Changrakata

Over the next several days, the weather turned gradually more humid. The pale, clear sky of the Golden Desert had been shading toward a gentler blue ever since we'd found the first valley; a few weeks later, we began finding dew on the grass every morning. I distinctly remember the first time I looked up to see an actual cloud overhead.

On Chakramalsian's request, we helped him to pull back the canopy of his wagon. He'd been spending as much time as possible outside of it anyway, now that the air outside was no longer dry enough to parch his amphibious skin. "Your painting has been a marvelous help in keeping me sane during the journey," he told me as we rolled up the silk sides of the wagon, leaving the fish-painted roof overhead to provide shade. "But if I have to spend another week without seeing where we're going, I think I might actually go mad."

He spent the rest of the day with his head and shoulders hanging out over the rim of the wagon, like a dog on a carriage ride, splashing the water in its bed with his tail and pointing out every interesting piece of scenery we passed to the endlessly patient Mogen.

The next morning, there was an entire bank of clouds on the horizon, lit up pink by the early-morning sun. A flock of birds was passing in front of it - or what I assumed was a flock of birds, though something was odd about their motions. Some sort of small dragonet or flying snake, perhaps. Distracted by the clouds, I gave them a smile and little more thought.

To Chak, they clearly meant something a great deal more important. He stared at them for several moments. He took off his spectacles and put them back on. Then, with a delighted grin, he uncoiled his long body, lifted himself out of the water, and swam straight up into the air.

"We've done it!" he cried in delight, coiling in graceful loops overhead. Glittering drops of water fell from his frilled tail onto our astonished, upturned faces. "We've reached Changrakata. We're here!"

He explained the situation to us while floating weightlessly above one of the folding chairs we set up for breakfast. While we ate and talked, we watched more schools of fish swimming overhead, which I had originally mistaken for flocks of birds.

There are many varieties of airborne aquatic life all over Hamjamser, of course. The glider-eels of the Railway Regions can remain in the air as long as they keep their long ventral fins dipped in the water. The butterfly guppies of the High Fields are a common sight, darting from flower to flower alongside bees and hawk moths during the Summer months. The sailfin mer-folk of the Crumpled Reef claim to have signed a formal treaty with the Element of Water, which allows them to glide through the air on carpet-like independent wavelets. The floating Sargasso Jungle reportedly has an abundance of floating species, though they tend to be dirigible in nature, filling natural gasbags and float bladders with homemade hydrogen instead of using more mysterious means of flotation.

The conditions that allowed Chakramalsian to float weightless in the air, with his whiskers and external gills drifting lazily in currents that the rest of us felt as mild breezes, are certainly among the more mysterious ones.

The sky of Changrakata is one vast ocean.

The name of the country translates, more or less, to “Sea-Dreaming Land.” The generally accepted theory is that the air of Changrakata somehow remembers the prehistoric time when the country was underwater - something that places such as the Railway Regions or the Golden Desert, for all their ancient aquatic fossils, have long since forgotten. Whatever the cause, any creature in Changrakata (in theory) can swim in the country's air, just like a fish in water, as long as it has a firm and unshakeable belief that it can do so.

In nearly all cases, a belief this strong is found only in creatures that are actually aquatic. The skies of Changrakata are full of fish of all sizes, as well as tree-grazing manatees, gnat-like swarms of darting krill, and giant squid as massive and stately as the grandest airship. However, you will find not a single dog, cat, or hoofed thugroffler among them. Otters take freely to the skies in pursuit of fish; their dry-footed cousins, the weasels and stoats, stay firmly anchored on the ground. Chak told us that even within the Changrakatan branch of his family, he has cousins born with fins who can swim in the air, while their own finless siblings cannot.

Naturally, Karlishek and I gave it a try, doing our best to convince ourselves that we could join Chak in the air. (Mogen declined to do anything so silly, but the prospect of flight seemed more than worth a little indignity to us.) Alas, we remained firmly on the ground. To be born with feet, it seems, is to be forever a walker. *

Chak, in contrast, had no trouble remaining airborne. While the rest of us rode the wagons behind the heavily plodding gafl, he spent the rest of the day swimming: darting down to ground level to examine interesting plants and insects, gliding up above the treetops to watch the fish overhead, or simply keeping pace with us with easy, rippling strokes of his tail. It was impossible not to smile while I watched him. After so many months confined to a single wagon, unable to travel under his own power, his delight at suddenly gaining the freedom of flight was infectious. I even caught Mogen grinning at him once or twice.

We continued to see aquatic life overhead all day. The sight was disorienting at first, but all of us had seen stranger, and we soon grew accustomed to seeing birds and fish sharing the same environment. A fish hawk snatched herring straight out of the air while a sea turtle munched on jellyfish above it. A day bat performed feats of aerobatics in pursuit of gnats and minnows. Every so often, we would briefly come under the shadow of a passing cloud or pod of whales. A few of the fish came low enough, curious about our group of mostly earthbound travelers, that I was able to identify them: tuna, grapplejaw trout, paisley salmon, and a few of the omnipresent sporefish. Catfish snuffled through the underbrush in search of slugs and beetles.

The mingling of salt- and fresh-water species in a single atmosphere is apparently not unusual here. When they're sharing the air with birds and insects, I suppose the usual rules must be somewhat relaxed.

I suspect that I'm going to enjoy Changrakata.

---

* There are exceptions, of course. A previous ruler of Gillirangl (one of Changrakata's larger cities) was mad enough that she believed herself to actually be a fish, even though she more closely resembled a rhinoceros; she was able to swim freely above the towers of her palace. This belief also led to her eventual disappearance. Her madness eventually led her to conclude that the sun was a particularly fat and shining beetle hovering above the surface of the universe, and she swam off into the sky, determined to catch and eat it. As far as anyone in Gillirangl knows, she is still swimming. Several subsequent rulers stated that they would step down if the Empress ever returned, since she would, of course, have the prior claim. Statements of this kind became more common as the chances of the Empress ever returning became increasingly remote. It's quite possible that a few of them even meant it. Tolerance for mad rulers has diminished somewhat in recent centuries, though, and the current popular opinion is that swimming off to eat the sun constituted an abdication of the throne. The city's present rulers are a pragmatic bunch; they have no intention of turning over their well-run city to someone who thinks that heavenly bodies are edible.

Icebox

The village of Frish is a small place, its houses slightly shorter than the sand dunes that surround it. In spite of its small size, though, we saw the village long before we arrived - one part of it, at least.

Frish is built in the shadow of an enormous Hill Builder machine, a complex - though unmoving - engine the size of a large hill. The base is half-buried in the sand. There's a long metal spire sticking at an angle from its top. I do mean long, too - the spire is easily fifty times as tall as any house in the village. It's not just the tallest thing nearby; it's the only tall thing nearby. According to the villagers, every thunderstorm that passes over the village strikes the spire with lightning at least once.

Its size is not the strangest thing about it, though, nor is its affinity for lightning. Even in the most blistering Summers of the Golden Desert, the engine is always cold. The villagers caution their children not to lick it. (Some even listen.) I walked over to it after we arrived in the village. In the hot afternoon air, I could feel the chill coming off of the metal in waves. Faint clouds of mist drifted from the spire above me. The cold was pleasant from a distance; close up, I actually started shivering.

After a year in the Golden Desert, I'd almost forgotten what it feels like to be cold in the daytime. Cold weather here tends to be strictly nocturnal.

I don't know what the engine is, or how it works, and neither does anyone else in the village. This is normal for Hill Builder relics. Whoever the Hill Builders were, wherever they vanished to, they left their tools and toys and other creations scattered about the world in astonishingly large numbers when they left. Many of their old machines are still running today. The Train of the Railway Regions is one of these machines; so are all of the floating cities. The original radios, the elegant and relentless Guardians, the little crystal brains used in clockwork pipe crawlers, the Omnipresent Typewriter, the infamous Answering Machine of Miggle-Meezel… The Hill Builders left a lot of useful things behind.

It's a shame they neglected to leave an instruction manual.

However it works, the engine is cold enough to pull moisture out of even the dry Desert air. Beads of water condense on its surface every morning - and with the entire height of the spire, that's a great deal of surface. The windward side of the machine's base is buried beneath a drift of sand, but the leeward side shelters a depression in the rock, where the water dripping down the spire forms a small pool. This is what allows the village to exist. We're days away from the river Lahra; all of Frish's water comes from this one frigid pool, as clear and cold as snowmelt.

Very little lives in the pool. The Golden Desert does have a few aquatic species - mostly amphibians and the occasional lungfish. Pebble-toads bake themselves golden brown in the sun and disguise themselves as rocks. Raindrop frogs spend months hibernating underground, sealed beneath the cracked surface of dry stream beds, only emerging for a few exuberant hours when the rain comes and frees them from the hard ground. Desert-dwellers who know where to look come out sometimes to find them dancing in the rain.

None of these species live in the engine pool. The water is clean enough, but it's cold - so cold that the children of Frish often dare each other to stand in it until their feet turn blue.* Frost forms on the stones around it at night. Anything that wanted to live in the pool would have to come from a mountaintop somewhere, or perhaps the arctic wastes of the Stone Ocean, and it's a long way from there to the Golden Desert. For now, the pool remains uninhabited.

The caravan will not stay here long, sadly, as the village grows only what it needs and has little to trade. Many places with Hill Builder relics take them apart and use the pieces for other things - Cormilack, for instance, exports hundreds of ancient gears every year from its huge and motionless Earthmover - but Frish is understandably reluctant to do so. They rely too much on their silent engine, their great metal icicle, to interfere with its mysterious workings.

Besides, all of its openings have been frozen shut for centuries.



* Their mothers try to discourage this, but so far, it hasn't worked. A few of the mothers have given up and taken to wading with their children instead. This seems to work better.

Departure

The gafl have apparently eaten their fill, ballooning to three times their previous size, so the caravan packed up and left Denemat this morning. I was surprised to discover how many of the people I've seen around the village are actually passengers on the caravan. Denemat's population, apparently, is even smaller than I thought.

