Bubble-Wrap

The fog rolled in today. I woke up this morning, in my silk hotel room like a giant's coat pocket, and there it was. The gauzy white buildings of Chelissera blended perfectly into the fog and became invisible. Nothing was left but the signs on them. The letters seemed to float in space, abandoned, like names that had forgotten whose they were.

I nearly fell off the thread bridges several times because I couldn't see them. It was not a good day to explore.

Now that I have money again, I spent this morning in the market, buying things I really should have bought earlier. Food, for one thing. I was down to my last salted cuttlefish. Fortunately, every town has some shop where travelers can buy the kind of food that lasts forever. In Chelissera, the best example of this seems to be a thing called "shell cake." No one seems entirely sure what it's made of. I suspect beetles. It is the color of fossilized sand. The main ingredients are shards of crunchy stuff held together with globs of slightly less crunchy stuff. The consistency is rather like fried eggs, if someone forgot to take the eggshells out and then burnt them.

The flavor is actually surprisingly pleasant; it has that spicy, nutty, shrimp-with-a-sunburn flavor that well-cooked insects often have. I suspected it would get monotonous fairly quickly, though, so I bought a few dried crustaceans* and six lumps of the universal travelers' staple, rock bread.

Ah, rock bread. How I love the stuff. It lasts forever and never gets staler.

Having obtained food, I then went to the bookstore and picked up a book, "Sikelak for the Mammalian Mouth."** I've been intending for some time now to improve my Sikelak. Of all the languages I know - not that there are many - it's probably the most often useful. I haven't learned as much as I might because it's so hard to pronounce. It has the flaw of all universal languages. Anyone can speak it; no one can do so comfortably. It strains every voice in the world. Its great advantage is that it strains them all equally.

Like KeChorlitrix, the shopkeeper spoke English. This happens in many invertebrate towns. The most successful shopkeepers are the ones who can speak the languages of lungs and vocal cords - such as Theskerel and English - as well as their native clicks and hisses. The owners who can't speak the languages themselves find someone who can to mind the counter. The spider behind the bookstore counter was every inch an arachnid, behind the compound spectacles and flowered apron, but somewhere in all those jointed mouthparts was something capable of pronouncing English. Clicking, scissory English, but English all the same.

I knew that my third and last stop would take a while. I decided to take a break for lunch. There was a cafe by the weavers' district that sold solid food; I got a pastry with what looked like blueberries, but turned out to be water beetle larvae. It was delicious. While eating, I watched a bristly spider outside weaving a basket, lying on its back and working with all eight limbs at once. The entire thing was done in about twenty seconds. No wonder the Chelisserites can afford to weave everything in the town.

After lunch, I went to the Chelissera tatter-shop. I try to visit the tatter-shop in every town that has one. This is where people bring their broken things - shredded clothes, smashed dishes, mangled machinery - in the hopes that someone else will find a use for it. Someone almost always does. A few people in every town make their living by fixing things from the tatter-shop and selling them. Others just use the pieces.

From the outside, the shop was all bulges and protrusions, like a sack stuffed with too many lumpy things (which I suppose it was). Inside, it was obvious why. The walls and floor and ceiling were hidden behind pure chaos. There were broken typewriters, reams of cloth with rips and stains, mismatched stockings (only five or six of a full set of eight), two-legged furniture (most of it designed for arachnid anatomy and completely incomprehensible to me), dented pots, stopped clocks, broken toys - everything jumbled together without system or reason. Any trace of organization the shop may have once had was more broken than the objects it contained. There were whole barrels full of shattered china. A spider was picking through them, sifting through shards and comparing them like the scrambled pieces of a hundred jigsaw puzzles. From the way everyone ignored him, I got the impression that he spent a lot of time there.

I looked around for quite some time, wondering about the purposes of some things and the state of others. What did that bottle hold before it lost two of its three spouts? What was the purpose of the clockwork beetle with abacus wings? Who in the world has the strength to not only bend typewriter keys, but to crochet them? I wish I knew.

Amazingly, in all the chaos of mystery and malfunction, I found the one thing I have needed for weeks.

