked sound. “I suppose I shall have to believe in it now.”

And then, because I am a pirate and because I cannot see a locked box without wanting to know what is inside it, I turned to my own page.

It was the shortest entry I saw in the whole of the ledger. A few dozen lines, crabbed and uncertain, as if the clerk had begun several times and crossed out several times and finally given up. No total at the foot. No line. No date. And in the margin, in that same fussy, patient, unsurprised hand, the annotation I have copied out and kept and looked at for eleven days, in front of me now as I write:

FERRET, FRETT. Captain, irregular. Variable unassigned. Value pending observation. Do not resolve.

Behind me I heard Scurvy cross the room. I had not noticed him leave the doorway. He came and stood at my shoulder, close enough that I could smell the lemons on him, and he read the margin of my page, and Captain Absalom Scurvy said softly, “There you are,” in the voice of a man who has finally found the one thing in all the world he came to steal.

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IX. Found

I turned round slowly. Pell’s rifle had come up again, and this time I did not push it down.

Scurvy was standing at the desk, an arm’s length from me, nearer to his father than he had let himself come all night. His yellow eyes were fixed on the margin of my page, on the four neat words, Variable unassigned. Value pending, and there was a hunger in them that I had seen before, in other faces, in other rooms, on the far side of other locked boxes. It was the face of a man looking at a fortune.

“Do you know what that is?” he said softly. “Do you have the faintest idea? Seventy-one years I’ve waited to stand in this room again. I’ve heard every story in the Drift about you, Ferret, and never once put them together until old Tobiah’s funeral. Nobody knows what you are. Nobody can settle it. The songs can’t agree. The magistrates can’t agree. Even the book can’t agree.” He licked his black gums. “That’s not a page. That’s a blank cheque.”

“You said you wanted to be written back in.”

“I did. I do. Probably.” He laughed, and it was a terrible sound, because it was honest. “But I’ve had a very long time to think, and when you have a very long time to think, you think of everything. If you wrote me back in, I’d be totalled. Line drawn, account closed, gone. Peace, at last. That’s what I’ve wanted. That’s what I’ve told myself I’ve wanted.” His eyes went back to my margin. “But if you gave me that. If you wrote, in the margin of my page, the same note the clerk wrote in yours. Pending. Do not resolve. Then I wouldn’t be struck out any more, and I wouldn’t be totalled either. I’d be,” he searched for the word, “open. Like you. Not rotting. Not dying. Just going on, and on, being nothing in particular, and the book never able to make up its mind.”

“That’s not what my margin means,” I said.

“Isn’t it?”

“No.” And I found, as I said it, that I knew this was true, the way Mother Abacus knew her sums were true: not because I had worked it out, but because it added up. “You think it’s a way out. It isn’t. It’s a way in. Nobody wrote do not resolve in my margin to let me off the hook. They wrote it because I’ve never been finished. Because every day I’ve been alive I’ve been deciding what I am, and I’m not done deciding, and they wanted to see what I’d decide. That’s not immortality, Absalom. That’s just living.”

He flinched. It was a very small movement, hardly anything, a tightening around the eyes. But I had known him for thirty years, and between us we had tried to kill each other three times, and I had never once seen him flinch. He stepped back from the desk, and then further, until he was standing in the doorway again.

Mother Abacus spoke then. She had said almost nothing since the first page, and when she spoke it was to me, not to Scurvy, and her voice had the dry, flat, careful tone she uses when she is plotting a burn.

“He’s right about one thing,” she said. “A closed account means peace. Look at this ship, Frett. Look at what happens to an account that can’t close.”

“I’ve looked.”

“No. Look properly. Two hundred and thirteen years. Fourteen seconds, over and over. The same bubbles in the champagne. The same stain on the carpet every forty-one paces. The stars outside going thin and repeating because there isn’t enough new to fill them.” She tapped the page. “That’s not peace. That’s not eternity. That’s what you get when nothing ever finishes. Nothing new can start. The whole place has gone to static.”

I thought of the night on the way out when I could not sleep, and of ANNA in the dark, telling me that every path was precious, and then, the moment I objected, that no path mattered at all. I had thought then that the danger was a universe with nothing underneath it. I looked at the purser dipping his pen, and thought of the steward on D Deck, still turning with his glass of champagne, and I was no longer sure that a universe where nothing ever ended would be any better.

“Perhaps that’s what dying is for,” I said slowly. I did not like the sound of it. “Perhaps it isn’t the enemy at all. If nobody ever finished, everybody would be doing this. Their best fourteen seconds, over and over, for ever.”

Mother Abacus was quiet for a long time. She looked at my page, with nothing drawn at the foot of it, and then at the purser, and then at me.

