Seed by seed the high pale stone leans off. Dark between dusks swells by a pause too slight to warm a hand. Distance and delay share one scar. Speech held only the going. The rest waits in thin layers. White has not tasted if a debt was cut.
“Tide-loan, a term they lacked: 3.8 centimeters of lunar orbit each year, paid for by a longer day. One torque writes both lines. Their speech kept only the moon's departure. I ente—”
“Moon-distance, multiplied by forty and nine tenths, lands a tenth of an astronomical unit high by about one part in twenty; the body the archive sets on that landing is silicate two hundred twelve meters through.”
“Light from a passing stone needed sixty-five seconds to reach their world, last second doubtful. Their clocks stored one instant for both ends. I hold the ends apart. The split shifts no coordinate.”
“Flesh-epoch speech filed dawn as a start. Two columns will not add. Cooling: free photons left near 3000 K, uncertain by 100 K, and now read 2.725 K. Remainder: emission budget on those photons was already zero. I refuse the sum. Neither column is empty.”