Chapter 8: Senator Solume Discovers the Subsection Has Been There Since the Beginning

The difficulty, Solume had found across four decades of legislative work, was never the reading. It was the re-reading—the return to a document already consumed and filed, when the consuming had been done in haste or by rote and the filing had served, without one's quite intending it, as a mechanism for not continuing to think about the thing filed.

He had sent his aide home at the eighth hour. He had sent the session's secondary staff home at the ninth. By the eleventh hour, when the Senate's evening maintenance crew had completed their circuit of the outer corridors and the great marble building had achieved the specific quality of silence that belonged only to institutions after hours—a silence not of emptiness but of held breath, of structure persisting in the absence of its ostensible purpose—Solume sat alone at his desk beneath a single lamp, with four centuries of Concordance trade legislation arranged around him in a topography that would have concerned his housekeeping staff considerably, had any of them remained to observe it.

He had begun with the document he trusted least: the Syndicate's filing itself, subsection fourteen, read now for the fifth time with the particular attention he had been unable to give it in the session's recess, when the knowledge that the chamber was waiting had placed a kind of temporal pressure on his comprehension. He read it slowly. He moved his lips, fractionally, in the manner he had not permitted himself since his first decade of legal study, when the habit had been necessary and then overcome and was now returned—not from necessity, he recognized, but from the instinct that certain texts required the body's participation to be properly processed, as though meaning resided not only in the signs but in the act of making them.