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My mother died on the ninth of March, at home on Ceres, three weeks after finishing the longest inspection circuit of her career. I registered the death the same afternoon. The clerk witnessed my attestation and the physician’s, and behind him the wallscreen changed her line in the Register of Persons from REGISTERED (LIVING) to REMOVED (DECEASED), and I remember thinking, with the bookkeeping calm that arrives before grief does: there. That errand, at least, can never come back.

In June a freighter docked from Pallas, and she was alive again.

REGISTER OF PERSONS — MERGE 88,410 (carrier: MV Lastochka, ex-Pallas) KOVAČ, ESTER MARIJA — status change: REMOVED (DECEASED) → REGISTERED (LIVING) Reason: element restored on merge. Live tags: 1. This is an automated consequence of synchronisation and does not constitute a finding of fact.

The pension office found out before I did. Their letter said that her annuity had resumed accruing, and would I ask her to confirm her banking details.

The Registry on Ceres is one long room with a counter at the end of it. The registrar on duty was called Ferreira, and she had the notice up on her screen before I reached her, which told me I was not the first person this had ever happened to.

“It isn’t a fault,” she said. “I know how it looks. It isn’t one.”

The Register of Persons is copied whole at every port in the Belt — some forty replicas, separated by light-hours at the best of times and by months of shipping at the worst. There is no calling a vote across distances like that, and the Register is not allowed to pause; people are born and die at Hygiea whether or not Hygiea can raise Ceres. So every port keeps its own copy and edits it freely, and every hull that files a flight plan carries the Register as ballast data, and when a ship docks, its copy and the port’s copy are merged, each taking the union of the other. It does not matter in what order the copies meet, or how often, or whether the same news arrives six times by six hulls. The union is the union. Given time and traffic, every copy comes to agree.

What makes the union safe is the shape of the entries. Nothing in the Register is ever a bare name. Every registration is an addition carrying a unique tag — the port code and a counter, minted once and never reused — and every renewal mints a fresh one. My mother attested her presence at every depot on her circuit, because ration continuity requires it, and each attestation was an addition with a new tag: herself, standing at a counter, thumb to the glass, witnessed by a clerk. A removal is different. A removal does not subtract anything. A removal is a list of the tags it has seen, marking each of them dead. When copies merge, nothing is discarded: live tags accumulate, dead tags accumulate, and a person stands in the Register so long as one tag remains that no removal has ever named.

Her death, filed at Ceres in March, named every tag that Ceres knew of. But she had spent fourteen months going depot to depot, and her tags were still out there, coming home at freighter speed. The renewal she’d filed at Pallas in October was not on the March list. The removal had never seen it. So when the Lastochka docked, the union contained one live tag, and one is enough.

“Then write a removal that covers whatever arrives,” I said. “Her death doesn’t expire.”

“A removal lists what it has observed,” Ferreira said. “It can’t name a tag that hasn’t reached us. That’s not the software, by the way. That’s the charter.” She put the clause up on the screen between us, the way you’d show someone a bone you couldn’t do anything about. No person shall be removed from the Register by a record that has never observed them.

The clause has a history, and she told it to me plainly, the way registrars tell it. Under the old rule — latest timestamp wins — a death record with a garbled date had once propagated port to port and deleted a living rockhopper named Brandt from every copy of the Register in the Belt. He spent two years proving he existed to machines that were in perfect agreement that he didn’t. The inquiry’s finding was short: a clock is an assertion, but an attestation is a witnessing. An addition means a person stood in an office and was seen. A removal is a claim about an absence. When the two meet with nothing to order them, the Register believes the eyewitness.

“The rule is older than spaceflight,” Ferreira said. “It comes down from the shopkeeping machines of Old Earth. Their copies fell out of step too, and the houses that ran them decided it was unforgivable to lose a thing a customer had put in a basket, and forgivable to keep a thing they’d taken out. We inherited the arithmetic. We changed what it was for.”

She filed the supplementary removal while I stood there — the Pallas tag, named and condemned — and I countersigned, and my mother was dead again on Ceres by close of business. Then Ferreira printed me what she called the horizon report: eleven depots whose copies had last merged with ours before the ninth of March. Any of them might still hold live tags of hers, riding towards us on whatever hulls called there next.

“So this happens again,” I said.

“Eleven more times, at most. Then never again, anywhere, ever. That’s the one promise the Register makes. Every copy agrees in the end. It doesn’t promise when.”

Themis arrived in August, on an ore carrier: a tag minted the previous May Day. Restored 11:02, removed 14:40 — I was at work; the condemnation waited on my countersignature, a courtesy the office extended and I never declined. Three days of annuity accrued and was clawed back by a letter that addressed her as Dear Ms Kovač and me as Sir or Madam.

Interamnia came in November, and that one I sat with for a long time. The attestation carried her signature, and the signature was wrong — cramped, leaning the other way — and the clerk’s annotation said traveller signs left-handed, right wrist splinted, declines assistance. I went back through her messages from that month. Nothing. Don’t fuss. She had typed them one-handed, eleven light-minutes away, and I had never known, and now a registry record had carried the fact home to me at freighter speed, thirteen months after the wrist had healed and eight months after the rest of her had stopped.

That was the winter the dread inverted. I stopped bracing for the notices and began waiting for them. Each stray tag was a fixed point: she was alive at that place, on that day, witnessed, thumb to glass. I learnt the shipping schedules the way she had known them. Ferreira let me sit at the public terminal and work out which hulls served which depots, and when a conjunction pushed the Eugenia packet’s arrival into the next year I felt it as a theft, and knew better than to say so, and Ferreira looked at me over the counter and said it anyway, gently, because it was her job.

“There are only so many,” she said. “She can’t file any more of them. You do know that.”

“I know that,” I said, and did, and kept coming in on days a hull was due.

Eugenia, when it finally came, brought two tags in one merge. Davida brought one, then — a hull having been rerouted — an older one, out of order, which changed nothing; the union does not care what order the news arrives in. The horizon report shrank from eleven to seven to four to one. The one was Hygiea, at the far end of everything, served by a single circuit ship on a twenty-six-month schedule.

By the time it docked — three years and forty days after the ninth of March — the office had a standing order in her file, and there was no longer any waiting for my countersignature; I had asked them to stop extending the courtesy, and then asked Ferreira, privately, to keep sending me the notices anyway. The last one reads:

KOVAČ, ESTER MARIJA — restored on merge 91,733, 09:14:31. Live tags: 1 (HYG-4471). Supplementary removal filed 09:14:31. Tag HYG-4471 observed and condemned. Live tags: 0. Horizon: 0 replicas outstanding.

Both events, one timestamp. For the width of a single audit pass, at one port, in one copy, she stood among the living, because a record that had seen her outranked every record of her death that hadn’t.

Some weeks later a final notice came, unprompted, flagged administrative: every replica in the Belt had now confirmed receipt of every removal in her file, and her dead tags were eligible for compaction. I took it to the counter.

“The tags get struck,” Ferreira said. “Once every copy has seen a removal, there’s nothing left anywhere for it to argue with, so we don’t have to carry the argument any more. The entry stays. Name, dates, issue. It just stops carrying the machinery.”

“Then she takes up no more room than any other fact.”

“That’s convergence,” Ferreira said. “It’s all that was ever promised.”

I keep the eleven notices in a folder I don’t often open. Eleven times, a ship came in carrying a morning on which she was alive, and the Register — which is not permitted to take anyone’s word for an absence — believed it, until it had seen otherwise with its own eyes.