A gazetteer of the far edges of a settled future, from the survey office of a government that no longer answers its post. Five places, three thousand years from here, and none of them has heard of the others.
The cable has not been inspected in living memory, and nobody at its foot wants to be the one who asks. Caravans cross the white pan for eleven days to reach the warehouses, where salt is still the only currency that keeps. Goods go up. Nothing has come down since the reign of the last Harbourmaster. On clear evenings the town's children lie on the roofs and watch the cable disappear into the cloud, and they argue about what it is attached to.
When the river rose, they did not move the city. They moved the farms up onto the aqueducts, one arch at a time, over four hundred years. The rice terraces now run for ninety kilometres along the tops of the old water-bridges, and each family owns an arch by the same deeds their ancestors used for a street. The dead are buried at sea, which is to say at the bottom of the garden.
Nobody aboard remembers planting the trees, and the ship has been in blossom for six hundred years. The sun is a line. The horizon goes up. Children learn to walk on a floor that curves away from them in both directions, and they find the idea of a flat place frightening. The ring's old fruit is the only thing the crew agree on: there is a rule, older than the charter, that nobody may eat the first apple of the year.
The order was founded on a simple observation: that the berg is melting, and that this is the point. Its monks carve their cells into the wall of a drifting tabular iceberg, and as the ice thins they carve deeper, knowing that the monastery will one day cease to exist on a date that can be calculated. They have calculated it. They keep the date in a sealed book. The lamps are for the boats, which come out in the polar night to ask them what it says.
One person at a time. The rule is painted on the only door, and the Keeper of the Lower Galleries has spent thirty-one years alone with every plant that has ever existed. She walks the catwalks with one lamp, turning the cylinders a quarter-turn each so that nothing settles. Upstairs, they think she is a myth. She has opened the outer door twice, both times to check that there was still an outside. She reports that there was.