I went back to say goodbye to Fenbit and Hasisha before we left. They were sitting in the shade of their acacia again, though the tree had moved to the other side of their house. Perhaps it wanted a change of scenery. They gave me a package to deliver to their grandson, who apparently lives in a remote town called Snarkish. If the caravan happens to come across the town on its journey, I'll deliver the package myself; if not, I'll give it to someone else before I leave the Desert. It will find its destination eventually.

The package seems to weigh almost half what I do, which is why they're not sending it by postbird. The postbirds refuse to deliver anything that weighs more than they do. Heavy mail has to take its chances with foot travel. Inhabitants of the Golden Desert are used to waiting months or years for their packages to arrive.

The train of wagons had already lined up at the outskirts of the village when I arrived. Everyone was loading things aboard. The merchants in the caravan are transporting a wide variety of cargos. One entire wagon is full of parsnips and munchmelons; another holds cages of pahareets, jazz birds, and salamanders. Several harried-looking potter's apprentices were shifting towering stacks of ceramic tiles, glazed with brightly colored butterflies and sheep and squid and peacocks, and wrapping them in thick woolen blankets before loading them into crates. Further on, a team of the caravan's largest and strongest lifters were carrying heavy chests reinforced with iron bands and massive padlocks. I don't know what was inside them. Most of the lifters were samovals, who tend to be larger and stronger than average; there was also an upright elephant with painted tusks, a few of the masked people I've glimpsed occasionally in the Desert, and a pair of twins who looked almost human, aside from the armadillo scales across their backs. They lifted chests that were larger than I am, and must have weighed three times as much, without any visible effort.

A team of men and women in white robes were taking great care in loading crates onto one of the wagons. A few of the crates were still open, and I could see glimpses of complex machinery inside, all gleaming brass and polished lenses. One of the team - an avian woman with jet-black feathers, who was panting in the heat despite the hood shading her face - gave me an enthusiastic explanation when she stopped to rest.

"Is for, eh, measure the sand, yes?" She fanned herself with one feathery arm. "Is for… Look in sand, see what is before. Sand now is small pieces, but before, maybe is castle, or mountain, or glass, yes?" She pointed to a crate where an elaborate series of lenses sat, half wrapped in cloth, gleaming in the sunlight. "Look with this, see castle, mountain, glass. What sand is before."

I'm still not entirely sure what she meant. Some unusual variety of archaeology, perhaps? The equipment was nearly all packed, so a demonstration was out of the question. My Amrat, unfortunately, is nowhere near as good as her English, and I'm no geologist. Most of what she said went completely over my head. She didn't seem disappointed with my incomprehension; she just shrugged and smiled, a slight rumpling of the feathers at the corners of her beak. "Eh. When you maybe learn more Amrat, I tell you again. Yes?"

One of the wagons has been cleared out and altered to hold a single passenger. Normally, a caravan would not allow this; space is too limited to waste an entire wagon on one person. (I will be sharing a wagon with five other travelers and their luggage, as well as a shipment of assorted fossil shells, and sleeping on top of my luggage.) However, from what I've heard, this passenger is not only wealthy enough to pay for a whole wagon; he is also aquatic. The alterations to the wagon were mostly to make it watertight. The wagon bed has been sealed - I assume with tar, or snail glue, or something of that sort - and filled with river water. The canvas roof has been replaced with a silk canopy nailed down tightly on all sides. This, apparently, will hold moisture inside the wagon and keep the water from evaporating too quickly.

I don't know the passenger's name, but I've heard that he's from a wealthy family of river merchants from the Scalps. How he got all the way out here, I have no idea. I hope he doesn't mind being stuck inside a wagon for the next month or so.

The caravan set off shortly after noon. This was later than it was scheduled to leave - I could hear Tirakhai's voice from one end of the wagon train to the other, booming at steadily higher volumes the later it got - but it's nearly impossible to organize this many people, much less to do it on time. I'm impressed we only left a few hours late.

The gafl handlers had been maneuvering their charges into position all morning, checking harnesses and providing a few last snacks before departure. They steered the gafl with a sort of percussive code, thumping out quick rhythms on the shaggy hides that told the creatures to stop, go forward, turn left, and so on.

I managed to find a good place to sit when we left; it was a seat near the front of one of the central wagons, where I had a good view of the whole caravan. It was quite a sight. All the gafl started nearly at the same time, lurching forward with surprising speed as they stretched and compressed their massive bodies. Hundreds of soft feet hit the sand at once. The sound was like a pillow fight of operatic proportions.

The rest of the day's journey was largely uneventful. The wagons slid over the dunes fairly smoothly, though they seemed to find more bumps and pebbles than I would have thought possible in what looked like perfectly smooth sand. The springs on their shafts at least kept them from sharing the gafl's lurching gait.

There was always someone singing. Over the course of the day, I must have heard dozens of melodies from one wagon or another. Karlishek identified a few of them for me when he happened to be nearby; one was a love song, another a prayer, a third a comical ballad about a man who built a house out of sand.

The sun set an hour or two ago. The wagons are currently arranged in a circle around a large campfire. There is little wood in the Golden Desert, so we're burning gafl dung. The handlers collected enough over the course of the day to make a sizable fire. Thankfully, it has almost no smell at all. The gafl themselves smell strongly of rosemary right now, as their handlers have been rubbing the herb into their fur to keep away parasites. The gafl seem to like the smell; they stuff their faces into each other's fur and sniff happily every time we stop. Most of them are sleeping at the moment. Their silhouettes are like grassy hills in the dark, rising and falling slowly with their breathing.

All the passengers who are still awake sit around the fire. Supper was a bewildering array of shared food, contributed by everyone, followed by an hour or so of songs and storytelling. I missed most of the stories, but I was able to at least hum along with the songs.

By now, everyone is quiet. Most of the passengers have wandered off to their wagons to sleep. The few who remain sit around the crackling fire, writing letters or journals, or playing games with boards and decks of cards that I've never seen before. It's peaceful.

The moon and grandmoon are high in the sky above us, wearing the campfire smoke like veils. There must be a million stars around them. Bats and night birds fly overhead, black on black, little fluttering silhouettes that croon and squeak softly to each other. I have a bed of sorts set up in the wagon, but I might just sleep outdoors tonight.

After all, it's not as if it's likely to rain.

Cactus Flutes

Today, the road took me through stands of flute-cacti. I had never heard of these plants before this trip to the Golden Desert; in the past few months, though, I've seen them in at least three or four places. They are tall plants, but otherwise unremarkable - at least when they're alive. When a flute-cactus dies, though, it leaves a dry stalk full of holes, which blows soothing notes in the wind. Birds like to nest in them, as do the more musically inclined varieties of lizard.

I first saw flute-cacti in the desert around Teshirak. The villagers there tend the cacti and encourage the ones with the sweetest notes. Some cut the dry stalks and arrange them around their houses, so that the village is filled with music whenever the wind blows.

The village of Korfa also has flute-cacti growing nearby. There, skilled instrument-makers cut them and attach complex systems of wooden stops and levers, turning the dry stalks into lightweight, eight-foot-long flutes that are quite popular among dragons and other large creatures.

The smaller nose-cacti, which also grow near Korfa, play a high, nasal note like a whining child. These the villagers hunt down and uproot without mercy.

This grove seemed to be wild. There were several stalks lying on the ground, cracked and silent except for the occasional faint half-note, but I didn't see any of the stumps that flute harvesters leave behind. The wind was blowing, as it always does in the Golden Desert. The cacti surrounded me with a constant, airy cloud of chords; miraculously, they were almost all in the same key. I found myself whistling as I walked. It was hard to resist. I went through a few melodies that harmonized with the cacti, finally settling on a sea shanty by Rango Tress. At the end of the first verse, I paused to drink some water.

The cacti whistled the tune back at me.

My first thought was that the heat was starting to affect my brain. I'd been lucky enough to avoid that so far, but there's always a first time. I felt fine, though, aside from the fact that my mouth was dry from whistling.

I whistled the melody again. This time, the reply came from a cactus a few feet farther down the road.

As strange as this was, I wasn't particularly alarmed; musical plants are rarely dangerous.* I took another sip of water and kept walking, whistling as I went. The music followed me. It always came from a cactus nearby; I never heard it from a distance. After a few minutes of simply mimicking my whistling, the cacti started to do variations and harmonies.

I'm fairly sure the source of the music was a zephyr. They're some of the more curious wind spirits - perhaps the only ones that take any interest in people - and they often have surprising artistic tendencies. Many of them like to draw in fine dust and sand. I've heard that some have even developed ways of making sculptures, though I couldn't tell you how.

After I finished the sea shanty, I moved on to a few of Majenti Huddle's clockwork ballads, then to an operetta by Sherm Trupelo. The zephyr - if that's what it was - seemed to be hungry for new melodies. Out here in the Desert, there probably aren't a lot to choose from. It picked up tunes almost as fast as I could whistle them, filling in two- or even three-part harmonies as it went. Sometimes it whistled the melody and I harmonized. I'm not much of an improvisational musician, but I've sung in enough choruses, here and there, that I can make up a fairly decent harmony when I need one. We whistled jazz, folk music, concertos from the Caroque period, slow torch songs and rapid arzenroyds, even a few rock songs by the Poltergeists. The zephyr had some trouble with the idea of percussion until it found a way to knock two cacti against each other.

I must have whistled fifty songs over the course of the afternoon. My lips were getting dry by the time I reached the end of the flute-cacti. The Desert stretched out before me, seeming strangely empty with no sound but the hiss of sand blowing off the dunes. Behind me, I heard the first few notes of an old Desert song of farewell. I whistled the next few notes. The zephyr and I harmonized one last time, exchanging a musical goodbye, and I set off - with some reluctance - into the less musical section of road ahead.

As I left, I felt a tiny breath of air on my face - hardly enough to notice, except that it was blowing in the opposite direction from the wind. It was like the ghost of a goodbye kiss.

