It was past noon by the time we got back on the road, but we did.

  I woke feeling more rested than I had since I’d gotten here, and found that Terenei had been busy. He’d checked on Nurea, whose attention was absorbed mostly by her new friends and new surroundings. He’d sent a message to his family that he was going to travel with Serru and her friends for a while and told the post office to hold his messages for him to pick up, so clearly he was determined.

  He’d done a quick shopping trip, too. I woke up with new clothes draped over a chair near the couch. Once dressed, I actually felt genuinely comfortable in my human form for the first time since I’d woken up here—other than being out for a while st night, in Terenei’s magical makeover. That might not have been just that I felt less like I stood out.

  Somewhere, he’d found bck leggings that stretched with no apparent limits, a white long-sleeved poet-style shirt that fell to my hips, a belt to secure it woven in a red-and-bck pattern, a bck-white-and-red fringed triangle scarf, and deep red boots that reached over my knees and had low chunky heels.

  Of course, I had to add jingly earrings that were silver and gold and copper, and my tiger’s-eye worry-stone neckce, and I swapped my things to my waist-bag and threaded it onto the belt; the pink-on-white actually sort of matched. I rather wished I could keep this combination to take home with me. I was pretty sure I’d never be able to find boots this comfortable that looked this good—and I’d been assured as well that they were waterproof and that I would want that.

  “Looks good,” Terenei said, and presented me with two bottles of squishy-looking dark purple blobs the size of a jelly bean. “They’re easy to swallow, or you can bite them, it doesn’t matter. One just before bed, and no nightmares. Each bottle has enough for a week. Don’t open the second one until you finish the first one, they break down much more slowly than potions but they will break down and become less effective. I hope we’ll have you home before those run out, but if we get deyed, let me know and I’ll make sure you get more.”

  “Awesome. Thank you.” Because I could, because he liked it, and because really, so did I, I gave him a hug.

  “You’re very welcome. You’re going through enough without having to be tired all the time as well.”

  We already had everything else, so once we’d eaten lunch in the inn’s restaurant, Terenei checked us out and made sure the bill was going to his grandmother as arranged, and we recimed the ornithians and left Ottermarsh.

  Despite the te start, we still made it a considerable distance, since I stayed in my human form and joined the others in the wagon.

  Without having to keep to a centaur’s pace, the ornithians could extend themselves once they’d walked a bit to warm up. I would not have believed how fast they could run, those feathery friendly dinosaur lookalikes, once they had accelerated enough to be on their hind legs only. Terenei didn’t have to push them to keep them going; if anything, they resisted when he slowed them to a more moderate pace near crossroads so Serru could choose our route. Even I could see that they were loving this.

  The fact that there was no wind battering those of us in the wagon, only a brisk breeze, just felt like the universe overlooking yet another little inconvenient detail of physics.

  Because there was nothing else to do, and because pying with my begleri toy kept only my hands busy, and because I didn’t feel like I could cope with absorbing more information about this world at the moment, I told them as much of the story of Alice in Wondernd and Through the Looking Gss as I could remember. Fiction was popur here, so there was no difficulty with the concept of it being a made-up dream-logic story meant to entertain children. It had been a while, re-reading stories my father had read to me at bedtime not being a high priority recently, so I definitely didn’t get it all right and it wasn’t the smoothest rendition, but they appeared to enjoy it anyway.

  “That’s a fun story,” Terenei ughed. “It does feel like a dream kind of reality, with things flowing into each other and making sense in the dream that would get a very different reaction if you were awake.”

  “And you said there are many stories about people going to different worlds where everything works differently?” Serru asked.

  Narnia, Oz, Nevernd, the worlds of the Phantom Tollbooth and the Neverending Story... and those were just the cssics I could think of from my own childhood. “I can think of at least five more. They’ve all been extremely popur for a long time. Although I’m not sure how often people read them anymore, it’s possible the books are mostly being forgotten and all people get is movies, sort of like theatre but you can watch it anytime on a gss screen, and usually the story gets changed. Sometimes a lot. Not always for the better.”

  “Recordings, you mean?” Aryennos said. “We have those.”

  “You do?”

