Caldris came down from the control room an hour later, when the heart had held through its first dawn and the hour after and Mara had stepped out of the cradle at last.
Two guards came with her, the guard from the control room’s lift and the one from the alcove, and Post 4 followed them down with his slips of paper. Caldris walked to the platform’s edge, where the console stood with the raw trace on it and Lisan in his turned chair, and she set her slate on the console’s ledge and laid a duty slip beside it.
“The timing records,” she said. “The wheel’s index. The raw trace. The cradle log. The recording.” Her eyes were on the console, not on Mara. “All records of the quench will be surrendered to the Compact for the file. The candidate will sign the surrender.”
She put a stylus on the slip.
The two guards moved toward the console. They walked to it without hurry, the way the crews had walked to the hatch on the conveyor field, to close it, without looking inside.
Lisan stood up.
He stood up out of his turned chair and took one step, so that he was between Caldris and the console, and between Caldris and Mara, who stood by the cradle with the cradle log in her hand. He kept his hands down and his voice low. He stood.
