pelagine polity

The Tyrian Court

A Pelagine polity centred on the eastern wall of the Trench of Avals; the principal interlocutor of the human survey since first contact.

I have written about the Court more often than about anything else in the survey, and I am still not sure what I am writing about. The word court is ours; the protocols are theirs. We are admitted to them on a schedule we did not draft, with a vocabulary they have been patient with, at depths neither side can comfortably hold for long.

The Tyrian Court is the polity the survey speaks to. Whether it is also the polity that speaks for the Pelagine is a question on which the Court itself has been politely opaque.

Form

The Court is not a court in the human sense. The translatable name appears to refer both to a body of officeholders and to a place — the eastern wall of Avals — and to a duration: a span within which certain decisions are considered open. Treaties are signed in named durations.

Relationship to the survey

Cordial, formal, slow. Treaties are negotiated at Marker IX on a quarterly cadence. The Court has not attempted to ascend above the liminal band, and has politely declined the Conservancy's offer of an instrumented submersible visit to the surface (which would, in any event, be fatal).

What the Court is not

It is not a kingdom. It is not a senate. It is not, despite recurrent surface speculation, a religion.

Whether the Court speaks for the Pelagine, or only for itself, is the question I have been told politely not to ask. I have stopped asking it. I have not stopped listening for the answer.