Текст книги "City at the end of time"
Автор книги: Грег Бир
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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
Jebrassy then moves to Ghentun and lies down beside the Keeper, to hold him as best he can while the Tall One—the former taskmaster and protector—stares up into the ice-crusted darkness. His eyes sink.
“I chose to become noötic,” the Keeper confesses. “When I was young. My only betrayal. I reconverted when I became Keeper. But my fate-lines were cut and remade, and tied up with the Kalpa. I won’t be going any farther.”
Ghentun touches the breed’s hand, feeling Jebrassy’s solidity, then moves his fingers to his own nose and makes that strange, explosive sound that signifies humor. “Let me see what he gave you.”
Jebrassy holds out the box.
“Open it for me. Show me.”
Jebrassy touches the top and turns it one way, then another, shaking it. He knows instinctively how to open it. The lid pulls away, and within there is a new, bright twist of gray metal, cradling a small reddish stone. The stone gleams within, like a star growing on the tweenlight ceil.
“Four is the minimum,” Ghentun says, and his sunken eyes turn away. “Some say three. But it isfour. Enough. They have had enough time and power. At the very end, the City Prince wins all.”
Dying eyes now focused on the young breed, with his last strength the Keeper pulls the stone up and away from Jebrassy’s suddenly frantic, grabbing hands, and smashes it against the littered floor. It does not break but makes a strange squeal and tries to pull away from the Mender’s armor. As if remembering something obscure, a last bit of instruction, Ghentun nods, then with his other hand reaches for the lid of the box—and examines the design engraved there. “Why play Eidolon games, young breed?”
Holding both away from Jebrassy, he lurches to his feet and clasps them to his breast, then closes his eyes.
There is nothing Jebrassy can do. He turns between the Keeper and Polybiblios, like a child caught in a tormenting game played by cruel adults.
The incarnate fragment of the Librarian seems at first to share Jebrassy’s horror, then holds up one hand, as if waving good-bye, or dismissing all further effort. Polybiblios crumbles to gray dust within the armor. The armor falls inward, shrinks to a wrinkled pebble.
No more words, no more information.
Trillions of years of memories—gone.
The Keeper turns white eyes upward, and then passes—becomes dust. His armor likewise shrinks, and pieces roll on the ground, sparking, sizzling around the box and the stone. All crumble.
Jebrassy tries to gather the remains in his gloved hands, but at this touch, the destruction begun by Ghentun’s passing is complete. Nothing but fine sand sifts through his fingers. All pointless.
Jebrassy gets to his feet. He is learning for the first time what it means to be utterly and completely alone. The False City, like his heart, is filled with a terrible screaming. He knows that voice, recognizes it from his dreams—from his origins.
Someone throws a rock. The rock continues on its arc to a destination. So long as it flies, a life goes on—a fate remains in play.
But now the purpose is gone, and there is only the fate.
Why play Eidolon games, young breed?
One last glance at the piles of sand.
Something new has formed there—a larger, polyhedral shape with seven sides and four holes, made of the same substance as the gray box.
His fingers twitch. He touches it—the armor does not interact. It is inert. Jebrassy picks it up and carries it with him, as a pede carries nesting material even after its clutch of eggs has been stolen and eaten.
He walks the last remaining distance under the deadfall, through a storm of whispering shadows—
The central shape of his most hidden dreams is gathering, he can feel its motion—a great revolving, spinning thing, like the design on the lid of the box: the symbol of the Sleeper. This geometric fortress will hold back the end for one last moment, until Brahma decides whether or not to awaken. Jebrassy passes through just as a great rotating band swooshes behind him. There is no going back, of course.
He has stepped onto a lake of translucent blue-green, the same color as the pieces of the muse collected by the Shen and gathered into humanlike form by Polybiblios.
The final part of his journey begins.
Toward the screaming.
CHAPTER 113
Jack has reached the center of the city. It looks like a center—everything spins out around it—though the scene is cockeyed and difficult to define, and so he turns, looks back over his shoulder, then bends over and stares between his legs—through the last iridescent film of bubble. The stone is hot in his hands, quivering with its own excitement. But everything else…very cold.
The center is a circular, emerald-green lake surrounded by revolving and whirling circular bands: the ever-moving, ever-slicing and parsing bars of a special prison. He is inside them. Somehow he has passed through the cut and slice. The bands are flat, of no thickness, and smooth, reflecting light with a brazen, defiant sheen.
