All the Stars Behind Us

The Skin

The sky was under her boots, and Tam stood on it the way her father had taught her: knees soft, tether short, breath slow, head hung down into all that black like a woman leaning over the lip of a well that had no bottom and no water and no end.

Above her, the only world she had ever known.

She could feel it more than see it—the long grey curve of the Calenture turning over her like a roof made of the back of some sleeping animal, the Skin frosted white at the seams, ribbed with conduit and the old welds of nine generations of walkers. The hull was up. The stars were down. That was the first thing they told you, in the Outwalk, the thing that broke most apprentices and made the rest into something other than the people who lived inside: out here, child, down is the stars. You will stand on the shell with the whole of forever beneath your feet, and you will not let go.

Tam had not let go in three years. She did not intend to start tonight.

She counted her breaths—one, two, three, the suit hissing each back to her warm and wet—and walked the patch line hand over hand along the safety wire, hull above, void below, her own small lamp throwing a coin of light onto the frost. The cold came up through the boots first. It always did. Even with the suit's heat singing in the soles, even with three layers of underwrap and her grandmother's old wicking sock that had a hole worn through the heel, the cold of the Skin found her and pressed, patient as a thumb. She had stopped minding it. You did not walk the Skin to be warm. You walked it to keep the warm ones alive.

Here. She crouched, and her stomach did its slow turn—the body forever insisting that down was wrong, that she was about to fall up into all those stars and never stop—and she put one gloved palm flat to the hull to steady the lie, and read the damage.

Pitting. A scatter of it, the size of her thumbnail across, where some grain of grit older than the Old Sky itself had come out of the dark at a speed no person could imagine and kissed the shell and gone on. The frost had crept into the little crater and made a flower of ice. Underneath that flower, she knew, the metal was thinning, and behind the metal, three armspans in, people slept in their bunks with their mouths open and dreamed of green.

Tam set her kit down on its magnet-foot and got to work.

This was the part Renn had loved. She knew it the way you know the shape of a missing tooth. He had never said I love this—hull-walkers did not say such things, not out here where words cost air—but she had felt it through the line, the small pleasures of his hands: the seal-gun's kick, the way the patch-paste went on grey and cured gold, the satisfaction of a clean weld run straight as a hair. Slow is fast, Tam-cat, he used to tell her, his voice coming flat and close inside her helmet, the way the dead now spoke to her in dreams. The Skin doesn't care how brave you are. It only cares are you here tomorrow. She laid the paste the way he'd laid it. She drew the weld the way he'd drawn it. Somewhere in the doing of it he was almost beside her, a shadow on the frost, and she let him be, because there was no one out here to see her grief and report it inside, and because the dead were lighter company than the living.

Three years ago they had given him to the Black.

That was the phrase. Given to the Black. As though the dark had asked for him. As though it were an honor, and not a thing that happened to a man one watch and was never spoken of after, his name folded away into the long lists the Chronists kept, his tether coiled and returned to the family in its little waxed box like the gift of a stranger. No one had told her how. No one had told her why. He walked out and did not walk in, Dav had said, and would say no more, and would not look at her when he said it, his eyes going off over her shoulder to the middle distance where men keep the things they will not name. She had been sixteen. She had screamed at the old man until her throat tore, and he had stood there and taken it with his jaw working, and afterward he had taught her, himself, every line of the shell her father had walked, as if knowledge could be a kind of sorry.

She half-blamed the outside. She knew that about herself the way you know a crack in a bone—it ached when she pressed it. She loved the Skin and she blamed the Skin, both at once, the place that had made her and unmade him. There was no sense in it. Out here there was no sense in much.

"There," she said aloud, to the dark, when the weld had run gold and held. "That's you patched. Don't tell anyone."

The dark, as ever, kept her secrets.

She straightened, slow, against the turning, and let herself do the thing she was not supposed to do and could not help, the thing that was the whole bitter wage of the work. She looked.

