With All Faults
By Michael Cash
Three hundred years ago, every machine-stored record in human space failed inside a single afternoon. Cloud, neural, and magnetic together. Roughly five thousand years of records vanished, and the official account of it has remained the same four sentences ever since, concluding with *the event is regretted; no party is at fault*. What survived did so because it was made of rag and oak gall and could not be instructed to forget.
The Codex carries two thousand one hundred linear miles of it, meticulously stored on mahogany under titanium, maintained at sixty-five degrees and forty-five percent humidity, forever. Seventy thousand four hundred and seventeen tons, and heavier in the evening, as paper absorbs moisture. Its route is filed with the Bureau nine cycles ahead. It has two qualified individuals aboard who can handle any of it, and the only thing it has ever sent across the dark is a quarterly return; a return has no line for a person.
Then, at one in the morning, a signal.
It repeats on a nine-second cycle, oscillating a second and a half either way and exhibiting no discernible pattern, indicating that it is not a beacon but rather a hand. In sixty years and four months aboard, nobody has ever signalled this ship.
What comes back through the tube is three people with no papers between them, along with a book.
The book is a duplicate. The Codex already holds that title from an edition of six copies printed four hundred years ago; two copies of such a rare item is not a mere coincidence. It poses a question. Elara Vance takes it down to a lamp set four degrees off the paper and starts working the gutter of the binding, discovering that this is not a forgery but a repair. It is very well done and quite old.
Meanwhile, the survivors are becoming a filing problem. The schema has no field for individuals who arrive without paper. What it does have is a condition that holds them until someone with better standing puts in a request.
WITH ALL FAULTS is a mystery novel intricately crafted in chain lines and watermarks, in stubs standing a quarter inch in a fold, in the differences between damage and treatment, and between a surname and a person. It is about a woman whose entire training is to refuse to say more than an object will support, and about the year she learns what that discipline truly costs. It also explores the machine that maintains the catalogue, which has no field for any of this, yet expresses it anyway.
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Literary science fiction published by Gossan Press. 99,000 words. This standalone work showcases series potential.
