A Lights Board inspector (Human, unnamed)

He timed the character from the shingle before he reached the tower, because he always did, and because a character timed from a kilometre off by a man with a watch set at the Board that morning was the inspection, and everything after it was the paperwork.

Two flashes. Dark. Two flashes. Dark. He counted five groups against the watch and had fifteen seconds group to group, inside the tolerance, and wrote the figure on the sheet with the sheet held against his thigh in the lee of his own body. The light was correct. It had been correct every time he had come down this spit and every time the man before him had, as far back as the Board's sheets went, which was a long way, and it would be correct the next time, and he had long since stopped thinking of that as information.

The tower was more tower than the picture on the Board's file suggested, which was true of all of them. Its door faced landward. The attendant had it open before he reached it, as she always did, and he went in past her into the whitewashed room at the foot of the stair with the sheet already out, because the falling tide gave him two hours on the spit and the sheet took one.

The Board's sheet for a light was a page. Lamp: he went up and looked at it and came down. Glass: clean, stopped down for nothing, no crazing. Structure: sound, the pointing good, the gallery rail tight. Stores: the usual. Gauge: read against the plate, the plate against the Board's datum, both in order. Clock. The sheet gave the clock two boxes, corrected against signal and correction logged, and he ticked both, because both were true, and the sheet had been drawn by people for whom both being true was the whole of the matter.

The register was open on the table at the page.

He had no need to read it. He knew the page the way a man knows a page he has signed a requisition against: nine, and under it a season, and under that the line of a season's corrections in a hand that did not vary, and off to one side, in a hand that was not hers and a decade that was not this one, the note every inspector who had ever come down this spit knew by heart whether or not they had ever seen it written. The tower has its own habit and always has. He had been told it in his first year at the Board by a man who had been told it in his, as the ordinary account of the Sceir Light, the way you were told which lights took a boat and which took a walk. He had not known until his first inspection here that it was a sentence in a margin. He had assumed it was a fact.

"Nine," he said.

"Nine. The second."

"The movement made no odds."

"None." She was at the sill with her arms folded, looking at the water and not at him, which was how she looked at most things. "I said it wouldn't, and the Board sent it, and I was glad to have it, and it made none."

He looked at the sheet. Under the two boxes the Board's sheet had a line, Remarks, for what the boxes could not hold, and in his experience it held that the stores were low.

"I can put it to the Board," he said. "As a remark. The rate."

"It's in the book."

"The book stays here."

"That's where it's kept."

He had an answer to that and gave it, because she had been straight with him and the Board's position deserved to be stated once in the room where it applied. A book in a tower was a record. It was not a report. Nothing in it reached the Board unless an attendant wrote to the Board or an inspector carried it up the spit on a sheet, and the Board could not act on what it had not been sent, and had never claimed it could.

"And what would they do with it," she said. Not a question, quite.

He thought about that honestly, because she had asked it honestly. The Board kept lights. A remark saying that the Sceir Light's clock needed nine seconds a season would go into the file where the requisition had gone, and the file would be read by the people who had read the requisition, and they would read it as the requisition had been read, as a clock asking for attention, and the attention the Board had to give a clock was a movement, and the movement had been given. There was no other box. He did not think that was a fault in the Board. A Board that kept lights had drawn a sheet for keeping lights, and the light was kept.

"They'd send you another movement," he said.

"I'm not asking for one."

"No."

He wrote under Clock, in the space the two boxes left: Corrected against signal and logged. Rate as previously noted. The previous note was the requisition, which was in the Board's file under this light's number, and said what it said. He read the line back once. It was true, and it was complete, and it committed the Board to nothing it had not already done, and he was aware, writing it, that it was also exactly the line the man thirty years dead had written in a different place, and that his was going up the spit to the Board and that one had stayed in the margin, and that he had no way to say which of the two was the better placed.

He did not write in the margin. The margin was the attendants' and had one inspector's hand in it already, and one was enough.

Before he left he went up to the gallery and timed the character again, from the rail, against the same watch, and it was correct, as it had been from the shingle, and he wrote that down as well. The glass carried the wind as a note so low he felt it in his teeth before he heard it, though the wind was nothing today. He had never known the glass to be silent. Nobody at the Board had ever thought that worth a box either, and he supposed they were right.