"Oh, you're in luck, Cley," she said as she took the seat beneath the window. "We have caribou steak."

How it all had gotten there—the vase of flowers, the pitcher of lemon water with ice, the baby carrots and threaded dumplings, was a phenomenon that should have floored me, but at which I hardly blinked. I sat down, lifted my knife and fork, and set to work on the meat, which was, of course, cooked to perfection.

"Delicious," I said after my first bite, and I could see in Anotine's eyes her relief that my utterance was a statement rather than another question.

We ate in silence for some time. I wasn't particularly hungry, and as I continued to eat I never really felt full. It was as if we had been preordained to finish the meal. Even the fleeting realization that what I was ingesting were Below's thoughts didn't put me off from slicing away at the sizable piece of meat.

I was just discovering the cheese vein in a threaded dumpling when she looked up, and said, "I study the moment."

"The moment?" I asked.

"That near nonexistent instant between the past and the future. The state we are always in but that we never Tecognize. When we stop to experience it, it flies away into the past and then we wait for the next one, but by the time we recognize its arrival, it too has gone."

"Why does it interest you?" I asked.

"Because there is a whole undiscovered country there. In my experiments, I try to pry a hole in the seam between past and future in order to get a look at that exotic place," she said.

"Interesting," I said, and stared as if caught up in her ideas, when in reality I was caught up in the depth of her eyes.

"Thinking makes us forget the instant," she said. "The present is not a function of thought. It is the absence of it."

"Good steak," I said, having lost her meaning early on.

She smiled, and I forgot not to stare. "God is there in that country," she said. "When you are finished eating, please take off your clothes."

A half hour later I was in the room at the end of the hall, naked, strapped into a metallic chair, feeling very much like Cley, the specimen. Anotine sat at a table in front of me, holding a small black box with buttons. Laid out before her were a notebook and a pen.

"You may feel a little discomfort during this experiment," she said, lifting the pen and writing something in the book. "But don't worry, this will cause no irreparable damage."

I was embarrassed and scared, and truly knew for the first time how my physiognomical subjects must have felt when I had called them forth to be examined.

"I will be recording your responses, so please be as candid as possible. Take your time and search for the proper words to describe your experience," she said.

Then she put the hand holding the black box beneath the table where I could not see it. "Now, I want you to look out the window behind me. Concentrate on the sunlight. It is warm and beautiful. Try to recall something pleasant," she said.

I tried to do as she said, but the only image that came to my thoughts was that of Bataldo, weeping as he walked off through the dark tree line of the Beyond. I shook my head and forced myself to remember the faces of Ea and Aria and their children. Then I settled on a memory of Jarek. I had taken the boy fishing one balmy summer day on the outskirts of Wenau. There was nothing special about that particular day, only that he had caught a huge river smad with bright orange spots. He unhooked the fish and laid it on the bank. I watched as he performed a ritual his father had taught him, wherein he thanked the fish for the food it would offer him. He passed his hand over its scales to calm it as it drowned in the air, and I remembered that on that idyllic day, a soft breeze blowing, how lovely and unusual I thought the sentiment that he expressed.

Then it came like a bolt of lightning, shattering my daydream—a sharp pain in my left buttock, as if it were being burned and bitten at the same time. The sudden force of it nearly made my eyes leap from my head. I cried out.

"Can you describe what just happened to you?" asked Anotine.

Tears had formed in the corners of my eyes. "A sharp pain in my rear end," I yelled.

"Did you experience anything else?" she asked.

"Like what?" I asked unable to hide my anger.

"The moment, perhaps?" she said.

"It hurt like hell," I told her, and she jotted all of it down.

"Did you see anything?" she asked.

I shook my head.

"Did you feel the presence of the almighty?" she asked.

"If the almighty is a searing pain in the ass, I felt it," I said.

"Good," she said, and silently mouthed the words pain in the ass as she wrote them.

I tested the straps to see if I could break free but found them immovable. "What are you doing to me?" I yelled.

"Relax, Cley," she said. "Now I want you to calculate the sum of 765 and 890."

I didn't even get through five plus zero before the next shock blasted me in the right shoulder blade. The torture proceeded in this manner. I cursed and yelled and begged to be released, but she simply smiled and told me always that it was almost over. I don't recall how many times she pressed the buttons on the black box, but near the end I merely fell into silence. It was then that I actually saw the almighty. The room faded from view, and I had a vision of Below, laughing uncontrollably at me. Through my desperate condition, I wondered if, within the depth of his diseased sleep, the Master knew I was there in his memory.

My return to consciousness was a slow and painful experience, and before I was fully awake, I had determined to leave the floating island and abandon my mission. All I needed to do was let Misrix know by thought that I wanted to return. But when I sat up and opened my eyes, I found that it was night. The spire lamps in the bedroom had been reduced to the glow of a candle again, but I was not on the brown rug. Instead, I was in Anotine's bed and she was asleep next to me. This night, she lay on her back, and one glance wilted my rage toward her, replacing it with awe.

I lay down and turned onto my side, resting my head on my hand so that I could see her. Through the window came the scent of the night blossoms and the murmur of the ocean. I reached out my free hand and cautiously passed it an inch above her body, tracing the topography of her face and breasts and stomach and thighs. I thought again of Bataldo and how he had danced with his wife without touching by the shores of the inland ocean. I remained in that position for over an hour, trapped in the moment.

11

The next morning I again woke to find Anotine gone. I recovered my clothes from where I had left them the day before in the room at the end of the hall. As I dressed, I stared at the metallic chair and shuddered at the memory of the pain it had inflicted.

A series of tables lined the perimeter of the room in the same manner they had back in the laboratory that Below kept in the ruins of the Weil-Built City. Now that I considered it, the room seemed almost a scaled-down version of that place. In keeping with the original, the tables were cluttered with strange-looking equipment, sprouting wires and needlelike appendages. Mirrors, candles, bowls of powder, and huge jars of colored liquid were scattered amidst the collection of exotic hardware. The very thought of how Anotine might make use of these in discovering the present sent me quickly down the hall to the dining room.

There I found, as I knew I would, a breakfast of eggs, sausage, and, to my delight, a steaming cup of shudder. None of this had been there, when, only a few moments earlier, I had passed the room on my way to retrieve my clothes. I smiled at the perfection of how it all looked and smelled as I took a seat. When I brought the cup of shudder to my lips and sipped it, I was swamped by a wave of nostalgia similar to when I had tasted the Rose Ear Sweet two nights earlier. It came to me as I took a bite of the sausage that I had dreamt of this very meal through the night. The implications of this phenomenon abounded, but I had no interest in considering them. I ate, as before, not so much to quell any hunger, but simply to fulfill a mysterious sense of obligation.