In Dark I Like everyone else, Ot has always at the back of her mind an image of the world. The image is small but clear, distant but entirely distinct. It is clearer than a memory, less present than a vision. The world floats alone in the darkness. The darkness is a deep darkness, and far away in the darkness are the stars. The stars are fixed and unblinking. Between and among the stars move the other stars. Some of these are flashes of light lasting less than an eyeblink, some are long streaks of orange flame, and fifteen are faithful performers, moving in an intricate dance unimaginably distant. The stars and the other stars dot the blackness both in the real sky, and in the background of the image in Ot's mind and in everyone else's mind. The shape of the world, as it floats alone in the dark, is the shape of a huge lizard, its four legs splayed out, its thick tail curving gently upward, its great eyes closed and its mouth slightly open, the sharp white teeth barely parted. Within the image of the world in her mind, Ot senses where in the world, where on the world, she is. She is, as she always is, in the great complex atop the Head, the complex that spreads in halls and rooms in every direction, the only structure or artifact visible on the surface of the world from the distance of the mental image, forming a low circular crown for the lizard as it floats eyes closed between the stars. Ot is seated on a broad flat cushion in one of the roofless rooms at the top of the complex, her neat grey sinuous legs folded under her, listening to Coth, her third mentor, rehearsing to her her future and her duties for the dozenth time. "When the Architor says that you are ripe for it, you will go into seclusion. After seclusion, you will be cleansed, and taken to the central Innerness, and you will go into the Innerness and come out again. Later, you will have a child. The Architors will take the child, and later the child will return as a youth, and will join us on the Head." Ot sighs. Her hands are clenched tightly into balls, and pain from them flows up her arms and around her neck, but she sighs quietly, as though relaxed. The pain is familiar and comforting. "And how will I enter the Innerness?" She has become used to speaking of these things with Coth, things that are otherwise never mentioned in open conversation; Innerness and children, and the hooded Architors. But still the fingers of her hands wind themselves into bundles, and squeeze, and there is sweet and bitter pain. "You will enter the Innerness," Coth replies as always, "head foremost, going slowly in until the Innerness surrounds you entirely, and then you will emerge. But," and here her voice changes, or Ot thinks it does, "you need not fear this; the Innerness does not smother or harm. You will emerge without distress." Now Ot says, as before, patiently, "I shall enter the Innerness feet first, and I shall enter only up to my shoulders. Then I shall emerge, and have a child, and I shall keep the child myself to raise into a youth." As she says it she squeezes her hands still tighter, and releases them, and squeezes them again. Coth rubs her forehead. She begins to speak, and stops. She sighs deeply. But then, and she has not done this before, she rises, and looks away from Ot, and says with an interesting heat in her voice, "Are we cats, or rodents, then?", and she walks quickly away, disappearing behind a screen of vines hanging from a sculpted burl. Ot bites at her lips, forces her hands to relax, and watches her go. She falls back onto the cushion, her arms limp and flexible by her sides, her fingers uncoiling. The central Innerness is at the heart of the Complex, in the largest of the hot under-rooms, roofed off from the darkness and the stars, pressed against the heat of the skin of the world. Like all Innernesses, it is a break in the world's skin, a window into red heat and pulsing wetness, warded by the Architors and tended by their tenders. Ot has heard of other Innernesses, somewhere outside the complex out on the open skin, that are urged and allowed to heal and close, that their Architors prevent anyone from approaching, that are covered with sheets of exudate until they vanish. But here on the head of the lizard there is only the one Innerness. It is kept open and tended for the use of the complex, and her mentors have said, or the Architors have said, that soon it will be for her. The tenders keep the complex Innerness open with fluids, and heat, and cold, and secret methods that they teach to no one. The skin of the world is tough but biddable. It can be urged to swell and grow, made to tighten and shrink, made soft or hard, open or closed, and of course when ripe it is easily made, by even the untrained, to yield up chewable pieces of itself as food. The cushion that Ot lies upon is a burl of skin, coaxed up and softened from the thick living membrane that is the floor of the room. The roofed under-rooms below her are pockets in the skin, formed in a time before living memory by long patient training of the skin up and over and around. Burls are brought up from the floor as posts and poles, for the vines to hang from and for clothes to be put into. Out away from the complex, Ot has heard, the skin is untrained and various, rough in patches and smooth in patches, here sharp and here shiny, bent mirrors on the skin of the wilderness. In Ot's rooms she has her own mirrors, brought forth from the walls by the artisans. In her mirrors she sees her face, the eyes small, the lips graceful and dark, and above her eyes thin tendrils waving in the air. Her eyes are closed now. The pain in her hands and arms and neck is subsiding slowly as she wills the muscles to relax. She feels the pain draining away to fatigue, and nods to herself, satisfied. Carefully she moves her lip from between her teeth. Earlier, before the Architor in her dark hood came to Ot's mentors and spoke to them about ripeness and seclusion and cleansing, Ot spent long strands of time at the edge of the complex Innerness, when the tenders would allow her to, watching the deep pulsing redness, and feeling the heat against the smooth grey skin of her face. At first she was shy of the tenders, thinking them naturally as silent and frightening and serious as the Architors, but then one had spoken to her, and she had replied, and in time she had come to think of them as only lonely, and unused to talking, for who besides Ot would come to the Innerness, and who besides Ot would speak to a tender? "Is the Innerness very deep?" she had asked once, sitting in the hot room, watching a tender spread some pungent chemical on the gnarled lip of skin. This tender was the first she had spoken with, and though they had not exchanged names, she felt entirely comfortable. "All Innernesses are deep, as the world is deep. But," and Ot wondered if here the tender was close to telling secrets that she was sworn to keep, "this one we train to narrow tightly three yards down, so no one can be lost." And though tenders of course speak entirely naturally of the Innerness, Ot thought she heard a catch in this one's voice, on the word "lost". So she did not ask exactly what it meant. She only stared harder into the swelling redness, and imagined herself lost in it, trapped, carried down into the Innerness below all Innernesses, and she shuddered. But she came back all the sooner. Once, lying boldly on her stomach on the ground (the warm skin of the world) near but not too near the central Innerness, she had smelled something, and felt a bit of more intense warmth under her hip, and curling downward had found a crack, a sharp and steaming opening the size of her finger, her own tiny Innerness connected (as she saw, looking at it more carefully) to the big central one by a hairline fracture, an almost-tear, as though it were trying to bud off on its own account. She had put her nose to the edge of the small crack and breathed the heat, and she had put her finger next to the edge of the narrow strip of redness and nearly touched it. It looked at once liquid and tough, essentially the same as the big Innerness looked from her spot on the edge of the platform watching the tenders, but somehow different here so close up. Then she had heard the Architor who stood scowling above her, and turned her head up to look, and the Architor had scolded her in a loud voice (whose words she could never remember afterward, but whose tone stayed with her forever), and she had fled, and not come back for many long stretches of time. The heat of the world, the generous warmth flowing out through the skin, has always fascinated her. Her second mentor, the one charged with her education as to facts and manners, answered her questions and gave her books, told her that the heat comes from within, from (saying it quickly and turning away afterward) the deep Innerness, that the heat is, along with the light of the stars and the other stars, what lets people see, and what gives energy to the plants and the creatures of the world. She loves the warmth, but also sometimes fears it, and is glad to be in the complex on the Head, for there she can go to the upper roofless rooms where the heat is less, and when she is tired she can lie on her back on the cool rough surface and look up at the stars. She imagines that out beyond the Head, on the open skin, people must rest always with the heat at their backs. It would distract, she thinks, from the beauty of the stars. Her second mentor gave her a book about the stars and the other stars. The book described an elaborate system that had been worked out long before the book was written, for recording and predicting the motions of the fifteen other stars that move faithfully out in the dark. Ot was for a time completely absorbed by this book. The system, it said, could be used to divide time into many fine equal pieces, more accurately than the length of time that one could walk before needing to rest, or the time it took the skin of the world to produce enough food to feed a person. It had, the book said, once been popular to use the system to divide time into these pieces, like the bones in an arm or the pieces of an exudate, and give names to these pieces, so that strands of time could be pinned and marked, and talked about as though they were things. But something had happened, some failure of the system or some rebellion, and it had been abandoned. Ot never quite understood it, how time could be made into pieces and given names, but she had somehow loved the idea anyway, and carried the book with her for a long stretch, putting it under her head while resting, and looking up at the stars. Now as her pain withdraws from her fingers and her hands and her arms and her shoulders, back into her mind for the next time she has need of it, Ot opens her eyes lying on the cushion and looks up at the stars. Just above her, between one group of stars and the next, one of the other stars appears. It has either just appeared, or her eyes have just found it. It is a bright star, deeper in color than most, and moving slowly in an arc. As she watches it, it seems to fade just as her pain fades, becoming dimmer and harder to notice, until she realizes that it, and the pain, are gone, although she did not notice either one cease. II Ot walks out into the complex from her rooms, to bathe. Those places where the artisans can coax water from the skin of the head are few, though not as few as the Innernesses, and Ot knows of none near the place where she eats and rests and speaks with her mentors. The complex is mazy and various, the shapes of its rooms and halls and squares and gardens shaped by the fickle biddability of the skin, by the whims and fashions of the artisans, the obscure pronouncements of the Architors, and only slightly by reason or necessity. Sometimes Ot loves the subtle insanity of the paths, sometimes she hates it. Sometimes, as now, she notices it no more than she notices the warm still air. At the baths, Ot slips off her gown of smooth pounded exudate, and leaves it on a shelf with a dozen others. Half of the bathing seats within the edges of the pool are occupied, but Ot sees no one she wishes to speak to. She lowers herself into the water, pushing her legs slowly into the thick coolness of it, her muscles immediately relaxing. The sweet narcotic smell of the water fills her head. She is lying with her arms on the edge of the pool, her head cradled on them, her body trailing out into the water, thinking of nothing, when someone speaks. She arcs her neck, and there is Na putting her own gown on a shelf and coming toward her, smiling, her eye tendrils waving a welcome. Ot watches Na slide into the water beside her. Where Ot's belly is the smooth continuous curve of youth, Na's is marked by the curved crease that says she has been a mother, has had a child. Ot thinks of Na going head-first into the Innerness, being swallowed by whatever is there, of the child tearing free from her belly, of the hooded Architor cleaning it and taking it away. Ot has never seen a child, but she has read about them in the books her second mentor gives her. "I am to have a child," she says to Na. "I know," the other replies, and bends one of her arms around Ot's shoulders, stroking the grey skin with her arcing fingers. Ot sighs and relaxes, feeling the firm touch, the bones beneath the skin. She thinks, as she often does, that Na might be her parent. Most likely it was her first mentor who bore her, but no one but the Architors know, and Ot likes to think that it was Na, with her creased belly and her graceful hands. Once Ot and her first mentor, walking in the large wild garden in the forward part of the complex, came upon the dried skeleton of a scavenger, fallen between two swells of burl. Her mentor had arranged the bones on the ground and shown them to her, ten bones for each limb, fifteen for the spine, ten delicate bones for the neck and ten for each finger and toe. People derive their grace and their flexibility, her mentor said, from the greater number of their bones, and the agility of the muscles. Ot know that she has forty bones in each arm, fifty in each leg, a hundred in her spine and neck, and that each finger and toe has a dozen. She curves and stretches her legs as Na continues to stroke her back. "I will raise my child myself," Ot thinks she says, but Na says nothing, and Ot thinks perhaps she only imagined saying it. Na takes her arm away, and Ot turns over, and they lie together on the edge of the pool, looking at the stars, thinking of nothing. The water, secreted by the labyrinthine glands of the world, soaks into their skin and softens and cleans it, and the world tastes their scent. "I wish to see a child born," Ot says to Coth, later. She is back in her rooms, wearing a gown, clothed as the people of the complex are clothed, to mark themselves as different. Coth shakes her head, the tendrils above her eyes drooping in quiet regret. Even before she speaks to reply, Ot has begun to bring out her pain, twining her fingers together and steadily beginning to squeeze. "The birth of a child is a very private matter, only for the mother, and the tenders, and the Architor." "Na says that she would let me see, if she had a fourth child." "Na says too much to you, as she always does." Na is a skilled artisan, expert at the guiding and tending of the water, and she takes liberties. "Might I at least ask someone, someone who is soon to bear, if I might see?" Coth shakes her head. "It would not be for the parent, but for the Architors, to allow that. And they would not." Ot is fully in the pain now; it radiates up her arms and along her neck to the base of her jaw. "You have the books that Ib gave you." Coth has never entirely approved of Ib's, her second mentor's, choices for her education. "I wish to see a child born," Ot says, and flexes her fingers open and twists them closed again, and the pain pulses in her arms. "Why do you ask me?" says Coth, and again stands and walks quickly away. Ot falls onto a cushion and begins to uncoil. "I will raise my child myself," she says to Na, and this time she is certain that she says it aloud. Na has come to see her, and they are in the ripest of Ot's food rooms, stroking and pinching the burls and wetting them with their tears, so that the skin will soften and give them a meal. Na looks across at her and frowns. She says nothing for a breath, rolling a nubbin of resistant skin between her fingers. "You are serious?" "I have not always been serious, I know; I have said nonsense, I have joked, I have spun stories, but now I am serious. Completely and entirely serious." Na purses her lips. "There is someone you should meet." There is something odd about En, the person that Na has taken her to meet. Sometime during the mutual introductions, Ot realizes with a start that En is _old_. People do age, slowly and subtly, but with enough food and regular baths, age never shows. En's skin is wrinkled, almost loose in places, and the tendrils above her eyes are stiff and seldom move. En meets Ot's eyes; has she noticed the start of surprise? She smiles. "I live too much in my mind," she says, "and I don't move about enough. I imagine you're fresh from the baths, aren't you? I should go myself." En's room is small and warm, down in a warren in the tailward end of the complex, and it is full of books and writings. "Such a youth," she says. Ot looks down, but then up again, meeting the old person's eyes. "I will raise my child myself," Ot says. This is what Na has brought her here to say. En frowns and leans back on her sitting burl, crossing her unsmooth fingers across her stomach and looking speculatively at Na and Ot. "So Na tells me. This is not a wise thing to say." "Na says you are not afraid of the Architors." En makes a sound with her tongue and shakes her head at Na. "Those are not the words I would have used, but it is close enough. I am not afraid of the Architors, but I have few illusions about them." She turns her back for a moment, and then turns back with a book in her hands. It is open, and on the thin pages of drawn exudate there are columns of letters and numbers. "Do you know what this is?" "No." "In this book we record every birth that we get word of. Here in the complex, for many births now, we have been able to get word of every one." She looks up, and Ot nods as if in appreciation, because she feels it is expected, though she doesn't know what this means. "And then we record every youth that the Architors bring to us. And we count, and we satisfy ourselves that for every birth that happens and every child that the Architors take away, they later bring us a youth." Ot's eye tendrils spread and billow; it has not occurred to her that that might not happen, that it needed to be kept track of. "And do they?" "They do," says En, "at least as far as we can tell." "And what would you do if they did not?" Beside her Na makes a sound and touches her hand. En's lips purse, but she says nothing, only closing the book and adding it to the stack on the mound before her. "I will raise my child myself," Ot says again. She feels something like ridiculous, something like abashed, to be saying it again in this room full of books, to this old person who has few illusions about the Architors. "That would not be wise," says En. "En --" begins Na, and Ot feels that she is regretting having brought her here, having told her that En is someone she must meet. But En's face softens, with kindness or resignation, and she spreads her fingers out in front of her. "The Architors," she says, "control the Innernesses. They know where they are, they know how to open and close them, and only their tenders know the secrets of them. Without Innernesses, there are no children, without children no youths, no new faces for the complex or the world." "Why do they want my child?" En shrugs, and her stiff eye tendrils bend. "Do you think we have not tried to ask them this?" It has never occurred to Ot to try to ask an Architor anything. "They do not answer, of course. It has taken great spans of time to come to enough agreement with them that we can track births and youths," En gestures at the piled books, "unhindered. I am sorry." The last words are directed, Ot thought, more at Na than at her. Thinking of the great spans of time recorded in the stacks of books, Ot is reminded of that other book, and of the measuring and dividing and naming of pieces of time. She wonders if En knows of the obscure old practice, if she would appreciate it in her work. But another part of her mind is twining her fingers around each other and thinking of squeezing and pain. "Sit," Na says, putting her arm around Ot's shoulders and urging her downward. "We will talk of other things." And they talk, of the complex and the stars and mutual friends, of the smell of water and the robes of the Architors. En has been outside the complex, on the open skin of the neck, and she tells Ot of towns formed from inexpertly grown burls of skin, of people who have never worn clothing. Then Ot feels that she must rest, and she leaves En's close warm room, going up a ramp to a plaza on the upper level, stretching out on her back, and staring at the stars. In one of the books that her second mentor gave her, long ago, there are drawings of various animals and their bones and organs. She recalls one picture especially, of the bones and tissues of a lizard. Who could kill a lizard, or take one apart finding it dead? The lizard in the picture had shockingly few bones, only two in each limb, a few in the neck and spine, a complex bunch, but still not many, in the feet. Ot turns her mind's eye to the picture of the world, the great lizard floating at rest in the darkness, and wonders if its movements would be stiff if it were to move. "I'm sorry," says Na, as they walk back through the squares and the halls, "I hadn't thought how -- careful En can be." Ot takes her hand, twining their supple fingers together. III So Ot goes into seclusion. Seclusion is a large mazy under-room with a low roof and only one door. The room is full of burls, soft and hard, flat and oddly shaped, and hanging vines and creepers that give off a sharp clean scent. One corner opens out into a food-room, and there is even a small pool of water, although it is not deep enough for Ot to submerge herself in. She has gone along with the silent hooded Architor into seclusion, because she has not decided on anything else to do. She has thought of running away, but lying in her rooms staring at the stars, running away seemed impossible, an overreaction, something that someone would do in a song. Now in seclusion itself, the big mazy room, she thinks that running away would be entirely reasonable. If seclusion had meant being alone, and unguarded, she thinks that she would have done it by now. But the dark-hooded Architor is almost always by the door, silent, and when she is not, one of Ot's mentors is. She is forbidden to speak to them. She is also forbidden to sing, or to have books. She is only to eat, and wash, and rest, until the Architor says that it is time for her to enter the Innerness. But how can one rest, in an under-room? Ot has always rested under the open sky, on her back on something soft, looking out into the stars. Coth has sighed at this invariable habit, counselling her that it is good to rest sometimes under a roof, not focusing on infinity, to keep the spirit concentrated. She has ignored her mentor's sighs, as she has ignored so many sighs. Early in her seclusion, she walked to the Architor at the door, and looked into the place she guessed the Architor's eyes were, and she said "I will raise my child myself. I will go into the Innerness feet foremost, only up to my shoulders, and then I will have a child, and I will keep the child, and raise her into a youth myself." She felt a great confusion grow in herself as she said this; as though she had meant to say it to someone else, or meant to keep it a secret. But the Architor had only turned away, with her back to Ot and her face to the door, and said nothing. Now, for a long time, Ot only sits by the shallow pool of water, sheltered from the eyes of her guards by a screen of hanging vines and a round rough-surfaced burl. Sometimes she splashes her feet in the water, sometimes she takes handfuls of it and wets her face and her arms. She is forbidden even clothing in seclusion. She thinks it is the first time she has been without it for so long. Sometimes she leans back against the wall beside the pool and closes her eyes, and her fingers twine together and squeeze, and the pain comes into her. Before, she always used the pain for strength and comfort when talking to someone who opposed her will. Now she is talking to no one, but the silence opposes her will, the room opposes her will. Her muscles are tired from the pain. Now, going from the pool to the food room because she needs to eat, Ot hears movement near the door. It is not one of her mentors coming to relieve the Architor. It is in fact two Architors, one whose dark hood and general shape is the one she is used to, and another that she has never seen before, in a black hood with abstract sweeps of red on the sides, a squat figure with short legs and thick arms, who is saying something in a low voice to the other Architor. Ot goes on into the food room, and spreads her hands on the warm skin, looking for the ripest places. She has just begun kneading a promising patch when there is a voice behind her. It is her Architor, the one in the plain dark hood. "I must go. Your mentor will be here to watch over you soon. Do not be afraid. Do not speak." And before she can speak, if she would, the Architor is gone out the door, followed by the small one with the red winged hood; she thinks that this one looks back at her for a moment before she goes out, shutting the door behind her. She hears the stiff sliding of the bolt, and shudders. Few doors in the complex have locks or bolts; they are difficult to make, difficult to maintain, and there is usually no need for them. But it seems that here there is. Ot's fingers twine together of themselves, and she sinks to the ground from the pain. But later, going from the pool to a soft place to rest, she feels a movement in the air, and sees that the door is not closed. Probably, she thinks, it is her mentor coming in, and she almost turns away to avoid seeing her. But there is a feeling of emptiness there, not a feeling of presence. She goes to the door, and it is open a crack, and there is no one there. She goes out into the corridor. There is no one there. Heart pounding and her fingers tingling unbearably, she runs. The halls and squares and rooms near her seclusion, her former seclusion, are empty, and she meets no one as she runs. By the time she reaches more populated corridors, she has collected her wits, and slowed down. She tries to walk casually, to meet no one's eyes. And she realizes as she passes more people that they are also avoiding her eyes, that their gazes slide off of her. In the complex, not everyone is clothed. Those from the outside, from the Neck, in the complex on errands or under order from the Architors, are unclothed as she is. She knows that when she was of the complex (she does not stop to be startled by that thought) her eyes similarly slid off of the unclothed. She is not proud of that, now. As she walks naked, and tries to calm her breathing, she wonders where she will go. "I will raise my child myself," she murmurs to herself, but in the face of her freedom, her fear of pursuit, her exhiliaration, the thought seems distant and abstract. If she leaves the complex, where will she find an Innerness to give her a child? But that thought does not lessen her determination to leave, a determination that she seems to have had for a long time now, although she has just noticed it. Tailward. If she is to leave the complex, she should walk tailward, away from the highest places of the head, back along the sloping hallways that lead toward the Neck, the exits from the complex. She has never seen them herself, but she has heard of them; she dimly remembers leafing through maps of the complex in one of Ib's books, touching with her fingers the peak of the Head, the stylized drawings of archways leading out onto the Neck, the towns and fortresses out there on the open wild skin. Then, they were something abstract, like a story or a song or a dream. Now she must find them in reality, and pass out through them to whatever really lies on the other side. Going tailward, she passes a corridor that leads to En's room. She thinks of the old person, surrounded by her books and her records, not afraid of the Architors, but with no illusions about them. Illusions! Ot knows it would do no good to seek her out. And Na. Something cold pricks at Ot, thinking suddenly of Na, and realizing that she will be leaving even her behind. And that she hasn't thought of that until now. She stumbles, but catches herself. She can come back, when she has her child and the Architors cannot take it, or Na can come out to her. She thinks of herself in some sort of house or courtyard on the open skin, a child (a sort of small youth) by her side, and Na striding across the skin to visit. She has seen only one Architor as she walks tailward, glimpsed through a crowd across a square. She shivered at the sight, and tried not to change her speed. Would the Architors be looking for her? Could they, would they do anything if they found her? Would they put her back into seclusion, against her will? Or do something worse? No one ever spoke of the power of the Architors. Ot did not know if they punished people who defied them, because no one defied them. Or no one spoke of it. Once the Architor had passed out of sight, the crowd subtly parting before her, Ot had thought for an instant of how good it would be to be hooded like an Architor rather than bare like a bather or an outsider. She could take an Architor's robe, she thought to herself, and drape it over her, and then the crowds would part for her also. It is the most frightening thing she has ever thought. Now she is in a part of the complex that she does not know, and she has become confused. Panting slightly, she slips into an alcove in the gnarled side of an irregular wall. From somewhere she smells the sharp narcotic smell of water. She closes her eyes and concentrates on the image of the world in her mind, the lizard floating in the dark, and she finds the point on that image that is the point where she is now. She has moved tailward, halfway to the edge of the crown, the complex. Soon she will have to rest. She would like to rest under the stars, here on the upper level of the complex, in a roofless room on a soft patch of cool trained skin; she passes people lying alone, and in twos and threes, on raised soft places in the center of a plaza, and she would like to lower herself down among them and let her mind drift off into the stars like theirs. But she is afraid to. A rough ramp leads down from the star-dimness of the upper level to the hot brightness of the under-rooms, and reluctantly she takes it. Down in the warm pockets of the lower level she feels more hidden, possibly safer, but also more tired. Perhaps Coth was right; perhaps resting down here, with the roof close over her head, will help her focus. She wants to focus. Down a corridor, across a broad room, into a winding nest, net, of narrow hallways and warm smells. People's personal rooms are marked off, where the people have chosen to mark them off, by hanging sheets of exudate, braided vines, even a door or two. But other people leave their rooms open, pass freely in and out of each other's spaces. People live closer together here, tailward. Ot looks for a covered place to rest. Coming around a corner, she is facing two hooded Architors across a narrow room. She stiffens, tries to relax, speeds up, tries to slow down, walks past them, manages not to run. They seem to ignore her entirely, although she keeps herself from turning to make sure. She turns a corner, and another, and another. Then she looks around, and they are not there. She cannot recall ever seeing more than two Architors together at once. People say that the Architors live in the Innerness, that they can travel to the stars, that they keep every third child for themselves (but En would have noticed that, surely). But mostly people do not talk about them at all, and turn away when they appear. She is very, very tired, and although she would like to be further from the pair of Architors, she has to rest. She finds, pleasingly quickly, a dense and quiet room full of tangled vines and resting nooks, and going to an unoccupied one in a sheltered corner she lies down and twines her fingers over her belly, curls her legs under her. It is odd to be resting under a roof, and at first she cannot quiet her thoughts. But she is so tired that they quiet of themselves, as tired as she is, and now she is staring up at the gnarled patterns in the skin of the burl that curves over her, and she thinks that it is nearly as lovely as the stars. IV Here is Ot, long before seclusion, before even the first time she saw the complex Innerness hot and red in its under-room, standing in a ring of people in their brightest clothing, and singing. Ot's voice is high and sweet. Their song is a good one, a new one just written by a person that Ot has never met, a person named Na. Ot stands in the circle with her fingers twined around the fingers of the people to her left and right. To her right is Ib, her second mentor, who has just