CHAPTER NINETEEN - HORSEHIDE SURREALISTS

The hotel was a grim old place, and there were bullet holes in the holes where cowards had been caught in the darker days of the war. It had an aura of grandeur about it which lingered, despite everything else - more of a ghost, really, hovering around even as the substance slowly faded. The reflection in a pond which refused to move on even after the person casting it had shuffled onwards to other things, or perhaps nowhere at all. Five stories of it, sprawling wide and flat across the slightly odd landscape - already, Tanner could see how it had an obstructed view of the rolling moor and the river, at night the water would turn silver, the moors would moan with wind, and the whole thing probably felt like being on the edge of the civilised world. Beyond here, there was nothing but fen and marsh, the great sagging depression of the Tulavanta, where rivers were as changeable as wandering stars, and spilled freely over the blue-grey grass, which bridged the gap between weed and reed. The rolling infinity of the former, the sturdy endurance of the latter. She could see faint pale patches, too - patches were contamination had seeped a little, just a little, enough for the shallow roots to take it up and mutate the plant. The grass there would be thicker, stronger, less uniform... and as sterile as if you'd doused it with a flamethrower. Mutation made it stronger, but it also made it too complex, too varied, too... scrambled.

A piebald landscape of grass, and a shimmering ribbon of silver. Hm, alright, she could see why people would come here to holiday. Briefly. This was the sort of hotel that developed a reputation. Felt that way, at least.

The interior preserved the sense of ghostly grandeur. An unnecessarily large lobby, with a wide stone foyer covered in wooden racks for mud-stained boots and soaked umbrellas - this was a place for hiking, not reclining. Indeed, they had to walk through a veritable army of boot-scrapers before they could get to the front desk, which was... unmanned. The lobby was one of those types which extended upwards towards the roof, and the entire building felt more like a tower, with rooms arranged on tiers facing out into the central, empty space. Their footsteps echoed loudly on the stone floors, and carpets were rolled up and stashed along the walls like the scrolls of an antique library, their threadbare patterns looming mournfully at the guests. Out of season. The broad dark desk, empty save for a large ledger, was utterly abandoned. Not even a bell to summon someone. The ledger, Tanner was interested to note, was turned to a page from... a very, very long time ago. Almost near the beginning of the book, years back. Every name was punctuated with a rank - private, colonel, corporal, captain, sergeant, condensed down to little abbreviations that made them seem like the scientific names of obscure species. Ah, yes, Sgt. Wilks, a subspecies of Sgt, also represented by Sgt. Balod.

Her thoughts trailed off as Marana idly flipped through the ledger for a moment, passing from row upon row upon row of soldierly names to... well, fewer and fewer, spaced further and further apart, gradually losing their ranks, until eventually... blank spaces. For page upon page upon page upon page. Tanner glanced around with a childish nervousness building up in her. This was the point in the theatrophone play where Marana would turn a page, and it'd be their names staring back at them, dated to today, registering a stay of indefinite length.

She flipped.

"Oh, there they are."

Marana's voice was infuriatingly mild. Well, there was... not names, not exactly, but just a series of handprints on the final page. Like the sort of thing a child did while learning to paint. Well, if a child had adult-sized hands. And vandalised ledgers. Tanner could feel her law-nose twitching - the law-nose, incidentally, was a specialised organ that only judges of the Golden Door could develop, located somewhere around the righteousness gland - for she could detect something amiss. Should've known that a bunch of surrealists would get her law-nose all flared and whatnot, the first thing she'd seen a surrealist do was engage in public intoxication, be related to the person who'd corrupted Algi to the ways of nonsense, and dribble wine-vomit over her cot. Thus far, her opinion of surrealists, legally speaking, was somewhere between dim and gloaming.

"Why would they mark their arrival this way? This just inconveniences anyone else who comes along."

Marana looked askance at her.

"Oh?"

Tanner felt her face warming, but her righteousness gland was pulsing, it was. Pulsating and excreting all sorts of zealous hormones. The iron grip of legalese was wrapping itself around the righteousness gland and milking it for all its inspiring juice.

She... she shouldn't be allowed to think. She clearly lacked the qualifications.

"I mean, it's... just inconvenient. Not vandalism, but it demonstrates a casual disregard for the comfort of others. If the hotel decided to complain about it, they'd have grounds to regard it as a nuisance. Depending on their policies, they'd be perfectly justified in expelling them."

"Tanner, these are handprints."

"It's the principle of the thing."

Marana blinked languidly, her face almost becoming motherly - reminded Tanner of some of the older judges, who could just wither people with a single glance.

"...last night, you were talking poetically about the symbolism of eels. Now, you're talking about the nuisance a bunch of inky handprints have caused. Do you... realise why this might be catching me slightly off-guard, my very large countrywoman?"

Tanner huffed.

"I keep work and pleasure separate."

"We're at a surrealist conference. Most of us barely know what work is. I mean, we're not factory workers, or farmers, or soldiers, and according to my father that means I've never worked a day in my life. So, I assume this is pleasure. Go on, get back in your eel mood, you're much more fun when you're like that."

"You've known me for a few days. And you've been drunk for most of them."

Marana's look turned to a look.

"And?"

Tanner opened her mouth.

Closed it.

"Never mind."

"And there we go."

