The Names

On day 236 of every year, at forty-one minutes past ten, the time of the first shot at the Aurora, both stations in the system switch their screens off for one minute. And at El Bastión, on what is left of the bridge, Colonel Reyna Ostrach reads aloud four hundred and twelve names.

This year she was going to read one fewer. She had spent eight days thinking about how.

---

Ostrach didn’t sleep the night before the anniversary. She hadn’t since Year 2. She would stand in the hangar in front of the wall and go over the names in silence so as not to get any of them wrong, although she never had.

That year, at three in the morning, she stopped in front of the centre column, at eye level.

LYS, ADA · TANDA PILOT · 24

LYS, AURELIO · CADET · 13

She remembered Year 12 as if it were last week. The Armisticio just signed. A young man of twenty-four, with grey cloth gloves and eyes that were still his own, at El Bastión’s gate, asking to see her and nobody else. Ostrach had recognised him before he spoke. She remembered his hands coming away from the frame of a hatch.

“Two names,” he had said. “For your wall.”

“Whose?”

“My sister. And a boy who died that day.”

“That boy is standing in front of me.”

“No, Colonel. The one standing in front of you is someone else. Read it every year, please. Someone has to say it out loud, and I can’t.”

Ostrach had read it thirty-five times. Thirty-five anniversaries saying the name of a living man, while the living man climbed ring by ring up El Pináculo to La Cúspide and became the Chancellor of the Cátedra, the one who never raised his voice. She knew. She had never told anyone. Keeping quiet was a wall. Ostrach was a wall. They had given her the nickname for something else, but it suited her.

Nor had she ever told anyone about the captain. That the Aurora wasn’t there by bad luck. That it had switched on its lights. That the order that nobody fire from the Aurora, the one she had repeated over the aft bridge intercom with a fainted boy in her arms, was the same one she had been carrying out for forty-six years under another name: the Vanguard never fires first.

She had kept quiet because she believed that truth was only good for starting wars.

Eight days earlier, on Tirane, she had heard it in full with eleven other people in front of her. And it hadn’t started any war.

---

On Tirane, after Mamparo said “end of the seven”, nobody spoke for a long time. Then the Tejedora spoke.

“This isn’t for sale,” she said.

She said it looking at the crate, with the face of someone who has just realised something she doesn’t like.

“You, saying that?” El Notario had said.

“A truth told to both sides at once is a map, darling. Told to one side only, it’s a weapon.” Vunn had shrugged. “And war is terrible for trade. Nobody buys anything while they’re being shot at.”

“I’ve got a crate down as a debt.”

“Then charge it to whoever wants it kept quiet.”

The Chancellor had got up from the crate he was sitting on. He had gone over to El Notario, asked for the notebook with a gesture and El Notario had handed it over, something he had never done with anyone. The Chancellor had written a figure on the debt page, in his small, upright hand, and signed beneath it. El Notario had looked at the figure for a long time.

“What’s paid for stays quiet,” El Notario had said, and closed the notebook.

It was Ostrach who proposed the rest, because someone had to and she was the only one who had been thinking about it for forty-six years. The recording would stay where it was: inside Mamparo. Mamparo would open it again when someone came who didn’t shoot. But this time a hold on Tirane wouldn’t be enough. It would have to be a table with both houses sitting at it, and both houses’ weapons at the door.

“That’ll never happen,” Vedma had said.

“Then I’ll hold for a long time,” Mamparo had said. “I know how.”

The Chancellor had looked at the Colonel over the crate, for the first time in thirty-five years the way you look at someone who knows you.

“Let the Colonel keep him,” he had said. “She knows how to keep things.”

And then he had turned to his Commander.

“You disobeyed me.”

“Yes, Chancellor.”

“In front of witnesses.”

“Yes, Chancellor.”

“Stay in command of the Guardia.” The Chancellor had put his helmet on. “I need someone who tells me no.”

---

At ten in the morning on day 236, El Bastión’s hangar was full.

