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I know I never fininshed telling what happened, but I've been quite depressed. I'd better tell it in order though.
Yama took me to his alchemist friend, an old woman named Sophie. Although she looked like a witch, I found myself trusting her, and was only a little worried when she injected me with a syringe-full of jellyfish venom. After watching me for a few moments and seeing that I had no reation to it, she drew another syringe-full of my blood and shooed us out of her labratory while she concocted the vaccine she was trying to make. I could see her logic. Apparently I had become imune to the venom, and she was trying to confer that to the sea-people.
Yama took me to the Order of St. George's library. It was amazing, and even more so compared to what passed for the public library on the Isle. It was a huge room, lined with bookshelfs from floor to ceiling, all filled with books, many looking very old. Yama sat down with a novel while I browsed the shelves, facinated. Finally I settled for a large book, old, but in good repair. Its title: Geography of the World of Gaia. From the date in the front, it had been published a century ago.
The first thing I noticed when I sat down and opened it was the large map of all of Gaia the filled the first two pages. However, this wasn't the map I was used to, the upside-down T shape with a fat stem, an uneven crossbar, and a bit missing from the top. This one was a large square, filling all the space on the pages and extending much further then I had seen before. It showed mountains past Durem, and Aekea was situated on the edge of something marked "Trackless Desert". The river near Aekea went all the way to the sea, and the sea went a good distance from the Isle de Gambino. The map even showed a few smaller islands on it.
At first I just looked at it in wonder. I had grown used to the fact that I could walk much longer distances then other people, but I had distorted the scale of the world (or the part I happened to live in) by doing so. I had only been to a small part of this map, and I was quite sure that it was only a small part of the world too.
But then another, more disturbing though struck me. As everyone knew, our knowlege of geography was pitifully small. Even the places north of the Reclamation Facility had only been discovered this year, at April Fool's Day. How could this ancient map show so much more?
For a moment, I flashed back to a day in Aekea, years ago. A skinny young man stood on a crate, shouting and shaking his fist at the factories. "Do you know why we don't have decent maps?" he yelled. "It's them! The factory owners! They want us not to know what lies outside our walls, so we'll stay here and work in their stinkn' beasts..." And at that, two robots grabbed him, not very gently, and dragged him off, while another made off with the crate. An enormously amplified voice from the speakers that are everywhere in Aekea boomed, "Back to work please! No crowding the streets!" And the crowd dispersed...