The Long Watch

The Tessellate could not simply be left, and the finding did not say she should be, and the eleven months after the arbitration were, in Yusra's opinion, harder than the arbitration.

Because a ship that is not a derelict belongs to somebody, and the somebody in this case is a chartering polity that was absorbed twice and no longer exists, and there is no more difficult question in settled space than who is responsible for eleven thousand and forty people whose government has been dissolved for a hundred and forty years.

Four jurisdictions declined. Cassilis declined politely and Marrow declined at length. Bellhaven took it, in the end, by a vote of its assembly that passed by nine, after a speech from a member who had read the ninth watch's log entry into the record and then sat down without adding anything to it.

The decision that mattered was about the wake. Every medical authority consulted said the same thing, which is that eleven thousand people cannot be brought up at once by anybody, and that a second-wave berth has never been opened by modern medicine and that the first one would be an experiment.

So they did it the way the Tessellate had been doing it. A watch of eleven, woken by people who knew what they were doing, with a hospital ship alongside and four hundred years of accumulated technique standing by, and if it went well, another watch, and if it did not, a stop.

They did not wake a random eleven. They woke the tenth watch — the eleven whose numbers were next on the roster, whose turn it was, who had been going to be woken in seven years anyway — because Yusra argued for it in a submission of four pages and because nobody could find a reason not to, and because as she wrote at the end of it: They have kept the schedule for two centuries. Let the first thing that happens to them be their turn.

The hospital ship's chief physician, who had spent four months arguing against the whole schedule and had lost, asked at the final briefing what was to be done if the first waking failed. And the Bellhaven assembly's representative said that in that event they would stop, and hold the bays at their floor, and wait for medicine to improve, for as long as that took — and that the Tessellate had already demonstrated, at some length, that this was a survivable thing for a ship to do.

The first of the tenth watch came up on a Tuesday, eleven months after the finding, and her name was Marit Osgood-Bey and she had been asleep for two hundred and six years, and the first question she asked, before where am I and before how long, was whether the bays were holding.

They told her the truth, in the order she asked for it, because Yusra had insisted on that too and had lost the argument twice before winning it.

The bays were holding. Eleven thousand and thirty-one green out of eleven thousand and forty; nine dark, all of them dark since before the fourth watch, all of them recorded and named. It was two hundred and six years. The drive fault had been terminal and the ship had drifted eleven degrees off track and had been found by a survey drone out of a place she had never heard of.

Marit Osgood-Bey, who was a systems engineer and forty-four years old and had gone to sleep expecting to be woken in eighteen years by nine colleagues and a fault list, took all of that in a room on a hospital ship over about four hours, and asked, at the end of it, whether anybody had picked up the transmissions.

And Yusra Adeyemi-Quint, who had asked to be in the room and had been permitted on the basis that she was the vessel's advocate of record, said: "Yes. Not when you sent them. But we found all nine of them, and I read them out, and they are the reason your ship is still yours."

Osgood-Bey asked to see the strip. They brought it. She looked at the nine entries, which are six words each, in nine different hands, one of them hers from the sixth watch, and she said, "We argued about the wording. For three days, in the fourth watch. Three days, on a dead ship, about six words." She put it down. "We could not agree whether to say requesting assistance or requiring. Requesting won because it was more polite."

Then she said, "Who is the master now?" And there was a silence in the room of about nine seconds, because nobody had thought about it, because everybody in the room was from four hundred years later and had been thinking about legal status and metabolic floors and berth integrity and not one of them had thought about the fact that a ship with a company has a master and that the Tessellate's had died in his berth in the second watch.

The Bellhaven physician said, carefully, that the vessel was under the protection of the assembly. And Marit Osgood-Bey said, "That is not what I asked," and looked at the eleven names on the roster she had just been given, and found her own, which is number four, and looked up, and said, "Then it is Renner, and Renner is in bay forty, and I would like him woken next, please, because he will want to be, and because somebody aboard that ship ought to be able to tell you what she needs."

The tug is still working. That is the least remarkable and most important fact about the end of this.

Deniz Halloran-Voss is sixty-one and still master and has taken on two apprentices in four years, which she never did before, and one of them is nineteen and from Cassilis Ring and was sent to her by a chandler called Marchetti with a note that said four words.

Kofi Adeyemi-Quint testified at three subsequent hearings about power curves and has, to his enormous embarrassment, become the person that registries call when a second-wave hull is found, which has now happened twice: once out past Wend, a hull with nobody in it at all, cold and open and honestly derelict, cut up and sold in nine weeks; and once eleven months ago, four hundred berths, and this time nobody had to argue about anything, because there is a finding now, and it has a name, and the name is not Cabral's or Bexhill-Nu's.

It is The Tessellate, and advocates cite it as that, and Yusra has been asked about eleven times whether it bothers her that the case does not carry her name, and gives the same answer, which is that it carries the ship's, and that this is correct, and that she would have fought anybody who tried it the other way.

She sat her final examinations at Bellhaven at twenty-four, four months late, because she was giving evidence. She was admitted in the spring. Piotr Ngoma-Reyes came to the ceremony, which he does for all his apprentices, and gave her the same present he gives all of them, which is a claim book, and which she did not need because she still had the old one with two names in the front of it.

Ines Cabral took her into chambers the same week and they have worked together for four years and have never once agreed about anything on a first pass, and Cabral has said in public that Yusra Adeyemi-Quint is the finest advocate of her generation and in private that she is a menace who has cost her firm eleven thousand in unbillable petitions and that she would not part with her for money.

And every year on the anniversary of her articles, Yusra writes out the nineteen words by hand, as her master taught her, and underneath them she now writes the panel's paragraph, and underneath that one line, and the line is: A person in cold sleep is a person.

She went back aboard four years after the finding, as a guest, which is a strange thing to be on a ship you have stood on with a cutting rig ninety metres behind you.

The Tessellate is under way properly now, under a tug escort, at a velocity that will put her at Bellhaven in nineteen years, which everybody involved regards as an acceptable pace for a vessel that has been travelling for two hundred and ten. There are four hundred people awake aboard her: three hundred and forty of her own company, brought up in watches of eleven over four years, and about sixty from outside, medical and engineering and two advocates.

The corridors are still amber, and will be until the yards at Bellhaven get their hands on her, and possibly after. Somebody proposed changing the lighting to modern standard in the second year and was voted down by the ship's company nine to one, and the minute of that vote is one line and it reads: The company prefers the light it has.

The chime still sounds every eleven minutes. Nobody has turned it off. Yusra asked Marit Osgood-Bey about that, on the walkway of bay nine, in a tenth of a gravity, with about four hundred faces visible from where they stood, and Osgood-Bey said that there had been a proposal about that too and that it had not even come to a vote.

"There are seven thousand of them still down," she said. "It has told them the bays are holding every eleven minutes for two hundred and ten years. We are not switching it off in the last stretch."

They stood there for a while. Berth nine-four-eleven still holds a woman of about fifty who looks as though she has dozed off in a chair, and her indicator is still green, and her name is on the brass plate at the head of the bay in the fifth column with the number thirty-one beside it, and her watch is the fourteenth and she will be woken in about nine years.

Yusra Adeyemi-Quint, advocate, twenty-seven, stood on a walkway in a warm amber light and looked at a hundred and forty names cast into brass by somebody at Anholt Yards who had never once considered that they might one day be evidence, and thought about nineteen words written by frightened people at Kessel Station, and about how nearly it had gone the other way, and how it had turned in the end not on any of her arguments but on a plate that a shipwright two hundred years dead had headed SHIP'S COMPANY because it had not occurred to him to head it anything else.