Chapter Ten — Bram
Amaleto found him in the wet lab a little after eight, which was where she generally found him, and set a single sheet of paper on the bench in front of him instead of a question, which he appreciated more than he could easily have explained. He liked problems that arrived already written down. A written problem couldn't be misheard.
Does the signature track solar activity in real time, or does it sit fixed.
"I need something that can sit at the outcrop and watch," she said. "Longer than a cast. Longer than this leg, ideally, though I know that's not going to happen. I need whatever the honest version of that is."
Bram read the sheet twice, the way he read everything that mattered, and did not immediately answer, because the honest version of a hard problem generally took him longer to find than the honest version of an easy one, and he had learned, mostly through trial and a fair amount of embarrassment, that saying something fast and wrong cost more than saying nothing for a minute and a half.
"We're not carrying a mooring rated for that depth," he said, finally. "Not a real one, long-duration, the kind that phones home. But we've got the spare thermal package from the aux rig — the one that didn't flood, the backup I wired in for redundancy on the first cast, remember, when I told you I wanted to say it before you noticed — and if I build it a housing that can just sit there, self-logging, no tether, no active transmission, it doesn't need to talk to us in real time. It just needs to remember. We recover it before we leave the area, pull the log, and we'll have however many days of continuous data as we managed to leave it down there for."
"That's not real time."
"No. But it's the next best thing, which is a recording of what actually happened, which you can read afterward as though it were real time, provided the clock inside it doesn't drift, which — " he considered this, already turning toward the parts locker as he spoke, the sentence trailing him rather than the other way around, " — which I can fix, actually. I can sync it to the ship's own clock right before deployment and check the drift rate against a known reference before we ever put it in the water. If I do that properly, when we pull it back up in three weeks, the timestamps will be trustworthy down to the second. Which means if a solar event comes through while it's sitting there, and the temperature moves, we'll be able to say exactly how fast it moved, and exactly how long after the event it started."
Amaleto watched him with an expression he didn't fully catch, too busy already sorting through the spares bin for a housing he was fairly sure would fit.
"That would work," she said.
"I think it would work," he said, careful, because would and think it would were different sentences and he had never seen a reason to round one into the other.
He spent most of the day on it, which was the kind of day he preferred to any other kind, hands occupied, a single defined problem in front of him with a shape he could actually finish. William came down around noon, ostensibly to check on the manifest for spare housings, and stood watching Bram work for a while without saying much, which was unusual for him, and left without commenting on the eddy entry from three days before, which was more unusual still.
Later that afternoon, reviewing the day's data uploads, William flagged Bram's original correlation entry — the one that had started the argument — and cited it, without further discussion, as the baseline reference for the new lander's expected signal window. He did not apologize. Bram did not expect him to, and would, if pressed, have said honestly that he didn't need one; what he'd wanted, the whole time, wasn't to be told he'd been right. It was simply for the number to be used the way a number was supposed to be used, which was as something other people could stand on without checking first whether it would hold.
It held. Nobody said so out loud. William simply built on top of it, the way you build on top of a foundation you've stopped worrying about, and Bram understood, watching him do it, that this was the actual apology, delivered in the only currency William Wolfgang Talbot had ever reliably dealt in.
Yaz found him on deck that evening, soldering the last connector on the housing by lamplight, Curiosity draped along the bench beside him with the specific proprietary stillness of a cat supervising a project she had no intention of helping with.
"You look happy," Yaz said, which surprised him, because he hadn't thought of it that way and wasn't sure, examining the observation, whether she was right.
"I like knowing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing," he said, after a moment. "Today I did."
"That's a low bar, Bram."
"It's not low. It's just specific." He tightened the last connector and held the housing up to the light, turning it once, checking the seam. "Most days I don't actually know if what I'm doing is the right thing until after it's already gone wrong. Today somebody handed me the question first. I got to be right on purpose instead of by accident, for once, and I'd forgotten that was a thing that happened to other people."
Yaz didn't have a joke ready for that, which he noticed, and appreciated, more than any joke she might have made instead.
[Oquendo, personal log, day ten, 21:05]
Housing complete. Thermal package, self-logging, synced to ship's master clock, drift rate confirmed within acceptable tolerance. Deployment scheduled for tomorrow's cast, west outcrop face, recovery planned prior to departure from area. Second identical unit stays on the wet-lab bench, logging on the same clock, as a control for the instrument itself.
Dr. Vintimilla's test design logged in full for reference: real-time tracking versus fixed signature, to be evaluated against solar activity data upon recovery.
Talbot cited my day-six entry as baseline reference without further comment. I am recording this because it is data, and because I think it is also something else, though I don't have a clean word for the second thing yet. I'll keep looking for one.
End log.