The ship came down over Ban Sai Yai during badminton, which everybody agreed afterwards was unfortunate, because Dao had been winning for the first time in her life and now nobody would ever be able to confirm it.
It had the general shape of a cathedral that had swallowed a second cathedral and was thinking about a third. It lowered itself onto the school field with tremendous care and flattened the net. The net belonged to the district office, which meant forms.
Khru Ampai stood at her gate with her stick in one hand and a bag of limes in the other. She had taught at that school for most of her life and had assessed many arriving vehicles from this exact spot, and she had learned that you could tell a great deal from the parking. This one had the sort of confidence that came from having never been asked to park anywhere else.
“Waan,” she said. “Come and look.”
Her wife came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on her apron, and looked for a while.
“They’ve flattened the net.”
Waan looked at the ship. “That seems excessive.”
A ramp descended from the underside and stopped at a height that implied somebody, somewhere, had been asked how tall the people of Ban Sai Yai were. Down it came in a complicated arrangement of limbs, joints, and formal-looking folds, as though its skeleton had been designed by a committee that had never met a skeleton. It also had too many elbows.
It arranged itself at the bottom of the ramp, unfolded a document that continued unfolding for longer than the ramp could support, and addressed the school field.
“I am Hessenwaal Pree, Latter Voice of the Perpetual Amity of Thurn, Ambassador Extraordinary and Without Foreseeable End, Keeper of the Grievance,” it said. “I am here about the ladder.”
The children said nothing. Dao picked up her racquet.
“I will require your Disinterested Party.”
“Our what?” said Waan.
“Whoever lives nearest the object,” said Pree. “The Book of Settled Practice is specific.”
Every head on the field turned towards the gate, and within seconds Ampai had somehow become the nearest authority on extraterrestrial parking.
The Book of Settled Practice arrived at the district office that evening in a crate. Fon signed for it, because Fon signed for everything, and then she read it, because she had discovered that if you left paperwork unattended, it developed ambitions.
Fon had been in Ampai’s class years ago and was the only child who ever read the whole textbook, including the appendix, including the publisher’s address. She worked in records now. She arrived at the house before sunrise with the crate roped to the back of her motorbike and the relevant sections marked with torn strips of till receipt.
“It is a legal code,” Fon said. “It governs every settled civilisation. There are twelve thousand and eleven clauses. Four of them are about biscuits.”
“Sit down,” said Ampai. “Waan, tea.”
“I would rather stand while I explain it.”
“Then stand.”
Fon stood. “Two powers are at war. The Perpetual Amity of Thurn and the Gracious Reciprocity of Klaad.”
“Those are both friendly names.”
“Yes. They are at war. The Book of Settled Practice says a grievance concerning a borrowed object must be arbitrated at the object’s last recorded location, by the person living nearest to it, in a venue of no strategic value whatsoever.”
Waan put down the tea. “The hall.”
“The multipurpose hall behind the temple,” Fon agreed. “I checked. It has no strategic value whatsoever.”
The hall had been assessed for strategic value twice. The first assessment found none. The second confirmed it. There had not been a third, because nobody had wanted to interfere with the result.
Ampai turned a lime over in her fingers. “And the object is here.”
“The object has been here a very long time,” said Fon. “They have been fighting over it, and nobody thought to come and look.”
They set up the hall the way they did for funerals and vaccination day, which is to say plastic chairs in rows and the good fan brought down from the head monk’s room. Ampai had the whiteboard wheeled in. The marker only worked if you held it at an angle, and Ampai had done so for years, which was long enough for the district to consider the problem solved.
The Thurn delegation entered first and unfolded into the left-hand chairs. The Klaad delegation came in through the other door and had to be helped, because Vuun of the Sorrows was wide enough to make the plastic chairs look optimistic, and in the end she settled onto the floor with her attendants arranged around her, and became, for the remainder of the week, a very expensive sofa with opinions.
“I will not sit opposite that,” said Vuun.
“Then sit at an angle,” said Ampai.
“Do you have any idea what that creature’s grandmother did?”
“I have not met your grandmother either. Sit at an angle.”
Vuun sat at an angle.
Ampai went to the whiteboard and wrote two words in her enormous teacher’s hand. PREE. VUUN.
“That is you,” she said. “I am not saying the rest. If I say the rest, we will be here until the mangoes come in.”
Pree drew itself up through several of its elbows. “My title is a record of service.”
“Your title is a record of a person with nothing else to fill the morning. Hands up before you speak. Nobody speaks over anybody. If you speak over somebody, I will write your name in the corner.”
