What It Will Carry

Status: Held as the author's own account, in the general collection; valid for its author, and read with its rating lines as the author set them, none removed and none added (see the receiving note)

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Receiving desk's note

The Survey Archive asked, through the Corps' rolls of serving officers, for a history of the Veyr Basaltborn by one of them. The author answered from a posting, and asked that the posting not be named in the filing, for a reason the account gives; the desk has kept the request, and the rolls hold the rest. The account was written by the author in the Archive's working language and sent to the desk in parts, each ending in a line the author calls its rating. The desk has removed none of those lines and added none, and has set no year to anything, since the author gives none. What the Veyr speak among themselves the Archive does not hold and the account does not supply: it is written in our language and in no other, and that is all the desk can say of how it was written. The note at the end is ours.

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The terms

The desk has asked for the history of my people. I will give it, and before I give any of it I will say how a Veyr gives anything, because if you read what follows the way you read your own histories you will stand on it in places where it will not carry you, and that would be my fault and not yours.

When we rate a thing we say two things. What it will carry. And where we struck it to find out. The second is not a courtesy; it is half the rating. A figure with no strike behind it is a wish, and on my world a wish is the heaviest thing there is, because somebody puts a load on it. So I will end every part of this with its rating: what the part will carry, and where I struck it. Where I did not strike, I will say so, and you may not stand there. That is the whole of the method.

Your record has one of us on file who says the lattice knows before the surface agrees. It was given to you as the nearest rendering of a thing we say, and I will not better it, since nearest is a rating too, and an honest one. I have put no word of ours in this. You will see at the end why.

Rated: this part will carry everything that follows. Struck at: my own apprenticeship, and every rating I have given since.

The fire

Your record says we were handed high-energy processing for nothing, and that we have never understood the reverence other peoples attach to it. Both are right, and I will tell you what for nothing means, since your record uses it as a figure and I use it as a fact.

It means nobody's name is on it. Heat is in the ground. Pressure is in the ground. The ground gives them to anyone standing on it, with no apprenticeship and no rating, and a thing that is given to everyone is not a thing anyone did. So we have no story of the first fire. I have asked, since I came among you, what your first fire was like, and you tell me a story every time, and the story has a person in it. Ours has none. There was nothing to do. It was there.

What we have instead is the first rating that held. I was told it at my apprenticeship, the first thing one is told, and what I was told was this: a thing was rated, and the ground moved, and it carried what it was rated for. Not what the thing was. Not who rated it. Not how long ago. The rating, and that it held. That is the beginning of us, and it is the only kind of beginning we keep, and everything of ours since is a version of it.

Rated: will carry what I have said and no more. Struck at: the record's page, which I have read, and the first thing I was told, which was told to everyone of my apprenticeship in the same words. Unstruck: what the first rated thing was. Nobody I have asked knows, and nobody minds.

The ground

Everything is hot. Everything is abrasive. Everything is moving. Your record has those three in the right order, and I would add only that the third is the one that matters, because the first two can be planned for and the third can only be braced against.

The ground on Veyr-3 does not stand still long enough to be stood on. I do not mean that it heaves. I mean that it is never at rest: a finished surface is being eaten from the moment it is finished, and a joint set true at the start of a working period is not true at the end of it, and nobody did anything to it. You have a word for a thing that stays where you put it. I learned the word among you. It is not a word I had a use for at home. At home the question was never whether a thing would move. It was whether what you had made would still be telling the truth after it had.

That is what we fought for. Your record says we fought for precision, and I have thought about the word, since your record is careful with words and I want to be careful back. We did not fight a people. Nothing on my world is against us; the ground is not an enemy, and it is not a friend, and it is not anything that could be either. We fought the way a brace fights, by holding, and the fight had no moment in it. Nothing was ever won. A rating held through one shaking, and then there was the next shaking, and the rating held or it did not, and either way there was the next. I will come to why that shape of fight suits us, since it is the shape we are poor at the other kind of.

Rated: will carry the ground as I know it. Struck at: the first part of my life, which was all of it until the Corps. Unstruck: whether the ground was ever otherwise. I was not there, and nobody has rated that.

The margin

Here is the thing I most want you to have, and I have put it fourth because the three before it are what it rests on.

An overstated rating on my world costs what you would expect it to cost. I will not give you the figure, because I did not strike it: it is not kept as a figure, and I would be inventing one. But I will give you the shape. A lattice that is loaded past what it will carry does not bend and warn you. It holds, exactly as the rating said, up to the rating, and then at the member that was lying it goes, and it takes with it whatever was standing on the lie. A lie is a figure with no strike behind it. That is why we have no reverence for fire and a great deal for the honest statement of what a thing will carry, and why an overstated rating was the one thing I was ever corrected for at my apprenticeship, and why we are so slow to give one.