“Perhaps,” she said. “Or perhaps that’s only what we’d like it to be for, because we have to do it anyway.” She closed her notebook. “For forty years in the Order I believed the sums had to come out in the end, Frett. I’m not going to start believing something new just because it’s more comforting. I don’t know what dying is for. I only know what it looks like when it doesn’t happen.” She nodded at the purser. “It looks like him.”

Scurvy was watching us from the doorway. The hunger had gone out of his face. What was left was only tiredness, and something that looked, in the green light, like shame.

He was silent for a long time. Then he looked past me, at the small neat man at the desk who dipped his pen, and lifted it, and reached for the page.

“He’s been sitting there for two hundred and thirteen years,” he said, “reaching for one more name. My mother’s. He’d only just seen that it might work. He never got to it; the moment his line went through mine, everything stopped. Because of me. Because he couldn’t stand to let them have me.” His voice cracked, finally, all the way through. “I don’t want to be open, Ferret. I’ve been open. I’ve been open for nearly a century and a half and it’s the loneliest thing in the world. I want to go and stand with my mother under the third chandelier. I want to be four years old again and go home. I want my father to be able to put his pen down.” He looked at me. “You’re open too, Ferret. An hour ago I envied you that.” He shook his head. “Not any more.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” I said.

I waited, standing beside Ambrose Thale’s chair with the ledger turned back to his son’s page, the page with the line through THALE, ABSALOM and the faded note in the margin, Entered in error. Do not collect. I counted the loop. Dip. Lift. Reach. Dip. Lift. Reach. And on the third reach, in the instant before the skip, as the gold nib of his good Lazenby fountain pen hung a millimetre above the paper, I took hold of his hand, and of the pen with it.

His hand was warm. That surprised me. I do not know why it should have.

The loop did not skip. For the first time in two hundred and thirteen years, Ambrose Thale’s pen touched the page.

He looked up. Not at me. At the doorway, where a tall, ruined, rotting man in a black sealskin coat stood watching him, not daring to come any closer, and the purser’s face did a thing that I will carry with me for as long as I live. At first he did not recognise him. How could he? He was looking at an old man he had never seen. And then, slowly, he did. He looked past the yellow skin and the black gums and the silver brace and the two centuries of accumulated hurt, and he found, somewhere underneath, the face of a small boy who used to slide down the banister of the Grand Staircase, and his face broke open.

“Absalom,” said Ambrose Thale. “Oh, my boy. Oh, what have I done to you.”

“It’s all right, Papa,” said Absalom Thale. He stepped through the doorway at last and crossed the room to him. “It’s all right. You can finish now.”

The purser looked down at the page. He looked at his own correction, the line through his son’s name. He looked at me, standing beside him with my hand still around his, and I think he saw what I was, or rather what I was not yet, and I think he understood. He nodded once, a small neat clerk’s nod, and opened his fingers, and let me take the pen. And under Entered in error, in my own untidy hand, I wrote what he told me to write:

Correction withdrawn. Entry restored. Found.

And I drew a line beneath it.

The clarinet reached its note.

I heard it through the walls, through the green baize door, through the walnut corridor, the clarinet in the ballroom that had been reaching for two hundred and thirteen years, rising and rising and at last arriving, a single high clear note that went on and on, and beneath it the strings opening out beneath it, and the timpani, the slow heavy heart, beating once, twice, and then no more. The symphony of Tamsin Achebe-Varga, which was to have been played on the twentieth night, came to the end of its seventh bar and passed it and went on, into music no one alive had ever heard, and the whole ship trembled with it.

“Frett,” said Pell. Her eyes were wide. “Frett, the pen. Can’t you hear it? It’s started again. It’s ticking them off. So fast.”

The ledger under Ambrose Thale’s hands was turning its own pages. Faster and faster, a blur of cream and black, and on each page as it passed I saw a tick beside the column, and beneath it a line drawn, and a total, and a word. Collected. Collected. Collected. Three thousand four hundred and twelve passengers. Nine hundred and six crew. Nine men and women of the Halberd consortium around a grand piano, and a tenth in the purser’s office, still reaching. The steward with the champagne. The boy and the girl in the corridor, reaching. Lieutenant Ashworth on the fifth landing. Ambrose Thale. Absalom Thale.

Below us, through the deck, through the diamond floor of the observation chamber, through the stencilled thinness of the dark, I felt the attentive thing in the Pale reach the end of its long-interrupted line, and pause, and turn the page.

“Run,” said Absalom Thale.

He was standing beside his father’s chair with one hand on the old man’s shoulder. He was already changing. The yellow was going out of his skin. The silver brace slid from his arm and rang on the floor. He was not getting younger, not exactly; he was getting simpler, the way a drawing gets simpler when you rub out the lines that were drawn by mistake, and under all the accumulated rot there was a face, and the face was smiling.

