Received

The department ended on a signature, and the signature was not hers.

General operations had certified the bench was the bench from the shelter's cold end to the staging site, from the staging site to the hull, and from the hull to this door, and at the door the certifying stopped. A Safety Corps Senior took the custody line, read it for its edges, and signed under the last entry, and the three sealed sources and the bench they belonged to went through the door into a floor that had never been anywhere. The general operations department of the Survey Corps' seventh revisit to Counterpane, which had existed for the duration of the revisit by the terms of the order that made it, did not exist.

She had read the order in the autumn, in a corridor at Threshold, with the new tab in her hand. Effective on the date of this order. For the duration of the revisit. She had read the second sentence as a sentence about when the work began. It had been a sentence about this door. The order was in her sleeve still, and she did not take it out, because she understood the sentence now and reading it again would have been a claim about which of them had been slow.

Fourteen names. She had read the two lists on the morning after the order, sitting down, as she had said she would, and had put fourteen names on a roster and answered for them from a warm room through a winter, from a cold shelter for the length of a fold window, and from a hull home. Nothing had arrived late. There had been no Lead between her and the watch for anything to arrive through, and she had noticed what the shelter cost the people she had put in it at the speed she had always noticed anything, which the Chief had told her was the one thing the rank took, and the rank had not taken it, because the rank had not yet had a department of the ordinary kind to take it with. One Principal had not slept on the membrane and had said he was fine, and she had moved his watch and said nothing to him about it, and his orders this morning had been the same as anyone's. Fourteen names had gone back to their lists at the docking, each to the posting it had come from or the next one, by orders that came up with the hull's and that she read standing and initialled, since they were hers to initial for as long as the department was, and the department was, until the door.

The log was the other thing. A department that existed for a revisit kept one log, and the log of a department that had ended went to the Survey Archive whole. The last line in it was the custody entry, the door's number and the door's time, in her hand, and under it her initial. She had written it at the door, standing, because the line was hers until the signature and the signature had not been made when she wrote it, and the Senior had watched her write it and had then signed, which was the correct order, and the only one.

Then she was a Chief Ranger in a corridor on Earth with nothing to answer for.

The unit did not change, Tobble said, inward.

She did not answer at once. The corridor was long and had a bench in it, and the light came down from somewhere high and did not move.

One bar. One ring. The count is the morning's count.

The department is not.

Departments were never in the count, Tobble said, in the voice he used for a thing checked twice. I counted the tab. I did not count what it was for. If you want that counted you will have to tell me what unit it comes in.

She did not know. She knew what a section came in, which was a watch and the people on it, and what a department came in, which was sections, and the Chief had told her the rest in the autumn in material terms and had been right about everything she had stood in since. What a Chief Ranger came in with no department, the Chief had not said, because it had not been the material part then. It was now, and there was nobody at this door whose part it was to say it.

She knew what the floor would do. She had done it once from the other side, at Eden, on a Safety Corps rotation before the Survey track: take a thing apart that had been somewhere, ask each piece whether the somewhere had changed it, and write down the answer and nothing else. The floor would do that to three sealed sources and a bench, and then it would braid them, here, where every braid ever made had sat inside its budget, and if this one sat, the number the bench had carried home would stop being cargo. None of that was general operations'. None of it was hers. She had certified the bench was the bench as far as the door, and the door was the end of what she could certify, and standing outside it for however many days the floor took, to be told a thing the record would tell anyone, was not a duty. It was wanting to be there. She had learned in the autumn, on a sill, what the rank did with that, and had found it true the evening she learned it, and had no reason to think it had stopped being true in a corridor.

She went out by the door she had come in by, which was the only door she had standing to use. The circular would carry the line when the floor had made it. She would read it where anyone could.

Halvorsen handed over the bench in the order it had come apart, which was the order it had gone together backwards, and the floor took it in the order the floor took things, which was not that.

She had never asked to go in. Five times she had brought three sealed sources home through a fold and walked them to this door and given them to a Safety Corps officer who did not know her and did not need to, and five times she had gone and sat on the bench in the corridor, which had been put there for people waiting for something and had, she suspected, been put there for her, since nobody else used it. The audit was the floor's. A Survey Chief who sat on the audit of her own bench had not audited anything. She had watched her own work being agreed with, which the floor could do without her, and did better.

The Chief Ranger had written the custody line's last entry standing, and initialled under it, and had watched the Senior sign, and had then stood in the corridor for about as long as it takes a fold window to be stated, and had gone. Not to the floor's door, where she had no standing. Out. Halvorsen had watched the going the way she watched a drift figure, not for the number but for whether it would stop, and it had not stopped, and had not hurried either. Five commanding officers had brought a department to this door in Halvorsen's time, and every one of them had asked to see the floor, as a courtesy to the Survey, and had been told, as a courtesy, that the floor did not take visitors during an audit, and had waited in the corridor anyway through the first day, because a thing one has carried a long way is hard to leave at a door. This one had not asked. This one had sat on a crate at the shelter's cold end for most of an hour with a source in her ears, and had asked what three sources sounded like braided, and had nodded at the answer, and had now walked away from the one room in the record where the answer would be made, without asking when.

Halvorsen noted it, and did not know what column it went in.

She sat on the bench. The floor would take what it took. Inside, three sealed things that had done their one thing honestly on both sides of a fold were being asked whether the fold had changed them, which it had not, six times, and she had no reading on the seventh, because a reading was what the floor was for. What she had was what she had brought home six times now and handed to nobody: not a value, not cargo, a question with no desk. It had got no shorter on the hull. She had not said it to the Chief Ranger on the membrane, and had noticed the Chief Ranger not asking it, and had not said it to her at the door either, and there was nobody at this door whose question it was.

So she held it where she held it, and the clock over the floor's door kept the floor's time, which had never been anywhere.

The floor took nine days, and the line came out to the corridor on a sheet, as the line always did.

She read it standing. Three sources: audited, certified unchanged by transit. Bench braided on the floor: within budget. Carried value, surveyed membrane, Counterpane, seventh revisit: reading. Width of one membrane. Confirmed. Three initials she knew and one she did not, and a date, and under the date nothing, which was where the Survey's three words had gone fourteen years before and where nothing had needed to go since.

Seven. The shape that was not ours had held for a seventh time, drawn to its own rule exactly, and the floor that had never left had said so, and now it was a reading, and she had not been in the room. She preferred it that way. She had preferred it five times before and found that the preference had not worn.

The sheet did not say who had carried the bench to the door. It was not a sheet that said that. It did not say that somebody had sat on a crate at the shelter's cold end with a source in her ears, or that the source had sounded like a source. That was in the department's log, which was in the Archive now, whole, with a Chief Ranger's last initial under its last line, and the Archive would hold the log beside this sheet without saying that the two were about the same morning, because the Archive did not say things like that, and did not need to.

She folded the sheet once. What she had carried home for the sixth time went home with her for the sixth time, since the floor had not been handed it and could not have been. It was not a Survey question, and this was the Survey's floor, and the one person who might have had the standing to be asked it had gone out of a door nine days ago without asking when the line would come.

She did not know whose question it was. She had begun to think that the not knowing was the reading.