Julian date 2459527, Wednesday, 9:40 a.m.
She opened revision v2 of the memo. The last save had been her own; the signature column had held eleven lines then. Now it held fourteen.
The three new lines sat at the bottom, the affiliation given as Nanshan. Of the three names she knew one—a man who had spent six days at Kashgar in 2019 and left a hardshell jacket behind in the machine room; Eli had mailed it back. The contribution column ran two lines: supplied one version of receiver temperature and gain records, March–August 2019, used for the comparison in section three, paragraph two, of this memo.
She pulled up that version and looked. Six pages; the last page was two photographs of a handwritten chart on the machine-room wall.
She asked Hu Yisu: did we use this.
He said: one number off the third page.
Which one.
Daily mean ambient temperature. Used it once for crude rejection. Rejected two days.
Two days.
Two days.
She said nothing in the group. She left the three lines where they were and dragged them two columns left, into the "participants" column.
Then she turned to the header. The two sentences Ursula had wanted welded shut—correlation carries no information; not modulatable—had run in the header of every page in her previous version. In this one the first page still had them; from page three on they were gone.
She asked in the group: who changed the header.
Old Cao said: typesetting squeezed it out. Nothing was touched content-wise. Those two lines just take up room.
She said: put them back.
He said: one line of small type on every page. Ugly in print.
She said: put them back.
He said: fine.
At 11:10 the Miyun email arrived, sender the station office. Three paragraphs. First, received. Second, data consultation and external liaison to be borne by the station office. Third, in bold: it is suggested that the acknowledgments include the Administrative Office of Miyun Radio Astronomy Observatory, with three comrades' names appended.
She added it. Third line of the acknowledgments, above the three from Nanshan.
Kramer's third letter came at noon. The subject was one word: table. Two sentences in the body: send me the 1,042 version. Do an internal preprint, circulated only between our group and Bonn, nothing posted online.
She replied: the 6,318 version is in the shared directory. Take it.
Twenty-two minutes later he wrote back: what I want is the 1,042.
She replied: that version hasn't finished the polarization cross-checks.
He wrote back: by the time you finish, I'll still be waiting for you to finish.
She didn't reply again. She copied the 1,042 table into a fresh version and stored it in the directory that looked like cache. The directory's name was three characters: 3t. When it was done she checked the usage. 27.4 G.
At three in the afternoon Old Tang called, asking for one thing only: a sentence for the annual progress form.
The institute reports before close of business Friday, he said. One form for the whole institute. Your square gets one line.
She said: write "still under investigation."
Last year was the same four words.
Then, still under investigation.
Zhou Yan, he said. Tomorrow morning is the institute affairs meeting. I have to read it out in front of a dozen-odd people. You want me to read "still under investigation."
She said: then write "exclusion chain, six of twenty-three items closed, seventeen remaining, to be advanced to—"
He cut her off: no numbers. Numbers invite questions, and one question and the year is over. I want one sentence. Four words, five, whatever reads aloud.
She said: still under investigation.
The other end went quiet a few seconds. He said: fine.
She said: one more thing. The two lines in the shared table.
What about them.
Five working days, she said. Counting from last Thursday, today's the fourth.
Have you filled them in.
Half. The completion-date column got five words.
Which five.
To be set, reported separately.
Don't send those five.
Haven't. It's in drafts.
Old Tang said: Zhou Yan, every line you strike through now strikes out an instrument and leaves you standing alone.
You've said that one before.
Then saying it again won't help, he said. Just listen to it.
After they hung up she sat a while. On her phone was one from Dr. Shen, two days old: did you take the medicine. She swiped it away. No reply.
In the afternoon she wrote the six numbers into v2 as a new section five, titled: relation between the directions of lines joining synchronized samples and the orientation of the interstellar magnetic field. She wrote two lines of method, then cut them to a line and a half.
Twenty minutes later Old Cao raised it in the group: the calibration parameters in section five include the version supplied by Nanshan. Suggest one more name in the signature column.
She replied: section five uses the public Planck archive and two stellar polarization catalogs. No Nanshan parameters.
Old Cao: then I may have misremembered. I'll read it again.
Hu Yisu, behind her, said: it isn't that one name he wants.
She said: I know.
