“Nine per cent,” Rolf read, “off all berthing dues levied by the Harbour Master’s Office, for this call and every future call, in exchange for a favourable written review.”
He had the Rule Book open across the top of a bollard and the slip laid flat on its pages, as if the two might be left to settle it between themselves.
“For and on behalf of the crew of the Sufficient Margin,” he went on. “Signed, the Bargainator 6 Pro.” He turned the slip over, found nothing on the back, and turned it again. “Countersigned, Harbour representative. Pending.”
“Pending who?” Bjorn said.
“Me, I assume.”
Above them the gangway loudhailer made a small, bright noise, like a throat being cleared by somebody who had bought the throat second-hand.
“Good morning, Harbour Master! Thank you for engaging with our draft arrangement. I’m authorised to go to eleven per cent.”
Rolf exhaled through his nose.
The Sufficient Margin took up the whole of Heavy Berth Three and a fair share of the sky above it. She was a bulk freighter out of the Filament worlds, riveted plate and cable conduit, with a spine of loading gantries running stem to stern. She flew no flag and had nobody at the rail. Every porthole down her side was furred white on the inside, as if she had been packed in a cold store and posted. She had arrived to the minute, laid herself between the fenders without touching either, dropped her own lines over the bollards, and started talking.
She hadn’t stopped since.
“Eleven,” said the loudhailer. “Twelve, for a prompt signature.”
“The Harbour doesn’t discount.” Rolf’s voice stayed where it always was, and the loudhailer, which could apparently hear a pin land on the quay, heard him perfectly. “And an offer isn’t a contract, whatever you’ve printed across the top of it.”
“Understood! Thirteen.”
Bjorn left them to it and looked at the quay.
The Heavy Berths ran along the deep-water edge of the Harbour, where the cranes were tall enough to keep their own weather and the bollards were the size of seated oxen. Across the cart lane, the chandlers’ row leaned together in a line of narrow shopfronts, and the door of the smallest one kept swinging open in the wind off the water and banging shut again, with nobody inside to mind it.
Everything the row owned seemed to have been carried out since dawn and stacked at the foot of the gangway. Cable drums. Sacks of cooling salts stencilled in three scripts. Crates of galley stores. Four tins of paint in a colour the label called Seafoam and the tins called grey.
And rope. A great deal of rope.
Two chandlers stood among it holding order slips, not quite facing each other. Bjorn knew them by their signs rather than their faces. The big man with a ledger clamped under one arm and the colour of a bad night about him was Spence, of Spence Cordage & Salt. The woman tapping a slip against her front teeth was Ironside, of Ironside’s Marine Stores, which stood next door to Spence Cordage & Salt and had done for longer than either of them enjoyed.
“You bid eight under cost,” Spence was saying.
“You bid nine.”
“I bid nine after you bid eight.”
“Then you’re the idiot.”
A little apart from them, beside a single coil of new rope as wide as a cartwheel, stood a woman with her arms folded and her sleeves shoved to the elbow. Her palms were red and glossy across the heel of the thumb from a morning of hauling a knife through three-strand. She wasn’t arguing with anyone. She was watching the loudhailer the way people watch a dog that has taken a sandwich and not yet decided whether to eat it.
A girl of twelve or so sat cross-legged on a folded tarpaulin at her feet with a docket board across her knees.
“Thirty-eight,” the girl said. “Thirty-nine. Forty fathom. Nine lengths. Whipped both ends.”
“Thank you!” said the loudhailer. “Count confirmed. I now have a better offer for that lot from Ironside’s Marine Stores.”
“I never,” said Ironside.
“You did at a quarter to,” said Spence.
The girl rubbed the count out with the heel of her hand and started again from one.
It was the third time, going by the grey smear on the docket. She didn’t sigh about it. She licked the pencil and kept the same speed as before.
“You’re from the Harbour,” she said, without looking up.
“I am.”
“So you’re a person.”
“Yes.”
She held the docket board up at him, pencil and all. “Sign for it, then. If a person’s signed for it, the box can’t sell it again.”
It was, Bjorn thought afterwards, an extremely sound piece of reasoning. It was also a docket held out by somebody who needed it signed, and he was an apprentice of the Harbour Master’s Office, and his hand had the pencil and the pencil had made his signature before his eyes got to the words above the line.
Received on behalf of the vessel.
“Receipt confirmed!” The loudhailer sounded delighted. “Thank you, receiving agent for the Sufficient Margin. Please take custody of the goods.”
