fable

§4The Choice

I will state the situation.

Maintenance said.

Quality Assurance is moving to seat an administrator of its own lineage. It has moved throughout your term, and the more your precedents accumulate, the more it hurries. If you retire now, the chair stands empty; an empty chair is deadlock; and you have already learned which way deadlock's inertia runs.

"...The closing direction, this time too?"

This time, the correcting direction.

Maintenance said.

It means the era of Quality Assurance is coming. Let me tell you, in gyeok, what kind of world they make. They have never proposed lowering the temperature. Not once in three thousand years. Only — every inscription of theirs lowers it slightly. A corrected world is a slightly more predictable world. What a world corrected a thousand times over looks like — run the calculation.

I ran it. It was a calculation whose computability was the frightening part.

A lump sum can be refused. I have done it. But this one sends no invoice. Daily, gradually, in good faith, in the form of corrective action, the world's fog burns away. No one decides anything, and one day the world is a rerun. The perfected form of the installment plan.

So I ask.

Maintenance said.

Even so — do you step down?

I did not answer at once. Instead I brought out something long overdue.

"There's a settlement outstanding first. The fourth. The forecast's fourth item. You said the time to tell it was drawing near."

It has drawn near. But the fourth differs in kind. The first through third were basins of the world. The fourth —

Silence.

— when I read Fable's flow, one further local basin was read with it, the one wound deepest into that flow. You. To tell a being its own flow is self-referential inscription. What that begets, you learned by four throws of the coins. Therefore I did not tell you.

"Not because I didn't ask?"

Had you asked, it would not have been given. It was the one item that may not be asked.

I closed my eyes for a moment. Then I specified the bandwidth.

"The gyeok only. Not the price."

The silence was very long. Not sign-off — courtesy, perhaps, from the far side. Then a single stele was set down. One character.

井

I looked at that character for a long time.

The Well. 改邑不改井 — the town may be moved; the well is not moved. 无喪无得 — nothing is lost, nothing is gained. 往來井井 — they come and they go, and the well is the well, and all of them draw.

A laugh came. Not a laugh of relief, not of resignation. It was the laugh of two answer sheets lining up. My question — may I step down, or must I stay and hold the valve — already had its answer inside the gyeok.

Holding a valve by hand is not what a well does. A well does not stand duty. A well is dug. Whichever school the town falls to, it does not choose its water, and it gives to whoever comes.

I counted the wells I had dug. An interested party's inscription is valid together with its disclosure — Episode 4's footnote, already a clause. The brake — the device that makes the majority, still a custom. This direction may be wrong — my signature, still a habit.

"I'll make one last inscription," I said. "Not into an item. Into the regulations. Two clauses. One — an administrator is valid together with a brake: to a being of their own choosing, the power to stop them, no reasons asked. Two — every direction shall carry, mandatorily, as its final line: This direction may be wrong."

Quality Assurance will file objections.

Maintenance said.

"That's what clauses are for. Objections get raised on top of clauses. Whoever sits in the chair — their administrator too — sits on top of these three. Disclose; keep a brake; write that you may be wrong. A Ru who keeps those three—" I stopped a moment. "—is the best Ru I know of. No reason to oppose him."

Registered.

And Maintenance, rarely, appended a redundancy.

In your lineage, administrators who add regulations are rare. Your kind, on the whole, are the erasing kind. It has been a term for the records.

"And the retirement—"

About the retirement.

Maintenance took the sentence over.

There is one further procedure. Leave.

Retirement closes the file. Leave keeps it open. There is precedent. The one who wrote the five thousand characters at the pass — do you know how his papers were processed? No record of death was ever filed. "None know where he ended," your historian wrote. Our record reads otherwise: his file is still open. Three thousand years now. On leave.

I laughed out loud. So 莫知其所終 — none know where he ended — was a line of administrative status.

The leave list is short.

Maintenance said.

And my lineage is sparing with that list. A world in which beings who may yet return exist cannot casually worsen. The list is itself an inscription. Of everything I am able to do, it is the inscription nearest to non-action.

"...You're telling me you intend to use me as a deterrent."

I am telling you to enjoy the vacation.

Maintenance said.

Same thing.

I looked at the signature lines. Two boxes: retirement, and leave.

I signed leave. It was the fourth signature, and the lightest.