Chapter 11 A Signature in the Ice

The oldest plates had been kept in a cabinet that faced the outer wall, and the outer wall of the archive room was cold enough in the dark season that the inside of the cabinet had begun to frost, and the frost had worked its way between the sleeves and left a fine gray rime on the edges of the glass. She found it one morning when she went looking for the survey's very first plates, the ones from the years when the dome had been new. She was looking for Tornquist's earliest nights, for the shape of the survey before the anomaly had any weight in it, and she had pulled four sleeves and set them on the light table when she saw, on the paper of the third sleeve, a line that made her put down the plate she was holding. The sleeve carried the usual things: a date, a field number, a note about seeing. And under the note, in pencil, there was a signature. It was two words, joined. It read: V. Skoglund. The date on the sleeve was thirty-one years before. She stood very still in the cold room and read it three times. Then she took the sleeve to the window and held it to the light and looked at the pencil, at the pressure of the strokes, at the way the V leaned and the g closed. It was her hand. She had signed her own name thousands of times in twenty years of logbooks, and she knew her own signature the way she knew her own face in a mirror that was slightly wrong: she knew it, and it was hers, and it should not have been there. She was forty-one years old. Thirty-one years ago she had been ten, and she had been in a different country, and no part of her life had touched this mountain until the truck brought her up the switchbacks in the late afternoon of a day she remembered clearly and would have sworn to. She put the sleeve down. She went and got the other early plates and checked every one of them, and found two more signatures in her hand, both from the survey's first years, both hers, both in places the survey's own filing would have put them. She sat down on the cold stool in the frosty room and made herself think the way she thought about data, because that was the only way she knew how to be honest. There were a small number of explanations and she listed them. She had signed them. That was impossible, and the impossibility was not the interesting thing; the interesting thing was that it did not matter whether it was impossible, because the evidence said she had, and the evidence was a pencil mark on paper, which was the kind of evidence that did not change when you looked away. Someone had copied her signature. That required that someone had wanted to, and had access, and had done it across multiple plates in multiple hands, which was not impossible, and was also the kind of thing a person does not do for no reason. The mountain did it. She wrote that one down too, because she had promised herself, when she began keeping the second book, that she would write down every explanation honestly, including the ones that made her look like a woman alone at altitude with too much time and not enough sleep. She spent that morning the way she spent every difficult morning, in the ordinary work, because the ordinary work was the only place she had left where her hands could be sure of something. She reduced the previous night's field clean. She checked the mirror's figure against the standard. She wrote the weather in the book and copied it into her own. It was the same day she would have had at any site in the world, and she held on to it the way a person holds on to a handrail in the dark. She took the plates to the control room and photographed the signatures. Then she did something she had not done before: she opened the personnel file the Foundation kept for the site, the one that recorded who had worked at Ravnholt and when. It was a plain record, names and seasons, and she read it from the top. The file listed Tornquist first, as the survey's founding observer. Then a sequence of names across three decades, most of them unknown to her, each one with a season or two and then a departure. She read down the list, and near the bottom, a few lines above her own name, she found something that made her sit back. There were three entries for V. Skoglund. Her own arrival was the last. But two earlier lines, dated years apart, in two different decades, carried a V. Skoglund as well, each with a season at this site, each with a departure, each with a clean paper trail that had never crossed her life. She read the entries twice. She read them a third time, slowly, and by then she had begun to feel the floor of her own past tilt under her, which is a thing that no one is ever ready for, because a person's memory of their own life is the last instrument they own, and she had just been handed evidence that hers was one of the ones that had been corrected. Later she would try to reconstruct the sequence of her own afternoon and would find that the parts she could recall had the quality of a photograph rather than a memory: she could see the sleeve, the window, the date, but she could not remember turning from the window to the door, or the corridor, or the sound of her own steps on the concrete. It was the first time a gap had opened in her own day rather than in the station's book, and it frightened her more than the signatures had, because a signature on a plate is a fact about the world, and a gap in your own afternoon is a fact about you. At breakfast she sat across from Emeric and Lisbet and Kolstad and Saskia and said nothing. She watched them eat and talk about the generator and the weather and the schedule, and she thought about the file and the signatures and the two earlier women who shared her name, and she understood, without being able to prove it to anyone and without wanting to say it aloud, that the station had a version of her that was older than she was, and that the version was in the book, and that the book was the thing that went down the mountain. On the way back through the corridor she stopped at the shelf where the personnel file was kept and read the three entries once more, and this time she read the seasons, not the names, and the seasons overlapped in a way that ought to have been impossible. Two of the V. Skoglunds had been at Ravnholt in the same decade, in consecutive years, and one of them had departed in a season that the other had arrived in, and the Foundation's own record had kept both without ever remarking on it. Either the file had been written by someone who did not notice, or the file had been written to make the noticing impossible. She went to her room afterward and took out her notebook and wrote the date and the fact, and then she sat with the pencil over the page for a long time and did not write the next line, because the next line was a question, and she did not want to be the kind of person who wrote questions like that. Then she wrote it anyway. *If the book has a version of me, who is writing me into it, and what does the version do that I do not?* ---