My new novel, The Translator in Spite of Themself, is available in epub format from Smashwords and in epub, mobi, and pdf formats from itch.io.

They are new to being a portal between worlds. Apparently they misunderstood their instructions, and they were actually supposed to connect two cities in the same world? Having a physical form is hard! But they will work hard and figure out what to do. So many people are counting on them.

A first contact fantasy novel from the point of view of a sapient portal, with gender-bendy bits. Contains a cast of characters and a glossary.

Edit 2/12: I just realized I messed up somehow with the itch.io release; I know I uploaded the files, but somehow I got an email from itch saying "Your project has no files," so I uploaded them again. Hopefully they'll stick this time.

Here is an excerpt:

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I don’t experience time quite the way you do – more so than I used to, before I spent so much time with your people, but still not quite the same. I will try to tell you the story in order; but what does “order” mean for us? Should I tell you about events in the order they happened, making ad-hoc adjustments for events that happened at the same time, or in the order I learned about them? And when and how should I tell of things that never happened, but which some of the participants remembered happening? Some of your stories, I know, narrate their events not strictly in order of time, but by the logical or emotional connections between them. Well, I will use all of these techniques insofar as they seem more likely to lead to enlightenment than confusion.

Where and when to begin? Perhaps with the playground. I see that you know of many places like it, though of none other with its history.

The elementary school and its adjoining playground had been built in the early 1960s, on land that had been part of a farm until a few years earlier. The field where the school was to be built had been, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, used a number of times for camp meetings. A long while earlier, not the Cherokees (from whom the land was seized and auctioned off by the state, the farmer’s great-great-grandfather buying a large parcel including the eventual site of the school and playground) nor the tribe who’d lived there before them, but the tribe who’d been driven out by that tribe which was eventually to be displaced by the Cherokees, had regarded this hill as a sacred place, and made it so by their worship.

Those rites began the process of wearing thin the membrane between worlds; the thoughts and fears and hopes of the worshipers at the camp meetings had continued it. Probably one or more incidents during the centuries when another tribe, and then the Cherokees, lived there, helped things along too, but I don’t know for sure. A traveling Chautauqua show from up north, which played highlights from Shakespeare and Molière to a small audience in 1922, was not a great success in its own terms, but it made its mark on the boundary. Then, after the farm failed and its fields and pastures lay fallow for more than a decade, the school and its playground were built, and the imaginations of generations of children did most of the rest. The membrane was still too thick to be easily broken, but it was thinner there than anywhere else within fifty miles, and very slowly getting thinner.

It would get slightly thinner every afternoon when school was in session, during the successive recess periods for the different grades, as the playground filled with children – more some days than others, depending on how elaborately imaginative the children’s games were on a particular occasion. But these games, interrupted after a short time by the bell recalling the children to class, had relatively little impact on the membrane. Each night the membrane would heal, though it was rarely as thick as it had been the previous morning.

More serious damage to the membrane occurred on weekends, when several children who lived within a short walk from the school gathered there and played for hours on end – elaborate games set, more often than not of late, in worlds far from this one by any measure.

Before the games got started, though, a conversation like this one was not unusual:

“…All right, so it’s Pirates of Salendria. I’ll be Captain Avendrion.” This from the oldest boy present, tall for his age and on the verge of puberty.

“You got to be Avendrion last time,” said a younger boy. “I’m playing him this time. You can be Darhalon or somebody.”

“You can’t do Avendrion’s voice right,” rejoined the oldest boy.

“Let them sort that out,” the oldest girl (older by a month than the oldest boy) said to her sister. “What about I’ll be Tishandra and you can be Queen Palanuria?”

“Only if I get to fight.”

“It’s all right with me, but Cyrus will probably get mad. He’s read all the Salendria books five or six times and you know he’s going to tell you that Queen Palanuria has her warrior maids do her fighting for her.”

“All right, what about if I’m Natsuko the Kappa-Hunter?”

The oldest girl rolled her eyes. “She’s Nipponese, and she doesn’t belong in Salendria, but I’ll back you up if Cyrus throws a fit over it. Actually, that would be pretty saucy. Natsuko is fighting the Kappa Shogun and he sends her through a space-gate to get rid of her, and she ends up in Salendria and helps Tishandra defend the queen against the pirates… yeah, I can talk Cyrus into that.” She interrupted the boys’ conversation to tell them about this.

