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“Come on,” said Rigg. “People always form into cities.”
“They do when they can,” said Ram Odin, “but no larger than the economy and the transportation systems can support. In some places, five thousand people is a city. In other places, it doesn’t feel like a city till fifty thousand. Odinfold once had cities of twenty million, but we’ve erased those paths through time. At the moment, with about a quarter of a million people Aressa Sessamo is one of the four largest cities on the whole planet of Garden. Most wallfolds have a largest city of no more than fifty thousand.”
“And you think I don’t want to go into them.”
“Because you’ve seen O and you’ve seen Aressa Sessamo. When humans live together in large numbers, they make the same accommodations. They develop the same rules, because only a few rules work. But in hamlets of ten families, villages of fifty households, towns of two hundred households—there’s where really interesting, peculiar customs can grow up because what evolves is exactly what suits the people in that place.”
“You’re already trying to shape my way of looking at other wallfolds,” said Rigg.
“I’m telling you that cities converge on the same kind of system of dealing with anonymity and crowding. But villages diverge and there’s where the really interesting things pop up.”
“Nothing interesting ever ‘popped up’ in Fall Ford.”
“You and Umbo popped up there.”
“You know we were poked into Fall Ford, me as a baby, Umbo as a genetic alteration.”
“But Nox wasn’t. She just grew there. Do you think every village has a Nox?”
Rigg thought about the woman he once believed, or at least hoped, was his mother. She kept a boardinghouse that took in the rare traveler. She cooked meals that people in Fall Ford praised and envied. She was kind and protective.
And she had the ability to create a mental field around her in which she could calm people down. It didn’t reach far, but it certainly was effective. You couldn’t be very angry or very afraid around Nox.
“She’s the mayor of Fall Ford,” said Rigg, realizing it for the first time. “Nobody knows it, but everybody knows it. It wasn’t just when they were coming after me. They always go to Nox.”
“She’s like a drug,” said Ram Odin. “When things made them upset, they’d go to Nox and she helped them feel better. When they were calmed down, they made better decisions. They all knew it, even if they didn’t know it.”
“You don’t know Nox.”
“But Ramex did. And he told me. She’s not the only one. She’s the other direction that human evolution took in Ramfold. We needed timeshapers so we paid more attention to you. But I had Ramex take you to a village that had Nox. A soother. Because you and Umbo were very likely to cause some crazy things to happen. And with Nox around, things couldn’t go too wrong.”
“And the other wallfolds—did they develop people like Nox?”
“I thought you wanted to form your own opinions.”
Rigg rolled his eyes. “So you’ll be my grandfather. That doesn’t explain my face.”
“It puts you under an old man’s protection. Instead of coming in as a lone monster, you come in as an old man’s strange grandson. That solves one problem, but not the big one.”
“That we’ll still be strangers wherever we go.” Rigg heard himself saying “we” and he knew in that moment that he had already decided to bring Ram Odin along. Because it really would be impossible to do this on his own. Oh, he could visit wallfolds alone, and observe people from a distance, but what would he really know about them without hearing them talk? Without seeing how they live? And with this mask on his head, he couldn’t get close enough. He hadn’t thought that through, and Ram Odin had, and so Ram Odin was going to get his way because his way was better.
“We have to have a reason for traveling,” said Ram Odin. “Or they’ll think we’re criminals, or escapees, or wild men, or refugees, or whatever else sets people to wandering. Where did you want to go first?”
“Yinfold,” said Rigg.
“Go to the farthest and work your way back. Makes sense.”
“When we’re traveling in Yinfold, what’s our story?”
“Depends on where in Yinfold. It’s a big place. There are only nineteen wallfolds on two very large continents. Each one is as big as—well, you don’t know Earth, so the comparison—”
“I studied maps and globes of Earth when we were in Odinfold,” said Rigg. “We all did.”
“Each of our wallfolds here is the size of Europe from Poland on westward. The size of India. Han China. I once divided the land masses of Earth into nineteen roughly equal parts and in some of those parts, there was an amazing amount of history. Great empires rising and falling.”
“But not in all.”
“Well, some of them were desert wastelands. Either very cold deserts, or very hot ones. But we have no great deserts in Garden. Only little ones.”
