The Harbour Master's Rule Book

There is a Harbour between worlds.

Not a harbour belonging to one kingdom, one empire, one species or even one reality.

It sits where routes that should never meet somehow do.

Ships come to it from worlds of sail and steam, from worlds of engines and spellcraft, from places where vessels cross distance by folding it, cutting through it, bargaining with it, ignoring it entirely or persuading something else to carry them.

Some ships are made of timber.

Some are grown.

Some think.

Some insist they are not ships at all.

The Harbour has learned not to argue with them until after docking.

Once, twelve worlds discovered this place and decided that whoever controlled it would control everything that passed through.

They fought for the crossings.

They fought for the berths.

They fought for the routes beyond them.

They fought over who could enter, who could trade, who could leave and who had the right to tell anyone else no.

For a time, every victory simply created another reason to keep fighting.

Then the cost became greater than the prize.

Routes collapsed.

Ships vanished.

Trade stopped.

People who had never cared who owned the Harbour began starving because somebody else did.

Eventually, the twelve worlds did something considerably more difficult than winning.

They agreed to stop.

The truce that followed became the beginning of the Harbour as it exists today.

No world would own it.

No world would command it.

Those who wished to use it would accept its jurisdiction while they were within it.

And everyone would abide by the Rules.

That was a long time ago.

This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

The twelve became dozens.

Dozens became hundreds.

Now more than a thousand worlds use the Harbour.

On an ordinary day, its docks might hold merchant vessels carrying grain beside diplomatic ships carrying ambassadors; refugee craft beside pleasure yachts; fishing boats beside warships under seal; pilgrim vessels beside creatures large enough to be legally classified as vessels themselves.

Cargo arrives in crates, cages, barrels, tanks, vaults, containment circles, pockets of slowed time and, occasionally, under its own power.

Customs deals with goods that are valuable in one world and illegal in another.

Quarantine deals with organisms harmless at home and catastrophic everywhere else.

Pilots guide ships through approaches that do not always agree on which direction they are travelling.

Dockworkers load cargo that may be heavier before lunch than it was when it arrived.

Merchants argue over ownership.

Diplomats argue over jurisdiction.

Captains argue because captains always argue.

And when all of that goes wrong, the Harbour Master has the Rule Book.

This morning, something had gone wrong.

Nothing had gone wrong yet. That is the other thing nobody warns you about.

There was a report, filed the previous evening and closed within the hour: a child’s claim, taken down word for word by a night clerk too tired to do anything with it but file it, and closed the way a harbour closes several hundred things a night — because nobody had thought to ask her a second question. The clerk had written advised complainant without advising anyone of anything, because there had been nothing yet to advise them of, and had gone home at the end of his shift telling himself, not quite successfully, that a closed file was the same thing as a settled one. He would think about that sentence again before the week was out, though he didn’t know it yet, standing at the door with his coat half on.

There was a chalk circle at the foot of the Lighthouse that nobody on the night watch would admit to drawing — a single unbroken ring, laid down in a hand steady enough that whoever had knelt to draw it hadn’t been in any hurry to be gone before it was finished. There was the gallery itself, sealed since before anyone currently rostered had signed their own name to anything, curtained from the inside by nothing at all, as far as any inventory on file could account for, and dark in a way that the working lamp two floors below it somehow never quite reached, however long the beam swept. And there was the lamp’s own turn, timed the same way for the better part of four decades, which had landed, once, on a different beat, and then corrected itself so cleanly that only a man who counted things for a living would ever have caught it doing so — and had gone back to his count afterward without writing any of it down, because there had been, by his own later account, nothing yet worth the ink.

Nobody had thought to ask what colour the coat had been, under that lamp, or which window, or how long he had stood there before she stopped looking. Nobody had thought to ask, either, why a chair in an officially empty room, two floors above anyone’s official business, should need turning to face a window at all, or who had last sat in it to leave it facing that way.

And there was a girl of nine, sitting very straight on an upturned crate in a coat too big for her, giving the same four sentences to the fourth adult in a row, in exactly the same order, because she had worked out, with the specific patience of someone already told once that she was wrong, that getting the words right was the only part of this still under her own control. Her father stood three feet away doing something careful and unnecessary with his hands, the way people do when their hands are the only part of them still willing to be useful. Her mother had gone back inside twice already, and come out again twice, which is its own kind of answer to a question nobody had thought to ask her yet either.

None of it was an emergency. All of it was going to be.

The apprentice came through the courtyard at the wrong speed, as usual, to be handed the smallest job the Harbour has: go and listen to a nine-year-old say a true thing for the fifth time. Nobody told him it would be the fifth. Nobody told him, either, that fifth was already one time too many.

The Harbour Master did not look up from the incident report.

“You’re late.”

The apprentice opened his mouth.

The Harbour Master opened the Rule Book.

End of Part 0