«It said, and I quote, ‘Clumsy sky-eels! Are fermented dwa-nel bugs making it drunk?’»

«Kysp isn’t that sophisticated so far, is it?»

«I had best go chat with this fur-pin and learn all about their crude romantic poetry and wooden scissors,» Roroku wrote.

So she fluttered around behind some bushes that grew out of the side of the scoral, and turned into a kysp herself. «This is a bit awkward. I don’t have levity organs any more. I have to hold on to things. Or cast a spell, I guess.»

«Nine legs and two tentatails ought to be enough to be enough to hold on with!» I scribbled, without the least bit of sympathy.

«No magic just now,» said Roroku. «And shapeshifting doesn’t count. This is a bit awkward, climbing from talonhold to talonhold on bushes on the side of a seriously overgrown giant floating sky-coral. Oh! There’s our florist, just reaching a tentatail around the bush!»

“Sorry, I didn’t see you there, I thought I was all alone!” said the kysp to Roroku. “Actually, are you all right?”

“Why shouldn’t I be all right?” asked Roroku.

“Well, you’re quite utterly naked, and clinging to that ywa-gu bush with six or seven claws as if you’re dizzy or drunk,” said the kysp.

“What should I be wearing?” asked Roroku.

“What any decent, I mean, well, normal, person would wear. A bandarella around your privates at least, and belt and saddlebags. Are you sure you’re all right?” The kysp darted its tentatail back. “Oh, no, is your spouse here, or coming to meet you? I’m so sorry to interrupt!”

“Nothing like that. Just me,” said Roroku.

“Right. Well, I’m here cutting flowers.” The kysp turned the eyes on her tentatails away from her. “For my fiancée. Who does not want me staring at naked people in the side-bushes.” She waited and said in a pleading, embarrassed voice, “Won’t you please put your clothes on?”

“I don’t have any clothes,” said Roroku.

«Roroku, don’t you remember how to shapeshift to clothed?» I wrote, when she told me.

«In theory but I’ve never done it,» she wrote back. «I never played at being a mhelvul schoolgirl like you did.»

«Well, practice before your next trip. It’s very useful when you’re spying. Saves immensely on laundry, and you don’t have to figure out how to tie a tippet or twist a toga.»

“It would be un-Kogoan to leave you out here alone, naked and dizzy. But it’s sinful to even be with you naked. Bother and botherly!” The kysp pulled a rolled-up cloth bag out of its saddlebag. “Here. I can slit the sides of this and you can wear it as a bandarella.”

«…Does that count as tribute?» asked Roroku.

«It counts as the kysp doing its best to help a stranger. Take it. You’re going to want to know how to wear a bandarella anyways.»

“Thank you,” said Roroku in a somewhat quavery and uncertain voice. The kysp took her tone as a sign of weakness and need, and cut the bag into a long strip with her shears and handed or tentatailed it to her. It is hard to avert your eyes when you have eleven of them, one on the limb that you are using, and all of them together giving you full-sphere vision, but the kysp tried.

Roroku took the cloth. It is far harder than it seems to twist a haphazard strip of cloth into a lemniscate around a squirming weasel body using only a pair of tentatails, even if that body is temporarily your own and nominally ought to be cooperative. Several difficult eternities later, Roroku said, “I think I have it.”

The kysp, who had been cutting a few more flowers, looked at her with a hand-eye. “Would you like a bit of help, miss…? I don’t recall your name.”

“I’m Roroku, and yes, do help,” said Roroku.

“Well, Ro-Ro-Ku, I’m going to need to reach near there to adjust the cloth. You mustn’t take that as any impropriety on my part, nor as an offer of anything that Dwwir or my my fiancée would disapprove of,” said the kysp, and tugged nervously at the shaggy edges of the bag. “There, now you can climb back to town and not show off your bribbly bits to everyone. I’m Dze-Ts-Kwy of Nwa-Bher, myself. Where did you say you were from?”

“I didn’t say…” said Roroku, or, as I shall call her when she’s pretending to be a kysp, Ro-Ro-Ku.

“Well, of course you didn’t,” said Dze-Ts-Kwy, perhaps a bit irritated. ”Would you say, please?”

“I can’t remember ever being in a single town in all of Kyspert, nor any scoral but this one” said Ro-Ro-Ku. (This is a tricky point. No dragon likes to lie. Those who do lie, experience unpleasant vericeptive sensations which I transcribe as vile smells when writing in languages used by people without veriception. So we generally phrase things in truthful but misleading ways, like this.)

“Have you been taking mind-scrambling compounds?” asked Dze-Ts-Kwy. “Or suffered a sharp blow about the braincase?”

«What should I say?”»

«Play amnesiac! Get sympathy! Get charity! Look around from the convenient spying position of not having to explain anything and having the perfect excuse to ask every question about everything!» I advised.

“I don’t think so … I don’t remember anything on Kyspert from before an hour ago,” said Ro-Ro-Ku.

“Bother and botherly! I don’t know what to do here. Still, Fra-Dwa has delivered you to my tentatails… I’d best take you back to Nwa-Bher. What’s the last thing you do remember?”

