The Weir

Myr is governed by its watershed councils, which meet at Lethwyn and are called the Weir, after the structure that refuses no river and lets none through all at once. Every lake, every old stand, every valley under management seats somebody. Their authority runs the whole moon and is exercised through whoever is responsible for the particular ground, so nothing concerning a place is settled without the people who live in it present.

They are presided over by the Harbormaster, an office that began as the keeping of the ferry berths on Lethwyn’s lake and grew outward from there, because whoever fixes the order of arrivals is deciding in practice what happens on Myr and when. The Harbormaster does not rule and would be startled to be told otherwise. The Harbormaster keeps the schedule. On a moon where very nearly everything is permitted, the schedule is the government.

The Weir hardly ever refuses. A Myrran finds a flat no discourteous and will travel a long way around one, and the courtesy is wholly sincere; visitors who read it as evasion are misreading people who genuinely wish them well. What the Weir does instead is grant the request and place it in sequence. The sequence is ordered by the condition of the living system the request would touch, that condition is assessed by the keepers charged with it, and the assessment is honest. It is also never entirely finished.

So everything here is argued in the language of when. Nothing is ever whether. Each delay comes with a reason attached, a nesting season, a stand not yet walked, a keeper who must be consulted and is upriver until the water drops, and the reasons are true, and they arrive in order for as long as they are needed. Nobody has ever demonstrated that any of it is deliberate. Nobody on Myr has ever been asked in a manner that would oblige them to say.

Kharad holds a timber concession on Myr. It was granted generations ago in the warmest terms and not one log has ever left the moon under it, and Kharad applies again every so often and is granted it again, which the Grasp finds maddening in a way it has never managed to work up into a grievance, nothing having been refused and nobody insulted. Myrrans are used at the same rate. A lakeside village waited eleven years for the road that would reach its clinic, put its case four times, was thanked warmly on each occasion, and did not complain once. Visitors find that considerably harder to be near than anger.

There are two places where the courtesy stops. Ilyra’s medical traffic runs on time, every season, and has for as long as anyone can document, because Myr holds medicine to be urgent and has never pretended anything else. Everyone in the Embrace has noticed what that proves about the rest of the schedule, and no Myrran has yet been brought to concede the point. And a real threat to the old stands, or to the cover Elowen lives under, produces the one thing nobody expects from this moon: a plain refusal, given once, with no date attached to it and nothing further offered.