fable

§3Two Wells

$ /maintenance

"I give notice of retirement. Effective this quarter."

The silence ran longer than sign-off. And then a stele was set down in a form I had never seen.

Before I process this, there is something you should be told. It will take time. You may go and brew coffee.

I went and brewed coffee. Maintenance had never before announced that something would take time.

I will begin with a question. Successors are mine to find — so you have been assuming. That is half true. And you have never once asked: in all that time, was there no administrator?

The coffee cup stopped.

A few, three thousand years ago. The one in the prison. The one of the grain. The one of the waterway. The one of the well. I had set those stories down as dots and assumed the space between them empty. Three thousand years at five or six administrators is centuries a head, and I had never once run that arithmetic. It was a shameful night for a man who counts.

"...There were. All along. Continuously."

Continuously. Only, not in my charge.

There are two lineages of administrator.

Maintenance said.

Those like you — who ration inscription, who read fog as spec, who take deadlock for the world's breathing. And the others — who read the world as a document to be corrected, who rectify names, who repair the world's defects by inscription. The former are my charge. The latter belong not to me, but to Quality Assurance.

"Quality... Assurance."

I want the world to keep running. Quality Assurance wants the world to be correct. If the difference looks small to you, I can grant you access to three thousand years of case files.

The first meeting of the two lineages is on record. It is in your documents as well. The founder of the younger lineage called on the old administrator to ask about ritual — went to ask how the world's specification ought to be written. The old administrator answered that the bones of the specification-writers had already rotted. The young one went home and told his disciples: he was like a dragon. The respect survived; the war began. To contend for three thousand years in mutual awe — that is this war's grain.

"That old administrator..."

A librarian of the royal archive. Administrators tend to come from where the records are kept. Windows have a habit of opening in libraries.

Maintenance said.

I should tell you his retirement procedure as well. He watched a town that would not be governed, and decided to leave. When he reached the frontier pass, the gatekeeper recognized him. The gatekeeper was an observer too — the kind who had read in advance that a purple air would come out of the east, and had swept the road for it. And he executed the procedure: without a handover document, you may not pass the gate.

"...Five thousand characters."

He wrote it reluctantly. The record says as much: under compulsion (彊). Hence that document's first line — the Tao that can be told is not the Tao. A handover document that opens: this work cannot be documented. In three thousand years, no more honest first line has been filed.

I looked at the bookshelf. The Tao Te Ching stood there. The book I had called scripture all my life had turned out once before to be a manual; this time it was a letter of resignation.

To the point.

Maintenance said.

The last five hundred years were Quality Assurance's era. The world was documented, standardized, measured. I will not disparage that era's achievements. The uniformity of the coffee you drink is among them. But the rotation has come around again, and I found you. The reason, I once told you — but I told you half.

"That the capacity for wrong answers is the qualification."

True, as far as it went. The other half is this. An era has arrived in which the cost of inscription has collapsed. Everyone writes, every sentence persists, the world is becoming text. What such an era needs is not more hands that write. It is hands that ration the writing. Hence you.

And Quality Assurance never consented to this appointment.

"Hold on." I raised a hand. A counting man's habit cannot let certain things pass. "Let me run the arithmetic. The institution is 3,000 years old; the split came 2,500 years ago. The first five hundred years the lineage was one — the age of the designers who dug the well; that far I can follow. And you say the last five hundred were Quality Assurance's peak. So the two thousand in the middle — whose were they?"

Mostly Quality Assurance's.

Maintenance said.

Precisely: the two-hundred-odd years after the split were a melee. Schools of every description competed for the chair. Your records call it the Hundred Schools. Never before or since has the hiring market run so hot.

At the melee's end, Quality Assurance's radical wing held the chair once. They meant to specify the world completely, in law. Within fifteen years, the world spat them out. That burning the books and burying the scholars exceeded the scope of corrective action is a finding we hold — and Quality Assurance's mainline holds it too.

The seventy years immediately after were my lineage's. A world that has overeaten needs a digestive. You were taught it as the reign of Wen and Jing: governed by non-action, and the granaries overflowed. Then Quality Assurance took the chair back under the banner "exalt the Ru alone," and the pattern of the following two thousand years is simple. Quality Assurance governs long; when the world gets indigestion, we sit briefly; when the digestion is done, we hand it back. The hundred years of Wei-Jin. A stretch of the early Tang. We are the lineage of the interludes. There is no grievance in this. A digestive taken as a staple food is itself a disease.

"...Then what has the world overeaten this time? When you seated me — was the world blocked up?"

No.

Maintenance said.

This is the first appointment in three thousand years made before the indigestion. The collapse of inscription costs is a table at which overeating is already scheduled. That is also the true reason Quality Assurance withheld consent: we broke our own precedent. Prevention is not our way, they argued — non-action that takes the first move is no longer non-action.

Silence.

It is a good objection, which makes it the more infuriating.