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and thoughts they could not truly have; protests at being jabbed and pulled and jiggled
along the scaffolding of the tower, over the uneven ground, like puppets directed by
something trying to mock a process of construction.
Olmy's body had up to that moment sent him a steady bloodwash of fear. He had
controlled this emotion as well as he could, but never ignored it; that would have been
senseless and wrong, for fear was what told him he came from a world that made sense,
that held together and was consistent, that worked.
Yet fear was not enough, could not be an adequate response to what they were seeing.
This was a threat beyond anything the body had been designed to experience. Had he
allowed himself to scream, he could not have screamed loudly enough.
The Death we all know, Olmy told himself, is an end to something real; death here would
be worse than nightmare, worse than the hell one imagines for one's enemies and
unbelievers.
"I know," Karn said, and her hands shook on the clavicle.
"What do you know?" Rasp asked.
"Every meter, every second, every dimension, has its own mind here," Karn said. "Space
and time are arguing, fighting."
Rasp disagreed violently. "No mind, no minds at all!" she insisted shrilly.
Light itself began to waver and change as they came closer to the tower. Olmy could see
the face of oncoming events before they occurred, like waves on a beach, rushing over the
land, impatient to reach their destinations, their observers, before all surprise had been lost.
They now entered the fringes of shadow. The revisions of their surroundings felt like deep
drumming pulses. Caught directly in a shadow, Olmy felt a sudden rub of excitement. He
saw flashes of colors, felt a spectrum of unfamiliar emotions that threatened to cancel out
his fear. He looked to his left, into the counterclockwise sweep, anticipating each front of
darkness, leaning toward it. Ecstasy, followed by a buzz of exhilaration, suddenly a spasm of
brilliance, all the while the back of his head crisping and glowing and sparking. He could see
into the back of his brain, down to the working foundations of every thought -- where
symbols with no present meaning are painted and arrayed on long tables, then jerked and
jostled until they become emotions and memories and words.
"Like opening a gate!" Karn shouted, seeing Olmy's expression. "Much worse. Dangerous!
Very dangerous!"
"Don't ignore it, don't suppress," Rasp told him. "Just pay attention to what's in front!
That's what they teach us when we open a gate!"
"These aren't gates!" Olmy shouted above the hideous symphony of brooms. The twins'
heads jerked and vibrated as he spoke.
"They are!" Rasp said. "Little gates into directly adjacent worlds. They're trying to escape
their neighboring realities, to split away, but the lesion gathers them, holds them. They flow
back behind us, along our world-lines."
"Back to the beginning!" Karn said.
"Back to our birth!" Rasp said.
"Here!" Karn said, and Olmy brought the car to a stop. The two assistants, little more
than girls, with pale faces and wide eyes and serious expressions climbed down from the
open cab and marched resolutely across the rippled sand, leaning into the pressure of other
streams of reality. Their clothes changed color, their hair changed its arrangement, even
their skin changed color, but they marched until the clavicles seemed to lift of their own will.
Rasp and Karn faced each other.
Olmy told himself, with whatever was left of his mind, that they were now going to
attempt a cirque, a ring gate, that would bring all this to a meeting with the flaw. Within the
flaw lay the peace of incommensurable contradictions, pure and purifying. Within the flaw
this madness would burn to less than nothing, to paradoxes that would cancel and expunge.
He did not think they would have time to escape, even if the shrinking of the Way was
less than instantaneous.
He stood on the seat of the car for a moment, watching the twins, admiring them. Enoch
underestimates them. As have I. This is what Ry Omis wanted, why he chose them.
He hunched his shoulders: something coming. Before he could duck or jump aside, Olmy
was caught between two folds of shadow, like a bug snatched between fingers, and lifted
bodily from the car. He twisted his neck and looked back to see a fuzzy image of the car, the
twins lifting their clavicles, the rippled and streaked sand. The car seemed to vibrate, the
tire tracks rippling behind it like snakes; and for a long moment, the twins and the car were
not visible at all, as if they had never been.
Olmy's thoughts raced and his body shrieked with joy. Every nerve shivered, and all his
memories stood out together in sharp relief, with different selves viewing them all at once.
He could not distinguish between present and future; all were just parts of different
memories. His reference point had blurred to where his life was a flat field, and within that
field swam a myriad of possibilities. What would happen, what had happened, became
indistinguishable from the unchosen and unlived moments that could happen.
This blurring of his world-line rushed backward. He felt he could sidle across fates into
what was fixed and unfix it, free his past to be all possible, all potential, once more. But the
diffusion, the smearing and blending of the chalked line of his life, came up against the
moment of his resurrection, the abrupt shift from Lamarckia --
And could not go any farther. Dammed, the tide of his life spilled out in all directions. He
cried out in surprise and a kind of pain he had never known before.
Olmy hung suspended beneath the dark eye, spinning slowly, all things above and below
magnified or made minute depending on his angle. The pain passed. Perhaps it had never
been. He felt as if his head had become a tiny but all-seeing camera obscura.
There was a past in which Ry Ornis accompanied the twins; he saw them working
together near a very different vehicle, tractor rather than small car, to make the cirque.
Already they had forced the Way to extrude a well through the sand. A cupola floated over
the well, brazen and smooth, reflecting in golden hues the flaw, the lesion.
Olmy turned his head a fraction of a centimeter and once more saw only the twins, but
this time dead, lying mangled beside the car, their clavicles flaring and burning. Another
degree or two, and they were resurrected, still working. Ry Ornis was with them again.
A memory: Ry Ornis had traveled with them in the flawship. How could he have lost this
fact?
Olmy rotated again, this time in a new and unfamiliar dimension, and felt the Way simply
cease to exist and his own life with it. From this dark and soundless eventuality, he turned
with a bitter, acrid wrench and found a very narrow course through the gripping shadows, a
course illuminated by half-forgotten emotions that had been plucked like flowers, arranged
like silent speech.
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