“I … I thought I was in the shape of a sky-eel, swimming from another scoral to this one. Can that possibly be true?” asked Ro-Ro-Ku.

“Perhaps a hallucinogenic concoction? Or a bad fever? May I lay a tent-pad on your central body, again without the slightest erotic intent?” Ro-Ro-Ku agreed, and Dze-Ts-Kwy palpitated her upper body. “No fever or chill. Does this hurt? Does this? No? Well, I don’t think you’re diseased or brain-injured, and I don’t smell shpe-der on your breath or mpwa-ko smoke on your clothes. H’m. Did you abandon your clothes because they smelled too much of mpwa-ko?”

“I don’t remember any such thing. I’ve never taken mpwa-ko, or shpe-der either,” said Ro-Ro-Ku.

“I’m glad you remember your name,” said Dze-Ts-Kwy. “Assuming that is actually your name and not three random syllables strung together; it’s outlandish. I think you need to get to a physician.”

Ro-Ro-Ku on Kyspert

Ro-Ro-Ku and Dze-Ts-Kwy made their way through the cracks and spars of the Bher, the scoral island Roroku had picked. I got a running commentary, which I will summarize thus:

1. Travelling by foot is in no way preferable to travelling by wing. Having nine or eleven feet does not improve the situation over having four.
2. The vegetation on Kyspert is quite variable. One set of plants grows on the tops of scoral; a wholly different set grows on the sides; a third set grows underneath. (Later on she and Itharieth would figure out that the concept of ‘plant’ is not quite right for Kyspert: scorals have some characteristics of both the plants and animals of normal worlds, and the wild variety of non-scoral growing things all should be categorized in the usually-modest categories of epiphytes and parasites. I am not sure why anyone but biologists should find this exciting, but they do, so I will mention it this once in case you are one.)
3. It is inconvenient to travel along the spiky surface of a scoral. One must climb from here to there, taking care that at least two or three of your feet and tentatails are holding on at every instant. Once Ro-Ro-Ku and Dze-Ts-Kwy had to get from one point to another one five yards away, but they were five yards of air, and the actual path wandered some eighty or ninety yards along scoral surfaces.
4. As they got closer to Nwa-Bher, such gaps tended to be bridged. Kysps are very careful about making bridges, perhaps because they have to make so many of them out of such inferior materials. A typical bridge is made by fastening a preserved treetrunk to both sides of the bridge with preserved leather or bark bands. (“Preserved” by considerable shellac. Kyspert is a very wet world, and unprotected wood rots fast.) Then exactly nine ropes are strung parallel to the treetrunk, at a convenient reach from it. Not that any kysp uses one claw on each of the ropes; it is a tradition. But having many independent strands of bridge is important! Every kysp can expect to have one strand of bridge fail under them in their lifetime — it is so common as to be a dozen proverbs — so, as the first proverb goes, “nine talon-holds is life.”
5. Being a small mammal clambering through cascades of huge ferns, and seeing scoral islands twinkling in the distance though the endless void of Kyspert, is a rather glorious thing. [The void isn’t actually endless, as I’m sure I will explain sometime, but even a dragon’s eyes cannot see clearly for more than a mile or so through such humid air, so it looks endless.]
6. But climbing isn’t glorious. It’s awkward.

Eventually they stopped climbing, after an epic voyage that must have taken them at least a quarter of an hour. Scoral islands are not very big. Neither are kysps, and of course “the straightest path lacks sufficient claw-holds”, as Dze-Ts-Kwy proverbed at Ro-Ro-Ku more than once.

“Now we are here, in Nwa-Bher, in the center of Bher,” said Dze-Ts-Kwy. The city didn’t look all that big at first. It was a cluster of immense lacquered pods or gourds, leather tents, and peculiar wooden polyhedra, stretching between dozens of thinner spars and spikes of scoral. But it probably held about 20736 people.(⌘) A flat-world city would have needed land for 144 × 144 people, which is a lot of land. A three-dimensional city only requires space for 27 × 28 × 28 or so, which means it can be much more compact. (Actually many Hoven cities on the flattish world of Hove do this with very tall buildings where many hovens live packed tightly. They’re usually not very nice, and the hovens who live there hate it. (Also the landlords are generally dreadful people who make promises of good service that they never fulfil. I didn’t enjoy the week or two I spent in one of them.) But kysps naturally live in a three-dimensional state of mind, even if they have to cling to the sides of things rather than levitate.)

(⌘) That’s 12⁴; Jyothky insists on duodecimal in all things. 20,000 is just as good an estimate. The actual number might be anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000, and that only if you trust Roroku’s powers of estimation. A census taken by the kysps some years later, after several population-modifying events, came up with 47,228. —BB and Jʸ.

“Now, you should go to see Dr. Naw-Fan. She’ll cure your amnesia in a flash,” said Dze-Ts-Kwy.

