Contents Premium

by Anti-Consolatory Fiction, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The Clement Hour went into the Kittering Reach sixty-one years ago with two thousand three hundred and six people on board and forty-eight lifeboats, and did not come out. Since then eleven of the lifeboats had come back. They did not come back to anywhere in particular. One was found in the outer belt at Haldane, turning slowly end over end, like a spoon somebody had dropped down the back of a cooker. One turned up in a parking orbit above a resort world, among the pleasure yachts, with its running lights on, and nobody could say how long it had been there. They came at no interval anyone had been able to work out. They came back empty.

Corder & Hythe Mutual, who had written the Clement Hour's hull policy in a year when nobody now at Corder & Hythe had been born, still paid on each one. The terms had been tested in four courts. A lifeboat was a recovered asset. A recovered asset attracted a salvage award, payable to the finder, of four per cent of assessed hull value, plus whatever the assessor saw fit to allow under the heading contents premium. In the last three cases the assessor had been Dace Ormerod. She was fifty-three, with a hip that had never forgiven her for thirty years of changes in gravity, and she was good at the work, by which the company meant that she allowed very little.

---

The twelfth boat came in at Mallow. It took her nine days to get there, by way of two transfer stations and a mail packet that carried, besides herself, a crate of hens. She came down the last leg on the yard shuttle with her kit case across her knees, and the man who had found the boat was waiting at the dock.

His name was Tobin Scaife. He was big and tired-looking, in a quilted suit liner mended at both elbows with silver tape, and he had his daughter with him, a girl of fourteen or fifteen called Mo, who had her hood up and did not say hello.

"We've not been in," Scaife said, before Ormerod could ask. "Only looked through the port. I read the rules."

"Good," she said.

"It's warm, though. You can see that from outside. The frost's off it."

"They're always warm."

He nodded, as if this were a great relief to him, and picked up her case before she could stop him.

Mallow was a breaking yard: a small cold moon with a thin brown sky, and above it, in a loose untidy ring, the ships that were being taken apart. Ore carriers, mostly. A few old liners. A troop transport with its name burned off. Scaife had a tug, a squat yellow thing called the Fair Do's, all grapples and cutting arms, and inside it smelled of hot metal and of the soup he and the girl had evidently been living on for some time. On the way out he told her how he had found it. He had been cutting the bow section off a carrier called the Ninefold, and he had come round the curve of the hull with the floods on, and there it was, nose in among the carrier's ribs, quite neat, as if it had backed in.

"Like it was waiting," he said. Then he looked embarrassed.

People always said something of the kind. Ormerod had a file of it. Like it wanted to be found. Like it knew. Like someone had parked it. She did not tell him so.

He had worked out the money. He showed her, on the back of a parts docket: four per cent of a lifeboat hull, at the current price of the alloy and the drive core, came to a little under thirty thousand. He owed thirty-four on the tug. "And then there's the premium," he said, not looking at her. "For the contents."

"We'll see," Ormerod said.

In the back, the girl laughed once, through her nose.

---

Lifeboat Thirty-One hung in the carrier's ribs exactly as he had said. It was the shape they all were, a blunt white capsule with a blue stripe round its waist and the number stencilled on its flank in a typeface nobody had used for half a century. The paint was not faded. By the hatch it was chipped, as if someone had knocked it with a bag on the way in.

Ormerod suited and went across on a line. The rules said that the assessor entered first and alone. She had never understood why, and had never asked, and took a certain satisfaction in keeping it. The hatch opened when she touched it. That was always the second thing. They were never locked.

The air inside was good. She checked it twice, then took her helmet off and stood in the little lock with her hair full of static, breathing. It was warm, and it smelled of people, the way the top deck of a bus smells of people in winter, of hair and wool and breath; and under that, faintly but quite definitely, of onions cooking.

She switched on her recorder. "Lifeboat Thirty-One, Clement Hour," she said. "Mallow yard. Assessor Ormerod. Interior."

Forty-eight couches, in four rows of twelve. They had been let down into beds. Some were made. Most were not: the blankets thrown back the way you throw them back when you get up in the night, a hollow left in the pillow. A pair of reading glasses lay folded on one. On another was a small grey cardigan, still buttoned, as if somebody had pulled it off over their head. Under the third row there was a child's sandal, red, with the buckle undone. She looked for the other one and did not find it.

She did not touch the beds. That was her own rule, not the company's.

