48.

Instructions Another Person Can Use

The First Threshold copy room and deep Archive, Year 200 AGH (month 11)

Sava had moved their own work to the far side of the desk, but not put it away. They finished numbering a leaf while Jo waited.

“Tell me where it stops making sense,” she said.

Sava Merret drew the instruction sheet toward them. They were nineteen, a human colleague whose careful copies Jo had already used. Their fine black hair was tied behind their head; a loose end fell forward when they bent to read. They tucked it back without taking their eyes from the sheet.

Jo set the permitted extract from the published Tibbs conversation beside it. She had chosen something already public, with a date and an ending to the supplied selection.

“May I write on this?” they asked, touching her instructions.

“Yes. Please do.”

They read for a while. Jo looked toward the work stacked at the other end of the table and tried not to watch their pen. When it moved, she watched it.

Sava drew a line under Correct errors before making the clean copy and brought the published extract closer.

“Do I change ‘Beast World’?”

“Mrs. Tibbs is quoting Barnaby.”

“I know. But you've told me to correct errors before I copy.”

Jo took her sheet back. Correct errors had seemed plain when the person correcting them would be her.

“I meant a mistake made in copying.”

“Then I'll leave his where it is. Could you put that here?”

She changed the line. A copying error was to be corrected against the source. A doubtful claim in the source needed a separate question, not a quiet improvement. She also gave the event's date and the date of copying their own places. Her first instructions had simply said date the page.

Sava put the printed source to the left of a clean leaf and the instructions above both. They entered twenty-six beside the event and the date of this copy in the separate place Jo had marked. Jo kept quiet while they wrote the passage, including the label Mrs. Tibbs had corrected.

At the end, Sava laid the pen across the leaf and pointed to another line on the instruction sheet: Mark any gap.

“This stops in the middle of the conversation. Do I mark that?”

“It's the end of the selection. You have all of what I gave you.”

“Then I shouldn't be deciding where the gaps are.”

“No,” Jo said. “I should have marked them in the text you get.”

She changed the instruction. An unanswered source question would stay a question. A part deliberately withheld under the telling's permission would stay withheld; the outward copy must not advertise a private omission unless that too was permitted. An unexplained break in copying called for comparison with the source and, if that did not settle it, a question. It did not call for a guessed continuation.

Sava read what she had written before taking up the pen again. They marked the last line as the end of the supplied selection, then passed the copy across.

“Here.”

Jo read it against the source. The quotation was intact.

“It works.”

Sava put the pen into the rest beside their own pile. “I have to finish those before they go up.”

“Thank you.”

“Leave me the corrected sheet when you've made it readable.”

Jo looked at the crossings-out. She had made a good deal of the space intended for a margin.

“I will.”

Sava drew their own work back into the middle of the desk. Jo gathered the public extract, independent copy and marked instructions without taking a leaf from the wrong pile.

*   *   *

“You have found someone,” the mind said when she told it about the exercise.

“I've found something wrong with my instructions.”

“I meant someone to come after you.”

“Sava agreed to try the sheet. They've gone back to their work.”

The mind was quiet long enough for Jo to begin setting out the clean copy.

“They asked to see the corrected sheet,” she added.

“Then perhaps...”

“For use in the copy room,” Jo said. “That's what they asked for.”

“How many instructions?” it asked.

“Wrong ones?”

“Yes.”

“More than I expected.”

“That is promising.”

She looked up.

“For the instructions,” it said.

Jo read the revised sheet aloud. In the last section she came to the direction to mark the point where work stopped so that it could resume from there.

“Whose point?” the mind asked.

“The point on the page.”

“Your copier could be behind us.”

She looked down at the fresh copy Sava had made. It ended where the supplied extract ended, not where the Tibbs conversation had ended, and certainly not where the mind's telling had reached in the book.

“Yes,” she said. “They could.”

She made two entries: the last checked place in a copy and the stopping place in the account being told. They were not to replace each other. When she read the altered direction, the mind asked which date would be beside the second entry. Jo supplied the date of the sitting and wrote it where the next person would see it.

They still needed someone willing to learn the work. Jo said she would keep asking, without adding Sava's name to a promise they had not made.

“Leave the copy where you can reach it,” the mind said.

She put Sava's page on the shelf above the working notes.