Saturday
Here is something I figured out on Day Seven that I think is genuinely important and that I should probably write down before I forget it.
Every society, no matter what kind it is, runs on information. Not food. Not money. Not power, exactly. Information. Who knows what, who knew it first, who tells who, and what it costs to find out.
In middle school, information is social currency. Who is having a party. Who said what about who. Who is in trouble and why. The kids at the top of the social food chain are there because they have information and they control how it moves.
I figured out on Day Seven that the floating sky village works exactly the same way.
It just took me a week to see it because I was busy being embarrassed in cheese pajamas.
It started because of Mom's language progress.
Mom had been doing her exchange sessions every morning and she was, I had to admit, getting genuinely good. She could hold a slow basic conversation. She knew the words for most of the common things in the village. She had learned some phrases. And the woman she was learning from most, whose name sounded like "Lira" and who had a quick way of moving and bright orange-brown wings, had started coming to find Mom specifically in the mornings.
On Day Seven I sat in on one of their sessions and paid attention.
Lira was telling Mom something. I could not follow the language but I could read the situation. Lira was animated. She kept glancing around in a way that was not nervous but was aware. She spoke in a slightly lower voice than usual.
She was sharing information that not everyone had.
Mom was nodding in the way she nods when she is following about sixty percent of what is being said and is too polite to ask for clarification on the other forty percent.
Afterward I asked Mom what Lira had been saying.
"Something about the gathering space," Mom said. "There is another event coming up, I think. A bigger one. She was describing something about it but I could not catch all the words."
"Bigger than the one last night?"
"I think so. She said a word that I think means once a year, or maybe once a season, I was not sure. And she was describing people coming from other islands."
I thought about this.
A larger gathering. Multiple islands. Something that happened once a season.
And Lira had told Mom about it privately, which meant it was not common knowledge yet, or at least not common in a way that everyone was openly discussing.
That was information. Valuable information. And Mom had it.
"Did she say when?" I said.
"Soon," Mom said. "I think."
Soon. Not now. A gap between now and then that was exactly the kind of space where a person could position themselves usefully.
I went back to Solen's food building with two goals.
Goal one: maintain the relationship I had built by being helpful.
Goal two: figure out what he knew about the big gathering.
I did the shelf organizing thing again, this time going through the back section that I had not touched the first time and looking at what was stored there. Solen watched me from behind the counter with his usual expression, which I had decided to interpret as approval even though it mostly just looked like neutrality.
While I worked I tried out one of the words Mom had taught me. It was the word for "gathering" or "meeting," she had said, though she was not completely sure.
I said the word.
Solen's expression shifted. Not dramatically. Just slightly, the way a person's face shifts when something that was not relevant becomes relevant.
He said something back. I caught the word Mom had described as "once a season." So she had been right.
I held up one finger and pointed at the ground, which I hoped meant "this season" and not something completely unrelated.
Solen nodded slowly.
Then he said something else and pointed across the stone bridge toward the second island and then further, toward the islands I could not see past the tree line.
Other islands. People coming from them. For this gathering.
I nodded like I understood more than I did. He seemed to accept that. Then he reached under the counter and put one of the cakes on the surface, and I understood that to mean the conversation was concluded for now.
I took the cake.
Progress.
Rowley found me at midday in what had become our usual meeting spot, the flat rock near the first stone bridge where the wind was strongest and you could see three islands at once.
He was doing the thing he did when he was about to say something that he knew I might find difficult, which was that he was smiling but carefully.
"What," I said.
"Feyn asked me something," Rowley said.
"Okay."
"He asked if I wanted to come and stay in his family's building for a couple of nights. To learn more about how things work here. His mother invited me."
I looked at Rowley.
"Stay over," I said.
"Just for two nights, he said. To see how their family does things."
"You want to go."
"I think it would be really interesting," Rowley said. He was doing the careful smile still. "And Feyn is really nice, Greg. I think you would like him too if you spent more time"
"I spend time around him," I said.
"You have not talked to him directly once."
I opened my mouth and then closed it again because that was technically accurate. My Feyn interactions had all been through Rowley or been very brief and one-directional.
"Greg, would it bother you if I stayed over at Feyn's?"
I thought about the honest answer to this, which was that yes it would bother me, but not for the reason Rowley probably thought. It was not that I would miss Rowley exactly, though I would, a little, in the way you miss a thing that is usually there when it is not there. It was more that Rowley had become my indirect access point to Feyn's network, and Feyn's network was the social layer I had not fully penetrated yet, and if Rowley went to stay with Feyn for two nights then that indirect access went with him.
"Go ahead," I said. "It is fine."
Rowley's smile became a real one. "Thanks, Greg. I told him I would ask you first."
"Why would you ask me?"
"Because you are my best friend," Rowley said, like this was completely obvious.
