Somewhere else is a field of lavender, which looks ordinary except for the strange curvature of the ground out at the horizon, the larger-than-usual size of the sun, the... extra sun... a bit further off... the six visible moons with visible greenery and water and civilization on them...

They stare around in bewilderment for a moment.

"I'd suspect this of being an opium dream, if I ever touched the stuff."

"No, Watson, this is definitely real, albeit strange. It would appear that the snake has transported us elsewhere. Perhaps whoever cultivates this field will be able to shed some light on the how and why." 

There's someone over there, picking the lavender and putting it in a basket! She's wearing a nicely tailored tunic and hose out of hard-wearing cloth and has her hair cut short.

They make their way over to her.

"Pardon me, miss, but I'm afraid we're rather lost. One minute we were being pursued through a London alley by an exotic serpent, the next we were in this field."

She looks at them and says something in an unrecognizable language.

They try French, German, Hindi, and Latin, getting increasingly less confident.

None of these work. Eventually she points in a direction with a helpful expression on her face.

Then they'll smile gratefully and head that way.

There is a little village there a mile on, with a few dozen houses and a handful of other buildings, in an unrecognizable architectural style.

They proceed to the one that has the most people going in and out.

That would be this one with the big sign out front with unrecognizable characters - too many and too complicated to be an alphabet. People look at them with interest but not alarm.

Holmes can deduce plenty about these people's occupations, pastimes, and level of material wealth, but none of that gets him any further on the language or on what happened to him and Watson. It's fascinating and troubling in equal measure. They head into the building and look for, if not someone who doesn't seem busy, at least someone who isn't actively going somewhere else.

There are offices; this one has the door a bit open and a man inside. He looks up at them when they approach and asks a question.

They run through the languages they know again, trying to ascertain if the man speaks any of them or recognizes the phrase "British consulate".

Nope! The guy looks increasingly intrigued as they try things and none of them land.

Watson has the most experience communicating across language barriers; he steps to the front when it becomes clear they're going to have to start from scratch. He points at himself and Holmes and gives their names.

The office fellow is called "Gorin", apparently. He calls in a young woman from across the hall, who wants to hear all their languages again and try some of hers - she knows a lot.

Not only do they not speak any of those, they don't even recognize any. Not really a surprise considering the extra suns and moons, but still strange. Watson starts soliciting vocabulary in mime.

The woman waves a hand and turns to the man. They converse for a bit. Eventually the man looks through his files and finds one he's looking for, and hands it to the woman, who meanwhile has introduced herself as "Serca". Serca flips through the file, more as though reminding herself what's in there than as though reading it for the first time, and then steps back from everyone and closes her eyes. The man goes into a closet and opens a box and pulls out an entire outfit like the one Serca's wearing.

They watch this procedure with interest.

Over the course of the next minute and a half, there's a shimmer in the air, gradually getting denser and taking shape and finally materializing in the form of a teenage girl, stark naked, who accepts the clothes Gorin hands her and puts them on in a businesslike fashion. "Well, hello there," she says to Holmes and Watson in perfectly comprehensible English, matching Holmes's accent with eerie precision, though her voice is a charming bell-like feminine one. She puts her hair into a sort of knot that doesn't need an accessory to hold up at least temporarily and pats it into place.

"Truly there are more things in heaven and earth," mutters Watson. "Pleased to meet you; I am Doctor John Watson and this gentleman is Sherlock Holmes."

"Miriqua. Charmed," says, apparently, Miriqua. "Welcome to Sorvay Village, Springround. What brings you here?"

"The purest accident, I'm afraid. We appeared in a field outside this city with no knowledge of where we are, except that it's very far away from anywhere we've heard of."

"What round are you from?"

"We're from London, in England, on the planet Earth."

"And who made you?"

"We were not made by that fascinating process that produced yourself just now; we were born, spent time as children, and grew into adults."

"Born?" asks Miriqua.

He is not giving this talk to a total stranger who came into existence less than two minutes ago. "I don't know how much of the world you're aware of yet, but it seems a fair amount. Are you familiar with animals, and how they bear young?"

"Yes. Are you saying you're animals?"

"Biologically speaking, yes, but we are also reasoning creatures. I take it your people are unable to propagate themselves in that manner and instead use the mechanism we just saw?"

"That's right. That's how it's been on every - planet we've encountered."

"You've mastered interplanetary travel, then? Back home it's still in the realm of fantastical literature."

She blinks at them. "...really? You must be astonishingly primitive if you can't build that tall - or is it the sails?"

"It's thousands of miles to our moon, and we can't build anywhere near that tall. What do you mean by sails? Between the Earth and other bodies is an airless void; do your sails catch the luminiferous ether?"

"You seem to be confused. Did a child make you?"

"No. We were born, as we said. It is only that things here are very different from where we come from. Now, how do people here get from one planet to another?"

"They climb up somewhere high and sail, or fan, themselves to the next round."

Watson looks at Holmes as if to say, Is she quite sane? Holmes smiles and says, "Fascinating. I would love to see a demonstration."

She blinks at them, then shrugs and turns to the other two and talks to them in their language, then turns back and says, "There isn't a sail in town at the moment, and even if there were, it's not something they want to do just to demonstrate to - you." Maybe they said something less polite than a pronoun that she's rendering that way.

"Oh, if it's not a routine matter we don't want to put you to the trouble. Anyway, it's more urgent to discuss either returning us to where we came from or, if that is as infeasible as it seems, we would appreciate advice on obtaining lodging and employment."

"If you really - came here from somewhere else the way you've described - I don't think anyone here will have the first idea how to undo that. What are you good at?"

"I am a consulting detective; people come to me with mysteries to solve or strange occurrences to explain and I investigate them. Watson here is a medical man and also helps in my investigations."

"This is a farming round and it already has a doctor. You might be better served catching a sail to a city round."

