Without the Can

He left the can inside.

That was the decision, and it had taken him two days to make it, which was a long time for a decision about a watering can. The plant did not need water. It had not needed water on the fourth day or the fifth, and the Deputy had probably known that both times, because the Corps wrote things down and a person who wrote things down for a living would have noticed a full can going into a wet pot. So the can had been a lie, and a small one, and the kind everybody on the ring told every day, and it had still been the wrong thing to bring to that hatch. He did not know why he knew that. He knew it the way he knew a spoke car was about to stop.

So he came out at the hour with nothing in his hands and crouched at the plant anyway, because standing in the corridor with nothing in his hands was worse, and looked at the leaves as though he were checking them, which he was not, and waited for the hatch.

It was the word that had brought him back. Not the step — he had understood the step, or thought he had: the tab was a rank after all, on this side as well as the other, and he had been a resident talking to the Corps and had not known it. That had stung and then stopped stinging. What had not stopped was that he had said Deputy the second time the way his mother said it when a Ranger came through the Compact side on some business that was not hers, politely, to a uniform. He had made the tab into a rank with his own mouth, in the same breath as finding out it was one. He had been the one to do it. He wanted, without any clear idea of how, to un-say it.

The hatch opened. The Deputy came out and stopped, and he watched the Deputy's eyes go to his hands first and to his face second, and understood that the absence of the can had been read before he had, and that this was the order things were read in behind that hatch, and that he had, for once, brought the right thing.

He stood up. He said the true thing, because it was the only one he had brought.

"It doesn't need watering. I know that."

No can.

That was the first thing, and Varn read it before reading anything else, because a week of writing the log had done something to the order in which a Deputy noticed a corridor: what was there, what was not, what had changed since the last entry. On the fourth day a full can and a wet pot. On the fifth the same. On the sixth, coming off shift, the soil dark and the corridor empty, which the log had not needed and Varn had noted anyway. On the eighth, the person and no can, crouched at a plant he was not looking at.

Then he stood and said it did not need watering and he knew that, and Varn had a whole sentence of assessment ready about what that meant and did not say it, because the officer inside had spent a week declining to tell a Deputy what things meant and it had started, somewhere around the seventh day, to seem like the only honest way to stand in a corridor.

Varn said what could be supported. "It was watered on the sixth day."

"By my mother." He had gone a little red. "That's the day. Of the week, I mean — it fell on your sixth. I'm not — the can wasn't about the plant."

"No."

He waited, and Varn understood he was waiting for the step, and that if the step came he would say Deputy the other way again and go in, and that this was in Varn's hands and had been on the fifth day too, and Varn had not known it then. It was not a comfortable thing to know. The Academy had a great deal to say about reading a room for who had noticed you and nothing at all about what to do once you had noticed them back.

Varn did not step back. Varn did not step forward either, which would have been a different report and not a true one. Varn stood where Varn was, which was one step further from him than there was any reason to stand, and left it there, and said the thing the shape of the week had an empty place for.

"What's your name?"

Something in his face opened the way a hatch opens, without a sound. "Noah. Adeyemi. It's on the door, actually, on the inside." He said it too fast and then stopped. "You're Varn."

"Deputy Officer Varn."

"I know. I looked it up."

"I know," Varn said, and heard that it had come out almost as a laugh, and that he had heard that too, and that neither of them knew what to do about it, and that this was apparently allowed, because nothing in the corridor changed and nobody said Deputy the other way. He put his hands in his pockets, having nothing to hold. Varn went through the hatch. The six lights were the colour they were.

At the end of the shift Smith turned the log toward the Deputy and said, "Enter it," and Varn wrote the instruments, the hatch, the officers, and stopped, as Varn had stopped the day before over a story, and this time did not write the rest. The corridor was not the watch's. A resident had stood in it and said his name. It had happened, and somebody who was not there could not check it, and would not need to, and it was not the Corps' to keep.

Smith initialled it. She did not ask what the stop had been for.

The hatch had been on the latch, as it was most days, and the corridor had said its piece in about forty seconds, which was longer than the two of them had managed on either of the earlier days and shorter than either of them would have guessed.

She had heard the first line and known the can was gone before she saw that it was, because I know that is not a sentence a person says over a full can. He had come back to correct something, and had been honest enough not to know what, and had brought the only thing he was sure of, which was that the earlier thing had not been true. She had watched fourteen Deputies learn to do that and it had taken most of them longer than four days.

Her Deputy had read the hands first. That was the log, working. Then the step had not happened, and she had waited for the other one — the step forward, the over-correction, the Deputy who has understood that a step said something and now wants it to say the opposite — and that had not happened either. Varn had stood exactly where Varn stood and asked a name. It was the least a person could do in that corridor and the first true thing anyone had said in it that was not about a plant, and she noted it, because the small things were what the assessments were made of, and this was one.

She did not note that the desk step had not moved. Varn had come through the hatch and stood one step too far from it, as on the first day. The corridor step and the desk step were not the same step, whatever they looked like from outside, and she had known Deputies who moved one and never the other, in both directions. The ones she remembered moved the desk one on their own, and not soon.

Not yet.