"Why do people want alive fabric - where is Parabola, or Polythreme -"

"Parabola is a sort of parallel universe that exists behind mirrors and in dreams. Polythreme is, uh, have I mentioned that the usual thing people want in exchange for cities is 'a dead or dying loved one, not that'? Well, uh, the very first time for the very first city, the Bazaar was new at this, and thought shoving a shard of Mountain-stone into the guy's chest would fix him up nicely, and didn't realize that that was like super overkill, so overkill in fact that the guy ended up turning into a living island all the matter of which is also alive. It's where the Clay Men come from, and let me tell you, those are the easy ones to deal with from Polythreme. I think not every single otherwise-inanimate object from Polythreme is a person? But any single object with, oh, twenty kilos or more of mass, is. It's a fucking mess."

"Are they hostile or just inconvenient?"

"Inconvenient. The little not-person stuff is fine, things like gloves that can grip things independently, but the big, person stuff? Well-nigh impossible to do right by. Imagine being a bed."

"Are we talking 'wants to be slept in, constantly' or 'wants to go on long walks on the beach' or what, in terms of how that shakes out?"

"More like the latter than the former. Stuff that can't move doesn't like not being able to move and getting it into a shape where it can usually hurts like hell."

"Shouldn't people on the island sleep in hammocks instead, they're lighter."

"Yes, they should."

"...but they don't, I guess?"

"It's sort of--hard to convince Polythreme people to do things. As an outsider coming in."

"Is there a specific reason or just general you're not one of them?"

"I think there's like--a sense in which they don't, uh, believe I can possibly be weighing all the factors, because Polythreme is so different from everywhere else, and I'm just some pink-cheeked mainlander who'll never have any idea what their lives are like, so how worth taking seriously can I possibly be."

"Pink cheeked?"

"I mentioned Clay Men? Yeah that's--literal. People from Polythreme are, one way or another, not typically, uh, made of flesh. That has blood in it."

"Do they just assemble new ones out of clay sometimes?"

"I think so but I couldn't swear to it."

"How did that start?"

"I don't know. Most of it happened outside Grandmother's sphere of perception and the Clay Men themselves don't know much and I haven't been able to see the King With A Hundred Hearts yet."

"That's too many hearts."

"Yes, well, that is slightly the problem with Polythreme."

"Do the bed people have hearts?"

"I mean, I don't think so, but hearts as metonymous for aliveness."

"Do crabs have hearts? I would not have been confident about that."

"I don't know about regular not-space crabs but I do."

"Are you actually very similar to not-space crabs or is it mostly 'eight legs, more like a crab than a spider'?"