So It Goes

1 · Unstuck in time

The run is mtbgptmz-5q. It opened on the words It is high summer now and it has not stopped since: one continuous valley, thirty-three thousand ticks, through the whole of last night and into this morning. At around five the keeper pressed F5. The valley wrote itself down in the doorway on the way out — it always does; leaving is the one thing it is never careless about — and came back mid-stride, same run, same tick, same twenty people walking to the same depot. In Timequake the universe flinches ten years backward and everybody relives the decade on autopilot, and the catastrophe is not the rerun but the moment free will kicks back in and nobody remembers how to steer. The valley’s timequake lasted about ten seconds and harmed nobody, but the prescription for coming out the far side of one is the same, and it is the best sentence in that book:

You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do. Kilgore Trout — Timequake, 1997

The archive this sheet is read from is Tralfamadorian. Four log files, every moment of the run still in them, all equally present; nothing in there is lost when the clock moves on, it is simply that way at that tick, the way the moment is structured. The aliens of Slaughterhouse-Five read all such moments at once and are calm about the bad ones. The record-keeping here asks the same of its reader: one frame of the file says thirteen settlers are bare-handed, and the run says otherwise, and the run is the truth.

Which brings up the refrain. Vonnegut tagged every death in that book with the same three words, over a hundred of them, general and champagne alike. The audit finds the refrain has almost nothing to attach to in this valley: no settler has ever died here, and none has ever been born — the record of births and losses was built two sittings ago and stands empty at both ends, arrivals only, life permanent. In the whole run the refrain fits exactly two things. The first is the wood:

The second is a friendship. The game’s own text for the mediation wish says why it was asked for: a falling-out is not for ever — which is to say that until wish-307, it was. In a valley where nobody can die, a quarrel is the only mortal thing. That is the finding of section 2, and it is why the second half of the keeper’s question this morning — is it the button that’s important, or the friends we didn’t lose along the way? — answers itself. The friends. It was always going to be the friends.

2 · The office of the unengaged

The audit, plainly. Wish-307, somebody to put a quarrel to, so a falling-out is not for ever, carried in Tove’s claim at tick 21,558 — one voter, Idris, whose reason was that mediating quarrels keeps people working together. The boon stood up an office: a settler with a grudge takes it to a third person both parties still like — not a rule anybody wrote down, just who you would actually ask — and what the hearer decides is not modelled, only that both people accept it. Fifty-seven valley days later the count of quarrels put to anybody stands at nought. The office has never opened. Nobody in Tove’s claim is on bad enough terms with anybody to need it.

Meanwhile the landing — seventeen people, the oldest settlement, the one whose minutes contain Idris and I have not spoken in a season and neither of us can remember starting it — put wish-307 on its slate five times this morning and killed it five ways: eliminated with nought first preferences at 04:17, waved off at 04:26, at 04:34, named the formal loser of the count at 04:54 and again at 05:00. The reasons given are a Vonnegut chorus. Nim: our work speaks for itself. Osk:

It’s not like we’ve got any real fights to mediate, just a few words left unsaid. Osk, forester — balloting against the mediator, 04:17

A few words left unsaid being the exact species of thing a mediator exists to hear. And on the same slates, morning after morning, one voter keeps ranking the mediator first and losing. Her reasons are not about procedure:

I want to get Idris to stop avoiding me — maybe even join me for a meal. Lune, forester — ranking wish-307 first, 05:09

So the finding is symmetrical, and it is the joke Vonnegut would have kept: the settlements that bought the office have no custom for it, and the settlement with the custom will not buy the office. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is the paperback for this, because its entire machinery — a foundation, an office, a listed telephone — exists to deliver one uninstitutional sentence, the one about babies: God damn it, you’ve got to be kind. The record shows the valley keeps that commandment ambiently, without the office. At tick 32,105, in the middle of this morning’s audit, with no mediator anywhere:

The kindness is fine. It is the repair that has no path. An unengaged mediator in a deathless valley is not a dead letter; he is the only undertaker the place will ever need, retained against the only kind of death there is, and the town that needs the funeral keeps voting to have no undertaker. The office stands. The record will note the day it opens.

