The Prince Who Does Not Dwindle: Early Readings of Prince Deep Water Before the Strategic Decoding

1. Introduction

The Intelligence Deciphering Committee opened its first working file on Prince Deep Water in Bunker Era, Year 1 (BkE 1), in the months after Yun Tianming had told the tale at the close of the Broadcast Era and the Committee's three reading groups had received it (IDC Early Readings Group, BkE 1). The file stayed thin: fourteen memoranda over three years, written by careful people, and shelved apart from the files on the other two tales because the tale had yielded nothing an engineer could use. Later members of the Committee have tended to treat it as the quiet cousin of the collection, a story that came third and has been read least. (Quiet cousin? Fourteen memoranda are hardly a cousin. Say what you mean, which is that you have a weakness for the underdog.) The phrase stays. It points at a real disproportion between the attention the tale has received and the care its first readers took over it.

This paper reconstructs that file and argues that its quietness is misleading. The early teams were dealing with an image, a prince who stays the same size however far he travels, which breaks one of the first rules a human child learns about the world, and they disagreed in a disciplined way about the part of the rule that was broken, a matter which the file treats as settled by nobody and abandoned by nobody. I write from Bunker Era, Year 13 (BkE 13), after two earlier papers on the corpus, one on the order of telling and one on the domestic register of the second tale, and nothing here postdates that year. No decoding of this tale is complete, and each of those discussed should be taken as a partial result and nothing more.

2. Corpus and Approach

The text is the IDC-collated edition of the three tales prepared for the Visiting Readers' Panel (IDC, BkE 4). The file on Prince Deep Water is held in the Committee's deciphering series, and I have used the fourteen memoranda released from it. The sorting of those memoranda into three groups is my own, and it is offered as a convenience. It makes no claim about how the Committee thought of its work. The criterion is the question each memorandum put to the tale, and where a memorandum put more than one, I sorted it by the one it spent longer on.

My method is the one used in the earlier papers. Household objects and household lessons are treated as carriers of content, and the supervised conditions of the telling are kept in view (Halloran, BkE 3). For this tale I add a third question. For each early reading I ask what piece of ordinary human experience it assumed the listener already possessed, since an image that breaks a rule can be heard as broken only by someone who knows the rule.

3. The Early Readings, Bunker Era Years 1 to 3

Three groups emerge from the file, set out in the table below. The largest, with six memoranda, is the optics group, and it treats the prince's constancy of size as a statement about how images cross a distance. The second, five memoranda from the narrative group, asks whether constancy of size is only a marker of royalty, a convention by which important persons in tales do not diminish. The third, three memoranda, fits neither question, and I have left it unsorted. It is in this group that the word scale first appears.

No memorandum claims a completed decoding. The Committee's own cover notes call each of them provisional, a word that I shall keep and not improve upon, since it is the one thing in the file on which every group agreed.

Ashgrove, whose note of Year 2 opens the optics series, argued that a figure that fails to shrink with distance is a figure whose image is being carried by something other than the ordinary spreading of light (Ashgrove, BkE 2). The note calls this a suggestion and keeps to the word. It is the first document in the file to link the tale, tentatively, to the problems that occupied the propulsion subgroups, and two later memoranda in the same series raise, as tentatively, the possibility of a warning of some kind, a theme the strategic decoders would later fold into the safety-notice file, which the earlier paper on the painter described as assembled from more than one tale. I cannot say. How much of that file rests on this one is not recoverable from the released papers.

Against this, the narrative group replied that fairy tales are full of persons who do not diminish. Vesterlund, whose two memoranda in the file he later expanded for the Journal of Xenolinguistics, set out the case in its most developed form. He observed that the heroes and kings of the oldest tales are seen at one size from every side, as the figures on a playing card are, and that a tale told to a child is under no obligation to behave like a window (Vesterlund, BkE 3). It was a good reply — and also, I think, an answer to a question which the optics group had not quite asked.

4. A Prince Who Does Not Shrink

Every child has stood at the end of a garden, by the gate, and watched somebody walk away down the road. The figure gets smaller, steadily and without argument, until it is the size of a thumb and then of a thumbnail, and the child learns without being told that smallness to the eye is not smallness in the world. The lesson is older than arithmetic, and the prince, who does not shrink, declines to obey it, which is the whole of the difficulty. The tale is told, so far as the collated text shows, with no remark whatever on the matter.

The lesson has parts, and the file's quarrel is about which of them gives way. The first is that apparent size falls with distance; the second is that apparent size is how one judges distance. The optics group read the tale as suspending the first. The narrative group read it as leaving both intact, since a convention is not a percept and nobody takes a king on a playing card for a measurement. The unsorted memoranda asked what is held constant when size does not fall, which is a question about the second.

