The compass had given Solt a reading it shouldn’t have been able to give — three-twelve to three-forty, steady, undeviating, for the third morning running — and she had not yet told Cartwright what that meant, which meant she hadn’t decided yet whether it was a hazard or a mystery, and the forms required her to choose.
Cartwright waited. He had learned the particular quality of her silences, the ones that were calculation and the ones that were unease, and this one had started as the first and was becoming the second in a way he was choosing not to name. He looked out across the flat instead, which was the wrong thing to look at if you wanted reassurance, but it was what was there.
The salt extended. That was the only honest way to describe it. Not stretched, which would have implied an effort or an end, but extended — outward and outward, a whiteness so complete and so level that it interfaced with the haze not by meeting it but by becoming it, the horizon a theoretical thing rather than a visible one, somewhere further out than either of them had walked in three days of eastern transect. No feature broke it. No elevation. A few times on the first day he had taken what he was sure was a shadow for the beginning of something — a ridge, a structure — and each time the closer they’d walked the more it resolved into simple flat, as if the plain were generating decoys. He’d filed that under optical distortion (class: probable refraction) and had not returned to it.
“She couldn’t tell it was steady,” Solt said.
He waited.
“Ferris. When she was here.” She had not opened the file in two days. She had the original surveyor’s notes by heart now, which was not a comfort. “The reading band, three-twelve to three-forty — she logged it twice. Both times marked it intermittent, probable instrument fault, and the second time she sent her compass home with the junior and kept working on her own dead reckoning.” Solt’s thumb moved across the compass face. Not checking it. Just touching it. “Her junior wrote the note that the compass was fine when they got it back to the depot.”
Cartwright thought about Ferris standing on this same white surface with no compass and no way to know what was behind the reading. “She kept working.”
“Eleven days on the flat with dead reckoning and good weather, and she filed quarantine, and she asked to have the posting struck from her record, and the Compact declined and filed the request alongside the recommendation as if they were equal documents.” Solt looked at him finally, her face doing what it did when she was solving a problem she didn’t yet have the right language for. “She retired in Soven, end of the same year.”
The wind arrived from somewhere very far out across the white. These winds were not local. He had understood that on day one — they had a character of having been travelling for a long time, carrying with them not cold exactly but the quality of a cold that had already happened somewhere else, and they arrived at long, irregular intervals, deeply unhurried, as if whatever exhaled them was in no particular rush. He had stopped noting them. The noteworthy wore thin after the third day if nothing changed.
“Three-twelve to three-forty,” he said, “in a compass reading on a salt flat — that’s a magnetic anomaly if it’s geological, but it doesn’t vary by position. We’ve walked twelve kilometres east and it holds.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not geological.”
“No.”
“What is it?”
She was already moving, back toward the eastern transect, and he fell in beside her because that was what you did and because the ridge behind them had four days ago stopped feeling like an exit and started feeling like a boundary, the way all boundaries did when you’d been beyond them long enough. He noted the time — 07:02, local interval, sky again the colour of old pewter, which was the only colour it had ever been — and kept his pencil ready.
“It’s directional,” she said. “That’s what it is. It’s pointing at something.”
He wrote reading band persistent, confirmed non-geological, hypothesis: directional signal and then looked up at the horizon that was not quite a horizon, white into white into haze, extending.
The forms offered him three fields for a reading of this kind: hazard, anomaly, or feature of interest. He held his pencil above the third and did not yet mark it, because Ferris had been a good surveyor, careful, fifteen years in Survey before this posting, and Ferris had sent her compass home and kept working and had never come back to the Compact’s service, and the file was thin not because the record was incomplete but because somewhere in the Compact’s hierarchy someone had found it easier, twice, to sign an extension than to ask why.
The flat extended. The wind arrived.
Solt was walking on a bearing of three-twenty-six, splitting the difference, directly into the heart of the reading. She had not said that was what she was doing. She hadn’t needed to.
He marked feature of interest, provisional, and followed her.