Sound, as Certified

The deck said the habitat was fine, and Tikket had stopped believing it on the second day.

Not in words. The Undersong has no word for a thing being wrong; it has the thing, and the thing was a mount under the dock ring — the third of six the humans' instruments hung from — that rang a little under load where the other five did not. A little. Less than a course-turn in the Long Skitter, less than a novice is marked down for missing. Tikket had felt it through the forelimbs on the first shift, the way one feels a step that is a finger's width lower than the last, and had put it where an apprentice puts such things: with the course, not with the tunnel. Eden was a tunnel nobody had tuned. Everything in it rang a little.

By the second day the other five mounts had settled into what they were, and the third had not.

The cutting itself was finished, which was the difficulty. The crew had cut the new members in the first week — good members, cut to what the ring would still be doing when the cutting stopped, and Tikket had been proud of them in the way one is proud of something that will never be looked at — and the habitat's monitoring had read the whole run and called it normal, and the certification had gone up, and the crew had stayed on for the snagging list. Snagging is the part of a job where one stands on what one has left and listens to it. Tikket stood on it now: on plating that belonged to Eden, listening to a mount that belonged to the Rangers, holding a ring the Compact had certified, with no standing on any of it except the standing that came up through the feet.

Kattik said it was the course. Kattik said Eden's monitoring was six instruments that had agreed with each other since before either of them had stood on a deck, and that a mount rang under load because a mount was under load, and that an apprentice who heard a fault in every unfamiliar structure would spend a career hearing faults. All of which was true. Kattik was rarely wrong about what was true. It was the other thing — what a structure was doing that its record did not say — that Kattik memorised and Tikket had begun, somewhere in the last year, to hear.

There was nobody to tell. That was not a complaint. The humans were kind, the module was sealed, the crew was four on one deck and could feel each other well enough. It was that the one thing Tikket knew for certain here did not travel through air, and everybody who could decide anything lived in the air.

So Tikket did what could be done from the feet. Went back to the third mount at the end of shift, when the ring ran quiet, and stood on it, and listened to it ring under the load of an approach the humans said was normal, and found — with the part of an apprentice that has begun to be an engineer — that it was not ringing wrong. It was ringing right, for a mount carrying more than the certification said it carried.

That was worse. A fault is a fault. A structure doing its job under a load nobody has written down is a structure telling the truth to the one person in the room who cannot repeat it.

The log was Kattik's, which was why the line went in.

Not because Kattik believed it. Kattik had said, and would say again to anyone with standing to ask, that Tikket was hearing the course. New deck, new ring, six instruments reading normal: an apprentice who could not tell a strange structure from a wrong one had not finished being an apprentice, and Kattik had told Tikket so, on the third mount, through the plating, in the flattest register the Undersong carried. Tikket had not argued. Tikket had stood on the mount and let it ring and said nothing, which in a crew of four on one deck is not nothing.

Tsikk had gone and asked the habitat.

That was Tsikk's answer to most things, and the crew had stopped remarking on it. Eden had a mind — two, the humans said, sharing one structure, which Kattik found less strange than the humans seemed to — and Tsikk addressed it the way one addresses a burrow's monitor: from the deck, as part of the work, without waiting to be introduced. The humans went through a desk to ask it anything. The habitat had answered Tsikk the way it answered everyone, with the reading: approach monitoring, normal. Tekka had said that settled it. Tekka and Kattik agreed about most things and disagreed about all of them, and this was one of the ones they agreed on.

Then Kattik had gone to the third mount alone, at the end of the shift after Tikket's, because a thing three of four have decided is still a thing one of four has heard.

It rang under load. Kattik had known that; a mount under load rings. What Kattik had not done, until standing on it with the ring quiet, was ask the question the burrow asks of every member before the cutting stops: what is this still doing? And the honest answer, the one the feet gave before Kattik had decided whether to want it, was: more than it was left to do.

Not wrong. Kattik would not write wrong, and did not. The certification was the habitat's; the monitoring was the humans'; the crew had cut what it was asked to cut and cut it well, and nothing in the Undersong had ever been improved by a stranger's note in a stranger's book. But the log was the crew's own — the one record on Eden that was theirs to leave — and a record that says less than the structure is doing is a record that has been cut too far.

So Kattik wrote the line, in the crew's hand, dated the last day of the work: Approach mount three, understructure: rings under load. Noted. Not a certification item.

Tikket, reading it through the plating the way the crew read everything, asked why not a certification item.

"Because it is not," Kattik said. "It is ours. Somebody will decide whose."

And then, because an apprentice who has begun to hear should be told once, plainly, and never again: "You were not wrong about the mount. You were wrong about what it meant. Those are different, and the second is the one that gets better."