Part Three: The Departure Liturgy

Entry 62. 2214–2231. The Belt. What salvage is.

The Belt, when I came to it for good in 2214, was no longer eleven thousand people and one bar; it was four million people and still, in every way that mattered, one bar. The record means this structurally. Planets make societies; rocks make crews. There was no Belt the way there was a Mars, no census-taking civic body with a capital and a self-regard, only a scatter of claims and co-ops and company stations strung across an emptiness so much larger than the settled worlds' put together that the mind, even mine, even the Chorus's, files it as weather rather than geography; and through that scatter, stitching it loosely the way the delay had once stitched families, ran the trade, and at the bottom of the trade, in the place societies reserve for undertakers and lighthouse keepers, was salvage.