The Time the Study Needs

The late set ran until the dock's shift changed, and Varga had been in the room for it fourteen nights out of the last twenty.

Not on duty. The rotation that had put her on Eden was the Survey Corps', ten weeks of it so far, a xenomusicologist attached to the delegation on the standing terms by which a branch borrows a desk where it has no business of its own. The delegation did the Passage's work. Varga did hers in the hours around it, which on a habitat with a dock meant the hours when the dock's people were not lifting things. The common room was under the ring, two decks below the berths, and had the acoustics of a place built for something else. The band compensated for the hum. That was in the name, she had been told, by the man who played strings, who had told her without being asked and had not asked why a Ranger wanted to know.

She had a page open on the table and had written on it, over fourteen nights, less than a page.

What she wrote was what she could show. The set was nine songs and did not vary. The break fell at the same quarter-hour every night, and on the sixth night she had worked out that it fell when the dock master's office was between its night staff and its day staff, because that was when the loaders came off and the room filled, and the band took its break to let them get a drink before it played the last of the nine to a full room. That was a thing an ensemble did. She had seen ensembles do it on four worlds. It was the last song she had come back for.

The room sang it. Not all of it: the chorus, and in the chorus one line, the high one, that the room had decided was its own. And the singer let the room have it. Every night, at the same bar, she came down off the line and sang under it, a fourth below, steady, the plain note the room's line stood on, and the room, which could not have told you it was doing so, sang the line it had been given a floor for. Varga had heard singers leave a line to a room before. It was a trick, mostly, and a good one, and she had written leaves the top line to the room on the second night and a trick beside it, with a question mark, because she did not know yet.

On the ninth night the room was thin, a dock holiday, nine people, and nobody sang. The singer came down off the line at the same bar and sang the plain note under nothing. The line was not sung. The song went on without it, and the nine people in the room sat with a chorus that had a hole in it where the room should have been, and the singer did not fill it.

Varga had struck the question mark that night. Not a trick, then; a trick fills the hole. What she wrote instead was the thing the branch had sent her out to notice, and had taught her to write only when she could point at it: the room's line is the room's. She sings the one she can carry and leaves the other to whoever can. Then, under it, smaller: and when nobody can, it is not sung.

That was the study. How music holds a room was the branch's first question, the one a novice learned before the harder one about peoples, and here was a room held by a singer who declined, every night, the one line that would have held it hardest. It was not modesty. Varga had been in the branch too long to file a thing under modesty; modesty was a reason, and the branch wrote down what it could show and let reasons wait. It was, as far as she could show, a rule the singer kept, and she wrote it as one.

There was a form for that. There was a form for everything in the Corps, and Varga had never once resented it; a form was how a thing noticed by one officer in a common room under a dock ring became a thing the college could act on. The intake recommendation was two pages. The second page was the college's and the first was hers. She could recommend a candidate to the college as a serving officer of its branch. The college would take the candidate on provisionally if it took her at all, a Novice, under evaluation, and would confirm Cadet standing when it was satisfied and not before. The placement, for a Novice of this branch, was an ensemble, for the time the study needed. The ensemble was already in the room.

There was a shorter road, for a candidate who arrived already doing the work, and the college had used it. This one had been in the room a year and had not been doing the work. She had been doing the band's, which was the thing the study wanted watched and not the thing the college certified. The ordinary road, then. A year, about.

She pulled the arrivals line the Compact gives the Passage oversight for every transit, which was all of the habitat's record the Corps was entitled to, and read it at the delegation's desk. Shepherd, Tissadelle. Tír na nÓg. Arrived 2824. The line for prior training said Garda college, Tír na nÓg; boards passed; oath not taken.

Varga read that line twice. She did not know what it meant. A police college on a Union world, finished, and the oath not taken, and then a dock band a long way from any hillside: it could be four things, and three of them were none of the Corps' business and the fourth was. She wrote on her page prior training: see record and nothing else, because she did not know, and the branch had a rule about that too.

She would ask in the morning. In the room she was a woman at a back table, and the band had been kind enough to leave her that.

The office was the Survey Corps' and the form was not.

Tissadelle had known what the woman at the back table was for nine nights before the woman said so, because a Ranger in a common room was a Ranger in a common room, uniform or not, and this one had sat where the sound was worst and written very little, which was not how anybody listened to a band. Marlow had talked to her. Marlow talked to everyone. He had come back and said she was a Principal of something with music in its name, on loan to the Survey people upstairs, and that she had asked about the hum, and Tissadelle had said nothing, and had sung the set, and had not changed anything in it, which had taken some doing on the ninth night and none at all after.

Now it was the morning, the ring's morning, which came up along the deck lights at the same hour whatever the dock was doing, and she was in the delegation office in her own clothes with the form on the desk between them.

The Principal, Varga, gave her rank and her branch and her corps in that order, as if the order mattered, which Tissadelle supposed it did, and then stated the position the way a person states a thing she expects to be answered. The Music Corps took its novices provisionally. A Novice of the Xenomusicology branch carried a study and held a placement, and the placement was an ensemble, for the time the study needed, and the ensemble would be the one she was in. The college would confirm Cadet standing when it was satisfied. It had never been known to say when that would be.