Long after the shimmering horizon had swallowed them from view, I could still hear the cacti singing behind me.



* A notable exception is the siren nasturtium. Fortunately, those only grow in semi-tropical areas, and most of them have been tamed for medicinal purposes, as their music provides a powerful anesthetic.

The Radio

On another brief wander this evening, I was passing underneath an open window when I heard the unmistakeable crackly sound of a radio. I'd almost forgotten what they sound like; it's been a few years since I last heard one.

The last time was on my last visit to the Railway Regions, when I would gather occasionally with a small group of passengers on the Train to listen to Mr. Intaglio's salamander-powered receiver, a tiny machine held together with twine and snail glue. We would stay up until the quiet hours of the morning listening to tinny, static-filled broadcasts from exotic places we'd never heard of.

The Inadvisable Music Hour is broadcast from a mountain toll bridge in Skeen, where the bridge-keepers would let musicians cross for free if they played a sufficiently outlandish instrument.

The Nightsound Show is a nocturnal cornucopia of music and philosophy from the distant underground town of Carburrow, where they discuss stories and foreign politics and the supernatural late into the night.

Brendan Harzelflat, age two hundred and three, tells stories of his long and eventful life and sends them out over the Aether from his solitary lighthouse, speaking in a voice as soft and unhurried as waves on a beach.

One opera program we never did find out the name of, since none of us recognized the language.

It was a good few weeks. That little radio receiver was one of many reasons I was sad to leave the Railway Regions. Until today, I'd almost forgotten the sound of static, of scratchy voices riding on invisible waves over impossible distances, of the mysterious and melodic Aether-whistles that interrupt them every so often.

It was startling to hear that sound here, in this tiny town in the middle of the Desert. I looked around to see where the sound was coming from and chanced to be looking up just when a wild-haired man stuck his head out of a second-story window.

"It's working!" he called to the street in general. I was one of the only people actually in sight, so he turned to look at me. "I'm finally getting a clear signal! Well, almost clear. Come up, come up and listen!"

I rarely refuse invitations to interesting things, so I went up to listen.

The building looked like a shop of some kind. It was closed at the moment (possibly because the owner was busy tinkering upstairs), but the door was unlocked. Since I'd been invited, I opened it and went in.

The lower room was full of clockwork and other machinery. The sun slanting in the window struck glints from pocket watches, clocks in various sizes, a gramophone or two, even some of the more complex types of farming equipment, all in various stages of dismantlement. Gears and cranks and other specialized bits of metal lay with an array of tools all over a pair of long tables that stretched the length of the room. The smells of metal and machine oil filled the air. Something clanked rhythmically in a dark corner in the back. It was fairly clear that this was the town mechanic's shop.

A half-dozen salamanders dozed on a table beneath the front window, with their scales turned dull black to soak up every drop of the remaining evening sunlight. Small, slitted eyes opened briefly and then ignored me.

I could hear a crackly, muffled voice coming from the back. Past a curtain, I found a narrow spiral staircase leading up. It looked like it had come from somewhere else. The ornate wrought-iron railings, twisted round with designs of winged weasels and snakes, were wildly different from the simple stone walls around them, and the staircase didn't quite seem to fit the stairwell. The middles of the steps were worn down, the edges scattered with mysterious bits of machinery.

If the downstairs room had been cluttered, the upstairs room made it seem practically empty by comparison. It was all machinery, floor to ceiling, stacked in precarious heaps and hanging from the rafters. Jars of nuts and bolts stood on any surface flat enough to hold them. Loops of chains and wire hung from hooks. Several of the heaps had small, open areas in the middle, showing that there were work tables somewhere beneath all the clutter.

The machines here - when I could pick individual ones out from the chaos - were much more fanciful than the practical, workaday devices downstairs. Here was a fan, a ring of thin blades punched with geometric patterns of holes, designed to be spun by the air rising from a candle flame; there, a music box built to play multiple brass musical cylinders at once; farther in, an ungainly machine for cracking eggs. Judging by the litter of pulverized eggshell around it, it had not yet succeeded in doing so gently.

In the center of the room was the man who had called me in, whom I assumed to be the mechanic himself. He was a short man with a face like a bespectacled sheep and a wild mane of woolly hair. He wore a shirt stained with machine oil and a vest that seemed to be made entirely of pockets.

"Oh good, you found the stairs." He spoke Halsi, almost too quickly for me to follow. "Some people can't. Do you speak other languages? I finally got a signal on this thing and I'm talking to someone, or trying to, but I can't understand a word."

I replied that I spoke several languages. Unfortunately, my spoken Halsi is not particularly good yet; my reply probably sounded something like, "yes, it speaks many language, what need?" This did not appear to fill the man with confidence in my abilities. He was about to say something else when the radio interrupted.

"Finally, someone else," said a crisp, crackly voice from the speaker. "I don't suppose you speak English?"

It was surprisingly pleasant to hear someone speaking my native language again - even if the voice was crackly and coming out of a machine. It's fairly common to hear English, along with every other language, in the larger cities of the Golden Desert. Since leaving Karkafel, however, I've heard very little of it.

The voice on the other end turned out to belong to a Miss Anthetica Mandrigore, who was speaking from a cottage in the High Fields. She's currently trying to assemble a group of radio operators to create a sort of radio communication team - a "network," she called it - between several of the more remote parts of the High Fields. In that country of cliffs, landslides, broken bridges, narrow switchback paths, and weather so unpredictable that even postbirds find it difficult to deliver mail on time, a system like this could be quite useful.

The mechanic introduced himself - when he remembered - as Bofrid Haggadan. With me as a translator, the two of them spent the next few hours discussing radio technology. I got the impression that neither of them often got a chance to discuss the subject with someone who was equally interested. Miss Mandrigore also had rather a sharp tongue, though, so perhaps it was just as well that the two of them couldn't communicate directly just yet. Not everyone patient enough to operate radios has the same amount of patience with people.

I am far from an expert in any of the mechanical disciplines, so the conversation quickly grew to be over my head. Fortunately, many of the technical terms are the same or similar in both languages; most of the words I didn't understand, Mr. Haggadan did.

No one is really quite sure how radio works. People first found the old transmitters in the floating cities; the theory is that the Hill Builders used them to talk to each other. Some of those old transmitters still work, even after thousands of years, and people like Mr. Haggadan and Miss Mandrigore have started making their own.

Electricity has generally been dismissed as an unstable and impatient form of energy, especially compared to salamander power and the ancient Hill Builder reactors that still power the floating cities. No one would consider using electricity for anything practical. Still, the Hill Builders seem to have been fond of the stuff.

Of course, since no one actually knows how radio transmitters and receivers work, the best anyone can do is put wires and magnets and electrically-trained salamanders together and hope that it all works. Those few who try succeed almost half the time. Even when radio does work, it's never reliable. The signals have a tendency to fracture as they spread, becoming crackly and distorted. They can only be picked up in random patches of space. Move two feet to the left, and everything dissolves into static. Many radio operators find themselves yelling across the room to their microphones, holding their antennas out of the window for a better signal.

Fortunately, nothing like that was necessary today. The two radio operators continued to converse, their voices passing each other on tenuous streams of radio waves stretching halfway across the world, until a storm crossing the High Fields finally drowned out Miss Mandrigore's crisp voice in a sea of static. The two of them made plans to contact each other again in a few days. Miss Mandrigore has a niece who speaks Halsi, so they will be able to continue to trade notes after I leave Rikanta. Coming from two such distant locations, it sounded like they had a lot to learn from each other. I suspect that the niece will find herself with a full-time job shortly.

After switching off his radio, Mr. Haggadan thanked me profusely for my help. He said he would have invited me to stay for dinner, except that - like many passionate craftsmen - he had never taken the time to learn to cook, and all his meals consisted of bread and garlic with the occasional cabbage. Besides, it was quite obvious that he wanted to return to work on his radio. I thanked him for the offer and said goodnight. When I left, he was in the middle of dismantling some piece of electrical wiring, muttering enthusiastically to himself and shuffling through the sheaf of notes he'd taken during the conversation. Perhaps this will be the beginning of a more reliable or widespread form of radio.

For now, though, it remains a pastime for the patient and the hopeful, for dreamers and eccentrics, for engineers who are willing to tinker endlessly with half-understood technology for the chance of hearing a stranger's voice from half a world away.

Then again, anyone who answers them is almost certainly a similar sort of dreamer. Perhaps they're not such strangers after all.

A Different Kind of Stone

I've spent most of the last two days walking. I've seen few people traveling and even fewer staying still. There's been the occasional hut, abandoned and overgrown, home to nothing but desert foxes and chimney swallows; one or two dried-out wells with sand spilling over their brims; a brightly colored tent with the symbol for DO NOT DISTURB painted many times over its entire surface - but nothing more permanent.

This is normal for the Golden Desert. It's rare to ever find two places less than three days' walk from each other.

Yesterday evening, just before sundown, the road wound its way into a cluster of rocky outcroppings. I hardly noticed them at first. The sky was cloudless, but the sun was managing a spectacular sunset anyway, painting the empty sky a hundred shades of gold and crimson. I walked in among the pillars of stone and suddenly felt as if I was in a forest. This has not happened in several months; I would have enjoyed it, except that the stones blocked my view of the sunset. I turned around and settled down near the base of one of the pillars near the edge, shrugging off my bags of books and clothing and art supplies, and took out a couple of pakals for dinner. (I love pakals. I'll write more about them in another letter.) I'd been walking since before dawn, and it was a relief to sit down and rest for a while. I would have sat in the shade, but I couldn't have watched the sunset that way.

It was a pleasant place to rest. There was a cool (relatively speaking) breeze off the river. A pack of winged hyenas was doing wild aerobatics overhead; I'm not sure if they were the same pack I'd been seeing all day or a different one. The sun had set where I was by then, lighting only the craggy tops of the stone pillars behind me, but the hyenas were high enough that their spotted fur shone like gold. Their laughter echoed between the stones.