"Eminently reasonable. How does one go about doing that? Also, you are currently the only person with whom we share a language. Can we prevail upon you to teach us the lingua franca of the nearest city?"

"I was planning to accompany you until you knew the language," she says. "This village isn't the best place to catch a passenger sail, it mostly hauls cargo. We can walk to the larger village and catch one to New Riverround, that's the closest city."

"Capital! We are ready to set off whenever you are."

"Immediately works for me. It's a walk of seven miles."

"Lead on, then."

She speaks again to the two people in the office, who nod, and then she leads them out of the building, out of the village, and along a dirt road between fields of wheat. "If you are really from somewhere else, or are badly made, you might find that your knowledge doesn't hold up as well as you expect it to, but New Riverround is a civilized place, you'll be able to get along and find something useful to do even if you can't be a detective and a doctor in particular."

"Yes, I rather expect I'll have some learning to do before I can practice on people who appear from nowhere without the normal mode of reproduction."

"Observation and deduction are the same everywhere. For example, I can tell that your creators had already been planning to make you, but did so ahead of schedule to take advantage of their ability to create you fluent in our language without having to study it."

"Then perhaps you'll adapt well."

"Yes, Watson and I are resourceful sorts." They follow her along, watching their surroundings even more attentively than usual.

It's fields. They're going to have to walk for hours. Halfway along the road, there is a food cart; Miriqua asks if they're hungry.

They had just finished chasing a criminal through a bunch of alleys before the snake got them; they're both quite definitely hungry. 

Miriqua reads the menu for them and gets herself a giant fried dumpling from the smiling man who operates the food cart. There are three dumpling fillings (spicy potato, chicken, and vegetable cheese) and also salads with cheese and chicken on them, and plain flatbread.

Miriqua's dumpling does not appear to cost any money. She doesn't mention prices and the menu is not organized chartlike in a way that could harbor any.

Watson gets spicy potato; Holmes gets chicken. Once they've received their dumplings, Watson asks their guide, "Say, how is this gentleman being compensated for his work?" He bites into his dumpling and adds, "And excellent work it is, too."

"This is a civilized round, Doctor Watson," says Miriqua. "We don't use money to make people do things they weren't made for."

"So you assure that all necessary work is done by making sure there are people with the ability and disposition to do it. How very direct." He is also enjoying his dumpling.

"Yes. Of course they have to use money anywhere they have a king making a new concubine every week with no consideration for how she'll contribute when he gets bored of her," says Miriqua, "but we have strict rules about that here. The only reason no one's being prosecuted for making you two without authorization and consultation is that there haven't been any approaches to the round from somewhere this language has been heard of. There's also two of you, which, if you're telling the truth about having appeared together, would imply two makers."

"Also, we have memories of existing somewhere else and knowing each other before we appeared here, which I take it is not common among newly created people."

"It's not the right way to do it, but it's not proof."

"I imagine it must be rather shocking to come into existence and discover one's memories are fabrications."

"That's why it's illegal to make people with memories they think are real."

"A very reasonable law. Do you have much crime? I imagine most law-abiding citizens would prefer to only make more of the same."

"Well, sometimes children make people, or people make children who don't grow up as they were originally envisioned - over time any flaw in the original construction will become manifest, and even very well made children are often very different in adulthood."

"Now that, at least, is a commonality between this world and what we're used to. Human nature is a fickle beast everywhere, eh Watson?"

"Indeed."

"So typically people create adults unless they very much want to raise a child, and the design is discussed extensively, and new states of the art are often brought into practice as we learn more. One useful thing about children who grow up unpredictably is that they can teach us new things about ways humans can be, which we didn't guess before or weren't sure would turn out well."

"What are some recent . . . innovations of that nature?"

"The most recent one I'm aware of is that people can respond in different ways to coffee and it's now standard practice to make them efficacious for everyone in case it's ever necessary. Perhaps more interesting is the older discovery that people can vary in how much sleep they need, so now everyone new needs less."

"What an interesting world to be a doctor in," Watson says, smiling and shaking his head.

"It makes for quite a lot of notes you need to look over on a new person to be sure they're up to spec. You shouldn't make any yourselves."

"Wouldn't dream of it. I wouldn't know where to begin, in a myriad of ways."

"I'm pleased to hear it."

Neither of them have much response to that; they just keep walking and watching whatever there is to see along the way.

When they no longer seem to be steering the conversation to their own points of interest, Miriqua summarizes the laws of the civilization spanning the nearest rounds - commonsense things like not murdering, previously mentioned things like not making people without proper procedure, and a few oddball things like not taking more food than you're actually going to eat and not misrepresenting your skills and interests.

None of that sounds like they're liable to get arrested over a misunderstanding, though they'd like to know exactly how soon you have to eat the food after you take it.

"What sort of government enforces these laws? Is it elected, or does each ruler create their own successor?"

"You don't actually have to eat it all, if you bring home a head of lettuce to make salad and only get around to half of it before it goes bad you won't be in trouble. It's even all right to take an extra sack of grain in case you get sick any time in the next centispan and don't have a chance to go get groceries then. What you can't do is take the abundance created by the civilized and responsible creation of proles and then turn it into trade goods with foreign rounds, or set yourself up as a purveyor to look productive when you're only handing out what you took in the first place," Miriqua explains. "Take food for yourself, for your houseguests, for the week or the month, just don't hoard it or sell it."

"The people made for ruling discuss the traits of the next generation of rulers whenever it's time to add to it, and then they come to a consensus on their traits and create new ones. It's not a single ruler; if that single ruler got sick we'd be in trouble, and they don't make power-hungry despots who are going to have a hard time sharing and delegating authority."

"A sort of hereditary parliament. Fascinating! If the rulers cannot reach a consensus on some question of policy, what person or procedure is the final arbiter?"

