Osune

Osune is a Mnemari of Ilenne, Set Down, and the author of one document in the record, By the Chair of That Day: an account of her people given by mouth to a reader of the Federation record at her Held Role, taken down in the reader's rendering and copied to the Survey Archive. The receiving note says why the reader was sent to her: the Federation census holds her as the oldest confirmed Mnemari at last count, past her eleventh century. Her people's page gives that elder without a name, and gives her own account of herself, that she had simply been careful, and somewhat lucky, for a very long time; the account repeats it in her words, and the Archive holds the identification as the Federation record's and not its own.

Her name is given as the reader gave it, and nothing more is known of it. She is she in the reader's rendering, as every Mnemari on the record is.

Known History

• Born on Ilenne, in a room she gives by who was in it and the record does not hold. Young in a long dry spell, walked between the places that held by one who told her which spring held and which only seemed to; she has kept both, and gives the routes to nobody but whoever is walking the next spell (By the Chair of That Day).
• Requested, in years the record does not fix, to sessions of the Federation assembly as a witness of Ilenne. She raised the standing item that Cirrane's delegate is not in the room at every session she was requested to, as Mnemari witnesses do, and was at a table where the Federation's founding was put to its members and each gave a year in its own reckoning; she holds every figure and sets none beside another, because the chair of that day said the Federation does not reconcile them.
• Spoke for Ilenne to a Federation demographer at a census, and gave her age as a room; the number the census holds is the demographer's.
• Served one long posting among mortal-lifespan colleagues, long enough to see most of them out, and was the first Mnemari to leave that institution, which held nothing for it because it did not yet know to. What her last colleague said at the door is in the account.
• Set Down, in a year the record does not hold, when she judged that what she carried was crowding the present; witnessed; in a Held Role since, sitting as a witness of last resort when a dispute wants a memory nobody can contest.
• In 2826 UCSD, Set Down on Ilenne and on no roll the assembly requests. Of the Star Rangers' first table with the Federation she gives nothing, since she was not in that room, and sends the reader to Ulessa, who was.

Character Notes

The account shows a witness who has been asked for less and less and answers exactly what she is asked, in the order it was said, and stops. She dates nothing by a year and gives every room by the chair of that day, knowing the name means nothing to the record, and says that it means the room. She marks her grades as the Archive marks its own: a room given to her by another witness is a lower grade than one she stood in, and she says so. She declines in the same register she gives in: the routes between the springs are for the next spell and not for the record, and the name of the chair at which the standing item was first raised is held, not lost, and was not asked for.

What her people's page calls a liability she calls one too, and says she has learned to carry it slowly. The one dry thing in the account, that she tends no archive since she is one, is said flat, and the reader did not write that it was a joke. Nothing she says of herself is framed as a feat; asked twice, by the census and by the reader, whether she was remarkable, she gave the same answer both times.

What the Record Does Not Carry

Her age beyond past her eleventh century, which is the census's figure and not hers. Her body, which the portrait shows as the record now draws it: filed in Endoskelia, built by Ilenne's uplands and not on the human frame, as the standing refusal requires, and drawn on Ulessa's page as three tall legs arched to a hub, the body slung beneath, and a long neck that carries the head forward. Her kin, and what Ilenne's kin-councils decided in bringing her into being. The posting she served, its institution and its world. The sessions she was requested to, which are on the Federation record and are not listed. The year of her Setting-Down, and what was said at it. The Mnemari language, which the reader rendered and the record does not hold. The name of the chair she can give and was not asked for.

See also

• By the Chair of That Day
• Mnemari, the people, and Ilenne, the world whose dry spells her account walks
• Ulessa, the witness on the roll she sends the reader to
• The Federation of Sentient Beings, whose record sent the reader, and Ollune, for the standing item
• Marked Absences, the doctrine the receiving note files her rooms under