Aravena (Human, Fliade surface party)

This is logged the way things are logged on Fliade: by someone who was there, into a unit that was there too, and read afterwards by someone who was not.

Aravena carried the unit. That was the job, or the part of the job that was Aravena's and nobody else's, and Aravena did not mind it. The unit was heavy and smooth and about the length of an arm, and it rode on your back down the long passage and sat on the floor at the junction and did what it was for, which was to listen, and to remember, and to talk to the relay when the relay was overhead. When the relay was not overhead it slept. You could tell. It went quiet in a particular way.

The junction was the party's furthest working point. Three passages met there, and the fungus on the walls was thick enough to work by if you had to, amber on one side and blue-green on the other, though nobody had to, because the party brought its own light. Egede was at the far wall with the imager, saying things. Egede always said things. The survey lead was reading the ground, which was what Nakagawa did, and which looked like standing still. Aravena set the unit down on its base at the middle of the junction, turned it until it was oriented the way the party oriented them, and knelt to it.

"Log," said Aravena. "Shift forty-one. Upper junction. Party of three. Nothing so far."

The unit hummed, once, low, the way it did to say it had heard. Aravena liked that. It was not a person and Aravena knew it was not a person, and it was still nice to be answered.

Behind them, down the third passage, was the dark. Not fungus-dark. The real kind, where the upper levels stopped and the ground went down into the deep networks, which the survey did not go into, because that was the rule. The party kept its back to it. That was not the same as forgetting it was there, though from the outside it looked the same.

The Anstolik had been through; you could smell them, warm and musky under the mineral cold. Egede logged the tracks. Nakagawa logged the ground. Aravena logged the temperature, twice, because the first reading looked wrong and was not. Then the working time was over, the way it always was, before anyone had finished, and they gathered the light and the imager and the handsets, and left the unit where it sat, asleep, because it was heavy and it was fine and that was what you did.

They went up the long passage toward the cold, all three, talking. Nobody looked back. There was nothing to look back at.