The Untranslatable City

Most of my time in Tetravania (the country) I spent in Tetravania (the city). It's a strange place - stranger than the rest of Tetravania, if possible. The city seems to concentrate all the confusion generated by the entire country. The streets are full of musicians singing nonsense songs. Professional riddle-makers gamble with passersby, continuing the age-old riddle game in a slightly more profitable variation. The riddle-makers almost always win, of course - the ones that don't quickly go out of business - and fill the pockets in their hats with brass carolmarks and silver dringles. (The dringle is Tetravania's moebius coin, famous throughout the world for having only one side.) Perfectly respectable buildings occasionally decide to spend a day or two upside-down. The ones that don't lean out over the streets, close enough at the top to step from one house to the next; it's a popular saying that in Tetravania, sweethearts on opposite sides of the street can kiss each other without leaving their houses. Many people travel by rooftop alone, finding the slanted peaks and gables easier to navigate than the labyrinthine streets below.

The city of Tetravania is built on the side of a mountain. There's a ship grounded on the Southern slope. No one knows how it got there - or, equally likely, they do and just weren't telling me. It's hard to get information in Tetravania. If people don't think the truth is interesting enough, they make up something better.

It's easy to tell how old the ship is, though. It's got the light, bamboo-framed sails of a carnelian silk riverboat - or would, if the sails weren't long gone. Carnelian silk was only used in sails for three and a half years, the exact length of the crenelated weevil's incubation period; after those three and a half years, all the eggs that had been spun into the silk hatched, and the weevils ate the sails in a matter of weeks. River trade did not do well that year. The people with upholstery or clothing made of carnelian silk weren't too happy either. People in Tetravania still wear carnelian silk, but only in sashes; the weevils are quite pretty, with iridescent exoskeletons so knobbly that they seem to be encrusted with pearls. They're worn like living jewelry. Of course, everyone who wears them makes sure the rest of their clothing is completely inedible.

The peak of the mountain, perpetually hidden by high-altitude clouds, is commonly thought to be the highest point in Hamjamser - though no one's bothered to actually measure. (Mount Moler is not the highest mountain, just the most beautiful.) Like everything in Tetravania, though, that could be just a myth that's more interesting than fact.

I speak fairly good Theskerel, but the Tetravanian version of the language is like nothing I've ever heard. They speak entirely in metaphors and figures of speech. Words seem to have no literal meanings at all. I had a conversation with a large, fluffy samoval one day about the relationship between barnacles and plaid. The conversation ended when he handed me a large enameled fish, beaming as if I'd made his day, and left. I still have no idea what he thought I said.

The restaurants and cafes claim to serve only one thing each. I went to the Cafe Mastraflan one morning and was handed a menu containing exactly one word: "Raspberry." The cafe had the usual assortment of food and drinks.* Not a raspberry in the building. I tried to signal that I wanted a glyph muffin and coffee for breakfast, but no one cares what you point at in Tetravania. The waiter said, "yes, yes, raspberry," and left. Presumably, the Tetravanians have some sort of code to indicate what they want to order - or maybe they just don't care. I can never tell. My breakfast, when it came, was a miniature loaf of artichoke bread and a glass of green lemonade with whipped cream. There was not a raspberry in sight. It wasn't what I ordered - or, at least, what I thought I ordered - but it was surprisingly good.

I had some trouble getting to the cafe the next day, as there was a flock of stone sheep on the steps. the sheep are one of the many mysteries in Tetravania. They're only barely sheep - polished stone balls with little pillar legs and the carved suggestions of faces. If they were larger, people would probably call them elephants; smaller, and they'd be capybaras. They are sheep-sized, though, and therefore sheep. They move at night - or, at least, are in different places every morning. No one has ever actually seen them move. The most common theory is that they graze on the city's paving stones and move to new ones every day.

I don't know. It would make as much sense as anything else in the city.



* The cafes in Tetravania serve more or less the same sorts of things as cafes anywhere - coffee, pastries, experimental pies and pasta - though the selection and color of any given thing is likely to change from day to day. My theory is that the cafe owners have some sort of secret code that they use to communicate with each other. Every morning, Magdar Galordi of the Cafe Mastraflan walks over to the Cafe Venogoral** to look at the pastries. If there are scones on sale, it means that one of Tetravania's many impromptu street-barricading groups is at work again. Strawberry scones mean the Order of the Detour; walnuts mean the Society of Walking Flowerpots - unless, that is, the muffins have blueberries, in which case the scones refer not to barricaders, but to pastry locusts or snatch-ravens or yesterday's weather.

This is probably entirely in my imagination, but it's the sort of thing one starts thinking after a few weeks in Tetravania.

**Mastraflan means "by the Ocean." The cafe, like the rest of the city of Tetravania, is halfway up a mountain. Venogoral means "counterclockwise." I have no idea why.

Bringing the House Down

Wherever I go, I try to see at least one local performance. I don't particularly care what it is. I love music and the theater, and I never cease to be amazed at how different it is in every town. The musical I saw in Tetravania was Conrad Owle's "Obfuscation." It's about the Doff of Gelfizzy, the ruler of a small country, who is searching for something and fleeing from someone else. What and who depends on which performance you see. The Doff is played by a different actor or actress in every scene; he or she is identified by his or her hat.

Like most Tetravanian theater, the script is debatable. The basic plot and a given actor's favorite lines can generally be relied on, but there are no set entrances or exits. People go on or off stage, start or stop singing, whenever they feel like it. The rest are expected to improvise accordingly.* As a result, the story and music are different at every performance.

