The Wharf of Temporary Intentions

Most eventually find their way back.

Others return only in body. Something in them seems to have been left behind along the journey.

From then on, they greet every new situation with growing pessimism, as though reality had taken it as a personal insult that they expected it to finally stand still.

The city of Brinehaven had one magnificent warehouse.

It stood directly beside the harbor, built from gray stone that had survived enough storms to consider the sea an administrative inconvenience. Ships arrived. Goods were unloaded. Goods departed. Merchants complained. Everything functioned exactly as expected.

Until the Council discovered a problem.

Ships had begun remaining alongside the quay for days. Some waited for buyers. Some waited for favorable winds. Some waited because their captains preferred taverns to navigation.

The harbor slowly transformed into a floating village.

“This cannot continue,” declared the Harbor Magistrate.

“We shall build a parking basin.”

The proposal passed unanimously.

Naturally.

Only afterward did somebody ask the uncomfortable question.

“Should ships pay for parking?”

The Treasurer answered immediately.

“Obviously.”

The Council agreed.

Another unanimous decision.

Naturally.

Only afterward did the Warehouse Master raise his hand.

“What about ships currently loading cargo?”

Silence.

“They are also parked.”

“Yes.”

“But loading is commerce.”

“Also yes.”

“It would seem strange to tax trade.”

The silence grew thoughtful.

The Treasurer smiled.

“I have a solution.”

Everyone became nervous.

The first proposal was beautifully simple.

Every captain received a wooden token.

One side read:

PARKING

The other:

LOADING

Whenever loading began, the dock workers would politely remind the captain to turn the token over.

The Treasurer called this: State Management.

Within two weeks half the tokens disappeared, several were accidentally reversed, one captain claimed to be simultaneously loading and parking, and three ships proudly displayed both states after sawing their tokens in half.

The Harbor Guards requested clarification.

The Council formed a committee.

The second proposal was considered far more sophisticated.

Instead of tokens, every loading operation required an official certificate. A clerk would verify the certificate every hour. A second clerk would verify the first clerk. A third clerk verified both. Eventually, more people were verifying loading than loading itself.

The Warehouse Master quietly mentioned this observation.

He was assigned responsibility for improving documentation.

The third proposal embraced modern administration.

Every ship would register its purpose upon entering the harbor.

Purpose A: Parking.

Purpose B: Loading.

Purpose C: Waiting.

Purpose D: Loading while waiting.

Purpose E: Waiting while intending to load.

Purpose F: Loading after waiting because another ship was waiting while loading.

By autumn, the official handbook contained seventy-three valid combinations. A visiting captain from another kingdom studied the forms for several minutes.

Then he simply sailed away.

The Witch arrived three days later.

She watched quietly from the seawall.

Construct H2O stood beside her, notebook already open.

“I have counted,” said Aitch.

“There are now twenty-one officials involved in determining whether a ship is parked.”

“And how many determine whether it is loading?”

“The same twenty-one.”

The Witch nodded.

“So nobody is actually observing ships.”

“They observe paperwork.”

“Paperwork is easier.”

“It rarely sails away.”

That evening she visited the Harbor Master.

He proudly showed her the great diagram.

It occupied most of one wall.

Seve
nty-three boxes were connected by considerably more than seventy-three arrows.

Several arrows returned to their point of origin.

Others crossed so many lines that nobody remembered where they had started.

One disappeared behind a cupboard.

“We have now described every possible state of a ship in Brinehaven Harbor,” said the Harbor Master.

The Witch studied the diagram.

“What happens if a ship catches fire?”

The Harbor Master paused.

“That would be an emergency.”

“Is an emergency parking?”

“No.”

“Loading?”

“No.”

“Waiting?”

“Not exactly.”

Aitch opened his notebook.

“Seventy-four,” he said.

The Harbor Master frowned.

The Witch continued.

“What if the ship is being repaired?”

“Seventy-five,” said Aitch.

“What if it is being repaired while cargo is unloaded?”

“Seventy-six.”

“What if customs detains it?”

“Seventy-seven.”

“What if customs detains it while it is being repaired?”

Aitch hesitated.

“Possibly seventy-eight through eighty-one.”

The Harbor Master looked increasingly unhappy.

The Witch pointed toward the sea.

“What if a storm closes the harbor?”

“That is hardly a state of the ship.”

“Will the ships remain?”

“Yes.”

“Will they pay?”

The Harbor Master stared at the diagram.

Aitch turned a page.

“What if the warehouse burns down?”

“Why would the warehouse burn down?”

“I don’t know,” said the Witch.

“What if the King changes the tax law?”

“He has not.”

“What if ships begin carrying cargo that cannot enter the warehouse?”

“They currently do not.”

“What if someone invents a kind of ship we have never seen?”

The Harbor Master folded his arms.

“You are deliberately inventing increasingly ridiculous circumstances.”

“Yes.”

“Which of them do you expect to happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why are we considering them?”

The Witch looked at him.

“Because neither do you.”

For a while nobody spoke.

Outside, somewhere in the darkness, a rope creaked against a mast.

The Witch looked again at the great diagram.

“You are trying to describe the future.”

“We are trying to describe the harbor.”

“The harbor is in the future surprisingly often.”

The Harbor Master did not seem convinced.

“So what would you do?”

“I would stop trying to guess which future will arrive.”

