“Glinda, you’re the sweetest peach in the fruit bowl, but I don’t believe you understand the aquifers in Oz and their effect on riparian systems.” Cherrystone took several lettuce leaves with his fingers and dumped them on the tablecloth. He mounded up one leaf higher than the other. “Look. The Great Kels of the Vinkus over here, right? And the lower Madeleines over here. Emerald City between them.” (He put a radish, with its singlefringe dome, in the middle.) “And the three great rivers? Let’s see.” Several of the longer green beans. “The Vinkus, like so. The Gilikin River. Munchkin River. More or less. Do you see?”

“Yes, and that little woggle-bug on the radish is the emperor of al it can survey. Traper, I did attend primary school.” Did his knee touch hers under the table? In the act of leaning forward as if captivated, she grazed his knee glancingly and then shifted her leg away, just in case. “Go on.”

“The Gilikin River, though long, is shalow. The river water leaches easily into the landscape. Gilikin is the Oz of which the poet speaks—‘land of green abandon, land of endless leaf.’ The river makes Gilikin into the kind of pretty picture of Oz that I expect to think of on my deathbed.”

“How absurd. I shal be thinking of my portfolio, and if I’ve adequately kept dividends from grasping hands. Go on.”

“The Munchkin River is the longest, but the Munchkins have hundreds of years of experience in irrigation by canal and aqueduct. You’ve seen them?”

“Of course I have. Don’t patronize me. Cross-ditching, they cal it.”

He raised an eyebrow. Score for her. “The point is, Munchkinlanders use their water wisely—upstream. They bleed it al along its length. So the Munchkin River, like the Gilikin, gives little more than lip service to Restwater as it debouches therein. And the EC to the north long ago overwhelmed the United Gilikin Canal Company’s capacity to supply it. Here’s my main point, Glinda. Your lovely lake caled Restwater is replenished daily by the water that courses down from the snowy peaks and wintry ice packs of the Great Kels. Every single peak of which looms solidly in Loyal Oz. The shortest but the healthiest, the fiercest, the wettest of the rivers of Oz is the Vinkus. And as it runs between banks of hard fleckstone ten thousand years old, it doesn’t leach into and make fertile the parched land. Indeed, the flat through which it passes is known as the Disappointments. The land is poor and affords farmers little more than a sulen, resentful crop of whatever is planted.”

“I always thought the Disappointments was the name of some sort of old-age hostelry.”