Chapter Text
Whatever had gone wrong had gone wrong somewhere in the dark of the long sleep.
Hashiba did not know what it was. The diagnostics he had run in the first numb hour after waking had told him the ship was operating within nominal parameters, which was the ship's way of saying the parameters have been adjusted, which was the ship's way of saying don't ask. Something had failed. Something had failed badly enough that two pods' worth of waking power was simply gone—vented or shorted or absorbed into a system that needed it more—and the ship had looked at what it had left and made a decision.
Of course they had known this was a possibility. He had seen them work, he had sat in the rooms where they argued for hours over failure modes that would never happen, he had watched them write protocols for the kinds of accidents that statistics said could not occur in the lifetime of the universe. They had planned for everything. Somewhere in the long tail of their projections there had been a number—small, unlikely, not zero—that said the system may, in some fraction of journeys, only have power for one, and they had looked at the number and they had written the protocol, because that was what they did.
So the protocol existed. Somewhere in the sealed memory of this ship there was a line of code that had looked at the three of them and chosen him, and the line of code had been written by a person, and the person had used something to write it. Some measure. Some quality the committee had reduced to a number and ranked the three of them against, and Hashiba had come out on top—or on the bottom, depending on which way the ranking ran. He did not know which way it ran. He did not know if being chosen meant most able to finish the work or least costly to spend on a long shot.
The harder question was not whether they had known—of course they had known—but what they had used. What had been the thing about him, specifically, that the parameters had used to decide.
He would never know for certain.
—
The other two pods were dark.
Yamamoto was on the left.
He had been on the left in every simulation, because the left pod was closest to the medical bay and Yamamoto was the one with the field surgery training, and if any of them came out of cryo wrong he would be the one to fix it. That had been the joke. If Yamamoto came out of cryo wrong, they were all dead, because none of the rest of them could fix him. He had laughed about it. He had a wife in Sapporo and two daughters and a third child his wife had been pregnant with when they left, and he had laughed about being the one who couldn't be fixed because he had not, in the end, believed it would happen to him.
None of them had. You could not get on this ship believing it would happen to you.
Hashiba did not look at his face.
He looked at the pod's status panel instead, which was a small mercy the ship had built into itself—a thing to look at that was not a face—and the panel said what he had already known it would say. The panel was not lit. The pod had been dark for a long time.
Inoue was on the right.
She had been the oldest of the three of them by a margin that mattered—not in years, the years weren't much, but in the way she carried the work. She had done a tour on the orbital station before any of this, and her husband had been waiting for her when she came back, and had agreed, somehow, to wait again. His name was Kenji. Hashiba had met him exactly once, at a dinner Inoue had hosted near the end of training, and Kenji had been the kind of quiet that was not shyness but a decision, the quiet of a man who had already done the math on how long his wife was going to be gone and had decided not to make her carry it. He had refilled Hashiba's glass twice without being asked. He had laughed at one of Yamamoto's jokes, the bad one about the cryo pods, and the laugh had been real. At the end of the night he had walked the three of them to the door and had put his hand on Inoue's back, briefly, the way you touched someone you were not going to see for a long time and did not want to make a scene about, and Hashiba had looked away from it because it had not been for him.
Her panel was also not lit.
Hashiba stood between them.
He thought: they were doing this for someone.
The thought arrived whole, and it was not a thought he could do anything with, and it sat in him for a long moment before he understood what was wrong with it. They had been doing this for someone, and now they were not doing anything, and the someones they had been doing it for were still on Earth, and would be on Earth for the years it took the news to travel back.
Yamamoto's wife did not know yet. Kenji did not know yet either. The committee had known. The committee had known who had a wife in Sapporo and who had a husband named Kenji and who had a third child on the way and who had, when the forms asked for next of kin, written down the name of an uncle he saw at New Year's because the rest of the page had no one to put on it.
Hashiba stood between the pods for a long time.
—
He stood between the pods for a long time, and then he stopped, because the ship was waiting.
The ship had been built by people who understood that a man who woke up alone would need a moment, and it had been programmed to give him the moment. But the moment had a length, and the length was now over. A soft tone sounded once, from somewhere behind him, the kind of tone that was not a summons but a notice—a thing you could ignore if you wanted to ignore it.
He turned toward it.
The console that pinged was the one left at the height a man of his height would find comfortable, angled toward the seat a man of his sitting habits would prefer. He had sat at this console in simulation a hundred times.
He had never sat at it without his crewmates at their consoles.
The screen did the small clean thing screens did when they had been waiting a long time to be useful.
Single-occupant wake protocol, it said. Acknowledge to proceed.
He read the line twice.
It was a careful line. Someone had sat in a room with other people and argued about what the line should say, and had, in the end, chosen single-occupant over the alternatives—over solo wake, which was too clean, over survivor protocol, which named a thing the committee had decided not to name. Single-occupant was a description of the ship's current state. It was not a description of him. The grammar had been written to hold him at a distance from what had happened. He understood the distance as a kindness. He resented the kindness.
