Scene 3

Hesper Nakagawa (Human, Fliade survey lead)

Time: 2834 UCSD, the survey's fourth year on the ground, at the turn of the year's file
Location: Fliade — the upper junction, the squeeze and the line, and the station on the roof

"It's working," said Egede, first, because Egede had been going to say it since the number came up. "That's the class. Any sound with a rising envelope that isn't a rock or an animal. The classifier's doing exactly what it was built to do. It's the one instrument on this station that's never once been wrong."

"I know it's working."

"Then I don't see the entry."

"The entry," said Nakagawa, "is that a hundred and sixty-four times, the only person on this roof who has said anything to anybody has gone into the file as an event, and the file is correct, and I have signed it twice."

Egede reached for the fix, and reached well. "Then write what it is. You struck fault and had me write what the imager saw. Do that. It's a voice. It's Aravena's. Put the name on the class and keep the entries under it." A pause, with the instrument specialist's own weight in it. "And keep them. You struck a word last year. This is two years of recording. There isn't a survey in the Corps that strikes a recording."

"No," said Nakagawa. "There isn't."

"Then."

"The imager was never asked what its entry said. I struck fault and wrote what it saw, and the imager had no view on the matter, because an imager doesn't. I let your seven stand for seven weeks because they were yours and you were there and you had a right to be wrong in your own hand. These are nobody's. They are the unit's. And the thing they are of has a name, and the name has never filed one word of them, and nobody has asked whether it would."

"You had a word," Nakagawa said to Egede, "for a herd fitted with a collar it was never asked about. In the note you had appended."

Egede was quiet for about as long as it takes to say a name.

"Unasked," said Egede.

"Yes."

"That was a collar."

"It was an instrument that filed a people correctly and relayed it to a station they did not know existed." Nakagawa turned the summary face down on the table, which was not a thing Nakagawa did. "I am going to ask. What I am sitting with is how. How a survey lead asks a surveyor whether the survey may keep a thing the survey has already kept."

Discussion