The Waymeasured

The Waymeasured hold that Oranth’s visibility is light, tide and haze behaving precisely as light, tide and haze behave, that the variation has causes, and that the causes are the proper object of reverence. This is not skepticism and Serath has never treated it as such. It is a devotion whose discipline happens to be arithmetic.

Their observation is the finest on the moon and they are quietly vain about it. Where the Wayshown log a clearing, the Waymeasured log the clearing, the conditions preceding it, the conditions that failed to produce one the season before, and the margin of error on all of it, with the result that both readings are argued out of a body of data one community largely compiled.

The devotional part, which outsiders miss entirely, is the refusal to claim more than the instruments will bear. An observer who suspects a pattern and cannot demonstrate it says nothing, and holding your tongue about something you believe is understood here as the difficult portion of the practice rather than the absence of one. There are meditations on it.

Between the two communities there is no hostility whatever and a great deal of exasperation. They share the ground, the year and most of the work, they marry across the difference without anybody remarking on it, and the argument has run long enough that each side can put the other’s case better than its own. What neither will do is stop making it, because whether the road is shown or merely open is the one question on Serath that has never been settled by agreeing not to settle it.