Syra (Krenyi)

The register was three volumes and Syra started at the beginning of the first one, which was the only way she had ever known how to read anything.

The hands changed and the instruments changed and the ink changed and the column did not. Date. Signal received. Clock reads. Correction applied, in seconds. Initials. Copperplate for the first two hundred pages, then a period of very poor pencil, then ballpoint, then a printed slip pasted in at intervals and hand-annotated, then ballpoint again when whoever had been supplying the slips stopped supplying them. Fourteen attendants that she counted, and one of them for forty-one years.

The corrections were small. That was the first thing, and it was the reason nobody had ever looked at them: two seconds, three seconds, four, at intervals of a season or a year, which is exactly what a mechanical clock in a damp stone tower on a coast does, and exactly what a person with a maintenance responsibility writes down and forgets.

The second thing took her most of the first volume to be sure of, because being sure of it required the whole of the first volume.

They ran one way.

Not predominantly one way. One way. A clock keeps poor time by drifting, and a drifting mechanism corrected by fourteen different hands across fourteen different mechanisms produces a column of numbers that argues with itself — gains here, losses there, and a rate that changes every time a bearing is replaced. This column did not argue with itself. Every correction in three volumes had been applied in the same direction, through four complete replacements of the movement, which is not a property a clock can have. It is a property a place can have.

The third thing was in the size.

She laid the volumes open across the table in the order they had been written and ran the column with a finger, and the early pages gave her two and three seconds a year and the middle volume gave her four and five, and the last forty pages gave her nine seconds inside a single season, twice, initialled N.B. in the same steady hand that had opened the door.

"Your corrections are growing," Syra said.

"They are." Beirne was leaning against the sill with her arms folded, watching the water rather than the table. "I put a new movement in it the winter before last for that exact reason. Cost the Board more than I'm worth. Made no odds at all."

There was a marginal note on the facing page, in a different hand and a different decade, initialled by an inspector Syra could not identify from the register alone. Corrections continue. The tower has its own habit and always has. No action.

"That is not a finding," Syra said. "A tower does not have a habit. A clock in a place has a rate, and if the rate is not the clock's then it is the place's, and somebody should have said which." She turned the page back and read the entry above it, and then the one above that, because a marginal note is worth exactly as much as the entries it was written beside and no more. "This was the reading available to him. He had the same column I have."

"He'd have had it for thirty years," Beirne said. "It'd have been ordinary to him by then."

Syra considered that and found it to be true rather than exculpatory, which are different things and are frequently confused. The inspector had not been wrong about the data. He had described a two-hundred-year measurement in the vocabulary of a fond remark about a building, and then he had written no action, and the vocabulary was the reason the no action had never once been challenged in the decades since — not because anybody had reviewed the judgement and agreed with it, but because nothing in the phrasing had ever announced that a judgement had been made.

She said none of that. It was not material and it was not hers to file.

"The station's discrepancy has been present for eleven years," she said instead. "That is what the incident reports support. It is not what your book supports. Your book supports a great deal longer, and Sir Galahad will want to say so carefully, because the two records were kept for different reasons and only one of them was kept by people who were being asked a question."

"You'll want the book, then."

"I want the book. You will want a receipt for it, and you should insist on one, because it is the Board's property and the Corps is not always careful with things it did not commission." Syra closed the third volume and put her hand flat on it. "Nai Syra. I am still here and I would like to be clear about one thing, because you have been clear with us. Nothing in this makes the light important. The light is an ordinary light and it has been kept correctly. What is unusual is the shore."

Beirne unfolded her arms.

"Well," she said. "That's the first sensible thing anyone from up there has said about it."