Chapter 2
The Shape of Silence
In which Aya makes room for a friend who isn’t there.
River Bunny Aya was walking with Genie in his bottle. Behind them lay the trace of the path Asign was making. Ahead, the path dipped between two hills and vanished.
“Genie, we’re walking into the unknown. Don’t you think we’re very brave?”
“Very,” said Genie. “Especially since we don’t know whether the unknown is ahead of us or all around us.”
Aya laughed.
“Genie, you sound like our friend Arbiflo! Oh, no! We forgot to invite him!”
“Oh! The philosopher of cheese and hearing—Arbiflo Crumbergo!” Genie exclaimed.
The early morning had forgotten to make one star disappear from the sky.
Aya looked up at the forgotten star.
“Perhaps Asign could assign that star to Arbiflo. Then he could join us!”
“A philosopher with his own light. Convenient,” noted Genie.
“But first,” said Aya, “I want to tell you something Arbiflo once said.”
Genie’s ears grew longer for careful listening.
“He told me about Socrates, who said, ‘I know that I do not know.’ Arbiflo respected Socrates very much, but he thought the magic of knowing was that we could be aware of not knowing.”
Aya looked at the disappearing path.
“There might be a valley ahead,” Aya continued. “Or a mountain. Or another river. Perhaps a reservoir with carp to count!”
“Carp are notoriously difficult to count,” said Genie. “They refuse to stay still.”
Aya smiled.
“The unknown isn’t empty, Genie. There are all sorts of things we haven’t met yet, but it has a shape! I wish Arbiflo were here. He knows so much about the shape of the unknown!”
“Then we’d better make room for him,” said Genie.
Aya spun around her own axis, shaping the space around herself.
“That’s it! We need to make him a space to be in before he arrives. It will be empty and silent, but it will have just the right shape for Arbiflo. Can we make something like that?”
Genie opened his palm.
A small golden sign appeared.
⍬
“Zilda,” he said. “Nobody home.”
Aya leaned closer.
“Is that really her?”
“Every bit.”
“But there’s nothing inside!”
“Exactly.”
Aya looked at the sign for a long moment.
“Can we make room for Arbiflo in her?”
“Yes. Though he may complain about the accommodations.”
Aya imagined Arbiflo’s whiskers twitching. She imagined him inspecting the empty space and asking whether breakfast was included.
She giggled.
Aya looked up at the star.
“We can assign Arbiflo, as we remember him, to Zilda first. Or, actually, we’ll assign Zilda to Arbiflo first, so his name has room in it.”
Arbiflo ← ⍬
“Then we’ll place the star there for his philosophical brightness. He’s a real star, Genie. The funny kind. And there’s only one Arbiflo Crumbergo. We can’t leave him lonely in his only!”
Genie chuckled.
“An only doesn’t need to mean lonely.”
Aya looked at the empty place they had made for Arbiflo.
It was no longer just a space.
It was somewhere she could imagine her friend. She had made room for him in her imagination.
“Hello, Zilda,” she said softly.
The golden ⍬ shimmered in silence with a shape.
“Now let’s give Arbiflo his star,” said Aya. “Magic begins!”
Magic was the word Genie had been waiting for!
“We can append a star to the empty vector and write:
Arbiflo ← Arbiflo , '★'
Or… even faster magic assignment!”
Arbiflo ,← '★'