Hesper Nakagawa (Human, Fliade survey lead)

Nakagawa laid it on the station table that evening the way the second-year entries had been laid out, two years ago, in a row, because a thing you are going to argue about should be where everyone can see it.

Rock shift, below margin. The whole series, since the first month. The arrivals: a boulder shifting below the margin every time the party came down, before the party was anywhere near it, which the party had reread in its second year and found was a knock. And then, from shift sixty-four, under every one of the hundred and fifty-six entries the unit had filed as sound, rising, one more: the answer. Felt through the boots at the junction, every time. Filed by the unit, every time, a little after.

"We have said, since the first stone," said Nakagawa, "that the survey does not record what it was not given. We said it about what Aravena says at the line. We meant it. I ordered the handheld's sound off so that the thing said at the line would not get into the log by accident. It has been getting into the log by accident, from the other side, since before I gave the order. Not the words. The answer. A hundred and fifty-six times, into an instrument that the one who gave it does not know exists, relayed up to a Corps it does not know exists, filed correctly." Nakagawa did not say collar. Nobody at the table needed it said.

"It's a rock," said Egede, first, because Egede had been going to. "The unit files a rock. There's no word in it. There's nothing in those entries that is anybody's. You said so yourself, about the rise: an envelope, a bearing, a time. That's all a rock is."

"The entry is a rock. The thing it is of is an answer."

"Then here is what you're proposing. Say it plainly, because I want it in the file plainly. You're not striking a recording. You're arranging never to have one." Egede's weight was all in it now, the instrument specialist's, and it was a real weight. "We found them by rereading two years of those. We had kept them without knowing what they were, and then we read them again, and there was a people in them. If that channel had been off we would be walking in without knocking today. A survey that arranges not to have a recording is not a survey. It's a party of three standing in a cave."

"Yes," said Nakagawa. "That is the cost, and I am naming it, and it goes in the file as a cost, in my hand. We found them by keeping a thing we had not asked to keep. Then we knocked. We cannot go on finding them that way, because we know they are there now. A thing kept by accident is a thing kept on purpose from the day you know what it is."

"And the arrivals? The one every time we come down. The one we found them by."

"Those stay. Those are said to the party. Whoever is at the junction is who they are for, and the unit is at the junction. The answer is not said to the party. One person goes to the line, alone, because a knock is one person at a door, and the answer is to that person. We decided that two years ago, and the unit did not hear us decide it."

Egede said nothing for as long as it takes to say a name, and then reached, the way Egede reaches, for the next thing. "The handheld. It's on Aravena's chest every shift with the optical open. It keeps a picture of the one on the line, every shift, from a hand's distance. Is that given?"

It was the right question, and Nakagawa had been waiting for it since the junction.

"The handheld keeps what the eye sees. The eye is ours. The one on the line stands in the open to be seen. It has stood in the open since the first stone, on a line where nobody had ever stood, and nobody stands in the open by accident, not for two years. That is a reading, and it is mine, and it goes in under my name. What it says is another matter. We keep what we see and what we are given. The rock was given to Aravena."

"A boot hears it."

"A boot keeps nothing."

Egede sat back. Nakagawa watched the specialist go through it, the way Egede went through an instrument, failure modes first, and come out the far side without a fault to report, which Egede did not enjoy and did not pretend to.

"Then say what we lose," said Egede. "In the file. Every shift. Not once, in your hand, on the day. Every shift the channel's off, the log says so, and says for how long. If we're going to have a hole in the record I want the record to say where the hole is."

"Yes," said Nakagawa, and meant it, and turned to the floor by the third shelf, where the one person on the roof who read holes for a living had not yet said anything.