Field Officer Zoe Smith (Human)

The fourteenth had asked on the seventh day. The others had asked between the fourth and the twentieth, and one had never asked, and she had told him anyway, on his last shift, because it was not a reward.

She had not been told what it was for either. The Field Officer who had her first — a posting the file covered in six lines and she had never had expanded — had told it to her at a desk very like this one, at the end of a shift very like this one, in a compartment on a station that no longer stood, and had not said why, and she had spent a year thinking it was about the well. Then a year thinking it was about the thing that came. Then she had stopped thinking about what it was about and started standing watches, and somewhere in there it had stopped being a story and become equipment, the way most of what the rank actually ran on had — not issued, not on any list, handed across a desk by the officer who had you first, and handed on.

She did not know whether the Academy taught it. She had never asked. If it did, it taught it as a thing that happened, which it was, and she would not have argued. What she had, and had never written down, was that a Deputy who had heard it as a thing that happened asked what it was, and a Deputy who had heard it as something else asked what the Corps said it was, and this one had asked both, in that order, and then a third thing.

Was she chosen. That was the Academy too — not a fault of the Academy's, a fault of every story the Academy's Deputies had grown up on, in which the girl at the well is the girl at the well because somebody picked her. She had given the honest answer, which was that there was a telling that said so and the girl had not, and she had watched the Deputy hear that the story would not close, and stand there holding it, and not put it down. Some of them put it down. They asked what it was for, or they laughed, or they said so it was a Levril in the voice of someone finishing a form. Varn had stood one step too far from the desk and held a thing with no end on it and had not, as far as she could see, wanted an end on it by the time the shift was over. She wrote none of that down. An assessment records.

What she could record was the entry.

Three of the thirteen before this one had put the telling in the log. The rest had stood the same shift and written the instruments and the hatch and the officers and let a thing that had happened in the compartment go unlogged, because it was not an instrument and it was not the hatch, and she had initialled those logs too, because a log that leaves out a story is not wrong. It is only shorter. Varn had stopped with the pen over the page for the length of two agreements, and then written it, with a duration, which she had not said to do. Fourteen minutes. She had not been counting. She believed it.

Her own Field Officer had told it with the well running warm for four days, not three. She had found the account in the archive in her second year and read it standing, and it said three, and she had never once told it as four and had never once gone back to the officer, who was dead by then in any case, to ask. The difference was the officer's. The account was the girl's. Both were in the record now, one on a page the Corps kept and one in a compartment that no longer stood, and she had never checked which the Deputies got from her, because it was not the part that could be checked.

The lights held. She closed the log.