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.

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.