Aravena (Human, Fliade surface party)

It stopped.

Not the way a thing stops when it is interrupted. The other way. Aravena had never heard the one on the line say anything and knew the difference anyway, the way you know the end of a passage by the air changing before the light does. There was a quiet after it, and the quiet was the kind at the end of something.

Then the hand moved the rock.

Once. A good one. The ground said so, through the silt and the boots, the way it had said it on every shift since the first stone, and Aravena heard it and understood exactly as much as on the first day, which was that it was an answer, and that it was to Aravena. And one thing more, that had not been true on the first day or any day since: that the stone had come at the end.

Not at the beginning. At the end.

Aravena stood for as long as it takes to say a name. Then went back through the crack, slowly, with the light held low, not scraping more than they had to, and did not run, and it was not the hardest thing Aravena had done at the line. The hardest thing had been staying. And that had not been hard either, which Aravena would not be able to explain and was not going to be asked to.

The junction. The fungus-light, the unit on its base, and three people standing in it who had been standing in it for a long time, by their faces. Nakagawa knelt to the unit and told it the channel was on, and the time, and the unit hummed.

Aravena knelt.

"Log. Shift two-three-four. Upper junction. Party of three and one. Knock answered."

The unit hummed. It had heard that. It had heard nothing else, and would not.

Aravena stayed kneeling. "Something was said to me at the line. By the one who answers. For a long time. I don't know what. I stayed for it. Then the stone."

The unit hummed again, low, once, which was all it had.

"Tell me," said Nakagawa. "In order."

Aravena told it in order. The stone, a hand from those feet. The step back. The thing said. The hand going down to the rock and staying there. The interval, and the point in it where you turn, going by. The light low on a hand that had not moved. The staying. The voice, if it was a voice; it was a voice. How long, which Aravena could not say and did not guess at. The stop. The rock. The going.

"The order says come back," said Nakagawa.

"The order says wait the interval. I waited it." Aravena had thought this through once on the silt and had not thought about it since, and it came out the way it had gone in. "The interval's for the stone. The stone hadn't come. It was coming. The hand was on it. You don't walk away from a door while somebody's hand is on it."

Nakagawa was quiet for as long as it takes to say a name.

"That's a reading."

"It's mine."

"Then it goes in under your name, and I am not going to rewrite an order standing up on the day a thing happened. If it needs rewriting it will look the same in the morning, and it will be rewritten then, in the file, with the reason." A pause. "It may not need it. The interval may always have been for the stone. The order never said what it was for."

"What did it sound like?" said Egede, who had been going to ask since the junction had first heard it, and had waited, which was not a thing Egede was known for.

Aravena thought about it, because Egede had waited.

"Like somebody telling you something," said Aravena. "That's all. Like somebody telling you something you don't know yet."

Egede made the sound Egede makes when a thing is going to end up in a document, and did not reach for anything to put it in, because there was nothing at the junction to put it in, and Egede knew that better than anyone on the roof, and stood there knowing it.