The Second Chair

Page 1 of 91

Greetings again, my dear readers. Lu'kifær Morkinstar. Page 1, and I want to be upfront that this is not an entry, there is no number on it, nobody is going to file it, and if you have been with me since Exxobar you are allowed to feel a little unmoored about that. I feel unmoored about it too. We can be unmoored together, which is I think the first honest thing I have said in about four hundred entries.

I built a case. I should tell you about the case first because I spent eleven days on it and it shows.

I am not a carpenter. I want that said plainly and early, before you get three paragraphs in and start suspecting it from the language. I have filed reports about things other people built, entire civilisations of things other people built, and somewhere in there I absorbed the idea that I understood construction the way you absorb the idea that you understand a language because you have been translated at extensively in it. I do not. I bought a plank saw off a very patient dockworker on the Directory's supply deck who watched me hold it backwards for four full seconds before he said anything, and then he only said "the teeth go the other way," which is the kindest thing anyone has said to me in a while and also devastating.

The case is a rectangle. That is the best thing I can say about it. It has a hinge, the hinge is on the correct side, and inside it I have cut ninety-one slots, each meant to hold a single page. I measured the first thirty by eye and the last sixty-one with an actual rule, because around slot thirty I noticed the gaps were getting narrower in a way that suggested my eye was tired rather than that the case had opinions, and by then it was too late to fix the first thirty without starting over, and I was not going to start over. So there is a visible seam about a third of the way down where careful replaces confident. I have decided to think of it as a section break.

The lid does not sit flush. I want to be very clear that I know this. I have tried shims, I have tried sanding the lip down, I have tried simply closing it harder, which achieved nothing except a small crack near the left hinge that I have now also tried to fix and made slightly worse. It sits down at an angle of maybe four degrees, gaps a finger's width at the corner, and every time I close it I hear a soft complaint from the wood, not a crack, more of a settling, the sound a chair makes when someone heavier than usual sits in it. I have accepted that this is simply what the case is. It will never sit flush, and I know exactly why, and I am telling you anyway, because if I do not tell you the honest state of the thing then what is even the point of any of this.

Ninety-one slots.

Here is where I have to be honest with you about something, because if I am not honest about it on page one there is no reason to expect I will manage it on page fifty, and the whole point of what I am doing here is supposed to be that I do not let myself off the hook the way the Directory lets itself off the hook.

I did not choose ninety-one because I worked something out. I chose it because I saw it work.

There is a world I visited once, a long way from anywhere I have any business claiming expertise about, where an entire civilisation burns every written thing it owns once every ninth generation, down to the land deeds and the star charts and the mathematics, and on the morning after the fire is out they put a stylus in the hand of one child of six, chosen by lot off a whole planet, and they ask that child to write one thing nobody has ever written down before. Not one thing nobody has ever said, that would be impossible to check, but one thing nobody has ever put down in ink, anywhere on that world, in nine generations of it. The child does it, the world starts counting again from nothing, and the page goes into a wooden case in a room with a window. Ninety-one burnings, ninety-one children, ninety-one pages, and that case is the whole surviving inheritance of four thousand clicks.

I did not ask permission to take that. I want to say that out loud because it is going to bother me if I do not. I sat in front of that case once, from the outside of everything that made it, alone in the room because the custodian had the grace to leave me there, reading ninety-one children through a rig and getting, at a generous estimate, a third of what any of them had actually meant, and I filed every word of it, and now, some entries later, grieving in a way I am not going to pretend I have a handle on, I went and bought a plank saw and copied the number. Ninety-one. Not because ninety-one means anything to me. Because it was the number I had seen work, on people who were not me, in a ritual that is not mine, for a cycle I am not running.

That is not wisdom. I want to be extremely clear I know the difference. Wisdom would be sitting with the actual size of the thing I am trying to do and arriving at a number that fits it. What I did was closer to what a person does when they cannot sleep in an unfamiliar room and they turn the pillow to the cold side, not because the cold side solves anything, but because it is a thing you can do with your hands at three in the morning when the actual problem has no handle on it anywhere. Ninety-one is my cold side of the pillow. I would rather you know that from me on page one than work it out yourselves on page forty.

Anyway. The case exists. The slots exist. Onto the part that has been bothering me more.

Who, precisely, am I saying "my dear readers" to.

I have opened every one of my entries that way for going on four hundred filings and I never once had to think about it, because there was an obvious answer sitting underneath the words the whole time: whoever the Directory's distribution list reached. Correspondents, archivists, the occasional Category-3 world with a receiving station and more curiosity than sense, a very small number of people who apparently read these things for pleasure, which still astonishes me. It was never a precise number and it did not need to be, because the filing did the work of making it real. I wrote it, the Directory stamped it, the Directory sent it, and somewhere out there it landed on actual eyes. I did not have to believe in you. The system believed in you on my behalf.

