Chương 197: CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY-SEVEN: NINETEEN PAGES

Alaric's reply to the third section came in April and ran to nineteen pages. Danny read it in one sitting on the bench outside the school, in the rain, under the eave, and did not come in until it was dark. He brought it to the study at the tenth hour.

"He's demolished the middle," he said. Marcus put down the pen.

"How badly?"

"Completely." Danny sat. He was fifteen and had grown four inches since autumn and had not adjusted to the chairs.

"Pages six through fourteen. He takes the argument apart in order and every step is right."

"Show me the worst one." Danny turned to a page and read it out. You write that an institution is honest if it can be changed by an encounter it did not seek. I accept the criterion. I put to you that it is not a criterion of honesty. It is a criterion of youth. A thing which is nine years old can be changed by everything. It has not yet met the encounter which would cost it its foundation to accommodate. When it meets that one it will discover the difference between a wall and a wall it has never leaned on.

I am seventy-two years old and my Church is fourteen hundred. We have been changed a great many times and we have also, twice in my lifetime, refused to be changed, and both refusals looked from outside exactly like the rigidity you describe, and one of them was correct. You do not yet have a story about a refusal that was correct. Until you do, your criterion has not been tested; it has only been convenient. Danny put the page down. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve.

Read this novel on Royal Road.

"He's right," he said.

"Have we refused anything?"

"Loads of things. That's not the point he's making." Danny pushed his hair back.

"He's saying we've never refused anything that cost us. Everything we've held onto, holding onto it was also the useful thing. The rights provisions, the labour standards, the review room — every single time we've stood on a principle, standing on it turned out to work." He paused.

"So we've got no evidence about what we do when it doesn't."

"The rifle," Marcus said. Danny looked up.

"Nine months," Marcus said.

"Briggs came to me yesterday with a version that works in six weeks and is wrong, and I said nine months. That's a refusal that costs."

"It cost you nothing," Danny said.

"There's no threat. You gave up seven months of nothing to keep a standard you weren't being pushed on." He shook his head.

"That's the cheapest possible version. That's exactly what he's saying." Marcus sat with that for a while.

"So write him back and say he's right."

"I did that at about the fourth page." Danny turned to the end.

"He knows he's right. He's not writing to win. Look at the last bit." He read it out. I have set this out at length because I believe the argument is worth the demolition. Most are not. You are fifteen. I have been informed of this twice, once by the Warden and once by yourself, and I have chosen not to make it a factor, and I am now going to break that rule for one paragraph and then return to it.

I began asking these questions when I was twenty-six and I asked them alone because there was no one in my house to ask them with, and I have been asking them alone for forty-six years. I do not expect you to understand what it is to receive nineteen pages of disagreement from someone who has read you properly. I expect you will understand it in about forty years, and I expect that when you do you will find you cannot remember which of my objections you conceded, only that somebody bothered.

Send me the fourth section when it exists. Do not hurry it on my account. I am old but I am not in a hurry either; that is the one advantage of the position. Danny folded it.

"I don't have a refusal that cost us," he said.

"I can't write the section without one and I can't invent one."

"Then you wait."

"For what?"

"For the encounter," Marcus said.

"He's not telling you to fix the argument. He's telling you the argument isn't finished being lived yet." Danny sat there with the nineteen pages on his knee.

"That could be twenty years," he said.

"Yes."

"He knows that."

"He's seventy-two," Marcus said.

"He knows exactly what he's asking you to wait for."