Or in other words stuff it all up your dirty animal arses, all your mediaeval ape-shit about revelation and the sanctity of God's Holy Word, your dangerous psychoses.  Have you ever thought of seeking treatment?  You haven't got a clue if there is a god, let alone what he, she or it thinks about anything.  Maybe there's something, maybe not but you are just a joke.  
PANTHER -> Site news -> Check-list: Multiverse defined by sexual equipment of human male
by Ysabel Howard - Sunday, 13 November 2011, 09:14 PM
That is what it boiled and boils down to. Form not essence. The defining feature of the universe is not Love, Fear, Chaos, Order, Infinity, God or Nothingness but maleness. Does it not occur to them the multiverse is a little bigger, even a little more complicated, than their pricks? Among a great many other things, it is of course a profoundly geocentric notion, the view that anything in the multiverse is defined by ape-descendants on the third rock from the sun. I imagine primitive man was fantastically impressed with himself and could not conceive of power, The Good and finally the cosmos itself as other than male, to which Whole women, since we irritatingly enough existed at all, were either subsidiary, the servants of men, or opposed, as the embodiment of evil. Some of us have moved on. The 'evils' of feminism and gay rights in fact represent a move to wholeness, a healing of the wound.

On a different note, on account of something generally known as The Troubles, I refuse to believe there is a single citizen of the Republic of Ireland, even one as stupid as Siobhan McGuckin, who does not know that England is Protestant.
​Extract from The Anile Heir © 2006.I, Ysabel Jehan Howard, hereby assert and give notice of my right under s.77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act1988 to be identified as the author of this book.
FIREWORK DISPLAY!  BLINDING LIGHTS!  FAL,YOU ARE A MORON!  Explosion in my whirring little brain, even.  UNDER, you imbecile, not over!  Because if the eso is the core, the block can’t get down to it, can it, so what I have to do is dig and go UNDER the block.  Never quite seen myself as a terrier, but ludicrous mental image of little terrier paws frantically scrabbling.  I suppose.   My self-confidence, let it be said, is not what it was.  Senta!  I dawdled off to find her.
I suspected I’d earned a gold star, but all she said was, “You will find it well-defended.”
“Ramparts?”
“Cannon,” she suggested.
My scowl must have been nearly as good as my eight-year-old one.
“This is going to hurt…”  I tried to put pieces together.  “Lounging around in the shrine didn’t hurt because there was no threat….” I giggled suddenly.  “The thing is, who is firing the cannon.”
“Yes,” said Senta.
“I – am attacking me.  Or defending.”
“Continue.”
Thanks.
“Does the eso join in!” Thinks: there are three of us here?  Me?  Senta waited.  “I – this hurts my head already.  I mean if I say – I have said – it bursts out in – time-slips.  It’s not passive.”
“Whom d’you think is firing the cannon?”
“Oh no,” I said.  “That’s – cheating.  The cannon was defending the block.”
“You are threatening the block.  You are bombarding yourself?”
I managed a grin.
“Why not, I am divided.  These are – metaphors.  This is not going to be fun.”  Mental image of me in a hard hat with a light on it in a dark cave, clad in what seemed to be padding and armed with a pick.  I burst out laughing.  Then jumped and rolled out of the way of rock fall.
“Hmm.  What happens to it?  More a rabbit.  Burrowing, I mean.  If I dig my way under – oh.  I don’t like that one.  Wouldn’t the simplest thing to do to me to be to collapse onto me and crush me.  In my mind, in my mind, in my mind, if I don’t want to be crushed.  But really if I emerge triumphant does the block vanish, like in a fairy-tale?”
“That may depend.”
“On what?”
“What it is.”
“Integrate it?”
“Or you become integrated.”
I stared.
“That would seem to suggest – the block is the eso.  Hang on – I – whoever that is - made the block from my eso?”
She smiled.  Infuriatingly.  Somewhere I am screaming at Hass: You knew!
“Guess it’s time I started digging.” I got up but she raised her hand to stay me.  Oh.  That bad?  “That bad?”
“Interesting,” said Senta.
That really annoyed me.  I realized it was meant to but not why – laters.
“I am not a spectator sport!”  Trouble is, when things are on about 15 levels at once, “Serious?  I’ve gathered up the pieces of me once.”  The response to that one hung in my mind.  “I didn’t put them together right?”
She smiled rather gently for Senta.
“I’m around.”
“Thank you,” I said, meaning not just the obvious: thank you for knowing I have to do this on my own.
 
I retreated to my room and flopped in the chair, then got up again and gathered paper and pens.  This I was definitely going to have to draw.  A mountain-range came immediately to mind.  I can do that.  Shaded triangles.  I laughed suddenly and added a little mountain-goat, but leaping from peak to peak was not the point here.  Female person in hard hat. Did I label any of this?  That, I thought, was (probably) the crucial question.  I knew I very much wanted to, label it, reason it, order it.  Only I don’t know what any of it is.  Or do I.  Either it’s all the same stuff or some of it is illusory, and pffft, vanishes like the bad-fairy in a children’s story.  Then I realized I was as usual (why?) totally missing the point and my shaded triangles became diamonds descending to the centre of the earth or me, as you prefer.  Heavily overlapping, of course, no easy gaps.  I sat back and gazed glumly at my work.  OK, Fal, one thing you have achieved here is make a small black block into an impassable range. How interesting.  Try again.
Simple rectangular block with a line through the middle.  On which is small female person in hard hat.  Under or over?  Want 3D!  Want software!  Want female person walking round block inspecting it, which was of course ludicrous because if I could walk round it.  Can’t be infinite in length, can it.  Why can’t I walk round it?  Why have I never thought I can walk round it?  S-s-s-enta (it did come out rather a hiss) you haven’t been having me on, have you. Back to the maze.  The block blocks the path to the centre, but only because it is a maze, only because it has walls, if it was plain flat ground.  Only if the block has – sentience, it’ll stop being a block and form itself into a wall around the centre.  Giggle-time: fine, all I have to do is burn down the maze.  Maybe. 
Or have I totally distracted myself from the task at hand?
Because right now I’ll do anything but this.  I took another piece of paper.  Big black box labelled ‘Job to be done’.  I’m actually not that hot on drawing a female figure turning her back on something but I had the general idea full on.  OhIsee.  Your presence would force me to do something, would it, Senta.  I so wish I could get outside all of it and see what I’m supposed to do. 
 
Suck it and see.  So I had my lightbulb moment, did I.  The way I’m going on, you’d think I only had one chance and had to make the right choice.  No, it is not an impassable mountain-range, it’s – I spluttered into giggles.  It’s a – sandcastle.  Damn you, block, whatever you are, I made you and you can be whatever I want you to be.
