2186-08-30 · 380 m

Marker IX, protocols

A quarterly meeting at the liminal station. The smallest possible exchange, conducted at maximum cost on both sides.

By the eighth marker meeting the procedure no longer surprised me, which is the working country's particular acclimation. Two days of pre-conditioning for an hour at the pane and six days back up. I include this entry in the chapter because the rotation produced it, and because the arithmetic of it — the eight days for one hour — is the kind of arithmetic the rotation teaches you to stop balancing in your head.

I did not sleep before the meeting and I did not sleep after. This is the rhythm at the markers. Two days of saturation pre-conditioning, an hour of conversation across two metres of black water, and then the slow return — six days, this time — through a sequence of pressurised cabins to the upper rib.

The envoy is the same envoy. They are always the same envoy. They speak to us through the hydrophone, in a register we can mostly hear and partly understand, and through a translator who is younger than I am and considerably better at her job. The conversation is procedural. There are signatures. There are also, this time, two minutes in which neither side says anything.

It is hard to convey, in writing, the quality of those two minutes. It is not silence the way a cathedral is silent. It is silence the way a held breath is silent: both parties are spending something for it, and both know it, and both have decided that it is worth spending. When the envoy moves to leave, they bow — a courtesy I am told they do not owe us — and the technicians on our side reply with the formal three-fingered touch to the observation pane that the Conservancy trains everyone to perform without thinking.

Note slipped under my cabin door on the ascent · author unsigned

The bow on their side is a courtesy you should not write into the record without first asking the translator. Some courtesies the Court does not wish noticed in print. I will explain on the surface, if you ask.

We rise. They sink. The dome stays.

I have not been able to write the two minutes any closer than this. Each attempt subtracts something. The three-fingered touch I can still draw from memory; the silence I cannot.