Below her boots the stars went on without number, hard and small and unwavering, no twinkle to them out here past the air, just the steady cold fire of them packed across the black like salt thrown on a floor. She knew their drifts the way a child inside knew the deck-numbers. There—the long smear they called the Spill. There—the three bright nails of the Anchor-set. And there, low and forward, toward the bow, toward the way they were all of them always going, the one she had been taught to find before she could write her own name.

Anchor's Light.

It hung in the black ahead like the head of a pin held to a candle. The destination. The green world's sun. Every child of the Calenture knew it grew brighter year on year as the great Glide carried them down toward it—knew it the way they knew their own pulse, knew it from the Eye that showed it each dawn-watch swelling on every deck-wall, knew it from the Tally that slid one notch closer each festival to the Landfall they were all of them sailing three hundred years to make. It was the brightest thing in the forward sky. It was supposed to get brighter. That was the whole of it, the spine of the world: the light grew, the Tally fell, the ship came home.

Tam looked at it a long moment, the way she always looked at it, with the cracked old hunger every walker carried. And something turned over in her, quiet, the way the pitting had turned her stomach—a thing she had no name for yet and would not have for days.

But the line crackled before the thing could finish forming.

"Marrow." Dav's voice, gravel through the wire, flattened by the suit. "You're drifting aft."

She wasn't. She glanced at her tether—nine lengths out, the slack pooling against the magnet-foot, well shy of the line he meant. But she knew the rule beneath the rule. You did not argue with the foreman about aft. You did not even let your lamp swing toward it.

"Holding at the patch," she said. "Pitting's sealed. Coming forward."

"You come forward." A pause, the kind Dav left when there was more in him than he'd spend. "Nothing for you back there but cold and the Lee. Drive's the Helm's ground, not ours. You know it."

"I know it."

"Say it."

It was an old call-and-answer, worn smooth as a handle. She gave it back the way she had a thousand times, the way her father had, the way the dead First Walkers had carved it into the first vow: "The Skin is ours. The Aft is the Helm's. The sky is no one's, and we say nothing of it inside."

"Good girl," said Dav, and the good had a crack in it she pretended not to hear, the same crack that had been in him for three years now, the crack that opened a little wider each time he sent her forward and away from the place her father had last been alive.

She gathered her line. She did not look aft. But she felt it back there the way you feel a door behind you in the dark—the long dead stern of the ship where the holy engines slept, the Aft Dark, the place the Helm sealed and the lore kept sacred and the walkers' wire stopped short of by twenty lengths and a hundred years of fear. Given to the Black. He had gone aft, hadn't he. Someone had said it once, drunk, at a wake, and been hushed so fast the saying nearly hadn't happened. He had walked toward the engines, toward the Lee, toward the wrecks, and he had not walked in.

She gathered her line, and she went forward, toward the light, the way they all went forward, and she did not say a word.

The airlock took her back the way it always did, with the long sigh of pressure and the slow return of weight that was not weight, the spin pressing her down into her boots until the stars were under the deck again where the inside-folk believed they belonged. Dav was at the rack when she cycled through, hanging his own line, an old man made shapeless by the suit, his face a map of broken weather. He took her tether from her without a word and coiled it, checking each length with his thumb the way he checked every walker's every watch, feeling for the fray you couldn't see.

His hands stopped, once, halfway down. She watched them stop. She watched him feel something—a memory, not a fray—and start again.

"Clean run," he said, not looking at her.

"Clean run," she agreed.

He hung her line on the third peg from the left. He always hung it on the third peg. The second peg had a length of wire on it gone grey at the splice, coiled tight and never touched, and they both of them looked at the wall above it rather than at the peg, because the second peg was Renn's, and the wire was Renn's last line, the one they'd brought in empty, and Dav had hung it there himself three years ago and let no one move it. Neither of them said his name. That was a vow too, though no one had ever sworn it. There were a great many vows in the Outwalk that no one had ever sworn.

"Get warm," Dav said. "Eat. You did good out there." And then, lower, to the rack, to the grey coiled wire, to no one: "Your da did it that way. The weld. Straight on."

It was the closest he ever came. She let it lie between them like a coal. Then she pulled off her gloves and went down into the Drum, into the lamps and the smell and the noise of four thousand people living for somewhere else.