 
Pause for sarcastic laughter.
 
I knelt on the beach in Zur with my trusty bucket and spade and began to dig. 
Yes, you’ve guessed. My spade snapped on solid rock.  Oh no, I said, this is an imaginary unbreakable spade and anyway there is no solid rock immediately below the surface of the sand. My next spade just might have looked less like a kid’s toy and more like something someone twice my size would use for shovelling cement.  It didn’t break.  That I suppose was progress.  It didn’t however, continue smooth descent to the depths, just stopped.  Common-sense Fal kicked in.  If I were digging in the garden and that happened, I’d take a trowel and scrape away the top-soil to see what the impediment was.  So I did, just slightly cautiously, as though it might be a nest of scorpions or something. Underneath the spade was – apparently – more top-soil.  To my surprise when I scrabbled at it with my trowel it shifted. Reassured this was moving a mountain of soil with tweezers, no threat?  I gave a particularly violent thrust with the spade.  It didn’t actually go very far but I had the distinct sensation of toppling into a hole after it.  Unnerved? Me? Fearless Fal?  Falling, falling, falling into Maya’s grave.  Nothing grotesquely obscenely screamingly awful happened like confronting her rotting corpse  I thought that was maybe because my self-preservation instinct kicked in but I forced myself to look around.  All on my own.  Whose grave?  Oh for - ! I’ve done the death of the self equals suicide bit!  Or was this the risk death bit. All the same I knew what I had to do next: dig down beneath my grave.  Senta is around.  Good!  I dug.  Bloody rabbit.  Do I bloody well go down the rabbit-hole?  I realized there was something a bit hysterical (does this surprise?) about my digging and paused.  I ought to – what ought I to do?  I couldn’t think of the word.  Shore it up, give it supports.  Think.  (I internalized it that) part of me died when Maya died.  I have to get beyond Maya’s death.  Which just might win the tritest remark of the year award.  Century?  Epoch?  My mind somewhat elsewhere as it often is when one is doing purely physical tasks (!) I imagined a few bits of broken stone and in a desultory and incompetent fashion shored up my tunnel.  I really think – OK, I’ve got this far.  It doesn’t have to be a bloody rabbit-hole, does it, it can be more human-sized, like an – entrance.  I am looking into a dark cave.  I giggled, remembering the Falsit.  I need a torch.  The cave was resistant to my attempts to illuminate it.  At the moment I so to speak crossed the threshold the word ‘pot-hole’ came to me and once more I was falling, falling, falling through free space, more floating, really, but I knew there was only one direction: down. As though I had a ‘chute. I am just – falling, endlessly falling.  Then – it wasn’t like ghosts or physical forms but – it was like Maya and Sorg were both there, smiling, and they both said, “You always loved Tet.” Which was all nicely calm and surreal except that I was choking and sobbing, tears pouring down my face and as far as I was concerned I might as well have been in a void for all sitting on the nice white carpet meant anything.
Except I landed.  In Tet’s arms with a white stallion he’d borrowed from Sarat not.  Back in normality not.  I don’t know where I landed.  I can’t explain where I landed.  Somewhere, nowhere, everywhere.  It had no identifying features.  That sounds good, doesn’t it.  Unless you’re there.  Maybe landed is the wrong word.  I didn’t fall further.  I was stationary.  It wasn’t frightening.  It wasn’t ethereal.  It wasn’t anything.  Chance to catch my breath?  Recall I am bloody well doing this to me.  What does this mean?  What am I telling myself?  Who is me? I ought to be floating if I’m nowhere!  I was actually then much nearer than I had been when sobbing to 1,2,3, end the trip, but well kind of I’d clearly been on one, arrived somewhere, even if it was meaningless. Even if it was meaningless, it meant something to me.  Open, open, what does open mean, no closed doors, no open doors, no doors, no divisions, whole.  If this is oo I have arrived where everything is whole, it seemed to me frankly – anti-climactic.  Wasn’t it more like – no possibilities.  What on earth have I done to myself now? Oh wait a minute.  I – make.  I focused on a bit of non-frightening non-ethereal nothing and demanded it be something, didn’t tell it what.   Whatever it was it needed to be it.  No, that was just being antsy!  If I just looked at it, I’d see what it was, if it was anything. I suddenly realized – maybe!  If I just totally let go.  I was refusing to see. 
The next bit was just a little hairy even by my high standards.  I was too dumbstruck to other than surrender to it.  Hmm, there may be something in that.  Think the best way of putting it is all my alternative futures.  One of the best ones was when I shot Sar-fenan but it also had me paired with Reakoed (Reakoed?), had me as some kind of ranger, had me crowned Queen of Dabida.  And had me dead, having thrust Maya out of the way and died in her place.  I died in Sorg’s place as well. 
And then it all faded and I was, I had put myself, back in my nice room.  I stretched out on the floor and went limp.  That was no effort at all. What the fuck did I just tell myself?  My eyes closed.
When I woke up it was dark.  I staggered to my feet and groped for the light, then sat blinking.
Who, me, dependent?  I have never in my life more wanted a cup of strong coffee.  I looked at the time.  I guessed it was possible to plead medicinal use but maybe not at 2 in the morning.  I found I badly wanted to talk to Sarat about the consequences of our choices.  I tried to see.  As if what actually happens isn’t complicated enough, in the background, if you don’t switch the bloody thing off, the busy little brain is also computing the might have beens and goo-ing you up with them too.  Hass said: it happened.  Only one thing happened at any given point, you stood here not there, you said this not that.  
That’s not quite the core of it, though, is it, Fal-girl.  The core is something less comforting: what is/was splitting me is in some way preferring one of those futures over what happened.  Lot of choice over being dead; Sar-fenan shot me in one of them.  Ohhh: is the death of the self suicide kick by any chance something to do with wanting a future in which I’m dead and at the same time of course deeply sincerely not wanting.  I dozed off again.
In the morning I popped in to see Senta
“Bit hairy.  Don’t think I’ve finished.  Just wanted to let you know I’m still alive.”