"They then vote, with the newer members so long as they are in good standing having more highly weighted votes as the senior members should expect their interests and values to have been represented in how they were made, and as the new members will have had less time to drift from their design."

Nod nod. More walking, and looking around, and listening to Miriqua explain whatever she feels like explaining.

Eventually they reach another village on the farm round, this one slightly bigger. People are coming and going on bicycles in all directions. There is a tall building with a pulley system for a large manually operated elevator on one side; at the top, apparently weightless, several strange boatlike contraptions with large sails fanning out from their bodies are docked.

Watson gestures at the elevator and the ships. "So this is how we'll get to the other round? How curious."

"Is it? How would you do it?"

"I didn't intend to compare it to any other method; as I've said, the planet where I lived until appearing here is too large for any such thing. Is there air everywhere, or are there areas of very thin or absent atmosphere between rounds?"

"There's air between rounds, and wind, which allows for sailing. It looks like a clear day, fortunately."

"Yes, I expect the view will be quite something."

"Does the city I mentioned sound like a good place for you, shall I go ahead and book passage?"

"I expect so." "Yes, please do."

And she goes and performs whatever nonmonetary ritual is associated with this, and comes out again. "I can begin to teach you the basics of the local vernacular if you would like while we're waiting to board."

"Yes, that would be excellent."

Miriqua starts. She doesn't introduce writing at this time; all the signage they can see is in the very complicated not-Chinese-but-about-that-involved character set.

They're both very attentive and one of them has an eidetic memory; they learn fast.

Then soon they'll be able to introduce themselves, ask for directions, indicate which items they want in points of distribution, ask for help, and ask people to wait for their translator.

All useful things to know! Holmes starts deducing the occupations or lack thereof of people nearby and using them as a springboard to solicit more vocabulary.

She describes and translates those occupations when she can confirm or refute his guesses.

He's right more often than he's wrong but less often than he's used to, at least in part because he's learning so much from the low-confidence guesses. There are occupations here he's never heard of! It's pretty exciting. 

For example, that man is a pilot! He ushers them up the building toward their sailer and has them strap into seats and, when Miriqua murmurs to him, provides paper bags that can be tied over their faces to prevent vomit from escaping into the cabin if they have trouble with the low gravity.

Neither of them turn out to have trouble with the low gravity! They just grin at each other a lot and crane their necks around to admire the view and generally push the boundaries of British dignity.

And over the course of the next couple of hours they approach New Riverround, which is indeed possessed of small rivers on its surface. The sail is tied on at the top of a New Riverround docking tower, and they and all the other passengers can disembark and step into the city.

"I've been wondering," Watson says to Miriqua, "Do people here ever decide they want systematic education on some subject they were not created already knowing? If so, how do they obtain it?"

"That happens sometimes. They look for someone to tutor them - or if they can get permission they can make someone to tutor them; you don't need to have all the skills of someone you create."

"A rather roundabout way of doing it, but I can see the logic. Once we have obtained some sort of lodging and my grasp of the language has improved I should like to look for a tutor in medicine."

"That sounds like a good plan," says Miriqua. "I'm not sure where it will be best for you to stay while you look for an available house. There are inns for people who are on the round for business, but they aren't meant for long visits; you might do better to take a room in your tutor's house as soon as you find one - and you?" she asks Sherlock. "Do you have a plan?"

"I intend to hang out my shingle as a consulting detective, but even when I had an international reputation cases were not sufficient to occupy all of my time. I was in the middle of writing a monograph on the analysis of footprints before I arrived here; I intend to finish it. In the long term, some combination of investigating any strange occurrences people care to bring me, and continuing my research."

"...the analysis of footprints?" says Miriqua.

"Indeed! A great deal of information can be acquired from footprints, both about the person who left them and about the conditions in which the footprint was made. I will want to adapt it to the different types of shoe and terrain found around here, of course."

"I suppose maybe there is a library that would like to carry such a work," she says dubiously.

"In the past my readership has generally been restricted to the police and to those with a theoretical interest in criminal investigation", Holmes says unconcernedly. "Though Watson tells me that occasionally my work finds its way into medical circles."

"Your work on footprints?"

"No, no, my previous work has included such subjects as determining the time and cause of death from examining a corpse."

"Is that frequently useful?"

"Unfortunately, yes."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"An occupational hazard of dealing with things outside the ordinary is dealing with people and acts outside the ordinary bounds of law and decency. As compensation, I can often ensure that justice is done afterward."

"We don't have much of this sort of problem on civilized rounds," says Miriqua.

"I am glad to hear it. Perhaps I will spend my days in chemical researches, and those interesting cases in which a mystery presents itself but no crime was committed."

"Perhaps. I hope you will be able to find some way to make yourself useful."

"Yes, we shall see where my efforts prove most valuable."

The sail ride is pretty nauseating; not only is there no gravity, they swoop around, sometimes with sudden shifts of momentum. Miriqua returns to teaching them the local predominant language, which is called Sirigan.

This is not very much like being on an ocean-going ship! They will hold onto their seats and focus on grammar.

And eventually they reach New Riverround, dock at a docking tower, and haul themselves out by handholds and down to where gravity begins to assert itself.

They're both rather relieved to be on solid ground again.

Miriqua finds them a hotel. "Do you need one bed or two?" she asks them.

"Two. Definitely two." He looks rather taken aback.

"- is something wrong?"

"Where we're from it is not customary for any but married couples to share a bed."

"I didn't have any way to know you're not married," Miriqua points out.

"We're both men. Surely you can tell we're both men, I haven't had trouble distinguishing the men from the women here!"

"...yes, and?"

"...two beds in one room or two rooms?"

"Two beds in one room is alright if it won't lead people to . . . make bizzare assumptions."

"Assumptions that you're married?"