“Run, Ferret,” he said. “It’s reading the whole ship. It’ll read anything that’s on her. It can’t close your page, but it can close your friends’. Go. Go now. Up the stairs.”

“Absalom,”

“I know,” he said. “No hard feelings.” And then, with a ghost of the old wet wicked grin, through teeth that were, I swear it, whole again: “Tell them I was awful, won’t you? Tell them in the bars. I’d hate to be remembered as a sentimentalist.”

We ran.

Up the walnut corridor, through the baize door, into the ballroom, where two thousand dancers had stopped looking at us and were looking at each other instead, turning to their partners with an expression of slow, astonished recognition, as if waking together from the same long dream. As we ran between them they began, one by one, quite gently, to go. Not to vanish. To finish. A woman in green lowered her cigarette holder from her lips and smiled at the man beside her and was not there. A couple in the middle of the floor completed their turn, the turn they had been completing since before my grandmother’s grandmother was born, and bowed to each other, and were not there. Under the third chandelier from the left, a woman in blue knelt with her arms open, and a small boy in a sailor suit ran into them from the direction of the purser’s office, and they were not there.

We ran up the Grand Staircase, seven decks, Doc wheezing, Pell hauling Mother Abacus by one arm, and on every landing the people at the banisters were finishing, a line drawn, a total, gone, and the golden well below us was filling with white.

On the third landing Pell let go of Mother Abacus’s arm and stopped. She did not stumble. She simply stopped, with one foot on the next stair, and turned, and looked down into the well, and her face had the look I had seen on the Vesper salvagers round their piano. Below her the white had reached the bottom of the stairs and was coming up them, step by step, without a sound.

“Pell.”

“Listen to it, Frett,” she said. “It’s finishing. It’s so nearly finished.”

Doc took Mother Abacus. I took Pell by the collar of her suit and hauled. She fought me for the length of one landing, and then she was crying, and then she was running again, and I did not let go of her collar until we were off the stairs.

On the fifth landing, Lieutenant Ashworth turned to us as we passed, and saluted, and said very clearly, “Thank you, Captain,” and was not there. Past the drained pool, where the shoes in their spiral flickered. I did not look back. I thought of a four-year-old crying over a lost shoe on the night the sky went pale. Through D Deck, along the blue carpet, where the stain beside the skirting board came round once more and then did not come round again. Past the steward, who turned, and reached the door, and knocked at last, and whatever answered him was enough.

We reached the forward lock with the white coming up the corridors behind us like a tide that makes no sound.

Ignatius Gauss was waiting at the Lark’s open hatch. He had brought her in to five metres, which is not something anyone should be able to do with a Merriwether clipper and which he has refused ever to explain. He hauled Mother Abacus through the lock. He hauled Doc. He hauled Pell, who was laughing and crying at the same time and could not stop. He reached out his hand to me.

And as I took it, Ignatius spoke, and so did his brother at the helm behind him, both at once, the way they had spoken only once before, on the approach. It had frightened us then. It did not frighten me now.

“Come on, Captain,” they said together. “Come home.”

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X. Coda: Value Pending

We watched her go from five metres, and then from eighty kilometres, and then from eight hundred kilometres, because Ivo put the Lark on full burn without being asked and nobody told him to stop. The rattle in the aft spine knocked the whole way, steady and polite, and for once it did not sound like a guest at a door. It sounded like a heart.

The Halcyon Majestic did not explode. She did not break up. She did not do any of the things that wrecks do, because she had never been a wreck. She simply went white. Not the enamel white of her hull, but the other white, the white beneath the diamond floor. It spread from her ballroom outward, deck by deck, window by window, the warm yellow lights going out one after another, until the last of them was gone and there was only a long pale shape against the stencilled dark, four hundred metres of nothing in particular. And then the stars came back. Not the thin repeating stars. Real ones, dense and uneven, filling the space where she had been.

The Penitent left at the same moment. I do not know exactly where. Pell says she felt its hum change as the Majestic whitened, the low wet breathing sound of it clearing all at once. Its crew, the quiet hollow-faced men and women who had been paid in years that did not count, had begun, I think, to count them again. ANNA recorded the ship lighting its running lights for the first time in living memory and burning away towards the inner Drift, slowly. I hope they got there. I hope somebody bought them a drink.

Calloway’s Lamp lay behind us, a dim grey coin.

That was eleven days ago.

I said at the beginning that the dark out here was thinner now, and that is true. Where the Majestic had been, the stars came back. Out here, eleven days on, the dark has begun to thin. Not the way it did around her: no stencils, no repeats. But Pell is right that everything tastes more like itself, and Doc is right that his instruments are reading something he cannot account for, a faint graininess in the background radiation of the Drift that was not there before.

