Bellis told him that the letters were instructions, orders, usually to make the sound that started their own name. She wrote her own first name, separating each letter from its neighbors by an inch or more. Then she had him obey the orders they gave him.

She waited while he faltered through the buh and eh and luh luh ih suh. Then she brought the letters closer together and had him obey them-still slowly-again. And once more.

Finally she closed the characters up into a word and told him to repeat his exercise quickly, to do what the letters told him ("Look at them, so close together") in one quick run.

Buh eh luh luh ih suh.

(Confused by the double lingua-alveolar, as she had expected.)

He tried once more, and halfway through he stopped and began to smile at the word. He gave her a look so full of delight that it brought her up short. He said her name.

After she had showed him the rudiments of punctuation she had an idea. She walked with him through ships’ bowels, past sections on science and humanities where scholars read hunkered beside oil lamps and little windows, then out between buildings in the drooling rain, over the bridge to the Corrosive Memory. It was a galleon at the outer edge of Grand Gears Library. It contained children’s books.

There were very few readers on the children’s deck. The shelves that surrounded them bristled with garish colors. Bellis ran her fingers along their spines as she walked, and Shekel gazed at them with a deep curiosity. They stopped at the very back of the ship, studded with portholes and listing quite sharply away from them, covered by an incline of books.

"Look," Bellis said. "Can you see?" She indicated the brass label. "Rag. A. Moll. Ragamoll. These are books in our language. Most of them’ll come from New Crobuzon."

She plucked a couple and opened them. She froze for a fraction of a second, too quickly for Shekel to notice. Handwritten names peered up at her from the inside front pages, but these were scrawled in crayon, in infants’ hands.

Bellis turned the pages quickly. The first book was for the very young, large and carefully hand-colored, full of pictures in the simplistic Ars Facilis style that had been in vogue sixty years previously. It was the story of an egg that went to battle against a man made of spoons, and won, to become mayor of the world.