By Invitation

The Starwarden's answer came on the twenty-fourth day and said noted, and Varn read it three times looking for the rest.

There was no rest. Referral from the fold-approach watch, Eden, received. Re-baseline finding noted. Refusal of countersign stands. Instruments to remain in place. The Corps does not inspect a Compact member's structure uncalled. No further action lies with the Corps. A signature, a reference number, and a date. It was the clearest document Varn had read since arriving on Eden, and it did nothing, and Varn stood at the hatch holding it and felt the ninth day come back round: a thing that was true and belonged to nobody, with an initial beside it.

"It is not n/a," Smith said, without looking up, because she had read the Deputy's face from the trace, which Varn was beginning to think she could.

"It says no further action."

"It says noted." She turned. "Read the two side by side. The office struck the crew's line out; the line is gone from their record and you had to go and fetch it from a second file. The Starwarden has written ours in. It is on the Corps' record now, under a reference number, with the number beside it, and anyone who opens that file, for as long as the Corps keeps one, finds a mount carrying a third again and a watch that would not sign. That is not nothing. That is the opposite of nothing, done by people who cannot do anything else." She went back to the trace. "The Corps does not come uncalled. Write that down too. You will need it."

Varn did not understand why, and then, that afternoon, did.

It was the raven.

Varn had gone round the ring on the watch's letterhead to lodge a copy of the Starwarden's answer with the Certification Office, which was the kind of errand a Deputy exists for, and had come out onto the dock ring's upper gallery where the residents walked, and had looked up because everyone was looking up. A raven was flying the ring. Banded, obvious, not hurrying: a long slow circuit under the gallery lights with the whole of the dock shift watching her and pretending not to, and a reference number, Varn knew without being told, filed downstairs meaning every word it said.

Varn had been told about this. A notification goes to the Commissioner in writing; the field observer flies; by the third circuit she is weather. What Varn had not been told, and worked out standing on the gallery with the Starwarden's noted in one hand, was what the raven meant before the letter arrived. She was not looking for anything. She was the notification, made visible. Somewhere a letter had gone out that said she would be here, and she was here, and so the letter existed, and so Five-O had moved.

The letter reached the watch before Varn did.

Smith had it open on the desk. It was from Larsen, on the Governor's authority, addressed to the Starwarden and copied to Commissioner Wayland, to Mayor Petrakis, and to the fold-approach watch, Eden, and it did the one thing no document on the ring had been able to do since the ninth day. It recognised. A Compact-certified structural member carrying the Star Rangers' fold-route monitoring is a matter the Compact cannot finish alone. On that recognition, under the Compact's own charter and not the Corps', Orbital Five-O invited the Star Rangers' Engineering Corps onto Eden's dock ring to inspect approach mount three jointly with the habitat's own engineers, before the scheduled quarter, on a date two days off. The annex said the task force's Field Observer would be flying the dock ring from the date of notification. Her name. Her band number.

Varn read it standing up, and then, for the first time on the posting, sat down without being told.

"Who asked them?" Varn said.

"Nobody. That is the point. Nobody can." Smith set the two letters side by side, noted and the invitation, the way she set everything. "The Starwarden cannot come. The Commissioner cannot ask the Starwarden to come; the habitat has no standing to invite the Corps onto its own ring and would not want one. The crew could not ask anybody. We could not. The one desk in the Compact that exists to recognise a case has stopped being the Compact's is the one that has just done so, in writing, with a bird." She almost smiled, which Varn had not seen. "You asked, on the ninth day, whose question it was. It was the Governor's. It was always going to be. It took fifteen days and a raven for anyone to be allowed to say so."

Smith had seen a wall come down once, years ago, on a posting she did not talk about, and had learned from it that a wall coming down was the wrong thing to want.

This one had not come down. That was what she wanted the Deputy to understand, and what she did not say, because the Deputy would get there alone and it would hold better. The Rangers had held no authority on Eden's dock ring on the ninth day and held none now. The invitation named one mount, one inspection, one date, and the Engineering Corps would walk onto the ring on that date with the habitat's own engineers beside them and walk off it when the inspection was done, and the next time a mount rang under load on Eden the Corps would once again be a courtesy on the Compact side, as it should be. Nothing had been lowered. Something had been passed over, in writing, by the one party with the standing to pass it, and the wall had done what a wall is for: it had made the passing visible.

She wrote it up the way she wrote everything.

Invitation received, Orbital Five-O on the Governor's authority: joint inspection, approach mount three, Engineering Corps with habitat engineers, two days hence. Watch to stand the shift. Countersign remains refused pending the record stating what the structure carries. Not a finding. She had written not a finding on every entry since the ninth day and would go on writing it until the day there was one, because the watch's whole discipline was to know the difference and to say so, and a Deputy who learned nothing else from her would have learned the thing that mattered.

Varn asked, from the hatch, whether the crew would be told.

She thought about that longer than the question deserved, because it was the right question and had no answer she liked. "No. They have no standing to be told, and they are gone, and their log is in the Compact's file with a line under the line." She had read Larsen's annex twice. The crew's own closing entry was quoted in it, in the crew's hand: read; by whom, not known to this crew; mount still rings. Five-O had found it where the clerk had filed it, and had put it in the invitation, because the invitation was built on it. "Their line is in the Governor's letter. That is as told as anyone on this ring gets."

The trace ran. Six instruments agreed with each other every ninety seconds, and a seventh, on mount five, disagreed with all six by a third, and the disagreement was now on three records and a letter, which was three records and a letter more than it had been on the eighth day, when it had been a thing a young Chthonari felt through the feet and could tell nobody.

"Two days," Varn said.

"Two days. Then an inspection, and a number from people whose job is numbers, and the countersign or the refusal, and either way the watch stands its shift." She did not look up. "You came to a posting that does not watch anything, Deputy. You have now seen what it watches. Go and get some sleep. The raven has it."