What Remains Unentered

The Reconciliation of Losses

A loss is not mourned. It is entered.

I had read that seven hundred times before I first understood what it costs. It stands above the entrance to the Hall of Balance on Karsis-Vor, cast in ceramite, and beneath it sit the scribes of the Third Consecration and do exactly that: enter. No prayer for the dead. An entry.

The Balance Archon was called Vey-Tanis. He had three eyes, two of them glass, and the habit of waiting half a second before every sentence: not out of courtesy, but because his larynx module pre-calculated the length of the syllables.

"Tech-adept Rehk. You are carrying an item that appears in no ledger."

It was not a question, so I did not answer.

"An emergency wafer. Issue of the Fourth Caste, batch unknown, contents unknown." Pause. "And a cog."

The cog lay in my left palm, where it had lain for one hundred and nine days. It was no sacred object, but the pinion of an access lock, warped by a heat that plasteel does not withstand, and it had belonged to Brakk-4-Ondes in the sense in which anything can belong to a Skitarii: he had had it in his hand when the Access Dome burned, and afterwards no one had taken it out of his hand but me.

"The item is not an item," I said. "It is a proof."

Vey-Tanis waited his half-second.

"Then present it."

That was what it was about. It was always about that.

The sacrifice of Electro-Priest Zeta-Milos had lasted one hundred and four minutes. In those one hundred and four minutes the main conduit of the Access Dome had stayed open, and because it had stayed open, two hundred people had been able to leave the Lower Ring. That was the number given later. Two hundred.

The number not given was three. Brakk-4-Ondes. Dekk-2-Lom. Zeta-Milos himself.

They had not fallen. Fallen is a state a ledger knows. They were unentered; that is not a state but a gap, and gaps are not tolerated on Karsis-Vor, because a gap means that somewhere an allocation stands open, a ration entitlement, a maintenance shift that no one takes over.

The reason for the gap was simple: in those one hundred and four minutes, no sensorium had recorded. The Kantor had shut down the channels, as he does when he calculates. What happened in that time exists in exactly one place — on an emergency wafer that a Skitarii Alpha had pushed into his armour before his memory was taken from him.

I had had it ever since. I had never read it.

One has to understand what an entry means on a Forge World, or one takes all of this for paperwork. A Skitarii of Maniple Theta has a registration number, and on that number hang eleven allocations: ration entitlement, maintenance shift, workshop window, munitions quota, two maintenance intervals for the leg actuators, a place in the order of precedence, three shares in maniple upkeep, and a bunk in the Lower Ring. As long as the number is not closed, those eleven allocations keep running.

That sounds like waste. It is worse. It means that every day a ration is issued that no one collects, and that every shift has a gap that someone else carries without it being written anywhere. Maniple Theta had gone for one hundred and nine days with three holes in its roster, and because the holes were not entered, it received no replacements.

Vey-Tanis set this out without a syllable of pity, and he was entirely right to. That is exactly why I render it here the way he said it.

"The reconciliation of losses knows three kinds of proof," he said. "Sensorium record. Testimony of two present. Physical evidence."

"There is no record."

"No."

"There are no two present. Of those present, two are alive, and one has had his memory taken."

"Also no."

"And physical evidence," I said, "does not exist for a burn-shadow."

Vey-Tanis waited his half-second.

"That is why you are sitting here."

"Tech-adept." Vey-Tanis's glass eyes did not move, but the third did. "You know what a read-out does to a wafer of this batch."

"I know."

"Say it anyway. For the record."

"The wafer carries no copy. It carries the event itself. Whoever reads it, spends it." I heard my own voice as I said it, flat and correct, the voice of a Third Consecration reporting a matter to an Archon. "Once. After that it is empty."

"Thank you." He made a note I could not see. "Then the matter lies clearly before your eyes."

It did not lie clearly before my eyes. It lay before my eyes like a sum in which both totals are right and one of them is wrong anyway.

The Iteration Debt

Tech-Priest Dolvai-Sech had taught me how to address a machine older than one's own order. You do not begin with a request. You begin with an inventory: this is what I am, this is what I can do, this is what I lack. Only then do you ask.

I tried it on him.

"I am Rehk, Third Consecration. I hold a proof that can prove two things. Only one of them survives the read-out. And I lack a rule by which to choose."

Dolvai-Sech sat in the workshop between two gutted servitors and did not look up. He is one of the few who still have a face one can still make something of.

"There is a rule," he said. "You just don't like it."

"Name it."

"The wafer is not yours. It belongs to the one who wrote it."

Thal-9-Kyrr, Skitarii Ranger Alpha, Maniple Theta, iteration five.

One says iteration because one does not want to say man and cannot say machine. The four before him had the same legs, the same registration number and the same mission. What distinguishes them has been erased, every time — after the Dome, after the Ring, after two deployments before that which no one remembers, because remembering is not part of the mission.

Once, in civil life, his name was Tavo Kyrr. That appears in no ledger. It is in his carapace, scratched in from the inside with a tool he damaged doing it — seven characters, mirror-reversed, so that he can read them himself when he puts on the armour.

I asked him once why mirror-reversed.

"So that no one reads it for me," he had said.

He came to the Hall of Balance because he had been summoned, and he stood the way Skitarii stand: as if standing were a task that can be carried out properly. Ossia-7-Rin came with him, though no one had summoned her. She is a veteran. Veterans come unsummoned.