A cross formed of two straight ribbons meets above the lake. From one angle the revolving bands move behind the cross—from another angle they surround it—and from a third angle they whirl in front. This is very like the symbol carved into the puzzle box. So he is where he should be, finally. And the others?
All he really wants now is to find Ginny. If she’s here, he’s certain she’s very afraid—that seems to define Ginny. Courage through fear. Jack—just a little afraid, but not like Ginny. Even this little fear comes close to paralyzing him.
Time to see things better. He turns around again, refreshing the polarity of his perception, and this creates a kind of clarity.
Curls of pale gray dart down and around, forming particle-chamber tracks through the distance above the frozen green lake, like greenish snow—all the snow in the world, summing to a peculiar blizzard here at the end of time.
The lake might be made of ice—greenish, glassy ice.
And at the center of the lake—
The Crux or heart…
A blurry black point. Too far off, too small to see any details from where he stands—just a foggy, dimensionless darkness. Nearby, another hollow opens up, carved out of the ice. Within the hollow he sees a lovely actinic glow—a billion arcs of brilliant blue. Vague shapes move there, small enough to be human—all but one, a nacreous cone with a brilliant luminosity at its apex—a face. Even from here he sees it is the face of a woman—or at least some sort of magnificent female. Looking through the blue light at that shape, Jack shivers. He knows where this is—and what thatis, or was. The icy surface of the lake is scored all around, as if giant skaters have carved deep pathways, gouges that would rise over his head if he went down there and fell into one. The tortured tracks of the Queen in White.
And so he isgoing. The sum-runner is hot and pulls him along. If he doesn’t hold on tight and go with it, it seems likely to just skitter down by itself, leaving him behind, and he will freeze, like all those giants he now sees gathered just outside the whirl of the bands—the ribbon sections of so many spheres—an armillary. That’s what they’re called. He saw something like it in a museum once. The armillary paradox is the symbol of the sum-runners—broad, interlaced fates rising forward and slipping back.
Now about those giants. Were they there before? He sees them on the opposite side of the whirling bands, gathered like extraordinary chess pieces, waiting in timeless judgment. They are horrifyingly beautiful—he is inadequate to the task of assessing their grandeur, their former power. Seeing them carries by itself a kind of knowledge, access to what had once been a tremendous future history. Once, they were judges, he guesses, builders and movers of galaxies—and then they became prisoners, held in thrall to witness the fumbling, inane destruction of everything they had ever lived and loved. Now they are gathered to await another judgment, another conclusion. The mighty and glorious await the arrival of the tiny and insignificant.
He has an audience.
He holds onto the sum-runner despite all of its enthusiasm. Jack never drops anything. As he steps onto the slippery surface, white and black shapes move around his feet, precede him onto the green ice—a river of silent, vengeful fur.
CHAPTER 114
Whitlow is triumphant as they approach the Queen in White in her abode. Above, the magnificent confusion of the armillary makes a humming backdrop.
The Crux lies within the black point around which pivots this stately gyre. Whitlow exults. They were just there—at the center. They are powerful and privileged. They will be rewarded magnificently for their success. All that was promised will finally be attained.
The Moth is above, around, everywhere—guiding them with a silken, dusty enthusiasm. Ahead Glaucous can make out, through a lattice of ever-changing shadows, one of the shepherds—the girl Virginia, walking carefully across the ice. She is attended by a few cats. He and Whitlow will soon be upon her.
Glaucous steels himself.
“A brilliant conclusion,” Whitlow tells him. “We need to present just one shepherd, one sum-runner to the Typhon itself, the master of the Chalk Princess, to gain our passage. Oh, such a prize, at such a time!”
Glaucous moves cautiously. All around, the grooves and cuts yawn in expectation of the clumsy. He is wondering how they can remove the girl and deliver her—before the cats do what the cats must do. The Moth brushes past, alerts them. Other visitors are crossing the circular green lake. Even at this distance Glaucous recognizes his own prey—Jack. The boy is following a much larger contingent of felines, like a fuzzy gray blanket.
Cats, ever the friends of books and stories—ever ready to attend to the reading of stories by sitting in a lap and purring. The death of all stories would not make them happy. The Moth touches his shoulder again. A third is now on the lake. It is Daniel, the bad shepherd. There are no cats with Daniel. He moves alone.