“I’m Tishandra and Dorcas is playing Natsuko, who came to Salendria from Nippon through a space-gate.”

“Saucy,” said the boy who’d been trying to convince Cyrus he could too do Avendrion’s voice. “What kind of a space-gate? Maybe I’ll come through another space-gate. I’ll be Captain Nemo.”

Cyrus threw up his hands. “All right,” he said. “Rob, you still want to be Garion?” The youngest boy, who had been dangling from the monkey bars and not saying much during the older children’s argument, said “Arr,” which Cyrus took as an affirmative. “Captain Avendrion and his men are boarding Queen Palanuria’s ship. Her warrior-maid Tishandra defends her – Captain Avendrion attacks,” – he brandished a long thin stick with a couple of twigs representing the guard, and the oldest girl thwacked his stick with her own, “when suddenly, a shimmering hole in space opens on the poop deck, where Garion is fighting another warrior-maid;” here Rob dropped from the monkey bars and waved his own stick in what he thought a suitably swashbuckling style, while Cyrus went on: “a Nipponese maiden with two swords leaps out of it. Meanwhile, a strange metallic ship arises from the sea off the starboard side of the North Wind. Are we ready?”

They all seemed to think so.

I heard and saw this just after I arrived and before they noticed me – I don’t think I was perceptible to their senses yet. I didn’t understand what they were saying, as I didn’t know English at the time, but I remembered it and figured it out later. What my arrival looked like from their point of view, I think, was something like this: their sword-fights took them from the monkey-bars over toward the edge of the small patch of woods between the playground and the backyards of the houses beyond. They were introducing themselves and forming alliances as Captain Nemo and some of his men boarded the queen’s ship from the opposite side as the pirate ship; then some of them saw a blur of color appear in the middle of the playground, amorphous at first and then resolving itself into a 360-degree rainbow, not hollow or transparent at its center but continuing into darker colors (indistinguishable to their eyes from black) inside the ring of indigo. At about the same time, they started to hear a quiet low-pitched hum. The others, who weren’t looking in that direction when I appeared, noticed their playmates’ strange looks before anyone said anything, and they all turned to look.

“By Tammuz!” said the oldest boy. “What do I see yonder?”

“It’s real, Cyrus,” said the oldest girl, sharply. “Stop playing. We have to figure this out.”

She walked toward me, Cyrus only a step behind her. The younger children hesitated a moment, then the youngest boy, Rob, dashed ahead, ignoring Cyrus’ call of “Wait!” I was watching eagerly, and was disappointed when Rob (whose name I didn’t know then, but learned soon enough) stopped short a couple of feet away from me.

My local manifestation, a circle of concentric colors translucent at its red edge and opaque well before it reached its deep ultraviolet center, was a little more than seven feet in diameter, oriented perpendicularly to the ground, and had its lower transparent edge just barely touching the ground. I had, I found out before long, badly misunderstood my instructions, but this aspect of them I had understood well enough and carried out faithfully; it would not be difficult for these children, or any other beings who happened along, to pass through me into the place where my other manifestation was forming. I was feeling uncomfortably stretched out, but this feeling soon passed, and I didn’t regret my decision; I felt more alive and aware than I’d felt in a very long time, perceiving the children inside and out, the playground equipment, the grassy field with vertical nets stretched at each end and the dirt field with small plastic squares placed around it in a larger square pattern, the labyrinthine building on the hill above us, the houses beyond in all directions and the people in them… And I was perceiving a similar extended field of sensations in the region around my other manifestation. I figured out I had done something wrong before the children decided what to do about me, because in the time it took for the children to walk quickly from the edge of the woods to where I had formed between the slide and the monkey-bars, a great deal was happening around my other manifestation.

I had temporarily lost contact with Tkesi as, with their help, I altered my state and stretched out, connecting the place where they were with the place I thought they wanted me to connect it to. In my new form, I could no longer speak with them as we had been doing in the time since they woke me from my long dreaming and taught me the language they spoke, but as my perceptions extended out from my local manifestation, I could hear them speaking, and understand what they said much better than I then understood what the children in the playground were saying.

“It appears to have worked,” they said to their companion, a tall, lean being much younger than Tkesi. “That’s what it should look like, anyway. Whether it it connected to the right place and whether it will function correctly, we have now to find out.”

