Hesper Nakagawa (Human, Survey Lead, Fliade survey)

Nakagawa sat with it, that night, in the wind, with Ferrant asleep in the spare berth and the third shelf humming very slightly in the dark.

The station had known. That was the thing Nakagawa kept coming back to, and could not get to the other side of. For two years, in a language nobody on the roof could read, under a seal nobody on the roof could break, the station had been saying so every day, and the word it had said was nominal, and Nakagawa had signed it twice. The file nobody read had been reading the whole time. Nakagawa had been trained on exactly that, and had taught it, and had kept the count of shifts on which nothing happened precisely so that the file would say how long a thing had been true before anyone looked, and had not once thought to ask what else on the station was keeping a count.

That went in the file too, in the survey lead's hand. Nakagawa's lapses were becoming a section.

Then the other thing, which was not a lapse and did not go in the file, because it was not a reading.

There were three records on this roof now. The survey's, which said what the imager saw. Ferrant's, which said what it was consistent with, at a grade, in a form the survey could not read. And the gravimeter's, which the survey could not read either and which had said nominal to itself for seven hundred days. Three records in one station, and no two of them could be laid side by side by any one person on it.

And below the margin, a fourth, if there was one. Kept by speaking. By people who had answered a stone every shift for a year and had never once been told anything by the party and had never told the party anything, and who, if they had seen what the imager saw, had made whatever they made of it without a page, and without a patch, and without a word for consistent with.

The survey had a page, and had made a fault of it. Nakagawa did not know which record was the poorer, and did not file that, because the survey does not file those.

In the morning Aravena would pick a stone, and carry it down, and set it on the line, and be answered. That was the only thing on the planet that had ever answered anything, and it was not on any channel, and Nakagawa went to sleep on it, which was the only test the survey had ever trusted.