“In the corner,” Pree repeated.
“Yes.”
“Is that considered a sanction?”
“No. It is the corner.”
Pree looked at the corner again.
There was a long pause. Out on the field, Dao and her brother were putting the badminton net back up, using the wreckage of the old posts and a length of blue nylon rope, and the sound of that carried in through the shutters.
Pree looked at the whiteboard. Vuun looked at the whiteboard. Neither of them had been given an instruction by a person smaller than a building in living memory, and the sensation was so novel that both of them wanted to see where it went.
Vuun raised what she used instead of a hand.
“Yes.”
“May I say what they did to the ladder?”
“You may.”
The grievance took most of the morning. Pree read every word, including the parts written by lawyers whose entire civilisation had since been folded into another civilisation and lost, because the wording was still the wording.
The facts were these. A long time ago, longer ago than either side could now pronounce with confidence, the Perpetual Amity of Thurn had lent the Gracious Reciprocity of Klaad a ladder.
“A ladder,” said Ampai.
“A ladder,” said Pree.
“Go on.”
The ladder came back. That much was agreed. Klaad had returned it, and Thurn had received it, and there the trouble started, because it arrived with paint on it, and a rung missing, but most of all, it arrived without thanks.
“Paint,” said Ampai, writing it on the board.
“Paint,” said Pree.
“What colour?”
Pree consulted the document. Pree consulted several attendants. The attendants consulted one another in a language of filing cabinets going downhill.
“The record does not say.”
“Write it down, Fon. Colour not recorded.” Ampai capped the marker. “Next.”
Next was the schedule of previous attempts to settle the matter. One had ended over the seating. One had ended over the seating at the one before. One had ended because the Klaad delegation arrived in the correct number of vehicles and Thurn assumed the number was intended to make a point.
“How many have there been?” said Ampai.
“This is the twelfth,” said Pree.
“And what happened at the eleventh?”
Pree checked. “The eleventh is what the tenth was about.”
Vuun’s answer took the afternoon. Klaad had never painted the ladder. Klaad had lent it onward, which Klaad was entitled to do, and it had gone out across half the Reciprocity and been used for orchards and for roofing and for one celebrated rescue at the flood locks, and had come home with the ordinary marks of an object that has been used.
“Then the paint belongs to somebody else,” said Ampai.
“The paint is history,” said Vuun.
“Whose?”
“An orchard’s. They had it at a wedding. It came back with rice on it as well, and we took the rice off. That is recorded as an improvement.”
“An improvement.”
“The only one in the schedule.”
“The paint must belong to somebody else, and you’ve just forgotten to clean it off.” Ampai put a small tick next to PAINT.
“That is not the same as breaking it. Pree, is it the same as breaking it?” Ampai said.
Pree was silent for a while. “No.”
“Say it towards her, not towards me.”
“No,” said Pree, at an angle.
By mid-week the whiteboard said PAINT and RUNG and NO THANKS, and under that, in smaller letters, because Fon had asked for it, the note that the war had run long enough for both sides to forget which of them built the ladder, and that they were now fighting about the document recording who had forgotten.
There was also the question of whether something lent onward remained, in law, lent, which occupied an entire session and produced more heat than the fan could move.
“Lending is a chain,” said Vuun. “Each link holds.”
“Lending is a chain,” Pree agreed, “and you handed our link to a stranger.”
“Because it was useful. A ladder in a vault is a plank with ambitions.”
“Our vault has a plaque,” said Pree. “The plaque is longer than the ladder. There was a ceremony. I was not born, and I have seen the footage, and it is difficult to sit through. The applause lasts eleven minutes.”
“Hands,” said Ampai.
Both of them put up a hand.
“Fon. What does the book say?”
Fon turned to her strip of till receipt. “Clause nine hundred and forty. A thing lent may be lent onward where the onward use is consistent with the thing’s nature.”
“And the nature of a ladder,” said Ampai, “is going up.”
“The clause does not specify.”
“Then I am specifying. Write it down.”
Pree’s hand went up again.
“Yes.”
“If they used the ladder for going up, as a ladder is for going up, then our complaint is the paint, and you have already established that the paint does not constitute a grievance.”
“Yes.”
“I have travelled a considerable distance to establish that the paint does not constitute a grievance.”
“Yes,” said Ampai. “Sit down. Your name is not in the corner. That is the best I can do on a Wednesday.”