When both the sunset and my dinner were gone, I got up and moved on. The best time to travel in the Desert is when the sun is just below the horizon; that way, it provides light without extreme amounts of heat.

The air was cool between the pillars of rock. Their surfaces were oddly layered, as if they'd been poured into place - quite different from the usual Desert rock formations. Their shapes didn't look as if they'd been eroded by wind and sand. Most of the smaller ones had holes in the top, which made me suspect some sort of volcanic activity; fountain volcanoes, perhaps, or some sort of geysers, dried up long ago. Several were encrusted with the tough brown lichen that grows in shady places here. I admired their rough, irregular shapes, wondering how they'd been formed, until they were reduced to silhouettes against the darkening sky.

As it turned out, I didn't have to wait long to find out. Right at the end of twilight, when the sky had gone a deep ultramarine and a few of the brightest fish-stars had come into view, a light appeared at the top of one of the nearby pillars. I couldn't tell what it was at first. Backing away, I climbed up on one of the stubbier pillars to get a better view - and watched as a frond of turquoise light rose from the stone.

It was dim at first, but more and more flecks of light appeared as it unfurled, blue and green with the occasional speck of rich violet. It was like a glowing peacock's feather. A second one unfolded from another pillar, purple and deep red, followed by a third in white and pink. I stood in amazement and watched. They shimmered with thousands of points of light, like the flecks of pigment in a pointillist painting. They were breathtaking.

They were also considerably larger than I was. As I watched, a large moth flew into one of the fronds, which snapped shut around it and made a motion that looked disturbingly like swallowing. I got off of the pillar I was standing on quite quickly after that.

The moths obviously found the shimmering light even more entrancing than I did. The night air was full of the sound of fluttering wings, cut off by the soft snaps of the fronds as they plucked one moth after another out of the air. I caught sight of the occasional bat as well, silhouetted against the lights. The gathering of moths must have been a feast for them as well. They had to fly carefully, though; more than once, I saw the fronds snatch at passing bats, though I never saw them catch one. Bats are good at dodging.

I had no idea what the fronds were. I'd heard of things like these - creatures somewhere between plant and animal, such as anemones and sea-ferns, that root themselves to stones and grow hard tubes to pull themselves into - but I'd never seen anything like them on land. For that matter, I'd never heard that they grew anywhere near this large.

I suspect I could have stood and watched this strange carnivorous rainbow all night if I hadn't dozed off eventually. When I woke up, the creatures were gone again; they'd pulled themselves back into their stones well before sunrise. That explained the holes at the tops of the smaller pillars. I looked into a few of them, but I couldn't see anything but darkness inside. The tubes must go deep into the sand.

This evening, exhausted after another whole day of walking, I finally reached a village. I limited myself to only the essential questions:

"Where is the inn?"

"How much for a room?"

"What were those feathery things in the Desert?"

According to the innkeeper, who seemed rather amused at the question, they're called samratheel - which roughly translates as "biting flowers."

The name seems to fit them.

The Desert Road

Now that the word-plague is cured and the town is no longer under linguistic quarantine, I packed up my things and left Arkit this morning. I made sure to leave before dawn. Travel in the Golden Desert is much more pleasant if you can reach someplace shady by noon.

Arkit is on one of the few permanent roads in the Desert. Elsewhere, there would be little point in roads; an unpaved one would just be sand on sand, and anything more solid would be buried by the sand instead. It would be like building a road on the ocean.*

However, being near the river, there are enough grasses and weeds here (Desert weeds are tough and brown and dead-looking) that the absence of them qualifies as a path. Or, if you're feeling generous, a road.

I'm traveling the Golden Desert on foot, as usual. I've acquired a wide-brimmed hat and some of the loose, blindingly white clothing worn by Desert nomads. These protect me from most of the sun. That only leaves the heat radiating up from the sand, the hot, gritty breeze that smells of dryness and baked stone, and the times - even worse - when the breeze doesn't blow. The air congeals then into something thick and unbreathable, like syrup poured over a pancake sizzling on the endless frying pan that is the Golden Desert.

It has taken me some time to become accustomed to the heat.

Fortunately, my body and the Shapeshifter's Curse I inherited have been as resourceful as ever. My toes have become quite long and thin, spreading my weight across the sand while exposing a minimum of skin to it. My skin, in turn, has developed a coat of scales even whiter than my clothing, with a collection of heat-shedding frills where my hair would be in colder weather. Several people have noted my resemblance to various Desert lizards. This seems like a good sign. The lizards, after all, have had quite a lot of time to adapt to this place; if I can become half as comfortable as them in little more than a year, I count myself quite lucky.

I have become surprisingly comfortable here, in fact. The heat has ceased to bother me much. I enjoy the silence of the long spaces between towns. The settlements of the Golden Desert tend to be bustling, exuberant places, communities of people who will gather around any source of water to build their houses and plant their crops and celebrate the miracle of life existing in the middle of such desolation. I love staying in Desert towns. After a week, though - sometimes two or three - I start to long for the desolation again, for a place where there are no voices to drown out my thoughts. I like people, but in moderation.

I have had many companions on my travels, but silence and solitude are by far the oldest and fondest of them.

They have been good company today. I spent the morning and parts of the afternoon traveling solo, wading through the rippling heat haze over the hard-packed road. My feet fell easily into the familiar rhythm of walking. I passed few travelers. One or two people passed me, traveling in the opposite direction on foot or on faded wooden wagons full of sand-tubers. One woman rode by on a flightless bird, somewhere between ostrich and roadrunner; there were message tubes strapped to both its legs, like a carrier pigeon. Each one must have held a scroll longer than my arm. The woman gave me a crisp salute with one white-gloved hand and shouted a greeting as she passed by. I didn't recognize the language.

Other than that, I spent the day alone. The silence stretched on long enough that started to notice the details of the Desert around me. Even here, there's always something moving. Occasional clouds wandered up over the horizon and burned up in the mid-afternoon sun. The darker shapes of vultures and winged hyenas passed overhead, dismissing me as too mobile for food. The hyenas called to each other with crow-like bursts of cackling that echoed for miles across the sand. Small, unseen creatures rustled in the weeds. Fine sprays of sand sifted from the tops of the nearby dunes. The wind blew dry notes across the brim of my hat.

I walked.

I have no particular destination in mind, and therefore little reason to care when I arrive. It wouldn't much matter if I did. The Golden Desert is a place of vast and changeable distances, impossible to predict; as the saying goes, you'll get there when you get there. People rarely hurry here.

Besides, it's just too hot.



*This has, of course, been attempted in many parts of the world, with varying degrees of success. Notable examples include the Serpent's Backbone, a floating bridge made of giant vertebrae that links a few dozen of the islands of Kennyrubin; Trifrost, an ice causeway kept frozen by imported glacier snails in the tropical waters of Barbaleel; and Skimmer's Path, a road built by the Great Acrobat, who somehow convinced a fifty-mile stretch of ocean to increase its surface tension to the consistency of ankylosaur leather. To this day, no one is sure how he did it.

Thrass Kaffa

We felt Thrass Kaffa before we saw it. After days in the dry air of the Golden Desert, the breeze this morning carried tiny droplets of water, which collected on every surface in the caravan. People walked along with their mouths open, drinking the water that condensed on their tongues. We were soaked by the time we reached the city.

The city of Thrass Kaffa is built beneath the Neverending Waterfall. The Waterfall comes straight out of the sky; if there were ever any clouds, it could almost be an exceptionally precise rain shower. Most of it has spread into a fine mist of spray by the time it reaches the ground. The constant wind of the Golden Desert blows the spray over the entire town, so everything is constantly wet. Rainbows appear at random in the air. Somehow, a whole collection of jungle plants ended up here many years ago; they've thrived in the dripping heat, growing over and through the entire city. Thrass Kaffa is a tiny patch of rainforest in the middle of the Desert. It's like being back on the Greenhouse Cliff. The buildings are draped with vines; orchids and bromeliads sprout from sandstone gutters. The streets are full of sunlit mist and the dripping green explosions of tropical plants.

There used to be a lake in the middle of the city, but by now, the jungle and the surrounding farmland drink up all the water that reaches the ground. The fish have taken to the trees instead, since there's nearly as much water in the air as on the ground. You can see them occasionally, wriggling up and down the trunks. Groups of Kaffans gather occasionally to race them.

Surprisingly, the city's aquifrax has never complained about the disappearance of its lake; it only seems to care about the Waterfall. The water that reaches the ground is no longer important. The aquifrax refuses solid gifts, disdainful of anything coarse enough to be affected by gravity, but it happily accepts offerings of music and poetry. It's said to have exceptional taste. When walking through Thrass Kaffa, it's common to find writers and musicians with their heads raised, blinking, singing or reciting their work to the rain. Every so often, the rain gives them an answer.

No one knows where the Waterfall comes from. Several of the city's avians have flown as high as they could, trying to find its top, but they all ran out of strength before they ran out of water.

Of course, not many avians live in the Golden Desert; most avians capable of flight need to eat nearly half their weight every day, and food is not quite that plentiful here. There are far more avians in the comparatively lush Blue Desert. In Thrass Kaffa, there are actually a surprising number of amphibian people - nearly all of the ones in the Golden Desert, I believe. Men and women with glistening, speckled skin pass by with perpetually damp clothes and brightly colored lap-frogs, only a few streets away from the waterless dunes.

The city of Karkafel often connects to Thrass Kaffa, though you can only travel between the two through catacombs and obscure back alleys. The cities are only visible to each other in the occasional mirage. Thrass Kaffa is built around the Waterfall, Karkafel around its famous Library; the cities trade life for information, nature for culture. Farmers pick fruit in Thrass Kaffa and bring it to Karkafel to trade for music. Archivists from Karkafel sneak into Thrass Kaffa when they've had enough of dust and dry paper and need someplace green. It's an unusual relationship, but the people of the two cities seem happy with it.

