Calendrical Rot

 

 

THIS IS THE way the hexarchate tells it, the one true clock, but they’re wrong. When incendiaries candle across dire moons, when voidmoths migrate across the missile-scratched night, when exiles carve their death poems into the marrow of ruined stars, the whisper across the known worlds is not unity.

In the year 1251 of the high calendar, on the 26th day of the month of the Hawk, a judge of the Gray Marches was assassinated. As a member of the high court, she was to sentence the city-station of Nran. Nran’s underworld dated its transactions using a calendar sewn together from perfect numbers and criminals’ death-days. The hexarchate often approved local calendar conversions in concession to celestial cycles, but the criminal calendar conflicted with the high calendar, and this the hexarchate would not abide.

The assassin used a compression gun to reduce the judge’s lifespan to a flicker-slash of milliseconds. When the judge’s bodyguard found the corpse, they saw the dross of years lived and unlived. Each stratum of the fossilized carcass contained fractures in the language of paradox, the stress residue of decisions dissented. Later, when the technicians inspected the remains, they would find, in the innermost stratum, evidence of a threadbare counterfactual in which the judge ascended to hexarch.

Divination by compression wasn’t illegal because it involved murder. It was illegal because it didn’t work. Nothing could restore the judge’s life, however bright her prospects might have been had she been luckier.

The technicians noted the judge’s time of death. She died at 17.23, on a day with 30 hours and in an hour with 100 minutes. All across Nran and its satellite tributaries this was true.

The nearby system of Khaio had a major city known for fine circuitry and a charming practice of eating honeyed crickets at funerals. It was uncertain, from the city’s standpoint, whether the clocks read 17.23 or 16.97 or something in between when the judge died. In a realm governed by a universal clock, the tyrannical lockstep of calendar, there should have been a single answer—and there was not.

In the Gray Marches, where the grave-dust of stars floated in thick drifts and shattered asteroids spelled out praises to catastrophes, at the hexarchate’s unfurnaced boundary, there were yet cities. Some were built of recycled vessels braided together with glittering filament. Some bore names in toxic alphabets. Others flashed paeans to vast suicide formations.

At the judge’s death, every clock in the Gray Marches broke. The great engines that powered the dust cities sputtered and died.

Had it only been a matter of cities, the hexarchs would have been indifferent. Cities could be rebuilt and engines replaced. But the voidmoths that traveled between the hexarchate’s star systems depended on the universality of the high calendar for their function. In regions where other calendars dominated, their stardrives were useless, inert.

In the Gray Marches’ gardens, flowers opened and closed and crumpled, trapped between night and morning.

Calendrical rot had set in.

 

 

Author’s Note

 

This story started life as the prologue to Ninefox Gambit. I sometimes wonder if the novel would have been more accessible if I’d left it in. I wrote it despite hating prologues and being convinced that in over 95% of cases they are either unnecessary or could have been incorporated into the novel another, better way. The only novel prologue that I actively support is that of Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay. So I lopped this off and forgot about it until I got an anthology call, and then I sent it in on the grounds that the worst that could happen was the editor would say no. As it turned out, the editor liked it! Sometimes a little optimism pays off.

The language in this piece owes a lot to one of my favorite science fiction poems, Mike Allen’s “Metarebellion.” I regret that I no longer own his poetry chapbook Petting the Time Shark, which included it (the flood again). But you can find it online at Strange Horizons. The other influence, which I have read over and over, is Tony Daniel’s “A Dry, Quiet War,” one of my favorite stories of future war.