A Sound in the Stillness

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On the third playback, Iria Sen heard a door close in a place where the photograph showed no door.

She stopped the recording and looked again. A stone tower stood above an empty basin, its upper half broken away. Beyond it were dunes, then a white strip which the survey caption called dry lake. There was nothing to close, nothing tall enough to shade a person. The microphone's own wind cover lay in the foreground like a small dead animal.

Dr Eren Saal reached for the laptop. Iria put a hand on the lid before he could start it again.

"What happened behind the camera?"

"Nothing. Jun was alone."

"Alone people can close vehicle doors."

Eren considered this. He wore a field jacket with the creases of a recent journey and shoes which had never belonged to that jacket. He had arrived at her rented workroom carrying a photograph, eleven minutes of sound and an envelope containing more money than anyone had offered her since winter. She had expected him to dislike the first ordinary explanation.

Instead he took out his phone and called the person who had made the recording.

Jun Ash answered from somewhere crowded. Iria heard crockery, a shout, the scrape of a chair. Jun had placed the recorder beside the tower, walked back to the survey truck and shut its rear door. The time was approximately right. Eren thanked her, and Iria moved the cursor past the short, low impact she had mistaken for part of the structure.

"That one is solved," she said.

"And the others?"

She played them through the small speakers. Three low tones rose beneath the moving air. The second was shorter. After an interval they returned in the same order, then a third time. They were not voices. They were not even, yet, evidence of a human mechanism. Wind could make astonishingly orderly things happen to holes in stone.

Eren watched her rather than the screen.

"Someone told you I could translate it," she said.

"Someone told me you would tell me if it couldn't be translated."

That was a better answer than the one she had prepared to refuse. She turned the photograph over. A date and a coordinate were printed on the back. Below them, in a different hand, someone had written: South Ear. Station or formation uncertain.

The name stirred something she could not immediately place. Not a scholarly association. A voice from an old bus journey, perhaps, singing words she had never properly listened to. She put the photograph down before the feeling could become a theory.

"I need the original file, the recorder model and Jun's field notes. Then I can tell you what I think is repeating. I can't promise words."

"I can pay for four days in the basin."

Iria looked at the envelope. Outside, the last freight train of the afternoon dragged its shadow across the wall. Namar Gate was a town built around departures. Even her workroom had once been a booking office. When trains passed, the window shook against a timetable which had been painted over without being removed.

She had come for a month of paid measurements at the rail workshops. That job had ended early. Her landlord had not yet asked whether she intended to remain.

"Who else is going?"

"A navigator, a mechanic and a medic. Me. You, if you agree."

"And what do you expect to find?"

For the first time he hesitated. He opened a map on her table, pushing aside an unpaid invoice without looking at it. The basin was rendered in patient shades of brown. A new blue line ran along its eastern edge: the supply works which had brought engineers, labourers and an unexpected boom to the town's guesthouses.

The tower coordinate lay far from that line. Around it the map showed an almost aggressive emptiness.

"There are accounts of a city," he said. "Avar. Not here, necessarily. Beyond the western ridges."

"Accounts by whom?"

"That is one of the questions."

She did not agree in the workroom. She agreed to meet the navigator.

Laila Qadir was underneath a green truck in a yard behind the old customs sheds. Only her boots were visible. Eren called her name, and one boot moved, indicating that he had been heard and should acquire patience. A young man on the running board was holding a work light in the wrong direction.

"Tavi," said the voice beneath the truck, "if you are illuminating your own knee, I can tell you what it looks like without electricity."

The beam shifted. A fastening clicked. Laila rolled out, carrying a small piece of metal which she placed in Eren's open hand.

"That is the bracket you were told was merely loose. The spare is fitted. The old one is not coming back into use because we become late."

Eren accepted the rebuke with a familiarity which made Iria watch him more carefully.

Laila stood and wiped her hands. She was taller than Iria, with sun-faded cloth around her neck and a pale line on one thumb. Her first question concerned Iria's footwear. Her second concerned whether she became ill in moving vehicles. She did not ask what the sounds meant.

"Have you heard the recording?" Iria asked.

"Yes."

"Does the name South Ear mean anything to you?"

Laila glanced at Eren. It was a small movement, but not an empty one.

"It means someone has called a place by a name," she said. "That is different from knowing a way to it."

She led them to a wall where a route had been drawn in chalk. The paved road ended eighty kilometres north of town. Beyond that, they would use a marked service track toward the tower. The first return option lay east, through Glass Well and the inhabited settlement of Kesh. Nothing on the wall promised a route to a city.

"Four days," Laila said. "A scouting trip. We do not turn it into an expedition farther north because somebody sees something interesting on the last afternoon."

"We could arrange an extension," Eren said.

"With supplies. With everyone agreeing. Not by making the return journey longer than the fuel remaining."

Iria found herself liking her, then distrusting how quickly liking could become a wish to be approved of. She asked to see the route card. Laila handed it over without congratulating her for asking.

At the yard's other end, a woman was unloading cartons from a small van. She introduced herself as Ada Venn and asked Iria to carry the lightest one. Inside were dressings and sealed packets, not the dramatic equipment Iria had imagined an expedition medic would require. Ada pointed out the passenger list, emergency contact sheet and separate water reserve. The practical arrangements made the proposed journey more real than Eren's blank map had done.

"Where does the supply project come into this?" Iria asked.

"They paid for Jun's survey," Ada said. "They are paying for ours. Renn Ordel is meeting us before we leave."

"The new intake opens in eighteen days," Eren added.

Laila corrected him without looking up from the route card. "The ceremony is in eighteen. Their first wet test is on the twelfth day from tomorrow. People keep telling me the ceremony date as if machines wait for speeches."

Eren's expression closed briefly. Then he nodded and wrote the other date beside the first.

Iria stayed while they finished loading. Tavi showed her where her equipment could be secured, and refused her suggestion that the delicate microphones would be safer on a seat. People needed seats. The case could be padded properly. She helped him do it.

At dusk, Eren returned with a written agreement which described her work as acoustic examination, not translation. The scouting route and four-day limit were attached. Her fee did not depend on discovering a city. She read it sitting on the truck's lowered tailboard, under a light which attracted moths and one exhausted beetle.

She signed, then asked for the photograph again.

This time she studied the base of the tower rather than the dunes. A low opening lay beneath an arch of pale stone. In the photograph it seemed to face away from the prevailing wind.

"Perhaps it isn't an ear," she said.

Laila stopped tightening a strap.

"What would you call it?"

"I don't know yet."

"Then leave room on the label."

Iria took a blank card from her case. She wrote the coordinate, the recording date and the name they had actually been given. Below it she left a line empty. For once, the emptiness seemed less like a failure than a place she might be allowed to arrive.