The Registration Office

The arrival point’s formal institutional face: the log of all arriving and departing passengers, the customs record for goods, and the single desk where Gaius or one of his family conducts the arrival interview that every passenger experiences. The interview is brief, courteous, and entirely standard in its questions. What is not standard is the assessment that Gaius forms during it, which he retains in his memory and occasionally in the margin of the registration log in a notation system whose meaning he has never explained to anyone and which would, if decoded, represent the most complete intelligence assessment of the island’s visitor traffic available in any single document.