He's testing how far you'll give, he said. Give one, and the next one to come won't be one person.
She left the cursor in the reply box and in the end sent nothing.
Julian date 2459528, Thursday, 22:00.
Seven boxes on the screen. Kramer in Bonn, Van der Merwe in Cape Town, Ursula in Vienna, Lu Weiming in Shanghai, two boxes from Nanshan, one from Miyun. The Miyun box had its camera off; over the avatar, a surname. The funding agency had sent someone, who opened by declaring himself: my name is Guan. I'm not a scientist. I'm only here to listen. Count anything I say as not said.
Hu Yisu's box was beside hers, microphone off.
No one came from the Miyun technical side. What came was the station office, the one with the camera off.
The first four minutes went to sound levels. In the fifth minute Director Cao of Nanshan opened: a procedural point on the signatures of the revision. Three young people did the work and their names sit in the participants column. That looks bad.
Lu Weiming said: the names can wait. First, the two lines in the shared table.
Old Cao said: the two matters are one matter.
Lu Weiming said: any one of the items shared across the nine chains fails, and nine stations fail together. This is a sickness of the common analysis chain, not something in the sky. Settle that one sentence, and the names can go in any order. Also, a proposal: add a column to the shared table, call it pipeline self-check, where each house fills in the self-check number and date for its own segment.
Old Cao said: that exposes internal station procedure.
Lu Weiming said: if you've filled it in, no one can say you're hiding anything.
Old Cao said: the procedure is the same.
Ursula sat in the upper left, not one word, pencil turning. It turned for about two minutes. Then she said: finish your quarrel first. Call me when it's finished. And she muted herself.
Over the following twenty-two minutes, the same passage was said three times.
The second time through, Lu Weiming used the sentence.
He said: Zhou Yan, this is not your discovery, it is everyone's disease. Since the memo went out, this is the second time.
She said: I know.
You don't, he said. Every time you answer me it's two words.
She said: then this time I'll answer with three.
He said: go ahead.
She said: I heard you.
Old Cao laughed once, realized midway it wasn't fitting, and pulled his face back.
The funding-agency man spoke then. He said: a suggestion that has nothing to do with science. Before any result has authoritative confirmation, unify the external line into one sentence: instrument systematics check. No new projects, no interviews, no replies. Six months.
Old Cao said: agreed. That's how our station handled a revision of the atmospheric correction last year.
Lu Weiming said: that was atmospheric correction.
Old Cao said: the procedure is the same.
Van der Merwe spoke for the first time, voice very small, and Cape Town dropped twice. He said: my segment goes in the public version. No name. When the names are lined up, delete my row.
Kramer said: delete his, delete mine too. I don't want this. I want the table.
Zhou Yan said: you can take the 6,318.
I want the 1,042.
That version isn't finished.
You're stalling, he said. Are you checking it, or keeping it?
She said: I am running the polarization cross-checks.
Nobody on the screen took it up. Face after face, box after box.
That was when the Miyun box spoke. The camera was still black. He said: one small thing. The shared table on page three. The medium column. Could we fill in portable hard drives to start.
Nobody answered.
He said: our stores have a batch. New. Four-terabyte. Twenty-odd units.
Van der Merwe said: what.
Portable hard drives, he said.
Zhou Yan said: I've already filled in the medium column. Tape, generation eight, twelve terabytes raw per cartridge. Forty-one terabytes is about four cartridges; six, once the data are scrubbed.
The man said: oh.
After that oh, someone on the call actually laughed, for under a second.
In the end three things were put to the vote.
External line: four for, two abstaining, one against. The one against was Lu Weiming. Carried.
Signature column in two tiers, one for data and analysis, one for participants: her proposal. Old Cao objected at first, then agreed, on condition that the three from Nanshan go in the first row of participants. Carried.
Who compiles the next version: Kramer said Zhou Yan. Old Cao said improper—the compiler should be neutral. Ursula opened her microphone at that point: the one who compiles is always the one who does the work. Whoever wants to compile can strike through the seventeen items themselves.
Nobody answered. The right of compilation stayed in her hands.
Just before the close Kramer said it once more: table.
She said: when it's done.