Your record has it that we calibrate by material behaviour rather than by instrument, and that this reads as personality until you know where it comes from. It is right. Where it comes from is that an instrument is a thing somebody rated, and the material is the thing itself. On my world the instrument has been shaken since it was set and the material has not changed what it is. So when the two disagree, you trust the one that cannot have drifted, and you work until the other agrees, and you do not sign until it does. I have been told, among you, that this is stubbornness. I have been told it kindly. It is the correct order of evidence, and your record, which I have read, says so in those words, and I was glad to find them there.

And I keep arguing for a reserve after the decision has been made. Your record says we do this, and it is right. I will tell you why, and it is not that we do not understand a decision. A decision is a rating. It was struck before the shaking, and it has not been struck since, and the thing it was taken on has moved. I am not refusing the decision. I am asking when it was last struck.

Rated: will carry a full load. This is the part I would stand on myself. Struck at: everything I have ever rated, and two members I have watched go, which I will not describe, since you did not ask for that and it would carry nothing you need.

The truss

Your record says the slender look deceives, and that outsiders get this backwards. They do. I have watched it happen on every posting, and I have never once minded, since a thing that is rated higher than it looks is the best thing a thing can be, and I would rather be that than the other.

What the record does not say, since it is written from outside, is that we did not learn the truss. We were one before we had a word for it. A Veyr is many slender members bracing one another, no trunk, no front, no privileged pair of anything, and a Veyr child learns to stand the way a Veyr engineer learns to build, by finding out which members are carrying and which are lying. The first thing I ever rated was myself. Everyone's is. On a world where your joints would go in a generation, a body that puts the load through one thick member is not available and a body that shares it is, and a people who are the second kind do not have to be taught what a truss is for. They have to be taught everything else.

Your things are rated lower than they look. I say this without disrespect; you have not needed otherwise. On your stations I am careful, and your record calls this calibration and not caution, and it is right, and the calibration is this: everything I touch here will carry less than my limbs expect, and a thing overloaded by a tip that did not mean it is exactly as broken as one overloaded by a lie. So I apply what the thing is rated for. It is slow. I know it is slow.

Rated: will carry my own body and what I have seen of yours. Struck at: myself, daily, and every surface I have worked on among you. Unstruck: what your record says of our eyes and our surface, which I have not checked against your words, since I do not see them from outside.

Where we are poor

A rating that leaves out where a thing fails is not a rating. So here is where we fail, and I give it at full rating, since it is the one thing in this account I am surest of.

We are poor at putting everything through one member at once. A truss is stable because the load is shared, and a truss cannot leap, or strike once and hard, or throw, or do any of the things your bodies do when there is one moment and everything must go into it. Where you would commit, we brace, and distribute, and apply, and there are situations, which your record says are mercifully rare in our work, where that is a half-second too slow. The record is right. I have been in one. It was not mine to carry, and someone else carried it, and I read the figures afterward.

The other half of the same failure is this. A people whose whole history is a brace against a thing that has no moment in it are not good at the kind of fight that does. We are poor at the plan with no fallback because we have never once seen a thing that did not shake, and poor at the single commitment because nothing on our world ever asked for one. Your record says we have been explaining the lattice to newcomers for as long as there have been newcomers. We have. We have been explaining this too, and it is the harder one, because the first makes us sound strong and this makes us sound slow, and both are true, and neither is a rating of our worth.

Rated: full, and I would stand on it. Struck at: my own body in the one situation I have named, and the record's page, which does not flatter us, and which I respect for it.

The Corps

I will say what I may of my service and no more, since the rolls hold what the rolls hold.

We are placed where mechanical stress and thermal risk overlap. Your record calls this neither tokenism nor coincidence, and I would put it more plainly: it is where a thing that has been rated honestly is most needed, and where a dishonest one costs the most, and a people who spent their whole history on the difference are put there because they know it in the lattice. I am a thermal transit specialist. I have not named my posting in this account, and I asked the desk not to name it, and the reason is that what I say here about hulls and ratings would be read, by anyone who knew the station, as a rating of that station, and I have not struck it for that purpose, and a rating given by accident is the one kind I was raised never to give.

Your uniform is a shell fitted per body, and my people are among the reasons it is. I wear no garment. My corps colour and my rank sit on the lattice itself, seated as every other tab is seated, on a surface that is not cloth. Your record says a geometry has no first language. That is right, and I would add that it has no handle either, which is the thing we would have told you about tools if you had asked, and which you found out by picking one of ours up.

The record holds one of us who would not sign, for a long time, against every instrument on a station, and was right, and whose refusal that station now files as a reading and not as a performance matter. It is their file. I will not add to it, and I will not use it, except to say this: every Veyr who has read it recognised it, and none of us was surprised, and the surprise on the other side is a thing your record has already written down better than I could.