I decided I needed to connect with normality before playing any more games.   I went swimming, after which I ran round the grounds of the retreat, after which I stuffed myself at our renowned buffet .  After that I sat on a bench in the gardens and cursed no phone on which to play some stupid mindless game.  There are moments in life when what you really need is to play Right Angles.  I thought about Benji instead and wondered how Lattic and Narak were doing.  Then I got irritable because I couldn’t see where to start.  Having an immovable block is such a good concrete project.  Actually I had a horrible feeling I knew where to start and I wasn’t going to enjoy it.  Just replay the movie. A moment of excruciating pain.  I crumple to the ground.  I am dead.  Not much to say there really.  Try harder.  Is that what I want? Extinction.  Never mind what it might be, take it as is.  Would my world be a better place without me in it.  Sorg would be alive.  Would his world be a better place without me in it?  Would I rather be dead than sitting in a retreat on the Leolisle.  Yes, I did recognize these were increasingly absurd questions.  I was in fact near giggling at my enthusiasm for pursuing the subject of my previous demise.  It had to be done…What – no, what did I get out of the idea that I should have died in Sorg’s place.  Sacrificed myself.  My self, to which I otherwise cling.  Like grim death.  Hmm.
Proved I could sacrifice my self.  I did giggle then.  The only person who demanded that proved being me.  Proved I could tell my self to take a running-jump – just not off the high board.  OK, Hass, this time I’m going to dive.  No pool ever had that many steps to the top.  Varied though my life had been, I had had few encounters with heights.  I had dived real-time but not I now realized from very far up.  Why am I making myself climb into the stratosphere?  Why don’t I simply jump in?  That seemed to me a much more sensible idea and I (equally cautiously) descended and stood at the side of the pool glaring at it.  Then I remembered I had a perfectly good real pool to jump into.
I sat pool-side real time and – noted I was trembling.  Oh FFS!  Me, water, frightened?  I think I need to report the swimming-pool is full of sharks.  So the outside meets the inside, does it.  I stood brave and resolute, courageously facing death by firing-squad or something.  I took a running jump, surfaced, swam to the side of the pool, swam a couple of lengths as though I was competing for gold because I was suddenly seethingly furious.  Climbed out.  What was all that about?
Felt no different other than that I was visibly shaking.  Oh right, Fal came to the retreat to overcome her terror of water.  This did not seem a constructive path to pursue. I knew I had to have done it.  WTF. I felt a definite preference for the apparently formless nothing. Follow another alternative future.  Reakoed.  I wracked my little brain.  Had he ever given the slightest indication – bearing in mind my defo hopelessness at people.  Work avoidance: OK, Fal, why the fear, why the fury? I had actualized – now that’s a good word – something that metaphorically petrified me, but that wasn’t actually the point.  The point was my little mind had refused to differentiate between my exciting inner life and reality. Ah, yes, it would seem a block has been removed.  It’s the wrong bloody way round!  What (I thought) was supposed to happen was that I jumped metaphorically with the total lack of concern with which I jumped literally.  Hmm.  Why the fury?  Hence the fury!  I think I need advice on this one.
“Am I going in the right direction?” I finished.  “Feels as if I’m disappearing up my own.”
Senta finished laughing.  I suppose that was a sort of answer.
Then she teased me.
“You are sure no subconscious fear of water, pushed under by one of the boys, perhaps?”
“Quite sure.  All of us.  Fins.”
“Continue,” she said.
“Thanks,” I growled.
“You might revisit the cave.”
“Might I.”
Lovely day.  One of those days when you feel everything is perfect unless you’re obsessed with how it isn’t.  Don’t wanna revisit a cave, real or imaginary.  I lay on the grass and after a while recreated my cave.  What Senta had not said is I went in the wrong direction.  It’s my cave; this time I was sure to give it a floor, though I wasn’t sure I trusted the floor.  Damn it, the least I can manage is a trustworthy floor.  I concentrated hard on the floor being granite reaching down to the core of the earth.  I crawled in cautiously and made myself comfortable with a couple of cushions.  I seemed to have forgotten it was a road to somewhere.  Inwardly and outwardly I began to doze.  A path opened, like a cliff-path, cut in the rock.  I viewed it with high suspicion, surmising it was going to take me somewhere from which I was expected to jump, but I climbed, quite fun, lots of handholds.  It seemed to be getting lighter.  I came to a step so broad it was like a platform or a seat.  I sat.  I decided it had grass or at least hardy weeds in the cracks.  By the way, you need to understand – as if I did – this was kind of a joint effort.  I didn’t consciously create the ledge, for instance, but I did consciously decorate it.  yesiknow: that means two of me present!  Or did it?  Anyway, I felt vaguely positive.  I continued my ascent.  I was still suspicious of this climb but there was plenty to hang on to.  Except it was all in mind and my mind over which my control is still imperfect could make it vanish.  I came out into a field.  Not, I was relieved to see, a field of flowers, but maybe it was the wrong time of year.  It was of course the field by the stream and I felt tense and tearful before there was anything to be tense and tearful about.  The stream came to meet me, I can’t put it any better than that.  Actually I can.  It was coming in my direction and flowed past me.  I need to follow the stream.  I walked along beside it.
               When I surfaced the sun was beginning to set.  Refrain: and what was that about?
I went to find something to eat then headed for the Art Room.  If there was one thing I was clear on, it was the layout of that particular stretch of land.  X marks the spot I started.  Therefore the stream was headed for Zur.  Been there done that.  Apart from minor details like the stream representing Sorg.  “You always loved Tet.”  I shouted out loud: No!  No, it wasn’t all fake, no, I loved you, no!
Die in people’s (plural) places to prove I loved them.  To them?  To me?
Why did you come back? I asked Sorg.  Shakily.  If you came back.  If I imagined you came back. 
I had to believe I loved you. More than life.  Beyond death.
As you loved me. 
Sorg will always be looking after me.  Thus the time-slip in the garden.  Metaphor? Reality?
Because Sorg loved me like that. 
The only person I love like that – oh shit, I can’t die for Tet.  Safe, safe, dear boring old Tet is safe.
I think pale and drawn summed me up at that point.  Oh and shaking like a leaf in a hurricane.
Chasing risk, Fal? Chasing death?
Chasing love.
The relationship I wanted with Hass didn’t actually have any sex in it.
Did it have any love?
Hass, I was suddenly completely sure, would risk his life for me.
Some people avoid talking about others to avoid blaming them or appearing to blame them.
Or merely just designating them too as not totally perfect.
Because if there’s one thing that stands out about this four-sided triangle of mine it’s that I’m the only one who ever had a problem with anything.  True-untrue?
Sarat let go of his boundaries.  Hass didn’t.  Wouldn’t.  Couldn’t.  But then Sarat loves Hass like that and Hass didn’t love me like that.  Except I’ve just said he did. Does.  If it had been up there on the pink cloud Hass wouldn’t have refrained because of Mel any more than Sarat refrained because of Maya.
Maybe.  The parallel is not the same. 
I’m the only one who hasn’t resolved his or her problem with anything.
What my problem is would er – seem central to that.
We were six-freaking-teen.  Why do I give everyone a break except me?