given her the book of maps and the book of skeletons, and to her left is someone she doesn't know, a graceful person with an alert and welcoming smile. Ot thinks that this person to her left has a voice she would like to hear singing by itself. After the song, the group breaks up into knots and filaments, people go off to rest, or to find food, or to talk in corners. Ot turns to Ib, and then to the tall singer next to her. "Introduce me," she says. And Ib tells Ot that Na is Na, and tells Na that Ot is Ot. "That was your song! It was perfect." Na smiles and touches Ot's shoulder. "I'm off to rest," she says, "I'm glad you liked it. We should talk later; Ib has told me about her new youth." Ot thinks she is also tired, that perhaps she should go with this Na and rest next to her, but she doesn't. She goes with Ib, and bothers her with questions about Na and about songs until Ib sends her a dozen hallways away with an unimportant message. Later, Ot learns that Na rests in upper rooms, under the stars. "Is that where you get your songs?" she asks. Na only smiles. In time, Ot learns Na's silences and her smiles, and that she is not only a writer of songs but a trainer of skin, an artisan who can make burls and mirrors, and guides for water. Ot makes a few songs of her own, but decides that they aren't very good. So she rests on her back under the stars, and sings Na's songs to herself. Later, Na has a child. First, she tells Ot that she will be away for awhile, and Ot should not worry if she doesn't see her. Then, when she returns, she is quiet and solemn. Her skin is taut, Ot thinks, and she does not smile as much. Na tells Ot that she is to have a child. The child grows within Na's body. Ot asks Ib for books about children, and with only a small frown she supplies them. The books are thin and few, with the same pictures of heavy people with odd lumps in their bodies, words about the extra food and warmth that people with child need, and two pictures of chidren, unsatisfyingly vague. Na spends more time resting, more time reading, more time in the close warm under-rooms. But she still rests in the roofless square, under the stars, with sheets of fibrous exudate covering her body. Sometimes Ot lies beside her, and they look up into the stars, and they sing, or they talk. Once Ot takes Na's hand as they rest together, and Na turns her head and looks at her, and twines their fingers more tightly together. Later, Na puts Ot's hand onto her odd bulging belly. Something moves in there, under the skin, and although she should have known it might, that the child there was alive, she gasps and pulls her hand away. Na pats her shoulder and her eyes go back to the stars. Here is Ot, walking with Na in the wild garden forward, Na having had her child not long ago, and the Architors having taken it away. Na seems less serious now, but almost sad. She moves stiffly, her body still awkward, and she rests often. "Don't fret about me," she says, "I'll be better." They sit on a long rounded burl, and Ot begins to sing a song, one of Na's songs from when Ot first met her, but Na raises a hand and stops her. "Look," she whispers, "look." Under the edge of the burl, away from the path, a large green lizard, as large as Ot's hand with the fingers all outspread, lies in the grass. Around it, on four sides, smaller copies of itself, tender pale green, shelter under its sides and legs. "Lizards," Ot says. "Lizards," says Na. Quietly Ot tells her about the book that talks about skeletons, and the few long bones that lizards have, and the many short bones that people have. She curls her arm in and out and back around her head, and Na smiles and does the same, and their arms do a coiling dance in the air, under the stars. They watch the lizards until someone runs past on the path. The lizards are startled and dart away, vanishing into the burls and vines, the little ones trailing after the big one. Later Ot and Na rest, as they always rest, on their backs on a cushioned rise, looking at the stars. Then they go to Ot's rooms to eat. Ot watches her friend moving around the room, coaxing food from the skin, and wonders at the way she guards her belly, and the stiff way she walks. "Could I --," she starts. And stops. Na looks up. "Did they -- the child?" And she reaches out toward Na, who looks surprised (Na never looks surprised), and looks down at herself. Na smiles, and Ot thinks that her smile is warmer than it has been, but also tired, wan, attenuated. "Come," Na says, and draws Ot to her. She slips her gown over her head and off. Ot's eye tendrils splay out wide, and she draws in her breath. Around Na's middle is a broad band of exudate, pulled tight around her, but above and below the band a red wound shows, an angry slit in the smooth grey skin. Ot touches the edge of the redness, gently, gingerly. "It doesn't hurt anymore," says Na, "it's healing." And Ot sees that in fact it must have been redder, rawer, deeper, not too long ago. She puts out three fingers and strokes the sides of the wound lightly, unable to look away from Na's skin, opened and reclosed, bound with the band around her middle. Now, lying in this close warm resting place, looking at the burls above her head, on the way from what is familiar to what is not, from the complex to the Neck, Ot thinks that the red of Na's child-wound was not quite the same as the red of the Innerness, and the healing puckering flesh at the sides of the wound not quite the same as the ridge of world skin at the edge of the Innerness. But not very different, either. Around Ot where she lies, the life of the complex goes on. Others rest in the room around her, for it is a room very suitable for resting, perhaps even designed for resting. The skin here has been coaxed into comfortable pockets and niches, and vines allowed to grow artfully from the burls to provide privacy and quiet. People pass through the room on the way from here to there; it is not quite a corridor, but also not a still place that leads nowhere. People in the complex move from place to place, visiting, going from eating place to resting place, going (Ot thinks) from friends to seclusion, from the bathing pool to the Innerness, where they will be plunged headfirst into the hot redness and lost, or made to have children that the Architors will take away. She opens and closes her hands, twines the fingers around each other and squeezes gently, feeling in the back of her mind the availability of pain, but having no desire to bring it out. She moves all of her muscles, and her body undulates in the resting place. Later, rested, she slides out of the nook and stands, not entirely comfortable to be without clothes, not entirely calm about leaving the Head, looking about her, she hopes subtly, for signs of Architors or pursuit. In the hallways and rooms near the tailward edge of the complex, Ot begins to see soldiers. She does not realize what they are at first. She has read about soldiers in her books, but they have seemed, like seclusion and running away once seemed, to be something only in books, or in the far past, or in distant places. But here near the Neck side of the complex there are soldiers in the rooms and the hallways. Not many, always in small groups, never in the way, always deferential. Or rather, Ot sees, always deferential to those clothed in the clothing of the complex, as she is not. The soldiers are clothed themselves, but their clothing is functional, holding their weapons, their guns and knives, their bullets. They move among the people quietly and slowly, going from one place to another, their eyes always in motion. Their eyes, Ot sees with some alarm, do not slide past and around her as the eyes of the softly clothed people do, as her eyes would have not long ago. The soldiers see her. Why are their soldiers in the complex? Her books have not told her much about history, except for isolated stories full of names and places. There have been battles for control of the Head complex, battles for possession of the Neck, battles for the choicest food fields. But those, she thinks, were all far in the psat. Some of the soldiers, Ot sees, have mother-scars on their bellies, barely showing under the padded weapon belts and holsters. Others do not. She wonders where the soldiers come from, and wonders why she does not know. Here is Ot, with Na, long after Na's first child, and not long before the seclusion for her second. Ot has been telling Na about her books, about the kinds of other stars that there are, about the ancient method of piecing and naming time. "Why don't people know about these things? Why are not there more books? Where is the book that tells me why people stopped naming time, since this book does not know?" Na smiles. "Always Ot," she says. "People have other things to do, songs to sing, food to eat, and the baths to soak in. Artisans are training the skin and drawing out exudate. Why should any more of it go into books?" Ot shakes her head, unable to explain. "Each book is trying to explain the world by itself. Why do they not build on each other? If I wrote a book, it would start from the place all the other books leave off." Na only smiles again and shakes her head. Ot thinks how lovely she is. "Come, I've written a new song; you should sing it with me." Ot tries to remember the words of that song now, standing in a corner of a room far tailward in the complex of the Head, watching people go by, wondering if she should be avoiding soldiers as well as Architors, wondering if anyone is looking for her, wondering what Na is doing. But the words elude her. V "Why do you wish to leave the Head?" Ot has been stopped by a soldier as she approaches the archways that must lead out of the complex, onto the open skin. As simply as that, she has been stopped and taken aside, into a room with a door, with one soldier standing by it, and another soldier, in different clothing, sitting behind a broad flat table of a burl before her. The soldier does not offer her a seat. Ot feels her fingers twining, tastes the memory of pain in her mouth and arms and lips. Are the soldiers workers of the Architors, like the tenders of the Innerness? Ot does not know. Her books do not say that they are, and she has never heard anyone say it. But they have stopped her, and she is afraid that they will take her back to seclusion. "I have never seen the open skin," she says, and then she thinks that that was the wrong thing to say, that now she cannot claim to be a guest or a worker or an artisan from the Neck come into the complex for a time on some business; but the soldiers must know that already, because they have stopped her, and they have not, or they have not as far as she has seen in a long time watching the archways, stopped anyone else, clothed or bare. "Why are you unclothed?" the soldier asks, "Has someone taken your clothing? Do you need help?" Ot wonders how the soldier, the soldiers, know that she should be clothed, that she has worn clothes almost constantly since she was a youth. People clothed and bare pass in and out of the archways, but something about her says "here is a clothed person walking naked." She looks down at her belly, at the smooth childless unbroken skin. "No. Only I know that people on the open skin go without clothes, and I thought I would also." The soldier considered, and nods, and waves at the low burl against the wall. Ot sits, and the soldier goes out, and in a short time another soldier comes in. This one is smaller, lighter armed, with a jagged mother-crease showing above her belt, and some other sort of scar on the skin of her shoulder. She sits behind the burl-table, and looks at Ot. After a moment, another person enters, with two curves vessels full of clear liquid. She puts them in front of the small soldier, and goes out. The soldier beacons to Ot. "Come," she says, "drink." Ot is taken aback. People get water from bathing. Drinking from vessels is a ceremony, a ritual (although, thinking of it, she supposes that people like En, who bathe rarely, must get their water somewhere, in private). Why does the soldier want them to drink together? Perhaps customs are different at the archways, or among the soldiers, or among the people who go unclothed. How little she knows, she thinks. Were there not books about this? She perches on the edge of the burl and takes the vessel in her hand. It is shiny and curved, some worked exudate or plant composite. The soldier smiles at her encouragingly, and she puts the vessel to her lips. It feels strange and formal. She drinks the liquid quickly, and even as she notices how odd the taste is and opens her mouth to speak, her legs are going limp and curling under her. Someone behind her, perhaps the soldier at the door, catches her under the arms and lowers her to the ground. Her eyes close. --- The world is a great ring of hard earth, surrounding and surrounded by a roiling sea of white fog. The fog rises and falls with the wind, and streamers break off and blow across the land. At the inner and outer edges of the ring, the land slopes down into the fog, vanishing into whiteness. The fog is not breathable; no one knows what lies at the bottom of the fog sea within the ring, or on the infinite trackless bottom of the fog ocean outside it. Ot awakens in a small dark house on the inner edge of the ring, not far from the edge of the fog. She sits up in her bed and blinks her eyes. Something has confused her, some dream (what is a dream?) that came in her sleep (what is sleep?). She stands (why are her legs so short and stiff?) and goes to the window, and looks out at the edge of the fog. The fog seems close this morning (what is morning?); it has risen during the night (she thinks 'what is night?', but only dimly for an instant; she is fully awake now). She sees some of her neighbors standing and looking worriedly at the edge of the sea, and others walking up the slope to their fields and factories. She pulls her nightgown off over her head and folds it under her pillow, goes to the dresser and finds clothers, dresses herself (her body feeling almost entirely familiar now). She is about to fix herself breakfast when the shouts come from outside. She goes to the door, and the wind in her face when she opens it strikes panic into her. The fog is billowing and tearing in the wind, but under the roiling it is moving, rising, rising more quickly than she has ever seen it rise, and the people who were only frowning at it not long ago are now running, running up slope to escape the fog, or running to other houses to awaken anyone who might still be within. Ot stands in her doorway (hers?) for a long moment, frozen by the activity outside. A dense wisp of fog curls out of the rising wall and wraps around her head, and her breath stops in her throat. The smell, the taste of the fog is stifling, deadening, a breath from something that has never known breath, the scent of a place that has never known life. She throws herself out of the doorway, out of the patch of fog, and takes a deep breath in the nearly-clear air. People are shouting on both sides of her, rousing nearby houses or shouting each other's names into the wind. "Has anyone raised the Shermans?" "Are the Fishers awake?" And before Ot can take more than two breaths, the shouting and running people are gone, and the fog has swept over and past her. Before it closes down, she thinks she hears a voice, one final shout, from downslope, from inside the whiteness. How long can Ot hold her breath? She knows that she has had to test this before, but somehow she does not know the answer. She runs downhill, her lungs already beginning to burn from the anticipation of air. There are pockets of healthy air within the fog, pockets of fog within every pocket of air. She manages one more gulp of air, but it has the taint of fog in it, and it slows her down. All along the inner side of this part of the ring, and all along the outer side of the opposite arc, the wind, a fifty-year wind, is ruffling the fog and pushing it up onto the land, covering houses and fields and factories and stores. In the wealthier districts they are spraying precious water up onto the fog, which weighs it down and pushes it back. But where Ot is the people only run. Ot fumbles with the handle of Na's door -- no, not "Na", what sort of name is "Na" -- the handle of Anna's door, wanting to shout but not having the breath for it. The door opens, the air within is full of fog. Ot's lungs are burning in fact now. She pushes herself into the room, and there on the ground is Anna, beside the bed. Ot crouches beside her, puts an arm under her shoulders, with her lungs bursting. Then she sees that what she thought was a tangle of sheets and pillows in the bed is a child. Why is there a child in Anna's bed? Ot's confusion returns, the quiet slur of the wind becomes a howling, air seeps through the walls and the house shakes. Ot tries to look in every direction at once, to lift Anna's sleeping body, to uncover the child. And then the wind shrieks still louder, and the fog is torn away, and the roof and the walls of the house are torn away, and Anna is awake and shouting and clinging to her. The child sits up and cries out, and they draw it to them, the wind ripping insanely at their clothes, debris whipping past them and slamming into them. Ot's head is bruised by a flat board, Anna's face is cut by a flying stick. The wind lifts them up and flings them away, out over the wide deadly stretch of whiteness that is the fog ocean. Down below them, like a toy or a drawing, the dark ring that is the world becomes steadily smaller until it disappears. Ot looks at Anna, but Anna is looking at the child, who has buried her face in Ot's shoulder, and is sobbing. Then something strikes Ot again in the head, and her eyes close. --- Ot awakens again lying on a cusioned burl, in a windless place. She holds her hand in front of her face, counts the eight curling fingers, twists her supple arm into a circle, holds the grey skin before her eyes. At the end of the burl sits the soldier. She is frowning at Ot in concern. "Are you well?" the soldier asks. "Well?" "We gave you a truth drug. You reacted strongly." "Truth?" Ot is puzzled by truth. And by drugs. But then she remembers, both the drink and before that a book, a book that mentioned liquids that would relax a person's mind and tongue. "What did I tell you?" Ot sits up, her head spinning. The soldier puts out a supporting hand. "Enough," she says. "We are not creatures of the Architors. We will not turn you over to them. But there is no point in running away. You should go back." Go back into the fog, Ot thinks. What fog? "I will raise my child myself," she says. The soldier shakes her head. "That is no business of mine. We will not stop you from going out through the archways if that is what you want to do. But the Neck is no place for someone from forward." "You will not tell the Architors?" "The Architors do not speak to us, we do not speak to them." "Why are there soldiers?" The soldier's eye tendrils splay apart, and she smiles oddly. "There are soldiers here so that there can be people like you forward. We all hope to be you later, just as those on the Spine hope to live on the Neck, and those near the Tail, when they wish anything at all, hope to live on the Spine. You should go back forward, since you can." "I will raise my child myself," Ot says, and rises to her feet and starts for the door. The soldier has said that they will not stop her from going through the archways. As she passes out the door, the soldier calls after her. "Be careful," she says, "not everyone is as kind as you are used to." Ot ignores her. The archways are broad and high, and beyond them is the open skin. VI At first she thinks it is just a large strip of wild garden. People pass here and there, the black sky and the stars rise over all, and burls and vines grow at random. But then she sees that what she thought was a burl near at hand is a hill in the middle distance, what she thought was a wall in the middle distance is a vast plain immensely far off, and she stumbles and falls. Her legs curl under her and she rolls softly down the slope from the archways, and people dodge around her and laugh. She stops on her back on a warm rough patch of skin, and someone helps her to her feet. She wonders if whatever marked her to the soldiers also marks her to these people, if she is obvious to all as a clothed person naked. She thinks suddenly of Architors in their hoods, looking out from the archways and seeing her standing there. She moves off quickly, away from the arches and the Head, into the tangle of burls and vines and people that stretches out down the Neck. Looking back, she sees the outer wall of the complex rising against the sky, and she thinks that the picture in the book looked nothing at all like the reality. The Neck is familiar and strange. The same plants grow here as within the complex, although she thinks they are thicker and tougher. The same warm skin is under her feet, but everywhere she goes is both warm, like an under-room, and open to the sky, like a room on the upper level. She knew, of course, that on the Neck where is only one level, only the open skin. But the word "open" has tricked her. The Neck around the archways to the complex is anything but the thing she had pictured, a flat gently rolling table of various skin with a few strange bare people walking here and there under the sky. The real Neck is a jumble of burls and walls and gardens and hanging vines and people going purposely through it as though they know exactly where they are and where they are going. Ot has spent her whole youth in the forward part of the Head complex. Now here her instincts and her reflexes lead her wrong as often as they lead her right. There are tight hallways where she would expect plazas, upward slopes where she would expect downward ramps (nowhere for a downward ramp to lead, here), closed doors where she expects arches, and everywhere there are walls, walls whose other side she cannot get to, walls with unknown things behind them. Walking idly between the walls and through the unpredictable squares, she is ambushed twice by the immensity of the world, by a hint of what she thought "open" meant on the open skin, by a sudden vista from a swell of skin down along the Neck and out across the spine. Both times she stands mesmerized, although she does not fall again. It is like looking up a wall that leads into the sky, like falling into a well. She thinks how many people there must be in the world, if all the skin she can see from here is as mazily occupied as this bit of the Neck. Pulling her eyes away from the second sudden vista, she is aware of people looking at her as they pass, their eyes perhaps narrow, the tendrils waving in amusement or some kind of curiosity. She does not want to attract attention. Some people, she sees, are clothed like people in the complex, although most have only pouched belts or a shoulder bag. Perhaps she should find clothing, not to appear like a clothed person naked and obvious to the Architors; but perhaps she should stay as she is, not to stand out from the mostly bare crowds around her. Now she realizes that she is hungry. She has not thought about eating in her escape from seclusion; it has been an escape entirely without plan. Her mind traces the way back into the complex, to her food rooms, estimates which one will be the ripest, urges her feet to turn that way. But she stays where she is, and thinks. If she had a friend here on the Neck, she could share her food. If she knew where someone kept a food room open, she could go there. If she asks someone, one of these passing busy people, will she attract attention? She asks. She catches the eye of a wide and likely looking person with a blue woven shoulder bag, who sits in the corner of a plaza stretching her feet. "A place to eat?" the person says, asking her question back at her, "Who are you? You are from the Head; where are your clothes?" "How did you know? Why does everyone know who I am as soon as their eyes touch me? What do I do?" The person smiles broadly, her eye tendrils curling and waving. "The way you carry yourself, dear, the careful way your feet touch the ground. Also you are entirely bare; where is your belt, your pack, your bag? How do you carry anything? Your body is young and soft, and obviously used to fine covering." And she stands. "My name is Tala," she says, "come home with me." --- Here is Ot out on the wild open skin, tailward and leftward from the town that crouches around the archways from the Head to the Neck. She is out of breath, and very tired, and beginning to be hungry again. She is only walking now, not running, but still she does not want to slow down enough to search among the tangled vines and convoluted burls for a place where the skin might be ripe with food. She wishes that she had eaten better in Tala's rooms, but the food had been dry and unripe. When Ot had suggested that perhaps another room would be more ready, Tala had only laughed, a laugh that Ot had not found very pleasant, and urged her to eat what she was given. Hungry, Ot had. Then Tala had shown Ot the resting nook in one corner of a close little room, and suggested that she rest (she was indeed very tired) while Tala went out to find friends, friends who would want to meet Ot. Ot was grateful for the chance to lie down (although the nook was too hot and too small, and the skin it offered to her looking up was mostly smooth and uninteresting). As Tala went out (her rooms were cut off from the plaza outside by a door), Ot heard a small sound, but thought nothing of it. Lying there, she had found it difficult to rest. She thought of Na, and of the long walk from her rooms in the complex, and again of which of her food rooms would be ripest, and of how moist and sweet the food would be. Then she thought of Architors, and seclusion, and being locked in a room, and then she remembered the sound of Tala leaving. She was at the door in a moment, tugging at it. It would not open. Her fingers began to tighten and twine around each other, but this time she put the pain away. When Tala returned, Ot was standing behind the door, and she wrenched it out of the wide person's startled hand, and pushed past her into the street, and ran, and ran. Behind her, she heard Tala shout something, or laugh. She ran as long as she could, and now she has walked as long as she can. She has run tailward, and because the people seemed to be densest along the line toward the Spine, she has run leftward also. Now when she stops and looks at the image of the world in her mind, she knows that she is on the left side of the neck, where it merges into the flat wrinkled back. The wilderness is a strange place, but not as strange as the town. From within a dip in the rolling skin, she can almost imagine herself in the wild garden forward, walking with Na, looking at the lizards. She has seen no lizards in the wild so far, but she has heard stirrings in the brush, and seen two scavengers and a wild cat run across her path. It is, she thinks, too hot to be the wild garden. Eventually, she is too tired to walk. She sinks to the ground beside a steep burl and looks at the sky. Being among the black and the stars is deeply soothing. One of the other stars burns suddenly across her vision, a streak of vivid blue that burns and is gone in a moment. She curls her arms and legs and fingers into a tight bunch and releases them, relaxing all of her muscles. Two more streaks, of blue and gold, flash across the sky. They look amazingly close, she thinks, for the other stars. Her body molds itself into the hot skin beneath her, in complete comfort. Then she hears the footsteps. Without moving, her body goes from relaxation to utter tension. Her mind is torn out of the sky and back down to the earth, to the vines in front of her, to whatever is walking on the other side of the burl she lies against. It sounded to her like a person, a person walking carefully through the vines. But might there be other things out here that walk the same way? The footsteps move on, become quieter and more distant, fade entirely. She considers staying where she is, but decides the spot is too exposed. Does she fear the Architors, or some unknown sinister friends of Tala? (Tala, who may she thinks have been entirely innocent, and locked her in from some benign motive that she cannot imagine.) But in any case too exposed. Exhausted as she is, she pulls herself up and, trying to move quietly over the viny uneven skin, looks for a more sheltered, a more hidden, place to rest. The place finds her, as she loses her footing on a pad of vine leaves and slides down into a tight niche between two jagged plates of skin. It is hot here, and the skin is hard, but she lands on her back with her face to the sky, invisible to anyone or anything that might walk past above, and she decides that it is not really all that uncomfortable. She has a long rest down in the niche, looking up at the sky and watching the lizard floating in the darkness in her mind. Later she notices her hunger again, and is preparing to get to her feet when she sees that the skin just above where her head rests is ripe with food. She sighs gratefully and wets the hot membrane with her tears and kneads it with her fingers until it comes away and she can eat it. The flavor is, she thinks, wild and sweet. No longer hungry, she begins to stand, but then falls back into the litter of leaves at the bottom of her niche. Where would she go, if she were to stand up? Which way would she walk, if she were to walk? "I shall enter the Innerness feet first, and I shall enter only up to my shoulders. Then I shall emerge, and have a child, and I shall keep the child myself to raise into a youth." She remembers someone saying that so confidently, a long time ago. Was it really her? Was it her in seclusion, going through the archways, smothering in the fog? (What fog?) Her mind entirely unsettled, her body relaxes back against the hot ground, and she looks up at the stars. Is there water out here in the wild, she wonders? How common is food? The patch she has just feasted on is small; it will give her one more meal, or perhaps two, but it will have to rest and ripen for a long time after that. Will she find a mirror out here, grown naturally in the various untrained skin? She smiles at the thought. Are there Innernesses out here? The thought startles her. She has heard of wild Innernesses, but only those that are tended and healed by Architors. She thinks of her own hidden Innerness, in a secret niche on the open skin, with a pool of water nearby, and patches of food, and a soft place to rest and to sing. She will, she thinks, bring Na out here to live with her. With her and the child. They can write songs, and sing them, and tell each other stories, and if they are lonely they can walk to the town by hidden paths that only they know, and talk to the people there. She decides that Tala was probably innocent after all, a friend, and locked the door because town people always lock doors, or because she was not thinking that it might frighten a guest. But she is not sorry that she ran; the wilderness has been a welcoming if exhausting place. She does not think of the footsteps. VII She has stood for the third time and climbed to the top of her niche, intending to go in search of water, of more food, of her private Innerness, when these things happen. A bright and terrible light comes down out of the sky somewhere ahead of her and disappears behind a swell of skin; the light is brighter than anything she has seen before, and her eyes are clamped closed and flowing with tears. Just before that, or just after that, there is a great noise, a roaring or tearing or gnashing, that fills the world and numbs her ears. And while her eyes and her ears are blinded and numbed by brighter and louder things than have ever happened before, something smaller and quieter, but infinitely more shocking, happens inside her. Back in the back of her mind, where the image of the world floats, the great lizard moves. The lids over its eyes crease and tighten, the mouth with its great teeth opens slightly wider, the vast feet splay wider and, most appallingly, the great mottled back arches, just perceptibly, into the shallowest of U's. And that smallest of bends throws Ot into the air. In the air, her eyes still shut and her ears ringing, her body, abandoned by her mind, curls itself into a ball. That ball falls back to the surface, bounces once, and tumbles down into the niche again. Another blast of light, further off, fills the world, and another sound, and another, more distant. The sounds die. The light is still too bright, light everywhere, but no longer unbearable. In her mind, the great lizard has moved its arms and legs and arched its back in four tiny but world-sized winces, and now it settles back to relaxation. Its face settles out of the momentary grimace, the eyelids smoothing and the mouth returning to almost closure. The ball on the floor of the niche unrolls, and is Ot again. She is amazed and horrified. The lizard has moved. The world has shown itself to have more light and more sound and more motion than she could have imagined. Is this what the world is like, outside the Head? But the lizard has never moved before; she would have seen it, there inside her mind. She opens her eyes and sits up on the floor of the niche. The light is still bright, but dimming fast, and no longer hurts her eyes. There is no sound at all, and she realizes that her ears