Aravena (Human, Fliade surface party)

This is logged the way things are logged on Fliade: by someone who was there, into a unit that was there too. This time the second half of that sentence is the whole of it.

Aravena knocked.

The stone, the size of two hands. The squeeze, sideways, the handheld's hard square against the breastbone, its sound off. The silt, and the one on the line, in the open, still, grey, large. Kneel. A hand from those feet. Step back. The thing said, going up at the end.

Wait.

The hand on the rock at the edge of the silt. The ground saying so.

Back through the crack, not running. Aravena had done this on more shifts than Aravena had counted, and it had become ordinary, in the way a thing you do every day becomes ordinary without once becoming small. What was not ordinary, this shift, was the junction. Aravena came out of the third passage with the light held low, and Nakagawa and Egede were where they always were, standing in the fungus-light with the boots that had just felt the rock, and between them, on its base, was the unit, and the unit had just heard it too.

Aravena had known that for seven shifts. It was a different thing to know it at the junction.

"Log," said Aravena, kneeling. "Shift two-one-nine. Upper junction. Party of three. Knock answered."

The unit hummed, once, low. It had heard. It had also heard the rise go down the third passage and come back up as a shape, and filed that; and then the rock, and filed that, under the name it had for a rock. It had done this every shift since the first stone, and every shift Aravena had knelt to it afterwards and told it the knock was answered, which it already knew, and it had hummed, and Aravena had taken the hum for the unit being there. It had been. It had been there the way the party had been there in the first year, at the edge of its own light, with something warm standing in it for eleven minutes.

Aravena stood up.

"The class," said Aravena, to Nakagawa. Not at the station, with the summary up. Here, where the unit was. "Leave it. Don't put the name on."

Nakagawa waited. Egede did not, quite, and said nothing, which for Egede is a kind of waiting.

"It wasn't said to the survey. You said that was the entry. It is. So the survey doesn't get to say whose it was. The unit can call it a rise. That is all the unit knows about it, and it's true." Aravena had slept on this seven times, which was more than Nakagawa had ever needed for anything, and it had come out the same every morning, and so had the rest of it, which nobody at the table had asked. "That's mine. The sixteen and the rest. I'll answer for mine. Now the other ones."

"Which other ones."

"Under every one of mine. Rock shift, below margin." Aravena looked at the unit on its base, which had filed every one. "Those aren't the unit's either. They're not mine. That's the one on the line, answering. Every time. Answering me. However many of them there are now; you have the number. And we've had the unit at the top of the passage keeping every one of them since the first stone, and I never once asked whose they were." A pause, with the breath still not back from the squeeze. "Nobody can ask. I know that. I'm saying it anyway, because it's the thing."

Nakagawa looked at the unit for about as long as it takes to say a name.

"A hundred and fifty-six," said Nakagawa. "Since the first knock. Come up. This one is the station's."