The Continuity Clause
Raina visited Anton's office a month after unification. She did not like condolence calls. They felt like theater. But she liked proofs that closed and laws that learned, and Anton had given her both. He poured tea because he had decided he preferred tea to coffee when he could admit it. He had a printout on his desk, an actual paper printout, of a graph labeled RCC over time for "Myles A/A'." Raina raised a brow.
"I keep it to remind myself that law is a graph and not a God," he said. "Also to remind myself that I am, in a dull mathematical sense, the beneficiary of a death.”
At the next closed session, Chair Mendel read the first draft of the Continuity Clause Amendment in a tone that balanced apology and defiance. He was good at tones. Haroun annotated with care and malice. Raina watched them both with the satisfied fatigue of a person who has held a door long enough for a useful procession to pass.
"Will we be accused of permitting immortality?" Mendel asked, and felt the absurdity of the question as he asked it, and asked it anyway because committees like symmetrical minutes. "Daily," Haroun said. "We will respond, patiently, that immortality is a superstition and that what we have permitted is the continuity of work in the face of brittle intervals, measured and bounded and audited like any bridge during a storm.” "And if we are asked whether identity is sacred?" Mendel asked. "We will say it is a habit," Raina said. "A very good habit, good enough to protect and to teach and to hand to the next bearer with both hands. Sacredness is the word we use when a habit has served us so well we are afraid to revise it when the world changes. We are not priests, we are custodians.” Mendel laughed softly. "It's ugly when you put it that way.” "I know," Raina said. "It is meant to be ugly so that it will survive beauty contests."
Two years later, the clause had saved a spaceplane launch, a vaccine rollout, a small island's water board, and a family whose obligations did not show up in any database because the database did not count the hours a woman spends making sure four other people can sleep. The Commission's critics accused it of elitism and then of populism and were satisfied by neither accusation. The clause did not expand. It did not shrink. It did what good law does: it became boring.
On a spring afternoon too warm for her jacket, Raina encountered Danzig in the garden between the buildings. He held a thin paper cup like a trophy he had not yet earned. "Dr. Abara," he said, as if she were an equation to be presented correctly. "I wanted to tell you that I have a Transition date next year. My mother wants me to wait but I want to go. I am writing my obligations down, like you taught us.” "I'm pleased," she said, and realized she meant it. "Write more than you think you need to. Write the small favors and the long grudges. Write the names of the people whose mailboxes you shovel after storms. The Lattice is good, it is not telepathic.” "Do you think I'll ask for an extension?" he asked, half a challenge, half a plea. "I think you will know," she said. "And I think if you do, you will have a good reason we can graph.” He laughed in the way of people relieved to be given permission to be reasonable.
In her office, Raina kept three objects that were not digital: a tea cup with a hairline crack that taught her to be gentle with hot water; a Metrobonds coin from a city that had once been brave enough to tax itself for subways; and a copy of the Continuity Act as first printed, with Clause Seven underlined in pencil. She added, after Anton the elder died, a fourth: a scrap of graph printed on cheap paper labeled RCC_total vs RCC_single in a hand she recognized from correspondence and from a brief, useful friendship with two versions of one mind.
She was not a sentimental woman. She disapproved of sentimentality on behalf of public policy. But she was very fond of objects that made abstraction carryable. On quiet days she visited the hearing rooms and let her memory rehearse the voices that had nudged law toward truth. She did not flatter herself. The Commission would have found the clause without her. But without Anton and Anton, it would have found it later, or uglier, or in response to a scandal that would have forced the wrong shape upon it. The right time matters. The right case matters. The right men refusing to die for the wrong reason matters more than most committees will admit in their minutes.
She filed a note: "Continuity is not the persistence of a face but the conservation of a willingness to take up specific burdens." She knew it was prose that would make engineers sigh. She wrote it anyway because sometimes engineers need to sigh and sometimes law needs to remember that words are tools as blunt and necessary as hammers.
On her way out of the building, she passed the small lobby where citizens pinned notices about things the city cared about without realizing it cared: lost scarves and found cats, a request for help moving a piano, an offer to tutor algebra for anyone who had failed not mathematics but patience. She pinned a new notice in a tidy hand: "If you plan to Transition and you know of an obligation that would die with you unless you rehearse it, rehearse it. If you do not know, ask someone who loves you. They will."
She stepped into the afternoon. The city carried its pieces, so did she. Somewhere a mathematician who had been two people and was one again brewed tea, opened his mail, and placed a draft of a dull, ambitious paper into an envelope addressed to a journal that would reject it twice before admitting it had been right from the start.
Raina smiled without audience. Impossible cases were rare, difficult ones were plentiful. She liked a world arranged that way. It meant the work would continue…
More Stories >