The Dark-Down

The Union's charter has a great deal to say about off-world delegations, and Gleann na gCaorach's arrangement with the charter was the arrangement every valley on Drithane had: the delegation could bring what it liked, provided it slept under somebody's roof. A guest under a roof is a person. A delegation in a compound is an institution, and Drithane had crossed forty light-years, once, specifically to be governed by fewer of those.

So the Survey Corps team came to Sorcha's holding — four of them, correct and courteous, with instrument cases that outnumbered their personal bags three to one — and Sorcha did what a warden does with guests in a crossing week: fed them, walked them through the dark-down times, and watched how they took it. You learned a guest fastest by how they treated the dark. One of the four asked whether the light custom was enforced, and wrote down her answer — by nobody — with the particular care of a man who suspected he had misheard it. Another asked, more usefully, which direction the first sparks would come from, and accepted depends which shoulder of the band we take first as a real answer, which it was; her grandmother's generation had argued the same question with the ark's own astronomers before the survey people ever came back to the sky.

The rabbit was on the manifest as a courtesy animal, which Sorcha had read twice, because the manifest otherwise itemised its cargo down to the spare gasket. Livestock she understood; the delegation's quartermaster had said morale, in the tone of a man quoting a form, and the rabbit had sat through the introductions with her ears at a diplomatic half-mast, being handed politely from one lap to another like a treaty provision.

By the second evening the treaty provision had established herself in the wool basket by the stove — and Sorcha, who had spent a working life reading animals because a shepherd who can't is a shepherd briefly, noticed that the basket the rabbit had chosen was not the warmest one. It was the one with the view of the room.

She mentioned it to nobody. On Drithane you did not embarrass a guest by noticing them too accurately, and the rule did not say the guest had to be a person. But she topped up her assessment the way she'd top up a ledger: the visitors' instruments watched the sky, the visitors watched the instruments, and the smallest thing on the manifest watched everything else, with the patient, unhurried attention of something that had been taught that watching was work. Her collies had the same look at gather time. She had never once seen it on a pet.

Barsik's instructions had been short, because his instructions were always short. Go with the delegation. Observe how a world watches its own sky. File, not volunteer.

Bubochka had asked what she should observe about it. He had said that if he told her, she would observe that, and nothing else. This was the sort of answer Barsik gave. She had learned to put them away whole, like a seed, and wait for them to be about something.

Drithane was cold, and the air was thin, and being a rabbit here was a completely different job. On Eden, nobody looked at her twice. That was the whole point of her. Here, everyone looked twice. The shepherd looked at her the way she looked at her dogs, which was a looking-at with arithmetic in it. The children of the valley came to visit her on purpose. One small boy explained to her, seriously and at length, which nights the sky would do its sparks, and showed her the calendar on the kitchen wall with the crossing hours marked in red, and told her that everyone turned their lights out for it, and that nobody made them.

She filed all of it. She was getting faster at filing.

At first she had worried that being interesting broke her cover, because her training so far was mostly about being ignored. But by the second day she understood something she suspected was the beginning of the lesson: being interesting was also a kind of cover. When people found you interesting, they explained you to themselves straight away — pet, mascot, poor creature, so far from home — and then they were finished with the question. Nobody keeps asking about a thing they have already explained.

The shepherd was the only one who had not finished with the question. Bubochka had noticed her noticing the basket. She put that away whole, too.

The lights went out the way a tide goes out. Not all at once, and nobody announcing it — just the far end of the valley going dark first, then the middle, then the near houses, then the shepherd's own windows, until the only lights left were the little red ones on the delegation's instruments, which the Survey people had asked permission to keep. The warden had said the sky wouldn't mind the small ones. It was strange to hear the sky spoken about that way, like a neighbour whose comfort you would naturally consider.

Then the sky started.

Bubochka had been told what the drithle would look like, by the boy, by the shepherd, by two separate Survey briefings with diagrams in them. All of them had been correct and none of them had been right. The sparks were slow. That was the thing the diagrams could not say. Each one lit up high and quiet, drifted a little way, and went out gently, the way an ember settles — hundreds of them, gold-white, with no sound at all. The whole valley stood in the dark and watched, and the animals were quiet too: the herds still on the hillside, the dogs sitting by their people, everything on the planet pointed the same way.

She noticed that she could feel her own subsystem wanting to classify it, and that she did not let it. That went in the report as well, although she did not yet know under what heading.

Afterwards, when the lights came back on the same slow way, she began her filing while the delegation talked over their readings. Her report was one page. What the sky did, what the valley did, what the animals did, in that order. At the end she wrote the thing she was most sure of and least able to prove, in the plain words Barsik said a trainee should prefer: the custom is not for looking at the sparks. It is for not being the sort of place that would miss them. Then she filed it, and did not volunteer it, and got into the wool basket with the view of the room, because the room, unlike the sky, was still working.

Walking the dark-down was the oldest part of the warden's job and the least necessary, which was, if you asked Sorcha, the correct order for those two qualities in any custom worth keeping. Nobody in Gleann na gCaorach needed reminding. The lights went down valley by valley the way they had gone down for eleven generations, and the warden walked the line of them anyway, because a thing kept by everyone should still be seen to be kept by someone.

The delegation's clerk walked a stretch of it with her, asking his careful questions. Why no law, if the custom mattered. She gave him the answer her mother had given a Union census-taker forty years before the survey people came: that a law is what you write when you expect to need one, and the valley had never yet produced the person the law would be for. He wrote that down too. She suspected the writing-down was his version of the custom — a kept thing, necessary or not — and thought better of him for it.

At the Ó Riain holding the shutters were closed with lamplight behind them, and she passed by without knocking, because a vigil kept indoors on a crossing night was one of the observances, and the dark-down's rule was the dark, not the watching. What was watched for behind those shutters was between that household and the sky. The Archive people had asked her about the vigils once, on the first visit, in the way of people fitting a custom into a form with boxes on it. She had told them the truth — that it varied, valley to valley, and that she had never asked — and had watched the form fail to have a box for that, with some satisfaction.

The crossing came up on time. It always did; that was half of what it taught. She stood at the turn of the lane where she had stood for forty crossings and watched the sky spend its sparks the slow way, gold on black, silent as snowfall, and made her usual accounting: the valley dark, the herds settled, the guests behaving, one small red constellation of permitted instrument lights below and the real thing above. The delegation would take away numbers, and the numbers would be true. They would not be what the night was for. She had stopped trying to put what the night was for into words somewhere around her twentieth crossing, on the grounds that the sky managed to say it annually without any.

The rabbit sat at her feet through the whole of it. Sorcha noticed — with an accuracy she would embarrass nobody by mentioning — that everything on Drithane watched the sky on a crossing night, and that she had billeted the one creature on the planet that watched the watchers. Head up, ears at their working angle, cataloguing the dark valley the way Sorcha catalogued her hills.

She found she did not mind. Somebody ought to have the other watch. And whatever the little visitor was — and courtesy animal was not it, any more than warden was a woman who walked a lane — she kept the custom like a native: her own small attention doused and turned outward, spending nothing, missing nothing.

When the lights came back, the rabbit went inside and sat in the wool basket, and Sorcha put the kettle on for the guests, and neither of them said anything about it at all.