Sorcha Nic Dhiarmada (Human, Drithane)

The engineer had asked permission for the ground arrays with the care of somebody who had read a file on the valley's customs, and had asked a second permission, separately, for the two of them — the engineer and the small one — to spend the crossing in the cellar rather than out under the sky with everyone else. Sorcha had said yes to both, and had wondered, walking her dark-down, what kind of guest crosses forty light-years to attend a sky and then asks to spend it indoors, underground, facing a wall.

She got her answer at the gate-turn, past midnight, when the crossing was at its full silent spend and she came back along the lane to check her own roof-line. The cellar door stood open on the dark. Inside, no lamp — a Chthonari needs none — just the engineer, flat to the floor with every limb spread, and the little vessik flat to the wall beside her, neither of them moving, both of them lying against her great-grandmother's stonework the way the herds were lying against the hill. Attending. Not to the sky.

To the ground under it.

The engineer told her, in the morning, what the arrays had caught and the vessik had confirmed — told her carefully, in the manner of a professional handing over something that belonged to the valley more than to the survey. The crossing was not only a sight. A whole hemisphere of slow burning, high up, pressed on the air, and the air pressed on the world, and the world carried it — a signal below any ear, wide as the sky that made it, riding under the valley for exactly as long as the sparks rode over it. Your sky writes on your ground, the flat pendant-voice said. Very lightly. Every crossing. It has been doing so since before your arks.

Sorcha thought about the herds, then. Every crossing of her life she had watched the animals lie down with the valley and stay down, and every generation had called it the custom keeping itself, the beasts quieting with the houses. Nobody had ever asked whether the beasts were listening to something the houses couldn't hear. She asked the engineer if that was the claim. The engineer said, with what the pendant rendered as care, that it was a question now, and had not been one yesterday, and that questions were the only cargo the Survey was licensed to take away.

The pair of them lifted two days later, the vessik sealed back in its carry-burrow — owed a rock, the engineer had said, and paid. Sorcha walked up to the cold-cellar that evening and stood a while with her hand flat on her great-grandmother's wall, feeling nothing, knowing better than she had ever known anything that nothing was not what was there.

The stone held a good note. She had that from the inside of the wall now, and she meant to keep it.