The Score — Chapter 1: Shipped Freight

The Score — a novel of the planet Ephergent. Chapter 1 of 12. Narration and score by ruru.

The crate arrived on a Tuesday, and it came with a signature that wasn't Chewy's.

He found it at the foot of the workshop steps, six feet of weathered pine banded in steel, a shipping label flapping loose at one corner. The delivery drone had already lifted off, its rotors folding into silence over the rooftops of North Prima, and the street was empty in that mid-morning way the workshop's block got — nobody walked past the Chambers place, not since Hollis.

Chewy stood on the top step with a mug of coffee gone cold in his fist and read the label twice.

Chambers, C. — N. Prima, Block 9. Freight-class: sealed survey equipment. Shipper: Chambers, H. — Verdanya Post 4.

His thumb found the edge of the label and worried it. The ink had that particular blue of a fountain pen run dry halfway, and he recognized the hand the way you recognize a limp. He'd seen it on contour margins his whole life, on the inside covers of his school notebooks, on the note taped to the workshop door eleven months ago that said back by the equinox, keep the kettle on.

The equinox had come and gone. The kettle had not been used for anyone but him.

"ARC," he said, without turning around.

The voice came from the small disc clipped to his collar, warm as a lamp and dry as a receipt. "Present. Crate is sixty-two kilograms gross, eighteen degrees off plumb, no delivery drone within three hundred meters. Would you like the probability that it's addressed correctly?"

"Do it."

"Given the shipper's last known position and the eleven-month gap between the postmark and today: sixty-one percent it was sent before the disappearance, thirty-nine percent it was sent after. I can narrow it if you open it."

Chewy set the mug on the rail and went down the steps. The crate was heavier than it looked, or maybe the street was sloped; he crouched and worked the label free, folded it once, and put it in his jacket pocket. The pine was Prima-grown, pale, and someone had stenciled the side in block letters: FRAGILE — SURVEY — DO NOT INVERT. Underneath, smaller, in the same blue pen: For C.

He got his fingers under the lid. The seal held for a second, then gave with a sound like a slow swallow.

Inside, packed in straw the color of old gold, was a trail-surveyor automaton.

It lay folded into the space the way you fold a thing you've folded a hundred times — knees up, head tucked, arms crossed over a chestplate gone green with age. Its face was a smooth plate with a single lens slot, and its cap — a real cap, cotton, sweat-stained, the brim curled by a thumb that had done it a thousand times — had slipped over one eye. The survey-insignia on the front was a compass rose with a needle broken off at the north point.

Chewy had seen one of these before, once, when he was nine, at the Prima depot. Hollis had crouched beside it and said, They don't make 'em anymore, and the ones they made don't stop. He'd put his hand on the cap and left it there a moment, like you'd touch a horse's neck.

"ARC."

"Automaton class: dead-reckoner, trail-survey. Registration is illegible but the insignia is Prima Depot, pre-fusion manufacture. Chewy, the packing list says one item. There's no second item."

"There's straw."

"There's straw." A pause, the kind ARC used when it was running something. "There's also a seam."

Chewy looked. The straw wasn't packed the way you'd pack a machine; it was stitched. A line of coarse thread ran the length of the crate's inner lining, and at one end the thread ended in a knot the size of a thumbnail, the kind of knot you tie when you want someone to find the end. He pulled it.

The lining came away in one piece, and in the fold of it, folded twice and sewn into the canvas, was a journal.

It was small, fit in one hand, bound in oilcloth the color of wet slate. The cover was blank. The pages inside were the cheap ruled kind you got at any Prima stationer, and they were full — not in sentences, but in Hollis's hand, the fast slanted shorthand of a man taking notes in weather. Coordinates. Bearing lines. Sketches of ridges. And in the margins, in the same blue pen as the crate label, a second hand of writing — smaller, slower, like someone had sat down afterward and thought about each word.

Chewy's thumb rested on the first page. The writing there was ink-black and ordinary. He turned a few. The ink held. He turned to a page with a sketch of a spire — a tall one, the kind that stood along the spine — and something about the drawing made him hold it up to the light.

Nothing. Ordinary ink on ordinary paper.

"Nothing," he said.

"Nothing what?"

"Nothing on this page. I thought —" He stopped. It was the kind of thought he'd had a hundred times since Hollis left: that there'd be a message, that the man would have left a message, that the message would be waiting on the page where you looked. He set the journal on the crate lid. "Okay. Let's wake the machine."

"The manual says they don't wake easily. And the manual says to address them by their survey number, not their name."

"Do we have a survey number?"

"We have a cap with a broken insignia and a registration that's illegible."