Marana maintained rigid eye-contact as she fumbled for a hitherto hidden ink pad, continuing to look right into Tanner's eyes as she clumsily unclasped it, pressed her palm down, and added her own sodden handprint to the collection on the final page. Fantastic, looked even more like some crowd of unreasonably large children had decided to deface something. Tanner bit her lip with barely-suppressed irritation. Nonsense. Stuff and nonsense. Judges, now, judges were normal, they didn't do this sort of thing, they obeyed the rules, listened to what was expected of them, had purpose. Didn't squat in empty hotels and deface ledgers. Was she getting a bit too worked up about this? Conceivably, conceivably. She was nervous, this was nowhere close to her home ground, and... well, acting as one should, almost to the point of caricature, helped. Indeed, the further away it got from reasonable reality, the easier it was to get lost in the role. The human mind was a moth, and authentic self was a consuming flame. Better to conjure up some deeply fantastical will-o-the-wisp which had no substance, no heat, nothing to it but a luring light which could lead the moth away. It'd never find its beloved flame, but it'd live. A mind locked into the right paths couldn't spin off-course and crash.

Anyway.

She followed Marana silently upstairs - only stairs, there were none of those newfangled elevating devices she'd heard about. The hotel was stained inside and out with age, and the walls seemed to ooze with mildew, layer upon layer of wallpaper and plaster used to protect against the advance of damp. The ceilings were covered with cheap stucco, sculpted into twisting flowers. Poorly sculpted, catching the dim dust-flecked light poorly, so they looked like deformed faces leering downwards at any visitors. The carpeting was brown as tobacco or horse-hide, and thick enough that each step left behind shiny footprints which resisted fading. Tanner imagined some beleaguered, bored maid scuttling through the hallways at night, straightening each individual hair until the immaculate brown was restored. How many soldiers had marched through here? A few of the rooms had open doors, anything to keep things aired out, and Tanner saw firm beds, slightly cloudy windows, and amateurish paintings of fruit baskets and handsome buildings. As they walked, they passed one truly surreal sight - a shoe rack. Just a shoe rack, the sort that was in the foyer. But it was stuffed with footwear, almost straining under the weight. Tall, military-style boots, scarred where the marches had been harsh on them. Sturdy hiking shoes with hobnail soles. Glittering black dress shoes, laces still stiff where they'd been tied with atomic precision. Small pumps, delicate high-heels... rarely did any shoe have a partner, most of them were solitary and lost-looking. And each and every one was polished to a mirror sheen, layers of polish thick enough to scrape off with an outstretched nail, and when Marana prodded one of the brown brogues, her finger came away ruddy, and cracks formed all over the waxy surface.

At the very top of the heap were two pairs of shoes, two of the only pairs which had a partner. A man's set of brown calfskin boots, and a lady's pair of high-heeled shoes that glittered slightly in the dim dusty light. Marana stared at them for a moment. Tanner stared too.

Maybe they were just placed there randomly, but... she imagined a pair of giggling lovers stumbling into a room, kicking their shoes off, leaving them outside for cleaning, and...

Then what?

How old were they?

Were they soldiers on leave? Some of the last civilians? Or were they older still, back when this was a functional hotel?

Were these lovers still here, in some way? Maybe they'd run into a man and a woman hopping barefoot down the hall, or...

They moved on. There were noises from one of the floors, and Tanner followed Marana hesitantly, drawn in by the low, low hum of conversation - a combination of bassy rumbles punctuated by the occasional chittering laugh. The floor where this was happening was... well... you could tell there was a party going on. Carts had been hauled here, heavy carts laden with trays that might've once contained food... and drink. Marana hummed in curiosity, and withdrew a little something from her bag. Ah. It was the milk crate that'd been filled with wine back in Mahar Jovan, and had gradually dwindled into nothingness as the days wore on. She unfolded the wooden thing, and her eyes gleamed eagerly as she looked around for... there. A cart with intact wine bottles. Immediately, she was poring over them, even as the sound of conversation rose nearby. Her fingers danced over the wine labels like they were holy texts, and she hummed, clicked her tongue, bit the inside of her cheek... mumbled incomprehensible things about terroir and vintage and good years and bad years and storage quality. One by one, she slid them out, before adding them to her little collection. Six bottles, in total. Six. The woman couldn't stand to go a day without a glass of something, apparently, and-

Oh, gods.

She had a second folding milk crate.

Tanner wished there was a law against excessive drinking, just so she could smack them away with a tut and a tsk. But... no, no, prohibition wasn't part of the golden law. They'd had some fights about that, generations ago, undermined by the fact that no-one wanted to be around the sober judges for longer than a few minutes. A sober judge was like a cat with fleas - looked nice at a distance, did all the things a cat did, but then you got close and suddenly remembered you had somewhere else to be. Anyway. She hummed disapprovingly, and Marana shot her a vixen-like smile.

"Oh, don't be a grouch, it makes you wrinkle with unseemly rapidity. Do you want your face to look like a turkey's wattle?"

"Hmph. I recommend asking for permission to take those bottles."

Marana sniffed the air suddenly, and her smile widened.

"Oh, I wouldn't worry about that, I think they've moved on from the wine. Anyhow, it's abandoned. I'm not plucking wine bottles..."

She plucked another wine bottle, adding it to her little clinking collection.

