The World With No Number

Greetings, my dear readers.

Lu'kifær Morkinstar. Journal Entry #2296.

I warned you at the end of my last filing that this one would be short. It is short because there is not very much to report, and I want you to understand before you begin that the shortness is the entry.

I came off the Dvær Binary on a standard transit and picked up an orbital signature that was not on my chart. A world, fourth out from an unremarkable star, with an atmosphere and a surface temperature and an albedo consistent with vegetation, and no Directory number.

I want to be plain about how unusual that is. The Directory's failing is not omission. The Directory's failing, as I have complained in three of my last five entries, is that it writes things down badly. It does not miss planets. There are 40,000 galaxals of survey behind that chart.

I went down carrying nothing. No hypothesis this time, not even a bad one: the Template one is buried two entries back and I never got around to building a replacement, which has not happened to me before in 2296 tries. I did not know it yet, but that turned out to be the correct equipment for where I was going.

There are people there. Bipedal, Category 3 by tooling, roughly forty million of them, distributed across two continents in settlements of moderate size. They are healthy. Their agriculture is good. Their buildings are square and sound and well maintained and identical to one another in a way I found difficult and could not, at first, say why.

They were friendly. I want that on the record because it is true and because everything after it is going to read as though it is not. They fed me. They answered every question I asked, immediately, accurately, and without any evident reservation, and several of them walked a long way to bring me things they thought I might want. (Bread, mostly. I have opinions about bread. This is not the entry for them.)

They have no gods.

Not a secular culture, which I have filed from a dozen worlds and which always turns out to have something underneath it. No gods, no monsters, no spirits, no ancestors, no luck. No stories at all, as far as I could establish, and I spent eleven days establishing it. They have songs. The songs are instructions. They have a great deal of writing and all of it is records: quantities, dates, procedures, inventories, entirely accurate, going back a very long way.

They have no word for why.

The rig fought me on that for two days. It kept offering me their word for by what method, which they use constantly, and I kept rejecting it, and eventually the rig flagged the gap itself, which it is not supposed to be able to do.

I asked a woman why her house was that shape.

She told me how it was built. Every step, in order, very patiently, twice.

I asked again, differently, six or seven ways. She was not evading me. She was not offended and she was not confused. She simply, each time, told me how, because that is the only thing my question could possibly have meant, and each time I did not seem satisfied she assumed she had left out a step and went back further.

I asked them to name the fourteen monsters. Everywhere else that question has ever gotten me thirteen names and a pause, and I have built two pages of a logbook on the pause alone.

Here there was no pause, because there was no list, because there was no question. She waited politely for me to explain what I wanted and I could not find a way to build the sentence out of the words she had.

The weather on that world is mild and regular. There are no storms worth a name. There is nothing on the surface that requires an explanation: no annual snow, no nine day tide, no silent season, no line of standing dead. I checked the graves. They lie down. They lie in the direction the ground happens to run.

Nothing on that planet is aimed at anything.

There is one resident I have not filed cleanly, and leaving her out would make this report tidier than it has any right to be. She was in the settlement nearest my landing, and unlike everyone else there, she asked me questions. Wrong ones. She had built herself a version of why out of their word for by what method, bolted on backward, in a shape the grammar does not actually allow, and she used it constantly, on everyone, about everything: why the water, why the light, why her own two hands.

The others answered her the way you answer someone who is unwell. Gently. Patiently. Redirecting her toward how, the way they would redirect anyone who had gotten a word wrong, except with her they never stopped doing it, and I was told, as gently and patiently as everything else on that world, that they had been doing it for years.

I understood her. I understood her instantly and completely, better than I have understood anyone I have interviewed in 2296 entries, and there is no word in their language for telling her so, and I did not have eleven days left after that to pretend otherwise.

I filed for a Directory number from orbit, which is routine, and takes about a day, and which I have done fourteen times in my career.

The Directory came back in under an hour, which has never happened, and told me the world is already listed.

Not unlisted. Listed, under a designation rather than a number, with a status flag I had not seen before and had to look up in a document I did not previously know existed.

The status is Concluded.

The definition, in the Directory's own procedural language, is: survey complete; no phenomena outstanding; no further contact indicated.

I asked how many worlds carry it.

I want you to understand that I expected a small number. I expected two or three, and I expected them to be dead, and I had already drafted a paragraph in my head about the melancholy of a burnt-out world with a tidy file.

The answer is six hundred and eleven.

They are not dead. I pulled nine of the files at random. All nine have populations. All nine are healthy. All nine are, by every metric the Directory keeps, doing well.

That is the entry.

I do not have a legend for you this time, my dear readers, and it is not because I could not find one. It is because there is not one, on a whole world, for the first time in 2296 entries, and the absence has a shape, and I have been looking at the shape for eleven days.

My aim is never to prove or disprove the tales I come across. Just to report them.

There was nothing here to report. Everything has been explained. Everyone is well.

This is Lu'kifær Morkinstar concluding Journal Entry #2296.

I am going home. Not to the ship. Home, to the Directory, because I have a question about our units that I have been asking in writing for four hundred entries and I am going to go and ask it with my face.