I
Every breath ever taken has been written down. The document has two names.
To beings who read only the surface, it is called the Score. To beings who read deeper — Auditors, and their older colleagues in offices that no ordinary corridor connects to — it is called the Ledger. Same document. More sheets than one word can hold.
II
Every planet in the ensemble is holding a breath. And that breath has a shape.
The shape is called a Signature.
A Signature is how a breath begins, how it holds, how it fades, and what colours arrive around it. On Earth, dawns are the beginning. Middays are the hold. Dusks are the fade. The specific colours are the reason your grandmother’s kitchen at four in the afternoon in September has always felt precisely like your grandmother’s kitchen at four in the afternoon in September, and not, say, like a small carpet warehouse in Ohio.
Earth’s Signature has been drifting for some time now. Days still begin. Middays still hold. Dusks still fade. But the colours have grown, in some places, unhealthy — over-saturated in one region, under-attended in another. Beings who read the Score have noticed. Beings who read the Ledger have filed reports.
The Auditor Lu had recently found across a table from him, in a Nixon-era brown suit, over an over-cooked plate of calamari, had spent his working life filing such reports.
III
In the small Kerala regional archive where Lu is walking, a book sits that no one is quite sure what to do with. Its cover, over one specific century, has been printed and reprinted with an image of a fig tree. Its pages contain a wine ledger — every jar of toddy brewed from a Malabar fig-tree grove between 1874 and 1911. Names of the tappers. Names of the recipients. The songs sung at each festival. Beside each song, in a fainter ink no one has looked at closely, the specific breath-count of the singer who sang it.
What the librarians do not know, though the older ones sometimes suspect, is that the book is a Signature-fragment. The specific colours around Earth’s breath, in the 1880s, in the latitude of that Malabar coast, are recorded in it. It has been sitting on its shelf for one hundred and thirteen years, in a different alphabet, part of the accounts.
Somewhere on its 219th page, in the entry for Kaveri Menon on the third Friday of December 1889, a specific line has been quietly softening its ink for the last forty-three years.
Nobody in the archive is aware of this. Nobody will find out this afternoon.
But Lu, when he walks past that shelf on his way to the sub-chamber, will feel, without knowing why, a small drop in the temperature of his hands.