I don’t love with my eso.  When I do I don’t recognize it.  So – so somewhere I ‘need’ the risk of external death to make up for not loving with my eso.  That is painful.  It is also very particular to the bMbK.  Whatever people’s questions and difficulties in normal life, the option of getting killed is not usually present.  I have to see something there.  Just not quite sure what it is.
More real.
Of course I embraced the bMbK – lit and fig.  It solved my problem.
It created my problem?
I thought my face was screwed up very tightly.  Bunny is desperate to get back to the centre of the warren.  I paused to relax myself.
In peacetime Dabida, peacetime anywhere, people don’t on the whole die suddenly and unexpectedly.  They have heart-attacks.  Tragic death of bather off Zalintan Head.  They don’t risk dying suddenly and unexpectedly unless they’re nuts.  Unicycling down the middle of the highway without lights while drunk?
The Matter of Kadun brought death into all their lives.  Sounds like something from the gutter-press.  Which doesn’t stop it being true. Before when it was given we’d all live out our lives and die naturally.  And after. 
Maya was ready to risk death.
But that must have clicked with something that was already going the wrong way in me.
Must it?
Fal, you screaming nitwit. Tet had been shot.  That is going to somewhere like I can only love people who’ll risk their lives.  Until in the end the life that has to be risked is mine.  What that is not is, you always loved Tet.  Bunny’s face was once more practically as if a spiralizer filter had been at it. Tet was defo – is – live till ripe old age until we perish of natural causes surrounded by doting grand-children.  Normality.  I sat back.  I sat forward.  I stood up.  I sat down.  None of it helped.  Of course I love(d) Tet but it couldn’t have been enough because I’d internalized – because Maya was my first love. Is that right? 
I was the only one anything was right with because I wasn’t hitched onto risking death for the bMbK.
That is another way of putting it.  Me and the rest of Dabida.  And Fidub.
So my problem with going back to Tet is what, emphasis, my problem, leave his problem out of this.  Forget betray Maya Sorg, betray the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun, Sorg bloody died for the bloody Matter of Kadun, Maya bloody died for the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun.  I am not Sorg.  I am not Maya.  Do Pietri and Caluna think they have to die for the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun because Maya did?  Vij, Sarsh? When I’ve quite finished getting furious with myself, I’d already come back to Zur.  Are you thinking I’m averse to helping Sarat?  Sponge.  I am very close to the B-word: balance.
Distinct, as in separate, as in running on a different track.  Vij must have been – but that doesn’t mean he got out the cammo and went off to – no, that’s – they’re all fighting this bloody war.
I don’t know how Fal fights this bloody war.  Without being consumed by it, literally, devoured. 
Crash-landing in Carlin.  Was that not now how I thought I had to fight this bloody war.  And all I can do is run it down, dropped out, broken down.  Pretending to have a breakdown.  Yes and no.  All I knew with total certainty is that my life was in shreds.  Sure, the car started.  That doesn’t mean I hadn’t reached rock bottom.  Or ground zero, as you prefer, being faced with myself.  I gambled with the bMbK being real and real it was,  kind of – kids have a plastic snake and put it in mum’s bed, only it’s real and its bite kills her.  That, I object to myself, is gambling with it not being real. My delusional trip.  What did they all think?  Does it matter?  I think most people have a sense – a funeral is some kind of closure, however inadequate.  It is to be completed.  Couple of stiff drinks, quick shot of sedative from the doc, whatever it takes not to throw yourself into the grave on top of the coffin, stand there screaming.  Maya and Jaizi held me up, literally.  Sarat wanted to be one of the coffin-bearers.  I think that was probably the only case ever when ‘not appropriate’ prevailed.  Only because he decided on something better.  Karci, Vrin, As, Mardis, Vishtu, Barfanu.  Then Sarat finished speaking and he walked over to me, and said possibly the only words that could keep me on my feet: “For Carlin.”  And so I spoke, but how much those two words went into me and through me and branded themselves on my soul and contributed to my current condition – we all went back to the House and I knew it was impossible for me to leave Carlin, impossible, rooted, not conceivable to so much as go back to Azt and collect my undies.  Then I saw the cottage.  I knew Saryulin understood, understood something basic.  He offered to do all the dealing with solicitors in Azt for me.  I said: I have to.  He nodded.
But my duty to Sorg is something I made up on the spur of the moment.  Doesn’t that sound wonderfully awful?  If it wasn’t quite that, what was it.  Something that came out of me, if a tree had grown out of me it wouldn’t have been any more shiftable.  At that on-going moment in time.  So what was it?  The perfect charade.  How the dashing young widow of the dashing young officer continues to fight the war.  Just exactly right, if I had neither past nor future.   If I weren’t me, more than, apart from.  Oh how desperately I tried to be only Falita san-yaega-baht.  It all made sense then.  But the roots I put down were real.  I wasn’t just there because of Sorg.  Real connections with real people.  What do they think of me in the Rabbiters’?  I need to talk to Vishtu.  Then Maya’s death broke it all open.
B is for Balance.  Nonetheless and heretofore it is the case that I am bound to Carlin.  If not by Sorg’s ghost.  If I want to be really vicious about myself and I want to be really vicious about myself, nothing like imagining I was communing with Sorg to keep me hog-tied.  Doesn’t any man break the rope?  I knew I was welcome at the House at any hour of the day or night with anyone whom I cared to bring with me.  Anyones: Tet and I and our kids.  Scream of brakes.  On the cusp of maybe Tet and I should live in Carlin.  After all, hasn’t he painted all the best bits of Zur by now. Just scream: have I achieved nothing but a huge circle?  I can live anywhere.  Got that bit.  Tet and I can live anywhere.  Got that bit.  How about Vaconik?  Don’t think we’d like the weather.  I knew there was something in Tet being before as well as after, but I wasn’t sure what.  Only natural, life goes on, of course Fal finds someone else.  Sorg was just a thin scraping of jam in between two thick slices of Tet? 
I dug out Senta and explained as briefly as possible that I needed to talk not to her, not to me, but to the Rabbiters.
 
Strange to be back in the real world.  I had a latte and suspected it made me high as a kite, but I wasn’t driving anywhere just yet.  Lattic saw me getting out of the cab and rushed to greet me. 
“Passing through,” I said. 
“It’s so lovely here, we’ll miss it!  But how are you!”
“I really don’t know,” I said. 
Narak came running over.  I owed them some kind of explanation at least.
Later I stumbled and tried to cover it with a light laugh.
Narak cocked his head.  Has the patient been wise to discharge herself?  Might she not be in danger of collapse?  The bloody car always starts. 
I muttered about not having eaten a lot and Narak frowned.  Senta, I observed to myself, thinks I’m a big grown-up girl capable of looking after herself.  I wonder if that’s true.
