Round Trip

The dust came off Dara's boots in the airlock, fine and red, and by the time she reached the instrument room it had worked into the treads again. 20:40, station time. The bench light came on under her hand. In its cradle the plate waited, soft silicone over the actuator grid, the surface gone dull in an oval where her right palm always landed. She wiped her palms down her trousers before she touched anything, though the dust was dry and harmless.

She pulled the appliance log.

Every packet was stamped at both ends in one shared mission clock. The older entries carried transmission and reception times. Then they stopped being arrivals. 21:00:00. 21:00:00. Playbacks, each tagged with an old recording date, each fired locally on her plate at nine o'clock, needing no transmit time at all.

She printed last night's pressure profile. The printer coughed out a strip as long as her forearm, and she laid it over March's, which had gone soft at the folds from handling.

The settling tremor at the start: three small stutters before the palm went firm. The beat at minute seven, a double tap where his thumb rested. The two curves lay on each other to the decimal she could measure, the stored hand lying down inside the hand she had laid down last night.

She had known since March. She had let it run, because a live answer meant waiting through the distance before anything came back, and the recording meant a hand at nine exactly. She had chosen the hand.

Ivo's Tuesday message was still open on the terminal, where she had left it. She had not answered it. The new counter is in, he had written. The drawer fits your knives exactly. Below that, plainer: organ contract signed, three years. Workshop lease renewed, the one under the flat. The relocation question had been deferred until after the organ restoration. Two years of after, and here it was, settled, and he had settled it alone.

The way she had settled it in April.

She opened the draft she had been carrying for weeks.

"I signed the second-phase renewal in April. Five years. Press live tonight at 23:00. No recordings."

She read it twice and sent it at 20:52. The terminal took it, stamped it, and showed one packet outbound.

At 21:00 she set her right palm in the worn oval, which took it exactly, and the queued press began under her at 21:00:00, one minute before her message reached his terminal at 21:01. The queue light blinked once and went steady. A live answer to her hand could not begin before 21:18, nine minutes each way tonight. Her other hand found the toggle on the cradle. She left it alone.

The tremor came first, three small stutters, then the firm weight of a palm that was not quite where hers was. She could have picked it out of a hundred presses. At minute three her fingers cramped and she flattened them again. At minute seven his thumb tapped twice against the silicone, and her own thumb was already resting over the place where the tap landed. At minute ten the pressure dragged left, the way it always did when he shifted his wrist. The actuators lifted and settled, lifted and settled under the grid, and she held still and let the recorded hand hold her back. Twelve minutes was longer than it sounded. The wellfield dust had dried to a pale line along the seam of her cuff; she watched it and did not move.

The actuators slowed, gave one last nudge under her palm, and quit.

She sat a moment, then opened the maintenance log and wrote the send, delivery and playback times.

20:52 sent. 21:01 delivered. 21:00:00 played back.

She underlined them with the station's cheap pen, a hard black line under each. Outside, the pump in the wellfield cycled on, drew its count, and shut off again.

His message landed at 21:11, stamped in the shared clock, and sat on the terminal whole, no greeting.

"I should have said this Tuesday. The organ voicing ran late three weeks running, and every night I did the sum. If I pressed live, you'd be in the wellfield or asleep. So I recorded one good press and tagged it. The scheduler fired it at your 21:00. After that I never had to ask when you were coming home."

Dara read it twice.

"The renewal bought me the same silence," she wrote. "I kept waiting for a night when the plate was already quiet."

His answer arrived eighteen minutes later. "I'm not sorry I recorded it. I'm sorry I let it stand in for asking."

They exchanged careful paragraphs while they waited for eleven, each separated by enough time to write and delete several answers. Ivo described the late organ voicing, the workshop jobs he took to pay the lease, the nights he came home and pressed nothing. She described signing the renewal after a double shift, her hands still shaking from the pump.

"The workshop lease is renewed under the flat," he wrote. "There's a counter now, with a drawer for your knives. I built it before I asked where you were going to keep them."

Dara looked at the pressure log open beside his message.

"The first production well came in at pressure in June. I want to see the second phase through. I'm not going to hand that back."

"I'm not asking you to. The organ has two years of voicing left. The workshop pays for the flat. I'm staying."

She wrote, "So am I."

The pump in the wellfield cycled on outside, drew its count, and shut off. When his next message arrived, it asked whether he should cancel the standing queue. She told him she would do it after eleven.

At 23:00 she laid her palm on the plate and pressed. Her touch began transmitting. The transmit indicator went from amber to green. Under her hand the silicone began to warm. The actuator grid stayed inert. She held for twelve minutes. At 23:12 she lifted her palm. The plate did nothing. The oval where her hand fit was dull and empty. Six minutes she sat with her hands in her lap and watched the clock. At 23:18 the plate stirred. She put her hand back down. No settling tremor. At minute four the pressure came down hard, harder than he ever pressed; at minute six it lifted entirely where he must have shifted his chair. She laughed alone at the bench, a short, startled sound that stayed in the instrument room. She kept her hand there and let him finish.

Afterward the messages were short. "The crate of my books is still at the port," she wrote. The crate held her field manuals, the paperbacks she read on night shift, and a tin mug wrapped in a shirt. "The spare key is under the blue cup." The key had lived there three years, under the cup with the chipped rim. He wrote back about the drawer: "The drawer is still here. I oiled the hinges." The knives were good ones; she had sharpened them the last winter she spent in the flat. She wrote, "Keep them. Use them." He wrote, "I will."

She deleted the standing queue, then reached under the bench and flipped the transmit toggle off. The amber light died. She did not open the pairing menu or carry the plate down to the fabrication shop. Then she laid her palm into the worn oval, the one her own hand had made, and held it there. The actuators stayed still. No packet went anywhere. The silicone warmed slowly from her skin alone. Her wrist ached. She did not shift it. She watched the clock through eighteen minutes. Then she lifted her hand.