"I'm salvaging detritus. What's the law on salvage?"

"Salvage is maritime. You're claiming abandoned property with the assumption that you're part of the party which claimed it, thus extending ownership to you as well. However, you're relying on assumptions, rather than explicit statements. Theft is the dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention to permanently deprive - it could be argued that you're acting dishonestly by claiming these wine bottles, especially if you're turned away from this conference, or it emerges that these bottles aren't owned by the conference at all."

Marana looked at her like she'd just started dribbling wildly - mixture of disgust, pity, worry, and mild annoyance. Perhaps a little amusement.

"Well, I ought to make sure then, shouldn't I?"

"You'd better. It's always good to be careful."

"Do you have a beau, Tanner? Satisfy an old woman's curiosity."

Tanner's jaw tightened, and she didn't dignify her with an answer. Marana hummed happily as she walked away, the smile making her face seem ludicrously young for a moment. Just a moment. Then Tanner saw the thick blue veins clustering along her hands, and the mottled calluses from years of drawing, the shape of her pens worn permanently into her flesh. Scars of exertion. Tanner followed. Marana knocked at a sturdy door. There was a sudden stilling of the conversation, during which Marana hid her plundered bottles behind a corner, ready for later retrieval. Tanner clenched her fists, eager to make sure Marana held by her legal duty to make sure she was entitled to claim these objects - Tanner had observed enough to make a judgement, and she was almost tempted to do so, just to do something. Dishonesty... she twitched at some of the buttons running up and down the black sleeves of her blouse like prayer beads, reminding herself. Dishonesty - difficult to define reliably, flexibility often necessary. Broadly, though, dishonesty meant appropriating property while aware that it was unlawful, believed that the property would not be granted to them by the owner if the owner was aware of it being taken (including contextual circumstances), or obtained abandoned property while aware of who it belonged to, or how to discover them by taking reasonable steps. Marana was aware the bottles belonged to either the hotel or the conference - if she made efforts to clarify this, she wasn't dishonest, and would be considered to have been mistaken, easily rectified by returning the property.

A malicious thought suddenly bubbled in her mind. What would happen if Marana drank some of the wine? Now, legally, she'd have consumed the property, meaning destroyed it, stolen it, prevented restoration. But... hm, if she'd only had it a minute ago, she wouldn't have digested it very well, and could be compelled to vomit it all up, then she'd just have vandalised property by including chunks of her breakfast in the wine, and possibly damaging its quality in the process. But if the hotel was currently hosting a emetophiliac sommelier, then things could be worked out rather elegantly.

...this wasn't going in her next letter to Eygi. Tanner had limits.

Without any further ceremony, Marana pushed the door open, summoned by a vaguely querying cry. The door swung... and a wave of smoke blasted out, sinking rapidly to the ground, covering Tanner from foot to chest - her head, almost comically, poked above the heavy cloud and blinked confusedly. Inside... well. Well. There was a crowd of maybe a dozen people crammed into a room only slightly larger than the others, barely fitting them. They didn't seem to mind, of course. No beds, only couches, drawn together for people to sprawl on. Some lay on the couches, sharing them with others, others lounged on the floor and used the couches as cushions, others were slumped against the walls like idling passengers at a train station. The couch-bound ones were practically comatose. The floor-bound ones had a slight jitter to them, an uncomfortable shifting which said they knew they were close to real comfort and were eager to taste it. And the wall-bound ones were simply irritable, concealing it in a haze of booze and smoke. Some had fat, Fidelizhi-style cheroots stuffed between their lips, but most were taking samples from an ominous glass monolith in the middle of the room, filled with smoke that seemed to shimmer unpleasantly. At the base of the monolith, which almost came up to Tanner's chin, there was a compacted mass of stuff, unrecognisable and dark. Tanner hesitated.

Blinked.

And covered her mouth. While Marana dove right in, kicking her shoes off as she went, and dragging Tanner with her.

The surrealists all blinked in unison as the giantess entered.

They were an odd bunch. Tanner was feeling a whole series of subtle anti-lawfulness detectors flaring in her skin, prickling like goosebumps. A mixture of men and women, most of them slightly fleshy in the sense of the aged debauchee, their skin swollen with wine, their lips a little irritated by the smoke, their eyes squinting just a little. They were starting to sag. And yet, they'd managed to bind themselves up with fashion, and high fashion at that, combined with a degree of artistic intensity she'd never been subjected to in this sort of quantity. They sprawled in ways that made Tanner feel uncomfortable - their suits and dresses were too good for that sort of thing, they should be sitting primly, not propping their feet up and rumpling all that expensive fabric, ruining it with malodorous miasma. She placed her hands over her stomach as she usually did, crossing them protectively... before switching them to her back, forming a military-style lock which helped stiffen her back and broaden her shoulders. Gave her a more intimidating mien, in her mind. The surrealists barely reacted.

One of them spoke, a cadaverous woman with high cheekbones, red lips, and hair cut into a fashionable bob that ended in little swirls along her hairline, like inverted shark fins. Her dress was amber and glittery, swooping down to her... oh, oh, to her knees. Her knees? Tanner could see her knees, how...

How scandalous. She thought knees were a wedding-night surprise, not something you flashed to every giantess who strode into your hotel room unannounced.

