Commorientes
The file reached me at eight-forty with both event-sets already attached, which meant intake had done its job and I could not defer it for want of papers.
Ada Halloran, ninety-one, died on Reach Station at 14:03:12, day eighty-eight, Convention time. Tomas Halloran, her grandson, forty-four, died aboard the courier Oleander at 13:54:12 the same day, when a coolant gallery opened along a weld and took the pressure hull with it. Nine minutes apart. Two point one light-hours apart.
Nothing passed between them. Nothing could have. The Oleander’s distress carrier reached the Reach at 16:00:12, by which time Ada had been dead an hour and fifty-one minutes, and the duty officer had two deaths to enter rather than one, and entered them in the order he heard of them, which is not an order that means anything.
My office computes precedence. That is the whole of the work. When two events bear upon each other in law and nobody can say which came first, they are sent to me, and I say which came first, and then the estate settles, or the lien attaches, or a child born in transit is a citizen of one authority rather than another. Four hundred and some determinations a morning, nearly all of them uncontested, nearly all of them between events that are only technically in dispute — a signature at Tethys and a payment at Ceres, a birth and a treaty’s expiry. Nobody notices the office when it works. It has worked, more or less without interruption, for sixty years.
Under the Code an heir must survive the testator. Ada’s residuary went to the Tethys Cultivar Registry; she had put forty years into it and thought well of seeds. But if Tomas survived her by any interval at all — by one second — the estate vested in him at the instant of her death and passed under his own instrument to his daughter, who is six.
In the Convention Frame, Tomas predeceased Ada by nine minutes. The daughter takes nothing.
Ms Ansah had the hearing at ten.
“I’m not going to pretend I’ve got a clever argument,” she said, before she had sat down. “I’ve got the obvious one, and I’m going to make it slowly, because I think it gets worse the slower you go.”
“Make it at whatever speed you like.”
She made it slowly.
In the Convention Frame — the barycentric rest frame, adopted at the twelfth revision, agreed by every authority inside the heliopause — the ordering is:
13:54:12 — Tomas Halloran, Oleander. 14:03:12 — Ada Halloran, Reach Station. Interval: 540 seconds.
In the rest frame of the Oleander, which was making twenty-eight per cent of light along the Reach axis, the ordering is:
Ada Halloran, Reach Station. 1,642 seconds. Tomas Halloran, Oleander.
“Both of those are correct,” Ansah said. “That’s not me being clever, that’s the arithmetic. Neither one is an approximation of the other. There isn’t a true one underneath that they’re both wobbling around. He inherited and he held it for twenty-seven minutes, and he also never inherited at all, and you can’t get behind that to something better.”
“You can’t.”
“Then why is yours the one that counts?”
I let her have the pause. It is a fair question and it deserves the room.
“Before the twelfth revision,” she went on, “you’d have had the presumption. Where it’s uncertain which of two persons survived the other, the elder is deemed to have died first. Ada was ninety-one. Tomas was forty-four. Under the old rule he survives her, my client inherits, and we’re all home by lunch.”
“The presumption was repealed.”
“Because you could compute it.”
“Because we could compute it.”
“You could compute an answer.” She had her hands flat on the table by then. “You couldn’t compute the answer, because there isn’t one. So you’ve still got a fiction. You’ve just stopped calling it one, and it’s stopped going my client’s way.”
She was right, and I told her she was right. The honest description of every determination this office has issued in sixty years is that a body of adults agreed to prefer one arbitrary observer to all the others, and then wrote down what that observer would have seen. We did not even choose an observer with anything in it. The barycentre is a point in empty space with no matter at it, which was thought at the time to be tactful.
“Then give me the ship’s frame,” Ansah said. “Just this once. It’s the frame the man was actually in. He was in it when it happened. Nobody has ever been at the barycentre.”
I gave her the Bellweather matters, because I always do.
Three deaths in the Ophir dispersal, the year before I took the chair. Pairwise spacelike, all three. My predecessor took precisely the view Ms Ansah was taking, because it seemed both the humane thing and the natural one: compute each ordering in the frame of the person whose act was in question. He found that Osei died before Lindqvist. He found that Lindqvist died before Nakamura. He found that Nakamura died before Osei. Every finding correct in its frame. Every frame reasonable. Every frame the one the deceased was actually in.
Title in a shipyard at Ophir passed to three people, each of whom took it from the next, and the ring closed. It took a special convocation and eleven years to open it again, and the way they opened it was to choose a frame and stop arguing.
“Order isn’t a property of events,” I said. “It’s a property of events and a frame. Vary the frame case by case and you don’t get a kinder order. You stop having an order at all. Precedence has to be transitive or it isn’t precedence, it’s a preference expressed one pair at a time, and it will eat its own tail inside a decade. I’ve seen it do it.”
Ansah looked at the table for a while.
“She’s six,” she said. “That’s my whole reply. I know it isn’t one.”
She had attached a photograph to the bundle. It is not evidence of anything and I did not have it removed.
Nobody asked me what Ada would have wanted. It is not a question the office takes, and I have never been sure whether that is a mercy or the other thing. The Code does not ask what the dead intended about the order of their own deaths, because the dead do not have intentions about that, and because the answer would not help. Ada thought well of seeds.
I issued at 15:20.
In the matter of the estates of A. Halloran and T. Halloran: the Registrar determines that the said deaths were not simultaneous in the Convention Frame; that T. Halloran predeceased A. Halloran by 540 seconds of Convention time; and that the gift to T. Halloran accordingly lapses. The Registrar records that the two events are spacelike separated, that their order is frame-dependent, and that this determination therefore expresses a convention and not a fact of nature. The convention is nonetheless binding.
The last sentence is mine. It goes into every determination I make. Nobody has ever asked me to strike it and nobody has ever appealed on the strength of it, and I stopped expecting either some years ago. I think most people read it as throat-clearing. I would rather it were there than not.
Ansah shook my hand on the way out and said no hard feelings, which I doubt, and thanked me for the Bellweather answer, which I believe. She is young and she will be very good, and in fifteen years she will be arguing the other side of it, because that is who they give the Registry to.
There is a frame in which they died together. A vessel making a little over seven per cent of light along the Reach–Oleander axis would have had both events at one instant and would have been exactly as correct as I am. No vessel was making seven per cent of light along that axis. There was nothing out there at all on that heading, unless you count the light going through it, and the light does not have a frame.
The frame exists regardless. Frames do not require occupants.
I worked the figure out on the back of the intake slip and then I filed the intake slip, because that is what one does with intake slips.
There were four hundred and eleven other orderings that morning. Not one of them was contested.