Through the hole the fibers race, coiling and recoiling in their eagerness. Oh, see what’s here, what this is, what that is. Oh, look, here a bone, there a cell, here an organ, here a mechanism. Ugh, nasty mechanism. Ugly and difficult. Inefficient. Painful. Still, interesting. Everything is interesting. This connects to that. This has been disconnected from something that should be here. Fill in the blank. What was it? What could it have been? What should it be? Feel, smell, taste, extrapolate.
Those fibers not engaged in exploration continue to nibble at the edges of the hole, though by now there are thousands of them thickly furring the outside of the case, thousands of little tongues making infinitesimal erosions of their own. Soon the vitreon is perforated like a sieve, then lacy as a doily, then only a fragile net, more holes than substance, then gone. What was inside is now outside, free, cradled, and covered by the fibers.
Nela sleeps. Bertran sleeps. They have retreated into dream, into a world of sleekness, of sinuosity, of easy movement rejoicing in its own grace. This is an old gift, this sanctuary of dream. They feel no pain. They have been released from horror too dreadful to bear. Where they are is in the world of antithesis where they live in movement and delight.
The fibers ramify. Here they like the taste of a cell, so they duplicate it, not once but a thousand times in a coiling chain. There they miss a flavor, so they create it, a new cell, of a new type. Here they form a sinew. There a bone. All very quietly. All very peacefully, not to disturb the dreamers who are all unaware of where they are, of what they were, of what they are.
Nela dreams she stands upon the precipice, looking out across the world. Around her the birds swirl in a joyous cloud, calling to her. She opens her wings and drops into their midst singing.
Bertran leaps from the surface of the sea, turns nose down and dives deep, bending and twisting as he follows his fellows in the spiraling downward dance. At the lowest point he turns to follow chains of bubbles upward in a single, pure curve that ends as he erupts laughing upon the silver waters.
“Nela,” he cries in a sea giant’s voice, calling to the sky, raising a finned hand, a fingered fin, in a gesture of greeting.
“Bertran,” she answers in a wind sound, drifting over the waters. Her wings brush him as she skims the surface. The breath of her passing cools his face.
Under the sand, a fiber eats a mechanism, atom by atom. Nasty, this, but it is necessary to digest it and get it out of the way. Metal and hydrocarbons dissolve, tiny chunk by tiny chunk. The wave generator of a gravitic unit sighs and falls apart into constituent elements. The mechanical linkages of a manipulator give up their coherence. Fibers carry the elements away, some to the river to be washed downstream, some to remote stone outcroppings, to be deposited upon the stone atom by atom, some deep beneath the grasses and reeds of the bank. If anyone comes to this place equipped with detection gear, searching, let us say, for certain elements found in vitreon or in dinka-jin mechanisms, those elements are no longer assembled, they are no longer present.
The vitreon cases hold skulls, hard shells of bone minus the jaws. The fibers take them apart, cell by cell, then rebuild them differently. What is this inside? Are there instructions here inside?
Gray leaf and gray tree and gray wind rising.
What is that?
Sorrow, fleeing from sorrow, swimming, diving.
This small, shelled thing, climbing, climbing. What is this? Does the other one have this thing too?
Here too. Sorrow, sorrow. Climbing, climbing. Turtledove, oh, Turtledove.
Instructions? Perhaps. Though this large mind seems too big, too intelligent to be contained in the little shelled being, which is moved by … by longing to fly. By a longing for wings.
It is small, yes, but important. Keep it.
Upon the naked bone, skin forms and a covering for that skin. At the knobbed white ends of joints, cartilage forms, then other bones. At the juncture of organ with organ, other organs form and rebuild themselves—or build themselves for the first time in new systems, in accordance with the dreams.
All of it goes on below the surface. All of it happens in the warm dark of the sandspit, moisture below, sun above. On the top, everything is still and level, rippled only a little by the breezes, otherwise flat and unrevealing. Tiny eyes forge up and down the river at the end of busy little stems. They jab glances like needles, here, there, searching in irritated lunges for something they do not find. The captives have gone. Where have they gone? In his node near the Deep, mighty Chimi-ahm wants to know. From a distant place, Legless God Breaze wants to know!
A flier comes, a buzzing bee-sized botherance, one of a numerous hive of such mechanical busybodies. It settles upon the sandspit in the quiet of late afternoon. After a time of turning and staring, it attempts to take off again and cannot. Though it struggles and hums,
