Iklix Varn

Iklix Varn holds the rank most Deputies hold for exactly as long as it takes to stop being new at it, and is, in the spring of 2828 UCSD, still new at it. Their first field posting is the fold-approach watch on Eden Space Habitat — a compartment on the fold-approach side of the ring, behind a hatch the habitat's residents walk past without seeing, where six cross-correlated instruments file their agreement with each other every ninety seconds and the nearest qualified officer stands a shift in case the event comes. It has not come in Zoe Smith's tenure. She said so on Varn's first day, as a fact about the posting and not as a comfort, and Varn understood that it was neither.

Varn is young, in the way the rank implies and the record does not further fix: old enough to have finished a Cadet year and been trusted with a posting under an officer the Corps hands its rawest Deputies to first; young enough to be standing, most days, one step further from the desk than they need to be. The record declines to attach a number to it. What it does carry is three words, which is more than it carries for most Deputies: lean in build, dark-haired, and of a quiet bearing — the last being the quality Smith's assessments will eventually have to find a longer word for.

The Posting

A Deputy works under a Field Officer's supervision by definition, and Smith supervises the way her assessments say she does: with exactly what can be checked and nothing that cannot. The posting's first lesson, which Varn took on the first day, is that the watch does not watch anything — the instruments watch themselves — and that its job is to be the closest qualified officer when something happens, and to log flatly, in a form that can be checked, when nothing does.

Its ninth day was a form. Structural work on Eden that touches the approach monitoring is certified twice, by the habitat and by the watch's countersignature, and the countersign needs the contractor's log as well as the certification copy. The log had not come up the ring. Varn was sent for it — across to the Compact side, where the tab at a Deputy's collar is a courtesy and not a rank — and came back with two documents that agreed about everything the certification had asked and one line the certification had not: a contractor's note that the third approach mount rang under load, initialled in the Certification Office and marked n/a. Varn did not know what the note meant. Varn knew what not a certification item meant, which was the sentence the whole ring was built out of: a thing that was true and belonged to nobody.

The watch's log records the rest. Smith declined to countersign, declined to refer, and sent the Deputy back to ask — politely, on the Corps' letterhead — not whether the note was true but who had decided it was not a question.

What They Decline

Varn does not ask why a log is missing. A Deputy who has been told to fetch a thing fetches it, and notices what the officer did not say — in this case, lost.

Varn does not sit down with a document unless told to. Reading standing up is how a Deputy reads anything, and it is why the extra line was found before the chair was.

Varn does not pretend to know. Asked what rings under load meant to a person who reads structure through their feet, Varn said I don't know, and was told that this was the correct answer and the only one that would have been accepted — and did not know, for a moment, what to do with being right by having nothing.

Character Notes

Varn's standing is the season's subject in a person. On the fold-approach side of Eden the Corps has a record older than the Compact and a Deputy to stand beside it; on the Compact side it has a courtesy. The contractors whose log Varn carried are the Compact's, on the Compact's ring, and cannot be asked by the Corps at all — we are a courtesy there, Smith said, and turned back to the trace. So the one person in the case with no authority anywhere is the one who ends up carrying its only complete account from one side of the ring to the other, which is a thing junior officers are for and nobody tells them.

The name is the Deputy's own; the service suffix that comm protocol appends to common names has not yet had reason to attach to it.