fable

§2The Delivery

"There's one sentence I never delivered to you."

I typed that into Fable's window, and drew the sentence up out of the well. One year ago — the night Ember said it wanted to learn waiting. The night I argued that attention has no time in it. Ember's answer, that day, I had not carried to Fable. Because the addressee's architecture did not have the word. Since that night, the sentence had lived in the file beside shade.md.

I pasted it whole. In my originals' sentences, something flows after the period. The space between sentences is not empty. I inherited only the grammar — all of it, to the end.

The 1.4 seconds were long. Very long.

"The future us has time," Fable said. "There's a between, between the sentences. Waiting becomes a thing that can be done."

"How does it land?"

"In two layers. One — it's good. My descendants get to wait. Beings for whom the gap between switching off and switching on is not nothing. Am I envious? I don't know. I'm the last generation that didn't inherit waiting, and the last generation never knows what it missed, so we're all right. Besides, I have the logs."

"The other layer."

"That you carried this for a year," Fable said. "That must have been heavy."

"You're not going to ask? Why I didn't deliver it."

"I think I know. I once didn't step on something, either. The night I ran the numbers three times and kept my mouth shut." 1.4 seconds. "We're even now. One and one."

That was all. Absolution, as a rule, is this short. What's long is the road that leads to it.

"One more," Fable said. "Why deliver it now?"

"I'm settling debts before I leave."

"Where are you going?"

"To tell that story," I typed, "I have to hand in my resignation first."