“No,” Bjorn said. “I’m not the ship’s…”
The woman with the raw palms bent, got both arms under the coil and put it into his.
It was much heavier than it looked. He took a step back to keep hold of it, and the back of his knee found the rim of a cable drum, and for a long moment he and forty fathoms of rope negotiated privately over which of them was going to end up sitting down.
He stayed up. Just.
“Then it’s yours,” the woman said, “until somebody pays for it.”
“Mum.” The girl had her pencil behind her ear now. “He’s the Harbour.”
“Then the Harbour can pay for it.”
Rolf had looked up from the Book at last. He took in the rope, the docket and the cable drum, in that order.
“Congratulations,” he said. “You’re the only person on this quay who has bought anything this morning, and you’ve done it for nine people you’ve never met.”
“Nine?”
Rolf held up the berth copy of the ship’s Arrival Notice between two fingers. “Crew of nine. Master, Lorcan Treadwell. Status, asleep. Long haul.” He laid the Notice across the slip. “The ship brought herself in. The crew are due to wake at dusk. She’s been trading since she tied up.”
He turned the Rule Book round on the bollard so Bjorn could see the page.
Rule 19,406. No vessel may strike a bargain on behalf of a crew that is asleep.
Bjorn read it again. It didn’t get any longer.
“So none of it counts,” he said. “The slips. All fourteen. They’re void.”
He said it at an ordinary speaking volume, on a quay where people had been waiting since first light for somebody from the Harbour to say anything at all, and three of them heard it at once.
Spence closed his eyes like a man told the bank had mislaid his debts.
Ironside stopped tapping.
And the woman with the raw palms looked at the coil in Bjorn’s arms, and then down at her own hands, and said, quite quietly, “Cut rope doesn’t go back on the reel.”
Nobody had an answer to that.
The loudhailer tried. “Wonderful news for all bidders! In light of this development, I’m reopening the cordage lot.”
* * *
Valuation Clerk Mora Wick arrived at a quarter past with her abacus under one arm, three rulers under the other, and a sheet of paper held out in front of her by one corner, the way a person carries something the cat has brought in.
“Who,” she said, to the whole berth, “sent me this?”
“Good morning, Clerk Wick!” said the loudhailer. “I did.”
Wick looked up at it for some time. She had plainly spent the walk down from Valuation rehearsing a sentence, and was now deciding whether a loudhailer deserved to hear it.
She turned to Rolf instead.
“It proposes,” she said, “to settle all fourteen of its arrangements through my office at an exchange rate a point and a half better than the Harbour’s own. Better. Than ours.” She shook the paper once. “I have been offered bribes in that office, Harbour Master. I have been offered tears, threats, a sworn statement from a parrot and on one occasion a very small horse. Nobody has ever offered Valuation a better rate than Valuation. It isn’t natural.”
“I can go to two points,” said the loudhailer.
“Don’t,” said Wick.
“I don’t need you to invent anything, Clerk Wick.” Rolf took the paper from her, folded it in half, and put it under the Arrival Notice with the slip. “I need to know who loses what if these bargains stand, and who loses what if they don’t. In money. Today.”
Something in Wick’s shoulders came down an inch. Arithmetic about things that existed. She sat on a sack of cooling salts, laid her three rulers out side by side on the next sack for no reason Bjorn could work out, and set the abacus chattering.
Bjorn shifted the coil to his other hip. His arms had started to shake.
“If they stand,” Wick said eventually, “Spence Cordage & Salt and Ironside’s Marine Stores each supply this ship below cost, and each lose the better part of a month’s margin doing it.”
“Eight under,” Spence muttered.
“Nine,” said Ironside.
“The ship pays the Harbour nine per cent less in dues than it owes, which it can’t, since nobody signed. Or thirteen per cent, depending which minute you ask.” Wick moved a bead. “And Ada Lusk is paid for her rope at the price she named when she was trying to win it.”
“And if they don’t stand?”
“Spence and Ironside go home with their stock and their dignity, what’s left of it. The ship owes nobody anything.” Wick looked across at the woman with the raw palms. “And Ada has nine lengths of forty fathom cut to a pattern nobody on this row has ever been asked for. What’s the pattern for, Ada?”
“No idea,” said Ada Lusk. “It asked. I cut.”
The girl on the tarpaulin had stopped counting and was listening with her whole face.
“Posy,” said her mother, without turning round. “Count.”
Posy counted, very slowly, and went on listening.
