Hesper Nakagawa (Human, Survey Lead, Fliade survey)

That evening Egede made the argument properly, at the station, with the wind going.

"He brought our unit back and stood it on its feet at the exact place we stopped. That is a courtesy. You don't file a courtesy under nothing happened for sixty shifts and call it caution. You answer it. We take something down to the line and leave it. Something small. Something that says we saw."

"And leave it," said Nakagawa.

"Yes."

"Say the rest of the rule."

Egede said it, because Egede knew it as well as anyone. Nothing stays on this world that the planet would keep if the station were abandoned.

"A thing left at the line," said Nakagawa, "is a thing left. Whatever it says. If we cannot take it back at will, it is not a message, it is the first piece of us this planet keeps, and we agreed there would not be one."

"Then what do we do?"

"I don't know yet. That is what the count is for."

Egede did not like it, and said so, and it went in the file too, because a refusal kept without the thing it refused teaches nobody anything.

Then Nakagawa did the thing that had been waiting some shifts to be done, and turned to the third of the party, who had said nothing all evening, and who had knelt to the unit on the line and filed no reading.

"You were the one who read its log. What did you think it was?"

Aravena took a while. Nakagawa let the while be as long as it liked.

"It wasn't dropped and brought back," Aravena said. "And it wasn't a line. It was put where we would find it. Facing us. On the exact place where we stopped." A breath. "Like a thing at a door."

"And what does one do at a door."

"You knock," said Aravena, and then stopped, and Nakagawa watched the rest of it arrive, the way you can watch a thing arrive in a face. "They knock. Every time. That's what the boulders are. Before we've even seen the margin, every time — they've knocked, and then they've stood back. And we've never — we walk straight in. Two years. We've never once —"

"No," said Nakagawa. "We have not."

The wind went. Egede, for once, said nothing at all.

"So we knock," said Aravena.

"Not today," said Nakagawa, and meant it exactly, and no more than that. "Write it down. The log says nothing happened, because nothing has. And under it, in my hand, that the party has never announced itself. Noted. And then we sleep on it, all three of us, and I mean sleep, and we see what it looks like in the morning, which is the only test this survey has ever trusted."

Aravena wrote it down. Nakagawa wrote the other line, and the count went up by one, and for the first time since the unit was lifted the count had something written under it.