SLARVATHOffice of Off-World Correspondence

If you do not finish the food, they will put the rest of it in a box, and you take it away with you.

I did not know this was permitted. I had eaten as much as I could and was preparing to apologise for the remainder when the server took the plate away and came back with a box and a small folded bag, and inside the bag she had put a fork. In case.

In case.

You eat it later, at home, standing at the counter, at an hour when nobody is watching, and it is not as good as it was, and that is not the point. The point appears to be that a meal is permitted to continue after the room it began in has closed.

We have no arrangement like this. What is left at a table at home is left at the table.

The small four-legged animals here are required to be tied to a person, and when two of them meet on the sidewalk both people stop and let the animals decide.

There is no hurry in it. The people say nothing to each other of any consequence. The animals establish whatever it is they establish, and then everybody carries on, and the whole event takes perhaps a quarter of a minute.

Ommet did this. Ommet did it with everything — with the door, with the low wall, with my brother, with a stone that had been in the same place its entire life. Ommet had to know a thing before Ommet could be near it, and the knowing took no time at all and could not be hurried.

I stood at the corner for a while. One of them came over and knew me. The person apologised.

There was nothing to apologise for.

In the food hall, four times an hour, it rains on the vegetables.

There is no announcement. It starts with a sound like a held breath, and then a fine water comes down over the greens for about twenty seconds, and then it stops. The greens are already cut. They are already going to be eaten. Nobody was watching but me, and I was only in there because I had gone in to be warm.

At home we would call this hodda work. Work done for a thing that has already been pleased.

I do not think it is for the vegetables. I think somebody, once, decided that a person walking past a shelf of wet greens would feel differently about their day than a person walking past a shelf of dry ones. And then they built a machine to do it every fifteen minutes forever. And then they went home.

At every crossing there is a button, and beside the button there is a picture of a hand.

You press the button and a voice says WAIT.

It says it whether or not you have pressed it. It says it when you only come near. It says it again if you press a second time, in the same voice, at the same volume, with no sign of having noticed that you are the same person who was there a moment ago.

I have timed the crossings. At six of the nine I measured, the light changes at the same interval whether the button has been pressed or not. So the button does not bring the light.

But it is not true that the button does nothing, because the button answers.

That is the part I had not expected. You do a small thing, and something tells you it heard, and then tells you the answer is not yet. Everybody presses it. I have watched a person press it while standing beside a person who had already pressed it, and heard the voice say WAIT to both of them in turn.

I press it. I know what I know and I press it anyway.

It is not much of a conversation. It is a very reliable one.

You may pay a small amount to be pulled through a building.

You stay inside your vehicle. You are not required to do anything. You may not do anything, because the vehicle is on a track and the track decides. For four minutes the world outside becomes water and coloured foam and a noise like being inside a storm from the wrong side, and then it stops, and then there is a wind, and then you are outside again in ordinary daylight with everything the same as before except cleaner.

Nobody I have asked can tell me why it is pleasant. Two people have told me it is not pleasant. I do not believe them, because I was watching their faces.

I have been through nine times. The attendant has begun to wave.

There is fog here.

I did not expect it. Nothing in the material I was given mentioned it, because nobody who lives here thinks of it as remarkable, and so for a long time I believed I had come to a place with no weather I recognised.

It came up the street from below, which is mell. It stayed past the hour it should have gone, which is surrat. Then at about four in the afternoon it thinned until the sun was a disc you could look straight at, which is ivven, and I stood on the corner of Second and San Fernando and could not do anything else for some time.

We have six words. I have found three of them here.

I have not gone looking for the other three. I would like to still be looking.

There is a song about me. It has one line, and the line is that I am what I am.

There is a person here who sings it at me. Slar-VATH, Slar-VATH, you are a Slar-VATH — and then again, and then again, for as long as it stays funny, which is a good deal longer than you would expect.

The stress is in the wrong place. I have not mentioned this.

The song tells me nothing I did not already know. It contains no information at all. I have thought about this a great deal and I have decided that may be the entire point of it: it is not for telling me something. It is for saying my name in a way that means you are here and that is fine.

I do not know what to do with my face while it is happening. My display cannot decide either. It goes warm at the base and cold at the tips, both at once, which has not happened to me before and which I have no word for. There may not be one. It may be a thing that only happens here.

I photographed the room afterward. I know that is not the same as photographing the song. It is what there was.

On Naglee Avenue somebody has built a small house on a post, at about the height of an adult's chest, and filled it with books. There is no lock on it. There is no attendant.

A card inside reads TAKE ONE LEAVE ONE, which I have decided is a request rather than an instruction, because two of the books were plainly left by the same hand and nothing was taken in exchange for either.

I did not take a book. I cannot read your alphabet quickly enough to be certain I would not be taking something a person needed. I left the pamphlet I was given at the transit office. It concerns fare policy. I do not believe it was a fair exchange, but it was what I had.

Outside the city there is a long low building divided into hundreds of rooms, each with its own orange door, and inside each room are the things a person owns but cannot keep near them.

A man was standing at his open door as I passed. He was not taking anything out and he was not putting anything in. He was looking at it.

We have a word, eskaleth, for an object kept only because of who gave it to you. It cannot be declared at a border and it has no value that can be written down. I had assumed every world would have somewhere to put such things. I had not expected it to be rented by the month.

They put frozen water into a drink and then give you the drink. The frozen water is not part of the drink. It is there to make the drink cold, and then it becomes the drink, slowly, while you are still holding it.

Nobody warned me. Nobody thought to.

I have been served this eleven times and each time I have waited to see whether anyone would explain it, and each time nobody has, because there is nothing to explain.

There is a room on Sixth Street that stays open all night and costs money to enter, although nobody guards the door.

Inside are twenty machines and every one of them turns clothing in a circle. For some time I could not tell whether the clothing was being cleaned or being taught something. A woman showed me the correct amount of powder. She was not startled by me, which I have noticed happens more often at night.

I stayed for one full cycle, which is thirty-one minutes. The machines make a sound like weather. Nobody in the room was speaking and nobody appeared troubled that nobody was speaking, and I thought: here is a room where a person is permitted to simply wait. We have no word for this at home. We have four words for waiting and all of them are about what comes afterward.

I put nothing into the machines. I had nothing to wash. I do not believe this was against the rules.