Vhen

Vhen is a keeper of the meeting-chorus of Thavren: the Ovruhn chorus that holds the keeping of the loud people, which is to say humans, the way the Ovruhn hold everything worth keeping — not written, but retold in overlapping voices, 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. No archival master exists or can; the master is the chorus. The Archive's translation desk took the text at one recital, by consent, flattened one keeper's line through it to a single voice, and marked the under-song only where the chorus's response made its content unmistakable. Vhen reviewed the rendering and is recorded as finding it "quiet, but not wrong."

The account is of humans, and is fair to them by its own repeated insistence. Humans have two songs, the word-song they shape and the body-song they cannot, and the songs do not agree; on Thavren they were never two, and the first meetings foundered exactly there. Human symbolic systems are "the finest thing our chorus has ever been asked to hold". A quiet human is to be filed as unread, neither safety nor threat.

Known History

• Keeper of the meeting-chorus of Thavren, undated. The record fixes neither the contact between Thavren and the Federation nor the recital more closely than that. The Two Songs of the Loud People.
• Holds the chorus's corrected error about human aggression — the once a human body stayed quiet all the way to the end of a thing — as a mark and a change of practice, not a scene, as the old keepers ruled. The chorus confirmed that passage in full unison, which the translation desk is advised is rare.
• The receiving desk's filing note holds the account valid for its keeper and notes one asymmetry: it measures humans against Thavren's baseline throughout, as every record does that has not yet noticed it is doing it.
• The first Ovruhn individual the record names; Mhoren, keeper of the oldest chorus, is the second.

Character Notes

Vhen keeps by asking to be checked. "Check me" opens the account and closes it, and the chorus is asked to check hardest at the two places a keeper drifts: wonder, and the old error. The account holds confirmed and felt apart — human offices that pass from body to body with the word-song intact are held "the way I hold deep arithmetic — confirmed, and not yet felt" — and ends by declaring the keeping unfinished, since the loud people are still arriving in it. The rendering carries the chorus's amusement, and under it old embarrassment at what the Ovruhn did before they knew better.

Vhen is they in the record's translation register, as every Ovruhn individual is. Age, line, the size of the meeting-chorus and whether Vhen has ever left Thavren are not on file; the record holds one recital and the keeper's three-word verdict on its rendering.

See also

• The Two Songs of the Loud People
• The Ovruhn (Deep-Sung) — Thavren, the under-song, and chorus-keeping
• Mhoren, keeper of the oldest chorus, whose history of the Ovruhn, The Quiet Has No Far Side, defers to Vhen on the loud people
• The Federation of Sentient Beings
• What the Record Refuses