Teddy

The name is the surface party's, and it is the third time on Fliade that a name has been reached for in a hurry. The survey called the herds Anstolik for a resemblance to Terran reindeer and the deep-network people Pandoids for a resemblance to bears, and the record reads both the way it reads every such name: as a fact about the observers. Teddy is the same move one step further in, and it is worth seeing what the step was. Reindeer and bears are animals. A teddy bear is a toy — a soft thing made in the shape of a dangerous one so that a child can hold it — and a party that reaches for that shape is recording, with great precision, what it wanted the encounter to be.

The survey log calls them Individual Four, the fourth Pandoid the Fliade survey learned to tell apart. This page uses the party's name because the log's is not a name either, and at least the party's is honest about what it is. They are a Pandoid of the deep networks beneath Fliade's equatorial band, smaller than any adult the survey has measured, and the only one of their people who comes up to where the survey works.

What the Survey Has Watched

Everything the Archive holds on Fliade is observational, and everything on this page is observational twice over: a party watching a person who, on the evidence, was mostly watching them.

Pandoids are large. Individual Four is not. The thermal profile the upper-level instruments log stands well short of the adults' and reads rounder, with a denser coat that holds the caverns' warmth close to the body long after an adult's has cooled toward the rock. The party read that as youth on the day it was first logged, and the survey lead struck the reading out the same evening: the survey has no method for ageing a Pandoid and has not pretended to one since. Smaller is the fact. Young is a guess wearing the fact's clothes, and the log now says only the first.

The adults are seen at the margin where the upper levels shelve down into the deep networks, and never above it. They withdraw when the party is working, by an interval the party has learned to measure, and they are announced — when they are announced at all — by the shift of a boulder. Individual Four does not withdraw. They come up past the margin into the levels the Anstolik share, into the fungus-light, to within a distance of the working party that no adult has ever closed, and they have never once been seen doing it. Every sighting is in a log, read afterwards. The one the party still tells is from a shift spent at an upper junction with the relay overhead: the unit's thermal channel, read that evening, showed a warm upright profile standing at the edge of the working light for eleven minutes, then gone. Nobody had looked up. No boulder shifted and nothing was heard, because there was nothing to hear.

The Relay

The survey's upper-level relay units are placed and lifted by the surface party, under the standing rule that nothing stays on this world that the planet would keep if the station were abandoned. In the survey's second season a unit placed at the junction the party had been using as its furthest working point was not, on the party's return, where the party had left it.

It was standing upright, on its base, oriented the way the party orients them, at the exact line in the floor's mineral silt where the party's own furthest tracks stopped. Nothing on it was damaged. Between the junction and that line is a squeeze the party rates impassable for anything of an adult Pandoid's mass, and the unit is heavier than a surveyor carries through it comfortably. Its own log records that it slept at the junction, as it does whenever the relay is below the horizon; that it woke once, in transit, to a thermal trigger at zero range; that it classified the trigger — by the same logic Survey Lead Nakagawa had refused to hang on the Anstolik — as an upright bipedal profile at the highest confidence it is capable of; and that it went back to sleep in the arms of the thing it had just identified.

Two readings were filed, and the record keeps both. Instrument Specialist Egede's is that a dropped thing was returned: a courtesy, in a form a party that had never been addressed could not fail to understand. The survey lead's is that a line was drawn, with the party's own instrument, at the party's own furthest mark, by someone who had watched where the party stopped and thought about it. The two are not in conflict about what happened, only about what it was, and the Fliade doctrine — slow everything down — holds under either. The unit was lifted that day. No unit has since been placed past the line, and the party has not crossed it.

From inside, Carried It Sleeping (S11E01C02) supplies what neither reading could: it was a stone moved first — the people's manners for entering a place, done with the party's own instrument because it is the only ground the party listens to — set at the line where the party's feet had once come through the squeeze and stopped, which from the deep side is the edge of the up-people's place. Egede's courtesy and Nakagawa's furthest mark are each half of it. The survey has no way to hold the whole, and this page, which is the survey's side, records that the whole exists and where it is told. From above, Eleven Minutes (S11E02C01) tells the survey's side as it was lived: the eleven minutes read that evening, the unit found on the line and its log read on the spot by Aravena, the two readings filed by Egede and Nakagawa and the third not given, and the question the one who knelt has asked the dark at the end of every working time since. The season's one act is recorded twice — Something Happened (S11E02C03) from above, Theirs to Move (S11E01C05) from below — and Carried-It-Sleeping, lying in the warm, is the one who sees the two stones as one thing done from both sides: the humming stone carried sleeping to the edge of the up-people's place, and a plain stone of the runners' ground carried through the crack to the edge of the people's.

What the Record Does Not Carry

Their name — as the survey holds it. Pandoid is a survey coinage; Teddy is a surface party's; Individual Four is a log's. None is a name they gave the survey, and on the survey's side the absence is marked rather than filled. From inside, the people's name for them is rendered Carried-It-Sleeping — a telling, on the pattern by which the Told name everyone — for the same act the survey files as the relay's placement. The party named them for a soft thing a child holds; the people named them for holding the party's thing still while it slept. The two names meet at one object and do not know it.

Their age, and their sex. The party's log says he. The party's word is the party's, and the record does not follow it; the they on this page is not a Pandoid pronoun either, only the record declining to claim one. Whether the Pandoids carry a system of their own is exactly the kind of fact a people states and an observer cannot.

Whether the relay was a message. Both readings above are readings. The placement is the fact.

Whether they were ever alone. The adults at the margin are logged on the days Individual Four comes up and on the days they do not, and the survey has no way to tell whether the margin is watching the party, or the smaller one, or both.

Character Notes

Soft and warm are facts about fur and the deep. They are measured, and a Pandoid is those things to every instrument that has ever been pointed at one. The mistake the party made was in what it let the facts imply — the toy's implication, that a soft warm thing is a safe one — and the log corrected it first and the party second. Nothing in the record has Individual Four doing anything weak, and nothing has them doing anything foolish: every approach unseen, every withdrawal before a head turned, one object touched in two seasons, and that one placed where it would be understood. The party's affection survived the correction. Only the toy did not.

What they could do is stated once and left. A person of that mass, moving through ground the party cannot, at a range the party did not know had been closed, with the party's back turned, for eleven minutes. The record notes it because the record notes what was not done, and because the survey lead's standing order after the relay was that the log say, every shift, that nothing had happened — so that on the day something did, the file would show how long it had been true.

See also: Fliade, A Proposal to Collar the Anstolik, Refused at Countersign, What the Record Refuses, What Nobody Certifies, Marked Absences, Frontier Transformation Protocols.