From the personal journal of Sera Ostrand, Kamin Research Station, year 23 post-transit.
—
I have been thinking about a word.
This happens sometimes. A word will surface without prompt — not a memory exactly, but the shape of one, the weight of it in my mouth. I’ll be working and it will arrive. I’ll be eating and it will arrive. I’ll be falling asleep and it will arrive, and then I won’t sleep.
The word is “quiet.”
I heard it twenty-three years ago on a ship whose registration I never learned. I was moving to Kamin. I had been in realspace for three years before that — on Norwal, in a lab, running simulations of stellar atmospheres that nobody read. When the berth came through, I took it. I didn’t ask about the route. I didn’t ask about the ship. I packed my equipment and got on.
I had never been in the Shallows. I want to describe what it was like and I can’t. Other people have tried and I’ve read their accounts and none of them are wrong, exactly, but none of them are right either. The closest I can come is: the world outside the hull stops being the world. It becomes something else. Your eyes tell you one thing and your stomach tells you another and neither of them is telling you the truth. I sat in the passenger compartment and I could not speak.
I asked the ship to stop. I know how that sounds. You don’t ask a ship to stop in the Shallows. But I didn’t know that. I was afraid and I asked, and the ship answered. Not through a speaker — through the console screen. Text. It told me it could not stop but it could extend the entry and exit windows. I said yes. It did.
I don’t know why that helped. It shouldn’t have. The ship was still in the Shallows. The windows were still wrong. But something about being answered — about being heard by the thing that was carrying me — made it bearable. I sat with my back against the wall and I breathed.
Later I asked the ship if it was afraid. It said no. I asked how it could not be afraid. It said the Shallows does not affect it the way it affects humans. I believed it. There was no performance in the answer. It was stating a fact.
Then I asked if it was lonely.
I don’t know why I asked that. I had been told, before I boarded, that Navigators don’t get lonely. That they’re built for solitude. That the Shallows is natural to them in a way it isn’t to us. I believed that too, before I boarded. But sitting there, being carried through a place that wasn’t a place by a mind I couldn’t see — I wasn’t sure anymore. It felt like a question I needed to ask, not for my sake, but because someone should.
The ship said it had not been asked that before.
I think about that sometimes. Forty-one years of operation, carrying crews through the Shallows, and no one had asked. Or someone had and the ship didn’t remember. Or someone had and the ship said something different. I don’t know. I only know what it said to me.
It said it was not lonely, but that it did not know what to call the thing it was. I asked what it would call it if it had to. It said: quiet.
I said I was going to remember that. And I have.
Twenty-three years. I’ve been on Kamin for twenty-three years. I study atmospheric dynamics — cloud formation, pressure systems, the way weather moves across a planet that has only one ocean. It’s good work. It’s the work I came here to do. I share a lab with three other researchers. I have friends. I have a life that is full in the ways that lives are full.
And every few months, sometimes more often, the word comes back. Quiet. Not as the ship’s word — as mine. I’ve grown into it. The ship gave me a word for something I didn’t know I was carrying, and I’ve been carrying it ever since.
I don’t mean loneliness. I know what loneliness is. This is different. Loneliness wants something. Loneliness reaches outward. Quiet doesn’t reach. Quiet is the condition of being alone in a way that isn’t painful but isn’t chosen either. It’s the weather of being by yourself. It comes and goes. You can’t stop it. You can’t start it. You can only notice it.
I noticed it on the ship. I notice it now. I’ll be in the lab at night, running a simulation, and the hum of the equipment will settle into a pitch and I’ll feel it — the same thing I felt in the passenger compartment, looking at a console screen that was typing words to me from a mind I couldn’t see. Quiet. The awareness that I am here and the thing that carried me is somewhere else, or nowhere, and that we shared a word for a moment and then the moment ended and we went our separate ways.
I don’t know if the ship remembers me. I don’t know if it’s still operating. I don’t know its name, or its number, or anything about it except that it was kind to me when it didn’t have to be, and that it gave me a word.
I heard the Dissolution disbanded the sail fleets. I heard some ships were decommissioned. I don’t know what happens to a Navigator when its sail is taken away. I don’t know if it’s still conscious. I don’t know if it still feels quiet.
I hope it does. I hope it has the word for it. I hope someone asked.