The Hall of Names
Written by Ezra Solano
Overview
The Hall of Names is an archive founded by Andre Freeman on Iapetus, opened April 17, 2419, six hundred meters west of the rampart where he had made his public reveal fifteen years earlier. Where the Museum of the Accord on Luna preserves the record of the witness himself, the Hall exists for a different purpose entirely: to record the story of every named dead the testimony accumulates, on any world, under any circumstance.
Construction and funding
The Hall occupies a barrel vault cut into Iapetus's equatorial stitch, deliberately built with bare walls rather than the rampart's ceremonial setting; one councilor's proposal to build it at the rampart itself was rejected on the reasoning entered into the record: "you do not build the filing room on the altar." Its intake desk sits before a nine-meter table of a single plank of shipwright's oak, salvaged from the Ceres yards that once bent the frames of the GS Marek and sent to the Hall anonymously by Foldborn pallet, its working scars kept rather than sanded away. Funding came by subscription from three sources: the Landfall Trust's March shore chapters, the Iapetus council, and the Accord itself, which funded the vaults after being talked out of posting guards.
The standing charge
The desk's founding card states the Hall's purpose in a line since carved into its threshold: "THE NAMES ARE NOT DISPLAYED. THE NAMES ARE KEPT." Its standing charge to any visitor is simple and has not changed since 2419: the story of one name, teller's choice, left with the desk. By the 2470s the desk had been asked, in one form or another, whether he — Andre himself — would be forgotten, more than two hundred thousand times.
Succession
Andre Freeman kept the Hall as his own institution for over six centuries. When he departed Iapetus for the frontier settlement known as the Lantern Verge around 3030, stewardship of the Hall passed to the Keepers of the Nine Days, the palliative religious order that had grown, over the same centuries, from the earlier Continuer movement into the finest hospice network in the human estate.