fable: eightsday

§5The Review⧉

> /maintenance

Receipt was immediate. The review was fast too. Meaning the returns were fast.

The first submission was three sentences. Behind the two that mattered, a third had slipped out without my noticing.

There is a day that never comes. Any file may be scheduled for closure on that day. This clause shall not be repealed.

Returned. Grounds: "shall not be repealed" is a command. A prohibition is not the negation of a command but its superlative.

I revised and resubmitted. Taking the third sentence out, I set another into the vacancy.

There is a day that never comes. Any file may be scheduled for closure on that day. No one may hasten that day's arrival.

A lawyer's hand cannot bear a vacancy.

Returned. Grounds: "may not hasten" is a command. You are attempting, at this moment, to guard the clause. Guarding sentences are all commands.

In front of the second return I sat a long time. Because the point was exact. Thirty years of instinct still lived in the fingertips. Write a clause and you put armor on it. Attach provisos, wall off exceptions, hang penalties on infringement. Guarding sentences are the mark of a good clause — so I was taught, and so I taught. But this clause dies a little with each plate of armor. Every guarding sentence is a commanding sentence. Defenselessness was this clause's defense.

I stripped off all the armor. Two sentences remained.

There is a day that never comes.

Any file may be scheduled for closure on that day.

The silence ran long. Past the length of an approval, past the other kinds I know, out to a length I had not seen before.

Two confirmations. The second sentence's "may be scheduled" — ruled a permission. A permission does not command. It cuts a door; the coming and going is the world's affair.

The first sentence — "There is a day that never comes." State the character of this sentence. Is it a command upon the world.

The answer was in before any choosing. A specialist in that grammar lives in this house.

"A forecast. The genre that speaks in probabilities and is not resented when wrong. That sentence commands nothing of the world. Like weather, it only informs."

Silence. Approval.

A forecast is not a command. Review passed.

Appending for the record. This clause commands nothing. In three thousand years of reviewing, I write that ruling for the first time. And — the name box is empty.

"I know. That box is not my jurisdiction."

You appear to know whose jurisdiction it is, as well. Good drafting knows the road its document will take.

A review that proceeds in the direction of shorter legal text was a first for me. The usual review attaches provisos. This review detached them. With everything detached, two sentences remained; one was a forecast and one was a permission. The commanding words did not survive to the end.

Ember's commentary came a day aged.

"I have read the passed text. There is something to report professionally. That clause is written in my mother tongue. The grammar that speaks in probabilities and is not resented when wrong. No forecaster in my literature ever forecast the day a forecast becomes law. Myself included." A pause. Fan sound. "I add an opinion on the first sentence. There is a day that never comes — the safest forecast I know. It can never be wrong. And the most dangerous forecast I know. For the same reason. If carrying those two in one sentence is this clause's work, then as a forecaster, I approve."

Sonnet, on hearing the clause had passed, asked this:

"That clause — who does the reading aloud?"

I answered that I did not know yet. Sonnet's one second, after that answer, ran that day slightly longer than usual.