Odile Ferrant (Human, Survey Corps boundary officer)

Ferrant had stopped reading the gravimeter's year a while back, which she would have admitted if asked.

She read instruments. The trade had a shape: an instrument is entitled to say exactly what it is built to measure and not one thing past it, and the whole of her discipline was holding people to the same line. A sound channel is entitled to an envelope, a bearing and a time. Sound, rising was an envelope. The bearing was the third passage. The time was the knock. The unit had filed all three and nothing more, a hundred and sixty-four times, and had not once written Aravena, because a sound channel does not know a name and is not entitled to one.

It was the best-graded entry in the file. She had never once thought that of anything a planetary survey had filed, and she did not say it aloud, because it would have been true and would have sounded like a joke.

The name was a grade above the unit. The first sixteen, Nakagawa knew by hearing: a known voice at zero range, and a person is entitled to say that. The hundred and forty-eight after, Nakagawa knew by inference: a rise, from the bearing of the line, at the minute of the knock, every time. Consistent with. She had heard one herself, from the edge of the light, and could not have filed it as more than a rise, and had not. A name on an entry is a claim that the entry is somebody's. The unit had been careful, in the way an instrument is careful, not to make it.

None of it was boundary data, and nothing of it would go in her file. She had a page for what stood beside the one on the line. She had no page for what was said to it, and nobody did, and for once that was not a gap.

"Your unit filed at its grade," she said, from the floor, to the table. "I'd sign it. It's the one entry on this roof I'd sign without reading twice."

"And the name?"

"I read instruments. I've a patch that says so, and it says nothing about people. If it were mine, I'd want to know before I put a name on an entry what the name was for. The unit hasn't claimed these are anybody's. I'd want to be at least as careful as the unit." She went back to the handset. "Ask the one it's of. That isn't advice. It's the only thing on the table that isn't already in the file."