Zero Surprise

Chapter One: Baseline

The audit room was the only compartment on Deepwatch Station with a bad chair, and Imogen Marsk had fought two requisition cycles to keep it that way.

The chair had a loose gas strut. It sank half a centimetre every ninety seconds or so, unevenly, and it squeaked when it sank. People sitting in it adjusted, shifted, laughed at it, complained about it, or ignored it in the particular tense way that showed up beautifully on a shoulder-tension trace. It was the cheapest instrument she owned and one of the best.

Amal Khoury dropped into it, felt it sag, and pumped the lever twice with her heel out of pure spite.

"You could fix that," she said.

"I could."

"You won't."

"I won't." Imogen slid the cuff across the table. "Left wrist. You know the drill by now."

Amal knew the drill. It was her eleventh pre-dive audit in fourteen months, and she wore the cuff like an old bracelet, snapping the clasp without looking, already talking. That was the first mark on the trace, and a good one: talking over procedure, unasked, unnecessary. Noise.

"Ask me the word list," Amal said.

"Not yet."

"Ask me the word list, I've been practising."

"You can't practise the word list. That's the whole point of the word list."

"I practised having opinions about it." Amal grinned. She was thirty-four, compact, with a scar through one eyebrow from a cargo hook on Ganymede and a habit of tapping any hatch she passed three times with two fingers. She had told Imogen once that it was for luck and once that it was to let the hatch know she was coming, and had never settled on which story she preferred, which was itself worth a line in the file.

Imogen ran the sequence. Colour naming under mismatched labels. Reaction time to a tone that sometimes didn't come. A silent minute where the subject simply sat, and the trace recorded what a person does with an empty minute — hum, fidget, chew a lip, count something, invent a small private ritual. Amal hummed. She always hummed, four descending notes, off-key, from some song she claimed not to know.

Then the corridor walk, which was the part nobody understood and everybody joked about. Imogen sent her from the audit room to the galley and back by a route she had walked a thousand times, and logged the wrong turns.

Amal took one. Halfway back, at the junction outside stores, she went left instead of straight, stopped, said a mild obscenity, and corrected. Twelve seconds lost. Imogen noted it and felt, as she always did at that moment, something she never wrote down: relief.

Back in the chair, Amal watched her work. "You're smiling."

"I'm reading."

"You're smiling at the reading. That's worse. That's like a doctor whistling." She craned her neck. "What's my number?"

"You don't get a number."

"Everyone knows we get numbers."

"Everyone is wrong in a way I find useful." Imogen turned the display so it faced the wall. "You get a certification or you don't."

Amal leaned back into the sinking chair, unworried. She had never failed. She was the noisiest diver on the roster, and had been since the day she arrived, and Imogen had cleared her eleven times.

Through the port behind her, the Harrow hung in the dark.

It did not look like nine kilometres of anything. Distance and the weakness of the sun out here made it a smudge, a long grey seed pod with a shadowed slot down one side where the divers went in. Forty-one years ago it had come in fast from somewhere unhelpful, spent eleven days braking with an efficiency nobody had reverse-engineered since, folded itself into a wide patient orbit around Neptune, and stopped.

That was the whole history. It had done nothing since. It transmitted nothing. It emitted no waste heat beyond what thermal equilibrium demanded. It did not resist instruments, or answer them. Drills took samples; the samples were minerals, arranged in ways no geology would produce and no chemistry forbade. Inside, the hollow ran almost its full length, and the walls of the hollow carried ranked stone fronds, thin and parallel and vast, like the teeth of a rake standing on end for a kilometre.

Hence Harrow. And hence the other reason for the name, which the first survey crews had coined and nobody had ever managed to unsay: the divers came out combed smooth.

"You ever want to go down again?" Amal asked.

Imogen kept her eyes on the trace. "No."

"Liar. Everyone wants to go down again."

"That's true of everyone who has been down. It isn't an argument."

"It's the best argument there is." Amal stretched her arms above her head until a shoulder popped. "It's quiet in there, Marsk. I don't mean no-sound quiet. I mean — you know when you're a kid and you're ill, and someone else is in charge of everything, and you just lie there? It's that. Nothing surprises you. You reach for a handhold and it's exactly where your hand thought it would be. Every time. All the way down."

Imogen's stylus stopped moving.

She had heard that sentence, or its cousins, perhaps four hundred times in eleven years of debriefs. It went into the files under environmental affect. She had written a paper about it once for the Consortium's internal review and nobody had read it, because it recommended nothing and cost nothing and therefore had no place to live.

"You reach for a handhold and it's where your hand thought it would be," she repeated.

"Right." Amal wiggled her fingers. "Like the rock is polite."

"And how does that feel, afterwards? In the shuttle, coming back?"

Amal thought about it — an honest three-second pause, another good mark. "Boring," she said at last. "Everything up here is so loud. Yesterday somebody dropped a tray in the galley and I nearly took someone's head off. Doesn't last. By the second night I'm normal again." She tilted her head. "Is that a problem?"

"It's a data point."

"That's what you say when it's a problem."

Imogen printed the certification, signed it with her seal, and slid it across the table. "You're cleared. Descent tomorrow, oh-six-forty, shuttle Plumb. Chika will do your bloods tonight."

Amal took the sheet and folded it in half, then in half again, which she did not need to do. "Eleven," she said. "You know Grimm's on twenty-two? Twenty-two. He's got a mug with a number on it."

"I know about the mug."

"He's so boring now," Amal said, and it came out lightly, the way people say things they have decided not to look at. "He used to be the funniest man on this station. He had that limerick about the Director's beard."

"He did."

"Now he says good morning like he's reading it off a card." Amal stood, tapped the hatch frame three times with two fingers, and paused there with her hand on the metal. For a moment something moved behind her face, and Imogen — who was paid to see exactly that — saw it clearly.

"Amal."

"It's nothing."

"Say it anyway. Nothing costs me nothing."

Amal shrugged. "I hummed in there. Last dive. Down at the frond bank, near the bottom, I hummed my four notes, and I couldn't hear them."

"The acoustics are strange. The lattice absorbs—"

"No. I mean I couldn't hear them in my head." She laughed, and it was a good laugh, a real one, three syllables and a snort at the end. "Like I'd forgotten how the song went while I was singing it. Anyway. Oh-six-forty."

She went out. Imogen listened to her tap the next hatch down the corridor, three times, two fingers, and then the next.

Alone, Imogen turned the display back around and looked at the shape of Amal Khoury: the hesitations, the invented rituals, the off-key hum, the wrong turn at stores, the unnecessary folding of a sheet of paper. Entropy score in the ninety-fourth percentile of station population. A woman generating noise in every direction, all the time, for no reason, because that is what a person is — a system that keeps guessing wrong and keeps guessing anyway.

Imogen filed the certification and did not think, because she had never once let herself think it, about why every diver she had ever cleared had looked like this.

Behind her, through the port, the Harrow went on doing nothing at all.