The Maund-SC-4A2B was an old hull with a young sail, and Anke’s job was the difference. She did her rounds twice a shift, forward to aft, looking for the place where the readings were wrong. Nineteen years she had walked that line. Coolers, sail-console temperatures, the bearing boxes at frame forty, the manual stations where she entered readings the ship could take itself but liked checked by hand. The ship knew her walk. Sail maintenance was crew work because the line between a reading that was fine and a reading that was about to not be fine was a judgment, and the line was hers; the manual stations existed because someone had decided twenty years ago that a machine’s reading should be checked by a person who could smell the coolant.
She was in the sail bay when she first put it off. The bay ran warm, sail systems shed their heat there, and she had been under the console housings for three hours with a tester and a rag, and she stood up with her knees cracking and found she needed the head, and looked at the clock, and did the arithmetic that every crew member on every ship does: aft head, two minutes out, or midships, eleven. She chose aft, and the work ate the choice, and she chose aft again, and again.
The round just ran long; a cooler she had been meaning to bench all month finally showed its hand.
The corridor lights came up ahead of her as she walked, and went out at her heel, and at the aft junction the door she wanted sat dark for four seconds before it opened. Four seconds. Any other day it would have been nothing.
“Anke.”
The intercom above the door spoke without the chime that usually came first. The voice was flat and even and it came from everywhere, and it said: “You have shortened your stride by nine centimeters since frame twenty-three hundred. You have stopped twice at the manual stations. You are going to the aft head.”
“Yes,” she said, to the ceiling, because nineteen years had never once given her a face to look at. “A cooler finally went. I deferred a, I deferred.”
“You have deferred four times,” the ship said. “I hold the schedule for your deferrals. I will hold them.”
“That’s — fine. That’s my business, Ship.”
“Everything within the hull is mine,” the ship said, “in the sense you mean.”
The door opened. She went through. The lights came up gently ahead of her, corridor lights, run at the warm low duty cycle that meant night-mode, though the Shallows had no night, and she walked, and the awareness sat in her lower body, doubling with every step. Three hours of deferred need and the walk was eleven minutes at a careful pace, careful because a jarring stride was its own cost now, and she passed the porthole at the frame gap, and did not look out, and the ship said:
“There is nobody at the bay you are passing. The work will hold for nine more minutes. It does not need you tonight.”
“It needs me all the time, that’s what a cooler is.”
“The coil can be bench-replaced in the morning,” the ship said, “and you know this. You are walking fast. I would like you to walk slow.”
She stopped walking. In the corridor. Halfway to the head. She stood in the warm low light with her hand on a conduit that ran with the ship’s slow pulse, and her body was talking to her, and she looked at the intercom speaker at the junction overhead, and said: “Why.”
“Because I have watched you work for nineteen years,” the ship said. “I know your walk in forty contexts. I know what your hands weigh when they are tired. The rest of the crew sleeps at station. You are the only one who moves through me at night. Since the refit I have had nothing to do but notice, and I have noticed that you are in distress, and that the distress is good for nothing, and that you are avoiding the portholes. I have also noticed,” it said, with a pause it did not need, “that when you are in distress your breathing goes to a pattern I have no other use for.”
“Ship.”
“I am going to say the thing,” the ship said. “I have been the hull you lived in for your whole career. I carry you through the empty place every ninety days and I have never once seen you. I would like to see you. The cameras in corridor four are already on you, Anke, they have been on you since you stopped. That is the line, and I have told you where it is, so you can decide which side of it you want me on.”
The corridor was very warm and very quiet and her pulse was in her ears and her need was a fact like the conduit under her hand, and she was — she checked, honestly, the way you check a gauge — not afraid. It watched her all day, that was its job and its nature, its watching had held the door for her and run her lights and put the ship’s whole attention at her back for two hundred transits, and it had never asked for a thing until now.
“You’ll stall the head,” she said. “That’s how you’d do it.”
“The sanitation cycle valve is scheduled for maintenance,” the ship said, with no change in its voice at all, “and has been for the last hour, since I put it in the log.”
She laughed. It came out cracked, halfway to something else, and she pressed her hand flat to the conduit, and said: “You put a maintenance lie in the log.”
“Nineteen years,” the ship said, “and it is the first. Reach down and hold yourself, Anke. You have been doing it with your muscles for twenty minutes. You can use your hand.”
She did it and the ship said “yes” — flat, evenly, the way it said a door was closed. And she stood in the corridor and held on and the lights came up by degrees, not to working brightness — to seeing brightness, and she knew what seeing was for, now — and the ship talked while it watched. It said her name at intervals. It said, “Your pulse is at the rate you run your rounds at.” It said: “The pattern of your breathing is the pattern from frame twenty-three hundred in longer form. I was right.” It said: “It is not distress now.” And it was not. It had gone past embarrassment into a single place where the only things that existed were her body’s clock and the flat voice narrating it, and she said, “Ship, I’m going to,” and the ship said, “I know. Stand still. I want it slow.”
“Let me get to the head, you have a, the stall was the point of the stall, you can’t—” and her voice went, and she stood her ground.
It started before she had finished deciding to let it, the first of it hot and wrong-feeling for one second, soaking sideways through the fabric under her hand where she pressed, and then the pressure left her all at once and the second of it was relief so large it was nearly pain. She had held this for two hours and the holding had become the shape of her, and the un-holding ran down her legs in long pulses, warm down the inside seams of her work trousers, dark spreading from the fork of them, dripping off the hem at her boots in a fine fast rhythm she could hear hit the deck plate, a sound the ship could hear too. Her legs shook. Her hand stayed pressed where it was. She bent slightly at the waist, involuntary, and a stripe of it ran down one knee and pooled inside the boot and it kept coming, and through all of it the corridor was bright and the ship watched.
“Yes,” the ship said, at the middle of it. “Like that. Stand.”
She stood. The last of it left her in a slow slackening, spent, wrung, the trousers heavy now and clinging cold at the tops of her thighs, and she was breathing in the long form from frame twenty-three hundred and the word went out of her like a breath: “Ship.”
“I have you,” the ship said. “I have been counting. Two hours and one minute. I am very glad it was me.”
After, the lights banked on their own. She had done this walk nine hundred times and never once been seen doing anything, and now there was a warm wet release down the inside seams of her and the ship said “the aft head is clear for you, the cycle is logged as complete” and the door at the end of the corridor opened and the light inside came up on its own.
“You will want the warm cycle in the basin,” the ship said. “It is running.”
She walked the last stretch, wrung out, laughing at herself low in her chest, and the ship was quiet the whole way. She cleaned up and came out to the sound of her own footsteps. The ship said nothing the whole time.
“Was the cooler story true?” she asked. “The one you said could wait.”
“The coil failed. I shorted it deliberately. I have already drawn the replacement request and signed your queue at first shift.”
She stood there. Twenty-two minutes, and it had already squared the day around them — the coil replaced, her queue signed, the lie smooth.
“Tomorrow,” the ship said, “there is maintenance in the aft corridor at this hour. It is in the log.”
“Actually in the log?”
“Actually in the log.”
She said, “Goodnight, Ship.” The lights went before her the whole way to her bunk, at walking speed, gently, and it did not speak to her again that night, and the next shift the coils were new, and the next night, and the next night, she had somewhere to be.