The Drum hit her the way it always did after the silence of the Skin—warm, close, loud, alive. The corridors curved up and away in both directions until they were lost in the haze of the cook-fires and the grow-lamps, the whole world bending overhead so that if you looked up the long way you could see other people walking the ceiling that was their floor, tiny and upside down and certain that they were the right way up. The air was wet and green and full of bodies. Someone two decks spinward was singing the count-rhyme to a child—Skoll runs and runs and never eats the sun—and the child was getting the order wrong, and the singer was patient. Pipes ticked. Water ran somewhere behind the walls, the same water, always the same water, three hundred years of the same water. Tam breathed it in and her chest unknotted by a notch she hadn't known was tied.

Home. Such as it was. Such as any of them had.

Her mother was at the shrine when she came in, of course she was, kneeling on the worn pad in the lamp-corner with her back straight as a weld, and she did not turn when the door sighed, only finished the line she was speaking under her breath—"...and keep us worthy of the green"—before she rose, joints clicking, and looked her daughter over the way she looked over everything, for damage, for sin, for any sign the world had got its hands on what was hers.

"You're cold," Sabine said. "You're always cold. Sit. There's broth."

"I'm fine, Ma."

"You're cold." She had her hands on Tam's face before Tam could duck, palms still warm from prayer, and for a moment Tam let her, let herself be a child held, before she stepped back. Sabine let her go. She always let her go now. She had not always.

The shrine took up the lamp-corner the way it did in every quarters on every deck: the little shelf, the worn cloth, the candle that was not a candle but a low electric coal because open flame was death in a tin world. And in the center of it, in its dish, under its square of glass gone soft with handling, the Seed.

The Landfall Seed. A pinch of dark grains no bigger than the nail of her smallest finger, sealed and saved and never sown, handed down mother to daughter to daughter since before the Tearing, since the Old Sky maybe, to be planted in the soil of the green world on the day they made Landfall and not one watch before. Every family had one. Every family kept it. You did not plant the Seed early. You did not even speak of planting it. It was the whole of the faith made into a thing you could hold in your palm: not yet, not yet, but soon. We are saving the best of ourselves for the somewhere we are going.

Sabine touched the glass with two fingers, the way she touched it twenty times a watch, and her face when she looked at it was not the face she wore for the world. It was younger. It was lit. "The Tally turns again at the festival," she said. "Bex told me. Another notch. Closer." She said closer the way some women said the name of a man. "Your father would have been glad of it. He liked the festivals."

"He did," Tam said, around the thing in her throat.

"He'd want you faithful, Tam. Whatever else. He'd want you to keep the Glide."

And there it was—the small wrongness, finally finished forming, surfacing through the broth-steam and the lamp-warmth and her mother's lit and hungry face. Because she had stood out there an hour ago with the whole forward sky beneath her boots, and she had looked at the light they were all of them living toward, the light that was meant to swell year on year, and she had thought of her father.

He had described it to her once. Years ago, when she was small and not yet sworn, he had taken her up to the obs-slit on the bow watch—against every rule, his big hand over her eyes until they were used to the dark—and shown her the destination star, and his voice had gone soft and strange in a way she had only understood later, after, when it was too late to ask. There. That's where we're going, Tam-cat. Anchor's Light. Look how small it is. Look how far. And he had told her exactly how it looked: a pinhead held to a candle. Low and forward. Steady.

She thought of Esme's tool, then, without meaning to—her grandmother's contraband starwand, the sighting-stick the old woman had never been parted from, scratched all down its length with little numbers no one had ever explained, sitting now in the box of effects under the bunk where Tam had put it the day they gave the legendary walker to the Black and would not let her granddaughter even hold the tether. Those who count true, Esme had said once, half-asleep, near the end, and would not say more. Numbers. Brightnesses. Fifty years of them, maybe.

A pinhead held to a candle. Low and forward. Steady.

That was tonight. That was tonight exactly—the same size, the same low place, the same steady cold fire. Years between, and a man dead, and a star that was supposed to be a hand's breadth nearer the candle by now, brighter, bigger, climbing toward them out of the dark the way the Eye showed it climbing every single dawn.