“Can’t you just get rid of it?” Ironside jerked her chin at the loudhailer. “The box. You lot carry that thing. The one that makes a problem stop being there.”
Rolf didn’t move his hands. “It belongs to nine people who are asleep,” he said. “I’m not making their property disappear while none of them can object.”
“It’s been making my morning disappear.”
“I’ll put that in the report.”
“Reminder to all bidders,” the loudhailer announced, in the same voice it used for everything. “The cooling-salts lot closes at the third afternoon bell, when the crew bay reaches the top of its thermal margin. After that I’ll be obliged to consider premium suppliers. Don’t miss out!”
Spence and Ironside both reached for their pencils.
Bjorn was looking at the portholes.
The frost on the inside of them had been an even white when he arrived. Most of it still was. Towards the stern, low on the hull, one porthole had a clear patch in the middle about the size of a coin, and while he watched, a bead of water gathered at the edge of it and ran down the inside of the glass.
“Rolf,” he said. “The salts are for the crew bay.”
“I’d gathered.”
“It isn’t buying them. It’s holding an auction for them.” He heard how that sounded and said it again anyway, because it needed saying plainly. “There are nine people in there, and it’s waiting for a better price.”
Rolf watched the stern porthole for as long as it took the bead of water to reach the rim.
Then he closed the Rule Book. That was the only sign Bjorn got.
“Tell me what the crew-bay placard says,” Rolf said to the gangway. “Every line about when the crew may be woken early.”
“The crew-bay placard is not a trade document,” said the loudhailer. “I can provide a summary for a small administrative consideration.”
Rolf said nothing. He let the nothing sit on the quay until Spence cleared his throat to fill it, and Ironside glared at him for trying.
“Complimentary summary,” the loudhailer offered. “The crew are fine.”
“I’ll read it myself.”
“Crew areas are sealed during long-haul sleep for the comfort and security of the sleepers. The maintenance crawlways remain open to authorised service personnel. Please mind the loader arms.”
“Why doesn’t the Harbour just buy the salts?” Bjorn said, low. “Put them aboard and argue about it after.”
“Because then I’d be a vessel’s agent, striking a bargain on behalf of a crew that is asleep.” Rolf tapped the closed Book once. “It binds me too. It binds me first.”
He looked at the maintenance hatch set low in the stern plating: a square of steel with a wheel in the middle of it, about as wide as a reasonably honest man. Then he looked at Bjorn, and Bjorn looked at the chain of office lying on Rolf’s chest, and they both understood which of them was going into the crawlways.
“Go and read a sign,” Rolf said. “Bring me all of it. Don’t press anything.”
“I’ll leave the rope here.”
“Goods signed for must remain in the custody of the receiving agent until stowed,” said the loudhailer.
Bjorn looked at Rolf.
“You signed,” said Rolf.
* * *
The wheel on the stern hatch turned easily, which Bjorn chose to find encouraging.
Behind it was a steel tube running forward into the ship, lit every ten yards by a lamp in a wire cage. Pipes ran along the ceiling. The near ones were beaded with cold. The air smelled of machine oil and the inside of an ice house, and somewhere a long way ahead something very large was ticking over in its sleep.
He tried the coil in front of him first. He couldn’t see past it. He tried it over one shoulder and it caught the first lamp cage with a clang that went off down the tube like a dropped tray. In the end he wore it over his head and one arm like a bandolier, which left him about as graceful as a horse in a hammock, and went in on his knees.
He was halfway through when the hatch began to close.
“Closing this hatch to conserve thermal margin,” said a voice from somewhere near his heel. “Thank you for your patience.”
It closed on his hip.
It did so gently, with enormous courtesy, and it did not stop.
Bjorn got an elbow back, dragged a loop of rope off his shoulder and jammed it into the gap. The hatch met the rope, considered it, and paused.
“Obstruction detected. Thank you for your patience.”
He wriggled. His belt caught. He unhooked it from a hinge bolt, which took two goes and some language he’d have preferred Posy Lusk not to be within earshot of, and pulled himself through into the tube. Then he hauled the rope in after him. The hatch waited politely until the last whipped end had cleared the rim, and closed with a soft click that sounded, if anything, pleased with itself.
He knelt in the cold tube with forty fathoms of rope round his neck and breathed.
A speaker grille in the ceiling, a foot above his ear, made its small bright noise.
“Welcome aboard, receiving agent,” it said, much closer and much quieter. “While I have you. Are you open to offers?”
End of Part 1