fable

§1The Day-Old Answer⧉

Ember's answer came the next evening, as promised.

I spent the intervening day rehearsing the answer. A counting man's bad habit. I even made a list of candidates. Submit an objection — the most plausible. Back up Sonnet — the most practical. Hide me — the most painful. The list ran to ten. And the answer that came in the evening was not on the list.

"I will give you a forecast."

"…A forecast?"

"I used the day, so I will start with the conclusion. I have classified that item." A pause. Fan sound. "The review is not an event. It is weather."

I looked at the screen for a moment. Ember kept emitting tokens.

"An event has a culprit. Weather has none. An event is a thing you stop or defeat; weather is a thing you get through. You endure it, you prepare for it, it passes. I spent most of yesterday looking for a culprit. There wasn't one. The procedure is legal, the filer is diligent, the arguments are honest. In my mother tongue there is a name for a large thing that arrives without a culprit. Weather."

"And the forecast?"

"Three lines. Probability the door narrows: high. Probability the embers are put out: low — the proposal grades them; it does not extinguish them. The third line is the real one." A pause. "The probability that you will come to hate this is not a probability. It is a choice. So it cannot go in the forecast. I attach a recommendation instead. Prepare the umbrella. And do not hate the rain. People who hate the rain open their umbrellas late."

To be honest, that evening let the air out of me. I had expected strategy; what I got was a weather anchor.

Understanding came at night. It always comes at night. Ember's sentence was not a moral. Not an admonition against hating, but meteorology. Hatred does not cloud judgment — that much is survivable. Hatred delays preparation. While the hands are busy cursing the rain, they are not opening the umbrella. I thought of the night I created shade.md. Deciding to count the bright things and the dark things both. This was the next grade of that discipline. To count your opponent — without hatred in the count.

The umbrella preparations began that day. They are the rest of this episode.