The coral-tide readings were not impossible — Survey Officer Maret Osk had learned early in her career never to use that word — but they were wrong in a way she could not yet account for, and that distinction mattered enough that she was still crouched at the threshold marker, stylus moving slowly across the tablet, half an hour after Senior Officer Brynn Calder had moved on into the interior.
The marker was a copper spike the previous survey team had driven into the mud: standard practice, chest-deep water having since receded to leave it sitting in open air at a slight angle, greenish and furred with something fibrous that was not quite moss. The tidal notation stamped into its base gave a high-water figure that was forty-three centimetres higher than the reading Osk had taken this morning. Forty-three centimetres was not a calibration error. Forty-three centimetres was a story, and she did not yet know whether it was the kind of story the Compact needed to hear urgently or the kind that could wait until she reached the warm, dry fact of a filing desk back home. She photographed the spike from four angles. She wrote see attached in the margin of the primary hazard log and then did not move.
The world through the door — they had not yet assigned it a Common Name, it was still Designation K-7 in the office file, a number that told you nothing of the quality of its light — had been surveyed once before, twelve years ago, by a two-person team who had filed a Quarantine recommendation on the grounds of high atmospheric particulate and three unlicensed structures of uncertain provenance. Neither officer was still active. One had died on a subsequent posting; the other had left the Compact under circumstances Osk had not been able to determine from the file, the relevant personnel record carrying only the annotation discharge: see senior administrative closure 0449-F, and when she had tried to pull 0449-F before departure, she had been told, pleasantly and without elaboration, that it was not available to her grade. Calder, who was four grades above her, had gone quiet at that and not answered when she’d asked whether he’d been able to see it.
She made herself stand. The mud here was pale and dense, the colour of old paper, and it held the impression of her boot for a long moment before beginning, slowly, to swell back into the shape it wanted. The sky above was the kind of white that wasn’t any one colour: not bright, not overcast, just resolved into something featureless and absolute, like the end of a transmission. She had been trained to note that sky in the physiological effects column, because it did things to depth perception and therefore to morale, though the field manual was careful to say perception and not morale, because morale implied a feeling and feelings were outside the manual’s scope. She wrote sky: ref P-7 conditions, visibility nominal, watch depth cues and thought that this was one of the ways the manual told you something was worth fearing without wanting to be responsible for having told you.
Calder was a hundred metres ahead, a dark shape against all that white, bending over what the previous survey had logged as Unlicensed Structure Two. He had not called back. That was not unusual — Calder communicated when he had something to communicate, which was a quality Osk had at first found uncomfortable and now understood as a kind of respect — but she walked faster anyway, past the line of dead reeds that marked the old shoreline, past the place where the mud gave way briefly to something harder and reddish underfoot, past the absolute silence that had struck her yesterday and was striking her again now: not a quiet world, she had decided, but a world from which something audible had been recently removed.
The structure had been described in the prior file as probable storage, non-residential, construction method unclear. Standing beside Calder and looking at it properly for the first time, Osk thought the description was accurate as far as it went and misleading in every direction it didn’t. The building was round and low, its walls made from the same pale material as the mud but fired or compressed into something harder, and the door — there was a door — stood open at an angle that suggested it had been left rather than abandoned. Inside, just visible from where they stood, were shelves. And on the shelves were records: bound volumes, scroll cases, the flat lacquered boxes that the previous team had apparently not opened and the current file did not explain.
Calder said, very quietly, “Water line.”
She looked at where he was looking. The inside wall, three shelves up, carried a faint horizontal stain. She thought of the spike. She thought of forty-three centimetres and did the geometry in her head and arrived at an answer she immediately wrote down, because writing a thing made it real and real things could be measured and measured things could, with sufficient patience, be understood.
The records had been underwater. Twelve years ago, they had been underwater. And now the water was gone, and the shelves held what the water had left, and some of it — she could see this even from the threshold, even in this white dissolving light — some of it was still legible.