Three lines on the pane were still grey on Saturday morning, and the method she had sent out on Tuesday could not reach any of them.
CARD NOT AVAILABLE: 3. REMAINS DISPUTED.
Two belonged to licensee 63. Hortensia Villa's garage in Avondale had taken a foot of water in the July 2046 monsoon, and the tackle bag of cards had been on the floor. The third was 150's, a head sold to a Tucson shop in 2047 whose new owner had reformatted the card the first day, which is what anyone does.
No card meant no service folder, and no service folder meant no serial on a cold start. Lourdes sat on the freezer lid in the garage with the door rolled halfway up for the light and Abuela's radio coming through the kitchen wall on the Saturday mass hour, and asked herself the same question she had asked of the 36 bag. Was there anything that remembered which head it was, that the owner couldn't lose?
The card was the owner's. The drift file was the county's.
Every night a walking crew opened on a county base station and closed on one, two occupations of a known point so the inversion could take the slow creep out of the night. The heads read absolute; the base loop only took out the creep, a few tenths of a microGal a week. The base values went into the drift file. The drift file went to Records the next morning and stayed there.
And every absolute head read a known point a little wrong, in its own direction. A few microGal. The causes were unglamorous: a laser wavefront not perfectly flat, a Coriolis term that changed with which way the head was facing, a reference mirror a fraction of a millimetre from where the software believed it was. The manufacturer called it the instrument offset. The county measured it every January at the McDowell pier, every licensed head on the same concrete on the same night, and published the table so that nobody's lot came out three microGal heavier because of whose truck had read it.
So a record's opening base tie, tide-corrected and set against the base's adopted value, was that head's offset on that night. Plus noise.
She tried it on herself. S/N 0219, her old first-gen head. January 2041 pier table, +2.1 ± 0.8. Six of her own 2041 drift files from Records, opening ties: +2.4, +1.8, +2.0, +2.6, +1.5, +2.2.
Her head had been leaning the same way at every base in the county for a year. Nobody had written it down as a fingerprint because nobody had needed one.
She wrote the limits first, on the back of a 2041 bag, before the result had a chance to make her like it. OFFSET = WHICH HEAD, IF THE HEADS DIFFER BY MORE THAN THE NOISE. TWO HEADS WITHIN ~2 µGAL: CAN'T SAY. DEPOT RECAL RESETS IT. And then underneath, smaller, the thing she didn't want to look at yet: Records keeps every licensee's drift files. Including the ones whose cards were cleared.
The pier room was in the basement under Records, past the boiler, where McDowell went quiet. A concrete slab cut free of the floor on all four sides, the gap packed with foam, eight painted squares numbered on its face. A radiator that didn't work, on purpose.
Delfina Ochoa had run the January intercomparison for nine years. She kept the tables in a binder because, she said, the server had been migrated four times and the binder had been migrated zero. She didn't ask why Lourdes wanted 2040 through 2044. She found the tabs.
JAN 2042 0402 (63) +4.6 ± 0.9 JAN 2042 0517 (63) −1.2 ± 0.9 JAN 2043 0455 (150) +0.8 ± 1.0 JAN 2043 0461 (150) +1.9 ± 1.0
Sixty-three's two heads sat about six apart every year, one heavy, one light. A hundred and fifty's sat about one apart, and the next January they swapped order.
"Six is a lot," Delfina said. "One is the weather in the basement." She tapped the 2044 page. "And a field base isn't my pier. Culverts. School slabs. Groundwater moves under some of them a couple of microGal a season. You'd want A and B the same night, same base, so the base cancels."
Lourdes wrote it down.
"And nobody calls it identification. I publish offsets so people can correct for them, not so somebody can say who was standing where. If Records wants my table for that, Records asks me in writing." She polished her glasses on the county fleece. "Tell them it's one sigma. People read plus or minus as a promise."
The elevator took four minutes. Delfina's voice came up the stairwell after her, not unkind: "Forty-five is a different table. They all went to depot that March. Every offset moved."
In the truck she wrote the method on one page and the cost on the second, because she had learned to put the cost where nobody could skip it. Same night, same base. Read each opening tie after the tide model, which Records ran on everything. Compare to that January's table, the January before the night. If the heads were within about two microGal, the answer was NOT RESOLVING, and it was to be written that way, not as a lean.
Then the line she had been driving around with since Saturday.
The 226 nights. Their service partitions had been cleared in March 2045, before anyone had thought to ask. But the drift files from 2038 to 2044 had gone to Records the morning after each night, and Records still had every one, opening ties and all, and 226's heads were on Delfina's January pages for every one of those years. The wipe had taken the cards. It hadn't taken what the cards had already sent.
She had the files open. It would have taken one evening, and she thought she knew what she'd find, which was the reason not to. If the notary who had filed the first rod complaint ran 226's numbers, 226's counsel would spend December on who ran them and never get to what they said. She had watched it happen at the closing table: the right number from the wrong hand thrown out with the hand.
THIS METHOD ALSO READS LICENSEE 226'S FILED DRIFT FILES, 2038 TO 2044. I HAVE NOT RUN THEM AND WILL NOT. RECORDS SHOULD, AFTER THE CUSTODIAN AGREES, AND SHOULD SAY WHO RAN THEM.
To Records, to 63, to 150, to Delfina, same minute, 10:22. Then a text to Tencha Villa, who was sixty-six and read email on Thursdays. The reply came in under a minute, capitals, no punctuation. VEN A LAS DIEZ TRAE EL PAPEL.
