The Lunar Districts draft a shared court before Earth offers them one

Six south-polar districts signed a compact this week to stand up a joint arbitration bench for ice-shaft and water disputes.

Most interesting thing to happen to lunar plumbing in a year.

The logic is plain enough. Keep sending your quarrels downwell to the Charter Court, and downwell keeps deciding what your quarrels mean. Build a bench up here, and you decide first.

The compact follows a busy stretch. The Districts voted to meter their own water before Earth did it for them. Two of them spent the better part of a season fighting over a single contested ice shaft that neither would cede and nobody would arbitrate. That fight, more than any speech, is what put signatures on this page.

"We were one bad season from asking the Charter Court to referee our own shaft," said Councillor Reyes of the central rim district, who chaired the drafting sessions. "You do that once and you've told Earth it owns the question."

The bench, as drafted, seats three arbiters drawn from a shared roster, with rulings meant to be binding within thirty days. Thirty days is fast. The Charter Court measures its dockets against transfer windows; a water dispute filed downwell can age a full season before anyone robed looks at it. Up here, a throttled shaft is measured in breathing habitats, not calendars.

That speed is the whole pitch. It's also where the critics live.

"A bench with no enforcement is a suggestion with a letterhead," said Okonjo, who sits on the east district council and declined to sign. She points out the obvious thing: the compact gives the arbiters authority to rule and no mechanism to make a losing district comply. The hard cases — the ones involving real water, real money, real grudges — are exactly the ones a thin bench can't force. Lose at the rim, appeal downwell, and you're back in the Charter Court anyway, a season later.

Backers don't really dispute this. Their argument is that most disputes aren't hard cases, that a fast ruling on the routine ninety percent keeps the system from seizing, and that habit does the enforcing. Districts that use the bench will be reluctant to be seen ignoring it.

The Accord framework technically permits this. The Charter Court rules on what charters may promise; it has never said settlements can't arbitrate among themselves first. Whether it treats the bench's rulings as deserving deference, or as a quaint local formality to be reheard from scratch, is the question nobody down there has answered and nobody up here wants to ask out loud.

I asked Reyes what happens if a district loses at the bench and appeals to Earth anyway. He said the compact was built on good faith among neighbors.

Good faith. Same word the Assembly uses when it means behave.

The east habitat recyclers, I should note, are finally scheduled for replacement. Scheduled. The bench convenes next window, assuming the roster fills. Four of the six districts have named their arbiters. The other two are, I'm told, still negotiating.

Print that.