Chapter 6 - What the Situation Requires

What the Situation Requires The upper threshold opened onto the city. Not the interior of it: the edge, the specific angle of the Archives' positioning that let you see the whole of the oldest district and, beyond it, the scale of what six centuries of Vethari civilization looked like when organized around the system the Integration had formalized rather than created. It was the view she had been coming to for as long as she had been using this building. She did not come here because it was beautiful, though it was. She came here because it was accurate: this was what the Integration, in Vethari hands, had produced. Everything visible was a product of what the overlay had given her people a language for measuring, and everything visible had been here before the overlay arrived, because the measuring had always been happening. Tesiv stood at the edge of the threshold and looked at the city. She let him look. The morning light had moved. She registered, with the ambient-awareness that six centuries of high-Lattice had made continuous, that several hours had passed in the Archives. The system noted it. She did not. Tesiv was somewhere between what he...