Wonderful Laptops of St Arbuc

David-Cream watched with detachment the changes blow through his madjesty in squalls of joy and grief in alternation. The Prince was like a bird with too many eggs to guard, and it had made him excited and jittery, and if anyone came near him he shrieked out of his long curved beak, and you could see the pale narrow tongue flickering within. The relics which Ali had brought back from a cavern in the ground within the heart of the ruins were piled in the palace and nobody was allowed near enough to him or them to advise the Prince, who had no idea what to do with any of it all oh so many. He spent his days secluded in his private chamber, lolling in bed, where he had the best of the relics transported, and he thrashed around in an ecstatic fury at having so much of the Old Time at his fingertips but being unable to work the lock which kept him out. He opened the lids of these peculiar folding-informatic-machines – he knew they pertained to information because they bore the symbol for St Able, the saint of information – and he closed them again. His people could get into the folding-informatic-machines, but they couldn't get in. Why?

Under the flat lids were little buttons, each with a little sign on them, most of which could be found in the symbols which Wesolych had been studying with such assiduousness. Was the folding-informatic-machine a key to understanding the symbols, or the symbols the key to understanding the folding-informatic-machine? What were the folding-informatic-machines capable of achieving? When he looked at all the little buttons ranged on their tabletop, he saw they held the little symbols, yes, but also others: what was a little flying machine doing next to F12? And if there was flying machine at all, why no F16? Why was there a big sun and a little sun, and yet no moon? And what was this, an @, and yet no ® or ©? Nothing, in truth, made any sense at all.