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are made by governments, which we also have plenty of. Everyone, even nonhumans, will be bound by whatever is in there as if it is natural law, like breathing or what goes up usually comes down.”
    “And you ain’t worried? I mean, that somethin’ buried in one of them wagons won’t suddenly change the way we look or talk or think or act?”
    “I was born here,” she reminded him, “I sort of take it for granted.”
    “You just learn to forget that it’s going on,” Joe told him. ” You can’t do anything about it anyway, and by this time everything really nasty that they could do has either been done or been stepped on by some prior rule so it’s canceled out anyway. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
    The boy frowned. “But if all them papers don’t make no difference, then why do it at all?”
    “Oh, they might make some minor differences,” Tiana told him. “Still, you are right—it’s mostly harmless at this point. But, you see, constantly revising and perfecting the Rules takes a huge bureaucracy, larger than the kind that runs most governments. Thousands upon thousands of people and fairies, all employed in everything from proposing the additions to arguing for them or against them, helping adopt and implement them, printing and delivering them—it’s a massive undertaking.”
    “And yet all them people do all that work and nothin’ much happens because of it?”
    “Essentially, yes.”
    “Then why do they do it? Seems like a total waste of time.”
    “Oh, their positions are essential,” she responded matter-of-factly. “If they didn’t do what they did, then all those masses would be unemployed, and, being bureaucrats, most of them couldn’t do anything useful. Why, they wouldn’t survive!”
    “Or, worse, they might get together and try to do something really useful,” Joe added. “That would be a disaster. So, don’t worry much about it, and particularly not yet. You’re still not quite within the Rules. So long as you aren’t physically changed here by some magic, you’re still outside the more specific rules. Unless you’re a changeling, which I seriously doubt, since we’d have noticed by this time, you’ll just slowly come under more and more the longer you’re here, without even noticing it.”
    “Changeling. Yeah, Like that sexy broad with the wings we melon the boat.”
    “Uh-huh. Marge. She came over with me and at the time was as human as Tiana or me. She changed into one of the fairy races after she was here. It happens. But I doubt if you qualify.
    I seriously doubt if your mother had that trigger in her genes, and I sure don’t. And, judging by the time she took to change, I think you’d have done it by now if you were going to, anyway.”
    “What do’ya mean by trigger in my jeans? I ain’t got no jeans on.”
    “In your blood,” Joe told him. “If you’d ever gone to church back home, you’d know that it wasn’t just here that angels mated with people. That was so long ago, though, back before Moses’ time, that it’s even more diluted back there than here. But some folks have a little of that blood, either from the angels or from demons, too, or early fairy-human matings, passed down in them. If you do, you become a changeling when you get here.”
    “Jeaz … I think that’d be kind a neat,” the boy said. “Maybe growin’ wings and gettin’ magic powers and all that. Uh—did you say demons?”
    Joe nodded. “There’s some pretty mean fairies, too. Pray you don’t meet them, believe me!”
    “But being one of the fairy folk isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Tiana pointed out, glad mat the boy was at least interested in something. “Our souls are eternal; they do not die with our body. In the fairies, the soul is made flesh and is the body. They never really grow old, although experience gives them that look after a long time, but as they are flesh, they are mortal. Iron, for example, is deadly to most of them, except gnomes and a