Akkit

Akkit is a Chthonari of Tsittak, the settlement cut into a lone body of nickel-iron beside a quiet-zone tunnel in deep interstellar space, and the author of one document in the record, Nothing Turned: an account of their people struck on the settlement's dock plating at the Survey Archive's asking and rendered by Tsittak's translating set. The receiving note says why the account was struck where it was: the set stands on the same plate. Akkit's own word for what the Archive holds is a description, and the Archive uses it.

The name is a struck signature, as every Chthonari name is: a vowel the ear supplies before a strike it was not ready for, two heavy strikes and a light one, spelled the way a human ear renders it through a deck plate. The record renders a Chthonari person as they, the Undersong's own person-marking being contact rather than sex, and a reader on a page is in contact with no one.

Known History

• Born in the Undersong Belt, in a burrow the account does not name. Checked the vessik in its walls before learning to read, as every Chthonari child does (Thrum's page holds the rule; the account repeats it as the first thing the rock teaches).
• Served in the Star Rangers' Engineering Corps in the fold-scaffold specialization, the work the species page says Chthonari choose in numbers well out of proportion to their population, by individual choice and never by quota. The account gives the posting as one member of the history and names neither its place, its years nor Akkit's rank: a deck off the Belt, a sealed module, kind humans, and one alone on a deck has the deck.
• Asked, by a reader of the record before the one who took the account down, who the first Chthonari in the Corps was; answered that nobody cut that member and many went. The record does not hold a first either, and the account supplies none.
• Left the Corps in a year the record does not hold, and came to Tsittak to stay, as the settlement's page says some of the Corps' Chthonari scaffold engineers do.
• Struck the account on Tsittak's dock plating when a Corps vessel, calling at the settlement before the tunnel as the Corps does by custom, carried the Survey Archive's request for a history of the Chthonari by one of them. The year of the asking is not given in the receiving note.

What Akkit Cannot Do

Hear a voice, or read a face: nothing in the airborne layer reaches a Chthonari, so Akkit takes a statement at its stated content, and says so in the account. Hear anything at all when not in contact with structure. See a thing as raw; the set could not render the strike for the word. Explain the Undersong to anyone who does not stand on it: the account calls itself a description more than once, and the set declined four renderings, and the author did not try to supply what the set could not.

Character Notes

The account shows a person who gives a history the way a burrow holds one, as members each named by what it rests on and what rests on it, and who refuses a year not as a withholding but because the Undersong carries relation and not count. Where the account reaches an absence it marks it and gives no cause: the first cut, under a floor that is doing its work; the first of the people to enter the Corps, which nobody cut; and Tsittak's own account of how its founders came to the tunnel, which Akkit has stood on and will not strike on a dock plate, because the plate is not it. The one dry line in the account, that a history with no turning in it is level, which is what a floor is for, is struck in the register for things that are the case, and the set did not mark it as anything else.

On the posting Akkit says only that the humans were kind, the module was sealed, and that the account is describing a load and not complaining of it, which is the species page's loneliness line carried and not complained of. The record notes, without a reading, that Akkit came back.

What the Record Does Not Carry

Akkit's age, their burrow of origin and what it is tuned to, the Corps posting's place and years, the rank held at leaving, how long they have lived at Tsittak, and what they do there. Whether they knew Kettsa, or the crew of four under Eden's dock ring, the record does not say; the Belt is dozens of burrow-clusters and the Corps' scaffold work is in several places. Their body, which the portrait shows as the record now draws it: small, six-limbed, exoskeletal, low and dense, with the vibration organs along each limb and the lower carapace. The strikes themselves, which the Archive cannot feel, and the Undersong, which is not on file in any form.

See also

• Nothing Turned
• Chthonari, the people, and The Undersong Belt, the home
• Tsittak, where the account was struck, and the one account Akkit will not strike elsewhere
• Kettsa, a Chthonari still in the Engineering Corps' fold-scaffold work
• Marked Absences, the doctrine the receiving note files the account's absences under