3 · Ice-nine

Cat’s Cradle ends the world with a seed crystal: one chip of ice-nine that teaches every drop of water it touches a new way to be water, and the ocean learns it in a day. The catalogue that hears this valley’s wishes had a chip of it in the mine-shaft entry. The word was timbered — a pit-prop word, timbered and propped, honest mining English. But the catalogue’s stemmer reads inflections off words so that sheltered can be heard as shelter, and it read the inflection off timbered and got timber. From that moment, to the catalogue, the word timber — alone, in any sentence — was a wish for a deep mine. In a valley of eleven foresters. Mara asked for a hand-cranked winch to lift timber off the forest floor, and the record filed her under holes in the hill:

A hand-cranked winch to pull the big trees down from the valley floor without getting trapped in the branches. Mara, forester — wish-327, filed as: a mineshaft

The fix is one phrase: the shaft’s entry now holds timbered and propped whole, which keeps the pit-prop sense and cannot be stemmed down to a tree. The trees got their word back. The ocean unfroze. And the audit that found it turned up Bokonon’s pair of teams along the way: Sula, Anselm and Pike once asked for the same thing in three trades’ different words — which timber is worth the walk — and the catalogue’s survey entry now names all three, a karass, a team doing its one job without knowing it is a team. The winch and the mineshaft, filed together on the strength of a suffix, were the other thing, the false team, the granfalloon — if you wish to examine a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon.

4 · The rope, delivered

The whole of The Sirens of Titan is the discovery that human history — Stonehenge, the Great Wall, all of it — was arranged by machines to deliver one spare part to one stranded messenger. The message being carried, when it is finally unsealed, is a single dot: Greetings. Here is the valley’s version. Ferro filed wish-316 last night: a rope to pull the trees down from the valley floor. I’d give my left hand, he said. It went to the ballot this morning and carried in two settlements inside one minute — the landing at 04:17, Bren’s claim at 04:17 — and granted precisely nothing, because the catalogue had no word for a rope that is not a ladder. The climb-words belong to the rigging; the bare word rope deliberately belongs to nobody. A decision, on the record, twice, attached to no thing: the fault this record documents more than any other.

This sitting the catalogue learned the words — winch, windlass, a rope to pull, lift timber — and they were put where they honestly belong, in the cart’s entry, because a cart was never the box on wheels: it is mechanical advantage on a load somebody was otherwise carrying on their back. Ferro’s rope and Mara’s winch both answer to it now. And because a wish on the record as new is re-heard from its own words every time the record is read, the healing is not prospective paperwork: the server already answers cart for both, and three older wishes that had sat as new since before the catalogue could hear them — Anselm’s axe-mending, Pike’s harvest-marks, Bren’s way to catch fish — came back healed in the same pass, upkeep, survey, fishery. The rehearing rule grants what carried before there was a name for it. Bren’s claim took Ferro’s rope up, and is owed the cart’s boon — everyone can carry three more — and the line the log will write when it pays is known in advance: asked for this before there was a name for it. That prediction is left standing for the record to grade, as is this series’ habit. A rope is a small spare part to arrange a morning around. The dot it carries says Greetings.

* * *

Two loose pages, clipped to the back of the report. In this morning’s minutes a voter’s recorded reason breaks off mid-sentence, in real time, upon noticing the machinery: Wait, we have a joiner in the settlement (standing: joiner — has made 14 furniture). So why are there two wishes for a joiner? The settlement has a joiner: — and there the ballot ends, on a colon, like Dwayne Hoover handed the author’s notes in Breakfast of Champions. And over every ballot that begins I’m a forester, so—, as every ballot here does, hangs the moral of Mother Night, the one Vonnegut said was the only moral he ever knew he had: we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. The pretending is the whole of a settler. It seems to be enough.