Usufruct

When Marta Owusu died, in the sixty-first year of the Landing, three laws died with her.

I was sixteen, and it was my first funeral in an official capacity. I stood beside my mother at the edge of the grave with the register open across my arms while the eulogies were given, and when they were done and the first soil was in, my mother stepped forward and performed the office that made her, for most people at the Landing, the person she was. She read the lapses.

“By the death of Marta Owusu, ratifier of the Charter, the following enactments cease to be law.” Act 9, the night curfew of the first years, which nobody had enforced in decades and nobody would miss. Act 22, on the keeping of poultry within the habitat ring. Act 31, the Foundlings Act, which governed guardianship of children orphaned without kin — and which the settlement could not do without, so that the funeral was also a summons: the Assembly would have to sit before the season’s end and decide whether to make that law again, and in what words.

That was the whole machine. There is a single article of the Charter behind it, and I can recite it the way other people recite scripture, because it has been my working life: No enactment of the Assembly shall continue in force beyond the lives of those who made it. Each act shall carry annexed the roll of its ayes; when fewer than half of those named remain living, the act lapses, and shall be neither revived nor construed, but only, if the living so choose, made anew.

There is no repeal at the Landing. There has never been an amendment. The founders considered both and refused both, and their reasons are in the Charter minutes for anyone to read. Repeal, they wrote, is a weapon; a temporary majority can use it on whatever it hates that week. Lapse is nobody’s weapon. It arrives on no faction’s schedule, it cannot be aimed, and it asks the living a neutral question at generational intervals: do you still want this? To keep the machinery honest they added the corollary that makes young lawyers groan — no new act may contradict a living one; where they conflict, the newer is void. If you want the ground an old law stands on, you wait for its makers.

They took the idea from a letter, and the letter is in the archive too, photographed from a paper original that stayed on Earth. Jefferson to Madison, September 1789. The earth belongs in usufruct to the living. The dead have the use of nothing; a law is the will of people who no longer exist the moment its makers are gone; and so, he wrote, every constitution and every law naturally expires — he had worked it out from Buffon’s mortality tables — at the end of nineteen years.

The founders admired the letter and distrusted the number. Nineteen years was the half-life of a majority of adult Frenchmen in 1789, and it was stale before the ink dried: people were already living longer, and would live longer still, and any fixed term written into a charter would drift slowly out of truth the way all constants written into law drift out of truth. So they made what they were sure was the repair. They bound the term to no table and no number. They bound it to the deaths themselves — to the actual breath of the actual people on the roll — so that the parameter could never again go stale, because it was the measurement.

For sixty-eight years it was the best-governed place I know of in the human record, and I include Earth. Every generation actually read its laws, because every generation had to decide which ones to make again. Re-enactment season came round like a harvest. Bad laws were not fought over; they were simply not re-proposed, and went out like unfed fires. Good ones were re-made in better words by people who had lived under them and knew where they chafed. My mother used to say the Charter had a pulse. You could stand at a graveside and feel it beat.

The clearance therapies reached us in Year 68 on a supply cycle, with fifteen years of Earth trial data annexed. The Assembly sat for two days. The act that authorised general treatment — the Continuance Act — passed by the widest margin ever entered in the register, four thousand one hundred and six ayes, the old voting with the young for once and no wonder. I was twenty-three. I took the course the following spring, the same week I was confirmed as my mother’s successor.

Nobody did anything wrong. I want that recorded somewhere less formal than the register, and this account is the only somewhere I have. Each person on that roll chose more life, which is the choice the whole apparatus of civilisation exists to offer, and the article of the Charter did afterwards exactly what it had always done: it counted the living. It has simply had, for some decades now, very little counting to do.

The deaths thinned. The lapses thinned with them. The register, which had averaged thirty entries a year through my apprenticeship, recorded four in Year 80, and one in Year 85, and then began to skip years entirely. And the law of the Landing froze — not everywhere, but in a stratum, and the stratum is easy to date. Everything enacted in the last re-enactment cycles before Continuance is with us still, word for word, its rolls intact, and under the corollary nothing that touches its ground can pass. The Second Tenancy Act of Year 44 divides the arable ring into parcels sized for a settlement of nine thousand. We are three hundred and eighty thousand. Every scheme for revising it is void on arrival, and will be while its ayes remain what they now are, which is permanent. Jefferson’s number was wrong the day he wrote it, and the founders repaired the error, and it was the repair that proved fatal. An arbitrary nineteen years would still be lapsing laws today.

What deaths remained belonged to the decliners — the few hundred who had refused the course, my mother among them. She never explained it to me and I never asked in a way that risked an answer. But the arithmetic of the Charter made their deaths the only constitutional events left, and everyone knew it, and knew precisely which statutes hung on which lives. The Second Tenancy Act was, by the nineties, mostly Teodor Baltus. I was present in his kitchen when a delegation of young farmers called on him, very courteous, with preserves. “We don’t wish you anything, Teodor,” their spokeswoman said. “We only wanted to know how you’re keeping.” He poured the tea before he answered. “You wanted to know when.”

My mother died on the thirtieth of Thaw, Year 97, at ninety-five. She had kept the register for twenty-three years and trained me to keep it her way: one line to an entry, no annotations, because the line is for the fact and the archive is for the feelings. Her line reads:

R. 97/2. Edith VARGA, Registrar emerita, d. 30 Thaw, Y97. Lapsed thereby: Act 118 (Second Water), Act 121 (Assembly Procedure), Act 129 (Archives). Rolls annexed.

The register has never distinguished between a death and its consequences. At the funeral I read the lapses myself, over my own mother, as she had taught me, and I watched the young people in the crowd — there were hundreds; they had come for this, not for her — hearing the office performed for the first time in their lives.

It was some of those same young people, I think, who found the way through, though it took another thirty years and it is not a way anyone would have designed. They began, first, by refusing to vote at all. I will not sign anything for ever — you heard it in every Assembly season, and legislation nearly stopped, because a vote had become a signature in permanent ink: a law tied to my life now dies when I do, which is to say never. And then someone read the article again, the way you read a will, and noticed what it does not say. The Charter sets the outer bound of a law’s life. It nowhere forbids a shorter one.

Last season the Assembly passed the first of the new acts. I entered it three days ago:

Act 407 (Tenancy, Provisional). Enacted 3 Sowing, Y131. Roll annexed. Lapses, irrespective of the roll, on 1 Sowing, Y150.

It is void, of course, while Teodor lives; it waits in the queue behind his tea and his preserves. But there will be others built the same way, because the sponsors have all sworn to write nothing without a lapse-date again — young people solemnly legislating mortality into their laws, clause by clause, having none left of their own to lend.

The eldest sponsor asked me, before the vote, whether the expiry clause was even lawful. I told her the Charter tells me when a law must die. It has never told one it may not.

I entered Act 407 as my mother would have: without comment.