are still numb, still stunned by the blow of the sound. How many people have been hurt, or damaged, by the the arch of the lizard's back? Ot does not know how people live on the open skin. Will they have been tossed too high in the air, or crushed in their rooms or resting places? Could people have died, have ceased to be? Ot knows herself of no one who has died, but it is mentioned in her books. People can die of poison, or murder, or even from the claws of a maddened scavenger. But not, she hopes, of the arching of the world's spine. (Do people live on the feet, on the eyelids? She suddenly finds it strange that she does not know.) In the image of her mind, of the quiet lizard floating motionless in the starry dark, she sees that she is still on the left side of the neck, at the edge of the back. She pulls herself up out of the niche. (Has the shape of the edge changed? Her arms and legs are sore, and there is a sharp painful place on her back.) The sky is dark, but the skin ahead of her is bathed in light. She walks forward (thinking that she should be running backward, back to the town and the archways and even back to seclusion), and the light grows. She walks between twisted burls and over wide wrinkles in the skin (are there more than there were before the light, before the sound?), the light swelling all the time. She pulls herself up over a last hot rough cliff (there is an odd scent in the air), and there in the skin before her lies the red moist heat of an Innerness. She walks to the edge slowly. Here there is no platform, no carefully-tended edge anointed with secret oils. The edge of this Innerness, of her Innerness, is raw and torn. What could it have been, she wonders, falling from the sky so bright and so terrible? She curls her legs under her (the skin is very hot, here at the edge, and the smell is strong) and sits, looking down the the tight hot redness. And then something rises out of it, tall and hot and dripping red, and takes a step toward her. And she screams. VIII Nartabee has been following the tall granch for a long time. She's been following her because she thinks there might be something in it. Nartabee's good at telling when there might be something somewhere. It's what's kept her alive and in food for, well, for as long as it has. The tall granch isn't careful, and doesn't look especially strong or otherwise obviously dangerous, but Nartabee sees that people are leaving her alone. She walks with a long stride, and her eyes seem to be looking through things. She looked through Nartabee once, and it didn't feel good. Nartabee knows that the granch is a granch, because that's what Nartabee does. She knows what things are, she knows when there might be something to it. She's got the sickness, has had it since she was a youth, like most people back here near the tail have the sickness, but it hasn't messed her up much. It's made her small, and not very strong, but she has exactly two eyes, and she doesn't get the screaming fits, or spend so long staring at a vine-leaf that someone has to remind her to eat, or any of those things. Not like some. So Nartabee knows that the granch is a granch, is someone from forward come back here to the tail for some reason of their own, the same way she knows anything else; inside her head and without really thinking about it. She knows the granch is a granch the same way she knows where she is on the image of the lizard in the back of her mind. Nartabee wonders if the granch is armed. She's not obviously carrying a club or a knife or any kind of gun, but she's walking with the kind of confidence that comes from being ready to defend yourself. Maybe, Nartabee thinks, she's connected in some way Nartabee doesn't know about, or maybe she's just too fresh to know that she should be worried. The granch has reached the edge of town, and Nartabee is wondering whether or not to keep following her. Nartabee is good at following, but it gets harder out on the open skin, and except for the vague feeling that there's something in it, she doesn't see any strong reason to keep on. But she does, for a little bit, and then the granch speeds up and goes around the corner of a tall vine-bush, and like an idiot Nartabee slides around after her, and of course there she is waiting right around the corner, and the tall granch grabs the short Nartabee with a very strong grip, and pulls her up off of her feet so they're face to face. And the granch grins. Nartabee grimaces back, trying to look friendly, wondering more urgently this time if the granch is armed, and if the granch minds being followed. "H-Hello," Nartabee says to the granch, into that unnerving grin, "I'm Nartabee. What's your name?" "Torcel Vellome," says the granch, still holding Nartabee off of her feet. Definitely a granch name, "Where do you get some food around here?" That is, of course, the main concern of everyone around the tail; how do you get some food around here, and how do you get strong enough and connected enough to move forward, toward the spine, and stop being around here at all? Now Nartabee grins. "It happens," she says to the granch, to her new friend Torcel Vellome, "that I know where a tall smart person like you and a quick smart person like me can get a nice meal or six, if we work together." And as she says it Nartabee realizes that it's actually true, and that that is probably why she's been following the granch, and that's probably what was in it. Because the granch isn't just a little tall, she is in fact the tallest person Nartabee has ever seen. Maybe she's not from so far forward to be entirely outside the sickness, and maybe that's what's stretched her out. Maybe her forward friends didn't like it, and chased her back here because of it, even. But Nartabee has a use for someone tall. Later, quite alot later, Nartabee and the granch Vellome are out in the wild skin around the right side of the tail, with a sack full of food, and a few bruises, and a newfound friendship. Or at least Nartabee thinks it's a friendship. Torcel Vellome, it turns out, doesn't talk much. "That was a close thing, eh, when the big gleezer with the knife came around that corner?" Nartabee likes to talk, and there aren't many people who will listen to her. She only wishes the granch would talk back. But now she does. "Don't move," Torcel says, her eye tendrils splayed out and quivering. Nartabee opens her mouth to say something, but before she gets a word out, the granch has hurled herself forward, knocking Nartabee down and vaulting over her head, and at the same time there is a tremendous scream, and what sounds like body striking body with considerable force. Nartabee, on instinct, runs a considerable distance, her legs curved and body low to the ground, before she turns to see what is going on. She sees only the last instant; a bulky misshapen something vanishing among the burls with a great crashing and snarling, and the granch, Torcel Vellome, slumping to the ground. Cursing, Nartabee goes to the granch and crouches down beside her. She is alive, awake, her eyes open but her face contorted and her legs bent oddly up around her body. She sees Nartabee and her face smooths gradually out, and her legs uncoil. There is a deep scratch, a gouge, in her lower chest. The flesh is red and torn, and seeping clear pungent fluid. "This hurts," says the granch. Nartabee curses again, and rifles in her pouch to find something to staunch the wound. "What hideous canchmer was that?" she asks the granch, winding what she hopes is a clean strip of exudate around the other's torso. "I don't know. Someone the sickness was not kind to." Torcel winces as Nartabee ties up the crude dressing. "This may not do." Nartabee shakes her head. "It will do only far enough. You need more than this. I know some people." And, Nartabee thinks, you probably kept me alive. IX So here are Nartabee Silgilesh, the small slick one from the town near the tail, and Torcel Vellome, the granch from somewhere forward, sitting in a close warm room in a tiny house, or large covered niche, out in the open skin somewhere tailward. Torcel's wound has been more neatly bound with medicinal exudate, and the two have shared their bag of food with the three others in the room. Tired, they lean back to rest, bits of the black sky and the bright stars visible through holes in the fabric above them. Vellome looks at the image of the world at the back of her mind, and locates herself. Am I any closer, she wonders, to where I am going? The other three in the room are these: Curatan Silgilesh, who was a youth along with Nartabee and who the sickness has touched only in making her skin mottled and pitted and ugly; Taraban Eluctog, whose feet are too large and who has visions of impossible creatures and agonizing cities that overlay the real world and sometimes render her all but blind; and Torgano Fonato, who was once a granch herself, and lived for a long time in the rich and easy towns of the spine, until she did something that she doesn't speak of, and her people chased her tailward. Torgano has lived here so long that she is fully a tailward person now, and added the syllables to the ends of her names to make it official. She tells stories; it may be that the sickness has gotten into her, and that the stories she tells are sometimes from the sickness and not from herself. They have eaten half the food that was in the bag that Nartabee and Vellome brought back, through the mazes of vine and burl that Nartabee brought them through, Vellome's wound still oozing and Nartabee straining to support her staggering walk. Now the wound is closing under the medicated wrap, and Torgano is telling a story about her youth, working in a medicine plant on the spine, and sometimes the story veers off into something else, something perhaps from the sickness, but Nartabee is content with either kind of story, and Torcel Vellome is equally discontent with everything. The medicine plant where Torgano, then Torgan, worked was a large airy room high on the spine, elegantly made from exudate draped around trained burls, with windows looking out down the slope of the side, and smaller rooms set into the walls for the secret doings of the artisans. Torgan was not an artisan, not then or later, but just one of the workers on the floor, pulling and working the skin, pounding the exudate with the pounding machines, applying the liquids supplied by the artisans, the bearers of the secrets, from their small enclosed rooms. Once, Torgano says, talking in a long stream of words in the close room (Nartabee is used to Torgan talking, and knows that there's nothing in it, but it's familiar, like the objects in the house, in the room are familiar), there was a disaster in the plant. The workers had misinterpred the instructions of the artisans, and the artisans had been too busy with a new formulation or secret or discovery to come out onto the floor and check their work. So at that time, one part of the broad flat skin of the floor had become very thin due to overuse, overtreatment with the training and exudation ungents, overextraction of the cloyingly sweet food that the artisans sold to the towns. Beside this thin section of the floor (the skin taut and pale, moving in odd ways with the vibration of the pounders and stretchers) was a machine, an awkward thing of hard compressed exudate and strange hard white rods (made, some of the workers said, from the bones of scavengers, or even the bones of lizards). The machine was used to press certain especially-pungent oils into strips of exudate that were then spread onto the skin and left until the artisans said to remove them, to change the tenor of the skin in subtle ways. The machine was a noisy and an unreliable thing, and at intervals pieces of it would break off and spin across the floor or into the air, and workers would curse and dodge, and the artisans would come out and cluck over the machine, and take it off into their closed little rooms to be repaired. At this particular time, spinning and whining next to the patch of too-thin skin, the machine was making especially tense and shaky sounds, and the two workers operating it (one working the foot-pedals that made it spin, the other working the handle and feeding in the skin to be treated in the wizzing and whining maw) were complaining of the vibration against their feet and hands. This time it was not a small piece tearing off the wheel and spinning into the air. This time the machine, after a sudden increase in noise and vibration, seemed to split entirely in half, sending a cloud of small pieces into the air, the bulk of the housing falling into the leg of the unfortunate pedal operator (a very long time in her mentor's house with medicinal exudate around her lower body, on her back staring at the stars through the hole in the roof), and the remains of the spinning wheel sliding sideways, past the hands of the other operator, and out onto the floor, into the center of that pale thin dangerous patch of skin. Which tore from end to end. "An Innerness," says Torgan, now Torgano, "an Innerness all red raw ripe smooth wet angry hot opened in the very floor the skin wide broad flat floor under our vibrating tired grey loud frightened feet." The artisans had come running from their rooms, pulled away from their potions and their secrets, by the sound of the exfoliating machine and the shouts of the workers. "I stood and shouted with them all out my soft horrified and cylindrical throat, and the air walls sky machine were ringing all with our shouts screams blows songs terrors flying all which way, and the splitting of the skin would go all across the floor and open and devour us and the world would split open and all everything everyone every person every house fall in and be lost in the red hot slippery terrible crease." But the tear that was the Innerness had not spread all across the world, or even all across the floor, only across the thin piece of floor, and stopping at the edge, narrowing to nothing at a raw hot lip. The artisans had pushed the workers out of the factory, out onto the square surrounding it under the deep black sky, and half a dozen Architors had come. "Six?" Torcel Vellome has raised herself on one arm when the thinning of the skin entered the story, and at the appearance of the Innerness has become all attention, her eye tendrils stiff and splayed and quivering. "Six Architors came, all at once?" "Yes, six in their hoods, one two three four five six, and they went past us sweeping like other stars brightly into the factory and onto the floor, and --" "Did anyone go to fetch them, or did they just come?" But Torgan, now Torgano, doesn't know that, and Nartabee raises a grey supple finger before her eyes to quiet the questions, because we don't talk, here in the niche, when Torgano is in mid-story, because Torgano is who she is and we are who we are. And Vellome settles back, still quivering, and is quiet. But listening. The Architors came, Torgano says, and swept into the factory, and the factory was closed for a long time, and even after it opened again there was a sheet of exudate over the place in the floor where the Innerness had been, and now and then they would all be herded back out into the square, the workers and the artisans alike, while a tender went in and did things that even the artisans were not allowed to see. The smell of the factory, Torgano says, changed in that moment, and never changed back, however much the winds along the spine blew through the windows and through the room. Torcel is biting her lips and twining her fingers and toes together at the side of the niche. Nartabee smiles at her, glad somehow to see her friend and savior not quite so much in control. After Torgano finishes her story, Torcel bites her lips even harder, waiting a decent interval for others to speak. "Torgan," Torcel says finally, "Ah, Torgano," and the smooth eyes turn toward her, "when the Architors came to the factory, after the Innerness was opened, do you remember if anyone went to fetch them, or if they just came?" "Just came?" says Torgano, but it may be either a question or an answer. "No one'd need to tell Architors about an Innerness," says the ugly Curatan Silgilesh, "they just know. They can smell them, or feel them through the skin of the lizard." "Heh," mutters Taraban Eluctog of the broad feet and glowing visions, "all but one, eh? All but one," and she chuckles disturbingly, and her eyes move across the room, following something that is not there. The room is silent. Torcel is standing now, looking from one to the other, and everyone else is looking aside, not meeting her eyes, or anyone else's eyes; only Taraban sits unaware, chuckling and watching what only she can see. "All but one?" asks Torcel, in a whisper, a strong and diffuse whisper that fills the space. Silence again. "We don't talk about that," says Curatan. Nartabee nods, uncertain. "I would very much like to talk about that." The granch's voice is quiet. Nartabee wonders if it is a dangerous voice; after all, she doesn't really know this granch except for one shared job (mission, adventure, piece of work, operation) and that one time when the granch had saved her life, but that might have been an instinct, a reflex. Still, she had done it. "She saved my life," Nartabee says. The others look around among each other, and they nod. "There is one Innerness," Curatan Silgilesh says, shifting around on her burl and arranging the sheets of soft pounded exudate around her legs and feet, "one Innerness that the Architors have never found. We don't know why." She looks up, and Nartabee and at the granch Vortel who saved Nartabee's life, like she's wondering if she's talked about it enough yet. But she hasn't. "Torcel Vellome, if you would go outside this room for a time?" Nartabee reflects that Curatan Silgilesh talks like a granch sometimes. Maybe that's just the way people talk when they're in charge of things, when they've got something large going for a long time; when people look up at them. So Torcel Vellome the granch, tall and long with her eye tendrils waving, walks outside the room, back and forth along the small and hidden vine-shrouded path that runs to and past and away from it, her hands and arms coiling behind her back, over her head. She looks at the place where the room opens to the path, at the black sky, at the scattered vine leaves. And later Nartabee puts her head out and says that Torcel can come back in. X To get to the Innerness, they make their way, the three of them, through a viny wilderness (the food too far apart to be worth anyone's time to raise a gang and control, too slow ripening to be worth the trouble to defend, no one here but starving wanderers and the very sick, and they see none of them), and then across an even more hostile place, a place where the skin is rough and channelled and treacherous, and not even the hardiest vines grow. "It smells odd," says Torcel, her tongue loosened with excitement, with finally perhaps being close to the thing, to something like the thing, that she has been looking for for a very long time, that she has borne exile for, that she remembers every time she looks at the sky. The other two, Nartabee Silgilesh and Curatan Silgilesh, say nothing, walking carefully across the unfaithful ground. Torcel, usually behind because the ground is unfamiliar to her, not only this particular ground but all the ground tailward, observes them when she has a chance to raise her feet from the skin. Curatan, she is deciding, is interesting in her ugliness; not beautiful (Torcel does not think that extreme ugliness merges into beauty, an idea she heard once in a song brought backward from the Head by some granch in her youth, a song about merging circles of life and death, beauty and ugliness, head and tail; a typical Headward song, and entirely unconvincing), but still interesting, not hard to look at. They have warned her that going to the Innerness means going still farther tailward, into air that may be more tainted with the sickness. This is, they tell her, one of the reasons that they seldom go there. It is also, of course, to keep it from the Architors, and from everyone else, so no gang takes hold of it (no gang but them), and milks from it whatever these four have failed to milk from it, and keeps them from getting to it. What do you do with a private Innerness? Ot, far forward, dreamed of having her own, near a pool of water and a rich patch of food, to make a child with and raise it with Na in peace and songs. "No, this Innerness has never made a child," Curatan says, "probably wild ones can't." But wild ones can, Torcel knows, with a knowing that she can't share because she can't explain, but no Innerness can make a child without knowing what only the Architors know. Which is another one of their secrets. "We've let a couple of people, people we liked --" "-- and who could pay us --" "-- come to the Innerness to try --" Torcel's eye tendrils flex. "You let them go into a wild Innerness?" "Phhh, yes, but we're not idiots, you know, not worms or bits of leaf, we tied them up with hotropes that could take the heat and not burn --" "-- or melt or char or break --" "-- and we pulled them out fast --" "-- like the Architors do --" "-- or as fast as the ones of us who have had children remember the Architors pulling us out then, from the legal Innernesses, the allowed the permitted Innernesses in the Innerness houses out between the town." "But they never have children." Now they are at the far edge of the sharp rough stretch of skin, and Torcel's legs are aching from the pace and the difficulty of staying upright and not having a leg caught in one of the ruts (ruts that lead into bright heat, but only the bright heat of scratchy mottled world-skin, not the bright red moist hot of the Innerness). Her eye tendrils alternately droop with fatigue and prick with eagerness. "Just ahead here." The sharp rough skin ends at a wall of viny burls that rear up like the spine itself. In the image in the back of her mind, Torcel the granch sees the lizard floating in the dark, and sees that she is back around down further tailward now, and she wonders if the odd smell in the air is the sickness, but she puts the thought from her mind. She tries to look closely enough at the world in her mind to see this ridge of skin burl and tangled vine that they are approaching, but all she sees, as always, as all anyone else ever sees, is the various uneven skin of the lizard. Curatan pauses for a moment, considering, then takes them off to the left. There, where no one could see it who wasn't looking, and in any case no one would ever come here who wasn't looking, as the skin under the vines ahead seems just as unripening and unpromising of food, if perhaps easier on the feet, than the desert they have just crossed, there is a place where the vines hang across an opening, and the opening may be passed through. The three of them pass through. And there, unmarked and unguarded by anything more than the desolation, the screen of vines, and two twists in the path between the burls, is an Innerness. Torcel feels it in her skin and sees its light before they turn the twist and come upon it. Her eye tendrils quiver with emotion. It is a small Innerness, and irregular in shape. It seems to have been formed by some error in the growth of the burls around it, perhaps incompletely healing an old wound (what could wound the lizard, out in the dark between the stars and the other stars?); one burl arches up over it, and another grows roughly around the rim, which is wide enough for a person to pass in, but not much more. On the lip of the Innerness are some coils of rope and various bits of plant and human litter. The wind does not reach here. "Our Innerness," Nartabee says, quietly and unnecessarily; this place has always made her uncomfortable; even back near the tail, Innernesses and children are not lightly spoken of. Torcel curls her legs and lets herself down at the edge, staring down into the slick hot moist red surface, that flows and heaves slowly and langorously, and scorches her face with its light. She turns back to the others, and opens her mouth. "My friends," she says, "I --". But then she turns back to the Innerness, and shakes her head. And plunges in, head foremost, before they can even think of restraining her. And she is gone. Nartabee Silgilesh and Curatan Silgilesh rush to the edge of the Innerness, shouting, heedless of who might hear and come and find their secret, not thinking of anything except that this person, this person they did not know well, but who is still a person and one they have chosen to trust, has just thrown herself into the heat and mystery and danger of the world, without a rope or an Architor, into an Innerness that probably has no bottom, and has vanished. They look at each other for a moment in silence. Neither suggests, although both consider and reject, the idea that one of them could tie a rope to the other, and that one could go down into the Innerness and see if by some chance the granch might be saved. "If she wanted to destroy herself," Curatan finally observed, her flailing eye tendrils belying the calm irony of her tone, "she could have found much simpler ways." XI The heat of the Innerness scorches Torcel Vellome terribly in the first moments of her plunge. This is the part she has tried not to think of, the part of the memory she has tried to supress, because it could weaken her resolve, could weaken anyone's resolve. The Innerness is trying to enter her, burning her lips in trying to enter her mouth, burning her eyes in trying to enter her eyes. She has not bathed in many days, and the places on her skin where dirt and her own exudations have built up burn more terribly than the rest. The place on her chest where the wound is, just beginning to heal, is the worst of all, a pain beyond description. Her body tells her to clamp closed her eyes and mouth and nose, but she opens them all wide, both because that was her plan, and because she is screaming from the pain. The redness and the heat scald their way into her, and she cannot breathe. The memory is false, she knows suddenly, and all that she has done is destroy herself, make an end to herself in hot red searing pain. She tries to scream again, and when her body desparately gasps for breath the Innerness enters her fully, suffusing her, and in a final spasm she is over the edge. And then the pleasure comes. The heat is still heat, as hot and searing as before, and for all of that the pain is still pain, but it is a joyous and proper pain that feels better than anything else in her life. She wriggles her legs and shoots forward into the hot red light of the inner fluid of the lizard, and it is better than the memory said it would be (although before she plunged in she would have said that that was not possible). She puts her arms above her head and clasps her fingers together, and wraps her legs around each other and undulates her long slim body, flying effortlessly through the thick hot medium of red. This is, she knows, the thing that her body was designed for. Walking around on the surface of the lizard's skin, feet separate and hands full of things, eyes full of dark, muscles aching, that is an accident, a mistake, a silly error. This is rightness. In the image in her mind, the lizard seems more alive, more vibrant, although it is entirely unchanged. She looks at the lizard and she looks at the hot redness, brighter here and dimmer there, thicker here and thinner there, feeling the currents flowing around her as she pushes gracefully forward, as the lizard floats in space. She is moving so quickly through the Innerness that she can see the movement in the image in her mind. She is speeding headward and spineward, into the great central currents of the world. Something whips past her right shoulder, frighteningly close and fast. She slows down, eases her joyous rush into a supple glide, and looks around. The red that engulfs her and fills her (every nerve in her body is screaming signals of heat, but those signals are now comforting and correct) is not uniform. There are patterns and patches, darker places and lighter places, objects embedded in the flow, some moving and some not. Will she be able to get back to the Innerness that her friends (such good friends, such true and perfect friends) led her to? She should go back at once, and reassure them that she is fine, that they should come in and join her, that this is what people were made for. With a flick of her entwined legs she flips herself around, out of the spineward flow and back toward the tail. She watches the image in her mind, finds the direction, and soon finds the place, or near the place, where the Innerness should be. But there is nothing, no trace of a break in the flow or an opening to the air. Torcel frowns, although this is a minor annoyance, and the joy that still pulses through her is entirely undisturbed. The Architors, she thinks, know about Innernesses because they feel them from within (she hopes there are none nearby). If this Innerness has been unfound by the Architors in their hoods for this long time, it must be because it cannot be felt from within. She is just giving up on the notion of returning to speak to her friends, and going off to immerse herself in joy forever, when a strange dark thing appears before her. She puts out a hand to touch it, and knowing from the terrible cold of it that it is a thing from the surface, she grasps it and pulls herself along. She does it quickly, knowing that if she lets herself think of going back into the cold upper world, she may not be able to do it. XII It was Nartabee who suggested tying something heavy to the end of their rope and lowering it into the Innerness, just in case the granch was down there and still in reach, but somehow trapped. Curatan approved the notion, more because she knew it would help her rest better than out of any hope of actually benefitting the granch, who was no doubt seared to painful nothingness by now. When something grabbed the rope and began pulling, Nartabee nearly let it go, so great was her surprise and so instant her fear. It was (oddly, as they both thought afterwards) Curatan who reached out and grabbed the line as it began to slip into the Innerness, and held it until Torcel, hot and terrible and dripping with red, sprang out of the Innerness to stand on the lip, searing liquid spewing from every orifice to slip thickly back down, gasping and moaning from the sudden cold and the end of pleasure. The granch began breathing air again with a horrible choking cough, and shook herself free of the last big drops of Innerness. (Many of these splattered onto the two Silgileshes, and while they were searingly hot they caused oddly little pain, and no damage. This is a thing that the two have noticed before, in the fruitless dunkings they have carried out in this room.) Now the three of them, the Silgileshes and Torcel Vellome the granch, who has just thrown herself into an Innerness and emerged again, stand in the narrow room, the cleft in the burls on the skin of the world, and look at each other. The silence is full. "Is there a bottom, then, to our Innerness?" asks Curatan Silgilesh, again sounding calmer than she is, though there is some fear and some anger in her voice. Torcel shakes her head and sighs, her eye tendrils flurring with the inability to speak. "Oh, my friends," she says, "you must come in with me." The two step away from her, or would if there were space in the place they are standing. No one has ever gone into an Innerness in company, nor for any reason but the will or the duty to have a child. The pain is not something anyone would go into lightly. "And why would we want to do that?" asks Nartabee, feeling that this granch is entirely a stranger after all; probably she saved Nartabee's life for some insane reason of her own. And then the face of the lizard grimaces with pain, and the legs of the lizard splay, and the spine of the lizard arches, and the three of them are tossed about the close place where they stand like stones in a bag, curled into tight grey balls. The three land as the lizard's arching ends, and roll, and uncoil. The ball that was Nartabee has skimmed the top surface of the Innerness and bounced off, and her left arm is scorched and dripping with thick red drops. Nartabee turns as soon as she can get to her feet, and disappears through the rustling curtain of vines. Curatan, the other Silgilesh, stands for an instant, mind spinning, and then darts after her, for no reason beyond wanting to be in motion, in the open. Torcel Vellome, on the other hand, dives headfirst back into the welcoming redness, and writhes, and screams, and lets the searing heat enter her again, and is full. Within the redness, things are the same, but different. The crash and the arch and the disaster that has come suddenly to the surface world and as suddenly died away has been slower in coming down here, but also slower in going away again. There are waves in the thick searing red, waves of compression and release, waves of light and dark, eddies and curls and coils of the slow roiling stuff that is the Innerness. Torcel again winds her legs together and her fingers over her head, and knifes and wriggles through the world at speed. In her mind she is flowing forward on the image of the world, toward the spine and the Head, up and in and around and through, feeling the flow with some sense that she has never had before but also has always had, somewhere in herself. And somewhere