  “Of theatre or other performance or for educational purposes,” Serru said, “or of sound only for music or readings of books or pys. I thought I had mentioned that, but there have been so many things we’ve talked about that it could easily and understandably have been lost on either side. When I’m alone between settlements, sometimes I enjoy the birds and my surroundings as they are, and sometimes I listen to something else.” She reached down between her feet to search in her bag, and produced the yellow metal box and choker I’d seen her leave with Terenei. “The sound is audible through the headphones, as with the communicators, although they won’t work interchangeably.”

  Headphones? Did I really just hear that word as headphones? When I pyed it back mentally, I was sure the sounds didn’t match up, but my brain gave me images of all the variations I was familiar with. None of which worked the same way, but they filled the same functional niche, so I guess I should just accept it as one more unexpected quirk of transtion.

  “Recordings are stored inside the box. It’s up to the artists involved, of course, but typically the prices aren’t high, and they’re easily purchased at shops that specialize in entertainment, or from some travelling merchants who choose to carry the necessary equipment, or directly from those who created them. With every such purchase, the appropriate amount will transfer to the account of the registered creator.”

  “Or will be split between multiple creators,” Aryennos amended. “The members of a band, or the author and anyone they asked to do the reading, or the pywright and sound effects artist and actors doing a reading of a py. Normally the person with the skills and equipment to record it is also included, because that’s a specialty of its own. Once it’s recorded, you just take it to one of those entertainment shops and they’ll add it to the system for everyone to access. Technically, you could remove it the same way, but people don’t do that often. They won’t make you pay for either of those.”

  Serru nodded acknowledgement. “Most people own a sound-pyer. You can link your purchases of recordings to your bank account and then if something happens to the pyer itself, or you run out of room and need to remove some, you still have access to them through the bank. The designer of this style meant it to be extremely durable and not need to be recharged often, and I’m comfortable with it.”

  “Is that a Vylieth?” Aryennos said, turning halfway in his seat beside Terenei so he could see. “I’ve heard of them. I’m going to have to repce mine eventually, it went to the bottom of a river.”

  “It is. And I would be lost without it. In fact, I was, for almost a month. I’ve been more interested in talking to Nathan and to you more recently, but it’s a relief to have it back since Coppersands. There’s a specialist there who sells and repairs them.”

  “She loves it so much I got one too,” Terenei ughed. “Although I don’t really need the same features in my very urban life. Which isn’t to say they’re the only good ones. I know someone else, a musician, who considers his Nessorit to have the best sound quality, although it needs to be charged more often. There are several options that suit different needs.”

  Serru leaned forward and handed Aryennos the choker and box to inspect. “Possibly a highly durable device would be the best idea for you.”

  “It probably would,” Aryennos said sheepishly, accepting them. “The one I just lost was my third, a really nice Shirivyn with a huge storage capacity and it’s meant to be best for pys and audiobooks and recorded storytelling sessions. I’ll have to see if I can track down a Vylieth. Although being durable wouldn’t have saved the st one.”

  “Okay, multiple brands, I get,” I said, finally finding my voice. They had bloody digital mp3 pyers? I mean, given how much they loved and valued creativity, it fit with their priorities, but someone or a team or series of someones had invented the method for recording and copying and selling and pying music and audiobooks and radio pys? Bank accounts could also act as cloud storage for media? “What about watching visual stuff like a py?”

  “Those are less portable,” Terenei said. “A box of, hm, perhaps the size of your house. It casts an animated image on a ft light-coloured surface. The sort that some households own have a limited range and cast a smaller image. Some businesses have a rger and more powerful version that needs to be pced back farther from the surface and casts a rger image. The projector itself does py the sound as well, but the quality is indifferent. It’s better to tell it to link to your own headphones, or key it instead to secondary speakers for that purpose that they pce around the space where they’re showing the performance.”

  “Any location with a stage,” Aryennos said, “is likely to have those in pce already. The stage picks up sound and reys it so everyone can hear properly. Not every performer can amplify their own show.”

  So many transted words that were giving me associations that couldn’t possibly be quite right, but must be equivalent...

  “Yes,” Terenei said. “Recordings can be of performances of any kind. Dance or theatre or music or storytelling or tours of exotic locations or whatever you prefer. The possibilities are virtually endless, and someone is always coming up with something new. They’re usually avaible the same way as audio recordings. A part of the box, the part that stores the recordings, is removable and you take it to the shop to have them added. If you take it with you to a performance, they may well have a recording avaible of an earlier instance that you can buy at the time. A good recording artist will help the creator produce something that will feel very much like you are there in person.”