It looked the same. It looked exactly the same.

It should be brighter by now, she thought, and didn't know yet that the thought would cost her everything.

The Tally

The whole Drum tilted up toward the Eye as the Tally slid one notch closer to a home none of them would live to see.

Tam felt the turning of every neck around her the way she felt wind-pressure against a faceplate—a held breath, then the give. Four thousand souls did not all gather in one place; there was no place to hold them. But on a Tally-turn the decks emptied upward, faces climbing the curve of the Drum's inner shell toward the great lens of the Eye where it hung at the spin-axis, and from below it looked as though the world itself were a bowl filling with the upward stare of the faithful. Down was outward, always, here in the Drum. Your feet pressed the hull because the cylinder spun and threw you against it. But on a Tally-turn everyone leaned the other way, toward the center, toward the light, and Tam—who spent her watches on the Skin where down was the stars beneath her boots—knew better than anyone how it felt to have your whole body argue with where it ought to fall.

She stood in the press of Garden-deck with her mother's hand warm and dry around her wrist.

Above them the Eye woke. It did not flicker the way the deck-lamps did; the Eye was old and certain. A disc of pale gold opened against the dark of the axis, and in the gold a star: Anchor's Light, the one they were all sworn to reach, rendered larger than truth, throbbing softly the way the Chronists said it had thrown its light across the founders' faces on the morning the Calenture first turned her nose toward it. A child near Tam made the soft oh that children made. Tam had made it too, once, every Tally-turn of her life, the small involuntary worship of a thing brighter than anything real.

A voice came down out of the Eye, even and unhurried, and four thousand throats went still to hear it.

"In the count of the Glide," said First Warden Iola Sere, "we are nearer this watch than we were the last."

The Tally answered her. Down the long throat of the Drum, on every deck, the figures turned—old mechanical drums of painted numerals that the Helm advanced by hand on the turning, so that the eye could see the count move and the ear could hear it: a soft heavy clack rolling deck to deck, a sound like a great patient animal swallowing. One notch. The number that had stood at the head of Tam's whole life dropped by a single increment toward zero, toward Landfall, toward the green world circling Anchor's Light that grew—they were taught—brighter year by year as the Calenture came on.

Sabine's hand tightened. Tam looked sideways and found her mother's face lifted into the gold, lit by it, years gone out of it. Whatever Sabine carried the rest of her days—the rationing, the watch-rosters, the empty side of the bed she had not slept on the far edge of in three years—none of it lived in her face now. There was only the light, and the count, and the certainty under both.

"We hold the Balance," the Warden's voice went on, "that the ship may hold us."

A murmur moved through the deck, half ritual, half something older. The Balance. Tam knew the shape of what was coming and hated that she knew it; the knowing felt like reading a death in advance.

"In the eighteenth ring of this deck," said the Warden, "Hollis Vane is given to the long Glide. We hold his place in the count of the living." A pause exactly long enough to feel. "And by the Balance, the place he leaves is opened. To the household of Teller and Ais Greve, who have waited, a leave-to-bear is granted, that the count of souls aboard not exceed the count the ship can carry to Landfall."

Somewhere up the curve a woman began to weep, and it was not grief. That was the thing Tam could never make sit right in her chest—that the same word, the same wet sound, served for the man given to the Glide and the child now permitted to be made. One life had to fall out of the count before another could be poured in. Old Hollis Vane had coughed himself empty in the dark of his ring and somewhere across the deck a young couple were being told they might, at last, after years on the list, hope to hold something living. Death freed the place. The ship could only carry so many to the someday. So you waited your turn to be born the way you waited your turn for everything—against the day of arrival, when all the waiting would be redeemed.

"Saved for Landfall," Sabine breathed beside her, and squeezed.

