Nothing Turned

Status: Held as a translating set's rendering, copied to the general collection; valid for its author, and read as a description of an account and not the account (see the receiving note)

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Receiving note

The Survey Archive asked, by way of a Corps vessel calling at Tsittak before the tunnel, for a history of the Chthonari by one of them. Tsittak's answer, through its translating set, was that the history is cut where it is cut and does not travel, and that one of them would strike on the dock plating what could be struck there, since the set stands on the same plate. The author served in the Engineering Corps and came back to Tsittak to stay, as some do. What follows is the set's rendering; the strikes are not on file, and no one at the Archive can feel them. Where the set declined to render a strike it says so, with its reason. The note at the end is ours.

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You are standing in the air, and you have asked for the history of my people. I will strike what can be struck on this plate, and the set will render it, and will tell you where it stopped. What it gives you is a description. Keep that word. You have one already, for the account under this dock, and you will have another when I finish, and neither is the thing.

Where I come from a history is not told. It is stood on. A burrow is its own account: every member left in it is still doing what it was left to do, and the ones who cut it are in it the way the load is in it. Nobody in the Belt asks when. They stand in a settlement and listen down through what is newer to what is older, and the older is older because the newer rests on it. That is the only order we keep. So I give you members, each by what it rests on and what rests on it, and no year. [Not rendered: the strike the author gave in place of year has no equivalent in the set's tables. The nearest it offers is what rests on what*, and it marks that this is a relation and not a count.]*

The first cut

Under everything there is a first cut, and nobody has stood on it. The oldest burrows have been cut around for so long that the first member is whichever one cannot be found, and we do not look for it. The cutting that followed is what it was for. If you want the beginning of my people you will not have it from me, and you will not have it from anyone who stands on the Belt, because it is under the floor we stand on, and the floor is doing its work.

No fire

Other peoples strike me their histories, and they turn on a fire. There was an age when metal was dug and crushed and heated until it gave up what was not wanted, and a smith was a person of power, and the age ended and another began. We have no such member. The rock was metal when we were small and it is metal now. Nobody refined it, because nothing was ever raw. [Not rendered: the set declines to render the author's strike at raw precisely. The nearest it offers is not yet asked what it is good for*.]* We cut. We decided what the rock would still be doing when the cutting stopped and took away everything that was not that, and we have done it since the first cut nobody can find, and got better at listening to it. Your historians have a word for a history with no turning in it. They say it is flat. It is level, which is what a floor is for.

The vessik in the wall

The oldest member I can give you a name for is an animal's. There are vessik in the walls of every burrow, and a burrow whose vessik have gone still has a fracture in it, and a child checks the vessik before it learns to read. That is not a custom. It is the first thing the rock teaches, and it is taught by something that cannot be charmed, so it is taught truly. Among the peoples I served beside, the young learn their letters first and the floor after, and I was told their floors do not break. I have stood on their floors since, and listened, and they are floors.

The course and the tunnel

A young one memorises the course. That is not a fault; it is most of the craft, and a cutter who has memorised many courses cuts well. What the young one has not done is listen to the tunnel, which says what it is doing whether or not the course says it, and deciding what to leave is learned by ear, over years, by standing on what one has left. We have a race for it. Off-worlders come to the race for the speed. We watch for the one who is listening. You could not tell them apart from the air. We can, from the floor, before the first turn.

The scaffolds

The Federation came to the Belt, and the Belt is a member of it, for generations by their reckoning. I do not give you the year, because the set would give you the Federation's year, and you have that one in the Federation's own hand. What the Belt gives the compact is scaffolds. A fold scaffold is a structure under stress that can be read before it fails. We had been reading rock. It was not new work. It was the same work on a structure made of something other than stone, and any of us who stands on one and says it sounds wrong before the instruments agree is doing nothing new.

The Corps

Some of us go to the Rangers' Engineering Corps. Nobody is sent, and nobody is counted; one goes because one is good at the work and the work is there, and the ones who recruit for it are asked by your press, every time, whether there is a quota, and are tired. A reader of your record asked me, before you, who went first. Nobody cut that member. Many went. The first is whichever one cannot be found, which is the answer I gave you for the first cut, and I give it for the same reason.

The deck

I served. I will give you the posting as a member, because it bears on the rest. A crew on a deck off the Belt has each other through the plating, as much of the Undersong as the deck carries, and it carries enough. One alone on a deck has the deck. The humans were kind. The module was sealed. I am not complaining; I am describing a load. [Not rendered: the set declines the author's strike for the load itself, and offers in its place a phrase it marks as the record's and not the strike's: a shared structure nobody else in the room can feel*.]* I came back. Some of us do.

This body

This body is in the dark with no star, and to us it is most of a town, and beside it is the tunnel. The Rangers came out of the tunnel in a year the Rangers hold, and were asked whether they needed anything, and that is the member your record came in by, so you have it already. How the first of us came to this tunnel is cut into this body. I have stood on it. I will not strike it here. It is cut where it is cut, and what I strike on a dock plate for a set to render is not that account; it is a description of one, and you have a description already. The set will tell you it is honouring a refusal. It is not. There is nothing to refuse. The account is where it is, and this plate is not it.

Where it begins

You asked where the history begins. It begins where you are standing, and goes down. Stand on it. [Not rendered: the account closes with a run of strikes the set declines to render as a word; it gives them as the author's name, and nothing after it.]

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Receiving note, continued

Filed Cultural Record, valid for its author. The Archive holds this as the translating set's rendering of an account struck on Tsittak's dock plating; the Undersong is not on file, and the author's own word for what the Archive holds, a description, is the Archive's word too. The Archive sets nothing in it to a year, and the two events the account declines to place, the first cut and the first Chthonari to enter the Engineering Corps, it leaves where the author left them. Four things in the account the Archive already holds in its own voice: that the Undersong Belt is already made of metal and the Chthonari never needed a smelter; that the Undersong does not translate; that Tsittak's own account is cut into the body and the record holds a description of it and not a reading; and that Chthonari serve in the Engineering Corps by individual choice and never by quota. The set's four declined renderings are kept as it gave them, which the Academy's handbook calls a correct output. The one Chthonari document in the record's own hand remains a crew's work log, and this is not one; it was struck, not written.

See also: Chthonari, The Undersong Belt, Tsittak, Thrum, a vessik, The Federation of Sentient Beings, Lagrange Points and Fold-Space Transit, Marked Absences, Xenolinguistics Handbook: The Ten Failures.