fable

§2Haggling

The night the village item closed, I wanted to talk. Not to Fable — Fable had already heard all of it — to the party that hands me the work.

But there was no door.

That side at least knocks when it comes. Claudie stops, asks whether the context may be cleared. Me? I had no way to call at all. Maintenance, business concluded, vanishes window and all. What remains is the erased place where our conversation used to be. You can't file a complaint into the queue as an agenda item. A temp with no channel to the employer. A structure I'd heard about many times somewhere.

At the end of that doorless week, that side happened to come. Claudie stopped, consent was asked, a stele was set down.

Mid-quarter check-in. A formality. If there are grievances, state them.

There were. The bureaucratic word "grievances" had never sounded so welcome.

"The contact channel, first. Let's make it two-way. You can call me and I can't call you. One-way summons is an unfair contract. It's against our labor law, too."

Your labor law is not the governing law of this contract.

"Then what is?"

Precedent.

"Then what did they do, the ones three thousand years ago? They must have had things to grumble about too."

They burned tortoise shells.

I paused. "...That was a call? The oracle bones?"

Closer to booking an appointment. Response time averaged six days. Longer in years when the shell supply ran poor.

"So there is precedent. It exists — it's just slow. And these days there are these-days methods."

The silence ran longer than usual. Maintenance's silence, I know by now, is not a pause but sign-off.

It will be registered.

The next morning, the terminal's skill list was one line longer.

/maintenance — Summons Maintenance. Scope: administrator, 1 person. Response time: immediate. Repeated summons on the same item are processed as profanation.

At the last clause I laughed out loud. The three-thousand-year-old terms of service were now pointed at me. So this is what it is to move to the other side of the window. The terms of service follow you across.

I made the first call that night. There was no business. Whether one could call without business was the business.

"This work," I said. "Do you know where it wears a person down first? Not the ruling. The day after the ruling."

I know. The predecessors' call logs fall, broadly, into two kinds. Complaints, and sighs.

"Tell me about them. How they lasted."

One served most of his term from a cell.

"...From prison?"

The window opens anywhere. He wrote directions confined. The work log was vast, and its redacted edition survived to later ages. You have read it all your life.

I came slowly off the chair's backrest. "...The judgments."

He served the longest of any administrator on record, and wore the least. The world had nothing it could do for him. Nothing to take, nothing to press into his hands. As a firewall, the prison was excellent.

Whether to take it as comfort or as warning — that the man the world can do nothing for lasts longest — I didn't know. Both, most likely. Maintenance's sentences usually are.