The taller person picked up a conch shell from a workbench cluttered with tools and spoke into it. “Salepsan, the gate seems to be fully formed on our end. Can you see it on your end?” He then held the conch to his ear, listening. A few moments later he said to Tkesi, “Salepsan says it’s not where it should be. She’s starting to look around for it; maybe it’s off by just a short distance.”

I understood just enough of this to know that I had done something wrong. I was sad, and I wanted to ask Tkesi where my other end was supposed to be, if not where it was, but I found that I couldn’t speak as before.

“Hmm. Well, we’ll proceed to other tests on our end. First, an inanimate object…” Tkesi picked up a wooden rod, longer than they were tall, and extended it into me. I passed it through myself, and let it extend into the playground, pointing toward the children. It was relatively simple in structure, and I didn’t have to do much to the rod to make it fit into the playground. Tkesi then drew it back, and I undid my adjustments as quickly as he removed it. From the point of view of the children, I realized later, the rod stuck out and drew back so quickly that they weren’t quite sure they had seen it.

Tkesi examined the end of the rod. “It seems unaffected,” they said. “Next, a small animal.” There was a rat in a small wire cage on the bench. The taller person tied the cage to the end of the rod and held it out, pushing it through me into the playground.

The living rat was more complex by far than the dead wood of the rod; my senses had extended far enough around my manifestation in the playground that I could feel small animals like it in the woods between the playground and the nearby houses. I realized that the fine structure of living things was not at all the same in the two places I connected, though their larger-scale structures were surprisingly similar. I had a great deal of work to do to alter the rat (so I will call it, for it was, like the rats you are familiar with, small, warm-blooded, omnivorous, tough and adaptable; more like your rats than anything else I’ve seen) so it could live in the playground, breathe the air the children and the small animals in the woods were breathing, eat whatever food was available there, and perhaps mate with one of the small creatures that I saw in the woods. The cage was far simpler and required no major adjustments.

“Leave it there for sixty-four seconds, Pelutka,” Tkesi said to their companion. Pelutka held the rod out, extended into me, while counting under his breath.

This was enough time for the children to see the cage and the animal inside it appear and remain suspended in the air, dangling from the rod, for about one second by their time. When Pelutka withdrew the cage, though, it seemed to the children to vanish without moving. The sudden motion slammed the creature into the side of the cage, causing several bruises and a slight concussion, and I faced my first dilemma as a translator; should I restore it to its original condition, healing it from these injuries, or adapt it back to the conditions in Tkesi’s workspace, preserving as much of its changed state as possible? Tkesi’s instructions, though detailed, had not covered this eventuality; I decided to heal the injuries but try to preserve the small changes that had occurred in its nervous system, representing recent sensations and newly forming memories.

“No obvious ill effects,” Tkesi said, as Pelutka removed the cage from the rod and set it down on the bench again. "I’ll examine the rat; ask Salepsan if she’s found the other gate yet.

Tkesi did not open the cage or touch the rat; he leaned over and looked at it closely for some moments, then spoke in a low voice, asking one of his tutzu associates to examine the rat and tell him of its condition. He then stood up again and looked patiently at Pelutka. When he put the conch shell down, Tkesi asked, “Well?”

“She has found no sign of the gate anywhere near the target site, and has enlisted the help of several tutzu to search further afield.”

Tkesi nodded. “I wish I could still talk with it,” they said. “Did it misunderstand my instructions, or playfully pervert them, or meet with some misfortune in trying to carry them out…? Sooner or later you will have to go through the gate and see where it leads. But first, another test with an animal. Bring one of the dogs, give it a long tether, and shoo it through the gate. We shall leave it there for an hour or until it voluntarily returns.”

I was hurt by Tkesi’s speculation that I might have deliberately connected their workspace to somewhere other than the place he had told me about. The place he’d described had seemed to me very similar to the place I’d found, by the metaphysical senses I had at the time; but now that I was physicalized and had different, more accurate senses, I could see more and more differences. It seemed to be too late to do anything about it, however.

