Hesper Nakagawa (Human, Survey Lead, Fliade survey)

Nakagawa wrote the log at the junction, standing up, in the survey lead's own hand, because this one was not Aravena's to write. It said what had happened and not one thing more. Party announced itself at the line: one member, one stone of the upper levels, set down on the line and left. An adult was present at the line, in the open, and did not withdraw. The party's stone was answered by a shift of rock at the edge of the silt. Nothing said is recorded. The line was not crossed by either party. And under it, where only the survey lead wrote, the count: sixty-three shifts on which nothing had happened, and then this one. So that the file would show, for anyone who read it afterwards, how long it had been true.

"What now?" said Egede.

"Now we have been told we may stand in the doorway," said Nakagawa. "That is all we have been told. It is a great deal. We work. And before every shift, from today, one of us goes down with a stone and sets it on the line and steps back and waits, and only then do we work, and if there is no answer we come back up. Every time. That is the standing order and it replaces the other one."

"Every time," said Egede.

"They have done it every time for two years," said Nakagawa. "We have some catching up to do."

Then the work, such as it was, because there was a shift to log and the imager was still in its case. Nakagawa did the ground. Egede did the wall. Aravena knelt to the unit and said, "Log. Shift sixty-four. Upper junction. Party of three," and stopped, and the unit hummed, low, once, to say it had heard, and Aravena said the rest.

Two years to learn to knock. Nakagawa filed it that evening at the station, in the wind, and did not think it had been slow. Two peoples had kept one line from opposite sides for two years, and the first thing either had said to the other was may I, and the first answer was you may stand there, and everything after that is a longer conversation, and the survey had never once been in a hurry.