Tea and mounds of toast, which I wolfed.  Narak frowned more.
“Been fasting?”
“Not consciously.  I guess…”  What did I guess? “Guess I don’t think mental journeys need as much nutrition as physical ones.”
They listened.
Narak said, “You have to talk to Tet.”
That had occurred to me on the ferry.  It was an agreement I’d made with myself that I shouldn’t talk to anyone directly involved until I was right side up.  You can break agreements you make with yourself.  It’s really easy.
In this case I thought not.  Carlin would be bad enough.  How should I start?  It’s about my future relationship with Carlin.  Sounds like a bloody envoy negotiating a trade-deal.  That was the conversation I was resolved to have and I was going to have it.
I slept deeply, woke up dopey, devoured croissants and jam, picked up essential kit and got into the car before I changed my mind.
I stopped for some good cries and eventually turned up at the Rabbiters’.
Faces wreathed in smiles.  I wondered if they’d be so happy after I’d babbled for twenty minutes.
After a few minutes I said, “I need to talk to you guys about something.  Can we go in the back room?”
This is awful, I thought.
We settled in the back room.
“It’s,” I said.  I did actually wonder if I was going to get any further.  “As you know.”
“Personal?” asked Vishtu.
“Yes,” I said.
“Known each other long time.  Terrible times too.”
These guys have seen me a hysterical demented wreck.  They also know about Sorg’s maybe-ghost.  Just maybe they know everything that matters.
“Sorg,” I said.
“Life goes on,” said Barfanu.
“Can’t stay living in the past,” said Vishtu.
“There’s someone else,” I said.
“Natural,” said Barfanu.  “Lovely lady like you.”
Vishtu grinned.
“Anyone we know?  Better deserve you.”
“It’s more than that,” I said.  “More complicated.”
“Don’ tell un it’s young Asdinan!  Waiting for him to settle down.”
“No, it’s not As.”  Expectant pause.  “It’s the guy I left for Sorg.”
“War,” said Vishtu.  “Things calm down, they look different.”
“Are they allowed to?” It came out without thinking.
“No-one expect you to stay a single lady.”
What made me think the Rabbiters weren’t as conversant as anyone else with the findings of the Vasuculi Civil Affairs Department?  Is it not a story as old as humanity?
“It’s more than that,” I said again.  I am going to flounder here. “It’s – complicated.”  When in doubt, repeat yourself.  “We’re still working things out.  It’s as if I’ve got two countries now.   I don’t want – as though Kadun doesn’t exist, Carlin doesn’t exist, Sorg – didn’t happen.  It’s all part of me.  You’re all part of me.  He’s an artist.  He’d love Carlin.  If – say – we lived some of the time here, would anyone mind?”  Is this busking or is it busking?  Is it the opposite of what I convinced myself of in the retreat?  Is it having my cake and eating it too?  Hi Tet, I’ve just planned our future.  What was that about walking all over me?  These weren’t exactly after-thoughts, more pushed down below the surface, with Mitch’s famous granite slab on top of them.  Which didn’t 100% prevent me from knowing they were there.
“Sorg’d want you to be happy,” said Vishtu.   “Anyone got a problem it’s his problem.”
“Thank you,” I said.  By this time wet rags have more backbone.
“Artist,” said Barfanu.  “More the merrier, I say.  Liven the place up.”
“Oh yes,” I said, “Tet livens things up.”.
“Friend of Mel’s, int he,” said Vishtu.  “Saw his stuff on TV.  Beautiful, just beautiful.”
Somewhere under the granite slab I am squealing Tet’s stuff has been on Kadun television and I never even knew! Somewhere else I am asking myself how I could ever have thought Mel’s friend could be unwelcome. And of course somewhere I am giggling because the whole of Carlin undoubtedly knew everything external to the maelstrom there was to know about me.
 
Then I sat in my car a little way outside the village and realized I’d done the unforgivable at last, not of course for want of trying: I’d said Tet and I were an item when I was by no means sure of Tet’s view of that.  Except I was.  OK, either I’m right or my crowning achievement is to have rendered myself wholly insane instead of merely half-insane.  I drove back to Zur feeling happier than I had for ages.  Being wholly insane may be enjoyable.  Delight in it until Tet blows my head off.
 
I arrived at – my home.  There was a sign on the door. ART IN PROGRESS.  DO NOT DISTURB.  I texted him.  I am a work of art in progress all on my own.  May I disturb. 
 
“Oh now Fal-girl, that’s for the morons.  And to what do I owe?”
“You haven’t killed me so far,” I said, “so I’m gambling you won’t kill me now.  I’ve just been to Carlin to see how people would feel about you and me living there, at least some of the time.”  Silence, not, I thought, ominous.  “Everything I did was all right and all wrong,” I added, meaning mostly that what I’d been doing in Carlin was cool, perfect, if only all of me had been there.
“I seem to have missed a few episodes.  You’d be living with me in Carlin?”
I took a very deep breath.
“I’m thinking the point here is would you be living with me in Carlin?”
“You’re that sure.  The missing episodes, Fal.”
A nose is not so hard.  Perhaps one day I shall show you.  I should like to argue this question of software with them.  I have not told you that I am loosely involved in art therapy here in Zur.  An advisory capacity.  I would like to meet Senta.
When I was digging my way out of my own grave, he closed his eyes a moment, but he laughed at all the ways I could have proved my self to no-one but me by ending up dead.  Then he became serious.
“Twice you could have killed, Fal, and no-one’d think the worse of you for it.”
“Except me.”
“The rule of law?”
I nodded.
He sat back and howled at my discovery so late in life I was terrified of water.
“So if I take you swimming and I dare you jump off the high-board – would I be so callous!”
“Grrrrr.”
I’m thinking your mind moves ahead of you.  The stream connects Carlin to Zur.
Yes, I said, and it’s fluid, amazingly enough.
He simply said yes to my having been hijacked by the bMbK, that he’d thought something of the kind, though not so plainly. 
“Where is Sorg’s grave?”
That shook me. 
“There’s a family cemetery.”
“I should have come.”
“Tet…”
“We are not all perfect.  Was holding you up not my job?  ‘For Carlin’.  I do not have Sarat down as a moron but possibly the worst thing to be saying to you!  But then Sarat on that day.”
“How could he have possibly known!”
“So then it was seeming to you a statement – what did you say, a smear of jam, a denial of reality.  Not just a man, that is past, but a place, many people, that is current. If Fal and Tet live happily ever after in Zur it never happened, a critical part of your life erased, where is Kadun?”
“More than just a long weekend.  Less than everything.”
