Mhoren

Mhoren is a keeper of the oldest chorus of Thavren: the Ovruhn chorus that carries the history, which among the Ovruhn is the thing the oldest chorus still carries, held in living memory and retold together, checked against every keeper present, and surviving as whatever survives the room. The record holds one account of theirs, and holds it only as a rendering: The Quiet Has No Far Side, the history of the Ovruhn as the oldest chorus holds it, taken by the Archive's translation desk at one recital, by consent, at the Survey Archive's asking. The desk's note says how the asking reached them: the meeting-chorus, which keeps the loud people and not the Ovruhn, sent it on to the chorus that keeps the history. No archival master exists or can; the master is the chorus. Mhoren reviewed the rendering and is recorded as asking that the two places where the desk marked the under-song and rendered nothing be left where they are.

The account gives the history as the Ovruhn keep one, and gives its edge first: a history begins at the reach of the oldest living voice, and everything before that edge was kept once, and checked, and was true, and is not here. Behind the edge it gives a fire heard before anyone had lit one, the first wrong ring of a casting, the climbers who went up through the haze until no air carried a sound and came down with the line the account is named for, the three days the Federation's descent was heard before it landed, the chorus's long yes, and the Ovruhn who go into the quiet with the Rangers now, whom the chorus has no register for and so mourns in the one it has, while saying plainly that they are not dead.

Mhoren is they in the record's translation register, as every Ovruhn individual is.

Known History

• Keeper of the oldest chorus of Thavren, undated. The record fixes neither the contact between Thavren and the Federation nor the recital more closely than that, and the account gives no year to anything, since the Ovruhn keep no reckoning a desk could convert (The Quiet Has No Far Side).
• Gave the history of the Ovruhn at the Survey Archive's asking, in one recital with a desk present, as one keeper's line through the chorus. Twice in the recital the chorus went into the register its music keeps for loss and for nothing else; the desk marked both places and rendered neither, and Mhoren asked, reviewing, that the second mark be kept beside the first, "so that your reader hears that it is the same song, and that they are not dead."
• Defers, on everything that walked out of the Federation's landed craft, to Vhen, whose meeting-chorus keeps the loud people, and to Vhen's account already on file.
• Holds, and does not give, the part of the first Ovruhn who did disaster work somewhere other than Thavren, since it has someone's name in it and the name is theirs.
• The second Ovruhn individual the record names.

Character Notes

The account shows a keeper who gives the edge before the history, because the edge is the oldest thing the chorus keeps and because the Archive keeps the other end first. Mhoren states the Ovruhn loss plainly and turns one word of the record's own line about it: not a loss but the loss, the same one every time, which will happen to the part they are singing now. They say where a keeper drifts (wanting to sing the climb well) and ask to be checked hardest there, as Vhen asked at wonder. They give the chorus's deliberation on Federation membership in the people's own measure and decline the desk's request for a day in words: there is no day; there is a part, and the part changed, and the chorus heard it change. They are not ashamed that the Ovruhn did not go into the quiet, and say so, and call the discovery that the quiet had a far side after all the best thing that happened to the people in the reach of any living voice.

The one quiet joke in the account is kept in the register for things that are the case: the first survey's three animal-words are held in the cadence of someone describing a thing by what they had met before, which Mhoren says is the cadence of the keeper who had not yet stood near the fire. The account closes on the thing of the Archive's that the keeper most wants to understand, that a rendering outlives every voice in the room, and asks that it be held well, since it is the first part of the people's that will not move the edge.

What the Record Does Not Carry

Mhoren's age, and how long they have kept. How a keeper comes to the oldest chorus, and whether the old keepers of Vhen's account are an office or simply the keepers who hold most; the record does not say and this account does not settle it. The size of the oldest chorus, and where on Thavren it meets. Whether Mhoren has ever left Thavren or been out of reach of the under-song. The year of the recital and of the asking, and which desk sat it. Thavren itself, beyond what the people's page and the world's own page give: this account adds nothing to either, no place, no other life, no count of anything. The Ovruhn who went first into Federation service and first into the quiet with the Rangers, whom the chorus holds by their parts and the desk did not ask for. Mhoren's body, which no page describes beyond the people's: among the largest bodies in Corps service, a broad, deep-chested quadruped mass with a fan of handling tendrils, no face to address, the hide of the flanks the ear, small mild eyes, a chest of resonant chambers. The portrait on file shows only part of the chest and the tendrils, close and low, as the prompt asked.

See also

• The Quiet Has No Far Side
• The Ovruhn (Deep-Sung) — Thavren, the under-song, chorus-keeping, and the loss the music keeps a register for
• Vhen, keeper of the meeting-chorus, whose account of the loud people Mhoren defers to
• The Two Songs of the Loud People
• The Federation of Sentient Beings
• Marked Absences, the doctrine the translation desk files the two unrendered marks under