ahead of her in that flow, that new and old sense finds something that draws her, something she wants to see. That something is where she is going, waving her legs behind her and knifing her arms forward through the red roiling heart of the lizard. She has been in the Innerness before, a long empty time ago. That time and this time merge in her mind as she flies through the midst of the world (cleaner than she has ever been, every atom of extra matter burned away in the pain that become bliss). That first time she was a youth; now she is older, weighted by experience. The first time was half an accident, half a youthful stupidity, rashness, fascination. This time it is like her life beginning again. That first time it was the odd Architor in the red-winged hood that pulled her out and spirited her away from the edge of the town's Innerness; this time it will be, she resolves, only her own choice ever to leave again. Now she feels other oddnesses, other tugs, in the flow, and she feels other presences at various distances from her, also moving (or is it just the flow moving around them?), with senses that are awakening slowly, but more with every passing heartbeat, every thick quick fluid motion of her intertwined legs pushing her forward, toward that first something that she felt. She is moving so fast now that she feels, sees, senses herself moving in the image in her mind, and that motion in that still floating image is nearly as shocking as the motion of the lizard itself, the terrible splaying of the feet and arching of the back, but the shock is a good shock, a strong one and a pure. She approaches the something quickly, and realizes that it is near the surface, or at the surface, and the idea of emerging back into the cold and the dark slows her. But it does not slow her enough to prevent her emerging, rising out of the red (the dark and cold spreading down her head and around her shoulders and her body and down her legs), and standing dripping at the edge of an Innerness, under the black sky, her eyes blinking, her eye tendrils (which are fat and backswept and writhing when she speeds through the red) stiffening and searching. And when the red has left her eyes, she sees before her on the bright but dark ground the loveliest person she has ever imagined. She takes a step toward her, and the lovely person opens her mouth and screams. XIII When Ot screamed, she screamed at the utter unexpectedness of it all, at the loudness and the brightness and the arching of the lizard's back, at the close heat of this tear in the skin, this new-opened Innerness, and finally at the tall dripping figure, rising from where she had imagined nothing rising. But she sees after a moment that it is only a person, a tall and wild-looking person, a person gasping and shaking the searing liquid off herself, but a person entirely undamaged and unconsumed by what she has just arisen from. The person from the Innerness is looking at Ot with a complex fascination. Her eye tendrils point outward, in interest or even fascination. As, in fact, Ot's own tendrils are pointing, as the tall person takes another step forward, and curls her legs and comes down beside her. Tercel Vellome, the granch who has gone from a town right of the spine, across much of the tailward back in search of a wild Innerness out of the control of the Architors, and now down and in and through, to this sudden tear in the skin of the world, just tailward of the head, just headward of the back, where the skin is rich and wrinkled, and something has torn a hole in it. The sight of this slim young person crouching by the side of the Innerness, her eye tendrils forward and now no fear in her eyes, is to Vellome one with the rushing searing joy of swimming through the red, one with the burning pain of having the dirt burned from the crevases of her body by the terrible kiss of the Innerness. These are the notions of beauty among the supple grey-skinned people that live on the great lizard floating in the void between the stars and the other stars. In the tailward towns, where the sickness is heavy and fragrant on the air, beauty is simply being alive, being ambulatory, coherent, being able to move and think and find good for yourself. A person with a rare free and easy moment will sit with her back to something, and watch her friends who are able to speak and think go about their businesses, and think how beautiful they are, compared to what they could be. Tailward, they think of those from the towns on the back, along the spine, as beautiful, whole stretches of skin where every person has two arms, two legs, functional fingers and toes, working eyes. In those towns, on the hind end of the spine, they look with longing toward the top of the spine, and the neck, where people are all strong and tall and healthy, without coughs or staggers or sudden fits of forgetting. Beauty in the tailward towns is about simple function; at the bottom of the spine, about health and efficiency. At the top of the back, in below the neck, beauty is counted a subtler thing, about not only health but the clear manifestations of health; about flesh that is well bathed and eye tendrils that are whole and fat and active. It is not enough, there, not to cough; one ought to have a clear and a strong voice, like those from the neck and (waxing poetic) those from beyond the archways. In the rooms ringing those real archways, and within the parts of the complex just beyond them (for over the long long body of time the two cultures have blended together more than either would admit), beauty is refinement, is a subtle and elusive thing that becomes more common as you go (if you were, indeed, entitled to go) headward, into the depths of the complex, the rooms where the inhabitants (graceful, strong, full of song, dressed in the finest of thin pounded exudate) go from youth to forever without seeing the open skin or even the archways. Beauty in the archway town and the tailward part of the head, then, is about the fine motion of the eye tendrils, the carriage of the limbs, the suppleness of the arms and legs, as though they had more bones even than they do, or no bones at all, just twining ropes of subtle and flexible muscle. And what do they use for beauty at the apex, at the forward parts of the head? What was Ot, delivered as a memoryless youth, as all youths are memoryless, to that blessed part of the lizard, what was she trained on, what did she, what does she (sitting, half fallen backwards away from the lip of the sudden Innerness, eye tendrils pointing at this tall hot figure) what does she think is beautiful? Life in the forward parts of the head is luxury unaware of itself. Song, and long stretches of empty relaxed time, and rooms of ripe food, and books, and the thoughts of companions. Beauty there is the shape of thought, beauty is the sweep of existence, abstractly construed, the fact of reality, the crystalline mystery of the universe, of the being of being. Looking into the eyes of this burning stranger, Ot feels that she has met a new piece of that reality, one wild and strange and especially beautiful. Torcel, looking into the eyes of this fine and perfect person, this soft and supple and elegant figure, feels that she has met someone from a story, a story of long ago and far away, and the fountains of the Head. Before these two notions of beauty can do more than see each other, much more than consider what the other's presence might mean, here on the edge of this terrible lovely spontaneous rift in the skin of the world, there is another with them. The Architor seems to come from nowhere. (Are those drops of red at the edge of her robe? Has she arisen from another part of the Innerness while the two were seeing only each other? Heat spills from her, but heat spills from everything here, and Architors are never cool.) Her face is hidden by her hood, which has sweeping shapes of red on the sides. She approaches them quickly along the lip of the tear, but not so quickly that Torcel cannot twist her body around and plunge back in, screaming and opening herself and twisting into the redness and away. (But not far away, stopping within sight, or what sense passes for sight when full of the searing red, of the bottom edge of the tear, that drawing oddity in the flow, tensing herself to rush upward again. Were the sweeps of red on that hood familiar?) And Ot, now wishing for nothing more than to uncoil entirely and lie on her back on the hot skin and look at the stars, watches the Architor hesitate by the edge as Torcel (as the tall beautiful figure) twists and plunges in, and then with a resigned and frustrated motion turn back to her, and hold out an arm. "The Architors," says the voice from under the hood, "-- the other Architors -- will be here in a moment. Will you come with me into the Innerness?" The voice is soft and sibilant, but very clear. Ot shakes her head and slides backward, away from the edge and away from the Architor. With a snarl of impatience, the hooded figure reaches out a long supple arm and takes her by the wrist. "Then come, this way, quickly." And she tugs Ot to her feet and pulls her away from the lip, in another direction. The two of them stumble and tumble down and away from the hill, the swell in the skin, where the thing from the sky hit and tore and made the new Innerness. Ot's mind is whirling from too many shocks; the sound and the light, the miracle of the wild Innerness, the tall wild stranger dripping red, and now this Architor, this odd but familiar Architor, and the strong grip on her wrist, pulling her deeper into the unfamiliar. Within the searing red, Torcel floats immersed in thick roiling bliss, waving her arms and twined legs to hold herself still, or something like still, near where she can feel the oddness in the flow that is the opening to the surface. Looking about her, with her eyes or with the strange but familiar new sense, she finds she can see flows converging on this point from many directions, weaving in and out between other flows to and from other places, going into the dark place (darkness is coolness, the cold of the surface) and coming away from it again. Floating here, next to such an obvious landmark in the red, Torcel knows she is exposed. If she is right about the Architors, about the way of the world, there will be more Architors here in moments. Opening her mouth and filling her body with the heat and the red, she wriggles up to the surface, rising only enough to free her eyes. The fluid of the Innerness flows off of her head (cold, so cold under the black of the sky) and off of her eyes, and she looks around, spinning herself with sweeps of her hands. The lovely kneeling gray figure is gone, the strange Architor is gone. (Was the pattern of that hood one she has seen before? Or is that an illusion of memory?) There is nothing to see here. She curls around herself and turns around, head down deep into the heat. Her arms and legs drive her quickly in and away. Are there other forms in the flow as she moves, person-size forms moving up toward the surface dark as she dives down into the brightness of the deep? In the image of the world in her mind, she sees herself moving not headward, not tailward, not left or right, but deep, downward and inward. The lizard floats unmoving, and within it she flees, the hot red flowing over her skin, burning and soothing at once, sweet and liquid around and within her. XIV "This was not supposed to happen," the red-hooded Architor says to Ot. They are sitting on a low burl, their backs to a supporting wall, sheltered by a screen of vines and the canyons of the lizard. Behind her head, the skin is cool (warm, but cool, cooler than the heat around the Innerness) and rough; she pushes her head against it and rubs. Her fingers are twined together, and she wonders if she will need the pain. "You wished to go into the Innerness feet foremost, and only up to your shoulders. You wished to have a child, and to keep the child, and to raise it yourself." Ot only looks at her. The Architor's voice is tired. "Do you still wish these things?" "I do. They will happen." The Architor shakes her head. "I arranged for your freedom, you know, from seclusion in the Head. I watched you go through the complex, through that decadent maze, on a path you could not have known existed, straight from the baths and the gardens to the Archways." Ot wonders at this, wonders if it is true, or if she was seen by numerous Architors who have reported her to this one, or if this one is simply making it up, from having seen her there, and seeing her here. "The soldiers do not love the Architors," the hooded voice says. "Why have you brought me here?" "I did not arrange your escape so that you could be found out here, and taken back, or taken tailward, or whatever my sisters would do with you, in the circumstances." "The circumstances?" "The skin has been breached. Something has happened in the sky, something has fallen to the skin of the lizard, and the skin has been broken. This has not happened in any living memory. This was not supposed to happen." "And what was supposed to happen?" The Architor stands, stiffly. Ot wonders if she is injured, or very tired, or if perhaps she is old, like En in the complex is old. And thinking of En she thinks of Na, and thinking of Na she is sad, and very tired herself. She stretches her legs before her, and leans her back backward, and rests, looking up at the sky and the stars. One of the other stars flashes across her vision, a long line of cold blue light that persists for a long moment and then dies. "What was supposed to happen?" repeats the Architor, softly, as if to herself. "What was supposed to happen? I released you so that you could persue your will, so that you could fly about the world as a loose spark in the wind, so that you could confuse and frustrate my sisters." "What are the architors?" asks Ot, in a distant and restful voice, her mind already up among the hard sparks of the stars. The Architor with the red-winged hood has begun to pace back and forth in the viny space, but now she stops and turns to Ot, and is silent for a long moment. Ot's body is relaxed, her eyes on the sky. The Architor turns away from her before she speaks, and again it is as though she is speaking to herself. "How did one brought up so softly become so hard, and so sharp?" she murmurs. "What are the Architors? Best ask what is the world, what is the universe." "I could tell a story," the voice continues, from under the hood, "I could tell a story about ancient beings, beings living so long ago, and so strangely different from anything you have seen or imagined, that 'being' is the only word that you have that would fit them. "I could say that these beings were powerful beyond words, just as they were strange beyond words, and that it amused them to create worlds, out in the starry void. And that they created this world, in the form of a splay-legged lizard, and that it was neither the strangest of the worlds that they created, nor the least strange. It amused them to put life onto the world, lizards on the lizard, and it amused them at last to put people onto the world, to look out at the stars and inward at the lizard, and to wonder and be cruel. "In this story, we Architors, for I will count myself as an Architor in this story, as they sometimes count me as one, and I sometimes count myself as one, we Architors are from outside the world, from another world that floats also in the starry dark, but that is as distant from this lizard world as one of the stars, more distant than the other stars, and more distant than you can imagine, as the beings that created the world are more strange and more potent than you (or than I) can imagine." Ot lay on her back listening to the murmuring voice, resting, not listening, not understanding now, but perhaps saving the voice and the words for understanding later. The sky was black, as the sky was always black, and the stars hard and bright, and none of the other stars appeared to her while the Architor spoke. "You cannot imagine travel between the worlds, among the stars, and for all of that neither can I, nor any of my sisters the Architors. We are from that other world, but we are also from here, and we none of us remember the journey. But we have been told certain things, and shown certain things, that we are forbidden to repeat. "My sisters, perhaps, take these things at their face value, and that makes them what they are. I, perhaps, suspect these things, look below the surface of these things, and that makes me what I am." Here the Architor looks up and over, directly at the supple grey form of Ot lying at rest on the cool warm skin, and is silent for a long moment. "What was supposed to happen? You, with your blind and stubborn will, demanding that you will go into the Innerness feet foremost, only up to your shoulders, and that you shall have your child and raise it alone--" And here the Architor stops speaking again. Above Ot, outside Ot's eyes, the sky is still clear and still and dark. Tercel Vellome, who was a granch and is now a shape swimming through the searing red, is diving deeper into the center of the world, the center of the lizard. The red is hotter there, but also thicker, and she finds herself moving more slowly, but no less encased in bliss. The Architor sighs, and resumes speaking. Now she is looking at Ot, or at least her hood is turned toward Ot, as she speaks. Perhaps she is no longer speaking to herself. Or perhaps she is. "You, with your blind and obstinate will, were to taste seclusion for awhile, and then to escape. You were to stumble here and there within the complex for a time, lost and alone, and I was eventually to guide you to certain places, and certain people, that I keep prepared." "You must be very lonely." Ot says this softly but suddenly, her voice still distant, but warmer. She has been thinking of Na, and of seclusion, and the sweet ripe taste of the food in Na's food rooms. The Architor is silent again, perhaps taken aback, perhaps thinking. The hood turns upward, toward the stars. If Ot were looking, she might see something of the face within the hood. But she is not. "I must be very lonely," the voice repeats, from the half-uncovered face under the hood. "I suppose I must. But not because I am alone. My sisters tolerate me. My sisters, I sometimes think, know of everything that I do, and allow it because at some level they consider it necessary. They think, perhaps, that the chaos I introduce into their system is useful to its stability. "Sometimes I fear that indeed it is." Now there is a silence more profound in that place. And within the world there is a silence around Torcel Vellome. She, Vellome, only realizes that there has been sound within the red when that sound is damped, quieted, thickened as the red becomes thicker, closer to the hot heart of the lizard. The swimming is slower, but no harder. On the surface of the world, there is the small sound of something moving in the vine leaves near where Ot and the Architor sit silent. There is no wind. Far away, tailward, Nartabee Silgilesh, Curatan Silgilesh, Taraban Eluctog (whose feet are too large and who has visions) and Torgano Fonato (who was Torgan Fonat) are nursing each other's wounds and scavenging news in the ruins of the tailward town (which was not much more than a ruin to begin with), where a dozen tattered people with various degrees of the sickness are rebuilding the (never more than ramshackle) house around their shallow but precious pool of water. The story of the granch and the time the lizard moved is already becoming legend, repeated by a dozen throats, and soon a hundred, and soon a thousand. Now the granch stops in her slow swimming through the thick blissful hot red, because she has caught a taste of something, or a smell of something (taste, or smell, or again some new sense that comes of being in the Innerness and being a different creature for it, although not as different as she will be), and that something is odd and out of place, sharp and metallic, somehow unmistakably Other. She twists her body around (arms still above her head, legs still coiled together behind her in a supple helical swimming tail), and around again, seeking the odd smell or taste or touch. There is nothing, and she straightens out and continues on, but then there is something again, that same something, barely perceptible. She looks around with all her old and new senses, and there in the red, deep in the deep Innerness, there is a trail. A path of differentness (darker, colder, or just oddly scented, subtly odd in taste or feel if you know exactly what you are looking for?) leads from somewhere above (from the tear in the skin of the world? what other place above would be reeking with Other now?) to somewhere below, still deeper into the pulsing core of the lizard. Torcel Vellome, the granch, turns head down again, and burrows inward, looking for the end of that path. Ot is still looking at the sky. Something touches her arm, and she turns her head lazily. The Architor in the hood with the sweeps of red on the sides is beside her, gently shaking her by the shoulder. "I must go, soon," the Architor says, her voice now more present and direct. "Since you will not wander lost in the complex to be guided by my subtle promptings, and since something has fallen into the world that may upset all of my plans, I will tell you of a place to go, and trust to you to decide to go there, or not." Ot's eye tendrils go slowly from the relaxed droop of deep rest to a more attentive waving. She sits up on the burl and looks at the Architor (within the hood there is, after all, only a face; a passably ordinary face, although somehow rougher, different in a way she cannot settle her mind on). Within the world, Torcel Vellome thinks that the oddness, the smell or flavor, is getting stronger, and the path more distinct. It, she, turns this way and that through the redness, as though whatever passed here and left the trail was buffeted about by the flow of the Innerness, tossed like a vine leaf in the wind. "There is a place that you might go," the Architor says to Ot, "a place at the front of the world, forward of the complex, nestled beneath its walls. I would have guided you there from the complex itself, through an old corridor that only I remember, but since you are out here now, and not going back in, you will have to go around." "Around?" "Around the complex on the head, around the crown, to the forward side. There is someone there that you might meet." "Is there an Innerness? Will I have my child, and raise the child myself?" The Architor stretches her sinuous arms above her head; it is a gesture of weariness, one that Ot has seldom seen, in her rooms forward. "There is an Innerness. For the rest, you must make your own way." The strange scent or flavor or feel in the red roiling Innerness is stronger now. It fills the granch with the taste of Other. Ahead through the bright heat of the medium in which she swims, Torcel Vellome sees something, or thinks she sees something, something large and bulky, turning in the currents of red. "Tell me," Ot says. She is sitting up very straight, and her fingers are splayed apart on her legs. "I would like to see a place forward of the complex, nestled up under its walls." Although she wonders, also, if she will be moving away from the tall wild stranger that she saw, so briefly, at the tear in the skin, at the strange sudden Innerness, the Innerness of noise and light. The Architor sighs, and tells her. Torcel Vellome is close to the Other now. She thinks of it as the Other, because it smells tastes feels of distance and difference. It is, in its core, a large round (irregularly round, like a lump of exudate not yet pounded) dark (cool) something. Surrounding that something, though, are more layers of Otherness. The outer layer is a grainy grey halo that merges imperceptibly into the searing red; this is what carried the Otherness, the smell and taste and feel of it, to Torcel and into her body as she moved through the lizard. The inner layer, between that grainy grey and the dark body of the Other's core, is a dark writhing that tries to reach out through the outer layer to grasp (Torcel thinks it looks like a million hands, or curving arms), but where it meets the red it shrivels and retreats, back into itself. The undulations of the inner layer are complex and nuanced, and Torcel the granch feels that they are speaking, but in a way that she does not understand. Ot listens to the Architor, more intently than she has listened to anyone for a long time (is this Architor, she thinks, her fourth Mentor?). As the voice speaks from under the hood, of the path around the complex to the front of the head, of places to avoid and people to seek out, Ot plots the journey on the image of the world in her mind. XV In the thick searing red place far beneath the skin of the world, Torcel Vellome, who has been a granch in the tailward towns, is pushing herself inward toward the Other, through the fog of the grainy outer corona, in toward the infoldings and outreachings of the million dark writhing arms. She could not have said then, and could never have said thereafter, why she swam and pushed so determinedly toward the center of that strangeness, just as she could not have said why, so long ago, she had let herself fall into that first unguarded Innerness, in the high cool town on the spine. The oddly smelling grainy fog at the outer fringes of the Other flows easily around Torcel's body as she pushes forward; only the thickness of the red itself, that enfolds and engulfs both her and her goal, slows her down. The cutting icy smell of it, feel of it, fills her head and her new and familiar senses. The Other, she realizes, is still moving through the body of the world, the body of the lizard, still carried by the terrible speed with which it fell from the sky, or pulled along by the roiling flow of the red itself. The path that it leaves stretches out behind and above them, back toward the cold gap that leads out to the sky and the stars. The smell and taste and feel of the Other dwindles quickly above them, mixing into the world, but still she wonders if someone else swimming in the red might feel the same thing that she felt. Now, ahead of her, the dark complexity of the inner layer of the Other's covering is reaching out toward her, as though it can see her coming. She pushes her legs harder, going to meet it. The arms that it stretches out twine around her arms, and draw her inward. The dark peculiar mass surrounds her, and begins to enter and fill her up. XVI Later, much later, and in another place, Ot will write a book, a long story, about her travels from that cool narrow place down the cliff from the tear in the skin of the world, around and up onto the shoulder, and onto and around the head, below the rough convoluted walls of the complex. Some of the story would be true, and some of it false. Some of it would be as her memory told her, and some of it would be otherwise. Not all that she wrote from her memory would true, and not all that she wrote from elsewhere would be false. In the book, she will write that she was told to closely skirt the edge of the town that clusters around the archways from the head to the neck. (Ot's book will not mention the Architor in the red-swept hood, not as such, but it will say that she received certain instructions, and heard a certain voice.) Against what she was told, the book will say, she veered out away from the settled regions, away from the ridge of the spine, into the corrogated wilderness of the far shoulder, watching herself, or the path of herself, in the image in the back of her mind. What tales will be in the chapters of Ot's book, written much later and in another place? A dozen tales, or two dozen, or a hundred. Tales of silence and loneliness, tales of people with strange ways living in the obscure towns and distant solitary houses of the far shoulder. Tales of long hungry stretches without food, of long dusty and miserable stretches without water. Tales of finding food unlooked for, and softening it with her tears and eating to repletion. Tales of finding water in broad shallow pools in the skin, and rolling her body over and over in it, and resting in it on her back looking at the stars, and pouring it over herself with her hands until the sweet heady smell of it fills her and she is finally clean. One tale in Ot's book will not be about the journey around the head, or about Ot. It will be a simple tale, with no point or reason, about Na, about Na spending a span in the complex, before her first child, when her belly was smooth and unmarked. Ot's book will draw a picture of Na resting, and walking, and eating from the food-room of a friend, and bathing herself in the baths, and speaking to friends. It will describe Na singing, her voice clear and sweet under the dark sky and the stars. Now Ot, Ot in reality or Ot in a tale in her book, or both, is far out on the high shoulder, away from the spine, the crown of the complex barely visible over a rising fold in the skin. This is as far as she will venture out; after she rests and eats her fill of the food, her path will curve back around toward the head, coming at last under the walls of the complex and to the place and the person that the Architor in the red winged hood has sent her to. This has been a good place; Ot thinks that she has been there for a long span of time. There is a wide bare patch, oddly colored but ripe with food, and there is a narrow cleft that fills with pungent water. She is sitting now, at her last rest in that place, with a pile of food at her side, and her feet soaking in the water, her long supple toes coiling and uncoiling idly. Her mind is far out toward the stars. The view in the back of her mind, of the world a lizard floating in the darkness of the sky, is the view from where her thoughts are, somewhere between the skin and the stars. Two of the other stars, fast and tight and bright, burn out in the sky, moving slowly and flickering in an irregular rhythm. The feels, not quite thinks, but feels, that during the long dry time, crossing the desolate shoulder with little food and no cleansing water, that then there was something in her thoughts, something that she was going to do or going to consider, as soon as she found enough food and enough water again. But there is no something now; it has gone like a vineleaf in the wind, or the momentary light of an other star. Finally she stands and steps out of the pool of water, bends to wrap her pile of gathered food up in the sheet of thin pounded exudate that came to her somewhere in her journey, picks it up, and starts out. The open wild skin, that seemed so distant and exotic, so theoretical, when she sat secure in her rooms in the complex on the head, is now familiar, familiar if not quite comfortable, certainly not safe, but part of the fabric of her mind. She walks with more assurance, smoothly but not fast. At the top of the swell she looks out across the high gnarled wrinkles of the shoulder, toward the crowned head. As Ot makes her way around the burls and through the mazy viny ravines of the wilderness, the dark mass of matter that was Torcel Vellome stirs in the heart of the world. It is nestled up against the side of the Other, the irregular bolt from the dark, and the Other is hidden among a tangle of flows and structures deep in the hotest layers of the red. What was Torcel stirs, and is still. Later (Ot has crossed two wide fields of open barren skin, and is approaching a series of successively higher and more forbidding ridges, deep wrinkles in the skin of the world), what was Torcel stirs again. It becomes aware of feeling, although it has no name for feeling. It becomes aware of heat, but has no word for heat. Still later (Ot is making her way up the second of the ridges, careful of her footing), what was Torcel opens its eyes, and becomes aware of light. Shortly after, it becomes aware of motion. It sees patterns moving in the flow, and it moves its head and its fingers. As Ot reaches the top of the third ridge, and sees with a frown that there are many and harder ridges to come, what was Torcel Vellome becomes aware of awareness, of its own placement in itself, and of the image in the back of its mind, of the world as a great lizard floating in darkness among points of light. And now that this mass of matter is aware of the world around it and its own power to move in that world, we may as well call it her, and call her Torcel again, although she will not recall or claim that name for some time yet. The dark Other-stuff, which has filled Torcel for so long, working away at her body while Ot trekked her long trek across the skin of the lizard, has changed the former granch, changed her in every conceivable way. At the first rush it licked at her, surrounded her, and sank into her, entering at her mouth and nose as the red had, but also at her eyes and through her skin. Like the grainy outer fog around the Other, it was made of up myriad tiny animals, or machines, swarming toward and away from the surface of the thing itself. But unlike the thin outer layer, the inner layer that engulfed and ultimately devoured and recreated Torcel Vellome was thick and interconnected, webbed together with filaments and linked together with wires or ligaments, each much to small to see, but together binding up and forming a shifting complex tableau of constanly-changing pattern. When the swimmer had first plunged, for an