THE REPORT
It took four hours to write.
Kai had written survey reports before — the compressed, precise language of field documentation, the particular discipline of rendering extraordinary things in ordinary notation so that the authority's classification system could receive them without distortion. He was good at it. Four years of practice had given him the instinct for where ordinary language broke down and needed to be propped up by new framework.
This was different.
This was not a survey report. This was — he found the word somewhere in the second hour, when Dresner had stopped writing and was looking at what she'd written with the expression of someone who had assembled a structure and was now examining whether it would hold weight — a translation. The first translation ever attempted from the language of a completed Source into something a room full of classification authority council members could sit with long enough to understand.
