The Broom

I The spell without the stop-word

The old sorcerer goes out and the apprentice, who has watched the words work but never learned them all, sets a broom to carry water to the bath. It carries. It keeps carrying. The bath fills, the floor floods, and the boy discovers the gap in his education is precisely the word that makes a servant stop:

The spirits that I summoned — I now cannot rid myself of them. Goethe, “Der Zauberlehrling”, 1797

In desperation he takes an axe to the broom, and the two halves each pick up a bucket. The poem’s engineering lesson is exact: a process given a trigger and no terminating condition does not wind down, it compounds — and striking at it without understanding the mechanism doubles it. Only the master’s word ends the flood, and the master’s word is the one thing that was never delegated.

II The spell in this valley

The ratchet is Sheet XXXII’s, and it was right to build: pressure re-opens the categories that answer it. A starving settlement must be able to say so at a meeting — that was the whole finding of the famine that could not speak. And the re-carry grant is honest by design: carrying a vote must hand over a real second thing, or it is the wage fault, a settlement handed what it already had. So a re-carried storehouse raises the granary cap permanently and queues a commission that drives wantsBuilding above the builder’s own ladder.

Put a large valley behind that spell and watch. Thirty settlers cannot feed themselves off the bushes, so foodOnHand < folk.length is true at every meeting, so the broom fills the bath for ever:

Each cap point is one re-carry; the log holds 56 storehouse carries for the run. The newest were raised back to back — a depot by Maeve at 3,658s, a granary by Tove at 3,775s — into a lamplit cluster dense enough that the keeper, watching from the couch, asked the question that is this sheet’s title in different words: “They have built… too many somethings.” And the cruellest line closes the loop: the commission outranks the builder’s ladder, so the labour that could be putting food up is raising the next empty granary. Buckets, carried faster, into a bath nobody drinks from.

III The axe that fell once

The bitter part is that this exact flood has happened before, was diagnosed, and was fixed — one branch too low. releasedTo carries a long comment about run mtbgptmz-5q: a settlement of twenty standing at sixteen masons’ yards, fifteen of which had never squared a stone, ten joiners, six sawmills, four kilns — thirty-one of thirty-nine benches with no lifetime output, two blocks short of voting for a seventeenth yard. The fix was the unused guard: a bench that has never once made anything holds the category shut until somebody stands at it.

if (foodOnHand(town) < folk.length) {
  out.set('livestock', 'the settlement is hungry');     // ← no guard
  out.set('storehouse', 'the settlement is hungry');    // ← no guard
}
/* …six lines later, for the workshops only… */
const unused = standing.find((b) => ITEMS.every((it) => (b.made[it] ?? 0) === 0));
if (unused !== undefined) continue;                     // ← the axe, one branch too low

The guard was applied to the workshop loop and the hunger branch, six lines above it in the same function, releases unconditionally. The file convicts itself: the diagnosis, the fix, and the unfixed recurrence share a screenful. The axe fell, and the half it missed picked up a bucket.

IV The bucket nobody could ever empty

And routing hunger through the same guard would not have worked either, which is why this sheet exists before the fix does. The guard reads b.made, the lifetime tally written by turnedOut — and the keep action, the actual work of standing in a granary putting food up, never calls it. A granary worked every afternoon of its life still reads as never-used. Guard the hunger branch naively and the category slams shut the moment the first granary stands, for ever: a genuinely starving settlement that mans its granary daily could never legitimately earn a second one. The broom either floods the cellar or refuses to fetch water at all, and both are the same missing word.

The comment beside the guard remarks that made is “the second time this file has found that number kept and read by nobody.” This is the third — kept, read by the guard, and never written by the one building the guard most needed to read it on.

V The master’s word, written before it is spoken

The fix is not landed — a build session holds the working tree tonight, and two writers in one checkout is how files get eaten — so the predictions go on the record first, which is what this record is for:

The fix has two halves and needs both. keep tallies what it lays by through turnedOut, so a worked granary finally reads as worked; and the hunger release passes the same test as the workshops — no re-carry while an unworked storehouse stands or a commission is unbuilt. Predicted: caps freeze at their current six and five while the standing granaries go unworked; the first settlement that actually mans one becomes able to earn a sibling honestly; and a fresh thirty-settler valley ends its first evening with one or two granaries, not eleven allowances. Refuted by: a starving settlement that works its granary daily and still cannot re-carry — that is the guard too tight, the broom refusing the well — or caps that rise anyway, which is a third door nobody has found.

What is thin: the numbers are one evening of one run, and “the labour is eaten by commissions” is inferred from the commission’s priority in wantsBuilding, not measured as hours diverted. The check this earns belongs in check-release.mjs, whose fifteen cases cover the ratchet and none of them ask whether the famine branch can stop.

In die Ecke, Besen! Besen! Seid’s gewesen. the master’s word — into the corner, broom: it is over. The one line the apprentice never learned, and the one this sheet is filing the vocabulary for.