“Consider the depths of time,” Whitlow natters on reverently. “Beyond our understanding. And yet here we are—among the few, the last. It makes me proud. All of our pains, justified. All of our poor deeds.”
Glaucous nods absently, focused on the Crux, the center—still working to draw down the last, best strand of fate.
Beyond the spinning cage, hauntingly familiar from all the puzzle boxes they have captured and tossed with their shepherds into the Gape: an awful audience, giants out of his worst nightmares. That a nightmare like himself should experience nightmares seems only just. The worst nightmare of all, being thrown off the back of the bird-catcher’s cart, rolling across the cobbles in a tangle of feathers…and then hearing the scrabble of rat claws out of the mud-and-sewage-caked gutters.
CHAPTER 115
Across the lake of green ice, from three directions the travelers move toward the center of the armillary fortress.
Jebrassy in his armor steps out carefully on the slick surface. The Kalpa has two final voices—the voice of his armor, and his own. “There are watchers,” the armor tells him, something he already knows—the giants from the vale of Dead Gods. They remind him of point-minders in the little wars, presiding over the endgames but forbidden by certain rules to intervene, possibly because they actually aredead. That doesn’t seem to stop anything else in the Chaos. But he is just as glad they come no closer.
“There are Silent Ones closing in,” the armor warns him. “They may be held back by the armillary. Sum-runners have gathered—the spinning fortress is their birthing shell.”
Jebrassy is not at all sure what he can do about any of that. He is intent on the shimmering dome sketched by the arcs of blue light. That is where Tiadba must be; he is sure of it.
“There are no intact suits of armor in this vicinity. But there are breeds. And others.”
Jebrassy is aware of those others, moving in, like him, on the center. “Who are they?” he asks.
“Pilgrims.”
“Like me?”
“Very like you.”
“My visitor?”
“Unknown.”
He nods and pauses to think that over. He would have said, in any other place, at any other point in his young life, that there were ghosts out there—but now reality travels along a sliding scale. These pilgrims may be less real than himself, but more real than the Silent Ones or the Dead Gods. One came to him in dreams. And is this any more real than a dream? Yet he suspects there are still rules of a sort. Not just anything will happen. Fewer things might be possible here than out in the Chaos. Teamwork. Do your part.
The voice of his other brings him some relief. They are near.
“Where’s Tiadba?” he asks.
“Unknown,” the armor says.
“Is she alive?”
“Unknown.”
“Everything’s closing in.”
“Yes.”
“Am I doing the right thing?”
“There is no going back.”
“Will I just crumble away like the Keeper?”
“Unknown.”
Jebrassy shakes his head. They’ve all come so very far—he can’t begin to understand how far. Yet he does not feel small. For once he feels quite large. Bigger even than the Dead Gods, and certainly more powerful. More powerful than any Eidolon. He tries to imagine the Kalpa—but all that is gone. He tries to imagine what Nataraja was once like—now reduced to the deadfall and, at the last, crushed against the spinning and whirling that wraps and protects a hard, slippery, very cold lake. Not for the first time he tries to imagine what the entire cosmos was once like. “It’s going to end in a few moments, isn’t it?”
“Unknown.”
“Anything else you care to tell me?”
“Yes.”
The armor’s voice becomes a gentle rush in his ears, like sifting sand. He does not want to be completely alone out here. The lake and the whirl change perspective whichever way he turns. So he looks straight ahead at the blue light. He still clutches the small piece of sculpture given to him by Polybiblios.
Barely audible, the armor’s voice says, “You have arrived. Finish the journey naked.”
“Won’t I die?”
No response.
The sandy rush fades to silence.
He squats on the ice, takes a deep breath behind the faceplate, and begins to remove his armor, first the helmet, then the torso, and finally the sleeves and leggings. It comes off easily, like peeling an overripe tork.
As he strips down, a creature unlike anything in the Kalpa walks up to him. It is barely as long as his arm and has four legs and is covered with black and white stuff that looks as soft as the fur on Tiadba’s nose.
“I’ve dreamed about you,” he says. “You’re name is…” His lips and tongue struggle. “ Catth.”
The creature slowly walks around him, inspecting, and then runs off. Not what it was looking for, apparently.
Jebrassy stands up wearing only the clothes he had with him when he left the Kalpa. The ice is cold under his feet. Everything is exceptionally cold. Worse, he feels his weight diminish. This makes him queasy. He hopes everything won’t just drift up and float away.
