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 and never had been.

Party announced itself at the line: one member, one stone of the upper levels, set down on the line and left; handheld carried, pointed low, sound channel off. The one who answers was present on the line, in the open, and answered: a shift of rock at the edge of the silt. A second shape was present on the line, at arm's length of the first, upright; optical return, no thermal return, no shadow thrown; it did not answer, did not move, and was present when the light withdrew. Nothing said is recorded. The line was not crossed by any party. And under it, in the survey lead's own column, nothing. There was no count for this. It was not a thing you waited by.

Ferrant wrote her line beneath. Direct observation. Reading unchanged. Then she went up to the station and wrote the rest in her own file, where it would be read by people who knew what the grade meant, with Aravena's sentence in it in Aravena's words, and the gravimeter's excursion at the same minute, and the page's name, and consistent with in front of it, which is not the same word as is and never will be.

"What now?" said Egede, who had asked that a year ago too.

"Now nothing changes," said Nakagawa. "We knock. We work. We don't go down. The handheld goes with the stone from now on, pointed low, sound off, and the log says what it sees. Same as always, with one more thing kept."

"And that?"

"That is on the line," said Nakagawa, "beside the one who answers, and it is not ours and it is not theirs, and the only person on this planet who has a page for it has told us the page does not say what it is, and we are going to believe her, because she is the one who is trusted to be right about it."

Later, in the wind, Nakagawa sat with it, and did not think it had been slow.

Two years to learn to knock. A third to learn that the line the party had drawn with its own feet, and the people below had kept from their side, and both had answered across for a year, could have a third thing standing on it that neither side had asked and neither could ask, and that both would go on knocking anyway, because the knock was for the one who answered and had never been for anything else. What the people below had made of it, Nakagawa did not know and the log said so. They had not been told. They had not told. The stone was where Aravena had set it, a hand from the feet of the one who answers, and it would be there in the morning, and so would the one who answers, and the party would knock.

That was the whole of what the survey knew, and it was a great deal, and Nakagawa filed it and put the light out and slept, which is the only test there is.