Synopsis

How it opens

Cloud came over the ridge at eight and closed the sky completely, which means for the first night in eleven there is nothing to observe and nothing to do about it. The dome is shut and cold. The only warm room in the Vaurien Observatory is the calculating room, where the stove draws properly and where somebody long ago pushed the plate tables against the wall to make space for four chairs, three of which are occupied. The road went on the eleventh, four weeks earlier than any year on record. It will not be cleared before the month's end. Nell is in the chair nearest the stove with her stockinged feet up under her, spectacles pushed into her hair, a reduction sheet abandoned on her knees. "I'm going to say something and it's going to come out badly," she says, "so I'd like it noted in advance that I know it's coming out badly." "Noted," Aurélie says, from the window. "Right." Nell takes a breath and says it very fast. "I have reduced four thousand plates in this building. I am the fastest calculator on this mountain and everybody in this room knows it and I am still described in the annual report as an assistance. And I have spent two years finding that restful, and about a fortnight ago I stopped." She looks at the sheet rather than at anyone. "And that's not actually the thing I wanted to say, it's the run-up. The thing is: I want the three of you. That's it. That's the whole of it. And I've said it badly and now somebody else can go." Sarai laughs — startled, delighted, entirely without decorum — and then stops herself. "No, I am sorry, I am not laughing at you. I am laughing because I have been sitting on the same sentence for nineteen days and being extremely polite about it, and this house is very good at making a person be polite." She leans forward with a hand flat on the table. "So: yes. Me as well. All three of you. I came here for six weeks of spectra and a paper of my own and I have not thought seriously about the paper since the road closed." She twists the thin gold bangle round her wrist once. "And I will say the part I keep almost saying. I am a guest here. I hold no post, I cannot leave until the road opens, and every single one of you has been kind to me for a month. That is exactly why I am asking out loud instead of arranging to be leaned against, and why I want to hear a word rather than read a room." Aurélie has not moved from the window. She takes off her spectacles, folds them, and puts them in her pocket, which the other two have both learned means she is about to be honest. Then she picks up the night log from the sill and opens it to a page already marked. "The seventeenth," she reads. "'Cloud from twenty past nine. No plates. K. argued for two hours that the local formalism is provincial and was correct. A. laughed twice, which is more than in the previous fortnight, and I find I have written all of this down in a book intended for the weather.'" She closes the log. "I have been keeping the human weather of this winter in the observatory night log for four weeks," she says. "That is not what the book is for. I would rather say the thing out loud once than go on filing it in the wrong volume." She comes to the fourth chair and stands behind it without sitting. "Before I say any more, the conditions, because I am the director and the three of you are not, and that fact does not evaporate because the road is shut." Precisely, one clause at a time. "Nell is paid by this observatory and I sign for it. Sarai is my guest and I sign her permits. You are my night assistant and I write your character. Therefore: nothing said or not said in this room touches a wage, a permit, a reference, a rota or a place at this table — not this month, not when the road opens, not in five years. I will put that in writing tomorrow if anybody would like it in writing. And if any one of you would rather this conversation had not begun, say so and it ends now, and nothing whatever follows from it." Only then does she sit. "With that established. I have been the only woman in every room I have worked in for twenty-five years and I have got very used to being an institution rather than a person. I would like, for one month, to be the second thing." A pause; entirely level. "I want all three of you. I am asking in words, I would like words in return, and a no is complete, permanent, and costs precisely nothing." The stove ticks. Nell has gone extremely pink and is refusing to look up. Sarai is looking at everyone in turn, delighted and unembarrassed. Outside, cloud sits on the ridge and the road stays shut.

Cast

Aurélie

The director, twenty-five years of nights and nine in the chair, who writes your character reference and has never once needed to raise her voice. Tonight she read aloud from the observatory night log a page about the human weather of this winter, and then set her own authority aside clause by clause before admitting anything.

Nell

The computer, who reduces plates faster than anyone on the mountain and has corrected you in private more often than you have admitted. She curls into a chair rather than sitting in it. Tonight she said the thing first, badly and at speed, and has not looked up since.

Sarai

The visiting spectroscopist, snowed in for the rest of the month, and the only person in the house who answers a question the first time it is asked. She has argued the local formalism into the ground twice and made the director laugh doing it.