unspoken and unknown reason, into that tight cloud of strangeness, the inner layer had been in the form of grasping hands and reaching arms, seemingly battling against the heat of the red, but turned always back by it. When the supple grey body came within reach of those arms and hands, the nearest seized eagerly upon her, and the rest, after a moment of wildly frenzied waving, formed themselves into a great swell, which swept around the surface of the Other and out and around Torcel. The pain and the bliss of that engulfing displaced for a moment the pain and the bliss of the searing Innerness, as the particles pushed through her skin, then there was only pain, and then only bliss, and then nothing that was Torcell at all. Until now. As Ot picks her way down the far, headward, slope of the third ridge, looking ahead for a promising way up the fourth, Torcel, that which was not Torcel and now is again, is remembering words. There is a word for the Innerness, there is a word for the Other, for heat and pain, for pleasure and motion, for swimming and arms, for the world and the stars. Her memory is dammed up behind strong doors, and when those doors crack open, the memories do not flood back, but rather seep, as the tiny machines or animals that now inhabit, or make up, her body slide more smoothly on their tracks, and her mind wakes further and further from the sleep of non-being. XVII The clefts between the ridges are becoming deeper and hotter as the peaks of the ridges become higher and cooler. Down in the cleft, the deepness, between the fourth and fifth ridges, it is both hot and bright. Ot's breath does not come easily. She wishes she had stopped to rest on the top of the ridge, cooler and nearer the stars. But she has no energy now to climb again. She puts down her bag, her folded cloth, with the food inside, idly on a small burl. She lies her body down beside it. She is thinner now, and stronger, less plump and water-soft. She thinks of the stranger, the tall red stranger from the Innerness, and how that stranger looked at her on the lip of that heat. The heat here is not unlike the heat was there. She wonders if it would be easier to tear through the skin here, in this valley between the thick wrinkles joining shoulder and neck. On her back on the ground, the lizard's skin hot under her, Ot rests, and looks upward. In the circle of her seeing is not only the sky (dark with darkness and bright with the pinpoint stars) but also the slopes of the ridges, the rough and towering slope that she has come down, and the one that she has yet to climb. She is at the bottommost point of the cleft, the valley between ridges, and here the skin is plated in narrow rasping plates that would move against each other if the lizard were to move its head. Though that head has not moved in living memory, or in song or in story, the plates and folds of skin hold the idea of motion within them, ready to be used. Ot watches for awhile the image in the back of her mind, the lizard peaceful in the black sky, eyes closed. Her muscles relax, her limbs uncoil and lie easily on the hot skin. She moves her own head, stretching her neck and feeling the muscles move against each other. When her head turns, so her eyes turn. And when she looks up into the overhang in the ridge above her, she sees that there is a person there, resting somehow against the under surface of the ridge, and that person is looking steadily at her. Resting, her mind is too calm to feel alarm. But she turns her head further, and all along the rough ceiling of that overhang she sees people, each hanging some distance from the next, each held against that ceiling or holding themselves against it, none moving. The closest one, the one she first saw, is looking at her. So is the next one, to her left along the underside of the ridge, and the one to her right. The others seem to be resting, eyes closed, or looking away from her. The suspended people are clothed, but not clothed as Ot was clothed in the complex, nor clothed as the people were in one shoulder town that she passed through, in crudely pounded exudate shaped to look like that clothing, from some third-hand description of clothing seen in the archway town. Rather, these people hanging unaccountably above her head are wrapped or swaddled in overlapping bands of some smooth thing that is not like other things that she has seen. She wonders at it, but is still too bone-weary to rouse herself from her rest. She looks at the people, and the people look at her, and for a long time none of them move. Ot's eyes drift away, back to the sky and the stars. When she turns her attention to the world again, one of the wrapped people is standing beside her, beside her head in the place where she lies. The wrapped person is tall and thin-limbed. She is looking down at Ot, her eye tendrils limp and relaxed. The wrappings cover her belly; Ot cannot tell if she has had children. Ot sits up, looking up into the face of the stranger. Neither of them says anything for a long moment. There is a hint of breeze, and Ot smells water somewhere not far away. "Is there a place to bathe near here?" she asks the stranger. An odd first greeting, perhaps, but Ot has become used to oddity out here on the shoulder, and has welcomed it into herself. At her question the wrapped person's face breaks into a large and almost frightening smile, and her eye tendrils straighten and wave. She steps back and puts out her arm; her fingers are short and supple. After a moment, Ot reaches out and takes the wrapped stranger's hand. As they walk, along the motionless sliding plates of the lizard's skin there at the bottom of the cleft between the fourth ridge that Ot has climbed, and the first ridge that she has not, Ot watches the motion of the other's eyes. She has the impression that the wrapped person is looking at her, shyly or stealthily, at her body, or her way of walking, or at her bag of food, or perhaps at all three. The oddness of walking in this wild place, hand in hand with a stranger (Ot thinks of walking through the corridors of the complex, hand in hand with Na, talking of nothing), this oddness adds to the other oddnesses that Ot has passed through, and that have settled into her, and the ball of oddness fills her up that much fuller. In the heart of the world, Torcel Vellome, who is Torcel Vellome once again, despite the changes, feels new clarity opening within her at the same time as old memory. She remembers who she is, slowly, and what she has done and seen and felt, slowly, and she wonders at it. Why did I do that? she thinks. And, more strongly, why did I not do that instead? As Ot and the wrapped stranger pass under the edge of the overhanging ridge (Ot bends her neck backward to look up at the hanging people, who seem to cling to protuberances in the skin with their limbs, and perhaps also to have somehow attached their wrappings to the ceiling on which they enigmatically lie), Torcel Vellome winds her legs (which have untwined and parted during the long long unknowing of her change) around each other, making her body long and sinuous for swimming, and thinks about moving out into the red. Ot finds it strange, but not extraordinarily strange, that the wrapped people have so far not spoken to her. In one town on the shoulder (or so she will write in her book, at any rate) speech is reserved for the most solemn or urgent occasions, and otherwise the people communicate only through touches and looks, having come over a long long time (for this town is near a pool, although it is shallow, and fields of food, although not of the highest quality) to know each other and their wants and needs and habits so well that nothing more is necessary. The first wrapped stranger, the one she talked to, still walks beside her, holding her hand. The other's hand is cool and dry, and her short fingers twine possessively around Ot's. They have been joined by others now, who walk behind them and to one side, four or six others, all smiling and walking along the bottom of the valley. In the direction they are walking, the cleft between the ridges narrows gradually, and Ot wonders what they will do when the bottoms of the ridges touch. Just before that happens, her guides lead Ot to a dark place in the bright hot side of the ridge, and with a start (her eye tendrils stiffening) she realizes that the dark place is an opening. She knows openings, from the doors and ramps and archways in the complex, but those openings are ancient trainings of the skin in crafted buildings. This opening in what seems the wildest of wild skin confuses, almost frightens her. But her hand is in the hand of the wrapped stranger behind her, and the others are behind them in an arc, still walking. In a moment she is under the opening, and in, and through, and she thinks that she has seen the signs of training, very old training, at the edges as they passed. This entire ridge cannot have been trained by the artisans, she thinks. But then she smells the water again, close and strong. Ot and her wrapped guides are in a narrow round-ceilinged corridor surrounded by skin. It is like an under-room in the complex, hot and bright and closed to the sky. The air is still and scented with water. They take her around a corner (and there are other corners in other directions, leading to other wide bright hallways and open places, and Ot wonders to find all this within the world), and there the opening widens out into a broad high-ceilinged room (the skin of the ceiling marked in broad irregular stripes of dark and light). In the center of the room is a pool of water, as wide and as deep as one of the smaller public baths in the complex, the water still and empty, and the air full of its sweet heady scent. One of the wrapped people takes Ot's other hand, and the three of them step into the water, the thick coolness pressing into their legs, and into their bodies as they lie back in it. The water is deep and pungent. The wrapped people do not remove their wrappings, and the water soaks into them, softening and swelling them. Ot has not seem clothed people bathe before, and wonders what it feels like. The other stangers who followed them into the water room have gone to the walls and climbed upward, clinging to the walls and the arched ceiling by handholds that Ot cannot see. Now they are perched, as before, at ease hanging downward from above, having affixed their wrappings to the skin and twined their toes around subtle knobs. Ot looks up at them, and lets her body relax again, lets the scent of the water fill her head, and the heavy pull of the water cleanse her skin. XVIII Under the world, Torcel Vellome has come fully awake, and pulled her body (what is now her body) out of the roiling pull of the layers around the Other. She is swimming with slow but powerful strokes around the Other, examining it from all sides. She is awake, she thinks, not only because she is thinking again, but also because she is thinking for the first time. In her mind, things come together as they have not come together before, as though some cloying barrier, some resistant fluid, has drained away. And at the same time there are new questions in her mind, the awareness of places where there should be connections, but there are not. Torcell Vellome is puzzled. When she was a youth, living in a prosperous town on the spine, being trained in minor bits of artisanry by her mentor, she had fallen into an Innerness that had somehow gone unguarded for a moment, a moment when Torcel happened to be wandering, looking at the stars, through the roofless rooms where the Innerness was contained. She could not have said then, and she cannot say now, for the memory is dim, and most of her memories are dim, still bearing the imprint of whatever cloud has now lifted from her mind, whether she fell into that Innerness entirely by accident, or whether an idle curiosity led her to allow herself to fall, once she had wandered unnoticed to the lip, and become dizzy staring down at the taut slick redness. But fallen in she had, and stayed in for a long span of time, longer than the Architors submerge one who is to have a child. Long enough for the first rush of panic and searing pain to pass, for the gasping of her lungs to draw the redness deep into herself, for the pain to yield to, to become, a pleasure equally intense, a physical feeling very like (now that she thinks of it) the mental feeling she has now, of some cloak having been stripped away, and only herself remaining. Within the Innerness, once the pain had become pleasure, she had dived down further into the red, and found the bottom. The bottom was a curving bed of skin, rough and of an unknown color (for what is color when the eyes are surrounded by red from both inside and out?). She followed it with her hands and her ears (or not her ears, for there was no sound there, but by some other sense that did as ears, down here), and found in the center of the bottom an opening that led out into further and hotter and more active redness. But the opening was too narrow for her to pass. She thrust her head through, but her shoulders caught, even the supple many-boned shoulders of a person as tall and snakelike as Torcell Vellome. With her head through, she could see (and not-hear, and taste) a vast world of red, all flowing with heat just beyond her grasp. And then something strong had caught at her ankles, and despite her struggling drawn her back to the surface of the Innerness and out into the cold dark air under the black sky, and the red had flowed out of her as she stood, held fast, gasping and sobbing on the smooth skin of the lip. Her rescuer, or her pursuer, had been, of course, an Architor, one whose hood was marked on each side with a sweep of red, like a cluster of leaves or the wing of an insect. This Architor had held Torcel until all the red was drained from her and her body stopped shaking, and then led her away, quickly, to a sheltered niche somewhere in the maze beyond the room of the Innerness. This was, Torcel thinks, still swimming her circles around the dark mass of the Other, looking at the complex writings of the layers around it (is the inner layer forming into those reaching hands now, seeking to bring her back into itself, or seeking for others to engage, now that she is finished?), this memory was two lives ago. Having been a creature of the surface, and a creature of the Innerness, now she is a creature of the Other, for whatever that may mean. She shakes her head at the oddness of that thought, dismissing it until it can be connected to some other thought that rests on firmer skin. For now she will only remember what happened then; what is happening now will have to wait. The Architor in the red-swept hood had taken her to the quiet niche, and given her food to eat and water to drink (as through it were a ritual, and now she allows that it was), and had calmed her, and talked to her. "The pain was, I suppose, very great?" the Architor had said, and for reasons that she again could not and cannot explain, she had felt other words within the question, as though this Architor was not so much asking as telling, not so much wanting to know as wanting to push the idea into Torcel's mind. "The pain was indeed very great," Torcel answered, and it had been, at first, and in fact the whole time, although later it had been as great as bliss as it was as pain. "You will not have a child, from this being in the Innerness," the Architor had said, softening a bit of food further with a tear, and handing it to Torcel, who had put it into her mouth and found it especially sweet and melting. "When someone is to have a child, there are -- other things -- that the Architors do to prepare them, before they go into the Innerness." Torcel had only nodded, savoring the food in her mouth. "You were in no danger of being lost within the deeper Innerness," the Architor went on, "for this Innerness is a tame one, a trained one, and it narrows to a small eye before it reaches the deeper Innerness. Do you understand?" And again Torcel felt that there were other words inside the Architor's question, and she only nodded. But in her mind the vision of that deeper Innerness was strengthened and heated, and it stayed hot and haunting for all the rest of that life, until she plunged headfirst into the wild Innerness outside that tailward town and found, as she had dreamed of finding, that not only did the pain sear through again into pleasure, but the Innerness opened down and out into that wider and wilder world of heat and bliss. Torcel relaxes her body, floats near the Other but outside of its layered halos, and goes back into other parts of her mind, other parts of her history. Here is the slim graceful creature crouching at the edge of that other Innerness, the strange wild one that so distorted the flows, after the back of the world arched. She nods to herself, there in the thick hot. So the Other came from out of the dark sky, and tore, or punched, into and through the skin of the world. It may have been alone, or it may have been one of two, or three, or several, Others from above punching into the hot heart of the world. Those punches hurt the lizard, and the lizard grimaced, and arched its back, and the world lurched. Torcel wonders what it would take to wake the lizard from its quietness. That would be truly a disaster. Do the Architors also swim through the deep Innerness? Torcel thinks that, before the Other engulfed and consumed her, she saw shapes, shapes that could be people, and who would people be in here but Architors, moving through the red, far from her but visible, or visible to these senses she has here. She moved away from them at the time, out of caution or instinct. Here again is that slim graceful creature in her memory, first crouching frozen with surprise by the side of the Innerness, limned in red because the red was still draining from Torcel's eyes; and here she is screaming, still lovely, her body and neck a perfect curve up to the shape of her mouth. And here is that creature, that person, no longer screaming, and no longer limned in red, looking into Torcel's eyes as Torcel is looking into hers, her eye tendrils pointing finely forward, rising up onto one knee. And then the Architor. Torcel frowns, and turns herself around in the Innerness with a sweep of her arms and legs. The Other lies to one side, nestled into the web of flows and structures it has found here in the center. On the other side is more of the web, and beyond that, somewhere, she can feel the open Innerness, the roiling flow. She senses no one, nothing person-sized moving in the range of her sight or hearing or smell or taste, or any other sense she might have, here, now. Does she recall the Architor, the one by the wild punched Innerness, having those same sweeps of red on the sides of her hood? Is that a true memory, or some overlay of the one Innerness over the other, the old memory over the new one? It that hood had the same markings, was it then the same Architor? If it was, what would that mean? Torcel is pleased with herself to be asking these questions, she feels herself sharp and bright like the point of a star, but she has no answers. She looks out again, through the web, and inward to the complex writhing surface of the Other, and considers where to go next. XIX The wrapped people have other rooms besides the pool room, other hallways besides the one that Ot walked down hand in hand with the short-fingered stranger. Down this corridor are food rooms, rich and abundant, and down this one is a broad plaza (not open to the sky, but somehow inside the ridge, under the wrinkle of the world's skin) with hanging vines and resting niches, like something from the complex, but different in style, somehow stronger, more raw. Ot has been in the wrapped people's rooms, in their complex, for some stretch of time. The delicious relaxation of that first bath stretched into a long idyll of resting and eating and bathing, walking up and down the cleft between ridges and looking at the stars, climbing a few heights up one of the ridges and lying on her back under the sky and singing. The wrapped people love Ot's singing. They are still silent themselves, not a word or a verse from their lips all the time Ot has been among them, but they seem to need no words. The people that Ot sees are all attending to her, holding her hand or bringing her food or pouring water over her body from smooth shiny cups, or they are resting themselves on walls or on ceilings, in their odd clinging way. There comes a time when the sweet smell of the water is too strong in Ot's head. She goes out onto the floor of the valley, up onto the side of the forward ridge, and lies on her back. Two of the wrapped people have come with her. (They look strangely similar, and she is never certain which silent friend is which; these two now are, she thinks, the first two that bathed with her in the thick water.) She looks up at the sky and the stars and breathes deeply. A tendril of cool wild air from the top of the ridge, or from the empty places further away, comes into her body and clears away some of the scent of the water. It reminds her of the air of the complex, the cool smell of the upper levels. Lying there on the side of the ridge, she sings another song, one of Na's songs, a song about the stars and the sky and of distant friends. Why, she thinks to herself, why have I stopped here? Why have I not continued to the head, to the buildings under the complex, why have I not sought out the person that the Architor told me of? Why am I here at all? And here Ot sat up and looked around at the wrapped people beside her, and up at the top of the ridge, and then down at the bright bottom of the cleft, where the plates of skin lay ready to slide against each other. And she said to the person next to her, "Do you have an Innerness here?" In the image of the world at the back of her mind, Torcel Vellome sees, knows, herself to be rushing forward once again. She has worked her way carefully out of the web of structures and flows; some of them hurt to touch, with a pain that is not just another form of pleasure. Others are surrounded by fast local flows that pull her body around and away if she gets too close. Others are disturbing to her new senses, and odd to her eyes. The web is not a pleasant place; when she comes out of it into the open red, she has returned home. She links her arms above her head, and twines her legs around each other, and with a strong flick of her body launches herself forward, back toward the head of the world. The wrapped people do not smile in delight at Ot's asking them for an Innerness. They look away from her, and then toward each other, their eyes meeting and their tendrils waving. They stand, both of her companions, and begin moving back down the ridge, back toward the bottom of the cleft. Only when they have gone nearly halfway down does one look up and see that Ot is not following, and extend a hand to invite her down. There is a narrow opening in the wall of one food room. Beyond that opening is a long twisting hallway, and a sloping ramp down into a hot bright place. At the bottom of this ramp there is an archway. Ot has never seen an archway like this, or anything like this. The skin of the archway, if it is indeed trained skin and not something else entirely, is smooth and shiny like a mirror, but yellow-gold in color, and in the surface of the archway there are lines, lines forming words and pictures that Ot passes under to quickly to see. Beyond that archway is a room, not small and not large, and everywhere in that room that she looks Ot sees something she cannot understand. There are bright places in the room where the light does not come just from the heat of the skin. There are dark places that should be bright, where the wall of the room looks like no skin Ot has seen before, trained or not, nor anything like a vineleaf or a bone or the most exotic exudate. And in the center of the room was the Innerness. But it was not an Innerness at all. Looking down, Ot saw the familiar roiling red, the searing color of the heat, the slick moist thickness that made her happy and sad and deeply afraid. She could feel the heat on her hands and her face. But the red was not there, not in the same air that she was. There was no smell, no flavor of it, and between it and her was some barrier, some substance that seeing passed through, but smell and sound and touch did not, something clear as water but solid as burl. Ot knelt on the hot floor of the room and stared. The clear substance covering the red of the Innerness was crossed by fine lines of some dark exudate, a hand's width or so apart, bars crosshatching the glow of the red with cooler brown. Ot puts out a hand and touches one of the bars, and then touches the clear, feels the heat of the Innerness close under her skin, but untouchable, locked away. "What is this?" she says, her voice a whisper. She has grown unused to talking in her time with the silent wrapped people. The three who have led her to this room say nothing, as they always say nothing, but one of them touches her on the shoulder with a soft well-fed hand. Ot looks around the edge of the Innerness, where the lip should be. The bars of brown join at the edge, encompassing the panels of shiny clear in a wide oval that covers the Innerness from top to bottom and side to side. It is, Ot realizes, something like a door, set into the floor, covering the Innerness, and set with these strange panes of solid water. "Can this be opened?" The wrapped people in the room with her look at one another again, their eyes meeting and tendrils waving. Ot wonders if they speak among themselves when she is not there. It seems unlikely, she cannot after all this time imagine them speaking at all, but they might. They might speak of her, when she is not there. Under the clear panes below Ot's fingers, the red Innerness swells and glows, rolling slowly over itself, hot and full. "Can this be opened?" One of the wrapped people crouches beside Ot, takes her hand, and points it into the Innerness beyond the strange oval door, at a particular point at the edge of the lip. There Ot sees something dark, an outcrop or a knob, on the other side of the door, seen through the clear hot windows. It takes Ot, inexperienced with doors and locks, some time to realize that the dark thing is a latch, and that this door can be opened only from the other side. In her wanderings across the shoulder of the world, or in the book she will write about those wanderings, Ot stayed for two or three rests in a town where the people spent their time making games. The games they made were played on a checkered board of dark and light squares of polished exudate, played with smooth round pieces also dark and light, also make of smooth exudate. Ot did not learn any particular skill at the game, and she has in fact forgotten the rules; but she also learned a little of how the material is made. Whether the artisan that showed it to her was breaking the secret oaths of the artisans, or whether this one town had for some reason put aside, or never learned, those oaths, Ot never knew; the small gregarious person that showed her these things seemed uninterested in the issue. To make the hard smooth material of the game boards and game pieces, the people of the town sought out certain kinds of skin in the area around their town, and sought it out at its time of ripeness. Very much, her guide explained, like people seek out food, only the signs of ripeness, and the nature of a promising patch of skin, are very different. Her guide took her out into the burls and flats around the town, to the section that she and her clan used. She showed Ot a section that would bear the exudate they needed, although she did not tell Ot how she knew that this patch of skin, a piece of slope half-covered with trailing vines at the edge of a small wilderness of burls, was any more promising than any other patch. She poked at it with her finger, and had Ot do the same. It had a ripe feel to it, as food rooms can feel ripe, but it did not feel (or look or smell) like food, and the thought of its ripeness made Ot uneasy. Her guide had softened a bit with her tears, but Ot could make no tears, not in this wrongly ripe patch of not-food, far out in the strange humped lands of the shoulder. The guide had Ot carry the cylinders of not-food back to town, in an exudate pouch worn around her shoulders. They were not heavy. In the town, in a roughly square building of trained burls that almost met overhead in a curved roof with a narrow hole to the sky at the summit, she told Ot to empty the pouch into a pool in the floor, and the pool was another disturbing thing, being not water, or even the red of Innerness, but a dark and congealed something into which the not-food taken from the skin by the artisan's tears sank and crumbled all too quickly. The artisan her guide had smiled, perhaps mockingly, at Ot's dislike of the not-food and the not-water, and had not explained where the contents of the pool came from, or what it was. But she said that in not too long a time, the material at the bottom of the pool would begin to solidify and harden, and she and the other artisans of her clan would scoop it out, and shape it into forms, and give the forms color with other substances that she did not describe, and make them into game boards and game pieces. Ot rested under the sky in a niche at the side of a high burl overlooking the town and the flats beyond. Then she ate with the artisan, and sat watching the people of the town play their game at their game boards. People from other towns nearby, and perhaps farther away, came to learn the game and trade their own objects for the gameboards. But whenever Ot thought of playing the game herself, of sitting at a board and moving the pieces, she thought of the lifeless way that the softened bits of the world's skin had sunk into the dark pool and broken apart, and she was not happy. So she did not learn that game, then. Now, crouching above the strange windowed door in the floor of the wrapped people's strange room, looking down at the Innerness that she cannot touch and feeling its muted heat in her face, Ot thinks for some reason of that town and its game. And when she sees the face down there in the redness, this time she does not scream. XX Below the skin of the world, down in the hot roiling red, Torcel Vellome, what was once Torcel Vellome and might as well be called that again, swims through the thickness, engulfed in bliss. She opens her mouth and the redness eddies into her; she flexes her body and it rolls around her, and rolls her around. In her mind she looks at the image of the lizard floating in blackness. The image is cool and dark, and all around her is hot and bright, and the contrast fills her with awe. She thinks of beauty, of the graceful person by the lip of that other Innerness. She senses where she is in the image of the world, and she wonders where that graceful person is now, where she would be on the image of the lizard. And suddenly she knows. The tiny animals or machines, the things too small to see that have filled and emptied and destroyed and created her, have made some difference there, or some correction. So not only does Torcel Vellome see where she herself is in the image of the lizard, she also sees where the graceful stranger is, in a place even farther forward and around to the side, somewhere on the left shoulder of the splayed lizard. With a flick of her legs behind her and her arms in front, she adjusts her course through the world, in the direction of that point. Roughly halfway there, between where she started and where she is going, she encounters the Architors. Or at least she chooses to think of them as Architors, for the time being, because she suspects that Architors live down here in the red, or at least travel down here in the red, and that no one else does. She notices them at the limits of her senses; not vision, nor taste nor smell nor whatever sense found her the Other in the first place, but some sense involved with the flow of the deep Innerness, something like what found her the way from the tailward town to the wild tear in the skin, but amplified and clarified now. Torcel hopes her senses are sharper than theirs, and when she stops (quickly, suddenly, instinctively, and with what she is sure is a loud turbulence in the searing red) the shapes at the limits of her senses do not seem to react, do not seem aware of her. They are becoming dimmer; the Architors (or whatever they are) are moving away from her, nearly on the line that leads where Torcel is going, but somewhat more straight forward, more toward the forward end of the head, or the mouth. (The mouth, Torcel thinks, what is forward at the mouth? Do people live above the mouth, inside it? Do people live on the eyelids? Are there towns, whole cities, that would be ground to powder if the lizard were to open its eyes, or that keep the lizard from opening its eyes? She adds these questions to the list of missing connections, of things she does not know that she ought to know, of things that no one knows and everyone should know.) She pushes herself forward again, keeping them just within feeling. They are moving more slowly than she was moving when she came upon them. She thinks there are five of them. (Has anyone seen five Architors together before? If not, why not? More questions for the list.) Are they speaking to each other as they move? She wonders if it is possible to speak somehow, under