Hesper Nakagawa (Human, Fliade survey lead)

Nakagawa signed the fourth year's summary that night, with the class as the unit had it. Sound, rising. A hundred and sixty-four. And under the count, in the survey lead's own column: The class is the unit's. The entries are not. Asked. Not today.

Ferrant read it and nodded once, as if a grade had been filed correctly, which, Nakagawa supposed, it had.

Then the wind, with the others asleep and the third shelf humming very slightly in the dark.

Nakagawa had struck young the same evening it was written, and fault after seven weeks, and had thought that the striking was the job: that the file could always be brought back to what was seen with a pen. Sound, rising was exactly what was seen. There was nothing in it to strike, and the one thing wrong with it was not in it at all. It was that the entry had a name, and the name was a person's, and a person is the one thing on a planet a survey lead cannot file correctly by being more careful.

Two years ago the party had sat at this table and reread the planet's entries and found that a people had been knocking the whole time. It had taken another two to reread its own and find that someone on the roof had been answering, every shift, into the only thing on the roof that could not tell a question from a rise, and had never been asked how the roof should keep it. A thing said to the dark is not a thing said to the survey lead. That had been true. It had also been convenient, and Nakagawa had not noticed the second half until tonight.

What the people below made of the rise, Nakagawa did not know and the log said so. They heard it; a sound that reached the junction through the crack reached the line a great deal better, and somebody stood on the line every time. What they had done with it was not a planetary survey's to know, and the survey had just found out that it had not known what it had done with it either.

In the morning Aravena would pick a stone, and carry it down, and say the thing, and be answered. The unit at the junction would hear a sound go up at the end and write down that it had, in the one class it had for that, and then hear the rock, and write that down too, and nobody on the roof had improved on it in two years, and nobody had tried.

Nakagawa had been told not today, now, and had found out what it was like, and did not file that, because the survey does not file those.