Colophon

This is what the volume is. A field manuscript kept against forgetting, by a cartographer-naturalist on contract to a survey that has paid me to look and to record what looking returned. I have written from inside the working country, from the rim of a pane at Marker IX, from a porthole at the Vault of Hours, and from a bell holding station above the Boneward in March. The chapters are the order I would now ask a reader to take them in; the dates are the order they were written.

What this volume is not: a complete account, an ethnographic study, a treaty document, or a guidebook. The Pelagine polities have their own records and have not asked me to compile parallel ones. The Conservancy keeps its own log of saturation hours, mooring inspections, and signatory attendances. The Filament Guild keeps its own cable diaries. What I have kept is the part that did not fit any of those ledgers — the kelp at sixty metres, the engineer who killed the work-lights, the two minutes of silence at the pane that I have tried to write three times.

I have copied the arrival entry forward into the second rotation’s ledger, and again into the third, with no edits, which is the closest I have come to admitting it is the chapter the rest of these begin from. I have stopped counting ascents. The contract closes at the end of the present rotation. Whether there will be a Volume II depends on the next contract, and on whether what is recorded in Volume I has earned the next one its own keeping.

For the reader: the Codex is the lookup shelf and the Atlas the map; treat them as appendices to the chapters, not as the structure of the world. The Glossary preserves real-world diving terminology because the diving is not the part of this world that is fictional.