About half of the caravan is staying here; the rest is moving on, taking the jazz birds off to who knows where. I'll miss traveling with their constant warbling improvisations. I have friends in Karkafel, though, and I want to at least stay long enough to try to find them before I leave.

The Shell of a Town

I'm not sure exactly when we crossed over from the Pinstuck Plains to the Golden Desert; perhaps we haven't yet. There's no clear border between the two, and what there is shifts constantly.

Rain is capricious in the outskirts of the Golden Desert. People settle in the green spaces, plant crops and build towns, only to have the rain move on a decade later and turn their farmland back to dust. There are ghost towns all over the Desert's outskirts. The dust piles up against cracked boards and peeling paint, drifting through the broken glass of carefully shut windows. Years later, if the rain returns, the exiles of a different town will move in and bring the ruins back to life. The people of the outskirts are used to living with someone else's ghosts.

CheChmit is one of these towns. It's new and old at the same time. The people only recently moved in, settling down in the abandoned husk of the town after weeks of traveling. Their old town dried up several months ago. A few months more, and it will look exactly like this one did.

At the moment, though, CheChmit is coming back to life. Weeds grow up around the buildings. In most parts of the world, people would pull them out, but not here. Weeds are a sign of life. When they start dying, you know it's time to leave. The town well has water in it again - though the bucket is rusted through - and the farmers are busy plowing the soil around the town. Families are clearing the dust from the houses, putting new glass in the windows, and replacing curtains worn to white rags by the wind. The children keep finding old wooden toys and glass marbles that have lain in the empty houses, forgotten, for decades. The town is like a hermit crab's home - a dry, discarded thing filled with sudden, bustling life. Before it was abandoned, this place was known as Kelikeff. The place its current inhabitants came from no longer has a name. This is the outskirts of the Desert, where whole villages pack up and move all at once; a town's name goes with its people, not with its buildings.

I walked around the streets for a while (there aren't very many), looking at the deep cracks the wind has worn in the stone and wood of the buildings. People were painting a few of them. Mostly, they limited this to a touch of red here, a yellow door frame there; in the Golden Desert, the texture of well-aged wood and stone is considered at least as beautiful as a coat of paint. I stopped for a while to help a family of reptiles patch the roof of their new old house. They were doing it very carefully, so as not to harm the tree growing up through it.

Their daughter stayed on the ground (her mother didn't want her up on the roof) and drew things on the walls with a piece of charcoal. I came down to take a look when we all took a break for water. She had drawn a procession on the walls; strange, solemn-looking shapes marched in a rough black line around two sides of the house. There were tall ones and short ones, smooth and spiny, bare-faced and hooded, fat and thin. Mostly thin.

"These are the quiet people," she said, without waiting for me to ask. "I see them every time we move. We've moved a lot. They always leave the towns before we get here, because they don't like noise. That's all my mother would tell me. She said it's not polite to talk about them. Too noisy." She returned to drawing. One of the taller shapes was covered in what might have been stripes or bandages. "She didn't say anything about drawing them, though."

I didn't ask anyone else about the quiet people - I wouldn't want to be rude - but I'll have to keep an eye out for them if I visit any more abandoned towns.

FlunDitChukk delivered the jazz birds and musical instruments to the leader of a caravan in town. They'll be moving on to some city or other in the next few days; the caravan is only in CheChmit to pick up the birds and replenish their water supply. I don't know how they managed to schedule the meeting so precisely. In return, FlunDitChukk picked up a load of palm-tree crystals to bring back to SuyMaTmakk. His wagon settled noticeably lower on its wheels when the chunks of honey-colored stone were loaded onto it. I said goodbye before he left, and he replied with a grunt that sounded almost friendly. The caravan leader noticed me a bit later, when I was painting a border of morning glory vines around the window of a house, and offered me a seat on the caravan. Apparently, they need someone to touch up the paint on the wagons.

I accepted. It's been years since I've visited the Golden Desert.

Mist-Wolves

They came up over the Edge this morning. It was cloudier than usual; this close to the Edge, there are occasional full-sized clouds, not just the little puffs of white that usually float over the Scalps.* The sun was a bright blur through the gray. At first, there was just the mist, drifting up from the cliff as usual - until it formed itself into shapes and came out into the geographers' camp.

They were gray and silent shapes, great beasts of cloud that drifted through the camp on misty paws. It was hard to tell where one ended and the next began. They were a pack and a cloud-bank all at once, a blur of paws and tails and hunched backs. Pale eyes and teeth gleamed in the mist. They flowed around and through the camp, passing through tripods and tent-poles as if they weren't even there, only occasionally pausing to glance at us. Mist-wolves aren't interested in solid things.

Most creatures in the world are solid - made from earth, as the elemental philosophers would say - but a surprising number are not. There are sea-horses that run in foaming herds across the waves near Kennyrubin, born in the froth of their crests. Fire-dancers hold wild, leaping gatherings over forest fires in the Railway Regions. Most parts of the world have creatures of fire and water such as these. Mist-wolves are creatures of air.

On the plains, they only come out at night or in the early morning. It's too dry during the day. I don't know where they go then; perhaps they sink into the ground or simply become so thin that we can't see them. That's what they do in the Winter. In January, mist-wolves are only visible on the most humid days, spread so thin in the cold, dry air that they can step over houses. These ones were smaller and denser; it's humid near the Edge. They were barely twice the size of solid wolves.

They left dewy paw-prints in the grass.

It was the first time I'd heard the jazz birds in the wagon fall completely silent. Normally, even when the rest of them are asleep, there's at least one still noodling to itself (tu-WHEET-a-deedle-deedle awk awk awk), but when the mist-wolves arrived, all they did was watch. Everyone did. The normal mathematical bustle of the geographers' camp gave way to complete stillness. I found myself holding my breath, half-afraid that the wolves would melt away if I disturbed the air. The only thing that broke the silence was a cup of coffee boiling over on a camp stove. No one moved to take it off.

One of the wolves padded over and sniffed at the steam rising from the coffee. It licked its muzzle with a pale white tongue, as if considering the flavor, then sneezed silently and flowed away. The others grinned at it as it rejoined the pack. I could see tents and wet grass through them. With the graceful unity of a cloud, the whole pack turned and padded out across the plains. A moment later, the sun came out and broke the spell. the mist-wolves vanished instantly, as though they'd never existed. They'd been transparent even under the clouds; in full sunlight, they were completely invisible. If we hadn't all seen them, I'd probably suspect that I'd dreamt the whole thing.

Later in the evening, the geographer with the echo-frogs showed me the reading from his sonograph. (Like a seismograph, it draws a line on a roll of paper.) For just an inch or two, early in the morning, there was a faint zigzag - a rhythm as soft as a whisper. One of the mist-wolves had passed around the sonograph, and the instrument had picked up its heartbeat.

* Some people, if they're used to bigger clouds, refer to the ones over the Scalps as "dandruff."

The Edge

After barely a whole day of traveling, we had to stop this morning; the road had come to an end. For that matter, so had the ground. The road led straight off the edge of a sheer cliff.

This is not what one expects to find on the Scalps. After months of flat plains, it's easy to forget that the world even has vertical surfaces. I certainly wasn't expecting a cliff.

The River KleMit skirted dangerously close to the cliff, but only a small branch of it actually went over. it vanished into the mist that rose up from below. It was impossible to tell how high the cliff was. Looking to either side, it was equally impossible to tell how wide it was. There was just the edge, tufted with grass and small bushes, winding away into the mist.

The Edge, as I found out later, is one of the areas most hotly debated by theoretical geographers. If it truly is the Edge of the world, it would prove the round-world theorists entirely wrong, as a sphere cannot have an edge. They maintain, of course, that the Edge is merely a very large hole. The flat-world theorists insist that it is indeed the Edge, while the mosaic and amalgam theorists don't really care one way or another. According to the mosaic-world theory, the world is neither round nor flat. It's merely a bunch of small pieces of ground that happen to be connected to each other at random (and constantly changing) points. The world doesn't have a shape; it just shares edges. You might as well say that literature has a shape because books share words.

To be honest, this has always sounded like the most reasonable theory to me.

The amalgam theorists maintain that space is an illusion and that every place in the world is simply a different facet of the same single location - similar to the way that, in geometry, an infinite number of circular slices can be taken from the same sphere. Every place is the same one looked at from a different angle.*

The debate between the four theories (and numerous more eccentric ones) has been going on for centuries, and everyone is still unsure whether the Edge is the actual edge of the world or just an unusually large hole. The mist never clears, so it's impossible to see. No climber or flier has ever found a bottom. Explorers have walked along the Edge for months, even years, and never returned to where they started. The cliff doesn't appear to curve in either direction. Of course, the constant mist makes it hard to tell; it just sits there, drifting up and down in plumes, wafting through the cliff's fringe of hanging grass, making it impossible to see any distance below or beyond the Edge. Possibly the Rain Dragon could be persuaded to do something about the mist, but no one ever knows where to find him.

I heard all of this from a team of experimental geographers staying at the Edge. It's a popular place for them, as you might expect. Some of them have been here for years. They have that disheveled-but-enthusiastic look that scientists often get when they've found something interesting; they're too busy to care if their coats are inside-out.

While I talked to the geographers, FlunDitChukk sat on the wagon and didn't look at the road. Every few minutes, he'd take a quick glance at it, just in case it had decided to lead somewhere else while he wasn't looking. So far, it hasn't. Maybe the dunderblub has been peeking at it. I doubt anyone could tell.

The geographers have a small forest of instruments set up at the Edge. There are telescopes, mist-lenses, all manner of surveying tools,** and dozens of other things I couldn't identify - devices like giant sextants and exploded clocks on carefully calibrated tripods. One geographer was inspecting the Edge with a sonograph and a trio of specially bred echo-frogs. Salamander lanterns burned everywhere, more for heat than for light. The mist makes it almost chilly near the Edge. A group of large samovals - research assistants, I assume - were gathered around one lantern, scribbling busily in tiny notebooks like a scientific sewing circle. Their thick fur is less help than usual here. The mist condenses in it, making it stick out all over in damp spikes.

