Aravena (Human, Fliade surface party)

Nakagawa asked, the next evening, the way Nakagawa asked things: plainly, at the station, after the others had eaten, with the summary up.

Sound, rising. A number beside it.

Aravena looked at it for a long time, and did not need to be told what it was the number of.

"That's me," said Aravena.

"Yes."

"All of them?"

"The first sixteen at the bottom of the passage, with the unit on your back. I heard those. You know I did. The rest from the junction, at the knock. The crack takes the words. It keeps the rise."

Aravena had not known the unit at the junction could hear the line. Had assumed, the way you assume a door is shut, that what was said on the silt was between the one who said it and the one it was said to, and the crack. And the whole time there had been a third thing listening at the top of the passage, humming once to say it had heard, and Aravena had knelt to it every shift and liked that about it.

"So it knows a thing went up," said Aravena, slowly, "and it doesn't know what."

"That is what it knows."

Aravena thought about the one on the line, who heard the whole of it from an arm's length every shift, and moved a rock. And did not say that, because it was not a reading.

"Here is the asking," said Nakagawa. "I can strike the class and write whose it is. The file would then carry your name a hundred and sixty-four times, and under sixteen of them it would carry what you said. Egede says do that; a recording is a recording. Or I can leave it as the unit has it and sign it a third time knowing what it is. I am not going to do either without asking you, and I should have asked before the first signature, and that is in the file as well."

Aravena had been asked a great many things by the survey lead in four years, and every one had been about the ground, or the unit, or the shape at the mouth of the third passage. This was the first that was about Aravena, and it was much harder to be asked than to ask.

"It wasn't said to the unit," said Aravena, at last. "The unit was there. That's all. It was there the way we were there, the first year, when he stood behind us for eleven minutes. Being there isn't the same as being told."

Nakagawa waited, because Nakagawa could tell when there was more, and there was not more, or not yet.

"The class, or the name. Or neither. I'll take any of the three."

"Not today," said Aravena.

And heard it, and went a colour, because it was not Aravena's line and both of them knew whose it was.

"That's yours," said Aravena.

"It is," said Nakagawa. "It was the right answer when I gave it. It appears to still be."