The nearest city of any size on this world lies 500 miles north of the northwest coast of the Inland Sea where Eichra Oren and I live. It was named by humans, who for fifteen thousand years have called it Lanternlight.

It's said there's a city there, in the S-bend of a great river, in a hundred thousand alternate worlds. Easy, rapid transportation and near-perfect communication have made such collections of individuals and buildings pretty much obsolete in this one. Add to that the fact that the landwelling population of the Elders' Earth is sparse, no more than a couple hundred million sapients on the whole planet, all of them Appropriated Persons or their descendants, and well spread out.

There are some very big cities in the Great Deep, I'm told, where it makes a bit more sense, long distance communication being somewhat more difficult, owing to the way water muffles radio signals at useful wavelengths. Down there, they utilize a worldwide network of light cables.

Lanternlight can lay claim perhaps to a million inhabitants, representing all Appropriated species, but above all it's a human city, a beautiful place, deliberately kept quaint, with its broad, high-crowned streets that have never borne the weight of wheels, and perhaps as many as a hundred faerie bridges arching over the cold, dark river. Streetlights, made to appear old-fashioned, in imitation of the gaslights of ancient Antarctica, bestow their enchanted glow on the cobbles, while high above the city, on a gracefully tapered tower of filagreed titanium—another gift to the Appropriated Persons courtesy of the Elders' guilty conscience—one great, soft light casts enough gentle illumination to compete with that of the full Moon.