Vey-Tanis presented the matter the way one presents a matter: completely, correctly, and without a single superfluous note.

"The wafer carries the event of the one hundred and four minutes. If it is read out, three losses are proven and will be entered. Your maniple receives the entry, their ration entitlements close, their maintenance shifts pass to the distribution. The gap closes."

He waited his half-second.

"The wafer also carries the state of the Alpha before the fourth erasure. If it is read out for that, iteration five receives the sequence back. The three losses remain unentered. For an indefinite time."

"Forever," said Ossia-7-Rin.

"For an indefinite time," Vey-Tanis repeated, and it was the first time I heard him say something that was not quite true and yet not a lie.

Then Sarquil-Vohm came.

I would have liked to write that he came too late to interfere. He came at the right time, and he did not interfere. A Magos Dominus never interferes. He orders.

"The choice has already been made," he said.

"By whom?"

"By arithmetic." He stepped up to the desk without looking at Vey-Tanis. "Three entries against one sequence. Three entitlements that expire, against one memory that founds no entitlement. Tech-adept, I am not asking you a question. I am reading you a balance."

"There is a third way," said Ossia-7-Rin.

Vey-Tanis looked at her. The unsummoned do not speak in a Hall of Balance; that he looked at her instead of sending her out was already a concession.

"Name it."

"The Kantor was calculating while the channels lay silent. What is calculated is filed. Ask him."

It was the suggestion everyone had been waiting for and no one had wanted to make, and I saw Dolvai-Sech in the second row lift his shoulders, three degrees, the way a Skitarii nods.

"The Kantor has been questioned," said Sarquil-Vohm. "On the eleventh day, on the thirtieth and on the ninetieth. I have the transcripts. He answers every question put to him, completely and truthfully."

"And?"

"And he did not file the one hundred and four minutes. He listened to them." Sarquil-Vohm let that stand as if it were a technical specification. "He says a canticle loop is not a datum. He says he listened the way one listens to a prayer, and a prayer is not archived but answered."

"That is not an answer," said Ossia-7-Rin.

"It is his."

And here is the unbearable part: he was right.

Not a little right, not the way superiors are right. He was completely right. Three against one. A ledger that closes, against a man who learns what he was once called and carries not one gram more of ceramite for it than before.

I looked at Thal-9-Kyrr.

He had not moved. He never moves when he is being talked about — that is not discipline, that is the fourth erasure, which taught him that conversations about him are not conversations with him.

"Alpha," I said. "It is your wafer."

For the first time since I have known him, he took a long time to answer.

What Is Entered

"What is on it?" he asked.

"I don't know. I have never read it."

"Why not?"

"Because it is not mine."

He nodded, a Skitarii nod, three degrees. Then he said the sentence I have thought of every day since, whenever I walk through the Hall of Balance and see the line in ceramite above the entrance.

"Then I don't know either. And I have managed one hundred and nine days without it."

"That is not an argument," said Sarquil-Vohm.

"No," said Thal-9-Kyrr. "It is a measurement."

He stepped up to the desk and laid the back of his hand on the read-out plate, as the regulation requires when a bearer releases a proof. He did not look at me as he did it. I believe that was kindness.

"Enter the three," he said.

Vey-Tanis waited his half-second. Then he did what he had been built for.

The read-out takes eleven seconds. I had expected it to take longer. One always expects such things to take longer.

What was on the wafer was not a report. It was a channel — Zeta-Milos's voice, one hundred and four minutes long, in a canticle loop he did not break off, because breaking off would have closed the conduit. He sang for one hundred and four minutes so that a door would stay open. In minute eighty one hears Brakk-4-Ondes's registration number, once, very calm. In minute ninety-four one hears nothing more but the loop.

Then the wafer was empty, and three lines in the ledger were full.

What happened afterwards happened quickly and without any ceremony, and I believe that is the most honest part of this whole story. Eleven allocations closed, three times over. A ration entitlement expired while we were still standing in the hall. Two maintenance intervals for leg actuators passed to the distribution, and somewhere in the Lower Ring a bunk came free that someone had by evening.

Maniple Theta was assigned its replacements the next morning: three recruits from the Fourth Caste whose names I do not know, because with Skitarii one does not learn names, but numbers.

It worked. It did exactly what it is built for. I have not met anyone since who would claim it was wrong.

I kept the cog. Vey-Tanis did not demand it, for a proof whose matter has been entered is no longer a proof, but metal.

Thal-9-Kyrr still carries seven mirror-reversed characters in his carapace and still does not know what they mean. He has not asked what was on the wafer. Ossia-7-Rin has not told him either, and she is a veteran, she would have been allowed.

Sarquil-Vohm was right, and the balance is correct, and the gap is closed.

I did something anyway that appears in no ledger.

In the night after the reconciliation I went into the workshop and clamped the pinion in a holder, and I scratched seven characters into it. Not his civil name — I do not know it, I never read the wafer. I scratched in the registration number of Brakk-4-Ondes, the way it sounds in minute eighty when a dying man speaks it: calm, and a little too slow.

It is not an entry. It founds no entitlement. It closes no gap.

Dolvai-Sech saw it and said nothing, and the next morning a second warped pinion lay beside my tools, unasked, with a second number on it.

A loss is not mourned. It is entered.

We enter it. We mourn it too. It just isn't written anywhere.