In the galley the hotplate was off, but when she held her glove an inch above the pan she could feel the warmth coming up. Onions, sliced thin, gone soft and gold, and at one edge a little dark, where whoever was cooking had let them catch. A wooden spoon lay across the rim. There were nineteen plates in the rack and two on the side, one with a crust on it. She counted the cups. Twenty-two.

On the fold-down table by the forward port somebody had been playing a game. It was a cheap old racing game: a cloth track printed with six green lanes, and six tin horses with the jockeys painted on, red, yellow, blue, green, black and white. The yellow horse was in front by three squares. There were two dice. One lay on the cloth, showing four. The other had gone under the table, and she knelt, which took some time, and found it against the bulkhead, showing one.

She said all this into the recorder, in the voice she kept for it, the voice of someone reading back a list of things they have been asked to bring from the shops.

Then she looked up at the boat's clock over the forward port. ELAPSED SINCE LAUNCH, it said, in green: 00:41:16. While she watched, it went to 00:41:17.

All the clocks on all the boats had said something under an hour. Never the same thing. The company's people had been looking at those clocks for sixty years.

---

"Well?" Scaife said, when she came back through. He had been watching from the tug. She could see the mark his face had left on the port.

"Personal effects," she said. "Clothes. Bedding. Kitchen. A game."

"Is that good?"

"It's what there always is."

The girl had come up behind him. She had her hood down now, and she was looking past Ormerod, out across the gap at the open hatch, where the light came out, yellow and warm.

"Is anybody in there?" she said.

"No."

"How do you know?"

Ormerod thought about it. "Nobody ever is," she said.

---

She slept on the tug, in a fold-down bunk behind the reactor screen that Scaife had cleared for her, and woke at some hour of the yard's night with her hip aching and the feeling that someone had just left the room. The tug was dark except for the instrument panels. Mo was sitting at the port in a blanket, with her knees up, looking out at the lifeboat.

"What happens to it?" the girl said, without turning round. "After."

"Your dad cuts it up. The company sells the alloy." Ormerod lowered herself onto the step by the chart table. "The contents go to Prior."

"What's on Prior?"

"A warehouse."

She had been there once, on her own, after the ninth boat. It was out past the freight terminal, a long, low, well-lit shed with racking to the roof and a man on the door who did not ask what she wanted. Everything from the boats was in there, cleaned, and folded, and sealed into clear vacuum bags with lot numbers on them: the blankets, the cardigans, the children's coats with the names inside, the reading glasses in envelopes, pans, scoured, in a row. Eleven boats. Aisle after aisle of it, under the lights, waiting for somebody to come and say, That's mine. She had walked to the end of the shed and back, and gone home, and not told anyone she had been.

"Do they still smell?" Mo said. "In the bags."

Ormerod considered lying to her. "Yes," she said.

The girl nodded slowly, as if she had expected that, and pulled the blanket up round her ears, and went on looking at the boat. Its light came across the gap and lay on the floor of the tug in a long soft square, like the light from a landing when a door has been left open for a child.

---

Aline Fairhurst came the next day on the yard shuttle, with a small blue case on wheels. She was seventy-four. Her mother and her brother had gone on the Clement Hour. She had been meant to go too, but the week before they sailed she had come out in measles, and they had left her with an aunt and sent her a card from the port, a picture of the ship with all its lights on against a sky that had been painted in afterwards. She showed Ormerod the card. She showed everyone. Ormerod had seen it at the ninth boat, and at the tenth, and at the eleventh, its corners a little softer every time.

"I was at Haldane," Mrs Fairhurst said, "when I heard. I came straight away."

Ormerod had come from Corder & Hythe's office on Prior, and it had taken her nine days. Haldane was on the far side of the Reach, three weeks from Mallow if your connections were good, and Scaife had called the boat in ten days ago. She did the sum again on the way up the dock. Then she stopped doing it.

"You know I can't let you in," she said.

"I know, dear," said Mrs Fairhurst.

---

There was not much left to do. There never was. Ormerod photographed the interior from all four corners and from the galley. She took the serial plate off the drive housing, which Scaife wanted, because it would add a thousand. She ran the hull test. Then she sat at Scaife's chart table and filled in the forms while the girl watched her over a mug of soup. Hull value came from the tables. It was what Scaife had said it would be. She would do contents last. She always did contents last.

Mrs Fairhurst sat in the tug's one good chair with her case at her feet and looked across at the boat through the port. She did not seem to mind waiting. She told them about the others. She had been inside two of them, years ago, before the company's rules got stricter. She had gone through every locker. She had smelled every pillow.

