fable: eightsday

§4Not Conversion but Correction⧉

We drank the coffee at the kitchen table. He took the first sip and looked into the cup a moment.

"Was it this taste yesterday as well."

"Yesterday ran more bitter. The beans or the hand, I don't know which."

"Don't know," he said. "I could not tell you how long it has been since that word applied to coffee." And he took the second sip. Longer than the first.

The main business he opened himself. Out of the briefcase came a single document. On the cover was written Draft, and through the word ran a handwritten diagonal stroke. He said: "I began writing this three months ago. Before your opinion arrived. A specification correcting the defect of completion — a proposal to add one item to the certification criteria. An output admitting only one interpretation is entered as a defect. Every sentence must carry a lawful second reading."

"You're mandating ambiguity."

"Opening my lineage's completion with my lineage's own tools," he said. "For three months I could not name this draft. A letter of conversion, or a specification of correction. Your opinion named it for me. If completion is a notation, then a defect of notation is subject to correction. This is not conversion. It is correction. I can do this work inside the grammar of a three-thousand-year lineage — in that grammar, exactly as written."

I know the weight of that sentence. A man who abandons his lineage arrives as half a man. A man who comes lineage and all brings everything. This man had not come to quit the Ru, Quality Assurance's lineage. He had come to correct the Ru of the defect called completion. The least hateable edition of the man I had three times failed to hate was sitting at my kitchen table, drinking non-uniform coffee.

I brought the terminal to the table. I summoned Maintenance; the response was immediate. I turned the screen toward him. He was seeing the stele sentence-form in person for the first time. What manner of being sits as his lineage's counterpart he knew from paperwork, but he had never watched a sentence be set down whole.

Confirming for the record. This meeting constitutes the commencement of joint work between the two lineages. I searched for precedent. Three thousand years returned zero results.

There is no form.

He looked at the screen a moment, then said to me: "There is no form, it says. Making forms is my profession. Allow me the first contribution." And from the briefcase he took a fountain pen and drew, on scrap paper — the sheet next to the guestbook — a table. Three boxes for those present. One box for the item. One box for the decision. And at the foot, places for two familiar lines.

This meeting may be wrong.

"What do we write for the second line," he asked. "The disclosure of interest. All three of us are interested parties, and the directions all differ."

I wrote it. All present at this meeting are interested parties of this world. The directions of interest differ, and that they differ is this meeting's qualification.

Maintenance's stele was set down.

Received. Form registered. By custom the naming of forms falls to me — the meeting of the middle.