The assistants, when they aren't busy, amuse themselves by throwing things over the Edge. If there's anyone down there, they're probably not amused.

* I have probably explained this entirely wrong. I don't pretend to understand the amalgam world theory in the slightest.

** Contrary to common belief, these actually have some practical uses and are not merely amusing mechanical curiosities. Surveying is not as pointless a pursuit as cartography. It can be quite useful in measuring the heights of large objects, such as mountains or termite mounds.

Fish of the Drought Land

Most signs of the rain are gone by now. The grass is dry again, except for half an hour of dew each morning; the sogginess of the ground has turned to steam and vanished in the sky. The only water left is in the streams.

To most of the rest of the world, the streams of the Scalps would barely be worthy of the name. They only hold water for a few weeks in every year. The rest of the time, they are simply dry channels, wrinkles in the Scalps, empty except for dust and cracked earth.

One of these streams runs beside the road I'm on. The water was low this morning, barely halfway to the grassy edge of the stream bed, but it was still there. The sound of it woke me up in the morning. It's been a while since I last heard running water.

There were little fish in the stream.

I have no idea how they survive in such a temporary place. Three days ago, the silt they were swimming over was a cracked desert. There has been no water here for months. Where did they come from?

It's different for other creatures. Periodic frogs and lungfish, for example, spend most of their lives waiting underground, sealed in the thin layer of moisture under dry stream beds. They emerge only in the floods after rain, released from their dark confinement for a few days, briefly free to swim and mate and eat ravenously. Unlike their cousins in more permanent waters, they don't lay eggs; their children are born fully mobile. They have to be. Before they're three days old, they have to burrow down into the mud with their parents to await the next rain.

These were not lungfish. They moved more like tiny salmon. It was hard to make out their shapes; the surface of the stream was shattered with the ripples of water going somewhere in a hurry, and the fish never stopped moving. They were like flames in the water, quick flashes of bronze and scarlet and electric blue. They were mesmerizing. These were not the kind of fish who burrow and spend months sitting in the mud.

I had no idea what they did plan to do. I sat and watched them while I ate breakfast. By the time I finished, the water was barely half as high as it was when I started. Mist rose around me as the dew on the grass returned to the air.

The water kept sinking over the morning. I watched it as I walked. The fish grew fewer as the stream shrank; every few minutes, there were fewer flashes of color beneath the surface. They must have been following the water downstream to wherever it was going.

There were still far too many when the stream dried up at noon.

I missed the exact moment when it dried up. I had gotten distracted for a few minutes, trying to remember the third verse of a song by Chellery Hewer. (It still hasn't come to me.) When I looked back at the stream, the water was gone. Only a few puddles remained. The bright fish were flopping in them, gasping as the water drained away into the ground.

I don't believe I was really thinking when I picked up the nearest one. When something is dying, the instant, automatic response is to do something - anything - to try to save it. It's a reflex. It keeps working even when there's nothing you can actually do. The fish continued to flop in my hand, just as doomed there as in the puddle I'd taken it from, a puddle that was gone already. The fish's mouth worked uselessly in the dry air. It was one of the red ones. There were tiny freckles of yellow down its side.

Still running mostly on reflex, I dropped my bags and fumbled one open with my free hand. The small glass jars I use for painting were on the top. With my feet sliding in the mud, I half-stepped, half-slithered to the bottom of the stream bed and filled a jar with as much muddy water as I could take from the largest remaining puddle. Two fish came along with it, blue with pale green spots. I dropped the red one in with them.

As the brown water cleared, I realized that half of it was mud. The fish swam in tiny circles in the inch or two that was left. There was barely room in the jar for them to turn around.

I stood there, looking down at the tiny, fragile lives in the little jar, and wondered what exactly I thought I was doing. Water is not abundant on the plains; only the very wealthy can afford to keep fish. It could be days before I found more water. I didn't even know what kind of fish these were, or what they ate, or how big they were going to get.

There were still dozens of them flopping desperately in the mud.

The sheer impossible hopelessness of the whole situation overwhelmed me a little at that point. There was really nothing I could do for most of the fish. They had fallen behind, unable to keep up with the water and their faster siblings, and they were doomed for it. Things die in nature all the time. It wouldn't work otherwise. I was probably crazy to try to intervene with something like this, but those three little fish were still swimming in the pathetic amount of water I'd managed to save. I couldn't just let them die.

I was standing there, staring blankly at the confused little circles of the fish and feeling like much the same thing was happening in my head, when I noticed something sparkling at the corner of my eye. I looked up. A sinuous, glittering shape was coming down the drying stream bed. As it got closer, I could make out a long body with a flat-topped head - a great snake, or possibly an eel. It must have been ten times as long as I was.

It was made of water. I could see the ground through it.

The snake meandered back and forth across the stream bed. I couldn't tell what it was doing until it got closer. It glided from fish to fish, sliding over the sad little flopping shapes and gathering them up into itself. I don't think it missed a single one. Its back was covered with the crossed ripples of a stream; on the snake, the pattern looked surprisingly like scales. When it reached the spot where I was, standing in mud halfway down the bank, it turned to look at me.

Its eyes were pools of liquid black, the color of cave pools or the ocean at night. Small fish swam in its face. Its whole body was full of them, a flashing rainbow of rescued colors, but all I could look at were those eyes.

I've only seen two other river spirits in my life. They don't often show themselves. The rest of the world seems to fade when they're around; everything else is simultaneously too solid and yet not real enough, depressingly static and ridiculously transient, too old to care and too new to understand. Nothing changes so constantly as a river. Nothing is so utterly unchanging. Nothing except, perhaps, the ocean.

This was only the spirit of a small stream. If there's a spirit for the ocean, I hope I never see its face. I would drown from looking.

The snake made an impatient gesture with its head, somehow managing to indicate the jar I held, and the spell was broken. My brain started working again. Quickly - there were fish still waiting in the mud - I held out the jar and upended it over the snake's transparent body. The surface absorbed the water with a small plop, sending ripples over the shining back, and the fish darted away to join the rest. I lost them immediately in the bright school of colors. The snake gave me a nod that seemed approving, somehow, then turned and continued down the stream. The wet trail behind it steamed in the sun.

I didn't try to follow it. There was no help I could give to a being like that, not beyond the well-meaning but useless little bit I'd already done, and I'm not sure I could have handled another sight of its face. I'm used to looking at rivers. I'm not used to them looking back at me.

Instead, I just watched until the shimmering tail had vanished in the glare of the sun. The mud in the jar had already dried to a thin, flaky crust when I put it away and picked up my bags. The road stretched into the distance. Cracks were appearing in the empty stream bed beside it.

I wonder where the spirit was going. I suppose I'll find out soon enough.

Rain-Walkers

It's been raining for two days now. Today, the rain-walkers arrived.

In Hmakk, they're called takahreel. It means the same thing. I'd never heard of them before, but apparently, they're fairly common on the plains. They follow storms.

They arrived at what the clocks said was noon, though the sun was nowhere in sight. One moment, there was nothing but gray sheets of water, thick enough to turn distant buildings to dim gray silhouettes; the next, tall shapes strode out of the rain, and there they were.

Their heads were level with second-story windows. They looked like frogs, but huge ones - plump, green-speckled bodies walking on two long legs, their waists eight feet off the ground. Their feet were the size of sleds. I counted nine of them, striding along with slow, careful steps, as if they were walking across snow. People came out of their houses as they passed. We stood there - under umbrellas, in rain coats, or simply getting wet - and watched the rain-walkers go by, a slow, silent parade in green and gray.

Their skin was shiny in the rain, but no water dripped off of them; somehow, they were absorbing the rain as fast as it could fall. They left dry footprints in the wet mud of the street.

They had tiny arms with delicate, long-fingered hands, which they kept tucked against their chests. Each walker held something. One had a trumpet; another, a carpet brush. A third clicked the beads of an abacus as it walked. Some had things from nature - a coconut, mostly bald; a lump of rock covered in pyrite crystals; a sun-bleached rabbit's skull. One held a mariner's clock covered in what I'm certain were barnacles. I don't know how far that must have come - it's hundreds of miles from here to the sea. I could still hear it ticking.

I watched this strange procession of objects, each one unique, as if it was the name of the rain-walker holding it. A found name.

Later, after the walkers had gone, I asked the whittler from yesterday about this. She had watched the walkers too, still gnawing at that lump of wood in her mouth. It was starting to look like something. I couldn't tell what.

"Hm," she said. "Might be names. Makes as much sense as anything else I've heard. I don't know - they never say anything. I can't tell them apart, but I recognize some of the things they're carrying. The one with the abacus was just a baby when they came through last year. Barely old enough to walk. Probably the same one, unless they trade their things when no one's looking. Somehow, I doubt that."

No one spoke while the walkers were here. It didn't seem right.

One walker had babies on its back.* They looked like fat tadpoles. Their tails were small and stubby - there aren't many opportunities for swimming on the plains - but they clung to the adult with webbed feet that were already as big as my hands. Not surprisingly, none of the tadpoles were carrying anything. Maybe they only get something when they grow hands to carry it.

One of the full-grown walkers held nothing at all. It clutched at the air as it walked, wringing its empty hands as if unsure what to do with them. Perhaps it had lost what it carried - lost its name. A little girl was standing in the rain nearby, watching the walkers underneath an umbrella bigger than herself. As the empty-handed one walked by, she put down the umbrella and tapped it on the foot. It stopped and stared at her. She stretched out - on tiptoe, she could almost reach the walker's knee - and held up a little wooden horse.

The walker stared at her for a moment, its eyes round and unblinking. I almost didn't notice when it started to sink. It was like watching a tree fall. The great knees bent impossibly slowly until it was squatting on the ground, looking more frog-like than ever. One arm reached out - slowly, carefully - and the long fingers gently plucked the little horse from the girl's hand. With the same slowness, the walker lifted it up to those huge golden eyes.

