Sir Galahad Thorne (Human)

He stood where she had put him, at the edge of the root plate, holding a lamp he had been told not to move.

Twelve years of Survey Corps discipline had left him with a reliable instinct for the moment when a procedure passed out of his competence, and this had happened at approximately the point where Elvira knelt down. He knew what he was looking at in the sense that he could have written the incident report. He did not know what he was looking at in any other sense. The distinction had bothered him three days ago. It bothered him less now, which he suspected was itself worth noting somewhere.

She had asked one thing of him before she started, and it had not been what he expected.

"Say the classification out loud when I tell you," she had said. "Not to it. To me."

"Why?"

"Because you have the vocabulary and I have the hands, and last time we tried this the gap between those two things was three years wide."

So he stood with a lamp he was not allowed to move and waited to be asked to say a word he had once withheld from her in a report cleared at a level she had never needed.

"Now," Elvira said.

He said it. Obliger, causeway sector, feeding method and anchor class, the full sentence in the flat committee grammar he had spent a career learning — and the wind, which had been absent all night in the way it was always absent here, came back.

That was all. No sound. No shape between the trunks. Only air moving through a grove where air had not moved, and the lamp flame leaning, at last, in a direction that meant something ordinary.

He did not move the lamp. He noted the time.