Small Again
The Register of Fairline Station is eleven hundred and four names long, and in two hundred and eleven years no one has died in it.
That is not a boast, and it is not a lie. It is a matter of columns. Each name has a line, and each line records its conferrals: who carried the name, and from what date. There is no column for death. When a bearer’s heart stops, the name does not end; it stands vacant, like a room with the light left on, until it is conferred again. The founders — who counted everything, air and water and the watts a sleeping body spends — worked out that the station could keep eleven hundred and four people alive with margin to spare, and rather than write a law saying no more than eleven hundred and four, which is a wall, they wrote a Register, which is a door. One name, one living bearer. To be someone here is to hold a line.
This document is the book of the name Edda, which I hold, and which you, reading this, hold now. Every name keeps a book, and the rule of the books is plain: write what the next bearer will need. Most books are lists — allergies, debts, which of the name’s friends can be trusted with money. I have read four generations of Edda and learned chiefly that we are prone to toothache and bad at cards. That is not what you will need from me. What you will need from me is Maren.
You may conceive on Fairline when the Register projects a vacancy. The medical section runs the forecasts; a licence is written against a line, the way credit is written against a harvest. It is understood, and never said, that the harvest in question is a person. The dying, for their part, are not obliged to keep schedule.
My daughter arrived nineteen weeks before her name did.
An unentered child is no scandal — there are usually two or three aboard, the arithmetic being what it is. The law provides for her with a fiction: she is not yet born. She draws no share of her own; she eats from her mother’s line, as the unborn do. So I carried her in my arms through the ring corridors, nineteen weeks old and unborn, and we called her Pip, which was not a name, the way humming is not a song.
Her licence had been written against my mother’s line. Everyone aboard knew it and nobody said it; my mother said it. She would lay her hand on my belly and tell me, “Don’t dawdle, then. I can’t wait forever.” She said it the way you say any small joke. It was the truest sentence in the room.
My mother was dead from Thursday to Saturday.
Those two days have a name — the vigil of the vacancy — and they are the only days on Fairline in which anyone is dead at all. The neighbours came on Thursday night and sat, and spoke of her in the past tense, carefully, the way you speak a dialect you learned late. She was. She used to. She would have. Two days is what the Register allows for the past tense. I did not know, then, that I was being given something that would not come again, and so I spent some of it asleep.
On the Friday the registrar came to our compartment. Prue is in your book too, or her successor will be; be good to that line, it does hard work.
“Maren goes to your household first,” she said. “You can decline. Then it goes to the pool, and Pip waits for the next vacancy.”
“How long?”
“Ivo’s poorly. Old Nan can’t be far off. A month; six. And she’d be someone either way — some other name, some other people attached to it. There are always people attached.”
I asked her what happened if I declined everything. Any name. All of it.
She looked at me the way you look at a hatch someone has left open. “There’s no provision,” she said. “I can’t feed a line that isn’t in the book. Nobody has ever asked me that with a live child in the room.”
I had no intention of refusing. I only wanted to hear that refusal did not exist, and it helped, a little, the way it helps to push once on a sealed hatch.
The conferral was on the Saturday. Prue read the line out — Maren: conferred 2093; conferred 2140; conferred this day — and closed the folio, and my daughter was born at nineteen weeks old, and my mother stopped being dead. That is not how I would put it. It is how the Register puts it, and the Register is the one that decides.
Then the station filed past the cot. Old Tomas looked in and said, “Small again, eh,” and laughed, wet-eyed, and gripped my arm — and I stood there receiving what I could not sort into congratulation or condolence, because on Fairline they are the same visit. Sera, who had sat beside my mother in the garden circle for fifty years, bent over the cot last of all. She did not say welcome. She said, “There you are.”
My father took his turn. He had been a widower for two days, which is as long as the station lets that word live. He put his finger into the cot for her to hold and said, “Well, Maren,” and his voice did something I will not try to write down.
The rule he was keeping is old, and you should have it exactly: words to the name, care to the body. You owe the name its due of speech — its kin-terms, its courtesies, its place in a sentence — and you owe the body what a body of that age needs. My father owed his wife’s name his words and a grandfather’s care, and he paid both for the rest of his life without once muddling the accounts.
The founders did not invent any of this. On Earth, on the ice, there were peoples who gave a dead woman’s name to the next child born, and with the name her place — a widower would call the infant wife, tenderly, and count himself less alone; a mother heard her own mother in the child at her breast. The founders read everything. Their invention was only to make it arithmetic.
What no one tells you is how well it works, or why. There is no mystery in it, and I will not pretend one. A child is partly what she is told she is. Everyone everywhere is raised by expectation; Fairline has only stopped pretending otherwise, and taken aim.
She got her chair in the garden circle at four — the chair, third from the misting valves, that had been Maren’s through three bearers. Conduct scaled to the body: she attended for ten minutes, was formally consulted on nothing, and was carried out asleep. The circle waited for her opinions the way you wait for fruit. When she was patient, and she was often patient, she was told, “That’s Maren — she could outwait a valve.” When she was stubborn: the same. A name gathers no evidence against itself.
I found my father with her in the galley when she was five, teaching her the black loaf, her fists in the dough to the wrist. “You always did it like this,” he said — to someone doing it for the first time — and folded his hands over hers, and showed her how she had always done it.
She is not my mother. Write that in your own hand somewhere, because the station will not say it to you. She sings flat, where my mother could split a note like kindling; she will not touch tomatoes; she is frightened of the dark spinward stretch by the recyclers, which my mother walked for sixty years. Nobody minds. A name is not a mould. It is a direction, and company while you grow.
And then there are the other evenings. In the spring of her seventh year she found me in the maintenance bay, crying over an old log page — valve seats reground, M. — my mother’s handwriting, which the station has no column for either. She watched me for a while. Then she came and put her hand flat on my head, the way you steady a bowl, and said, “Now then, little one.”
My mother’s phrase. My mother’s place in the sentence. My mother’s weight behind it.
I answered her. That is the part I cannot explain to you until it has happened to you: I answered.
I am fifty-one and well, so you are not yet born, and I am in the strange position of every writer of these books: knowing you will hold my line, and my toothaches, and my debts, and not knowing your face.
When Edda falls vacant they will keep this folio for you until you can read it. Here is what it is for. My line is daughter to Maren’s line; that does not lapse when I do. The woman holding Maren at your conferral — I believe it will still be her — will come and look in at you the way Sera once looked in at her, and she will not say welcome. She was my mother before she was my daughter. She has stood on both sides of this. There is no one on the station who will hold your line better.
Her tea is black, no sugar. She sings flat, and likes to be told otherwise. When she calls you little one — answer.