By the end of that autumn the Pond had had enough of Nutsy.
He owed the fruit seller eleven shells. He owed the library three, and a book about the sea with a bent corner. He had lost his bird in the spring, lost fifty apples in the summer, and told the market he had invented waiting. On Tuesday he knocked the nut barrel over, and Pip said a word Bao had not heard a frog say before.
"Somebody should stop him," said the bread woman.
"Yes," said Bao, before she had decided to.
So the two of them went to find out who can.
They went to the gatekeeper first. The gatekeeper said he could keep Nutsy out of the gate, but the gate was not the market, and Nutsy did not come in through the gate anyway, he came along the water.
They went to the caller. The caller said he called what was said. If Nutsy said a thing, he called it.
"Call it quieter."
"I have only one voice," said the caller.
They went to the book keepers, all nine of them, at sundown, which took some arranging. The mole heard them out and said that he wrote down what was called, and that if Nutsy traded, Nutsy went in the book, and that he had no second book for animals anybody was annoyed with.
They went to Pip, who was still cross, and who said the barrels could not tell one animal from another and that this was the entire reason anyone used them.
They went to Cogsworth, who said MARKET DAY.
By then it was dark, and Bao was standing in the middle of the square trying to think of one more animal to ask, and there was not one.
"There is nobody," said the bread woman.
"There is nobody," said Bao.
The bread woman went home.
Bao stayed.
Because she had stood in this exact square, four seasons ago, with three plums gone to a cat in a green hat, running from the caller to the book keeper to the gatekeeper and back again, asking every single one of them to change one small line for her.
And every one of them had said no.
She had wanted somebody in charge so badly that day.
Tonight she had gone and looked for that animal again, with the bread woman beside her, and the whole market behind her, and for a very good reason.
And it was the same square, and the same nobody, and the same answer.
Moolah was sitting on the rim of the well.
"You could have told me," said Bao.
"I could have."
"There is no door."
"There is no door."
"If there were a door," said Bao slowly, "somebody would be standing at it. And one day they would not like me either."
Moolah finished her coffee and put the cup down on the stone.
"You can swim now," she said.
Nutsy turned up the next morning and bought four apples, and nobody could do a single thing about it, including Bao, who found she did not want to.
He paid the fruit seller six of her eleven shells in the spring.
Margin Note: The rule that protects you is the rule that won't let you off.
The Honest Bit: This is what permissionless means. Nobody can be asked to keep you out, because there is nobody to ask, and that holds whether the animal at the gate would have liked you or not. It is the same arrangement that would not give Bao her three plums back. You do not get offered one without the other, and anybody who promises you both is describing something else.
The Question of the Day: Bao spent a whole evening looking for somebody with the power to shut Nutsy out. Say what she found instead, and why she stopped wanting it.
Try It: Nobody approved your wallet. Nobody checked who you were. Think about who would have had to say yes, if somebody had to say yes.
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