"Nothing changes in the room," Varga said. "That is the first thing and I will say it once. In the room you are the band's. You sing in your own clothes, you take the band's break, you do not tell the room, and if the band tells the room that is the band's. The file is ours. The hours for the file are here, and you wear the uniform for them, because that is what the hours are."

"And what goes in the file?"

"What you can show." Varga turned the form round. "What a room does. What it does when the band does a thing, and what it does when the band does not. Later, what a people does, when the Corps has a people in front of it that nobody has asked that of. That is later. The room first."

The form was two pages and the first was hers to fill. It asked what every form asks, and then it had a line for prior training, and she looked at it for a while.

She could have left it. Her arrivals line held it already; the Principal had read the line, she could tell, because the Principal had not asked where she was from. But a line left empty on a form she had signed was a thing she had been taught about at the Garda college, in a room with the Mannán light coming in flat across the benches, by a sergeant who had said that the empty line was the one the court would ask about. She had passed the boards on that and on a great deal else, and had left two weeks short of the oath. So she wrote it. Garda college, Tír na nÓg. Coursework complete. Boards passed. Oath not taken. In her own hand, which was slower than the record's and said the same.

Varga read it the right way up.

"Why not the oath?"

Tissadelle had been asked this by her mother, once, on the hill, and had given the only answer she had. It had not got better in a year.

"It was more like being pulled than pushed," she said. "I had nothing against the Gardaí. I still have nothing against them. There was nothing on the ground pushing. It was more like the sky." She stopped, because past that it became an explanation, and she had none.

"And why the Corps?"

That one she had expected, and had thought about on the walk up from the ring, and had found that the things she could say were all things she would later be asked to stand over, and that she could stand over none of them. There was a hillside, and a band, and a song half-written that she did not point to, and a woman at a back table, and none of those was a reason.

"I don't have a reason I could write down," she said. "If I give you one I'll be defending it in a year. I would rather not have to."

Varga wrote. Tissadelle could read upside down, a Garda college habit, and what Varga wrote was no reason given; candidate declines to supply one, and then, after it, noted as answered. She did not know what that meant either, and did not ask.

The tab came from the quartermaster's record an hour later: a small hard-edged thing with one bar on it, seated on the chest of a shell that had been cut to the record and not to her, which the quartermaster said was the ordinary way round and would be corrected. One bar. A Novice wore one. She had read the ladder on the walk up, the whole of it, Novice to the Triumvirate, because it was there, and had noted that it was a long way, and that the first rung said provisional and under evaluation in so many words, and she found she did not mind that. It was, at least, exact.

She wore it for the study's two hours, at a desk the delegation lent, with a page in front of her on which she wrote what the room had done the night before and nothing it had not. Then she took the shell off and put her own clothes on, and the tab went back into the record's drawer, and she went down to the ring to find Perrin and Marlow before the set, because a thing like this was told the day it happened or it was a thing you had kept.

Her mother would have called them na Maoir Réalta, with the small turn of the mouth the Boirinn holdings kept for anyone who came up the hill with a form. Tissadelle had the form now. She found she still did not know what she would call them.

She told them in the corridor behind the common room, forty minutes before the set, in the clothes she always wore for it, and Perrin's first thought was that she had chosen the corridor so that nobody would have to look at anybody.

A Ranger's novice. Provisional, she said, and under evaluation, and the words had the shape of words off a page. The band was her placement. In their files, and she said the branch's, and then, seeing it land on nothing, the Music Corps', the band was a project, with the band's name on it, and the project was her, in the room, writing down what the room did. Nothing changed in the room. She had been told that and she was telling them. If something did change she would say so.

Marlow asked what a project paid, which was Marlow's way of asking whether they were now a Ranger band, and she said it paid nothing and they were not, and that the woman at the back table had been very exact about that, and would go on sitting at the back table, and the room would not be told. Marlow said that was fine, then, and went to tune, because to Marlow a thing that paid nothing and changed nothing was a thing that had not happened, and he had the gift of living like that.

Perrin did not have it. He stood in the corridor with her a moment longer.

What he noticed was not what she had said. It was that she had said it today. The thing had happened that morning, she said so, the morning, upstairs, and she had come down to the ring before the set to say it, rather than after, or next week, or never, which were the three ways he had seen people in dock bands handle a change in their circumstances, and he had been in dock bands for eleven years. He had not, until that corridor, had any reason to think about which of the three she was, because for a year nothing in her circumstances had changed that he knew of.

He said the thing he could say, which was that it was fine by him, and that he would want to know if the file said anything about his timing. She said the file would say what the room did, and the room had never once complained about his timing, and that was the nearest she had ever come to a joke with him, and they went in.

The set was the set. Nine songs, the break at the quarter-hour, the loaders in at the shift change with the dust still on them, and the last song to a full room. The woman at the back table wrote something at the second verse and nothing after. The room took its line in the chorus, the high one, the way it had every night for a year, and Tissadelle came down off it at the same bar and sang the plain note under them, and the room, which would never know there was a file on it, sang.

Perrin had wondered, now and then across the year, whether she could reach that line. He found, counting it through on the drum, that he had never once heard her try; and that it was not the same thing; and that he had not, before tonight, had any reason to tell the two apart.

The Ranger left before the loaders did. The room went on singing, and Perrin kept the time.