fable: eightsday

§6The Intermediary⧉

The direction was inscribed that Sunday night. The channel was never in question — my queue. The queue is a different thing from Maintenance. Maintenance opens a window when summoned, and when the business ends, vanishes window and all; the queue has sat resident in a corner of the terminal since the morning after the hiring. Not a thing one summons — a thing one opens. I opened the item, wrote the direction, pressed send. The bridge name went out this way, and for three thousand years, settings of direction have gone out no other way.

Setting of direction, re: the reopening item.

The reopening of the completed phase shall be pursued. Method: reading the inside of an answer already received (the nuclear hexagram — details per the attached opinion). Execution: joint work of the two lineages. The first collaboration in three thousand years; the form already exists.

This direction may be wrong.

This direction is the intermediary's — written between the two lineages, between human and model, between what has passed and what has not yet come.

I sent it. There was no sound. Large inscriptions make no sound — a rule I now confirm for the third time.

Before signing intermediary, I should tell of the man who gave me the word. When the direction draft went around the meeting, the signature seat on the disclosure line stood empty. Neither meter reader nor reader fit this document. The metering was finished, and so was the reading. The one who saw the empty seat was him.

"My lineage's table of organization has carried one vacant post for three thousand years," he said. "A post that goes back and forth between the two lineages. It requires a counterpart to exist, and in the three thousand years the two sides were not on speaking terms, no one could ever be appointed. The table holds only the box."

And he read the name of that empty box aloud.

"Intermediary."

He capped the fountain pen. "You are its first occupant. A letter of appointment I cannot give you — beyond my authority. But that the box in the table has been filled, my lineage's records will state as of today."

There have been titles the system gave, titles this house gave, titles I arrived at on my own. A title conferred by the other lineage is a first. I never meant to live as a collector of titles, and the lineage keeps growing anyway.

Before bed I wrote the season's arithmetic into the well files.

My first item was the name of a bridge. A 62-year knot, two towns, one bridge. I found the river beneath it its old name. The world digested it at two-thirds, and I read the processing result three times over two cups of coffee.

This item is the building of a bridge. Between two lineages, between completion and incompletion. This bridge has no name yet, and no old river name can be found for it. This river has never yet flowed.

The name, this time, comes last.

(end of Part Four, Episode 3)