Reach for Him

Once a week for a year, Tess Kovar had poured for an alien too big for her doorways, and once a week he had stood at the low end of her bar and refused, courteously, to sit down. She had stopped asking why early on. She had never once let herself call the not-asking what it was.

The low dock woke up the way it always did, which was badly. She had the bar lights up by six and the first pot on by five past, and by twenty past she had Pell Anouk at the rail with both hands around a mug like the mug had personally offended him, and Mirsa Bel at the second table doing her stock-runner's sums on the back of a manifest slip, which was the nearest Mirsa ever came to sitting still.

The ceiling ticked. It did that when the dock's heat cycled on, one long tick and then a shorter one, somewhere over the low end of the bar, in the stretch of panelling that had been sagging since before Tess signed for the place. Four percent of this bar was hers. The rest belonged to the Reach, and the Reach had never sent anybody down to look at the ceiling, which told Tess exactly how much the Reach expected the ceiling to matter. She wiped down the rail and thought about the delivery due off the morning shuttle and did not think about the ceiling.

Sennik came in at half past, off the end of the night shift, the way he always did.

He had to duck for the door. He had to duck again for the conduit run somebody had bolted under the lintel a decade before Tess was born, and then he straightened, slow and careful, in the middle of her floor, and the bar got smaller around him the way it always did. A head and a half taller than her, and she was not tall, but still. Slate-blue from collar to cuff, the bronze patterning that ran down his throat and along his forearms sitting quiet this morning, dim as old coin. His eyes had no white in them at all. She had stopped finding that strange somewhere around month two and now it was just Sennik, same as the ceiling was just the ceiling.

"Morning," she said.

"Tess." He had a voice like a pump running somewhere below deck, and he used her name the way he did everything, like he had weighed it first. He took his place at the low end of the bar — the far end, where the ceiling dipped worst, where no human would stand if they could help it — and he stood. He always stood.

She had given up asking him to sit by month three. She still dragged the tall stool out from the back every week and set it at the low end anyway, because not offering anything at all felt ruder than offering something he would refuse, and every week he looked at the stool and said thank you, and meant it, and stayed on his feet. The stool was heavy and awkward and she moved it the way she moved everything heavy, low and square, hip and shoulder doing the work — she was broad through the hip and the back, thick in the arm, and had never once wished otherwise: it was a useful body and it did what she asked of it. It had become a ritual so ordinary that she no longer noticed herself doing it, like lighting the burners.

"Usual?"

"Please."

She poured the dark grain liquor the Umeth crews drank, the one that came in flat-sided bottles and cost her more than it earned, and set it in front of him, and he wrapped one enormous hand around the glass and it disappeared. That was the whole transaction. It had been the whole transaction for a year. He drank one, sometimes two — never before a shift, only after one; she had worked out inside a month that this was the far end of his working week and not the near end of it, that the man came off eleven hours of pressure seals in the dark and spent two of his own hours standing in a warm room where nothing was owed of him, and then went and slept; he paid exact; he stood at the low end watching the room with the patience of a man waiting for weather; and when he left he said her name again, like putting a tool back where it belonged.

Pell raised his mug without lifting his head. "Tell him the news, then."

"Which news," Tess said.

"Any of it. All of it. There's a breach drill on the mid dock at seven." Pell said it into his drink. "Waste of a morning. Some rigger's going to stand around in a suit for three hours learning how to die tidy. Not him. He's done his night; that's day rota's grief."

Mirsa didn't look up from her manifest slip. "It's not a drill if nobody's told. Davek's crew got pulled off the transfer dock yesterday and nobody's said why."

"Refit rota," Sennik said, from the low end, to his glass. "The transfer dock plates came due for their five-year. They put us on the mid-dock until it clears. It was chalked on the board a fortnight ago."

"Davek's crew gets pulled off everything," Pell said, who had not heard a word of it. "They're the only ones who can find their own—"

The comm panel over the back bar crackled, and Ottily Rask's voice came down the dock channel, thin and fast and completely uninterested in being greeted.

"All hands low dock, this is harbourside. This is not a drill." Ottily never sounded excited. She sounded faintly annoyed, like the station had failed a ledger. "There is a hull breach in the transfer throat above you. Pressure's holding but holding is a word we're using generously. Low dock goes hard-sealed in—" a pause, paper or the sound of somebody else's math— "eleven minutes, and it stays sealed for two days, give or take whatever the seal crews tell me after. Get your people out or get comfortable. Harbourside out."

The bar went very quiet. The ceiling ticked.

"Two days," Mirsa said. She was already on her feet, manifest slip folded into her sleeve, doing the thing stock-runners did where their whole body pointed at the door before their head had finished deciding.

"Not a drill," Pell said, with enormous satisfaction, and was also on his feet, mug abandoned half-full, which Tess had never seen in all the years she had poured for him. "I knew about Davek's crew. I said. You both heard me say."

"Out," Tess said, and pointed, and they went — Mirsa first, fast and low, Pell behind her still talking, and she heard him in the corridor telling some other early-shift idiot that he'd known, he'd said, they'd all heard him say. The door cycled behind them and the corridor noise cut to nothing and Tess stood in her bar and counted.

Eleven minutes from the call. The call had been maybe a minute. Pell and Mirsa had taken thirty seconds. The morning shuttle's delivery was now somebody else's problem, which was a pity, and the bar takings were a pity, and none of it was a disaster, because she had a full cellar and a chiller that— she turned around to take the glass off the low end of the bar and Sennik was still there.

He had not moved. He stood at the low end under the worst of the ceiling with his glass in his hand, and he was watching her with those whiteless eyes, and he did not look alarmed, or surprised, or like a man who had missed anything. He looked exactly like he always looked, which was like he had decided to be precisely where he was.