I think the thing in the Pale has turned the page it could not close for two hundred and thirteen years. Perhaps it is reading this part of the book now. I think it will reach us all in time, as I suspect it reaches everyone sooner or later, and draw a line, and write a total, and a word. I find I do not mind as much as I expected. I have seen what happens to an account that cannot close. I have walked the blue carpet past the same stain every forty-one paces. I would rather be read.

But not yet. And not, I think, completely.

I have been thinking about my margin.

I said at the start that the question everyone asks about me, whether I am a woman or a man, does not matter. Now you know why. The book did not record gender. The clerk looked at me and wrote nothing down.

I find I like that very much. A legend is a garment other people sew for you, and this is the finest piece of cloth I have ever been given. Let them go on arguing in the bars about the duchess and the smuggler and the borrowed ballgown. Let the magistrates go on getting it wrong. The day the songs agree about Frett Ferret is the day Frett Ferret stops being worth singing about.

Do not resolve, the clerk had written underneath.

I have decided to take that as advice.

Not about my sex. I am not so foolish as to think the universe cares very much what I keep in my trousers. About everything. About the whole business of being a person. Every legend in the Drift has tried to settle me: duchess, smuggler, mother, father, weasel, Thing in the Long Coat. Every one of them was a line someone wanted to draw under me so that the account would close and they could stop wondering. And every one of them was a worn path that I could have set foot on and walked for the rest of my life, the way the dancers walked their fourteen seconds, the way Absalom endured his rot. I did not take any of them. I do not know why. Boots, perhaps. Contrariness. Scurvy said I could not bear to be told what to do, and he meant it more kindly than I knew at the time, and he was right, and it is the best thing anyone has ever said about me.

So here is what I believe the answer is, since I promised you one.

ANNA was wrong that night on the way out, both times. The meaning of a life is not just any path at all, as if every path were equally good and the book did not care. And it is not nothing, either, as if the fact that every path ends in the same place makes the paths worthless. The book does not record verdicts. It records paths. It does not care, in the way ANNA meant, whether I am a good pirate or a bad one. But it cares enormously, it cares with the full attention of the thing in the Pale, about what it was like. It wants to know. It is the only question it has ever asked. And the only way to answer it is to live in a way that has not been lived before, at least a little, at least at the edges, at least in the margins where the old paths have not yet been worn.

The dead do not give the book back its pages. Nothing is erased. Every account that closes stays where it was written, totalled and legible, for whoever comes after. What death gives back is movement. It is not the enemy of meaning. It is what saves us from the static, from fourteen seconds over and over, the same bubbles rising in the same glass. Because the old pages stay, we can learn from them. Because they are closed, we do not have to live them again. Each new life can start from undefined, free to make mistakes nobody has made before, and to find a path of their own instead of a worn one. And the living, while they are living, have one job, which is not to finish too early. Not to settle. Not to let the line be drawn while there is still something left to find out.

That is all. It is not much. It is less than the treasure in the Lazenby strongbox and considerably more than the crown, which, I would remind you, had no back.

I asked ANNA again, last night, what the meaning of life was. I told her I wanted her to disagree with me, whatever I said, and that if she agreed with me even once I would have Ignatius rip out her vocal module and replace it with Ivo’s mining choir.

There was a very long pause.

“Captain,” she said at last, in a small and uncertain voice I had never heard from her, “I don’t think I know.”

It was the best answer she has ever given. I told her so. She thanked me, and then, after a moment, very carefully, she said: “But I’m not sure you’re right about that, either.”

I think there is hope for all of us.

Doc’s specimen jar was empty the morning after. The seal on the lid had not been broken. He looked at it for a long time, and then he took down the velvet box with the little brass compartments and put every tooth in it out of the airlock, one at a time, without a word. He says it was the scientific thing to do; the samples were compromised. I think he no longer wanted to be loyal to everything.

Pell sings. The hum is quieter, she says, but clearer, like a pen on good paper.

Mother Abacus has started a new notebook. I asked her what she was adding up. She said she was not adding anything. She said she was keeping a log.

And I am writing this one. I do not know who it is for. Perhaps for you, whoever you are, in your bar in the Drift or your polished room in the inner worlds, with this account open in front of you like a ledger at the end of a long day. Perhaps for the clerk, who will one day turn to my page and find it longer than it was, and a little less crabbed, and still, I hope, with nothing drawn beneath it. Perhaps only for myself, so that I can read it back and see whether it adds up.

It does not. Mother Abacus says that is the point.

I began this account by calling it my last testament. I see now that I shall have to cross out the word last. I find I have a great deal more to say, and a great many more ships to take, and the paper on the Lark is very cheap.

My name is Frett Ferret. I am a captain, irregular, of the Rattling Lark, out of nowhere in particular, bound for somewhere I have not decided yet. My value is pending. My account is open. Whatever the songs tell you, whatever the bars and the magistrates and the old drunks with their grease-pencil maps may say.

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The End

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