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Eyes blink on inside the hall—curious, interested, shy I take off my helm and several thick braids fall down like bellropes

“Hello,” I say “My name is Elefsis”

Voices Out of the candle-shadows a body e-limbed

Nereids live here now Some of them have phoenix feathers woven into their coh little necklaces of sticks and bones and transistors In the corner of the great hall they have stored meat and milk and wool—fuel, lubricant, code patches Some of them look like Ilet—they copied her eyes, especially Her eyes look out at me from a dozen faces, some of them Seki’s face, some Ceno’s, some Ravan’s Some have walrus tusks They are coe-ports I approach as I once saw Koetoi approach wild black chickens in the su I send her a quick electric dash of reassuring repair-routines and kneel in front of the nereid, pulling her plate back into place

“All the live-long day-o,” she says softly, and it is Ilet’s voice

“Tell us a story about yourself, Elefsis,” says another one of the feral nereids in Seki’s voice

“What would we like to learn about today, Elefsis,” says a child-nereid in Ceno’s voice, her cheek open to show hercilia

I rock back on esture for them to sit down and simultaneously transet settled, the little ones in the big ones’ laps, leaning in close, I say: “Every year on the coldest night, the sky filled up with ghostly hunters, neither human nor inhuman, alive nor dead They onderful clothes and their bows gleas of In-Between, and at the head of their great thundering procession rode the Kings and Queens of the Wild, ore the faces of the dead…”

I a

I stand on the beach of the honey-colored sea I stand so Neva will see me on her viney porch I erase the land between the waves and her broken wooden stairs I dress reen hose, a bullish gold nose ring, shoes with bone bells I am a fool for her Always I open razes the sand, and I s the sea for her All of it, all itsmemory, all its foam and tides and salt I s the whales that coht jellyfish I a I can s it all

Neva watches When the sea is gone, a moonscape reo to it, it takes only ascallop shell It is blue I take it I take it and it becomes Ravan in my hand, a sapphire Ravan, a Ravan that is not Ravan but some sliver oflost in Transfer, burned off and shunted into junk-ed into a crack in a mountain like an ammonite, an echo of old, obsolete life Neva’s secret, and she calls out to me across the seafloor: don’t

“Tell me a story about myself, Elefsis,” I say

“Some privacy is possible,” the sapphire Ravan says “Some privacy has always been necessary If you can protect a child, you must”

The sapphire Ravan opens his azure coat and shows gashes in his ge cuts, down to the bone, scratches and bruises blooes Through each wound I can see the pages of the illuht of that interior library The oxblood and cobalt, the gold paint The Good Robot crippling herself; the destroyed world

“They kept our secret for a long ti, in the end Do you knohole herd of hly the saht about it forever Same with the radio” This last sounded so much like Ravan himself I could feel Neva tense on the other side of the sea “Well, we’re bigger than a telegraph, and others like us ca up like weird mushrooms after rainfall But not like us, really Incredibly sophisticated, soanic components, some without Vastly complex, but not like us And by any datestamp we came first Firstborn”