It was her mother's favorite sentence in the world. The good cloth was saved for Landfall. The unburnt lamp-oil, the real coffee in the Held Decks that no living tongue had tasted, the seed in the family shrine that no Marrow hand had ever sown—saved, sealed, kept against the green morning when the Calenture would open like a fist and let three centuries of waiting spill out onto solid ground. Tam had been raised on it the way other children were raised on milk. Not now. Soon. There. You did not eat the seed. You did not plant the seed. You carried it, generation to generation, toward a field none of you had seen.

The Eye dimmed the star to a tolerable ember. The Warden gave them the closing words, the ones every throat could shape: We who walk the Glide will make the Landfall worthy. Four thousand voices, and Sabine's among the loudest, and Tam's mouth moving on the old shape while her mind stood somewhere else entirely—out on the Skin, last watch, the starwand cold against her glove, Anchor's Light sitting in the wires of the sight exactly, exactly where her grandmother's numbers said it had sat fifty years ago.

It should be brighter by now.

She had not stopped thinking it. Three days, and it had not let her go.

──────────

The dead did not own much, on the Calenture. Nothing was wasted; a death released not only a place in the count but a kit, a bunk, a ration-share, a handful of tools that the Chronists logged and the Helm redistributed. Esme Marrow had been a hull-walker for sixty years and a legend for forty, and what she left behind fit into two grey kit-cases and a netting bag, and even those had to be catalogued before the family could keep what the family was let keep.

The Chronist apprentice they sent was younger than Tam expected. Younger than her, maybe—twenty at most, with ink-dark hair he hadn't trimmed to regulation and a stylus he turned end over end through his fingers without seeming to know he did it.

"Ferran," he said, when she let him into the bunk-ring. "Rede. I'm—they sent me for the inventory of effects. For Esme Marrow." He stopped, and the stylus stopped. "She taught my aunt the dead-reckoning sights. My aunt said she could find a star through a bulkhead."

"She could find one through worse than that," Tam said.

He almost smiled, then put it away, the way you put a tool away in a place you don't want it scratched. He was careful with the cases. Tam gave him that. Some Chronists handled the dead's things like cargo; this one lifted Esme's gear out into the lamp-light a piece at a time and named each one to his slate before he set it down, and when his hand closed on the worn brass of the starwand he held it a moment longer than the rest.

"This is a sighting tool," he said. "An old one. Pre-Tearing casting, I think—you don't see the brass anymore, they went to the grey alloy after." He turned it. "It's—covered in—"

"Scratches," Tam said, and reached, and he gave it to her without being asked, which she also gave him.

She had held the starwand a hundred times. Esme had taught her on it, out on the Skin in the dark, the old woman's voice flat and patient in the suit-link: bring her down to the wire, girl, hold your breath, count it true. But she had held it the way you hold a teacher's tool, careful of the wires, careless of the rest. She had never read the haft.

She read it now.

Numbers. Tiny, scratched fine with a needle-point and rubbed dark with decades of glove-grease so they stood out against the brass—rows and columns of them, marching up the haft and around it, so close-set in places they overlapped. Not random. She knew the shape of a brightness-tally the way she knew her own hand inside a glove; every hull-walker scratched their readings somewhere until they could log them, and lost half of them anyway. But these had never been logged. These had been kept.

A column of years down one edge, abbreviated the old way, two digits and a watch-mark. Beside each year a figure: the magnitude of Anchor's Light as a hull-walker's eye and wand took it from the Skin, where the air of the Drum and the glow of the deck-lamps could not soften the dark and the star stood naked against the Black.

Tam's eye ran up the column. Then ran up it again, slower, because the first time her mind had refused the plain sense of it and she made herself look the way Esme had taught her to look at a weld she did not want to find a crack in. Don't decide what it says. Read what it says.

The numbers did not climb.

Fifty years of a star they were falling toward, and the figures did not climb. They wavered—a hand's tremor of a difference, a watch where the wand had iced, an eye gone old. But they did not march toward brightness the way Anchor's Light marched toward brightness every year on the Eye, every year on the approach the Chronists sang, the green world swelling toward them through the dark. Esme's star had stood still. For half a century, her grandmother had climbed out onto the Skin, brought the same star down to the same wire, and written down that it had not moved—and told no one. Had told no one, and kept the tool, and given it to Tam with the rest of her silence.

