In the first post I said I had pressed the button. It turns out that was the easy part.
What follows is true. Only the names have been moved one letter to the left, in the manner of a story I read a long time ago and have never gotten over.
The Wright
Long ago, in the days when all games came in boxes and the writing of code was upon a Star, there was a Wright who built in a yard behind his house, at night, for no wages.
He built with Swift, which is a bird, and therefore quick. He kept a Kit of Sprites, who painted whatever he asked of them and never once slept.
Ashore he kept other servants. Sequel kept the ledgers, and remembered everything that had already happened. A Pie was set upon the table, cut into ends, and each end did one thing only, and did it the same way every time. And it was written that where the ship and the Pie disagreed, the Pie was right and the ship was in error.
All of this was carried by a Serv Ant, who is small, and bears forty times his own weight, and lives in a hill with a thousand others. And the hill belonged to a Host of Dreams, whose sign is a sliver of moon, for he keepeth his lamp lit all night, which is when dreams are had, and chargeth but a sliver. The Wright had paid him every month since the days of the Razr. The moon over his door had waxed and waned two hundred and seventy times, and in all that while he had never once asked the Wright what he was doing.
And the Wright made a ship, and called her Raid & Rescue. And he put aboard her an Aye Aye, to command the other side, who answereth every order with the same two words and then doeth as he pleaseth. Him the Wright had bred through six thousand battles in a night to lose convincingly, which is the harder art, as I have told elsewhere. And she would sail the same voyage twice from the same wind, which few ships can. And he looked upon her, and saw that she was good.
She was, in fact, good. That turned out not to be the question.
The Orchard
Now to sell passage a man must cross to the harbor of Coo Per Tea No, where the Orchard keeps a walled garden with a single gate in it, and there be cleared.
So the Wright laid her up in the Ark Hive, as is done, and loaded his manifest and nailed up his papers and shipped her, which is the oldest word in the trade and one that nobody who says it daily ever stops to hear.
She arrived on the fourth day of September. She was answered that same afternoon, which the Wright took for a very good sign, and which was not one.
For the Orchard sends no judge. The Orchard sends an inspector of rigging.
Guy D. Line
He came with a board and no small talk.
Now the law of the Orchard is written as rigging. Every rule is a rope, every rope is numbered, and every inspector takes his name from the rope he keeps. This one kept the second rope, and the first strand of it, and so he was called Guy D. Line, and his number was two point one. Every Wright who has ever crossed to the Orchard knows that number, and none of them likes it.
And he said unto the Wright: I do not say thy ship is bad. I say I have never seen her. New flag, no history in this harbor. Therefore I have seven questions, and thou shalt answer every one.
He cared nothing for Sequel, nor for the Pie, nor for the Serv Ant in his hill, nor for the Host of Dreams and his sliver of moon. He would have their names written down, and that was all. For the Orchard inspects the ship, and only the ship: what a passenger sees, and touches, and can be charged for, from the moment he steps aboard. Everything ashore was the Wright’s own affair, and the Wright had spent a year on it.
Show me her working, and not a drawing: a moving picture with the wind in it. Tell me what she is for and who sails on her. Tell me how a stranger gets below decks, and with whose name and whose key. Name every other house thou dealest with, and I mean every one, including any Oracle thou keepest. Tell me whether she behaves differently in different waters. Tell me whether she carries anything regulated, or any man’s cargo but thine own. And thy ten Wares: what each one is, and precisely where aboard a passenger lays his hand upon it.
And the Wright, who had rehearsed a great many answers, found that none of them were to these questions.
Guy D. Line hath many brothers, who inspect other ropes, and the Wright was glad to have met only the one.
Then he went back inside his little house. And the ship was moved out to the Unresolved Isles.
The Unresolved Isles
There is a place off Coo Per Tea No that every harbor keeps and no chart explains properly, and it is called the Unresolved Isles.
A ship upon the Isles is not being inspected. She is not in the queue. She is not, in any sense that signifies, being thought about by anybody at all. She waits upon her own Wright to open his mouth, and until he does nothing happens, world without end, and from the shore the Isles look precisely like a harbor with no ship in it.
