XXI

My legs hurt. Ah, shit. So does my head. I am face-down on the grass. So does my stomach, it feels like there's a rubber ball in me somewhere. I can feel the grass among my fingers and cutting into my face. My body is gathering around me. I can hear the river again.

Almost fixed everything, but the net came through.

Anyway, like to see them follow that trail.

My insides feel twisted, messed up, like they're not all mine, maybe, like they're spiked with pieces of random scramble . . . possible . . . maybe I feel that way because I know it's possible.

Don't know. I lift my head. It is dark, night time in the Yellow Book. I can see the remains of the reprogrammed nets fluttering in the current. A section is washed away into the scramble. Just in front of me the messenger, dark and empty, its code spent, shivers on the grass. As I watch, it moves an inch towards the river.

I want to go to sleep on the grass, but I get a leg to twitch, and from there I work upwards and suddenly in one painful movement I'm standing up.

I stumble between two trees. One of them has an ugly brown face in its trunk. I don't stop to see what kind of gargoyle or statuette the face belongs to. The sound of the river is replaced, gradually, with the scratchy sounds of the forest. It's very dark.

I keep walking. After a little while, I sit myself down on the dark tinsel leaves, and start going over my body. I locate and vomit up a massive four-and-a-half second clip of the Rubi Trueworth Show that was stirring restlessly, in my stomach, and one or two other nondescript bits and pieces that don't seem to belong. I'm sure there are other fragments, and there's probably more missing than there is extra, but I feel better after that.

Not many can claim to feel anything after being absorbed into the scramble flow. I don't throw the pieces away; I save them in a less vital area of myself. I don't want to find out later that Rubi Trueworth talking to people who have put their minds into their pets was a vital cog in my cognition.

There is a sound from the trees around me, uncommonly loud for the forest. A surprised chuckle.

I remember Omni-ysp5. I start jogging towards my cave.

After a while, I break into a sick sprint.

XXII

I am stooped over, underground, sifting through moments, sixty five, sixty six, listening to the noises from the surface. There's a small passageway leading out of this chamber. That leads to a larger chamber, which has seven exits, three of which lead, in an indirect fashion, to the surface. Some improbable shafts of moonlight filter down. Enough to count moments by. Noise gets down here too. Usually the noise of the wind.

Tonight it's the laughter of packs of lobster-rodents, and the crashing footsteps and avalanche instructions of Omni-ysp5, and what sounds like the beat of helicopter blades, and a low grinding that I can't identify. But everything's get closer. The walls of the cave are vibrating slightly.

They're back. I don't know what I expected; of course they're back.

Sixty seven. I can see that there are five left. Sixty eight. The sounds outside mute a little, except the grinding noise, which gets louder. Sixty-eight darkens my palm.

Now Omni-ysp5 is saying, in what it must think to be a whisper,

Dom Drane, Dom Drane, Dom Drane, Dom Drane. Dom Drane, Dom Drane, Dom Drane, Dom Drane.

It goes straight through my body, that:

Dom Drane, Dom Drane.

My eyes turn to the other passage, the small dark one that leads down. I've never completely explored my caves, but I know that they go on a long way, and there are sure to be gaps here and there where I can split myself thin, discard some bad memories, squeeze deeper underground, oh, all the memories are bad, I can squeeze deeper than anyone's ever been. I can scatter moments behind me. They'll find seventy-three black slugs. They'll never know, never know which one was Dom Drane II. Never know.

The ground goes all water-bed. All the rock around me is shaking. Moments are sliding in all directions, animated by indecisive gravity. The temperature drops.

I force sixty-eight down my throat. I can feel its presence, heavy and warm and reassuring, as great gashes of starry night appear in the ceiling. My body relaxes. The floor's quaking seem to have slowed, is no longer frightening. I can anticipate the way the stone moves, keep my feet, keep my head. There's a jolt; I'm being lifted upwards. My hands move mechanically, my mind counts backwards, as sixty-seven and sixty-six and sixty-five slide down my throat. Omni-ysp5's eye is visible through the spaces, a huge red and white mass. It blinks slowly.

Sixty. Fifty-nine. With each moment I consume, things around me slow down. The only thing that doesn't slow down is the rate at which I am moving upwards, but I understand, with absolute clarity, that this is not because the floor is rising faster, but because I am growing. Thirty-three; twelve.

Some moments have slipped underground. I probe the spaces beneath me, thinking how funny it is that I could have thought I could hide there. Seven. None. Well, four, I started at sixty-eight. I examine the last four. I laugh at them. Perhaps they laugh back. They understand me. I eat them. Omni-ysp5's eye is frozen shut.

-- I lie, it is not completely still, there is glacial movement, the ancient trembling of a long, gothic eyelash. I look around, to see how they have opened up the caves, but I find nothing. Here is a puzzle -- it seems as if the cave is inverting all by itself, very slowly, now. I look to Omni-ysp5. More of it is visible as I brush aside pieces of the ceiling. It's a dark thing, painted up in leathery turrets, tall stone and ink and bats, but I can't see that it's involved in opening the earth. I look closer. The rocks move of their own accord.

Behind Omni-ysp5 floats an army. Ninety-four lobster rodents, I count, insubstantial and still, and a hundred and eight ghostly six-legged horses, with tiny horse heads for eyes, and two hundred small flat things covered in bombs, and among them thirteen Nimmet-like things.