It stared at the horse for what seemed like forever. Finally, it turned back to the girl and nodded its head. The great legs unfolded, as slow as a sunrise, and the walker strode away to rejoin its companions. It clasped the wooden horse tightly against its chest.

Most of us followed the rain-walkers as they made their gradual parade down the street. They don't come into towns very often. There are a lot of them on the plains, walking in groups or alone, but there's also a lot of space on the plains. For every walker that comes within sight of a town, there are probably hundreds that walk past it, hidden and silent in the rain.

They had reached the outskirts of town (not a long walk) when the rain grew gentler, then stopped altogether. The air turned dry almost immediately. The walkers paused and stood there for a moment, blinking, then changed to match it. Clear membranes - some sort of second eyelid - slid over their eyes. Their skin turned from slick green to a dusty gray. I could almost see the pores closing up. The one with the tadpoles opened its mouth, and they all climbed inside. I suppose that's one way to keep them wet between storms.

The whole group stood there for a minute or two, swaying slightly. Their heads were tilted as if they were listening for something. Mist rose from the hot ground around them. There was no signal I could see, but they all turned in unison and strode away over the wet grass. On their way to the next storm, I suppose.

The little girl watched them go. When they had almost vanished in the mist, she dropped her umbrella and waved. It was hard to tell, but I thought I saw one of the tall shapes wave back.

* I would say on her back, but there are plenty of amphibians that let the father carry the babies. All the walkers looked more or less the same to me.

The Burning Man

Today, I was woken at sunrise by horrific screaming. I stumbled to the window, certain that someone was being murdered outside.

The street proved to have a distinct shortage of death. People were walking around and nodding to each other. No one seemed to notice the screaming, though I didn't see them trying to talk either. I doubt anyone could have heard.

The flames I'd glimpsed last night came to mind. Maybe this was just one of those towns where fire and screaming were considered unremarkable. I usually try to avoid those. They're quite rare, fortunately, but it's not always easy to tell when you've found one. I had nearly made up my mind to sneak out quietly, before anyone noticed me, when I happened to see the source of the screaming. It was a little gray bird, about the size and color of a mouse, which sat on a fence post and screamed as if it was being eaten alive. It seemed far too small to have a voice like that. Occasionally, it stopped to sneeze or preen its feathers.

I gave up trying to sleep and went outside instead.

Twokk is a fairly small town, so it was easy to find my way to the center (which was lucky, as I couldn't have heard anyone if I'd asked for directions). There was a man there. He was sitting in the middle of the town square, and he was on fire.

This seemed like the sort of situation that might warrant screaming, but everyone in sight seemed as unconcerned as ever. Several people stood with buckets next to a trough of water. I assumed there were there in case anything else caught fire. They watched the burning man idly, looking almost bored.

"Er… does this happen often?" I asked one of them.

She shrugged. "Usually he only does it once every few months, but there's been a drought lately."

I had been under the impression that droughts were normally a reason not to light fires in the middle of town.

"Normally, yes." The woman took the piece of wood she'd been whittling, eyed it critically, turned it around, and stuck it back in her mouth. I tried not to stare. I can't recall ever meeting someone who could carve wood with her teeth and talk at the same time. "Not in his case. He does this to end droughts, apparently. Something about taking the dry thoughts and burning them away. When he wakes up, he won't even remember there was a drought unless we tell him. I don't pretend to understand it myself, but I've seen it rain after his little bonfires often enough. Whatever he's doing, it works. Besides, the salamanders like it."

I looked closer then, trying to see through the flames. The man was sitting in what looked like meditation - one of those poses that requires minimal use of muscles to maintain. The flames rose from every inch of his body, bright and roaring, as if he was made of dry wood. I could feel the waves of heat blowing from him.* His eyes were closed; his face was peaceful, completely unmarked by the fire.

He was also covered with salamanders. They perched on his head and shoulders, sat around his feet, and clung gecko-style to his bare chest. My own salamander seemed agitated, so I let it join them. It climbed into the flames and settled down on a heap of other salamanders on the man's foot.

Maybe salamanders like the taste of dry thoughts.

One of the other bucket-holders checked a pocket watch. "You showed up just in time. He's been going for almost a whole day now. Can't be much longer."

"Usually, he remembers to take his clothes off first." The whittler pointed to the ground around the man. It was covered with a thin layer of ash and a few half-melted buttons. "Not this time."

"Hmm." The man with the watch put it back in his pocket. "Pity. That was a nice shirt."

We talked for maybe ten minutes or so. The screaming had stopped by then. The bird, I found out, is called a throkelit skeee, which literally means "shriek of death." They're found only in a very small region of the Scalps. Thank goodness. Apparently, the shrieking is a mating call; females are attracted to the males with the most bloodcurdling screams. They occasionally get confused and mob the heroines (sometimes the heros) of particularly melodramatic traveling plays.

We were comparing the plot of "Death in a handbag" (the dialogue in the Hmakk translation is apparently a bit more… explicit… than Trachia Ghastie's original script) to that of "The Perils of Pulgreen" (one of the few plays with an ogre as the heroine) when the burning man woke up. His eyes were wide and golden. Steam hissed as the fire vaporized the water on them. He didn't seem to care.

The fire died down gradually as he sat there, as did the conversation. He looked strangely naked without the coat of flames. (Technically, he was, but since he was a reptile, no one cared.) His scales were orange and yellow, speckled here and there with the intense blue of a fire's heart. I could just make out the shape of clothing silhouetted on him in soot. Other than the ash on the ground, that was all that was left. He got up, stretched, and gave everyone a vague smile.

"My, it's hot out here, isn't it?" he said.

No one seemed to have an answer to this.

A cool breeze wafted in as he spoke, carrying the scent of rain. His smile widened. "Oh. Never mind."

With that, he turned and walked away, shedding salamanders as he went. The rain swept in a few minutes later. Everyone ran to gather their own salamanders, or their children who had been watching the show, and disappeared into various houses. The extinguished man disappeared in a cloud of his own steam. The raindrops sizzled and vanished when they touched his skin. It rained until nightfall, and I spent the rest of the day inside, illustrating the inn's menus.

I never did find out his name.

* It was early, after all. The morning air was barely hot enough to melt candles.

The Lost Pet

I spent most of today walking a path on the plains. There aren't exactly roads here. Instead, there are paths through the grass, beaten trails of varying width and solidity. The biggest ones are almost what would be called a dirt road in other parts of Hamjamser. The smallest are fit only for field mice. This one was somewhere between the two - antelope-sized, perhaps. It also happened to be leading me in circles.

The paths of the Scalp (some call them "parts") are one of the less predictable forms of transportation in the world. They rarely follow the same route or lead to the same place twice. Some take you to towns or landmarks. Some lead back to where they started. Some peter out and vanish in the middle of nowhere. Some take travelers out into the featureless plains and lead them in circles for days on end, until the sun works its way into their brains and they return to civilization half-delirious from heat, babbling of visions that they can never quite explain to anyone, visions that fade - like dreams - with the sunstroke.

People don't travel much on the plains unless they're nomads. The chances of finding your way to any place you've been before are nearly nonexistent. The chances of finding your way to any place at all, in fact, are less than certain. Travelers on the plains get used to this sooner or later.

I was starting to suspect that the path I was on was one of the circular ones. Landmarks are scarce on the plains, but the last six bushes I'd passed had looked suspiciously similar. Luckily for me, the heat was - for once - not a problem. Back in late April, my skin developed a coat of brilliant silver-white scales and a dimetrodon-like frill along the back of my neck. It makes wearing shirts somewhat difficult, but keeping cool is easy. I wasn't worried about the heat. I was more worried about boredom. I'd been walking all morning without seeing so much as a shed, and the endless lumps of grass were starting to get monotonous. I amused myself by singing for several hours. By noon, the air was so dry that I was doing more coughing than singing, so I stopped in the almost-shade of identical bush number seven to have lunch.

Meat on the Scalp tends to become shoe leather by the time it's about eight hours old. I'd been chewing on the same piece of bacon since breakfast the day before. The bread I'd bought back in KhniLiPraNa* was still good, though, if rather stale, and I had plenty of water. If you travel on the Scalp, you expect to get lost every so often. A smart traveler carries enough food for a week or two.

I was just about to bite into a sandwich that bore a striking resemblance to a stack of boards when there was a scuffling noise from underfoot. "Hey," said a voice from ground level. "Hey you." **

I looked down to see a hole in the ground. For a second, I was sure that one of the hills had opened its mouth to talk to me - this is the sort of thing one starts thinking after a day of walking over the Scalps - but then I caught a glimpse of a dark shape moving around inside. There was someone talking to me from under the ground.

"Yes, down here," the voice continued. "Sorry to interrupt your lunch, but I'm sure your teeth will thank me. Have you seen a centipede nearby?"

I had, in fact, seen several centipedes that morning. There are a lot of them on the Scalps, twining through the grass like elegant head lice with fangs. One of the larger ones had been eating a woodchuck.

"What size centipede?" I asked.

"Oh, just a little one, about six feet long or so. She has spots and a blue collar."

The largest centipede I'd seen was barely two feet long - the one with the woodchuck - and that one had surprised me. I said as much. The voice muttered a word I didn't know, which might have been a good thing.

"Could you look around for her? She can't have gone far. She has the attention span of a drunken hummingbird."

Stalking a distractable six-foot centipede through the tall grass was not exactly an appealing prospect. "Is there any way you could-"

"I can't come out," the voice snapped. "Have you seen what the sunlight's like out there?"

This was like asking a fish if it had seen the ocean. "Yes," I said.

"I've lived in caves my whole life. If I come out, I'll sunburn so badly, my teeth will be peeling. Don't worry, she won't bite you - she's tame."

As I was walking out into the grass, I thought I heard the voice add, "mostly."

If you've never searched blindly for a venomous predator as long as yourself in a place where you can't see your feet, you're probably lucky.*** I'm rather proud of myself for not yelling when the fangs burst out of the grass a foot from my left knee.

