Odile Ferrant (Human, boundary officer, Survey Corps)

She filed that evening, at the station, in her own file, which was the boundary side's and went up the relay under its own seal and was not the survey's to read, and which the survey lead did not ask to.

She wrote the fact first, as the survey had, because the survey's fact was good and there was nothing to improve in it. Optical return, edge lit, no thermal, no sound, no mass. Seven in seven weeks. Then the gravimeter: the offset, with its date, which was before the knock; the seven excursions, coincident; the band, and the word the band had been reporting. Then the reading, under the name of the page she read for a living, at its grade, with the grade written in the form her patch obliged her to use and nobody else on this roof could read, and consistent with in front of it, which is not the same word as is and never will be.

Then the thing she did not write. Nothing about what stood on the far side of anything. Nothing about the feature under study near this world, which was in her file already, from before she came, and which the survey had never been told the nature of and did not need to know. Nothing that would let a reader of her file say what the shape at the third passage mouth was, because she could not, and the grade said so, and a grade is not a reproach.

In the survey's log, in her own hand, one line: Read by boundary officer. Reading filed boundary-side at stated confidence. Fact unchanged.

Nakagawa read the line, and then asked the question Ferrant had known was coming since the wind.

"What did you see in the gravimeter?"

"A small stable wrongness, since before you knocked. And seven small changes, at your seven times."

"Which means."

"Which is consistent with the page I read for a living, at the grade I filed it at, and not with that page being settled. Your entry's sentence about the feature near this world does not change. Neither does mine."

"You know what the feature is."

"I know what's in my file," said Ferrant. "It isn't in yours, and I'm not going to put it there. That is not me keeping something from you. It is me not writing a thing into a planetary survey's log that a planetary survey can't check, so that it sits there for eleven years with nominal beside it. You've read how that goes."

Nakagawa had. Everyone had.

"And the conduct?"

"No change. You knock. You work. You don't go down. Nothing past the junction. I'll read the third shelf every evening while I'm here, beside you reading the unit, and when I go it goes back to nominal, and nominal will mean what it meant." She paused. "That's not a comfort. It's a description."