But he doesn’t know why it shouldn’t. Obviously, the last of the old rules—imitated, remade, and finally ignored and abused—are passing.
CHAPTER 116
Jack can barely hold the stone, it’s become so hot. But he won’t let it go. It can burn his fingers to char for all he cares. Ginny will be holding hers, he knows—and what about Daniel?
Blue veins rise in the green ice, begin to cut and churn.
There are two paths—there have been only two paths for some time now, at least since he rode the bicycle on autopilot and saw the earwig in the warehouse district.
But he doesn’t know which path this is.
He’s working on autopilot again.
Seeing with other eyes.
Staring down at different feet, naked—and watching a cat walk away with its tail held high.
“ Catthh,” he says, his lips numb.
CHAPTER 117
Tiadba feels almost nothing. She can no longer see her companions—they lie at the edge of her vision, black crumples of flesh and abandoned underclothes, not alive, not dead, not even asleep. Best if they were dead.
The female presence spreads like an enveloping cloak. But there are now twopresences. She can feel them both—
One is cold and frightening, crying out in the darkness, seeking her lost children only to destroy them, surrounded by this swirling prison that is more felt than seen.
And the other—ancient, filled with potential.
The prison will keep one and set the other free.
Animals brush by—sniff her naked feet, rub against her arms, then move on. They are hunting something small and weak.
“Catthh,” she says, then tries the word again. “ Cats.”
CHAPTER 118
Ginny is paying so much attention to the other layer of vision and experience—lost Tiadba—that she does not feel the touch on her shoulder until it is too late.
CHAPTER 119
Whitlow comes upon the child, kneeling on the ice as if to catch her breath. She does not turn, does not hear, apparently does not see.
Delight perverse and damp gleams on his pale, wrinkled face. He stumps the last few paces. The Moth is everywhere, a gray mist radiating its own triumph.
“For our Livid Mistress,” Whitlow says matter-of-factly as he lifts the girl high with one hand. “A final delivery. Our greatest triumph.”
Glaucous agrees.
With all of his strength, he holds out his fists and plays this game as no game has ever been played, pulling a single steel thread down even through the whirling of the spheres—and with the greatest of grunts, the grunt of birth and death and voiding, the grunt of victory and defeat and infinite pain, this squat gnome, hunter of birds, gambler’s friend, hunter of children, invertsWhitlow, not just his heart but his insides—liver and lights, blood and ouns.
Through the messy cloud, heedless of the thin wail of the dissipating Moth—Whitlow was always his ground and root—Glaucous reaches out to grasp the girl before she simply flies away. He has pulled down as much of this chosen cord of fate as he can: penance and game, set and match. This is the greatest thing he has ever done, and almost his last—almost. The fate he has grasped and pulled forward is not a good one, not for him. He knew that from the moment he saw it, near the Crux. He sets the girl upon the ice, oblivious—still seeing with other eyes.
“You’re welcome,” he mutters to no one, then crosses himself—an old habit—and kneels beside her. As the avengers approach, Glaucous uses his thick, ugly hand to gently push her aside. The wave of cats breaks over him. He is their first prey. Only right, he thinks—one terror of birds to another. Glaucous curls like a hopeless child and with all his remaining will tries not to add to the screaming. His blood spurts onto the ice. The gray tide moves on before he is finished, but the darkness closes in as his pain is chilled and pinched into a single, drawn-out throb. Something else is about to die.
The cats have found other, more important prey.
CHAPTER 11
First Avenue South
Ginny pushed a handcart stacked high with boxes down aisles formed by more boxes, having caught the knack of steering with the single long handle, like a backward toy wagon—anticipating the turns, working everything in reverse. These boxes arrived two days ago and had been dumped unceremoniously on the warehouse’s cold but dry loading dock, beneath a corrugated tin overhang. So many boxes—where did they all come from? Where did Bidewell get the money to send out all his scouts, buy all these books, have them shipped from around the world?
More mysterious still, why?
She pushed the handcart to the sorting table in the same corner as her sleeping area. She had walled off her bed with crates and boxes. Books do make a room.
The warehouse was heated, fortunately—everything maintained at a steady sixty-five degrees, and dry. Bidewell may have been mad, but he did not collect just to collect, then allow his items to mildew and spoil.