Bubble-wrap is a variety of cloth that can only be made by spiders. It's one of the most precious things to come out of Chelissera. Unique among every kind of cloth, it is completely waterproof. All you have to do is wrap something in it; drop it to the bottom of the ocean, and it will remain dry.***

The secret of bubble-wrap is the stickiness of spider silk. Other kinds of cloth are waterproof only to their edges; you can weave them tight as an alligator's grip, oil and wax them until they gleam, and water will still leak through the seams. Bubble-wrap doesn't have seams. A mix of adhesive and static electricity makes it cling so tightly to itself that even air can't escape between the layers. This is why it's so prized by travelers in the Great Shwamp. If you leave enough air inside the wrapping, not only is your luggage waterproof, but it floats as well (hence the name). You can simply tow it along behind you in the water.

The wrap in the tatter-shop was somewhat shredded, which is why it was in the tatter-shop, and why I was able to afford it (it cost only a sixel).**** I spent an hour this afternoon sewing the tears together and sealing them with snail glue. It's not as perfectly waterproof as the bubble-wrap itself, but it will help it stay in one piece.

Inside the wrap was a pocketwatch with six hands and no numbers on its face. I have no idea how one is supposed to read it. Apparently, neither did whoever left it there. The shopkeeper seemed to have given up trying to sell the watch; when I asked about it, she threw it in with the bubble-wrap for free.

I have more useless curiosities than I probably should. I can't help it. There's something irresistably fascinating about devices that do nothing at all.

In a place like the Great Shwamp, though, bubble-wrap is as far from useless as a sheet of cloth can get. I really should have gotten something like this years ago. It's only luck that I haven't been caught in the rain more often than I have, and I can't rely on the Great Shwamp's haphazard assortment of transportation to keep my luggage dry. My encounter with the troll made that quite clear. Sooner or later, I am going to need waterproof luggage.*****



*It's been weeks since I gave up asking people to identify Shwamp crustaceans for me. It's impossible. No two seem to be the same species - if the word "species" even applies - and they blithely ignore all the rules of taxonomy. They combine features of crustaceans, insects, arachnids, and fish. Many seem to have chosen their number of legs by rolling dice.

**Given the variety of people who speak Sikelak, books on the language are sorted not by the native language of the learner, but by their vocal anatomy. The other options were "Sikelak for the Avian Larynx," "Sikelak for the Metatarsi," and "Sikelak for the Bipalate Coccitella." I didn't think those would help me much. I don't even know what a coccitella is.

***Even in Chelissera, city of spinners, bubble-wrap can be only be made by the very best. It takes experience to make fabric so tight it's waterproof. The master spinners hire other spiders with inferior thread to do their hunting for them; it takes a lot of protein to make silk. The masters grow fat and enormous, spending their days eating and spinning and rarely moving from the same spot. Most eventually learn to spin with one pair of limbs; this becomes a mechanical motion that they do with as little thought as I would need to tap my foot. Their remaining limbs are free for whatever occupation they choose to pass the time.

****Sixels, it turns out, are the middle of the Great Shwamp's glass currency system. One sixel equals eight crickles (smaller marbles with ants inside). Four sixels make a terlimick, a larger marble containing a flightless harlequin grasshopper. There's apparently a fourth coin that is large enough to hold an entire crayfish. No one I've met has ever seen one.

*****I borrowed a lovely waterproof chest while I was in Cormilack, the city with more rain than air. Unfortunately, it was too heavy for me to bring along even if I'd owned it.

Chelissera

Invertebrate towns tend to be different from the rest to begin with. The differences in anatomy, speech, family structure, and seasonal schedules tend to keep them just slightly out of step with the vertebrate world. I enjoyed my stay in Carvendrone, meeting giant wasps who have a thousand sisters and speak with their wings, but I know there's a great deal I will never understand about them. For the most part, the differences aren't important - but they still exist. Most people prefer to live in places they understand. This is why insect towns tend to stay insect towns.

None I've visited have been half as odd as Chelissera.

Chelissera is for textiles what Woodpot is for ceramics. Most of the thread and cloth in the Great Shwamp comes from here. This is because the town is inhabited by giant spiders. From beneath, the town looks like a vast cobweb; there are a few wooden buildings, but most are enormous cat's-cradles of rope and silk strands. Hanging threads connect every tree. Many of the highest ones are woven to catch birds, the way small spiders would catch insects, in a strategy quite different from that of the trick-hunters. The rare ones they carefully untangle and set free; the rest they eat. Other lines go down into the water to catch fish.

