Orisseth

Orisseth is a Prismeri of Prismere, Full Wings, a reader of one of the astrogation guilds that read the sky over Prismere for the Federation and, under the standing material compact, confirm fold-corridor conditions for the Survey Corps. The record holds one account of theirs, Two Points in One Life: the history of the Prismeri as a guild reader reads it, given at a Survey Corps confirmation table on Prismere at the Survey Archive's asking, in the working rendering the guild's confirmations already come to the table in, and taken down by the Corps' reader. The receiving note says how the asking reached them: a guild answered that a history is not a thing a guild confirms, and sent a reader anyway. Which guild, the desk did not press, and the account does not say. Orisseth gave it hanging, the Corps' reader standing below, and said first that this meant nothing.

The name is given as the Federation record gives it, and nothing more is known of it, as nothing more is known of the name of Isserith, the one Prismeri the record named before them. The record renders Orisseth as they, the translation default and the people's page's own usage of an individual; no pronoun system is declared for the people, and none is proposed here. Orisseth is the second Prismeri the record names, and not Prismere's delegate to the Federation assembly of Nobody Present, who is Full Wings and unnamed and stays so.

Known History

• Born on Prismere, in a lumenspire settlement the record does not name, in a year it does not hold. First Wings from birth, as every Prismeri is.
• A scout of that settlement in First Wings, good in the close spaces by their own account, since nobody in the guild would say it for them; knew the groves by their stall, which is how a First Wings knows a grove. Had the shadow on the facet band once, under the canopy where the rays do not hunt, from something that was not a ray and that they never identified and did not go back to look for (Two Points in One Life).
• Entered the Second Emergence at a point the record does not fix and came out Full Wings, too heavy for the groves they had known; went up into the haze, and could read what the sky showed, and was taken into a guild for it. Taught the forest by a scout who never left it, and says nothing they read in the haze is read better than they read the groves.
• A reader since, at the confirmation table and in the haze. Has never been on an off-world posting; gives what readers who have come back say of them, in the order they say it.
• Answered the Survey Archive's asking for a history of the Prismeri by one of them, at a guild's sending, and gave it by the form of the one who saw each thing and nothing by a year. Offered the desk the standing of the corridors over Prismere at the Federation's first asking, as it had come down to them, and said in advance that it would mean nothing at the Archive's table; the desk declined it for that reason. Asked, at the close, what the kinship finding had cost the record, and was not answered; the desk files that the question was asked. The year of the asking is not given in the receiving note.

Character Notes

The account shows a reader who gives a history the way their guild reads a life, in two forms with a shell between, and who says at the start that the whole of it is a reading and not a record, since the Prismeri were themselves read from the ground and read wrong twice by people who meant well. Orisseth declines a year for anything and says why: a guild keeps confirmations, a confirmation is a thing that was so on a day, and the day is kept by the sky, which does not count. They give the people's First Wings as the forest, where everything the people are was made and most of it still lives, and are careful to say that a First Wings life is a life entire and not a beginning. They give the shell twice, the person's and the people's, and describe the inside of neither, since it is not history and nothing said about it from outside is true. On the trigger of the Emergence they say one thing more than the guilds say, which is why the guilds say nothing, and mark it as the reader's reason and not the guild's.

They hold the Federation's two preliminary species reports as a careful mistake and not a grievance, think no less of the first report for being wrong, and set one correction against the record at the close: the report that said two peoples was wrong about the people and right about the lives, and the naturalist who kept the first two sheets as drawn and redrew only the third is the one who filed what the Prismeri are. They say the compact runs one way, toward the Corps, and give a reader's reason for wanting it kept so: a confirmation is worth something only while the one who gives it wants nothing back for it. The one quiet joke in the account is kept in the register for things that are the case: that a surveyor who walks through a lumenspire and sees nothing made until they look at where the weight goes has given the people the oldest praise they have had, without knowing it.

Of their own Emergence they say that what the forest lost the settlement knows and they do not ask, and that what they lost is answered by the body: a Full Wings does not hang from a First Wings ledge, and the ledge is still there, visible from the haze on a clear night by the forest's light.

What the Record Does Not Carry

Orisseth's age in either form, and the natural span of a Prismeri life, which no page gives. The settlement they scouted for, and the guild they read for, neither named. Their kin, whom the people's kinship records hold and the Archive does not. The year of the asking, and which Survey Corps reader sat the table. What the shadow under the canopy was. Whether Orisseth has met a Ranger away from the confirmation table, or any human but the Corps' readers there. What a Prismeri on a Ranger liaison posting is on the Corps' rolls, a sworn Ranger or a seconded guild member, which the record has not established and the account does not say; Orisseth has been on no posting and has not asked. The Prismeri language, which the record has not described in any channel; the working rendering the account was given in is the compact's and not a description of the people's speech. How a settlement or a guild decides anything. Whether Prismeri is the people's own word, which the account answers only with at this table we answer to it. Any chapter. Their body, beyond what the people's page gives every Full Wings adult: hardened gold-and-blue plate over a light, long, level-spined frame, wings that are the forelimbs with three free clawed fingers at the leading edge, long-toed prehensile hind feet, two large forward eyes set low and a band of facets along the skull ridge, the long motile crystalline tendrils that grow from that ridge at the Emergence, a short neck and no tail; nothing on record tells one Full Wings Prismeri from another by sight. No portrait is on file; the prompt is written.

See also

• Two Points in One Life
• Prismeri, the people, and Prismere, for the Lattice, the lumenspires and the haze
• Isserith, the first Prismeri the record names, First Wings and in no guild
• Plates of the Prismeri, the naturalist's sheets, and Halle Ostrander, who redrew the third after the kinship finding
• The Federation of Sentient Beings, for the compact the guilds serve, and The Ladder in Other Tongues, for the ranks nobody from Prismere has rendered
• Marked Absences, the rule the receiving desk files the unidentified shadow under