"Ah... yes, it's the governor's daughter, isn't it?"

Marana grinned.

"Go and perform some mutilating performance art, darling, if you'd be so kind. I hear there's a fondness for doing the breast-stroke in pools of razor blades at the moment, it highlights industrialisation. Ought to give it a go."

The woman sniffed, and took a huff of the monolith's smoke from a long, rubber hose. A man next to her, bald, with protruding ears and sunken eyes, smiled wanly.

"Lovely to see you too, Marana. Love the giantess."

Tanner grimaced.

"Good evening."

She shot Marana a look, and Marana laughed lightly behind her hand.

"Oh, yes, may I ask - the wine bottles in the hallway, are they ours?"

A general chorus of acceptance, and Marana shot Tanner a look which screamed 'there, you excessively judgemental juggernaut'. Tanner hummed. Well, that was... nice. Good. No theft involved. Marana was nudging someone aside so she could perch archly on the arm of a couch, one leg over the other. Tanner stood around awkwardly before she managed to shuffle to the side, to a corner where no-one was nearby. The door closed. And the smoke continued to accumulate. The surrealists talked... well, they didn't often talk in languages she understood. Some of them seemed to be from very foreign parts, and insisted on speaking in their own languages, which Marana was often able to answer back to in like fashion, her accent resolutely remaining cut-glass and aristocratic. What Tanner could catch was... odd. They switched quickly from high-minded philosophical discussions which involved convoluted terminology, meandering metaphors, and references that clambered atop one another until it formed an incomprehensible mountain... before immediately and rapidly clicking into low-grade gossip, talking about scandals, most of them fleshy. Artists with perverse tastes. A woman with hair drawn up so tightly that her entire face was slightly stretched talked about being buried alive as part of an experiment to 'awaken her unconscious animus' - a rite conducted on the grounds of a friend's estate. The bald man with protruding ears, who crouched on his couch like one of Mahar Jovan's sacred gargoyles, rambled slightly about his latest bout of work, where he took mutant corpses in formaldehyde and presented them in a public square without warning - to show people what they were missing, the danger, the vitality of conflict that had sustained civilisation and yet was kept distant, like a necessary groundskeeper who was nonetheless never allowed into the house.

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Tanner had felt herself paling when he laughingly talked about the moment when one of the cases had almost cracked.

There was a man nearby Tanner, and she found herself paying more attention to him. He was tall, though not as tall as her, and had a slow, reptilian look to him, like he was slowly warming some internal source of power before he dared to do anything. Young, just a bit older than herself, and dressed all in black, save for the stark whiteness of a high-collared shirt, and the glittering of a heavy golden signet ring. His face would've been handsome, if it wasn't for his downturned, sallow lips that reminded her of unbaked dough being pounded out into a long roll, and his pale face which was blotched with little eruptions of redness here and there, and which had the clawed look of hasty shaving - his neck moved rarely, as if the skin making contact with his collar irritated him. He stood limply against the wall, one leg down on the ground, the other raised at a right angle behind it, crossing over around the knee. Sometimes, she noted, he switched the leg - only exerting one at a time. He glanced at her, his eyes wide and slightly flat, possessed of a singular dullness that made her wonder if anything was happening inside that flaxen-haired head of his.

He moved a little closer, the others in the room lapsing into yet another foreign language - Tanner couldn't say much for the surrealists, but they were startlingly well-spoken. Most of them, at least.

The man spoke.

"You look a little out of place here. If you'll pardon me saying so."

Tanner looked down at him, hands still behind her back.

"Hm."

"Judge?"

Her face was flat, and she strengthened the grip on her own hands.

"You can tell?"

"You've got that look of permanent disapproval on your face, and you keep examining people like you might need to pick them out in a courthouse soon enough. I've met enough judges, they tend to look similar in situations like this."

She tilted her head slightly, tightening her jaw.

"Well-observed. Sorry, I don't mean to be curt. I'm travelling with Ms. Marana here, and she invited me in to... have a look around."

The young man smiled slightly, his dough-like lips stretching a little further than was seemly.

"Having fun, yet?"

"I'm just here to observe, really."

"Fair enough, the party's been at a bit of a low ebb since we... well, we do workshops, see. You found us in the middle of a rest period, none of us are really performing at our best. Give us time, we'll get back into it."

"Workshops?"

"Go out into the wilderness, put on gas masks, lug rifles, and do things. We take boats, when we can. Head upriver to have a look at other things. We arrived just four days ago. First day, we arrived, dropped our bags off, then headed out into the wilderness to go and build a fire. Took some of this... interesting substance from the south, then tried to stay in the river as long as we could in our skivvies, before running off to the fire to dance around it in the nude, just to stop us catching frostbite. You should've been there, was exhilarating."

Tanner looked at him like he was about to start drooling and biting things. Which he very well might be, it was unhealthy to be in a river like that in one's undergarments.

"I see."

The dough-lipped man smiled faintly, and Tanner tried to not imagine him naked around a fire.

"Well, it's just something to do. The goal is more to slowly break down the mind through intense experiences and juxtapositions. The more we oscillate, the easier it is to break down and reach that state of automatic production which... well, you can read our literature if you like, but it's all for a purpose. Hot, cold, they're just arbitrary sensations forced onto skin, people perceive them very differently depending on what they're used to. Switch back and forth, back and forth, the body numbs and just becomes insensate, it doesn't know what it wants, so it gives up, and suddenly... clarity of thought. Nice place, isn't it? The hotel, I mean."

