Emma la Chapelle (Human, Field Officer, Survey Corps delegation)

Emma filed that evening, at the compound, under the lamp, with the log open on one side and her own notes on the other and the band register between them, which was where it lived.

The fact first, as the delegation filed facts: Delegation instrument, placed by the Kingdom's keeper at a location the court chose, interior, Krilzat. Optical return: a standing figure, outline consistent with the population's, at the wavelength of a hand lamp, present on three occasions for the duration the lamp was present and absent otherwise. Thermal nil. Sound nil. Then the two Kingdom records, each under its own name, each in its own words, as given, and nothing joining them: the chronicle's line, from the reciter's mouth, with the pauses; the Accounting's entry, from the Abbess's mouth, with the name the Abbess had said once in the long room and had not offered the court, which Emma had written down because it had been said in her hearing and had not been said to her.

Then the readings. Three, because three was what she had and she did not have a fourth.

That it was an optics of the place: the old stone, a lamp, a room shaped to gather. She could not rule it out and did not think it was so.

That it was the thing the delegation's own word was for, photographic, Strozzi's rendering of the court's word for a likeness drawn in light by nothing, which was a rendering and not a reading, and sat at its own band, and she did not raise it by putting it beside a log.

That it was a thing the Kingdom's two records each had a name for, one of them nothing and one of them Orrin, who waits, and that the delegation's instrument had recorded a third thing, a wavelength and a duration, and that none of the three was a reading of either of the others, and that this was not a reading the delegation was equipped to make.

She filed all three at the lowest band the register admitted. She adopted no name.

Then she sat for a while with the one thing she had not written, because it was not a reading either. The Abbess had sent a sixteen-year-old to a shelf, and the sixteen-year-old had come back with a page that said the room had been there since before her mother was born, and had held it out, and the Abbess had read it without taking it, in front of the court's reciter, and had answered the question the court asked and not the one it had not. Emma had been on this world three years and had never once seen the two records put beside each other in one room, and it had been done by a novice with a loose page, and nobody had pressed anything, and the delegation's instrument had recorded a figure for four minutes and eleven seconds and had not been asked what it thought.

It was always there. She wrote that down as given, under the Abbess's name, and closed the file.