# The hand-off, 1996

The [[lore/marrow-tape]] left [[lore/dead-letter]] and arrived at
[[lore/nailhouse]] in 1996. Ten months later Ossuary posted the
[[lore/armistice-banner]].

Those are the two facts. Everything connecting them is inference, and the
inference is so natural that most accounts do not flag it as one.

## What is attested

That the cartridge was Ossuary's and afterwards was Halberd's. Both men refer to
it, on their own boards, on either side of the date. Neither describes the
transfer.

No accompanying message survives. Nobody has claimed to have carried it. The
month is uncertain within about a season.

## The natural reading

That a man who had argued in public for eleven years sent his opponent something
he valued, without commentary, and then ten months later conceded the part of
the argument that was causing trouble.

Read that way the tape is the turn and the banner is the announcement, and the
ten months are a man working out how to say something in fifteen lines that
names nobody.

It is a good reading. It is also exactly the reading a tradition constructs when
it has two events and a gap between them, and this folder has been careless about
that before — see [[lore/the-1986-problem]], where a preferred order hardened
into an assumed fact.

## What argues against

**Ten months is a long time.** Long enough for the two to be unrelated. Ossuary
posted daily; he was not a man who took ten months to say things.

**The tape was not obviously a gift.** [[lore/marrow-tape]] is a cartridge of
copied material, and the plainest explanation for a copy moving between two
operators is that one of them wanted a copy. Halberd kept a roster and may
simply have asked.

**Nothing in the banner refers to it.** Fifteen lines, and the concession is
entirely about rosters and forty days.

**Halberd's four words.** *He did it properly* — a comment on the banner, and
not obviously a comment on anything preceding it.

## Why it matters either way

Because the alternative account of how the eleven years ended is that they ended
the way most long disagreements do: both parties got tired, one of them was
tired first, and nothing in particular caused it.

The hand-off is the only physical object that lets anyone tell a better story
than that. The tradition has wanted the better story, understandably, and has
never quite acknowledged that it is choosing one.

[[lore/halberd-and-ossuary]] gives the eleven years in full. This page exists to
mark the join between the two events as a join and not a link, because on the
current evidence that is all it is.