[And now it is inevitably time for a note on kysp pronouns. Kysp genders are maddening to think about, so of course kysp languages don’t have gendered pronouns like ‘he’ or ‘she’. They have either one or two third-person singular pronouns, and when they have two they either refer to high- and low-status individuals, or members of the locally dominant religion and non-members. So I will use ‘he’ and ‘she’, because it sounds better that way. I will either use the individual’s sex at the time I first introduce them when I know it, or roll a die when I do not. I will arbitrarily count everyone who is not in male phase as being female, because it amuses me no end to have the females outnumber the males. Which is a silly conceit from a dragoness who has been outnumbered by drakes all her life! In any case, the pronouns I use for kysps have only a weak connection to their sex at the moment they are introduced, and far less to their sex later on, and these are details that matter not at all to the kysps. I have no idea what sex Dr. Naw-Fan was or is, but my dieroll came up 9, so she gets ‘she’. — Jʸ]

“Oh, dear,” said Dr. Naw-Fan, who was a chubby and dull-green kysp wearing a black bandarella and a white some-other-kind-of-garment, and who worked inside of a tremendous dry gourd hung about with platforms and crossbars and swinging bags of herbs and seeds, racks of probes and scalpels, and jugs and vases and jars. Ro-Ro-Ku submitted to a detailed examination. All that I heard of it was that, whenever the doctor inserted something into her, she took care to clean and sterilize it with vodka before and after.

“Well, physically, you are in the very center of health,” said Dr. Naw-Fan. “You are neither bruised nor contused, and there is not the slightest sign of any injury. Not to give you a headache, much less loss of memory. Next we consider drugs. There is no stink of alcohol or shpe-der on your breath, no cloudiness indicative of certain other drugs in your excreta, no signs of an incision which could introduce still others into your blood directly. The most plausible cause I can think of is that you might have been wrapped in leather and rendered unable to breathe for long enough to injure your brain, but not quite long enough to kill you. There is a case study or two of this happening, though usually the result is death. Of course you show no visible signs of struggle either. Did you do this thing voluntarily? Or were you assailed, but show no signs of a struggle? Your situation is utterly mystery.”

“I’m sorry,” said Ro-Ro-Ku. “I have no idea what to do about that. I’ve never been an utter mystery before.” She chuckled, which for kysps involves snuffling with both breathing-holes. “Or maybe I do it every day, for all I know!” As far as I know, that is the first joke Roroku has made in three duodecades.

“The question arises of what we shall do with you. You are clearly in no shape for us to set loose to go wandering about, to make your way in the world as best you can,” said the doctor. “I shall consult with Mayor Nao-Vim-We, and with Dze-Ts-Kwy who brought you in. Wait here for a moment. My assistant will bring you refreshments and damp cloths,” said the doctor.

“The damp cloths are for what purpose, doctor?”

“Comfort on this quite hot day,” said the doctor, and departed.

⁂

Roroku was not truly amnesiac, and, indeed, had not forgotten a bit of the information magic she had studied. Scrying on the doctor was a simple enough matter. And this is what she saw and heard.

“Mayor Nao-Vim-We, highest-caste kysp of Bher, I have examined the newcomer,” said the doctor. “May I report?”

“By all means it is fitting and proper that you report! I have been waiting for nothing else this past hour!” The mayor, by tradition, ought to have been a corpulent old kysp heavy with graft and wickedness. In fact he was a slender and quite nervous young [I roll a die here and get 25 — Jʸ] man. I don’t know about the graft and wickedness.

“You may have my report. You must wait for answers,” said the doctor, and told what she had learned.

“That’s not helpful,” said the mayor.

“I was under the misimpression you wished for truth rather than helpfulness,” said the doctor.

“Dr. Naw-Fan, please, I do wish for truth. I intend no displeasure for your part in this. Instead I express consternation.”

“Consternation with whose part in it?”

“I don’t know! Let us enumerate the possibilities,” said the mayor. “First, of course, is that this Ro-Ro-Ku is a kysp who lost her hold on some scoral above us, and fell to Bher. The experience was so traumatic and unpleasant that she has somehow lost all memory. Nonetheless it was not so physically bad as to injure her in the slightest.”

“I suppose that this could be the case,” said the doctor. “It would be unusual, from a medical clawhold.”

“Second, I suppose, is that she took some strange new drug that destroys the memory. I am not sure how she got to Bher in this case,” said the mayor.

Dze-Ts-Kwy arched up to speak. “One story could be that some wicked pharmacist is experimenting with new drugs. She gave Ro-Ro-Ku a dose, and found it destroyed her mind. He disposed of her on another scoral, not wishing to have her found, and not wishing to entirely kill her.”

“I suppose that could have occurred,” said the mayor. “An implausible story, to be sure, but the situation is entirely implausible. A more plausible story, which has the advantage of being physically possible and not require some mysterious new drug, is that Ro-Ro-Ku is a criminal or fugitive herself. She has some reason to flee whatever scoral she came from, and make a new life for herself in a place where she has no past.”

The doctor expressed polite disagreement, by means of a gesture of curled tentatails. “If this is the plot, it is very clumsily done. Coming to a new scoral naked and peniless, feigning amnesia and attracting all manner of curiosity, seems like a very bad way to manage it. She would have been better off with clothes and money, hiring herself as a servant or laborer or whatever. For that matter, why Nwa-Bher? Why not a much larger city, where there are so many kysps that a new one more or less is not notable?”

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