And just as the meeting was breaking up, Ursula opened her microphone and said four sentences: you have three camps now. One says sickness, one says waking, one says don't bring it up yet. The third will win, because the third doesn't have to do anything. Now, the table.
She took off the headset. Hu Yisu's box hadn't left.
He said: Shijie.
Mm.
You're fighting a war you can't win.
She said: I know.
Then why fight it.
She said: what I want is the right to compile. Everyone fights over the name column. Nobody fights over the compiling.
He said: the compiler ends up carrying all of it.
She said: yes.
He said: then what's the difference between you and them.
She said: none. I'm the one who does the work.
At 23:41, three boxes left on the screen.
Hu Yisu. Ursula. The A4 sheet behind her had been swapped for another, the writing smaller.
Zhou Yan said: let me show you a number.
She read out the six: 34.2, 21.6, 16.1, 12.4, 9.8, 5.9. Isotropy would give 16.7.
Ursula put the pencil down. That was the first time she put it down.
She said: read the shuffled-position set as well.
17.1, 16.9, 16.6, 16.9, 16.4, 16.1.
The high-galactic-latitudes-only group.
31.8.
Ursula said: tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll lecture. Today I can't.
What time tomorrow.
This hour.
She added one more sentence: what I say tomorrow, don't take notes. Notes will get it wrong.
Julian date 2459529, Friday, 22:00.
Two boxes on the screen.
Ursula held the A4 sheet up to the camera and lectured looking not at the lens but at the paper.
Stars are discharge units. The magnetohydrodynamic instabilities in plasma serve as the ion channels; they decide when a unit discharges and for how long, which is the same job the ion channels on a neuron's membrane do, only six or seven orders of magnitude slower, twenty-odd orders wider. And what joins unit to unit: the interstellar magnetic fibers. The angle you measured yesterday is not a coincidence; it is the directional preference of pathways. This passage—do not ask where it is located. A place has boundaries. An organization doesn't. When you ask where it lives, the question itself is the grammar of places: a thing is either here or there. An organization isn't like that. A memory in your head sits at no coordinate; cut out that one patch and it is still in the others. For three months you have been asking where it lives. Wrong question.
She paused, and set the paper down.
Zhou Yan heard the first half clearly. The second half scattered in her right ear—the hiss had pushed up another notch since evening, up to the mark of day twenty-three. She did not ask her to say it again.
Hu Yisu, beside her, had taken three lines of notes. She leaned over to look. The first line she understood. The second had two words she didn't know. The third was only an arrow and a Greek letter.
What she thought of then was not neurons. It was a board she had soldered herself the year before last: two joints, the two farthest apart, no trace between them, and measured forever at the same potential. Not because they were connected—because they were soldered to the same board. The nine residual series and those 11,300 optical events, the same.
Ursula said: that letter is not your business yet.
He said: I took a screenshot.
The screenshot is no use either, she said. You can't compute it.
Then she rolled the sheet down. Formula after formula went by. At the seventh line, Hu Yisu typed into the chat box: here.
In the middle of that line stood a Greek letter with a small hat on its right shoulder.
Hu Yisu asked: what is this.
Ursula glanced at it: an undetermined term.
What undetermined term.
She said: I call it the cosmetic.
Hu Yisu typed a question mark.
She did not explain. Just then Kramer's name jumped in the list—wanting in, probably, probably still wanting the table. Ursula said "I'm going," and two seconds later the box went dark.
Zhou Yan wrote one word in the paper notebook: cosmetic.
Under it she left two lines blank and filled in nothing.
After the meeting Hu Yisu sent over the screenshot. She stored it in 3t under a one-word filename, no extension.
She flipped back to the page with 0.31 on it, looked at it, closed the book.
After the meeting she wrote Kramer one reply, two sentences only: the 6,318 version is in the shared directory, take it freely. The 1,042 version you get when it's done; not before.
She sent it at 23:17.
She opened the message whose subject was one word. The recipient line was empty. She clicked the cursor into it, held about five seconds, closed it.
In the tank the water was twenty degrees. Lao Wu under the driftwood, claws outward, the third notch no deeper.
In the drawer the tape lay under a stack of printouts. She pulled out a stack, looked at the cassette, put it back.
She counted the signature column of revision v2 from head to tail: nineteen names.
Of them she knew four.