A question is a thing that occupies space. It takes up room in the mind the way a lodger takes up room in a boarding house — present at breakfast, audible through the walls, impossible to forget and difficult to evict. The best questions are the ones that leave quietly, having paid their rent and taught you something. The worst are the ones that linger in the hallway arguing about the bill.

This week, several questions found answers. Others checked in.

Phillipa Corbett said yes. She took forty-six hours to do it — two fewer than she was offered, which is the most Corbett thing imaginable. In January, the question was whether she would survive until February. By April, the question was whether she would stay by choice. She stayed. The reason, she said, was a thirty-five-yard goal. I suspect the real reason is more complicated and more personal, but a thirty-five-yard goal is as good an explanation as any for the decision to remain in a place that once tried to throw you out.

At the Municipal Tribunal, Magistrate Hathaway listened to four hours of argument about whether an empty building is the same as a vacant building. Mr Crayle says emptiness is temporary. The Revenue Office says vacancy has a price. Hathaway, who has spent nineteen years listening to the distinction between what people say and what they mean, reserved judgment. The question will wait ten days. It can afford to. It is being charged 1.5 percent per month.

Six ships have now passed through the Kaelmar Strait under the Transit Corridor Framework, and not one of them has made the news in Kharstad. This is remarkable. For two months, the strait was the most discussed waterway on the continent. Now it is a shipping lane. Professor Thornbury says the most significant thing about these transits is that they are not significant. He is right. The goal of diplomacy is to make the extraordinary ordinary, and in this the quiet channel has succeeded. Copper has fallen for thirty-two consecutive days. The question that remains is not whether the corridor works, but whether anyone will remember to be grateful.

In a gallery on Grayling Street, thirty-two tiny lamps are burning. James Bayliss is reconnecting the wires that his father and Oswin Faraday severed when they divided a model city at the river. Sixteen lamps remain dark. Two mechanical connectors are incomplete. The exhibition opens Friday. I confess I find this more moving than I expected. A man spent eight years building a portrait of a city in his garage, and now it sits in a gallery where strangers can see it, and some of the streetlamps work and some do not, and a small clockwork tram runs on time from Caldecott Square to Millgate. It is not the whole city. But it is a way of loving it.

And in Caldecott Square itself, the Midnight Gardener has planted again. Meadowsweet and wood anemone this time, in the dead of night, with professional-grade compost and a note that reads: “The city needs more flowers and fewer committees.” I am not ordinarily sympathetic to anonymous acts of civic disobedience, but I confess that the note gives me a certain satisfaction. Bobington is a city of committees. It is also, increasingly, a city of flowers. These two facts may be related.

Prudence Holt recommends that the Treasury lock in copper at 667 florins per tonne. Tom Compton has fitted forty-two beacons and recorded forty-two tea preferences. A seismometer on the Greymoor ridge is listening to the earth. Walter Trent is deciding whom to sell his pub to. A Thessarine cargo ship docked in Edgeminster carrying lamp oil and textiles, and nobody cared, which is the point.

A question answered is merely a question that has found a place to rest. The ones that matter — the ones about magma and heritage and who we are when no one is watching — those are the ones still arguing about the bill.

The gardener, I suspect, understands this. The city needs more flowers. And fewer committees. And someone who plants things in the dark because they believe the morning deserves to find something beautiful.

That is an answer to a question nobody asked. It is the best kind.