“That part of you that died with Maya. I cannot for a moment deny that the physical, the emotional aspects of another man in your life, but I am thinking there was always a third person in our relationship.”
“Yes,” I said. “Perfectly and utterly happy, only there was always someone else there.”
“You ran off with Maya.”
“Actualized – it’s my new word.  My delusion.”
“So now both people are dead and I – I do not think one death more critical to our relationship than the other.”
“It’s a bit,” I said.
“We cannot play what if.  Only what is.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“Am I not a simple lad at heart?  And if I say what is, what was, what was real is a line of fire burning through all the dross, is that not simplicity itself!”
“Give or take a few million words.  They told me I was not being real.  Can I ever forgive myself?”
“Have you not paid for your idiocy? A thousand times over.” Pause.  “I am thinking we are both on the high board and if we dive it is irrevocable.  But did you not just dive?  Did I not dive many years ago now?”
“Fire,” I said, “not water.”
He grinned.
“Who would not have doubts about flinging herself into the flames.  Perhaps too there is something in the idea we were kids.  Playing with fire.  But now we are not children. Should we not be looking at property, like responsible adult citizens?”
“Tet.”
“Oh my Fal-girl.”
Fire melted the coffee-table between us.
 
When we asked ourselves whom to invite we realized it was half the continent and absurd and should invite no-one, but after, after we should have a party. 
Mum and Dad.  We went together.  Mum gave a little squeal and threw her arms round both of us.
There were still shadows, my shadows.  Not dark deep dirty ones, but shadows.
Dear Karci and Vrin
I just – just?  Wanted – want? In person, don’t want you to hear it at second-hand.  If it’d been a piece of paper, I’d’ve torn it up. 
Where are they, anyway?  I have no bloody idea where they are.   Last seen in Azt.  I didn’t think either of them would be far from Sarat.  Hey, maybe I should make it a mass-mailing exercise: Hi, Everyone I Know in Azt.
Try again, absolutely plain.
Dear Karci and Vrin
I want you to hear from me in person that I’m getting back together with Tet.  We’re going to live in Carlin, at least part of the time.  Part of me is now carlini.  That’s just how it is.  Part of me of course isn’t. Fal
The other one of course I just had to drive across Zur. I didn’t want to give Sarsh a miscarriage.  Tet volunteered to come with me.
“What good would you be if Sarsh went into labour!”
He burst out laughing.
“Get some practice…I do not think Sarshi san-yaega-baht is so fragile.”
“I don’t really.”
“Metaphor.” He’d dubbed it the Sandwich Syndrome and we both knew he was right.
We also of course both knew that if we both pitched up it saved a lot of words. 
We pitched up in the evening and got told they were on the hill.
“Is it,” I asked cautiously, “something official, d’you know?”
Are you entertaining the leaders of the Pentangle, Mel?  Or just negotiating AMI’s future relationship with Carlin.  This is much more important.
But nothing like a bit of farce was more guaranteed to make Tet and I – Tet and I.  We chortled together and drove off to the hill.
Hass was extracted from whatever the gathering was.  He looked at us and laughed.
“We wanted to see Vij and Sarsh,” I said.
“Of course,” he said. 
When much later I was telling Hass the whole story, he said this bit reminded him of nothing so much as Sarat and Maya’s dilemmas over whom to speak to first.
“Darling,” said Sarsh, “you worry so much about things.”
Tet hooted.
“Free and easy type myself.”
“Good for her,” said Sarsh firmly. 
I wondered how much Sarsh knew.  I doubted Hass had told anyone anything, ‘cept maybe Sarat, but the state I’d been in in Carlin was common knowledge.  It was 20 years before I learned that Sarshi, who did believe in a – manifestation of a dead Sorg independent of my subconscious, had said half-laughing half-crying, Sorg, let there be an end.  Bad enough your being dead. And Pilo said: he will not leave Carlin with unfinished business. 
“I’m going to fret,” I warned everyone.  “I haven’t told your parents.  I haven’t told Saryulin, Duvi, As.  It’s just I don’t want people to find out second-hand.”
“Sorted,” said Sarsh briskly.
Karci to Fal:
Dear, dear Fal
Woo-hoo!  Look forward to the exhibition!  But you, dear Fal.  No-one expected being s-y-b to define you for life but Sorg is/would be (I’m a just don’t know on these things) so happy for you, it’s just so exactly on the grand scale, I mean what’s a border, a line in the sand or in this case a dirty great ravine, how he’d want it to be.
Love Karci.
I seemed to have forgotten about the grapevine.
Sarat to Fal:
Well, now, Fal-girl, and isn’t this is turn-up.  So glad for you both.  Maya would be so pleased. 
All our love.
I remembered I was a responsible adult citizen and reckoned Narak and Lattic and for that matter Senta would assume I stayed overnight in Carlin.  Text from Narak: Everything OK?  Everything, I replied, is just fine.
And so to bed.  I realized I felt shy.  Tet realized he felt shy.  Both of us realized each other felt shy but only one of us could say why we felt shy.
“As though it’s the first time,” said Tet. We flopped on the bed giggling and after a while stopped feeling shy.
Farce broke in again.  We wanted to go to the shrine, nab the first free mentor and just very quietly and privately get paired, but we still had to have witnesses and it would be good if they were people who mattered to us, not two stray Zuri hauled in off the street.  Reakoed and Maitlan were obvious, but that was only three-quarters of the Six. We have to have Mel and Hass.  And we had to have Cantilip and Venga.  Dual-nationality?  It’s a doddle.  This made ‘quietly and privately’ a bit problematic.  
“And Lattic and Narak,” I said.
Tet rang Mel.
               “What is the point of being King of Dabida if you can’t slip unnoticed in and out of your own shrine?”
               “Often wondered that,” said Mel.
               I knew this was the culmination of the conversation the five of them had been having ever since I ran off with Sorg and that nothing bar war or death would have kept them away.  I also realized that I didn’t really want this momentous occasion to see me clad in leggings and a T.
               I rang Narak.
               “Eek, darling, eek.  Of course we’ll  come!”
               “There’s a posh frock in the back of the wardrobe.  Dark blue.  Matching shoes.  Dark blue earrings.  Any make-up you can find!”
               “It shall be done!  Where are you?”
               Lattic brought a little posy of flowers from the garden.
               Narak grinned.
               “We nearly brought Benji but perhaps not.”
               “Benji,” I said firmly, “will be there in spirit.  No-one has had more of an earful from me than Benji!”
               I disappeared upstairs and duly emerged transformed.
               “Whew!” said Narak.  “Not seen you dressed up much.”