She barely had a moment to blink before he soldiered on.

"I mean, hotels always have a quality of the liminal, they're for us, but never for us, they're all the structures of home compressed in a fashion which is undeniably alien. You know, I usually sleep naked - helps my circulation, excellent on warm nights, encourages a fuller appreciation of the human experience - but in hotels, I simply can't manage it. I have to wear a full suit in bed. Can't abide the idea of being surrounded, exposed, in that little cocoon of constructed domesticity. I mean, the domestic is an environment which allows for the structuring of thought - as we know, most sages tend to be homeless for a reason, or at least rootless - but if you work hard enough, you can turn your home into a kind of self-mobilised dictator of thought, something which violates the usual hierarchies of space and arrangement in order to make the world more real, or at least, experienced in a more real fashion. I mean, why should a kitchen have a table? Or chairs? I eat on the floor, I lounge around on the stone and exclusively take my soup from fine champagne flutes - soup has to be cold, of course, or the flutes crack open in your hands, very painful."

He came to a sudden stop, mouth snapping like a bear-trap, and he looked up at Tanner with those flat, thoughtless eyes. Tanner looked down at him. Scrambled for thoughts, for anything. Her mind was whirling in odd directions now, everything hazy due to the smoke from the monolith. She wasn't nervous, really, just... slightly annoyed. She knew how conversations worked. She'd observed them often enough, studied them, made little templates in her mind of the rhythm, the tempo, the tone. Conversation was a vital skill, so she tried to develop it. And she knew that conversations didn't work this way.

Still.

Wait. Memory. One she had filed in a deep, dark drawer in her memory room, but once she touched the handle, it slithered outwards in a puddle of silk stitched with stars, and the feeling of the differing textures woke up the right ideas. Algi in the kaff, years and years ago, when he was still studying. An awkward lunch where Eygi hadn't been there to mediate and moderate. Her voice was low, and she kept it to the cadence of a judge - the stately rhythm, the clear pronunciations, the avoidance of weasel words.

"I heard about one philosopher who thought something similar. I can't remember the name, but... he was talking about public dining, and about how public dining is... non-civility, how you surrender autonomy when you go inside, stop engaging with our own environments, talking about hotels reminded me of-"

"Oh, yes, I've heard of him. Fusty old fruit, ghastly little reactionary."

He waved her off, silencing her for good.

"Anyway, I was finished with that. The point is, liminality, the ambiguity of the space. Regardless. I find that it allows for an awakening of the mind to higher ideas - you're uncomfortable, aware of where lines of acceptability and unacceptability, familiar and foreign are blending and fusing, the division easier to see than ever, and easier to bypass... and it allows for a certain work. Why, we've been doing these wonderful workshops where we simply... well, breaking divisions is such a vital aspect of our work, if one doesn't break them down, how can one possibly cut through the layers of rite and tradition and law which otherwise confine us so completely? Don't you think that, sometimes? I mean, here you are, surrounded by surrealists in the process of unbinding their minds from conventional reality through explorations of the liminal, and here you are in your black dress with your little golden glasses, judging us - and I can definitely see you doing it, I don't dislike you for it, of course. But surely you can see how this makes you seem rather mad, by comparison? Honestly, this might make the good subject for a little drawing, if it weren't overdone as a concept - once you fully immure someone in the revolution, it stops being a revolution, and you have to remain cutting edge, avant-garde. If we'd met a few decades ago, there might've been something."

Tanner had no contribution to this. Well, beyond a vague bellow of 'how do you pay to do this?' and 'oh, make fun of my glasses, well, I'd like to see you pass even one of the dozen or so exams I had to get through, so there, my exams give me height of a proverbial nature, in combination to the literal! Ho ho!'

A bit mean.

Then again, she was a judge. She judged things. Ask her about the law, or about eels, she was your woman. This felt like a lecture, and one she wasn't really the right audience for. It felt like he was lecturing to someone who might not actually exist. Honestly, the closest she came to philosophy was some of the higher-minded legalistic principles, which largely talked about perfect law as an idealised state, and the idea of the law acting as a kind of... alchemy, that shifted bare, unadorned, uninspiring barbarian life to good life, characterised by contentment, confidence in where one is, where one was, where one is going, and where others fit into the same pattern. And those weren't really for debating, they were just core principles which validated expounding the law as something more than a mechanism. And this dough-lipped chap was talking incessantly about... breaking down boundaries, deconstructing thought, unleashing some inner primordial self.

She looked down at him, and hummed. Nothing to add. Nothing to subtract. Let him ramble, because she had no way of engaging. She started tuning him out, only vaguely listening to his ramblings about liminal spaces, and the strange activities they'd gotten up to here. She was heading up north to make sure a settlement was being run correctly, she had practical concerns. Sure, it was nice to sit around here and get drunk and dance naked around a fire, but some people had work in the morning. She managed to ignore him slightly for a while... but he snapped her back, maybe twenty minutes later, with a pointed question.

"...and I mean, it's not like your lot is going to last for long, but I-"

Tanner blinked, a little spark of defence lighting up in her stomach.

