Kattik

Kattik keeps the log. On a Chthonari contractor crew that is not a clerical duty; the log is the one record on a job that is the crew's own to leave, separate from whatever the client certifies, and the one who keeps it decides what a record is for. On Eden Space Habitat in the spring of 2828 UCSD, Kattik decided. The name is a struck signature — a heavy strike, a light one, a heavy — spelled the way a human ear renders it.

The Crew

Four on one deck, on their first posting off the Undersong Belt: Kattik; Tekka, with whom Kattik agrees about most things and disagrees about all of them; Tsikk, who asks the habitat; and Tikket, the youngest, who has begun to hear. The cut under the dock ring was good, the habitat's monitoring called the run normal, the certification went up, and the crew stayed on for the snagging list. Then Tikket heard the third mount ring under load, and Kattik said it was the course.

What Kattik Cannot Do

Hear a voice, or read a face; nothing in the airborne layer reaches a Chthonari, and Kattik has never been charmed by anyone. Hear anything at all when not in contact with structure. See a thing as raw. Write wrong in a log about a structure that is doing its job — and Kattik did not.

Character Notes

Kattik is rarely wrong about what is true, and said so, on the third mount, through the plating, in the flattest register the Undersong carries: new deck, new ring, six instruments reading normal, an apprentice who cannot tell a strange structure from a wrong one has not finished being an apprentice. All of which was true. It is the other thing — what a structure is doing that its record does not say — that Kattik memorises and Tikket has begun to hear, and Kattik knows the difference well enough to have gone to the mount alone, at the end of the shift after Tikket's, because a thing three of four have decided is still a thing one of four has heard.

Standing on it with the ring quiet, Kattik asked the question the burrow asks of every member before the cutting stops — what is this still doing? — and got the honest answer before deciding whether to want it: more than it was left to do. Not wrong. The certification was the habitat's, the monitoring the humans', the crew had cut what it was asked and cut it well, and nothing in the Undersong was ever improved by a stranger's note in a stranger's book. But a record that says less than the structure is doing is a record that has been cut too far. So the line went in, in the crew's hand, dated the last day of the work: Approach mount three, understructure: rings under load. Noted. Not a certification item.

Asked why not a certification item, Kattik said: because it is not. It is ours. Somebody will decide whose. Then told the apprentice, once and plainly, that being wrong about what a thing means is the kind of wrong that gets better — which is the nearest the log-keeper comes to saying anything twice.