The Frontier Record · Sheet XC
Three people are shut in a drawing room with no windows and no executioner, and the line everybody quotes is hell is other people. The line that matters is a stage direction: near the end the door swings open, and not one of them walks out. This sheet is about how a settler leaves, which turns out to be two questions with two different answers.
A settler may leave a settlement. No settler may leave the valley. The first door is built
and has worked since the beginning: a person for whom a place has stopped working walks down
the coast, asks the next settlement to take them in, and is taken in if there is food
— 4 more meals than mouths, and nothing else is asked. It moves them. The second door
is the one off the coast entirely, and Sheet LXI designed the whole of it: a valley year of
silence to a visible warning, 2 years to the boat, the boat sailing only when somebody needs
the seat. Not one line of that exists. There is no sail in this game — no
crossing, no seat, no verb anywhere that moves a person over water. So the room has a door
between the sofas and no door out of the room. You may change seats. That is the whole of
what leaving means here, and this record has spent 2 days describing the other kind as
though it were furniture already in place.
Garcin hammers on that door for the length of the play. He wants out and says so, and says it again. Then it opens.
Nobody moves. He looks at the corridor, shuts it, and the three of them go back to the sofas. The famous line about other people has carried the play’s reputation for eighty years and quietly buried the better one. The room was never locked. What Garcin lacks is not an exit, and Sartre is exact about what he lacks instead: he will not go while Inez is watching, because going would settle what he is.
Which is a play about being witnessed. This valley writes everything down.
Sheet I announced it on the first evening and it has been true ever since. A settler can go. If a settlement stops working for someone they walk down the coast and ask another to take them in, and somebody has to say yes.
The test is food and only food. Not whether they like you, not whether you are useful — whether there are 4 more meals than there are mouths. It is the first vote in the game with an exit attached, and the exit is real. The leaver’s town changes, their home moves, their happiness rises by 0.25, a bond forms with whoever let them in, and they carry their own share out of the stores on the way out. The lock cuts both ways, as the feed says when it happens.
That is a working door and it should be said plainly, because the rest of this sheet is about one that is not. A settler in a bad settlement is not trapped. A settler in this valley is.
Sheet LXI built the second exit out of Ellis Island, and built it carefully, because roughly 1 in 3 of that era’s arrivals eventually took the ship home and the ledgers of the day recorded it as failure. It was nothing of the kind.
| what Sheet LXI designed | what exists |
|---|---|
| 1 valley year of silence raises a visible warning | nothing |
| 2 years puts them on the boat | nothing |
| the boat sails when somebody needs the seat | nothing |
| a sailed settler keeps their whole life on the record | nothing to sail from |
| a verb that carries a person over water | there is no sail |
The boat got a price today, and a sprite, and a day of work.
check-capabilities caught what was still missing, in its own words:
unlocks a boat, which has nothing anybody does in it. It was given meet
— walk to a named place and wait for a named watch — which is boarding with the
leaving taken out. The check went green. The hole did not close, and the comment beside the
entry says so rather than pretending.
a sailed settler’s whole life is on the record, so a return is a return. Sheet LXI · Birds of Passage · 29 August
That is the fare on a passage nobody can book. And Sheet LXXXIX, printed hours ago, went and advertised it: the ships run both ways, set in the same size as the outward, on a handbill whose whole argument is that the return is the part honest bills leave out. This record has now designed, priced and advertised a departure it cannot perform.
Which puts the man on the rock in a different light from the one he was drawn in.
Seafarer is beached on 10 bare tiles with a wrecked hull, and the obvious reading is that he is mending it to get himself off. He isn’t. He is the ferryman, and the job is to bring settlers to this valley and out of it. His hull is the second door. The first thing he does in this world is repair the only exit anybody else will ever have, from an island he cannot leave, before there is a single settler to carry.
And he can do it, because repair falls through plank to
wood to stone and takes 1 unit a patch. His rock has stone. 3
patches at 45 apiece is 135 work against a valley day of 200 — 0.68 of a day, with no
mill and no furnace anywhere in it.
The door is not locked. It never was. It is 3 stones and an afternoon, and then it opens onto exactly the room it opened from, because the verb that would carry anybody through has not been written.
The wreck is not on the rock yet. Nothing in this game places a settler on an island on purpose, or puts a ruin anywhere, so section IV is a specification and not a run. Its 3 patches are arithmetic off 2 numbers in the source, and arithmetic is not a coast.
The walking door has a limit this sheet has not measured. It moves a settler between settlements on one coast, and every settlement is on that coast. So it is a door between rooms, and calling it working begs the question of how far it goes when there is only one other room to be in.
And the reading of the play is the flattering one. Garcin stays because Inez is watching. No settler here refuses anything for that reason, and there is nobody on the Faring to witness a refusal at all. The furniture matches and the motive does not, and a record that dresses an unwritten verb as a moral condition has stopped reporting and started decorating.
Hedge on the door: Huis Clos is a play about being seen by the two other people in the room, and most of what it says concerns them rather than the corridor; the borrowed shape is narrow — an exit that is available and unused, and the discovery that the lock was never the thing holding anybody in.
Written 30 August with the boat 6 hours old. 2 doors: 1 that moves a settler between settlements on a test of 4 meals, and 1 that was designed in full, priced at 14 wood and 20 planks and 8 iron, advertised in the same size as the outward, and never hung. A settler in a bad settlement can walk out. A settler in this valley cannot go home, because home is not a place this game has a word for reaching.
The Frontier Record · Sheet XC · 30 August