Commander Kai Larsen (Human)

The berth log came back on the eighth day, complete, which Larsen had expected, and with the night rota attached, which he had not asked for.

Eden's dock master kept a good log. Every berth on the ring had a clamp, every clamp had a state, and every state was written down at the change of the ring's quarter-hour whether or not anything had changed, so that the log for a quiet night ran to the same length as the log for a busy one and could be read for its silences. Larsen read it for its silences. The two tugs — the other habitat's, on long lease at the paired berths at 22-Low, the only drives on the ring that night that could have been lit inside an approach — had been clamped at both berths from the end of second shift to the start of first, drawing keep-alive current at a draw that did not vary by a digit, and nothing on the ring had opened or closed between two and five ring time. Not a berth. Not a service hatch. The dock master had initialled the hour himself, which he did not usually do, and had added no remark, which he did.

The rota said what Larsen already knew. The night staff signed off at three. The day staff signed on at half past. Nobody had written anything in the half-hour between, because there had been nobody there to write it, and the rota had looked like that for longer than the dock master had been the dock master, and the dock master had attached it anyway, without comment, because a man who sends you a log for a night when nothing moved is a man who would like you to see that he knows what you were going to look for.

So the Compact's record of a quarter past three was complete. It said: everything clamped, everything drawing, nothing moving, nobody at the desk. It said the last part by omission, which is the only way a rota can say anything.

And the Corps' record of a quarter past three said that something artificial, in the drive band, had crossed the approach for a measured number of seconds, and said it six times over, on six principles, with a reference number.

Larsen put the two side by side and sat with the space between them, which was his trade, and found it was not the space he had been built for. The seams Five-O worked ran between habitats: two ledgers, each perfect, and a fact that lived in neither. This seam ran between the Compact and the Corps. On the one side a dock ring, which was the dock master's; on the other an approach, which was the Passage oversight's and had been since before the Compact had a Governor; and between them a hull plate, a hatch the residents walked past without seeing, and no office at all. He could write to the dock master, and had. He could not write to the oversight, which had already passed what it would ever pass and did not take questions from a Governor's task force about what its instruments had agreed on, and would have been right not to.

What he could do was go and look at the thing the paper described. He had been going to do that anyway — the way he did most things on Eden, he noticed, which was by turning up.

The other question, the one he had not made into a rule in two years, the log had answered for him. There was no case. There was a dock ring on which nothing had moved, and a man who wanted to stand on it at a quarter past three to see what nothing looked like, and a man who did that without saying so first was a man investigating something and declining to say what. He had resigned a commission over walls that let cases die quietly. He had not resigned it to be quiet on somebody else's deck.

He wrote to Eden's Space Commissioner. The letter was short, because there was nothing in it he could not support: that the task force had received, by way of the Chief Commissioner's office, a transient notice from the Passage oversight, reference attached; that he had obtained from the dock master the berth log of the night, reference attached, and that it showed nothing moving; that he would walk the dock ring between half past two and four ring time on the following night, at the paired berths at 22-Low and the dock master's office, in uniform; that he would open no berth, enter no office, ask no question of any member of the dock's staff, and open no case; and that the Commissioner would receive a second letter when he had finished, saying what he had done.

He read it once for anything it asserted about Eden, and found that it asserted nothing, and sent it.