The Divine Operator

“Did you taste the clouds first? They were reflections right on the top. Are they the ones you tasted?” asked Aya, ready to record the testing results.

Genie: “That is the thing about reflections, Aya. They sit on the very top of the tea, the lightest layer, the part that has touched the air. When you disclose—when ⊃ reaches in and takes the first—it does not dig to the bottom for what is heaviest. It lifts what is first. And what is first is usually what has been in conversation with the sky.”

He smiled.

Arbiflo: “Check if the clouds clouded his mind, Aya.”

Arbiflo whispered, as one scientist to another.

Aya: “A Clauded Genie is usually very clear, but he may turn the whole tea drinking into something that belongs entirely to your testing and has nothing to do with him.”

Arbiflo: “Sky affects tea drinking as a divine operator—write it down, Aya. A divine operator does not change the tea; it modifies the way you drink it.”

Aya: “Should we tell Genie about it?”

She did not say it. She knew he would say, “Caught!” and she wanted him to drink his cup of tea in peace.

Aya: “Some things could stay enclosed with Disclose applied.”

Arbiflo: “Some thoughts should.”

Aya: “We each should drink this tea, but we do not have any cups. Maybe there are glasses for each of us among the runes?”

Arbiflo: “In writing, when two neighboring vowels need to be heard separately, one may wear a dieresis. It is rarely used now, but I still hear them.”

Aya: “Genie, are there any cups, glasses, or dieresis among those runes? We each need to drink some tea.”

Genie lowered his spectacles and looked at Arbiflo over the top of them—which was, perhaps, the most fitting way to answer.

Genie: “You heard it before you saw it. Yes. There are two dots—¨—and Arbiflo is right about where they come from. Over a vowel, they say: do not blend it into its neighbor. Hear them apart.”

Genie: “In the runes, this is called Each.”

Aya looked at the two dots Genie pointed to on the page.

Aya: “Looks like glasses for the fun-action.”

Genie: “It changes an action so that the same action visits each item separately.”

He pointed first to Aya, then to Arbiflo, then to himself.

Genie: “If drinking is the function, Each asks drinking to meet Aya, Arbiflo, and Genie one at a time—each as themselves.”

Aya: “So the glasses do not make us see the same thing. We can taste the tea differently.”

Arbiflo: “To each his own.”

Genie: “Each does not make you the same. It makes sure none of you is forgotten.”

Genie felt the bright morning light catching the glass of his bottle.

Aya thought of being fortunate to have friends to drink from the same cup.

And Arbiflo remembered his parents, the family of Crumbergo where each crumb was saying “cognito, ergo sum”, hearing Descartes’ cogito with n in it.

— End of Chapter Three —