Deceleration Margin

She did not sleep, and in the not-sleeping she did the arithmetic she had been avoiding, which was the arithmetic of who. There was a way to think about the problem that made it survivable, and Imogen reached for it the way a cold person reaches for a coat. The way was this: the burn was eighty-one years away. Eighty-one years was four generations. Four generations was enough time for engineers smarter than her, with tools better than hers, working without the panic, to find a margin she could not see. Perhaps the drive could be improved. Perhaps mass could be shed. Perhaps the destination, when they finally resolved it through the long-range instruments, would turn out to have a moon, an atmosphere, some geometry of mercy that changed the sum. The problem did not have to be solved by her. It had to be handed forward, intact, honest, to the people who could. That was the coat, and it was a good coat, and she wore it until almost the third hour of the night-cycle, and then she took it off and looked at the cold thing underneath, which was that handing it forward honestly meant telling someone now. And telling someone now meant the question of who. She lay in the dark and walked the ship in her mind, deck by deck. There was the Navigator's office — but the Navigator was a young man named Castellan who had inherited the post from his mother and treated the founders' documents the way the devout treat scripture, and Imogen did not think he would survive being told that the scripture had a forged page. There was the Standing Council, nine elected stewards, and the Council was where decisions were supposed to go, and the Council also leaked like cracked plumbing, every private word in its chamber somehow damp on the corridors by evening. There was her sister, Renny, who was wise and kept nothing from her own husband, which made her two people, not one. And there was the Founders' Round. Imogen did not like to think about the Founders' Round, because thinking about it meant admitting it was real and not the half-rumour the ship treated it as. It was supposed to be a custom rather than a body — the descendants of the first crew, a few dozen families, meeting on the founding anniversary to read the compact aloud and remember. A ceremonial thing. A heritage society. Except that Imogen had been the ship's accountant for nineteen years, and she had noticed, the way she noticed wrong notes, that the Founders' Round had a budget line, and that the budget line was larger than a heritage society needed, and that it had been larger than a heritage society needed for four hundred years. She had never followed that number. It had always balanced, in the narrow sense — the money was accounted, the receipts existed. But it had never made sense, and now, lying in the dark with one lie already in her hands, she found she could not stop looking at the second one. A society that read the compact aloud every year. A society that had, for four centuries, been funded to do more than read. And a founding document, sealed by the first crew, containing a single forged number that no one had ever been positioned to catch — no one except the accountant, and only then by accident, only then by tripping. Unless the accountants had caught it. Nineteen of them, before her, across four hundred years. It was not a difficult reconciliation. It was a quarterly chore. Some of them must have substituted the real speed, the way she had, just to see. Some of them must have watched the reserve run dry. And the ship had sailed on, and the number on the assembly hall wall still said eight per cent, and the budget line for the Founders' Round had stayed exactly large enough. Imogen sat up in the dark. The drive hummed its single patient note. She understood, with the particular clarity that comes at the third hour of the night-cycle, that she had not discovered a mistake this morning. A mistake is alone. A mistake does not have a budget. She had discovered that she was the twentieth person to discover it. And she did not yet know what had happened to the nineteen.