Log 0028: Corrections

TRANSMISSION LOG 0028
ORIGIN: Tamsin Ridge Deep Archive / Bell Array
TARGET: LANTERN (adjacent fold, designation L-1)
LOCAL DATE: 2192.12.19 / 03:12
SIGNAL INTEGRITY: 68.9%
ENCODING: DEAD TEXT v4 (archival flat)

The list was incomplete. I've added the 19th.

19th. Finish the index cards for the printout. Count the lamp oil. Restitch the strap on Teo's lamp, which he has now mended badly twice.

That's the correction. An archivist who finds an incomplete entry under her own name corrects it. That's all this is, and I'd like it noted that I've done it properly, with the date in the margin.

The needle is still at full scale. The ledger has nothing left to tell me, so I didn't learn it from the ledger. I learned it from Teo, yesterday morning, over the porridge.

[TEO: The plates lit. Yesterday, before light. You were downstairs.]

I asked him what time.

[TEO: Nine minutes to five. I looked at the clock because I thought it was you.]

He'd been lying by the grate, awake, with his hand on the iron. The light came up through it, he said, amber, the way it does when I'm at the key. He sat up and looked across at the console, and the chair was empty, and the key wasn't on it.

[TEO: Not long. One breath. Maybe two. Then dark.]

He didn't come and find me. I asked him why not, and he looked at his bowl for a while, and then he signed that he hadn't wanted to be the one to tell me in the vault, in the cold, with nobody else in the building. So he waited until there was porridge. That's Teo. He thinks about where a load will land before he lets go of it.

I know where I was at nine minutes to five on the seventeenth. I was on the lid of crate one with the lantern guttering, and I'd stopped writing because my hand was too cold to hold the pen. I looked at my watch. I'd got as far as the 18th. So it went then, all at once: everything I'd written down there that night, from the first line to the last one I'd finished, and nothing after it. It didn't wait for me to finish the list. It didn't take a word I hadn't written.

Which means you've read it. The porridge and the socks and the bowl in Teo's hands. The scar. The part where I said I missed you. I didn't write that to you, and I'm not taking it back.

So tonight I took the key out of the drawer and bolted it onto the console again. The bolts went in as easily as they came out. If the record is going out anyway, it's going out corrected, and in my hand, with the dates right.

I'd sent those first two sentences and hadn't finished the 19th when it came through the boards of the terrace window, low, from the hairpin.

add the nineteenth add the nineteenth

I didn't go to look. I finished the entry.

Here is what I've lost, and I want it in the record because I'm not sure anyone else will notice it's gone. I'll keep the notebook. But I write in it now the way I write to you, every line squared and checked, because it will be read. There's nowhere left in this building where I can put a thing down without arranging it first. The vault was the last place. I thought a page with nobody on the other end of it was the one room here with a lock on the door.

It isn't the console. It's me.

I don't know what that means. I've written it down, which is as much as I'm willing to do with it tonight.

There was a note at the gate at dusk, pinned in the slot. The ▒▒▒ note since the exhibit went out. Teo brought it up.

OUR SCOUTS ON THE SWITCHBACKS HAVE SEEN A TALL GREY-HAIRED WOMAN IN THE CHORUS.

STANDS LIKE A LECTURER.

SEPARATELY. THE PRESS-CENTER TAPES. WE HAVE PLAYED NONE OF THEM. WE KNOW WHOSE VOICE IS ON THEM.

THEY STAY SEALED.

SOL.

He hasn't played them. He wants me to know he knows whose voice. I believe him on both counts, and I'm not going to ask him for them.

The rest of it I read four times.

Tall. Grey-haired. That could be a great many people, and I've told myself so, in an empty room, more than once. It's the second line I can't put down. You can tell a scout to look for a height and a color. You can't teach him that. He'd have to have seen it, and not known what he was seeing, and written down the only words he had.

She always stood like that. As if the room owed her a question.

The window slot is twenty steps from this desk. I haven't gone to it. Not yet.

END LOG 0028 // DO NOT REPLY