Everything billows in the wind. Brightly colored flags and curtains hang everywhere. Many of the master spinners live in huge, gauzy hammock-pagodas hung between branches; the billowing buildings seem to just float in midair, like clouds with faint, busy silhouettes inside. The threads that hold them up are practically invisible unless the sun hits them right. Sparkles glint on the thousands of tiny strands, played by the light like the strings of a violin.

The spiders bought several large jugs from the Pelirikas. Ranapleximilian told me - very quietly - that they use these for what they call "half-soup." This is the food that they've digested with their venom but haven't eaten yet. He obviously thought the idea was quite disgusting and therefore talked about nothing else for almost half an hour. Half-soup is inedible to nearly everyone who isn't a spider; the acids alone would kill most vertebrates. Among spiders, though, it's by far the most popular food. There are half-soup chefs who strive to achieve the perfect combination of meat and venom, dissolving fish and fowl alike and stirring them together. They experiment with different acids, different animals, even different combinations of specific organs (though many consider it barbaric to dismantle prey while it's still solid). Spiders consider no part of an animal inedible except the skin and bones.* The rest all gets mixed together anyway. A few chefs have experimented with fruit and vegetables, but this is considered avant-garde at best and simply ridiculous in most cases.

It all sounds quite fascinating. This is an entire culinary world that's completely separate from any other. I can't decide whether I want to become a spider to try it out or whether I just want to be sick.

Fortunately, half-soup is not the only thing of interest in Chelissera. Most of the town is involved in the spinning and weaving of fabric. There is, after all, no one better suited to it. They dye the thread as much as any ordinary spinners, but the fact that they produce it themselves means that they don't have to add the color afterward. Many of the farms in the town are devoted to edible dyes. A relative of indigo grows down near the water; cochineal beetles are raised in the trees. The spiders eat them to change the color of their silk. This takes much less work than coloring it separately. There are spiders who eat cochineal like candy, specializing for their entire lives in producing red silk and nothing else. Others choose different dyes or mix them together, balancing their diets based as much on color as nutrition, striving for the perfect shade. The dye eventually stains their exoskeletons as well. There are spiders in Chelissera covered in outrageous swirls of bright colors (they don't blend in the chitin as they do in the silk) whose relatives are uniformly black or brown. The rainbow spiders wear their colors with pride. It takes dedication to a job to achieve so spectacular a change.

Spider silk isn't the only material produced here, of course. There are several farms in the town that produce the more ordinary variety made by worms.** Flax and cotton grow in boxes of earth high in the canopy, field plants growing next to silvermoss and other epiphytes. Sheep graze on the huge tussocks of grass that pass for land in this part of the Shwamp. I'm fairly sure I even saw a few angora goats and longhaired needle-mice.

Much of the cloth in the town actually comes from people. The Great Shwamp has fewer longhaired mammals than colder, drier parts of the world; long fur can be a nuisance in the sticky humidity that lasts all Summer here. Many do live here, though, and nearly all of them are in Chelissera. They go in several times a year to be shorn, just like the sheep. The difference is that they get paid for it, and they can take the dirt and brambles out of their own fur.

I was surprised to realize that, despite all the farming, there actually isn't much more land here than in any other part of the Shwamp I've visited. The tussocks are the only solid things in the water. Even they have very little actual soil, growing instead on the decomposed leaves and roots of previous layers of grass. Most are perfectly round. They sit in the water like giant green pom-poms with sheep on top. The spiders stick a post in the top of each tussock and tie the sheep to it; otherwise, they have a tendency to roll off the sides.

It's strange to see land again - real land, oddly shaped as it might be, with plants growing on it. I'd almost forgotten what that looked like. The Pelirikas plan to stay here for a day or two, selling pottery. I may stay longer than that.



*On invertebrates, of course, skin and bones are often the same thing.

**Like many silk farmers, they kill the moths before they chew through the cocoons. Unlike many silk farmers, they eat them afterward. Spiders don't let much go to waste.