"Or . . . or behaving scandalously."

"Scandalously?" Miriqua says blankly.

"In a society with no possibility of illegitimacy, they would never have invented the concept."

"Never mind," says Watson, still looking distinctly uncomfortable.

"...okay. So one room is all right?"

"Yes."

She gets them one room with two beds, and gets herself the room across the hall.

They've had a long day, arguably two long days. They pass out for several hours.

Whenever they may choose to wake up, Miriqua's up in her room with the door open, consuming a book and a breakfast.

"Good morning! If you will tell you us where obtained your food, our grasp of the vernacular should be sufficient to go find some of our own."

"You can get it downstairs from the innkeeper!"

"Excellent, thank you." They head downstairs and request some breakfast in accented but comprehensible vernacular.

They get oatmeal with fruit in it.

The familiarity is reassuring. When they're done eating it they do whatever everybody else is doing with their dishes.

Bussing them for the proles to wash!

How convenient. Back upstairs to ask Miriqua for more language lessons, ideally including a start on their troublingly non-phonetic writing system. They've learned a handful of words from context cues but something more systematic would be appreciated.

"I think most people who don't begin knowing our language never learn to read very well," Miriqua warns.

"Unsurprising, since your language is not constrained by being easy to teach. We shall simply have to make do as best we can."

She will teach them some common words' characters.

Are there any patterns whatsoever in what collections of lines correspond to what meanings, or is it entirely arbitrary?

There are some repeated components - the system did evolve over time, it wasn't designed whole cloth to be maximally confusing.

Then it has that advantage over memorizing the properties of three hundred kinds of tobacco ash. It's not as orderly as the Latin-derived names of every bone and muscle and nerve in the human body, and Watson will never complain about English orthography or Latin grammar again, but they both press on.

Miriqua is a very patient teacher.

They'll keep at this all day, minus the time it takes to get some lunch and bring it upstairs.

Lunch is served in the same way as breakfast; it's eggs and rolls.

They eat their eggs and rolls and go right back to studying.

Since the writing system is so difficult Miriqua focuses mostly on speaking, and occasionally writes notes for them in Latin characters.

They copy the notes into local characters for practice.

"- you need to be able to recognize thirty thousand characters to read a typical newspaper," she says.

"And probably even more to read a medical journal."

"Well, it would cover fewer topics, but you'd certainly need different characters for that," she says. "People created as children can learn it if they start then, but adult learners usually just get by with the spoken language."

"Are there enough of those that it's possible to be illiterate without being a burden on society? I do still hope to open a practice here."

"It's possible, yes."

"Then I think I'll get really good at the spoken language first," he says in the local language.

"Good. Once you know how to speak it you'll be able to ask almost anyone to read things for you, and until then I'm the only third party you can talk to," she says.

They keep up their lessons for the rest of the day, if Miriqua is willing. At some point they'll probably want to wander around outside getting used to voices and cadences other than hers, but it doesn't need to be this afternoon. 

Miriqua was literally made for this (among other things). She'll keep up with it to the extent of their stamina.

Outside people are bustling around distributing goods and services and social interactions to one another.

They can pick up on bits and pieces of conversations! Not as many as they could have in London, especially when the goods and services and social interactions are ones they don't have all the context for, but they're making progress. 

As one pays attention one becomes aware of a pretty bright line between proles and everyone else. There are more proles than there are everyone elses, but the latter are more attention-getting, have more and livelier conversations, once a pair are glimpsed to have a child with them, they have more complicated social relationships. The proles have work, they mostly talk about work, they mostly socialize with either people they know through work or the geographically nearest prole socialization locale. It's not that they're dim or lifeless. They are bright, lively people who, as it happens, really enjoy making shoes or sweeping streets or cooking meals or doing laundry for fourteen hours a day.

They both love their work, but only what feels like a reasonable human amount; the proles are a bit unsettling. How much time do the other type of people seem to spend working?

Varies widely. Non-prole work is less suspicious to be really fascinated by, anyway - research, the arts, governance and diplomacy. Some professions seem to have a mix of prole and non-prole practitioners, including medicine. It seems perfectly respectable for someone understood to be well-made but not aimed at anything that would (in a society with money) constitute gainful employment to bop around trying various hobbies and dabbling in things while living off the delightedly-provided prole labor.

Watson would be far to embarrassed to do that sort of thing himself if there's any way he can get gainful employment instead, but Holmes will appreciate being able to continue his Bohemian lifestyle of research and the violin. Or more likely some novel foreign instrument, since finding an actual violin here seems implausible.

There are novel foreign instruments to be had, though they seem to be mostly custom made rather than kept in stock; maybe he could get a violin if he described it well enough.

He can definitely describe a violin well enough, and will probably do that if it's that easy to get something custom. He will, however, resist the temptation until he has slightly more permanent lodging.

Watson, meanwhile, will begin a search for a medical teacher. Not a particularly systematic one, just yet; more exploring the ways in which teachers and students might find each other. Do people post advertisements for that sort of thing, for instance.

Generally not. It's typically more of a word of mouth sort of thing.

Then if he hears anyone talking about medicine or visiting a doctor, he will inquire of them in halting vernacular.

This person is on painkillers for his shoulder injury.

"Excuse me, sir, can you tell me what doctor you went to?"

"Oh, yes, I saw Beretn."

"Thank you. And can you tell me where is--where he works?"

"The corner of Sixteenth and White Street."

"Thank you again!" It may be too late in the day to head straight there, but Beretn will probably be there tomorrow. For now he'll go back to language lessons. 

There aren't really days. People seem to have loose schedule syncing, but there are suns in all directions as the round turns.

Yes, "tomorrow" is more of a shorthand for "after they've eaten again and studied some more and had some sleep" than any well-defined astronomical situation.

