From the Culture and Technology group, screen shots of Subject’s latest addition to his chamber walls. Here was the Subject, stretched to full height, his squat lifting legs erect as he used a manipulating arm and something that looked like a crayon to add a fresh symbol (if it was a symbol) to the symbol-string that adorned the walls of the room. This one was part of a string of sixteen progressively larger snail-shell whorls; the new one terminated with a flourish. To Marguerite it looked like something a restless child might doodle in the margin of a notebook. The obvious inference was that the Subject was writing something, but it had been established early on that the strokes, lines, circles, crosses, dots, etc., never repeated. If they were pictographs, the Subject had never written the same word twice; if they were letters, he had yet to exhaust his alphabet. Did that mean they were art? Perhaps. Decoration? Possibly. But Culture and Technology thought this latest string suggested at least some linguistic content. Marguerite doubted it, and she flagged the report with a priority that would stack it up on the peer-review desk with a dozen similar documents.

The rest of the backlog consisted of progress reports from the active committees and a couple of brief segments the landmarks survey team thought she might like to see: balcony views, the city stretching away beyond the Subject in a pastel afternoon, sandstone-red, layer on layer, like an empire of rusty wedding cakes. She stored these images to look at later.

She was finished by midnight.

She switched off her office wall and walked through the house turning off other lights until the soft dark was complete. Tomorrow was Saturday. No school for Tess. Marguerite hoped the satellite interface would be back up by morning. She didn’t want Tess to be bored, her first day back home.