Hesper Nakagawa (Human, Fliade survey lead)

Nakagawa signed the summaries at the station table, after the others had eaten, with Egede across the table and Ferrant on the floor at the third shelf with the handset on her knee, reading the gravimeter's year the way she read it every evening, which was without saying anything.

Thermal. Imager. The seven, under their rewritten line, and a year of nothing at the third passage mouth, counted shift by shift, because nothing is a count. Nakagawa signed both.

Sound channel.

Three classes. A sound channel is told what kinds of thing to notice, before it ever comes down a passage on anybody's back, and files each under the name it was given for it, and a thing it was not built to notice is nothing. Anstolik, passing. Rock shift, below margin — which the party had reread, the whole of it, two years ago, laid out in a row on this table, and found was a knock. And the third.

Sound, rising. A hundred and sixty-four, since the unit was lifted.

Nakagawa knew what it was before reading anything else, the way you know a voice. Then checked. A hundred and sixty-four was the number of shifts since the unit was lifted from the line. Not one short.

Nakagawa pulled the entries.

The first sixteen were what Nakagawa had heard, every one, in the evenings of the second year. Zero range. The unit on a back, at the bottom of the long passage, after the others' voices had gone up. One voice. A short thing that went up at the end. A long quiet after it. Footsteps going up. Nakagawa had said nothing about those, on the rule that a thing said to the dark is not a thing said to the survey lead, and had thought that was the end of it.

There were a hundred and forty-eight more.

They were different. Not the end of a shift: the start. Not zero range: the unit on its base at the junction, and the voice gone down the third passage and through the crack to the line, and what came back up was what the crack let through. The crack took the words. It kept the shape. A rise, with nothing in it; the thing Ferrant had heard from the edge of the light on the one shift she went down, and called the shape of it. The unit filed it where it filed the other sixteen, because that is what a class is for. And then, every time, a little after, in its own class: rock shift, below margin. The answer.

Nakagawa sat back.

The party had reread one of the unit's three classes and found a people in it. It had never reread the other, because everybody knew what that was. And nothing, which Nakagawa had read off the sound channel every evening for two years and written down, had meant nothing outside the three classes, and one of the three had been a person.

Egede's artefacts had been in Egede's hand and could be struck; Aravena's young had been in Aravena's and was struck the same evening. The unit's were in nobody's, and nobody had struck them, because nobody writes a thing for an instrument to be struck.

That went in the file, under the survey lead's name, in the section that was becoming the best-read part of it.