When those conditions have been met, Watson sets out for Sixteenth and White Street, having obtained directions from the innkeeper and signage transcriptions from Miriqua. Holmes wishes him good luck on his way out.

There are of course four corners to the intersection, and a few buildings in all directions that could be described as "on the corner". That one over there has a ramp, though, and none of the others do.

Then that's the one he'll knock on first. 

"Come in!" calls a voice.

In he goes, and takes a look around.

It's an office, but there's a hallway off which what might be patient rooms branch. An elderly woman is manning the desk. "Hello, what brings you here?"

"Hello. I would like to study medicine, and I hope Doctor Beretn can teach me or tell me the name of someone who can teach me."

"He's with a patient at the moment," she says. "May I have your name?"

"John Watson." Introducing himself as "doctor" would be confusing, and it isn't as if he has whatever they use as the equivalent of an MD here--if they use one at all.

"Jonwatson," she repeats, writing this down. "Just take a seat, he'll be out in a few minutes."

He's gotten used to the local naming convention, but still gives both parts of his own out of habit. He takes a seat.

Beretn comes out fifteen minutes later; so does his patient, who heads out the door. "Hello there," he says.

"Beretn, this fellow wants to learn medicine," says the receptionist.

"Do you now! Tell me about that," says Beretn.

"I come from very far away, where people are somewhat different. I was a doctor there; I want to be a doctor here too. So I need to learn how to do medicine here, learn how it's different from there."

"How are people different?" asks Beretn.

"They can only be made as babies, and they start inside their creators' bodies." It sounds very strange when he says it like that, doesn't it.

"- that must take up a lot of doctors' time, that sound horrid," Beretn says.

"Yes, it can go badly wrong. The way it happens here is much safer."

"Was that your specialty?"

"No, I was in general practice."

"Injuries and colds and such?"

"Yes."

"Well, that's what I do here, too. Come have a look at a fellow I'm keeping overnight, see what you make of him."

"Okay." He nods and follows Beretn.

The fellow has a crush injury to one leg and the urine collecting from his catheter into a jar is dark brown. Even in his sleep he has a water straw dripping a slow stream of water into his mouth, tied around his head to stay in place, for him to swallow.

"The muscle injury hurt his, what's your word," he points at his own kidney, "kidney, that's it. Good that you're putting water into him."

"Very good!" says Beretn, applauding quietly so as not to wake the poor guy. "We might or might not save him, even waking him up every couple of hours to make him drink more, but he has a chance. Do you have any better treatments where you're from?"

He shakes his head sadly. "Lots of water, and hope."

Nod. Beretn leads him out of the patient's room and gets a bunch of old records and starts quizzing John about those.

His diagnoses agree with Beretn's most of the time, with the most notable disagreements revolving around psychology (Watson occasionally diagnoses things as "hysteria" or "nerves"). In a few cases the treatment Beretn used was one that British medicine hadn't invented; in a few it's the other way around.

"What is hysteria?" asks Beretn, writing down what John's been able to tell him about plasters.

"A mental complaint that happens to women under stress. It causes problems with the emotions, loss of appetite, and--I don't know the word--suddenly not being awake."

"Narcolepsy? Fainting?"

"Fainting, yes, that's it."

"This only happens to women?" says Beretn, confused.

"From what I've seen, yes. Are there no illnesses like that here?"

"Some, but things like vaginal yeast infections."

"Then perhaps the cause is the stress of making children, and women here don't have those problems."

"Only women make people in your country?"

"It needs a man and a woman together, and the baby starts inside the woman." 

"This sounds like a very inefficient way to do things," Beretn remarks.

"The way you do it here is not possible there. I still do not understand how it is possible here."

"Why wouldn't it be possible?"

"You can't make, I don't know, buildings appear all at once with whatever things you want. At home we can't make buildings all at once, and can't make people all at once."

"- why would making a baby be easier?"

"Women where I'm from grow people inside their uteri, as babies, if they have sex with a man. Is the simple version. What does the uterus do here, if not babies?" 

"They're vestigial, like nipples and appendices."

"Do you mean women's nipples are vestigial or only men's?"

"- both, although I think women are more likely to find them of use in sexual functioning?"

"Interesting. At home women, but only women, can use them to produce a fluid that babies can eat."

"I think I've heard that as a relatively harmless mistake people sometimes make when producing adults, although I didn't know it was a female-only error. It clears up on its own after a while. Babies particularly like the fluid?"

"Yes, eating it is good for them."

"Huh. I suppose you could write that up and someone might find it useful."

"I will!" he says cheerfully. He'll need to get Miriqua to transliterate it, of course, but it will potentially help some infants and definitely be good language practice.

"Now about the everlasting pill, that sounds interesting - we don't usually induce vomiting for anything other than poison - what kind of metal is it exactly?"

"The name in my language is 'antimony', but I would have to ask my translator for the local name--gray, shiny, easy to," he mimes crushing something, "break?"

"I don't know it off the top of my head, so I doubt we have any medical applications for it known here."

He nods and makes a note to ask Miriqua what the local word for antimony is.

Beretn occasionally has to interrupt the information exchange to see patients, almost always minor injuries from accidents.

Watson observes these consultations, if that's allowed.

Yes, it is. They have invented painkillers and antiseptics and stitches, which are most of the first line.

None of those are particularly new to Watson either, though he wouldn't be surprised if the formulae of their painkillers and antiseptics were subtly different given that they have different plants.

This is correct.

Usually the patients can go home after they're seen to, a few he has to put in rooms.

Watson soaks up vocabulary and local best practices. The fact that basically everyone starts out with excellent baseline health affects diagnostic assumptions a bit, as well as being heartening.

Everyone not only starts out healthy, they start out with good immune systems, if they're well made - they notice that carelessly made people get sick more often and are likely vectors for disease.

