The upshot, here in the cabin of this flivver, was that the missions just concluded by Kath Two, Beled, and Rhys had no value — in effect, they had never happened — until reports had been filed. And the reports could not simply consist of data dumps and pictures. Surveyors had to write actual prose. And the more judgment and insight were condensed into that prose, the more highly it was thought of by people like Doc and, increasingly, his senior students.
Knowing that, Kath Two had been writing her report since before her glider had touched down on a broad swath of grass a fortnight ago. What remained was some editing and a summary. This ought to have come easily. But half an hour after she pulled the document up on her varp, she found herself gazing at it, unable to focus.
“Beled,” she finally said. Distinctly enough for him to hear it, not loud enough to wake up Rhys.
“Working on your report?” he asked.
He could see her, and the rest of the cabin, through the translucent light field of his varp. He might have seen the movements of her hands, indicative of text entry. In any case the question had a bit of an edge to it. Hours earlier, Beled had noted some uncertainty in Kath Two’s face. There was no telling, now, how long he’d been observing her through eyes screened by the varp.
“Did you see any Indigens?” she asked him.
He reached up and slid the varp onto the top of his head: a polite gesture.
“I planned my route to avoid a certain RIZ,” he said. Registered Indigen Zone, a place listed by name in the Treaty as a district where Sooners — people who had illegally gone to the surface ahead of schedule — were grandfathered in under the politely evasive term “Indigens” and allowed to live subject to certain restrictions. “I saw it from a distance. They did not see me.”
“Of course not,” Kath Two said, suppressing a smile.
“Does that answer your question?” Beled asked, knowing that it didn’t.
“I think I saw one not in a RIZ,” Kath Two said.
This piqued Beled’s attention. “Establishing a settlement or—”
“No,” Kath Two said firmly. “I’d have mentioned that. I think he, or she, was in scope.” Meaning, conducting activities, such as hunting and gathering, within the scope of Second Treaty. “Most likely fishing. But at least two hundred kilometers from the nearest RIZ.”
“A long way to carry a dead fish,” Beled remarked.
“Yeah,” Kath Two said, and felt her face warm slightly. Obvious as it seemed now that Beled had pointed it out, she’d missed that detail.
“Did you investigate further?” Beled asked.
“Unable,” Kath Two said. “I saw this person from my glider, on my way out.”
“It is not mandatory to explain every last thing in your report,” Beled pointed out. “To leave a loose end, under those circumstances, is acceptable. It will give some other surveyor a challenging and welcome task to shoulder.”
An idea came to Kath Two. “What if we were shouldering it?”
“Explain.”
“Does it seem to you as though there was an unusual concentration of Survey activity in that one zone?”
“Unusual,” Beled allowed, after thinking about it for a few moments. “Not without precedent.”
“Makes me wonder,” Kath Two said, “if some previous surveyor saw what I saw, and triggered a wave of missions in the same area.”
“In that case,” Beled pointed out, “Survey would have informed us of what it was they were sending us to look for.”
That was so sensible, and Beled said it with such simple conviction, that Kath Two nodded and declined to press it any further. But she was thinking, Unless it is something they don’t want us to know.
The conversation with Beled had been useful in that it had given her a way to proceed, which was simply to type up the Indigen sighting as a loose end, and thus drop it into the lap of whoever read the report. She went to work on that general plan, trying to clarify the fleeting memory in her mind’s eye, to sort out objective observations, made in the moment, from judgments and suppositions she’d added later. Which was tricky, since the latter were supposed to be part of her job.
A while later Rhys was awakened by an alarm he’d set on his wrist. He made a sleepy flight to the toilet and back, looking at her in the classic style of the extrovert who wants you to drop whatever you’re doing so that you can have a conversation with him. After exchanging a few words with Beled, he settled in to work on his own report, and the cabin was quiet for a while. Later the two men broke out some rations and had a snack, talking of this and that.
Kath Two was snapped out of her work reverie by a mild shift in their tone of voice. Now they were talking about something important. Not in an urgent or concerned way. A glance at the display told her what it was: they were nearing the ring, which meant that they were about to lance through the twenty-kilometer-wide gap between two space habitats. There was no reason that this should be a problem, but it was the sort of feat that focused one’s attention and brought a discernible edge to one’s voice.
She reached up and found the lever on her varp that activated an opaque screen over the lenses: essentially, a blindfold. Her view of the cabin was now blocked. The only things she could see were those being projected into her eyes by the varp. At the same time she activated an application that gave her the ability to see the flivver’s surroundings as if she were floating adrift in space. The same service could have been provided by a bubble of glass on the flivver’s hull, but it wouldn’t have been as good. It would have exposed the user’s head to cosmic radiation, and the contrasty light would have made it difficult to see certain things. The varp, on the other hand, played games with the light’s dynamic range so that bright things were less so while dim things were bright enough to see; it gave everything a luminous warm quality that did not exist in reality. It was so far superior to looking at the world directly that many space suits eschewed transparencies altogether and just encased the wearer’s head in a radiation-shielded dome with a varp on the inside.
She was now “looking” at an enhanced view of the universe from their current location, which was just inside, but rapidly approaching, the habitat ring.
The ring was spinning past them. It was a little like being on the inside of a carousel watching the horses wheel by, except that instead of horses, these were space habitats as much as thirty kilometers across, and they were moving at three thousand meters per second.
The task was to shoot between two of them without getting hit. By the standards of orbital mechanics it was no great feat, but it looked shockingly dangerous, and as such it was great fun to watch. As Kath Two looked straight ahead, the habitats seemed to be whizzing across their path like the teeth of a buzz saw. But through an apparent miracle the flivver found a gap between two of them.
“Whip dock in three,” announced a synthesized voice, and Kath Two’s hands moved around to check the straps holding her into her seat.