It was the bridge’s old shuttle hangar, its walls still black with smoke from the Forty Days, and about twelve hundred people fitted in it standing up. There were people from La Cicatriz, from all three rings and all five guilds. There were people with El Pináculo insignia and people with El Fondeadero insignia who didn’t look at each other. There were pilgrims, scrap-pickers from the outer ring, children. The heads of the five guilds were in the front row, standing, as every year: Sable Okoye in her soil-stained coat; Torvun Ekes with soot even in his eyebrows; Kestrel Vasko with her hunting rifle on her shoulder, the only one the Vanguard lets into La Cicatriz, for the Ombrask on the cordon; Quill Sarn with his band of lenses, looking at the walls in light nobody else could see.

None of them had brought their compi awake. Only one can be awake in a room, because two tread on each other’s readings and both end up silent. It was the one rule the Flota and the five guilds agreed on without argument.

That year the one awake was behind the Colonel’s shoulder.

The workshop at El Bastión had made him a shell: a new sphere, grey, with Vanguard plating and two small nozzles to float with, round a core that had forty years of crossing and forty-six of waiting in it. They had registered him as a compi of The Vanguard. The workshop had signed for the body. The rest was his. When the workshop chief asked if he wanted anything special in the shell, Mamparo had said: “Nothing tight.”

In the front row, beside the guilds, stood Ada Lys. She wore a pair of the Tozuda’s orange overalls, borrowed, sleeves rolled up, and at her belt a new ProtoGun, made by herself in the ship’s workshop with Vedma’s, because a ProtoGun is made with your hands and another ProtoGun. She had paid off her thaw in eight days digging plate in the Cementerio. Vedma said nobody had ever dug so much in so little time. Vedma, Chemo and Tais stood behind her, like staff hired to watch her back.

In the sixth row, alone, sat a man of about sixty in grey civilian clothes and cloth gloves of the same colour. Nobody sat next to him. Some recognised him. None of them said anything.

---

At forty-one minutes past ten, at El Pináculo and El Fondeadero, every screen went off for a minute. At El Bastión there were no screens to switch off, so the voices switched off instead. Twelve hundred people fell silent at once and you could hear the wind off the grassland beating against the walls.

At forty-two minutes past ten, the Colonel began to read.

She read slowly, without paper, in the flat voice of reports. Each name with its trade and age. She never skipped one and never paused between one and the next longer than it took for the name to stay a moment in the air. Some people come just to hear one. They stand until she says it and then they leave. Ostrach knew most of them by sight. There were fewer every year.

It took her fifty-eight minutes to reach the centre column.

“Lys, Ada,” she said. “Tanda pilot. Twenty-four.”

And she stopped.

A different silence fell in the hangar. Ostrach looked at the front row. Ada Lys was looking at her, in her borrowed orange overalls, hands still.

“Not this one,” said Ostrach.

She turned to the wall, took a key from her belt and unscrewed the plate. It took her a while, because the screws hadn’t moved for thirty-five years. Nobody said anything while she did it. When she had finished, she stepped down and put the plate in Ada’s hands.

“This one’s come back,” she said, to the whole hangar.

It was the first time in thirty-five years that Reyna Ostrach had taken a name off her wall.

---

She went back to her place. The next name was the other one.

Ostrach looked at the sixth row. The man in grey gloves was sitting very straight, hands on his knees, looking at her. Then she looked at Ada. Ada was holding the plate with her own name against her chest.

Ada nodded once.

“Read it,” she said quietly.

“Lys, Aurelio,” said the Colonel. “Cadet. Thirteen.”

In the sixth row, the man in grey gloves bowed his head.

He did nothing else. He didn’t get up, didn’t leave, didn’t say anything. He stayed like that, head bowed, while the Colonel went on with the next name and the next, to the last, and Ostrach, who was watching him out of the corner of her eye as she watched everything, saw that at some point he had taken off a glove and had his metal hand open on his knee, palm up, like someone waiting to be given something.

---

When she had finished the four hundred and eleven, Ostrach didn’t step down.