“And do what instead?”

“Break your harbor.”

He stared at her.

“Conceptually,” she added.

He appeared only slightly relieved.

They spent the following morning doing exactly that.

They imagined storms.

Fires.

Broken cranes.

Damaged ships.

Foreign ships.

Ships carrying unfamiliar goods.

Ships arriving before their paperwork.

Ships whose paperwork arrived before the ship.

Changes in taxation.

Changes in customs law.

A second warehouse.

No warehouse.

Too many ships.

Almost no ships.

A royal decree declaring Wednesdays exempt from something nobody had previously considered taxable.

The Treasurer contributed enthusiastically to this last possibility.

For every imagined circumstance, they asked the same questions.

What would cease to make sense?

What would have to change?

And what would still be useful?

The seventy-three states did not fare well.

Some survived one circumstance and failed under the next.

Others existed only because another state existed.

Several turned out to describe distinctions nobody at the harbor actually cared about.

A few had apparently been created solely because there had been empty space on the original form.

But some ideas kept returning.

A ship occupied harbor space.

Time passed while it occupied that space.

Sometimes it performed an activity the harbor explicitly existed to support.

Loading was such an activity.

Unloading was another.

Repair could be one.

Emergency shelter could be one.

Customs inspection could be one.

The particular activities changed.

The distinction survived.

Aitch looked at his notes.

“We keep losing the states.”

“Good,” said the Witch.

“But these things remain.”

“Also good.”

“What do we call them?”

The Witch looked at the remains of the diagram.

“Useful.”

That afternoon they returned to the seawall.

The Harbor Master was still troubled.

“If loading should not be taxed, one must identify loading.”

“Yes.”

“And repairing.”

“If you choose to recognize it.”

“And emergency shelter.”

“Likewise.”

“Then we still have states.”

“You have activities.”

“That sounds suspiciously similar.”

“It often does at first.”

The Witch drew three circles into the sand.

One she labeled: Loading

Another: Repair

A third: Emergency shelter

Then she drew a large boundary around them.

“This is your harbor.”

She pointed at the circles.

“These are things you presently recognize.”

Then she pointed at all the untouched sand inside the boundary.

“What is that?”

The Harbor Master frowned.

“Everything else.”

“Precisely.”

“You mean parking?”

“No.”

The Witch shook her head.

“That would make the same mistake again.”

Aitch looked up from his notebook.

“You would define another state.”

“Exactly.”

She pointed at the empty sand.

“This is simply what remains when none of the recognized activities applies.”

The Harbor Master considered this.

“And we tax that?”

“If that is what you intend.”

“What happens when we recognize another legitimate activity?”

“Add the activity.”

“And the parking rules?”

“Remain.”

“What if we stop recognizing one?”

“Remove the activity.”

“And the parking rules?”

“Remain.”

“What if ships change?”

“Let them.”

“What if the harbor changes?”

“It will.”

“What if we have forgotten something?”

The Witch smiled.

“You have.”

The new law occupied only three sentences.

Harbor activities are defined independently.

While performing any recognized harbor activity, no parking tax applies.

Every remaining stay within the harbor is subject to the parking tax.

There were no exemptions.

Because nothing was exempt. There was no exhaustive catalogue of possible ship states. Because nobody knew what all possible ship states were. And, most importantly, nobody needed to.

Years passed.

New ships arrived.

New forms of cargo appeared.

The harbor acquired a second crane, lost the first one in a storm, built a second warehouse, temporarily lost that one to a fire, introduced quarantine inspections, abolished them, and later reintroduced them under a different name.

The parking law remained untouched.

Recognized harbor activities changed.

The residual rule remained.

The Treasurer found this deeply disappointing.

He had already begun writing The Comprehensive Catalogue of Exceptional Circumstances. It remained unfinished.

Naturally.

That evening, Construct H2O looked thoughtfully across the harbor.

“So we did not discover every state a ship might ever be in.”

“No.”

“We deliberately considered many states that may never happen.”

“Yes.”

“Some were even ridiculous.”

“Especially useful.”

Aitch frowned.

“Why?”

“Because plausible futures tempt you to predict.”

“And ridiculous ones?”

“Force you to think.”

Aitch looked back toward the Harbor Office, where the great seventy-three-state diagram was being removed from the wall.

“So the point was not to find the correct future.”

“No.”

“It was to discover what remained useful across many different futures.”

The Witch nodded.

Aitch wrote this down.

Then paused.

“And those things that remain…”

“Residues.”

He looked across the harbor.

A vessel was unloading barrels.

Another was undergoing repairs.

A third sat quietly at the far end of the quay doing nothing that anyone could identify as useful.

“So residuality is about designing what is left over?”

“Not quite.”

The Witch watched the ships for a moment.

“It is about discovering what survives uncertainty.”

Aitch considered this.

“Does this happen outside harbors?”

The Witch smiled.

“Almost everywhere.”

She looked toward the city.

“Organizations like to describe the future before it happens.”

“They become surprisingly good at describing.”

“And the future?”

“Less cooperative.”

Aitch closed his notebook.

“So instead of predicting which reality will arrive, we expose our ideas to many possible realities and pay attention to what survives.”

“Exactly.”

“That sounds considerably easier than predicting the future.”

“No.”

The Witch turned toward the city.

“It merely has the advantage of being possible.”