Tsikk (Chthonari)

Tsikk asked the habitat every shift, and the habitat answered every shift, and that was why the last shift was different: the answer changed, and nothing else did.

The asking was not a ceremony. A burrow has a monitor and one addresses it from the deck, as part of the work, the way one addresses a cutter one is about to use; Eden had a mind, two minds the humans said, sharing one structure, and Tsikk had addressed it from the first day the way one addresses a structure that can listen back, which is to say as a completion. The humans went through a desk to ask it anything. Tsikk had never understood what the desk was for. One stood on the plating, struck the question into the deck in the flattest register the Undersong carried, and the habitat, which read its own structure the way the crew read it, answered in the humans' way, through the module's panel, with the reading.

Approach monitoring, normal. Every shift for six weeks. Tekka had said that settled it, and Kattik had written the line anyway, and Tikket had gone on standing on the third mount at the end of each shift as though standing on it would change what it did, which it would not, and which Tsikk had not said, because an apprentice who has begun to hear is owed silence while the hearing finishes.

The last shift was snagging. There was nothing left to snag. The new members had been cut to what the ring would still be doing when the cutting stopped and were doing exactly that; the crew's tools were in their cases; the lift up to the dock was booked for the end of the shift, and after that a Federation transit and the Belt, where a tunnel was tuned and a question struck into the rock came back as the rock's own. Tsikk struck the question into the plating for the last time out of order rather than hope. One asks the monitor before one leaves.

The panel answered. Approach monitoring, mount three: re-baselined against independent reference. Countersign: refused, fold-approach watch, Star Rangers. Understructure inspection: scheduled, next quarter.

Tsikk stood on the plating for the length of a long breath, which is not how a Chthonari measures anything, and had no other measure for it.

Nobody had told the crew. Nobody on Eden could have; the crew had no standing to be told and the humans had no channel to tell it through, and the module was sealed, and the air carried nothing. The habitat had not told the crew either. The habitat had been asked, from the deck, the same question as every shift, and had answered with the record, and the record had changed, because somewhere in the air somebody had asked the structure properly, through something that could hear it, and the structure had answered them the way it had been answering Tikket for six weeks.

Re-baselined against independent reference. Tsikk knew what that was. It was the burrow's question, what is this still doing, asked by an instrument of an instrument. Somebody had set a second ear on the ring and let the six hear themselves. It did not say who. It did not say what the second ear had found. It said refused, which was the humans' word, and scheduled, which was the humans' other word, and between those two words a thing the crew had cut six weeks ago was standing in the dark carrying what it carried, now with a record that said so.

That was a completion. Not of the ring. Of the asking.

Tsikk told the crew through the deck, in the register for things that are the case, and felt Kattik stop moving at the far end of the module, and Tikket come up off the third mount, and Tekka, who had said it was settled, say nothing at all for longer than Tekka had ever managed.