Chapter Five
The ‘post-post-aftershock’ was what everyone called it now, or simply ‘the PPA’.
Tayyan, the junior annalist Jaxon had assigned the task of recording the Regent’s experiences around the time of the episode, was interested in words. He theorised that prefixing ‘post-post’ and using the acronym PPA diminished the relative importance of the occurrence in common parlance. It was a way of pacifying the citizens, almost of modifying facts. Convincing them that everything was under control. Instead of ‘the worst calamity the Pale had experienced in generations’, the PPA was just another incident in a series of events, all of which the policosmos had survived. Simply changing the words changed the event, in retrospect. Clever. Tayyan liked that.
Satisfied with his analysis of the s