The lack of children is probably also good for public health; children are delightful but they do tend to catch and spread every disease they possibly can.

"Why is it they're particularly susceptible?"

"They haven't gotten resistant to anything, and they put everything in their mouths."

"Gotten resistant? We usually find that a new well-made person is less likely to get sick than someone who was well-made forty years ago."

"Children where I'm from start with bodies unused to any diseases, and become resistant after encountering them."

"There are some diseases you only get once, but you can make a person so they never do in the first place."

"That is lucky. We have ways of doing that for a few diseases, but it's harder than simply making the person that way."

"Well, there are always older people who can catch things, especially the flu."

"Unfortunately the flu isn't one of the ones we can prevent by immunization."

"What can you prevent?"

Watson describes the symptoms of smallpox, cowpox, and cholera, "but I don't know if you have the exact same ones here, and I don't know how to prepare the specific treatments, only the general idea".

"The symptoms appear but not in exactly those clusters."

"I'm not surprised we have different diseases. The general idea is to get the body used to the disease in a weakened form so the strong form can't get them."

"I hope you haven't brought any contagions from wherever you're from."

"Yes, I did worry about that. But anything I might have had when I arrived would be either gone or showing symptoms by now."

"You could still carry it. People who look after those in quarantine have to be in quarantine themselves."

"It's a bit too late to quarantine everyone I've spoken to on this round, but if in your opinion I should avoid people for a while I could do so."

"No, you're right it's too late, but if I'd met you when you arrived I would have recommended it at the time."

"If I had realized sooner how far from home I had ended up I would have done the same." No need to mention that getting Holmes to comply with a quarantine with so much novelty to explore would have been much harder than pulling teeth.

"I'm going to have dinner and go to bed," Beretn says. "This office is manned by my colleague Risan while I sleep, so if you're still feeling quite awake I can pass you over to her."

"That would be very good, thank you," says Watson, whose circadian rhythm is currently at "early afternoon".

Risan comes in a few minutes later and Beretn performs introductions and disappears to go have dinner across the street.

"What have you been covering?" asks Risan, putting up her hair in a ponytail and peering at the records the secretary shows her.

"Differences in medicine between here and where I was educated, and I observed him with some patients."

"Where were you educated?"

"London, but I expect you haven't heard of it."

"I haven't," she agrees. She goes in to perform some maintenance tasks on the fellow with the crush injury.

"I'm told it's common to live with one's teachers while a student. Should that happen here, or should I stay in my current temporary lodging?" He asks when she's done with the maintenance tasks.

"It's not common here and I don't think either Beretn or I has the space. Arrange that separately," she advises.

"I shall. Any particular places I should look at or avoid?"

"No, apart from your own personal tastes in the matter."

"Okay." He should probably get some food, and then he can go back to observing Risan.

There are plenty of places with food, and they will serve him for free.

This is an excellent and no longer surprising feature of this place. He gets something that reads to him as lunch.

They have invented the sandwich, after a fashion - more like a pita pocket, full of hardboiled egg and interesting sauces and fried vegetable slices and salad. There isn't a lot of meat around, although he can find something like chicken with a bit of looking.

Sounds delicious. He asks the food provider if the egg-equivalent is from the chicken-equivalent. It's probably a stupid question regardless of what the answer is, but he's curious.

The chicken-equivalent does lay eggs, and they get eaten, but those eggs are more useful in baking than as whole egg product like what's in his sandwich. They use a different kind of bird to make eggs for eating straight.

That's interesting to know, and also these eggs are tasty. He finishes his pita pocket and heads back to the office.

Risan tells him things and quizzes him as she works, briskly, on each patient.

Watson absorbs things and correctly answers quiz questions.

Meanwhile, Holmes has been walking the streets of the city in a pattern as systematic as their street layout permits, taking in everything. He isn't sure if he and Watson will stay here long term, but if they do he will eventually come to know it as well as he knew London. He still can't read all of the street signs, but that's less of an impediment to building a mental map than it would be for someone else: he remembers each street, not by its name, but by how it's paved and what shops are on it and how it slopes and whether it curves and what sort of people tend to walk on it and what they're doing as they go and the smell of the air and a dozen other things less easily expressed in words.

Nearly all of this round is city, though it has more and less dense sections - some detached houses with trees around them, some tightly packed avenues full of shops and apartments. It has hundreds of square miles to cover.

London is well over a hundred square miles as well, though it lacks the distinction of taking up an entire celestial body. He enjoys the denser sections of the round the best, and spends most of his time in them.

In New Riverround, there are factories, many towers with sails coming and going, loading and unloading, theaters, stores, restaurants - lots of them - offices, museums, temples, government buildings, and many homes.

He builds up a picture of all of this in his head; much of it is still new enough to be exciting. What sort of religion or religions is practiced in the temples? What sort of plays are going on in the theaters? 

There is one religion practiced in all the temples; it seems to be a sort of animism. The plays include:

- a comedy about someone who makes herself a husband but screws up in a way that gives him (ultimately endearing) foibles
- an opera about a historical war
- a heartwarming drama about a moderately dysfunctional polyamorous family unit who create a child who brings them closer together
- a romance between a person from this civilization and another "less civilized" one, both parties created as children but from very different worlds
- various concerts and dance shows; one dance show has a plot that sounds like it was something somebody had a dream about, with a lot of fox imagery

If the concerts are as free as the food, he'll spend an hour or two listening to music.

The concerts are as free as food, although the first one he tries is full up and some of them don't let people enter in the middle; once he finds one that is letting people in he can take a seat and enjoy some stringed instruments stringing along.

Delightful! After the concert finishes he grabs some lunch and continues exploring the city. What sort of housing options exist for the people who aren't solely focused on some sort of productive work? He can't make specific arrangements for himself and Watson until he knows where the latter will be commuting to, but he can scope things out.

