Addendum: Dlamini, N.

ADDENDUM: DLAMINI, N. FILED WITH THE STRIFE OFFICE AND THE FEDERATION SITE. D. PRYCE. NEW WAVE CHAMPION. FOR THE RECORD, THE NIGHT BEFORE NO ESCAPE. ———————————————— I do not ordinarily amend a filing. I said what I had to say in "Findings," and I closed it, and I intended to let the closing stand unaltered until the cage settled the matter. I am amending it once, briefly, because two things have happened since that I did not have in hand when I wrote it, and a findings document that omits new information is not a findings document. It is a guess wearing better clothes. I will be brief. This is not a second dossier. It is a correction to one line. ———————————————— The first thing that happened, the federation already has on record. In a corridor at BCD 9, I told Mr. Dlamini that whatever he opened, he would be opening into my hands. He told me I had read the shoulder correctly and it would not matter, because he was going to open anyway. I want to note, for the file, that he said it smiling, and that it was not a nervous smile, and that I have thought about the distinction more than once since. The second thing the federation does not have on record until this document. Mr. Dlamini has, this week, published a piece — I expect it is public by the time anyone reads this addendum, and if it is not yet, it will be shortly — in which he names, for what I believe is the first time in his own hand, a question he has apparently been declining to finish for some weeks. Whether he would be what he is if the early competition had been harder. Whether the gift is real or simply untested. I want to be exact about what I am about to do with that, because I think the federation will assume the worst of me and I would rather correct the assumption than earn it. I am not going to use it as a taunt. I have never once, in fifteen years, found a taunt useful, and I am not going to start on the eve of a championship I intend to keep. I am also not going to pretend I did not read it, because pretending is a kind of dishonesty I have no talent for and no patience with. What I am going to do is amend the file. ———————————————— In "Findings," I wrote that Mr. Dlamini's greatest quality and his available angle are the same anatomy, viewed from two directions. I want to add a third direction, because he has, in his own words, supplied it to me for free, and I am not in the habit of declining a gift that arrives already labelled. The chain I described — ankle into knee into hip into spine — was a physical structure. What he published this week is the same structure, one level up. A man who has never been made to find out what he is made of is, structurally, exactly as open as a man extending his spine at the top of a leap. Both conditions are the price of the thing that makes him extraordinary. He cannot have the leap without opening the chain. He cannot have the certainty he performs without, somewhere underneath it, an actual question he has never been forced to answer. He knows this. He said as much himself, more plainly than I would have dared to say it for him. I have simply added his own finding to my file, in the section where it belongs, beside the others. I want to say — and I will only say this once, so the federation should attend to it now — that publishing it took a particular kind of nerve I did not expect from a man his age, and I respect it fully. Most competitors spend a career hiding the exact thing he put on the public record eight days before defending nothing and challenging for everything. That is not weakness. I have never confused honesty with weakness, and I am not going to start with him. It does, however, remain an angle. Respect for the nerve it took to publish something does not un-publish it. ———————————————— The original closing line stood as follows: he should tap. He won't. I have no cause to revise the second half. I am revising the first, slightly, in light of the addendum above. He should tap. He still won't. And now I understand a little more precisely why. There is other business waiting on the far side of this match, in its own room, on its own night, and I have said elsewhere that I will be available for it when the federation is ready. That has not changed and this document is not the place for it. Tomorrow, in The Crucible, I shake his hand, and then I do the only thing I have ever known how to do, which is look at what a thing is for. — D. Pryce New Wave Champion Filed.