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. This season the reading afterwards is the whole of it.

Aravena knocked.

That was the job now, or the part of it that was Aravena's and nobody else's. Every shift, before anything: pick a stone at the junction, a good one, the size of two hands, carry it to the front down the third passage, through the squeeze sideways with the stone turned lengthwise and the side scraping, out onto the silt with the light held low. Kneel. Set it on the line. Step back. Wait.

And every shift, the one on the line bent, and put a hand to a rock at the edge of the silt, and moved it, and the ground said so through the silt and Aravena's boots.

A year of that. A hundred and some shifts, and the party had stopped counting, because a count is for things that might stop. The one on the line was there every time, in the open, still, grey against the stone, large, and did not withdraw and did not come nearer, and Aravena could not have sworn it was always the same one, because the party had never learned to tell the adults apart, and would have sworn it anyway. You know a person by how they stand. This one stood like a person who had decided where to stand a long time ago.

Aravena said the thing, too, every shift, facing the one on the line, going up at the end. It was not in the log and never would be. Then back through the crack, not running, and up to the junction, where Egede had the imager out of its case and Nakagawa was reading the ground, and the shift could begin.

"Log," said Aravena, kneeling to the unit. "Shift one-one-seven. Upper junction. Party of three. Knock answered."

The unit hummed, once, low, to say it had heard. Aravena still liked that.

Behind them, down the third passage, was the dark, the real kind, and the party kept its back to it while it worked, which was the rule, and which was not the same as forgetting it was there. Egede at the far wall with the imager, saying things. Nakagawa standing still. Aravena logging the temperature, twice, from habit. The Anstolik had not been through. Nothing had. Then the working time was over, the way it always was, and they gathered the light and the handsets and left the unit asleep, and the imager, which stayed now, on its stand at the far wall, facing the junction, because Egede wanted the room while the party was gone.

They went up the long passage toward the cold, all three, talking.