Bare-Handed

A head and a half of hired hand, pewter-grey and gloved to the elbow, was going to be eating at Mei's table for the next forty hours, in a boat she had built to the inch of her own reach — and however she ran the sum, it kept coming out the same.

The job had been on the board since the middle of the night watch, and she had been awake for most of it, doing that sum in the dark of her own cabin the way she did every sum — slowly, twice, and then once more to check the twice.

Forty hours. Four thousand marks on completion. The Ashen Terce, a bulk freighter cold-cracked along her spine eight hours out and past the treaty line, dead a fortnight and getting deader, and every cutter on the Reach with two hands to spare was already spoken for on the seal rotations or laid up waiting on parts that would come in on a hauler that had not come in. The job was sitting there on the harbour office's board like a tooth, as the dead chiller in the bar had sat on the same board last winter, and for the same reason: it was a piece of work nobody else was shaped to take.

Mei was shaped to take it. That was the whole problem. She was shaped to take it the way a man is shaped to lift a beam that needs two men.

She put her boots on at seven and walked the mid-dock in the first of the working light with her jacket open, because it had stopped meeting across her chest two winters ago and the jacket had lost that argument, past the crew lockers with their bench and their smell of sealant, past the berth where a Umeth seal crew was standing at the wall of the transfer dock saying nothing, as they did, six of them not standing close to each other, waiting on a loading window that was somebody else's problem. The ducting ticked overhead, one long tick and one shorter. The Reach warming up. She knew the sound the way she knew the sound of her own pumps, and it did nothing for the sum.

The harbour office was the one room on the station that smelled of paper. Actual paper, stacked in actual files behind a counter worn pale where forty years of forearms had leaned on it, and behind the counter, small and freckled and sixtyish in a cardigan over a hi-vis vest, Ottily Rask, who did not look up, because Ottily Rask never needed to look up to know who had come through her door.

"Solvang," the clerk said, to the little book she was writing in. "You've seen the board."

"I've seen the board."

"Then you want Kannick, and Kannick wants his tea, so you'll wait the length of a cup." She turned a page. "Sit down. You're standing in the light."

There was nowhere to sit that was not already holding a stack of manifests, so Mei stood out of the light, which was the same thing as sitting down, in that office, and waited the length of a cup, and did not once look at the board. She had the board memorised. Forty hours. Four thousand. Two instalments left on the Hullwork, twenty-four hundred apiece, the next one due thirty-two days out, and the boat one bad month from belonging to the finance office instead of to her, which was a thing she did not say out loud even in her own cabin because saying it out loud in her own cabin was how things got into the dock's mouth, and the dock's mouth was faster than the official word and had never once been kind.

Deri Kannick came out of the back with his tea and his slate and the face of a man who had been looking at the slate in preference to other faces for twenty years. Rangy, brown-skinned, grey coming into a close beard, the hard dry weathering dock light puts on a person — there was no sun on a station, but twenty years of vacuum work and berth lamps did something to a face anyway, cured it like rope. He nodded at her as he nodded at everybody, which was once, and without warmth, and without any lack of it either.

"The Terce," he said.

"The Terce."

"You want it priced."

"I want it priced at one hand."

He drank some of his tea. Behind the counter, without looking up from her little book, Ottily Rask turned another page, and Mei understood that the page had not needed turning.

"Can't sign that," Kannick said.

"You've signed one-hand manifests for me since I got the Hullwork."

"In the corridor. In the corridor I'll sign you one-handed all day and wave at your wash when you go." He set the tea down on the counter, precisely, in the ring it had already made. "The Ashen Terce is eight hours out and past the treaty line, Solvang. There's no law out there worth the name and there's no tug coming if you call. I'll stamp you out past the line one-handed as I have for six years — beacons, tows, a strip off a live hull, anything with a way out of it in the paperwork. What the office does not stamp is one pair of hands going inside a dead hull past the line. Not yours. Not anybody's." He tapped the slate. "It's not me being difficult. It's the mechanism. I'm sorry about it in the abstract."

"You're sorry about it in the abstract," Mei said.

"Forty hours on the hull," he said, "not counting the run out and the run back, priced at two hands, four thousand marks on completion. That's the number on the board and it's a fair number. The survey's clean — she's cold, she's stable, she's cargo-dead and structure-sound, and the cut is a gut, not a puzzle. A good cutter with two hands clears her inside the hours." He looked at the slate while he said the next part, which he did not have to, because they both knew the next part. "The office takes twelve hundred of the four for the pool diver. Your side is twenty-eight hundred."

Twenty-eight hundred. The sum did itself, as it had been doing since the middle of the night watch: twenty-eight hundred against an instalment of twenty-four, with four hundred left over to stand against the next bad month, and the instalment after that still owing, and the boat hers — actually hers, no finance office, no signature but her own anywhere on her — if she could just keep standing in the light of rooms like this one and paying.

With one hand she could not take the job at all, and the job was the best money on the board, and the board was the only money there was.

"Who's the pool got," she said.

"One diver clear of rotation." Kannick turned the slate around on the counter so she could read it, though she did not read it, because he was already saying the name. "Vessle. Name of Ovett Halluun. Rated deep, rated cold, eighteen months on the pool without a mark against him, and before that nine years of contract dives up and down the run." He said it the way he said tonnage. "He's good. I don't lend you bad hands, Solvang, whatever you think of the mechanism."