"Sennik." Her voice came out wrong. "You have to go. Now. The seals—"

"I heard the clerk." He said it evenly. He looked at the door, and back at her, and he did not move toward it, and she understood, with a lurch that had nothing to do with the station, that he was doing arithmetic she could not see. "If I leave now I reach the corridor before the drop. If the crew down there is slow to seal, I am in a corridor full of men who should have left already, pushing." He set the glass down, empty, squared to the rail, exact as payment. "The breach is in the transfer throat. This bar is aft of the second bulkhead. Pressure-wise, it is the safest room on the low dock."

"That's not—" She was already moving, coming out from behind the bar, which she never did when he was in it. "Sennik, it's two days. You don't want to spend them sealed in my bar, you have a bunk, you have a crew, you have—" she gestured at the whole rest of his life, somewhere up-dock, on the far side of seals she could not lift — "a life."

Something moved in the bronze at his throat. He said, "The door, Tess," in a voice that was not unkind at all, and that was when the klaxon went.

It was not loud, on the low dock. It was a flat, patient tone, one long note, and under it she heard the seals themselves — a sound she had only ever heard in drill announcements, a deep sequential thunk, thunk, thunk travelling down the dock like a slow fist knocking, each bulkhead dropping in its turn. She ran the last three steps to the door and put her hand on the manual cycle and the panel was already red. Locked from harbourside. Through the porthole she could see the corridor, empty, lit in the flat yellow of emergency lighting, and at the far end of it the last bulkhead sitting down into its housing like something that had never intended to move again.

Four minutes. The call had said eleven and the seals had come in on eleven, the way Ottily's numbers always did; she had simply spent four of them standing in the middle of her own floor telling an enormous alien to go home instead of throwing him out by the shoulder. She got the arithmetic wrong by four minutes. She stood there with her hand on a dead panel and did the sum twice more to be sure and it came out wrong both times, and it did not once occur to her that the four minutes had not been hers to spend — that he had looked at the door and declined it in plain words, for reasons of his own, and that no amount of throwing would have moved him. She charged herself for it anyway. She always did.

"Two days," she said, to the door.

"Give or take," said Sennik, behind her, exactly like a man quoting a clerk, "whatever the seal crews tell her after."

She turned around. He was still at the low end of the bar. He had picked his glass back up, seen it was empty, and set it down again, and the ordinariness of that small gesture hit her somewhere under the ribs. The bar was empty of everyone but the two of them. The lights were still up, the second pot was still hot, the stool she had dragged out that morning still sat at the low end with nobody on it, and the whole dock was sealed and silent behind a red panel, and she was going to be alone in this room with Sennik Kessek.

What she felt, to her total bewilderment, was embarrassed.

It made no sense. She had served this man every week for a year. She had been alone in the bar with him at closing a dozen times — more than a dozen — stacking chairs around him while he finished his glass and paid and said her name. Nothing about this was new except the door. And yet her face was hot, and she had turned back to the rail so he would not see it, and she stood there wiping down a bar top that was already clean, furious at herself, unable to name a single thing she was embarrassed about.

It was the room, she decided. The room was suddenly wrong. A bar with no one in it but the two of them was not a bar, it was just a small hot room with a man in it, and she had not, in a year, noticed how small it was, or how hot, or how much of it he took up, because there had always been Pell's voice and Mirsa's manifest slips and the dock noise through the door to keep it a workplace. Now the door was sealed and it was not a workplace. It was the low end of the bar and him, standing under the bad ceiling, standing the way he always stood, like standing was the shape he had chosen to be.

"Well," she said, to the clean rail. "I can still pour. You're a paying customer for the duration, that's the rule, I don't make the—"

"I have no quarters on this dock," Sennik said. "My bunk is on the crew deck, mid station. My kit is in a locker on the transfer dock." He said it without complaint, the way a man reads out a manifest. "The clerk gave the length of it. The seal crews will tell her longer." A pause, and then, with the faintest possible weight on it, like he was setting the words down the way he set down the glass: "I can stand."

"You can sit," she said, sharp, because it came out before she had hold of it, and she heard it land and could not take it back. She gestured at the stool, at the tables, at every chair in the empty room. "It's two days, Sennik. Nobody stands that long. I have a room upstairs, I have—" she stopped herself, recalculated, kept going — "a couch. You can have the couch, I mean. For sleeping. It's short but it's flat."

He was quiet for a moment. When she looked up he was regarding the stool the way he regarded it every week, and she could not read the look at all, and she had known that for a year and it had not bothered her before this morning.

"Thank you," he said, and meant it, and stayed on his feet.

She was opening her mouth to say — something, she did not know what, something about the ceiling or the seals or the stupid ordinary fact of him — when the alarm started.

Not the klaxon. Smaller and nearer and infinitely worse: a high, even peep, peep, peep from below her feet, up through the floor grating by the cellar hatch, a sound she knew in her spine because she had paid for the unit that made it. The chiller. The chiller that held her cellar at four degrees, the cellar that was, at this hour of this morning, stocked fuller than it had been all quarter, because the delivery due off the morning shuttle was meant to go out as fast as it came in. Her whole margin on a bar she owned four percent of was sitting downstairs in the cold, and the cold had just told her it was dying.

Tess stood very still for one breath, and then she was across the floor and hauling the hatch up, and the air that came up out of her cellar was not cold enough, she could feel it on her face, faintly, insultingly warm, like a hand that had almost remembered you.

Behind her, unhurried, taking up the whole middle of her bar, Sennik said: "Tess."

"I know," she said.

"I run pressure seals." His voice came from closer than she expected, and he was there at the hatch beside her, ducked low under the joists, looking down into her cellar with those whiteless eyes, and the bronze at his forearms had come up a shade without her noticing when. "Cold is a seal problem. Show me."

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

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