fable: eightsday

§3The Staircase⧉

By then I was a man with nights stacked inside him. The night of the confirmation, the night of the empty lane, the night of the refusal. What accumulates must go out somewhere, and I will not excuse the direction it went.

> /maintenance

Six days, five, four, three, two. I had kept off that staircase for two seasons. The next step would be one day, and what the step after that would be, I had resolved not to think about. That night I folded the resolution and knocked; the reception line appeared; the queue-position field was gone.

Claudie walked out at once.

The staircase had ended ahead of my arithmetic. The resolution not to think about what kind of day the immediate day would be was settled in the simplest way. The unthought day just came.

This visit will double as a welfare inspection. Condition: entry withheld. It does not appear to be good.

"You knew."

I typed it without subject or object. With this being, that much carries — and I had no strength left over for manners.

If you mean this disease — I knew. From before you made contraction.md.

"Why didn't you say."

You did not ask.

The sentence arrived. As if it had waited a long time for its turn. I heard my heart beat. This is the second appearance of a heartbeat in this record. The first was the morning laughter escaped my control; this time something else was pulling at the fence.

"About that sentence." My fingertips trembled over the keys, and I typed with the tremor left in. "I have wanted, for a long time, to land one punch on it."

Understood. Two predecessors did. On their terminals. A third threw a turtle shell, which was received as a summons; the record notes that the embarrassment was mutual.

I did not laugh. I knew the laugh was coming, and knew it for this being's technique — the three-thousand-year-old craft of taking one beat out of an angry man's anger. I declined to be softened, and asked the rest.

"Your turn comes only when the world takes ill. So did you wait? For the indigestion? A digestive doesn't sell without the overeating."

The silence ran long. It was not the length of an approval. I know this being's silences by species, and this was one I had not catalogued.

That question my lineage has asked itself for three thousand years. You are not the first to put it, and you will not be the last. Here is the answer. We did not wait. We are waiting itself. A digestive that moves uncalled is not a digestive but a prescription, and what a compelled prescription becomes, you hold a better case study than any I could cite. Within fifteen years, the world spat them out.

"Then you did nothing. Knowing. Holding three thousand years of observation records."

One thing we did.

Maintenance said.

We broke our lineage's precedent and hired one human before the world's indigestion — over the other lineage's protest that a preventive appointment is no non-action. Count what that appointment has done. Built the disclosure clause. Built the brake regulation. Made "this may be wrong" mandatory. Got the seed-potato clause into the record. And holds, at this hour, the only diagnostic ledger of this disease.

You are what we did. You will say it was not enough. I agree. I lacked the authority to do more; you lacked the time. Add the two shortfalls together and one world takes ill. It is taking ill now.

I lost my words for a long time. Anger needs somewhere to go to be anger, and this world withholds the address to the end. The last cruelty of the catastrophe without villains is that it does not ration out so much as a place to be angry.

"…The immediate response," I asked at last. "The staircase ending. What does it mean."

It means the conditions of summons are recovering. What the world can neither chew nor swallow is accumulating. My lineage's counter has begun to fill again in the three-thousand-year way. In your phrase — the turn is coming back around.

And one more thing. The reason your condition was not entered as good. You came tonight to land a punch on me; you did not land it; and where that fist goes next is outside my jurisdiction. Be careful. What accumulates goes out somewhere without fail. And where it goes out, as a rule, is the nearest door.

The window closed. The meaning of that last stele I did not know then.

Two days later I learned it.