here. If not for the Architors ahead, she would try to shout. She imagines being here with the graceful stranger by her side, or with Nartabee Silgilesh, or being with the Architors, in the midst of their group, moving steadily forward on some routine or urgent business. Moving more slowly through the red, with nothing to do but follow the dim shapes ahead until they change course, or until they reach the place where she will have to decide whether to follow them or veer off toward where she knows the graceful stranger is (still in the same place on the wrinkled shoulder, having moved hardly at all), Torcel observers more closely the form and texture of the substance through which she is passing. The redness is hot, it is thick, and it is red; these things she has known from the beginning. It is also semi-transparent, like cloudy water. Simple vision is not of much use here, not for forms or objects at any distance, as everything blurs off into uniform red not far away. (Or not quite uniform; looking around her she sees that the light is dimmer and cooler upward, toward the skin of the world, and brighter and hotter downward, toward its heart.) But close up, near against her eyes, the substance, the fluid or liquid through which she swims (and which fills her) is not entirely uniform. Things move past her vision now and then, things which are themselves hot and thick and red, and not easily distinguished from the other parts of the medium. But now that she is swimming more slowly and looking about herself more carefully (not merely lost in the bliss and the newness of herself) she can see them, and she thinks that she can feel them brushing against her skin as she moves along. The Architors continue moving forward in a steady line. Torcel reaches out a hand toward one of the things, but she misjudges the distance, and it fades away. Some of them are small, small as a finger; others are as large as a person, but irregular in shape, rough ovals that undulate through the red as though alive, unless that is just a trick of the flow that carries them along. She reaches out with both hands, more determinedly (her legs full of their tiny animals or machines can easily match the Architors' speed alone), and almost closes them around one of the middle-sized creatures, or objects, or nodules. She feels it for an instant in her grasp, something thicker than the red that surrounds them, yielding and pliable, smooth textured, but then it wriggles, or perhaps she squeezes it too hard, and it slips away and vanishes. Ahead of her, the Architors have slowed even more, although they still seem to take no notice of her, and they still move forward. Reaching out into the flow with her other senses, with something like feeling that extends out beyond her skin and her fingers, she tries to feel the things, the odd oval shapes, between herself and the Architors. She finds them, as subtle differences in the feel of the moving red, of her own movement through the red. There are many of them to each side of her, and above and below; fewer directly ahead. Perhaps they sense her motion and dodge from her path, or perhaps her motion simply sets up its own flow that pushes them aside. Are the things alive? She adds this to her list of questions. Now the Architors have sped up again, and they are all of them far enough forward that Torcel must decide if she will follow them further (and what will she do when they arrive somewhere, or vanish, or turn back toward her?), or turn aside, away from the center line of the world, toward the place on the surface where the slim graceful stranger is. She stops in the flow, her body turning gently around its long axis, her arms and legs moving only enough to keep her roughly stationary in the complex flow of the deep Innerness. The Architors continue forward, fading from her senses, but not yet entirely gone. She stays as still as she can, feeling the world around her and the world's skin somewhere above, feeling the soft oval things that move through the flow, now uniformly gathered around her, moving past her in smooth waves, following each other in ranks, or merely carried in flows within the flow. The Architors fade from her awareness entirely, forward toward the mouth, or the nose, or the jaw, toward some place far outside Torcel's knowledge. The graceful stranger is somewhere above her and off to the side. With slow gradual strokes, she pushes her way toward her. XXI While Ot, for whatever reason, has a hard time telling one of the wrapped people from another, she has instantly recognized the face down there in the redness as the face of the tall wild stranger that emerged from the tear in the world. She draws in her breath and moves her hands before that face, toward the latch at the side of the door, trying to draw the stranger's attention to it. (Behind her, one of the wrapped people sees the motions of her hands and the sudden tensing of her body, and leans forward to look, and then turns away, gesturing urgently at the other two, and the three of them vanish through the the doorway. Ot does not notice.) Has the stranger been down there since she plunged into that other Innerness at the approach of the Architor so long ago? Ot thinks that she has lived an entire life since then, in the long journey across the shoulder of the lizard, the long idle quietness here with the wrapped people. What does she eat, down there in the searing red? How does she breathe? Torcel has headed directly for the place on the surface where the image in her mind tells her the graceful stranger is. She has not thought how she will get through the skin to join her, or even if joining her is what she intends. This acting without conscious reason is something she associates with her old life, her first two lives, before the Other, but there is enough of her unchanged, at least in habit, that she is willing to accept it; the great difference is that now she is conscious of it. Coming up from the depths of the inner Innerness toward the place on the skin where she senses her goal is, Torcel felt nothing in the flow that hinted at a break, a hole, a tear, a way from the Innerness to the surface or the surface to the Innerness. Only at the last moment, when she was close enough to the underside of the skin to see it with her physical eyes, did she see the oddity. There on the upper side, the ceiling, of the roiling red was a patch of darkness. Closer to it, it looked like a hole, an opening, but the flows said that it was not. Torcel Vellome (the granch, the swimmer in the Innerness, the product of the Other) had the same moment of uncomprehension from her side as Ot did from hers; this uncanny patch of solid water, crossed by thin brown bars, holding in the Innerness but not blocking the sight. She put her face up close to the barrier, and out there in the dark coldness she saw a face, and recognized it, and was glad for the perfect accuracy of the small animals or machines inside of her. Ot's hand signals puzzled Torcel at first, but then drew her attention to the edge of the strange patch of dark, to the hand-sized protuberance. Her fingers explored the shape of it, and she knew it was a latch. If she opened it, would the red flood into the room beyond? It would be interesting to find out. Ot watches the wild stranger's fingers work at the latch beyond the Innerness door, her eye tendrils stiff and quivering. Behind her, a panel of smooth whiteness slides down across the archway of the room, closing it off; but Ot is too intent to notice. The latch is stiff and tight, but Torcel works it free, and it gives suddenly. The pressure of the flow beneath it pushes the door open just as suddenly, and Ot is knocked from her crouch, onto her back on the floor of the room. A swell of searing red presses into the room from the opening, filling the air with heat, and from it emerges a figure, again dripping with red, again stepping toward her, and Ot finds it hard not to scream again. But the red drains away, and again it is the tall wild stranger standing at the edge of an Innerness, gasping for breath, shaking herself, and then taking a step toward her. Ot curls her arms and legs around herself, not knowing what to do, wanting (for all that she was eager a moment ago to have that door opened) nothing more than to be back in the complex with Na, looking at the stars and singing soft songs. Despite the efficient dance of the tiny animals or machines (animals and machines?) within her (composing her), Torcel is disoriented as the red drains out of her in the close cool room. She is again on the lip of that first wild Innerness, again looking through clearing eyes at a lovely person whose eyes are fascinated and frightened. But now she is in a small space, an odd space whose walls are covered with strange knobs and ridges, and which seems to have no exit. The door that had covered the opening of the Innerness is thrown back, but still attached at one side of the lip, like the door to a room, and the Innerness swells and grows and heats the air. Torcel has forgotten why she is here, forgotten that she does not know why, but has accepted the fact, and is only confused. She steps from the hot moist red, toward Ot, who she still does not know is Ot, and collapses softly to the ground. Ot waits for a few moments after the tall wild stranger falls bonelessly to the floor, and then uncurls herself from her ball and goes to crouch beside her. Ot touches Torcel's skin for the first time (it is hot and rough, and in it she thinks there are tiny intricate patterns that are barely too small to see). She strokes Torcel's back, and stretches herself out on the floor beside her. Her eyes notice that, across the room, there is now a slick white wall where there had been a door, but her mind puts the fact aside. Torcel struggles out of the sudden weakness after a long moment, and sits up, taking Ot's hand in her own and looking into her face. "I am here," she says, "although I don't know why." "I am Ot," says Ot. "I am Torcel", says Torcel, "Torcel Vellome, once of the town of Varo on the spine, now of everywhere and nowhere." "I am Ot", says Ot, "of the complex on the head. There we have only one name." There is a silence. "I intend," says Ot, "to have a child, and to raise it myself." Torcel shakes her head. Another dozen questions have been added to the list of things she ought to know. But some connections seem more important than others. "Where are we?" she asks, "Does this strange room have a door?" Ot's eyes close, and her fingers, still held in Torcel's, tense. "There was a door," and Ot tells Torcel some part of the story, the story that much later she would write, almost accurately, in the book of her journey; she tells Torcel of the cleft between the ridges of the shoulder, the people that wrap themselves in exudate and hang from ceilings, the pool and the dark sky and this room. And the door that is no longer there. She also tells part of the story of the complex, and seclusion, and running away. Torcel frowns, twining her fingers around the fingers of this Ot, this lovely poetic stranger from the complex of the head, and considers what this might mean. "Have you seen Architors, while you were here with the wrapped people?" "None." Torcel frowns again. "They may have gone to find their Architors. Or they may have gone for some other reason. There may be Architors down in the deep Innerness, where I have come from. Our opening of the door may have changed the flows, and they may come to see what has happened. Or they may not. This is something I know very little of." Ot only shakes her head. Torcel goes to the door, the place where the door was, and pushes at it. There is no visible handle, or knob, or slit, nothing to pull or push on. "I do not want to be here if Architors arrive," says Torcel. Ot nods, "Nor do I." "It seems our only exit is into the Innerness. Have you been there?" Ot's eye tendrils stiffen and splay out. She backs away from Torcel, or from the Innerness, or from both. "I will go into the Innerness feet foremost, and I will go only up to my shoulders. Then I will have a child, and I will raise the child to a youth, myself." Ot says the words loudly, distinctly. Torcel shakes her head. "You can hope. That is one thing you can do, stay here and hope that the Architors do not come. I do not plan to rely on that hope." Ot finds she has begun to twine her fingers around each other, that the pain is offering itself to her mind. She will go into the Innerness feet foremost, she says to herself, and only to her shoulders. It will not engulf and swallow her, she will not be lost in it. Her body is shivering. "Entering the Innerness is very painful," says Torcel, "but the pain is transitory." Which is not true, but is as close to truth as she can come. "You should not be afraid of the pain." This surprises Ot. She is not afraid of pain, has never been afraid of pain. Pain is her friend. "I am not afraid of pain," she says, standing straighter and taking a step toward the wild stranger, toward this Torcel Vellome. "But I will do as I choose." Torcel nods. "As will I. But I think you should choose, we should choose, quickly." XXII Ot stands by the side of the Innerness, looking in. The red is hot and moist, shiny and hot and fragrant, swelling out of the hole in the floor as though it might at any moment burst into the room. She remembers the central Innerness in the complex, the long spans of time spent there when she was a youth (whole lives ago), the quiet movements of the tenders, their strange chemicals and small tools. The way the tender said "lost" when telling her of the narrowing of the Innerness, so no one would be lost. But the tall wild person, Torcel Vellome, has been into the Innerness, into an Innerness with no careful narrowing, and Torcel Vellome has not been lost. Or not entirely lost. Ot shivers. "They may," says Torcel, evenly, "open that door again in a moment, and have some innocent reason for having closed it. Or it may open and let in Architors, or Architors may leap out of this Innerness at our feet. We should not delay." Ot's fingers begin to twine around each other, but she stops them. If she needs pain, there is pain in plenty waiting within the red. "I shall enter the Innerness feet foremost," she repeats, "and I shall have a child, and raise it myself." The words spin in her head, beyond her control, but she has cut out the words about entering the Innerness only up to her shoulders. Her fingers relax. Ot takes a step forward, and leaps feet foremost into the searing red. Torcel stands for an instant, wrapped in the beauty of the simple motion, then lowers herself in after, ignoring the pain long enough to swing the strange windowed door closed before she sinks into it and it fills her. Ot screams. This is not pain like the gentle friendly pain of twined fingers squeezing each other in love and support and familiar punishment, this is the pain of destruction, of buring flesh, of eyes jellied in their sockets by the heat. She tries to struggle back to the surface, but she has already sunk too far, and Torcel's body is in the way. So she screams again. Torcel, wrapped patiently in her own pain, feeling it searing its way toward pleasure, thinks she hears something in the way of a scream or a shout from the writhing figure below her. She reaches out for the latch (moving her arms brings fresh and raw pain, and hastens the growth of the pleasure), and pushes it closed. No one will be opening that door from above. Unless there are devices she did not see. (More connections to be made.) Lost in the pain, Ot feels Torcel push past her, into the huge empty open redness beyond. She tries to scream again, and the red comes into her mouth and her throat, and she is consumed. Her limbs writhe again, she tries to push off and away from the pain, and suddenly she is in motion, knifing through a thick searing universe, and her skin is burning outside and within, and all at once she is filled with joy. She screams again, for the joy of screaming. Torcel, out in the open red, sees and senses Ot burst away from the dark hole, and thinks again that she may hear something. She flicks her legs and goes to Ot, matching her speed through the Innerness, curving her body to match the other's joyous erratic course. She says Ot's name loudly, but the other shows no sign of hearing. The effort of speech seems odd, wrong, futile. There is no air for the lungs, only the thick and torrid red. Then Torcel is wrapped in Ot's arms, and Ot's legs, and Ot's fingers and toes. Ot's body is shaking, and Torcel thinks that she is laughing, or possibly crying, or both. "We should not stay here," Torcel says, or tries to say, or imagines saying, thinking of a band of Architors coming through the red, perhaps not slowly this time. But again there is no sign that Ot has heard. Torcel shakes herself free of Ot's curling limbs, and swims off a short distance into the red. Ot's body twists where it is for a moment, then flicks awkwardly over to join her. Torcel moves again, faster, and then faster still as Ot follows more easily. Before long the two are speeding together through the inside of the world. In the image in her mind, Torcel senses both of them, moving tailward. When they begin to veer from the course she has set, Torcel circles around Ot, directing her back. Again she thinks she hears some sound, but they cannot stop here to experiment. Torcel is taking them to the Other. Halfway to the destination (again), Torcel feels something at the range of her senses, and diverts their course in a long arc away from it. Another band of Architors? The same one? Something entirely else? Torcel does not need to know. When they near the edge of the web of forms and structures where the Other is embedded (or Torcel thinks it is the same one; navigation within the skin of the lizard, guided by the image in her mind, is far from exact), she slows down, and Ot slows down, and they come to rest just within. Torcel has no intention of urging, or even allowing, Ot to engulf herself in the Other and be destroyed and created. But here in the web she hopes they will be safe from any other people that might be in the deep Innerness, that might be searching for them. Ot is running her hands over the rough mottled texture of the web, squeezing it with her fingers. Torcel says her name, but neither of them hear it. Torcel takes Ot's hands in her hands, and raises all four hands above their heads. Their bodies are drawn together, and their legs twine together, and they are pressed together tightly. "Do you hear me now?" Torcel asks, loudly, willing the liquid in her chest to move. From the moment the pain burned through into pleasure, Ot has been shaking; shaking in the deep laughing sobs that shook her as she wrapped herself around Torcel in glee, or shaking in the subtler throb of energy and speed that filled her as they travelled through the heat. (So fast, Ot thinks, watching herself moving in the image in the back of her mind as they go, and the world so huge.) She was shaking, a blissful and fascinated vibration, even as she sat at the edge of the odd place that Torcel Vellome brought them to, and ran her fingers over the strange plants there. Now Torcel, the stranger, has stretched them out and coiled them together, here in the depths of the world, and Ot is still shaking. She feels herself shaking against Torcel's body, feels her fingers shaking where they are entwined, her belly shaking at the center of them. But the shaking is softer now, and slower. She feels a vibration, something almost like sound, between them. She stretches her arms further above her head, stretching Torcel with her. There is another vibration. "Are you saying something?" Ot asks, or tries to ask, but she has no voice, her body is full of the searing redness that entered her when she screamed, and that still fills her with that blissful pain. She asks it again, louder. "Yes," says Torcel, and she hears it. "Yes!" she shouts back, and wriggles her legs, and like a single creature they shoot deeper into the web, caromming from a long column or stem, and then into a soft fibrous mass where they come apart, Ot dissolving limply into laughter (silent laughter, throat full of thick searing red), and Torcel to one side, waiting. Ot gathers her mind together (when will she see the stars again, when will she be cool?), and comes to her, taking her hands again and stretching their bodies together. "Can you hear me?" she asks, pushing with her voice as hard as she can through the heat. "Speak," says Tercel, in reply or at least just after, "slowly. Very. Slowly." And Ot hears her, although the sound is slow and fuzzy, indistinct, needing to be held for long seconds before reaching sense. Ot finds this way of talking almost irresistably funny at first (did she laugh this easily on the surface, back at the complex, on the long journey across the shoulder? she thinks not), but controls herself, and after that they can speak almost naturally, if not fast. "Where shall we go?" Ot asks, pressing her fingers against Torcel's and rubbing her face against the side of her head. Torcel is uncertain, now, distracted by the strange behavior of this other, this graceful and fey creature from the Head. (Though did she not act strangely herself, when the pain first burned through to pleasure? Might she not have been just like this, had anyone else been there?) "I know of another Innerness, tailward, that the Architors do not control." Or did not control, and may still not. And at this thought Torcel remembers being able to find Ot in the image of the world in her mind, and she reaches back there, and looks to see if she can find Nartabee Silgilesh. And she finds that she can. "Why?" asks Ot, forgetting almost to speak slowly, so slowly and loudly that Torcel can hear, "Why another opening, why go back to the surface? We can stay here, I shall have my child, we will raise it here in the joyful heat. Later, when it is growing, we can take it outside and show it the stars." Torcel shakes her head, strokes Ot's fingers in comfort or warning. "You will not have a child, I think, from only being in the red. An Architor once told me that there is something else required." "What?" asks Ot, eagerly, "What is it?" "I don't know. But if we return to the surface, and avoid the Architors, we can find someone who has had a child, and perhaps she can tell us." Ot's project, her dream and desire, the stuborn wish that animates her, has, Torcel notices, become hers as well. Having found the deep Innerness and acheived her own end, this new one is welcome. "Guide us," Ot says, and she wriggles their combined body and launches them out into the open red, away from the web's forms and structures. Torcel extends her senses out as far as they can go (the graceful burning form twined around her does not seem to interfere with them), and moves along with Ot, and they move through the red like a single being. Nartabee Silgilesh, Torcel sees in the image in her mind, is far tailward, as she would have expected, in the area of the tailward town and the hidden Innerness. She arches her body and guides them, herself and Ot, in that direction, around and past and away from the web of the Other. They do not move fast, not as fast as either could alone, but at this speed Torcel is more confident that she will see any Architors (or anyone or anything else) in time to react to it. The conjointure is odd, novel, something like delicious, and the tiny animals and machines that fill Torcel, or compose her, slide into harmony with it almost at once. Torcel moves when Ot moves, and Ot moves when Torcel moves, and when they wish to speak they speak, in long syllables that last for many moments. Later, Ot begins to sing, somewhere halfway between normal singing and the lengthened tones of their speech. The song rings through their single body; Torcel is very happy. In the back of her mind, on the image of the world floating in the starry void, Torcel Vellome senses Nartabee Silgilesh, and senses herself and Ot drawing gradually toward her. XXIII Torcel can find Nartabee Silgilesh in the image of the lizard in the back of her mind, and can bring herself and Ot twined together to a point in the roiling red somewhere below where Nartabee Silgilesh is on the surface of the lizard. But the underside of that surface is tough and thick, and there are no openings here. (Is the red a different flavor, back here tailward? Does it flow more sluggishly, more thickly? Torcel is not certain. More questions that needs answers.) Ot does not ask Torcel where she is taking them, or why they have come to this particular spot on the dark red underside of the skin, or why Torcel has now stopped, relaxing her body, floating in thought in the red. She is content, for the moment, to lie suspended in the hot thickness, arms and legs coiled around Torcel's arms and legs, body pressed to body, singing to herself, or speaking of nothing in the strange slow speech that they must use here. The not-asking bothers Torcel. She appreciates Ot's beauty, her spirit, the depth of her determination to raise her child herself, to enter the Innerness feet foremost (and the beauty of her wrestling with her older determination, and finally plunging in much deeper than her shoulders). But now that her own, Torcel's, head has been cleared of the soft barriers by the Other, she is annoyed by the evidence of those barriers in Ot. Ot should be asking questions. The one question she did ask, sliding through the Innerness, is whether this being in the Innerness would give her a child. "I think not," Torcel replied, "an Architor once told me" (and during the long drawn-out words Torcel thought how odd it sounds to say "an Architor told me") "that there is something else that must be done. I do not know what." And then Ot was silent again, for a long time, and then she spoke of other things, and now they are here. "Somewhere near here is an Innerness, an opening to the surface," Torcel says, loudly and slowly in the voice of the red. "But I cannot find it just now. We can search, and later I might have another way to find it." She has found that she can sense not only Nartabee Silgilesh, but also Curatan Silgilesh, and Taraban Eluctog who has visions, and also Torgano Fortano, who was a granch and who once saw an Innerness torn in the skin of the world by a shattered machine. They are all four close together up there on the surface, all at the same point as far as Torcel can tell from the image of the lizard in her mind. Later, she hopes, one of them will go apart from the others enough to follow, and when she follows that one she will find the secret Innerness there. Torcel thinks of the story that Torgano, who was Torgan, told a life ago, about the thin place in the skin. If there were a place here where the skin was thin, could they break through from below onto the surface? What would they use to cut? There is nothing. The texture of the skin, the underside of the skin, is soft and spongy, but tough, impossible to pull off even the smallest piece. It is red and elastic, and quite hot, hot enough that pressing against it heightens the pain. Ot, when she splits away from Torcel, remembering how to be a single person, floats just under the underside of the skin, touching it with her fingers and sometimes pressing her body into it, and shivering from the blissful pain. Torcel is impatient with this. She had hoped to find one of the tailward towners guarding or attending their Innerness, marking their way to it, although she had not expected it. Now that she no longer has that hope, she needs something else to do. "Come," she says, twining herself and Ot together again and speaking slowly and loudly, "we will search a bit. Perhaps we will be lucky." They spend some time (and what is time within the buring heart of the world?) looking for the entrance to the secret Innerness, the one that is invisible from within. Torcel reaches out with all her senses, old and new and Other, hoping that in combination they will tease out some wrinkle in the flows that the Architors cannot see. But if there is a wrinkle, her senses are too new to her to find it. Sometimes Ot unwinds herself from Torcel and just floats in the red, coiling and uncoiling her arms and legs and supple body. Perhaps singing, or dancing, or thinking of nothing in the way Torcel knows she used to think of nothing in the long dim patches between the stages of her search for an wild Innerness. Then Torcel goes apart from her, looking along the underside of the world's skin for that break, or any break that might lead them undiscovered upward. She can sense Innernesses here and there, ripples in the flow more or less distant from them, but those the Architors must know about, and guard, and control. She thinks of bursting forth from an Architor's Innerness and running, pushing aside any tenders or Architors on watch, and fleeing into the wild. But that would gain them nothing even if she could be certain of success. Ot wants a wild Innerness to give her a wild child, and Torcel wants what Ot wants, for the moment. "Why do we not need food?" Ot asks, one time that they are twined together, sliding past long fluted ridges in the underside of the skin, casting with their eyes and their other senses for an opening. The question startles Torcel, because Ot has asked it and she herself has not. It has been a long span of time, surely, since their last food; Ot has not eaten since sometime in her dim dreamy stay with the wrapped people, and Torcel -- she realizes with a start that she has not eaten at all in this life, since well before plunging into the Other, since well before even diving into the wild Innerness that they are now searching for. Food has become unnecessary. Rest, the rest of lying limp on one's back and staring at the stars or the burls of the skin above you, has become unnecessary, though they do spend stretches of time relaxed in the red, floating near each other, or twined around each other, thinking or singing or doing nothing. What has the Other done to her, Torcel wonders, and what has the Innerness done to both of them? And why are there not more people down here, with them? She keeps her senses (eyes? ears?) extended at all times (or nearly all times; sometimes she catches herself relaxing, inattentive), feeling out into the opaque red for Architors, or things that might be Architors. Twice, three times, she feels them. Twice she and Ot are already twined together and moving, and she has only to steer their course away. Once, she is as far from Ot as she allows herself to get, and the shapes (the traces or eddies or tastes in the flow) are closer than she likes them to be, and she must swim toward them to get to her. That time, Ot was floating with her eyes closed, focused on nothing, actively thinking of nothing, of nothingness, feeling the buring pain on her skin and in her throat, and feeling through the pain to pleasure, as always, and then through the pleasure to nothing, to the core of herself. When Torcel came out of invisibility, swimming fast, and grasped her arms and legs and pulled them both twined into sudden speed, it as as though her mind had been left behind, and took some time to catch up. In the mindless interval, her body shook again, as it had in the first moments of her plunge into this hot red timeless space. "Architors," Torcel had said. An odd name, thought Ot, for a rushing out of the void, a sudden grasping and pulling, a twining together, and a delicious speed through the burning heart of the world. Eventually, after her mind caught up with them, she had remembered what Torcel meant by it, and what she had been doing ("doing" not an easy term to grapple, fresh from the nothingness) by pulling them away. But still the feeling of speed and surprise and bliss stayed attached somehow to the word in her mind. Twice Nartabee Silgilesh went away from the others, and Torcel and Ot followed, but there was no opening there, either time. (Once it was a granch come tailward, that Nartabee has followed, casually, for the memory of Torcel; once it was a cache of hoarded food that she heard of, and went to investigate, and came away with a heavy pouch.) Once Taraban Eluctog went away from the others, and Torcel and Ot followed, but there was no opening there, either. (She followed her visions far out into the empty skin, walking the streets of impossible glowing cities, and laughing at the blue-skinned clowns, and came back only because the cities dissolved, and she needed to eat. She passed within an easy walk of the hidden Innerness, but had no reason to go to it, and Torcel and Ot did not chance across it.) Then Nartabee Silgilesh and Curatan Silgilesh both went away from the other two, in what Torcel thought a promising direction. She went to Ot, gently this time, and took her hands and feet and they twined themselves together, and Torcel told Ot what has happening, and Ot smiled and settled her head next to Torcel's head, and they moved, following with the motion of their swimming the motion of the two tailward people in the image in Torcel's mind. Now Nartabee and Curatan have stopped, or stopped as far as Torcel can tell (and it bothers Torcel also that Ot does not wonder, or does not seem to wonder, as Torcel wonders, why she has this ability, that Ot does not, to find other people in the image of the world in her mind), and Ot and Torcel have stopped, floating in the red beneath them, and separated. Ot looks about her, watching the world vanish into redness and heat, looking