Second Outwork

Second Outwork is a sapient of Meridian, of the reef-city the record renders as the Long Shelf, and the author of one document in the record, What Came in the Water: the council's history of itself, struck on the city's lattice at the Survey Archive's asking and carried on the Halyx Relay Station's chemical-and-percussion translation channel in its exact shape, the short strike that goes far and the slow water that comes after and says what the strike meant. The council made the words; Second Outwork struck them, and says so, and keeps one part back as its own: the address at the close, which is what others strike to call Second Outwork. The Archive files the petition under that address, since a council is not a person the Archive can file.

The name is the relay station's translation instrumentation's rendering of a percussion address, given, as Sixth Course's is, as a part of the city's lattice. The author says of it only that this is what an address sounds like to a channel. Whether it names where Second Outwork was raised, where Second Outwork works, or something the record has no word for, the Archive has not asked, and the account does not say. No pronoun system is declared for Meridian's people, and this page uses the name throughout, as the record does for Sixth Course and for the Cerebraun.

Known History

• Strikes for the council of the Long Shelf, by the author's own word: the council makes a petition in the water, over sittings the author will not count, and Second Outwork strikes it on the city where the relay station's channel hears. When this began, and whether the author struck any of the council's petitions the record already holds, the account does not say (What Came in the Water).
• Struck the council's history of itself for the Survey Archive, after the Long Shelf's own consultation on the Sentinel of 2828 UCSD, which the account recounts as done; the asking came through the Halyx liaison office under the standing data-exchange arrangement, and the council answered by petition, insisting as before that the channel carry the exact shape.
• Gave the address at the close of the petition as the one thing in it that is the author's and not the council's, and asked that it be struck back.

Character Notes

The account is the council's, and the author says so in words: the water after every strike is the council's and not mine, except this. What the page can say of Second Outwork is therefore what the close shows and what the choice of form shows. The close is dry and exact: an address offered as a part of the city because that is what a channel makes of it, a count of sittings declined, and an invitation to strike back with the one condition the whole document has been teaching, that the water be waited for. The form is the author's craft. A petition carried smooth, the account says, is a petition with the water taken out of it, and the council asked the channel to do the slow thing on purpose; the one who strikes for a council that insists on its exact shape is the one who has to strike the shape exactly, and the strikes the channel renders are short, level and in a pattern, each history given in three or four lines that go far and then a water that takes its time.

Second Outwork stands, like every person of the Long Shelf, under an administration the city did not choose, and the account gives the deep beds in the council's register: struck about four times, heard and written each time, not slowed, and not a surprise, since the city has put slower questions to the sea. Nothing in the account is bitter, and nothing in it is a complaint; the council's one petition, at the close, is that its shape be kept. On the Sentinel the author strikes the council's discipline and adds nothing: resemblance, not an address; nobody has asked whose it is; a question not put is not answered. The quiet jokes are the council's and structural, and cost nobody: the two surveys that filed the city as rock were filed by the city as weather, and the half-hour the channel spends on connotation, which the liaison office counts against the channel, the Long Shelf would count the other way.

What the Record Does Not Carry

Second Outwork's age, in any reckoning; the record holds no Meridian lifespan and no conversion between a course of the Long Shelf and any year. What Second Outwork counts from, or names. Whether striking for the council is an office, a craft or a turn taken, and how the one who strikes is chosen; the record holds the Long Shelf's council and its analysts and nothing of how either is composed. Whether Second Outwork knows Sixth Course, who serves the same council; the account names no analyst and the record holds nothing. Whether Second Outwork struck the council's petition of early spring 2828 UCSD, or its thanks, or any of its four objections on extraction; the account recounts them as the council's and claims none. The author's own view of the extraction, of the Hegemony, or of the Sentinel's hand, none of which the account gives. What the people call themselves, their world, their sea or the Hegemony; whose secretion the lattice's composite is; what is under the lowest course; whether any other reef-city was asked. The author's body, which no page describes beyond the people's, as the record's one Meridian portrait shows it: a long, low, segmented body in dark mineral-grey plates on many short jointed limbs, a smooth armoured hood with a row of small sense-pits, and two blunt forelimb claws. No portrait is on file; the prompt is written and waits on the desktop.

See also

• What Came in the Water
• Meridian, the people, the reef-cities, the two surveys and the settlers who nearly quarried a city
• Sixth Course, the record's one other named Meridian person, an analyst to the same council
• The Sentinel, the question the council was asked about and the one it has not been asked
• Tavesh, who keeps the channel the petition was struck to
• What Meridian Asked (S03E01C03), the council's first petition in its exact shape
• Marked Absences, the doctrine the receiving desk files the council's unasked things under