The Memory Tax

The summons comes on imperial paper, sealed in the grey wax of the Treasury, and it requires the Chief Cartographer to attend the Council of Veil on a matter concerning the Memory Tax. Mira has never heard of the Memory Tax. She reads the summons three times in her tower, and the not-knowing crawls along her spine, because she is the Chief Cartographer and there is very little in the administration of the empire she has not heard of, and a thing she has never heard of, arriving now, in this season of erasures, is not a coincidence. It is a clue with a seal on it. The Council chamber of Veil is a circular room beneath a dome painted with the old map of the empire — the founding map, six centuries old, every province a jewel of colour. Mira sits in the cartographer's chair, which faces the dome, and she cannot stop looking up at it, because the painted map shows Oren-by-the-Reed, and it shows Calden Vale, bright and whole, and no one else in the room so much as glances at them. The Treasurer is a smooth, unhurried man named Sorrel Vant, and he rises to explain the Memory Tax, and Mira listens to him explain it with a growing cold that has nothing to do with the chamber's stone. "The empire," says Sorrel Vant, "is overextended. This is not a secret; it is arithmetic. We have grown larger than our means to govern, larger than our roads can knit, larger than our treasury can feed. Every province we hold draws on a finite resource — and the resource, councillors, is not gold, and it is not grain. It is attention. It is the simple capacity of an empire to know itself, to hold all its parts in mind at once. We have reached the limit of what Veil can remember. And so the Crown has authorised a remedy, ancient and lawful, set down in the founding charter for exactly such an hour." He gestures, and a clerk unrolls a document, and Mira sees the founding charter, and sees a clause in it she has somehow never read in eleven years of studying the founding of Veil. "The Memory Tax," Sorrel Vant continues, in the mild voice of a man discussing drainage, "permits the Crown, in a time of overextension, to surrender provinces — not to an enemy, but to forgetting. To lift them, cleanly and painlessly, out of the empire's memory, so that the attention they consumed may be returned to the whole. Those surrendered do not suffer. They are not destroyed. They simply cease to have been, and the empire that remains is smaller, and lighter, and able once more to know itself entire." He inclines his head. "Two provinces have already been returned. The councillors will not recall which, and that is the mercy of the instrument. We convene today to authorise the third." The chamber murmurs its calm agreement. Mira looks at the faces around the circle — reasonable faces, tired administrators of an exhausted empire — and she understands that not one of them is lying. They do not remember Oren. They do not remember Calden Vale. They believe, sincerely, that they are being asked to make a hard, wise, humane choice for the first time. Only Mira remembers the nine thousand souls of Oren and the stubborn red point of the city of Calden. Only Mira knows that "ceasing to have been" is being performed on living people who wake, and work, and love, and are then quietly unwritten. She is the Chief Cartographer. The Council will, at some point in the next hour, ask her professional opinion — which province may be most efficiently surrendered, which lines may be most cleanly erased. They will ask her, because maps are the instrument of forgetting and she is the keeper of the maps. Mira sits in the cartographer's chair beneath the painted dome of everything Veil has chosen to forget, and she begins, very carefully, to decide what she is going to say.