When I was finished eating, I pushed the plate away and took the last few sips of shudder. The drink gave me that same rush of energy I had come to rely on back when I was a busy servant of the realm, and the taste made me long for a cigarette. I made a mental note to try to appropriate one from Nunnly at our next encounter. As I was considering how I might approach him on the subject, it came to me that I was wasting valuable time. It took some effort to remember my neighbors in Wenau and the dire predicament they were in. "Don't forget," I told myself.

I left the dining room and walked down the hall to the laboratory. Perusing the tables that lined the room, I wondered what mathematical formulas, philosophical secrets, personal memories might be contained in the souls of the objects that lay before me. "This could very well be the chemical code of the antidote," I whispered as I lifted a gold, three-pronged fork with a diadem at the opposite end of the stem. I put it back down, and reached for a steel ball the size of a fist that perched upon a small stand. Lifting the sphere, I found that, although it appeared solid, it was lighter than a crumpled piece of paper. I decided that it was as good an object for study as anything. Taking it with me, I left the laboratory.

In passing the dining room, I looked in to find that the dishes had vanished, and now only radiant sunlight lay atop the table. Back out in the bedroom, I sat down cross-legged on the brown rug and brought the shiny ball up close to my eyes. Its smooth surface reflected my face and, with the distortion of its shape, spread my features out, making my nose enormous.

I tried with all my will to see past myself, as if I might find some image beneath my own that would offer a clue to the thing's essential nature. What I saw were my own eyes, and mirrored in them, twin steel orbs each bearing miniatures of my face. Of course, if I could have seen with the power of a microscope, I would have been witness to the same optical trick ad infinitum. Long after I knew this technique to be useless, I continued with it till my eyes crossed and the squinting gave me a slight headache.

The next procedure I tried was to bring the ball up to my ear. I closed my eyes and listened with the concentration I employed when listening for the weak heartbeat of a newborn child. What came to me were the myriad sounds of the island—the breeze, the distant ocean, the call of some mnemonic bird off in the wood. These gave way to the sound of my own blood pulsing in my temples. I focused so intently that I heard everything but the ball, which revealed itself to be a large marble of complete silence.

I rolled the object around in my hands, rolled it along my forearms and my face. I rested it atop my head, thinking that its symbolic meaning might penetrate my skull through some kind of osmosis. Occasionally, an image would jump into my mind, and I would see the black dog, Wood, or the jagged column that was the remains of the Top of the City, but there was no feeling of certainty accompanying any of these mental pictures. I thought for a moment of Misrix and wondered if I would ever escape the reality of Below's memory.

I spent a good hour and a half there on the floor of Ano-tine's bedroom with the ball, rolling it, dropping it, whispering and shouting at it, tapping it with my knuckle and banging it against my forehead. My growing frustration finally got the better of me, and I threw it against the wall. In my desperation, I thought this might jolt the meaning out of it, but it didn't. It merely struck the smooth plaster with a dull thud and fell to roll some way back to me along the floor.

I stood up and stretched in an attempt to disperse my anger. 'Til clear my head," I thought and walked over to the window opening at the back of the room that gave a view of the field below and the boundary of the wood just beyond. I spent some time staring out at the peaceful, sunlit scene, and the sight of it relaxed me. Eventually, I turned away from the hypnotic tranquillity of the view and took a seat at the table that stood just to my right.

"Come on, Cley," I admonished myself. "You must …" But I never finished the thought, because lying now on the table in front of me was a pack of Hundred-To-Ones, my brand of cigarettes from the days of the Weil-Built City. Next to them was a box of matches and an ashtray. My hand shot out instinctually to the cigarettes, and I lifted them to make sure they were real. On the front of the green package was the usual red insignia of the wheel of fortune. I flipped it over and on the back was the expected image of Dame Destiny, wearing a blindfold. In her right hand she held a revolver, and in the left, a flower.

I opened the pack, retrieved one of the cigarettes, and immediately lit it. That first blast of smoke against the back of my throat was a great relief. With this aid to concentration, I turned my attention again on the steel ball. As I stared at it now, from a distance, my mind wandered and I came up with a theory about the sudden materializations of food and cigarettes.

These, it seemed to me, were incidentals. The mnemonic world was very convincing in its important detail, but one could never plan for all of the contingencies of logic, so things that weren't really necessary were created extemporaneously, so to speak. The memory filled in the gaps when the reality of the island was found wanting. Food, cigarettes, probably alcohol, were unimportant. That is why when I ate, it was not because I felt hungry. I realized then that since I had arrived on the island, I had yet to use a bathroom. There probably were no bathrooms, which was just as well, since I felt no urge in that direction at all. Hard, fast rules and definite limits abounded, pain and probably true death among them, but then there was a gray area where the memory created as fast as the need arose.

With my second cigarette, I began laughing at myself, picturing my crude attempts to break through the shell of symbolic representation. While I was puffing away, an indescribable urge began to take hold of me. This feeling increased until, upon stubbing out the cigarette in the ashtray, I rose and approached the shiny sphere of frustration. Then, I lifted my foot and brought the heel of my boot down on the thing with as much force as I could muster. To my surprise, the ball collapsed, splitting open in three places and crushing down into a flattened, ragged disk of steel. I stepped back and inspected my work. There had been a degree of satisfaction in the act, but in all I was no wiser than before.

"What are you doing, Cley?" asked Anotine.

The voice momentarily frightened me. I looked up to see her standing in the entrance, wearing a puzzled expression.

"Looking for the moment," I said, and forced a smile.

She shook her head. "Leave the experiments to me."

I nodded and looked away, embarrassed at the thought of how I had gawked at her body through the night.

"Come, we have work to do," she said.

Imagine my relief when instead of heading down the hallway to the laboratory, she turned and went back through the entrance into the sunlight. I hurried after her.

She walked quickly, leading me up and down stairways, across terraces, through a labyrinth of winding alleys lined with flowering vines drooping down from planters situated high above. It was the first time I had been outside in the sunlight since arriving, and now I could see just how beautiful and complex the village was.

I looked ahead to where Anotine waited for me at the bottom of a short set of steps. She wore a loosely fitted, white-muslin dress that the breeze had its way with and the sunlight had no difficulty penetrating. Her hair was tied back and woven together in an intricate braid.

As I caught up to her, she said, "You had a difficult time with the experiment yesterday."