City of Golden Shadow (Otherland, #1)

by Tad Williams

The small man shook his head. “There is no need. When I said I was not comfortable, I was speaking of my own thoughts, my own feelings. Renie knows that I have many worries about my people and their past.” He smiled. “Their future, too. Perhaps it is better that some people can see it here at least. Perhaps they will remember . . . or at least wish they could remember.”

help you. In my family, we say ‘I wish baboons were on this rock.’ Except that we call them ‘the people who sit on their heels.’ “ “Call who?” “The baboons. I was taught that all the creatures who live beneath the sun are people—like us, but different. It is not a familiar way to think among city-folk, I know, but to my family, especially my father’s family, all living things are people. The baboons are the people that sit on their heels. Surely you have seen them and know it is so.” Renie nodded, a little ashamed that she had only seen baboons caged in the Durban Zoo. “But why did you say you wished there were baboons on a rock?”

It was a story, no more, no less, and stories were the things people used to give the universe a shape. In that, she realized, !Xabbu was exactly right: there was little difference between a folktale, a religious revelation, and a scientific theory.

Wasn’t that the way someone said religions—and paranoid obsessions—got started? As an attempt to make sense of a universe too large and too random for human comprehension?

He shrugged. “It is a matter of words. In my birth language there are more ifs than whens, but I must make a choice every time I speak a sentence in English. I try to choose the happier way of saying things, so that my own words will not weigh me down like stones.