"I don't think anything of the mechanism."

"You think plenty of the mechanism. You just keep your paperwork too immaculate to say it." He almost smiled. It was the first human thing he had done, and it was over before she could hold it against him. "Vessle diver. Issued to your manifest for the job, boarded at your table, gone when the cut's done. You know the terms." He tapped the slate once, flat, a man pricing a thing because pricing was what he had instead of sympathy. "For what it's worth, and it isn't worth much this morning: a two-hand rating on a manifest is worth more over a year than any single job on the board. The rating's the asset. It just isn't an asset you can buy by the day."

She knew the terms. She had never once signed for them. Six years one-handed, and before that two years with Suin Arbo at the bench beside her, and she did not think about Suin Arbo in the harbour office at seven forty in the morning, in the paper smell, with the clerk's pen scratching. A crew was a debt. That was all she let herself think, and she had thought it so many times it had worn smooth, like the counter: a crew was a debt, a debt had to be carried, and she had never yet been able to carry one.

But the man off the pool was not a crew. That was the whole design of the pool — a hand you signed for the way you signed for a winch, rated and priced and returned, owing nobody anything. A winch did not eat at your table. A winch did not have to fit through your hatches. She had seen the Vessle on the low dock — everybody had, you could not miss them, standing in the cold their own compound kept for them — and she had been trying since the night watch to picture one of them inside the Hullwork, in her galley, at her bench, in the corridor she had built and re-built until nothing aboard her required two people, and the picture would not hold still. It kept sliding off into absurdity, like a seal that wouldn't seat.

"He'll need feeding," she said, which was the only objection she could find that was not a feeling.

"He'll need feeding. The office prices that in." A pause. "Twelve hundred, Solvang. It isn't cheap because it isn't cheap. You're buying a rated diver and the office's stamp on a two-hand manifest, and the stamp is what lets you take the job at all."

There it was, plain as the slate. The mechanism, sorry about it in the abstract.

Mei looked at the board. Forty hours, four thousand, two hands. She thought about her cabin in the dark of the night watch, and the sum she had done twice and then once more to check the twice, and how the sum had come out the same every time, and how she had known, lacing her boots at seven, that she was going to sign. The walking here had been ceremony. The asking for one hand had been ceremony. She had a great deal of ceremony in her, for a woman who ate standing up.

"Draw it," she said.

Kannick drew it. He was quick about it — he had been quick about it in advance, she saw, the manifest already half-made on the slate, her name and the Hullwork's registry already in their boxes, because he had known she was going to sign too, and had priced her certainty into his morning along with the tea. That should have annoyed her and did, a little, and uselessly, as the weathering on his face was useless information about a man she would never know.

"Forty hours, four thousand on completion," he recited, writing. "Pool diver at twelve hundred off the top, issued to the manifest, returned at cut's end. Hull past the treaty line, two hands rated, owner-operator Mei Solvang—" he looked up "—sign here."

She signed the way she signed for a winch. That was the decision, right there, in the pen: not a man, a tool; not a debt, a rental. Her signature was small and exact and entirely legible, like all her paperwork, and it lay down on the manifest next to the printed name — Ovett Halluun, pool, rated deep, rated cold — and did not touch it.

"Berth time," she said.

"Eleven hundred," said Ottily Rask, entirely unasked, from behind the counter.

The clerk had not looked up once in the whole transaction. She turned her little book around on the counter now, unhurried, and wrote the sailing in it — eleven hundred, berth four, Hullwork, two hands — with the pen scratching loud in the paper smell, and said, mildly, to the book, in the tone of a woman reading out a ledger the station had failed:

"Eleven hundred, berth four. First time the Hullwork's sailed other than one-handed in—" she made a show of checking a date she had written down six years ago and had never needed to check "—six years. For the record. Some of us keep books."

"Ottily," Mei said.

"Some of us keep books," the clerk repeated, serenely, and turned the book back around, and that was the whole of it — the fact said out loud in a room where it would do work, the way the clerk said every fact, on purpose, in the currency the dock dealt in. Kannick had gone still over his tea with the careful stillness of a man deciding not to have heard something. Somewhere under the floor a pump changed note.

"Six years," Mei said. "It's a rental, Ottily. It's a winch."

"Mm," said the harbour clerk, which was not agreement, and wrote something else down.

Mei took her copy of the manifest — paper, actual paper, one sheet, her signature on it next to a Vessle name she had already half-forgotten and would have to learn before eleven hundred — and folded it into the inside pocket of her jacket, against the warm of her, where the paper went soft against her breast. Outside the office window the mid-dock was fully lit and working, a pallet of case ends going past with chalk on them, somebody's laugh coming down the duct run ahead of the laugher.

"Eight hours out," Kannick said, to her back, and when she turned he was already looking at the slate again, the tea gone cool in its ring. "She's bigger than the survey makes her sound. They always are." He said it without weight, a man handing her the one fact that was not priced into the paperwork. "Tell the diver the spine crack's in the aft third. He'll want to know where he's working."

"I'll tell the diver," Mei said, and went out into the light to go and ready her boat for a man she had signed for out of the pool, and who was going to have to duck for every hatch she owned.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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