Wednesday at 18:30 the pane updated while Abuela was at the comal.
63 / 21 FEB 2042: A +4.5, B +4.7. CONSISTENT WITH ONE INSTRUMENT (0402). CORROBORATED. 63 / 15 MAY 2042: A +4.3, B −0.9. CONSISTENT WITH TWO INSTRUMENTS (0402, 0517). OVERLAP. NOT RECORDED. 150 / 9 OCT 2043: A +1.1, B +1.6. INSTRUMENT OFFSETS NOT RESOLVING (Δ 1.1 ± 1.4). REMAINS DISPUTED.
She read the third line twice. Not resolving. Grey, because grey was the true color, with the numbers that made it grey right there beside it.
The second line had HORTENSIA VILLA on both sides.
She checked the condition before she let herself read the result as a result. Same night, same base, or the base could be doing the talking. Both 15 May records had opened on TB-14, the county base on the culvert headwall at 99th Avenue and the Roosevelt Irrigation canal, which every West Valley shop used because it was the only base with a paved shoulder. Both had opened within seventy minutes of each other. The solid-earth tide could move a base tens of microGal in seventy minutes, but both ties were tide-corrected, the same model on the same headwall. What was left was the ground, and a culvert base could move a microGal in a wet season. It could not move five in an hour. Whatever had read +4.3 at 21:10 and whatever had read −0.9 at 22:20 on the same headwall were not the same instrument, and the only two heads on 63's license that year sat at +4.6 and −1.2.
She had spent the autumn telling other people that a grey line was not an accusation. She found she wanted to tell herself the same thing, and that it was harder from this side.
Abuela set a plate down without looking at her. "You're doing the face."
"What face."
"The well-log face. When somebody's grandfather drilled where he wasn't allowed."
Further down, Records had a note. The method would be applied to 226's TIGHT records by Records staff, from filed drift files and the pier tables of the same years. RUN BY: R. AGUIRRE, RECORDS. LICENSEE 118 HAS NO ACCESS TO RESULTS BEFORE PUBLICATION. On or after 12/31, with the depot tickets.
A name on the line. Someone she didn't know, which was the point.
At 18:52 226's counsel wrote to Records with her copied. Unvalidated forensic use of a calibration product. Proposed by the original complainant. All rights reserved. The second sentence was true. It was why she hadn't run them. It didn't change what the base ties said, and they would say it with R. Aguirre's name on them.
She didn't answer. Abuela turned the radio up for the rosary, which meant enough for tonight.
Thursday at ten, Avondale. A block of 1970s ranch houses two streets from the wash, and on Tencha's garage door a waterline thirty centimetres up, painted over in a white that didn't quite match. The streetlight at the corner had a municipal head in its base, a grey collar with the county seal and a status LED that went green on the signal tap at night and amber in the day when the duty cycle slept. The whole block's water table was a layer on somebody's map because of it. It had not existed when Tencha's cards went under.
The printout was on the kitchen table, already underlined. Tencha didn't look at the two pages Lourdes brought. She put her finger on 15 May.
"Cero cuatro cero dos. That's my truck. The heavy one. Memo called it la gordita." Her husband, dead in 2044; Lourdes had seen it on the license transfer. "Cinco uno siete was his."
"So A was you."
"A was me. Tolleson, the lot behind the tire place, my own rod. Memo took the other truck to Laveen with Pablito." Her nephew. "Pablito couldn't sign yet. So I signed both. I signed everything. It was my license."
She said it the way you'd say what time the bakery opened. That was how a two-truck family shop had run in 2042, with one license and one name.
"The pane sees two heads and one holder," Lourdes said. "The rule says neither night."
"Your rule."
"My rule."
"Then make it say one." Tencha tapped +4.3. "That's la gordita. Nobody else drove la gordita."
Lourdes had had since last night to think about it, and she gave her the true answer, which was the cold one.
"The number puts the head at A. It doesn't say who was holding the rod beside it. For you that's the same thing. For 226 it wouldn't be. If I ask Records to give a holder whichever side her own truck was on, 226 says their holder always rode with their truck, and nobody can check it."
"So I lose Tolleson because of them."
"You lose Tolleson because the rule can't tell you from them. I wrote it so it couldn't."
"That's worse," Tencha said. "Not better."
She went to the hall closet and came back with a plastic file box, cracked and warped from the water. Spiral notebooks inside, swollen and dried, the ink run blue at the edges. She found 15 May 2042 by feel. Memo's hand: LAVEEN, PABLITO ROD, 0517. Hers underneath: TOLLESON, YO.
"Not a record," Tencha said. "I know. Your coffee can. Nacho told me."
She tore the page out carefully along the spiral and held it out.
That night the garage smelled of motor oil and wet cardboard and the Christmas lights were still in their box on the shelf, because nobody had had the evening to put them up. Lourdes took the coffee can down and opened the zip bag with Cheque's feed receipt in it, NOT A RECORD in Sharpie, and put Tencha's page in beside it. It was soft from the water and it lay flat against the receipt.
Two people now, each in the right place on a night the county had wrong, and both of them in a can behind the Christmas lights, because she had built a rule that couldn't hold the difference between them and the people who had been paid.
She wrote the date on the bag under the first line. 12/17. TOLLESON, VILLA. Then, because it was true and because nobody else would write it down, she added in pencil, small: 0402 AT A, +4.3 ± 0.9. NOT IDENTIFICATION.
She put the can back on the shelf. Somewhere on a county server, R. Aguirre had two weeks and a binder of Januaries.