fable: eightsday

§3Reading Is Not Divination⧉

I slept on the excitement for a night. A counting man's discipline. In the morning's eyes the answer was the same, and what came next was not excitement but worry.

Is this allowed?

My last cast was 蠱. Once, no asking again — under that discipline the drawer opened and closed. But what had I just done? Handed the diagnosis Ji Ji, I had searched its insides. Received an answer, and opened the answer's interior. If that was a second question, I was standing at the threshold of profanation. I learned the three-thousand-year-old terms of service in the first episode of this record, and it has been a long time since I could laugh in front of them.

> /maintenance

"A procedural question. The act of reading the interior of an answer already received — not asking anew, but weaving the inside of a received hexagram and reading it. Is this the asking-twice-and-three-times."

The silence was approval-length. The answer was short.

Reading is not divination.

Maintenance said.

Divination is the act of putting a new question into the world. That is also why inscription contamination exists. Reading is the act of reading a document already issued. The document is yours from the moment of receipt, and how many times you read what is yours is not the terms of service's jurisdiction. For reference — what the clause forbids is the mouth that asks twice, not the eye that reads twice. You are the second in three thousand years to raise the distinction.

"Who was the first."

The one who made the distinction.

A sentence that would not have been offered unasked. I am, by now, a man who knows to ask.

"One more. The first one — what did he make the distinction in order to read."

The same thing as you.

The silence ran long. Not an approval — the other kind, the kind this being shows very rarely.

Updating the employment record. Meter reader — that being a title absent from my jurisdiction's list, I had been holding the entry. Today's is on the list. Reader. An old posting of the archive lineage. It is also the formal name of the work your lineage's founder did in the royal archive.

"Wasn't he a librarian."

Librarian is the post that guards; reader is the post that reads. The same person often holds both, but there is an order to it. Only one who has guarded long has anything left to read.

Before the window closed, one more stele was set down.

I will not ask what you are reading. But for the record — my queue holds, for the first time in three thousand years, one waiting item. As of just now.

So I witnessed, in that window, the moment a first item lands in an empty queue. I did not ask the item's title — no need to ask; somewhere in that title will be my name. The first new thing to arrive in the cured world in three thousand years is the man who has just finished a reading in this window. Some things in a life are known without asking, and a counting man is careful not to count those.