"I'm sorry?"

"...I said your lot aren't going to last for long."

"Aren't we?"

"Of course not. The fundamental structures of society are breaking down. People are unmoored, divorced from any kind of meaning. I feel, sometimes, as though most people just walk around in a dead-eyed haze, unaware of the world, no voice in their heads, just blind acceptance of everything around them before someone lowers a bolt-gun and puts a little spike in their brains to turn them off for good. I mean, I feel as though we might've lost touch with our living values, and if we can't get in touch with those, we're not really living, not truly, not in a self-realised, self-actualised, self-aware fashion, and how can we contribute to a meaningful higher order of thought, possessed of a proper solar link to a kind of higher conception, becoming absolute individuals if we're the equivalent of... intellectual creeps, posing as it without-"

"What's your name?"

"Oh? Didn't I say? My apologies, I'm Ape."

"What?"

"Ape. I reject conventional names. Chains of thought. Mind-forged manacles. No, I aspire to apes, they seem much more content, more in-tune with living values and higher orders - they grow from psychic and spiritual soil of a richer quality. Names are just instruments of control and differentiation, they bind us to an in-group which prevents us from engaging with higher, ultimately pan-cultural truths."

He seemed rather proud of this. Tanner rather wanted to leave. She didn't feel like she had anything to offer this place, and wasn't sure if she wanted it to offer her anything.

Marana was lounging, smoking from the glass monolith, talking rapidly to a woman who was wearing a nightgown, a single very long black silk glove, and nothing else. No idea what was going on there, but she was starting to feel as if this place was fundamentally incompatible. She started tuning Ape out once he started talking about how he saw his art (which mostly consisted of abstract painting) was meant to allow for a widening of the human mind to see to a state of ultimate reality, and he was just trying to harmonise sight, sound, smell, and taste until he could really invoke a violent reaction from his subjects. Again, how did he pay to do this? Did artists just vomit money at random intervals? Did they somehow wind up immune to rent or medical costs? How could they concentrate when they were perpetually aware of how poor they were, how close to catastrophe? Oh, sure, a job was a restraint, a binding, a thing which imprisoned them, but guess what, a diving bell was a prison, didn't see the people inside complaining!

Settle down, settle down. It helped no-one to get angry.

Tanner tried to tune into what Marana was talking about, and... hm. They were talking about the infinite variety of groups the two had engaged with at some point in the past - student societies, reformed salons, the occasional cult or esoteric group, a union of mediums, various artists and their students, a reading group at a small restaurant... all sorts of little meetings and arrangements, and Tanner found herself wondering, strangely, how they managed to find the time for it. If, say, they went to one of these restaurants in order to engage in discussion, and no ideas came to them, the discussion trailed off, did they just... eat in silence? What happened if feuds broke out? How did they get schedules to align, and if they were all poor, unemployed artists, how did they afford to dine out so consistently? For a proper meeting, they'd need to reserve a table, probably order drinks regularly to stay in the good graces of the owner, just thinking about the splitting of the bill was giving her a mental hernia...

Well, in the case of feuds, presumably it led to the founding of another group entirely, no idea on the other stuff. But there were other things, things she just... how could someone just have a salon? A place where, what, you just talked about things, showed some things off? Who provided the food? Who cleaned up? Was anyone sending out questionnaires on allergies and preferences? What if one of the artists only ate lobster out of a philosophical commitment?! She just... struggled to think of the basic administration, and the sense of mystique. To her, the last time she'd felt a real air of the mystical and divine was in that tunnel underneath the inner temple, where she'd had her cheeks painted with ash. There'd been something real in that, something... hard to describe. A part of her just found it hard to imagine recreating that sense of the mystic every couple of days at a different meeting. People couldn't just talk deeply all the time, surely there were periods where no-one was saying much at all, and when moments like that happened, did they ever think the joke was going a bit too far, and they'd committed too much? Put simply, she couldn't imagine them talking about the weather. And talking about the weather had saved her life on a hundred occasions, so she had no idea how these people functioned.

And she felt like talking about any of this would make her look like an idiot who'd wildly missed the point.

A voice suddenly spoke, and for once, it wasn't Ape droning on about how he was going to marry a lobster to prove how much he was transcending boundaries and taboos. A part of her wondered, idly, if he was attracted to her. No-one else was talking to him, and he was thrusting his surrealist credentials at her like they were a well-ornamented codpiece. No, would be narcissistic to assume... anyway. She gladly turned away to see who was speaking.

The cadaverous woman from earlier, with the short bob haircut that was practically plastered to her scalp, and the slinky amber dress. Her mouth tilted sharply down at the edges, and her eyes had a dark quality to them which made them hard to read.

"Ape, stop bothering her."

Ape blinked.

"I'm not bothering her, I'm talking about-"

"You're talking about nothing. Go and smoke something, there's a free space."

Ape grunted slightly, and shuffled off unceremoniously, face stiff with annoyance. Tanner flashed the woman a small smile.

"Thank you. He was... rather trying."

"I'm aware. His art is woefully derivative, woefully. Can't imagine listening to him for longer than a little while, it's not really arguing with a person, it's arguing with a pile of assembled pamphlets."

A pause.

