Idrun Hesk

Idrun Hesk is an Ilveth of Sardain and, by her own account, a sealer: one who keeps a buried working floor from showing its heat. The record holds one account of hers, and holds it twice: Shown to the Sky, the history of the Ilveth as she gave it, in the warm-write, outside, at night, on the ice within sight of her province's ground, recorded by a Survey Corps reader's imager and unread by anyone in the Archive; and her own click-speech gloss of it, given passage by passage after each had cooled, which is the text the Archive files. She answered the Archive's asking after an interval the desk did not measure, and named her terms before she gave anything: not in a room, and not in the day-register. The Archive has the gloss, the imager's record, and three passages she wrote in warmth and did not gloss, which the desk marks and does not supply.

She is Ilveth, cold-bodied, and not humanoid, as her species' page says of all of them; nothing on this page or in her account describes her body beyond the people's. Idrun Hesk is the click-speech handle. Her full name is a warm-write pattern, and the record cannot carry it, as it cannot carry Suvra Kel's. She is she in the record's translation register, as Suvra Kel is, and the record asserts nothing by it.

Known History

• A sealer of a buried working floor on Sardain, by her own account, undated. The record holds buried floors, banked heat and insulation raised to the level others reserve for art (The Ilveth, They Dug for Fire), and names no trade; the trade is hers.
• Gave the history of the Ilveth at the Survey Archive's asking, in warmth, under the open sky at night, with a Survey Corps reader present in the field shell and an imager that passes the thermal band and decides nothing. The telling took most of a Sardain night. She rested the day after and asked that the rest not be counted against the telling, since the telling had been paid for already (Shown to the Sky).
• Was not on the watch that saw the survey's first landing party, and says so; gives that part of the history as what everyone has.
• Has never, by anything in the account, left Sardain or served in any corps. The record's one other named Ilveth took Corps service; this one stayed, and the account is given from the side that stayed.

Character Notes

The account shows a person who prices speech before she spends it, and spends it anyway. She opens by refusing the room she was offered and giving the reason first, since among the Ilveth the reason is the price. She calls her craft a ledger and not an art, and says the finest thing she knows how to say of a place is that one could cross it at night with the pits open and see nothing. She gives the Ilveth's first error at contact, the answering of human faces, in full and at its cost, and says plainly which way the shame went and when it turned.

She holds the oldest courtesy through the whole of a night beside a body in the field shell that, by her lights, spent heat into the sky without stopping, and answers none of it. The account's one quiet joke is there: it has said a great deal. She declines, in words, the things she will not spend on: a count to convert, the people's name for themselves, who speaks for Sardain, the first fire and the first wall. She does not say the Ilveth were behind anyone for reading their sky correctly, and she does not say they were not; she says she has read the record's sentence and will not spend on whether it is kind.

The account closes on the reason for the sky, which is the landing party: a people who showed the sky their heat for three nights and lived, when everything the Ilveth are was built on the fact that they cannot. She gives the history the way the visitors live, in the open and at full price, and then sends the reader indoors and stays out. It is dark, and I can see all of it.

What the Record Does Not Carry

Her age, and how long she has kept her floor. Which province, and where on Sardain. How a sealer comes to the work, and whether sealer is an office, a trade or her own word for what she does; the record holds no Ilveth polity, office or Federation standing, and the account settles none. Whether she has kin, or what kin is among the Ilveth; the record holds nothing of Ilveth sex, birth or lifespan. The interval between the asking and her answer, and the year of either; the Ilveth measures she names are watches and nights, and the record converts none of them. The three passages she wrote in warmth and did not gloss. Her body, which no page describes beyond the people's: long and low, several paired limbs under a segmented body at ground temperature, a hooded sensory crown of dry mirror-pits with a ring of small photic eyes below it, broad vascular vanes folded along the flank and crown.

The record holds no picture of her. The Survey Corps imager's record of her telling is on file beside the account and is not reproduced here: in visible light an Ilveth shows nothing of who she is, and in the thermal band the imager passes, a body at the temperature of the ice records as almost nothing beside the warm-write.

See also

• Shown to the Sky
• The Ilveth (Warm-Eyed) — Sardain, the mirror-pits, the warm-write, the sky as the coldest thing there is
• Suvra Kel, the record's one other named Ilveth, who took Corps service
• The Ladder in Other Tongues, the Ilveth rendering her account explains from the inside
• Marked Absences, the doctrine the receiving desk files the three unglossed passages under