第9章 The Second Logbook

The station kept one official journal, and it lived on a shelf in the control room, and every shift wrote in it in turn, so that across a season the book became a conversation in four or five hands. Weather. Seeing. Instrument state. Anything worth knowing in the morning. It was the memory of the place, and Viveka had written in a dozen such books at a dozen such places, and she had never once thought of one as anything but reliable. She thought about it now because of a page she had photographed on her third day. That photograph had been an accident. She had been copying a page of exposure times and had caught part of the facing page in the frame, and she had left the image on her camera and forgotten it. On the tenth night, looking for something else, she found it again and opened it on the console, and there on the small screen, in the corner, was the facing page of the journal as it had stood nine days earlier. She read the page. Then she went to the shelf and took down the journal and opened it to the same page, and read it again, and did not move for a long moment. The entries were the same entries. The hands were the same hands. But the words had changed. A line that nine days ago had read *wind south, gusting, mirror closed by eleven* now read *wind south, gusting, mirror held to dawn.* A sentence about the generator's fuel had lost its number. And at the bottom of the page, where nine days earlier Emeric had written a note about the seeing, there was now a longer note, in his same sloping hand, that said the seeing had been excellent all night and the season was one of the best on record. She laid the camera beside the open journal and looked at the two versions of the same page for a long time. The photograph did not change. The book did not change while she watched it. They simply disagreed, quietly, the way strangers disagree about the past. She did not tear the page out. She did not photograph the new version, though she wanted to, because she had begun to understand that a copy was the one thing that seemed to survive. Instead she closed the journal and put it back on the shelf in its place, and went to her room, and took out her notebook, and started a second book. The second book was not a copy of the journal. It was her own record of the journal: every night, at the start of her shift, she read the official page and wrote down, by hand, what it said. She wrote the date and the weather and the entries in her own words, not theirs, so that later she could tell which was which. It took a quarter of an hour each night. It felt, at first, like diligence, and then, within a week, like standing guard. The first thing the second book taught her was that the official journal was very slowly becoming kind. Entries about bad weather softened. Entries about instrument faults lost their sharpness. Where the original hands had been terse and tired, the pages grew patient, forgiving, as though someone had gone through the season with a soft eraser and taken out every complaint. She checked her own entries against it and found the pattern holding: the journal remembered the season better than it had been. There was also the other change, the one she did not write down for three nights because writing it would have made it real. In the official pages, the handwriting had begun to drift. Emeric's entries still looked like Emeric's. Lisbet's still looked like Lisbet's. But once or twice a page, in the middle of a hand that belonged to one of them, there would be a word formed the way she formed her own letters: an open-bodied g, a long flat t, the particular way she crossed a seven. Not every line. Not a signature. Just a word here and there, like a coin dropped in someone else's pocket. She found the first one on the twelfth night and dismissed it as coincidence. She found the second on the fourteenth and sat with the journal under the lamp for an hour, comparing her own notes to the page, letter by letter, until Kolstad came in to bank the stove and found her there. He looked at the open book, then at her. "You are reading the season back," he said. "I am reading it forward." He laughed, a short sound, and went to the stove, and while he worked he said something that she would carry with her for the rest of her time on the mountain. "In the old days the survey had two books," he said. "A book for the station and a book for the weather. The station book went down the mountain with the season. The weather book stayed. The weather never went anywhere, so the weather book could stay. That is what I was told when I came here, and I have never known if it is true." "Which book is this?" He looked at the journal on the shelf. "That one goes down the mountain," he said. "That one is the season. It is written for the people who are not here." She thought about that all night, and by morning she had understood what he was telling her without knowing he was telling her anything: the official record was written for people who were absent, and the people who were absent were the only ones who could read it without being corrected. A book written for the valley would say whatever the valley needed to hear. And the mountain, which corrected everything, would make sure it said it. Keeping two books was work, and it wore on her in a way she had not expected, because a record is not a thing you hold; it is a thing you maintain, and maintaining two of them meant that every ordinary observation passed through her hands twice, once as the station's and once as hers, and the two versions did not always agree, and when they did not agree she had to decide which one she had actually seen. She began to distrust the first reading of anything. She wrote the weather twice, once from the window and once from the gauge, and compared them. She had trained twenty years to observe without doubt, and found herself, at forty-one, learning the opposite discipline, which was to doubt everything exactly once and then verify. She went to the shelf at the start of her next shift and read the page, and wrote it down in her own book in her own words, and marked with a small cross the one word on the page that had been written in her hand. She marked the crosses not as accusations but as a census, and the census had a use she had not anticipated: it let her see the change from the outside, as a curve rather than a series of days. One word in her hand on the twelfth night. Two by the eighteenth. The curve rose gently, like a rise in the fuel consumption of a machine that is slowly, patiently, wearing out of true. She did not know yet what the crosses were counting. She knew only that the count made her feel less alone and then, after a while, more, because a curve is a shape that continues, and a shape that continues has a far end, and she could not yet see hers. By the end of the season there would be four of them. She would not have found all four yet. But she had begun, in the way of a careful person, to keep a count. ---