What the Walls Could Not Hide

The page opens with a location, as his pages often do: We are in the Five Arches. By then the café had already been checked for snipers. It had already been warned off its own menu by an android. Now it gave them someone to talk to.

His name was Twomas En. Taeon's notes describe him as bald and as a lashunta, and then, a line later, more precisely, as a damaya. Damaya are the taller, finer-boned lashunta, but nothing in the notes suggests this one was fine-boned. Dude looks rough, Taeon wrote. Looks thuggish. He was talking to Bren, not to Taeon, which is probably why Taeon had time to look at him so carefully.

Two facts came out of that conversation, and the notes keep both on short lines. Twomas knew about Eyrub Paqual, the man who had invited Dr Solstarni to this café two days before she disappeared and who has no face anywhere in the records. And Twomas had acquired some documentation for him.

I have read that second line many times. It does not say what kind of documentation, or who it was meant to fool, and Taeon did not guess. But a name with articles and no photograph needs papers to stand on. Somebody had to make them.

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Someone in the party searched the infosphere. The search turned up advertisements for a smuggling group, and Taeon wrote Twomas's name beside them in brackets. That is the whole entry. A man who forges papers for a man who may not exist works for a business that places ads. I don't think any of them found that surprising. Qabarat is a port city, and port cities are full of people who move things.

The next line is harder to place: Stocky Lashunta in Port Authority. The three intruders on the university footage had worn Gateway District Port Authority uniforms, so the party had reason to be asking there. But the notes record only the lashunta's build. They don't say what was asked, what was answered, or whether this stocky figure was helpful, hostile or simply on shift. I leave it as he left it. A stocky lashunta stood in the Port Authority and was noticed.

Then they ate. The notes say so plainly, Ate some food, between the Port Authority and the meeting, and they don't say what or where. Twomas had told them to come to a warehouse in the Gateway District in an hour. An hour is long enough for a meal and too short to do much else. They used it well.

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The warehouse sat among a great many other buildings, nondescript in the way, Taeon notes dryly, as you'd expect a smuggler's warehouse to be. The party read it from the outside, and the notes give each of them a line. They write these lines after the knock, not before it, so I can't say for certain which came first. I have told it in the order the Canon would want.

The Field Canon later turned those lines into a lesson. It is one of the few entries in that book where I can see exactly which day it came from.

ON STRUCTURES — approaching a building held by others (later additions)
Measure the shell: length, width, height, floors. Count the exits, front and back.
A building with no windows has chosen what it will see. Find its cameras.
A nondescript building stands among others like it. Take a neighbouring roof.
(Kopalo, from field notes; Qabarat.)

— the Field Canon, on Structures, later additions

Qwitch did the measuring: about two hundred feet long and a hundred wide, twenty-four feet high over two storeys. It had no windows, one sliding door at the front and one emergency door at the back, and cameras watching both. Grek climbed. Where the wall gave out he used his jump jets, and he came to rest on the roof of a building nearby, and watched from there.

Taeon did what Taeon could do. He listened.

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It is the part of this day the novitiates always ask about, and the records give it two lines. First: Thinking there might be at least two voices in there. Then, after a pause the notes mark only by a line break, a surer reach: two thinking minds.

The order teaches a Reading for this. He would have known it long before Qabarat.

Note the burrow before you note the animal.
Do not put your hand in to learn what lives there.
Stand still at the mouth. Let the ground carry it to you.
Note the breathing. Note how many breathe.
The first count is a guess. Do not act on it.
Stand longer. Listen closer.
The second count is knowledge, or nearer to it.
A wall is only a wall to the eye.
To the one who listens it is a skin, and skins are thin.
Note what waits. Note what waits without moving.
Then choose whether to knock.
So stand. So listen. So count.

— the Observances, from the Readings on Approach

We are taught this Reading with our eyes closed, in front of a hollow log, and most of us count wrong the first time. What I notice in his notes is not the gift, which was his and not ours to imitate, but the order of them: a guess, then a closer reach, then a number he trusted. Only after that does the next line come.

Knock, door pops open … automated.

Nobody answered the knock. The door simply slid aside on its own, as doors in such buildings are made to do, and showed them the inside of a place where two minds were already waiting. The notes stop there, at an open door, before anyone steps through it.

The Reading ends with a choice about knocking. It says nothing about a door that opens before anyone comes to it. The warehouse let them in without a word, and the two minds behind its walls already knew they had arrived.