I wander up the hallway from the south, carrying a pewter tea tray. I carefully set it down on the doily, then gently toss the binder onto an empty chair, leaving myself a seat next to the tray. I settle into that seat, throwing my leg over one of the arms.

I hand you an empty cup and saucer. I have already poured myself a cup of some tea that smells of cinnamon, and offer you some. You decline the cinnamon, and rummage in the bowl of tea bags also on the tray. Selecting one you like, you reach for the teapot, and I reassure you that the pot contains only hot water. I hand you a spoon, and reach for a shaker next to the tea bag bowl. I sprinkle a bit of green powder from the shaker into my tea, and stir briskly, my spoon clinking rhythmically against the porcelain edge of my cup.

I spend a lot of time here. But I also spend quite a bit of time on the mainland. I have a beach house there, and an apartment in another town. The apartment is often my base of operations when I am working, although I do some of that here.

There is a tradition among my family and friends to give names to their dwellings. Thus I have an aunt who lives at Rabbit Hill, a grandmother who lived at Meandering Way before she passed on, and friends who lived for a while in the Cave. Some of those friends were my roommates at the Collective and later at the Continuum, and so on.

In the same vein, this wonderful domicile is named the Abode, and I call my mainland apartment the Determinant. All of the names always said something about the place or the people who lived there that was important, some defining characteristic, and the same is true today.

I feel lucky that I have so many places to live.

But I don't just have these places. I live also in my mind, for hours at a time, doing a complex mathematics problem, or otherwise existing unconnected to the flesh-and-blood world around me, striving and losing and winning in worlds that aren't, that never were.

If you have made it this far, I do not have to tell you that books, well-written ones, can be good for a flight of fancy to another place, another time, another world. The same goes for movies, of course, but they are limited by their budgets, and besides, we do not have any movies from a millennium ago. We have books that old.

That's part of why I got the slow-moving clock in my study.   I point south down the hall with my thumb.   To remind myself of the passage of time on a much larger scale than my own lifetime.

If I had all the time in the world, I'd spend more of it teaching people to read. Spider Robinson has an excellent essay on this subject, titled "The Seduction of the Innocent," I believe.

Anyway, worlds upon worlds . . .

I sip my tea for a few minutes.

If you decide you like visiting worlds that never were, one response is to make your own. People who make their own out of scratch we call artists (or perhaps videogame designers); folks who try to transform this world into something more like their own personal vision we call researchers and engineers (or perhaps political activists).

If you were to visit the Determinant in my absence, a look around the place would tell you certain things about me, about my history. You could make inferences about my tastes and personality; I am not even sure what all the clues would tell you.

But I myself have never been as interested in knowing about others' choices of tables and couches as I have been in knowing their mental furniture. There's even more variety inside people's heads than in their living rooms.

I sip my tea.

Putting down my teacup, I gesture widely with my arms.   This place will tell you more about the landscape inside my head than any visit to the Determinant.

Hmmm . . . well, perhaps that is not true right now. But it will be . . .

This reminds me. There are a few boxes that I need to unpack. Just leave the tray here when you are done; I'll summon the cart for cleaning later.

I stand and stretch, then I head around the corner to the east, taking my teacup, saucer and other utensils with me.

After I leave, you look in the sugar bowl and realize that there is no spoon. You finish your tea, and put the cup down; standing up, you look down the hallway.

You move around to my side of the cart to put your saucer and cup on the tray. As you do this, you notice a faint patch of light on the side of my chair. It is emanating from the cart. You lift the doily up and see a monitor screen with a keyboard below it recessed into the side of the cart.