And the Wright looked out upon the Isles, and he was sore amazed, and then he was sore confused. For first he believed she was being examined, and he was proud of her, and he told people. And then he believed she had never arrived at all, and he went looking for the wreck.
He walked the shore of that harbor at every hour. In the middle of the night he walked it, and at first light, and again before his supper, and each time the water was empty and the Con Sole, which is a long polished desk where a clerk consoles thee, told him nothing he could use. And at last, going the long way round, he came upon a rock he had not thought to look at, and there she sat: whole, unharmed, every lamp lit, waiting upon him. She had been there the entire time. The Isles are like that.
The Ten Days
Now the ship that sailed was crewed by Bild, the Wright’s fifty-second son. By the time she docked, the Wright had ten more sons, and it was the youngest of them who stood upon her deck. For the Wright did not spend those days at the spyglass.
He went back to his yard and unrolled the plans, and read them as a stranger would, and for the first time in a year he saw her plainly. And the Flock came, who follow a hull as gulls follow a trawler, and when they find a crack they do not mention it politely; they shriek, and wheel about, and shriek again. And the Wright, who had once found them merely loud, sat down upon the rock and listened. And in the shrieking he heard where every crack was, and he mended each one, and each mending was a son.
And it came to pass that answering the seven questions honestly meant reading his own manifest against his own ship, plank by plank, in daylight. And some of what was painted upon her hull was not so. She did not sell to a nameless Guest, though he had written that she did. Her demonstration chest was bare, though he had written that it was full. He had described the ship he meant to build instead of the one tied up behind him, and every line of it was a thing an inspector confirms in his first two minutes aboard. So he scraped the boasts off and wrote down what was true, and found that the truth explained itself better than the boasts ever had.
Now to put his youngest son aboard, the Wright went back to the Con Sole and lifted the ship’s name out of the open Sub Mission. It came out cleanly. It would not go back. The clerk looked up and said, An unexpected error occurred, and would say nothing further, then or ever. No rule was named, no rope, no strand. The Wright asked again, and was consoled again, and again, until the afternoon was gone.
So at last he gave the Sub Mission up for lost. Ten days upon the rock, and the boasts scraped off, and ten sons, and the petition they were all pinned to would never move again. He burned it. And he sat down that same hour and did the whole of it over: a fresh petition in the same hand, the same ship, the same ten Wares, the same answers to the same seven questions, all of it written out again as though for the first time. It took eleven minutes.
Ten days, and then eleven minutes.
The Con Sole. A clerk consoles thee. Thou art not consoled.
The Second Harbor
While the first ship waited upon the Orchard, the second was finished. Her hull was cut from the wood of the coffee bean, which groweth the same in every soil. Her lamps were lit. And she made ready to sail for the other coast, to the land of And Droid, who is green.
On that coast Goo Gull keeps his docks. He is a gull, and so he has followed every hull in the water since the beginning, and he remembereth where each one went.
He is the more talkative of the two harbormasters. Ask him how long, and he will tell thee. Ask the Orchard, and it saith nothing whatsoever, ever, and meaneth it.
But that crossing is the next tale, not this one.
Two harbors, two lamps, both dark. One of them will at least tell thee how long.
What I’d Tell Past Me
Plainly, and with no rope puns.
Write the review notes early, against the running build, not from memory, and keep them in the repo like any other source file, because they are one. Then read every claim in them as though somebody were paying you to disprove it, because somebody is.
So, a question for you: what is the longest you have been becalmed waiting on a gatekeeper, and what did you build while you waited? Box below, as always.
More soon. Next time: either the verdict, or how a game got carried to the land of And Droid in a week. Whichever tide comes in first.
Credits
The whole conceit is lifted from Lincoln Spector’s The Legend of the Pea Sea, a Gigglebytes column from July 1993 that retells the history of the personal computer as scripture: a Gatekeeper fashions a Dosfish to swim the Pea Sea. My copy is the D/FW Computer Currents reprint from that August, page 62, torn out and kept in a box of keepsakes. I have thought about it roughly once a month ever since.
If you have never read it, read it now, before you read anything else of mine.