24

I WOKE GROGGY AND CONFUSED INTO THE HARSH SUNlight streaming through the dome. My first inclination was to look for the dog, hoping against reason that he might have been able to stay with me. What I found was that not only was he gone, but Anotine was also nowhere to be found. I got nervously to my feet and spun around, calling her name. Five times I revolved in a circle, until dizziness set in, and I staggered forward, nearly falling on my face. The sudden fear of being alone, stranded on a memory ship upon a memory ocean was overwhelming. In my mind, I had an image of myself as a character on a page ripped from a storybook and thrown to the wind. I was frantic with the sense of having been buried alive. Running over to the unconscious Below, I begged him to return her.

I had my hands on his shoulders and was shaking him when I heard a distinct knocking sound. Looking up, I saw Anotine, standing outside the dome, waving to me. The sight of her there plunged me further into confusion. For the longest time, I simply stared at her. She knocked on the dome again in order to break my trance, then pointed her finger. I thought she was pointing at me. I put my hand to my chest and nodded. Her lips moved, and I was able to read their message. "Turn around" she was saying. I did, and behind me on the other side of the dome, I saw what I had missed in my panic. A doorway stood open in the low wall that defined the circumference.

I went over to it and, getting down on my knees, was able to see that there was a walkway with a railing outside that encircled the platform. It was a feature I had never taken notice of back on the island from my vantage point at ground level. The opening reminded me of the entrance to Anotine's secret place, where we had defeated the Delicate. I crawled over the rail and out onto the walkway. Once outside I could more clearly hear the movement of the ocean. The sharp breeze and direct sunlight were instantly refreshing, driving off the last shreds of the previous night's intoxication.

Since the passage was rather narrow, the railing low, and the pitch of the dome more pronounced outside, I stayed on my hands and knees and started around the path toward the other side. Eventually my head bumped into Anotine's knees, and I looked up to see her laughing at me. I should have been embarrassed, but I didn't care as long as she was still with me. I grabbed the railing with one hand, and she took the other to help me to my feet.

"I thought you were gone," I said to her, and put my arm around her for support.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I should have told you. I was playing around with the switches on the black board of Below's chair, and I discovered that one of them opened that small door. Isn't the view here magnificent?"

I mustered what courage was left in me and turned to look out over the silver ocean. The waves swelled and died beneath us, and now that I could see them, their rhythm and regularity seemed somehow reassuring.

"I can see now the Doctor's fascination with the ocean," she said. "The scenes, the little illustrated plays, are endlessly entertaining. I believe I saw you in one not too long ago."

"Was I crawling?" I asked.

She laughed. "No, I think you were making Below drink something from a cup."

"What else have you seen?" I asked.

"So much, but there is almost too much rushing by to make sense out of it. It's forever curling and changing and becoming something other than what it once was. If I were still a researcher of the moment, I would say there were interesting implications here."

"Interesting implications," I said, and smiled.

I don't know how long we stood there, but it was a considerable time. The undulation of the liquid mercury was hypnotic, and the constant flow of scenes, disjointed in time, but each obviously an integral part of some complete story, made me think that always the next one would tie it together and the entire saga would make sense.

While I watched them, feeling content with Anotine at my side, my mind wandered. It came to me that I hadn't eaten in quite some time, but I felt no hunger or use for food. I would have liked a Hundred-To-One just then, but found that my ability to conjure cigarettes had dissolved with the island. "How long would this last? Should we make an attempt to awaken Below? Now that I knew that Anotine was still with me, did I want it to change?" These were some of the questions I pondered as I witnessed the Master's life flowing by beneath me. With what we had just been through on the island, and now this, I had the impression that I was awake inside the bubble of a dream.

The sun rose to its apex and began to descend before I managed to turn away from the ocean's performance. My last subject of contemplation was that the sun, which shone brightly, was an indication that Below, back in my old reality, must not yet be too close to death. As soon as that thought had passed, I began to get an uncomfortable sensation in my head as if my brain were itching. Severe chills accompanied this symptom, and though I was feeling strange, I had an unquenchable desire to make love to Anotine.

The unstoppable urge made me bolder than I might normally have been. "Shall we find the moment?" I asked.

She smiled and pointed for me to make my way back inside. By the time we found our place on the floor, I was overwrought with desire, almost physically ill with necessity. This painful craving only began to be alleviated when I moved atop her and was working away in rhythm with the rocking of the waves. In the middle of this dalliance, I happened to look up and see Below, sitting there as if in judgment upon our love. It was then, as we teetered on the edge of the moment, that I realized the discomfort had been born of withdrawal and the desire of addiction.

When we finished, I again experienced the narcotic effects of the beauty while Anotine slept. This time, I looked out through the top of the dome to where the Fetch materialized, flying high above us. Her speed left a rapidly fading green line in its wake, and her aerial acrobatics spelled out a message against the blue. "Truth lies at the end of a circle" she wrote, and its meaning for me was profound. Everything made sense filtered through this aphorism, but the minute the hallucination ended, I lost the thread of my discoveries, which unraveled into a dullness of mind that forced me into sleep.

Two more days and a night passed in this same manner, and I combine them in the telling because, for the most part, they were indistinguishable—a hazy stew of sex, hallucination, ponderous thought, and splinters of drama, riding the backs of waves. Anotine was very much both the essence of sheer beauty and a real woman in this time. As often as my physical contact with her would send me off into flights of fancy, the conversations we shared would ground me by way of her intelligence and depth of feeling. She was both metaphor and matter, a hybrid I could never quite get my mind around.

One early evening out on the walkway we sat in the twilight with our backs to the dome. The sky was growing dark, but the last rays of sunlight streaked the silver, setting it on fire. She held my hand in her lap, and the serenity of that moment made me feel as if she had always been with me.

"I want to talk to you about the future, Cley," she said.

"I thought you specialized in the present" I said.

"I want you to know that it is all right if you must leave me."

"Nonsense," I said. "Where am I going?"

"Back to the place where you have a past."

"I've forgotten it," I said, and realized that those words might be truer than I ever could have imagined.

"What about the antidote we were trying to find?"