RAMBLINGS FROM WISKER // 453

SUBJECT: FOOD
ARCHIVAL VALUE: OBVIOUSLY CORRECT
SOURCE: WISKER
EDITORIAL INTERFERENCE: ATTEMPTED

There are more kinds of food than there are worlds. Maxen says this isn't true, which is one of those things Maxen says when he thinks something sounds impossible and therefore must be wrong, but Maxen hasn't eaten all the food and he certainly hasn't been to all the worlds, so I'm not sure why anybody would consider him an authority on either. I haven't eaten all the food either, obviously, but I have eaten considerably more of it than Maxen has, and I intend to continue doing so, which means eventually one of us is going to be proved right and I think we all know who it will be.

People don't talk about food enough when they talk about worlds. They tell you about mountains and cities and kings and wars and somebody who died three thousand years ago whose grandchildren are apparently still very angry about it, but nobody thinks to tell you whether the little stall beside the eastern gate sells those fried things with meat inside them. This is much more useful information. You can learn a lot about somewhere from what people eat, and even more from what they'll let you eat, because some people are very strange about that.

There are rules I've learned. Anything given to you on a stick is usually good. Anything served in a bowl so small that you can see the bottom before you've started is probably not enough. If somebody spends longer explaining the food than you will spend eating it, you should ask for two. And if something is glowing, you should always ask why it is glowing before you eat it, although I would like it made clear that asking why and deciding not to eat it are completely separate decisions.

Maxen disagrees with that last one, but Maxen disagrees with lots of sensible things.

Fish is good almost everywhere, which I find interesting because worlds disagree about nearly everything else. I've seen skies that weren't the right colour, oceans above cities, forests where the trees moved when nobody was looking and one place where up wasn't particularly committed to being up, which made eating far more difficult than it needed to be. Yet somehow, eventually, somebody somewhere invents fish. Then somebody else has the excellent idea of drying it, and occasionally somebody truly exceptional adds spices.

There was a woman in a market once who had seven different kinds of dried fish hanging from little strings. Seven. Maxen bought me one because apparently seven was "excessive", which is a word he uses when he means more than he personally thinks I should have. The woman warned him that one of them was much too spicy for a little pet ferret, so naturally I had to find out whether she was right. I ate three while Maxen was talking to her.

I couldn't see properly for a little while afterwards, and my tongue felt bigger than my head, but neither of those things means she was right.

I would like that recorded accurately.

[It has been.]

[Good. People exaggerate these things.]

There are things you shouldn't eat, of course. I know people assume I don't understand this because of the chair, but I knew perfectly well that it was a chair before I ate it and therefore I don't see what that proves. It wasn't even the whole chair. There are things between worlds that look like food and aren't, and things that don't look remotely like food but turn out to be surprisingly good, and you learn the difference after you've travelled for long enough. Smell helps. Watching somebody else eat it first helps. Teeth are useful. If the thing develops more teeth after you've bitten it, however, that's usually worth considering before taking another bite.

Usually.

Actually, there is a Hound that travels with HVNGER, and I've wondered about this because apparently it finds things for it to eat. Little meals, they call them, although I don't think little means the same thing to HVNGERING that it means to everybody else. I imagine the Hound wanders around finding interesting things and brings them back, and HVNGERING eats them, and then the Hound goes looking for something else. That sounds quite nice, really. I think I would have been very good at it.

Probably better than the Hound.

Maxen says I shouldn't say things like that, but I've never understood why. I haven't even met the Hound properly, so it's not as though it can hear me.

Probably.

Anyway, dried fish is better when it has the little red flakes on it. Some worlds put sugar on dried fish, which I don't understand. Not everything needs improving just because you've discovered sugar. Meat is more complicated because people insist on giving every part of every animal a different name, and sometimes they'll tell you what something is after you've eaten it as though this information is supposed to change what it tasted like. This is why I don't ask too many questions before dinner. If it smells good, somebody cooked it deliberately and nobody nearby is screaming at you to stop, you're generally doing alright.

There was one exception to this rule.

We don't need to discuss it.

Maxen likes discussing it because Maxen wasn't the one who ate it.

Sacred food is another strange idea. I've eaten sacred fruit, ceremonial bread and something a priest once told me had been prepared according to an unbroken tradition stretching back farther than his civilisation could properly remember. He spent a very long time explaining how honoured I should feel before I ate it, so I assumed it was going to be incredible.

It was alright.

There was a little fried thing from a stall beneath a bridge in Solvane that was much better. I don't know what it was called because the man selling them kept laughing whenever Max tried to ask, but they were crispy around the edges and soft in the middle and had something salty inside. He gave me six. Maxen insists he only gave me six because I saved the world, the man also scratched my head and called me something that sounded affectionate, so I think it's equally possible that he simply recognised an appreciative customer.

Kaia would understand. Kaia is much better about sharing food than Maxen is, although she has started putting things higher up when she doesn't want me to have them, which is insulting because we all know height has never been a particularly serious obstacle for me. She also scratches properly behind my ears rather than patting the top of my head like I'm a dog, so her opinions should generally be given greater consideration.

[This record concerns food.]

[Kaia gives me food.]

[Yes.]

[So I was talking about food.]

There are some things I miss, though. That's the part people don't tell you when you start going from one place to another. Sometimes you eat something and don't know you're eating it for the last time. You think you'll come back, or you'll find another market somewhere, another little fire with the same pot hanging above it, another person who knows how much spice goes in without measuring because their mother showed them and somebody showed her before that. Then you go somewhere else, and even if you find the same ingredients and somebody swears they know the same recipe, it isn't quite the same.

Maybe places get into food somehow. People too. Maybe that's why recipes never quite work when you take them too far from where they came from.

Maybe a recipe isn't really instructions at all. Maybe it's just people trying to make somewhere happen again.

I don't know.

I still think there are more kinds of food than there are worlds though, and Maxen is welcome to prove me wrong once he's eaten all of both. Until then I think the archive should consider the matter settled.

Also, if anybody reading this knows where to find the spicy dried fish with the little red flakes—the proper ones, not the sweet ones—tell Maxen.

He'll know where I am.

Usually.

ARCHIVE NOTE: Attempts to obtain a more cosmologically relevant contribution from Wisker were unsuccessful.

WISKER'S NOTE: Food is cosmologically relevant.