As Ginny unloaded the boxes, Bidewell stepped in through the rolling steel door that led to his library and private rooms. In the same dark brown suit he always wore, his ancient body made a gentle question mark against the door’s dingy whiteness. He paused, then took a shuddering breath, as if lost in weary contemplation, perhaps of a job never to be completed; work beyond anyone’s power to finish. He turned his head slowly and said, “These are all paperbacks?”
Ginny noticed for the first time that this was true; she’d been working on autopilot for the last hour, letting her thoughts go as she repeated the mechanics and motions. “So far,” she said. Bidewell clasped his hands. “Books produced in quantity seem to enjoy mutation, especially in the great piles that modern publishers stack in their vast warehouses. Packed together, compressed, unread—they reach a critical mass and start to change. A symptom of boredom, don’t you think?”
“How can books be bored?” Ginny asked. “They’re not alive.”
“Ah,” Bidewell said.
She spread the books out on the table in stacks five high. All of them had been printed in English; all were less than twenty years old. Many were in sorry condition; others appeared brand-new, except for browned paper and the occasional chipped or dinged corner or spine. They smelled musty. She was coming to hate the smell of books.
Bidewell approached. Ginny never felt threatened or afraid in his presence, but all the same, could not help thinking that he needed watching.
He studied the stacks she had made. Like a dealer of cards, he worked through them, fanning the pages of each book with his thumb, lifting them to his nose to sniff, barely glancing at what was on the aromatic pages. “Once a text is printed, there are no new books, only new readers,” he murmured. “For such a book—for such a text, a long string of symbols—there is no time. Even a new book, freshly printed, stored in a box with its identical compatriots—all the same—even that book can be old.”
Ginny crossed her arms.
Bidewell suddenly showed her a toothy smile: wood-colored teeth. George Washington’s choppers, but these are real—and they look strong.
“Everything old is bored,” he said. “Hidden away in great piles of sameness, lives and histories laid out, unchanging—wouldn’t youplay a little game, given the chance?” He stared up the aisles between boxes and shrugged, then blew his nose with a crisp, bubbling hoot. “A letter flipped, a word changed or lost—who will ever know? Who even looks or cares? Has there ever been a scientific survey of such tiny, incremental deviations? What weare looking for is not the trivial, the commonplace, but the product of permuted genius: the book that has rearranged its meaningor added meaningwhile no one was looking, no one was reading—and most fascinating of all, the book that has altered its string of text across all editions, throughout all time, such that no one can ever know the truth of the original. The variant becomes the standard. And what this new version has to contribute—that must be interesting.”
“How could you ever find it?”
“I remember what I read,” Bidewell said. “In my lifetime, I have read a lot. Within that significant sampling, I will know if anything changes.” He waved his long fingers over the table and sniffed. “These are of minor interest. They have varied individually, a letter here, a letter there. Their variations are intriguing, perhaps even significant, but of little use in the time left to us.”
“Sorry,” Ginny said, petulant.
“Not your fault,” Bidewell said. “Like me, books can be tedious.” He winked. “Let’s get through this shipment by eventide. Then, we will order in takeaway.”
With an impenetrable look of severity, Bidewell stalked away through the aisles to the steel door and closed it behind him, leaving Ginny to her endless task of sorting and stacking. She opened the next box on the handcart, pulled out a paperback, and lifted the pages to her nose. The odor of rotting pulp made her sneeze.
CHAPTER 120
The Typhon knows neither time nor space. It exists without thought in a condensed shapelessness, smaller than the smallest imaginable point. In most ways, it can be described—much as we might describe the muses or Brahma—only by negatives: not this, not that. But let us simplify things and use human words, ascribing such motives, activities, and emotions as are familiar to humans—much easier to convey, however incorrect.
When the Typhon first became aware of our aging cosmos, it sensed vacancy—and opportunity. The old cosmos had few defenses. Its observers were many but scattered across an immense and thin geometry, worn by long and decadent eons. Like a great tree that falls in a forest, lives on for a while, then slowly leaks away its sap and its will, the cosmos’s heartwood was beginning to crumble. The Typhon was young, as timeless things go, and untried. Even the smallest, most formless aspirant to rule must prove its quality. This was its chance to take root like a seed falling onto a nursery log. It would rise above the dying realm and grow—and grow—to full nobility.
To Godhead.
