Chapter 24: Solume Takes the Floor for the Last Time

The forty-ninth emergency session of the Concordance Senate was called to order at the ninth hour past meridian on the fourteenth day of the Third Commercial Quarter, and the session record—one of the more complete documents in the Bureau's collection, preserved through the fortunate accident of its custodial administrator having taken a personal copy home that evening, a practice technically prohibited by parliamentary procedure and here, as in several other instances across this chronicle, the sole reason that anything survived at all—notes the chamber's attendance as one hundred and twelve of the full one hundred and fifty-three seated membership.

Forty-one absent.

I have spent some portion of my eleven years with this document considering those forty-one absences. Not all of them were arranged. Some were illness, prior commitment, the ordinary attrition of a body whose membership had been eroding in confidence and cohesion for the better part of three years. But some of them—and the session's pre-circulation list, recovered separately, confirms this with a precision I find neither coincidental nor comforting—were senators who had in the preceding seventy-two hours received, through channels I have traced in four cases and suspected in nine others, communications advising them of scheduling conflicts that did not, upon examination, exist.