Tekka (Chthonari)

Tekka had said the reading settled it, and had meant it, and now had to say what settled it, which was harder, because the reading had moved and Tekka had not.

That was the thing about memorising. One memorised the course and the course was true, and then the course changed and one was standing on the old one. Kattik memorised too, and disagreed with Tekka about every part of it, and Kattik had written the line. Tekka had not. Tekka had said: six instruments, reading normal, an apprentice hearing the course; and all of that had been true, and the mount had been carrying more than its record the whole time, by however much the second ear had found, which the panel did not say and which Tekka would never now know. The habitat had not been wrong. The habitat had been reading from a floor somebody had set with the load already in it, and Tekka had called the floor the ground, which is the mistake a cutter makes exactly once in the Belt and is marked down for forever.

There was a dissonance in the module. Not loud. Four on one deck, and one of them had been right about the structure and wrong about what it meant, and one had been wrong about the structure and right about what settled things, and the two readings did not sit in the same plating. In the Belt an argument is a dissonance and a settlement is a chord, and a crew does not leave a tunnel with a dissonance in it. It is not a rule. It is what a crew is.

Kattik opened the log.

Tekka watched the line go in under the old one, in the crew's hand, dated the last day: Mount three line: read. By whom, not known to this crew. Mount still rings. Kattik did not write we were right, because Tikket had been right and the crew had not, and did not write the structure is wrong, because the structure was not; the structure was carrying more than its record, which is a fault in a record, and the crew had cut what it was asked to cut. Kattik wrote what the deck gave and stopped.

"That is ours," Kattik said, through the plating. "It was always ours. Somebody has decided whose the rest is."

"Who?" Tikket asked.

"The ones with the second ear. The ones with the word refused." Kattik closed the log. "Not us. We are the ones with the line."

Tekka found, standing on the plating with the dissonance going out of it, that this was the chord. Not that the crew had been vindicated; a crew is not a thing that gets vindicated. That the question had been asked properly, by somebody, through something that could hear, and the structure had answered, and the record now said what the structure was doing, and what anybody did about it was the air's business and had always been. A structure that has been asked and has answered is a completion. The ring was not finished. The asking was.

"It settled it," Tekka said, to Tsikk, who had struck the question for six weeks and been answered normal for six weeks and had not stopped. "You were right that it would. I was wrong about when."

The lift was booked for the end of the shift. Tikket went down to the third mount one last time, which nobody remarked on, and stood on it, and came back up, and said through the deck that it rang as it had on the second day. More than it was left to carry. Not wrong. Right, for what it carried.

They took the lift. The ring went on being read, by six instruments and a seventh, from a floor that was now written down, and the crew went back to a place where the ground answers, and left on Eden the one thing that was theirs to leave.