For their own part, Eeferi remains available to answer questions or provide suggestions.

Sometimes, they turn their visage to the sky, and wonder.

The discussion meanders back and forth. Mostly, they try to figure out how any potential immortality power ought to operate. There's a certain amount of contention between the people who want to come up with a wording that renders death impossible, and the people who want to come up with a wording that makes it reversible.

At one point a young man with close-cropped black hair leans back and regards Eeferi for a moment.

"What do you think, Eeferi? I'm guessing that genies have the can't-die kind of immortality; does first-hand experience give you any insights?" he asks.

"I think .. one should take care to never be trapped in an inescapable situation.  An unconditional immortal could be in enough pain, whether mental, physical, or emotional, to want to be mortal again - and also be incapable of making it so.  The freedom to leave any circumstance, no matter how apparently desirable, is one many of my past Masters have foolishly squandered."

That swings things in favor of the "reversible" crowd, and the discussion shifts to what the mechanism should be like.

"... so it can't just be one person with a power, right, because they need to be able to come back."

"But having a transmissible power in the first wish didn't exactly work correctly."

"Wasn't that just because it isn't safe to turn non-prophets into genies?"

"I don't think we know that — we just know that it was safe to turn one person into a genie."

They toss around a few more ideas, including having special resurrection rocks, having a transmissible resurrection power, having people just reappear, and other ideas along those lines. One by one, people head away to bed, until it's just Eeferi and Gamesa.

Gamesa is silent for a minute, collecting his thoughts.

"What kind of place do you want to live, once you're free?" he asks. "I mean," he gestures at Eeferi's illusory building. "You could live wherever you wanted, in whatever kind of house. So where would you choose?"

"Everywhere and nowhere.  I want to explore.  I want to perceive the stars.  I want to know every name and every face and never let them go.  I don't know who I am without these bindings upon me."

".. I want to know what its like, to not desperately want what you can't get."

Eeferi lightly chuckles.  "You know .. I think a good home neither traps you within nor disappears when you're distracted."

Gamesa leans back against one of the benches.

"That makes sense," Gamesa agrees. "I can't imagine what I'd do if I had to pay constant attention to keep our house standing. Things are better when they last. Do you know, I want to go and see the Archive some day? When you're traveling around, you should stop by and see it. They say it's as big as a whole city, just filled up with books. Years and years of history, stretching back to the first farmers. Great stone buildings, out in the desert where there's no risk of water ruining them. And the Archivists are always accepting new books and filing them and transcribing old books before they are lost."

"Well, I know now.  It sounds .. like something I would enjoy seeing.  I hope you get to see it and it fulfills what you need from it."

"I wonder how it would change, if the Archivists had Wishes?  Would they want to be quick enough to never miss a book?  Would they want it to fill itself?  What of indestructible tomes, or knowledge not from this world?  What of hidden knowledge, secrets that the keepers do not want shared?  It sounds .. I seem to struggle to find the words that seem accurate to how I feel of it."

"Well, I'm not an Archivist, so I can't know for sure. But ... the way the traders and messengers tell it, their mission is that our knowledge should only grow, and not be lost," Gamesa muses. "So I bet they would love indestructible books. But that's not the whole thing, right? Because the books do nobody any good if nobody can read them, or if nobody is willing to write their secrets down."

He waves a hand vaguely.

"So there's more to it than just accumulating books. You can send the Archivists a book, along with a letter explaining how secret it is, and they'll keep it secret for as long as you ask them to in the letter, before putting it into circulation. And they don't let anyone see the secret books until the right time. It sounds counterproductive — why would a society dedicated to letting people know things keep secrets? — but if they didn't do that, and if they didn't make sure everybody knew they did that, they'd lose a lot more books in the long run."

"Following the whims of others so that your own may be followed .. experience tells me it's doomed to failure, but hope strives to believe otherwise."

Gamesa shrugs.

"They've managed so far. But ... that's part of what is beautiful about it, and why I want to see it. Without wishes, nothing lasts, save those things that we put in the effort to make last. So the Archive only remains because so many generations of people have heard the story of it and said 'yes, that is a worthy thing for us to do'."

"... I don't know what things are going to be like tomorrow," he confides after a moment. "We spend so much time just maintaining what we have ... I don't know what we're going to do next. Maybe we'll all go traveling, and the village will be abandoned."

"You could bring it with you .. if you wanted.  There isn't actually .. there isn't a rule that exploration must be alone."

Gamesa boggles for a moment.

"Oh! Pick it up and take it with us? Eeferi, that's a brilliant idea!"

He starts thinking about how that would work.

"I guess we wouldn't really be pressed for time, so we wouldn't need to keep an itinerary. We could get to everywhere that someone wanted to see, eventually. Have you seen traveling villages before? I'm imagining a sort of giant cart, but maybe we want it to fly, actually, so that things on the ground don't get squished ..."

"Usually its a city, a castle, or a boat that flies.. though I see no reason a village couldn't fly too."

"That would be cool. Imagine if everywhere did that, though — how would you find anything, when villages can all take to the sky and come down elsewhere, like flocking birds?"

He yawns.

"... I am going to be a mess by dawn. Would you be willing to mention the flying villages idea to some of the others in the morning? I don't know how many people will want to go for it, but I would hate for the idea to be lost just because I sleep through the morning."

"Perhaps the Archivists could coordinate between the various villages."

"I have no qualms doing so.  Rest well."