Chief Commissioner Dorian Calloway (Human)

Calloway read all five habitats' Commissioner reports himself, first pass, every quarter, on the theory that a coordination office which stops reading its own inputs closely enough to catch the small discrepancies has already failed at the one thing it exists to do. It was a good theory. It had the defect of occasionally working.

The quarter's close is a disposition exercise. Every line in it resolves to one of four words — charged, corrected, closed, carried — and the office's entire function is that by the time a report reaches Governor Voss, there is nothing in it that a Governor has to decide. Four words, nine thousand bonded crossings, five habitats, one afternoon. It is not glamorous work and Calloway had never once pretended to want other work.

Duarte's office had got there before him, helpfully, the way Halcyon's office was always helpful. The Eden figure, it suggested, could be corrected to Halcyon's: one instrument, one entry, one amended line, and a discrepancy becomes arithmetic and arithmetic becomes a disposition. Calloway read the suggestion twice and did not like how much he wanted it. Correcting a figure is a claim that it is wrong. Nobody had established that either figure was wrong, and a correction entered to produce a disposition is a coordination office writing fiction into the Compact's own metrology record in order to have a tidy afternoon.

The second suggestion came from inside his own office, from a deputy who meant it well and had the structure exactly at her fingertips. Eden is a Class I Fold-Proximate Research Platform. There is a fold route through its neighbourhood, there is a service with charter standing over that route, and that service has desks, instruments and whole offices for readings nobody can account for. Write the cradle up as an anomalous reading at a fold-proximate habitat, have Five-O invite the Rangers, and the number stops being the Compact's.

It was, Calloway thought, the single most attractive sentence anyone had put in front of him in nine quarters. An open remainder is the one thing his office genuinely cannot file. An invitation is a door: the paper goes through it and does not come back, and whatever is written on it is thereafter somebody else's to be wrong about.

He did not write to Larsen suggesting it. He had no say in where Larsen went and had been careful for two years never to behave as though the question were open. He wrote asking for a disposition, in the office's own flat register, and left the four words where Larsen could see them, and the door where Larsen could see that too.