Why We Measure Time In Hells

Greetings, my dear readers. Lu'kifær Morkinstar. Journal Entry #2300, and the first in all of them that is not filed from a world.

I am on the Directory. Not a planet, before anyone writes in: the Galactic Directory is an object, a ring about the size of a small moon, and I have spent my entire career being paid by it and had until eleven days ago set foot on it precisely twice (both times to file paperwork, which tells you everything about how glamorous this job actually is).

I came here to ask about a footnote.

Every one of my entries ends with a terminology block. You have read four hundred of them if you have read four hundred of these. And in every one of those blocks, near the bottom, sits this line:

Milgalaxal — Equivalent to 2228 Hellheims or 2455 Earth Years.

A click is one Hellheim is two Earth years. That is the base of the whole system and it has never wavered. So 2228 Hellheims should be 4456 Earth years.

It says 2455.

I noticed this in Entry #1906. I have filed four correction requests. The first three were acknowledged. The fourth was acknowledged with a note thanking me for my continued diligence, which I took at the time as sarcasm and which I now understand was nothing of the kind.

Nobody fixed it. And across every document the Directory has produced in 61 galaxals, that line has stood, wrong, in the same wrong way, and I have watched three generations of correspondents copy it out without looking at it, myself included, several hundred times.

So I came here with my face and asked.

The department I was sent to is called Deep Registry. It is nine decks down on the unlit side and it is one room. There is one clerk. His name is Ossul, he has held the post for 22 galaxals, and when I explained why I had come he put down what he was holding and looked at me with an expression I have seen exactly once before, on a Marltain woman on a hillside who told me my pair was running late.

He said: nobody has ever come down here about that.

Not "nobody has asked". Nobody has come. Four requests in writing, from me, routed to this room, sitting in a queue behind nothing, for four hundred entries.

Here is what he told me, in about six minutes, without hesitating, because he has known it for 22 galaxals and there has never been anyone to tell.

The 2455 figure is not a typo. It is a correct conversion. It is correct for a different Hellheim.

The Hellheim was redefined. Once, a long time ago. The old one ran about 1.1 Earth years. The new one runs 2. The galaxal line was updated at the changeover, along with every other line in the table, by a competent team who did a thorough job.

The milgalaxal line was not.

And I asked, because I am a reporter and it is the only question I have, why the Hellheim was redefined at all. A base unit is a base unit. You do not touch it.

He said: because a Hellheim was keyed to the year length of a specific world, and that world was Concluded, and a Directory unit may not be keyed to a Concluded world.

I asked him to say that again and he said it again in exactly the same words.

There is a procedural document. He showed it to me. It is short and dry and it says that when a world receives the Concluded flag, any Standard measure derived from that world's rotation, orbit, or biology shall be rebased against an active reference within one galaxal, and that all derived values shall be restated.

Every line in that table was restated.

Except one.

Which means, my dear readers, and I had to sit down on the floor of Deep Registry while I worked this out, that the number 2455 in the terminology block at the bottom of four hundred of my entries is the last surviving measurement of that planet's year. It is the only place in the Galactic Directory where the length of that world's trip around its star is still written down. Everything else about it was restated into the new units. That one line was missed, and by being missed, was preserved.

I have spent four hundred entries and four formal requests trying to get it deleted.

Ossul knew. That is why it has never been corrected. He has been quietly failing to action those requests for 22 galaxals, and his predecessor did the same, and he does not have the authority to protect it any other way, and he has never told anyone because the safest place for that number is a queue nobody reads.

And since I had him, and since Deep Registry apparently keeps everything nobody else wants, I asked Ossul to pull the bearing surveys too, the ones I started taking on Jötunheimr back in Entry #2277. I promised you a result either way. He found six worlds on file with anything aimed at anything, and the six bearings do not agree, not even loosely, so that is the whole report: no pattern, no thread, just six worlds pointing at six different pieces of sky, and me finally allowed to let it go.

I asked him what the world was called.

He said the Directory does not hold that. Concluded files are closed and the designations are numeric. He can tell me the number. He offered.

I said no.

[Fun Directory Fact #1- and the last one I am ever going to file. Deep Registry has one chair. Ossul brought me a second one, from another deck, on the eleventh day. I did not ask him to. I did not tell him about Marlt. He has never been to Marlt.]

Now the rest of it, quickly, because I want to get to the end.

I asked Ossul where the unit names come from. Hellheim. Purgaheim. Words I have typed several thousand times and never once looked at.

He gave me the founding charter. Not a copy. The charter, in a case, on a shelf, in the room, unlocked, exactly like a wooden box by a window on Cendre.

The Galactic Directory was founded by fourteen.

Fourteen signatories. Their names are on the back page and I read all fourteen and I am not going to reproduce them here and you will see why in a moment.

Section 3 of that charter is titled Standard Intervals, and it does not define the units mathematically. It defines them by citation. Each interval is named for a realm out of a cosmology, and the cosmology is not identified anywhere in the document, because at the time of writing everyone signing it evidently knew the reference and did not think it needed a footnote.