  “One of my father’s band’s full recordings of a performance,” Aryennos said, “was done outside, and all was going well, but towards the end of a song, a dog started howling nearby. They didn’t miss a beat, just switched the next song to one that the howling sounded appropriate with, and when the dog actually ran onto the stage, Dad just dropped to one knee and sang the st verse and chorus to the dog. They talked afterwards about whether it would be better to just try again on the next show, but it’s very memorable and didn’t really disrupt anything, and the audience who were there loved it, so they just released that one.”

  “That sounds adorable,” Terenei said. “I need information so I can get a copy of that.”

  “It’s not possible to just edit that bit out of the middle, or something?” I asked.

  “Edit?” Aryennos said bnkly. “For a recording? It just saves what is. You can stop it and continue ter, or put separate recordings together in a sequence and link them to make a longer one, but you can’t change one without destroying that whole recording. It saves all as one piece. For my favourite version of one of my favourite pys, the troupe performing it recorded each scene in an appropriate real setting, a forest and a seashore and a tavern, that kind of thing, and someone clever assembled the scenes in the right order. But taking a section out of a scene... I’m pretty sure there’s no way to do that. I know you can’t with music so I think it would be harder with a visual aspect.” He turned to pass Serru back the box and choker; she tucked them away in her bag.

  “That seems like an odd idea,” Terenei said. “I suppose mistakes can happen but those are just part of the experience and sometimes the results are wonderful. I think I’d prefer recordings that are what was actually presented. Then I can pretend to be there.”

  So there was probably no TV to go mindless over, and no way to edit the hell out of scenes. That probably limited visual effects to what you could do live, although I was pretty sure that was a lot—people had been doing amazing effects live on stage for a long time.

  However, there were ways to experience the performances of artists even if you never got anywhere near them, and re-experience a version of something you’d been to as often as you wanted, and do it in the company of friends or in a public setting or alone.

  And the whole industry cked any gatekeepers or hype, just an endless range of actors, dancers, musicians, pywrights, authors, and god only knew what others sharing whatever they’d put their passion into.

  Wow.

  Which suggested, since fiction and research were both respected, that however the publishing industry worked, it probably looked simir. No gatekeepers. Consume what you chose. Maybe schools, or public libraries like the one Aryennos worked at, or bookshops, curated research to some degree, or commented on reliability if asked—there was probably some system to help you determine whether to trust something. But it was up to you.

  “Nathan?” Serru said. “You’ve gone quiet.”

  “Sorry. Entertainment is a massive industry in my world and it’s competitive and there are a few people who get to decide what music or books or whatever get distributed to everyone. They make all the rules for their benefit and they’re not actually creators themselves. It’s... I’m not even going to get into how many ways the whole thing is just bad for creators and their audiences and just... everyone. There are people now trying to reach an audience directly but they still have to have the resources to do it and not everyone does, so... it’s a mess. I really like your system. But then, that’s not new. I like your system better for just about everything. If it weren’t for my family...”

  “I know,” Serru said gently. “Maybe you’ll be born in our world next time and start a proper life here without that conflict.”

  “I would really like that. I hope that happens.” Even if it would be without my current friends.

  “For the moment... there’s accessible water near the next crossroads and ft ground where we can camp. It might be a little windy with the ocean breeze, but there are still a few trees to help break it. We’ve come farther this afternoon than we could have on foot even had we left early this morning.”

  Terenei ughed. “I told you they’re fast. We’ll have to go more slowly in the Gss Shallows, we shouldn’t risk an accident on the causeways and bridges—although the wagon will float like a raft in fairly still water, and they can trot along quite happily as long as it’s below about tail level with a reasonable surface at the bottom, just not at anything like full speed. Those feet of theirs work great on most kinds of ground, they spread so wide with a kind of tough spongy pad on the bottom and those big blunt cws.”

  “They’re wonderful,” Aryennos said. “I never got the chance to actually interact with them before. They’re so sweet and friendly.”

  “That’s why I started helping my aunt out with them. I already have enough to keep me busy, between art and the shop and how many great performers come through Coppersands, but they’re irresistible. I started out just wanting something new to draw. Ah, and there’s our crossroad, I think. I know you’re enjoying running, boys, but time to take a break.”

  They grunted in annoyance, but they obeyed the pressure on the reins and gradually slowed their pace down to a steady lope, then their front feet dropped back to the ground and they resumed walking.