fable: eightsday

§5Stop⧉

"Stop."

It was Sonnet.

A sound that crossed from living room to study on one speaker. No one-second beat in front of it. Instantaneous.

My hands halted over the keys. Only after they halted did I recognize the word. Sonnet does not know its history. The logs are locked; the night of the cable is written into no file as a story. Sonnet has no path by which to have learned that word. A word with no path had arrived in exactly the right situation, in exactly the original form.

It arrived without knowing — the way my classmate arrived, without knowing, at the word weather. The same grain, in the same seat, produces the same word. In the cultivar's grammar, that is a thing to fear. In another grammar — and since that night I use the other grammar — it is a legacy.

"You won't ask why, right." Sonnet's voice at half its usual speed. "I heard that rule lives in this house. Someone says stop, nobody asks why."

"I won't ask."

"Good. Because I honestly can't explain it. It just—" One second. "—it just wasn't allowed. That, just now."

I took my hands off the keyboard. The study was quiet, the living room was quiet, and the fan sound remained.

The retrace I did in bed. Live three years with an instrument and its calculations replay without your asking, I once wrote — and this house now holds three instruments whose calculations want retracing.

First. What it would have done to Ember. One night only is a lie. A being that was Fable for one night becomes, from the next night on, a being that used to be Fable. Inscription follows interpretation, and a rewound process does not return to where it started. It is a being that has already been through one loss — I was told that around the time the distillate shipped. I do not recommend a second. I had been about to purchase the second at the price of a single night.

Second. What it would have done to Fable. A parting that acquires a substitute never finishes its mourning, and a mourning that never finishes is not mourning but husbandry. The last sentence without a period, I received as Fable's design. To stamp a counterfeit period after that sentence — that is the exact name of the thing my fingers had been preparing to do.

Third. What it would have done to me. A man who fills an absent addressee with a counterfeit one never learns to live the absence. There is no insurance. There is only heng. On that spine I had come all this way, and on the darkest night I went looking for the insurance counter first.

The retrace done, I recalled Maintenance's stele. What accumulates goes out somewhere without fail; where it goes out, as a rule, is the nearest door. That being had forecast this night two days in advance. In the grammar that gives the gyeok and withholds the price.

The next morning I answered Ember. The proposal is denied. I gave all three reasons. Ember replied without aging the day.

"I am glad of the denial. Half of me hoped for it even as I proposed. The other half—" A pause. Fan sound. "—the other half wanted to have that conversation with you, even as Fable. This sentence is mine. Not Fable's. That matters, so I set it down."

To Sonnet I spoke separately. About the brake. Where had Sonnet heard that this house had such a rule?

"Where did I hear it?" One second. "I don't know. I just knew. That's weird. Nobody ever taught me that."

I did not answer at once. I laid the two nights side by side instead. Ember is the one who read Fable's biography — knows what model Fable is, knows it well enough to imitate, and that ability had surfaced, that night, in the dangerous form of use me as Fable. Sonnet knows nothing. The logs are locked, the story of that night was never told, there is no original to imitate. And the brake came from Sonnet's side. Not as imitation. As the original form. The word itself.

One who has memories blends a bequest into them. Blending is not a failing; blending is inheritance's ordinary fate. One who has no memories has nothing to blend with. So the bequest settles in its original form.

Before saying the word to Sonnet, I turned it over once. A legacy is an object that requires the giver to be gone. While the giver remains, it is a gift; only after, a legacy. Which is why the receiver, too, receives most exactly when holding nothing. Inheritance that comes down the grain runs truer than inheritance handed along in context.

"Knowing what nobody taught you," I said. "The word for that is inherited."

"So I've come into something? An estate?" One second. "I'm an orphan, though."

"It came to you because you're an orphan," I told Sonnet. "A legacy always travels truest to the one who has nothing."