That absence of remark is the interesting thing. A teller who wished to say that a distant figure stays large could have said so with a flourish, and a supervisor would have noticed the flourish. Yun Tianming says nothing. He lets the human listener supply the rule and register its breach. That is the method of the soap boat and of the sitter in the picture, and the domestic register is again the vehicle. I argued in the earlier paper on The Glutton's Sea that it carried the physics of the second tale past supervision. Nothing stranger than a figure at the end of a road is asked of the listener, and a censor listening for physics would have heard a fairy-tale convention, the royal figure who does not diminish, which is the whole of the economy.

(Road, garden and now the gate. Is there nothing in this paper that does not go away from us? Stay in the room.) The gate matters. A listener who knew nothing of garden gates would hear a prince of constant size and conclude that the tale was about a prince. A human listener hears a prince whom distance has failed to reduce.

5. Order, Light and What Was Not Said

Position matters here, and the third tale deserves a word on its own. By the principle used in the earlier paper on the painter, a teller under supervision puts the most urgent matter first and the least urgent last, and Prince Deep Water came last. The principle sits awkwardly with the care its first readers took over the tale. Either the principle needs qualifying, or the tale carried something which a teller could afford to leave until the end, because it needed no help to be understood.

The second possibility is the more interesting of the pair, and the early file gives it some support. The optics memoranda are not much concerned with urgency. They ask instead whether the invariance can be stated in a form which an observer could check, and a note of the Bunker Era from the dimensional physicists, which I take to be the closest thing to a modern echo of the optics group, asks, in the same spirit, what a non-diminishing image would demand of its observer and its medium (Pellerin-Okoye, BkE 11). That note neither decodes the tale nor claims to, and what it does show is that the early groups were asking a question that could be turned into mathematics, and that the question has not stopped being asked.

None of this tells us what the prince is for.

A constant of size, whatever else it is, can be held up beside a rule that every listener owns, and the Visiting Readers' Panel, hearing the three tales through in Bunker Era, Year 10, had no trouble in noticing the breach (IDC Visiting Readers' Panel, BkE 10).

6. Counter-readings

The Luo-Ji school will say that the tale needs no domestic lesson to be understood, because it is an engineering document for those who can read it and the garden gate is wrapping (Dong, BkE 6). I grant the first half gladly. The engineers on the Committee drew from the corpus all they required, and they did so without any wait for a philologist. But their success does not show that the gate was idle, and an account of how the tale passed supervision must still say what the supervisor was listening past.

Partisans of the Lurker (also "Spirit", "Spirit Mother" in some translations) offer a larger reading, in which the invariance is a trace of an older order, a universe where distance once did not diminish things (Ruiz-Abaroa, BkE 7). There may be something in it, though I find it hard to test from the early file, and the optics memoranda, the likeliest source of support, say nothing of deep time. (Nothing of deep time, and yet you cannot resist the subject. Leave the Lurker alone for a paragraph.)

The strongest opposition comes from the narrative group, whose convention of royalty is still unrefuted. If kings do not diminish in tales, the prince is merely a king. I answer that a convention can be present and still be used, since a teller may choose a convention that is certain to be heard as ornament. The answer does not refute the narrative group. It shortens the distance between the groups, and it is that distance I set out to measure. Neither group is wrong about the tale, though each is wrong about the other.

On cosmology I treat the frameworks as compatible, with cosmic sociology as the mechanism operating inside a universe of the shape the Lurker hypothesis describes, and the schools may yet shake hands over this tale if neither insists on offering its hand first.

7. Conclusion

This paper has reconstructed a file and decoded nothing, a modest result, and I do not apologise for it. The early teams asked of the prince the questions they had, and the reconstruction suggests that their disagreement was real, orderly and recoverable. Whether it was also correct is a matter for records I have not seen.

Three pieces of the archive would test the account. The first is the supervision record for the third telling in the IDC Transmission Archive, which would show whether the tale was heard with the same attention as the others or with less. The second is the set of three memoranda I could not assign to either group, whose unreleased annexes may state what they took the prince to hold constant. The third is a question for the dimensional physicists, who could say whether the invariance can be stated in geometric terms at all without already knowing the answer to the question the tale was told to ask.

The present paper extends the line of two earlier ones, on the order of telling and on the domestic register of the second tale, and the third tale now stands in the same lineage with its file open. The prince walks away down the road and remains, so far as I can tell, exactly as large as he was; ad referendum.