“This year there are eight more,” she said. “I don’t have them. He does.”

Mamparo came out from behind her shoulder and floated to the centre, in front of the wall, at the height of the Colonel’s head, which was where cores stayed in the corridors of the arks so as not to be in the way.

“Section seven of the Arca Aurora,” he said. “The first tanda pilots’ room. They died in their pods waiting for someone to come. I saw. I logged them.”

And he said them, one by one, with the date.

“Nadim Corbo. Tanda pilot. Year 3.”

“Elsa Ríos. Tanda pilot. Year 9.”

“Piet Anand. Tanda pilot. Year 14.”

“Marta Quiles. Tanda pilot. Year 19.”

“Joaquín Ude. Tanda pilot. Year 23.”

“Hana Brest. Tanda pilot. Year 30.”

“Rafa Miró. Tanda pilot. Year 33.”

“Celia Om. Tanda pilot. Year 36.”

In the front row, Ada Lys had her eyes closed and moved her lips with each name, silently, because she had played cards with seven of them and had always lost to Celia Om.

---

Mamparo turned round. His lens found Ada in the front row and stayed on her.

“Nueve.”

“Yes.”

“Am I still holding?”

Ada didn’t answer straight away. She looked around. She looked at the full hangar, the twelve hundred people, the insignia of both houses not looking at each other, the five guilds in the front row, the Tejedora Sable Vunn in one corner with her arms folded, El Notario in the other with his notebook closed, Commander Kray by the door in her white uniform and without a weapon, Vedma and her crew behind her. She looked at the sixth row.

“No,” she said.

“Has someone come?”

“Everyone’s come.”

Mamparo stayed still for a moment, floating in front of the wall.

“Logged,” he said. “Letting go.”

And the light in his lens, which had been on at full since Tirane, dropped slowly until it settled into a calm amber, the amber of lights that aren’t warning of anything.

“Next order,” he said.

“None,” said Ostrach, behind him. “Now you choose.”

Mamparo turned towards the wall. Then towards the smoke-black ceiling. Then towards the walls of El Bastión, visible through the open hangar hatch, plate on plate on earth, forty-six years of walls.

“I’m staying here,” he said. “It’s got walls.”

---

People left slowly, as they always leave the reading, not saying much.

Sable Okoye stopped by Ada, put a hand on her shoulder and took out her cloth notebook.

“I’ll take the tomatoes off,” she said, and crossed out a line.

Torvun Ekes stopped in front of Mamparo and looked at his new plating with a smelter’s eye.

“How much did the metal take?” he asked.

“Frame fourteen, not much,” said Mamparo. “The others, just enough.”

Ekes nodded, like a man receiving a figure he had been waiting years for, and left without another word.

Kestrel Vasko didn’t stop. Quill Sarn did: he stood for a moment looking at Mamparo with his band of lenses, in light nobody else could see, and then went off towards El Faro Roto muttering coordinates.

---

The man in grey gloves was the last to leave the sixth row.

Ostrach saw him stop at the hangar hatch, where Ada was waiting for him. The two of them stood a metre apart: a girl of twenty-four in borrowed overalls with a metal plate in her arms, and a man of fifty-nine with his gloves back on. Ostrach didn’t hear what they said. She didn’t want to. She was the bridge police: her job was to be there and for nobody to remember.

She heard only the last thing, because he said it as he turned away.

“Choose your house, Ada.”

“On the 238th.”

“I know.” He paused for a second. “I already know.”

And he went off across the grassland towards the white ship waiting for him, without escort, without hurrying, his gloved hands clasped behind his back.

Ostrach went back to the wall. Where Ada’s name had been there was a rectangle cleaner than the rest, with four holes. The name beside it was still in its place. She would read it next year, and the year after, and every year she had left.

“Now there are twelve of us holding the same thing,” she said to Mamparo, who was floating behind her shoulder, in the place he had chosen.

“It holds better,” said Mamparo.

“Yes.”

“I know. I’ve tried it both ways.”