               “She is, isn’t she,” said Tet.  “Now, my lady Fal-girl, if you will do me the honour of accompanying me to the shrine.”
               “Nothing,” I said softly, “would or could please me more.”
               I am Falita Emery and I like it!
               We all crept, not really any other word for it, back to the house. I saw that a small but critical amount of catering had been fixed.  Maitlan examined a flagon of apple-stock.
               “I believe carlini live on the stuff?”
               Narak, Lattic and I produced a trio of most evil grins.
               But it wasn’t like a party and even less like a wedding-party.  It was much better than that: a family get-together.  I rapidly kicked off the posh shoes, which didn’t fit terribly well, but no-one would let me play hostess, so I reclined on the sofa I’d bloody well bought in a state of delirious contentment, with Tet beside me grilling Narak on the cultural scene in Carlin.  And schools.  And I grinned and said, hang on, we’re all foreigners!  Or honorary carlini as you prefer.  I think all three of us have roots.  Absolutely, said Lattic.  Hass grinned and said send them to the basket-weavers’.  The what? asked Tet.  What they call Simtian-Li, posh progressive.  As went there.  And me! Said Venga.  I looked up at Hass and he met my eyes and we both knew he’d avoided saying ‘what Sorg called’.  One day we’ll mention his name in normal conversation.  Not today.  Low-down on anything is in the village, Narak was saying.  Latest productions – director probably lives in the village!  It might have been the apple-stock but I pointed at Tet in mock-horror.  He has never been to the Rabbiters’!  Cantilip patted his hand.  Never mind, darling.  We can’t all be perfect.  For reasons I’d swear totally unknown to her, Tet and I creased.  She blinked.  Long story, I said.   The action is in Car-sandis, said Narak, but the nucleus is the village. 
The bell went.  Tet came back carrying a small box.
“PANTHER Courier Services. ‘Tis from Sarat.”
So everyone paused agog.
I opened it carefully.
In it was a huge translucent shimmering scarf.  The Leotard Look.  I laughed and cried at the same time as Tet carefully arranged it round my shoulders. But at the bottom of the box was a large book and I got all trembly again because I knew what it was.  It’s dark green leather with a clasp, the key still attached by a tiny chain.  I opened it and suddenly recovered myself, laughed, proudly displayed the front page.
               “You didn’t know we were talented calligraphers, did you!”
               This is Fal’s and Maya’s Unique Record of Everything
               But still only I knew just why this book.  I turned the pages slowly and carefully.  Had the pressed flowers survived the years?  Would they fall out?  There were poems meticulously transcribed. 
‘Love never dies.’  But that wasn’t it.  Birth-days.  I giggled remembering we argued about hyphenating it.  Maya was adamant: birth-day expressed the day you were born, not the anniversary thereof.  A snapshot had come loose and fluttered to the floor.  Sarat and Maya on the beach.  When we were six-freaking-teen and nothing could hurt us. Nothing can hurt us.  Nothing has hurt us.  Is that the last and craziest step of all? Mel picked up the picture and sat looking at it and it passed through me, but painlessly, others suffered, Fal, as much if not more.  Then there I was, six-freaking-teen, as drawn by Tet.  I showed him.  He said, Did I not always love you? And I knew that was the line of fire cutting through all the dross. Has anyone got a phone!  But no, what I wanted to say to Sarat was possibly beyond words but certainly not a public occasion.
               “It’s the same and it’s different,” I said.  “OK, I’ll make sense in a minute.”  Shall I?  I wanted to say nothing has changed, don’t you all see, nothing has changed.  Nothing real.  It was crazy.  The hell with that.  But Tet understood.
               “Should we not all go down to the beach?  Perhaps metaphorically speaking.”
               “Neither of us,” I said, very clearly, “none of us, wants today to be a public occasion.”
               Venga said softly: “Click, click, bloody click.”
               “Exactly,” I said, and laughed.  “Not sure where that gets us.”
               “I will not be trapped in my own home,” said Tet.
               “Ignore them,” said Cantilip.  “Perhaps they’ll go away.”
               “There are other things,” I said.  “People I haven’t told yet, people who matter to me.  Don’t want them to find out from bloody Glitz.”
               “Ah,” said Cantilip.
               “Then I tell them!” I said.  “It’s the same.  It’s different.  This party is moving to the Rabbiters’.” 
               “All or nothing,” said Mel.  “I wonder if Sarat can come.”
               “Is this mad or is this mad?”  Me.  Mel and Sarat both can command a decent amount of privacy if required, but I knew Mel knew what I knew: the party would not be complete in Zur.
               “I’m thinking,” said Tet, “it does not matter a damn what anyone else thinks this party is about.  We know what it’s about.”
               Small matter of explaining, I thought.  We’re not going to explain it.
               “It’s still not Batna-kri,” I said.  “The border.”
               “Fly,” said Mel.
               And so I stood in the drawing-room at the House and said, “This is my partner, Tet.  We’re going to live in Carlin.”
               Tet said only slightly mockingly: “It’s excellent work for the empire she does, I’m thinking.”
               “My dear girl,” said Saryulin.  “Welcome back.”
               “We’re having a party at the Rabbiters’.  Mel, Hass, all of us.  Mel’s there fixing it.”
               In due course Sarat arrived with Karci and Vrin.  If anyone thought, this is loony, OK, Fal’s got together with her ex, big-freaking deal, it’s a national event?  we didn’t care because we knew what this party was about.
               I teased As about not having ‘settled’ yet, and he said there is someone, she’s in Azt, so we’re keeping it very quiet.  Tell, tell, I said.  She’s an academic, translational philosophy, whatever that is, bit out of my depth, I confessed. 
               Finally I got two mins alone with Sarat.  I twirled my translucent chiffon.
               “Thank you.  Beyond words.”
               “Maya didn’t have much,” he said.  “Not in Kadun, left it all behind in Zur, but the few things that mattered to her I kept.” 
               I knew that also meant that Pietri and Caluna had borne the brunt of the horror of sorting through her things.  And that I was one of the things that had mattered to Maya.
               When I looked for Tet, he seemed to have vanished.  Ah well, can’t have gone far.
Unless he’s got lost!  I didn’t think Tet got lost.  When I saw him again he was drawing our party.                   Narak and Lattic insisted that they had their duty to Benji and we should stay at their place and house-hunt. There were one or two problems with this, like no clean knickers and still being dressed up.  Oh, and technically speaking we were in a foreign country without our passports.  While we were sure Sarat could smooth our path, we thought on the whole Mel could fly us all back to Zur. Tet went to his place and I to mine.  I tried to keep a straight face about what I was packing for my honeymoon – wax jacket and combat boots – and observed to myself that while I meaning we had not had a sexy undies things I really thought I’d like something more interesting than white cotton but I could hop into Car-sandis for that. Then lost in conversation with Narak and Lattic I didn’t really notice how long Tet was taking to pack.  Then Tet arrived and Narak handed us the keys and observed the freezer was full so we shouldn’t be forced to pop into the village if it was ‘inconvenient’, and just for our convenience put a box of tea, coffee, bread, milk, butter and eggs in the car, and we were off.
