Hesper Nakagawa (Human, Survey Lead, Fliade survey)

Nakagawa struck the word.

Seven entries, in Egede's hand, and Nakagawa went through them that night at the station with Egede present, because a thing struck without the person who wrote it teaches nobody anything, and struck artefact from each, and fault where it appeared, and had them rewritten to what the imager had recorded and not one thing more. Optical return, third passage mouth, edge lit, no thermal, no sound, no mass. Forty seconds. And the count.

"It's a reading," Nakagawa said, before Egede could. "I know it is. So is broken. I let yours stand for seven weeks because it was the better one, and it was, and it was still a reading, and I let it into the file as a fact, which is the one thing I have told you both for three years not to do. That is my entry, not yours, and it is in the file too."

Egede, to Egede's credit, said nothing for a while, and then said: "What is it, then?"

"I don't know. Neither do you. Neither does Aravena, who has the best account of it and knows it isn't one." Nakagawa turned the screen off. "Here is what I know. A shape with a return on one channel and nothing on any other, at this party's furthest working point, seven times. There is a page in the Corps for that. I have not read it. It is not a planetary survey's page. It belongs to the people who sit at the boundary stations and read this kind of thing for a living, and I know who they are, and I have written to them tonight for one of them, and attached the fact, and attached no reading, and asked them to come and look."

"And until then?"

"Until then the log says what the imager saw. It does not say what the imager saw was. Nobody writes fault and nobody writes anything else. And we knock, and we work, and we do not go down, and we do not put an imager past the junction. Same as always."

Later, in the wind, with the others asleep, Nakagawa sat with it.

Two years the party had kept its back to the dark, and a thing had stood in it for eleven minutes and nobody had looked up. Now the party looked at the dark every evening, on a screen, and had spent seven weeks calling what it saw there a broken instrument. Nakagawa did not think that was worse. It was the same thing from the other side. A survey knows a thing by its warmth first and sees it second, and here was a thing seen first and never warm, and the party had the two words it had always had, somebody and nothing, and this was neither, and so Egede had reached for the only other word there was, and Nakagawa had let the reach stand.

The request was filed. Somebody who knew the page would come, and would read it, and the log would say what they read.

On the third shelf of the rack, under a seal that was not the survey's, something went on logging what the survey had never read.