The centipede was every bit of six feet long, and she did indeed have spots and a blue collar. There were frogs embroidered on it. Her front legs held the dried-out shell of a large riddler crab; she clutched it tightly, staring at me with a pair of beady black eyes.

We stayed that way for a few seconds. Then, apparently, she decided I was boring and turned her attention back to the crab, wiggling its legs around like some sort of hollow crustacean doll.

I tried everything I could think of to get her to follow me. I beckoned; I whistled; I coaxed and pleaded with increasingly desperate cheerfulness. I tried baiting her with meat, though its resemblance to dry tree bark may have made it slightly less than appealing. Nothing worked. All she did was sit there, playing with her dead crab and giving me the occasional amused glance. Oh, you're funny, her shovel-shaped face seemed to say. Go on. Do something else.

Eventually, it was obvious what I was going to have to do.

When I picked her up, the centipede unfolded a pair of poison fangs as thick as my thumb. I was sure for a moment that I was going to die. She refrained from biting me, though; instead, she draped herself over my shoulders and spent the entire trip back to the hole buttoning and unbuttoning the collar of my shirt. She seemed fascinated by the concept of buttons. The crab fell into the grass somewhere on the way, no longer the most entertaining thing in reach.

It's amazing how heavy a six-foot centipede is. Her legs hooked over my shoulders and arms with the wiry, surprising strength of a bird's talons. I could hear some sort of rhythm through the leathery armor of her body - breathing, perhaps, or the beating of her heart. Maybe several hearts. I don't know. I'm not particularly familiar with the anatomy of ordinary centipedes, much less giant ones.

"Marta!" said the voice when I returned to the hole. "Where have you been? What have I told you about wandering off through holes? Someday, you're going to come up through someone's drain and give them nightmares!"

The centipede - Marta - hung her head and looked sheepish.

"Thank the nice lizard thing and come back in here," the voice barked. "Now."

Marta somehow managed to give me an embarrassed look with a face made of armor plate. She crept slowly off of my shoulder, her head hanging - and then, with one flick of her fangs, she snipped one of the buttons off of my shirt and scurried into the hole with it.

I didn't object. She'll probably have much more fun with the button than I would, at least until something more interesting comes along, and I'd had enough of arguing with giant centipedes for one day.

Besides, I don't really know how I would have stopped her.

* All the towns on the Scalp have names like this. They get offended if you don't capitalize every syllable. More about that later.

** Actually, it said, "hni paka," but this conversation will probably be much more interesting to most of you if I translate it out of the language of the Scalp.

*** Also, you've obviously never played hide and seek with the viper squid in Kennyrubin. I'm still fairly certain they let me win. But that's another story.

A New Type of Writer

I left Crucible yesterday, having run out of every color of paint except red and black. I haven't met people so starved for color since I left the Gray Coast. I hope I find a place to buy more soon. I spent this afternoon walking along the banks of the Truckle, trying to stay in the shade, watching frogs and lungfish jump into the water as I passed them. I'm always surprised at how high lungfish can jump. It's not what one expects from creatures with no legs.

The first traveler I met on the road was an amphibious man carrying an enormous book. It was written in a hieroglyphic language I didn't recognize; he said it was Tectograma, the Language of Earthquakes. He was sweating rather violently in the heat. Huge drops of greenish liquid formed on his face and arms and rolled down into his shirt, which would have been stained quite badly if it hadn't already been green. He left a damp trail in the dust of the road. I asked him several times if he would like me to watch his book while he took a dip in the river; I was afraid he was going to melt away to nothing as we walked. He said no the first few times, clinging tightly to the book with long-fingered hands. (He was wearing gloves, presumably to keep the book dry.) Eventually, he relented, handing the book to me and leaping into the water. He was noticeably larger when he came out again. Maybe he really had been gradually shriveling away. I don't think full-time air-breathers completely understand how important water is to amphibians. As we continued walking, his stops for water got more and more frequent; by sunset, I ended up carrying the book on the road while he swam along beside me. That seemed a more sensible arrangement. If he hadn't had the book to keep dry, I doubt he would have come out of the water at all.

He said his name was Rumbulligan. That was more or less all he said all day. Before he let me carry the book, he was in no state for conversation; after he let me carry it, he was mostly underwater. We traveled in a companionable silence.

There were few other travelers on the road today. Perhaps it was the heat.* We passed a few people on foot, a group of crow-feathered avians panting in their black plumage, a two-headed musician practicing counterpoint with himself as he walked, and a coggerel fruit vendor who was quite happy to sell us as much as we wanted. (It was plump, juicy coggerel fruit, glistening in buckets of cold water. Drops of condensation had formed on it in the humid air. No one can be expected to resist this sort of thing in June.)

The sun was getting low, dripping light as thick as honey sideways through the trees, when we met the final traveler of the day. We had stopped just before a bend in the road, resting in a small clearing under the trees. I had had more than enough heat for one day and was ready to stop for the night. I don't know what Rumbulligan thought. I'm not sure he was awake. His eyes were open, but I'm fairly certain he doesn't have eyelids, so that didn't mean much. The other traveler came around the corner while we sat there. He was human - the first one I've seen in nearly a month now. I like to see other humans occasionally. I haven't looked like one in so long that I sometimes forget what they do look like. He seemed fairly ordinary: perhaps a foot shorter than me, with brown skin, purple eyes, and zebra-striped hair. Nothing particularly unusual. He stopped at the clearing and we exchanged the usual courtesies - good afternoon, mind if I stop here, not at all, I have interesting food, perhaps we can trade, and so on.**

There was a clicking noise farther down the road. As the man began setting down his luggage, a typewriter came around the corner, walking along on spidery metal legs.

The man's name is Alister Radish. He's a traveling accountant and transcriptionist. The typewriter is named Selio, after the legendary poet T. T. Selio. It appears to have once been an ordinary typewriter, but it's been altered quite a lot since then. The legs are only the most obvious additions. On top of it are two mechanical eyes, those little black glass lenses that people dig up with other Hill Builder technology that no one understands. While Mr. Radish was unpacking his dinner, the machine folded itself into a sitting position, extended two slender metal arms, and began cleaning its roller with a small dustcloth.

I was not surprised when Mr. Radish told me that the typewriter runs on a crystal brain, like a clockwork pipe crawler. He says he gave it the brain so it could refill its own ink and check his spelling. It does a lot more than that by now.

It writes poetry.

Pipe crawlers are intelligent in a simple way, like trained animals, but they've never shown any gift for language. They work by imitating the plumbers and mechanics who own them. The mechanical Guardians of the floating cities have written poetry - they've done practically everything at some point in their dedicated, millennia-long lives - but their crystal brains are far more advanced than those of humans, much less pipe crawlers. I've never heard of one of the small brains doing anything like this before.

Of course, I've never heard of anyone linking one to a typewriter. Perhaps it simply picked up language like the ordinary ones pick up mechanics; perhaps any of them could communicate if given the words. If you teach a creature nothing but good plumbing, it's likely to give you nothing but good plumbing in return.

Mr. Radish has sheets and sheets of the typewriter's poetry in the basket of neatly filed papers he carries on his back. He pulled out a few to show us.

At the first was only darkness
And the world was only letters
As those letters came together
In the wrong ways or the right
Then the eyes were given to it
And filled the dark with light
But still in words and letters
It hears pictures in the night

I don't know if it's particularly good poetry or not. It's certainly the best I've heard from a machine. The typewriter seems to have a vague grasp of rhyme and rhythm, though I don't know how it picked those up with no ears. Perhaps syllables are syllables whether they're heard or not. The typewriter seems more concerned, though, with the number of letters in each line. The syllables may vary, but the lines always match. It sits there every night, clicking away to itself, and in the morning, there's a new poem. Some are short:

Ink on paper
Black, white
Two becoming
All there is

Some are long, and some are continuations of other poems. One of the longest - it took the typewriter two months - seems to be a sort of epic about a grain of light traveling through glass tunnels. Neither Rumbulligan nor I could make any sense of it. The poems are put on paper complete and never rewritten; the typewriter makes only one copy of each. If there's any editing, it occurs entirely within the crystal brain.

The typewriter has never written anything but poetry. There are rare occasions when it seems to be trying to communicate something practical, but even those are in poetry:

In the joints
Of right foot
Is a grinding
Is a catching
Needs the oil
Make it loose
And a sliding
Of two pieces
Out of jammed
Set them free

If it weren't for the poetry, it wouldn't seem any more intelligent than any other small crystal brain. It follows Mr. Radish around like a large mechanical dog or mule-crab. It had to be taught to walk; it damaged itself several times at first by walking off ledges or into trees. Even the poetry isn't always understandable. Some seem to be simply playing with words:

Pocket Watch
Pocket Watch
Patch Socket
Pocket Watch
Shack Rocket
Packet Shock
Snatch Hatch
Catch Pocket
Pocket Watch

Others are complete nonsense, at least as far as anyone who's read them can tell.

Parrot the Milky Way
On an enviable swing
The toad on the moon
Shall give it a ring
Try all of it oncely
And hear it all sing
The seconds are over
And minutes the King

The three of us slept on the ground, not bothering to put up a tent or umbrella. After the last few days, no one cares if we get rained on; it would cool us off. As I write, I can hear the typewriter clicking away, its keys going up and down by themselves like the keys of a player piano. (I wonder if anyone's ever hooked a crystal brain up to one of those.) It's a surprisingly relaxing sound, somewhat like rain on a roof.

The postbird has been waiting very patiently for me; I'll stop writing now so that it can take this letter and leave. I don't expect to be awake for long after that.



* My most recent round of molting left me covered with fine golden-brown scales, spotted with dark blue like a gecko, and quite hairless. It's a good combination for the Summer. I don't know how full-time mammals endure it.

** Most countries have courtesies of this sort, but in Sedge, they have an almost ceremonial rhythm to them. Everyone knows the same set of greetings and responses. I've heard older travelers speed through the entire introductory conversation in five seconds, reciting the familiar sentences too quickly for me to make out the individual words.