               I knew Tet was in love was Narak’s as soon as he saw it, but all he said was, “Is this a style of building common in Carlin?”
               “Yes,” I said enthusiastically.  It’s curved.  Set a little forward from the trees, it follows the curve of the woods, and the roof is a single slope.  “Not nearly big enough for a family.  Hopeless as a studio.”
               “Ah, but the potential.”
               Once inside, he looked at the grate and grinned.
               “There is no Imperial Clean Air Act in Carlin?”
               “No-one thinks wood-smoke counts.”
               “In that case we must lay a fire.”
               “Logs are out the back,” I said.
               When finally we were reclining before a blazing hearth sipping coffee, he reached for his bag and carefully lay what I knew to be a drawing – it was between two sheets of cardboard – between us. 
He took my hand.
               “Hass showed me where Sorg’s grave is. I wanted to have a little talk with him. Nothing I’m sure he didn’t know already.”  I felt as if the world had stood still.  “I told him you were safe now.  I told him he was more than welcome at our party for is this not his place.  I told him indeed he was welcome at any time.  I told him a man or a woman can love two people equally and in life that is complicated but when one is dead it is not.  And then I told Sarat my conversation and he said, of course she’s here.”
               I was still suspended in time and space.
“Silly of me,” I said.  “I just knew our party could not be complete in Zur.”
Tet laughed,
“Are there not strange metaphysical questions there, all of which we shall ruthlessly ignore. ”  He looked mischievous.  “Duvi I think had a more mundane curiosity as to what is this man called Tet.  Of course my lady of Carlin does nothing so crude as the third degree.”
“Inevitable,” I said cheerfully.
 “And now I’ll show you.  And others.  A few select others.  Is there a scanner here?”
There were Mel and Vishtu and Cantilip and Karci and Sarat – and Maya sitting on a table and Sorg lounging in the doorway and in the middle of all of them me, and I haven’t gone through life not realizing I was good-looking but just possibly not that exquisitely, transcendently beautiful.  Then I realized we were all just slightly translucent.
“We weren’t exactly in Carlin, were we, any of us.  That’s why they could come.”
I knew now I didn’t have to explain anything to anyone ever again.
We found the scanner.
Pilo and Sasala, Mardis, Vij and Sarsh, Pietri and Caluna.  Amida, Taja, Vax.  And Senta.
Subject: Our party
[image]  Tet and I paired today at the shrine in Zur.  At first we were going to be quiet and private, just Mel and Hass.  But that wasn’t right. We realized it was our party and went to the Rabbiters’. Tet drew it for all of us. We’re going to live in Carlin.
“Duvi gave me the names of some realtors,” Tet was saying.  “Shall we set to work?  I’ll make us some more coffee.”
Sarat, Saryulin, As, Karci, Vrin, Mel, Hass.
Subject: Our party
[image]
Sarat’s reply was instant, must have been one of the few ten second interludes in which he was sitting down.  Thank you.
Amida’s reply took longer to come.  Darling, Cho and I will treasure.  Long to meet your Tet, you must bring him to see us.
My dear, typed Pietri, if that was not so, then there was no point.
A number of other mails shot back and forth, which I didn’t know at the time.  The words ‘field effect’ occurred rather often.  Perhaps I should have mailed Kaminua.  The Rabbiters’ Rest, among other things in its long history the local for half an army, was not in or even particularly near the field and not noted for its ethereal nature.  But several things occurred to me all at once.  I followed Tet into the kitchen and stretched out against his back.
“Keep doing that.  Raises making coffee to another plane.”
I kissed the back of his neck, then whispered romantically in his ear, “I don’t know how much you’ve heard about the inner and esoteric aspects of the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun.”
I felt him grinning.
“A little, Fal, a little.”
“Would I be totally off-target if I said I can get really involved in the plans for the railways and you’d smile cheerfully and say Lido-extenders rule!”
His grin seemed to be spreading through the kitchen.
“But it’s not entirely true to say I don’t give a flying fuck about the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun!  We’re not living in that field, I’m telling you that much!  Our kiddies will be finding their own way not born half in another dimension or whatever it is.”
I buried my face in his hair and half-choked with laughter, then surfaced.
“So long as you know the lie of the land,” I said smoothly.  “How many?”
“That would be rather up to you, I’m thinking.”
“Don’t forget the studio will need an electrified fence.”
“That I’m thinking seriously.  A converted attic, a small retractable ladder?”
Later when we were slaving over hot Grid-sites the bell went.  Ridiculously, we felt surprised, as though nobody knew we were there. When Tet opened the door, there was no-one there, just (yet another) cardboard box of groceries, fresh milk, fresh butter, fresh bread, cream.
“Look arter un own in Carlin,” I said.
“Looked after my Fal-girl.”
“Oh yes,” I said, “they looked after me.  Nothing fancy, mind, nothing embarrassing.”
We went early to bed, not, we thought, because we were particularly tired, but in fact we slept like only intermittently tactile logs way through to 10 the next morning.  It had been a rather exciting 24 hours. 
“Lunch at the Rabbiters’, I think,” said Tet.
Half a story.
Tet approached Vishtu, who was directing moving tables around.
“If you have a moment, I do not think I thanked you for our very fine party.”
“Pleasure all ours,” said Vishtu.
“As you may know, I draw, and I drew our party and I should like you to have that drawing.”
Vishtu slowly took it all in and smiled.
“Put it above the bar.”
Tet turned
“And now I’m thinking there’s someone we owe a drink, someone who kindly left us groceries.”
“’Course they were here,” said Barfanu.
Tet, I thought, brilliantly concealed his astonishment that all the Rabbiters had assumed Maya and Sorg were at our party.
“It is not, you understand,” he said to me after, “I am being patronizing.  It is not a usual response by any standard.  The field?”
“Barfanu,” I said softly, “thought it was perfectly sensible and reasonable for Sorg’s spirit to be looking after me.  The Rabbiters – they’ve been here for ever, seen it all – all the history of Carlin.  So any – experience of broadening of what is normal was first experienced centuries ago and passed down.  It is their normal.”  I was grinning at something else.  “You do know you’ve just become carlini.  Tet, all they need to know about you is you know Maya and Sorg were at the party.”
​