Kattik (Chthonari)

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."