"I do apologise. He's... well, sometimes one feels like the only real person here, and everyone else is simply acting out the part of the good, quirky surrealist. I mean, Ape just does things based on how good they'll sound at the next little meeting, and that fellow over there is just here because we provide good narcotics. So hard to find authenticity these days, real authenticity. Mahar Jovan, yes?"

Tanner nodded.

"Poor city, so stiff. And Fidelizh is worse, they practically make pretence a cultural feature there - that's where I'm from, don't try and spy a god on my back, I shucked them off years ago and don't intend to replace them. Ghastly superstition - you'd think they'd try and engage with something higher, but no, it's all so... domestic. Because of course the gods, beings of interminable thought and power, are very interested in your choice of coat. You're a judge, I assume you studied there, I hope you didn't embrace their ghastly business."

Tanner hesitated, remembering her lovely, lovely amber buttons. And they were lovely! And a man with an orange scarf had once helped her find the inner temple, and Eygi had been so open with her due to incarnating the right god, and... anyway. The woman seemed less incline to ramble endlessly.

Seemed. Which meant a conversation was in order.

"...may I ask a question?"

"You may."

"What do you do?"

She seemed slightly offended at the question.

"What do I do? I dream. I create. I slowly get in touch with ultimate reality in the form of dreams and unconscious perceptions. I do what surrealists do, on account of being a surrealist."

Tanner brought her hands around to the front, wringing them slightly to generate a bit of luck, aware that this pose made her look like... like that comical creature from the exhibition in Fidelizh, the pangolin. That was it, made her look like a big old pangolin.

"But... do you paint, or...?"

"Painting requires too much deliberate thought, it destroys unconscious process, and ergo, any hint of super-reality."

Dismissed the question, flashing Tanner a look of mild annoyance at being given so prosaic a query.

"...so, no sculpting?"

"No sculpting, no drawing, no inking, no prose, no poetry, no sophisticated choreography, no murals, no collages, no plays, no theatrophone dreck, no monologues, and no odious little stunts."

"...but what do you do?"

"Interpretive dance. I had a small exhibition in Mahar Jovan two years ago where I was utterly nude and smeared in paint. Quite fantastic, though I could only manage the correct chemical regimen for a week of performances, after that point I developed the most unsightly ulcers, had to cancel the rest."

She said all of this mildly, and Tanner had the sudden image of this woman, who looked like a skeleton dipped in wax and draped in a dress, spinning around while completely naked, mouth frothing with blood from her ulcers, jerking like she was in the middle of a fit, while a bunch of people in excellent suits nodded with absolute seriousness.

Tanner hummed.

"May I ask another question?"

"If you must."

She wanted to ask how much money that performance actually made, or how she got a deposit together for a theatre, or who came to visit, or how she coped with the paralysing terror of no-one coming, or how she mustered up the will to perform alone, naked, while dancing randomly, when Tanner had almost passed out when she had a few prescribed lines to perform in the background. How did she do it? Where did she get this confidence from?! But... no, no. Rude. Something else.

"I met... well, a man from Fidelizh, but he moved to Mahar Jovan. He's a monarchy restorationist, I was just wondering-"

The cadaverous woman erupted with sharp laughter.

"Oh, those clowns? Absurd. Not remotely practical. They love talking about spirituality and the regaining of some taproot into the unfathomable source of human thought, but all they really manage is some kind of unsightly political group which rambles a lot, puts up ugly posters, and promptly does nothing at all. There is nothing, my dear, more sad in all the world than a political group which no-one listens to, it's a hub of unappealing melancholia, and I've no time for it. I mean, they can't expect to change anything by doing their sort of business, passing our pamphlets, giving speeches in parks, sending petitions around for no-one to sign. Have you ever been to a failing political group? They're loathsome, full of this small-minded zealotry which makes me feel like they're all rampant onanists who smack themselves in the face after each successful release. A bunch of balding men sitting around in a little meeting room, waiting for the single female member to show up so they can promptly leer guiltily. It's always the same, the sad old men, the sad middle-aged men, the virginal young men, and the two females - the ancient secretary who bakes terrible cakes and the young debutante that everyone ogles. I might appreciate their spirit of change, resisting this tide of modern drudgery that's oh-so-eager to crush the human soul, but I do wish they'd be less unrelentingly pathetic about it all."

Tanner stared for a second at the woman.

"Alright."

Going to memorise that speech. Just in case she met Algi again. Just to see what he thought about it.

...was his present flame one of the 'two females'?

Was he despised by the other neo-monarchists for taking the only eligible female in the group?

Goodness. The world was such a complicated place, and she was quite glad to reduce it down to laws. The cadaverous woman sniffed sharply, like a questing mole finding a likely-looking worm.

"And that's that. No more on those cretins. Ah, my calm is shattered just thinking about them, my mind is reeling just by contacting such a depth of moronicism. The world is such a bore - I'm going for another smoke, would you like to join in?"

"No, thank you."

"It's good product, I assure you. We have some herbs from the south, the west... there's tobacco, too, if it helps. And we've even managed to capture some of those fumes from the titan by the river, keep it in canisters. Rather exhilarating, we're intending to release it into the room so we can dance around in it again."