It did not expect resistance. This was its flaw. It did not know how to use and incorporate confrontation and defiance, necessary skills for any god. The push back of creation—the freedom of unbridled will—engenders love.
Not for the Typhon. Whenever it encountered things that saw differently, it ended them—with great fear and loathing.
And then with something like amusement.
It enjoyedhating, and there was nothing to stop it—for many trillions of years. It had found its quality.
But now, in all possible dimensions, conclusions are arriving, consequences are falling into place. It is no longer a young god or an infinitesimal point, everywhere and nowhere at once. It has acquired a kind of limitation, an unwanted substantiality condensing out of the ur-nothing, the monobloc beneath all possible creations—rising out of the smallest virtual foam of the tiniest imaginable volume of vacuum. The Typhon acquires dimension and shape—it becomes bloated and sprawled. In its awful, pointless passion for deconstruction and destruction, it finally loses whatever focus it might once have applied to its whims or tasks at hand.
The overextended cosmos—the old, crumbling nurse log—has deteriorated to such a degree that it has turned into a trap. The blades of Brahma’s armillary spin. It is now a very bad place for a bloated, undisciplined god.
All the Typhon can do is flail within the whirling prison, using up the last of its strength to cause more suffering and frustrate any possibility of good outcome. It has stretched its contamination backward across time, perverting creation, causing endless cycles of directionless pain. It is now pressing our cosmos toward a nasty end, dissolving space and time back to the beginning—eating away and corrupting almost everything we could ever possibly know.
We might speculate about what would have happened to the Typhon in more fortunate circumstances. Perhaps we should extend pity, those of us who have felt its corrosive touch—every one of us. The bad that traveled from the future, not from the past.
Final sin.
But we are inadequate to such speculations. We are inadequate to feel pity for a failed god. And so—
Let’s not. Let’s not feel pity.
The Typhon—formerly without thought or viscera, without conscience or sympathy—realizes that its puffy carcass can now feel. What it feels is a kind of apprehension—even fear. It is no longer more powerful than those it once crushed.
It has become a small, brownish-gray thing, lying in the center of the last of the universe like a metaphysical abortion, pitiful but for its history. And soon there will be no history. No trace of its works, its conclusions.
What it had done its very utmost to stop, to prevent, is advancing. Even the tools it forged across eternity are turning against it. It can feel the last two threads, swirling and twining and trying to cancel, competing and summing against all the Typhon’s efforts.
One of those threads is finally dissolved.
The Typhon experiences another unfamiliar emotion.
A dire, dreadful sense of hope.
Only one thread will survive. And that in itself is not a healthy condition for any cosmos. The Typhon may pass into true nothingness, but it will at least have the satisfaction of taking every last observer with it—blinding forever those outrageous eyes.
No more memories.
No more stories.
No more.
CHAPTER 121
Jack sees Ginny half swimming through the snow and fog and the rising chunks of ice, toward the blue gleam. With supreme effort, propelling along this last cord of fate, all the other possibilities being pinched and cut to pieces by the armillary shell, he catches up with her. The stone helps—a little.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.” She glances at him. “Watch out for the cats. They look pretty mad.”
“Yeah—didn’t think I’d make it.”
“Thought you’d forget about me,” she says.
“Never.”
She reaches out, he reaches out, their hands meet, and then they hug and feel their combined warmth, and something joins them together—far sexier than anything either has experienced—and gives them strength. The sum-runners clink against each other, squeezing their fingers between them, and then separate with a reddish flare.
“We need at least three,” she says. “I remember that much.”
“If the third one isn’t here, we lose everything—right?”
“I guess so. Who’s that?” Ginny asks, pointing at another shape in the fog.
CHAPTER 122
Jebrassy has come to the edge of the brilliant blueness, naked and shivering, his feet and lower legs frozen into stumps. Two tall people—he assumes they are people, mostly enclosed in fog and snow—approach. One reaches down to lift him up by his armpits.
They are tall but not Tall Ones—not like Ghentun. He stares through the greenish storm into a familiar face, and then another. He sees himself through the other, and allows the other to see him, but actually it’s very hard to see anything at all. Constant streams of blue light shoot between them, obscuring outlines but igniting an even greater sense of renewed will—perhaps even energy. They’re speaking but their words are difficult to understand. So he offers up all he has, like a child gifting a toy to new friends, old acquaintances: the sculpted polyhedron with four holes. The piece almost explodes with blue arcs.
