Deputy Officer Iklix Varn (Human)

On the thirtieth day the ring was a habitat again.

It had been one all along, Varn supposed, and the Corps' engineers under the dock ring and the raven over it and the two shifts of the inspection had been the exception, the way the event would be, if it came. They had gone when the inspection named was done. The Compact side had its ring back and its certification corrected and its remedial work scheduled, and the office two hundred metres round the curve had filed something and closed it, and the hatch sat where it sat, between a door with a name on it and a door with a plant outside it, and the two residents who went past it as Varn came along at the hour did not look at it, which was the posting's whole design, and which Varn now found, without having decided to find it, a comfort.

Thirty days. Varn had not been counting. The log had, in a dozen hands going back years and one Academy hand going back a month, every entry saying what had happened: the instruments, the hatch, the officers, and on one day a story with a duration, and on nine of them a line that belonged to nobody, carried up the ring and set on a desk and left there until the record said what the structure carried. Varn had read back through it standing, that morning, before the shift, for no reason the Academy would have recognised, and had found that the month had a shape, and that the shape was not the shape of nothing.

Varn used the handle, which was right.

Smith looked up and said, "Varn," as a fact, and there was a form on the desk that had not been there the day before, printed, because a form on a reader is a form until the reader fails. Varn did not read it upside down. A Deputy does not read what is on an officer's desk, and besides, Varn knew what it was. The Corps asked for things at the end of a month. The Academy had said so, in the voice the Academy used for things that would happen to you and that you could not affect.

Varn went to the desk and stood.

The six lights were the colour they were. The rack hummed at the pitch it hummed at. Somewhere past the hatch the ring turned, which nobody in the compartment could feel and everybody knew. Varn stood at the desk the way Varn had stood at it for thirty days, and waited for the shift to begin, and it was a while before Varn noticed that Smith had not turned back to the form.

She was looking at the floor. Not at Varn. At the place on the floor where Varn's boots were.

Varn looked down too, and saw nothing, because there was nothing to see: a floor, lit evenly from nowhere in particular, and a pair of boots for grating standing on it. Then Varn looked at the desk, and at the distance between the desk and the boots, and understood that it was the wrong distance, and had been for about a minute, and that Varn had not put it there.

One step. Not the honest step, the one a Deputy stands from a desk because a Deputy does not know where they stand. Nearer. Where a person stands when they have come to a desk to do a job at it.

Varn had not decided that. Varn would have remembered deciding it. Varn had come through the hatch after a month of a log and a line and a countersign and the Corps leaving the ring, and had walked to the desk, and had stopped where Varn stopped, and it had been here.

The Academy teaches a Deputy to correct a posture when it is noticed. Varn did not move. Moving would have been a report, and not a true one.