Outside, the ship had been asked to move a short distance to the left, because the school field was needed, and to everyone’s astonishment it had. The children were selling iced drinks to the attendants through the fire door at a price that rose across the week and that nobody in the Gracious Reciprocity of Klaad thought to query.
By then the attendants had discovered the morning market. They went through it in a line, stooping under the awnings, buying things they had no use for, and the market let them, because they paid without haggling and were pleasant about the dogs, cats, grasshoppers, and snakes. Dao’s grandmother taught one of them to fold a banana leaf. It carried the leaf home and showed it to the Reciprocity. The Reciprocity was not interested, so it showed them again.
At the point in the proceedings when Waan brought in the food, the Office of Ratification arrived.
He came through the fire door, which was propped open with a breeze block, a small grey creature with a stamp on a lanyard. His name was Bib, and he was the happiest creature any of them had ever hosted.
“I am terribly sorry,” said Bib, radiating delight. “This is void.”
“On what grounds?” said Fon.
“On the grounds that the Disinterested Party is required to be disinterested, and she is not, because she has been provided with lunch.”
Ampai looked at the trays. Sticky rice in baskets. Waan’s nam phrik, the one with the burnt shallots, in the cracked blue bowl she refused to throw out. Fried river fish, still going.
“Lunch,” said Bib, “constitutes a benefit.”
“Sit down, Bib,” said Ampai.
“I am afraid I really cannot. Once I have said void, it is void. I have a stamp.”
Fon took another strip of till receipt from the crate and turned to the page it marked. She didn’t look up while she read. The page was staying put, and there was no need to give it the satisfaction of making her follow it with her eyes.
“Clause four thousand and nine,” she said. “Where refreshment has been offered and accepted in the presence of both parties, the parties are held to have entered into hospitality. Hospitality binds. A binding may not be voided by an officer who has also eaten.”
Everybody turned to Bib. A piece of fried river fish was halfway to what passed for his face.
“That is a very old clause.”
“It is clause four thousand and nine,” said Fon. “Just before the biscuits.”
“I have only had a little. I thought it would be rude not to finish it.”
“Sit down, Bib,” said Ampai, and Bib sat down, and Waan gave him another piece, and he took it, and after that Bib was on nobody’s side at all and enjoyed the rest of the week more than any of them.
Vuun ate the nam phrik out of politeness and then ate the rest of it for reasons that became increasingly difficult to explain, then asked, through an attendant, whether the shallots were burnt on purpose. Waan said yes. Vuun went quiet in the manner of a civilisation revising its position on several things at once.
They found the ladder because Fon went and stood in the temple courtyard and looked up, which was the one thing nobody in the galaxy had done.
It was lashed to the wall of the bell tower under the eaves, out of the rain, where it had been kept for as long as anybody could remember. Bringing it down took four men, and the head monk’s instructions, which were unhelpful, and he admitted as much afterwards.
They carried it into the hall and laid it on the tables, and the Perpetual Amity of Thurn and the Gracious Reciprocity of Klaad stood over the thing they had been killing one another over, and looked at it.
It was a ladder. It had paint on it.
It had a great deal of paint on it. It had the red from the Songkran festival two head monks ago, and under that the flaking cream from when the school was cream, and a run of gold leaf on the top rung where somebody had been careless with the Buddha’s shoulder and had put a hand out on the way down.
Pree set a manipulator against the split end where the layers showed and counted them back, one civilisation of paint at a time. It reached the cream and stopped. The stiles were worn pale and smooth in the two places where hands go. One rung was new mango wood. The one below it was teak out of Somsak’s bed frame. The one below that carried a bracket of galvanised strap around the joint, because Ampai’s grandfather had opened his palm on the split and had fixed it because nobody else would.
Every lantern festival, the ladder went up the bell tower with rope and came down with something else fixed, until nobody could remember which parts belonged to the original ladder.
“There is a rung missing,” said Pree.
“There is not,” said Ampai.
“The record says a rung is missing.”
“The record is old. We put it back.” She laid her stick against the mango wood, pale and clean and with another life left in it. “We have put it back many times. That is what a rung is for.”
Vuun had moved without anyone catching her moving, which at that size was an achievement, and had one manipulator resting on the smooth place in the stile where the hands go.
“This is worn,” said Vuun.
“Yes,” said Ampai.
“Is it worn because it was used?”
“Yes,” said Ampai.
“We kept it in a case,” said Vuun.
“We kept it in a vault,” said Pree, “with the case.”
They looked at each other across the table, two powers with enough ordnance between them to unmake a spiral arm, who each had spent an unimaginable span of their history guarding a photograph of a ladder.