Oh, it's risky to blink when I am nearby. Now you are statues, and I am something going among you too fast to see, and I am still growing. Stone, hung in the air at the moment of collapse, is around me waist, and now around my knees. I am staring out across the woods of the Yellow Book.

I am the size of Omni-ysp5.

Now I am larger.

Quietly, quickly, I disassemble it, eating what I can as I go along. While I am chewing on its center, an eyelid is slowly lifting, and the eyeball inside slowly turning, looking to the place where I took my first mouthful. Horror begins to color Omni-ysp5's expression. I nibble on, greased lightning never striking twice in the same place, it trembles, it's too slow, it's not jacked up on seventy-two moments in the space of a second, it dies.

I locate Nimmet among the search parties. I whisper, slow enough for her to hear,

Nimmet? You're working for me.

I lift her up, and then I stalk through the frozen hordes, pausing here and there to kill a searcher and eat its moment, across the frozen river, where every droplet holds a familiar face, and where I can taste the ancient in the air. I reflect to myself how, yet again, it hasn't been charity that has brought me good fortune, but the appearance of charity, and sin.

XXIII

Want to know why my landscape betrayed me? Want to get the gremlins in those crumbling yellow cliffs, the walking wood, the inside-out cave? Want to understand the sunshine? Nimmet and I have been doing some research. It just gelled.

Get this: approximately one hundred and seventy years ago, an entity was uploaded into a younger and more tranquil Milieu. The entity was a grease ball. She escaped a net of gnashing black Retrieve-and-Delete Functions.

I don't know if the entity was male or female. It isn't particularly important, but for the purposes of my own thinking, I like to imagine her as female. One hundred and seventy years of expansion, of quiet thought. And compassion! She sees greaseballs such as she once was. She rescues them from themselves. These months and months and months I've spent inside the mind of my goddess are made things, carefully constructed programs of healing. I haven't been camping out in the hills. I've been camping out in a person.

She has been messing with my mind.

When it's done, she gets one of the many firms she owns (and runs, I see, involved on every level from administration to employee design, maybe this explains why Nimmet looks so much like the girl from my dreams . . . were even my dreams artificial?) to kill the old and fetch the new from her. The patterns are obvious, if you have the correct information. She has been doing this for just over sixty years. I would have seen it sooner, if she hadn't been actively trying to hide it from me.

What a lady. Nimmet and I are heading for a place I know called the Dancing Queen Tavern, to lie low for a while.

It affords a great view of the Yellow Book and surrounding lands.

XXIV

I am spending some time in quiet inaction.

The Yellow Book's powers are greatly superior to my own, and must have been superior even when I was at the height of my moment-high. The Yellow Book could easily have stopped me from destroying one of her servants, stealing another. She didn't. I wonder why.

There's a lot to do. I still wonder about the Sons of Isaac, about whether or not they know. If they don't, it's only a matter of time. I haven't had my final showdown, not by a long way.

Nimmet has been buzzing slowly around me, frantic, stressed, a little frightened, and I've been finding it quite pleasant to speed up my mind, to watch her drifting ice-like from place to place, observing the details of her movement, the activities of her mind, which was put together a little distance from here, in the Yellow Book. I have explored her little form quite thoroughly. I have examined her workings, and looked beyond them with an insight well in excess of her own. She is artificial intelligence, with a moment like me. I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to tell her.

If I had been told, a few weeks ago, about the liberties the Yellow Book was taking with my mind, I probably would have taken offence. Certainly, my redemption should be self-defined, and in theory I resent any external attempt at therapy, moral or otherwise. But the truth is, I don't much care. Another time, I'll consider how valid the remaking of Dom Drane has been over these past few months. For now, I am content that I have solved my identity crisis: Dom Drane is dead. All that Dom Drane represented in me is dead. I have dropped the "Dom Drane" from the name I gave Nimmet while I hid behind my fish. This leaves me with "II," a peculiar reinvention. The roman numeral makes me feel as if I have simply taken the only constant -- myself, "I", and doubled it. Reinforcing my reality this way might be childlike, but there's the clue as to what else "II" represents: a second stab at life. A new beginning. Born again. Etc. Etc.

Something else: I intend to become the second entity of a type, the second member of a species, only the second to ever exist. Two. Sequel. That's me.

Oh, say it. I'm in love with the Yellow Book. I have had few occasions for these experiences in the past, but the way I remember them when they did occur, what remained in my mind during spells of solitude were not faces or forms so much as expressions, and movements, and perhaps a little substance here and there a color, a texture, a fragment, and so it is now with the Yellow Book. I am unable and unwilling to comprehend the entirety of the Yellow Book, but sit here instead and think, again and again, about the dim caves and the moods I have had there, twitching dust, the gentle electric streams of moments, or of myself walking across her grasses where her thoughts rippled, all the time, complicated and secret, all across the hills forever and everywhere.

Of course, the Yellow Book may have been a little enthusiastic in imparting altruism to her patient. I can relax a little now. Look out for myself a bit more, take advantage when opportunities present themselves. A little. I'll be very careful. I won't let her find out about it. I don't want her thinking anything dirtier than sunshine of me.

I understand that there are problems of age and scale, but I have time and space, and I can wait, and I can learn, and I can grow. A few hundred years of living and thinking, that's all I need. The Yellow Book has nestled many like me. I'm sure a few of them have found out. I'm sure a few love her too. I have competition, but I'll win.

I am in love! I am in love.

I am too much in love not to win.