He acknowledged.
The list expanded.
It was a good list. It was thorough. The first items were the items he expected—life support confirmation, hull integrity, a check on the cryo bay's environmental seals that he understood, after a second of reading, was not a check on the cryo bay but a check on him, a way of giving him something easy to do with his hands while the ship watched to see whether his hands worked. He did the check. His hands worked. The ship moved him to the next item.
The next item was crew status: confirm.
He sat with that one for a while.
The confirmation was a formality. The ship knew. The ship had known for however long the ship had known—weeks, months, the better part of a year, he did not have the data and was not asking—and the ship was not asking him to tell it something it did not know. It was asking him to say it.
He put his hand on the panel.
Yamamoto, K., the panel said. Status?
There were two options.
He selected the one that was true.
The panel did not change color. The panel did not make a sound. The panel simply absorbed the input and offered him the next name.
Inoue, M. Status?
Again. He selected the one that was true.
The panel offered him a third name, which was his own, and he selected active, and the list moved on.
He sat for a moment with his hand still on the panel.
He had done this before. Not this, but the shape of this—the sitting at a desk, the answering of small questions in the language the desk required, the way the desk did not look up at him while he answered. The desk had been a different desk. The questions had been different questions. The principle had been the same: that there was a form, and the form had to be filled out, and the filling out of the form was the thing the world required of him before the world would let him do anything else. He had filled it out. He had been good at filling it out.
He took his hand off the panel.
The list had moved on without him. The list was now showing him the next set of items—diagnostic confirmations, a request for a verbal log entry, a reminder that the transmission window to Earth would open in approximately forty-one hours and that he would, at that time, be required to compose a communication—and he read down the list and noted that the list did not at any point ask him how he was. The list did not include a check-in. The list did not include a prompt for grief, or a suggested period of rest, or a recommendation that he speak to the ship's counseling subroutine, which he knew existed because he had helped write parts of it. The list assumed he would keep moving.
The list had been written by people who had read his file.
He understood this slowly, the way you understood a thing that had been true for a while before you noticed it. The list had been written by people who knew what was in his file, and the file had told them something about him, and the something was that this man does not require a check-in. This man requires a list. Give this man a list and he will work down it. Do not interrupt him. Do not ask him how he is. He will tell you, in his own time, by the quality of the work, and the work would be good, because the work had always been good, because the work was the thing he did instead.
He read the next item on the list.
He did it.
—
The transmission window opened in approximately forty-one hours.
He had known this since the list had told him, and the list had told him early, the way the list told him things it wanted him to have time to think about without telling him to think about them. Forty-one hours was a generous window. The committee had chosen the number. Someone had sat in a room and argued for forty-one over thirty-six and over forty-eight, and had won, and the winning argument had been—he could almost hear it—that a man in his situation would need a night's sleep before he wrote, and would need a second night's sleep before he sent, and would need the hours between to do the work of finding the sentences. The number was a schedule for grief. It had been written by a person who had thought carefully about how long grief took to become legible, and had landed on forty-one.
He did not sleep the first night.
He did not sleep, but he also did not try to write. He understood the difference. Trying to write before he was ready was the kind of mistake that produced documents you could not unsend, and the window was one-way, and the window was final, and a document sent into a one-way window was a document that would be read by the people it was for in exactly the form he sent it, with no possibility of revision, no follow-up, no what I meant was. The window did not permit second drafts. The window permitted one draft, and there was no version of this in which he got to try again.
So he did not try.
He did the items on the list instead. He did them in order. He spoke the verbal log entry the list requested, and the speaking of it was easier than he had expected because the verbal log was for the ship, not for anyone, and the ship did not require him to find the sentences—the ship required him to confirm that his voice worked, that his cognition was within parameters, that he was capable of producing speech that another human being could later parse. He produced the speech. The ship logged it. The list moved on.
He ate something. He did not taste it. The list noted that he had eaten and moved on.
He slept for two hours in the third quarter of the first day, not in the bunk but in the chair at the console, the way you slept when you had decided not to sleep but your body had decided otherwise. He woke without transition. The list was where he had left it. The window was closer.
In the second day he began to think about the message.
He did not write yet. He thought. He thought about Yamamoto's wife first, because Yamamoto's wife was the harder of the two and he had learned, at some point in his life, to do the harder thing first, when his hands were steadier and the day had not yet used him up. Her name was Aiko. He had met her twice. Once at a function he did not remember well and once at the dinner Inoue had hosted, which he remembered in detail because it was the dinner where Kenji had refilled his glass, and Aiko had been there too, and she had been six months along and had eaten very little and had laughed at the same bad joke Kenji had laughed at, and her laugh had been different from Kenji's, faster, the laugh of a person who was tired and was using the laugh to give herself a moment.
He thought about her receiving the message.