I am not filing this.

So when I sit here and type "my dear readers," which I notice I have now done twice in this entry out of what I can only call pure muscle memory, I have to ask myself who that is actually addressed to, because there is no distribution list underneath it doing the believing for me anymore.

I thought about this properly for the first time on the eighth day of building the case, sanding a corner I had already sanded twice, and the honest answer I arrived at, the only name I could put to a person who will, with something close to certainty, actually see these pages, is Ossul.

Clerk of Deep Registry. Nine decks down, unlit side, one room, one desk, and as of eleven days ago, two chairs. He is the only person I know of who reads slowly and carefully and has nowhere else he is expected to be, and he is the only person who has, in my entire career, ever asked me a follow-up question instead of simply acknowledging it and moving on. I do not know if he will read these. I have not asked him and I am not going to. But when I picture "my dear readers," what actually arrives in my head, before anything grander, is one man at one desk nine decks down, and I am a little embarrassed by how small that turns out to be after four hundred entries of imagining a galaxy on the other end of the line. I am going to keep saying "my dear readers" anyway. I think if I stopped saying it I would be admitting there is nobody, and I would rather keep saying a thing that might be slightly untrue than test whether it is.

Moving on quickly, because that is not a feeling I want to sit in any longer than I have to.

The rule, for anyone joining without having read the last entry, is that each of these ninety-one pages has to contain something that has never been written down before. Not never said. Never written. That is the whole discipline of it, and I sat with a blank first slot for two full days trying to think of something in the entire galaxy that fit, because it turns out "never written down" is a much narrower door than it sounds. Everything I know, I know because someone wrote it somewhere, even if the somewhere was obscure. I have spent a career finding the things other people already wrote and had simply not sent to the right desk.

And then I thought about the desk.

Twenty-two galaxals. That is how long Ossul has held that post, by his own count, given without hesitation because he has clearly done this arithmetic before, alone, with nobody to say it to. And I went looking, out of nothing more than habit, to see what the Directory's own archive holds about him, because the Directory holds something about everything, that is its entire stated purpose, to produce a complete and final account of every world.

There is nothing.

Not a redacted file. Not a thin file. No file. The Directory catalogues worlds, in exhaustive, occasionally deranged detail, down to a planet's precise moisture content during a half-momenta thaw, and it has never once turned that same attention on the person sitting nine decks down cataloguing the catalogue. Ossul is not a world. He is staff. Staff do not get filed. Twenty-two galaxals of a man's actual life, and as far as any record anywhere is concerned, he does not particularly exist.

So here is page one, and it is not a legend and there is no monster in it and nobody halves themselves to save anybody, and I am fine with that, because the rule was never that it had to be dramatic, only that it had to be new.

Ossul eats the same meal every day that he is on shift, which by his account is essentially every day, a grain paste the Directory's canteen calls something official on the label and that he calls, without any apparent irony, "the paste," as in "I had the paste," as in a complete sentence describing an entire meal. He has a stone on his desk, smaller than a fist, dull grey, no markings I could see, that he moved without comment when I first sat down, the way you'd move a cup out of someone's way, except he moved it closer to himself, and did not explain it, and I did not ask. And he says the word "restated," which he must say fifty times a shift given what his job actually is, with the stress on the wrong syllable every single time, re-STAT-ed instead of RE-stated, consistently, for twenty-two galaxals, and nobody has ever corrected him, because nobody has ever been down there long enough to hear it twice.

That is it. That is the whole page. A meal, a stone, a mispronounced word. None of it is in any record anywhere in the Galactic Directory, and now it is, because I wrote it down, on the first of ninety-one pages, about the one man I am fairly confident is going to read it.

Page one was easy, in the end, though it did not feel easy while I was standing over a blank slot for two days not knowing what belonged in it. It was easy because once I had the question right, I already knew the answer, I had known it since the eleventh day, when he brought a second chair down nine decks from somewhere else in the ring, for no reason he gave me and none I asked for.

The other ninety are not going to be like that. I do not have ninety more people sitting quietly undocumented nine decks down waiting for me to notice them. I am going to have to go looking, the way I always have, except this time nothing I bring back gets filed anywhere except into a case with a lid that will not sit flush, built by a man who is bad at carpentry and knows it, and admits it, and is going to keep doing it anyway.

I am not, if I am honest with you, looking forward to that part.