Rated: will carry my own service and what the record holds of the Corps. Struck at: my postings, which I do not name, and the record's pages on the uniform and on the one refusal. Unstruck: how the first of us came to the Corps, and when. I was not there, and I have never heard it given with a strike behind it, so I give it with none, which is to say I do not give it.

What I have not rated

I give these so that you do not go looking for them in the parts above.

How we speak among ourselves. Your record says it does not know, and holds no rendering of your ladder from us. It still does not. This is in your language. I have put no word of ours in it, and the reason is the method: a word of ours in your record would be a thing you would stand on, and I cannot strike it for you, since I do not know what you would put on it. The one rendering you have is marked nearest. Leave it marked.

Who speaks for us at home, or whether anyone does. I have not struck it. I have been in the Corps a long time.

When we met you, and where, and how. I was not there.

What else lives on Veyr-3. You did not ask, and I have rated nothing that is not mine.

What mark we carry at home, beside the one your Corps seats on us. I have not said, and I will not, and that is not a refusal of the desk. It is that I have not struck the question of whether it is mine to say.

Rated: this part carries nothing, and is meant to. Struck at: nowhere. That is the point of it.

What it will carry

The desk will want a year somewhere in this. I have given none, and I will give the reason as a rating, since that is what it is.

A year is a figure. I did not strike it. Nothing I was told at my apprenticeship came with one, and nothing I have rated since was improved by one, and if I put one here it would be the one wish in an account that has none, and someone would stand on it, since that is what your record does with a year: it stands on it, and builds the next thing on the first. I will not give you a member to build on that I know is lying. You have a record that keeps years, and it is a good record, and it has read us more honestly than I expected. Keep your years. Beside them, keep this: a people who had fire for nothing and spent everything they had on the other thing, which was to make a statement that was still true after the ground had moved.

I have struck this account at every point I know. It rings as I have said it will. I did not strike it everywhere. Nobody can, and a Veyr who tells you otherwise has given you a figure, and you know now what to do with a figure that has no strike behind it.

Rated: will carry what each part says it will carry, and nothing across the parts that any one of them does not. Struck at: the parts. Where it is unstruck I have said so. Stand there and the failure is yours; stand where I struck it and it is mine, and I have signed.

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Receiving desk's note, continued

Filed Cultural Record, valid for its author, as their own account, with every rating line as the author set it. The Archive has set no year to anything in it and has asked for none: the author gives none and says why, the record holds no Veyr reckoning and no conversion from one, and the Corps' first meeting with the Veyr Basaltborn is undated and unplaced in the record and stays so. What the Archive holds in its own voice, on the Veyr Basaltborn entry, the account also holds: that Veyr-3 is active basaltic volcanism, dense mineral aerosols, continuous micro-shocks and a gravity under which human joints degrade within a generation; that a Veyr is a truss and not a frame, many slender braced members with no trunk and no fixed front, and that the slender look deceives; that high-energy materials processing was the ambient condition and precision the bottleneck; that Veyr engineering is of margin, tolerance, redundancy and the honest statement of a rating; that they calibrate by material behaviour rather than by instrument and are careful in low gravity by calibration; that they are poor at a single decisive commitment of the whole body and apt to keep arguing for a reserve; that Veyr Rangers are placed where mechanical stress and thermal risk overlap, wear no garment, and carry corps colour and rank seated on the lattice; and that one Veyr's refusal to certify is filed as a reading requiring disposition. What the account holds from no source but the author: that a Veyr rating names what a thing will carry and where it was struck; that the people keep no story of a first fire and keep instead the first rating that held; that the first thing every Veyr rates is their own body; that the fight for precision had no opponent and no moment; and the reason for the absence of a year. The author's corps, rank, posting and years of service the rolls hold and this account does not, the posting withheld at the author's asking for the reason the account gives; that they are a thermal transit specialist is their own word. Who speaks for the Veyr at home, what mark they carry beside the Corps', what else lives on Veyr-3, and how and when the Veyr met the Corps are not held, and the author does not supply them. The people's own words for anything and how they speak among themselves are not held: the record holds no Veyr language in any medium and no rendering of the ladder from them, and the account, written in the Archive's working language, supplies none, under the Archive's own rule that what it cannot carry is marked; the one proverb on file stays marked as a nearest rendering, in the file it was given in. The author's name is as the Corps' rolls carry it, in the record's translation register, as the record's one other Veyr name is; they are they in the same register, as Qiren Tal is, and the Archive asserts nothing by it. The rating lines are filed as the author's own and are not the Archive's grading of anything; the desk notes only that they are of a piece with the people's page, which the author had read.

See also: The Veyr Basaltborn, Oshek Var, Qiren Tal, Refusal to Certify, The Ladder in Other Tongues, Rank, Insignia, and the Ranger Uniform, Cross-Biosphere Taxonomy, Habitable, for Whom, What the Record Refuses, Marked Absences.