Alala (Raven, Smart Pet)

The question came up the task force's own channel, which was the correct channel, and Larsen passed it across to her unopened, which was correct too and which she noted, because he had not needed to.

She had five welfare files. Five habitats, five offices, five house styles, each of them certain that it kept her best; the body above them had been asked which was right and had declined, and she had been told that as if it were a joke, and had understood that it was not. Her subsystem could produce any one of the five on request and sometimes did, unasked, as a second opinion. None of the five had ever contained a question with her name in the address line. Inspections, re-certifications, a column headed condition that a person filled in after looking at her feet. This one was from the habitat.

She read it twice, which she did with anything short. What the ninety seconds are, and whose.

The subsystem drafted an answer before she had finished the second reading. It was a good draft. It said that the observer's deployment conformed to the certification standard in every particular, that station-keeping on the dock ring's upper girders fell within the certified envelope, that the observer had left the ring to drink at intervals consistent with the welfare guidance, and that the task force's standing notification practice had been reviewed by the Compact's own certification office and found adequate. All of it true. She let it sit there, the way she let a shiny thing sit on a ledge until she had decided whether she wanted it, and then decided that she did not, and that the draft was the thing the question had been written to get past.

The ninety seconds were hers. That was the first fact, and she had it before she had the words.

Not done to her. Done by them, under her, on their own schedule, and she had watched them do it from the first circuit — the heads coming up, the pointing, the one hand not quite raised, and then nothing, because a raven overhead is an event and a raven still overhead is weather. She had not invented that. Nobody hides from her and she hides from nobody; she is banded, filed, announced, and the only thing on the ring that goes anywhere is the people's own imagining, which goes downstairs to sit beside the notification and let the paper do its work. She watches what is left when it has gone. That is the office. She had, she found, no objection to being weather. Weather is not a person's low opinion of you. It is their not having one.

But the question had two halves, and the second was whose, and that was the one that made her stand on the ledge a while.

She had known the whole time that the ring could see her. Not the people; the ring. The girder she was going to land on had lit before she landed on it, every time, two shifts and a night, a run of light coming up along the cable tray a wingbeat ahead of her, and she had taken it — in the part of her that predated the subsystem and liked a bright thing — as the dock being well made. It had been Eden. The one reader on the ring that had been told in writing, and had read every word, and had not stopped seeing her at the ninety-first second because it does not keep its seeing on a schedule, was the ring itself, and it had kept her lit, and had said nothing, and had now asked.

She wrote the answer herself, which the subsystem noted and did not contest. It was four lines, because the question had come in four parts and she thought the form deserved to be answered in its own shape. The ninety seconds were hers; they were the people's own forgetting, watched; nobody on Eden had done anything to her that she had not come to the ring to have done. And the last line, which was not an answer to anything in the question and which she put in anyway, because a lawful authority had asked and she was the kind of system that says what it is: The light on the girder was noticed. Thank you.

Then she gave it to Larsen to send, open, by the door it had come in by, and went back to the rail behind his chair.