There are eight intervals in Section 3. Galactic Standard uses six.

The two that are not in use are defined, named, and have no length assigned to them. The charter's phrasing, verbatim, is:

Interval: not yet required.

They wrote down two units of time at the founding, gave them names, and left the length blank, because nothing had yet lasted long enough to need them.

The realms, in the order the charter gives them, run from the coldest and lowest to the highest, which is a shape you will recognise if your culture has ever had an afterlife, and most of yours have.

Galactic Standard time is measured in afterlives.

Every date I have ever filed. Every date you have ever read. Two thousand three hundred entries, all of them stamped in units named after the sequence of places a thing goes once it is finished, by fourteen founders whose first stated purpose, in the charter's opening line, is:

to produce a complete and final account of every world.

Complete. And final.

And I owe the Template Hypothesis its last line, because I gave it a name in Entry #2263 and a funeral in #2291 and it deserves better than being left in a drawer.

I was not wrong that the Directory was in this somewhere. I was wrong about which way round it goes. I spent five entries trying to prove that my employer had printed a number onto worlds that never asked for it, and the number was not printed onto anything. It walked in here, at the founding, and signed the back page, and everything since has been copied forward off that.

I had the arrow backwards for fifty-five entries. That is not the worst thing about it. The worst thing is that I would have got there faster if I had been willing to think worse of the Directory rather than better, and I was not, because it pays for the ship.

Let me lay out what I have, in the order I got it, and then I will stop.

Eight worlds gave me fourteen gods and fourteen monsters and thirteen names.

A mason on Jötunheimr told me the fourteenth is not one of theirs, because it is on everyone's list.

A custodian on Cendre showed me a page with one word on it, four thousand clicks old, written by a child, and told me it was the fourteenth's name, and I read it and would not copy it, and I am about to.

A storyteller on Solvei told me, as an aside, that there were only ever fourteen, that each has a front and a back, that thirteen of them split when they were finally observed from both sides, and that the one that did not split is named only on the god lists, because its front and its back are the same face and it only ever had the one name.

It has no name on the monster lists, he said. Its name is already on the other one.

And on a world with no number, forty million people are well, and fed, and healthy, and have no gods and no stories and no word for why, and their file carries a status flag that reads:

Survey complete; no phenomena outstanding; no further contact indicated.

Six hundred and eleven worlds carry it. That was the number when I asked. I asked again from Deep Registry eleven days later, out of a professional thoroughness I now wish I had suppressed, and it is six hundred and twelve.

The word on the Cendran child's page is one syllable. The rig renders it four ways and they are all the same word.

It renders as Done.

Which is, in the Directory's own procedural language, in the flag on six hundred and twelve files, in the founding charter's first line, and at the bottom of every single entry I have ever written:

Concluded.

I have signed off two thousand two hundred and ninety-nine times with the same sentence. This is Lu'kifær Morkinstar concluding Journal Entry #NNNN. I chose that wording myself, when I was young and thought it sounded professional, and I have typed it more times than I have said my own mother's name.

I am not going to tell you the fourteenth god's name on your world. I could not anyway, there are too many of you and you all call it something different.

But I can tell you where it is written. It is at the top of your list. It is the one who orders and keeps and completes, the one who is the patron of records and endings and rest, the one nobody has ever been afraid of, the one that is always at the top because your ancestors put it there out of gratitude.

Go and look at the top of your list. I will wait. I have nothing else to do.

Here is the last thing, and then I want to talk about how this entry ends.

On Grïnjdarlay there is a monster called Uhl who eats names, and a god called Ösrun who gave everything ninety-nine of them so that Uhl could never finish, and a deaf child called Tveggi who worked out that a name does not have to be a sound, and cut a mark into a rock, and thereby made the one name that a mouth with no hands could not take.

The Vöskh still use it. A single vertical scratch at the top of every document on that planet. It has no sound. If you ask what it says they look at you as though you have asked what a wall says.

I have drawn it at the top of this page. You will not see it because you are reading a transmission and the Directory's rendering standard has no glyph for it, and I filed a request about that too, and I hope very much that nobody actions it.

And now the ending.

Feeriko talked to a serpent for a momenta because the deal was that if she stopped, he would stop. Tveggi cut a mark. Sœbra kept a tally that burned and got put in a pantheon for it anyway. Hild-Ronn dug a hole and put her mother in it standing up and started a wall that is still being built. The Ombri hold a cold thing and keep counting past eleven and it has never once worked and they have never once stopped. And every ninth generation the Væhn burn everything they own and hand a stylus to a six year old and ask for one thing nobody has ever said.

Not one of those is a victory. I have filed nine legends and there is not a single clean win in any of them.

Every one of them is somebody refusing to let the account be closed.

That is the only move on the board. It is the same move on every world, in every system, in every language, and it has never once been enough, and it has always been enough for one more click.

So.

I have a wooden case to build and ninety-one pages to start and about four hundred clicks of complaints to withdraw.

This is Lu'kifær Morkinstar.

This is Journal Entry #2300.

I am not going to file this one under a