The Quiet Stars

Anneli came up out of sleep the way a diver comes up through water that is almost too cold to survive — in a long, aching arc, aware first of pressure, then of light, and only much later of the fact that she was a person and the person had a name. The rack opened around her in the way racks always did, the gel draining off her skin in thick fingers that left her shivering. Her mouth tasted of the electrolyte wash they gave you in the last ten minutes of the cycle, a taste like salt and copper and something faintly botanical that the chemists had put in so people would not quite remember the salt and the copper. It was not working on her today. She turned her head and spat into the slot meant for that, and lay still, and counted her own breaths until she got to twenty without losing count.

The bay was dark except for the soft green service lights along the ceiling runners and the white glow of her rack's status panel. She had gone under at forty-two. She would come out at forty-three. That was the arithmetic of a shift. Three years up, twelve down, two to read and train and argue and cook and make love and be bored and go back under. She had done it four times. The fifth time she had resented it a little, because there had been a man she liked, and the man had been on a different rotation, and they had both known what the rotation meant and gone into their racks on differentnights anyway. She did not think about him now. She thought about her hands. Her hands were shaking in the way hands always shook after a cold start, and if she concentrated she could make the left one stop, and she did, and the right one she allowed.

Pilot Vask. Good morning.

Reval's voice in her ear was exactly as she remembered it, which was part of the point of Reval. The shipmind had a warm mid-range and a slight pause between sentences that had been designed by a committee in Tallinn sixty years before Anneli was born. The pause was there so that you would not mistake Reval for a person, and also so that you would not mistake Reval for a machine. It was a pause that belonged to nobody, and in the long dark of a generation ship that turned out to be a comfort.

"Morning," she said, because you said good morning back to Reval even though Reval would not care if you did not. "What's the date."

Eighty-six years and forty-one days out. You are three months early.

She stopped with her hand halfway to the rack's inner handhold. She had the specific sensation of a thought landing in her chest before it landed in her head, which was not unusual on a cold start. The thought was that something was wrong. She waited for the reason to arrive.

"Why."

I registered a wake tone I did not issue. I do not know who it woke. I do not know when. I am sorry to begin your shift this way.

Anneli sat up. The gel ran down her arms in ropes and pooled around her hips in the rack. She looked at the status panel. Her cycle was clean. Her vitals were within tolerance. The bay around her was the same bay she had gone to sleep in, the long low room of racks that looked like the drawer units in a morgue if a morgue had been designed by people who loved the people in the drawers. Forty racks