There are apartment buildings with one or two bedrooms rooms each; there are many fewer houses with three and four, a little more remote. There are a couple of branches of an office which handles keeping track of who lives where and suggesting empty places.

He can tell which ones are inhabited by looking at the outsides; he'll have a list of two-bedroom places in various locations ready to hand when he meets back up with Watson that evening. Between prospective houses, he amuses himself by looking at other passers-by and deducing their professions, pastimes, and problems.

The people are mostly proles and have pretty obvious professions - bricklayer, sailor, brewer, baker, shopkeeper. The challenges are the non-proles, who do things like acting and chemistry research and sculpture and math.

This is as always a diverting pastime. If the chemistry researcher isn't in a hurry he might try to strike up a conversation.

"- yes, hello?"

"Hello! I noticed you're a chemical researcher; I happen to be one myself. I arrived on this round unexpectedly, and would appreciate advice on getting set up with lab space and equipment."

"Oh, what happened to your lab on your last round?"

"Nothing happened to my lab; something happened to me, such that I had to come here without it." he says in a tone of unconcern.

"Well, I suppose you could get authorization to make a prole assistant to help you get set up."

"I would want to wait until I've found long-term housing first, but then potentially yes. I expect there are already some excellent makers of lab equipment around."

"Yes, there's a good glassblower and suchlike."

"Good to hear. So what sort of research do you do?"

"Lately I've been interested in the pressure of various gases! My papers are circulated in the Gazette."

"Interesting! I intend to restart my research on identifying burned substances from their ashes. I'll take a look at your papers."

He smiles. "I'm Toring, though most things in the Gazette are worth reading."

"I'm Holmes. Thank you. I won't take up any more of your time."

"Best of luck!"

"Thanks!" And back to exploring the area until it gets to be then time when Watson is likely to be returning to their inn for dinner.

Riverround has its share - maybe more than its share - of charming architecture and fountains and prettily patterned street paving and such. It has a sewer system populated by sewer maintenance proles.

Surely not "populated by" in the sense of them actually living in there?

Some of them do sleep underground because the sewers go pretty deep in some places, but usually not every night.

Well, clearly they aren't down there for lack of suitable housing up here. Exploring the sewers sounds potentially interesting, but it should wait until he has things like a lantern and more suitable clothes.

The sewer proles bid him good day.

He bids them good day as well, and takes a look at the positions of the suns when he's back at street level. How much longer until Watson is likely to be done with a full day of medicine?

Any minute now!

Then he will make his way back to the inn for dinner with Watson and Miriqua.

Miriqua orders fish and potatoes. "How did you two fare today?"

Watson orders sausage and potatoes and eagerly describes the handful of advances he learned about and says he should be ready to open his own practice in six months, maybe a year if he wants to get fully fluent in the language.

Holmes gets fish and miscellaneous greens and mentions a nice little house a comfortable walk from Beretn's office.

"And you've checked that the place is empty?" Miriqua says.

"It was quite clear from the windowsills that no-one was living in it, but I can talk to the office tomorrow. Unless you're planning to move with us, Miriqua, in which case I should look for roomier houses."

"I can stay in town for a few weeks, but temporary arrangements will suit me. After that I will go back to my original round and we can correspond in writing or visit occasionally."

"That sounds very suitable," says Holmes. "For my part I look forward to having a more permanent residence."

"So do I," adds Watson. They're having this conversation in the local language, and both of them are getting along alright, albeit with somewhat slow speech and obvious accents.

"You're picking up the language very well," Miriqua says. "Whoever made you didn't make you slow, that's a tremendous mercy."

Watson has already explained the concept of parents once today. "Where we come from, there's a lot more chance involved in creating people--for one thing, everyone starts as babies."

"The fact that there's two of you makes it more likely that you really did come from a place like that," acknowledges Miriqua. "But you should be aware sooner or later, it's possible to make people with false memories."

"I expected as much. But my memories of Watson are extremely detailed and have so far matched the truth in every particular."

"Could I have been made with a piece of metal in my shoulder? Because it's definitely still in there where I remember it."

"- no, I don't think you could have," she says. "So if the wound's not fresh... huh."

He nods. "It was a scar when I arrived, just as I remember it."

"Truth, I find, is often stranger than fiction."

"This would be very strange indeed, yes, quite unheard of."

"It will have been a big surprise in London as well. I hope they managed to stop the snake before it put anyone else through its mirror."

"...I hope so too," says Miriqua.

They keep eating, slightly subdued.

Between bites she tells them things she's thought of that will be useful to them about the language.

Complex tenses! Interesting differences in what prepositions should be used in what circumstances! Other useful things! They're very appreciative. 

And she also tries to smooth out a couple of the roughest edges of their accents.

They'll probably never sound exactly like native speakers, especially Watson, but they can at least get easier to understand.

And eventually she goes to bed.

They do likewise. After breakfast the next morning Watson goes back to the clinic, and Holmes goes to the housing office nearest the house he liked.

The housing office is not very busy; he can be seen after a seven minute wait.

He mentions the specific house he took a liking to and asks if anyone has claimed it.

"Hmm - nope, the previous occupants moved out when one of them died, a couple of weeks ago. It's been cleaned up and it's available. How many will you be living with?"

"One other person."

"Names?"

"Sherlock Holmes and John Watson."

"How do you like to write those?"

He demonstrates the characters Miriqua helped him and Watson come up with.

The clerk writes them in and asks after the addresses of their workplaces in case they need to be found promptly for house-related reasons.

Watson is at the office of Doctors Beretn and Risan on such and such a street; Holmes plans to work out of his house. 

And it's theirs! They can move right in. (There is no transfer of key; they do not usually bother to lock houses on this round.)