Ampai let the silence sit. She had been teaching long enough to know that silence had a useful life, and that if you gave it another few seconds it became somebody else’s problem.
Then she said, “The paint is settled. The rung is settled. Neither of you crossed the sky for a splotch of paint.”
Pree’s elbows folded down, one after another, until Pree was nearer the table than the ceiling.
“They did not thank us.”
“No,” said Ampai.
“We lent it,” said Pree. “It went all across the Reciprocity. It was in the orchards. It was at the flood locks when the children were on the roof. Everybody sang about the flood locks afterwards. There are twelve songs about the flood locks. There is a monument. There is a public holiday. Nobody has ever once said, ‘That was your ladder.’”
Vuun was silent for a while. The fan turned. Outside, Dao’s brother was practising the festival drum and tangling the second bar, the way he always did.
“It had no name on it when it reached us,” Vuun said. “By then it had been ours so long. We thought it had always been there.”
“Now say the part you’ve left out,” said Ampai.
Vuun’s attendants shifted.
“Say it towards her.”
“We had your ladder,” said Vuun. “We used it for years and failed to mention it. This was poor administration. Thank you.”
Pree folded its elbows and pushed the document off the table. It landed in the dust beside the breeze block and the flattened remains of the district’s badminton net, where it looked no more important than anything else in the hall.
Bib stamped the grievance, the breeze block, and the net, and beamed.
Then Fon raised another difficulty. By then everyone had learned that if a difficulty existed, Fon would find it.
“Whose is it now?”
“Mine,” said Ampai.
“You cannot say mine, Khru. The Book of Settled Practice requires a determination,” said Fon.
“Then determine this.” Ampai put her hand flat on the top rung, on the gold leaf, where the Buddha’s shoulder had come away on somebody’s careless thumb. “It has my grandfather’s strap on it and Somsak’s bed frame in it and paint off every building in this village. If it was ever theirs, it isn’t any more. We mended it, and a thing that has been mended enough belongs to whoever did the mending.”
“That is not in the Book of Settled Practice,” said Fon.
“Write it in. There is room. There are twelve thousand clauses and four of them are about biscuits,” said Ampai.
“Then it is yours,” said Vuun. “We have crossed half the known civilisations for a ladder that now belongs to a schoolteacher.”
“No,” said Ampai. “You have come a very long way to borrow a ladder. You may as well do it properly.”
The hall went quiet.
“Lantern festival is in the dry season. The rope goes up the bell tower, and the ladder needs one person at the bottom and one at the top. Last year I did both, which is not a sensible arrangement.”
She took her hand off the top rung.
“So you will come. Both of you. One at the bottom and one at the top. You have spent the week deciding whose ladder it is. You can spend one day putting it to work.”
“And then it is ours,” said Pree.
“And then you bring it back,” said Ampai. “That is the point of a ladder. You do not keep a ladder. A ladder is for lending.”
Vuun made a sound her attendants afterwards refused to translate.
“Write the date on the board, Fon. They will want it in writing. They are that sort.”
Fon wrote the date. Both delegations photographed the board. Fon wrote down that they had photographed it. One of the delegations photographed that.
The Perpetual Amity of Thurn and the Gracious Reciprocity of Klaad have returned every dry season since. Pree goes up, because Pree unfolds, and Vuun holds the bottom, because Vuun is not going anywhere. They bring the rope. They are permitted to bring nothing else, on Waan’s instruction, except for the year they brought a case of something from the Reciprocity that had been banned there for three hundred years and was now apparently very good with rice. The head monk laughed until he had to sit down. After that, they were permitted to bring that as well.
Dao beat her brother on the school field that first dry season with the whole of the Gracious Reciprocity of Klaad watching from the touchline. There were witnesses. It is recorded at the district office, and Fon has the paper.
The war is over. The Book of Settled Practice records the reason for its ending in a new clause, near the end, after the biscuits, in language that took a committee an entire session to agree, and which Fon, who holds the only copy on this planet and keeps it in the records office under a fan, has translated as follows.
A ladder belongs to whoever has repaired it often enough to know which rung will fail next. A ladder kept in a case belongs to nobody, and the case is not evidence. If you lend a ladder, remember that somebody else will use it. If you borrow a ladder, return the ladder. If it comes back in better condition than you lent it, say thank you.
Underneath, in the section reserved for places of no strategic value whatsoever, there is now an entry for Ban Sai Yai, and the entry says only that this is where the ladder is.
The badminton net has been replaced. There were lots of forms.