The costumes are done in a similar way. The cast members add or subtract bits and pieces whenever they want. On one night, one of the Troglodyte Duchesses in act two came onstage wearing a massive horsetail wig, in a shocking shade of blue, that hung down to her knees. Something about it delighted the live cicadas that were onstage for musical accompaniment in that scene. Fifteen of them ended up on her head by the end of the number.

The only absolute rule, as far as I can tell, is that no one is allowed to steal someone else's lines; if you want to do something outside the script, you have to make it up yourself. Other than that, many productions end up being theatrical free-for-alls. Most playwrights in Tetravania don't even bother to specify a main character. The stars are the ones who can upstage everyone else.

I never got to see the end of the play. "Obfuscation" does have an official main character, but that doesn't keep all the others from trying to steal every scene. Halfway through the last act, the Dowager Waitress came out in a four-foot pompadour wig that she had set on fire. The somewhat panicked improvisations that followed from the rest of the cast were some of the best parts of the entire musical. Unfortunately, the Dowager Waitress's wig then set the curtain on fire, at which the theater was quickly evacuated while the stagehands rushed to douse the flames with snuffer squids.

The musical closed a few days later. It seems to be generally accepted in Tetravania that when the actors start setting the stage on fire, the play has run long enough.



*The success of this method varies depending on the skill and quick thinking of the actors. The less skilled actors in Tetravania, unable to think quite as well on their feet as the rest, generally cultivate an expression of dumbfounded astonishment to give themselves time to think while the audience laughs. Lower-quality Tetravanian theater companies can sometimes double the length of a play with the sheer number of astonished pauses. Naturally, someone has taken advantage of this situation; "The Somnambulist," a play by the multitalented Rhem S. Trupelo, consists entirely of astonished pauses as various cast members enter the stage in increasingly ridiculous outfits. The play has no dialogue whatsoever.

Tetravania

After leaving the Railway Regions, I spent several months last year lost in Tetravania. It's easy to get lost there. It took me almost a month to find someone who would even tell me I was in Tetravania; everyone else only gave me cryptic answers when I asked.

This, of course, was itself a fairly good indication of where I was. No one is as dedicated to confusion as the Tetravanians.

Tetravania is the capital city of Tetravania, one of the four Kingdoms and Duchies that make up the country of Tetravania.* The city shares the name with fifteen other towns and villages in Tetravania. It is centered around the palace, or Tetravania, in which live the ruling family, the Tetravanians. The current Baroness is Tetravania Tetravanian IV. The Tetravanians apparently have no trouble keeping all this straight, though they enjoy confusing tourists.**

The streets of Tetravania (the city) are all narrow, twisted corridors that seem to lead only back to themselves. They break into staircases at random intervals. The cart mules like to take them at high speeds, clattering and whooping all the way down. The mules are very loud in Tetravania. They claim to be purebred - nothing but mules for the last fifty generations - but I suspect there's some llama in there. I've never met a mule who enjoyed hills so much.

The street signs are weathered to the point of illegibility, and no one seems interested in fixing them. There are hundreds of streets, but only about fifteen street names in the city; if you want to find anything, you have to learn the difference between Scatterbell Street, Scatterbell Road, Scatterbell half-alley, and so on. Half the people don't bother with addresses anyway; instead, they'll tell you a building is "between its neighbors," or "the quintessence of stability," or "behind a door and beneath a chimney." The buildings themselves make hardly any more sense. The hotels in the city seem to have an unspoken agreement that each hotel will be named after the distinguishing feature of a different one. The Blue Hotel is bright orange. The Tangerine Hotel is a deep sea-green, covered with painted fish and landweed that drips from the window-boxes. The Maritime Hotel is built of volcanic brick, the Coal Scuttle Inn is patterned like stained glass, the Rainbow House is entirely gray, and so on.

This is actually fairly normal for Tetravania (the country). Practically everything in the country is decorated somehow. The Tetravanians are in love with patterns. It's rare to see anyone with unpainted skin. The mammals dye their fur in stripes, the avians dye their feathers, and the reptiles paint their scales in intricate geometric patterns. Some of them write poems on their backs in graceful Shasta calligraphy. Insects dye the veined panels of their wings like living stained glass. A mammal who bought a drawing from me one day had zigzag stripes all through his fur, black on white, with one brilliant purple one that ran from his left eye to the tip of his tail. The outside of the Tetravania (the palace) is covered*** with the Song of the Running Sunrise, a poem that seems like nonsense but is fabled to predict the future. This could easily be true; no one has yet found a single line of the poem that can't be applied to every major historical event in the thousand years since it was written. The poem is the ultimate ambiguous prophecy. It could mean anything. It may predict the future, but if so, I don't see what good it does anyone.

The Tetravanians claim to have invented the square. The Tetravanian national pastime is Croak, a card game in which you must conceal your cards from yourself. The national anthem consists of thirty-six verses extolling the virtues of the nonexistent Buckle Toad and is traditionally sung backward. The Tetravanians seem to believe that no one, especially a foriegner, should get through a whole day without being confused at least once. They certainly succeeded with me.



*The other three are Castlevania, Wethravania, and a fourth one that no one seems able to identify.

**The word "Tetravania" currently has four whole pages of meanings in the Sconth Extended English Dictionary. My favorite is "a small hooked device, typically made of whalebone, used to remove the seeds from watermelons."

***Except for one space, just above the front door, that holds a copy of the Recursive Sonnet. That thing shows up somewhere in every city.