After he left I sat on the flat rock for a while and thought about the fact that Rowley's first instinct when invited somewhere was to ask me if it was okay, and that my first thought about his absence was how it affected my strategic positioning.
I was not going to examine that comparison too closely. But it sat there.
With Rowley gone to Feyn's in the afternoon, I had to do something I had been building toward and then finding reasons to delay.
I had to go introduce myself to the rest of the village on my own terms.
Not with Rowley as social infrastructure. Not through Mom's language sessions. Not through the button event or the shelf organizing, which were indirect. Actually go up to people and make a direct attempt at connection.
I started with the kids, because they had already shown up with rocks and so the opening existed.
There was a group of five or six of them on the lower platform of the big tree, doing something with a length of cord that involved tying and retying it in different configurations. I recognized two of them from the rock-bringing group.
I walked over and watched what they were doing.
One of them looked up. I did the greeting gesture.
They did it back.
I pointed at the cord. Then at them. Then at myself, with a questioning tilt.
The kid holding the cord looked at the others. Some kind of fast silent kid-communication happened. Then the kid held out the cord.
I sat down and took it.
I only know two knots. The regular overhand knot and the shoelace bow knot, which does not count as a real knot in my opinion. But I tied the overhand knot, slowly, and then I held up the cord to show them.
The kid next to me immediately untied it and made a different knot, a complicated one with several loops, and held it up to show me.
I untied it and tried to copy it. I got about halfway there.
They found this extremely funny. Not mean funny. Just funny, the way things are funny when someone is trying hard and getting something almost right.
I tried again.
One of the kids shifted closer and guided my hands through the steps, very patiently, and at the end I had made a rough version of the knot that at least resembled what they were doing.
I held it up.
A small sound of approval went around the group.
I stayed there for an hour. By the end I had learned three new knots and taught them the shoelace bow, which they found bizarre and possibly impractical but which created a genuine moment of shared confusion when I tried to explain via demonstration what a shoelace was.
I did not get any of their names. That was next. But I had sat with them and learned something and they had learned something and we had laughed at the same moments.
That was real. That was not a strategy. That was just a thing that had happened.
That evening Dad found something, which he brought to our family dinner with the expression of a person who wants to share information but is not sure how it will be received.
He had been doing his perimeter walks, but on Day Seven he had gone further, across the second island and past the main tree line, to where a third stone bridge led to a third island that none of us had been to yet.
"There is more village over there," he said. "Another cluster of buildings. Smaller. And the bridge is solid, same stone as the first one."
Mom was interested. "Did you go across?"
"I looked from this side," Dad said. "I wanted to let you know first."
"Tomorrow we can all go," Mom said.
"I want to go now," Rodrick said.
"It is evening," Mom said.
"There is no real night here," Rodrick pointed out, which was technically true because the sky never got fully dark, just that slow blue shift, and the water below started glowing, and the torch lights came on, and everything continued being perfectly lit. "It is basically just a slightly different kind of day."
"Rodrick," Mom said.
"I am just saying."
I ate my flatbread and thought about what a third island meant. More buildings, Dad had said. More people, probably. And connected to all of this by solid stone bridges, which meant it was central, not peripheral.
The more I thought about the layout of this place, the more it felt designed. Not random floating rocks with people on them, but something arranged. The bridges were not accidental. The distances between islands were not accidental. Something or someone had put this together with intention.
I did not know what to do with that thought exactly, so I put it next to the Manny thing and the humming sound from Day Two and the particles moving in circles, in the part of my brain where I was keeping things I noticed but was not ready to think about.
That section was getting a little crowded.
One more thing.
After dinner, walking back to our building, I passed the spot where Rodrick had been doing his percussion sessions. The drum one of the kids had brought was still there, left out because they were clearly coming back tomorrow.
I sat down and tried to play it.
I am not going to say I was good. I am going to say it sounded like a drum being hit by a person who had never hit a drum, which is what it was.
But after a couple of minutes I found a rhythm. Simple. Just the same beat repeated. It was quiet enough that nobody could hear it from the buildings.
I sat there in the almost-dark with the glowing water below the island and the golden-blue sky above it and hit a drum quietly to myself for about ten minutes.
It did not achieve anything. It was not strategic. It was not building toward anything.
It just felt okay for a minute.
Day Seven: information economy mapped, three new knots learned, Rowley at Feyn's, third island identified. Sat alone playing a drum at dusk and tried not to think about the things I was keeping in the back of my brain.
Getting harder not to.
[SKETCH: Greg sitting cross-legged in the near-dark on the main platform, one hand on a drum, looking out at the glowing water below the island's edge. The sky behind him is the deep blue-gold of the sky's almost-dark. There is no one else around. His expression is not his usual calculating face. He just looks like a kid sitting somewhere quiet.]