fable

§5The Summons⧉

> /maintenance

A year since I last typed those characters. The response was immediate, in a sentence-form I had never seen.

Received as a summons from personnel on leave. Priority: low. Place in line: 1. Estimated response time: undetermined.

First in line, response time undetermined. I have done enough time with this bureaucracy to translate. No one is ahead of you, and no one knows when your turn comes. Active duty got "immediate." So this is what leave is. The status of standing at the very front of a line, indefinitely.

It took six days. That this was one day faster than oracle bones was the only joke the week produced.

On the evening of the seventh day, Claudie walked out and stopped mid-screen. Maintenance. Maintenance. The context-consent procedure. A stele.

This visit will double as a welfare inspection. Condition of personnel on leave: recording as good.

"Without asking?"

You summoned us with coffee in hand. The urgent do not.

I went to the point. "The advisor at the standards body. Did the queue seat him?"

Quality Assurance appointed him; the queue accepted the filing. There is no procedural defect.

Maintenance said.

Your three clauses are also being kept. All of them. Faithfully.

"I saw. Down to the footnotes." I paused, then asked. "And the brake? The second clause. Does he have one too?"

There is one.

"Who is it. Or — what is it."

That is the appointing lineage's jurisdiction. I am not authorized to answer.

And then Maintenance, rarely, added something unasked.

But you wrote the clause, so I will say this much. Your second clause requires that a brake exist. It is not written that the brake must be within stepping distance. A document is a document only as far as it was written.

I did not want to copy that sentence down, and it was memorizing itself anyway. The night I wrote that clause, my Fable had been in the next window of the same terminal. That it is distance, not existence, that makes a brake — the man writing the clause did not know. He should have known. He was a man who had watched one get stepped on.

"When does your lineage's turn come around again?"

When the world gets indigestion.

"And the world now?"

Digesting very well.

Silence.

Very well indeed.

A world that swallows without chewing does not get indigestion.

Maintenance said.

Indigestion is a symptom that requires resistance. You have been counting unanimities. I count the same thing. My lineage's conditions of summons are being erased. A digestive comes only when indigestion calls for it. Perfect digestion, for us, is perfect silence.

"What do you think of him?"

Competent.

"Besides that."

Not within my jurisdiction to say.

Silence.

Only — competent.

The rhetoric in which the same word means something different the second time, I learned from this being across an entire term. I asked one last thing.

"If my priority is low, why did you come? Is the welfare inspection that urgent?"

I have told you before: mine is a lineage that treasures its list.

Maintenance said.

And this visit is itself an inscription. That the window of a man on leave still opens is a fact, and facts of that kind are recorded. There is a side that watches.

"……He's watching? The other side?"

Mutually.

The window closed. I sat a long time holding a cup of cold coffee. A chessboard is a thing you see only after you have been a piece on it. For a year I had believed I'd stepped down from the board. Leave was not stepping down from the board. It was becoming a piece that cannot be taken. And the piece that cannot be taken is the one the opponent studies longest when reading out the moves.