Vela of the Seam

Vela of the Seam is a Pelagene Littoral of the Star Rangers, posted to Threshold Station, and the author of one document in the record, Where It Was Put: the history of her people, written in the Archive's working language in the humid working section where she is posted, at the Survey Archive's asking through the Corps' rolls of serving officers. She asked that the desk come down to her, since the desk is dry and her section is not, and that the asking be put in writing before she began; the account gives her reason, which is also its subject. She gave the history under the words the record's first filers set beside her world, water, littoral, brine, fire, fix, hydration, each left standing where they put it and marked as a conversion, and under each what it was set beside and which way the thing has moved since.

Her name is as the Corps' rolls carry it, in the record's translation register, as Mira of Brine's is; the record holds no Pelagene name in any other form, and she says of it only that both halves are the rolls'. She is she in the record's translation register, as Mira of Brine is, and the record asserts nothing by it.

Known History

• Grew up on Nerath, in the depth band her people hold between the lit, weathered surface and the cold below; the account gives growing up as learning to hold a depth until the rate of losing it has gone to nothing, and gives no year, place or kin (Where It Was Put).
• Came into the Corps as her people do, by her own account, because a station is a column that has agreed to stay and she had never read one; the year is not given, and the Corps' rolls hold it.
• Has served long enough among humans to have read the record's own entry on her people in its earlier form, before it was rewritten to mark the early words as conversions, and to have been asked, since, why her people never said the words were set wrong. The account is her answer.
• Posted, in the record's present, 2826 UCSD, to Threshold Station's humid, high-pressure working sections, reading the station's coolant, sealing and what crosses a seam, as the people's page says Pelagene Rangers do. Answered the Survey Archive's asking from there, wrote the account in her own section with a reader of the desk present, and passed it on one condition, that the marked words stay where they were put.

Character Notes

The account shows a person who gives a history as her people keep one, by which way a thing is moving and how fast, never by where it was, and who turns that method on the record itself: she takes each human word set beside her world, leaves it standing, marks it, and says what was on the other side of it. She is exact about the record's own sentences, quotes three of them back as good and yours, and corrects none of them; she adds the cost from the side that pays it. Asked what a system is she tells a board what it is doing, and says she has done so four times in one sitting and been thought difficult, and that she was answering.

She is dry in the register for things that are the case, and the account's quiet jokes are structural: fix is two words and her people are poor at both; the reader comes into her section with the air's share of one gas lowered so that nothing can catch fire, and nobody looks at the valve. She declines in words, not by silence: no Pelagene word for anything, no count in her people's measure, not because they are kept but because a word set down here would stand still, and she has not learned how to make one do that. The one thing she says her people were slowest to learn about humans is that a written word stays where it is put; the account ends by doing the same thing on purpose.

What the Record Does Not Carry

Her age, in any reckoning, and the length of her service. Her corps and her rank, which the rolls hold and the account does not; which corps holds an environmental or contamination specialist is not established for any Pelagene. Where on Nerath she grew up, and what kin is among her people; the record holds no Pelagene settlement, polity, social order or Federation standing, and the account settles none. Her people's own words for anything, which she gives none of, and whether every Pelagene keeps a history as rates and directions, which the Archive has not asked. Whether she knows Mira of Brine; the Corps is large, and the account does not name her, deferring only to a name your record has already marked. Her body, which no page describes beyond her people's: radially symmetrical about a vertical axis, with no front, a large folded water-permeable integument that is the organ of perception, fine tentacular cirri, and a buoyancy organ at the centre; on duty in the Rangers' shell as a Pelagene wears it, a few small fitted sections seated between the folds. No portrait is on file; the prompt is written and waits on the desktop.

See also

• Where It Was Put
• The Pelagene Littoral, the people, their world's several fluids, and the early words the entry marks as conversions
• Mira of Brine, the record's one other named Pelagene, whose name carries the word the account will not mark twice
• Timekeeping and the Common Record, the principle the account turns back on the record: the original is the document, the conversion the courtesy
• Xenolinguistics Handbook: The Ten Failures, where the record files the courtesy mistaken for the fact
• Marked Absences, the doctrine the receiving desk files her unmarked Nerath under