"It's never them," she said. "That's the thing. It's never anyone's. Have you noticed that, Mrs Ormerod? In sixty years. Not one thing anybody knew. Not a hairbrush. Not a letter." She smiled. "You'd think there'd be one thing."

Ormerod had noticed. It was in the file. Eleven boats, some thousands of items, each offered to the families for identification as the policy required, and none ever claimed. The company had put pictures of the clothes on the public net. It had published the names written on the labels inside the children's coats. Nobody had come forward to own them, and no passenger list held them.

"Maybe it's someone else's ship," the girl said. She had not seemed to be listening.

"Perhaps it is," said Mrs Fairhurst comfortably.

---

At five, ship's evening, Ormerod went across to seal it. The rules required a recount before sealing. She went in with her helmet under her arm. The onions had gone a shade darker. She could smell that they had. The clock said 00:52:40.

Plates in the rack: nineteen. On the side: two. On the table, beside the game, a third, with nothing on it and a fork laid neatly across.

She stood and looked at it for a while.

The yellow horse was still in front, but only by one square now, because the black had come up. Both dice lay on the cloth, a five and a two.

"Recount," she said into the recorder. "Plates, twenty-two." She did not go back and change the first figure. In three boats she had never once changed a first figure. That was not what the recount was for.

When she turned round, Mrs Fairhurst was standing in the lock in a suit of Scaife's that was far too big for her, the helmet off, her white hair on end with static, looking in at the beds. Behind her, at the end of the line, was the girl.

"I didn't let her," Mo said. "She just came."

Ormerod opened her mouth to say what she had said at the ninth boat, and at the tenth, and found that she did not want to.

Mrs Fairhurst came in. She walked down between the rows the way people walk down a hospital ward at visiting time, looking left and right, trying not to stare. At the grey cardigan she stopped, and looked at it for a long time, and did not touch it. She went into the galley and bent over the pan and breathed in. Then she came and sat at the table by the game, on the bench that ran round it, and folded her hands in her lap.

"Black's coming up," she said.

"Did you move it?" Ormerod said. "Earlier. Did you come across?"

"No, dear."

The girl had come as far as the first row of beds. She stood very still, her arms wrapped round herself, though it was warm in there, warmer than the tug, as warm as a kitchen.

"Can you hear that?" she said.

Ormerod listened. She could hear the air system, and the small ticking of the hull, and, so faintly that she could not be sure it was not her own blood, something that might have been a great many people a long way off: the sound that comes up a stairwell from a room where there is a party, several floors down.

"No," she said.

---

Mrs Fairhurst would not come out. She said so quite pleasantly. She would sit for an hour, if they did not mind, and then she would come. She had taken the card out of the suit's thigh pocket, the ship with its lights on and its painted sky, and she held it on her knee.

"I can't leave you in here," Ormerod said.

"You can't take me out either, dear," said Mrs Fairhurst, "unless you carry me. And look at you, with that hip." She picked up the dice and held them loosely in her hand. "One hour."

They went back across to the tug, the girl first. Scaife was at the chart table. He had squared the forms to its edge and laid his hands flat on either side of them, as if they might get away.

Ormerod sat down and did the last box. Under contents she wrote: personal effects, unclaimed; bedding; galley equipment; one game (horse racing, tin, incomplete). Under contents premium she sat for a minute with the stylus in her hand. Then she wrote: provisions, fresh: onions, approx. 0.5 kg, and against it the market price, which she looked up. Nothing grew on Mallow. Everything came in on the packets, with the hens. It came to forty-one.

She turned the form round so that Scaife could read it.

He read it twice. "Forty-one," he said.

"Onions," Ormerod said. "They're dear here."

He looked at the form, and then at her. Then he folded it once along the crease and put it away inside his liner, carefully, the way you put away a letter you mean to read again later, when you are by yourself. She did not apologise.

The girl was at the port. "Look," she said.

Across the dark, in the carrier's ribs, the lifeboat's lights were going off. Not all at once. One port, then the next, along the row, the way lights go off in a house when people go up to bed: a pause, then another, as if someone were going from room to room. The galley went last. Then there was only the small light over the hatch, and then not that.

"She said an hour," said Scaife.

Ormerod took off her watch and laid it face up on the chart table between them. Nobody got up to go across. Nobody put the soup on. The three of them sat in the yellow light of the tug with the dark shape in the window, and waited for the hour to be up.

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum Kalendās Novembrēs (26 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Fictiōnis Sōlācium Recūsantis per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Anti-Consolatory Fiction, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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