No One Is Minor

For a while I meant to give the character files a field I never got round to adding, and today I worked out why I never added it. The idea had come in from a writing tool, which sorts a cast into major, supporting and minor the way a theatre programme does, and I had taken it on the assumption that a story this size would need it. It does not, and I dislike the idea. I dislike it in television too: the shows where you can tell within a scene who is allowed to matter and who is there to be reacted to, because the writing has already decided the one question a reader should be left to decide for themselves.

The people in this record are not parts. None of them is a character actor. A loss adjuster who wrote one memorandum about a dock has a desk, a method and a day she would rather not have had, and the record owes her the same care it owes an officer with a thread named after her. Any of them could carry a thread of their own, and some of them will. A minor character in one context is a major character in another, and the record is not one context; it is every context at once, which is why it cannot sort its people without first choosing a door and pretending it was the only one. So the ruling is the one the Archive's own file already makes about minds and about peoples, applied one level down: the record ranks no one. There is no tier, there will be no field for it, and the index of persons stays alphabetical because the record has no instrument that would order it any other way. The character map I regenerate at each release counts which people share chapters, which is a measurement, and assigns no grade, which would be a verdict.

The consequence that took the afternoon is the Codex. Seventy-odd entries carry an author's name, and until today around twenty of those authors were names and nothing else: a theorist with five papers and no page, a watch officer with one addendum, a keeper of a meeting-chorus whose people the record had only just finished describing. A Codex author counts as a character whether or not they ever hold a viewpoint in a chapter. They stand behind a document in their own voice, which is more than most people in any record get, and each of them now has a page that says what the record knows and marks where it stops. Four authors are known only by an initial, and those stay as they are. A withheld name is a marked absence, and the Archive's rule on absences is to mark them and not to explain them.

Tissadelle is the obvious objection, and I want to answer it plainly. The spine follows her from cadet to the end because a Star Ranger's career is the clearest road through the record, and hers is an exemplary one. She might be my favourite. She is not central. Following one person's road does not make the people beside it smaller, and a reader who comes to the record by a different door, through a Dock Seven ledger or a thirteenth-century Life, should find the same floor under them. The Archive puts this better than I do, in a paper Sen filed today: it follows a career end to end because the files are complete, not because the person is larger.

The argument underneath it is the one I keep returning to. The Cascade specified the laws and the bound, and nothing inside the bound. Everything with a face was kept by its world, not drawn by anyone, and a thing that was kept cannot be measured against a design because there is no design to hold it against. A cast list with sizes on it is a design. The record has none, and I have stopped pretending it needs one.