The Guild Hall, an empire, a Thursday

The proposal is tabled by the junior surveyor and everybody expects it to be laughed out of the room.

The objection is put first, and put well. A map at the scale of one mile to the mile is not a map. A map is a reduction; the reduction is the whole service; a thing the size of the thing is simply a second thing.

The junior surveyor agrees, and asks the room to consider which of the two things the Emperor will consult.

There is a silence recorded in the minutes as of some length.

He continues. A reduction, he says, is a set of decisions about what may be omitted, and those decisions are made by us, in this room, on a Thursday, and are then experienced by everyone downstream as the shape of the country. We have been governing for two hundred years by choosing what to leave off. The proposal before the guild is simply to stop choosing. Let the map contain everything. Then it will be neutral, and we will finally be innocent.

It carries, eleven to four. The four who oppose it are recorded as having done so on grounds of cost.

The minutes end with a clerical note in a different hand, added at some later date, which reads in its entirety: the innocence was not achieved.

The map was finished. It is in the western deserts, in pieces, with animals living under it. The country is also still there, and is consulted less.