Pelutka left. While he was gone, Tkesi walked all around me and pointed various small instruments at me, then spoke to the conch shell again and listened to it. After a few minutes, Pelutka returned leading an emaciated, mangy dog on a long leash, most of which was coiled tight around his hand. (Again, I analogize it to the dogs of your world, a few of which I later perceived when they came within range of my senses.) He approached me and paused, allowing the dog to explore the area with its nose. It sniffed at Tkesi, at the work bench, at a few spots on the grass which I noticed were a little denser with certain organic compounds than others. It did not seem to notice me, however, expressing neither curiosity nor fear. I realized later that I had no smell; to its senses I was a round blank wall against which no other dog had ever peed, and with no scent-traces of any interesting prey animal.

“Go,” Pelutka said to the dog. He released the coil of leash, and nudged it toward me. It hesitated for a moment, then walked into me.

I adapted it as I had done with the rat, though I had no nearby models of an especially similar species to imitate, and the resulting creature was not, I discovered later, really much like your world’s dogs. To the eyes of the children, it was a rat the size of a dog, with thick, shaggy fur, missing in a few patches. After passing through me, it paused and sniffed the ground before it, then the air; then it advanced towards them.

Tkesi said: “Tie the leash to the stake there, and relax a while. We’ll give it an hour to explore its surroundings; if it doesn’t return before then, reel in the leash again. But slowly; we don’t know what’s wrong with the gate yet, besides opening to the wrong place.”

The children reacted with shock and surprise at the appearance of the rat-dog; all except Rob backed up a step or two. The rat-dog was fascinated by the children’s smell, apparently, and approached Rob, sniffing at his shoes and pants legs. He started to put a hand out to pet it; the oldest girl snatched him away, beyond the reach of the rat-dog’s leash, before he could touch it.

“We don’t know what it is,” she said, “it might be dangerous.”

As if in answer, the rat-dog emitted a sound like a rat’s squeak, but deeper in pitch. I had scaled up a rat’s vocal apparatus, modeling it partly on the dog’s.

“It’s a dog,” Rob said. “Hi, doggy!”

“No, it’s not; look at that snout and those ears,” said Cyrus. “You don’t recognize it either, Kate?”

“Maybe a tapir?” the oldest girl said, squinting at it. “No… I’ll have to get the book out of the library again, but I don’t think a tapir has shaggy fur like that.”

“Let’s see what it eats,” the other boy said. “I’ve got a candy bar here…” He pulled a shiny object from his pocket and began to peel away its wrapping. “It’s kind of melty, but he probably won’t mind…”

“You can’t feed a dog chocolate, Tom!” Dorcas cried.

“It’s not a dog, remember?” Cyrus said.

“See?” Tom said, and, peeling away the foil, he tossed the brown lump toward the rat-dog.

“We have no idea what it is; chocolate might be poison to it, like it is to dogs,” Kate said.

“It seems to like it,” Tom pointed out. Indeed, the rat-dog had devoured the chocolate in a single bite, and gave a growl-squeak of contentment – or so I later interpreted it, after it passed through me again and I perceived its recent memories.

Just then, the time allotted by Tkesi for the experiment was complete, and Pelutka began slowly reeling in the leash. That slow reeling-in was still fairly fast by the time-rate of the children’s world, and they saw the rat-dog dragged back through the portal in the course of two or three seconds. I took note of the creature’s happiness in discovering chocolate, and its frustration in being dragged away from the only known source of it; I restored its anatomy to its previous form, but modified the undigested chocolate in its belly into a substance that I had seen wild rats eating in the area surrounding me.

Tkesi and Pelutka then began a series of diagnostic tests on the dog, which lasted some time. As they began to work, Kate said:

“You saw it was on a leash? And then – whoever’s on the other end pulled it back, it looks like.”

“So there’s somebody there,” Cyrus said excitedly. “Probably that space-gate popped up unexpectedly wherever they are, and they’re just as puzzled by it as we are, and they sent their dog through to explore a bit and see if it was safe.”

“It’s not a dog –” Kate interrupted, and Cyrus interrupted her back:

“Okay, not their dog, exactly, but their extramundane pet that they happen to be walking on a leash when this space-gate pops up. I’m pretty sure it’s not a tapir, either, or anything from Earth. Point is, that thing could breathe our air, and it wasn’t crushed by our gravity, so that means we can walk and breathe over there too!”

Cyrus was partly wrong in assuming that he would be able, unmodified, to breathe the air of Tkesi’s world. However, he was also partly right in supposing that stepping through me would be safe.

“Tangy!” Rob said, and dashed through me, to cries of dismay from Kate and Dorcas.

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