Moving their stuff is trivial, since they didn't accumulate much beyond toiletries and a couple changes of clothes. Now that they no longer have a move in the future, they can change that. Holmes ventures forth to look for a glassblower, a chemical shop, and an instrument-maker, starting with whichever is closest.

There is an instrument maker closer than either of the other things. She's a cheery prole winding strings around a wooden body to make a lutelike thing. "Hello!"

"Hello! Can you make new instruments from a description?"

"I can try! Drawings will help, and anything you can tell me about its range and timbre."

He can draw a precisely-proportioned picture of his violin, down to notes on which way the wood grain should go where. His musical vocabulary in this language is still somewhat limited, but if the instrument-maker will let him play example notes on some of her other wares he can draw extensive comparisons.

She's happy to demonstrate! She does have some bowed string instruments, tuned differently from his violin.

Those are very interesting. He would like his tuned a bit differently, in thus and such a way, he can demonstrate on that one if she doesn't mind him messing up the tuning it's got.

She'd rather he not handle her instruments, but if he tells her what to do she can retune this one.

They go through a couple iterations of asking her to tighten this string and loosen that one, and eventually arrive at something that's quite close, accounting for differences in the shape of the resonating space (fixable) and the material of the strings (likely less so).

"What are the strings on your violin made of?"

"Gut, like these, but from a different animal and probably differently prepared, though sadly I don't know the details of how."

"Well, hopefully the local kind will work well enough. And the bow?"

"Animal hair, and under a bit more tension than this, but this should do nicely."

"All right! I can have that for you in a few decawakes."

"Excellent, thank you."

Onward to more errands! How furnished was the house they just got; do they need all new beds and chairs and dishes and so forth or did the previous residents leave anything?

The house has about half of its furniture - the occupants who moved took the beds and there are gaps where a chair or console table has been taken. There is still dining furniture in place and the old couches are in the living room and the old nightstands and one dresser remain near where beds once were. The dishes are gone, except for one very large tureen and a kind of ugly serving platter.

That platter is going to end up covered in experiment and Watson probably won't even mind. He'll get them some beds and chairs but hold off on dishes, since they may not end up taking food home very often. He recalls a furniture store over that way . . .

The furniture store has furniture. They have weird bike-drawn vehicles to get the furniture to the house.

Bikes aren't new but this application of them is! It's pretty neat. Also, now they have beds and chairs. Also also, it's lunchtime. He'll get something with that one root vegetable that doesn't have an obvious analogue in Britain, if anywhere nearby has it today.

Yep, he can get it in dumplings fried in butter down the street.

Delicious! Next stop, the nearest apothecary, or wherever one goes for basic reagents here.

There's a medicine dispensary, but he'll have to walk a bit farther to get reagents. They are all of course labeled in local parlance with no reference to the etymology of their English counterparts.

The periodic table is the same here, and he had Miriqua go over their notation for compounds, so if the distributor knows the formal names of things he'll be fine. If not, he may have to just note the location and come back later with Miriqua; much of this stuff is only useful if he's totally certain it is what he thinks it is, and dangerous otherwise.

The distributor does know the formal names.

How good of them. Now unless they happen to have delivery, he'd better bring these bottles home rather than carrying them around any farther than he has to.

This one isn't set up for delivery, although it's possible to engage a prole for delivering things that don't have in-house arrangements; this service is used by people with broken legs and the like.

Holmes does not have a broken leg and planned to spend all day walking around anyway; he'll carry his own stuff.

Then soon his house will have all his reagents in it!

Next thing to look for is a glassblower, for flasks and pipes and so forth, but before he heads out to do that he examines the kitchen. What facilities does it have for making things hotter or colder and keeping them that way?

It has a wood-burning stove with an oven compartment. It does not do particularly precise heats. There are a few zeer on shelves near a large window, though they've dried out and they're empty in the middle at the moment.

In that case, he might also want a Bunsen burner or similar. He sets out in search of one along with the glassblower, contemplating the experiments he plans to start today or tomorrow.

The glassblower is not hard to find and is working on a set of fluted glasses at the moment.

Holmes watches appreciatively and deduces things about the glassblower's personal life until he's at a reasonable stopping point.

The glassblower dude is married to the fellow next door who does coppersmithing and he's thinking about making a successor soon since he's getting a bit old and is getting enough business that he could split his work.

"Hi! What can I do for you?"

"Hello! I'd like some flasks and pipes suitable for chemistry work . . ." he goes on to describe dimensions and quantities.

The glassblower takes this all down, nodding along, asking necessary clarifying questions, showing examples of various thicknesses he can do, and when he has the whole order written up says it'll be a decacycle but some pieces might take longer than that.

"Then I'll see you in a decacycle. Thank you! Oh, and one more thing; do you also make lenses?"

"I can, yes!"

"Oh, good!" He also wants some lenses of such and such dimensions; his explanation is a bit roundabout because he doesn't know their words for type and amount of curvature, but it's understandable.

The glassworker puzzles it out and writes everything down and expands Holmes's vocabulary and says this will add time, does he want the vessels or the lenses first?

Considerably fewer people smoke here than did in England, so his analyses of tobacco ash are less interesting than his work on soil compositions. "I'd like the vessels first, please."

"All right! I'll have an updated time estimate of anything that's not finished in a decawake."

"Very good. I'll see you then."

Any further purchases of housewares should wait until Watson is available, even though he knows exactly what the latter's opinions will be. Back to exploring the city!

It is as ever! Their neighbors are road maintenance proles, custodians, rugmakers, sailors, and crop processors.

Eventually it gets to be dinnertime; when Watson gets back from work Holmes is in their new sitting room, finishing off some food. 

"Good evening, Watson; I observe you enjoyed your second day of work."

"Yes, it was much like my first but with a slightly better grasp of the language."

A neighbor (one of the rugmakers) knocks on the door, holding a plate of cookies.