He could not picture the room. He did not know what her apartment looked like, did not know if she still lived in the apartment she had lived in when Yamamoto left, did not know whether the third child was a son or a daughter or had been born at all—the math said the child was nearly four now, but the math was Earth math, and he did not know how much of Earth math still applied to anyone he had known. So he did not picture the room. He pictured, instead, the moment before the room. The official at the door. The official's face arranged for the work. The clipboard or the tablet or whatever the officials carried now. The pause on the threshold during which Aiko would understand, without being told, what the official was there to tell her, and would have, in that pause, the last clean second of her life as a person who did not yet know.
He knew the shape of the official at the door. He had answered a call, once, to someone arranged for the same work.
He thought: my message will arrive in her hand after that second is over.
He thought: my message is for the after.
This was the thing he had not understood until he thought it. The message was not the news. The news would be delivered by another person, in another room, in a sequence he did not control. The message was the document she would read in the days and weeks that came after, when she was looking for something to hold, when she had been told the official version and needed an unofficial version, when she needed to know whether her husband had been spoken of by the man who survived him, and how. The message was not for the moment of breaking. The message was for the long after.
That changed what it had to do.
It did not have to deliver. It had to last. It had to be the kind of document a woman could read once in the first week and once in the third month and once on an anniversary years later, and find, each time, something that held. It had to not flinch and it had to not perform. It had to contain Yamamoto—not all of him, that was not possible, but a true shape of him—because the document was, among the things it was, the last new piece of him she would ever receive. After this there would only be what she already had. He was writing the final addition to her archive of her husband.
He sat with this for a long time.
Then he wrote.
He wrote the salutation first. He wrote Aiko-san, and he looked at it, and he changed it to Yamamoto-san, and he looked at that, and he changed it back. Aiko-san was what Yamamoto had called her in his hearing. Hashiba had earned the name by being someone Yamamoto had spoken to about his wife. The committee had not assigned him the name. Hashiba had it because he had it. He kept it.
He did not write I am sorry.
He wrote about the morning, three weeks before launch, when Yamamoto had come into the briefing room with a thermos of the coffee his wife made and had poured a cup for Hashiba without asking, because Hashiba had mentioned, once, two months earlier, that he liked it strong. Yamamoto had remembered. Yamamoto had remembered and had brought enough for two and had poured it without making a thing of the remembering, and Hashiba had drunk it, and it had been the best coffee he had drunk in a year, and he was telling her this now because he wanted her to know that the coffee she had made for her husband had been drunk, eventually, by someone else, and had been good, and had been remembered, and was being remembered now.
He wrote one more paragraph.
He read what he had written.
It was good.
He sat with that.
Then he wrote Kenji's.
Kenji's was harder in a different way, because Kenji had not been the one going. Kenji had been the one staying. The document for Kenji was a document for a man who had already done the math once, who had agreed to wait, who had walked them to the door and put his hand on his wife's back and decided not to make her carry it, and who would now be asked to carry the rest of it alone, for the rest of his life, with no wife coming back at the end of the second waiting. The document had to acknowledge the math. It had to acknowledge that Kenji had known, from the beginning, that this was a number in the long tail, and had agreed anyway, and was now living inside the number.
He wrote Kenji-san.
He wrote about the dinner. He wrote that he had understood, that night, that he was being taken care of by a man who was preparing to lose his wife for a long time and who had decided that taking care of his wife's crewmate was part of the preparation. He wrote that he had not, at the time, known how to thank him for it. He wrote that he was thanking him now.
He did not write she did not suffer. He did not know whether she had suffered. The pod had been dark for a long time and he did not have the data and he was not going to lie in a document like this, because a lie in a document like this would be detected later, by Kenji, who had always been a man who detected things, and the lie would poison the rest of what he had written, and the rest of what he had written was true, and he wanted Kenji to be able to keep it.
He wrote what he could write that was true. He wrote that she had been the senior of the three of them in the way that mattered. He wrote that he had relied on her. He wrote the thing she had said to him at the end of their last day of training, when the two of them were walking back across the yard and she had stopped, briefly, and said it without looking at him, the way she said things she meant, and he had carried it into the pod, and had carried it, in some way he could not fully explain, out of the pod when he woke. He wrote it down for Kenji because Kenji was the only person now living who would recognize her in it. He was carrying it still.
He read it.
It was good.
He saved the documents.
He did not send them. The window was not yet open. The window would open in eleven hours, and he would, at that time, send them, and the sending would take a fraction of a second, and the documents would travel for the years it took documents to travel, and would arrive in the hands of two people he could not picture in rooms he could not see, and would be read, and would do whatever they did.
He stood up from the console.
He noticed, standing, that his hands were shaking. They had not been shaking while he wrote. They had begun, at some point after he saved the second document, to shake, and he watched them shake for a moment with the detached interest of a man observing a system that was not quite his own, and then he put them in his pockets, because the list did not have an item for shaking hands, and he was not going to add one.
He walked to the galley. He drank water. He came back.
The list was waiting.
He read the next item.
He did it.