Anne Wender

Anne Wender did not name the settlement, and could not have refused it.

Wender

She went out in her early forties to a frontier world under charter to the Cairn Trust, hired as a safety officer for a buildout — the decade or more of imported cores, certified crews and rationed power that stands between a founding landing and a colony that can carry itself. It is ordinary work and she was good at it, in the way that is only visible afterwards: the settlement's early years contain no incident anybody remembers, which is what a safety officer is for and is never what one is thanked for.

Then the colony constituted itself and elected her, which is not the same job and answers to a different authority.

The Frontier Corps' caretaker mandate on that world ended in the same afternoon, without review or petition, exactly as its charter requires — one elected sheriff ends it — and the Ranger who had held it attended the swearing-in as the Corps' tradition asks, in civilian clothes, unarmed, at the back of the room.

The settlement took her name at its constitution, and she had no say in it. A world that constitutes its own authority names its own institutions and the Corps has no standing to comment; neither, as it turned out, did she. Anne of Wender followed from that and not from any decision of hers.

The course of the election itself — what the Trust argued, on what grounds, and how long it took — remains to be established in story.

Known History

• Aboard a long-voyage vessel wrecked in deep transit in 2788 UCSD. Every adult aboard died. She was about fifteen and the oldest person left, and the compartment ran for nine days on three rules she made: everyone ate when she said, everyone slept when the lights dimmed on the cycle she kept by hand, and every question got a true answer or the true statement that she did not know.
• Recovered with the other children by Lucene-9000, Xenon and Lumbarian, and carried to Eden Space Habitat — see A Person's Name.
• Gave her name at Eden's intake hall, and her sister's after it. When the form reached the line asking how they were to be housed, she answered "Together" before the question finished, and the officer wrote it down. That word is why Karla Wender and Andrew Falkorian are her family and not three names on one manifest.
• Raised at Eden alongside both, in the care of Lucene-9000, whose escorting never formally ended.
• Went out to the Wender charter in the mid-2810s as a Cairn Trust safety officer.
• Sworn in as the world's first sheriff, closing the Frontier Corps' file on it.

Character Notes

The three rules were a method, and she still uses it. Eat, sleep, and get a true answer — she did not invent a philosophy at fifteen, she invented a rota and a rule against lying, and she has never found a version of the job that wanted anything else. A settlement in buildout wants the same three things a wrecked compartment wants, in the same order, and she has been running that list for forty years.

She counts. On the ninth day she counted eight small machines down the corridor toward the compartment, and when the last lock closed she counted five of them back, and gave the two numbers to nobody. She has been the person with the count ever since — of stock, of shifts, of who is where and whether anyone has been missed — and she is still not in the habit of saying the total out loud unless somebody with a reason asks for it.

She says Lucene, whole and correct, and always has. Her sister made a name out of a designation within minutes of the rescue and has used it privately ever since; Anne noticed at the time that the name had her own inside it, and never found the first idea what to do about that. What she did instead was the plain thing, every time, for four decades. The habit is not distance. Nobody who has watched her do it has ever thought so.

She does not talk about the ship. Not as a wound and not as a subject — she gave a complete account to the people entitled to one, once, a long time ago, and has never been asked a question about it she felt was hers to answer differently since. The rescue's remaining unknowns are unknowns she declined to chase on the night. She has not revised that.

See Also

• A Person's Name — the wreck, the naming, and the word on the form
• Karla Wender — her sister
• Andrew Falkorian — her foster-brother
• Lucene-9000 — who came down the ramp and kept coming
• The Cairn Trust — the charter she went out under
• The Star Rangers Frontier Corps — the mandate her swearing-in ended