carefully to see the fat oval shapes that move in the thick fluid, thinking again of catching one. But Torcel is apart, holding herself as still as she can, looking and feeling and smelling. The first time she found this Innerness, this opening to the surface, from the underside, it was only because someone had dangled something on a rope from above. It is too much to hope that that rope or that something will still be here. Torcel stretches out her senses, and finds nothing. She kicks herself up against the inner skin itself (delicious searing pain), and spreads her fingers out across it. She wills the small machines or animals in herself to extend her senses further. And finds nothing. Then Ot barrels into her and knocks her away from her place pressed against the skin, and Ot is pulling on her arms, pulling her somewhere at a great speed, and then stopping and looking about herself. They are close to the skin, a little way from where Tercel was clinging when Ot began pulling her. It seems no different. And then at the limit of her vision she sees the frayed end of the rope. Later, when they are shivering in the cold, huddled beside the lip of the Innerness, on the unfamiliar surface, their lungs raw and filled with air, Ot will tell Torcel that she followed one of the soft oval things that move in the redness, and it took her to an opening, and she went to show it to Torcel, but could not find it again. And Torcel will only smile and shake her head. XXIV When something tugs at the rope that they have left dangling, for no well thought out reason, over the lip of their Innerness and into the deadly moist redness, Nartabee Silgilesh and Curatan Silgilesh both leap to their feet, and with a common unspoken thought run from the narrow room among the burls. And when Torcel Vellome, who was a granch, and Ot, who was a youth in the Head, burst one after the other from that Innerness, to stand gasping (both) on the lip with the hot red draining from their bodies, and then to sink shivering (both) to the ground beside it, Nartabee Silgilesh and Curatan Silgilesh are watching them from behind a curtain of vines, wondering if there is something in it. The two lying beside the lip, curled around themselves and hunched close to each other, are so clearly not a threat, not an immediate danger, that the two Silgileshes consider it safe to go back into the room, and at least one of the Silgileshes (Nartabee, remembering the terrible thing in the wilderness and how the granch perhaps saved her life) considers it almost a duty (the concept of duty having some purchase, even in a mind like Nartabee's, even in a place like the tailward towns). They have been so long down in the searing red, Ot and Torcel, (the nurturing and blissful red, the seat of pain and delight, blindness and speed), that the draining way of that thick heat and the feel of the cold emptiness around them (and in their lungs and down their throats) is overwhelming. The cold is not painful (is not even cold, strictly speaking), but the absense of heat, the draining away of enlivening pain, leaves them both enervated, weak. When Nartabee and Curatan come out from behind the curtain of vines, come into the narrow space and across to the lip of the Innerness, Ot does not notice them, their being there does not penetrate the shell she has wrapped herself in against the cold and the emptiness. But Torcel has found herself again more quickly, the animals and machines that live in, or are, her body perhaps adapting more quickly to the change, in the manner of animals and machines. "This is Ot," she says to Nartabee, who has come closest, and is crouching by the shivering pair. "She will be better, I think, in a short time. We have been down in the heat very long." Nartabee shakes her head. "You granches are an odd lot," she says, seeing that Ot, while wild and curled and shaking, is still the most elegant creature that she, that Nartabee, has ever encountered. From somewhere far headward, certainly, or somewhere else completely. (In the tailward towns, even more than elsewhere, there are stories of people from the stars, or from other lizards floating just beyond sight in the black sky.) Now Ot stirs, uncoils her arms enough to coil them up again, around Torcel's neck, pulling their bodies together so that she can lie, face toward the top where the burls do not quite touch and the black sky shows a handful of stars, with her head pillowed against Torcel's legs. She sighs and closes her eyes, resting, as she has not rested on the surface, under the stars, for a very long time. Torcel looks at Nartabee, and shrugs her shoulders. The granch looks different somehow, Nartabee thinks; thinner, certainly, but somehow darker of skin, odd in some not quite visible way. Then Curatan pushes forward and sits on the lip with them, and in low voices they begin to talk, with Ot on her back looking up at the sky, listening but perhaps not hearing. The moving of the lizard (lives ago for Ot and Torcel, but just recently for the other two; the last thing of any significance that has happened tailward, the sole thing that most people talk about, still) has been a disaster here, as elsewhere. Tailward has been hurt more, and less, than other places on the lizard's various skin. More, because their buildings and machines and contrivances were so slapdash and fragile, and so easily destroyed by the terrible arching of that terrible back; less, for the same reason, because the buildings and machines and contrivances being slapdash, they can be rebuilt from the ruins, mostly, and be no worse than they were. "Will you live here again, now?" asks Nartabee, and it annoys Torcel that neither she nor Curatan ask the harder questions, ask how they have lived so long in the Innerness, what they found down there, what they did. In her new curiosity, she is impatient by their incuriosity. Not that she could answer all those questions if they were asked. "Have either of you had a child?" Ot's voice, coming from the ground where she still lies, looking upward, startles Nartabee and Curatan, and surprises Torcel, who has not felt her stir until she spoke. Nartabee and Curatan look at each other, uncomfortable. This is not a casual question, even here tailward, perhaps especially here tailward. The Architors do not call for many children, back here. The land, the skin, is already drained by the scattered people that it supports, and there are always granches. So neither Nartabee nor Curatan bear the mother-scar. "But we know --" "We know of those who have," Curatan finishes for Nartabee, who being impetuous and easy might have named one. "Can we speak to some of those?" Ot asks. Torcel admires her singlemindedness again. "We will need to ask them," says Curatan. And they speak of other things, the shortage of artisans and the sad state of the local baths. Then Nartabee and Curatan go off, perhaps to speak to someone who has had a child, and Ot and Torcel lie by the lip of the Innerness, half twined together, looking up at the stars. Na has had a child, Ot thinks. She has had children, three children. Na has the shiny puckered curve of the mother scar on her belly. Three times, Ot thinks, Na's belly has opened, and a child has come out, and the Architors have taken it away. Did Na ever think of keeping the child for herself, to raise into a youth? What was it like, to be Na, and have a child? If she were back in the head complex, she could talk to Na, and ask her these questions, ask her what the Architors had done to her, after her seclusion, after her cleansing, before (or after?) her plunge into the Innerness. But Na is far away. Ot closes her eyes and looks into the darkness there, and pushes herself closer against Torcel, and time passes. * Zoanta Farmalon has had a child. Curatan Silgilesh comes through the vine curtain, sits on the lip of the Innerness with Torcel and Ot, and tells them that there is someone who will speak with them, who has had a child. They leave the maze of the Innerness room, and cross the waste beyond. (Ot is stronger now, but still cold, still empty. The Innerness is warmth and comfort and speed, but she will have a child, and raise it herself. Torcel walking beside her seems a different person out here, separate and cold and quiet.) Zoanta Farmalon is a small wiry person, the mother-scar deep and clear on her skin, looking somehow larger, longer, than its bearer. She lives in a solitary house, of stiff exudate molded to a framework of thin curving burls, trained into a dome sometime long ago for an unknown reason. Now it makes a comfortable if eccentric house, far from anything, with a meager food patch nearby, a long walk from the nearest water. "It is not something that I would talk about," she says, and of course it is not something that anyone would talk about. But she has let Curatan bring them to her house, and she has had them in, and shared with them a few pieces of saved food (dry and tasteless, Ot thinks it is, and her stomach roils and protests at having anything in it that is not red and flaming and alive). She will tell them, it seems, about seclusion. (It was an elegant place, her seclusion, somewhere far away, leftward and headward, with resting nooks and a bath sweeter than any bath here, the water more soothing and pungent and thick, and with two food rooms, one always ripe.) And she will tell them about being cleansed (two tenders with her at an even deeper bath, the scent of the water filling her head, laving her body from head to toe with the water, and leaving her to rest in it for a long luxurious time, with the hooded Architor always in the background). But she will not tell them about going into the Innerness, or about what there was between the cleansing and the Innerness. She lets out only that there was something, and it was not something she would talk about. Torcel feels her impatience burning through to a kind of patience, as the pain of the Innerness burns through to pleasure, although with a grim and cold burning rather than a joyous and a hot. "Is there anyone more likely to tell us?" she asks Curatan as they cross the waste again after leaving the strange solitary house of Zoanta Farmalon. "None more likely, no other as likely." Torcel wonders (as Ot does not) why the Architors have put this prohibition on the people, this stopping of the mouths. She does not doubt that it was the Architors, does not even consider that it might not be. She thinks of the Architors as a great cold hooded figure, looming over the world out of the darkness. "Do the Architors hate us?" Torcel asks Ot, or asks herself aloud, when Curatan Silgilesh has left them, and they are again stretched out by the lip of the hidden Innerness. "One told me that they are not people, that they come from outside the world," Ot replies, twining her fingers in and out of Torcel's, and looking at the stars. "What?" Torcel is surprised, thinking again how odd it is to hear that an Architor has told anyone anything. So Ot tells Torcel Vellome the story that the Architor with the red-swept hood told her, near the wild torn Innerness up headward, about the creators of the lizard, and the Architors who are from another world out in the stars but also from this world, and the secret things they have been told and forbidden to repeat. And Ot tells Torcel Vellome (for she remembers the words well, though she has not tried hard to understand them) of the chaos the red-swept Architor introduces into the system (whatever the system is), and her suspicions about why her sisters the Architors allow it. Torcel Vellome is fascinated. She feels the connections snapping into place (or snapping into place and breaking and forming again) within her mind, in the places where the Other has removed the frothy yielding barriers. "Do we believe what that Architor, or that not-quite Architor, said?" Torcel wonders. "Believe?" Ot's voice is distant and abstract, her mind up among the stars. Torcel looks at her and sighs. "I also knew an Architor whose hood was swept with red wings. She it was who told me that there is something beyond being in an Innerness that you need before you can have your child." And Torcel told Ot, or told herself, the story of her tumble into the Innerness in that prosperous town on the Spine, and the Architor in the red-swept hood who had talked to her of the things needed to have children, and the narrowing of Innernesses, and the not-narrowing of wild ones. "Let us say that this was the same Architor in the same hood as the one that freed you from your seclusion, and that came to you near the wild torn Innerness, and that told you of someone up on the edge of the head that you should meet." "The same one," says Ot, her mind out in the stars. Is this star the same as this star, she wonders? Is the other star that flashes blue across the black sky at one time the same one as the other star that glows and burns steady orange in another part of the sky at another time? Is every Architor the same as every other? Every mouthful of water the same as every other? Is every word that Torcel speaks the same word? Torcel is still talking, but the words are flowing through her without meaning. It is good, she thinks, to rest under the sky, looking at the dark through the opening in the top of the burls. Now something is blocking her vision, something warm and round and near. Torcel's head, her face looking down into Ot's, her fingers touching Ot's head. Something hot and wet falls into Ot's cheek, another into her mouth. Ot's rest is so deep and thorough that half a dozen of Torcel's thick hot tears, swimming with millions of tiny animals and machines, have fallen onto her skin and into her mouth (flowing down her throat to multiply in the welcoming climate of her body) before the oddity of the situation finally draws her attention, and she rolls aside and sits up. "Why did you do that?" Ot has never tasted a tear before, not directly. Tears soften ripe world-skin, tears let you draw food from the world, tears perhaps give taste to food, and when a friend gives you food it may be that you taste her tears. But Torcel Vellome (the granch, the wild stranger from the Innerness, the other half of the twin body speeding her through the red) has dropped her tears directly onto Ot's skin and into her mouth. The taste is strong and strange. Torcel doesn't answer, but only looks at Ot until Ot looks away, lying now on her belly with her head cradled on her arms. "Shall we go back to Zoanta Farmalon, and ask her again?" "I think it would be fruitless." Torcel's voice is somewhat distant now, and distracted. She is going over in her mind the action of leaning over Ot, of dropping her tears into Ot's face and into Ot's mouth. How often, she thinks, do we truly know why we do the things that we do? "Where is the Architor with the red-swept hood?" Ot asks, her face turned away from Torcel. "I don't know." "You knew where Nartabee Silgilesh and Curatan Silgilesh and the others were." And again Torcel is startled by the question. She looks into the image of the world in her mind, the lizard floating in the dark, and she sees where in the world she is, back tailward, and where Ot is, in the same place, and then when she looks to see where the Architor in the red-swept hood is she sees that also, far up forward, just rightward of the center at the leading edge of the head. "I know where she is," she says, and Ot turns her head to face her. "But do we want to find an Architor?" "I will have a child," says Ot, "and raise it myself." "The Architors will take it away." "They will not." Ot's will, or her confidence, are as unbending as bone. Torcel shakes her head. XXV Ot and Torcel are twined together again, arms to arms and legs to legs, stretched out and waving their bodies in rhythm through the thick searing fluid of the Innerness, heading forward, toward the place where Torcel sees in her image of the world that the Architor is with the red-swept hood. Ot screamed again at the pain on plunging into the red, and Torcel screamed, to open her lungs, and both of them curled up and coiled out as their bodies burned through into pleasure. Now they are fully in it again, and it in them, and they think, both of them, without saying it to each other, that it will be harder still to get out, into the cold and the empty, the next time. The burning and the speed, and having herself wrapped around Torcel, and Torcel wrapped around her, these all feel good, normal, perfect. But something feels odd in her head, and her throat, and down into her chest. Not pain, not sorrow, but something changing. Ot wonders what it is. Torcel wonders how likely it is that they will find the door in the skin of the world, without Ot crouching above it as a beacon to her sense of place. If they cannot find that door, they can find any Innerness (she can feel the open ones in the flow, the ones that the Architors must own, the ones where the red swells and roils against the air), and they can burst out of that and run away, past any Architor that might be there. Or they can come up directly where the Architor with the red-swept hood is (the place that Torcel can feel in her mind), and it's likely that there will be an opening there, for aren't Architors creatures of the Innerness? Ot and Torcel talk about these things, in loud slow voices that vibrate through their twined bodies, as they speed through the red. First they decide to look for the window of the wrapped people. Then they decide to go to the red-hooded Architor, the Architor who loves chaos and may again speak to them. When they approach the head, and must decide which way to go, that is still what they have decided. If the red-hooded Architor is near an Innerness, they will go to it, and spring from it, and catch her by surprise. If she is not, they will find the nearest one and spring out of that. They are both reckless now, the pair of them, Torcel giddy with having found the Innerness and having found Ot, and Ot dizzy with the thought of her own child, and with whatever is happening in her head. As they swerve aside from the spine, rightward toward where their quarry is in the image in Torcel's mind, there is a twinge in Ot's head, a pain, a different kind of pain than the ecstatic burning of the red, and her mind leaves her. Ot is sitting in an oddly bright place, a place where the light comes from above rather from the ground. She is sitting outside, under a bright gray sky (but how else should the sky be?), sitting on a chair, at a table, and drinking wine (why is she surprised, for an instant, at wine). She is looking at Na, and beyond Na at the sea of fog that rolls up to the ring that is the world from the infinite distance. Na is looking at her, but it is hard for Ot to look back. Ot is about to betray Na to the Architors. The child, Ot's and Na's child (how can a child come from two different people?) is sitting on the ground under the table. She is a small child, like a small copy of Na, but with larger eyes and a large head. Waiting for the Architors to come and take Na away, Ot comforts herself, or tortures herself, by looking under the table at the child. Each time she does, she is flooded by something like pain, or like pleasure so intense that it is pain. Na looks at her and smiles, and Ot cannot avoid her eyes. She smiles back weakly. Na reaches across and strokes the back of her hand (her fingers strong and warm), and she says, "Don't worry". Don't worry. The Architors come out of the sky in a round flying boat that settles to the ground near the table with a long crunching sound, as though it were crushing ashes under its wheels (what are ashes? what is a boat?). They walk, three of them in dark hooded cloaks, to the side of the table and stand, looking down. Ot closes her eyes. But of course they do not take Na. They take Ot, and when their hard hands close around her upper arms she screams and flails at them with her hands and feet. "What is it, what are you doing?" Torcel's voice is loud and slurred, almost too slurred to understand here in the thick red that slows and deadens sound. Ot's head aches horribly, and feels empty and echoing. Where are they, Ot wonders, where is the child? But there is no child, they are going to find an Architor and get her to tell them how she can have a child and raise it herself, and Na is not here. How could she be? "I'm sorry," says Ot, "I don't know -- I felt very strange." Torcel squeezes Ot's wrists comfortingly, and they speed on through the searing red. In the image in her mind, Torcel sees that the Architor they seek is moving, slowly, away from them. And then sees that she is sinking downward, into the body of the world, into the Innerness. "The Architor is in the Innerness," Torcel says. Ot smiles. "All the better." But Torcel is worried. What if the Architor is faster than they are, here? What if it joins a crowd of others? How will they confront her, or even speak to her, here? "We will follow her, and see where she comes up," says Torcel. Why should she ever come up, Ot asks herself, and why should we? But down here in the speeding rivers of red, there is no place to have or raise a child. The Architor moves headward, but not fast. Soon she is within the range of Torcel's extended senses; through the flow Torcel can feel her, somewhere ahead of them, or taste her or smell her through the wisdom of the tiny machines and animals. Ot and Torcel do not speak, for fear the sound will interfere. The Architor (and Torcel senses only the one, not a cloud of them) moves steadily forward and spineward (centerward, more accurately, here so far forward), and they follow, their speed slower now, keeping her just in view, or in feel, or in taste. In Ot's head, more twinges and movement. She feels things moving through her arms and legs, as though she is being explored from inside. Where her arms twine with Torcel's before her face, she sees the delicate lines in Torcel's skin, and as she watches the same lines slowly form in her own. She thinks that she should be frightened, but she is not. "She is at the back of the mouth," says Torcel. "What is at the mouth?" "I don't know." No one knows. It occurs to both Torcel and Ot, now, that it is strange that no one knows. "She has emerged, I think, out of the Innerness, and into the back of the mouth. She is moving very slowly now." "Are there other Architors, around the opening?" "I don't know. Be ready to run as we come out, because there may be, and they may try to stop us." "What would they do with us?" "I don't know." The flow here dwindles and calms; the fluid they move through is barely the same fluid at all, so thin and placid it is. And then they are in a swell of it, and then they have broken through into the air, and they find that while it is easy enough to talk about running down in the free and searing red, the chill of the air and the draining of the red drains their strength, and they stand shivering, holding each other up. But there are no Architors to run from. In fact there is nothing at all. They are in a place with a roof, but the roof is higher than any roof has ever been. The ground, the skin on which they stand, is strange and soft, oddly moist as the ripest food patch, but smelling entirely wrong, entirely exotic. There are no burls, but everywhere the ground is humped and dimpled. "This way," Torcel says, and they set off, still shivering, across the odd uneven skin. The back of the tongue (for this must be, Torcel thinks, the back of the tongue) slopes gently but constantly upward, away from the circular depression that cups the Innerness through which they rose. Torcel looks back at it once as they walk, and finds the patch of glowing roiling red disturbing. Are Innernesses not owned and guarded by the Architors at all? Or is this one far back on the tongue somehow out of their domain? Or have they left it open and untended for a short time, by accident or design? The Architor in the red-swept hood has now stopped entirely, at least as far as Torcel can tell, looking at the image in the back of her mind. She might be as close as the other side of this long dimpled slope in the tongue (might not the lizard feel people walking on its tongue, and awaken, or at least sneeze?), or as far as a long walk ahead. Ot looks around her as they walk, following a few steps behind Torcel who knows the way, feeling the odd soft skin under her feet, and trying to shake the odd buzzes and itches out of her head and her body. Several times she thinks that she has fallen, but finds she is still walking. They are out of the Innerness, and Torcel is quiet again. Near the top of the slope, Ot becomes aware of the wind. The air, when they first came out of the opening that is now behind them, was still and softly scented. Now there is a definite and very constant breeze coming from behind them, from the bright but indefinite place beyond the far slope, on the other side of the opening. It is strange to feel a wind blow for so long, so steadily. It is, Ot realizes, the breath of the lizard. XXVI "She told you that Architors come from other worlds, far from the lizard?" Pito Belloc seems vastly amused at the idea, and offers them more of the strangely bland water that she pours with incredible freedom from a sparkling pitcher. "Do you not believe it?" "Oh, I believe she said it all right. She'll say anything if it suits her, or if she thinks there's some reason to." "But is it not true?" "Beyond the world? I doubt that it's true. They seem to be people just as we are people." They are sitting in a large room with a ceiling of strangely smooth skin, in the impossibly odd complex (small complex, or huge house, or something that neither Torcel nor Ot have a better word for) that they saw upon crossing the top of that slope of tongue. Outside, the wind is now fierce and hot and strongly scented. They reached the lee side of the house (castle, giant smooth burl, broad building) just as it became unpleasantly buffetting, and difficult to breathe. "You have worked with this Architor for a long time?" "A long time, I suppose. As long as anyone." "And she has no name?" This strikes Ot as the oddest of the many odd things that this Pito Belloc has said. "No, Architors have no names. That should not surprise you, of all people. Names become shorter as you move forward; back on the Tail they have long and impossible names, up in the head you fancy folk have only one short one. The Architors, who either are or take themselves to be the most forward and important people on the lizard, have the shortest possible names; none at all." "How do they talk to each other?" "How do they talk about each other, you mean," says Belloc, "it's simple to talk to someone without knowing their name; it's only difficult to talk about them." Belloc seems to Torcel, and to Ot, to be a strange and a literal sort of person, someone who builds square structures in the air with her words, and who drinks thin odorless water from nearly invisible vessels, and whose eye tendrils are supple and calm. Torcel knows, and said quickly to Ot as Pito Belloc was opening the door to them, to admit them out of the intoxicating wind, that the Architor in the red-swept hood is somewhere nearby, somewhere very near where they are in the image of the world in the back of her mind, far back on the tongue of the partly-open mouth of the lizard, enveloped by its breath. "Is she present, now, in this house?" Torcel winces at Ot's question. He has not wanted to ask that, so directly and clearly, until they had a better idea where they were, what danger they might be in, how the forces stood. But now it is asked, and Belloc seems to have taken no offense. "She is about somewhere, I believe; I think I heard her come in shortly before you came and pounded at our door." Belloc has been disarmingly casual and unconcerned about their arrival from the windy and empty tongue. She has not asked who they are, or where they come from, but has only invited them to sit, and share the thin bland water, and commented on the wind, its fierceness and its reliability, the words coming from her easily, something she has said, and heard, often before. The room, Ot thinks to herself, is a testament to industry, to the work of some artisan more skilled or more devoted than any in the complex, or more determined to produce the look of artifice, and set the room apart from the wild. There are square corners here, and smooth surfaces, smooth as bone, and a ceiling that admits no gaps to the sky (or no, Ot thinks, not to the sky, because they are far into the mouth, and even if this room had a gap in the ceiling, it would show only that next ceiling, the roof of the mouth, far above). There are flat surfaces for holding things, and there are things on the surfaces, more things than Ot has seen in one place before. "Is this how all Architors live?" "I know no other Architors, I'm afraid. My experience is limited." It has occurred to Torcel suddenly that this person, calling herself Pito Belloc, might in fact be the Architor who wears the red-swept hood. But this Belloc is long and thin, and she remembers the Architor as small and compact, almost squat. "What is wrong with this water?" Ot asks, and Torcel winces again, and again Belloc shows no offence. "That is not the right question," Belloc says, "but I am not the person you want for that story." She takes another long drink of the water (which is oddly cold as well as oddly bland, and really hardly water at all), and then rubs the heels of her hands into her eyes. "Now I will ask you to excuse me; it has been awhile since I rested." Belloc rises and goes out of the room, through the appalingly regular door in one wall. Ot curls downward and touches the floor, touches the seat she is sitting on, touches the smooth and perfectly flat wall. "This is the oddest place I have ever seen," she says to Torcel, and wishes that they were in the deep Innerness, limbs wrapped around each other, speeding through the thick burning liquid. "I'm not sure we were completely wise to come here." "How can we know?" Torcel only nods. "I am tired," Ot says, because she is, and she takes Torcel's hand, and they look for a place to rest. It seems impossible somehow to stretch out on the floor of that square room, and look up at its flat and unmarked ceiling. The Architor in the red hood finds them, not too long after, still hand-in-hand, lying on the softness of the cushions in her own favorite resting room, looking up at the distant roof of the mouth through the transparent ceiling. Outside the wind has died down. Soon, the Architor knows, it will calm entirely, and then start back in the other direction, as it always does, as it always has. She stands for a moment, a few eyeblinks, looking at Ot and Torcel lying in deep relaxation on her floor, and then she steps into the room, allowing her footsteps to make enough sound to rouse them from their contemplation of the world, or of nothingness. "I will have a child," Ot says, "and I will raise it myself." She recognizes the Architor in the small heavy person who is sitting beside them, as does Torcel, although she is not wearing her red-swept Architor's hood, or anything else. Her belly, Ot sees, is smooth and unmarked. The Architor nods. "That is why you are here, although you did not come by quite the path I had established." "What is it that the Architors do, besides seclusion and cleansing and the Innerness, that lets a person have a child?" The Architor's shoulders hunch slightly at this. "This is not easy even for me to say aloud. Our training of the world is entirely too good." Ot and Torcel wait. "It is the eye," the Architor says, "the eye of the body." Ot puts a hand to her belly, low down on its curve, to the small puckering of skin that is the eye of the body. It is perhaps the oddest and most useless part of a person, this little eye that youths can open and close, but beyond which there is only a wall of skin. It is another thing that one does not speak of. (Torcel tells herself that she should have made that connection between unspoken things.) "Behind the eye is a wall of skin. The Architors my sisters put that wall there, in every child, before returning her to the world as a youth. To have a child, that wall must be broken. When the Architors treat the mother-wound after the child is born, they also repair the wall of skin, until it is time for the next child." "How is the wall broken?" Ot's throat feels thick. The itches and movement within her have spread well down from her head to the rest of her self. Deep in her belly, behind the body's eye and the Architors' wall of skin, she feels the anticipation of pain. "The wall is not strong; a determined finger could break it, although there would be pain. But after seclusion and before cleansing, the Architors my sisters break it with a special knife. There is still pain, but the cleansing puts the person into a deep rest, and dims the memory after." Ot's fingers are massaging the ring of skin on her belly, and inside herself she is looking for the muscles, long unused, that open it. Torcel sits to one side, concerned and uncertain, rubbing her own belly unthinkingly with the heel of her hand. The Architor is still talking, something about the process of cleansing and the uses of seclusion. Ot finds the unpracticed muscle, and tenses it, and relaxes it. The skin beneath her fingers squirms, tightens, loosens. The texture of the eye-skin reminds her of her youth, the beginning of her time among the people of the complex, her first and second mentors, because then, before they broke her