Sir Galahad Thorne (Human)

The station's incident record was eleven years deep because the station was thirteen years old, and Galahad had spent the walk down from Dock Seven turning that over the way he turned over any figure that had been offered to him as a depth. Eleven years was not a depth. It was a floor. Any baseline older than the station had to come out of something that had already been standing here when the first hull was laid, and on this shore the list of things that had already been standing here was short.

One of them had a light on top of it.

The spit ran out from the shingle for the better part of a kilometre and it did not take a vehicle on a falling tide, which the duty clerk had told him twice, in the tone of a man who had watched people find that out for themselves. So they walked it. The wind had come round to the southwest during the briefing and had not eased since: not a gust structure at all but one continuous pressure with harder events inside it, arriving from the left, so that the three of them walked the spit leaning and corrected between events like people crossing a deck. Speech was not available in it. Galahad had tried once, near the shore end, and had watched the sentence leave his mouth and go inland without him.

The tower was whitewashed stone and there was a great deal more of it below the gallery than a photograph ever suggested. Its door faced landward. Nothing on this coast put a door on the seaward side twice.

The attendant had the door open before they reached it and did not appear surprised by any of them, including Rook-7, which most people looked at twice.

"You've an hour and fifty of the falling," she said, once the door was shut and the noise had dropped to the level where a room was possible. "After that you're stopping the night, and there's the one bed."

"Sir Galahad Thorne. Survey Corps, up at the station."

"Nuala Beirne. I know what you are, the coat says it." She was somewhere past sixty and dressed for the gallery rather than for visitors. "I've the light and I've the tide gauge, and the gauge is the Board's and the light's the Board's and neither of them is the station's, so whatever it is, say it plainly and I'll tell you if it's mine."

Twelve years of boundary postings had taught Galahad that the useful witnesses were almost never the ones who volunteered. "Your clock," he said. "The one that times the character. I want to know how often it needs correcting, and I want to know whether anyone has ever written that down."

Beirne looked at him for a moment with an expression he could not immediately file.

"Everyone writes that down," she said. "It's a maintenance record. That's the whole job." Then, after a pause that was not quite hesitation: "Nobody's ever asked for it."

She went up for the book. The tower did not sway — a good tower does not, and this one had been built by people who knew that — but the lantern glass carried the gale as a single low note that came down the stair and sat in the jaw rather than in the ear, and Galahad stood in a whitewashed room at the foot of a tower older than his own service and did not say the thing he had already begun to think.