Chewy leaned over the crate. The automaton's lens slot was dark. Up close, the plate of its face had a scratch running from the left edge to the center, like something had caught it long ago. He put two fingers on the cap's brim and pushed it back to where it belonged.

"Hey," he said. "You're at my house."

Nothing.

"You were Hollis's. I'm his nephew. Chester."

The lens slot lit — not bright, a low amber, the color of a filament warming. The head moved first, a quarter turn, then stopped as if listening. The arms unfolded. The thing sat up in the straw with the unhurriedness of a man who had been asleep a long time and was in no rush about it.

Its voice, when it came, was gravel over iron. "North-northeast, and don't argue."

"I'm not arguing."

"Good." The automaton looked at the crate walls, the street, the sky. Its cap brim went up and down once, a recalibration. "Wind me. We're walking."

"Wind you."

"Field order." It put a hand on the crate's edge and levered itself out, joints complaining like rigging in a gale. It stood in the street, six feet of greened brass and old cotton, and the broken compass rose on its cap caught the light. "I have been wound since the depot. I am telling you the order. Wind me, meaning: put your hand on the key at my hip and turn until you feel it catch. Then we're walking."

Chewy looked at the journal on the crate lid. He looked at the machine. The morning had gone very quiet.

"Where are we walking?"

"North-northeast, and don't argue."

"ARC," Chewy said. "Ledger."

"Opening," ARC said. "Ledger one, entry one. Probability that Hollis Chambers is alive: four point seven percent."

The number sat in the air between them. Four point seven. Chewy had expected a smaller one. He had not known what he expected.

"Four point seven is low," he said.

"Four point seven is not zero. It is a number that requires a walk to become a different number. That is what ledgers are for." ARC's voice was level. "I should note that the automaton's field order and the journal's provenance are now correlated data. The crate was packed by your uncle. The machine inside it was packed by your uncle. The journal was sewn in by your uncle. He shipped himself a walking order, addressed it to you, and it arrived on a Tuesday."

"He shipped it eleven months ago or yesterday."

"Thirty-nine percent after."

Chewy picked up the journal and put it in his jacket, against the folded label. He went back to the crate and found, under the last of the straw, a coil of climbing rope, a tin of rations, and a field notebook with the first forty pages torn out. The tin was dented. The rope was good.

"Wind me," the automaton said. It was standing at the bottom of the workshop steps, looking up at the door with its lens slot half-lidded, the way a dog looks at a porch it remembers.

Chewy went to its left hip. There was a key there, brass, half the length of his hand, recessed into a housing that said DEPOT in letters worn to ghosts. He put his fingers around it and turned.

It caught on the fourth revolution, a soft click he felt in his wrist more than heard.

"Good," the automaton said. "Now the pack."

"There's no pack."

"Then take what's in the crate and we'll make one on the road." It started up the steps, joints clicking a steady two-beat. At the top it stopped. "I don't go inside. I haven't got orders for inside. Leave the door, and the kettle, and come out."

"You knew about the kettle."

"I know the label said For C." The lens slot turned to him. "Wind me and we're walking. That's the whole order."

Chewy stood in the workshop doorway a moment. The room was as he'd left it — Hollis's drafting table, the wall of rolled maps, the kettle on its hook, the chair by the window where Chewy did his homework because the light was good. Nothing had changed in eleven months. Everything had changed in eleven months.

He took the journal out and held it so the light fell on the first page. The ink was ordinary. He put it back.

"ARC, route."

"North-northeast from Block 9 puts you on the Prima ridge road in twenty minutes. Beyond that, I need a destination."

"Then we'll find one." Chewy shouldered the rope and the tin and the notebook. He took the crate's lid and set it over the straw like closing a coffin, gentle, because he didn't know why. "The label said Verdanya Post 4. That's a waypoint, not a destination."

"It is a waypoint, and it is eleven hundred kilometers from here."

"Good."

The automaton made a sound that might have been approval, or might have been its bearings settling. It went down the steps ahead of him, its cap straight, its broken compass pointing north at nothing.

Chewy locked the workshop. The key went in his pocket with the label. On the top step he paused and looked back at the door — the note was still taped there, curling at one corner, the handwriting he'd read every morning for eleven months. Back by the equinox. Keep the kettle on.

He turned north-northeast.

The street was empty. The drone that had delivered the crate was long gone. Somewhere past the ridge, past the Prima suburbs, past the border into a country he'd only seen on maps, there was a spire that had not yet woken, and a number on a ledger that wanted to become a different number.

Four point seven percent.

He walked.

Behind him, the workshop stood with its door locked and its kettle on its hook and its light good at the window, and the morning went on being a Tuesday, ordinary as anything, until it wasn't.