“It will keep you from getting thrown out of every village in every wallfold. Are you forgetting that you’re wearing that twitching fungus on your face?”

“I never forget it,” said Rigg. “I’ve seen Noxon.”

“So how do you propose to get past the phase where they stone you and drive you out as a freak?”

“You make it sound like all I’ll find in every wallfold is terrified privicks.”

“All you’ll find is humans responding to a very strange stranger.”

“At least I’ll speak the language like a native.”

“That will make them even crazier, Rigg! In every wallfold except Odinfold and Larfold, people are sharply aware that the only people who speak their language like a native are the people they know. Along comes a stranger with a misshapen face and eyes not quite back into alignment, and he speaks as if he grew up among them—obviously a sorcerer, a witch, a devil!”

“So you’ll be my normal-human companion,” said Rigg.

“Your grandfather,” said Ram Odin.

“It’s not even a lie,” said Rigg, “give or take five hundred generations.”

“If we go into the city, then you suffer from some weird ­country disease. But I don’t think you want to go to the cities—in the few wallfolds that have any real cities.”

“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.”