Deputy Officer Iklix Varn (Human)

The shift was the shift. The lights held. At some point in the middle of it, when the form had gone into the tray and the compartment had gone back to being a compartment, Varn asked the question that had been held since the seventh day, because the answer was standing in front of Varn and the Academy had been wrong about that being a reason to wait.

"What is it for?"

Smith did not ask what is what for. She waited, which was still worse.

"The story. The girl at the well. You said the officer who had you first told it to you, and that you have told it to all of us, and that you have never told a Deputy what it is for." Varn kept the voice level. "I have had it for three weeks. I have stood a watch with it. I have carried a log up the ring with it. I would like to know what it is for."

Smith put the pen down, which she did when a shift was over, and it was not over.

"I do not know," she said.

Varn waited for the rest of the sentence. There was a rest of it, and it was not what the Academy would have had.

"I was never told. She told it to me at a desk like this one, at the end of a shift like this one, on a station that no longer stands, and did not say why, and I did not ask, and then she was dead and there was nobody to ask. I thought for a year it was about the well. I thought for another year it was about the thing that came. I have told it fourteen times since, and every time I have told it I have been waiting for one of you to tell me. That is the honest answer. It is handed across this desk as a question. It was never an answer. I have never said that to a Deputy, because I thought it would spoil it, and I am saying it to you because you asked in the right order and I am tired of being the only one who knows I do not know."

Varn stood where Varn was standing, which was nearer than the first day, and held that, and did not put it down.

"The first day," Smith said. "I told you the watch does not watch anything. It stands where it is, and it is the nearest qualified officer to the event if the event comes. I have said that to every one of you, as a fact about the posting. It is a fact about the posting. It is also advice. I have never said that part either." She picked the pen up. "You worked it out in a corridor on the eighth day. I watched you do it through a hatch on the latch. I am only telling you now so that it has been said."

At the end of the shift she turned the log toward the Deputy and said, "Enter it."

Varn wrote the instruments. The hatch, opened once and closed once. The officers, named. No event. Then the pen stopped over the page for the length of one agreement between the instruments, and Varn thought about a form in a tray and a step on a floor and a question with no answer handed across a desk, and did not write any of it, because none of it was the watch's, and somebody who was not here could check every word of what was.

Smith read it as though it had been longer, and initialled it, and said nothing at all, and this time Varn understood that the nothing was not declining. It was the rank.

At the hour Varn went out through the hatch, and the corridor was doing what the corridor did, which was not look, except for one person, who was crouched at a plant with nothing in his hands.

"My mother wants to know," Noah said, standing up, too fast, "whether the hatch is staying. Now the Corps have gone. She saw them go, the engineers, from the Compact side. She said she didn't know the Corps had been on the ring until they left, and then she asked me whether that meant you were leaving too, and I said I'd ask." He stopped. "So I'm asking."

Varn stood where Varn was, which was one step further from him than there was any reason to stand, and left it there, because that one was a different step and had been held on purpose since the eighth day, and said what could be supported.

"The hatch is not the Corps that came," Varn said. "It is the one that stays."

Noah thought about that, and nodded, and went in at the door with the plant outside it, and Varn walked on along the ring, and it curved gently away in both directions, and nobody looked at the hatch, and that was what happened.