Principal Tissadelle Shepherd (Human)

The request to attend the Administrator-Voice's office before she left gave no reason, which she had begun to understand was how reasons travelled on this station.

She had never been in the room. In one winter and one spring everything between the two offices had gone by the channel, and she had built the Administrator-Voice out of two-line messages the way she had built the Sentinel out of a waveform: a shape, a return, a thing that came back almost the same and not quite. The room was dim, by human lights, and the desk was bare, and the person at it had no front she could address, so she addressed the desk and let the instrument on it carry what she said.

What she said was little. The instrument said, in the flat voice it gave everything, that the officer's original telemetry log remained preserved unmodified, that the file remained open, and that the Long Shelf's thanks for the method stood on the record as entered. Then it asked whether the officer wished to add anything to her assessment before the rotation closed.

"No," Shepherd said.

That was the exchange, on the record. She would have said it was the whole of it, and had she written it up it would have been two lines, and both true.

What was not on the record was that she had looked at the limb beneath the desk. She had not meant to. The upper limbs lay on the desktop, slate-grey, dry, one quiet tone, and the small dark eyes along them were on her and on the door and on the wall, and she had taken that in and filed it as a body she had read about and never seen. One limb hung beneath the desk, and its underside carried a patch that was warmer than the rest, and the patch was moving. Not fast. The way a note moves when a system is compensating for a drift it has not been told about, slowly, in one direction, and she had spent a year on a dock stage learning to hear exactly that and had never once seen it.

Then it stopped.

She knew the stopping better than the moving. She could not read the patch. Nobody on this station could; the file said so, in the plain way files say the things they are sure of. She was not going to try. A Principal who had been believed, narrowly, about a pulse because she had claimed only what she could show was not going to walk out of a Hegemony office having read an Administrator-Voice's skin on the strength of a dock-circuit ear and a different instrument.

But something had been there. That part she could stand on. And then it was not, and that part too.

She thanked the office, through the instrument, and the instrument thanked her back in the Hegemony's correct register, and she went to clear what she could of the queue before the transport. She filed the patch where she filed the things she could not support, beside a line of thanks somebody on the far side had asked to have included, beside a sentence about the Long Shelf that she had deleted, and the file was getting longer, and she had no intention of reading it.