It resulted in two. Y and Nolle used the logic of the game to implicitly describe, linguistically and algorithmically, an amended Contract-Song, which by necessity was instantiated as a booklike Machine, and a machinelike Book. The Charmed pair were named Eulalie and Éloi. The complete tortured logic of the new Contract they embodied would take days of sustained song, but would, in theory, supersede the overbinding Contract keeping everyone under the spell of Säve’s Plan.

The Gamemakers Winsome and Zsofia, being careful not to let on too much detail about its complete meaning, recruited a House of Musicians to chant the new Contract over the course of two and a half days. The Musicians incanted two at a time, each with one of the two Mecha-Tomes. Velle motivated them with some Storytelling and helped them understand the workings of the conceptual and physical wheels within wheels of its syntax, and the nuances of passing lines back and forth between the performers, especially at the crucial moments of shift change. It worked on the second try, and the Contract shifted instantly into its new, subtler, more flexible form. Work on the masking of celestial bodies was immediately dropped. Melancholera had begun.

The Musicians were, by the way, familiar. Members of Outerbridge House, not far away, that had once been assigned as Opposites to Goodbye House, before the Phlegmatic Age supplanted the House system. The performance of the Amendment is reminiscent of when you saw them through the W’drawing Room wall, being so enraptured by the swell of their Music as to unconsciously sing along. This time you do not sing along, for fear of disrupting the Amendment.

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