Hesper Nakagawa (Human, Fliade survey lead)

That evening Nakagawa read the unit's channels at the station, as on every evening for four years. Thermal. Imager: one upright shape on the line, one return, a hand from the stone. Sound channel.

Anstolik, passing. Two.

Nothing else, and tonight nothing meant forty-four minutes, and Nakagawa read it twice, to be sure that was what it was, and it was.

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

Four years ago the party had walked into a place where a people had been knocking the whole time, and had not heard it, because the instrument that heard it filed it as a rock. Two years ago it had learned to knock back, and had been answered, every shift, by a stone. Today it had been answered by the thing itself, whatever the thing was, at length, in a voice, to one person, and the whole of the survey's record of it was that it had happened, and for how long, and who had been there. Nakagawa had never signed a thinner entry. Nakagawa could not think of one that held more.

What was said, the party did not know, and the log said so. Whether the party would ever know, the log did not say, because the survey does not file what it cannot see the shape of. What the people below had made of a small up-person standing still for forty-four minutes on the silt with a light held low, Nakagawa did not know either, and that was not a planetary survey's to know, and the log said that too.

In the morning Aravena would pick a stone, and carry it down, and say the thing, and the one on the line would put a hand on the rock, and Nakagawa did not know whether the stone would come at the beginning or the end, and found, standing at the window with a timepiece in a pocket, that this was the first thing in four years on Fliade the survey lead had not needed to know in advance, and slept on it.