Again, the word 'dance' - what did they mean, dance? Tanner thought dancing was... well, there was music, maybe choreography, something along those lines. She just found it hard to imagine someone saying 'let's dance', and then everyone stands up and, what, whirls? Pirouettes? Does numerous backflips? She could imagine them standing up, could imagine them sitting down again, but the middle portion of the equation was a complete blank, how did people dance without training? How did they dance without, say, having some kind of canon to look at and refer to, even just to rebel against it?

This was why she didn't go to those dancing halls like some of the other students, she didn't have the time to take the prerequisite classes.

Time passed.

She made her excuses.

They begged her to stay, despite the only people interacting with her being an insufferable bore and a very scary woman with weird hair.

She made her excuses more firmly, and left. Polite as possible. Always courteous. Always-

Completely bloody exhausted.

Hadn't had a thing to drink, and... sod it. She was a member of this party, she'd been here long enough, suffered too many people talking about rebelling against boundaries and bypassing reality. Destroying tradition and taboo and all that business. Sod it, she wanted something to drink, just to clear the stench of smoke out of her nose. Where was the spirituality in just blazing your brains out with some sort of herb, what was the point? She didn't feel like she could debate them, she didn't feel like she wanted to debate them, she just felt like there was a fundamental incompatibility. She felt annoyed, in short, as she grabbed an unattended bottle of wine and headed off, sealing the bottle away in a brown paper bag she was able to find. She was seemly, she didn't drag naked bottles of wine around, and she certainly wouldn't drink directly from it. Intended to head back to the boat and pour herself a glass, just one, as a nightcap. She felt stuffy and grumpy, felt like she'd come within an inch of being outright ridiculed, and just...

Anyway.

She was ready to go to a boring old colony in the north, where people thought about practical things, like snow, and law, and trout. Tanner Magg, she found, just didn't get art. And she didn't particularly want to. All the talk about... breaking boundaries, unwinding restraints, it just made her think that... well... a child could be unrestrained, and that was acceptable, they were still learning, and they weren't going to hurt anyone. She moved into the lobby, continuing her thoughts, lips moving in time with them - like she was rehearsing a play that would never be performed. A child could be unrestrained, and those rather flabby artists up there, maybe they could be unrestrained too - because what were they going to do? Once she reached the lobby, she could hear none of them, they were utterly silent, sealed behind layers of walls in their little smoke-room. She almost felt like... the only reason they could talk like they did, act like they did, was because they were toothless. She was a judge, she dealt with more practical matters - that cadaverous woman put on a play where she danced around naked, and Tanner had probably meaningfully affected more lives with a dryly executed judgement. Restraint was necessary when under conditions of responsibility, reality, and removing those restraints was only really permissible with someone who was harmless.

And she already knew they'd respond immaculately, with a proper speech about how she was wrong and woeful, how her entire mindset was warped from the beginning, how she was trying to philosophically commit suicide and abrogate all responsibility to broader systems and roles, how she was just afraid and if she ran around in a field naked for a while she'd become a more complete human being... her jaw tightened. Silly. All of it. Ape had slightly repulsed her with his constant showing off, the cadaverous woman had just criticised everything put in front of her like a spoiled child, and the rest... Tanner tried to adjust her golden glasses, remind herself of the upshot. They were fine, let them do what they wanted. She had no reason to engage with them, and didn't particularly want to. She had her books, her law, her job. Let them have their hotel room filled with smoke, in this dead building with brown carpets and damp-stained walls.

So what if they could manage to just do this sort of thing, emanating acts she couldn't dream of accomplishing. So what if they'd arranged a conference at a random place between participants from multiple cities and had managed it without a hitch. Really, she was impressed at their facility for organisation, very admirable. So what if all she could gesture about was 'but I know more about the law than you do', aware that they'd just laugh off that knowledge as time wasted. It was one thing to meet people you were incompatible with, it was another thing entirely to meet people who exceeded you through that incompatibility. Like being a fish, seeing mammals prance around on land. Sure, she could breathe water, and if they dove into her pond she'd mess them up good, but...

...well, she liked the look of running around mindlessly in a green field. Just maybe.

Marana's voice called out, suddenly. Tanner's jaw tightened further. Right. Marana, the one who'd dragged her here seemingly as a kind of freak-show act, meant to be surprising for surprise's own sake.

"I say, hold on!"

She was trotting downstairs rapidly, her shoeless feet utterly silent on the ancient carpets... before turning to a light pitter-patter as she reached the naked stone.

"Hold on! Hold on!"

Tanner looked at her through narrowed eyes.

"I'm sorry for leaving so abruptly. I just felt like getting some sleep."

"Me too."

Tanner froze.

"Excuse me?"

"Yes, definitely, one hundred percent. Back to the boat."

Her face was slightly flushed.

"You... came here for this conference, surely-"

"Forgot how rampantly, unapologetically odious some of them are. They're reminding me of my uncle all of a sudden. I just thought, well, I'll drop out tonight, maybe pop back tomorrow morning, see if my mood changes - I'm always a grumpy little so-and-so when I've just finished a journey, I grow too used to my own thoughts, start thinking that everyone thinks the way I do. Just need to resolve imagination and reality, should be right as rain."

She spoke too much.

Tanner hummed.

And reached out a hand to take one of the milk-crates of wine, then the other.

"Come on."

Marana smiled, and there was something... not quite her in it. Something different.

"Sounds wonderful."