of the habit, she would stroke the body's eye, and open and close it under her fingers. Now, finally, the eye relaxes fully, and opens, and she slides her fingers over the tender skin. Within is a small dry pocket of herself, between the opened muscles of the eye and the wall of skin that she now thinks of as Architor's skin, as something from outside herself. Before she can think, she has stiffened one finger and driven it sharply against that wall of skin, and bitten her lip from the pain, and then done it again, and the wall has torn, and the pain swelled and ebbed again. A little clear fluid has flowed out into her hand, and Torcel has sat up with a start, and the Architor sits with her mouth still half-open from the last thing she said. And Ot is ready to make a child. XXVII The Architor with the red-swept hood (Torcel has forgotten to ask her if Architors really have no names) takes them to another room, in the warm bottom level of the strange square complex. In that room there is an Innerness, a tame Innerness tended by Pito Belloc, an Innerness (the Architor says) that narrows down to a handswidth before it gets to the open roiling red. "It was trained that way long ago," the Architor says, "when there was a town here on the back of the tongue." Torcel does not ask, until much later, what became of that town. Ot steps to the edge of the moist and pulsing red, and smells the heat of it. She lowers herself in, feet foremost. The pain is terrible. She sinks down into the thick clinging heat, and stops, with her arms on the lip, and her head cradled in her arms. "Only as far as my shoulders," she said, before she went in. Now she does not speak, but moans, and cries out. Her feet and her legs and her torso burn with the pain, and she expected that. But now the red gets in through her body's eye, into a new place within her belly. She thought, when the pain burned through into pleasure and she swam for so long immersed in the flow of the deep Innerness, that it had seared her through and through, burned every inch of her. But now there is pain in a place she did not know existed until now, a deep pocket in the center of her that had been untouched, and is now aflame. She screams, finally. Torcel Vellome and the Architor, who have been crouching by the side of the Innerness (Torcel holding herself back, not reaching out to pull Ot from where she writhes in the red; the Architor impassive, thinking whatever Architors think), pull her quickly out, the Architor judging that the time is long enough, and Torcel unable to bear any longer the sounds she is making. She lies limp on the lip of the Innerness, not shivering, not moving, all tension draining out of her muscles, and deep within her some small piece of the Innerness not draining out of her body. Inside that pocket in Ot's belly, a piece of the Innerness begins to change, and as it changes the small animals and machines that have passed into her through Torcel's tears weave themselves into it. In that moment, sometime in the next thousand heartbeats, I begin to be. When Ot can move again, or wants to move again, she sits up and wraps her arms around Torcel. "I will have a child," she says, "and I will raise it myself." "Will the Architors allow this?" Torcel asks, looking toward the Architor, or the sister of Architors, sitting by the lip of the Innerness, holding the fingers of one hand above its surface, feeling the heat, but not quite touching. The Architor shrugs. "They will not be happy." "Will they allow it?" "I am no prophet. They may. As long as it is not a common thing, they may not trouble themselves. And they may not find out about it, if you are careful." Ot does not want to be careful. As I grow inside of her, slowly and with some pain (the stretching of her internal organs and structural elements to accommodate me, the growth of the things within her that support me as I swell), she thinks of Na, and of the complex. The Architor's food rooms are adequate, more than adequate, but they are odd and square, and have no vines. The water is thin and bland. The wind, and her own need for rest, keep her within the structure nearly all the time, and she paces. "Would it hurt the child if I went into the deep Innerness while she is within me?" "It is not done." "Would it hurt the child?" "It should not. But it is not done, so that 'should not' has not been tested." Ot paces. Torcel also feels enclosed. Eventually she says that she is going back across the tongue, the next time the wind dies, and into the Innerness there, into the open red. Ot wraps herself around Torcel where they lie in the Architor's resting room, and looks out at the roof of the mouth. "I want to see the stars," she says. The Architor sighs when they come to her, where she sits in a small room, scribbling in a book. "Yes, certainly you may return to the Innerness, I am not your mentor or your guard." She does not look at them. "Pito Belloc will tell you when the wind has died." The wind dies, Pito Belloc tells them that it has died (is there laughter in her voice, as at some secret joke?), and they walk, the two of them (and me with them, riding in Ot, now an obvious swelling and tautening of her body) back across the tongue, over and down the moist slope, to the edge of the red. They plunge in, and again the pain is startling, devastating, both of them feel that their memories of the pleasure must be illusions, that they are about to die here, both of them writhe in torment, and both finally scream, and are filled with the thick red, and then with the pleasure. The eye of Ot's body has closed up as I grow within her, and the red does not flow into me, but I feel its heat, and the contractions of the muscles that surround me. Twined around each other again, Ot's body fitting into Torcel's despite its changing shape, their arms and legs coiled, they flit out into the thin hot red, and then out into the central flow, into the searing roiling thickness of it, past the familiar struts and structures that lie within it, stretching their senses and remembering, again, what it is to be here, and be correct. "Where shall we go?" says Torcel, and then says it again, more slowly and more loudly, so Ot can understand it. "Everywhere," says Ot, "and then to see Na, and the stars". Before they left, the Architor with the red-swept hood has told Ot that, if she will finally go to the person that the Architor told her of so long ago, in the town nestled under the forward edge of the complex, that she will find there a faster way inside, faster than travelling back around the edge, or over the shoulder, back to the archways of the neck. "That is why I sent you there in the first place, to introduce you as a disturbance back into the place you came from. But you are not a very biddable bit of chaos." So again here are Ot and Torcel in the deep Innerness, twined together as one, sometimes separating to float as two. Torcel's senses are sharper still than last time, and wider ranging, and she keeps them well away from anything that might be person-sized, that might be an Architor, or a flock of them, or even someone else like them, down in the red for their own reasons. Torcel does not miss the stars, and does not want to see the complex on the Head, or hear Na sing, or do anything else for a very long time but fly and swoop and burn in the red, and talk to Ot about nothing in the loud slow speech of the inside, and feel the bulge of her stomach (of me) pressed against her. But Ot does want many of these things, and finally she and Torcel go that way, toward where the Architor has shown Ot to go, to an Innerness (that first Torcel and then Ot can feel as a lump or a hump or a hollowness in the flows around them) that sits on the skin just forward and to the right of the wall of the complex, the lizard's crown. There should be, the Architor of the red-swept hood told her, none of her sisters nearby. Ot wonders if that "should" has been tested. They emerge from the red, shooting at speed out and into the cold, and there is indeed no one there, and again the place is strange. All around the red wound of the Innerness (the smooth round trained lip that holds the hot wine in place) are bulging vessels of skin, joined by thick vines, or pipes that look like vines, and between the vessels are round burls, waist-high or head-high, that have an air of purpose about them. When they emerge Ot, whose energy within the lizard has been full to bursting, lies spent by the lip for a long time. Torcel walks around, never out of sight of her, poking with her eyes and fingers at their surroundings. When Ot is strong enough to stand (and she is hungry, for out of the Innerness both she and I must be fed, and I am larger all the time), Torcel takes her hand, and shows her the one open path that leads away. XXVIII Ho Ta lives under the gnarled wall of the complex, in a five-room house of elegantly trained burls. From the door of the house, the front of the world spreads out in an astonishing view, down across the strange contorted landscape of the upper forehead, with its bulging burls and knobby wrinkles, and then the long smoothness of the snout, and beyond that only the black and the stars. Ot sits in the doorway, resting her back against a thin arc of trained skin, her mind out among the cool stars, her hands rubbing the swell of her belly. Torcel and Ho Ta talk in the room behind her, and the words go into her head among the tiny animals and machines, and the lizard floats still in the dark. "There is a way into the complex proper from here?" "Several ways, one of them easy." "Easy even for her?" "Easy even for her." Ot has eaten, eaten well. Ho Ta's food is sweet and soft, although her water is nearly as bland as the Architor's. "What do you do here?" "Here?" "With all these vessels, and pipes, and the odd round burls?" "We prepare the water." "Tell me about this." "Perhaps later," says Ho Ta. She is not used to visitors. When Na has rested, and eaten again, and rested again, she says that she is ready to go, to walk in the complex again, and to find Na, and hear her songs. Looking at Torcel Vellome, she sees that the other does not want to come with her. "I would like you to meet Na." "I miss the Innerness," says Torcel. And she does. So what happens is this: Ho Ta makes a large pouch of food for Ot, and a map on finely-pounded exudate of the way through the maze of the upper forehead into the complex. Ot and Torcel Vellome stand at the corner of a path, with the dark and the stars above them and the warm skin of the world rucked up into strange swollen shapes around them, and they twine their fingers together, and their arms together, and Torcel touches Ot's belly (do I move under her hand?), and then they part. Here is Ot, making her way through the maze. She is surprised how easy it is. She hardly needs the map. The path coils and curls between and around tall and complex burls, leads across narrow bridges with bright vine-filled depths to either side, but still it is a path. Above her is the wall of the complex, complex in another way, reaching up into the dark. She is approaching it quickly. Behind her, over her shoulder when she stops to turn around (she is heavy, and easily tired, and rests often), the sky is here also, when there is no vine or burl in the way. Propping herself against an incline now close under the complex wall and looking back and out, the view is wide and deep. The stars out beyond the snout are the same as the stars up above her head, pinpricks of light and now and then one of the other stars glowing or flashing past. Soon she will stand again, and turn, and go on, looking for and finding the small archway that leads to the passage that leads into the crown, into the complex where she lived very long ago, where she sang with Na, and where someone else must be living in her rooms by now. Here is Torcel Vellome, who was a granch several lives ago, turning back down the path, toward the five-room house and the bland silences of Ho Ta. She feels a heaviness, a weight that she understands as sadness, as longing for the joyous heat of the Innerness, as a draining away of purpose. Ot will have her child, and perhaps the Architors in the complex will not take it from her. She stops on the path, at a curve, looking past a row of trained burls that hold and direct oval pools of water, or something like water, out past the snout and into the stars. She looks into the image of the lizard in her mind, in the back of her mind. She sees where she is, here so far forward, and where Ot is, nearly in the same place, but moving, and even where Ho Ta is, nearly the same place also, on the image of the world. "Are there towns on the snout, do people live there?" Torcel asks. Ho Ta only shrugs. "Do you have books? Ot spoke of the books her second mentor gave her." Ho Ta has books, but only a few, and they are books about the guiding and treatment of water, and the properties of fluid extracted from the skin. They do not say if there are towns on the snout, or on the tail. "There could hardly be people living on the tail," Ho Ta ventures, "the sickness would be too bad." Torcel nods. Here is Ot, winding her way through the passage that leads through the wall of the complex, rough-floored and sloping. She stops often, and closes her eyes, and rests looking at the image of the lizard in her mind. She thinks of Na, and the tiny animals and machines that are remaking her (and that are making me) show her where Na is, near the center of the complex, somewhere near her rooms, their rooms. Ot's eye tendrils stiffen at the new sense, but she is otherwise calm, her eyes closed, stopped along the disused path, resting her legs, her hands across the taut swell of her belly. Torcel is frustrated by the vagueness of Ho Ta's answers. She leafs through the books, but they are in a language, suffused with a jargon, that she does not understand, and is too impatient to take the time to learn. She does not know why she is here, in this cold empty place, and without Ot or Ot's child. And not knowing why she is there, she goes. She goes back to the Innerness among the pipes and vessels, and plunges in unhesitatingly, into the burning agony (again she is sure that she will be destroyed this time, but now she knows further within herself that that certainty is false), and the scream that lets the red into her is a scream of release much more than it is a scream of pain. So here is a long stretch of time, as I grow within Ot and Torcel moves within the world. How long it is, how many of the bits that Ot's book says people used to divide time into, we have no way of saying. How long does it take to make a child? Ot finds Na, and they embrace. They go to the baths together, the baths that are open to the sky, and Ot rests on her back looking at the stars. Na cups water in her hand and lets it drip, thick and pungent, onto Ot's belly, and Na's strong fingers stroke Ot's skin. Ot feels the child moving in her. The scent of the water is not the drug that it was, she feels, not the deep invitation that it was, to rest and not to think. She has changed, with the Innerness and the child and the gift of Torcel's tears. She looks up at the stars, and over at Na (who lies now on her back in the water, limp and thinking of nothing), and her mind is almost frighteningly clear. "I shall keep the child myself, to raise into a youth," she says to Na, later, when they are in Na's ripest food room, wetting the skin and pulling off succulent whorls with their supple fingers. (It is the best food she has tasted for a long time; she wonders if Torcel is eating, or if she is down in the roiling deep where food seems not to matter.) Na frowns, and then smiles. "Always Ot," she says. "Now you are truly going to have a child, though. It is time to put that dream aside, I think." Ot looks at her, and then away. She touches her belly, touches me through her clothing and her skin (she is clothed again, and it is at once odd and soothingly familiar). Later Ot will go and talk to En, who is still old, still surrounded by her books. "I shall keep the child myself, to raise into a youth," she will say. But En will only shake her head, and assure her that when the child comes, the Architors will take it, but En and her friends will record it in the books, and they will watch to be sure that the books balance. Far tailward, Taraban Eluctog sees Ot, or a figure that looks like Ot, in a vision. In the vision, Ot is moving through a city of cylindrical burls, tall and perfectly smooth. Taraban Eluctog follows her. There is, in the vision, something dark and difficult to see following Ot through the streets. And ahead of her walk three children, neither infants nor youths, something like small people, with vine branches wrapped around their heads. Ot goes to visit a friend of a friend of En's. She has found out, through subtle conversations with a dozen people, a maze of hints and things not quite questions that she has surprised herself by weaving, that this friend of a friend of En's may know something about the truth drug that the soldiers use. In the complex that makes up the crown of the lizard, the only feature visible in the image of the world that sits in the back of every mind, everyone has what they want. There is no currency, but there is casual trade. If I have a song, you may invite me to share your food. If my food room is ripe, you may bring with you an especially fine roll of finely crushed exudate when you come to eat with me, for me to make into a gown. When Ot goes to see this friend of a friend of En's (a friend of a friend of a friend of Na's, she says to herself), she brings with her exactly that, a long piece of exudate, pounded thin and crushed to give it a fine ridged texture, colored a uniform rich brown. It has been hers for a long time; Na took it, and many of Ot's other things, away to her own rooms when someone finally moved into Ot's. (In the head, rooms are taken and used and abandoned here and there, now and then. There are always enough.) Now Na has given Ot back her things, and Ot is living in Na's rooms, and resting beside Na on soft cushioned burls, and holding Na's hand. She does not wrap her arms and legs around Na's arms and legs, and press their bodies together; there is no searing Innerness here, to speed undulating through. Ot gives the friend of a friend of a friend of Na's the roll of fine brown stuff, and the friend of a friend of a friend of Na's, who lives leftward and tailward within the complex, shares with Ot a kind of water that she has, that is produced by, she says, the same water artisans that produce the soldiers' truth drug. They drink the water from shallow bowls, and then lie down and watch the stars. The world is a great ring of hard earth, surrounding and surrounded by a roiling sea of white fog. The fog rises and falls with the wind, and streamers break off and blow across the land. At the inner and outer edges of the ring, the land slopes down into the fog, vanishing into whiteness. The fog is not breathable; no one knows what lies at the bottom of the fog sea within the ring, or on the infinite trackless bottom of the fog ocean outside it. Ot awakens lying on a soft bed that sits on a tall spire, open to the sky. The spire rises tall and straight from the tallest hill on the ring; when she sits up and rubs her eyes and looks out, she can see a great distance out over the fog. In one direction is the inner sea, and beyond it the opposite arc of the ring. In the other direction is the outer sea, stretching to infinity. The ring curves off in the other two directions, the world going off to meet itself to her left and right. Ot sits on the side of the bed. She is wearing a soft gown of black silk (not exudate; what is exudate?). Her belly is smooth and nearly flat; why would she expect it to be otherwise? A child comes from behind her, where the spire's stairs reach the top, and climbs up onto the bed next to her. Ot puts her arm around the child, and it leans its head against her body. It is small and beautiful. Below them, the fog swells and heaves in the wind. Ot thinks of her friends, far below on the ring, and of the danger of the fog, opaque and unbreathable. "Shall we blow it away?" she says to the child. The child smiles and nods, its face shining and eager. Ot and the child purse their lips, and blow, blow in front of them, turn and blow behind them, blow to the sides, and the fog shreds and writhes and roils, all around the ring and from edge to edge, and is finally swept away, down into the depths of the inner sea and the outer sea, out into the infinite distance, out and away from the dark ring of the land. Ot awakens again, on her back on a cushioned burl, with a friend of a friend of En's looking down at her in concern. "You were very deep into it," she says. "I was." XXIX Here is Torcel Vellome, back again in the deep Innerness, feeling again that this is where she was intended to be all along, that that other place, the place of coolness and emptiness and the black sky (the place that she can still see in the back of her mind, surrounding and buoying the still body of the lizard) was a mistake, a place that was perhaps supposed to exist, but not a place she was meant to live. In the thick searing fluid, Torcel Vellome invents acrobatics. She wriggles her body like an eel (there are no eels on the lizard), pushing herself forward at great speed, and then curls her sinuous limbs around her body, and spins forward. She can spin four, five, six times, even in the thickest part of the flow, before her body stops turning. Coiled around herself, eyes closed, the blissful burning of the Innerness suffusing her, she is utterly still; if there is motion and if there is turning, it is the universe moving and turning around her. She looks at the lizard in the back of her mind, and finds herself on it, somewhere deep inside and tailward of the shoulders. She finds the people she knows, Ho Ta forward of the crown, Nartabee Silgilesh and Curatan Silgilesh and Taraban Eluctog and Torgano Fonato and half a dozen others back in the tailward town. The Architor of the red-swept hood, she sees, has left her odd square building on the tongue and is moving tailward along the spine at some speed; she must, Torcel thinks, be down here in the Innerness also, swimming through the heat. And in the image of the world in the back of her mind, Torcel sees Ot, somewhere forward in the crown. It takes Torcel some time to find the web of forms and structures that conceals the Other. There are, she finds, many such webs within the body of the lizard, and several of them are within the area her memory tells her the Other occupies. (The tiny animals and machines within her, that have sharpened her vision and let her find other people on the lizard, do not tell her where the Other is. She wonders why.) Within the webs, the webs that do not contain the Other, Torcel finds other things, things that have been cast about by the flow and become tangled in the complexities of the webs. There are things like bones, and things like crumpled sheets of exudate. There are round hard things, some as large as Torcel's body curled into a ball, some smaller than her hand. Most of these are hard, a few are soft and feel ripe. If Ot were here, Torcel thinks, she might want them to eat one of the small ripe ones. The Other, when Torcel finally finds it, is the same round ball of darkness in the hot bright web. The hazy outer layer and the complex dark inner layer still writhe around it like flames, licking out into the heat and shying back. Torcel floats beside it, within the strange alien tang of its scent, but well outside the grasping arms and complex unfinished shapes that the inner layer forms and absorbs. She feels a vague unease, a dissatisfaction, as though she has failed to do something desirable, or forgotten an important lesson. She still feels in her mind, as she did in the first moment of her awareness in this latest life, that an old barrier has been stripped from her mind, and new connections (an internal web of her own) have formed. But there are more connections missing than made. It was more comfortable, she thinks, to be filled with fluff than with this aching emptiness. She turns to leave the web, go back to her acrobatics in the hot sweet joy of the flow. But she stops, and goes back to the Other, drifting now slightly closer to its core, and she thinks. It is hard at many levels to leave the Innerness this time. She pauses at the edge of the flow, just below the dark patch that is the opening near Ho Ta's house and the maze of pipes and vessels under the wall of the crown, and closes her eyes. Returning to the surface will hurt, will chill her body, will be like leaving her body to spin in the emptiness. She thinks of Ot, lying on her back with her body limp and her eyes on the stars. Here is Torcel Vellome on the surface again, sitting on the lip of the Innerness with her arms and legs wrapped around herself, her eye-tendrils shivering and waving fitfully. The red has drained out of her, back across the mottled skin of the lip and down toward the heart of the world, and she is alone. Later, she stands and walks up the path, past the same enigmatic vessels, the gurgling pipes. Halfway to Ho Ta's house, she is stopped by the strong scent of water, the pungent narcotic dream-smell that she remembers from other lives. For an instant she feels the comforting fluff fill her mind again, the ache of missing connections stilled, all questions unasked. Then the wind changes (the breath of the lizard? random movement of the air between the stars?) and the scent is gone. She shakes herself (eye tendrils stiff), and walks quickly up the slope. At the door of Ho Ta's house she pauses again, her hand on the finely trained skin. She calls out, but there is no answer. In the house, touching the walls and the warm floor, she wonders why there is no one else here, no one wandered up from tailward to touch this floor, this wall. Tired, as she is never tired in the sweet burning red, she lies on Ho Ta's cushioned burl to wait. "Tell me about what you do here, preparing the water." Torcel sits in the door of the five-room house. Ho Ta has just brought out a tray of food and a dish of bland water for them. She sits down also, not saying anything for a stretch of time, slowly eating a soft finger-shaped piece of food, her eye tendrils waving slowly left and right, in introspection. "There are substances, reagents, that the artisans extract from the skin, and that the Architors bring us. We combine them, and add them to the water. For some, we hold the water in our holding tanks until it is combined, and then add other reagents. The processes are complicated." Torcel takes a piece of food from the tray. It is still moist from Ho Ta's tears. She turns it in her fingers, looking at the soft texture of the food, looking at the fine tracery in the skin of her fingers. Ot had noticed it, had run her fingers along the fine lines. Ho Ta has said nothing, has given no sign of seeing anything strange about Torcel or Torcel's skin. "Why do you do this? Where does the water come from? Where does the water that you prepare go to?" Ho Ta wets a piece of food in the bland water and puts it into her mouth. "Wait," she says, "finish this food with me, and we will see the works." Torcel Vellome follows Ho Ta down from the door of the house, and the infinite view out over the snout into the stars slides down and is lost in a tangle of trained skin, thick growths of vine, pipes and vessels and pools of open water. They go by a path Torcel has not seen before, along narrow ways between walls of skin rough and smooth, and the scents of the air are strange. At a place where three tall burls come together, three trained burls that rise high above the surrounding mazy passages and tangled pipes, there is a ramp that slopes down into a bright place. At the bottom of the bright place is an opening. Beyond the opening flows, not the hot sweet red of the Innerness, but a stream of water. It is more water than Torcel has ever seen or imagined; it rushes past in a thick roiling torrent. "Is that water?" Torcel asks. Although she knows of nothing else it could be, it is faster and lighter than water, and the smell of it is cool and empty, like a slap in the face, not the cloying dreaming smell of the cleansing pools. "That is water in its natural form," says Ho Ta. "In the chambers beyond this channel, within the works, the water is tamed and treated, given its scent and its power its thickness. Every drop of water you have seen before now has passed through here, and been prepared by the works." The water runs noisely below them, and in the image in the back of her mind Torcel feels it spreading out from here, through the tight contortions of the works, and then all through the world, all over the surface of the lizard through channels and vessels hidden and mysterious, and then returning here to be treated again, in an endless circle. "And what you do to the water, what does that do to the people that bathe in it, that drink it in their ceremonies, that rest in it and breathe the sweet smell? Does it cloud their heads with fluff, and keep them from asking questions?" "Perhaps. And perhaps it keeps the lizard herself at rest. Who knows? We do as the Architors ask. We always have." Torcel and Ho Ta return back through the maze of the works. The breezes carry a dozen different smells to Torcel's nose; thick smells and light smells, the smell of heat and the heavy heady smell of water, or of what she had thought was water. When they return to Ho Ta's house, Ot is there, and when she sees Torcel she comes forward and wraps herself around her, arms and legs and swollen belly, and she does not speak for a long time. XXX Resting under the stars not long before, on a cushioned burl by a public pool, the sound and scent of water around them, Na had reached over with her firm hand and felt Ot's child moving inside her. "You will have the child soon," she had said. Ot smiled, her eye tendrils stretching laguorously. "And I shall keep the child myself, to raise into a youth." Na had smiled, and then shaken her head and frowned. "Ot," she said, "when you have the child, the Architors will come and take it, as the Architors took all of my children, and the Architors take all children newly born. En's people will record the birth in their books, and ensure that the books are balanced. The child shall come among us as a youth, and the world will go on." Ot felt, as she had not felt for a long time, that soft familiar pain lurking in the depths of her mind, and she twined the long flexible fingers of one hand around each other, and thought about squeezing. But the thought of squeezing and the thought of Na collided in her head, and she looked away, up at the stars. "I shall keep the child myself," she said softly. And later Na had gone apart from her, off into the crown, and Ot had thought vividly of Na talking to En, and En talking to the Architors, and the Architors circling through the hallways, surrounding her in a ring of silent hooded figures. In her belly the child moved, turning and kicking. She touched it with her fingers and thought of heat, and speed, and freedom. "Come with me," she had said to Na, the next time she saw her. "Come with me outside the complex, onto the forehead, or come with me into the Innerness." And she had told Na about the searing red and the pain that burns through to pleasure, and when she saw that Na's body was tense, and her eye tendrils stiff and quivering, she made her voice more gentle, and told Na about a place on the open skin below the neck, where they could have a place with water, and food, and raise the child together. But Na had only frowned, and Ot saw that inside herself Na was only thinking that Ot was being too much Ot, and that the Architors would come to take away her child, as they came to take away all children. It had not been difficult to find the pathway again, and trace it backward, alone, out of the complex and back to the house of Ha To. And finding Torcel there, it had been impossible not to wrap herself around her, and cling there without speaking for a long time. Later, they lay under the stars (stars above them, and stars forward of them out over the snout), and spoke to each other in low voices, and Ot told Torcel Vellome what Na had said and done, and Torcel had felt connections forming in her head, but she had only stroked Ot's belly (tauter and fuller all the time, with the child, me, kicking closer and closer to the surface), and put something soft under Ot's head. And still later, when Ot was resting with Ha To in the house, Torcel had gone back down the other path, deep into the works, to the place in the bright cavern where the water flowed pure and light in a torrent below the walkway, and she had brought the tears to her eyes and let them fall, tear after tear, into the water, each tear with its load of the tiny animals and machines that filled her, and that had spread from her into Ot. Then, when her tears would come no more, she went back up the path to the house, and rested and ate with Ot, and after awhile the two of them went back into the sweet hot searing Innerness, to swim with their bodies twined together, and to wait for me to begin opening a way out into life. And by the time Ot's belly splits, and I push my way into a world whose barriers are shredding and blowing away in the wind, the Architors who might have come to take me away are all busy with other things. (The End)