Tare

Tare is a reader of the ledgers. The Tally have no rank that is not a role and no role that is not rotated, and the reader's is one of them: when the ledgers are shown to anyone, they are shown in the hull, in the Tally's language, by a reader who turns the pages. The Survey Corps has asked to see them three times and been shown them each time. At the third showing the reader was Tare.

She was born aboard, as every Tally has been for three centuries. Her birth is in the ledger, which among her people means it is counted and not that it is carried; the Tally have declined to give the record their number, and the record holds the refusal as the settlement's own business. So the Archive knows her age exactly as well as it knows anyone's aboard, which is not at all.

Her name in her own tongue is a word of the count, as her people's own name is, and the Archive renders it by what it says rather than reproducing it, on the same convention: Tare is the weight of the vessel, entered first so that what the vessel carries can be counted on its own. Whether a Tally name is given at birth or taken with a role, and what hers would mean to the person beside her, the record does not state.

Known History

• Born in the hull at the Mooring, in a Tally year the record does not hold.
• Reader of the ledgers at the Survey Corps' third showing: the pages turned in the hull, in her language, copies neither offered nor asked for.
• Present in the hull in 2826 UCSD; the record places her nowhere else and has no reason to.

Character Notes

What the record holds of her is manner, and the manner is her people's: exact, courteous, unhurried. She turns a page when the reader before her has finished it and not before, and she does not hand the book across. When the Survey's reader asked, at the third showing, roughly how far back a particular run of entries went, she gave the figure to the day and waited, and the Survey's own note of the visit records that it was the Survey who had been discourteous and not she.

She does not look at the sky. There is nothing in it the Tally count, and the body their hull is moored to has a name that is not for the sky's sake; the Sun, in her own account as in her people's, is the light that was. What she thinks of the people who come out to look at the books, and go home to estimate, she has not said on any record the Archive holds. What she does is exact and small: she turns the pages, every one, and closes the book.

The record gives her no family, no role before the reader's and none after it, since the roles rotate and the ledger that holds the sequence is not carried. It does not say who read at the first two showings, or whether the two Rangers' visits, both in the ledger, were read to anyone.

See also

• The Tally
• The Generation-Ark Era and The Habitat Threshold, for a set of books nobody else keeps
• Tove Strand, who brings the Survey's readers out and takes them home
• The Survey Corps