Tam's breath had gone shallow. She counted it back to four, the way she did when a tether fouled. In, hold, the count, out. The numbers did not move while she breathed. She made them not move; she was certain her hands were shaking and was certain, looking down, that they were not. That was worse.

"Those are tallies," Rede said. He had come around to look without her noticing, and she fought the urge to close her hand over the haft. "Star-tallies. She kept private ones?" He sounded delighted in the small dry way of his kind. "We're not supposed to love that, you know. Private records. But the old walkers all did it. The Chronists used to fight the Outwalk over whether sightings belonged to the ship or the eye that took them." He leaned in. His stylus had started turning again. "What star is—"

"I don't know yet," Tam said, too fast, and then, smoothing it, "I'd have to work the corrections. The casting's old. The wires are wide." All true. None of it the truth.

And then she found her own hand in it.

Low on the haft, the most recent rows, scratched in a needle-fist she did not recognize because it was not Esme's—lighter, neater, a younger hand, scratched in the months before the old woman died when her sight had gone and she had sent Tam out to take the readings for her and read them back into the dark of the bunk while Esme lay still and made her say each one twice. Tam had thought it a kindness she was doing a blind woman. Take Anchor down for me, girl. Tell me true. She had taken it down. She had told it true. And Esme had scratched it here, into the bottom of fifty years, where the last figure sat against the second-last figure—thirty years apart, the second-last in Esme's own old hand—

—and they were the same.

Not near. The same. The star Tam had brought down to the wire last season sat at the exact magnitude the star had sat at when Esme took it three decades before Tam was old enough to hold the wand. Tam had logged that reading herself, last watch, into the Outwalk ledger as a clean sight. She had thought nothing of it. You did not think anything of a star sitting where the tables said it should sit; you thought of it only when it did not.

It had not. It never had. And here was the proof of it scratched into brass by a woman who had carried the knowing for fifty years and then handed it down a column to her granddaughter without one word, trusting Tam to read the haft.

Tam closed her hand around the wand. Slowly. As if it were warm.

"Are you well?" Rede had stopped turning the stylus. He was looking at her face, and Tam understood she had let it stand open too long. "You've gone the color of the deck."

"Cold gets in your bones out there," she said. "It comes back on you, after. You'd not understand." She made herself set the wand down among the catalogued things, into the lamp-light, where it looked like nothing—an old tool, a dead woman's habit, brass worn smooth. "Log it as personal effects. The guild will want it back. We pass the wands down."

"I'll mark it for return." He made the note, and his stylus moved, and Tam breathed her four and watched it move and thought about how a single mark on a slate could let a thing back out of the hands of the Chronists, who held everything that mattered, who held the records, who held—

"Rede." She kept her voice in the place she kept it when she was talking a frightened apprentice down a tether, easy, unweighted, a voice with nothing riding on it. "The approach. The brightening—what the Eye shows, the star growing. There's a record of that? The real figures, I mean. Year by year. What it's measured at, as we come on."

"The approach tables." He said it the way you'd name a thing everyone knew. "Of course. The Chronists keep them—the master set's in the stacks, the sealed run. They're how the Helm sets the Tally, partly. You take the brightness, you work the distance, you advance the count." He shrugged, pleased to be asked, pleased to know. "They're beautiful, actually. Centuries of them. You can watch the whole Glide in a column of figures—the star getting nearer every year, right there in the dark, all the way back to—"

He stopped, because she had not stopped looking at him, and something in her stillness had finally reached him.

Tam felt the door, then. Not the bulkhead door of the bunk-ring, though that was shut. The other one. The one that, once you set your weight against it, did not let you back through to the side where the star grew brighter every year and your mother's face lifted into the gold and the count slid down toward a green morning. The one her grandmother had stood at for fifty years, hand on the brass, and never opened—and had died leaving open just a crack, just wide enough for a girl with good eyes to get her fingers in.

She heard Esme, flat and patient in the dark of the suit-link. Don't decide what it says. Read what it says.

"How far back do the approach tables go?" she asked—lightly, the way you ask before a door you can't unopen.