But a kind of acceptance began to steal over her. She floated, without her body, a mote adrift in this strange sea.

Was this mood of resignation itself part of the process? Without a bloodstream fizzing with adrenaline, perhaps it was impossible for her to feel fear: perhaps there was too little left of her even to be afraid. And if she had no body, did she have a self anymore?

She felt herself spreading out. If the edges of her body had been erased, now so was the boundary of her mind, her very self. She was merging with this wider sea, she thought, like a drop of coloring dropped into a bottle of water, spreading out, growing more and more dilute. It wasn’t uncomfortable, just a subtle dissolving. It was like falling asleep.

Or it was like joining the Transcendence, she thought, like being immersed in that vast panoply of linked minds. But the Transcendence was something higher than mind. This bloody ocean was different; it was something lower than the body, lower than biology itself. Still she tried to fight it, to reflect back on herself.

It was her last conscious thought. After that, for an unmeasured time, there was only an endless, formless, oceanic dreaming.

And then something new.

Separateness.

There was no detail, nothing to be said about this which was separated from that. There was only the separateness itself, a relation between abstracts, beyond analysis or understanding. But that was something to cling to, a source of a deep formless pleasure — an exultance that I am.

Then something more. A kind of growing. Splitting, budding, a complexifying of the I, of whatever it was that had separated out of the rest. The growth was geometrical: two, four, eight, sixteen, a doubling every time, rapidly exponentiating away to large numbers, astronomical numbers. Cells: they were the units of the dividing, specks of biological matter each with their walls and nuclei and complicated chemical machinery.

The cluster that was growing out of the doubling cells was an embryo.

But that was a wrong thought, an inappropriate thought. It was not something the I should understand, not now, not yet. And that realization of wrongness was itself wrong. A recursion set in, a feedback loop that multiplied that awareness of wrong. Here was another sudden separating, a distancing. Within the I — or around it, or beside it — was another point of view, separated from the I by an awareness that could never be part of the I itself. The viewpoint was a witness to this growing thing, this budding coalescing entity. It felt everything the I felt; it was as close to it in every sense as it was possible to be. And yet it was not it.

The separated viewpoint was Alia. She knew herself, who she was. She even had a dim, abstract awareness of her other life, like a half-remembered dream.

And meanwhile the I, the subject of her inspection, continued to grow.

That relentless budding was not formless. In the final body there would be more than two hundred different kinds of cells, specialized for different purposes. Already an organization was emerging in this growing city of cells. Over there was a complicated cluster that might become a nervous system, with terminations flowering into what might become fingers, eyes, a brain. And over there were simpler clusters, blocks that might become kidneys and liver and heart.

This was a wondrous process, for there was nothing here to tell the cells how to organize themselves in this manner. As the cells split and grew and split again, they communicated with their neighbors through salts, sugars, amino acids passed from one cell’s cytoplasm to another’s. In this way the cells formed collectives, each dedicated to developing a special function — to become an eardrum or a heart valve — and, through a clustering of the collectives themselves at a higher level, to ensure that ears and hearts, arms and legs, all developed in the right place. Out of this mesh of interaction and feedback the organization of a human body developed.

The whole process was an emergence, an expression of a deep principle of the universe. Even the I, the wispy unformed mind that was lodged in this expanding, complexifying cluster, was itself an emergent property of the increasingly complex network of cells. And yet already there was consciousness here, and a deep, brimming, joyful consciousness of growth, of increasing potential, of being.

Now, strangely, death came to the differentiating cluster of cells. Succumbing to subtle pressures from their neighbors, cells in the shapeless hands and feet began to die, in waves and bands. It hurt, surprisingly, shockingly. But there was purpose to this dying; the scalpel of cellular death was finely shaping those tiny hands and feet, cleaving one finger from another.

The growing child lifted its new hand before its face. Not its, Alia thought — his.Already the processes of development had proceeded that far. His fingers were mere nerveless stumps yet, and could not be moved; and in this bloody dark nothing could be seen, even if the child had eyes to see. And yet he strained to see even so, motivated by a faint curiosity.

His curiosity, not Alia’s.

This union was not like Witnessing. She was embedded deeply in the machinery of the child’s shaping body; she felt everything he did, shared every dim thought, every sensation. But she was somehow, subtly, separated from him, and always would be. She was a monitor, a watcher; she shared everything the child lived through — and would throughout his whole life — but not his will, his choice.

And there was something wrong, a note out of place in this great symphony of manufacture and assembly. There was something not quite right with the heart, she saw, a place where the mindless self-organization had gone awry. Nothing was perfect; this was not the only flaw in the growing body. Perhaps it would not matter.

As his body and nervous system developed, the child’s mind continued to evolve.

At first there had been no sense of time, or space. There were only abstractions like separateness, one thing from another, and only events, disconnected, acausal. Time gradually emerged as a sense of events in sequence: first the hands, then the cellular Die-back, then the separating fingers, one after another. Space came after that, as the body itself grew in extent and emerged from formlessness into a tool that he could, in a limited fashion, use to explore the space around him. It was a passive exploration at first, not much more than a dim realization that the universe had to be at least big enough to encompass his body. But then he had fingers to stretch out, legs to kick with. Soon he could feel the sac that contained him, could kick against its walls, and he began to get the sense that even beyond this sac was a wider universe, perhaps including beings more or less like himself.

That sense deepened when sight arrived. He could make out a dim ruddy glow, that waxed and waned. Sometimes, when the light was at its brightest, he could even make out the pale fishlike shape that was his own body, the rope that anchored him to the walls around him.

But the light would dim and return, dim and return, and a new sense of time imposed itself on him: not a time dictated by the events of his own body, but a cycle that came from a wider world outside him. There were processes that went on independently of him, then; he was not the whole universe — even though it still felt like it.

Then there were sharper sensations, brought to him in a rich stream of blood. The nourishment he received could be rich or thin, familiar or strange. Sometimes it was even intoxicating, mildly, so that he thrashed uncomfortably in his tank of flesh. This came from the mother, he knew on some deep level.